Demography Flashcards

Question

Improved medicine...

Answer 1

After the 1950s, improved medical knowledge, techniques and organisation did help to reduce death rates. More recently, improved medication, bypass surgery and other developments have reduced deaths from heart disease by one-third. Consider the covid vaccine.

Answer 2

In the 20th century, more effective central and local government with the necessary power to pass and enforce laws led to a range of improvements in public health and the quality of the environment. These included improvements in housing (producing drier, better ventilated, less overcrowded accommodation), purer drinking water and laws to combat the adulteration of food and drink.

Answer 3

The decline of more dangerous manual occupations such as mining Smaller families reduced the rate of transmission of infection Greater public knowledge of the causes of illness Higher incomes, allowing for a healthier lifestyle

Answer 4

Life expectancy refers to how long on average a person born in a given year can expect to live. Life expectancy has greatly increased since 1900: For babies born in 1900 it was 50 years for M, 57 for F For babies born in 2005 it was 77 for M, 81 for F Falling infant mortality: low life expectancy in 1900 was largely due to the IMR pulling down the average life expectancy of the population as a whole. As the IMR fell life expectancy rose.

Answer 5

The average age of the UK population is rising. In 1971, it was 34.1 years. By 2007, it stood at 39.6. By 2031, it is projected to reach 42.6. There are fewer young people and more old people in the population. The number of people aged 65 or over is projected to overtake the number of under-16s for the first time ever in 2014.

Answer 6

Public services One-person pensioner households The dependency ratio

Answer 7

Older people consume a larger proportion of services such as health and social care than other age groups. This is particularly true of the old old’ (usually defined as 75 or over) as against the ‘young old (65-74). However, we should beware of overgeneralising, since many people remain in relatively good health well into old age. In addition to increased expenditure on health care, an ageing population may also mean changes to policies and provision of housing, transport or other services.

Answer 8

The number of pensioners living alone has increased and one-person pensioner households now account for about 14% of all households. Most of these are female, both because women generally live longer than men, and because they are usually younger than their husbands.

Answer 9

Like the non-working young, the non-working old are an economically dependent group who need to be provided for by those of working age, for example through taxation to pay for pensions and health care. As the number of retired people rises, this increases the dependency ratio and the burden on the working population. However, it would be wrong to assume that ‘old’ necessarily equals ‘economically dependent’. For example, the age at which people retire can vary — about one in ten men in their 50’s is no longer working, while recent changes mean that women will soon have to wait until they are 65 to access the state pension (previously women’s pensions began at 60, men’s at 65). Others carry on working into their 70s. Also, while an increase in the number of old people raises the dependency ratio, in an ageing population this is offset by a declining number of dependent children.

Answer 10

Age statuses are socially constructed. This also applies to old age. Much discussion about old age and ageing is negative and has constructed it as ‘problem’. For example: The Griffiths Report (1988) on the care of the elderly saw society as facing the problem of meeting the escalating costs of health and social care for the growing numbers of old people. Recently, there have been concerns about the ‘pensions time bomb’, with fears about how society will meet the cost of providing pensions for the elderly.

Answer 11

More broadly, in modern societies, ‘ageism’ — the negative stereotyping of people on the basis of their age — often portrays the old as vulnerable, incompetent or irrational, and as a burden to society. This contrasts with the view of the elderly found in traditional societies. Peter Townsend (1981), one reason for negative attitudes to the elderly in our society is that old age has been socially constructed as a period of dependency by creating a statutory retirement age at which most people are expected or required to stop working and are forced to rely on inadequate benefits.

Answer 12

According to Hirsch the main problem of an ageing population will be how to finance a longer period of old age. This can either be done by paying more from our savings and taxes while we are working, or by continuing to work for longer, or a combination of both. Hirsch therefore argues that we need to reverse the current trend towards earlier retirement. One way of doing this is by redistributing educational resources towards older people so that they can retrain and improve their skills and so continue earning. Similarly, there may need to be changes in housing policy to encourage older people (who are more likely to be living in larger houses than they need) to ‘trade down’ into smaller accommodation and retirement homes. This would release wealth to improve their standard of living and free up housing resources for younger people.

Answer 13

Migration refers to the movement of people from place to place. It can be internal, within a society, or international. Immigration refers to movement into an area or society. Emigration refers to movement out. Net migration is the difference between the numbers immigrating and the numbers emigrating, and is expressed as a net increase or net decrease due to migration. For most of the 20th century, the growth of the UK population was the result of natural increase (more births than deaths), rather than the numbers of people immigrating and emigrating.

Answer 14

From 1900 until the Second World War (1939-45), the largest immigrant group to the UK were the Irish, mainly for economic reasons, followed by Eastern and Central European Jews, who were often refugees fleeing persecution, and people of British descent from Canada and the USA. Very few immigrants were non-white. By contrast, during the 1950s, black immigrants from the Caribbean began to arrive in the UK, followed during the 1960s and 1 970s by South Asian immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and by East African Asians from Kenya and Uganda. One consequence of this immigration was that it produced a more ethnically diverse society. By 2001, minority ethnic groups accounted for 7.9% of the total population. One result of this has been a greater diversity of family patterns in Britain today. However, as noted earlier, throughout this period, more people left the UK than entered. Nor did non-white immigrants make up the majority of settlers. During the 1950s, the Irish were the largest single group (with over a third of a million) and almost as many again arriving from continental Europe.

Answer 15

From as early as the mid-16th century until the 1980s, the UK has almost always been a net exporter of people: more have emigrated to live elsewhere than have come to settle in the UK. Since 1900, the great majority of emigrants have gone to the USA and to the Old Commonwealth countries (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and South Africa. The main reasons for emigration have been economic— both in terms of ‘push’ factors such as economic recession and unemployment at home, and even more so in terms of ‘pull’ factors such as higher wages or better opportunities abroad. In the earlier part of the century, there were often labour shortages in the destination countries, while after 1945, the relatively poor performance of the British economy compared with that of other industrial countries acted as an incentive to emigrate. These economic reasons for migration contrast with those of some other groups, who have been driven to migrate by religious, political or racial persecution.

Answer 16

The effect of migration on the dependency ratio is complex. On the one hand, the fact that migrants are mainly of working age reduces the dependency ratio. On the other hand, immigrant women tend to have higher fertility rates, which in the short term contributes to a higher dependency ratio by adding more children to the population. However this also reduces the average age of the population and in due course produces more workers, thereby lowering the dependency ratio as these children grow up and reach working age. Finally, to complicate matters further, evidence suggests that the longer an immigrant group is settled in the country, the closer their fertility rate comes to the national average.