Another day and another population story. Last week The Economist ran a longer article about the growing number of grandparents around the world. Highlighting the differences between countries with more and fewer grandparents, the article considered the benefits which grandparents offer, not least in terms of the free childcare enabling women to enter the workforce.
Before that were a number of stories highlighting the news that China’s population is now shrinking. I often have to correct students for their loose language, referring to a declining population when they are actually referring to reduced population growth. In the case of China though, their population has fallen for the first time in over fifty years. This shows the seismic and brutal effect of their One Child Policy which has left the government desperately scrambling to reverse their ‘over-achievement’ which, according to one pithy comment, could see their population becoming old before it becomes rich. China’s population management has come alongside exponential economic growth but their manufacturing growth and broader economic development is now at risk from their shrinking workforce, growing elderly population and, most worryingly for policy-makers looking for levers to pull, a change in cultural preferences to smaller family size which has proven stubborn to shift in the easing of the One Child Policy seen over the past seven years. (The shift to a Three Child Policy also made the news at the beginning of this year).
Last October, The Economist featured an article looking at the economic divide between India’s states and the close link to demographic differences: wealthier states tended to have lower population growth, with the opposite also true. Demography matters, which is also the name of a book by Danny Dorling and Stuart Gietel-Basten (also perhaps a better pun than ‘population counts’) that The Economist recommended as part of a reading list on demography. I have always felt that the magazine (sorry, newspaper) gives excellent coverage to geographical issues, even if it doesn’t always acknowledge them as geography so to speak.
In other recommended reading, I have come across Science Direct again. Previously I’d got to it via an internet search, found what I needed and just moved on. Today I took a slightly longer look, albeit I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. While cynically it could just be labelled as a try-before-you-buy shop window for Elsevier academic journals and books, it is more generous than that. You can search through some 19 million articles and chapters, of which 1.4 million are open access. The previews are quite generous and you can normally get quite a bit from your searches before you have to click on things that would cost money.
Commonplace 