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.