1. Washington Post: Robert Samuelson: America’s demographic denial
... For proof, see Paul Taylor’s new book, “The Next America.” Taylor oversees many of the Pew Research Center’s opinion surveys. His masterful synthesis of polls shows that three familiar mega-trends lie at the core of America’s political and social stalemate. First, immigration. By 2050, immigrants and their U.S.-born children are projected to represent 37 percent of the population, slightly higher than in 1900, when the country last experienced mass immigration. ...
... Second, family breakdown. In 2011, unmarried women accounted for 41 percent of U.S. births, up from 5 percent in 1960. The trend affects all major groups. The rate is 29 percent for whites, 53 percent among Hispanics and 72 percent among African Americans. Although 60 percent of single mothers have live-in boyfriends, half of these relationships end within five years. Single parenthood’s stigma is gone. ...
... Finally, aging. Every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 65. The retiree flood is swamping the federal budget. ...
2. Economist: How divorce and marriage compare internationally
3. NPR: Walking Down The Widening Aisle Of Interracial Marriages
... More than 5.3 million marriages in the U.S. are between husbands and wives of different races or ethnicities. According to the 2010 Census, they make up between opposite-sex couples, marking a 28-percent increase since 2000. ...
4. Pew: Record share of wives are more educated than their husbands
5. NPR: Older Americans' Breakups Are Causing A 'Graying' Divorce Trend
For baby boomers, divorce has almost become, like marriage, another rite of passage. The post-World War II generation is setting : Americans over 50 are twice as likely to get divorced as people of that age were 20 years ago. ...
6. Atlantic Cities: The Developing World's Urban Population Could Triple by 2210
... A new working paper (PDF) by my colleagues Brandon Fuller and Paul Romer of NYU’s Marron Institute projects that the world’s urban population will reach 9.8 billion people by 2210, with nearly 87 percent of the 11.3 billion people on Earth living in cities. That urban population will be split unevenly, with just 1.2 billion people living in the cities of what we now think of as developed countries, and a whopping 8.6 billion making their homes in the cities of the developing world. These projections, based on UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Data, are some of the largest that I’ve seen to date. ...
7. Conversable Economist: U.S. Teen Birthrate Plummets
8. The Diplomat: Japan's Demographic Crisis: Any Way Out?
... However positive the macroeconomic outlook for the Japanese economy and however successful Abe might be at normalizing Japan’s military stance, Japan isn’t back — its falling birthrate and shrinking population will significantly damage its international competitiveness. Japan’s population fell by a record 244,000 last year, further evidencing that this trend is accelerating. Is it all doom and gloom for Japan from here on out or is there a possible way out? ...
... The immigration solution to demographic problems presents a novel scenario for Japan, which has traditionally been ethnically homogenous despite its high level of integration with the global economy. According to the Japanese government, the number of foreign residents in Japan is slowly but surely rising. Should the government’s plan to add an additional 200,000 immigrants per year succeed, Japanese society will begin to look very different within a decade, raising possible national identity issues. Currently, less than 2 percent of Japan’s population is non-ethnically Japanese. Should immigrants comprise a greater percentage of the whole, the idea of Japan will have to change, incorporating its new residents into the fold. That change won’t be easy, but it might be necessary to avert the alternative scenario: a country that shrinks its way into ruin.
9. USA Today: 'Do it for Denmark' ad encourages Danes to have more sex
... Denmark has the lowest birth rate in 27 years, according to the "Do it for Denmark" campaign the travel company launched Wednesday. "The Danish government has not found a solution," the ad says. "But there has to be one."
That solution, according to the company, is to travel, see your partner in the light of a different city and get romantic.
The ad claims that Danes have 46% more sex on vacation and that 10% of all Danish children are conceived on getaways. It's unclear where these stats came from, so take them with a grain of salt. ...
10. Atlantic: There's Something About Cities and Suicide
As more people move to a city, you’d expect about a one-to-one increase in shirts being worn, for instance, or the number of house keys issued. If something doubles as population doubles, that’s not surprising. What is unusual, though, is when something grows faster or slower than a population. That means people seem to be doing more or less of it, on average, and that could signal an interesting societal quirk. ...
... The authors found that if they doubled the size of a Brazilian city, car-crash deaths would also double, as predicted. But the rate of murder would grow by 135 percent—that is, homicides would more than double.
The rate of suicides, meanwhile, increased slower than population growth, rising just 78 percent when population went up by 100. A similar trend was true among the U.S. counties. There seems to be something about big cities that makes murder more likely but suicide less so. ...
11. New York Times: Why Black Women Die of Cancer
SINCE the early 1970s, studies have shown that black Americans have a higher death rate from cancer than any other racial or ethnic group. This is especially true when it comes to breast cancer. A study published last week in the journal Cancer Epidemiology found that, in a survey of 41 of America’s largest cities, black women with breast cancer are on average 40 percent more likely to die than their white counterparts.
The principal reason for this disparity is the disconnect between the nation’s discovery and delivery enterprises — between what we know and what we do about sick Americans. ...
12. Christian Science Monitor: Why African-Americans are moving back to the South
... The Coxes' decision is one unfolding in African-American households across the nation. After decades of mass exodus, blacks are returning to the South in one of the most notable migrations of the new century.
It's a subtle but significant shift that experts say provides not only a snapshot of the changing economics and sociology of the nation but of an emerging new South and, in some cases, of a growing disillusionment with the urban North. ...
13. New York Times: Population Growth in New York City Is Reversing Decades-Old Trend, Estimates Show
New York City may be an expensive place to live. Jobs are not easy to find, even as the city rebounds from the recession. And the public transit system is not always reliable or comfortable.
But despite the challenges of city living, the city’s population is growing in ways not seen in decades.
For the third consecutive year, New York City last year gained more people than it lost through migration, reversing a trend that stretched to the mid-20th century. ...
14. Business Insider: How The American Population Changed In One Year
15. Carpe Diem: Today’s new homes are 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973, and the living space per person has doubled over last 40 years
16. Watch as 1000 years of European borders change
17. Business Insider: Here's What The World Would Look Like If It Were Divided Into Regions Of 100 Million People
18. Business Insider: 6 Land Transformations That Are Changing The World (GIFs)
As the global population grows past seven billion, our cities continue to expand, increasing the need for natural resources while simultaneously decreasing the supply.
Google's Earth Engine team created these time-lapse maps to illustrate a few of the trends reshaping the world right now. ...
19. Aljezzera America: How the north ended up on top of the map
Why do maps always show the north as up? For those who don’t just take it for granted, the common answer is that Europeans made the maps and they wanted to be on top. But there’s really no good reason for the north to claim top-notch cartographic real estate over any other bearing, as an examination of old maps from different places and periods can confirm. ...
... The McArthur map also makes us wonder why we are so quick to assume that Northern Europeans were the ones who invented the modern map — and decided which way to hold it — in the first place. As is so often the case, our eagerness to invoke Eurocentrism displays a certain bias of its own, since in fact, the north’s elite cartographic status owes more to Byzantine monks and Majorcan Jews than it does to any Englishman.
There is nothing inevitable or intrinsically correct — not in geographic, cartographic or even philosophical terms — about the north being represented as up, because up on a map is a human construction, not a natural one. Some of the very earliest Egyptian maps show the south as up, presumably equating the Nile’s northward flow with the force of gravity. And there was a long stretch in the medieval era when most European maps were drawn with the east on the top. If there was any doubt about this move’s religious significance, they eliminated it with their maps’ pious illustrations, whether of Adam and Eve or Christ enthroned. In the same period, Arab map makers often drew maps with the south facing up, possibly because this was how the Chinese did it. ...
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