Is College Worth it? You Bet It Is!

Every now and then someone comes along to suggest that maybe a college education really isn't important any more. Beyond the genuine improvement in one's understanding of how the world works, a college education is, in fact, a good financial investment. These are the clear findings of a study just released by the US Census Bureau. The authors, Tiffany Julian and Robert Kominski, use data from the American Community Survey to show that "education levels had more effect on earnings over a 40-year span in the workforce than any other demographic factor, such as gender, race and Hispanic origin." Mikoto Rich at the New York Times picked up on the story and added these comments regarding the persistent gender bias in earnings:

Among full-time, year-round workers, white men with professional degrees make nearly 49 percent more in lifetime earnings than white women with a comparable education level. The gender gap is narrower for blacks with professional degrees: black men with professional degrees earn 24 percent more in lifetime earnings than their female counterparts.

Would You Want to Hide in Niger?

Niger has been in the news lately because of reports that some of Col. Gadaffi's loyalists have driven south there across the desert to seek refuge from the rebels who are now in control of Libya. Most of us do not know a lot about Niger, and so I was reminded of a recent article about the country published in the journal "International Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health," by demographers Malcolm Potts, Virginia Gidi, Martha Campbell, and Sarah Zureick. Their major point is that although Niger is currently a country of only about 16 million people, it is growing at a pace that will reach 55 million by the middle of this century! Yet, no one knows what exactly how Niger is going to cope with this growth, since it is almost unimaginably poor.

In 2008, Niger ranked 174 out of 178 countries on the Human Development Index, with more than 60% of its population living on less than US$1 per day,  and the country’s Gross National Income that year ($330; purchasing power parity, $680) was among the world’s lowest. Furthermore, recent economic growth (approximately 2% per year) has been lower than population growth (more than 3.9%). Niger’s high dependency ratio (i.e., the ratio of dependent people to the working-age population) of 108 per 100 undermines the potential to build up the savings needed to expand the country’s infrastructure.

Pensions are a Problem in a Global Recession

There has been a lot of discussion in the United States and Europe about the cost of state-funded pensions--which are almost always PAYGO (pay as you go--current workers are paying for current retirees). The age structures of richer countries are heavy on the elderly of retirement age and light on the younger people of working age. This is why schemes are promoted to have workers pay into their own private pension plans over their lifetimes. In the current global recession, however, investments in the stock market, which are the major ways to "grow" your own pension, are going down, not up. As a report by Reuters notes, this may wind up forcing a delay in the retirement age even if governments don't push such a legislative agenda.

Pension funds in developed economies are facing a new crisis as falling equities and tumbling bond yields widen their deficits, threatening the incomes and retirement dates of future retirees.

At the heart of their problems is a steady move by pension plans in the United States, euro zone, Japan and the UK to cut exposure to risk after the financial crisis.

But this "de-risking" may end up depressing their long-term returns from stock market investment and challenge the conventional wisdom that shares generate higher returns than bonds.

Contagion--Ripped From the Headlines

The new movie "Contagion" hits the movie theaters this coming Friday, but Keith Darce of the San Diego Union has seen it already and obviously likes it--partly because it aims to be "true," and partly because it has a local connection to biotech firms in the region.

The film likely benefited from a trip to the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta taken late last year by one of its stars, Kate Winslet, and producers Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher, who previously worked together on “Erin Brockovich” and “Pulp Fiction.”

Winslet, who plays a member of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, met with Dr. Anne Schuchat, the assistant surgeon general and director the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. 

Although the genre has an ignoble track record for reflecting reality, the makers of “Contagion” appear to have gone to great lengths to ensure that their film rings true with public health experts as much as it might with moviegoers when it opens Friday.
One scene highlights genetic sequencing, a powerful biological tool that promises to revolutionize the way disease outbreaks are fought.
A pair of San Diego County companies have led the way in creating a new generation of machines capable of mapping the DNA of viruses and bacteria in a matter of hours instead of days and weeks.

Haiti Tries to Turn the Tide on the Urban Transition

In the wake of last year's devastating earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti is experimenting with de-urbanization--trying to get people out of the city and back into the countryside. At the time of the earthquake the city was home to nearly a third of the country's 10 million people, but as the Associated Press story about this notes, you have to understand why Port-au-Prince was so crowded in order to appreciate why this might just work.

Part of the reason was that Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, the late dictator, shut down ports and tore up roads to undermine his opponents in the countryside. And in the 1980s, new factories lured farmers to the city from fields where they were struggling to survive.

When the magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck on Jan. 12, 2010, some 300,000 people died, according to government figures. Densely packed neighborhoods became death traps. Whole neighborhoods were flattened. Many in Haiti have speculated that the death toll would have been lower had there been jobs and basic services in the countryside to keep people there.

The Plague is Still the Plague

The Black Death arrived in Europe in the 14th century and devastated the population. It finally left Europe in the 17th century, after which the population and economy rebounded. As the New York Times reminds us:

The agent of the Black Death is assumed to be Yersinia pestis, the microbe that causes bubonic plague today. But the epidemiology was strikingly different from that of modern outbreaks. Modern plague is carried by fleas and spreads no faster than the rats that carry them can travel. The Black Death seems to have spread directly from one person to another.Victims sometimes emitted a deathly stench, which is not true of plague victims today. And the Black Death felled at least 30 percent of those it inflicted, whereas a modern plague in India that struck Bombay in 1904, before the advent of antibiotics, killed only 3 percent of its victims.

Portugal's "Lost Generation"

Who would have guessed a few years ago that if you lived in Portugal your job opportunities might be better in the former colonies of Brazil, Angola, or Mozambique? Yet, a story in BBC News suggests that there is a new generation of young professionals in Portugal who are looking to these places for work, given the really tough economic times in which Portugal finds itself. This is sort of a brain drain in reverse (since it is usually the former colonies whose brains are drained).

One in 10 graduates now leaves the country, leading many to talking about Portugal's "lost generation".

"This is the biggest emigration wave since the 1960s," says Filipa Pinho of the government's newly established Emigration Observatory.

Portugal has traditionally exported some of its manpower - it has a diaspora around the world of three million. But in the past, it was blue-collar workers and villagers who left for a better life. Now it's the skilled and well-educated.It is a historic role reversal, because for decades Portugal lured immigrants from its former colonies in Latin America and Africa.

The Diversity Paradox

The Diversity Paradox is the title of a recently published book by Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean of UC-Irvine. At this summer's annual meeting of the American Sociological Association it received the Otis Dudley Duncan award from the Population Section. The awarding committee praised the book in these terms:

"The Diversity Paradox" uses census, survey, and in-depth interview data to examine patterns of intermarriage and multiracial identification among Asians, Latinos, and African Americans.  Lee and Bean analyze where the color line, and the economic and social advantage it demarcates, is drawn today and on what side of it members of these groups fall.  They show that Asians and Latinos with mixed racial ancestry are not constrained by strict racial categories in several geographic areas of the United States.  Racial status often shifts according to situation, with individuals choosing to identify along ethnic lines or as white, and their decisions are rarely questioned by others.  Asians and Latinos also intermarry with whites at moderate to high rates, which is viewed as part of the process of becoming American. African Americans, in contrast, intermarry at significantly lower rates than Asians or Latinos.  Multiracial blacks often choose not to identify as such and are typically perceived by others as being black only, underscoring the stigma still attached to being African American and the entrenchment of the one-drop rule.  Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean conclude that many Asians and Latinos, on the other hand, are relatively successful at disengaging their national origins from the concept of race. Their book will change the way we view immigration, the second generation, race and racial politics.

A New Way of Understanding What Might Kill Us

It has been more than half a century since the discovery of penicillin revolutionized our ability to control communicable disease. Since that time a lot of progress has been made on all kinds of diseases, although the emphasis has been more on degenerative diseases--treatments for cardiovascular conditions, cancer, and other issues that are associated especially with an aging population. But, a story in today's New York Times puts the control of bacteria and viruses back in the spotlight. The story focuses on the work of Dr. James M. Musser, chairman of pathology and genomic medicine at the Methodist Hospital System in Houston.

It is the start of a new age in microbiology, Dr. Musser and others say. And the sort of molecular epidemiology he and his colleagues wanted to do is only a small part of it. New methods of quickly sequencing entire microbial genomes are revolutionizing the field.

The first bacterial genome was sequenced in 1995 — a triumph at the time, requiring 13 months of work. Today researchers can sequence the DNA that constitutes a micro-organism’s genome in a few days or even, with the latest equipment, a day. (Analyzing it takes a bit longer, though.) They can simultaneously get sequences of all the microbes on a tooth or in saliva or in a sample of sewage. And the cost has dropped to about $1,000 per genome, from more than $1 million.

Federal Judge Blocks Alabama Immigration Law--For the Moment

A Federal District Judge in Alabama has temporarily blocked the implementation of the new anti-immigrant legislation that was scheduled to take effect this week in Alabama. She blocked it only to give herself more time to study the law, so both sides apparently took comfort in that fact:

The ruling was cheered both by Republican leaders who were pleased the judge didn't gut the law and by opponents who compare it to old Jim Crow-era statutes against racial integration.

Blackburn didn't address whether the law is constitutional, and she could still let all or parts of the law take effect later. Instead, she said she needed more time to consider lawsuits filed by the Justice Department, private groups and individuals that claim the state is overstepping its bounds.

The judge said she will issue a longer ruling by Sept. 28, and her temporary order will remain in effect until the day after. She heard arguments from the Justice Department and others during a daylong hearing last week.

Urbanization is a Major Source of Environmental Degradation

An important new study has just been published in the academic journal PLoS One summarizing our knowledge of what growing urban populations mean for the environment. The authors--Karen Seto, Michail Fragkias, Burag Guneralp, and Michael Reilly--drew the following major conclusions:

The conversion of Earth's land surface to urban uses is one of the most irreversible human impacts on the global biosphere. It drives the loss of farmland, affects local climate, fragments habitats, and threatens biodiversity. Here we present a meta-analysis of 326 studies that have used remotely sensed images to map urban land conversion. We report a worldwide observed increase in urban land area of 58,000 km² from 1970 to 2000. India, China, and Africa have experienced the highest rates of urban land expansion, and the largest change in total urban extent has occurred in North America. Across all regions and for all three decades, urban land expansion rates are higher than or equal to urban population growth rates, suggesting that urban growth is becoming more expansive than compact. 

Why Are We Still Even Talking About Vitamin A?

The BBC News today highlights a paper just published in the British Medical Journal that extols the virtue of Vitamin A supplements for children.

UK and Pakistani experts assessed 43 studies involving 200,000 children, and found deaths were cut by 24% if children were given the vitamin. And they say taking it would also cut rates of measles and diarrhoea. The body needs vitamin A for the visual and immune systems to work properly. It is found in foods including cheese, eggs, liver and oily fish.

The incredibly sad part of this is that we have to keep talking about it in order to get the world to remember how important Vitamin A is for children. A very nice history of the discovery of how important Vitamin A can be is told in the PBS special of "Rx for Survival--Back to the Basics." Dr. Alfred Sommer at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is interviewed in this program, which I highly recommend to you:

Researchers Have Linked Climate Change and Conflict

A new research paper in Nature is reported to be the first to find a statistically significant relationship between climate change and conflict. The researchers, Solomon M. Hsaing, Kyle C. Meng, and Mark A. Crane, from Princeton and Columbia Universities, "looked at data on conflicts between 1950 and 2004 that killed more than 25 people in a year. They compared El Niño years, which happen roughly every five years, with La Niña years. El Niño tends to bring hotter, drier conditions - and La Niña cooler ones - to tropical countries, but both have less of an influence on temperate countries. The analysis included 175 countries and 234 conflicts, over half of which caused more than 1000 deaths. It found that the risk of conflict in tropical countries rose from 3 per cent during La Niña years to 6 per cent during El Niño years. The effect was absent from countries only weakly affected by these climate cycles."

The link between climate change and conflict is probably not a direct one, and the researchers were not able to nail down cause-and-effect relationships, but they do have some possible explanations in mind:

Lead author Solomon Hsiang of Columbia's Earth Institute said El Nino was an invisible factor -- but not the only one -- in driving intra-border conflict.By causing crop losses, hurricane damage or helping to spread epidemics of water-borne disease, it amplified hunger, loss, unemployment and inequality, which in turn fuelled resentment and division.

Other factors that could affect risk and the outcome are the country's population growth and prosperity and whether its government is able to manage El Nino events properly.

New Marriage and Divorce Data from the Census Bureau, of all Places

The US Census Bureau has just published its first detailed report on marriage and divorce in the United States. Why? Well, the Census Bureau explains it thus:

Historically, data on marriages and divorces in the United States were collected from marriage and divorce certificates filed and collected at the state-level through the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) vital statistics system. In 1996, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the NCHS discontinued the collection of detailed state-level vital records data from marriage and divorce certificates. Beginning in 2008, questions about marital events were added to the ACS to collect national and state-level marriage and divorce data. These new marital events items fill a void in the marriage and divorce data collected in the United States.

The Associated Press picked up on the main findings:

Will the Census Bureau Really Kill Off the Statistical Abstract?

There has been a great deal of moaning the past few days about the news from the US Census Bureau that it is thinking of shutting off the US Statistical Abstract, which is one of the most popular items on its already very popular website (www.census.gov). Reuters News Agency summed up the situation:

A cost-cutting plan by the Census Bureau to kill off its U.S. Statistical Abstract was under fire this week from pundits and policy experts who rely on the annual collection of census data.

Published since 1878 and now nearly 1,000 pages, the abstract summarizes key metrics -- some weighty and some just interesting -- on the social, political and economic shape of the United States and beyond.

The bureau said in its fiscal 2012 budget report to Congress that it could save $2.9 million a year by terminating the abstract. It said the move was a "difficult decision." Both the printed and online versions would be discontinued.

Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times who is often at odds with Samuelson on policy issues, in a column on Monday also protested the bureau's judgment.

Some Elections Are Demographically More Important Than Others

Since the Constitution requires that Congressional Districts be redrawn after each decennial census, the election just before the census data come out winds up laying the groundwork for districts for the following decade. As it turned out, the Republican Party won a lot of seats in 2010 and has been in the position of driving the redistricting bus in the majority of states that still leave that process to the governor and legislature. As the Associated Press notes:

Republicans romped last November, gaining 63 House seats to secure the majority, winning 11 governorships, including Ohio and Pennsylvania, and seizing control of the most state legislative seats they've held since 1928. The GOP is capitalizing on its across-the-board control in 26 states — governorship plus legislature — in the census-based drawing of a new political map that will be a decisive factor in the 2012 elections and beyond.Nearly half of the states have finished redrawing House lines based on population changes, although lawsuits and Justice Department reviews loom. The immediate post-election claims that the GOP could add 15 to 30 seats in the U.S. House through redistricting have proven unfounded, in large part because Republicans captured so many seats last November. Instead, the GOP has used the redistricting process to shore up its most vulnerable lawmakers, people like Ellmers and Farenthold."Redistricting starts with Republicans at a peak," said Tim Storey, an elections analyst with the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures. "They hold a solid majority of seats in the House. It's hard to gain much more."

A Malaria Treatment So Wacky It Just Might Work--Someday

The New York Times has a very interesting story today about a project that is being funded by the Gates Foundation to try to bring malaria under control. The idea is to treat patients (mice, to begin with) by placing them (or parts of them) in a very low wattage microwave. It will be some time before we know if this treatment will work to rid a body of malaria, but the article's main value is that in interviewing one of the method's co-inventors, Dr. Jose Stoute at Penn State, it provides a very nice summary of the complex biology of the malaria parasite, which helps us understand why this parasite has been a nemesis for thousands of years.

The idea, he said, is based on the fact that malaria parasites invade red blood cells and eat the hemoglobin inside them. Hemoglobin contains iron — and, as any bozo who’s ever tried to heat up a sandwich wrapped in tinfoil knows, it’s a bad idea to microwave metal.

Of course, the red cells containing parasites are floating along in arteries right next to healthy red cells, so whatever damage the microwave does to the parasites cannot be visited on the healthy cells, too.

Women in Asia are Just Saying No to Marriage

The Economist's lengthy cover story this week is about the flight from marriage among women in Asia. Japan continues to be the prime example, but the story notes that the phenomenon is spreading to other Asian countries, including China and India. The basic story is a familiar one: women are increasingly better educated and in the labor force, but they are still expected to do the bulk of childcare, eldercare, and housework, while at the same time having little ability to divorce a man they no longer want to live with. This is pretty much a bad deal, and many women are rejecting it.

What is remarkable about the Asian experience is not that women are unmarried in their 30s—that happens in the West, too—but that they have never been married and have rarely cohabited. In Sweden, the proportion of women in their late 30s who are single is higher than in Asia, at 41%. But that is because marriage is disappearing as a norm. Swedish women are still setting up homes and having children, just outside wedlock. Not in Asia. Avoiding both illegitimacy and cohabitation, Asian women appear to be living a more celibate life than their Western sisters (admittedly, they could also be under-reporting rates of cohabitation and pre-marital sex). The conclusion is that East Asia’s growing cohorts of unmarried women reflect less the breakdown of marriage than the fact that they are avoiding it.

Slave Maids in Lebanon

You have probably never have contemplated what the work of the Minister of Population in Madagascar might involve. Right? It turns out that one of her tasks is dealing with the tragedy of human trafficking. More specifically, dealing with the issue of poor women from Madagascar who are essentially sold into servitude in the middle east, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and in a story today from BBC News--in Lebanon.

Forced to work as a "slave maid" for wealthy families in Lebanon for 15 years, Abeline Baholiarisoa - a 59-year-old woman from Madagascar - finally achieved her freedom in March.
Madagascar's government chartered a plane to evacuate her and 85 other women.
The youngest of her four children, whom she left behind when he was six years old, played a key role in her evacuation, tracking her down via a welfare agency that rescues "slave maids", she says.
Ms Baholiarisoa says she was trapped in "a living hell" after being duped into going to Lebanon.
Madagascar's Minister of Population Nadine Ramaroson, the only government minister tackling the issue, says "a very organised network" involving senior government officials and businessmen emerged in the 1990s to engage in human trafficking.Ms Ramaroson says the government is trying to break the criminal networks, but it is not easy.Government officials provide fraudulent work permits, travel and identity document for around $5,000 per trafficked woman, social workers say.

Obama Administration Backs Off on Deportations

The Obama Administration has systematically been deporting a record number of undocumented immigrants, as I have noted before. Today, however, came an announcement that the policy would change and that only those who posed a threat to national security or public safety would be targeted for deportation (remember that being an undocumented immigrant is a misdemeanor, not a felony). The New York Times focuses on the benefit to non-US-born children of undocumented immigrants.

The new policy is expected to help thousands of illegal immigrants who came to the United States as young children, graduated from high school and want to go on to college or serve in the armed forces.Under the new policy, the secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, can provide relief, on a case-by-case basis, to young people who are in the country illegally but pose no threat to national security or to the public safety.

The Associated Press looks at the bigger picture:

Laura Lichter, president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the devil was in the details of reviewing 300,000 cases.

But whatever the result, she said, the policy does bring administrative changes to the immigration system at a time when congressional action seems unlikely.

Many Republicans have long opposed any immigration overhaul, including the DREAM Act, characterizing such proposals as amnesty.

While the new policy does not provide illegal immigrants with a path to permanent residency, it does allow those whose cases are indefinitely stayed to apply for a work permit. The government could also reopen deportation cases if an immigrant is arrested or other circumstances in their case change.