How Do I Count Thee? Various Angles for Examining the Doubling Times of the Amish
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18061/jpac.v1i2.7990Keywords:
demography, doubling time, constant annual percentage increase, social and cultural change, The Diary, Raber's AlmanacAbstract
The focus of this article is the measurement of how rapidly various parts of Amish society grow, including the number of settlements, households, church districts, and ordained men. "Amish society" means those Plain Anabaptist communities that both identify themselves as Amish and forbid car ownership. Doubling time was selected as the statistic to examine this growth. It is a measure of how quickly a population doubles; that is, its exponential growth. Most of the doubling times calculated for this article were within a few years of the doubling time estimate of 20 years for the Amish population in general, based on statistics from the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. The article concludes with a discussion of what these measures of growth mean for the future of Amish society and extrapolations, based on current doubling times, by decade from 2020 to 2050. Recommended is a greater focus among Plain Anabaptist scholars on the population dynamics of the Amish, arguing that demographic dimensions underlie possible changes in the social, cultural, religious, and economic features of the Amish through the remainder of the twenty-first century.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Joseph F. Donnermeyer
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
This Author Agreement for The Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities ("Agreement") is entered into by and between The Ohio State University, on behalf of its University Libraries ("Publisher") and the author ("Author").
For good and valuable consideration, Publisher and Author agree as follows:
1. Author hereby grants to Publisher the right to publish, reproduce, distribute, translate, transmit and display his/her submitted work and an abstract thereof ("Work") in The Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities in whole or in part and in all formats and all media. Author also hereby grants to Publisher the right for Publisher to enter into agreements with third parties that grant such third parties any or all of the rights that Author has granted to Publisher herein. The aforementioned rights may include the rights necessary to index and abstract the Work. The Author agrees that any subsequent publication of the Work will credit The Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities as the site of first publication and provide a link to The Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities website. This Agreement is subject to the terms and expectations outlined on Publisher's website (http://go.osu.edu/publishing-services).
2. Author represents and warrants that: (1) they are the creator and rights holder of the Work; (2) Publisher's exercise of the rights granted to Publisher herein will not infringe or violate any copyright or any other right of a third party; (3) if the Work contains any third party content, they have obtained the unrestricted permission of the copyright owner or that use of third party material is allowed because the material is in the public domain or an appropriate fair use analysis has been performed and there is a reasonable belief that use is permitted and (4) the Work contains nothing libelous or otherwise unlawful. Author hereby agrees to indemnify and hold harmless Publisher and its trustees, officers, employees, agents, and subgrantees from all claims related to Publisher's exercise of the rights granted to Publisher herein or related to the subject matter covered in Author's representations and warranties.
The Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license, to allow for certain types of reuse without permission. By submitting this agreement, the Author agrees to apply a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license to the Work upon publication.
