The propagation of Population Statistics and a small history about it

The valuation of population size and economic status has been the major study of man kind. Different philosophies were integrated on above assessment “Population Theories”. One of the philosophies is to link population size with economic level of the population. Since, then, the main source of income was agriculture. The initial population theories were developed in terms of the relationship between land and man.

Many century back, Chinese philosophers includes the view that the excessive growth in the no. of people may depress the standard of living. Famous philosopher Aristotle too agreed that the land property could not be increased as rapidly as the numbers of inhabitants. As a result, poverty was likely to be the outcome. A famous contemporary of John Graunt (the pioneer of the population statistics) was William Petty. He developed a political arithmetic involving the measurement of the effect of population in Human affairs.

In the following generation, eminent persons of other fields like science took an interest in population study. Edmund Hally, an astroner was the first to attempt to construct a life table on the basis of recorded death statistics. The basis of his work was the assumption that birth and death rate of a population will always remains the same. But subsequently, he came to conclusion that it was difficult to maintain static or stationary population. Similarly, there came Richard Price, who constructed a reliable life table, but again in the belief that population was stationary. T.R. Malthus, who is considered as the father of modern population theory, observed that it is the natural tendency of population to increase in geometrical proportion unless other wise checked, where as food increases in arithmetical progression owing to the nature of land. Since then, lots of developments in population theories have been made and these theories have given the population studies a new dimension as Demography.The date relating to human population is called population statistics. Population statistics is the oldest of all statistics collected by nations for keeping good estimation of man-power to protect the king himself. In fact, the study of statistics was started as the study of population.