Module 4: Demographic Perspectives.

• Should the population become greater than the available food supply, the best thing to do is to either import food or export people.
• In order to reach a non-growing population, Mill believed that women should be given the opportunity for their voices to be heard, considering that they have less desire for children. In this manner, the birth rate will eventually decline.
• According to Mill, the key to lessening children among the poor is through a national education system.
• Social Capillarity, according to Dumont, is when a person’s desire to get ahead in the social hierarchy is far greater than his desire in having children that he. /she is willing to sacrifice his/her chances at procreating
• According to Emile Durkheim, population growth encourages people to specialize since competition in acquiring various resources becomes tighter.
• Durkheim’s idea of “population growth leads to specialization” came from Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, which, as we all know, has the basic premise of “survival of the fittest.”
• Book of Genesis: With the population starting at a low number, early doctrines, such as the Bible, clearly pushed for reproduction.
• Venus and Aphrodite: Ancient goddesses who assist people with fertility.
• Plato: “Population quality more important than quantity; emphasis on population stability”.
• St. Augustine: "Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation."
• St. Thomas Aquinas: “Celibacy is not better than marriage and procreation”.
• Mercantilism: is an instrumental factor in population growth since additional hands would contribute to economic prosperity.
• Physiocrats: They regard agricultural land as the determinant of population size as well as the distribution of resources in the economy.
• Adam Smith:  “Wealth sprang from the labor applied to the land”.
• Thomas Malthus: “Population increases geometrically, and subsistence increases arithmetically.
• Thomas Malthus two postulates: (1) Food is necessary to the existence of man; (2) the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.
• Neo-Malthusian: “Accepting the basic Malthusian premise that population growth tends to outstrip resources, but unlike Malthus believing that birth control measures are appropriate checks to population growth”.
• Garrett Hardin wrote Tragedy of the Commons.
• Paul Ehrlich: The population would continue to increase, and food, though it could be made available for all, may not be of the same quantity and nutritious for all.
• Karl Marx: “Each society at each point in history has its own law of population that determines the consequences of population growth; poverty is not the natural result of population growth”.
• The three modern demographic thinkers. 1. Thomas Malthus 2. Karl Marx 3. Paul Ehrlich
• Aphrodite: Goddess of love, beauty and sexuality, representing fertility.
• Venus of Willendorf: Discovered by Josef Szombathy in 1908.
• Venus of Willendorf: Believed to serve as a talisman for fertility; it's petite in size that it could fit in the palm of hand.
• Confucius: "The government should move people from overpopulated to underpopulated areas".
• Confucianism's possible answers to China's Demographic Disaster: (1) prioritizes family over the individual. (2) welcomes children as gifts.
• Plato: "Population quality more important than quantity"; emphasis on population stability.
• Plato's strategies for population control: 1. Late marriage 2. Infanticide 3. Migration
• St Augustine: "Human sexuality was a supernaturally good thing but also an important cause of sin.
• St Augustine: Abstinence is the preferred way to deal with human sexuality.; the second best is to marry and procreate.
• St. Thomas Aquinas: Argued that marriage and family building were not inferior to celibacy, thus he promotes the goodness of population growth.
• Ibn Khaldun: Population growth is inherently good because it increases occupational specialization and raises incomes.
• Mercantilism: Believed that a strong nation should have a large population that would provide a supply of labor, market, and soldiers.
• Mercantilism's population policies: 1. Penalties for non-marriage 2. Encouragements to get married 3. Limiting out migration and (4) promoting immigration.
• Mercantilism's population policies can be applied to specific country and not all of human society.
• Thomas Malthus' 4 processes of natural law of population: 1. Increase of food resources 2. Increase of population 3. Increase consumption of food resources 4. Poverty
• Malthus: Blamed the poverty on the poor themselves.
• Malthus' 3 checks to growth: 1. Positive checks 2. Preventive checks 3. Moral restraint
• Paul Ehrlich: "too many people, too little food, leading to environmental degradation.."
• Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels: They both argued that overpopulation is a result of capitalism.