Monday, December 24, 2007

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to Demography.Matters' Readers

As we get ready to turn the page on another year I think it is due time to wish the readers and commenters of Demography.Matters a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We realize that the latter part of 2007 has been somewhat meager with respect to normal tradition here at Demography.Matters but we hope that our readers will be able to forgive us. We have of course not been idle and I am certain when I say that the work we have been doing of a more intense data collecting nature will serve us well indeed in our future work here at Demography.Matters. Moreover I am happy to see that our readers, new as well as old, are ready to engage in interesting and intelligent commentary most recently proxied by the enlightening discussion following Edward's post on the demographics of the US. In a year where Al Gore secured himself the nobel prize for putting the climate issue on the agenda you cannot help but feel that some countries would be better off if somebody explained to them a little more emphatically their inconvenient truth with respect to demographics. Here at DM at least we will keep on churning in the new year.

I leave you with some snippets and light reading suggestions for the holidays.

Firstly and really as a reference to the post trailing this one on the demographics of the US (see link above) a recent piece in the Washington Post caught my attention.

For the first time in 35 years, the U.S. fertility rate has climbed high enough to sustain a stable population, solidifying the nation's unique status among industrialized countries. The overall fertility rate increased 2 percent between 2005 and 2006, nudging the average number of babies being born to each woman to 2.1, according to the latest federal statistics. That marks the first time since 1971 that the rate has reached a crucial benchmark of population growth: the ability of each generation to replace itself.

More information can be found in the article which conforms well with the general discussion such as it has been going on here at DM. The second article I want to emphasise comes from the extended Christmas edition of the Economist. It is called 'Census Sensitivity' and talks about the difficult process of counting people by quantitative as well as qualitative measures. Finally, the Economist also has a piece up on the hunter-gatheres which I found very interesting and which I am sure will interest our readers.

Having presented these small snippets I will depart wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We will resume posting here at DM again in the new year barring some kind of dramatic unforseen events.

Best Wishes

The DM team.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Marry Christmass to You as well :)