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Module 6: Human Population

Family Planning in Thailand
Thailand’s highly successful family planning program combines humor and
education with economic development.
Down a narrow lane off Bangkok’s busy Sukhumvit Road, is a most unusual café.
Called Cabbages and Condoms, it’s not only highly rated for its spicy Thai food,
but it’s also the only restaurant in the world dedicated to birth control.
In an adjoining gift shop, baskets of condoms stand next to decorative
handicrafts of the northern hill tribes.
Piles of T-shirts carry messages, such as, “A condom a day keeps the doctor away,” and “Our food is guaranteed
not to cause pregnancy.”
Both businesses are run by the Population and Community Development Association (PDA), Thailand’s largest and most
influential nongovernmental organization.
This campaign has been extremely successful at making birth control and family planning, which once had been
taboo topics in polite society, into something familiar and unembarrassing.
Although condoms— now commonly called “mechais” in Thailand—are the trademark of PDA, other contraceptives, such
as pills, spermicidal foam, and IUDs, are promoted as well.
Every second, on average, four or five children are born, somewhere on the earth.
In that same second, two other people die. This difference between births and deaths means a net gain of roughly 2.3
more humans per second in the world’s population.
In mid-2009 the total world population stood at roughly 6.8 billion people and was growing at 1.14 percent per year.
This means we are now adding nearly 75 million more people per year, and if this rate persists, our global population will
double in about 61 years.

Human populations grew slowly until relatively recently:

For most of our history, humans have not been very numerous compared
to other species.
Studies of hunting and gathering societies suggest that the total world
population was probably only a few million people before the invention
of agriculture and the domestication of animals around 10,000 years ago.
The larger and more secure food supply made available by the agricultural
revolution allowed the human population to grow, reaching perhaps
50 million people by 5000 b.c.
Until the Middle Ages, human populations were held in check by diseases,
famines, and wars that made life short and uncertain for most people (fig. 7.3).
Furthermore, there is evidence that many early societies regulated their population size through cultural taboos and
practices such as abstinence and infanticide.
Among the most destructive of natural population controls were bubonic plagues (or Black Death) that periodically swept
across Europe between 1348 and 1650.
During the worst plague years (between 1348 and 1350), it is estimated that at least one-third of the European
population perished.

Does environment or culture control human populations?

Since the time of the Industrial Revolution, when the world population began growing rapidly, individuals have argued
about the causes and consequences of population growth.

Thomas Malthus = argued that excess population growth is the ultimate

cause of many other social and environmental problems.

Karl Marx = argued that oppression and exploitation are the real causes of
poverty and environmental degradation.
Population growth in this view is a symptom or result of other
problems, not the source.

Demography = is derived from the Greek words demos (people) and graphos
(to write or to measure).
It encompasses vital statistics about people, such as births, deaths, and
where they live, as well as total population size.
How many of us are there?
The estimate of 6.8 billion people in the world in 2009 quoted earlier in this chapter is only an
educated guess.
Even in this age of information technology and communication, counting the number of people in
the world is like shooting at a moving target.
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Governments may overstate or understate their populations to make their countries appear larger and more important or
smaller and more stable than they really are.
We really live in two very different demographic worlds:
1. One is old, rich, and relatively stable.
2. The other is young, poor, and growing rapidly.
Most people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are included and these
countries represent 80 percent of the world population.
Fertility measures the number of children born to each woman
Fecundity = is the physical ability to reproduce
Fertility = describes the actual production of offspring.
Those without children may be fecund but not fertile.
The most accessible demographic statistic of fertility is usually the
crude birth rate = the number of births in a year per
thousand persons.
Total fertility rate is the number of children born to an average
woman in a population during her entire reproductive life.
Zero population growth (ZPG) = occurs when births plus immigration in a
population just equal deaths plus emigration.
It takes several generations of replacement level fertility (where people just replace themselves) to
reach ZPG.
China’s one-child-per-family policy decreased the fertility rate from 6 in 1970 to
1.8 in 1990 and 1.6 in 2009 (fig. 7.10).
This policy, however, has sometimes resulted in abortions, forced sterilizations,
and even infanticide.
Another adverse result is that the only children (especially boys) allowed to
families may grow up to be spoiled “little emperors” who have an inflated
impression of their own importance.
Furthermore, there may not be enough workers to maintain the army, sustain the economy, or support retirees
when their parents reach old age.
Mortality is the other half of the population equation:
In demographics, however, crude death rates (or crude mortality rates) are expressed in terms of the number of deaths per
thousand persons in any given year.
Countries in Africa where health care and sanitation are limited may have mortality rates of 20 or more per 1,000 people.
Crude death rate subtracted from crude birth rate gives the natural increase of a population.
We distinguish natural increase from the total growth rate, which includes immigration and emigration, as well as births and
deaths.
Both of these growth rates are usually expressed as a percent (number per hundred people) rather than per thousand.
A useful rule of thumb is that if you divide 70 by the annual percentage growth, you will get the approximate doubling time
in years.
Life span and life expectancy describe our potential longevity:
Life span = is the oldest age to which a species is known to survive.
Oldest age that can be certified by written records was that of Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France, who was 122 years
old at her death in 1997.
The aging process is still a medical mystery, but it appears that cells in our bodies have a limited ability to repair
damage and produce new components.
Life expectancy = is the average age that a newborn infant can expect to attain in any given society.
It is another way of expressing the average age at death.
Life expectancy has increased nearly everywhere in the world, but the increase has lagged in the least-developed countries.
Even if total fertility rates were to fall abruptly, the total number of births, and population size, would continue to grow for
some years as these young people enter reproductiveage. This phenomenon is called population momentum.
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Many factors increase our desire for children:

Factors that increase people’s desires to have babies are called pronatalist pressures.
Children can be a source of pleasure, pride, and comfort.
They may be the only source of support for elderly parents in countries without a social security system.
Where infant mortality rates are high, couples may need to have many children to be sure that at least a few will survive
to take care of them when they are old.
Often children are valuable to the family not only for future income, but even more as a source of current
income and help with household chores.
In much of the developing world, children as young as 6 years old tend domestic animals and younger siblings, fetch
water, gather firewood, and help grow crops or sell things in the marketplace (fig. 7.15)
Other factors discourage reproduction:
In more highly developed countries, many pressures tend to reduce fertility.
Higher education and personal freedom for women often result in decisions to limit childbearing.
The desire to have children is offset by a desire for other goods and activities that compete with childbearing and
childbearing for time and money.
When women have opportunities to earn a salary, they are less likely to stay home and have many children.
Not only are the challenge and variety of a career attractive to many women, but the money that they can earn outside
the home becomes an important part of the family budget.
Thus, education and socioeconomic status are usually inversely related to fertility in richer countries.
In developing countries, however, fertility may rise, at least temporarily, as educational levels and socioeconomic status
rise. With higher income, families are better able to afford the children they want; more money means that women
are likely to be healthier, and therefore better able to conceive and carry a child to term.

Demographic Transition = a pattern of falling death rates and birth rates due
to improved living conditions usually accompanies economic development.
Stage I = represents the conditions in a pre-modern society.
Food shortages, malnutrition, lack of sanitation and medicine,
accidents, and other hazards generally keep death rates in such
a society around 35 per 1,000 people.
Birth rates are correspondingly high to keep population
densities relatively constant.
Stage II = as economic development brings better jobs, medical
care, sanitation, and a generally improved standard of living in,
death rates often fall very rapidly.
Stage III = in a mature industrial economy, birth rates fall as people
see that all their children are more likely to survive and that the
whole family benefits from concentrating more resources on fewer children.
Note that population continues to grow rapidly during this stage because of population momentum (baby boomers
reaching reproductive age).
Stage IV = represents conditions in developed countries, where the transition is complete and both birth rates and
death rates are low, often, a third or less than those in the predevelopment era.
The population comes into a new equilibrium in this phase, but at a much larger size than before.

social justice = a fair share of social benefits for everyone.

> is the real key to successful demographic transitions
Hunger, poverty, violence, environmental degradation, and overpopulation are symptoms of a lack of social justice rather
than a lack of resources.