Population, Demography, and Social Inequality Concepts
Lesson 4: Population and Demography
What is Demography?
Demography is the branch of sociology that studies human populations by analyzing statistical information. The word “demography” comes from two ancient Greek words: demos (the people) and graphy (writing about something). Thus, it means writing about the people.
Demography studies the size, structure, and distribution of populations, and how they change over time due to births, deaths, migration, and aging. It began in the 19th century with the rise of cataloging information about the world. Demography measures both:
- Quantitative aspects: Composition, density, distribution, and structure of the population.
- Qualitative aspects: Sociological factors such as education quality, crime, development, social class, wealth, and well-being.
Definitions:
- Age-sex structure (population pyramid): Proportional distribution of males and females in each age category. This is the cumulative result of past trends in fertility, mortality, and migration, and is essential for the description and analysis of other data.
- Aging of population: A process where the proportion of adults and elderly individuals increases in the population, while the proportion of children and adolescents decreases.
- Baby boom: A dramatic increase in fertility rates and the number of births.
- Baby bust: A decline in fertility rates during the period immediately after the baby boom.
- Birth control: Practices to reduce the likelihood of conception and birth during sexual intercourse. This term is synonymous with contraception, fertility control, and family planning.
- Birth rate: The number of live births per 1,000 persons in a year.
- Birth rate for unmarried women: The number of live births per 1,000 unmarried women aged 15-49 in a year.
- Brain drain: The emigration of highly educated professionals from a country, usually to other countries offering better economic and social opportunities.
- Carrying capacity: The maximum sustainable size of a resident population in an ecosystem.
- Case fatality rate: The proportion of persons contracting a disease who die from it during a specific period of time.
- Life expectancy: The average number of years a person could expect to live.
- Life span: The maximum age that a human could reach under optimum conditions.
- Life table: A tabular display of life expectancy and the probability of dying at each age in a population. The life table provides an organized picture of mortality.
What is Malthusianism?
Malthusianism is a doctrine that follows the theory of Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus was a British economist and demographer who based his ideas on Adam Smith’s demographic thinking and other previous writers, incorporating the Law of Diminishing Returns. He published his theory in An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798), in which he stated a “Law of Population” with three propositions:
- The means of subsistence limit the population.
- The population grows when the means of subsistence grow, unless powerful and evident obstacles impede it.
- These obstacles maintain the population at the same level as the means of subsistence, which are: moral restraint, vice, and misery.
Lesson 5: Social Inequality
What is Social Inequality?
Social inequality is the existence of unequal opportunities and rewards for different social statuses within a society. It encompasses structured patterns of unequal distribution of goods, wealth, opportunities, punishments, and rewards.
Socio-economic inequalities in industrialized economies reflect the effects of changes in the labor market linked to globalization and technological change, as well as social variables such as household composition and the redistributive activity of the welfare state.
Socially defined categories of people are differently positioned when it comes to access to social ‘goods’ such as the labor market, education, healthcare, political representation, and participation. We can measure social inequality according to two variables: