Demography

A Very Short Introduction

De: Sarah Harper

Narrado por: Samantha Desz

The generation into which each person is born, the demographic composition of that cohort, and its relation to those born at the same time in other places influences not only a person's life chances, but also the economic and political structures within which that life is lived; the person's access to social and natural resources (food, water, education, jobs, sexual partners); and even the length of that person's life. Demography, literally the study of people, addresses the size, distribution, composition, and density of populations, and considers the impact the drivers which mediate these will have on both individual lives and the changing structure of human populations.

This Very Short Introduction considers the way in which the global population has evolved over time and space. Sarah Harper discusses the theorists, theories, and methods involved in studying population trends and movements. She then looks at the emergence of new demographic sub-disciplines and addresses some of the future population challenges of the 21st century.

©2018 Sarah Harper (P)2018 Tantor

Even at the time it was written, it was outdated.

Written in 2011, or at least recorded them according to the info on the audiobook, it is not only outdated but extremely biased. It will talk about certain views on certain subjects without giving the countervailing views even though those views have been gaining ground and the view that she is pushing, mostly regarding the limited resources of the earth to feed the population are not only mathematically sound but have been disproven time and time again as technology carrying capacity for man time and time again decade after decade. One needs only to look to the continued growth of rice yields and the yields of other agricultural products to see that her argument stands on shifting sand. She seems to not understand that we throw away half of the food that we produce currently either. people starve in the world today for political reasons because of genocidal governments, wanting to kill off ethnic groups, so their ethnic group can take over the land in places such as Africa. No one is starving for lack of agricultural productivity on the planet. She makes the earth sound like, a supermarket that’s not getting any more deliveries. She doesn’t take into consideration that the Earth might be fine. We do not know it’s upper caring capacity limits nor is the earth the closed system. Our food grows using energy from the sun, which comes from outside. Very liberal bias everywhere. We are in a depopulation crisis and she is talking about the weird musings of ideologues from the 1960s the silence spring kind of stuff still. Very outdated.