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.

Sex Ed About to Start in Malaysian Schools

Somewhat unexpectedly for a Muslim-majority country, Malaysia has announced that next year it will start teaching sec education classes throughout the country. This has been brought about by an increase in out of wedlock teenage pregnancies, leading to babies being abandoned by their mothers.

Giving birth out of wedlock carries a strong social stigma in Malaysia, a multicultural society embracing Muslim Malays as well as ethnic Chinese and Indian communities.

In 2009 there were 79 cases of baby-dumping but as of mid-September this year there had already been about 70, sparking alarm among authorities and in the community.

In May, the nation's first "baby hatch" centre for rescuing unwanted newborns was introduced in the capital, Kuala Lumpur. The centre, modelled on similar services in Germany, Japan and Pakistan, allows mothers to leave their babies anonymously.

Today is World Pneumonia Day

Few people think about pneumonia any more--unless of course you or someone you know gets it and then it scares you to death. And that's the point, of course. Pneumonia is still out there killing a lot of people, which is why the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and many other groups try to publicize it with its own day.

Pneumonia remains the number one killer of children under 5 worldwide, claiming more than 1.5 million young lives each year – more than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and measles combined. Yet this illness is preventable; by increasing access to simple, inexpensive tools such as antibiotics and vaccines, we can help save the lives of more than 1 million children a year.

Stark Contrasts in Gender Equity

Out of Spain this week comes news that the government may change the pattern of naming children, which has historically listed the father's name first, followed by the mother's name, but with the caveat that the father's name was "more important."

Spaniards have two surnames, and under current law for registering babies, either the father's or the mother's can come first. Traditionally, however, it is the dad's and in cases of disagreement among the parents, the father's name automatically takes priority.

But under a bill presented to Parliament, if a couple does not specify an order or cannot agree on one, a child's last names would be assigned in alphabetical order.

"I think this is good and also much more egalitarian," Jose Antonio Alonso, a Socialist Party spokesman in the lower chamber of Parliament, said Thursday.

To the east, in Afghanistan, however, life for women continues to be vastly unequal to men, and some women see attempting suicide by burning themselves as the only way out.

Even the poorest families in Afghanistan have matches and cooking fuel. The combination usually sustains life. But it also can be the makings of a horrifying escape: from poverty, from forced marriages, from the abuse and despondency that can be the fate of Afghan women.

Mobile Phones Outnumber Toilets in Developing Countries

President Obama has just completed a trip to India, one purpose of which was to shore up opportunities for US businesses to expand in a way that would benefit US workers. Organizations doing business in India are most apt to interact with the well-educated, English-speaking middle and upper classes, but it is important to remember that there is a huge underclass in India--an enormous (and still rapidly growing) segment of the population that lives on only a few dollars a day. As in much of the developing world, their scope in life is enhanced a bit by the now ubiquitous mobile phone, and ahead of the President's visit to India, it was reported that there are more cell phones in India than there are toilets. Data from UN-Habitat suggest that this is probably true in every developing country. Communication is an important part of modern life, but people also need public health and education (both of which require huge investments in infrastructure) if their lives are to materially improve. Mobile phones get around some of the infrastructure requirements of land lines, just as bottled or other packaged water gets clean drinking water into the hands of people without a huge water piping project. But that should not lull us into believing that all infrastructure problems are readily solved in this way.  

Life in the Slow Lane

Baby boomers in the United States (and in Canada and Western Europe as well) represent not only a disproportionate fraction of the population, but an increasingly large fraction of all drivers. A symposium at the National Transportation Safety Board this week was treated to the news that 15 years from now, one in five of all licensed drivers in the United States will be age 65 or older. This is related not simply to aging, but also to the fact that the boomers are growing older mainly in the suburbs and exurbs, where there is very little in the way of public transportation. This essentially forces people to keep driving as they get older, because they have few other options.

Black Families are Increasingly Fragile

Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control show that 72 percent of births to African-American mothers are out-of-wedlock--an increase over previous years. There are numerous explanations for this phenomenon:

The legacy of segregation, the logic goes, means blacks are more likely to attend inferior schools. This creates a high proportion of blacks unprepared to compete for jobs in today's economy, where middle-class industrial work for unskilled laborers has largely disappeared.

The drug epidemic sent disproportionate numbers of black men to prison, and crushed the job opportunities for those who served their time. Women don't want to marry men who can't provide for their families, and welfare laws created a financial incentive for poor mothers to stay single.

If you remove these inequalities, some say, the 72 percent will decrease.

"It's all connected. The question should be, how has the black family survived at all?" says Maria Kefalas, co-author of "Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage."

Quantifying the Momentum of the Age Transition

The age transition is the single most important aspect of the overall demographic transition because the demographic changes to which a society must respond manifest themselves through changes in the age structure. It is also a difficult concept to quantify because it reflects so many changes taking place simultaneously. Professor Thomas Espenshade and some of his colleagues at Princeton's Office of Population Research have taken on this challenge by decomposing population momentum into that part which is due just to the difference between the actual and the stable age structures (what they call non-stable momentum), and that part which is due to the relative changes between fertility and mortality (which they call stable momentum). Their paper, which will appear in the journal Demography next year, is not necessarily an easy read, but here are some highlights:

Our estimates indicate that world population would grow by an additional 40% if global fertility rates had moved instantaneously to replacement in 2005. Nonstable and stable momentum contribute roughly equal shares to world population momentum. Taking natural logarithms shows that nonstable momentum accounts for about 53% of total world momentum, and stable momentum contributes roughly 47%.

10-Year-Old Mother, and in Europe, No Less

It is rare anywhere in the world for a 10-year-old girl to have a baby, but especially in a European country such as Spain it seems shocking. Yet, a few days ago that happened in the city of Jerez, in southern Spain (the area perhaps best known for its Sherry--an Anglicization of Jerez). However, the story is more complicated because the young mother is reportedly the daughter of a Roma widow who migrated to Spain for work, but left her daughter behind with a grandmother in Bucharest, where the girl wound up having a sexual relationship with her cousin. The young girl joined her mother in Spain to deliver the baby. 

A relative in Romania has explained to the newspaper that, in principle, "the couple wanted and planned to raise the baby together, although I do not know if they even knew how to change a diaper." However, something went wrong with the couple and when Elena went to Spain to give birth, Gheorghe stayed in Romania.

Mom and baby are now living with relatives near Lebrija, where Olimpia try to gloss over the scandal: "These things are normal in my country. The girls marry at 10 years old so I do not understand why people are so surprised. Elena is fine, as is her daughter, who is a very pretty girl. "

A story such as this will naturally be held up as support for the French deportation of illegal Roma immigrants a few months ago. But, more importantly, it is a sad sign of the low status of women within this population.

Black Plague Traced Genetically to China

Researchers have strongly suspected for a long time that Central Asia was the source of the bubonic plague, or Black Death, which wiped out much of Europe's population in the 14th century (after having devastated China), and which periodically reappeared in the west until the late 19th century. Now an international group of researchers has used new techniques of gene sequencing to confirm that China was the source of the plague, carried west by fleas that accompanied the rats that accompanied traders.

The authors in this new study say the plague evolved around the area of China over 2000 years ago and spread globally several times as deadly pandemics. They compared 17 complete plague genome sequences as well as 933 variable DNA sites on a unique worldwide collection of bacterial strains (plague isolates), allowing them to follow pandemics that took place in history around the world, and to work out the age of different waves of them.

In order to prevent bioterrorism, access to Yersinia pestis - the bacterium known to be the cause of the plagues - is seriously restricted; therefore, assembling a comprehensive collection of them is impossible. An international team of scientists from the UK, USA, Ireland, Germany, Madagascar, China and France had to collaborate for a decentralized analysis of DNA samples.

Another Setback for Saudi Women

There are few places on earth where women are more subjugated that in Saudi Arabia. Despite relatively high levels of education (always sex-segregated), and high levels of household income, the conservative clergy continues to push its ancient prejudice against women.

Saudi Arabia's top government-sanctioned board of senior Islamic clerics has endorsed a fatwa that calls for a ban on female vendors because it violates the kingdom's strict segregation of the sexes.

The powerful committee said in its ruling Sunday that the mixing of sexes is forbidden and women should not seek jobs where they could encounter men.

Midterm Election Results of Demographic Interest

A few days ago, prior to the election, I noted some issues that were on tap for yesterday's midterm election in the US and now we have answers to at least some of the questions raised. In California we know that Proposition 20 passed which now gives a citizens commission created two years the power to draw congressional district boundaries in California, as well as the state legislative boundaries. This is designed to "take the politics out" of the redistricting process. At the same time, Proposition 27 in California failed, which is important because it aimed to eliminate the citizens commission altogether and hand the redistricting responsibilities back to the legislature. Since the Republicans generally won more gubernatorial and congressional seats than did Democrats, it is likely that this cascaded down to state legislatures (although I cannot confirm that of this writing) and so this should put Republicans in more advantageously drawn congressional districts in the 35 states that continue to have this task undertaken by legislative bodies rather than citizens commission. Of course, redistricting is not an issue in the seven states that still have only one member of the House of Representatives due to their small population--Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming.

UN Confirms That Life is Not Easy for Immigrants

On the same day that the US Court of Appeals took up the legality of Arizona's anti-immigrant law, the United Nations General Assembly heard about the plight of immigrants in many countries of the world. Githu Muigai is a Kenyan lawyer who is also the U.N. Human Rights Council's special investigator on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance. He spoke to reporters after presenting reports to the General Assembly on efforts to eliminate these practices:

"If I have found any specific group of people to be the subject of the most insidious contemporary forms of racial discrimination, those are migrants," he said. "And I think in many parts of the world today, immigrants bear the brunt of xenophobic intolerance — and this is true of the United States, and it is of Europe, and it is of many parts of the world."

China Counts Itself

The world's most populous country is undertaking the world's biggest census, and it promises to be better than previous ones.

China has kicked off its national census, sending out six million census takers to go door-to-door to document the demographic changes in the world's most populous country. 

Chinese census officials on Monday [1 November 2010]  began fanning out across the country to try to visit 400 million households over the next 10 days.

For the first time since the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, China will count people based on where they actually live, rather than where they are registered under the household registration, or hukou, system.

Also, for the first time, the census will include foreigners living in China.The results will help measure the degree of China's urbanization, as well as previously uncounted children born in violation of the one-child policy.