How Populations Grow and Change: Crash Course Geography #33

Summary

In this episode of Crash Course Geography, host Ali Zay Carrere explores the complexities of global population growth and change. While some regions face challenges from overpopulation, others, particularly in Eastern Europe, are experiencing declining birth rates, prompting governmental incentives for citizens to have more children. The episode discusses the historical and economic theories surrounding population growth, such as Malthusian predictions and Boserup's agricultural intensification theory. It highlights the importance of demographics, economic security, and women's empowerment in understanding and influencing population trends. The episode emphasizes that addressing global ecological and social tensions requires a nuanced understanding beyond mere population numbers.

Highlights

• Countries in Eastern Europe are encouraging higher birth rates despite concerns of overpopulation elsewhere 🍼.
• The Malthusian prediction linked poverty to exponential population growth, but it hasn't materialized as expected 📈.
• Boserup's theory suggests agricultural innovation responds to population pressure, offering a counterpoint to Malthus 📊.
• The demographic transition model explains how birth and death rates affect population changes over time 🔄.
• Empowering women and enhancing economic security can drastically reduce birth rates and positively influence population trends 👩‍💼.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding population growth requires considering both overpopulation and underpopulation dynamics in different regions 🌍.
• Economic security and women's empowerment are key to managing population trends and birth rates 👩‍🎓.
• Theories like Malthusian predictions and Boserup's counterarguments provide insight into historical views of population growth 📚.
• Demographic tools help illustrate how birth rates, death rates, and migration patterns interact 🧮.
• Global efforts, such as education and economic policies, can significantly influence population dynamics across nations 🌐.

Overview

In this enlightening episode, Crash Course Geography delves into the dual challenges of overpopulation and underpopulation. While overpopulation tends to dominate environmental discussions, particularly in high-density areas, there's a growing concern in some Eastern European countries over declining birth rates and the resultant economic impacts. This episode paints a complex picture of population dynamics, moving beyond simple headcounts to consider the intricate socio-economic factors at play.

The show revisits historical perspectives on population growth, such as Thomas Malthus's dire predictions of resource scarcity due to exponential population growth, juxtaposed against Ester Boserup’s optimistic view of human innovation in agriculture under population pressure. Through these lenses, the discussion expands to modern demographic tools like the demographic transition model, which illustrate how population metrics are influenced by various economic and social changes.

Empowerment and education, especially of women, are underscored as pivotal in managing population growth. By highlighting how increased education levels and access to economic opportunities can lower birth rates, the episode emphasizes that tackling population issues involves understanding how economic security and societal structures impact people's decisions. Thus, the narrative encourages a more comprehensive approach to discussing population than merely focusing on numbers.

How Populations Grow and Change: Crash Course Geography #33 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 back in episode 16 we got into two ways our earth can be overpopulated either when there's pressure in an area from more people in a place than the area can support or when even a small number of people apply pressure by overusing the resources in an area and both types of overpopulation sound like a big deal especially when we think about how we're using our resources and the other effects on our environment but if we check out global news over the last few decades we'd see something that seems counterintuitive policies encouraging people to have more kids basically to increase the population in the early 2000s countries across europe and
• 00:30 - 01:00 especially eastern europe started to notice an alarming trend fewer and fewer babies were being born so countries like estonia began implementing new policies like benefits and payments to encourage people to have more children so it seems like we're getting some mixed messages while we worry about there being too many people for the planet to support we can also worry about how fewer people in a given place may affect the economy what may happen when there are more elderly people who need healthcare than there are healthcare workers or even be concerned about how many people are necessary to carry on a language religion or other
• 01:00 - 01:30 aspects of culture population is more complex than just having too many or too few people but when we understand what drives the population of a place whether we're talking about movement in and out of a country or how many people are being born or are dying we can begin to understand future patterns of urban and rural growth cultural changes and even political movements i'm ali zay carrere and this is crash course geography [Music]
• 01:30 - 02:00 as population geographers we focus on the spatial aspects of populations or specific groups of people like where people are located why they're located there and how the location a number of people impact a place like in india we're losing habitat in the region that is the genetic hearth or birthplace of many varieties of banana so we might look at how the banana diffused as people traveled and then migrated along the silk roads over many centuries then we'd look at when the habitat started to decline and make note of who was using the land and how they were using it maybe the density or
• 02:00 - 02:30 number of people per square kilometer had changed or the economic or political practices or both as the land use changes we'd look for how humans have driven that change in fact while worrying about natural resources and the impact of population feels like a very 21st century climate crisis thing scholars have been talking about overpopulation for a couple hundred years now back in 1798 british economist thomas malthus first proposed what we now call the malthusian prediction based on what he was seeing in britain where agricultural production was increasing linearly but the population
• 02:30 - 03:00 seemed to be increasing exponentially he concluded that the world would soon be overrun by people who would use up all of the available resources malthus also argued that poverty causes population growth and that adding more people to the planet would doom us all today there are about 7 billion more people on the planet than in 1798 so malthus hasn't been right yet but while many of malthus's ideas were disproven the idea that poverty and population growth are linked stuck around in fact between the 1940s and 1960s it resurfaced as part of growing environmental awareness this
• 03:00 - 03:30 neo-malthusian movement pointed back to malthus's arguments sounding an alarm that there were too many people on the planet and soon there wouldn't be enough resources for everyone malthusian ideas like that we should be wary of outstripping our resources and that poverty is to blame led to global movements to encourage poor countries to achieve lower birth rates but not everyone agreed with the rather convenient for wealthy countries argument that global environmental disaster was the fault of poor people like danish economist esther bosrip who in 1965 published what sometimes called
• 03:30 - 04:00 the beaucerup theory or agricultural intensification unlike malthus beauserip argued that people innovate and in particular the agriculture sector only innovates when there's pressure from having more mouths to feed so poor people weren't going to use up all the resources like malthus thought and disaster wasn't imminent what malthus and boastrop were both getting at were ideas of carrying capacity which in human geography means how many people a given environment can support rather than blame over or under population today when population sizes increase or decrease a population
• 04:00 - 04:30 geographer will ask questions to figure out what's happening in that place and how humans are putting pressure on the environment we also use the tools of demography or the study of population to study how populations change over space and time demography often includes lots of statistics like birth rate which we've already mentioned and death rate or the mortality rate one tool demographers use is the demographic transition model which tries to approximate how different birth and death rates lead to population change and how that ties into the economy in fact it was originally created to
• 04:30 - 05:00 model how population size might respond to changes in the economy like within or between agricultural manufacturing or even service-based economies like any mathematical model the demographic transition model isn't perfect because predicting the future is hard in particular the demographic transition model was developed based on population patterns in western europe and north america and doesn't always capture patterns in lower income or non-white populations and while we read the stages from left to right when using the model it's important to remember that economic development and population changes
• 05:00 - 05:30 aren't strictly sequential it's possible for dramatic events like a war or an environmental disaster to create conditions that cause populations and economies to skip back and forth between stages but we'll still talk through them from left to right in the demographic transition model stage 1 populations have high birth and high death rates which end up balancing each other out more or less so the population size is roughly small but steady before the industrial revolution every country would have been considered a stage one country but today none exist a stage two population is one that is
• 05:30 - 06:00 growing rapidly like the population of western europe when malthus was writing in the 18th century lots of people are being born but fewer and fewer people are dying better healthcare and nutrition mean that people are living longer in 2020 there were only a few countries considered stage 2 like yemen and to see what a high birth rate and low death rate means for the overall population and trends over time we can use another demography tool called a population pyramid a population pyramid allows us to see historic impacts on population and also predict future growth and decline which helps
• 06:00 - 06:30 governments allocate resources from this pyramid we can see that in 2020 there was a steady decline in population after 10 years old and a sharper decline after 44 years old so this is a time as population geographers we can ask questions to see what's happening in yemen turns out there's been conflict and war in the region going back to at least 2011 and that dip represents some of the people who have died in the conflicts but overall a triangular pattern like this tends to indicate that the population will continue to increase while there aren't many countries in the stage 2 category in 2020 a large number
• 06:30 - 07:00 of the world's countries fit in stage 3. this stage is where both death rates and eventually birth rates start to decrease so our population growth rate starts to slow down in fact the world's population growth rate or the rate of natural increase which only considers births and deaths and ignores migration was actually at its highest in 1963 but in 2021 there's still a lot of population momentum the birth rate might be getting smaller but bigger and bigger groups of people are getting old enough to have kids so the world population will still
• 07:00 - 07:30 increase for a few more generations until the number of people who aren't old enough to have kids is smaller than the number who are which brings us to the final stage we'll discuss stage four where countries have slow to declining population growth across eastern europe there's been an economic stagnation after the wars and economic decline of the 1990s and instead of leading to high birth rates like might happen in a stage one or two country the lack of economic opportunity leads to voluntary migration kind of a double population whammy as people leave there are fewer people to support the economy and take care of the aging population so
• 07:30 - 08:00 stage 4 countries like japan or germany or even some stage 3 countries like estonia are trying to create incentives for people to both stay in the country and have more children what we can learn from demographic tools like the demographic transition model or by studying population pyramids is that the interplay between birth rates death rates and migration requires a lot of context but we can use this information to better understand the relationship between people their economic security and their impact on the resources they use globally there have been drastic
• 08:00 - 08:30 efforts to reduce population sizes in the name of saving the environment or resources like restrictions on the number of children a family can have or even four sterilization programs but by looking at more than just population size we can notice that most places where the birth rate comes down have a few things in common especially economic security and the role of women in society in societies where economic security is shaky or where children rarely make it to adulthood or where there is no guaranteed retirement income there's often a high birth rate and countries have found that if they want
• 08:30 - 09:00 to encourage a decrease in birth rate one of the fastest ways to help that happen is to empower women many different studies show each year of education a woman has decreases the birth rate by 5 to 10 percent an education combined with access to good paying jobs is a major factor in the total fertility rate or the average number of children a person is expected to give birth to over the course of their reproductive years a population geographer uses all of these tools to assemble the population trends into a picture that helps us understand the role they play in economic and environmental issues
• 09:00 - 09:30 societies can then use this picture for decision making like to understand the current population trends and predict the future trajectory to better plan for workforce and resource needs or to implement policies to educate women and encourage them to participate in the workforce to try to decrease future population pressure so is the world overpopulated or underpopulated it seems to be both it just depends where you're located the global population is increasing but some countries like estonia japan or to some extent the u.s face an aging crisis a
• 09:30 - 10:00 huge chunk of their population is getting older without enough younger people to care for them other high-density places like bangladesh india and south korea have implemented a wide range of programs or have economies that give people economic options that make it more possible to have smaller family sizes if we want to understand how to address some of our largest ecological and social tensions we need to understand more than just how populations grow we have to understand what makes people feel economically secure but keep in mind that economic success uses up a lot of resources so rather than go ah there
• 10:00 - 10:30 are almost 8 billion people on the planet it's more helpful if we remember we're talking about people with complex lives and dreams living in particular economic situations not just numbers and look at multiple factors to understand the problems related to population size thanks for watching this episode of crash course geography which is filmed at the team sandoval pier studio and was made with the help of all these nice people if you want to help keep crash course free for everyone forever you can join our community on patreon
• 10:30 - 11:00 [Music] you