Overview of demographics

Voiceover: We've spent plenty of time learning about urbanization, population dynamics, demographic transition, globalization and social movements. Now that we've had a nice detailed look into demographics let's take a quick moment to review all the topics. To start off we have urbanization. Urbanization is the movement of people from rural areas like farms to urban areas like cities. From a functionalism perspective, cities are both good and bad for our society. They are centers of culture and diversity but also of crime. From a conflict theory perspective, cities are sources of inequality where the elite use resources from the poor to enrich their own lives, and the cultural diversity leads to more conflict between different beliefs and values. Symbolic interaction you see cities as hubs for culture with strong norms and values. People move to urban areas for a number of reasons. Jobs, better utilities, easier access to hospitals and schools. As more and more people move to cities and metropolises it really begins to affect the people who live there. In order to make friends and form connections people must seek out small communities to join. For some people though those small communities aren't enough. They need to get away from the fast pace and often stressful [havoc] but still want something more than what a rural environment would have to offer, so they moved to the outskirts of the city. This creates the suburbs that extend from the urban areas. Here, people can form communities with their neighbors while maintaining their own individual oasis. Then beyond suburbs are the exurbs which are often very prosperous. The drive into the city for work can be rather tiresome though so some suburbs create their own economic centers. Some people rebuild areas of the city itself in what is called urban renewal which can lead to gentrification where the former residents are forced out because they can no longer afford the property. Then there's rural rebound. When some people desire to get away from urban areas altogether and choose to move back to rural areas. All right, so the main gist of urbanization is people moving to the city. Next on the list is population dynamics which looks at how population grows or shrinks over time. This includes fertility, migration and mortality rates. We usually look at about a year's worth of population change so we can catch trends though you can of course look at a population change over any period of time. Fertility measures the rate at which people are born in a population. Burst increase the population. Migration consists of two factors. Immigration where people move into a country to permanently make it their home which adds to the total population and emigration where people move out of the country to make somewhere else their permanent home which decreases the population. Last is mortality which measures the rate at which people are dying in a population. In case you were wondering, deaths decrease the population. People migrate for a number of reasons. Some people are seeking refuge, others are seeking work, others still just want to live in a different country. When looking at the population of a country it is interesting to look at the population pyramid which divides up how many people of different ages and genders there are. Expansive pyramids means there are lots of deaths and lots of births. The population has a bunch of young people and not so many old people. A stationary pyramid usually means birth rates and death rates are low. You have lots of everybody. A constrictive pyramid also means low birth and death rates, but there are fewer young people than old. Usually you see this constrictive pyramid in very developed countries. If you want to see how the population of a country changes also known as the growth rate, you take the initial population plus the number of births, plus the number of immigrants, minus the number of emigrants, minus the number of deaths, and you get the new population. If this number is bigger than the initial population, obviously, the population grew so the growth rate is positive. If this number is smaller than the initial population the population has shrunk and the growth rate is negative. Right now most countries are growing though a few like Bulgaria and Czech Republic are shrinking. This equation here wraps up population dynamics nicely. Fertility and immigration increase a population. Death and emigration decrease the population and right now most populations just keep getting bigger. This leads nicely into the concept of demographic transition. Demographic transition is the model of the changes in the country's population. At some time in the not so distant future, the high birth rates and high death rates of the past will transition to low birth rates and low death rates. There are five stages to demographic transition. One, there are high birth rates and high death rates with a stable population, modeled by a high stationary population pyramid. Two, death rates begin to decline because of better sanitation and food supply and the population of older people increases. Modeled by an early expanding population pyramid. Three, birth rates also begin to decline because of access to contraception and changing social values, and the population stops growing quite as fast which is modeled by a late expanding population pyramid. Four, the birth rates and death rates balance out so the population stabilizes, but there are a lot of people because the population has been growing up until this point, which is modeled by a low stationary pyramid. Stage five is only speculative right now. The population could remain stable or increase or decrease which would be modeled by a constrictive population pyramid, and it all depends on the external and internal pressures of the individual society and the world. Here is as simple as it gets. Demographic transition models the changing population of a country or the world. Now that we're looking at the world let's check out globalization. Globalization is the sharing of ideas, cultures, services and products across national borders due to the interdependence of different countries, the progress of technology and advancements to communication technology. People migrating to different countries or working in different countries bring their native customs with them. There are many theories of globalization. World systems theory states that the world is a single social unit divided into three regions. Core countries which are industrialized and relatively independent of outside control. Periphery countries which are greatly influenced by coronations and transnational corporations, and depend on one type of economic activity. And semi-periphery countries which are the middle ground between core and periphery consisting of either declining core countries or rising periphery countries. Then you have modernization theory which states that every country follows a similar path in development from traditional to modern, and that today's third world countries can reach the same state of development of today's first world countries with help over time. Dependency theory which is a reaction to modernization theory states that the third world countries have their own unique structures and are poor and will remain so because of their unfavorable economic position in the world economy. Other theories look at culture or social networking or economy or politics or goods. There are different perspectives of globalization as well. Hyperglobalist believe that individual countries will become less important as countries become interdependent and the global society takes presence. Skeptics believe that countries are still very important and rather than becoming globalized the world is become regionalized, which you can see exemplified by transnational corporations. Despite their role on the global economy they are still tied to their home country. Finally, transformationalist take a middle ground and simply state that the importance of national governments is changing, as is the design of the world order. Though they're unspecific as to what it all is changing into. I've used the term transnational corporations a few times already so, let's take a look at what that means. Many corporations have grown to the point that they are looking across national borders for cheaper materials and labor. Some of these transnational corporations make more money in a year than entire countries do. Isn't that crazy? All of these means that countries are no longer solely self-dependent. They look to other countries for some of their necessities. Sometimes the effects of globalization are bad like the negative effects due to countries competing to provide cheapest labor to transnational corporations, but there are also benefits to globalization. All these interdependence causes foreign nations to become interconnected. Today, globalization is facilitated by the ease of communication and transportation of ideas, money and people across the world. It affects the cultures as well as the economies of every country with foreign ties. In short, globalization is the sharing of ideas, products and cultures across national borders that change those nation's economies and cultures. Last but not the least, we have social movements. Activist social movements seek to change something about society while regressive or reactionary social movements resist social change. When we think of social movements we can think of the environmental movement. This is a good example. A group of people with a shared idea who have the resources and leadership to organize members to achieve a shared goal. Social movements either encourage change in their society or they resist change. Either way they will have an impact on their society and forever leave it altered. In the early 20th century social movements were seen as negative calls for attention by people seeking meaning in their lives. This was during the time of nautism, fascism and solonism which harmed millions of lives. Today though, social movements are observed to be an instrumental part of the evolution of a society. According to relative deprivation theory, people who perceive some sort of deprivation or inequality will band together to try and change that in society. But according to resource mobilization theory they must have the resources to fund the movement, to publicize it, to recruit members, to make an impact. Rational choice theory states that the patterns of behavior in society depend on the choices of people who weigh different actions and choose the one that benefits them the most. Social movements can cause widespread effects by creating panics where people are unreasonably fearful and act hastily or crazist where something is incredible popular for a short period of time. In the end, social movements only have two options. They either fail and fade away or they succeed and become integrated into this society becoming the new norm. To wrap it up, social movements are groups of people with a shared idea, a strong leadership and the resource to make an impact on society. There we have it. The bird's eye view of demographics.