Review - Population: A Lively Introduction 4th Edition

By Joseph A. McFalls Jr.

Mcfalls gives novices like me an excellent overview of what it means to study demographics and population geography.

He breaks the factors that are most important to determining population change into three categories that can be measured and used to prepare predictions: Fertility, Mortality and Migration.

Fertility must first be separated from ‘fecundity’, that denotes the physiological ability for women to have children. Fertility, often expressed as Total Fertility Rate or TFR, the average total number that a woman will have in her lifetime. For reasonable developed countries with a low death rate, a TFR of 2.1 is enough to keep a country’s population static, at replacement level.

The four proximate determinants directly affecting TFR are: the Proportion of women who are married or in a sexual union, the percent of women using contraception, the proportion of women who are infecund (b/c of breastfeeding maybe) and the level of intentional abortion.

Life expectancy is the most common indicator of mortality levels. Life expectancy is the average age that someone born in a particular ear group can live to. It’s like TFR is a synthetic metric derived from the average deaths in the different age groups for the same year.

Life Expectancy in the US has risen from 1900 to 2001 from 47 to 77, an increase of 30 ‘average’ years.

Migration is the most volatile population metric. Push and pull factors can make for an areas’ natural population loss or cause a country to experience a negative population growth. Emigration can cause problem in the places where migrants leave by causing brain drains. Immigration can cause problems in the destinations of migrants overwhelmed by people that the natives oftentimes feel don’t belong there.

Calculating a country’s population growth is a matter of adding up it natural increase and net migration. Natural increase is the number of births minus deaths. Net Migration is the number of immigrants minus emigrants.

The biggest and most important message that I walk away with is the changing shares of global population contained within developed versus developing countries. The developed countries’ share of population has dropped markedly from 1950 to 2003. This drop that can also be seen as a gain for Latin America, Africa and Asia is very open to interpretation. The definition of what is a developed country or region will change over time. The China and India of 2050 will scarcely resemble the same countries as they were in 1950. Still the picture this trend paints could be disturbing for many both in the developed world and in the underdeveloped countries where population growth is quickly outpacing development.