Immigration is a complex topic. Unfortunately, our public discourse produces much more heat than light on the topic. Allan Bevere and I recently had a conversation that only skims the topic, but maybe it will provide some food for thought and encourage helpful conversation.
The rate of Black entrepreneurship has always been lower than for other communities due to systemic and overt racism over past generations. This CNBC piece does a good job explaining the ongoing obstacles faced by Black-owned enterprises.
The great majority of people throughout most of human history have precariously been able to subsist. (See Level 1 below.) A great divergence began just over two centuries ago. Global life expectancy at birth has more than doubled and abject poverty as a percentage of the population has declined.
The average life expectancy at birth used to be about 30 years. That doesn't mean no one lived to old age. One in four children born alive died before their first birthday, so the average life expectancy at birth was skewed downward. But life expectancy at every age has been improving, especially over the past century.
The researchers at Gapminder have constructed this informative chart showing anticipated improving economic status over the next twenty years. (These numbers attempt to account for changes in the value of "a dollar" over time and across national borders.) Each block equates to 100,000 people. As you can see, the population is larger in twenty years, but a higher percentage of people have moved rightward on the continuum to greater prosperity. Many people find these numbers too abstract. What does this mean in practical terms? Gapminder has constructed this helpful chart to describe what life is like at the four levels.
Three truths. The world has become profoundly better in recent generations and is on an improving trajectory. There is much suffering and injustice as vast room for improving our world. We can make the world a better place.
Despite recent trade turbulence, the ratio of gross exports to world GDP is still remarkably close to its all-time high. Even after falling from a peak of 32% in 2008 to 29% in 2019, this measure of global trade integration is still 20% higher than it was in 2000, twice as high as it was in 1970, and almost six times higher than in 1945. ... Globalization can go into reverse—as demonstrated by the trendlines between the 1920s and 1950s—but recent data do not depict a similar reversal. ...
[T]he world is—and will remain—only partially globalized. Globalization can rise or fall significantly without getting anywhere close to either a state where national borders become irrelevant or one where they loom so large that it is best to think of a world of disconnected national economies. All signs point to a future where international flows will remain so large that decision-makers ignore them at their peril, even as borders and cross-country differences continue to make domestic activity the default in most areas.
In mid-April, Bill Bennett said COIVD-19 is no big deal. Projections showed 60,000 deaths, about the same as the flu. Our stringent "stay-at-home" measures were unnecessary. It is faulty reasoning on several counts. As I noted of Facebook, “We didn’t lock down the country to try to prevent 60,000 deaths; we locked down the country to limit deaths to 60,000 (or whatever the ultimate toll is).” (See The Absurd Case against the Coronavirus Lockdown)
Through March 31, the tally of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. was doubling every three days. Had that rate continued, there would have 275,000 deaths by April 21. Instead, we had 40,000. The doubling rate has stretched to nine days. We flattened the curve. We do not know the exact rate at which deaths would have multiplied had we not acted but it is certain it would have been much higher. Slowing the fatalities prevents medical facilities from becoming overwhelmed and ensures that each new hospitalized victim gets optimal care, thus dampening the fatality rate over the course of the pandemic.
Furthermore, the 60,000 flu deaths represent the total for an entire year. In the U.S., COVID-19 is barely two months old. This is like looking at a baseball player’s strikeout totals for the previous season, comparing them with his total strikeouts for his first month of the following year, and upon seeing they are about the same, conclude he is doing okay. What will the death count comparison be like a year from now?
Finally, it is invalid to compare deaths officially attributed to COVID-19 to the Center For Disease Control’s flu death total.(1) The reported flu deaths are calculated using an algorithm.(2) Over the last six years, the number of flu deaths officially coded as such (direct or comorbidity) ranged from 3,448 to 15,620 (See Jeremy Samuel Faust.) The CDC believes flu deaths are underreported for a variety of reasons. Instead of official tabulations, they take the number of flu and pneumonia hospitalizations and report a percentage of them as flu deaths. According to Faust, the result is about six times more flu deaths than the officially reported number each year. (Faust is critical of CDC methods, believing it significantly overstates the death total. I have no way of evaluating that.)
Recent analysis indicates the official COVID-19 count is a significant undercount. Using average numbers of deaths up to a particular point in the year from recent years, analysts are finding sharp rises in the number of deaths where COVID-19 outbreaks have occurred. Yet, the officially reported COVID-19 deaths are accounting for only half the increase in deaths. That suggests the true COVID-19 impact may be much higher (double?) than the official account. (See here)
As of today, May 5, we have 70,000 officially reported deaths. So if you want to make legitimate comparisons, it is 70,000 versus about 9,500 for officially reported deaths. Using algorithms to capture unreported deaths, the comparison is more likely something like 100,000+ deaths to 60,000 deaths. And this is comparing COVID-19’s first quarter to an entire flu season.
COVID-19 is not just the flu.
1 “Official.” A CDC database tracks COVID-19 deaths reported through official channels. Their provisional death count in the National Vital Statistics System shows almost 40,000 COVID-19 deaths. They note that it can take weeks for deaths to make it into the NVSS. The numbers for past weeks are revised as the data is received. The National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System is the source for the numbers we typically see in the media and an up to date report of confirmed and probable deaths. That total stands at about 70,000 today. I am using this number as the “official” count. (Source: Did the CDC Significantly ‘Readjust COVID-19 Death Numbers’?)
2 Center for Disease Control, Frequently Asked Questions about Estimated Flu Burden. "How many adults die from flu each year?: Flu deaths in adults are not nationally notifiable. In order to monitor influenza related deaths in all age groups, CDC tracks pneumonia and influenza (P&I)–attributed deaths through the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Mortality Reporting System. This system tracks the proportion of death certificates processed that list pneumonia or influenza as the underlying or contributing cause of death. This system provides an overall indication of whether flu-associated deaths are elevated, but does not provide an exact number of how many people died from flu. As it does for the numbers of flu cases, doctor’s visits and hospitalizations, CDC also estimates deaths in the United States using mathematical modeling. CDC estimates that from 2010-2011 to 2017-2018, influenza-associated deaths in the United States ranged from a low of 12,000 (during 2011-2012) to a high of 79,000 (during 2017-2018). The model used to estimate flu-associated deaths uses a ratio of deaths-to-hospitalizations in order to estimate the total flu-related deaths during a season." The site offers links for those wanting more detail.
The chart below is based on maternal mortality rates, the number of women per 100,000 who die from pregnancy-related causes in a year. The first bar shows how many women die each year while the second bar shows how many would die if they had Europe’s living standards. What conclusions would you draw?
The global rate is 216, while the European rate is 8. The global rate is 27 times higher! About 290,000 women die each year because they do not have the living standards of the most affluent countries.
I would hope this would spark a sense of injustice. Something is wrong with a system that creates such a disparity in outcomes. Surely, we must upend this inequitable system and replace it with something just.
Now look at the second chart. What conclusions would you draw?
Prior to 1800, the global maternal mortality rate was 900. Today it is 216! It has dropped by 75%. By historic standards, this borders on miraculous. Something is right about a system that radically improves human well-being. How can we preserve and extend the improvement? (Note: The global rate dropped steadily from 385 in 1990, to 216 in 2015. The trajectory continues rapidly downward.)
A holistic view of human well-being will take into consideration this chart, including all three bars.
Some observations.
First, without the systems that developed over the past two centuries, we would have a more equitable maternal mortality rate. No place on earth would have a rate of 8 deaths OR of 216 deaths. We would still have a very equitable world of 900 deaths. Is that “equality” preferable to the 8 vs 216 inequality of today? I do not think many would agree. The 8 vs 216 differential is a good thing relative to the historic alternative.
Second, that some locales have a rate of 8, points to the possibility of a world where this level of well-being spans the globe. Justice requires that what we pursue this equitable outcome. We must be looking back to understand what brought us to where we are and we must be discerning about obstacles block this objective going forward.
Third, I am using maternal mortality rates as a symbol of broader improvement in human well-being in recent generations, sometimes called the Great Divergence. Appreciating this great divergence from human history neither requires us, in some consequentialist way, to a) embrace all that has developed in the past couple of centuries nor b) to refrain from asking rigorous questions about justice going forward. There have been profound injustices and inequities in the world of the past two centuries. There obviously are today. And yet, the Great Divergence happened and it continues. Lack of historical context and blindness to trajectories, can lead us to snap-shot-in-time views that inspire us to well-intentioned but destructive actions, destroying good in the process. Keep what works and adjust with discernment. Neither revolution nor complacency will do.
Population control is sometimes championed as a way to fight climate change. Bernie Sanders recently raised this idea. The world population is growing. There are 7.7 billion people today. There will be nearly 11 billion in 2100, according to United Nations estimates. Extra people mean extra CO2 emissions. While two children per woman may seem reasonable, women in the poorest countries can average five or sex. Sanders and others believe this excess fertility is why the world population is growing. Fewer children will mean less CO2. Unfortunately, this perception is decades out of date.
We are already at “peak children.” Globally, there are 680 million children under the age of five. U.N. projections show a peak of 700 million about 2060. There are projected to be 650 million children in 2100, less children than there are today. Yet the overall population will grow by nearly 50%. How can that be? It is the compounding effect of people already born that will drive population growth over the next century, not excessive birth rates.
Trends in Fertility
Assume women have two children over their lifetime. They replace themselves and one other. Population size will be stable from generation to generation. (The actual replacement fertility rate for an affluent nation is 2.1 children per woman.) Throughout history, the total fertility rate has been six or seven children. One quarter of children died before their first birthday. Another sizable percentage died before age five. Of those who made it past five, many died before marrying and having children. High fertility rates ensured a couple of children would survive to continue the family.
As affluence emerged and health practices changed (first in Europe and then spreading elsewhere) more children survived into adulthood. We needed fewer births to perpetuate a family but it took a while for customs related to fertility to adjust downward. That lag between declining death rates and declining fertility rates is what led to the population explosion that began two centuries ago. That growth accelerated into the twentieth century and continues into its final stages today. As recently as the 1960s, the global total fertility rate was as high as five children per woman.
Today, the global total fertility rate is about 2.4 and dropping, but the rate is not evenly spread throughout the world. Europe, the Americas, China, Japan, and other regions have fertility rates below the replacement rate, well below it in many nations. A handful of smaller poor countries have fertility rates of five or six, but they also have some of the highest child death rates. The world average is fast approaching the 2.1 replacement rate. However, because the global fertility rate has usually been higher than the replacement rate for most of us now living, it means the cohort of people born one year is usually larger than the cohort of people born the previous year. So let us think about what that means for the future.
The Compounding Effect in Future Fertility
To keep things simple, assume going forward that we birth the same number of children each year, the death rate stays the same, and no one lives past one hundred years. Now say there are 100,000 people age 100. By next year, all will have died. The group that was 99 will now be 100. Because more of them were born, there will now be, say, 105,000 people 100 years old. After two years have passed, the new group of 100 hundred year old people will be the people who are 98 years old today. They will be a still larger group. That will continue for one hundred years.
At the other end of the age continuum, we have the largest number of children ever born in a year and the largest age cohort alive. A year later, this youngest age cohort will replace a smaller cohort a year older than them. But keep in mind that for the next forty-five years the number of women of childbearing age will be increasing each year. Therefore, each year the total fertility rate will need to fall slightly more below the replacement rate if the population is to stabilize. It can then rise to the replacement rate after forty-five years. This will continue until 2120 when each age cohort is the largest age cohort that has ever existed for that age. This is the primary driver of population growth going forward but there is at least one other key factor. (Clearly, I am oversimplifying to illustrate my point. We are not down to replacement rate fertility, so there is still some marginal population growth due to “excess” fertility.)
Furthermore, actual global death rates are not constant. They are dropping. People are living longer. So not only is each age cohort larger than the one before, it is living slightly longer than the one before. This too contributes to population growth over coming decades.
Therefore, we would need considerably less than replacement-rate fertility to limit global population growth substantially. In fact, there are credible projections of a population peak at fewer than nine billion. Demographers once assumed transition to low fertility and death rates would stabilize at about the replacement rate. Instead, the fertility rate has dropped well below replacement rate in nearly every affluent nation, in some cases nearly one child per woman. From the narrow view of CO2 emissions, this may look like a good thing. From a holistic standpoint, many social scientists are troubled. Depopulation can be as destructive to human well-being as overpopulation.
The Depopulation Problem
A vibrant society needs a critical mass of productive workers relative to its dependents (primarily children and the elderly.) This is the dependency ratio (dependents divided by workers multiplied by 100). With excessively low fertility rates, it is possible to have a great imbalance with a large number of seniors and too few workers to provide for society. We have already seen that current UN projections say we will have nearly the same number of children now as in 2100 but the overall population will be nearly 50% larger at eleven billion. That growth is a consequence of a burgeoning number of elders. A smaller population of nine billion may mean fewer total people but an even worse dependency ratio.
Modest help may come from lengthening the number of years people work or a higher participation rate in the work force for working age people but at some point that will be insufficient. Then consider the possibility of medical breakthroughs that cure cancer or dramatically reduce heart disease. That means more people living longer, intensifying the dependency ratio imbalance.
As an ever shrinking number of people (potentially a minority of the population) is expected to support everyone else, improvement in living standards will begin to stall and possibly reverse, making the world ripe for any number of societal dysfunctions. It will not take eighty years for this challenge to become real. Japan is already struggling with these issues. China is already headed down this road. One can envision China opening up to immigration from the remaining regions with the highest fertility rate and investing there resources in growth economies, but if every nation is headed to fertility rates well below the replacement rates, that is only a temporary fix. The dependency ratio for a world with eleven billion people is already seen as a challenge. The only way to get a peak population under nine billion people is to achieve fertility rates well below replacement rates substantially intensifying the dependency ratio imbalance just a generation or two down the road. (For more detail see the Brookings' piece, How will we cope when there are too few young people in the world?)
Decoupled Economic Growth
At the most basic level, climate policy needs to be about economic growth decoupled from CO2 emissions. Population growth is one issue driving this need for economic growth. But also consider people are advocating for a $15 living wage for every worker in the United States. That would put nearly every US worker in the top 10% of wage earners in the world. Meanwhile, despite astonishing improvements in human well-being around the world and the dramatic reduction in extreme poverty, there are still hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty. A couple billion more have more stable lives but still live well below standards we would consider tolerable. If it is a matter of justice that everyone in the US has a $15 an hour living standard, then it is only just that all citizens of the world have something approximating that standard. The only way that happens is through economic growth. Measures like population control are shortsighted and potentially calamitous. The principle mission is decoupling economic growth from fossil fuel consumption, along with other disruptive measures like decoupling land use from agricultural production.
Worldwide, there were 12.6 million deaths for children under five years old in 1990. As of 2017, there were 5.4 million. Keep in mind that the world population grew by 50% during this time. Had death rates continued at the 1990 rate, there would have been about 19 million childhood deaths.
One of most important observations (among many) from the late Hans Roslings’ Factfulness:
When a population is not growing over a long period of time, and the population curve is flat, this must mean that each generation of new parents is the same size as the previous one. For thousands of years up to 1800 the population curve was almost flat. Have you heard people say that humans used to live in balance with nature?
Well, yes, there was a balance. But let’s avoid the rose-tinted glasses. Until 1800, women gave birth to six children on average. So the population should have increased with each generation. Instead, it stayed more or less stable. Remember the child skeletons in the graveyards of the past? On average four of six children died before becoming parents themselves, leaving just two surviving children to parent the next generation. There was a balance. It wasn’t because humans lived in balance with nature. Humans died in balance with nature. It was utterly brutal and tragic.
Today, humanity is once again reaching a balance. The number of parents is no longer increasing. But this balance is dramatically different from the old balance. The new balance is nice: the typical parents have two children, and neither of them dies. For the first time in history, we live in balance. (pp. 87-88)
Demographers refer to this as the Demographic Transition – the move from high fertility and mortality rates to low fertility and mortality rates. A few centuries ago, living standards in some regions began to rise via technology, specialization of labor, and extensive trade. That trend dramatically accelerated about 250 years ago with the Industrial Revolution. Fewer people died young and more people lived to old age, but the fertility rate lagged in its decline. The population explosion of recent generations was due to this lagging decrease in the fertility rate relative to the falling mortality rate.
The Demographic Transition began in Europe but we have seen it repeated in every part of the world in recent generations. The global fertility rate is now below 2.5 children per woman, down from 5.0 fifty years ago, and heading toward “balance” at 2.1 children within about twenty years.* Furthermore, life expectancy at birth in recent generations has risen from about 30 years throughout human history to 72 today – in excess of 80 in some affluent countries.
Every time I reflect on these numbers, I think of Isaiah 66:20, where Isaiah describes the new creation:
Babies in Jerusalem will no longer live only a few days. Old people will not fail to live for a very long time. Those who live to the age of 100 will be thought of as still being young when they die. Those who die before they are 100 will be considered as having been cursed by God.
We are approaching that reality. The world we live in today was positively Utopian until the past generation or two.
We did not get here by being content to die in harmony with nature. We decoupled from nature. We become radically more innovative and productive. The key to future well-being and the welfare of the planet lies in greater decoupling – climate friendly fuels, environment friendly production, more productive agriculture, and the eventual transition to endlessly recycled materials. It must be a world where everyone experiences abundance through their participation in networks of productivity and exchange. That is what "living in balance with nature" truly is.
(Note: At replacement rate fertility, the global population will grow from about 7.7 billion to between nine and eleven billion by century’s end. The children born in 2020 will likely have children at about the replacement rate. However, the population born in 2010 is larger than the coming 2020 population, and the population born in 2000 is larger than 2010’s. If all these age cohorts simply replace themselves in the next few decades, the population will continue grow but at a decelerating rate.)
Alongside life expectancy, a second measure of prosperity demographers frequently use is the child mortality rate. The child mortality rate is the number of children that die between birth and their fifth birthday, per 1,000 live births. Because the first years of life are when human beings are most vulnerable, their ability to survive the first years of life says a lot about the state of their society; thus the significance of the child mortality rate.
So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are estimates of the infant mortality rate (deaths by age one) typical of social scientists and economists who study these issues:
In the year 1000, the average infant could expect to live about 24 years. A third died in the first year of life. Hunger and epidemic disease ravaged the survivors. By 1820, life expectation had risen to 36 years in the west, with only marginal improvement elsewhere. (Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD, 69)
Before industrialization, at least one out of every five children died before reaching his or her first birth day; that is infant mortality measured as the number of children dying before the age of one, typically exceeded 200 per 1,000 live births. … In the United States, as late as 1900, infant mortality was 160; …” (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 27)
Estimates are that child mortality were over 40% prior to 1800.
Let's look at the change in the child morality rate for the last 200 years:
Globally, that is drop from 40 children per 1,000 to 4 children per 1,000. This graphic compares various nations at 1800, 1950, 1990, and 2013.
Note that the 2013 child mortality rate for all but a few small lagging countries is lower than the rate for all but a few of the wealthiest countries in 1950. The worst country in 2013 has a rate half that of the best country in 1800.
This is not to say that every nation, or every region within a nation, or every subgroup within in a nation, have prospered equally well. Still, there is dramatic improvement in all regions of the world.
During the 1990s, there was a small increase in the rate for the former Soviet nations but that trend has turned positive again. There are disparities between Anglos and non-Anglos in the United States. The African AIDS epidemic has been harmful. Other regions face other challenges. Yet the overall trend is dramatically downward.
Using child mortality as measures of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than it has ever been and the gap is narrowing between the top and bottom rungs of the global social ladder. Again, most of this change has occurred over a time when the total world population grew sixfold, from less than 1 billion in 1800 to about 6.6 billion today!
So as we look at the trajectory of change in the world, we find an unprecedented rise in prosperity. It is uneven improvement but every corner of the planet has improved and the gap between top and bottom nations is closing.
Demographers commonly use life expectancy rates as a measure of societal well-being. Life expectancy is the number of years someone is expected to live at the time they are born based on actuarial science. Long life is a universal indicator of prosperity across cultures and time. It is an important measure to demographers because achieving it requires a complex mix of variables, like a sustained nutritious food supply, a sanitary and safe environment, relatively little disease, absence of war, and a stable society.
So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are estimates of two social scientists and economists typical of those who study these issues:
For most of its existence, homo sapiens lived in far-flung hunter-and-gathering communities, each of which was quite small and barely able to reproduce itself. Life expectancy at birth was hardly twenty-five years on average, and those persons who survived childhood often died violently, in combat with other hunters, at relatively young ages. (Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, 48)
For much of human history, average life expectancy used to be 20-30 years. By 1900, it had climbed to about 31 years … By 2003 it was 66.8 years. (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 31)
To put the last statement by Goklany in perspective lets graph the estimated life expectancy on a chart:
If we show only the last 250 years we get a clearer picture of what has happened:
Using life expectancy as a measure of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than it has ever been. The gap is narrowing between the top and bottomof the global community. More amazing, most of this change occurred over a time when the total world population grew sixfold, from less than 1 billion in 1800 to about 6.6 billion today!
This is not to say that every nation, or every region within a nation, or every subgroup within in a nation, has prospered equally well. AIDS has been devastating in regions of Africa. War and discord has harmed some nations. Yet over the past forty years, we see broad improvement in the world. Keep in mind that the global population nearly doubled during this time:
The trajectory of change is an unprecedented rise in prosperity. It is uneven growth but every corner of the planet has improved and the gap between top and bottom nations is closing.
Were Slaves Immigrants? Yes. If that answer troubles you, please hear me out.
Ben Carson touched off a firestorm this week when he referred to slaves as immigrants. (Barak Obama has done the same several times.) The uproar has been that equating slavery and immigration minimizes the horrors of slavery. I have engaged in a number of social media discussions on this topic. At the crux of the matter is volition. Are people brought to a place against their will immigrants? Merriam Webster Dictionary:
Immigrant - “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.”
Volition is not part of the definition. As any demographer will tell you, populations grow (or decline) via three factors: births, deaths, and migration. When looking at a particular locale, people who come to that locale are immigrants. People who go from that locale to another are emigrants. Births and immigration grow the population. Deaths and emigration shrink it. It is a closed system. Volition is not part of the equation.
I am in agreement with concerns about minimizing slavery and I worry that statements by Carson and Obama risk doing that. As Jemar Tisby writes, a generous reading of Carson’s characterization is that “African slaves endured unimaginable hardship to carve out a life for themselves and their descendants.” I think that was indeed the intent but it is challenging. Framing slaves as rough equivalents of people who bought a ticket on a boat to come to America in search of a better life minimizes slavery. Both were immigrants but with very very different stories. The desire to present African-Americans as other than simply victims while embracing the horrors of slavery is a tough needle to thread in the space of a few words as both these men were trying to do.
“Increasing mobility has left us uprooted and disconnected from communities in America.” This is a common refrain going back at least 100 years. Think of the song following World War I that asked how are you going to keep them down on the farm once they have seen gay Paree’? The lament of increasing mobility is a compelling narrative except for one minor problem: Mobility has been declining for decades.
Sociologist Claude Fischer writes:
The evidence that mobility has declined is more robust for roughly the past 65 years, thanks to annual census-bureau mass surveys. Around 1950, about 20 per cent of Americans changed homes from one year to the next. In the 1980s, under 18 per cent did. By the 2000s, under 15 per cent – and now we are approaching annual moving rates of only 10 per cent. About two-thirds of movers do not go far, relocating within the same county, and the frequency of such local moves has dropped by about half since the Second World War. The proportion of Americans who move across county and state lines is considerably lower, but that rate, too, has dropped substantially, from about 6.5 per cent in the 1950s to under 4 per cent now.
So what is the cause? My best guess is that the greatest single factor in the great settling down was the increasing physical and economic security of US life.
Thanks to a growing and stabilising economy, spreading affluence, vastly improved public health, the establishment of government institutions from policing to business regulation, and all sorts of ‘safety net’ programmes over several generations – from Social Security to federal disaster assistance – fewer and fewer Americans have been forced to move because of unemployment, floods, the death of a breadwinner, and so on. Greater security also helps account for an apparent shift from the 19th to 20th centuries in who was likeliest to move.
I have done extensive work on tracing my ancestors. I have traced every line back to at least my third great grandparents, most of who were born in the early 1800s. I know more about some than others but the part that has always intrigued me is how much they moved. I would estimate that the majority lived in at least three different states and in more than five counties over their lifetimes. I suspect most people who have identified American ancestors this far back have similar stories. But I have also noticed one anomaly.
My great grandmother, Augusta (Holmes) Kruse was born in Dekalb County, Missouri, in 1870, the year after her parents had moved there from Plymouth, Massachusetts. Her ancestors go back to seven of the Mayflower passengers and include many other people who arrived shortly thereafter. Her family had stayed in place for nearly 250 years. Her maternal grandfather, Ebenezer Pierce, was seaman who owned ships and sailed the world. Her mother had been to finishing school in Boston. Her grandfather Holmes was an accomplished carpenter. These were not exceptionally wealthy people but they clearly had stable comfortable lives. Her parents moved west because of her father’s health. Augusta married my great grandfather, Carl P. Kruse, who had emigrated from a small town in Denmark where his family had lived for generations and where his father had served in the Danish Parliament. Because of the population explosion in Denmark, farmland was scarce, and wanting to farm, Carl came to America.
Most of my other family lines consist primarily of farmers, miners, and laborers. Ancestors in these families seemed to be constantly on the move. This anecdotal analysis of my family history seems consistent with what the author is describing.
Demographers talk of migration in terms of push and pull factors. Push factors are those that make the status quo more unbearable to maintain. Pull factors are those that promise relatively better circumstance than the status quo. It would appear that in past generations, push factors might have played a bigger role; things like war, drought, local economies gone bad, and the like. However, as America has become more prosperous, there have been fewer pushes pushing fewer of us. Migration is more about positive pulls.
The “settling” of America is one more piece of evidence about an improving world in terms of material well-being. But as the author notes, we still have challenges to social cohesion. While improved transportation and communication may not have made us more inclined to move, it may have reshaped who we choose to interact with in our communities. And as the global economy reshapes the work we do, the trauma of regional job loss is possibly made more traumatic because we are less and less accustomed to uprooting and relocating. Focusing on increasing mobility as a cause of rootlessness takes us in an unproductive direction.
Life expectancy at birth is one of the single best indicators of societal well-being. So many things have to work well for the great majority of people to live long lives that the high life expectancy serves as proxy for holistic well-being. The measure is of particular value in that it measures something relatively concrete, as opposed to income (which has varying impacts relative to local living standards and exchange rates) or happiness (a highly subjective term.)
Throughout human history, global life expectancy at birth was about 30 years. This does not mean that everyone died before age thirty. It is an average age of death. One in four children died before their first birthday (it is less than 1% in developed nations today). Some people lived to be quite old. But on average people lived to be thirty.
Over the past two hundred years, something has changed. Global life expectancy at birth has more than doubled and it is still improving. I won't give a dissertation on why that might be but rather invite you to realize that contrary to our intuitions, news reports, and personal biases, we are living through the most astonishing improvement in human flourishing in human history.
Here is a chart showing the trend.
This chart offers an animated presentation of the improvement by nation.
The world is becoming a better place. It is not utopia. We are not without substantial challenges. But we are becoming (as in movement along a trajectory) better (as in measurably improved according to a standard.)
The Human Development Index is a United Nations measure of well-being combing data about income, literacy, education, and life expectancy. Here is the index for the nations of the world in 1980 and then in 2012. The reality is that we are living through the most astonishing transformation toward human well-being in all of history. You can find the interactive version of the chart at Our Data.
Are you smarter than a chimp? When it comes to knowledge about global socioeconomic trends, there is a good chance you are not. For years, Swedish global health expert, Hans Rosling, has been giving Ted talks and making presentations about global trends. One his favorite teaching tools is to ask people a question like this:
Globally, over the past 20 years, the rate extreme poverty has:
Doubled.
Stayed the same.
Decreased by more than half.
Now chimps will select at random, giving a 33% chance of each answer. Yet when Rosling asks audiences, at least half will say A, a sizable percentage will say B, while a few will say C. Yet C is the correct answer! This is the case on one variable after another. Audiences routinely score worse than chimps, choosing the most negative option.
As an old adage has it, "It isn't what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know that ain't so." That we routinely pick the wrong answer more often than chimps shows that we clearly we have bias.
In the Ted talk, How not to be ignorant about the world, Hans' son Rosling notes that part of the problem is our education system. Teachers go to college at a particular point in time and learn the state of the world at that time. But they tend not to learn about ongoing developments. The data has often been hard to come by and hard to interpret. So teachers are biased by what they learned years ago. (Reporter have the same problem.) But there are other factors.
During our evolutionary history, our brains became wired to notice threats. Hunters walking through the brush who were attentive to the possibility of tigers lying in wait, likely survived those who went about carelessly enjoying a beautiful day. So when we reflect on broad human trends, we are disposed to fixate on perceived threats. What was useful for us in the wild, is counter-productive for us as we try to interpret socioeconomic trends. If you want to outscore a chimp on an exam about global well-being, Ola Rosling suggests that you must drop your predispositions and adopt these four rules of thumb:
1. Assume most things are improving. 2. Assume most people are in the middle of a distribution, not a binary of rich and poor. 3. Assume social development precedes becoming wealthy. (Don’t assume that a population must be rich before meeting basic social needs.) 4. Assume you are exaggerating the threat if the topic is something about which you personally have great fear.
Additionally, Hans, Ola, and others have been working to build the Gapminder website to provide you with data that can be presented in meaningful ways. But one of the most important contributions the Roslings have made is their collection of entertaining and informative videos. In this post I am including every video I can find with a brief annotation. (I'll add more as I find any.) Many of the videos overlap or cover similar data but they are all well worth viewing. So here is your resource for becoming smarter than a chimp. Don't say I never gave you anything.
(This link also has links to most of these videos including some shorts not listed here: Gapminder Video)
Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes (2010)
If you are just getting acquainted with Rosling, I'd begin here. This 4 minute presentation gives you a quick sense of what he is talking about.
Hans and Ola Rosling: How not to be ignorant about the world. TED June 2014
This is the second video to watch. The front half is Hans making his case that the world is improving and the back half is Ola explaining, as I recounted above, why are so disinclined to see positive change.
Hans Rosling: The magic washing machine. TED December 2010
This is the third one to watch. This one of my favorites. While fully embracing the concern about environmental impacts of economic growth, Rosling shows the importance of economic growth through the story of the washing machine.
THE REST ARE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
Hans Rosling: The best stats you've ever seen. TED February 2006
The TED presentation that kicked it all off. He focuses on the positive changes underway in world and points to his efforts to liberate, integrate, and animate data, and to find ways to present data the public finds understandable.
Hans Rosling: New Insights on Poverty. TED March 2007
Rosling shows that social development tends to precede economic development. He addresses the issue that unfortunately to date, economic development has always been based on fossil fuels. Higher yields, technology, and markets are key to ending poverty but there are more dimensions that need our attention like human rights, environment, governance, economic growth, education, health, and culture. The ending has a great surprise!
Human Rights and Democracy Statistics- Gapminder c. 2008
Rosling describes why human rights are so hard describe and evaluate.
Rosling shows that countries that have developed from poverty to well-being have done so at far faster rates that Western nations did. Poor countries today can make the transition much quicker because of what previous countries have learned.
Hans Rosling: Insights on HIV, in stunning data visuals. TED February 2009
Uses Gapminder data to show nuances in how AIDS has spread and what it takes to defeat it.
Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset. TED June 2009
This is the third video should watch. Rosling deconstructs the dichotomy of wealthy and developing nations, and challenges the idea of thinking in sweeping terms like "Africa."
The Joy of Stats with Professor Hans Rosling - Gapminder c. 2010
Rosling shows how making data available and animating is empowering people to make better decisions, sometimes without really realizing they are using statistics.
Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when. TED Nov 2009
Rosling forecasts when China and India catches up with the USA and UK.
Hans Rosling: Global population growth, box by box. TED June 2010
Rosling says that child survival is the new green. This video explains why.
Hans Rosling: The good news of the decade? We're winning the war against child mortality. TED September 2010
Rosling breaks down the remarkable trends in child mortality. Education of women accounts for at least 50% of the drop.
Hans Rosling: Religions and babies. TED April 2012
Religion is not a factor in family size. No significant difference between Islamic and Christian countries when it comes to births per woman. The defining difference is economic well-being.
DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population. BBC November 2013
A one hour investigation into the dynamics of population growth using stories about real live families interspersed with Rosling's entertaining presentation of data.
Don't Panic - How to End Poverty in 15 Years. BBC September 2015
Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling are truly brilliant and entertaining. The first part of this video highlights how poorly we assess what is happening in the world. The back half gives some simple tips on how to avoid developing false perceptions and suggests why it is important that we do so. Enjoy!
"The legendary statistical showman Professor Hans Rosling returns with a feast of facts and figures as he examines the extraordinary target the world commits to this week - to eradicate extreme poverty worldwide. In the week the United Nations presents its new goals for global development, Don't Panic - How to End Poverty in 15 Years looks at the number one goal for the world: eradicating, for the first time in human history, what is called extreme poverty - the condition of almost a billion people, currently measured as those living on less than $1.25 a day.
Rosling uses holographic projection technology to wield his iconic bubble graphs and income mountains to present an upbeat assessment of our ability to achieve that goal by 2030. Eye-opening, funny and data-packed performances make Rosling one of the world's most sought-after and influential speakers. He brings to life the global challenge, interweaving powerful statistics with dramatic human stories from Africa and Asia. In Malawi, the rains have failed as Dunstar and Jenet harvest their maize. How many hunger months will they face when it runs out? In Cambodia, Srey Mao is about to give birth to twins but one is upside-down. She's had to borrow money to pay the medical bills. Might this happy event throw her family back into extreme poverty?
The data show that recent global progress is "the greatest story of our time - possibly the greatest story in all of human history". Hans concludes by showing why eradicating extreme poverty quickly will be easier than slowly.
Don't Panic - How To End Poverty In 15 Years follows Rosling's previous award-winning BBC productions Don't Panic - The Truth About Population and The Joy Of Stats."
"The decline of white suburbia has already begun. ...
... For the Brookings Institution, Frey explains that white populations accounted for just 9 percent of the population growth of the suburbs (in the 100 largest metro areas) between 2000 and 2010. The Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings just launched a fascinating map that shows where white cities and suburbs gained and lost populations. It shows that some metro areas are already breaking from the population pattern that has fueled the last half-century of growth: white losses in cities, white gains in suburbs."
If billions of impoverished humans are not offered a shot at genuine development, the environment will not be saved. And that requires not just help in financing low-carbon energy sources, but also a lot of new energy, period. Offering a solar panel for every thatched roof is not going to cut it.
“We shouldn’t be talking about 10 villages that got power for a light bulb,” said Joyashree Roy, a professor of economics at Jadavpur University in India who was among the leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
“What we should be talking about,” she said, “is how the village got a power connection for a cold storage facility or an industrial park.”
Changing the conversation will not be easy. Our world of seven billion people — expected to reach 11 billion by the end of the century — will require an entirely different environmental paradigm....
... The “eco-modernists” propose economic development as an indispensable precondition to preserving the environment. Achieving it requires dropping the goal of “sustainable development,” supposedly in harmonious interaction with nature, and replacing it with a strategy to shrink humanity’s footprint by using nature more intensively.
“Natural systems will not, as a general rule, be protected or enhanced by the expansion of humankind’s dependence upon them for sustenance and well-being,” they wrote.
To mitigate climate change, spare nature and address global poverty requires nothing less, they argue, than “intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world.”
As Mr. Shellenberger put it, the world would have a better shot at saving nature “by decoupling from nature rather than coupling with it.”
This new framework favors a very different set of policies than those now in vogue. Eating the bounty of small-scale, local farming, for example, may be fine for denizens of Berkeley and Brooklyn. But using it to feed a world of nine billion people would consume every acre of the world’s surface. Big Agriculture, using synthetic fertilizers and modern production techniques, could feed many more people using much less land and water.
As the manifesto notes, as much as three-quarters of all deforestation globally occurred before the Industrial Revolution, when humanity was supposedly in harmony with Mother Nature. Over the last half century, the amount of land required for growing crops and animal feed per average person declined by half. …
… Development would allow people in the world’s poorest countries to move into cities — as they did decades ago in rich nations — and get better educations and jobs. Urban living would accelerate demographic transitions, lowering infant mortality rates and allowing fertility rates to decline, taking further pressure off the planet.
“By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth — even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends,” the manifesto argues. …
Read the whole thing. Decoupling is essential. We have already seen this with land use. We are using no more land for agriculture in the United States than we were 100 years ago. Before that time it took a fixed amount of land to feed each person. That same decoupling is developing worldwide but it could be accelerated. The amount of energy consumed per unit of GDP has now begun to decline. We see this decoupling with other resources. Add a move to solar and nuclear power in combination with decoupling and we have a real chance to drive down carbon emissions drastically.
I haven't yet read the whole EcoModernist Manifesto linked in the article, but the parameters and reasoning laid here is the best articulation of my views on economic development and sustainability that I have read.
Study in Lancet Says Rise Is Result of Dramatic Health-Care Advances
... The rise in global life expectancy is mainly the result of dramatic advances in health care. In richer countries longer lifespans are spurred by a big drop in deaths related to heart disease, while poorer countries have seen big declines in the death of children from ailments such as pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria. ...
There are many other graphs that could be shown about a host of important social indicators but the article closes with the most important one: life expectancy. Improvements in life expectancy require that a wide range of variables move in a positive direction and for that reason an improvement in life expectancy is often a proxy for overall well-being.
The author closes with:
So complain all you want about how horrible everything is. There's certainly a lot left to fix. But as you complain, remember:
It shows the risk of dying at any given age, with the lighter-colored line representing the risk in 1970 and the darker line representing the risk in 2010. In 1970, people had a 28% chance of dying before they turned 50. By 2010, that risk had been cut in half. For children under five, the news is even better: mortality dropped from 14% in 1970 all the way down to 5% in 2010.
When it comes to understanding inequality, the debate is frequently encumbered with a multitude of misunderstandings about data. When talking about wealth inequality, we see statements like “85 people own more wealth than the bottom half of humanity.” Wealth is routinely misunderstood to mean the money and things someone owns. It isn’t. Wealth is someone’s total assets minus their liabilities. It is common to have negative wealth. The peasant farmer in rural China who has managed to save $200 and is debt free, is “wealthier” than the high-income young M. D. who has a negative net worth due to substantial student loans (i.e., she owes more than she presently owns.) I recently wrote about this in The World’s Bottom 10%: 7.5% Live in North America and None Live in China … And Other True But Worthless Facts.
Then there is the constant citation of growing inequality in pre-tax and pre-transfer income in the U. S. (usually just stated as “income”), and the need to rectify it through redistribution. But if you only look at pre-tax and pre-transfer income, no amount of redistribution will have one penny of impact. We could transfer $100,000 to every household in the bottom half the income distribution and it wouldn’t matter because it would be income after taxes and after transfers. When we look at after-tax and after-transfer income, we see that there has been little change in inequality between those at the 95th percentile and those at the 20th percentile for the last twenty years. See my post, Is Income Inequality Really the Problem? It Depends on What You Call Income.
Today, Arnold Kling reviews Chasing the American Dreamby sociologists Mark Robert Rank, Thomas A. Hirschl, and Kirk A. Foster. (See Kling's post: The Longitude of Well-Being) He cites a stat that shows that homeownership rates have remained fairly constant at about 67%. Kling then asks you what percentage of Americans aged 55 have owned a home? A) 50%, B) 70%, and C) 90%. Kling says he would have guessed 70% when in fact it is 90%. The 67% number is a cross-sectional piece of data, taking a “snapshot” of homeownership at a given point in time. The 90% number is a longitudinal piece of data, taking a “video” of homeownership for over a period of time.
… the question that I asked concerns what demographers refer to as longitudinal information. If you follow given individuals over a long period, what sort of cumulative outcomes will you observe? In particular, over a lifetime, how many people will at some point own a home? To answer a longitudinal question, you need to use longitudinal data. To instead use time-series cross-section data risks making serious errors.
Most of the conventional wisdom about relative economic well-being, including the famous studies by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, commits the time-series cross-section fallacy. Rank, Hirschl, and Foster did not set out to debunk this fallacy or to attack the many economists guilty of it. Instead, they took what seemed to them a natural approach for studying the evolution of wealth and poverty: longitudinal data. The result, in my reading, is that, like the boy in the fable, they have in an innocent, unintended fashion exposed statistical nakedness among many economists who are regarded as experts on the topic of inequality.
Once you think about it, the truth about homeownership rates makes sense. At some point in our lives, nearly all of us have been renters. In addition, most of us are likely to "downsize" as we grow older, and in the process many of us may choose to rent.
Kling moves on to the authors’ discussion of how many years a household spends in poverty or in affluence between ages 25 and 60. Kling offers an interesting alternative.
I would be interested in what the data show if, rather than looking at the extremes, one does the opposite. That is, throw out each household's lowest and highest three years of income. For the remaining years of income, take the average relative to the poverty line. If this average is below 150 percent of the poverty line, call it low. If it is above 500 percent of the poverty line (which works out to about 200 percent of the median), call it high. Then calculate the proportion of households that have high, medium, and low incomes by this longitudinal measure.
This would produce a very different breakdown. For instance, suppose that, rather than quitting my job to start an Internet business, I had kept working and that my salary had continued to increase gradually until I reached age 50. In that case, under the authors' measure, our household would be in the bottom of the income distribution, because of the "poverty" of my graduate school years and my failure to achieve the income level that they require for "affluence." However, using my approach, my household would have been somewhere in the vicinity of the boundary between high-income and middle-income. That seems much more reasonable to me.
Overall, as with homeownership data, the longitudinal view of income paints a picture in which life-cycle variation and idiosyncratic factors play a role. This role is overlooked in discussions of inequality that commit the time-series cross-section fallacy.
As I read Kling’s piece, I began to wonder how many people have had pimples. My guess is that the answer approaches 100%. Yet we don’t see headlines about acne being experienced by more than 90% of people at least one year in their lives. We understand that for most people this is a temporary life-stage issue. The universe of people for whom acne is an ongoing problem is much smaller. The same is true with poverty. I’m intrigued by Kling’s idea of discarding outliers and looking at 90% of the data between the outliers.
The reality is that no one set of data, or particular lens, can tell us the whole picture about issues like poverty and inequality. We must look at the issues from multiple angles to get to the truth. But it is incumbent on us to be cognizant of what lens we are using at any given time and what that lens is actually showing; in this case, knowing the difference between a snapshot and a video.
Dirty air killed an alarming 7 million people – or, one of every eight human lives lost – in 2012, according to new estimates released today by the World Health Organization (WHO).
The new data shows that air pollution has become the world’s largest single environmental healthrisk.
n 2010, air pollution ranked as the fourth leading preventable health risk, behind poor diet, high blood pressure and tobacco smoke, according to a major study funded by the Gates Foundation.
Indoor air pollution, primarily caused by burning solid fuels for heating and cooking, accounted for slightly more than half – 4.3 million – of those deaths in 2012.
"By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in fact, Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world is getting worse. The belief that the world can’t solve extreme poverty and disease isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful. That’s why in this year’s letter we take apart some of the myths that slow down the work. The next time you hear these myths, we hope you will do the same." - Bill Gates
I sometimes have issues with Gates' optimism about aid but I think he does a fairly balanced job in this piece. There were also two graphs that I really liked. They demonstrate once again how misugided so many doomsayers are. There is reason for hope. How can we get more of this good stuff to happen better and faster, in sustainable ways is the big question.
Almost five years ago I did a series of posts on Bill Bishop's book The Big Sort. (Series here) Bishop explains that for at least thirty years we have been sorting ourselves into enclaves of polarized groups, even physically locating ourselves with others who think and live like us. But the big question is why?
Avi Tuschman has a piece in The Atlantic that has some interesting ideas, Why Americans Are So Polarized: Education and Evolution. The lead reads: "Improvements in learning—which correlates with stronger partisanship—and the tendency to choose likeminded mates may be helping to create divided politics."
He writes:
"... The dynamics that fuel the Big Sort accelerated in the second half of the 20th century, coinciding with a massive increase in education. Between 1960 and 2008, for instance, the proportion of women with bachelor’s degrees nearly quintupled. The dramatic rise in educational attainment has a couple of unexpected side effects. For one, research shows that higher education has a polarizing effect on people: Highly educated liberals become more liberal, while highly educated conservatives grow more conservative. Second, people with college degrees enjoy greater freedoms, including social and geographic mobility. During the 1980s and 1990s, 45 percent of college-educated Americans moved to a new state within five years of graduation, compared with only 19 percent of their counterparts who had only a high-school diploma.
Meanwhile, evolutionary forces are pulling these more mobile, like-minded individuals together, because our political orientations play a key role in our choice of a mate. In society as a whole, spouses tend to resemble one another—at least a bit more than they would if coupling occurred at random—on most biometric and social traits. These traits include everything from skin color to earlobe size to income to major personality dimensions like Extraversion. Most of these statistical relationships are quite weak. But one of the strongest of all correlations between spouses by far is between their political orientations (0.65, to be precise). Spouses tend to have similar attitudes on moral issues like school prayer and abortion not because they converge over time, but rather because “birds of a feather flock together.” Biologists call this assortative mating. ...
I think he is on to something. I think he is also correct when he writes:
... The silver lining to these gloomy findings is that our ideological positions are not set in stone. Only about half of the variance in political orientations comes from genetic differences between individuals; the rest comes from the environment. So it’s certainly possible to transcend the attitudes that threaten to divide us. The first steps in doing so are to understand our political nature, develop realistic expectations about ideological diversity, and make a renewed commitment to pragmatism over ideology."
I think Tuschman is on to something. From my perspective, I find myself asking what role the church plays in all of this. Seems to me the church just mirrors what is happening in society and Christians on the left and right are quite content with that.
This is just fantastic! Hans Rosling pulls together many of his various presentations over recent years and melds them into a one hour long presentation about the astonishing way our world is improving while pointing to challenges that lie ahead. I know this long but if you watch this closely and learn, you will be well positioned to accurately reflect on the alarmist claims of environmentalists, neo-cons, and a host of other ideologies. If I were teaching a class on demography or economic development, this video would be the first hour of the first class of the semester.
I still hear many people today talk about the "Third World." It refers to those nations that were poor and not aligned with either the Western capitalism (First World) or the communist world (Second World.) The Third World has vanished and it is time to bury the term. The world’s nations and populations exist on a continuum and there are now multiple poles, not two, shaping the world. Furthermore, the story is not one of descent into global dystopia but one of rising prosperity. It is hard to meaningfully address contemporary problems with antiquated frameworks.
It’s time to develop a new framework for assessing the post-Cold War, post-9/11 world. ...
... The three worlds used to be capitalist, communist, and the rest. Now they are the West, the failed states, and the emerging challengers. But that's still too simple a view. A small and declining number of developing countries are charity cases. And none are competitors with us in a zero-sum game. Rather than dividing most of the planet into two threatening classes, we need to see states of the developing world as vital partners—both in strengthening the global economy and in preserving the global environment. ...
... Given that much of the world only makes headlines when it is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis and U.S. assistance is on the way, it isn’t surprising that the average American thinks things are going to hell in a handbasket: a recent survey of Americans found that two thirds believe extreme poverty worldwide has doubled over the past 20 years. The truth is that it has more than halved. This might also explain why Americans think that 28 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid—more than 28 times the actual share.
According to the World Bank, the developing world as a whole has seen average incomes rise from $1,000 in 1980 to $2,300 in 2011. Life expectancy at birth has increased from 60 to 69 years over that same time, and college enrollment has climbed from 6 to 23 percent of the college-age population. Progress is happening everywhere, including Africa: Six of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies over the past decade are in Africa. There were no inter-state conflicts in the world in 2013 and, despite tragic violence in countries including Syria and Afghanistan, the number of ongoing civil wars has dropped considerably over the last three decades. Emerging markets themselves are also playing an ever-expanding role in ensuring global security. The developing world is the major source for blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers, who are ending wars and preserving stability in 16 different operations worldwide. The 20 biggest contributors of police and military personnel to the UN’s 96,887 peacekeepers are developing countries. ...
Our friend and colleague Max Fisher over at Worldviews has posted another 40 maps that explain the world, building on his original classic of the genre. But this is Wonkblog. We're about charts. And one of the great things about charts is that they show not just how things are -- but how they're changing.
So we searched for charts that would tell not just the story of how the world is -- but where it's going. Some of these charts are optimistic, like the ones showing huge gains in life expectancy in poorer nations. Some are more worryisome -- wait till you see the one on endangered species. But together they tell a story of a world that's changing faster than at arguably any other time in human history. ...
As the author notes, we have challenges but we hardly descending into some global dystopia. I think these charts give a pretty holistic view. Here are a three examples. It was commonly believed that primitive societies were more peaceful and that modern civilization gave rise to unprecedented violence. This chart compares death rates by war in primitive societies as calculated by anthropologists to the death rates for Europe/USA in the 20th century. And then there is this:
The graphs point to environmental protection and adaptation as the biggest problems in the days ahead. Those challenges are not insurmountable. Energy sources like natural gas and nuclear power can be used in the interim on the way to practical renewable technologies. Genetically modified crops can help to reduce water consumption, increase yield, and improve hardiness. Innovations in fields like biotechnology, nanotechnology, and 3-D printing hold the promise of revolutionizing the world economy into a less wasteful and more affordable human existence for everyone. There is work to do but there is also much reason for hope of a better world.
What's the best nation in the world to live in if you enjoy, ya know, staying alive?
That would be Monaco, where a person born in 2013 can expect to live on average up to age 90. Conversely, the worst place to be born last year in terms of suffering an early death is Chad, where the typical life stops a year before one's 50th birthday.
These insights are crammed with dozens of others into "Life Expectancy at Birth," a fascinating new visualization from data artist Marcelo Duhalde. ...
These maps are four years old but for some reason Upworthy decided to resurrect them. Interesting stuff. And it is from my graduate alma mater Kansas State University.
On of the things I noticed was a strong streak of morality running from the upper Great Plains southeastward toward the Mid-Atlantic states. Looks to me like there is a wealth of social science research in the making based on these maps. Here is the one for greed.
As as starting point, here's a graph showing changes in households by type. Married households with children were 40.3% of all US households in 1970; in 2012, that share had fallen by more than half to 19.6%. Interestingly, the share of households that were married without children has stayed at about 30%. Other Family Households, usually meaning single-parent families with children, has risen. Overall, the share of U.S. households that involve a family (either married or with children) was 81% back in 1970, but down to 66% in 2012. The share of households which are men or women living alone has risen. The figures are not the same across gender in part because of differences in older age brackets: "Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of men aged 65 and over lived with their spouse compared with less than half (45 percent) of women."
The percentage of babies born prematurely in the United States fell for the sixth straight year, but the problem remains more common than in most other industrialized nations, says an annual report card out Friday.
The nation's preterm birth rate in 2012 was 11.5%, which is a 15-year low, according to the report from the March of Dimes. But the non-profit organization says it could be as low as 9.6% if known prevention efforts were fully embraced. ...
Teen pregnancies in the developing world are declining, however 7 million girls under the age of 18 still give birth each year, 2 million young moms are under the age of 14, according to a UN report.
... It remains to be found out how many people, if you asked them, would say that they had moved or wanted to move because of politics. Liberals threaten to every four years if the Republican presidential candidate wins, but few actually make good on it.
But other political scientists have noticed that Americans are tending to move into jurisdictions that share their worldviews and can become uncomfortable when they don't fit in.
"The structure of a place cannot only shape political attitudes. It can also attract very different kinds of people," Torben Luetjen, a German political scientist who has been studying liberal and conservative enclaves in Wisconsin. "America has split into closed and radically separated enclaves that follow their own constructions of reality."
This short video gives a wonderful presentation of declining fertility rates over the past fifty years and explains what falling fertility rates mean for the world. Go to the website here: The Baby Bust
... What’s less well appreciated is how much the incidence of violence, like so many salient issues in American life, varies by region. Beyond a vague awareness that supporters of violent retaliation and easy access to guns are concentrated in the states of the former Confederacy and, to a lesser extent, the western interior, most people cannot tell you much about regional differences on such matters. Our conventional way of defining regions—dividing the country along state boundaries into a Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest—masks the cultural lines along which attitudes toward violence fall. These lines don’t respect state boundaries. To understand violence or practically any other divisive issue, you need to understand historical settlement patterns and the lasting cultural fissures they established.
The original North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Isles—and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain—each with its own religious, political, and ethnographic traits. For generations, these Euro-American cultures developed in isolation from one another, consolidating their cherished religious and political principles and fundamental values, and expanding across the eastern half of the continent in nearly exclusive settlement bands. Throughout the colonial period and the Early Republic, they saw themselves as competitors—for land, capital, and other settlers—and even as enemies, taking opposing sides in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.
There’s never been an America, but rather several Americas—each a distinct nation. There are eleven nations today. Each looks at violence, as well as everything else, in its own way.
The precise delineation of the eleven nations—which I have explored at length in my latest book, American Nations—is original to me, but I’m certainly not the first person to observe that such national divisions exist. ...
"Too many people is a big problem, but too few is a concern as well." "The story of the 21st century has been one of falling birthrates, rising standards of living, and a revolution in food production. But the global picture is uneven: As populations decline in wealthier nations, in other countries – particularly in Africa, says a new report – they are rising at rates that may mire their people in poverty."
The number of people who leave their
countries to work abroad is soaring, according to the United Nations.
More than 200 million people now live outside their country of origin,
up from 150 million a decade ago.
"... Even though casual sex is becoming more common in Japan, a 2011 survey found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of relationship — a rise of 10% from five years earlier, according to Haworth.
One of the reasons for the decline in dating and sex among young Japanese adults seems to stem from the fact that men and women have different long-term values — while men have become less career-driven, women are valuing their careers more than romantic relationships, and don't want to give up their fulfilling (and time-intensive) jobs. ..."
Where do America's Latino and Hispanic populations live? Let's start with where they're not living: in Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and a whopping chunk of the Midwest that probably hears a sías often as the cry of an Amazonian toucan. ...
... Indeed, our number-crunching shows that rather than flocking into cities, there were roughly a million fewer boomers in 2010 within a five-mile radius of the centers of the nation’s 51 largest metro areas compared to a decade earlier.
If boomers change residences, they tend to move further from the
core, and particularly to less dense places outside metropolitan areas.
Looking at the 51 metropolitan areas with more than a million residents,
areas within five miles of the center lost 17% of their boomers over
the past decade, while the balance of the metropolitan areas,
predominately suburbs, only lost 2%. In contrast places outside the 51
metro areas actually gained boomers. ...
Sunbelt, Rustbelt, Energy Belt – geographers, economists and urbanists
have long endeavored to map the economic, political and cultural
structures of America's regions. But to what extent do these places have
their own distinctive personalities?
We all have our handy stereotypes for regional personalities, of
course. Stolid Midwesterners, indolent but mercurial Southerners, and
nervous, fast-talking New Yorkers make repeat appearances in pop
culture. But can we identify the actual psychology, the deep personality
traits that define regional distinctiveness?
Those questions are at the center of a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. ...
"... Does the earth have too many people for its own good? Can another
three or four billion be added (the current United Nations projection
for 2100) without fatally harming the planet?
The issue is not one of how many people the planet can support, but how wastefully and aggressively those people act.
Ten thousand years ago, with less than five million people on the Earth, large animals were already being hunted to extinction by aggressive humans.
It was the domestication of plants and animals that filled the world
with both humans and large herbivores. Today, with seven billion people,
these herds of pigs and cattle satisfy our ever-growing demand for
meat.
Untouched wilderness seems scarcer (although national parks in the US
remain much as they were a century ago, once you leave the concession
stands and roadside attractions). But true wilderness, untouched by
humans, on Amazon rainforest and American plains ceased to exist
thousands of years ago when human populations were a tiny fraction of
what they are today. Native Americans burned, dug, and reshaped the forests and plains to suit their needslong before Columbus brought guns and horses to the New World.
Won’t too many people drain food supplies, produce poverty and damage
the climate? Again, it is not the number of people but how they act
that matters. Food supplies are fine – it is food distribution that is the problem. ...
... Fears of climate change now reverberate widely. But again, the problem is not too many people. ...
... People who fear overpopulation commit the fallacy of simply multiplying
faults – they take the most harmful and wasteful actions of any set of
people today and multiply it by the growing number of people in the
world. ...
... Doing away with billions of people is no substitute for doing away with
the vices in people’s behaviour. Instead we need to pursue cleaner,
healthier, and more ecologically sound lifestyles and ways of satisfying
our needs. For that we need more, not less, creative and passionate
people to guide us to a better future. The planet can handle it, if we
improve how we handle ourselves. ...
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United Nations forecast Thursday that the
world's population will increase from 7.2 billion today to 8.1 billion
in 2025, with most growth in developing countries and more than half in
Africa. By 2050, it will reach 9.6 billion.
India's population is
expected to surpass China's around 2028 when both countries will have
populations of around 1.45 billion, according to the report on "World
Population Prospects." While India's population is forecast to grow to
around 1.6 billion and then slowly decline to 1.5 billion in 2100,
China's is expected to start decreasing after 2030, possibly falling to
1.1 billion in 2100, it said.
The report found global fertility
rates are falling rapidly, though not nearly fast enough to avoid a
significant population jump over the next decades. In fact, the U.N.
revised its population projection upward since its last report two years
ago, mostly due to higher fertility projections in the countries with
the most children per women. The previous projection had the global
population reaching 9.3 billion people in 2050. ...
"The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food-insecure homes as those
households that don't regularly have access to enough to eat for an
active, healthy life, and the problem is more pervasive in rural America
than in cities. ..."
This chart explains why many demographers worry about a
population bust, not a population bomb. Replacement rate fertility is 2.1. In
country after country, economic development has led to declining fertility
rates but the rates drop right past 2.1 into population decline. Some countries
in Europe have rates in the 1.0-1.5 range. Assuming there are not reversals in
low fertility countries, and assuming the global trend follows the lead of
developed nations, about thirty years from now there are going to be
significant economic problems. Some are already becoming evident in countries that
have had prolonged low fertility.