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.

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.

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:

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.

New Evidence of Family and Household Evolution in America

A new report on American families has just been released by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, and it got press in today's New York Times.

The number of Americans who have children and live together without marrying has increased twelvefold since 1970, according to a report released Tuesday. The report states that children now are more likely to have unmarried parents than divorced ones.

According to the National Survey of Family Growth, part of the Centers for Disease Control, 42 percent of children have lived with cohabiting parents by age 12, far more than the 24 percent whose parents have divorced.

The report notes, however, that there are clear differentials in the population on this score:

Jobs in Texas--What's Growth Got to Do With It?

Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, announced this weekend that he is running for President, and the pundits expect that his campaign will emphasize the theme that Texas has the answers for America in terms of how to grow jobs. However, in today's New York Times, Paul Krugman offers a correction to that view, and it has a decidedly demographic bent.

So where does the notion of a Texas miracle come from? Mainly from widespread misunderstanding of the economic effects of population growth.

For this much is true about Texas: It has, for many decades, had much faster population growth than the rest of America — about twice as fast since 1990. Several factors underlie this rapid population growth: a high birth rate, immigration from Mexico, and inward migration of Americans from other states, who are attracted to Texas by its warm weather and low cost of living, low housing costs in particular.

But what does population growth have to do with job growth? Well, the high rate of population growth translates into above-average job growth through a couple of channels. Many of the people moving to Texas — retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life — bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment. At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas work force keeps wages low — almost 10 percent of Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average — and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State.

So Texas tends, in good years and bad, to have higher job growth than the rest of America. But it needs lots of new jobs just to keep up with its rising population — and as those unemployment comparisons show, recent employment growth has fallen well short of what’s needed.

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:

Will the Boomers Blow Out the Housing Market?

This Thursday the Census Bureau will release more geographically detailed 2010 census data, including homeownership numbers, and that has whetted journalists' appetites for stories about the housing market. One story that NPR raised today, and which has been floating around for awhile, is what will happen to the housing market as the baby boomers age?

The oldest of the baby boomers — the generation of 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 — have already turned 65. As the generation continues to age, some warn that there won't be enough Americans around of working age to buy all their houses.

"Older people are a ticking time bomb for the housing market," says Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California. "What we've gone through recently could be nothing compared to what we have five years from now. When the boomers start to sell off their houses, there are going to be too many boomers and not enough buyers."

The Clash of Civilizations Continues in Saudi Arabia

I have commented before on the idea that gender issues represent the real clash of civilizations in the world, and that Saudi Arabia is the poster child for this idea with things like the proscription (social, not legal) against women driving themselves. The battle has continued in that country, with an increasing number of women driving--often with their husband's cooperation--and then talking about it on Facebook.

The Women2Drive Facebook page said the direct action would continue until a royal decree reversed the ban.

Campaigners have not called for a mass protest - which would be illegal - but have asked women who have foreign driving licences to drive themselves as they go about their daily life.

"All that we need is to run our errands without depending on drivers," said one woman in the first film posted in the early hours of Friday morning.

The film showed the unnamed woman talking as she drove to a supermarket and parking.

Young People Need Jobs

Now, you may think that the headline "young people need jobs" is so obvious as to be trite. But the Associated Press reports that this was the message that Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel delivered yesterday to a meeting of the United Nation's International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva. She was referring specifically, however, to young people in Arab nations who have been trying to leave those countries and head to Europe in search of jobs. Europeans really don't want them in Europe and so, of course, the message is to create jobs in those Arab countries that have been experiencing turbulence. Her argument was not framed in terms of discouraging migration, of course, but rather in terms of promoting democracy.

"We want that in those countries, too, freedom and democracy can develop well. This will be inseparably linked to providing sensible perspectives for the many young people who are prepared to work," Merkel told a U.N. labor meeting in Geneva.

Germany plans to support job creation in North Africa by providing opportunities for young people to gain training and qualifications "so they can work in their own countries," she added.

Religious Minorities Discriminated Against in Pakistan

Despite the post-WWII partition of India into predominantly Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan (now itself divided into Pakistan and Bangladesh), there is still a sizable minority (about 8 million people) of Hindu, Christian, and other religious faiths living in Pakistan. A newly published report by a Pakistani think-tank suggests, however, that the current government of Pakistan is failing to protect those religious minorities.

The rising tide of vigilante violence and extremism is threatening Christians, Hindus and Ahmedis, the report by the Jinnah Institute said.

The assassinations of two prominent advocates of minority rights this year had led to an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, it added.

The report warned extremists posed a serious threat to Pakistan's stability.

The 70-page report, entitled "A Question of Faith", was released on Tuesday by the Asian Human Rights Commission.

Women Drivers (or Not) in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is working very hard, according to the New York Times, to keep Arab monarchies in power and to tamp down revolution wherever it possibly can. The goal seems to be to maintain the power and credibility of its fundamentalist form of Islam, Wahhabi, which allows an authoritarian leader such as a monarch, whereas the more mainstream form of Sunni Islam practiced in most of the rest of the world does not condone that form of government. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia is trying to protect the region from the influence of Shia Islam as practiced in Iran, especially, but also in Iraq, as well (Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan are the only Shia-majority countries in the world).

From a purely demographic perspective, Saudi Arabia has the kind of young population that could spark a revolution, if pushed by circumstances. Nearly 1 in 2 Saudis is under the age of 25, although that percentage is declining as fertility slowly comes down in the kingdom. Still, its population of 27 million is twice what is was only 25 years ago, and UN projections suggest that the population will very nearly double again by the middle of this century. Thus far, one of the more noticeable signs of discontent has come from a woman pushing for the ability of women to drive cars in Saudi Arabia.

US Census Data Confirm That Married Couples Are Not in the Majority

The 2010 Census data released today confirm the findings from the ACS (see Figure 10.2 in my 11th edition) that married couple households are no longer the majority type of household in the US. The New York Times reports the story with help from William Frey at the Brookings Institution:

Married couples represented just 48 percent of American households in 2010, according to data being made public Thursday and analyzed by the Brookings Institution. This was slightly less than in 2000, but far below the 78 percent of households occupied by married couples in 1950.

What is more, just a fifth of households were traditional families — married couples with children — down from about a quarter a decade ago, and from 43 percent in 1950, as the iconic image of the American family continues to break apart.

The biggest change for the decade was the jump in households headed by women without husbands — up by 18 percent in the decade. The next largest rise was in households whose occupants were not a family — up by about 16 percent, Mr. Frey said.

Do Demographics Explain the Latest Drop in Crime Rates?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has just issued its latest crime report and the New York Times reports that the data reveal a drop in crime in the US:

The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years, a development that was considered puzzling partly because it ran counter to the prevailing expectation that crime would increase during a recession.

All of the experts interviewed for the story were baffled by this trend, and that immediately called to my mind the highly controversial theory put forth by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their very popular book Freakonomics. In Chapter 4 of that book they argue that:

What's in a Name?

The US Social Security Administration has come out with its latest list of baby names, and one surprise is that José is no longer among even the top 50 most popular boy's name among Hispanics, not even in Texas, where it had been the most popular boy's name for a long time, but has now been replaced by Jacob (the overall most popular boy's name).

Because this happened when birthrates for Hispanic-Americans were among the highest of any ethnic or racial group, the rankings just might be a measure of assimilation, said Prof. Cleveland Kent Evans, who teaches psychology at Bellevue University in Nebraska and wrote “The Great Big Book of Baby Names.”

But, not so fast, argue others:

Outliers in Family Demography

The killing of Osama bin Laden has resurrected the very unusual circumstances of his family life. In the first place:

Bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia in 1957, one of more than 50 children of millionaire construction magnate Mohamed bin Laden. 

In fact, Wikipedia suggests that Osama bin Laden's father had 54 children with 22 different wives. It is almost impossible to contemplate this constant turnover and turmoil of wives and births of children. Indeed, it is said that Osama was the 17th child, and that his mother was the 10th wife, yet by the time Osama's father was killed in a plane crash ten years after Osama's birth, his father had married (and presumably also divorced--since Islam only allows four wives at a time), an additional 12 wives who bore him an additional 37 children. Osama's mother was a Syrian-born woman who was divorced by Osama's father shortly after his birth. She remarried and had additional children.
With respect to the family that Osama created, it is reported that:

Parenting Taking a Back Seat in Richer Countries

The Paris-based think tank OECD has just released a new report on families in the more developed countries. The results are not necessarily surprising, but they are sobering. In particular, the data show that 26 percent of children in the United States are being raised by a single parent--considerably higher than the average of 15 percent among all the countries surveyed. The Associated Press looked for reaction in the US to the report and found the following:

Experts point to a variety of factors to explain the high U.S. figure, including a cultural shift toward greater acceptance of single-parent child rearing. The U.S. also lacks policies to help support families, including childcare at work and national paid maternity leave, which are commonplace in other countries.

"When our parents married, there was a sense that you were marrying for life," said Edward Zigler, founder and director of Yale's Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy. "That sense is not as prevalent."

Single parents in the U.S. were more likely to be employed — 35.8 percent compared to a 21.3 percent average — but they also had higher rates of poverty, the report found.

"The in-work poverty is higher in the U.S. than other OECD countries, because at the bottom end of the labor market, earnings are very low," said Willem Adema, a senior economist in the group's social policy division. "For parents, the risk is higher because they have to make expenditures on childcare costs."