Information to Sociology/Demography/Taerim Kim

1. summary
The word demography refers to the study of human population dynamics. It tells how population changed through birth, aging, and so on. Demography can explain lots of sociological phenomena, and that’s the reason why people study demography. In demography, birth and death rates are most important indicators. The demographic transition is a theory which describes the transition of birth/death rate. It’s theory based on the research of Thompson, Blacker, and Notestein. If there are more people than resources which they need for survival, we call that overpopulation. Shortly, overpopulation is a ratio that population over resources. Back in 19th century, Thomas Malthus said that resources tend to grow arithmetically, while population grows exponentially. And he also argued that population has to be controlled by moral restraint. The things which could be followed by overpopulation are: child poverty, little surplus food, lower levels of literacy, etc.

2. interesting/new things
In this article, there is a part suggest problems of overpopulation. I was interested in various problems which occurred by overpopulation. There were child poverty, high birth rates, little surplus food, lower levels of literacy. But to me, lower levels of literacy and child poverty was most interesting. Because those two problems are commonly found in a big family which has many children (sometimes over 10).

3. discussion point
Did you hear of VHEMT? VHEMT is a short for Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. It was founded by Les U.Knight in 1991. They don’t They think it’d be better off if there is no human on earth. Their motto is “May we live long and die out.”. It Looks like a bit extreme, but I assume that there is a proper population for all those people who live here. What number of human is proper for our lives? Or our earth? And what made you think so?

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