United Kingdom Tries to Limit Immigration

The United Kingdom has been moving to limit its "uncontrolled immigration," especially from Eastern Europe. However, a think tank in the UK has concluded that net migration is unlikely to change much this year because very few people are leaving the country, even if the number of immigrants might go down a bit.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) says the figure for immigrants to the UK minus the number leaving will be around 200,000.

One reason it points to is that only about 30,000 UK citizens are emigrating - the lowest for almost a decade.

The government said it was committed to reducing net migration from its current 215,000 to less than 100,000 by 2015. 

Empowering Muslim Women

The gender divide is probably the single most important "clash of civilizations" in the modern world, and there is evidence that progress on this front is being made by Muslim women in the United States.

“What we’re seeing now in America is what has been sort of a quiet or informal empowerment of women,” said Shireen Zaman, executive director of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonprofit research institute founded after the 2001 attacks to provide research on American Muslims. “In many of our home countries, socially or politically it would’ve been harder for Muslim women to take a leadership role. It’s actually quite empowering to be Muslim in America.”

As Najah Bazzy, a American-born nurse and founder of several charities in Michigan, put it: “Yeah I’m Arab, yeah I’m very American, and yeah I’m very Islamic, but you put those things in the blender and I’m no longer just a thing. I’m a new thing.” 

No Census Reform After All

The Senate earlier this month had unanimously passed a bill that would reform the administrative structure of the Census Bureau in a way that would give it more autonomy and would be less influenced by politics. In an earlier post, I noted that the opposition in the House seemed to come mainly from the Republicans. Unfortunately, it turned out to be President Obama and key Democrats who shot it down in the house.

The administration’s objections had more to do with turf issues than substance. Gary Locke, the commerce secretary whose department houses the census, objected to one provision that called for the director to report directly to the secretary rather than to a midlevel commerce official, saying that it undercuts a secretary’s prerogative to organize the department.

Is Inequality Good for Your Life Chances?

The New York Times today features an excerpt from a new book by one of their writers, Eduardo Porter, called “The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do,” coming out in January 2011 from Portfolio Publishers. Income inequality is the theme and the message is an old and complicated one: As economies grow, inequalities in income tend to increase, but too much inequality then hampers the very social mobility that is required for economies to continue growing. Although Porter does not go into this in the excerpt, we can note that Marxism arose in reaction to the inequalities of capitalism in the 19th century, but then it turned out that the Marxian solution stifled the kind of competition and opportunities for personal economic advancement that provide the incentives for an entire society to be lifted out of poverty. At the same time, too much inequality also stifles those opportunities, so a societal balance with respect to inequality seems necessary for long term economic progress. The importance of inequality is illustrated by Porter with respect to immigration:

Despite the great danger and cost of crossing the border illegally into the United States, hundreds of thousands of the hardest-working Mexicans are drawn by the relative prosperity they can achieve north of the border — where the average income of a Mexican-American household is more than $33,000, almost five times that of a family in Mexico.

Health and Mortality Lessons from Mark Twain

One of the hot-selling items this holiday season is the newly released Autobiography of Mark Twain. He had carefully instructed that it could not be published in its entirety until 100 years after his death (which occurred in 1910). Twain was born as Samuel Clemens in 1835 and grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, and suffered through his father's death from pneumonia when only 11 (although his mother lived into her 90s). This was a time before the confirmation of the germ theory--before modern public health and medical revolutions--and life expectancy in the United States generally was in the 40s, about the same as the poorest countries today in sub-Saharan Africa. Twain recounts the "health care system" that existed in his town:

The doctor worked by the year— $25 for the whole family. I remember two of the  Florida doctors, Chowning and Meredith . They not only tended an entire family for $25  a year, but furnished the medicines themselves. Good measure, too. Only the largest persons could hold a whole dose.  Castor oil  was the principal beverage. The dose was half a  dipperful, with  half a dipperful of New Orleans molasses  added  to help it down and make it taste good, which it never did. The next  stand-by was calomel; the next, rhubarb; and the next,  jalap. Then they bled the patient, and put  mustard plasters  on him. It was a dreadful system, and yet the death-rate was not heavy. The calomel was nearly sure to salivate the patient and cost him some of his teeth. There were no dentists. When teeth became touched with decay or were otherwise ailing, the doctor knew of but one thing to do: he fetched his tongs and dragged them out. If the jaw remained, it was not his fault.

Doctors  were not called in cases of ordinary illness; the  family’s  grandmother attended to those. Every old woman was a doctor, and gathered her own medicines in the woods, and knew how to compound doses that would stir the vitals of a cast-iron dog.

More Stories Emerging From the 2010 Census Numbers

There are lots of stories hiding in the 2010 Census numbers, and the New York Times and other news agencies are doing a good job of telling them. One such tale relates to Nevada, which was the fastest growing state (in percentage terms) between 2000 and 2010, even though the state's population grew in absolute terms only from 2 million to 2.7 million. Still, that was enough to allow Nevada to add another seat in Congress (probably at Michigan's expense). The issue is that even as the census was being taken, the state was already losing some of that population! The growth in Nevada had been fueled especially, if not mainly, by the speculative housing market. The bursting of that bubble also blew the lid on population increase.

The state demographer, Jeff Hardcastle, estimated that Nevada had lost more than 90,000 people since July 2008, and expects the decline to continue through next year. He said that before 2007, Nevada had been the top-growing state for most of the past 20 years.

People are leaving in search of more prosperous economic climates. But analysts said the state’s population had been hurt by a declining birthrate, not uncommon during tough economic times, and illegal immigrants leaving, or at least avoiding census takers as public attitudes toward them turned harsh.

First Results from the 2010 US Census

Yesterday morning the US Census Bureau posted its first numbers from the complete count, short-form, 2010 census data. These are the constitutionally required numbers of the population by state, which are used to apportion seats in the US House of Representatives. As the New York Times notes:

According to the new counts, Texas will gain four seats, Florida will gain two, while New York and Ohio each lose two. Fourteen other states gained or lost one seat. The gainers included Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina and Utah; the losers included Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

Not yet discussed anywhere, as nearly as I can tell, is that the census count is several million people larger than expected. As of yesterday, the Census Bureau's population clock on factfinder.census.gov still showed slightly more than 305 million people, based on the demographic balancing equation which built on the 2000 census and then added births and immigrants while subtracting deaths and emigrants. However, the 2010 census count as of 1 April 2010 was 308.7 million, and the population clock has now been updated to December 2010 to show 310.5 million. Thus, there are about 5 million more people in the country than expected. This excess of observed over expected was also discovered after the 2000 census and the reason then, as almost certainly now, lies mainly with more undocumented immigrants than anticipated by the Census Bureau's estimating procedures. 

Demographic Fit in Europe

I was recently interviewed on CNN International's Connect the World program to talk about the results of the censuses from the United States and other countries. They had asked me ahead of time if I would talk also about Argentina (which just completed a census) and Turkey (which is just about to start one), but we never got that far, spending time instead talking about China and India. I had, however, reminded myself of Turkey's demographic situation. In particular, I was struck anew by the tight demographic fit between Turkey and western Europe--especially Germany, with which Turkey has had a century of relations, including guest worker programs. To a certain extent, Turkey is to Germany what Mexico is to the United States--a source of young immigrants to fill in the dents in the age structure. In Turkey right now, 44 percent of the population is under age 25 and is in need of a job. Turkey, like Mexico in recent years, has a strong economy, but not necessarily strong enough to create good jobs for the booming young population. At the same time, in Germany only 25 percent of the population is under 25, and there is a diminishing number of young people to fill in the labor force. The principal difference between Turkey and Germany compared to the United States and Mexico is that Turkey has a larger population than Germany's, whereas Mexico's population is only about one-third of that in the US. That sheer size is almost certainly an impediment to the eventual inclusion of Turkey into the European Union.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

The Economist this week leads with a story about the U-shaped pattern of happiness by age (the "U-bend," as they call it). Younger people are more happy than middle aged persons--with a global trough at age 46, according to data used by The Economist--and then older people are the happiest lot of all. So, don't dread old age. Instead, you should look forward to it, with the idea that you don't have to prove anything to anybody anymore. You can just enjoy what you have and who you know. But Richard Easterlin at USC (and a former President of the Population Association of America, and who is mentioned by The Economist, but only in reference to older work) says not quite so fast. In a new book titled "Happiness, Growth, and the Life Cycle" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), Easterlin notes that the U-bend depends on cross-sectional data, such as that derived from the World Values Survey. The results are not quite the same if you use data for cohorts.

Life Cycle happiness is also clearly different from the U-shaped regression relationship of happiness to age estimated in the economics of happiness literature. This U-shaped pattern is obtained by comparing people at different ages who have identical life circumstances--the same income, marital status, health and the like. But life circumstances change systematically with age and affect the life cycle pattern of happiness. For example, older people, in comparison with those middle-aged are, on average, more likely to have lower income, be in poorer health, and to live alone--circumstance that would affect adversely their happiness compared with those mid-life, and that need to be taken into account in estimating the life cycle pattern of happiness (p. 131).

DREAM dies in the Senate

As predicted, the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (the DREAM Act) did not garner enough votes in the Senate today to be brought to the floor for a vote. It did get 55 votes--a majority of Senator did vote to bring it to vote--but the Senate procedure called "cloture" (or end to debate--a move to avoid a filibuster) requires 60 votes, so the motion failed. This bill has been rattling around Congress for nearly a decade and despite its good intentions to provide a path to citizenship for children brought to the US as undocumented immigrants by their parents, it seems unlikely that it will get majority support in the new Congress coming into office in January, despite a pledge by President Obama to push for it.

How Can You Possibly Oppose a Bill That Aims to Prevent Child Marriage?

The US House of Representatives today voted down a bill (previously passed unanimously by the Senate!) that would require the US government to develop policies to prevent child marriage, with the goal of eliminating this practice anywhere in the world. The bill also seeks to promote the educational, health, economic, social, and legal empowerment of women and girls.

United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 60 million girls in developing countries now ages 20 to 24 were married under the age of 18. The Population Council estimates that the number will increase by 100 million over the next decade if current trends continue.

The World According to Facebook

I have already commented on the size of the Facebook "nation." Now it turns out that a Facebook intern has assembled Facebook data to find the linkages between Facebook friends. The result is an amazing map of the world according to Facebook. The linkages clearly define most of the heavily populated areas of the world. China is dark because of its censorship, and sub-Saharan Africa looks sparse because it is not yet well connected to the internet. With the exception of China, this map is amazingly like the NOAA map of nighttime lights--both of them showing where there are people with enough money to have electricity and an internet presence.

More Results from the Newest ACS Data Release

People are having a lot of fun with the latest release of American Community Survey data, which represent our first look at census tract level data since the release of the 2000 census data. These data are coming to us well ahead of when we would have had such information had the census clung to the old long form instead of pushing ahead with the ACS. The New York Times leads with the story of the suburbanization of minority groups in the US, which factors into the potential for diminished levels of residential segregation. On that score, the NYT notes that William Frey's assessment of residential segregation from these data is not entirely in line with the analysis of John Logan at Brown University, who used data from a slightly different scale to conclude that there has been no real change in patterns of residential segregation. We will hear more about that as time goes on, I'm sure.

Census Tract Level Data Now Available from American Community Survey

The US Census Bureau today released the first set of data from the American Community Survey that go down to the census tract level of geography. This was done by combining the respondents from the 2005 through the 2009 surveys. We are now getting very close to the promised equivalent to the long form on previous censuses, which has now been replaced by the ACS. Demographer William Frey at the Brookings Institution jumped quickly on this goldmine to evaluate levels of residential segregation by race in US metro areas.

America's neighborhoods took large strides toward racial integration in the last decade as blacks and whites chose to live near each other at the highest levels in a century.

Geodemographics of Slavery Before the US Civil War

I was just made aware of a very cool map of the pre-Civil War slave population of the southern states in the United States that is posted to the New York Times website. If you haven't seen it already, you must visit it, since it has considerable historical importance:

We don’t know when Lincoln first encountered the Coast Survey’s map of slavery. But he became so taken with it that Francis Bicknell Carpenter included it in the lower right corner of his painting, “President Lincoln Reading the Emancipation Proclamation to His Cabinet.” Carpenter spent the first six months of 1864 in the White House preparing the portrait, and on more than one occasion found Lincoln poring over the map. Though the president had abundant maps at his disposal, only this one allowed him to focus on the Confederacy’s greatest asset: its labor system. After January 1, 1863—when the Emancipation Proclamation became law—the president could use the map to follow Union troops as they liberated slaves and destabilized the rebellion.

We use GIS these days to create maps like this, and can do such maps in a very short amount of time because of the readily availability of data, but that was a very different story a century and a half ago. This map uses data from the 1860 census and was drawn up by the US Coastal Survey.

Revolution of Rising Expectations in China

China is famous for having a large and cheap unskilled labor force, and for exporting a lot of excellent students abroad for graduate education. For the last decade, however, the country has been educating a new generation of college students with the expectation that they would populate a new middle class of white collar workers in China. The results seem to be disappointing, at least so far, according to a story in the New York Times.

The economy, despite its robust growth, does not generate enough good professional jobs to absorb the influx of highly educated young adults. And many of them bear the inflated expectations of their parents, who emptied their bank accounts to buy them the good life that a higher education is presumed to guarantee.

“College essentially provided them with nothing,” said Zhang Ming, a political scientist and vocal critic of China’s education system. “For many young graduates, it’s all about survival. If there was ever an economic crisis, they could be a source of instability.”

Can the Census be Saved From Politics?

The U.S. Senate has just unanimously (meaning, obviously, in a completely bipartisan way) passed legislation that would give the director of the Census Bureau more autonomy within the Department of Commerce and would extend the term of the director to five years. Both of these moves, if approved also by the House of Representatives, would give the Bureau a bit more shelter from the politics that surround each decennial counting of the population. As the New York Times noted in an editorial today, the big question is whether or not the House will pass it. Despite strong support in the Senate, there are opponents in the House, largely among some key Republicans. Thus, it seems that if the bill can be ushered through the current lame duck session controlled by Democrats, it might have a chance for passage--otherwise, it may be in trouble with the new Republican-controlled House in January. Stay tuned.

Bolivia Lowers Retirement Age--What Are They Thinking?

President Evo Morales of Bolivia today signed into a law a bill lowering the retirement age in Bolivia from 65 for men and 60 for women down to 58 for both. This obviously runs counter to the raising of the retirement age being advocated for virtually all of the world's richer, aging nations. 

The law, which takes effect in a year, also extends pensions to the 3 million people — 60 percent of the working population — who labor in the informal economy as everything from street vendors to bus drivers.

"We are fulfilling a promise with the Bolivian people. We are creating a pension system that includes everyone," Morales said at the signing ceremony.

The new law will allow Bolivia's 70,000 miners to retire two years earlier — or as soon as age 51 if they have worked in life-sapping conditions deep underground. Mothers with more than three children will also get special treatment: the right to retire at age 55.

The DREAM is Fading

The DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act has been around for awhile, but supporters were encouraged yesterday by its narrow passage in the House of Representatives. If ultimately enacted into law it would provide a path to citizenship for young people brought to the United States by their parents as minors without documentation. Either military service or enrollment in college could lead to qualification for citizenship under this proposed legislation. However, the Senate brought those hopes crashing down today:

Facing GOP objections, Democrats put aside the so-called Dream Act and said they'd try again to advance it before year's end. They're short of the 60 votes needed to do so, however, and critics in both parties quickly said they won't change their minds in the waning days of the Democratic-controlled Congress.

Is China Really the World's Second Largest Economy?

WikiLeaks has not, in truth, provided very many secret cables relating to population or environmental issues. But, one very interesting tidbit has emerged, namely that the Chinese themselves are not very confident in the gross domestic product (GDP) figures that they put out for the consumption of the rest of the world:

China's GDP figures are "man-made" and therefore unreliable, the man who is expected to be the country's next head of government said in 2007, according to U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

Li Keqiang, head of the Communist Party in northeastern Liaoning province at the time, was unusually candid in his assessment of local economic data at a dinner with then-U.S. Ambassador to China Clark Randt, according to a confidential memo sent after the meeting and published on the WikiLeaks website.

Chinese economic numbers, especially at the provincial level and lower, have long been viewed with suspicion by analysts.

"That China's GDP is not reliable, especially for local GDP, that is nothing new," said an economist with a foreign bank who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussing top national leaders.

What If We Were Able to Increase Human Lifespan?

Models of the health and mortality transition typically assume that human lifespan is fixed at approximately 120 years, but scientists keep teasing us with the possibility that some discovery or another might push that to higher ages and that, at the same time, more and more of us might survive to those very old ages. New research on mice at the Harvard Medical School, in which the aging process was "reversed" has been the latest tease:

"What we saw in these animals was not a slowing down or stabilisation of the ageing process. We saw a dramatic reversal – and that was unexpected," said Ronald DePinho, who led the study, which was published in the journal Nature.

"This could lead to strategies that enhance the regenerative potential of organs as individuals age and so increase their quality of life. Whether it serves to increase longevity is a question we are not yet in a position to answer."

This led to the following commentary by Joan Bakewell of BBC News as she contemplated the possibility of living forever:

There are people frantic for eternal life. A few years ago I met people who were vesting their savings in the cryogenic movement - a movement that undertook to freeze your body after you were dead and keep it until such time as science came up with the solution to whatever had killed you, at which moment you could be defrosted, cured, and resume your life.

A Hard Reminder of the Hard Past

On a day when 12,000 Albanians have been evacuated because of flooding, and rain-fed landslides in Colombia killed dozens of people, the BBC News also offers a hard reminder of what happens when disaster strikes outside the scope of modern day rescue efforts. One of their reporters and a crew went deep into a remote part of southern Pakistan that was affected by flooding several months ago. What they found was a small village that is still in shock, and which offers a glimpse of what probably happened to countless human settlements over the course of hundreds of thousands of years of human society:

Pirral Faqir, one of the elders, speaks for them all.

For the last few months, he told me, they were marooned, sleeping in the open air without bedding or blankets.

The village tube wells, their source of clean water, were out of action.

All they had to drink was contaminated floodwater. They were constantly hungry. All the livestock gradually died.

As the months passed, many of the villagers became ill with vomiting and fever which they suspect was malaria.

One man had a stroke. Another man, pulled from the floodwater, suffered brain damage.

Three children became so ill that they eventually died. Pirral Faqir solemnly indicated his two younger brothers who each lost a son.

Welcome to a past that we thought, in truth, was long behind us.

Populations at Risk in Ecuador and Alabama

This week brought news of two different kinds of populations at risk, although in both cases they share the theme that it is socially vulnerable populations who are in the path of environmental danger. In Ecuador, the Tungurahua volcano, 85 miles southeast of the capital of Quito, appears to be on the verge of erupting, forcing the evacuation of nearby villagers, most of whom are indigenous Quechua speakers.

People living on the slopes reported the ground and buildings shaking, and a rumbling sound coming from the volcano.

Hot gases and rocks started flowing down the western side of the mountain at mid-morning and ash has been raining down on the villages of Pondoa and Patate.

Meanwhile, back in Alabama, a mound of coal ash sludge shipped in from Roane County, Tennessee is piled up in the Arrowhead landfill in Perry County, Alabama. According to The Economist:

Preferences for Male Children Are Easing Around the World

A recently published study by sociologist Kana Fuse shows that in developing countries there is now a widespread preference for a sex balance among children, based on responses to Demographic and Health Surveys. In fact, in virtually every one of the 50 countries for which data were available, a majority of women indicated that they wanted either the same number of boys and girls, or they had no preference. The countries with the strongest preference for males over females (even though sex preference was a minority of all responses) were in southern Asia (Pakistan, Nepal, and India) and in west Africa (especially Senegal, Mali, and Burkina Faso). There are also regions in which female children are favored over males (although again a specific sex preference was the minority of all responses).

When we compare the percentage of women who have son and daughter preferences, we find that, in all of the Latin American/Caribbean countries except for Bolivia, more women report having a daughter preference. The percentage of women exhibiting a daughter preference is especially high in the Dominican Republic (33.2%) and in Haiti (23.2). This is consistent with prior anthropological research in the Caribbean, which found that matrifocal kinship patterns are prevalent, and that daughters are thus highly valued.

Being Empowered is Good for Your Health

A new study from the UK shows that doctors are less likely to refer older people, women, and the poor to specialists in cases where those patients could, in fact, likely benefit from treatment by a specialist. Although the study did not delve into the reasons for these inequalities in referrals, the authors speculated that older people in general, women, and the less well-off were less likely to ask for a referral, and so the general practitioner did not offer one. Why are they less likely to ask for a referral? Malcolm Gladwell, in his book "Outliers" reviews research showing that children who grow up being empowered by their parents to interact with and question adults are more apt to succeed in life. "Success" (i.e., getting that needed referral) in talking with your physician may well improve your health, and this type of empowering behavior is more characteristic of younger people, and the middle or higher classes. This does not excuse the potentially discriminatory behavior of these physicians, but it is a reminder that being being a little pushy may be good for you.

Retirement Benefits Under the Gun in the US

Although the US population is not aging as quickly as Europe's or east Asia's, it is aging nonetheless, and the benefits that will accrue to an ever larger older population are coming under scrutiny. President Obama's Deficit Commission, headed by former Senator Alan Simpson, has proposed raising the full retirement age even higher than it currently is (which is higher already than in most European countries). This would involve "a gradual increase in the Social Security retirement age to 68 by 2050 and 69 by 2075, using a less generous cost-of-living adjustment for the programs and increasing the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes." There are also plans to reduce the costs of Medicare in a variety of ways.

The Frontline of Global Climate Change

The Economist this week has a special report on global climate change in which they argue that it is, for all intents and purposes, too late to prevent it. It is happening and we can slow it down, and maybe even eventually reverse it, but for now we are going to have deal with it. 

The fight to limit global warming to easily tolerated levels is thus over. Analysts who have long worked on adaptation to climate change—finding ways to live with scarcer water, higher peak temperatures, higher sea levels and weather patterns at odds with those under which today’s settled patterns of farming developed—are starting to see their day in the uncomfortably hot sun. That such measures cannot protect everyone from all harm that climate change may bring does not mean that they should be ignored. On the contrary, they are sorely needed.

In lock-step with this is the story this week from Norfolk, Virginia, where the rising sea level--a consequence of global warming melting polar ice--has led to flooding of neighborhoods near the water.

“We are the front lines of climate change,” said Jim Schultz, a science and technology writer who lives on Richmond Crescent near Ms. Peck. “No one who has a house here is a skeptic.”

Politics aside, the city of Norfolk is tackling the sea-rise problem head on. In August, the Public Works Department briefed the City Council on the seriousness of the situation, and Mayor Paul D. Fraim has acknowledged that if the sea continues rising, the city might actually have to create “retreat” zones.

Kristen Lentz, the acting director of public works, prefers to think of these contingency plans as new zoning opportunities.

Migrating Toward the Future

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Geneva, Switzerland, has just released its World Migration Report for 2010. You probably won't be surprised to learn that they expect migration to continue into the future:

There are far more international migrants in the world today than ever previously recorded – 214 million according to UN DESA (2009) – and their number has increased rapidly over the last few decades, up from 191 million in 2005. If the migrant population continues to increase at the same pace as the last 20 years, the stock of international migrants worldwide by 2050 could be as high as 405 million. At the same time, internal migrants account for 740 million migrants (UNDP, 2009) bringing the total number of migrants to just under 1 billion worldwide today.

The report also notes that the overall composition of migrants is changing:

International migration involves a wider diversity of ethnic and cultural groups than ever before. Significantly more women are migrating today on their own or as heads of households; the number of people living and working abroad with irregular status continues to rise; and there has been a significant growth in temporary and circular migration. 

Yet another migration turnaround in Iraq?

Movements of refugees are the clearest signs of the havoc created by humans or by nature. The havoc of war in Iraq over the past several years produced an outflow of an estimated two million refugees. But, the high hopes associated with a return to civilian rule led 100,000 or so of those refugees to venture back home. However, the New York Times reports that they seem to find that no one really is ruling the country, and many are figuring out how to leave yet again.

In a recent survey by the United Nations refugee office, 61 percent of those who returned to Baghdad said they regretted coming back, most saying they did not feel safe. The majority, 87 percent, said they could not make enough money here to support their families. Applications for asylum in Syria have risen more than 50 percent since May.

Being Thankful for Small Things

Depopulation has never been popular with humans--growth is almost universally valued over decline. So, the impending population drop in Japan is a fascinating topic for the potential lessons that it may offer, and The Economist, in particular, regularly revisits this theme, recently with a special report that emphasizes the economic downside of an aging population. Married women are not quite replacing themselves and their husband, and more importantly many women are postponing marriage to increasingly older ages and, unlike in many other countries, are not having children out of wedlock. At the same time, Japan's famously high life expectancy keeps the older generation alive longer than in any other population. 

In almost every other rich country of the world, immigrants (and especially their children--the small things for which societies are thankful--whether they acknowledge it or not) have kept the population from declining even in the face of below replacement fertility of the native population. The Japanese have steadfastly refused to employ this option, so their options for maintaining economic productivity come down to three: (1) keeping older people in the labor force longer (the kind of thing that the French recently rioted over); (2) allowing women greater scope in the labor force (breaking down the intense gender barriers that exist in East Asia); and (3) having more children immediately. The Economist suggests that "if Japan tackles its demographic problems swiftly, it has a chance of being a model of how to deal with ageing, rather than a dreadful warning." But, given what we know about population momentum, the birth rate option will not provide a "swift" solution. It will take at least two decades for the demographic momentum to swing around in Japan if an increase in the birth rate is the demographic option exercised, and it will require that the average woman not just have two children each, but more than two children each for this generation of young women. What are the odds of this happening?

The UK is Tightening its Immigration Belt

The new government of David Cameron in the UK has already introduced a variety of austerity measures to bring the government's budget under control. The latest move in this direction is to restrict the number of immigrants, based on the idea that some categories of immigrants are a burden on the welfare system.

Public anxiety over immigration — and the burden on public services caused by new arrivals — was a key issue during the country's national election, when then-leader Gordon Brown was angrily challenged by an elderly voter over workers arriving from eastern Europe.

Home Secretary Theresa May told the House of Commons that the number of non-EU nationals permitted to work in the U.K. from April 2011 will be capped at about 22,000 — a reduction of about one-fifth from 2009.

Urbanization Takes a Break in China

The future of China, as for the rest of the world, is an urban one. China has been building cities at a booming pace, catching up with the rest of world in terms of its level of urbanization relative to its level of development. The world-wide recession, however, has produced a hiatus in some of that growth, creating at least for moment the appearance of ghost towns in China, as evidenced by this report from NPR's "Here and Now."

Clash of Potential Disasters--How Do We Feed 9 Billion People?

October 16th is World Food Day each year, commemorating the establishment of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization on that day in 1945 in Rome--in a building that Mussolini had intended to be headquarters for Italian colonies around the world. The world has increased from 2.5 billion people to nearly 7 billion since that time and the average human is better fed now than then, even though nearly a billion are still undernourished. That increase has been fueled, of course, by the Green Revolution with its technological approach to farming. This year, however, "Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said in a statement to mark World Food Day that there is currently 'little to rejoice about', and "worse may still be ahead". 

De Schutter said the emphasis on chemical fertilisers and a greater mechanisation of production was "far distant from the professed commitment to fight climate change and to support small-scale, family agriculture".

In addition, "giving priority to approaches that increase reliance on fossil fuels is agriculture committing suicide", he said.

Instead, there should be a global promotion of low-carbon farming, he said, adding that "agriculture must become central to mitigating the effects of climate change rather than a large part of the problem".

"Low-technology, sustainable techniques may be better suited to the needs of the cash-strapped farmers working in the most difficult environments," De Schutter said.

"They represent a huge, still largely untapped potential to meet the needs and to increase the incomes of the poorest farmers."

Climate change and agricultural development must be thought of together, instead of being dealt with in isolation from one another, De Schutter urged.

A Small Step for Humans, A Giant Leap for the Vatican

Excerpts from Pope Benedict's new book, "Light of the World," have been released by the Vatican, including passages that are accepting of the potential usefulness of condoms as a way of stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS.

The pope cites the example of the use of condoms by prostitutes as "a first step toward moralization", even though condoms are "not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection".

While some Roman Catholic leaders have spoken about the limited use of condoms to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS as the lesser of two evils, this is the first time the pope has mentioned the possibility in public.

Benedict made clear the comments were not intended to weaken the Church's fundamental opposition to artificial birth control, a source of grievance to many practicing Catholics.

The Irish Migration Turnaround (again)

Ever since the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-19th century, Ireland had been a nation of emigrants, until the government decided to lower the corporate tax rate in the mid-1990s, drawing in a flood of foreign investment and foreigners themselves searching for new work opportunities. A key to this was that, as a member of the EU, money and people from other parts of Europe could flow into Ireland pretty freely. The economic boom gave Ireland the nick-name of the "Celtic Tiger" and life was good. Or so it seemed. The boom boosted property values and developers borrowed heavily to cash in on the new prosperity. But the worldwide recession has brought all of that to a halt, and the debt--much of which was hidden by the state-owned Anglo Irish Bank--is now a national catastrophe. The predictable result is that people are once again leaving Ireland, although to be fair, most of the evidence thus far is anecdotal, not official.

Metropolitan America Interactive Map

The Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution has just updated its interactive "State of Metropolitan America Indicator Map" with 2009 American Community Survey data. It is a great tool for exploring the demographics of America's biggest urban areas. Check it out.

Is There Really Food Insecurity in the United States?

The media have been all over the recently released report by the US Department of Agriculture that 17.4 million households "had difficulty providing enough food due to a lack of resources, about the same as in 2008." Since there are 114 million total households in the country, this amounts to 15 percent of households, or roughly one in seven--and this latter figure was the major headline. The report also noted that the number of households receiving food assistance increased from 3.9 million in 2007 to 5.6 million in 2009. The Reuters news agency somehow managed to calculate this as having "nearly doubled" (come on, let's do the math!). In fact, there is essentially no food insecurity in the United States, at least not by UN Food and Agriculture Organization critera. Given the high caloric intake of the average American, not getting as much food as people want is not necessarily a sign of unhealthy deprivation. In many respects, that was actually the point of the USDA report, which celebrated the federal assistance programs that have kept hunger from the door of American households.

Riots in the Time of Cholera

I reported three weeks ago on the nascent cholera threat in rural Haiti, apparently spread downstream from a toilet used by Nepalese peace-keepers which emptied into the Artibonite river without any treatment. Since that time the disease has spread to Port-au-Prince and, along the way, has thus far killed nearly 1,000 people. This is not going over well in Haiti, as you might imagine.

Protesters who hold U.N. soldiers from Nepal responsible for a deadly outbreak of cholera that has killed nearly 1,000 people barricaded Haiti's second-largest city on Monday, burning cars and stoning a peacekeeping base.

A case of cholera had never before been documented in Haiti before it broke out about three weeks ago. Transmitted by feces, the disease can be all but prevented if people have access to safe drinking water and regularly wash their hands.

President Rene Preval addressed the nation on Sunday to dispel myths and educate people on good sanitation and hygiene. But sanitary conditions don't exist in much of Haiti, and more than 14,600 people have been hospitalized as the disease has spread across the countryside and to nearly all the country's major population centers, including the capital, Port-au-Prince. Doctors Without Borders and other medical aid groups have expressed concern that the outbreak could eventually sicken hundreds of thousands of people.

The suspicions surround a Nepalese base located several hours south of Cap-Haitien on the Artibonite River system, where the outbreak started. The soldiers arrived there in October following outbreaks in their home country and about a week before Haiti's epidemic was discovered.

Will the Sea Rise Up and Grab Us?

Yes. The evidence is irrefutable that water temperatures are rising, glaciers are melting, and the sea level is rising. The only question to which we don't have a definitive answer is how much the rise will be. One or two feet one way or the other can make a huge difference in the number of humans at risk. The New York Times recently published a lengthy review of current knowledge on the subject. 

To a majority of climate scientists, the question is not whether the earth’s land ice will melt in response to the greenhouse gases those people are generating, but whether it will happen too fast for society to adjust.

Recent research suggests that the volume of the ocean may have been stable for thousands of years as human civilization has developed. But it began to rise in the 19th century, around the same time that advanced countries began to burn large amounts of coal and oil.

The sea has risen about eight inches since then, on average. That sounds small, but on a gently sloping shoreline, such an increase is enough to cause substantial erosion unless people intervene. Governments have spent billions in recent decades pumping sand onto disappearing beaches and trying to stave off the loss of coastal wetlands.

Satellite evidence suggests that the rise of the sea accelerated late in the 20th century, so that the level is now increasing a little over an inch per decade, on average — about a foot per century. Increased melting of land ice appears to be a major factor. Another is that most of the extra heat being trapped by human greenhouse emissions is going not to warm the atmosphere but to warm the ocean, and as it warms, the water expands.