Theories of Demographic Change – Demographic Shifts and Social Change (SOC)

00:00 Let's look at Demographic Shifts and Social Change.

00:04 Demographic Transition is a model that describes a country's population change overtime.

00:10 We know that this isn't a static process and that would in a separate time.

00:14 You going to see some changes.

00:15 And if you look over longer period of time or across countries you also see changes in demographics.

00:21 So, it moves to a period of high births to deaths rates to low birth/death rates which stabilizes a population.

00:29 So you might start off with a lot of births and a lot of deaths.

00:33 So they kind of balance each other out.

00:35 But then you transition to the second style where we have low births to deaths and that stabilize the population.

00:41 So there's a growth phase and there's a stabilization phase.

00:44 So Population Growth is the rate at which the population increases in a given time period expressed as a fraction of the initial population.

00:53 You're going to force a little bit of math here.

00:54 And we should be familiar with the way that we can calculate this.

00:57 So, population growth rate equals the current population minus the initial population over the initial population times a 100 will give us a percentage.

01:08 What are we looking at here? If we want to look at changes over say a year or starting, we're in 2016 right now.

01:17 So say we want to start the exact same time in 2015.

01:20 What was your population? So say the population was 10 million people.

01:24 And then, you're going to look at where we at today.

01:27 or actually at 16 million? Sorry, where at sure 16 million right now.

01:32 Your going to take 16 million minus the initial population which was 10 million.

01:38 And you going to divide that by the initial population which was 10 million times a 100 to get a value.

01:45 How do you establish what's comprising or what's making up the current population? All we know that the current population is actually made up of the initial population.

01:54 That's what you started with. 10 million in this scenario.

01:57 Then we have some births this year.

02:00 We add the births but then we must have had some subsequent deaths as well.

02:04 So you subtract the deaths.

02:06 And then we're going to have some people that are coming into our country or immigrating.

02:09 But they're also some kind of people out there leaving.

02:12 You take all of that and you do the math, that gets you your actual current population value.

02:18 Now, we got to remember as well, as a caveat here, That a lot of this is done through consensus or surveys And it's kind of an extrapolation on some subsampling.

02:28 So this isn't an exact number or it's more trans but it at least gives you some idea or some estimation of what's actually happening.

02:35 So for currently for most countries we actually have positive growth, right.

02:39 Countries are getting more and more populated.

02:42 Many countries support positive growth through compensation.

02:46 They're actually wanting to grow their population.

02:49 How things and certain countries where you would get a monthly bonus.

02:53 It's kind of called sometimes a baby bonus and you're going to check.

02:57 So you're being subsidize or you get other tax benefits if you have children with the idea being let's bolster our population. It's considered a status of success where you have population growth.

03:09 And it also helps bolster your economy. It helps further propagate the social cultural values.

03:16 Now, in developing countries, this positive growth made sense because it actually increased their labor force.

03:22 So you can see in this image here, we have all bunch of people working in the field.

03:25 And the idea here is where you don't have a necessary knowledge power and you're more labor based.

03:31 if you don't have a technology and you're more of a work force.

03:34 The more hands you have on deck, the more powerful and the better you are.

03:38 That's why in developing countries it's not just not 1 or 2 kids it might be 4,5,6 kids or they support having more and more children.

03:47 Now, this model this demographic ransition model has five stages.

03:51 And in each stage, you will notice some differences in that ratio that we had just try to figure out.

03:58 In the first stage, we have the Pre-Industrial Society.

04:01 And there's high births and death rates which are almost are balanced.

04:04 Which means there's low population growth.

04:06 So if you have 50,000 births but then you also have say 50,000 deaths That kind of count each other out.

04:13 So, all human population are believed to have had this balance until the late 18th century.

04:18 Because of the whole bunch of reasons.

04:21 The economy, the lack of available resources, the lack of understanding of health and actual healthcare.

04:29 So a lot of people being born but a lot of people were dying.

04:32 Now, we get to Stage 2, which we'd see in developing countries.

04:36 In here the death rate drops rapidly due to the improvement in food supply and sanitation with increase lifespans and reduce disease due to improve healthcare and education.

04:45 So we're getting to a better place for sure. And what this does is it allows for rapid increase in the demographic change and it increases the population of our country.

04:57 Next is Stage 3 or we call the Mature Industrial Age.

05:00 At this point births rates decline due to access to contraception and there's changing social trends towards smaller families.

05:07 So at this point, we have birth control,we have condoms, we have more educational around the fact that you can control birth and so rates start to decline.

05:16 And we also see that's there's a changing social trend.

05:18 So people don't want to have the 15, 16 people in their family And that number declines dramatically.

05:24 Now back at over the Stage 4, which is the Post-Industrial Society.

05:28 And at this point, not only our births rates low but death rates are low.

05:32 This leads to a similar situation that we had in stage 1. But in this point, the population has been growing through stages 1 and 3.

05:40 So we have a fairly high population and it's starting to become stable.

05:44 The population like we say has been growing.

05:46 Now, this is a scenario that you would see in countries like US, Australia and most of Europe, in Canada, where we have people who are not having 10 kids or just having 1 maybe 2 They are living a long great lives, high quality of life because of the quality of the healthcare that we have, the access to healthcare that we have and the quality of life that's available.

06:04 So great place to be.

06:07 Now, some propose the Stage 5.

06:09 So Stage four is certain, a stage five which is slightly uncertain and that's, it propose a birth rates will continue to decline to below death rates.

06:18 And so, at this point we're actually going to start to see a population decline.

06:22 And we are actually starting to see this in certain places.

06:24 It's a little bit hard to attain this and its usually maybe not as long live.

06:29 But the proposal is that overtime this is where most of us are going to actually had to.

06:36 So, the Malthusian Theories are prediction of a force return to decreasing our stable growth once population growth has outpaced agriculture production.

06:44 So, we call this the global breaking point.

06:47 In English, what we're saying this theory is saying, is that we've had this great run where we've had essentially a limited resources.

06:55 and we've had nothing really limiting our potential for growth.

06:59 You can have as many kids as you can really afford really.

07:03 And so, the limiting factors are more around sort of personal drivers as opposed to social cultural or global drivers.

07:12 That's going to change overtime. And they're saying, eventually we are getting it to a point we just don't have enough food, shelter, space to accommodate.

07:19 And so we can't keep having babies, we can't keep going at some point things are going to actually return to having a lot less babies more death or no babies. And they're going to start to see this decline coming back down.

07:32 So you can see in the image here. This is from the UN looking at some of the data that they per forth in the model. And you can see with the line is going up gradually.

07:42 Then we see a nice dramatic increase. And that's sort of the linear fashion on that right now.

07:46 That once that blue line stops, we have three options: One were continues to incline will be a high trend where we continue our growth and the patterns that we have now. Which as you could see become exceedingly high and almost unmanageable.

08:03 And then we have a medium where things are going to start to taper off.

08:07 that will be the middle line.

08:08 And then we have, what will the line with the Malthusian Theory is that we're going to see is the actual decline.

08:13 And so that what we say is the global breaking point.

08:17 So at that point, which one of this is going to actually come true? And if it's if we surpassed the breaking point we expect to see the decline.