This blog is intended to go along with Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues, by John R. Weeks, published by Cengage Learning. The latest edition is the 13th (it will be out in January 2020), but this blog is meant to complement any edition of the book by showing the way in which demographic issues are regularly in the news.

You can download an iPhone app for the 13th edition from the App Store (search for Weeks Population).

If you are a user of my textbook and would like to suggest a blog post idea, please email me at: john.weeks@sdsu.edu

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Very Useful Online Resource

I have just been alerted to a very nice online resource for demography courses, which is part of the Habitable Planet series put together by the Annenberg Foundation in 2007. Part 5 of the series is about "Human Population Dynamics."  How do I know this is a valuable resource? Because it includes an interview with Deborah Balk, who talks about spatial demography and other aspects of demographic research.

The most innovative and potentially useful aspect of this resource is the population simulator (which they call the "demographics lab") that allows you to modify the birth and death rates for eight different countries (USA, China, Egypt, India, Italy, Mexico, and Nigeria)--five of which I show graphically in Chapter 8--to see how the age/sex structure would change over time as you change those demographic parameters. It does not include an estimate for net migration, but the illustrative changes are still very thought-provoking.

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