Demographic facts all students should know right now

If anyone tells you that "facts are useless in an emergency," give them a bad grade.

Family Demography Seminar syllabus, 2021 edition

This week it's back to teaching Family Demography. I added a few weeks of pandemic related readings. And some things I never read before.

New COVID-19 and Health Disparities lecture

I recorded a new version of the lecture I created last spring: COVID-19 and Health Disparities. It defines health disparities, introduces the theory of fundamental causes, and then describes COVID-19 disparities by race/ethnicity and age with reference to education and occupational inequality. For intro sociology students. Using data from Bureau of Labor Statistics (inspired by…

Race and racism in America (video)

In my Social Problems class we're spending the next few weeks on race, racial inequality, and racial politics. Step one is this lecture on race and racism. After a tangent on racial identity, idealism and its enemies, I address biology and race, describing the classic racist racial categories in relation to vast human diversity in…

The COVID-19 economic crisis is increasing every kind of inequality (video)

I recorded a 25-minute lecture on the COVID-19 economic crisis, with emphasis on increasing inequalities, for my Social Problems class. The slides are posted here, CC-BY. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BRAV6Wl3RI

Measuring inequality, and what the Gini index does (video)

I produced a short video on measuring inequality, focusing on the construction of the Gini index, the trend in US family inequality, and an example of using it to measure world inequality.

Demographic facts your students need to know right now (with COVID-19 addendum)

Here’s the 2020 update of a series I started in 2013. This year, after the basic facts, I'll add some pandemic facts below. Is it true that “facts are useless in an emergency“? I guess we'll find out this year. Knowing basic demographic facts, and how to do arithmetic, lets us ballpark the claims we…

Pandemic Social Problems, with video and partial reading list

An introductory lecture and reading list for Social Problems, pandemic edition

Inequality, family change, and the pandemic (interview with Joanna Pepin)

Joanna Pepin was kind enough to interview me for her family sociology class.

My green screen teaching setup explained

I don't want to decorate my living space to show students and colleagues in the background, I want a nice green screen setup to put me somewhere else.