Geography II: Population, Migration, Culture, Political Geography, Development

This is Unit Eleven of Social Sciences and History, part one of two: human geography from population's measures to the languages of contact. Unit ten closed on the climate record read as pattern. This part carries one habit through population, migration and culture: ask what the measure counts. A density means nothing until you know whether it divides by all land, by food land, or by farmers. A crude rate is crude because it ignores age. A refugee is a status granted, not a condition assumed. A creole differs from a pidgin by having native speakers. Every classification in this part turns on that question, and the two procedures at its center, choosing a density and classifying a mover, are the habit made explicit. By the end you will be able to compute natural increase and say what fertility and momentum mean. To place a country in its transition stage. To choose the density that answers a question. To classify a mover. And to name a contact language and tell folk culture from popular.

Five entries on population's measures: where people are, three densities, the crude rates, fertility, and doubling and momentum.

Where people are.

SSH 1001 Where People Are: Clusters and the Ecumene

The human population is still growing, but more slowly than in the recent past, and unevenly: some places grow fast and others shrink, and the fastest-growing tend to be poor. The ecumene is the inhabited part of the Earth, and Finlayson's clusters are East Asia, South Asia and Europe. Impact is place-bound: rich low-population places often use more resources.

Three densities.

SSH 1002 Arithmetic, Physiological, Agricultural Density

Population density is people per areal unit. Arithmetic density divides a country's population by its total land area. Physiological density counts people per unit of arable land. Agricultural density counts farmers per unit of arable land, a measure of how many work the fields: a desert country runs low arithmetic and high physiological. Choosing among them comes later in this lecture.

The crude rates.

SSH 1003 Crude Birth Rate, Crude Death Rate, Natural Increase

The crude birth rate is live births per thousand people in a year; the crude death rate, deaths per thousand. The rate of natural increase is births minus deaths, excluding migration: thirty births and ten deaths give two percent. Morbidity is disease within a population, mortality deaths. The rates are crude because they are unadjusted for age structure.

Fertility.

SSH 1004 Total Fertility and the 2.1 Line

The total fertility rate is the average number of children a woman would bear over her lifetime. Replacement level is the fertility that lets a population replace itself, roughly two point one, the anchor says. Below it, a population eventually shrinks without migration. A cohort is a subset defined by age.

Doubling and momentum.

SSH 1005 Doubling Time and Population Momentum

Doubling time is the period a population needs to double. Population momentum is the tendency of growth to continue because many people are in their childbearing years, so growth continues for decades after fertility reaches replacement. A population projection is an estimate of future population. Momentum is why the transition's third stage still grows.

Five entries on the transition, the pyramid and capacity: placing a country in its stage, reading a pyramid, carrying capacity, mortality measures, and choosing a density.

Placing a country in its stage.

SSH 1006 The Demographic Transition: Placing a Country in Its Stage

The exam describes a country's birth and death rates and asks its stage, and Dorrell's four-stage model sorts it. Stage one, pre-modern: birth rates high, death rates high, population low but stable. Stage two, industrializing: food, water, sanitation and medicine improve, death rates fall, infant mortality first, while birth rates lag, so population grows very rapidly. Stage three: birth rates fall as society finds equilibrium, but births still exceed deaths and population keeps rising, which is population momentum; the stage ends in rough balance. Stage four: stability returns at a much greater number of people. Deaths falling fast, births still high, explosive growth: two. Births falling, growth slowing but continuing: three. Ask which rate has moved: neither, deaths only, both with births catching up, or both settled. The trap is stage two's growth: it comes from death rates falling, not birth rates rising. The second trap is stage three: population still grows there, by momentum, though the rates are converging.

The pyramid.

SSH 1007 Reading a Population Pyramid

A population pyramid graphs the distribution of age groups, cohorts, in a population. A wide base is young and fertile; a wide top, aging; a bulge in the twenties is a boom cohort. The dependency ratio compares those outside the labor force, generally under fifteen and over sixty-five, with those in it. The pyramid shows structure, not size.

Carrying capacity.

SSH 1008 Carrying Capacity and the Overpopulation Question

Carrying capacity is the maximum population an environment can sustain indefinitely. Overpopulation is a condition in which a place has outstripped its ability to provide for its own needs. Rich places with few people often use more resources than poor places with many, the anchor notes, Russia against Bangladesh. The ecological fallacy infers individuals from their group.

Mortality measures.

SSH 1009 Infant Mortality, Life Expectancy, Morbidity

The infant mortality rate is infant deaths per thousand live births, and countries with low development tend to have high rates. Life expectancy is the statistically expected years of life from birth; the anchor's global figure is about seventy-two in twenty fifteen, voiced with its year. A cartogram sizes countries by population. Uneven growth and poverty lead to migration.

Choosing a density.

SSH 1010 Which Density Answers Which Question?

The exam asks which density measure answers a question, and the anchor's three, with Finlayson's use of them, settle it. Arithmetic density, population over total land area, answers how crowded a country is on average and nothing about its farmland. Physiological density, people per unit of arable land, answers how much pressure the population puts on the land that can feed it; a desert country with a fertile strip scores low on the first and high on the second. Agricultural density, farmers per unit of arable land, answers how the land is worked: many farmers per field means labor-intensive, low-technology farming; few means mechanized. Carrying capacity sits behind all three as the ceiling. Is Egypt crowded: arithmetic says no, physiological says very. How mechanized is a country's farming: agricultural density, low where machines replace hands. Ask whether the question is about all land, food land, or the people who farm it. The trap is reading a low arithmetic density as room to grow; the anchor's point is that arable land, not area, feeds people. The second trap is agricultural against physiological: both use arable land, but one counts everyone and the other counts farmers. What the measure counts is the whole question.

Seven entries on migration: migration defined, push and pull, Ravenstein's laws, classifying a mover, brain drain, remittances, and the instruments of policy.

Migration defined.

SSH 1011 Migration Defined: Permanent, Prolonged, Net

Migration is a permanent move to a new location. An emigrant moves away from a country and an immigrant into one for a prolonged period, at least a year, the World Bank says; net migration is immigrants minus emigrants in a year, and return migration goes home. Twenty sixteen's count was two hundred forty-six million immigrants, dated to its year.

Push and pull.

SSH 1012 Push and Pull

Push factors are forces that encourage people to leave a place, war and drought; pull factors, forces that draw them to another, jobs and family. Forced migration is movement coerced by external forces, environmental, economic, social or political. Migration is a nexus of movement, not a single one-way move. Economic factors are the main reason, Ravenstein's sixth law.

The laws of migration.

SSH 1013 The Nineteenth-Century Laws of Migration

Ravenstein's laws of migration, eighteen eighty-five: most move only a short distance; each flow produces a counter-flow; long-distance migrants head for major cities; rural residents are more migratory than urban; females are more migratory than males; economic factors are the main reason. Most still hold, except the fifth. The glossary leaves him unnamed; the section names him.

Classifying a mover.

SSH 1014 Refugee, Asylum Seeker, IDP: Classifying a Mover

The exam describes a person who has fled and asks the term, and the refugee definition is the nineteen fifty-one Convention's wording. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of nationality, and cannot or will not seek its protection; recognized refugees hold the right not to be forcibly returned. An asylum seeker has left one country's territory to seek refugee status in another and has not yet been recognized. Internally displaced people have fled for the same reasons but have not crossed an international boundary and hold no refugee status. A guest worker holds temporary permission to work without permanent status. She crossed the border fleeing persecution and has applied for recognition: asylum seeker. The same woman, recognized, cannot be sent back: refugee. He fled the same war but is still inside his country: internally displaced. Ask why they moved, whether they crossed a border, and whether a state has recognized the claim. The trap is calling every border-crosser a refugee; the status is granted, not assumed, and the asylum seeker is the one waiting. The second trap is the IDP, who may be in worse danger with fewer rights, since no border was crossed.

Brain drain.

SSH 1015 Brain Drain, Brain Gain, Brain Waste

Brain drain is a country's collective loss of skills, education, training and wealth when its highly skilled people leave, nurses, doctors, IT specialists, athletes; brain gain is the receiving country's collective gain. Brain waste occurs when educated migrants cannot work in their field because of regulations or certification rules. A surgeon driving a taxi is the waste.

Remittances.

SSH 1016 Remittances and Transnationalism

Remittances are money international migrants send home, the largest external funding source for many developing countries, six hundred billion dollars worldwide in twenty sixteen by the anchor's figure, dated and unconverted. Transnationalism is migrants' sustained exchange across borders. A diaspora shares a homeland it no longer lives in, generations later still identifying with it.

Policy instruments.

SSH 1017 Points Systems, Guest Workers, Visas

A points system is an immigration policy that admits anyone with the prescribed skills, language and education once they score enough points; the anchor names Canada, Australia, New Zealand and England, England being the anchor's word for the United Kingdom's system. A visa is permission to enter, unlike a passport. Globalization is connection and movement among distant places.

Seven entries on culture and language: hearths and landscapes, folk against popular, global culture, commodification, language families, spread and death, and the languages of contact.

Culture hearths.

SSH 1018 Culture Hearths and the Cultural Landscape

Culture is learned human behavior associated with groups, and material culture is a group's objects and things. A culture hearth is the historic location where a culture formed. The cultural landscape is a landscape produced by the interaction of physical and human inputs, and cultural ecology studies human adaptation to physical environments. Unit ten's diffusion is how a hearth's culture travels.

Folk and popular culture.

SSH 1019 Folk Culture Against Popular Culture

Folk culture is practiced by a small, homogeneous, usually rural group; the anchor also calls it traditional, and many of its attributes date from the diffusion of agriculture. Popular culture is created for consumption by the mass of the population and arrived with the industrial age, fashion being the latest, most esteemed style. Homogeneous means similar people; heterogeneous, dissimilar.

Global culture.

SSH 1020 Global Culture, Placelessness, Resistance

Global culture is people in diffuse places practicing similar culture. Placelessness is a place exactly like any other place. Resistance is actively obstructing a process. Roads and the Internet, the anchor says, reduced the friction of distance for popular culture's diffusion, where tomatoes once took decades to reach Italy. Friction of distance is the anchor's phrase; the gravity model is not stated.

Commodification.

SSH 1021 Commodification and Cultural Tourism

Commodification transforms a cultural activity into a saleable product, a ritual performed for ticket-holders. Cultural tourism explores the culture of a place. Globalization, in this chapter's terms, is the global movement of money, technology and culture, and cultural conflict follows where it meets folk practice. Unit ten owns the region types this chapter restates.

Language families.

SSH 1022 Language Families and Branches

Languages are classified by family, such as Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan or Niger-Congo, descending from one ancestral language, the proto-language; by branch, such as Germanic, Slavic or Romance; and by subgroup, English within Germanic, Spanish within Romance. The most widespread are Chinese, Spanish and English, in the anchor's list. This chapter's printed outcomes repeat chapter seven's.

Spread and death.

SSH 1023 Why Languages Spread and Die

Language is a mental capacity shared by a speech community and a symbol of social identity. Distribution follows settlement history, demographic strength, ways of living, and contact with other groups; American English dialects track settlement and annexation. Some languages become dominant and displace others, which may go extinct: language death. An official language holds special legal status.

Contact languages.

SSH 1024 Pidgin, Creole, Lingua Franca: Naming the Contact Language

The exam describes a language situation and asks the term, and the anchor's key terms sort it. A pidgin is a composite language with a simplified grammar and a limited vocabulary, made for contact. A creole is a blended language distinguished from a pidgin by more complex grammar and by its status as a first language, learned by children. A lingua franca is a language used to make communication possible between people who do not share a native language, and it may be anyone's full language. A dialect is a variant of a single language. Intergenerational language shift is the pattern by which immigrant groups move from monolingual in the old language to monolingual in English. Traders on two sides of a river building a stripped-down tongue for bargaining: pidgin. Their grandchildren speaking it as their mother language with full grammar: creole. Pilots worldwide using English on the radio: lingua franca. Ask whether the language is simplified, native, or shared. The trap is calling a creole a dialect; a creole is a language of its own with native speakers. The second trap is treating lingua franca as a kind of language; it is a role a language plays.

Look at what you can now do. You can compute natural increase as births minus deaths per thousand, and say that replacement is roughly two point one and momentum keeps growth going past it. You can place a country in its transition stage by asking which rate has moved, and you know stage two grows because deaths fall. You can choose the density that answers a question by asking whether it counts all land, food land, or the farmers. You can classify a mover by why they moved, whether they crossed a border, and whether a state recognized the claim, and you know a refugee is a status granted. And you can name a contact language by whether it is simplified, native or shared, and tell folk culture from popular. In every case you asked what the measure counts, which is the habit this lecture was built on. Part two opens on place names and dialect, then carries religion, ethnicity, the state, development, and the core and periphery.