2.6 Demography

• Reasons for birth rate decline

  (Harper)

  Education of women is the important reason why there has been a decrease of birth and fertility rates.
• England and Wales Birth Rates 2014

  12.2
• Total Fertility Rate 2014

  1.83
• Infant Mortality Rate 1900 vs 2021

  154 / 1000

  4.6 / 1000
• Decline in infant mortality & birth rate

  (harper) lower infant mortality rate leads to a lower birth rate as if less children are dying the family needs to have less children to replace the children that have passed
• Criticism of link between infant mortality & birth rate

  brass and kabir - the trend to smaller families first began in urban areas where the imr was high rather than in rural areas where it first started to decline
• What are children now? Why?

  An economic liability due to child labour laws, compulsory education & higher leaving age so children are economically dependent for longer
• Dependency ratio

  the number of people who are too young or too old to work, compared to the number of people in their productive years
• Death Rate 2012


  8.9
• Infectious diseases and diseases of affluence

  tranter - over 3/4 of the decline in death rate from 1850 to 1970 was due to the fall in number of deaths from infectious diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis, which caused the premature death of infants, children and young people. these infections have been replaced by 'diseases of affluence' such as heart disease and cancer, which affect the middle-aged and old
• Improved nutrition

  mckeown - argued that improved nutrition made up half of the reduction in the number of deaths from tuberculosis as people were stronger and more able to fight infection
• smoking and diet

  harper - the greatest recent fall in death rate is due to the number of smokers, however it has been replaced as a 'lifestyle epidemic' by obesity
• Public health measures

  housing improvements - drier, better ventilated and less crowded living spaces

  purer drinking water

  clean air acts - reduced air pollution such as smog which led to 4000 deaths over 5 days in 1952
• Life expectancy

  from 50s in 1900 to 80s in 2010s
• Obesity Rate 2012

  One quarter of UK adults were obese
• Walker


  Those living in the poorest areas die on average 7 years earlier than those in the richest areas
• Average Age 2014

  40.3
• Dependency Ratio 2015

  3.2 People of working age per pensioner
• ageism

  phillipson - as a marxist old people are no longer useful to capitalism and so the state is unwilling to look after them, which places their care on (female) relatives
• inequality among the old

  pilcher argues that inequalities of class and gender remain important into old age

  class - the middle class have better occupational pensions and greater savings from higher salaries which means they live longer and are more able to fight infirmity and maintain a youthful self-identity

  gender - women earn less than men and often take maternity career breaks, and are subject to sexist as well as ageist discrimination
• Policies

  hirsch - a number of important policies will need to change in response to the growing ageing population e.g. who to finance a longer period of old age - paying more into savings and taxes and/or working longer
• Ethnic Diversity 2011

  Ethnic minority groups accounted for 14% of the population
• Net Migration 2014

  260,000
• Types of migrant


  citizens - full citizenship rights, the uk state has made it harder to achieve this status since the 1970s

  denizens - privileged foreign nationals such as oligarchs welcomed by the state

  helots - illegally trafficked workers and migrants tied to a job, viewed by the state as 'disposable units of labour power
• The feminisation of migration

  shutes - 40% of adult care nurses in the uk are female migrants. there is also a global transfer of emotional work to migrant nannies who provide affection to their employers children at the loss of contact with their own family
• Migrant identities

  eade - second generation bangladeshi muslims in britain held heirarchical identities: they were muslims, then bengali, then british

  their identities were challenged by others and they were accused of not 'fitting in
• criticisms of migration policy

  castles - assimilation policies can lead to migrant groups being labelled as 'other' and culturally backwards or migrant groups responding by emphasising the cultural differences which creates further marginalisation
• Ehrenreich and Hochschild


  Care work, domestic work and sex work in domestic countries increasingly done by women from poor countries
• Castles and Kosack


  Racism benefits capitalism as it create a racially divided working class prevention United defence action