UD6 - Demography and Population

What are the 4 components of population change?

Births, Deaths, Internal & External migration

What is the 1st demographic transition about?

A shift from high fertility and mortality rates to low fertility and mortality rates

What are two reasons for the decreasing fertility rate?

1. lower child mortality rates due to better healthcare and diet

2. increase of productivity and improved welfare state, which made children less of an economical need.

Why is the population of the Netherlands growing despite lower fertility rates? name 2 reasons

1. migration

2. life expectancy

What are 4 key characteristics of the 2nd demographic transition? what’s the effect on households?

1. emancipation of women

2. birth control

3. changing norms on gender and family

4. individualisation

• number of households and its diversity are growing

what does the 3rd demographic transition refer to?

the situation in developed countries where the decline in fertility and the ageing of the population will lead to labour shortages, leading to population decline or growth by immigration; both will lead to major social transformations.

Why is the 3rd demographic transition ‘a bit iffy’ according to some researchers?

the population growth caused by immigration will make particularly the developed world more diverse in their racial and ethnic composition, sometimes framed as ‘population replacement’

What is nativism?

• Peoples, countries and their culture/ appearances are set: certain populations belong in some locations and not in others

• Populations have more rights in their lands than populations whose families did not originate in that location (blood and soil)

• Migration will contaminate bloodlines or lead to ‘inferior cultures or ‘physiques’, and will lead to social and econonomic decline

• There is a great replacement: white Europeans dying, a new population will take their place.

What do nativists ignore or fail to understand?

• that anthropological and DNA research have found it extremely hard to tie human groups to geographies (and they try)

• migration histories of ‘native populations’, both in recorded history and in the 300,000 years before that

• that nations are 19th-century social inventions

• that the growth of one group is not a replacement as long the other group is still having children. Cohort replacement is not the same as ethnic (1 to 1) replacement.

From a Malthusian perspective, what’s the relation between population and resources/economy?

population grows exponentially while resources grow linear, leading to a long-term lack of resources (Malthusian catastrophe)

what’s the difference between ‘population dynamics in cities’ and ‘population dynamics of cities’?

of: demographic changes of a city as a whole

in: demographic processes and the composition of a population within a city or city region itself