U.S. Population Growth Hits an 80-Year Low

Thanks to Rubén Rumbaut for pointing me to a nice summary of U.S. demographic trends by Brookings Institution demographer William Frey. The U.S. Census Bureau recently came out with its year-end summary of what happened between July 1, 2017 and July 1, 2018, and Bill gets right to the point--we're getting older and slowing down. Yes, I mean all of us, but this applies generally to the U.S. population.

Their data show that the national rate of population growth is at its lowest since 1937, a result of declines in the number of births, gains in the number of deaths, and that the nation’s under age 18 population has declined since the 2010 census. This is on the heels of recently released data showing geographic mobility within the U.S. is at a historic low. And while some states—particularly in the Mountain West—are growing rapidly, nearly a fifth of all states displayed absolute population losses over the past two years.

Here's what it looks like graphically:

As the baby boomers move into the older ages, the number of deaths is increasing, and since younger women are delaying having babies (and may have fewer than previous generations), and fewer immigrants are coming into the country, we are growing very slowly. This is probably good for the environment, but it introduces a lot of potentially unwelcome changes that we may all be coping with for the rest of our lives.

This week’s release of census estimates appears to put an exclamation point on what we should be preparing for as the country ages and grows less rapidly from natural increase. The latest national growth rate of 0.62 percent is noticeably below what we have experienced in decades prior. While it is still far higher than in countries like Germany, Italy, and Japan, it means that policymakers must place increased attention on caring for a larger and more dependent aging population, and dealing with the realities of a slower-growing labor force. In particular, it requires a more serious discussion of U.S. immigration policy because of the future contributions that immigrants will make to growing America’s society and economy.

I couldn't agree more. Immigration policy should be the #1 topic under discussion by Congress when they reconvene--right after they get the budget back on track and continue the funding of the Census Bureau!

Mexico is Now Dealing With the US Undocumented Immigration Issue--UPDATED

With any luck you saw the Pew Research report a couple of weeks ago in which they estimate that the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has been declining. This is due mainly to the fact that the migration of undocumented Mexicans into the U.S. has dropped precipitously over the last decade as the birth rate in Mexico has fallen and the economy has grown. The “demographic fit” between the U.S. and Mexico has pretty much ended, but that doesn’t mean the end of undocumented immigration.

My thanks to Professor Rubén Rumbaut for pointing me to an article from the Center for American Progress highlighting the increasingly important role that Mexico is playing in coping with migrants. In the first place, they have been coping with a large number of Mexican migrants who have been deported from the U.S. back to Mexico. The Pew report reminds us that the number of deportations of people back to Mexico increased dramatically first under the Bush administration and then particularly under the Obama administration. Indeed, I noted a few years ago that Obama was being called the “deporter-in-chief.” This has not been easy for Mexico to deal with, as these people are typically dumped across the border with few resources of their own. The Mexican government’s programs are under-funded although at least some of the slack has been taken up by non-profit organizations.

The second and more dramatic issue is the role being played by Mexico as an increasing number of migrants leave the “northern triangle” countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, to seek refuge in the north from the horrific conditions they face in their respective countries.

Mexico is facing new challenges as millions of Mexican migrants return from the United States and Central Americans seek asylum and safe passage through the country. Historically, Mexico has been a predominantly immigrant-sending country. Political unrest and violence in Central America, heavy-handed immigration enforcement in the United States, and increased development in Mexico has made Mexico a country of destination, return, and transit. Each of these roles demands a unique, humane, and thorough policy response.

My own view is that the United States needs to provide governmental support to Mexico to deal with this situation, while at the same time encouraging public-private investments in Mexico and the northern triangle countries to improve the quality of life and thereby reduce the pressures people face to get out of there and head north. Like everything associated with migration, this won’t be easy, but the longer we wait, the harder it will be.

UPDATE: Today the Washington Post reported that the U.S. will provide more aid to Mexico and Central American governments in renewed attempts to cut down the migration from Central America.

The United States announced a total contribution of $10.6 billion, most of which will be allocated from existing aid programs. Around $4.5 billion of that sum comes from new loans, loan guarantees and other private-sector support that could become available through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC).

The Mexican government said it would contribute $25 billion to development in southern Mexico over five years, which López Obrador has suggested could serve as a source of employment to Central Americans who are granted work visas. 

López Obrador “has to take advantage of this opportunity, this honeymoon with Trump and Mexico,” said Rafael Fernández de Castro, a former senior Mexican foreign affairs official and now director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California at San Diego.

The WP thinks this may be mostly symbolic, but at least it is a step in the right direction. 

UN Approves Migration Pact

The United Nations has been working on a global migration pact for quite a while now, and today there were 165 countries who signed on to it. The United States and several other countries chose not to participate, "citing concerns about migrant flows and national sovereignty" as the New York Times reported. 

The text of the accord was approved in July by every member of the United Nations except the United States. But it has since gotten caught up in a nationalist movement in Europe that has centered on the issue of immigration and prompted around a dozen countries to reject the compact outright, or to pull back from endorsing it in Morocco.

The United Nations has insisted all along that this pact was not a mandate for rich countries to take in poor migrants. Rather, it was an acknowledgement that migration is a fact of life, and every country should make good decisions about how to cope with it.

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, a 34-page document, asserts that “no state can address migration alone” and outlines 23 objectives. They include the collection of better data on the movement of migrants, the strengthening of legal paths to migration, efforts to combat human trafficking and cooperation to ease the safe return of migrants to their countries of origin.

Most migration is not from “south to north” but between developing countries, he said, seeking to dispel other falsehoods and noting that there were more African migrants in other African countries than there are in Europe.

Moreover, migrants provide a boost to the economies of their host countries as well as to their countries of origin, he said. Migrants spend 85 percent of their earnings in the countries where they work. They send the remaining 15 percent home in remittances, providing vital lifelines to developing countries that add up to three times the value of official development assistance from richer nations.

The fact that most migration is not "south to north" is important to remember, but of course that does not assuage people who want to raise alarms about the south to north migration that they feel affects them. And, to be sure, part of the global compact is an attempt to address xenophobia and the integration of migrants into societies. These are not easy to do and almost always take more time than people think they should. 

The Demographics of the Far Right Movement in Germany

My thanks to a reader who pointed me to an article in the NYTimes that I had missed a few days ago, about the demographic factors in East Germany that are helping to drive the far right movement in that country. It seems to take us back to the "tearing down of the wall." From this distance that just seemed like a universally good thing (well, unless you were a big shot in East Germany's Communist Party). However, this article suggests that West German men came in to run businesses and governments in East Germany, and East German women were at the same time heading west, leaving behind a lot of spouseless and jobless East German men. The story starts out with an interview of one of these men...

...Frank Dehmel was on the streets of East Germany in 1989. Every Monday, he marched against the Communist regime, demanding freedom and democracy and chanting with the crowds: “We are the people!” Three decades later, Mr. Dehmel is on the streets again, older and angrier, and chanting the same slogan — this time for the far right.

He won freedom and democracy when the Berlin Wall came down 29 years ago on Nov. 9. But he lost everything else: His job, his status, his country — and his wife. Like so many eastern women, she went west to look for work and never came back. To understand why the far right is on the march again in Germany, it helps to understand the many grievances of its most loyal supporters: men in the former Communist East.

Although Angela Merkel--Germany's leader for the past 13 years--is from the East, there is the sense among these men that she betrayed them, and that was even before she encouraged a million asylum seekers (largely from the mess in the Middle East) to settle in Germany. 

“We have a crisis of masculinity in the East and it is feeding the far right,” said Petra Köpping, minister for integration in Saxony. When Ms. Köpping took office in 2014, she thought her job was to integrate immigrants. But as hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers began arriving in Germany a year later, a middle-aged white man heckled her at a town-hall-style meeting. “Why don’t you integrate us first?” the man had shouted. That question, which has since become the title of a book written by Ms. Köpping, prompted her to tour her eastern home state and interview dozens of angry men. The disappointed hopes and humiliations of 1989, she found, still fester.

And Ms. Köpping notes that when the wall came down, it was women who were most likely to jump at the new opportunities:

Long before the #MeToo movement, Communism succeeded in creating a broad class of women who were independent, emancipated, often better educated and working in more adaptable service jobs than eastern men.

After the wall came down, the East lost more than 10 percent of its population. Two-thirds of those who left and did not come back were young women.
It was the most extreme case of female flight in Europe, said Reiner Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, who has studied the phenomenon. Only the Arctic Circle and a few islands off the coast of Turkey suffer comparable male-female imbalances.

In large swaths of rural eastern Germany, men today still outnumber women, and the regions where the women disappeared map almost exactly onto the regions that vote for the Alternative for Germany today.

This is an important story for several reasons, including the fact that the rise of the Far Right in Germany seems to have a different set of underlying (albeit clearly still demographic) causes than those in the United States (and probably anywhere else). We need to keep that in mind as we digest the news. 

Immigrants Actually Subsidize US Health Care, Rather than Bringing Diseases

There has been a huge deal made about the demographic characteristics of the "caravan" of immigrants heading through Mexico on their way from Central America to the United States, where they apparently hope to seek asylum. Fox News and the Trump administration have repeatedly suggested that they are bringing small pox and leprosy. This is clearly nonsense. The World Health Organization declared back in 1980 that small pox had been eradicated from the world (thank you, vaccinations!!). Leprosy is still with us, but almost all cases are concentrated in Africa and South Asia, so it is unlikely that anyone in this group heading north has been exposed to the disease. We can put those negative ideas to bed with regard to this group of migrants, or any other group of people coming into the U.S. (all of whom are, of course, subjected to medical exams in all events).

What about the positive aspects of immigrants? In my last post, I mentioned that the Baby Boomers are really going to need some young immigrant workers to help pay for their retirement. It also turns out that immigrants are a net economic benefit to the health care system in this country. Many thanks to Professor Rubén Rumbaut for a link to a blog post in AcademyHealth by a physician who is Director of Research at the Institute for Community Health in Massachusetts.

Published in the October edition of Health Affairs, findings from our study using nationally representative data show that immigrants heavily subsidize private insurance of US-born enrollees and boost profits of private insurers.

For many immigrants, such as undocumented immigrants or those residing legally in the US for fewer than five years, private insurance is often the only coverage option. Because immigrants are mostly working-age adults with high rates of labor force participation, many enroll in job-based coverage.

Our study was the first to look at immigrants' role in financing private health insurance. We used data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey to determine immigrants' premium contributions to private insurance, including premiums that employers paid on their behalf. Then we tabulated all payments that private insurers made to doctors, hospitals, and other providers for immigrants' care to determine whether immigrants paid more or less into private insurance than they used. Undocumented immigrants, who generally use little medical care, generated the largest surplus at $1,445 per enrollee. The surplus contributed by immigrants offset a per enrollee deficit among US born individuals of $163. Previous research shows that insurance outlays for immigrants are low because they are relatively young and healthy, and often face linguistic and other barriers to care.

This is the "real" side of immigration. The U.S. is a nation of immigrants, and the only people who can realistically complain about that are Native Americans. 

Demographics of Global Climate Change

I'm sure that you've seen the report that came out this week from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projecting that the negative impacts of emissions on global climate change are likely to come about even sooner than previously thought. The NYTimes summarizes the report and reactions to it.

The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for the most severe effects of climate change.

“This report makes it clear: There is no way to mitigate climate change without getting rid of coal,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University and an author of the report.

Burning coal was, of course, a huge asset to the economic development that has brought us the current global prosperity. The same is true of petroleum. Population and prosperity have grown together over the past two centuries as a consequence not just of the spread of the potato, but because of human ability to harness energy sources. The problem is that both have the potentially disastrous side-effects of putting us on the path to unsustainability with respect to growing food, and putting people on the path--literally--to another home because rising sea levels are swamping the land they live on. As the NYTimes notes we can either act now and try to avoid those disasters, or decide to wait and see how bad the disaster is and act then. We know what to do--switch to sustainable energy sources like solar and wind power, and we need to do it sooner rather than later.

The Demographic Power of the Potato--UPDATED

The European "discovery" of the Americas was amazingly consequential in demographic terms. I discuss this in my text, of course, but a story in today's Washington Post has a pretty good summary of the three key elements: (1) bringing the potato to Europe to help fuel population growth; (2) the spread of disease that killed a huge proportion of the indigenous population; and (3) the enslavement of Africans to work on plantations created by Europeans in the Americas. Let me focus here on the first of these:

The potato alone gets credit for population booms in parts of northern Europe that paved the way for urbanization and, in turn, fueled the Industrial Revolution. Tobacco had such value it was used as currency in some places. Some American foods became staples abroad, from the tomato in Italy and cassava in Africa to the peppers that became the paprika of Hungary and the curries of India.

Eventually, starting with a group of monks on Spain’s Canary Islands in the 1600s, Europeans figured out how to cultivate potatoes, which form a nutritionally complete — albeit monotonous — diet when combined with milk to provide vitamins A and D. The effects were dramatic, boosting populations in Ireland, Scandinavia, Ukraine and other cold-weather regions by up to 30 percent, according to Qian’s [Nancy Qian, an economics professor at Northwestern University] research. The need to hunt declined and, as more land became productive, so did conflicts over land.

If you've read my book, you know that the statement above may give a bit more credit to the potato than it deserves. The potato arrived in Europe at about the same time that the plague was leaving, and at about the same time that the Little Ice Age was receding, thus opening up more farmland for cultivation. Still, were it not for the potato, it is unlikely that the health of the European population would have improved as it did, thus helping to set off population growth that eventually revolutionized the world. 

UPDATE:  Maybe this should really be a PRE-DATE instead of an update, but I just realized that I blogged about the demographic impact of the potato six years ago, based upon a paper just published at that time by Professor Qian, who was quoted in the above Washington Post story. Here's a link to that earlier blog post.

Gates Foundation Looks at the Demographics of Extreme Poverty

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has just released this year's "Goalkeepers" report and the focus is on helping children living in areas of extreme poverty. The world needs for these youngsters to grow up healthy and well-educated--not an easy task, but certainly a possible one.

Today’s booming youth populations can be good news for the economy; if young people are healthy, educated, and productive, there are more people to do the kind of innovative work that stimulates rapid growth. This helps explain the amazing progress of the past generation in most of the world, and it is the key to spreading that progress everywhere.

This progress has come in waves. The first wave centered on China; the second wave centered on India. As a result of successes in Asia, the geography of poverty is changing: extreme poverty is becoming heavily concentrated in sub-Saharan African countries. By 2050, that’s where 86 percent of the extremely poor people in the world are projected to live. Therefore, the world’s priority for the next three decades should be a third wave of poverty reduction in Africa.

One of the obstacles the continent faces is rapid population growth. Africa as a whole is projected to nearly double in size by 2050, which means that even if the percentage of poor people on the continent is cut in half, the number of poor people stays the same. Even so, for most African countries, the outlook is positive. For example, Ethiopia, once the global poster child for famine, is projected to almost eliminate extreme poverty by 2050.

As I read the report, I was instantly put in mind of the population projections made over the years by Wolfgang Lutz and his group at the Vienna Institute of Demography that have demonstrated the pretty amazing demographic consequences of education, especially when it equally includes boys and girls and is, of course, taught by well-qualified people. Investing in young people is, as the Gates reports says, an investment in the future of these countries because these are the people who are going to have to be change-makers at the local and regional levels.

South Korea's Fertility May Drop Below 1 Child Per Woman

Thanks to both Todd Gardner and Stuart Gietel-Basten for almost simultaneously pointing me to a story in yesterday's Guardian suggesting that the fertility rate in South Korea may soon drop to less than one child per woman. This is low-low fertility of nearly unheard of proportions even in what has become a very low fertility region of the world (and check out the brand new 2018 PRB World Population Data Sheet to make those comparisons for yourself!):

The average number of babies born per woman of reproductive age is due to be as low as 0.96 this year, falling below one for the first time in history, according to a study commissioned by the Chosun Ilbo newspaper [that article is in Korean, btw].

Such a low fertility rate is normally only seen during wartime, said Lee Chul-hee, an economics professor at Seoul National University and one of the authors of the study.

“There’s definitely going to be a psychological shock among the Korean people,” he said. “It will likely influence what is considered to be an ideal number of children, and could lead to the rate dropping even further.”

At the end of the Korean War, UN demographers estimate that the TFR in South Korea was above 6 children per woman, but a rapid drop in fertility after that (not unlike the one in Taiwan) brought fertility down to below replacement in the mid-1980s and it has stayed below replacement since then. This has, of course, generated the almost ideal demographic dividend that has helped the country leap into prosperity in a relatively short period of time. 

As is also true in Southern Europe, the birth rate is so low in South Korea at least in part because of the strings that are still tied around the lives of women:

The status of women in South Korea, a deeply patriarchal society, is a major driver of the trend, along with worsening job prospects for young people and rising property prices. Women are getting married and having children later in life, if at all, for fear of being denied promotions and facing discrimination at work.

The average age for South Korean women marrying for the first time is 30.2, according to figures from the ministry of gender equality and family, up from 24.8 in 1990. On average, women have their first child at 31.6.

There are going to have to be some decisive cultural changes--not just simple government policies--if the birth rate is going to get back up closer to replacement level. It can happen, of course, but it won't be easy.

Max Roser and Our World in Data

Over time I have regularly given shout-outs to the great work that Max Roser and his team at Oxford University do in assembling and presenting data for the world around us--focusing heavily on demographically-related themes (remember, indeed, that nearly everything is connected to demography!). There is no time like the start of the Fall term to go online and access these resources. You could start with the graphs of world population growth, such as:

Or, you may want to start with a YouTube video sponsored by Bill Gates, focusing on the important demographic work that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does around the world:

And there's lots more. Browsing these resources is a great way to start the term.

World Population Day 2018

Today is World Population Day, the theme of which this year is "Family Planning is a Human Right." It is genuinely sad to think we have to keep emphasizing that point, rather than all of us just taking it for granted. Another thing we typically take for granted is being alive, but I missed last year's World Population Day celebration because I was in the hospital intensive care unit as a whole team of physicians (several of them immigrants, I should point out) saved my life when I came down with sepsis (cause still unknown). So, I am very grateful to be here thinking about the 8th anniversary of this blog. 

Back in 2010 the world's population was getting very close to the 7 billion mark (which we hit the next year in 2011). As of today, the Census Bureau's population clock estimates that we are at 7.5 billion. So, in the eight years that I have been blogging, we have added 500 million people to the planet (and, no, I am not to blame for that!). Other demographic trends have been moving in the right direction during this time. The UN Population Division estimates that since 2010 the world's total fertility rate has dropped from 2.57 to 2.47, while life expectancy at birth (both sexes combined) has gone up from 69 to 72. 

We have to remember, though, that the medium variant of the UN population projections suggests that the world's population will continue to grow until at least to the end of this century, and that takes into account expected declines in fertility and mortality. Those things are not likely to happen automatically, however. We need to stay active in the pursuit of those improvements in the quality of life all over the globe.

Hungarian Prime Minister Blames Low Fertility on "Liberal Democracy"

According to a report today from US News and World Report, the Hungarian government is blaming its low fertility and declining population on liberal democracy, and it intends to fight back.

Hungary's government will launch measures to stop and then reverse a demographic decline by 2030, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday, as he blamed liberal democracy for undermining traditional families.

Orban said the key question was whether the Hungarian nation was preserved "biologically and in numbers" and what the government should do to stop the demographic decline. He said the government would launch a "serious family policy action plan" but did not go into detail.

Liberal democracy had failed to halt immigration, protect Christian culture or strengthen the traditional family of one man and one woman, Orban said.

"Christian democracy protects us from migration, defends the borders, supports the traditional family model of one man, one woman, considers the protection of our Christian culture as a natural thing," he said.

Orban, 54, took power in 2010 and has continually increased his control over the media, put allies in charge of once-independent institutions and campaigned on a platform of fierce hostility to immigration.

This seems more like a rant against Muslim immigrants than anything else, especially since low fertility and population decline have been characteristics of the entire Central and Eastern European region for a long time. Hungary's next-door neighbor, Romania, has been experiencing similar trends and a paper just out in Demographic Research by two Romanian demographers suggests, somewhat ironically, that the best route to higher fertility in Romania is by increasing the levels of female labor force participation which can increase economic development and make it easier for couples to be able to afford children. This is probably not what the Hungarian Prime Minister wants to hear, but it just might work.

Can Egypt Survive Its Demographic Storm?

It has been over a year since I last blogged about Egypt, and the concern then was that rapid population growth was threatening to undermine the country's fragile stability. A major issue then was that, as I pointed out three years ago, the birth rate in Egypt has been rising, not falling. Fast forward to an article that came out today* from the Brookings Institution written by two economists at the World Bank:

Egypt’s worrying population boom fails to generate the same headline attention as terrorist attacks, the impact of economic reforms on the poor, the country’s hyper-constrained politics, or accusations of human rights violations. Yet, the very real dangers it poses were highlighted when the head of the country’s statistical agency, Abu Bakr el-Gendy, called this seemingly irrepressible tide a “catastrophe.” To Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, it is a “challenge as critical as terrorism.”

This growth has grave implications. The number of primary school students grew by 40 percent from 2011 to 2016. One can imagine the impact on a system where 35 percent of students entering middle school cannot read or write. Employment is another challenge, with 700,000 new entrants annually into a labor force where over 25 percent of those 18-29 years old—one-third of whom have university degrees—are unemployed. The International Monetary Fund projects a labor force of 80 million by 2028. Reminiscent of the 2011 revolution, in which youth played a major role, 61 percent of the current population is under 30 years old and 34.2 percent is under 15 years old.

Back in 2015 I noted that "[i]t will be very important for the current or future governments to reinvigorate family planning programs so that married women have greater access to birth control (historically these programs have been much more available to married than to single women), and to invest again in education for women and create employment opportunities for young women, so that they will be encouraged to delay marriage and thus lower their lifetime number of births."

It seems as though the government is finally getting serious about this.

The government has launched a family planning campaign with the slogan “two are enough.” The Ministry of Health’s Operation Lifeline aims to reduce the birth rate to 2.4, targeting rural areas where many view large families as a source of economic strength and resist birth control believing that it is un-Islamic. Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, one of the world’s foremost sources of Islamic learning, supports the ministry.

We know that concerted efforts to make family planning available to women work--look at Iran, as I discussed last month.  The world needs to step up to help Egypt succeed in this, because demographic chaos in Egypt will not stay in Egypt.

*And, yes, thanks to Todd Gardner yet again for the link!

US Birth Rate Down Yet Again

Women in the U.S. continue to have fewer babies. That's the news from the National Center for Health Statistics, highlighted in today's NYTimes (and thanks to Rubèn Rumbaut for the link).

The fertility rate in the United States fell to a record low for a second straight year, federal officials reported Thursday, extending a deep decline that began in 2008 with the Great Recession.

You can see in the graph below that both the number of births and the general fertility rate (births per 1,000 women aged 15-44) plummeted in the 1970s as the country went through the Baby Bust that followed the Baby Boom. The number of births recovered over time, largely because the number of women of reproductive continued to increase. But you can see that the birth rate itself never really recovered. It bounced up a bit in line with the rise in economic activity that ultimately led to the Great Recession in 2008, which was followed by a relatively precipitous drop in numbers of births and the birth rate.

It is good of course that the teen birth rate continues to drop, and it is interesting that the only age group with a clear increase was 40-44. The long-term trend has been for rates to be declining at all ages under 35, and rising at ages 35-44. Clearly women are postponing births. Why? The reaction to the economic rise (an increase in the birth rate) and the Great Recession (a drop in the birth rate) suggests that the economy has a lot to do with people's decision-making, especially in an era where birth control is readily available (no matter how hard some people want to put a lid on that!). My theory is that the root cause of the fertility trend is the increasing level of income and wealth inequality in the United States. Neither the President nor Congress seems to have any inclination to invest in infrastructure improvement and other government-sponsored programs that have been key components to past economic growth. Handing big tax breaks to a relatively small number of wealthy people and large corporations has no history of stimulating the kind of economic growth that helps a wide swath of people, whereas government-sponsored programs do have that kind of history.

Iran's eye-popping demographics

I was recently alerted to a story published more than four years about the "biggest population boom in history." Now, I have to tell you ahead of time that I haven't confirmed that Iran's population boom right after its revolution in the late 1970s was the "biggest" ever, but the UN Population Division data do show that it was large. Of special importance is how the boom was dramatically reversed. But first the origins of the boom:

Before its Islamic Revolution, Iran had begun a family-planning program, following a 1966 census that showed a startling increase over the previous decade. In 1956, Iran had 18.9 million people, but Iranian women were averaging 7.7 children apiece [UN data show a slightly lower--but still high--number]. In only ten years, they added 6 million more. The health ministry began distributing birth control, but with only modest success: the 1976 census still showed fertility rates of 6.3 children per woman. The top-down program was training medical personnel, but failing to explain to parents why they might want to limit the size of their families.

But shortly after the revolution, Saddam Hussein took control of the government of Iraq and immediately started a war with Iran--one that would last eight years.

The Population and Family Planning office closed. In its place was a campaign for every fertile Iranian woman to help build Iran a “Twenty Million Man Army.” The legal marrying age for girls dropped from eighteen to thirteen. To encourage women to bear many children, ration cards were issued on a per capita basis, including newborns.

As war with Iraq dragged on, the birth rate surpassed Khomeini’s demographic dreams. Although a million Iranian fighters, including mere boys, were martyred by inhaling poison gas, clearing land mines, or charging in human waves into artillery barrages, the 1986 census counted nearly 50 million Iranians: a doubling in two decades. By some estimates, the growth rate peaked at 4.2 percent, near the biological limits for fertile women and the highest rate of population increase the world had ever seen.

As the UN brokered a peace deal in 1988, Iranian government officials took stock of the incredibly high level of population growth and decided that it could not continue.

A month after the August 1988 ceasefire finally ended the war, Iran’s religious leaders, demographers, budget experts, and health minister gathered for a summit conference on population in the eastern city of Mashhad, one of holiest cities for the world’s Shi’ite Muslims, whose name means “place of martyrdom.” The weighty symbolism was clear. “The report of the demographers and budget officers was given to Khomeini,” Dr. Shamshiri recalls. The economic prognosis for their overpopulated nation must have been very dire, given the Ayatollah’s contempt for economists, whom he often referred to as donkeys. “After he heard it, he said, ‘Do what is necessary.’ ”

Unlike China, the decision of how many was left to the parents. No law forbade them from having ten if they chose. But no one did. Instead, what happened next was the most stunning reversal of population growth in human history. Twelve years later, the Iranian minister of health would accept the United Nations Population Award for the most enlightened and successful approach to family planning the world had ever seen.

What did they do? They offered free methods of birth control (including sterilization for both women and men), without any restrictions such as needing a husband's approval. And--very importantly--education for women was a top priority. "In 1975, barely a third of Iranian women could read. In 2012, more than 60 percent of Iranian university students were female." These are important reasons why the demographics of predominantly Shiite Muslim Iran today (with a TFR of 1.7 children that is well below replacement level) is quite different from all of its neighbors.

Immigrants the Key to Continued U.S. Population Growth

The U.S. Census Bureau just released its latest projections of the U.S. population. This is called the 2017 series and, like the previous 2014 series, it builds on the base of the 2010 census. Of particular note, of course, is that despite the gradual aging of the U.S. population (which is mainly what has been hyped in the press), we are projected to continue growing in number, from 326 million this year to 404 million by 2060. This is true even though the fertility rate remains low, largely because of the projected continued net immigration into the country. Todd Gardner very astutely picked up on this particular graphic from the Census Bureau's news release about the projections:

Notice that if we assume a continuation of approximately one million new immigrants per year, then by 2030, the immigrants will make a bigger contribution to U.S. population growth than will natural increase (the excess of births over deaths). And, of course, since migrants tend to be young adults, they also contribute more to the births than to the deaths during the first several years after their arrival. What could change those ratios? Obviously a change to immigration policies could slow down the flow of migrants. An improvement in the death rate among the very young and the elderly (the ages where the U.S. lags behind other rich countries) would push up the rate of natural increase, as would an increase in the birth rate. The latter is probably the least likely of those three scenarios.

Was the Agricultural Revolution History's Greatest Fraud?

I mentioned a few days ago that I had read (and enjoyed) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. Enjoying it does not mean, however, that I agreed with everything. In particular, I strongly disagree with his “signature” revelation in the book—his belief that the agricultural revolution was the biggest fraud in history. Here’s his synopsis of that idea, from page 79 of his book:

Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2

The reference (2) at the end of that paragraph refers to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. I like that book and reference it in mine, and was sure that Diamond had never made such an assertion about the Agricultural Revolution. I grabbed my copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel and found that I was right—he had not. Harari just made this stuff up. Diamond is quoted on the cover of Harari’s book, but he never actually says that he agrees with Harari.

When I finished the book, I went online looking for reviews to see if people had the same reaction I did (a reaction predicted by my older son, John, who had recommended that I read the book). Behold, there was review by none other than Bill Gates who, as I recently noted, is clearly becoming a demographer. Here is what he says, and I don’t think I could have said it better:

As much as I enjoyed Sapiens, there was plenty to disagree with in the book. For example, Harari sets out to prove that the agricultural revolution was one of the biggest mistakes in human history. Yes, it allowed civilizations to thrive, but on an individual level, he writes, we were much better off as hunter-gatherers. As farmers, people had to work a lot harder and in exchange they had a worse diet than they had as foragers. Agricultural societies also created social hierarchies in which the majority toiled as peasants and a minority of elites ruled over them.

That’s certainly a provocative argument, but I wasn’t convinced. First, arguing that we were happier as hunter-gatherers than as farmers creates a choice when there isn’t one. It’s not as if we can turn back the clock and restart as hunter-gatherers or we can run an experiment to prove one way of life is better than the other. Second, I think Harari underestimates the hardships of being a hunter-gatherer. He suggests that death and violence rates were much lower in hunter-gatherer societies than after the agricultural revolution. But it’s more likely the violence was higher because of competition over resources. A farming society can support many more people per square mile than a hunter-gathering society. In order to keep population densities low, conflict was inevitable among groups of hunter- gatherers. Finally, calling the shift to agriculture a “mistake” overlooks the fact that farming societies were able to specialize, leading to written languages, new technologies, and art—all things we value today.

Hungary is Hungry for People

As the Historian of the Population Association of America, I automatically keep my eye on stories that relate to Past Presidents of the PAA. I don't know how he does it, but Todd Gardner has his eye on everything and just posted a tweet link to a story about Hungarian demographics featuring Past PAA President Paul Demeny. Paul is Hungarian by birth, but received his PhD at Princeton and was President of the Population Council and Editor of the prestigious journal Population and Development Review until his retirement just a few years ago, which I commented on at the time. My wife and I had dinner with him at the PAA meetings in San Francisco just a few months before he retired, but I haven't seen him since, so it was very nice to "be in touch" again.

Hungary Today recently published an interesting interview with Pál Demény, a demographer who is researching population trends. The 85-year-old Demény left Hungary in 1956, lived in the US and now has decided to retire to Budapest. (Read here.) [And, yes, I definitely recommend that you click on that link]

He was born in Nyíregyháza, went to university in Budapest and in 1961 received a PhD in Economics from Princeton. Demény has analyzed the links between demography, economics and policies and claims that Hungary will face a dramatic population decline soon. He agrees that by 2100 Hungary’s population will be halved; it will drop to 5.4 million. According UN estimates Hungary’s population will drop to 8.3 million by 2050. Can this trend be stopped, or only slowed down?

Mr. Orbán [Hungary's Prime Minister] thinks that by spending 4.6 percent of the GDP on family support programs sooner or later fertility rates will dramatically increase. I think he is mistaken and Demény also disagrees with him. He says that Hungary’s population decrease is irreversible!

Many demographers have warned that the Hungarian government is already late to start an immigration program. Demény thinks that the population problems of poorer countries will not be solved by emigration, “because only a small fraction of the population might conceivably leave.” He is probably right, but the “small fraction” can run in the millions.

In the lengthy interview with Paul Demeny in January, referred to above, Paul discusses the immigrant issue in more detail. He also offers a very interesting stimulus to the birth rate, which I had never heard of before: give children a vote! Of course, you don't actually let them vote until they are adults, but their parents could have a weighted vote. So, if you are a mother with 2 children you would have 3 votes in an election instead of just 1. The rationale is that your vote doesn't just affect you, but also the future of your children. That adds nuance to the idea that demography is destiny.

Economic Uncertainty Keeps Fertility Low in Italy

The rich country angst about low fertility is widespread, and often overshadows the concern about fertility levels that are higher than wanted in many less-rich nations. At the same time, if we believe that every person and every population of people should aim for replacement-level fertility, both concerns are equally important. I thought about this demographic divide as I was reading the latest publication in Demographic Research--a paper by Francesca Fiori, Elspeth Graham, and Francesca Rinesi titled "Economic reasons for not wanting a second child: Changes before and after the onset of the economic recession in Italy".

This is a very nice descriptive analysis of data drawn from ISTAT (the Italian National Institute of Statistics) surveys conducted in 2002 and 2012. The authors focus on women who have already had one child and look at which ones in each of the two surveys (before and after the Great Recession) are thinking about having a second child.

Between 2002 and 2012, the proportion of primiparous mothers in Italy intending not to have a second child increased. The economic recession appears to have played a role in shaping their negative intentions, as the proportion of mothers who reported economic constraints as their main reason increased significantly.

This raises the interesting question of whether the increase in negative fertility intentions simply reflects the higher proportion of women experiencing economic hardship. Our findings suggest that it does not, but rather that it is also the consequence of a more pervasive feeling of insecurity which has affected the wider population, including those who have not been as severely hit by the crisis. Our results show a narrowing of socioeconomic differences, which indicates a greater increase in the propensity to avert risks associated with having another child among mothers with medium or high educational levels, and even among mothers with permanent employment contracts. At the same time, age differences have become more pronounced, mainly in response to the particularly adverse effect of the economic recession on younger individuals, suggesting that personal experience of economic difficulties may be more influential among younger women.

Keep in mind that economic insecurity has been rampant among humans forever, but very low fertility is a relatively new phenomenon. Obviously, it is the relative level--the gap between expectations and reality--that is important. The authors do not get into issues for which there were no data collected in the ISTAT surveys, such as the role of patriarchy and paternalism in pushing fertility to below-replacement levels in rich countries, but they leave the door open for these kinds of discussions. 

Racism in China

Racism has been an issue in the United States since the founding of the country. For that sad reason, we are familiar with the topic and race/ethnicity is routinely analyzed as an important demographic characteristic. At the same time, we generally lump all persons of Asian-origin into a single race/ethnic category, even though there is tremendous cultural variability within the Asian-American community. And, of course, we have to remind ourselves that the cultural differences are the only things that really separate people. Ethnicity as a cultural variable is real in a way that race as a biological variable is not. This latter point is important to keep in mind when reading an article in The Economist about racism in China.

Chinese officials often try to portray racism as primarily a Western problem. Yet there is a widespread tendency in China to look down on other races, especially black people. Two years ago a television ad for a laundry detergent showed a young Chinese woman luring a black man closer, triumphantly popping a detergent capsule into his mouth and stuffing him into a washing machine. At the end of the cycle, out came a fresh-faced Chinese man, over whom the woman swooned. Among the tens of thousands of Africans living in a neighbourhood of Guangzhou known as “Chocolate City”, many report racist slights.

The outraged response of many netizens in China to the African skit suggests a growing awareness at home that bigotry is a Chinese problem, too. It may be one that time will help alleviate. After all, America went from bans on inter-racial marriage to electing a black president in a mere four decades. And even those Chinese who acknowledge that China has a problem rightly observe that it is far from the worst offender. Myanmar burns Rohingya villages, Islamic State tried to wipe out the Yazidis, and Sudan until recently enslaved black Africans. Racism in China, by contrast, is seldom expressed violently.

But a problem it is, and one that is aggravated by the authorities’ efforts to suppress discussion of it (censors raced online to delete criticism of the TV sketch). The Communist Party fears that such debate may undermine its efforts to portray Chinese people as victims of Western racism during the 19th and early 20th centuries—a narrative of humiliation which the party regards as a crucial explanation of why it has the right to rule.

This is an under-appreciated demographic reality in modern China, and one that Westerners may confront in person as the Chinese government seeks increasingly greater influence in the global economy and global politics. No one can profitably ignore the country that for several centuries has had the world's largest population.