How big a population is and how fast it grows or shrinks depend on a simple process of addition through births and in-migration and subtraction through deaths and out-migration. In most industrial societies today, births are nearly balanced by deaths, and growth happens primarily through migration. In the United States, migration accounted for just 12 percent of population growth in 1950, compared with 40 percent in 2012. The flow of undocumented immigrants has grown so rapidly that no one really knows just how many people cross the border each year.8 As of 2012, non-Hispanic white people constituted numerical minorities in the populations of Hawaii, Texas, New Mexico, and California, and the populations of New York, Maryland, Mississippi, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia were not far behind.9 Such trends have inspired intense debate over laws to control immigration into the United States and to many parts of Europe—including Britain, France, and Germany—where competition between foreign-born and native-born workers has prompted calls for the expulsion of immigrants.
In nonindustrial societies, which include most of the world, most growth occurs through a surplus of births over deaths. Current growth rates vary from highs of almost 4 percent in Niger to negative rates in Germany and Russia.10 Four percent may seem like a small number, but not when figured into the law of compound interest. At a 4 percent rate of increase, a population will double in around eighteen years, quadruple in just thirty five years, and increase eight-fold in seventy years, which is less than the average human life span. The world’s population is currently growing at a rate of about 1.2 percent per year, which implies a doubling from its current size of around 6 billion people to roughly 12 billion by 2065.
Population affects systems of all kinds and sizes, from households to the world economy. New households and families, for example, are created first through migration when people marry or otherwise decide to move in and live together. In some cultures, the husband is required to move near the wife’s family, while in others the pattern is just the opposite. In the latter case, the wife’s already-subordinate status in the marriage is reinforced by her physical isolation from kin who might otherwise support her, while in the former, the husband’s dominance is lessened by the nearness of the wife’s family. In societies where couples can live wherever they want, the problem is more likely to be a lack of contact and support from either family and the kind of isolation characteristic of the modern nuclear family.
The typical new family household starts with a population of two, which is a relatively simple and manageable number. The best way to see this is to imagine what happens when we add just one more to make it three. As we saw in the previous chapter, if the new member is a baby, the structural consequence is a radical change in the household’s role structure. But from a population point of view, something else happens as well. With three people, coalitions become possible, as two can gang up against or exclude the third. With just two people, neither can feel excluded, because one person can’t create a relationship to exclude the other from. With three people, however, two can form a subgroup within the larger group.
Add a fourth member and it becomes possible to have two subgroups, such as the children and the parents, and thereby two coalitions can shape the distribution of power. Theoretically, children could organize to counter the power of their parents, but it is more likely that one of the children will join with one or both parents to gain power in relation to the other child or parent. Whatever happens structurally, the range of possibilities will vary with the number of people.
As families age, population continues to shape and reshape their culture and structure. As everyone gets older, for example, the age structure shifts upward, and with it may come profound changes in how the family works. Parents lose power as children gain autonomy and independence, and everyone’s role expectations begin to change. When children migrate away to go to college or work or to form households of their own, the shift in family power structures becomes even more pronounced, although financial dependence can preserve some aspects of it for a while. In fact, getting out from under parental authority is a major reason why young adult children may long to migrate away and be out on their own.
Physical separation also changes the communication and role structures and may prompt the ‘empty nest’ syndrome, which can occasion as much relief as grief. If daughters and sons form families of their own, the addition of new members to the network of extended kin increases the overall family population and complicates most of its structural and cultural characteristics. At the other end of the life span, death brings not only loss and grief but also structural and cultural shifts. When our parents die, we can find ourselves feeling as though now we are the true adults in the family with no one in front of us to watch and measure ourselves by. This can be a time of shifting weight in family roles as we step into a sense of responsibility that we would find hard to imagine while our parents were alive.
Such changes flow from the fact that how family life unfolds depends greatly on the dynamics of population through which people are added and subtracted, age, and move around in relation to one another. This dynamic operates in societies and the world as a whole and includes patterns of birth and death that reflect how birthing and dying always happen in relation to social systems.
Although everyone has to die sometime, for example, the statuses we occupy affect how long we’re likely to live and our most likely cause of death. Men are consistently more likely than women to die at any given age and from most causes of death. Some of this is undoubtedly due to biological factors, since males are also more likely to die before they’re born. But a great deal of the sex differential in death is about sex as a social status. Men are far more likely than women to die from homicide, suicide, and accidents as well as from physical causes, such as cancer and heart disease, that have clear links to how people live. Men are more likely than women to work at hazardous occupations, take physical risks, and act out aggressively. Men are also less likely than women to see a doctor when they’re not feeling well, which means they are less likely to discover a life-threatening condition in time to do something about it. They are also heavier users of cigarettes, alcohol, and addictive drugs.11
Death and dying have an especially powerful structural connection through the effects of social class and race. The wealthier people are, for example, the more likely they are to describe themselves as being in excellent health, a pattern that repeats itself with educational attainment and occupational prestige.12 Death rates at each age of life are lowest among those with the most education and highest income. In comparison with white people, the age-adjusted death rate for African Americans is 30 percent higher, the infant mortality rate is more than twice as high, and life expectancy at birth is five years shorter. For homicide, African American death rates are almost six times higher than for white people. Suicide is the only major cause of death with lower rates among African Americans than among white people.13
None of these differences tells us what will happen to any specific person who participates in this society, but they do reflect paths of least resistance that load the odds in different ways, depending on our social characteristics. Being a white man doesn’t mean that I will someday kill myself, but it does mean that my position in the world makes suicide far more likely for me than for people of color and white women. It also means that I am far less likely to find myself in a situation where I’m likely to be murdered than I would be if I were black. Being in the middle class means being far less likely to work in a dangerous occupation, such as lumbering, trucking, mining, or construction, or to be exposed to cancer-causing chemicals and other threats to health. It also means being less likely to smoke cigarettes or abuse alcohol and more likely to have health insurance and access to quality health care.
If we look at these differences from an individualistic perspective, we might conclude that they are simply a matter of personal choice, as in choosing whether to smoke cigarettes. But applying the basic principle of sociological pra
ctice leads straight to the fact that every choice is made in relation to the systems we participate in. From there we have to ask how the paths of least resistance presented to people differ depending on what those systems are and the social positions people occupy in them. In my middle class neighborhood, there are no billboards with glossy cigarette advertisements, but for many years in inner-city neighborhoods across the United States, cigarette manufacturers have targeted lower- and working-class African Americans with ads that aggressively promote cigarette smoking as a glamorous and attractive thing to do, as one ‘pleasure’ that is available even to people living in poverty. The path that is easier to follow—to smoke or not to smoke—depends to some extent on where you live, and where you live is invariably affected by social class and race.
Population and the Big Picture
If we look at population at the level of societies or the world as a whole, it is hard to miss the huge and growing mismatch between the needs and resources of societies on the one hand and the size and growth of populations on the other. The fifteen poorest countries of the world contain roughly half the world’s population, and countries whose populations account for 80 percent of all the people in the world share less than a quarter of global annual income. In many countries, per-capita income levels have actually fallen in recent years, and recurring periods of famine have become almost permanent facts of life. This will only become worse with the effects of global warming.14
A common explanation for the widening gap between rich and poor nations is large differences in birth and growth rates. It is argued that such countries as India, Mexico, and many in Africa, contain too many people. The populations in those countries are growing too rapidly to keep up with the demand for basic services and resources, such as food and water. With Mexico’s population growing at a rate of 1.5 percent each year, for example, the economy must also grow 1.5 percent just to keep up, let alone having anything left over to improve standards of living.15 Since a 1.5 percent rate of economic growth is hard to achieve year after year, it would seem that high rates of population growth virtually ensure continued deprivation and misery for people in Mexico and in many other areas of the world.
What makes a bad situation worse is that high birth rates also result in a high percentage of children in the population, and children are relatively unproductive and claim resources that could otherwise be invested in economic growth. Also making matters worse are migration patterns that swell already-crowded cities, such as Mexico City and Mumbai, India, with unskilled workers looking for relief from rural poverty. What they find, however, is a lack of sanitation, water, food, jobs, and shelter.
The situation in such countries is so dire that it might seem obvious that population would be the most important determining factor in social life. But it’s not that simple, because what we call ‘overpopulation’ is not just a matter of resources’ being inadequate because there are too many people. Resources can also be inadequate because they are distributed in a way that gives a great deal to some and very little to others.
India, for example, contains 17 percent of all the people in the world but consumes only 5 percent of all the energy used each year. By comparison, the United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but claims a 19 percent share of all the energy consumed.16 Which society, then, places a greater burden on the world? Which country shows the greater mismatch between population and resources? Is it India, with its 1.1 billion people, each of whom consumes relatively little? Is it the United States, with only a quarter as many people but who consume almost four times as much? Or is it both?
If we look at the world as a social system, we can ask how population dynamics affect structural patterns of inequality between societies through which resources and wealth are distributed. It might be that there simply is not enough wealth to go around. But it also might be that there is plenty of wealth that is kept from going around by a world system in which enormous economic and political power is held by elites in a tiny number of nations containing a small fraction of the world’s people.
Certainly there are practical limits to population growth and size. The human species—within societies and in the world as a whole—cannot indefinitely ignore the natural laws that limit the populations of every other form of life. But it would seem equally clear that wealthy countries cannot continue indefinitely to pretend that population is the only or even the primary issue shaping the fate of nonindustrial societies and that the solution to the misery of billions of people is simply for there to be fewer of them. The principle that we are always participating in something larger than ourselves applies as much to nations as it does to individuals. In that sense, the wealth of the industrial world and the pervasive poverty found everywhere else are connected to each other, and sociological practice is a powerful way to see just how this happens and why it matters.
5
Us, It, and Social Interaction
Having spent four chapters on social systems, those things larger than ourselves that we participate in, it’s time to look more closely at the ‘we’ and what our participation is all about. Social systems do not happen without us, and, in important ways, we do not happen without them. On the one hand, systems contain paths of least resistance, but we are the ones who perceive, interpret, and choose among those paths. We make visible and manifest whatever power they have to shape social life. On the other hand, we live as thinking, acting beings, and yet the stuff that thoughts are made of and the meaning of our actions make sense only in relation to cultural, structural, and ecological aspects of social systems.
Self: The I Who Participates
“Take care of yourself,” a friend of mine says at the end of a conversation. As I return to this work, I wonder just what that means. Who or what is this self I’m supposed to take care of, and is the ‘I’ who takes care of that self something other than the self that gets taken care of? Is my self something I can touch, hear, or smell? I can sense my body and what it does, but my self is more than that.
Behavioral psychologists, such as B. F. Skinner, have little interest in the self, since they cannot figure out a way to observe it scientifically.1 And yet we think about the self as something real and thinglike that is responsible for what we do. When my ‘body’ does something wrong—as when my hand takes something that doesn’t belong to me—no one blames my body, even though it did the deed. Nor do they blame my brain (“Bad brain!”), which directed my body to do it. They blame my self (“You should be ashamed of yourself ”). What that self is that I’m supposed to be ashamed of and where I am likely to find it are elusive things, because more than anything, the self is an idea we have about our own existence.2 But it is a powerful idea, because we do not live it as such: we act as though the self is as real as anything we can see and touch.
Part of what makes the idea of the self so powerful is that it locates us in relation to other people and social systems. One answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ is ‘Allan Griswold Johnson,’ three words that name me in the same way that words name an oak tree or a banana. They also serve a similar purpose. In my culture, they identify me as male (Allan being regarded as a man’s name) and thereby distinguish me from females. They distinguish me from all the people I am not (except for those who have the same name). And they connect me to kin marked by common names—Griswold being my mother’s family name and Johnson my father’s. A person’s name, then, and the self that it names have a purely relational purpose of marking us in relation to others. The only reason to have a name is to be able to participate in social life, and this is also why we develop ideas about the self in general and about our own selves in particular.
As philosopher and sociologist George Herbert Mead sees it, we discover ourselves as children through a process of discovering others and the ideas they have about themselves and about us.3 Infants tend to experience the world in an egocentric way in that they cannot distinguish between the world and themselves. Everything is ju
st one big whole, with them at the center of it all. This leaves them without a way to know that other people exist as separate people with thoughts and feelings. As an infant, I could not imagine that my mother had a point of view on things, including me. I could not see that she thought about herself in relation to me and me in relation to her or about things that had to do with neither at all. I could feel her body and otherwise sense what she did and said, but I had no way to know there was something going on beneath all that, that she had ideas about who she was or who I was or about how to be a good mother or what kind of man I would grow up to be or what to have for dinner.
If I could not imagine that my mother had a point of view on herself and the world, then I also could not imagine that I had a point of view on anything. As far as I could tell, the way I heard and felt and otherwise sensed things was simply the way things were and had nothing to do with who I was in relation to them or how I perceived or interpreted them. I was like a baseball umpire who, instead of saying, “I call ’em as I see ’em” or (confidently) “I call ’em as they are,” says, “Until I call ’em, they aren’t.”
As an infant, I could not be aware that I had a point of view on things, because I had no way to think about myself as a self, to imagine an ‘Allan’ who existed in the first place. Mead argues that we learn to think about ourselves as selves by discovering the inner lives of other people. We realize that other people think about us, perceive us in certain ways, expect things of us, have feelings about us, and have lives separate from our own that in many ways have nothing to do with us. This happens primarily when people use language to talk about themselves, us, and what they experience as reality. They use language as a bridge of meaning to connect their experience to the experiences of other people. When I was hungry, I might have experienced that as just a bodily discomfort, an empty feeling in my stomach that made me cry until it was taken care of. But when someone used words like ‘I’m hungry’ to describe that experience, then I could imagine how they felt and put myself in their place.
The Forest and the Trees Page 14
