Developments in Demography

Joachim Singelmann () and Dudley L. Poston ()
Additional contact information
Joachim Singelmann: University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), Department of Demography
Dudley L. Poston: Texas A&M University College Station, Department of Sociology

Chapter Chapter 1 in Developments in Demography in the 21st Century, 2020, pp 3-9 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract A knowledge of the demographic structure of a society is of crucial importance for decision making. Demography is the social science that studies (1) the size, composition, and distribution of human populations; (2) the changes in population size and composition and distribution over time; (3) the components of these changes, i.e., fertility, mortality, and migration; (4) the factors that affect these components; and (5) the consequences of changes in population size, composition, and distribution, or in the components themselves. Demography is important because it makes many societal outcomes more likely than others. For example, the age structure of the U.S. population at the time of the introduction of Social Security made it more likely that this program was funded intergenerationally instead of building up individual annuities, because at that time, there were far fewer people in retirement ages than in working ages. The ultimate decision, however, was a political one.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ssdmcp:978-3-030-26492-5_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030264925

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-26492-5_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in The Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().