Children are the Future--Chinese Version

There is a large urban core of Chinese who have grown up being considerably better educated than their parents, and who are driving China forward. However, this week's Economist reports that there are still a lot of Chinese children being left behind.

THE greatest wave of voluntary migration in human history transformed China’s cities, and the global economy, in a single generation. It has also created a huge task for those cities, by raising the expectations of the next generation of migrants from the countryside, and of second-generation migrant children. They have grown up in cities in which neither the jobs nor the education offered them have improved much.
This matters because the next generation of migrants has already arrived in staggering numbers. Shanghai’s migrant population almost trebled between 2000 and 2010, to 9m of the municipality’s 23m people. Nearly 60% of Shanghai’s 7.5m or so 20-to-34-year-olds are migrants.

The problem lies with the hokou family registration system, which means that people whose families are registered as rural are considered rural, even if they were born in a city. This effectively shuts them out of the same educational benefits provided to children whose families are registered as urban.

In 2010 Shanghai was home to 390,000 children under the age of six who were officially classified as “migrants”.
They are fated to grow up on a separate path from children of Shanghainese parents. Migrant children are eligible to attend local primary and middle schools, but barred from Shanghai’s high schools. They receive better schooling and social benefits than their parents did, and some pursue different types of work (see next story), but their status and their education are still more likely to lead to an assembly line than a university classroom.
For years reformers have called for changes in the hukou system. Children with a rural hukou want to lead a better life than their parents did. Many have never worked on the farm, but the system denies them a fair chance to move up the ladder.
This is unlikely to change soon. First, China’s factories still need large numbers of migrants, and the system now in place ensures that many of them will seek work there. Second, Chinese cities have welcomed migrants without a coherent plan to educate them. Shanghai had 170,000 students enrolled in high school in 2010, but there were 570,000 migrant children aged 15 to 19 living in the city who were unable to attend those schools. “The Shanghai government needs to provide its educational resources to the locals first,” says Xu Benliang, deputy director of the Shanghai Charity Education and Training Centre, which teaches young migrants how to get on in life. Mr Xu says the centre tries to tell migrants: “Don’t complain about things that you can’t change.”

This doesn't bode well for the future of China, unless the goal of this nominally communist country is to heighten the already growing inequality in its younger generation.

Maximizing the Potential of Children

It's a cliché that children are the future, yet adults are often so wrapped up in themselves that they don't pay attention to the truth of that simple idea. Two stories this week made me think about this. The first is a report just issued by UNICEF suggesting that in relative terms, children in the US are very nearly the poorest and most deprived among all of the developed countries, with only Romanian children being in less good shape. As the Huffington Post notes, there are a variety of methodological issues in the analysis, but the overall lessons are probably pretty solid.

Sheldon Danziger, the director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, said the report does a good job of summing up what many economists have believed for a long time. "Among rich countries, the U.S. is exceptional," he said. "We are exceptional in our tolerance of poverty."
Danziger said he was especially impressed by a figure showing Canada and the U.S. have the same relative child poverty rate -- 25.1 The chart also showed that after government taxes, benefits and other social programs, Canada's child poverty rate drops to 13.1, while America's barely budges, hovering above 23.1 percent.
"Basically, other countries do more," he said. "They tend to have minimum wages that are higher than ours. The children would be covered universally by health insurance. Other countries provide more child care."

The second story comes from The National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University. Researchers there note that according to data from the US National Surveys of Family Growth, men with the lowest levels of education are most likely to have become a father prior to their first marriage. This is an interesting topic in and of itself since premarital childbearing is almost always discussed in terms of mothers, not fathers. But, with rare exceptions, all of those babies have a father and without the support of both parents the odds of the child's success in life diminishes. Discouragingly, even among the most educated, there has been an increase in premarital fatherhood in the US.

Regardless of whether men first married in the 1990s or in the 2000s, the percentage who enter a first marriage with children declines with increased levels of educational attainment. Men with less than a high school education were the most likely to enter a first marriage with at least 1 child (41%) followed by men with a high school degree (34%) and men with some college (28%). Men with at least a Bachelor's degree were the least likely at only 6%. The greatest change occurred among men with at least some college--the percentage of fathers entering marriage with children doubled among those with some college (13% vs. 28%) and those with a Bachelor's degree (3% vs. 6%). 

None of these trends bodes particularly well for children in the US.

The Still Unfinished Business From the 1994 ICPD

One of the most contentious issues at the most recent--1994--UN-sponsored World Population Conference, which is known as the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), was the rights of women in general, and more specifically with respect to reproduction. This week a follow-up conference was held in Istanbul, Turkey:

Lawmakers from 110 countries reaffirmed today their support to the principles and goals of the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), emphasizing their continued centrality to efforts to reduce poverty and safeguard people’s health and rights, including sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights.

At the fifth global parliamentarians’ conference on population and development, held here on 24-25 May, some 400 delegates, including more than 200 parliamentarians, discussed a course of action over the coming years to implement the ICPD Programme of Action by 2014 and beyond. They also considered ways to influence any new development framework to follow the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015

“ICPD is about human beings, respect, rights, and what we can do to ensure that every individual can make his or her own decisions,” said Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, Executive Director of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. “Only then would the world be in a better place.” 

With only two years until the Cairo agenda is expected to be complete, delegates committed themselves to its unfinished plan by unanimously adopting the Istanbul Declaration of Commitment. In it, and under the theme, Keeping Promises — Measuring Results, they determined to advocate for increased national and external funding for the entire implementation of the ICPD agenda in order to achieve access to sexual and reproductive health, including family planning.

The Istanbul conference, which concluded with an address by Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was organized by the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development (EPF) and UNFPA, under the auspices of Turkey’s Grand National Assembly. It followed four similar global conferences, in Bangkok in 2006, Strasbourg in 2004, Ottawa in 2002 and Addis Ababa in 2009.

So, keeping in mind that the conference was in Istanbul and was addressed by the Turkish Prime Minister, you might be surprised then to learn that the very same Turkish Prime Minister made headlines in the New York Times this week by suggesting that abortion was murder and should be abolished.

Since 1983, abortion has been legal inTurkey for up to 10 weeks after conception, with emergency abortions allowed for medical reasons after that. Mr. Erdogan proposed outlawing all abortions that are not medically necessary, and limiting medically necessary abortions to the first eight weeks after conception, according to NTV, a private television news network.

Mr. Erdogan, who wants every married couple to have at least three children, dismissed criticism of his position, saying Friday that abortion “has no place in our values” and on Saturday that “our only goal is to elevate this country above the levels of developed civilizations, for which we need a young and dynamic population.”

This would seem to put a radically different spin on the "Istanbul Declaration of Commitment" than most of the delegates at the conference would likely agree with.

The Greek Brain Drain

One of the not-so-surprising side-effects of the budget crisis in Greece has been that younger Greeks are bailing out, creating a brain drain. We expect that those with the most salable skills are likely to be the ones to go elsewhere when the economy collapses. But what is especially surprising, according to a story today on MSNBC, is where they are heading.

Germany, Europe's economic powerhouse and a country which has been criticized by many Greeks over its harsh demands for austerity cuts in return for bailout cash, has experienced an influx of young skilled immigrants.
Der Spiegel magazine noted that while Greek newspapers "printed cartoons depicting the Germans as Nazis, concentration camp guards and eurozone imperialists who allow their debtors to bleed to death," the Greeks have kept arriving – bringing an "anything is better than Athens" attitude with them.
With more than 50 percent of young Greeks out of work, it's not surprising that official statistics show the number of Greeks who moved to Germany increased 90 percent during 2011.
Unemployment rates have consistently been shrinking in Germany in recent years and the economy is thriving despite Europe's ongoing financial crisis. Relaxed cross-border employment regulations for member states of the European Union also make Germany an attractive choice for job seekers. And while Germany is in need of specialized workers, the Greek labor market has little to offer.

This turn of events is generally good for those Greeks who can find work in Germany, although in the long term the demographic shift will clearly benefit German society at the continued expense of Greece. These younger Greeks will help to pay the pensions for aging Germans, but they will be contributing little if anything to the Greek economy. Of course, to the extent that Germany's economy is bailing out Greece, the transfer of labor power from Greece (where they wouldn't be working) to Germany (where they are more likely to be working) is probably an economically good situation.

Can the Urban Health Advantage be Maintained?

For most of human history, cities had higher death rates than rural places because crowding people together in an unsanitary environment increased the spread of disease. The public health revolution that began in the 19th century changed all that, and for the last 100 or more years, urban places have held the health advantage over rural populations. But can that hold up as more and more people crowd into cities in developing countries? That question drives much of my own current NIH-funded research and it is the topic of a Scientific American online article:

“While cities have the potential to be healthier places for their citizens, this requires active planning,”Yvonne Rydin, of the University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning, said in a prepared statement. The authors conclude that urbanization alone will not automatically help everyone lead healthier, happier lives. Already about 1 billion , and that number could double in the next 18 years. The tide of urbanization is not going to raise all proverbial ships. “Economic growth cannot be assumed to lift all urban citizens into a zone of better health,” Rydin said. “In many urban areas, rich people and poor people live in different epidemiological worlds, and the burden of ill-health is highest in the poorest groups. The double burden of communicable and non-communicable disease is borne predominantly by poor people.” To improve the health of all urban dwellers present and future concerted planning will be necessary, but global payoffs will be great.

The article unfortunately speaks to simple things like walkable neighborhoods and urban gardens. Those are the luxuries of the rich. In cities of poor countries, the health issues revolve around basic infrastructure such as clean water, sewerage, adequate housing, access to health care facilities, along with basic education about health issues, and the ability of people living on very little money to have an adequate diet that increases their chances of resisting both communicable and non-communicable disease.

Will the Arab Spring be Wasted on the Young?

Richard Cincotta is one of the foremost authorities on age structures and democracy, and the NewScientist has a story about the paper that he presented at the recent annual meeting of the Population Association of America:

A YEAR after ousting Hosni Mubarak, Egypt appears poised this week to elect his former minister of foreign affairs, Amr Moussa, as its next president. Many commentators say his presidency will differ little from Mubarak's, disappointing those who hoped to see a liberal democracy emerge from the youthful uprisings last year.

Meanwhile, Yemen elected their ousted leader's vice-president on a single-candidate ballot, violence surrounds Libya's elections and Syrian protests get bloodier by the day. Was the Arab Spring all for naught?

The recent turn of events does not surprise demographer Richard Cincotta of the Stimson Center in Washington DC. The fact that the populations of these countries are all very young, he argues, predicted not only that revolutions would occur, but also that it may be some time before they make a successful transition to liberal democracies.

Cincotta studied revolutions between 1972 and 1989, focusing on the age structure of countries. He found that oppressive autocracies with a median population age between 25 and 35 had the best chances of becoming democracies.

All of the countries that made the transition when their median age was greater than 30 are still democracies today. Nine out of 10 countries with a median age less than 25 slid back into oppressive regimes following revolution. Any older than 35 and revolutions did not occur in the first place. The only other indicator that came close to predicting transition success with the same level of accuracy was wealth per capita.

If the pattern holds, Tunisia - with a median age of 30 - is the Arab Spring country most likely to hold a democracy permanently. Egypt and Libya have median ages of 25 and 26, respectively, giving them a fighting chance of moving to democracy in the next few years, according to Cincotta. But Syria and Yemen - at 21 and 17, respectively - will be lucky to end up with even partial democracies, he says.

You can read more about Cincotta's work, along with other analyses of the youth bulge, in the recently published book that Debbie Fugate and I co-edited on "The Youth Bulge: Challenge or Opportunity."

We Are All African

A few days ago, I linked to the special issue of Nature on peopling the planet, which is based on the premise that human society began in Africa and migrated out from there over the span of tens of thousands of years. That idea draws from evolutionary theory which, unfortunately, not everyone buys into. Why unfortunate? Richard Leakey answered that question today, in a story from the Associated Press:

Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that "even the skeptics can accept it."
"If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it's solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive," Leakey says, "then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges."

Thus, the point is that without this understanding of how the real really works, it will be impossible to solve the problems that we have created for ourselves by unprecedented population growth and economic development.

Now 67, Leakey is the son of the late Louis and Mary Leakey and conducts research with his wife, Meave, and daughter, Louise. The family claims to have unearthed "much of the existing fossil evidence for human evolution."
On the eve of his return to Africa earlier this week, Leakey spoke to The Associated Press in New York City about the past and the future.
"If you look back, the thing that strikes you, if you've got any sensitivity, is that extinction is the most common phenomena," Leakey says. "Extinction is always driven by environmental change. Environmental change is always driven by climate change. Man accelerated, if not created, planet change phenomena; I think we have to recognize that the future is by no means a very rosy one."
Any hope for mankind's future, he insists, rests on accepting existing scientific evidence of its past.
"If we're spreading out across the world from centers like Europe and America that evolution is nonsense and science is nonsense, how do you combat new pathogens, how do you combat new strains of disease that are evolving in the environment?" he asked.

Religion and Babies

One of my former students, Cindy Tsai, just alerted me to the fact that Hans Rosling has recently posted another video lecture (this one is 13 minutes) on TED. This one is nominally on "Religions and Babies," but the punch line is more generally on the topic of why the world's population continues to grow even though the birth rate is dropping. I love this guy's graphics, and I admit that I did not disagree with anything he said. He is not very nuanced, but he gets the point across, and it's an important one--we have to plan for a world of 10 billion people. Check it out.

Census 2010 in US was "Outstanding" According to the Census

The US House of Representatives recently voted to drastically cut the Census Bureau's budget (although that is still waiting to be debated in the Senate), so this was a good time for the Bureau to announce the findings from its post-enumeration of the 2010 Census. A random sample of households are selected in this survey and the results are then compared with the census data. Dr. Robert Groves, Director of the Census Bureau, called the census "outstanding" based on the post enumeration survey results:

The results found that the 2010 Census had a net overcount of 0.01 percent, meaning about 36,000 people were overcounted in the census. This sample-based result, however, was not statistically different from zeroThe 2000 Census had an estimated net overcount of 0.49 percent and the 1990 Census had a net undercount of 1.61 percent.
As with prior censuses, coverage varied by race and Hispanic origin. The 2010 Census overcounted the non-Hispanic white alone population by 0.8 percent, not statistically different from an overcount of 1.1 percent in 2000.

The Census Bureau attributed the overcount largely to people who own multiple homes, since the census is based initially on household addresses

The 2010 Census undercounted 2.1 percent of the black population, which was not statistically different from a 1.8 percent undercount in 2000. In 2010, 1.5 percent of the Hispanic population was undercounted. In 2000, the estimated undercount of 0.7 percent was not statistically different from zero. The difference between the two censuses was also not statistically significant.

The Census Bureau attributed these undercounts largely to the fact that higher proportions of these race/ethnic groups are renters, and renters are traditionally harder to count than home owners.

Peopling the Planet

Nature magazine has a special on-line issue this month on "Peopling the Planet," which brings together new data on the timing of humans out of Africa into the rest of the planet. As a check on up-to-dateness (if that's a word), I noted that they did indeed include the research reported in the New York Times a few days ago about the evidence that North America was likely inhabited by humans earlier than had been previously estimated.

We now know people were in the Americas earlier than 14,000 years ago. But how much earlier, and how did they get to a continent sealed off by thick sheets of ice?
Working theories vary. Some scholars hypothesize that people migrated from Asia down the west coast of North America in boats. Others suggest variations on the overland route. One theory even argues that some early Americans might have come by boat from Europe via the North Atlantic, despite the fact that the DNA of modern American Indians does not suggest European origins.

The Nature special issue isn't necessarily controversial, but it is highly informative, and I encourage you to explore it.

What's the Life Expectancy in Your County?

There are some rather remarkable disparities in life expectancy by county in the United States.

Across US counties, life expectancy in 2007 ranged from 65.9 to 81.1 years for men and 73.5 to 86.0 years for women. When compared against a time series of life expectancy in the 10 nations with the lowest mortality, US counties range from being 15 calendar years ahead to over 50 calendar years behind for men and 16 calendar years ahead to over 50 calendar years behind for women. 

Some of the disparities are sadly predictable. For example, here are the top counties in the US in terms of male life expectancy:

1. Marin, Calif.         81.6 years
2. Montgomery, Md.       81.4
3. Fairfax, Va.          81.3
4. Douglas, Colo.        81.0
5. Island, Wash.         80.9
6. Los Alamos, N.M.      80.7
7. Gunnison, Colo.       80.7
8. Pitkin, Colo.         80.7
9. Collier, Fla.         80.7
10. Santa Clara, Calif.  80.6

What do these counties tend to have in common? (hint--income).


These were among the many interesting facts that came to light in a story on the website of msnbc.com today, linking back to a paper published last year, but publicized last month by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. At this latter link there is a PowerPoint presentation that you can download to look at in detail, or it will play directly on your computer. The media had especially picked up on one angle of the story--that the gap in life expectancy between men and women has been narrowing, after having widened over most of the 20th century. If you have read Chapter 5 of my text, you know that most research suggests that this narrowing of the gap has to do with smoking--women took up smoking later than men, and so the health effects of smoking, which take a long time to catch up with you--are now catching up with women, so their life expectancy is not rising as quickly as that for men. Therein lies that tale (OK, it's not quite that simple, but close to it).


More interesting from my perspective is the spatial pattern of differences in life expectancy for both men and women. Blacks have been catching up with whites over time, but predominantly black counties in the US still lag behind in life expectancy. The lack of a national health insurance scheme almost certainly accounts for a major fraction of these differences. Not all, to be sure. We know from the UK that spatial disparities can exist even when a national health insurance system has been in place for a long time. On the other hand, the UK has higher life expectancy at lower cost per person than the US.

Making Babies is Not a Totally Random Process

If you have ever thought about how many people shared your birthday (month and year), you probably came to the obvious answer--1 out of every 365 people on the planet (give or take a few, since we really should account for the leap year babies). That assumption, however, is based on the idea that the probability of conception (and the eventual live birth) is the same on every day of the year. It turns out that this is not quite the case. Demographers have known about the seasonality of births for a long time, but it is more fun when that is discovered by a lay person such as Matt Stiles, a journalist at NPR, who has a blog called thedailyviz. Recently he ran across data from the National Center for Health Statistics showing births by month in the US, which reminded us all that August has more births than any other month, suggesting that "deep in December" is when more babies are conceived than at any other time. He did a nuance to the calculation by dividing each month by its number of days, showing that September was the winner by this count, but it will refer to very early in September, so the overall conclusion about the power of winter conceptions isn't changed. In the end, though, he offers this caution:

But notice there isn’t much difference between months in the distribution of the births.

Just enough for us to notice it and comment on it... 

There May be No Such Thing as "Good" Cholesterol

The control of cardiovascular disease has been an important reason for the continued rise in life expectancy, especially in the richer countries. One of the most important risk factors for a heart attack (myocardial infarction) is high cholesterol. When we use that term generically we mean high levels of LDL (low-density lipoprotein), which causes clotting of the arteries that can then lead to a potentially fatal heart attack. LDL can be lowered by changes in diet (and exercise), often combined with drugs called statins. LDL is the "bad" cholesterol, whereas HDL (high-density lipoprotein) cholesterol has long been considered to be a "good" cholesterol, because people with high HDL are known to have a lower probability of a heart attack. As a consequence, a lot of effort (albeit largely unsuccessful) has gone into figuring out ways to raise HDL. However, a new study just published in The Lancet and reported in the New York Times suggests that the relationship between HDL and heart attack may not be causal. If this is true, then trying to raise your HDL is unlikely to save your life.

The study’s authors emphasize that they are not questioning the well-documented finding that higher HDL levels are associated with lower heart disease risk. But the relationship may not be causative. Many assumed it was because the association was so strong and consistent. Researchers also had a hypothesis to explain how HDL might work. From studies with mice and with cells grown in the laboratory, they proposed that HDL ferried cholesterol out of arteries where it did not belong.
Now it seems that instead of directly reducing heart disease risk, high HDL levels may be a sign that something else is going on that makes heart disease less likely. To investigate the relationship between HDL and cardiovascular risk, the researchers, led by Dr. Sekar Kathiresan, director of preventive cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a geneticist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, used a method known as Mendelian randomization. It is a study design that has recently become feasible with the advent of quick and lower-cost genetic analyses.
The study found, as expected, that gene variations that raise LDL increase risk and those that lower LDL decrease risk. The gene effects often were tiny, altering LDL levels by only a few percent. But the data, involving tens of thousands of people, clearly showed effects on risk.
“That speaks to how powerful LDL is,” Dr. Kathiresan said.
But the HDL story was very different. First the investigators looked at variations in a well-known gene, endothelial lipase, that affects only HDL. About 2.6 percent of the population has a variation in that gene that raises their HDL levels by about 6 points. The investigators looked at 116,000 people, asking if they had the variant and if those who carried the HDL-raising variant had lower risk for heart disease.
“We found absolutely no association between the HDL-boosting variant and risk for heart disease,” Dr. Kathiresan said. “That was very surprising to us.”

So, if these results are to be believed, it is still very important to lower LDL--that can save your life, as expected. But, trying to do alter your HDL may just be a waste of time.

Whites Now Account For Less Than Half of Births in the US

The top news story in the US today was the release of a set of population estimates by the Census Bureau showing that last year, for the first time in history, minority groups accounted for a majority of children under the age of one. I saw the story first in the New York Times.

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.The trend toward greater minority births has been building for years, the result of the large wave of immigration here over the past three decades. Hispanics make up the majority of immigrants, and they tend to be younger — and to have more children — than non-Hispanic whites. (Of the total births in the year that ended last July, about 26 percent were Hispanic, about 15 percent black, and about 4 percent Asian.)
Whites still represent the single largest share of all births, at 49.6 percent, and are an overwhelming majority in the population as a whole, at 63.4 percent. But they are aging, causing a tectonic shift in American demographics. The median age for non-Hispanic whites is 42 — meaning the bulk of women are moving out of their prime childbearing years.

The problem, of course, is that older whites may not feel the same generational bonding with minority children and it is from that changing face of the youth that some of the angst stems among older Americans. On the other hand, those kids will be the ones paying the bills for the elderly.

And the fact that the country is getting a burst of births from nonwhites is a huge advantage, argues Dowell Myers, professor of policy, planning and demography at the University of Southern California. European societies with low levels of immigration now have young populations that are too small to support larger aging ones, exacerbating problems with the economy.
“If the U.S. depended on white births alone, we’d be dead,” Mr. Myers said. “Without the contributions from all these other groups, we would become too top-heavy with old people.”

Still, there are enormous challenges, especially around education, as William Frey at Brookings noted:

A college degree has become the most important building block of success in today’s economy, but blacks and Latinos lag far behind whites in getting one. According to Mr. Frey, just 13 percent of Hispanics and 18 percent of blacks have a college degree, compared with 31 percent of whites.

You can see and hear Bill Frey say these things himself on the PBS News Hour.