Demography+

Current Thoughts

The Baseball Demographer II The real Curse of the Bambino wasn’t placed on the Red Sox. It was the first instance of the Yankees exercising their edge and the beginning of decades beating up on the little guys. Any way you cut it, New York teams have been the best. It’s all about building on the market, something Major League baseball is doing little to compensate for in an era when even more advantages are swinging to the big guys.

The Baseball Demographer I That’s Joey Jay to the left. He was my favourite ballplayer when I was seven years old. He was one several very good pitchers on the pennant winning 1961 Reds who made me a life-long Cincinnati fan and committing me to one of the smallest cities in the majors. Reading J. C. Bradbury’s The Baseball Economist  gave me the idea to see how much influence being small has had on the Reds performance. I’ve now processed 110 years of data and it looks like it has had a bit of an effect if not as much as I expected.

Past Musings

	Halifax Rising Since I had the data at hand, I applied Zipf’s Law to assess the relationship among Nova Scotia’s counties. I found that Halifax has surpassed the expectations set by Zipf to achieve a much more prominent place in Nova Scotia. Indeed, Halifax has become the preeminent city in Atlantic Canada.
	The Zipf Line George Kingsley Zipf’s “Law” of city size hypothesizes that the largest city in a country will be twice as large as the second largest, three times as large as the third largest, and so on. It fits remarkably well with recent data from Canadian and US Censuses, and provides important insights to the pattern of urban development.
	Histories Mysteries I recently obtained a fascinating table showing the populations of every Nova Scotia county in every Census since Canada’s 1867 Confederation. Examination of these numbers provides insight to the development of the province and surprising information on the past that I did not appreciate.
	Serve Yourself Retail and service operations that aren’t just disappearing are concentrating. While less retail and service space reduces the potential for land use conflicts, planners are losing a key device for maintaining and sustaining people places.
	Under the Influence III – On the Right Foot The influence of University of Toronto demographer David Foot on Canadians in general and me in particular is unavoidable. Sure, he exaggerates a bit but if it wasn’t for him who in Canada would know the massive influence of the Baby Boom on the past 50 years and on 50 years to come.
	Under the Influence II – Dealing with Decline Nirmala Cherukupalle’s Plan Canada article “Projections for Managed Growth Situations” didn’t cause much of a stir when it was published in 1976 but it did give me a number of issues to think about. The tendency to over project, the value of the cohort-survival method, and the need to generate comprehensive and detailed projections for small areas have all been issues that have concerned me since.
	Under the Influence I – The New Ballgame Baseball was my favorite sport growing up. As an adult, I’ve made Bill James is my favorite statistician. James has played a leading role in the development of sabermetrics, the statistical study of baseball that has proven itself not only in print but also on the field of dreams. His example ought to be followed by planners who could benefit from reasserting the value of hard analysis in their field of practice.
	Demography Whatever Philip Longman’s article “The Global Baby Bust” is a pretty typical example of a genre that wants to scare us into thinking that Western Civilization, if not the human race, is about to expire. It has long been balanced by the possibly sillier postulations of writers like Philip Ehrlich whose 196? bookThe Population Bomb asserted that technological man would extinguish. Thank heavens for balance because that is where I’m pretty sure we are headed.
	The Parts are Greater Than the Whole Most of the attention in demography is devoted to international population growth and movement: the population boom, the fall of birth rates below replacement level in western societies, the impact of AIDS in Africa, and so on. Its fascinating stuff but here at Demography+ we are interested in projecting and forecasting population for small areas to address the problems of regional and local planning.