8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World
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- $34.99
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
A provocative description of the power of population change to create the conditions for societal transformation.
As the world nears 8 billion people, the countries that have led the global order since World War II are becoming the most aged societies in human history. At the same time, the world’s poorest and least powerful countries are suffocating under an imbalance of population and resources. In 8 Billion and Counting, political demographer Jennifer D. Sciubba argues that the story of the twenty-first century is less a story about exponential population growth, as the previous century was, than it is a story about differential growth—marked by a stark divide between the world’s richest and poorest countries.
Drawing from decades of research, policy experience, and teaching, Sciubba employs stories and statistics to explain how demographic trends, like age structure and ethnic composition, are crucial signposts for future violence and peace, repression and democracy, poverty and prosperity. Although we have a diverse global population, demographic trends often follow predictable patterns that can help professionals across the corporate, nonprofit, government, and military sectors understand the global strategic environment.
Through the lenses of national security, global health, and economics, Sciubba demonstrates the pitfalls of taking population numbers at face value and extrapolating from there. Instead, she argues, we must look at the forces in a society that amplify demographic trends and the forces that dilute them, particularly political institutions, or the rules of the game. She shows that the most important skills in demographic analysis are naming and being aware of your preferences, rethinking assumptions, and asking the right questions.
Provocative and engrossing, 8 Billion and Counting is required reading for business leaders, policy makers, and anyone eager to anticipate political, economic, and social risks and opportunities. A deeper understanding of fertility, mortality, and migration promises to point toward the investments we need to make today to shape the future we want tomorrow.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sciubba (The Future Faces of War), an international studies professor at Rhodes College, looks at how population trends shape the world in this sobering survey. According to Sciubba, human population growth is a story of inequality. On average, 240 babies are born every minute in the world's least developed countries; by contrast, 25 are born per minute in the most developed ones, she writes, and some of the world's youngest countries are also the most autocratic and poor. In looking at population rates, she covers familiar ground regarding young women in developing countries without access to contraception, and outlines some countrywide measures to balance or increase population, as well, such as the sterilization of Indian men in the late 1960s under Indira Gandhi and the monthly fertility checkups Romanian women were formerly subjected to at their workplaces. The planet's population is set to continue increasing, Sciubba writes, urging administrations worldwide to enact policies that account for demographic trends, and powerfully concluding that the main question to consider is, "How can we use the 8 billion people we have on the planet today to shape the world we want tomorrow?" Comprehensive and full of incisive analysis, this is not to be missed.
