Stephan's Gallery of Demo-graphs

• WORLD POPULATION -- This is the Big Picture, the context within which everything else must take place.
  • "The increase of population is the most revolutionary phenomenon of our times."
      - Ortega y Gasset
  • "Earth's population has been like a long, thin powder fuse that burns slowly and haltingly until it finally reaches the charge and exlodes."
      - Kingsley Davis
  Not a pretty picture.

• WHEN AND WHERE -- This is the fastest growing decade in the history of the world, and it's happening in regions where economic growth and the status of women show little hope for rational control. Nothing of this ever appears on the nightly TV news.

• FERTILITY ROLLERCOASTER -- Here is the fundamental fact society must deal with continuously: absorption of new births into each subsequent phase of the life cycle. Displace this chart by twenty years and you have crime-prone and college-bound populations; push it thirty years ahead and you have have the housing market; push it much further and ... can McDonald's be converted to black arches?

• YOUNG FOLKS' BURDEN? -- A dramatic rise in the ratio of older to younger Americans should hit just just as today's college students enter what should be their peak earning years. I haven't heard Clinton or Gingrich, Oprah or Ricki, Jennings or Rather discuss this.

• PRISON POPULATION -- Have we gone nuts in this country? We want to put still more in prison? Is prison going to be our new version of public housing?

• DEATH EXPECTANCY -- This is like Life Expectancy, but it's easier to visualize (I think). Anyway, this compares death expectancies for US males and females, whites and non-whites, from 1900 through 1990. The main results:
  • infant mortality has been drastically reduced over this time.
  • there hasn't been much change in old-age life expectancy
  • what was clearly a racial difference in 1900 (whites outlive nonwhites)
    has become a gender difference (females outlive males).
  I would think the replacement of social inequality by biological inequality would get more attention from sociologists, but they don't seem to be aware of it yet.

• SEX -- So it got your attention. Well, these are maps showing the "sex ratios" (males per 100 females) for each of the 48 continguous states from 1790 to now. Interesting to watch the civilizing  of the continent, i.e., the womanizing of the frontier. Note: the sex ratio is very sensitive to the age of a population -- young populations are male, older ones are female.