Reviews for SMP 11-16 1a Whole Numbers 3 Pack of 5: Whole Numbers 3 (School Mathematics Project 11-16)

The average rating for SMP 11-16 1a Whole Numbers 3 Pack of 5: Whole Numbers 3 (School Mathematics Project 11-16) based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-11-03 00:00:00 Todd Darby I was interested to read this directly after Global Economic History because together the two form a global history of the elements of secular cycles. As it turns out, this book is not nearly as good as that one, at least in its ability to maintain clear, thesis focused writing across a huge scope of subject matter. I don't know that I was ever to optimistic that this would turn out to be the application of something like Complex Population Dynamics to humans, but I was still a bit disappointed to see that the framing is almost entirely descriptive rather than scientific. This isn't from a lack of interest so much as, as far as Livi Bacci implies, a lack of definitive research. So there are couple examples, which I'll describe later, that do give a coherent mechanistic explanation for certain phenomena. Overall, though, the main point of the book is to explain important variables and processes in human demographics and show data illustrating how they have changed across time and space. The introduction to humans in comparative ecological perspective was I thought pretty weak. The frustrating thing is that both dramatic changes in carrying capacity associated with revolutionary niche construction developments as well as even the demographic structural cycle itself are mentioned and more or less explained on their own terms, but neither of them are subjects of interest demographically. The ecological mechanisms of the enormous population changes the book describes are considered in some detail, yet somehow they end up feeling like afterthoughts to be fundamentally demographic processes going on. Like the focus is too closely on the trends of variables like mortality and fertility and age structure as proximate causes to ever really come to terms with ultimate causes. Similarly, the examination of Malthusian and Boserupian theories about the fundamental limitation of human populations is messy and inconclusive. Knowing what I think I know about secular cycles has come to make this conversation fairly annoying for me, and I was hoping that this book might shed some new light on it for me. The strange thing is that, by the end, it did. But in the section when it actually tries to address the topic directly, it doesn't include those insights at all. Instead, it draws a dichotomy between voluntary limitation of fertility and violence Malthusian mortality without providing any insight into how one solution comes to be adopted in some cases and not in others, and honestly not really investigating very thoroughly to discern whether the former was actually operatives in the examples he gives in the first place. Toward the end, he examines estimates of global comparison capacity and dismisses pretty much all of them as unrealistic. The idea that carrying capacity is a local limitation that can change over time but still very much influences short term demographics doesn't come up. There are a couple of important variables that this survey picks up that weren't present in Population Dynamics. One is the age structure of the population. A major conclusion of the book is that the Industrial Revolution has not only increase the abundance of humans on the planet, but shifted them from a regime of high child mortality and evenly distributed adults ages with a relatively low life expectancy to a relatively long and predictable lifetime arc of education, productive work, and retirement. He raises the idea that this difference might have a strong effect on economic growth itself, independent of its effects on population growth. Another element I was a bit surprised by is the emphasis on nuptiaity (ie age at and frequency of marriage). This is used as a proxy or summary variable for the differences in age and frequency of conception under natural fertility (i.e. before contraception). My intuition would be that changes in the fertility rate of this sort would have negligible impacts, changing the slope of increasing abundance a little perhaps, but not meaningfully altering the outcome. Apparently, though, there are some fairly substantial differences in this variable between cultures and over time. These don't seem at all independent of resources and stability--the highest population growth described in the book is in French Canada, caused in part by very high marriage rates and low age at first marriage, and associated with the early settlers of a huge new resource base. The French-Canadian and the other case studies were among the most interesting elements in the book. I have read a decent amount about Native American demography, for instance, but I had never learned about the natural experiment that separated epidemic mortality from political mortality. The Guarani in Brazil were apparently protected from colonial exploitation by Jesuit missionaries to the extent that diseases were the only significant source of mortality inflicted by Europeans. And it turns out that they experienced relatively frequent epidemic crises while maintaining an overall growing population. This story finally put the pieces together for me to see the conquest of the Americas in a new light. In the disintegration phase of a secular cycle, mortality comes from all sorts of mechanisms. Diseases are one, but the most important in really driving down the abundance seems to be elite conflict, expressed as civil war and banditry. And what else was European colonialism but the spillover of surplus elites trying to maintain elite lifestyles at the expense of producing populations? In a sense, it is as important that Native Americans were "virgin soil" for European elites as for European diseases. The combination of the two continued to inflict mortality where populations might have been recovering from one or the other. Much of the rest of the book reads like an extended Gapminder presentation. It explores first the demographic processes associated with the Industrial Revolution, then those operating in developing countries, and gives a prognosis for the future. The Industrial Revolution that was the one I was most hoping for a satisfying answer from. I didn't really get it. For the most part, he seems to assume that the dramatic increase in population growth was caused by medical discoveries that reduced mortality. He briefly considers the effect of increased food production on nutrition, but dismisses it as an unlikely cause. But then at another point he says that many European countries "made considerable progress [on increasing life expectancy] before the impact of medical discoveries is felt." So what happened there? This seems very interesting, why is it never investigated? Similarly, he implies one “cause” of decreased mortality could be the mysterious disappearance of the plague, not caused by any medical discovery but apparently through sheer ecological happenstance. What happened there? Do we really not know? Most of these processes seem kind of obvious – medical discoveries eliminated much of child mortality and increased longevity, economic development was associated with decreased fertility, etc. There are some interesting "exceptions" that show how much variability there can be in these patterns. The identical life expectancies of countries as economically disparate as Cuba, Chile, and South Korea illustrate the power of context and political will to deviate from the path that European nations took, for instance. Arguably, it is only in the developing countries that we finally have the right combination of large, thorough data sets and the application of some but not other elements of economic modernization to start teasing out causal relationships in that demographic explosion. For instance, the reduction of fertility in the 20th century is initially explained as the result of contraceptive use. That suggests questions about the cultural differences that make contraceptives acceptable in some societies but not others. It brings up a familiar debate feminists have with religious conservatives about abortion and contraceptive access, as well as the legitimacy of Western feminists pushing those things on non-Western cultures. As it happens, though, when you have data that includes not just fertility but also desired fertility, it becomes clear that contraceptive use is a bit of a red herring here. The driving variable, in Europe and elsewhere, is the number of children people wish to have. Access to contraception allows them to achieve that number without exceeding it in a way that cultural variations in nuptiality, etc., were never able to. But if people don't want to have fewer children, access to contraception won't significantly reduce the birth rate. That just begs the question: what determines how many children people want. And here Livi Bacci provides an insight that I think finally moves the Malthusian conversation forwards. Desired number of children is not primarily cultural, but economic. It is a function of the expectations parents have about how much it will cost to raise a child, how much money they will lose spending their time raising a child instead of working, how much money a child will able to earn for the family, and to what extent they will need to rely on their children to care for them in old age. In Europe and America, all of those forces pushed toward smaller families at the same time that medicine and prosperity reduced mortality. But in countries where improvements in health and food technology have not been accompanied by economic development, rapid population growth has been prolonged. (Again, important to note that this is only true with contraception; without it, natural fertility can apparently only be reduced to a degree that is much higher than replacement rate. Interesting to contemplate what population trends in rich nations would have been like without it.) This microeconomic interpretation of the Malthusian "choice" solution is very interesting. It implies that having children has perhaps been integrated as a part of niche construction itself, a coevolutionary partner of the grandmother hypothesis. That is, people have children not just to pass on their genes to their grandchildren, but also to support them as they age so that they can help their grandchildren pass on those genes. Like many things in niche construction theory, it's the sort of observation that seems like it doesn't add anything to our understanding until circumstances drastically change. Before modern changes in mortality and fertility, family size ended up being around the same as what it is now. Women had more babies, but more of them died, so the average ended up close to the replacement rate. This wasn't achieved through any intentional measure to prevent overshoot; it’s just a consequence of parental evaluation of the social niche. It is ultimately very sensitive to environmental conditions, which is why the replacement rate comes about when new technological or spatial niches are filled. But it places an interesting barrier or lens between population and carrying capacity that bears further study. While Livi Bacci casts doubt on many mechanisms by which persistent population growth is hypothesized to impede economic development, it seems plausible that there’s a diversion between stable population/high consumption and rising population/low consumption outcomes going on here. The amount of insight brought by this simple natural experiment is substantial, and it really makes me wish there were more of that kind of thinking in the book.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-01-27 00:00:00 Laura Kitko "In traditional rural societies, awareness of the problems created by demographic growth was probably more immediate than it is in modern society. The inhabitants of a village, valley, or region experienced directly the negative effects of new settlement in an area already demographically saturated, and, while less efficient than those of the present day, regulating mechanisms could gradually bring about the necessary adjustments. The expansion and integration of markets and the development of trade have contributed to masking from individual perception the link between natural resources (land, for example) and consumer goods. Hong Kong can grow out of all measure, importing agricultural products from the United States or Argentina, without any awareness of the connection between the grain or beef consumed and the rural environment which produces them. This sort of detachment is a necessary consequence of economic development, but it should be pointed out that as a result the direct link between the protagonist of demographic choice (the individual) and the producer of the forces of constraint (the environment) has been broken. This link is slowly being reestablished as the minority of individuals, institutions, and governments that now recognize the global nature and interconnectedness of environmental phenomena increases. [...] While modern society may be better equipped with regard to the regulation of mortality and fertility than societies of the past, the same cannot be said with regard to another mechanism of choice, namely migration. The peopling of the world has been accomplished by means of migration and settlement which has distributed population according to existing or potential resources. Emigration has also always been the principal route of escape from poverty and destitution. This 'freedom' of settlement, which in modern times has led to the Europeanization of temperate America and Australia, is today much impaired. In response to primarily political considerations, nations generally regard immigration as a marginal fact, acceptable only within a fairly rigid framework and in small numbers. Given the enormous national differences in wages and assets and the relative ease of mobility, perhaps it could not have been otherwise. Nonetheless, it is also the case that there exists no open and available territory to act as an outlet for demographic excess and to colonize with human population, plants, and animals. In addition, greater economic integration (for example, the increased value of international trade in relation to production) is accompanied by greater separation of peoples and ethnic groups; the creation of new national states, often bounded by unnatural borders, has led to the redistribution of ethnic groups, previously mixed, within well-defined political units; and a tendency toward segregation between groups is also frequent within national borders. So the effectiveness of an important tool of 'choice,' migration, has declined as compared to the past. Our balance sheet, then, has both credit and debit entries, and it is not easy to calculate the bottom line, though the ability to control fertility, when it becomes universal, will constitute the decisive factor for controlling growth."