Oda Rygh

This is pasted for my examrevision of social demography. A Wonderful exam (I got an A), in a subject taught by a demographer who started out in gender studies, my most inspiring lecturer yet.

“Social demography has the perks that the main theory and founding event of this statistical subject “The demographic transition“, occured in a time of few to no records on poupulation composition, happened at various times in various countries to various extent, with the events and assumed causes of the effect having no system to them when countries are compared. Norway were quite EARLY with a fairly accurate-ish cencus (Ignoring certain vagrant groups and ethnic minorities and suchlike), the first one being in 1901. Demography is in other words the art of making accurate predictions based on the past on which we have no meaningful data, assuming that all generations will have identical lifecourses, no social change happens, and ignoring immigration.

It makes for great essays and much EU funding.

This is another feminist lecturer, this time a man, who has his own special theories regarding female emancipation as an EFFECT of lower birthrates, rather than as a cause of them. These theories are seductively simple and intuitive, and I have to work really hard to not take everything he sais as fact. The man is just TOO NICE.

Anyway, for those of you interested in numbers which are lies:

Replacement rate: The assumed number of children each woman must have to keep the population up. It is calculated by adding a fraction of each child a woman have had over a cross section of society. i.e, It takes the number of kids 1000 16yearolds have, divide it by the bredth of the study (The gap from 16 to 50), and then do the same to every year in the cohort.  And add up the average number of children a fertile woman have AT THAT TIME.

The replacement level of 2,1 is entirely arbitrary, after the system “2 per couple, plus a bit for the infertile ones and early deaths”. This number would be entirely ok to measure trends with if all generations did presicely like the previous one. The recent dip in replacement rate is more likely to do with women delaying childbirth till after education, than women deciding not to have kids. Which is the case will only be measurable when the women who FIRST decided to delay childbirth have come to the end of their fertile years (or more to the point: The end of what is measured).  In norway this number has now corrected itself, and women of Norway are birthing as much as before the intruduction to the pill.

I will come back to you on this one in 30 years in other words.

Ageing population: The art of making the fact that childhood mortality has reduced, and people surviving past 70 seem like a bad thing.

Dependency ratio: Surely this is the number of people who are economically active divided by the people depending on these people for support? Surely? No.
This is the number of people of working age, divided by the people under 16 and over pensionable age. Another perfectly good measure in certain economic situations. But not when it comes to deciding if we are heading for a tax burden crisis. Students, the infirm, the unemployed, and female labourmarket participation has NO effect on this ratio. If anything it has “improved”, as large families are no longer commonplace, and infant mortality is extremely low.

…I am fairly relaxed. And feeling smug. I have defeated numbers. Using brains.