A Very Relevant WSJ Article on Worldwide Population Crisis
I love when this happens: I found an extremely relevant and recent article (published yesterday!) that directly relates to an application problem we are working on and discussing in class.
We are working on the comparison of linear and exponential growth using Thomas Malthus’ population and food supply pamphlet. I wrote about this application problem a bit in this BLOG POST from last year. I had just gone through THIS POWERPOINT and pointed out that human population has been increasing nearly nonstop since the beginning of the human species, but based on this new article, I may need to correct myself!
This article is from the Wall Street Journal, which I subscribe to ( as detailed in this BLOG POST). I read the article at dinner with my 13-year-old son and he was pretty knowledgeable on which countries currently had the highest population and fertility rate. I enjoyed the graphs and visual displays of data included in the article, and was reminded a lot of my Fall 2023 Data Science course when I saw this infographic:
Before reading this article, I had already heard of and seen population pyramids like the ones below, but reading the article really highlighted just how important having a proper distribution of ages is in a country in order for it to thrive.
It makes me wonder if, in 50-1oo years, China, USA, and Russia will be dominant power-players on the world stage anymore - maybe other countries that are currently not highly developed will rise in importance as they take advantage of their young, up-and-coming population. I plan on reading this article with my students this week once they finish the classwork packet on the Malthus population and food supply problem.
UPDATE:
I had students ‘popcorn’ read this article together after their quiz, and it went really well! I say ‘popcorn’ in quotes, because I didn’t have students choose the next person to read after them; I had my graphing calculator set to Random Number Generator, and after about 2-3 paragraphs, I had the calculator generate a new number. Whichever student sat at that desk number would pick up reading. This helped keep everyone engaged and at the same place in the article. We didn’t have quite enough time to finish the entire article, but we got through about 2/3 of it.
We began the article after a quiz on exponential functions. As I walked around to collect the quizzes, I projected the following Classroom Screen for groups to discuss and start thinking about population and fertility rate:
Then I showed them the actual fertility rate of each country as of 2020 (this image is from the article):
Then I showed them this screenshot ‘meme,’ if you will, from Facebook, because it honestly hits home and feels so accurate in the US, at least:
And then we read through the article!
As a side note, I had time to read with my son before he went to bed, which was so special and fun. I haven’t had time to do this with him in a couple years because I am either putting my 4-year-old daughter to bed or grading/lesson planning when her dad puts her to bed. Since it’s National Poetry Month, I checked out THIS BOOK from our town library a week ago with the intent of reading some of it with him. We hadn’t touched it yet until tonight, when we had time to not only play a game of chess, but also read some funny and entertaining poems full of word play, rhymes, and some nonsense. Ahh, the joys of not having a mountain of grading to attack at night!
If you have kids that are able to read, I would highly recommend checking this book out and enjoying poetry with your child. I don’t typically read poetry, and neither does my son, but he kept saying, “One more!” each time I went to say goodnight and leave :)