The Way Forward Demographically

This week's Science magazine (a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and one of the world's most prestigious magazines/journals) is a special issue (Volume 332, Number 6042, 29 July 2011) devoted to an examination of "the opportunities and challenges created by demographic changes around the world." This issue is done in conjunction with the world's "achievement" this year of having 7 billion of us alive at that same time.

Although you cannot read the articles online without a subscription to the magazine, I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy at your library. The Sciencemag.org website does include a nice seven-minute video providing an overview of the world's population issues, and the introduction to the special issue lays out the problem:

Today these demographic patterns spark concerns, not of a single explosion, but of “cluster bombs” in rapidly growing countries such as Nigeria and Pakistan, which are hobbled by poor governance and limited schooling capacity and already have huge numbers of poorly educated young adults without job prospects.

Small Town America is Nearly a Thing of the Past

Reporters have continued to mine the recent Population Reference Bureau report summarizing findings from the 2010 Census, and have discovered that rural America is on the verge of disappearing.

The latest 2010 census numbers hint at an emerging America where, by midcentury, city boundaries become indistinct and rural areas grow ever less relevant. Many communities could shrink to virtual ghost towns as they shutter businesses and close down schools, demographers say.

More metro areas are booming into sprawling megalopolises. Barring fresh investment that could bring jobs, however, large swaths of the Great Plains and Appalachia, along with parts of Arkansas, Mississippi and North Texas, could face significant population declines.

A key element in all of this has been the decline of mining and timber industries that created jobs in rural areas in the past but no longer do so. Farming is a now a big business, so there are relatively few farm families any more. Furthermore, almost everyone has access to the same TV and internet as everyone else, so rural areas are not socially isolated in the way that they once were.

Asian Immigrants in Jordan

The discussion over the past few months related to the Middle East has obviously been of the events generally known as the Arab spring, and surrounding that discussion has been the issue of whether or not the violence and conflict have roots in a youth bulge. A report today from the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC indirectly suggests that the youth bulge may not have been such a big issue after all. Here's why: An increasing fraction of the labor force in Jordan is composed of Sri Lankans and Filipinos (actually Filipinas--see below), rather than Arabs, who have traditionally made up the immigrant labor force. 

Unskilled and semi-skilled migrant workers from the Arab region have been filling labor shortages in Jordan for decades, shaping its labor market and sustaining its economy. Although Arab nationals still account for a majority of migrant workers in Jordan today, the migration flow to Jordan has changed in recent years with the growing importance of non-Arab migrants from Asia.

Jordan’s census data suggest that the non-Arab Asian population’s share of the total foreign population more than doubled from 7 percent in 1994 to 15 percent in 2004. Among economically active migrants, non-Arab Asians comprised an even larger share, reaching nearly 30 percent by 2004.1A significant proportion of this new migration flow from Asia comes from Sri Lanka and the Philippines, which together account for nearly a third of the total.

A Small Crack in the Chinese One-Child Wall?

This week's Economist reports that the director of Population and Family Planning in China's Guangdong Province has applied to the central government for a "relaxation" of the one-child policy as applied to his province. The proposal is to allow a couple to have a second child if only one of them is a singleton, compared to the current policy which allows a second child only if both potential parents are singletons.

Zheng Zizhen, a demographer at the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences (GASS), says even a modest change would help. “Every couple, in Guangdong and all over China, should be able to have two children. But before we take a second step or a third step in that direction, we need to at least take a first step like this one.”

Most demographers think the one-child policy has imposed huge costs on the country. The 2010 census showed that population growth was even slower than expected, rising just 0.57% a year over the past decade. The policy has caused conflicts with ordinary people and been a target of intense foreign criticism, worries Peng Peng of GASS (who nevertheless worries about relaxing it too fast). The costs were highlighted recently by revelations of a long-running scandal in Hunan province, where officials are accused of brutalising parents who violate the policy by confiscating “illegal” babies and putting them up for sale in the adoption market.

North Koreans Are Having Trouble Feeding Themselves

North Korea makes the news largely for its nuclear program and human rights abuses, but it now appears to be facing a serious food shortage, as well. This is almost certainly not as bad as that in Somalia, but it still seems to be bad.

North Korea's food shortage has reached a crisis point this year, aid workers say, largely because of shocks to the agricultural sector, including torrential rains and the coldest winter in 60 years. Six million North Koreans are living "on a knife edge" and will go hungry without immediate food aid, the World Food Program said, calling in April for $224 million in emergency aid.

The country has not had the resources to invest heavily in agriculture, so the ability to grow food is limited.

North Korea, population 24 million with an annual per capita income of $1,800, has the manpower but lacks the economic and natural resources to succeed at farming, said Kim Young-hoon from the Korea Rural Economic Institute in Seoul, South Korea. He said the North Koreans continue to pursue new ways to stimulate the agricultural sector but cannot fund their ambitious projects.

Killings in Norway Appear to be Racist Response to Immigration

Norway was rocked yesterday by the killing of more than 90 people and the wounding of many others by a single person, identified as a Norwegian.

The man blamed for killing at least 93 people during terrorist attacks on Norway's government headquarters and an island retreat for young people wanted to trigger an anti-Muslim revolution in Norwegian society, his lawyer said Sunday.

The attacker picked targets linked to Norway's left-wing Labor Party. Breivik's manifesto pilloried the political correctness of liberals and warned that their work would end in the colonization of Europe by Muslims.

Such fears may derive, at least in part, from the fact that Norway has grown increasingly multicultural in recent years as the prosperous Nordic nation has opened its arms to thousands of conflict refugees from Pakistan, Iraq and Somalia. The annual Labor Party retreat — which the prime minister, Stoltenberg, fondly remembers attending in his own youth — reflected the country's changing demographics as the children of immigrants have grown increasingly involved in Labor politics.

Deportation of Undocumented Immigrants on the Rise in the US

The Obama administration has put a new de facto immigration policy into effect in the last couple of years. This involves a considerable jump in the number of immigrants, especially those without documentation, who are deported after committing a crime in the United States. This is not quite what it seems, however, seems a large fraction of arrests are for misdemeanors, especially traffic violations.

The U.S. deported nearly 393,000 people in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, half of whom were considered criminals. Of those, 27,635 had been arrested for drunken driving, more than double the 10,851 deported after drunken driving arrests in 2008, the last full year of the Bush administration, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data provided to The Associated Press.

An additional 13,028 were deported last year after being arrested on less serious traffic law violations, nearly three times the 4,527 traffic offenders deported two years earlier, according to the data.

The spike in the numbers of people deported for traffic offenses as well as a 78 percent increase in people deported for immigration-related offenses renewed skepticism about the administration's claims that it is focusing on the most dangerous criminals.

UN Declares Famine in Somalia

The drought situation in the Horn of Africa, which I mentioned three weeks ago, has been upgraded (if that is the right word in this horrendous situation) to a famine, especially in Somalia.

The UN officially declared famine in two southern Somalia regions Wednesday as the world slowly mobilised to save 12 million people battling hunger in the region's worst drought in 60 years.

UN humanitarian coordinator for Somalia Mark Bowden declared that southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions had been hit by famine.

In total, the UN said an estimated 3.7 million people -- or nearly half of the war-torn country's population -- were facing a food crisis.

"If we don't act now, famine will spread to all eight regions of southern Somalia within two months, due to poor harvests and infectious disease outbreaks," Bowden told reporters in neighbouring Kenya.

The Economist this week notes that the situation may well be as bad in Eritrea, but it is even more difficult to get information from there than from Somalia.

Media Demographics Follow the Boomers

The Economist this week has a good analysis of the changing demographics of the media, and what that means for people trying make a profit by aiming at different demographic groups. For a long time, the prime target audience was the 18-49 "demographic," but that is so yesterday.

The noisy disruption of media business models by the internet in the past decade has obscured a profound demographic transformation. Whether they are buying music, listening to the radio, reading newspapers or watching television, media consumers are ageing even more quickly than the overall population. Rather than trying to reverse this trend by attracting younger people, many companies are attempting to profit from the greying of media.

Safer Deliveries in Sierra Leone

Data from the World Health Organization show that Sierra Leone has the highest rate of maternal mortality of any country in the world, with 2,100 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births (compared, for example, with 11 in the US and 7 in Canada). The New York Times reports on a new internationally-funded program in Sierra Leone to waive fees for pregnancy and delivery in order to improve birth outcomes.

Sierra Leone is at the vanguard of a revolution — heavily subsidized for now by international donors — that appears to be substantially lessening health dangers here in one of the riskiest countries in the world for pregnant women and small children.

Country after country in sub-Saharan Africa has waived medical fees in recent years, particularly for women and children, and while experts acknowledge that many more people are getting care, they caution that it is still too early to declare that the efforts have measurably improved health on the continent.

In Sierra Leone, though, it seems clear that lives are being saved, providing an early and concrete lesson about the impact of making health care free for the very poor and vulnerable.

By waiving the requirement for payments — which sometimes amount to hundreds of dollars and clearly represent the main barrier to using health facilities — the government here appears to have sharply cut into mortality rates for pregnant women and deaths from malaria for small children.

Educating Our Way Out of the Great Recession

There is no question in my mind that the single most important thing a person can acquire in life is a good education. But as college professor, I can easily be accused of bias on this issue, so it was good to read Nicolas Kristof's Op-Ed piece in today's New York Times, in which he laments that the Great Recession is taking its toll on our nation's greatest asset--our educational system.

The United States supports schools in Afghanistan because we know that education is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to build a country.

Alas, we’ve forgotten that lesson at home. All across America, school budgets are being cut, teachers laid off and education programs dismantled...The Center on Education Policy reports that 70 percent of school districts nationwide endured budget cuts in the school year that just ended, and 84 percent anticipate cuts this year.

And he hits a target close to my home:

The Dangers of Demographic Deception

I have already commented on the tendency of cities to think that they have been under-counted by the census--although there is never a complaint about over-counting. Mark VanLandingham, a demographer at Tulane University, has a very good Op-Ed piece in today's New York Times pointing out the dangers of over-estimating the population. 

Such overestimates have been especially problematic for New Orleans. According to the original census estimates for 2007, the city’s population stood at 239,124, which independent sources, like voter turnout and death records, indicate was a reasonable guess. But after heavy lobbying from then-Mayor Ray Nagin’s office — claiming the bureau’s methods missed large numbers of poor residents — the number was revised upward by about 20 percent, to 288,113.

A similarly successful challenge to the 2008 initial estimate led to yet another substantial uptick; combined, these revised estimates put the city on pace to recover almost all the residents it had lost after Hurricane Katrina within a few years.

Children of Immigrants as a Demographic Force in America

The Pew Hispanic Center has just released a new report showing that births among immigrants from Mexico (the largest source of migrants to the US) are now more important a factor in demographic growth than is immigration itself. This is, of course, an old story. Until the implementation of the racist national origins quota laws in the late 1920s, the children of immigrants had historically been more important to growth in the US than had the immigrants themselves. So, we are really just returning to a familiar theme from the past. 

Miriam Jordan of the Wall Street Journal has reported on the story:

The population of Latinos of Mexican origin, who represent nearly two-thirds of U.S. Hispanics, grew by 7.2 million between 2000 and 2010 as a result of births, but the Washington-based research center attributed only about 4.2 million to immigrant arrivals. In the previous two decades, the number of new Mexican immigrants in the U.S. either matched or exceeded the number of births.

The current surge in births follows the massive wave of Hispanic immigration to the U.S. that began in the 1970s. The tilt suggests that descendents of immigrants could be the main engine of U.S. population growth for decades to come.

Mr. Potter, the Texas state demographer, says the higher fertility among Hispanics is unlikely to last forever. "As the Hispanic population becomes more mainstream, fertility rates will decline," he said.

Smoking Slowly Being Snuffed Out in US

Janet Lavelle of the San Diego Union-Tribune followed up today on a report just issued by the California Department of Public Health showing that the smoking rate has fallen to a record low in California. This is a very encouraging sign since smoking is one of the major "real" causes of death throughout the world.

The rate of adult smokers statewide dropped to a record low of 11.9 percent in 2010, making California and Utah the only states to reach a federal target to cut smoking rates to 12 percent by 2020.

Officials attributed at least some of the drop to California’s aggressive public anti-smoking campaign launched in the late 1980s. While the latest statistics are encouraging, health officials said smoking remains the leading preventable cause of disease and death, killing more than 400,000 Americans annually.

It is important to note that this overall drop is not just a result of the overall aging of the population. It is very importantly dropping in the teen years--the ages at which people are  most likely to get addicted to cigarettes.

Children Are at an All-Time Low as a Percent of US Population

The Population Reference Bureau this week released a report on some of the major findings from the 2010 Census, and among the things picked up by the press was that children now represent an historic low as a percent of the US population.

Currently, the share of children in the U.S. is 24 percent, falling below the previous low of 26 percent of 1990. The share is projected to slip further, to 23 percent by 2050, even as the percentage of people 65 and older is expected to jump from 13 percent to 19 percent due to the aging of baby boomers and beyond.

In 1900, the share of children reached as high as 40 percent, compared to a much smaller 4 percent share for seniors 65 and older. The percentage of children in subsequent decades held above 30 percent until 1980, when it fell to 28 percent amid declining birth rates, mostly among whites.

Social theory would suggest that as the number of children declines, then there should be greater investment in each child--trading quality for quantity. That may work in the classic family setting of two parents and their children, with no older people to care for, but the analogy may not cross over into the community setting.

Another Reminder About the Future Food Supply

I was probably attracted to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald because I agree with everything it says, and I couldn't have said it better. 

Decades of rapid population growth, especially in developing countries, means there are more mouths to feed. The world's population will reach 7 billion this year and is forecast to top 9.5 billion by 2050. That will be three times more than in 1950. But it's not just the extra people adding to food demand - rising prosperity, especially in Asia, is playing a role. As people get wealthier they eat more and they eat differently. The consumption of products such as meat and milk has been growing rapidly. Dietary shifts linked to rising wealth that took centuries to occur in Western countries are taking place over a few decades in developing counties.

The push for biofuels - fuel made from plants - is another factor stoking demand. High global energy prices prompted many Western governments to encourage the production of biofuels with a combination of subsidies and mandates. As a result, millions of tonnes of cereals have been diverted away from food markets to energy needs.

World Population Day 2011

Today is World Population Day and is also the first anniversary of this blog. We are still officially in the countdown to 7 billion people being alive on the planet at the same time, but of course the official counter is only approximate since we are continually trying to get a better handle on data through censuses and vital statistics. 

In reality, every day is world population day because the population is constantly growing and constantly testing the limits of the earth's resources. A terrible reminder of this is the current drought in Somalia:

The head of the U.N. refugee agency said Sunday that drought-ridden Somalia is the "worst humanitarian disaster" in the world after meeting with refugees who endured unspeakable hardship to reach the world's largest refugee camp.

The Kenyan camp, Dadaab, is overflowing with tens of thousands of newly arrived refugees forced into the camp by the parched landscape in the region where Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya meet. The World Food Program estimates that 10 million people already need humanitarian aid. The U.N. Children's Fund estimates that more than 2 million children are malnourished and in need of lifesaving action.

The New Nation of South Sudan

Today was the first day of reality for the nation of South Sudan, which came into being as a result of a "divorce" (as the BBC calls it) from the rest of the nation of Sudan. This followed a vote for secession that took place this past January, which I noted at the time was itself the result of a peace agreement made back in 2005.

The population of the new country is estimated to be somewhere between 7.5 and 9.7 million, and it is described by everyone as one of the poorest nation's in the world, although it does have oil reserves, and apparently has been getting some direct foreign investment from China. However, there are still rebel groups working in the new nation, so it will probably have a rocky start to life, hampered by very low levels of literacy, and very high rates of infant and maternal mortality.

Alabama's Anti-Immigration Law Challenged in Court

The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a lawsuit challenging Alabama's recently passed anti-immigration law that is set to take effect on September first. The law has been described by the director of the Center as making Arizona's law look like child's play. The New York Times has called it blatantly racist, and the Southern Poverty Law Center suggests that it hearkens back to the Jim Crow era because it will "create an underclass of people who are denied equal protection under the law, just like the racist laws that stained Alabama and the Deep South for many decades."

The lawsuit, filed in Huntsville, claims the new law will make criminals out of church workers who provide shelter to immigrants and even citizens who give their neighbors a ride to the store or to the doctor's office.

"This law interferes with the free exercise of religion. It criminalizes acts of love and hospitality," said Scott Douglas, executive director of Greater Birmingham Ministries.

The lawsuit said the measure goes well beyond similar laws passed in Arizona, Utah, Indiana and Georgia. Federal judges already have blocked all or parts of the laws in those states. It asks a judge to declare Alabama's law unconstitutional and prevent it from being enforced.

Is the Demographic Fit With Mexico Ending?

Damien Cave of the New York Times has pieced together evidence that the net flow of undocumented migrants from Mexico to the US may have dropped to zero or even have reversed itself. That does not mean that no one is crossing the border heading north, but the flow is considerably lower than it used to be, and may be matched by people heading back to Mexico from the US. Elizabeth Aguilera of the San Diego Union-Tribune has also pulled together a similar story. 

The evidence comes collectively from the latest round of data collected by the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University (which interviews migrants in Mexico about their experience in the US), the calculations of undocumented migration by the Pew Hispanic Research Center, which are based especially on the Current Population Survey, by Border Patrol apprehension data, and by organizations such as the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC, San Diego which regularly track data from selected communities in Mexico.

Is the Demographic Fit With Mexico Ending?

Damien Cave of the New York Times has pieced together evidence that the net flow of undocumented migrants from Mexico to the US may have dropped to zero or even have reversed itself. That does not mean that no one is crossing the border heading north, but the flow is considerably lower than it used to be, and may be matched by people heading back to Mexico from the US. Elizabeth Aguilera of the San Diego Union-Tribune has also pulled together a similar story. 

World Bank Opens its Data Vault

If you are new to research that involves comparisons between countries, you may not appreciate how important it is that over the past year or so, the World Bank has made its huge international database increasingly available to the public over the internet. 

Created in 1944 and, by custom, headed by an American, the World Bank initially helped finance the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Since then, it has extended many trillions in loans for a wide variety of projects, be they institutions like schools and hospitals, infrastructure like roads or, controversially, environmentally unfriendly projects like coal-fired power plants and hydroelectric dams. Along the way the World Bank, like the I.M.F., has tinkered with entire economies, sometimes with disastrous results.

In the process of handing out gobs of money, the World Bank has collected gobs of data and until very recently parsed it out sparingly and usually only for a fee. That approach began to change when Robert Zoellick became head of the Bank four years ago.

“As opposed to some imperious bureaucracy in Washington, we’re making things open and accessible to people,” he says. “That makes for better performance, it makes for a more open system, it makes for people having a different attitude about the World Bank.”

This has been a very welcome change and I encourage you to explore the data available online at www.worldbank.org.

Anti-Immigration Legislation Bubbling Through the South--Redux

The Fourth of July is a good time to contemplate various aspects of freedom, and the opposite of that--namely the anti-immigrant laws recently enacted in several states in the south. An editorial in the New York Times picks up the theme:

If you thought the do-it-yourself anti-immigrant schemes couldn’t get any more repellent, you were wrong. New laws in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina are following — and in some ways outdoing — Arizona’s attempt to engineer the mass expulsion of the undocumented, no matter the damage to the Constitution, public safety, local economies and immigrant families.

The laws vary in their details but share a common strategy: to make it impossible for people without papers to live without fear.

South Suburbs of Chicago Grow as Blacks Leave the Loop

The New York Times today followed up on a story that I commented on several months ago as the first data from the 2010 Census were being released--the City of Chicago has been shrinking because the black population has been heading to the suburbs. More specifically, the southern suburbs of Chicago.

One path that so many black middle-class home buyers have followed from Chicago’s South Side in recent years ends just off Lincoln Highway, past the entrance to the Newbury Estates subdivision in Matteson.

The subdivision, about 30 miles from the Loop, represents only part of a much greater migration to the south suburbs from 2000 to 2010. In all, Chicago’s black population declined by about 181,000 people, or 17 percent, in that period, according to recently released figures from the 2010 census. The rapid contraction of the black population was the main driver of the city’s overall population loss of about 200,000 in the last decade, a fact noted by Rahm Emanuel in his mayoral inauguration speech in May.

Kansas Anti-Abortion Rules Blocked for the Time Being

The state of Kansas has tried to stop legal abortions from taking place there by creating a new set of rules by which all abortion providers (of whom there are only three) must abide. However, a federal judge has temporarily blocked the implementation of those rules until a trial is held to determine their legality.

U.S. District Judge Carlos Murguia's injunction will remain in effect until a trial is held in a lawsuit challenging the Kansas rules. A new licensing law and state health department regulations had taken effect Friday, and abortion providers were given the latest version of those regulations less than two weeks ago.

The new law requires hospitals, clinics and doctor's offices to obtain an annual license from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to perform more than five non-emergency abortions in a month. The regulations tell abortion providers what drugs and equipment they must stock and, among other things, establish minimum sizes and acceptable temperatures for procedure and recovery rooms.

In blocking the law, Murguia said evidence presented in court documents showed the providers would "suffer irreparable harm" through the loss of business and patients, and that at least two women currently seeking abortions would be harmed by not being able to go to the provider of their choice.