Will the Protests in the Arab World Have a Demographic Impact?

With the sudden and unexpected momentum of street demonstrations in Arab nations, especially in Egypt, many people are trying to take stock of what it means for the future. Anthony Shadid in the New York Times gets at what seems to be the heart of the matter throughout the region--people are tired of repressive and corrupt governments that are holding the people back from accomplishing what they believe they can do with their lives, if only given a chance.

“Dignity” was a word often used Wednesday, and its emphasis underlined the breadth of a movement that is, so far, leaderless. Neither the Brotherhood nor a handful of opposition leaders — men like Mohammed ElBaradei or Ayman Nour — have managed to articulate hopelessness, the humiliations at the hands of the police and the outrage at having too little money to marry, echoed in the streets of Palestinian camps in Jordan and in the urban misery of Baghdad’s Sadr City. For many, the Brotherhood itself is a vestige of an older order that has failed to deliver.

A Quiet End to World Population Conferences

Quietly and under the radar screen just before Christmas in 2010, the United Nations General Assembly seemed to pull the plug on any vestige of hope that there would be another world population conference any time soon. I was first aware of this in an email sent out a few days ago by the UN Population Division, which noted that:

The United Nations General Assembly debated last month the follow-up to the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994) beyond 2014. 

A resolution was adopted, acknowledging that many Governments may not meet all the goals and objectives of the Programme of Action by 2014, and extending the Programme of Action and the key actions for its further implementation beyond 2014. 

The General Assembly also decided to convene a special session in 2014 to assess the status of implementation of the Programme of Action and to renew political support for actions required for the full achievement of its goals and objectives; it also called for the Commission on Population and Development to convene an interactive discussion in 2014 on the assessment of the status of implementation of the Programme of Action.

The US Continues to be a Melting Pot, Not a Salad Bowl

The detailed data from the 2010 US Census, based on the American Community Survey, will start coming out later this month and journalists are trying to get a head start on some of the stories by mining the most recent set of ACS data. One trend that has emerged was the subject of a lengthy story recently in the New York Times. It dealt with the increase in the number of young people who are multi-racial and who see themselves that way, aided by the question on race in the census form that, since 2000, has allowed people to choose more than one racial category to identify themselves. This seems to be an increasingly popular option.

The crop of students moving through college right now includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States, and they are only the vanguard: the country is in the midst of a demographic shift driven by immigration and intermarriage.