Review of The Texas Challenge: Population Change and the Future of Texas edited by Steve H. Murdock, Nazrul Hoque, Martha Michael, Steve White, and Beverly Pecotte

摘要

Steve H. Murdock, in collaboration with four secondary authors, has produced an intriguing but somewhat puzzling book on population change and the future of Texas. While population studies are certainly within the authors' domain of Rural Sociology, Texas is no longer a "rural" state based on population. Over eighty percent of the state's population now resides in urban areas, although Texas laws, traditions, and attitudes still honor and project a rural mystique. This might have been emphasized as part of the Texas Challenge. Throughout the text the authors emphasize four major trends in Texas population: the changing rate of population growth and the relative role of migration and immigration in that growth, the aging of the population, the growth in the size of the minority population, and finally, the changing composition of households in Texas population.