Remembering Past PAA President Sidney Goldstein

The arrival today of the latest IUSSP newsletter brought the news about the death last month of Sidney Goldstein, who was president of the Population Association of America back in 1976. He died just one day after celebrating his 92nd birthday. He had retired to Lexington, Kentucky, although most of his career was spent at Brown University, where he helped establish, and then directed, their Population Studies and Training Center. This has long been an important resource in demography, as another Past PAA President, Robert Moffitt, recently discussed in his interview with the PAA History Committee. Here's a nice synopsis of some of Goldstein's important work in demography:

Sid’s specific area of interest was the migration of people within countries, especially their movement from rural to urban areas. Beginning with analyses of migration in the United States and Denmark, his focus shifted to less developed countries, including Thailand, China, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Guatemala, and South Africa. In each case, he was especially interested in the impact of rural-urban migration on the welfare and life patterns of the migrants and how they differed from those who were residentially stable. An important component of his work in these countries was the development of local expertise, so that the work that he had begun could be carried further by in-country researchers.

You can read more about his professional life in an interview that Jean van der Tak, former PAA Historian, conducted with him many years ago. It is on the website of the Population Association of America (it starts on page 313 of that document). Check out this rather amazing exchange between Jean (VDT) and Sidney Goldstein:

VDT: And you went through your Ph.D. program in just two years. You got the degree in 1953.
GOLDSTEIN: Was it that soon?
VDT: Yes. And Charlie Westoff and Richard Easterlin got Ph.D.s at Penn the same year.
GOLDSTEIN: Right. I still have movies of that commencement, in which the three of us are marching together down the line.
VDT: You marched together a long way in the same field.
GOLDSTEIN: I always thought that was symbolic. I've often thought back to that commencement, the three of us being together. And a number of years later, the three of us were presidents of PAA almost consecutively [Westoff, 1974-75; Goldstein, 1976-77; Easterlin, 1978].

People Are Waiting Longer to Get Married

One of the central points raised by the theory of the Second Demographic Transition is that young people in richer countries are growing up with ideas of what to do with their lives besides the time-honored tradition of marrying and having kids. Today the U.S. Census Bureau reminded us of this trend with data from the Current Population Survey. Here's the pattern over time in average age at marriage for males and females in the U.S.:

The graph starts back in 1890 when the rise in the age at marriage (relative to earlier years not shown in the graph) was associated with the beginning of the decline in fertility. This was prior to the advent of effective methods of contraception, so delaying marriage (which in those days also meant delaying the onset of sexual activity) was a way of limiting fertility. The post-WWII period changed all of that and set in motion a round of early marriage and childbearing that produced the baby boomers. But the younger generations have been consistently delaying marriage, although not necessarily delaying sexual activity. In the process, they are creating a very different set of family and household relationships than we've experienced before. This is, of course, why family demography is such a key element in modern social science.

The Second Demographic Transition Comes to America

The Washington Post recently published a widely retweeted story (at least among demographers!) about the continued decline in fertility in the U.S., focusing on the fact that every demographic group has experienced the drop. 

The CDC said Wednesday that the total fertility rate — a theoretical figure that estimates the number of births a woman will have in her lifetime — fell by 18 percent from 2007 to 2017 in large metropolitan areas, 16 percent in smaller metro areas and 12 percent in rural areas. A similar downward trend holds for white, black and Hispanic women.

Low fertility in the U.S. is not, in and of itself, news. I last blogged about this only three months ago. But this new analysis of the birth data takes us into the comparisons among groups that we hadn't seen before. So, what's going on? The Washington Post sought answers from demographers:

The University of Pennsylvania’s Hans-Peter Kohler, who studies fertility and birthrates, said the data indicated that many shifts affecting fertility are occurring “in the transition to adulthood.” The biggest recent drops in birthrate have been among teenagers as well as people in their 20s. In 2016, the teen birthrate hit at an all-time low after peaking in 1991.

“The declining total fertility rates are children not born in the moment, but the hope is that they are delayed, not forgone,” Kohler said. “The exact details we won’t know until the young adults who are currently delaying having children are in their 30s or 40s.”

William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, said that what struck him about the new report is the figures on Hispanic women, who have traditionally had high fertility rates. From 2007 to 2017, Hispanic women experienced a 26 percent drop in fertility rates in rural areas, a 29 percent drop in smaller metro areas and a 30 percent decline in large metro areas.

The reality is that the Second Demographic Transition--the decline of fertility to below replacement levels in rich countries--has finally caught up with America. It seemed for awhile as though we might somehow avoid it, but these new data illustrate the amazing changes in family demography that have been taking place over the past couple of decades. Women are delaying marriage and child-bearing--or avoiding one or both altogether at levels that are historically unprecedented. They are living for themselves, not just for their husbands and children. As in Europe, the percent of births that are out-of-wedlock is historically high, as Bloomberg reported a few days ago, building on data from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). 

The data show such births in the U.S. and EU are predominantly to unmarried couples living together rather than to single mothers, the report says. The data suggest that societal and religious norms about marriage, childbearing and women in the workforce have changed, said Kelly Jones, the director for the Center on the Economics of Reproductive Health at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Welcome, America, to the Second Demographic Transition. We don't know how this is going to turn out, but we're clearly in the middle of it. 

Should Countries Enforce Population Control?

An opinion piece with this evocative title was published over the weekend by Ozy.com encouraging people to weigh in with their own opinions.  I'm guessing that the whole topic was inspired by the a book titled "Choosing Daughters: Family Change in Rural China," by Lihong Shi, an anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University, since much of the written space is given over to China's one-child policy. The editors also seem to accept the somewhat controversial analysis of David Goodkind that the one-child policy averted 400 million births in that country. As I said when that issue first emerged: "The one-child policy was a human rights disaster and, in my view, was not necessary to the drop in fertility in China. The Chinese were going to avert those births with or without that policy."

The title of the article suggests that "population control" means population limitation, with references to trying to limit births in China and India, and also getting into sterilization programs among mentally-ill people that arose during the social Darwinist movement early in the 20th century. However, if you watch the video of people interviewed on the street somewhere, you actually see a more nuanced view of "control." Human society controls many aspects of demographic change in ways that both encourage and discourage population growth. For example, we regulate human fertility by regulating age at marriage, and often by limiting your options once you are married, limiting incestuous sexual relationships, controlling access to contraception and abortion, as well as access to health providers who might be able to save lives were they more available. We allow access to guns that can kill people, but delay our reaction to finding lead or other contaminants in the water (keeping in mind that clean water is essential to human health). We control access to toileting and sewerage. We control who can come into and, in some cases, who can leave countries. In other words, as humans we control aspects not just of fertility, but mortality, and migration as well. Some of these regulations encourage lower rates of growth, at least in local places, and others encourage higher rates of growth. 

In my view, the bottom line is that a successful future for human society requires giving each of us as much control as possible over our own lives, especially in terms of reproduction and health and the ability to move where we want at least within our own country, but always keeping in mind that humans are a social species and we need to have a set of rules ("laws") that we can agree upon and make sense to us. A key element of this kind of "positive" control is education and on this point I am in 100% agreement with the Ozy.com conclusion: "Educating and empowering women just might save us all".

Culture and Money are Part of Demography

Demographic research shows us very clearly that culture and money influence the way we organize our lives, and in turn affect underlying demographic trends such as the birth rate, death rate, and migration patterns--which in turn circle around to affect culture and money. I was inspired to point these things out by an Op-Ed in today's NYTimes by Andrew Cherlin, Professor of Sociology at The Johns Hopkins University, and a Past President of the Population Association of America, as I've mentioned before. He was weighing in on the ongoing question of how did it happen that Donald Trump was elected President? On what basis, for example, did white voters who had helped elect Barack Obama to the presidency, wind up then voting for Trump? Was it culture (a fear of "cultural displacement" that can lead to or exacerbate racism?) or was it economics (a feeling that lower-income white workers had been left behind by Democrats?). Professor Cherlin was very clear about his view of the matter--you can't separate these things:

The debate over why the white working class supported Mr. Trump raises a question: Why do we care so much about determining precisely how much political upheaval is due to economics and how much is due to culture?

Perhaps we are drawn to this futile quest because economic problems seem more tractable — more easily dealt with through the levers of government policy — while cultural issues seem more resistant to change. Perhaps it is because people’s economic troubles are often said to reflect larger, structural problems beyond their control, whereas their cultural deficiencies are sometimes seen as their own fault. When academics and journalists want to express affinity with the working class, in other words, they focus on poverty, and when they don’t, they focus on prejudice.

Controversy over economic versus cultural explanations of poverty can be traced to 1966, when the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, in his book “La Vida,” on Puerto Ricans in New York, wrote of a “culture of poverty” that seemed impervious to change.

Today, however, astute scholars do not see a wall between economics and culture. They acknowledge that financial hardship affects the daily lives of working-class Americans, but they add that how they respond is based on cultural beliefs that may lead them to scapegoat minority groups.

People with unstable or insufficient incomes may express their fears by talking about race because that is the way they have learned to interpret the world. People who are frustrated by their lack of progress may still try to defend the dignity of their work. It is a mistake to see economics and culture as distinct forces. Both propelled Mr. Trump to victory.

If you read this and think to yourself, "what does this have to do with demography?" the answer is of course that everything is connected to demography. Patterns of migration, patterns of births and deaths, and the demographic characteristics of different groups that are shaped by cultural changes taking place are all wrapped up in what we can generally call "cultural demography."

New Additions to the PAA Oral History Project

I am taking the liberty today of copying an article that I wrote for the latest issue (Spring 2018) of PAA Affairs (the quarterly newsletter of the Population Association of America), since I think that this stuff is important!

The PAA History Committee is very pleased to let you know that two new interviews of Past PAA Presidents have been added to the PAA Oral History Project archives on the PAA website: http://www.populationassociation.org/2016/06/09/paa-oral-history-project/ .

The latest interviews are with Dr. Andrew Cherlin (PAA President in 1999) and Dr.Arland Thornton (PAA President in 2001). Both of them are self-described family and household demographers. Here’s how Cherlin describes the field of demography as he saw it in his early years in the profession:

In the 1960s and early ’70s, the PAA was still about the population problem, how to reduce the birth rates. And a huge proportion of all the people who attended the meeting or were presenting papers were presenting on fertility—some on mortality, because we wanted to get death rates down. Fields like family and household demography and also migration were very underdeveloped. There were a lot of changes happening right at that time in the American family. And so there was a good group of people who were interested in these changes. And I think that group attracted people like Arland Thornton and me at the time.

To be sure, Thornton tells a similar tale:

I first went [to a PAA meeting] in 1972—I think we met in Toronto that year. It would be nice to see that program. I think that program would have been dominated by international family planning. I don’t think there was very much on mortality or on migration. I think that there would have been things on these issues, but not a lot. I think the main focus was on family planning. I think that the 1972 session where Paul Glick had a paper in a session on the family was the only one on the topic we now call family demography. And now, PAA is much bigger. The list of topics is much, much bigger. I think I would have had a little bit of a hard time in 1975, ’6, ’7, ’8, saying that divorce was part of demography. I think some people would have defined it as being outside demography. But with Andy [Cherlin] and Linda [Waite] and—oh, I didn’t mention Larry Bumpass and Jim Sweet before--it all soon became part of PAA. And studying school and mobility and occupational attainment, I don’t think there was very much of that at PAA in 1972. But Dudley Duncan was doing it, and if he was doing it, it almost had to be part of PAA. I think the expansion of topics at PAA has been amazing, and I’m delighted. I like demography being a big tent.

He also adds some advice for young people starting their careers:

I tell graduate students and post docs—this might be worth saying—to pick things to study that you’re passionate about. Do things that captivate you, that are enjoyable, that are fun. And if you do that, you’re going to work all the time, but it won’t seem like work.

The PAA Oral History Project is a unique source for the history of demography. It currently includes interviews with 51 of the 71 demographers who have served as president of the PAA since 1948. The project began in 1973 as the brainchild of Anders (Andy) Lunde. In 1988, Jean van der Tak replaced Andy as PAA Historian, and Jean was tireless in her pursuit of interviews until 1994, when the job of PAA Historian was handed over to John Weeks. He subsequently formed the PAA History Committee, whose current members include Karen Hardee, Dennis Hodgson, Deborah McFarlane, and Emily Merchant.

Will Old People and Robots Dominate the Future?

I've discussed the future role that robots might play in human society several times over the years--first in 2011, and most recently just last month. And, of course, I've blogged a lot about aging because the richer countries, in particular, are almost obsessed about the perceived negative consequences of the transition to a higher proportion of people being older (e.g., 65+). If you follow the interesting posts of John Mauldin, as I do (following up on a reader's recommendation several years ago), you may already have read his summary of his recent Strategic Investment Conference held here in San Diego last week. I was especially intrigued by his description of Karen Harris's presentation (she's from the Macro Trends Group at Bain & Company).

Last month Karen’s group issued a magnum opus report called “Labor 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation and Inequality.”...Bain thinks automation will eliminate up to 25% of US jobs by 2030, with the lower-wage tiers getting hit the hardest and soonest. That will be devastating, and it’s not that far away...Why is this happening? Demographics and automation are mutually reinforcing trends. One we already see: Employers turn to automation increasingly because they can’t find workers with the skills they need in sufficient numbers. The Baby Boom generation is leaving the workforce (though many Boomers are delaying retirement as long as they can). The additional labor that came from one-time factors like China’s opening has mostly run its course. If sufficient numbers of qualified people aren’t available, employer turn to machines.

Notice in the graph above from the Bain Group that greater inequality is one of the projected dimensions of this future scenario. As Mauldin notes:

The result will be even more inequality between lower-wage workers, highly skilled professionals, and business owners. That will create a variety of problems, one of which is consumption growth. The small number of wealthy people at the top can only spend so much. They save most of their income. Lower-income people spend more of their income. This pattern will only intensify.

Mauldin tends to be politically conservative and so is not too happy about the likely prospect that there will be calls for the wealthy to pay more in taxes to keep society afloat. This is, in fact, exactly the issue raised by Steven Ruggles in 2015 in his Presidential Address to the Population Association of America, as I noted at the time. Keep in mind that the U.S. population is aging, but not nearly as quickly as most European and East Asian societies. As automation and artificial intelligence replace the younger workers who are not being born, and people work longer into older age, a bit of transfer from the wealthy to everyone else is the likely answer to keep the country on track.

Bill and Melinda Gates are Becoming Demographers

Bill and Melinda Gates have been doing intensive and extensive philanthropic work for nearly two decades. The initial thrust of the Gates Foundation work was toward children's health. But over time they came to the realization that as ever greater fractions of children stay alive, the demand for ways of limiting family size to what people desire grows because people realize that too many children can exhaust a family's resources. In sum, Bill and Melinda Gates came to appreciate the basic elements of the demographic transition, and they discuss that very explicitly in their annual newsletter, which came out this week and is in the format of their answers to ten tough questions they get asked. Tough Question #5 is "Does Saving Kids' Lives Lead to Overpopulation?"

Melinda: We asked ourselves the same question at first. Hans Rosling, the brilliant and inspiring public health advocate who died last year, was great at answering it [One of my very first blog posts back in 2010 was about his famous Ted Talk]. I wrote about the issue at length in our 2014 letter [and I blogged about that at the time]. But it bears repeating, because it is so counterintuitive. When more children live past the age of 5, and when mothers can decide if and when to have children, population sizes don’t go up. They go down. Parents have fewer children when they’re confident those children will survive into adulthood. Big families are in some ways an insurance policy against the tragic likelihood of losing a son or a daughter.

Now, to be clear, population size almost always DOES go up as the death rate goes down, because historically it has taken a while for people to realize that low death rates are here to stay, plus they need to have access to birth control. At the same time, if people trust the work of the Gates Foundation and have greater faith than in the past that death rates will be low and reproductive health care needs will be met, the gap between low death rates and low fertility will be lower and the population size impact will be less.

Bill: There’s another benefit to the pattern Melinda describes—first more children survive, then families decide to have fewer children—which is that it can lead to a burst of economic growth that economists call “the demographic dividend.” Here’s how it works.

When more children live, you get one generation that’s relatively big. Then, when families decide to have fewer children, the next generation is much smaller. Eventually, a country ends up with relatively more people in the labor force producing economically—and relatively fewer dependents (very old or very young people). That’s a recipe for rapid economic development, especially if countries take advantage of it by investing in health and education.

I commented very recently about the demographic dividend, and I am pleased to see that Bill Gates is thinking along these lines. Indeed, I would not want any of my comments to be viewed as negative toward what the Gates Foundation has been accomplishing. I encourage you to read the answers to all ten of their tough questions--answers which are admirably insightful and honest.

Was Queen Victoria a Malthusian?

If you are a fan of PBS's "Masterpiece Theater," as my wife and I are, then you have probably already seen the first episode of the second season of "Victoria." This series has thus far brought us into the early days of Queen Victoria's nearly 64-year reign, starting in 1837. Charles Dickens was just gaining fame, and Thomas Robert Malthus had recently died. I mention these two people because they both show up in Season 2, Episode 1, which starts in 1840 after the birth of her first child. The ladies of the court are very complimentary of Dickens' new story, "The Old Curiosity Shop." Dickens was decidedly not a Malthusian, in the sense that he did not agree with the way in which Malthus's ideas had been politicized to suggest that the government should not encourage the poor to have children. Indeed, there is a lot of discussion on the internet that Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" was deliberately anti-Malthusian and that Scrooge was Dickens' representation of Malthus.

Perhaps not coincidentally, a little later in the episode we see Queen Victoria reading aloud from Malthus' "Essay on Population," referencing the geometric growth of populations. She seems in agreement with these sentiments in the TV program, and that squares with comments by a British Historian, Stephanie Polsky, in her book "Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in NeoDickensian London." Indeed, in one page about Victoria, Polsky brings in Malthus, Darwin, and Marx--along with Dickens. Although I don't talk about Dickens in my book, you can get more on the connections between Malthus, Darwin, and Marx in Chapter 3.

Keep in mind that one motivation of the writer(s) of "Victoria" to introduce Malthus might be that Victoria herself had children at what seems like a geometric pace--9 children in the 21 years that she and Albert were married before he died of typhoid fever. They were all married off to various European royalty and Victoria was dubbed "the grandmother of Europe." We could probably have a long discussion about whether that was a good or a bad thing.

Dan Brown--Novelist and Demographist

I have admitted before that I am a fan of Dan Brown and I always look forward to the release of his books--the latest of which is Origin. When his novel Inferno came out in 2013, I blogged about it because the theme of the book was about the threat of global overpopulation (as I note on page 8 of the 12th Edition). He refers to Malthus as a "demographist" and I had never heard that term until Dan Brown used it. A Google search suggests that it is a synonym for demographer, but I think I am going to be a little more nuanced. A demographer is someone who has an academic background in the field of demography and teaches and/or does research on demographic issues. By contrast, I am going to label as a demographist those who use demographic ideas and information without necessarily having a lot of background in the field of demography. That is not a bad thing; it is just a different thing. 

So, by that definition, Dan Brown is a demographist, along with being a brilliant novelist (and of course it doesn't hurt that his protagonist is a college professor!). His novels take place in real places that he has obviously carefully researched, and with real substantive themes, typically related in some way to religion. I thought about that, in fact, when on page 29 of Origins, Brown describes atheists as "one of the planet's fastest-growing demographics." Based on reports from Pew Research, I'm guessing that this is not an easy statement to fact-check, but the data do seem to suggest that the proportion of people in the U.S. who say they are atheists is growing. The number is larger if you more generally refer to people with "no religion" (which doesn't necessarily mean they don't believe in God). 

Interestingly enough, the "culture clash" between atheists and followers of traditional religions that forms the theme of Origins is taking place in Spain, and much of the action occurs in Barcelona--in Catalonia--a current hotbed of culture clashes, as I recently discussed.

Overall, then, reading Dan Brown novels is another example of how demography underlies everything in the world, whether we realize it or not.

Inside Demography--An Interview with Andrew Cherlin

Dr. Andrew Cherlin is the Benjamin H. Griswold III Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at John Hopkins University, and is a Past President of the Population Association of America (PAA). He is one of the world's foremost family demographers--widely published, cited, and quoted. He has appeared in numerous of my blogs over the years, starting in 2010 and most recently just a couple of weeks ago.

Last April he was interviewed by members of the PAA History Committee (which I chair) during the PAA's annual meeting in Chicago, and we now have this interview available online at the website of the PAA. One of the important themes in Dr. Cherlin's work over the years has been to bridge the gap between academic research and public policy. Here is an excerpt from page 18 of the interview:

The recent development that I see as most productive among policy people is an agreement among conservatives and liberals that both economics and culture make a difference.

In the economic realm, people with college degrees are the winners in our globalized and automated economy. And they’re the ones who have a marriage-based, stable family life these days. What we need to do is help the people who are not the winners, help them by getting them better educated, not necessarily college degrees for all, but community college training and other apprenticeship-based programs. That’s what we need to do.

On the cultural level, I do think there is a role for stressing the importance of stability in family life. And there is nothing wrong with the liberals doing that. So we need to think about both economic and cultural ways to lessen the class divide that in 2017 seems so strong among American families.

In my view, this is the one of, if not the, most important reason for doing demographic research--to improve our understanding of how the world is working, so that we can do our best to improve life for all humans. 

Catalonia is Important to Demographic History

One of the hardest things that humans do everywhere in the world is to get along with people whose culture is different than theirs. Spain has a long history of culture clashes and the most recent is the referendum in Catalonia--in northeastern Spain--to become independent of Spain. The difference between Catalonia (whose regional capital is Barcelona) and the rest of Spain lies at the heart of our current understanding of the demographic transition. On page 85 of the 12th edition, I note that:

In the early 1960s, J. William Leasure, then a graduate student in economics at Princeton [and subsequently a Professor of Economics here at San Diego State University], was writing a doctoral dissertation on the fertility decline in Spain, using data for each of that nation’s 49 provinces. Surprisingly, his thesis revealed that the history of fertility change in Spain was not explained by a simple version of the demographic transition theory. Fertility in Spain declined in contiguous areas that were culturally similar, even though the levels of urbanization and economic development might be different (Leasure 1962). At about the same time, other students began to uncover similarly puzzling historical patterns in European data (Coale 1986). A systematic review of the demographic histories of Europe was thus begun in order to establish exactly how and why the transition occurred. The focus was on the decline in fertility, because it is the most problematic aspect of the classic explanation. These new findings have been used to help revise the theory of the demographic transition.

Those provinces that caught Bill Leasure's eye were especially the ones in Catalonia. Compare the map below of marital fertility rates in 1950 in Spain [from one of Leasure's publications] with the regional linguistic map of Spain [reproduced in a paper by Ron Lesthaeghe and Antonio Lopez-Gay]:

In the Catalan-speaking areas, marital fertility was lower than elsewhere and this was due partly to the fact that urban and rural fertility rates were both low. Elsewhere in Spain the birth rates followed the expected pattern of being higher in rural than in urban areas, but Catalonia was different. This caused demographers at Princeton at the time to rethink their approach to the demographic transition in order to take culture--not just economics--into account. Current demography theory is much more sophisticated (and complex) as a result.

Cereal Production Exceeds Population Growth--For Now...

Max Roser at Oxford does a magnificent job of putting data together to help people understand what's happening in the world, and one of his group's recent blog posts (by Hannah Ritchie) relates changes over time in cereal production to population growth. The tension between population and food was at the heart of Malthusian thinking and, to be frank, if were still back in the late 18th/early 19th century of Malthus's day, we would almost certainly agree with Malthus' view of the world. As I detail in my book, two important things have happened since then: (1) we have figured out how to control both mortality and fertility; and (2) we have figured out how to grow more food on an acre of land. Here's a graph of recent trends (which is interactive if you go there directly):

Cereal production accounts for more than half of the global caloric input (including cereals that are fed to animals that are then slaughtered for human consumption) and its production has increased faster than the population has grown. This is due almost entirely to agricultural intensification (more yield per acre), rather than extensification (we are already farming all of the good land).

Of course, we don't know how long this relationship will last--and that is the critical issue. As Ritchie notes in her blog:

The adoption and success of the Green Revolution has not been consistent across the developing world. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been a region of particular concern in terms of food security. Despite making significant progress in reducing hunger in recent decades, undernourishment in Sub-Saharan Africa remains the highest in the world (with almost one-in-five people living there defined as undernourished). 

In the chart below we see that SSA’s cereal production has been unable to keep pace with population growth. Despite an increase in cereal output of around 300 percent, per capita output has been declining. Overall, we see much greater emphasis on agricultural expansion in SSA, increasing by 120 percent since 1961—approximately equivalent to the total area of Kenya. Relative to Asia and Latin America, SSA’s improvements in yield have been much more modest (increasing by only 80 percent).

Since Africa has the world's most rapidly growing population, the fact that cereal production is lagging behind population growth is a very poor omen for the future, no matter how rosy the current global situation may seem. We have to stay real about this. 

Does a Low Birth Rate Delay Young People's Entrance into Adulthood?

When demographers talk about low birth rates, the usual conversation is about why they are so low. And when consequences of those low rates are mentioned, it is almost always in the context of the negative effect on the age transition--with too few young people relative to the older population. Now, however, we have a new perspective from Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor who has written famously about "Generation Me," in which her analyses suggested that younger people were growing up in an age of "entitlement" rather than "enlightenment". Her newest book is iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.” The San Diego Union-Tribune has a lengthy story about the substance of that book along with a paper on this topic that just came out in the journal Child Development.

Today’s 18-year-olds exhibit similar milestone behaviors as did 15-year-olds in the late 1970s, Twenge said. Moreover, they’re mostly doing this voluntarily — parents aren’t imposing this delayed independence.

But while smartphones and social media enable these trends, Twenge says it’s not the whole explanation. Advances in safety and a declining rate of childbirth drive this process. When parents have fewer children and expect them to grow up, they will expend more care on them.

Twenge said an evolutionary explanation called life history theory appears to be behind the trend. It classifies the maturation of species into “fast” and “slow” strategies.

Fast strategies involve producing prolific amounts of offspring with minimal care. Spawning fish and lobsters are examples. Very high death rates are acceptable, because only a tiny fraction need to survive to perpetuate the species.

Humans, with many years of care and training required for independence, represent the slow strategy. Modern society makes the slow strategy more feasible than before, Twenge said. 

Thus, fewer children per parent enables "helicopter parenting," but Twenge doesn't see that as necessarily bad--just different. Lower death rates with associated greater longevity (including healthy years of life expectancy) diminishes the need for children to rapidly become adults. Indeed, it may be socially useful for younger people to spend longer figuring out how the world works and where they are going to fit into it.

UN Population Commission Meets to Discuss Age Structures

If you've read my book, you know that I refer to the age transition as the "master" transition because it is what societies really have to cope with. The overall demographic transition is not just about changes in population size--it's about the changing numbers and percentages at each age. This week the United Nations Commission on Population and Development is meeting to discuss exactly those issues in the context of achieving the sustainable development goals. They have put together a very nice 10-minute video summarizing the Commission's work and, of course, the work more specifically of the UN Population Division. Indeed, John Wilmoth, the current Direction of the Population Division is featured in the video, as are previous directors. Here is a brief description of the focus of the week's meetings:

The historical reductions in mortality and fertility are driven by, and help to reinforce, other defining aspects of sustainable development, including expanded access to education, improvements in sexual and reproductive health, and greater gender equality. Collectively, these changes promote an increased productivity of workers, a larger workforce especially as women take on new social roles, and a higher standard of living. 

Changing population age structures also present a substantial challenge, especially to countries that are unprepared for them. The failure to account for and adapt to changes in a population’s age structure can exacerbate existing gaps in development, especially when the shift in population over time is toward age groups that lack access to essential services and social protection. Countries with growing populations of young people must find ways to provide education and employment opportunities for youth or risk forfeiting some of their potential contribution toward sustainable development.

This is an important example of the concept that demography underlies almost everything in the world. And, of course, it underscores a point made by Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, who recently argued that: "Demography is ultimately more powerful than economics, yet we hear constantly from economists and hardly ever from demographers. We need to hear more from demographers".

All Is Not Lost--At Least When It Comes to Seeds

Modern agriculture is based on simplification, not diversification. This has allowed us to feed most--albeit not all--of the nearly 7.4 billion people currently alive on the planet. But in the long haul we may want to have access to 10,000 years of agricultural diversity in terms of different seeds. Climate change and other environmental impacts on the globe may change our minds about what is best to grow. Luckily, others have thought of that and figured out a solution, as was reported this morning on CBS Sunday Morning. It turns out that Norway hosts a "Doomsday Vault" of seeds from all over the world.

On the Arctic tundra in Svalbard, Norway, about half-way between Oslo and the North Pole, there are no gardens, no trees. Yet, deep beneath this barren surface lies the largest concentration of agricultural diversity anywhere on Earth. 

The angular, concrete structure seems more “modern art museum” than “seed storage vault.” It impresses even before entering.

American agriculturalist Cary Fowler heads this international effort to safeguard the sources of the world’s food supply -- one designed to outlast any disaster, and ultimately, all of us. 

In one room there are seeds for more than 150,000 different varieties of wheat. “The most important thing is that it represents everything that wheat can be in the future,” Fowler said. “So, those different varieties have different traits; maybe one is higher protein and another one is resistant to a particular insect or disease. And we need that collection of traits, because we don’t have a crystal ball. We don’t know what’s coming in the future, and we don’t know which of those traits will be useful or important.

The project is funded by the Crop Trust, based in Bonn, Germany, and I admit that I find it reassuring that people have planned ahead in this way. As Malthus and many other writers over the years have reminded us, the bottom line question for human society is whether or not we can feed ourselves.

Demography Now and Then

It has been my pleasure recently to become acquainted with Professor Alan Berstein at Gordon State College in Georgia. His doctorate is in demography from the University of Pennsylvania and he taught at Washington University in St. Louis for several years before leaving academics for a couple of decades. He then returned to academia a few years ago and just this past year was able to teach demography again. He recounted his experience to an audience of colleagues at Gordon State and at my request has provided a link to the essay that he shared. Since he's only a little younger than I am, his perceptions of changes over time in how demography is taught mirror mine very closely. The essential ingredients of demography are not much different now than they used to be--these are universal principles we're talking about--but the approach to teaching is a lot different (and I think better) now that it used to be. Here is one of my favorite paragraphs from his essay:

It’s the change in doing demography that has transformed my teaching it. Fifty years ago, my first forays into demographic research as a sophomore in college inevitably led me to library stacks and dozens of census and vital statistics volumes; armed with magnifying glass and legal pad, I withstood the ravages of book dust in pursuit of quantitative truth. Today, a few weeks into my class, I took my students to one of our computer labs to visit, hands on, data sites at the U.S. Census Bureau’s magnificent American Fact Finder, the CDC's "WONDER" (which actually isn't really), the Georgia Department of Public Health’s OASIS, and the Vinson Institute, where it’s all there for the clicking! Students can engage with the data and hence the field immediately and in real time. Further, we can all follow developments in the field not only with online access to scholarly journals, but with resources more intellectually accessible to all my student like the population blog maintained by John Weeks, the author of my textbook (Weeks 2017). Hence demography today jumps out from the textbook and data to motivate students to look at their world through a demographic lens almost as soon as the semester starts.

I have devoted my entire adult to understanding how the world works, and I am convinced that demography is in the center of everything. When I see other teachers and students as excited as I am about learning I know that everything is going to be all right.

An Annotated Guide to President Trump's Speech to the U.S. Congress

Yesterday I asked the question whether or not the Trump administration might actually think about a process of legalization for at least some of the undocumented immigrants in the U.S. He did not touch on that in last night's speech, so we will just have to wait and see. His speech did, however, offer a wide range of policy possibilities without providing any specific details about how he would do things like bring back jobs, rebuild the country's infrastructure, reconfigure health care, deal with immigration, and play a key role in world affairs. These are not simple things to do. First, you have to diagnose the real problem, and then find answers that a majority of people in Congress can agree on. That's a lot of work, but the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine today provided a helpful online resource by pointing to books put out by American scientists (the people who really do know more than others about their subject areas) that offer the diagnoses and treatments for many (albeit not all) of the points made in President Trump's speech last night. 

The President’s Joint Address to Congress focused on topics including immigration, health care, and infrastructure. The National Academies Press provides resources directly related to these issues.

In keeping with our seven-year tradition of providing resources on the topics in Presidents’ State of the Union addresses, we’ve annotated the complete text of President Trump’s Address to Congress with relevant reports from the National Academies that provide authoritative, independent guidance on these issues.

Each of the books can be downloaded for free as PDF files. Enjoy! 

Demography and Democracy

Ben Wilson at LSE has posted a very nice blog in Demotrends about the relationship between demography and democracy, building on his work with Tim Dyson. Their analysis is that the kinds of societal changes associated with the demographic transition are those that also tend to promote democracy in societies:

In the second half of the demographic transition, the proportion of adults in the population becomes larger. In demographic terms, fewer children means that the number of people eligible to vote increases, as does overall civic engagement. Put bluntly, children aren’t interested or engaged in politics. 

Another consequence of demographic transition is that when women are caring for fewer children they are more likely to enter the labour market. Women are able to pursue careers, skills, and training in a way that they aren’t able to if they are caring for large families. As a result, they tend to have a greater interest in the political system and their rights.

They then show the statistical relationship between the Vanhanen Index of democracy and the median age as a proxy for where a country is in terms of the demographic transition. The relationship isn't perfect, but it is very intriguing. Now, full disclosure, I have been following Tim Dyson's work forever, and I doubt that I have ever disagreed with anything he wrote. Indeed, if you go back and look at my blog post about the Colombia peace agreement, you will see some similarities with this theme that democracy and demography are intimately related.

Political Demography and Latin America

Today I was the guest on Understanding Latin American Politics: The Podcast, which is hosted by Dr. Gregory Weeks, Professor and Chair of Political Science at the University of Carolina, Charlotte. Greg has always been like a son to me since, of course, he IS my son. Not surprisingly, we talked about political demography, which he and I have been working on together for several years. Today we talked especially about Colombia, Venezuela and Cuba. Enjoy!