Demographic Transition

We studied a demographic transition model in class today and further discussed the stages of population change. To help us better understand this, we watched a video from yesterday from Khan Academy. In the video, demographic transition was explained through its main factors, birth rate, death rate, and natural increase/ decrease.
In stages 1 through 4, the population increases due to birth rate consistently being higher than death rate, but in the fifth stage, the population decreases. This natural decrease is caused by birth rates being lower than death rates. Birth rates drop due to societal and cultural norms, such as women working paying jobs instead of being homemakers and stay-at-home mothers, as well as less people seeing having children and 'starting a family' as a necessity in the modern age. Since children can no longer be legally used for free manual labor, and most people live in urban environments where children can't be used for manual labor on farms, there are less reasons to have children. In countries like Japan, we see that a population decrease can be a bad thing because it means less people able to do necessary jobs like construction and medicine, but overall, a decrease in population seems to be a good thing. A population decrease worldwide would mean more resources and less pollution for everybody. Unfortunately, since very few countries have entered stage 5 of the demographic transition, and they haven't been in this stage for very long, we don't really know what it means long term, or how it would impact a country overall.

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