Converting a Cohort Component Model into a Microsimulation Model

In this chapter, we show and explain the code that reproduces the multistate projection of India described in Chap. 10.1007/978-3-030-79111-7_2 into a microsimulation model. The microsimulation code is divided into modules for each demographic event, namely the mortality, the education, the fertility, the domestic migration, and the reclassification of rural to urban areas. Section by section, we explain the code for the simulation and the production of outputs. We also a basic validation of the mode. The code file “Chapter 3—Replicating multistate.sas” contains the final complete code that generates the simulation for 2010–2060, including the setting up of the workspace (see Chap. 10.1007/978-3-030-79111-7_2).

The Bantu Expansion

The Bantu Expansion, the foremost linguistic, cultural, and demographic event in Late Holocene Africa, has sparked a fervent interdisciplinary debate, especially regarding its driving forces. As is often the case with hotly debated issues, certain ‘factoids’ bearing little relation to factual evidence emerge. Two such factoids are that (1) the Bantu Expansion would have been a single migratory macro-event and (2) it would have been driven by agriculture. These two widely held beliefs are critically assessed here. Regarding (1), the chapter argues that the Bantu Expansion did involve the actual migration of Bantu speakers but that backward and forward migration occurred after the initial spread and that Bantu languages also expanded through adoption by autochthonous hunter-gatherers. As for (2), the chapter argues that the earliest Bantu speakers had their own archeologically visible culture, but they were not farmers. Therefore, the Bantu Expansion is not a textbook example of a farming/language dispersal.

Feeding the next billion: hunger and conservation

Sometime in October 2011 the human population reached seven billion. The date is uncertain—nobody knows exactly how many people there are as national censuses are intermittent and many inaccurate (Bloom, 2011). But the exact date does not matter: this was a political not demographic event. The seven billionth child was deemed by the UN to have been a girl, born in Manila, Philippines.

Life and Death in a Chinese Famine: Infanticide as a Demographic Consequence of the 1935 Yellow River Flood

Famine mortality has a special interest for those interested in population history. After Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, famine was viewed as an event that “checks” population growth, perhaps the inevitable consequence of overpopulation. Although demographers have recently tried to show that a single famine or demographic crisis cannot retard population growth in the long run (Watkins and Menken 1985; Bongaarts and Cain 1982), yet famine, to the extent that it exists today, still constitutes a most dramatic demographic event.