This report examines the ways in which societies change over time.  Specifically, this site presents data on social, economic and political aspects of society, and analysis of the relationships among these components, especially their relationships over time.  Through these relationships, we present a picture of how society is constructed, and how society changes over time.

The focus of this report is on changes in the last half of the 20th century, because data for this time period is most accessible.  One section, though, (long term trends) builds the context for understanding current change by examining patterns of change for population and economy through the very long term, over the past 2,000 years.

Table of Contents

Introduction  Aim and description of this study.

Literature review  Brief summary of theory and recent research about social, political and economic change.

Methods  Description of data and methods used to present and analyze the data.

Long term trends   Data describing popluation and economy from 0 to 1998.

Demographics  Characteristics of populations, e.g., size, growth, age distributions, urbanization, infant mortality rate, others to be added....

Social  social characteristics, such as education, crime, others ...

Technological   Characteristics of technological infrastucture, e.g., electrical consumption, telephone lines , others...

Economic  Tables and descriptions for GDP, growth, poverty, economic freedom...

Political   Tables and descriptions for political freedom, democracy, corruption, ...

World trends (to be added) Tables for data that don't necessarily have individual country data.

Combined analyses  Examining relationships among variables in different chapters, e.g., among demographic, economic and political variables.
 

Conclusions (to be added....)
 

Appendix  Listing data sources, notes about data.

Data Set   Data set containing data used in this study.
 

Last updated 3/22/02
This site was prepared using Netscape Composer
and Star Office  version 5.2.  This used to be a free Sun Microsystems office package.  It is no longer available for free.
 

This report is copywrite November 2000 by Gene Shackman, Ya-Lin Liu and Xun Wang.
Copywrite renewed 2001, 2002, by Gene Shackman, Ya-Lin Liu and Xun Wang