The Age of Humans

As an antidote to all of the Republican presidential candidates who have been pretending that global climate change doesn't exist, The Economist this week has a lengthy story on the "Anthropocene"--the modern era in which humans shape the planet, rather than the other way around. Today's New York Times puts the dot on that "i" with a story about the detection from space of human-induced groundwater depletion:

Scientists have been using small variations in the Earth’s gravity to identify trouble spots around the globe where people are making unsustainable demands on groundwater, one of the planet’s main sources of fresh water.

They found problems in places as disparate as North Africa, northern India, northeastern China and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley in California, heartland of that state’s $30 billion agricultural industry.

Jay S. Famiglietti, director of the University of California’s Center for Hydrologic Modeling here, said the center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, known as Grace, relies on the interplay of two nine-year-old twin satellites that monitor each other while orbiting the Earth, thereby producing some of the most precise data ever on the planet’s gravitational variations. The results are redefining the field of hydrology, which itself has grown more critical as climate change and population growth draw down the world’s fresh water supplies.

However, as the article notes, lawmakers don't really want to know about this, because the solutions are expensive and politically sensitive. I'm sure you know the old adage that the two things that are hardest to get out of water are salt and politics...

From Brain Drain to Brain Gain

It has been a seemingly universal law of migration that outmigration is a bad thing for the sending community, because the migrants tend to be younger and among the more ambitious. When they leave, things are worse than they were before--the brain drain is a bad thing. In a new book (Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define our Future, by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, and Meera Balarajan), which is reviewed and extensively commented on in this week's Economist, the authors show that the world is different than it used to be--the brain drain has become a brain gain. It is not that migrants are any different than they used to be; rather the world is a very different place than it used to be. There are two very important pieces to the puzzle--the ease with which migrants can stay in touch with and potentially return to their country of origin, and the ease with which remittances can be sent back home. The transfer back home of new skills and knowledge, along with the money, are important components of lifting the sending countries out of poverty.
As the Economist's own analysis suggests:

The possibility of emigration may even have beneficial effects on those who choose to stay, by giving people in poor countries an incentive to invest in education. A study of Cape Verdeans finds that an increase of ten percentage points in young people’s perceived probability of emigrating raises the probability of their completing secondary school by around eight points. Another study looks at Fiji. A series of coups beginning in 1987 was seen by Fijians of Indian origin as permanently harming their prospects in the country by limiting their share of government jobs and political power. This set off a wave of emigration. Yet young Indians in Fiji became more likely to go to university even as the outlook at home dimmed, in part because Australia, Canada and New Zealand, three of the top destinations for Fijians, put more emphasis on attracting skilled migrants. Since some of those who got more education ended up staying, the skill levels of the resident Fijian population soared.

Thus, the argument is made that migration is good for the migrants, good for the receiving countries, and surprisingly good for the sending countries. Yet, most people in the richer countries are still generally opposed to immigration. Why?

Immigration is unpopular in rich countries because people overestimate its costs and underestimate its benefits. An influx of unskilled migrants may drag down the wages of unskilled natives, but this effect is “very small at most, and may be irrelevant”, according to a number of different studies. Migrants often create employment for natives. Indian entrepreneurs in San Francisco create new technology firms. Mexican nannies hold babies while American mothers go out to work. Migrants come when their services are wanted and stay away when they are not. Through the migrant grapevine, they know that jobs are drying up several months before government statisticians notice.

Since the future holds the promise of a demographic fit between aging richer countries and still youthful developing nations, migration is likely to be a fact of life, and a constant bone of contention, for the rest of this century. 

Women Drivers (or Not) in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is working very hard, according to the New York Times, to keep Arab monarchies in power and to tamp down revolution wherever it possibly can. The goal seems to be to maintain the power and credibility of its fundamentalist form of Islam, Wahhabi, which allows an authoritarian leader such as a monarch, whereas the more mainstream form of Sunni Islam practiced in most of the rest of the world does not condone that form of government. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia is trying to protect the region from the influence of Shia Islam as practiced in Iran, especially, but also in Iraq, as well (Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan are the only Shia-majority countries in the world).
From a purely demographic perspective, Saudi Arabia has the kind of young population that could spark a revolution, if pushed by circumstances. Nearly 1 in 2 Saudis is under the age of 25, although that percentage is declining as fertility slowly comes down in the kingdom. Still, its population of 27 million is twice what is was only 25 years ago, and UN projections suggest that the population will very nearly double again by the middle of this century. Thus far, one of the more noticeable signs of discontent has come from a woman pushing for the ability of women to drive cars in Saudi Arabia.

It's time to just let women drive: "There need not be a stand-off or confrontation on this issue if it is handled correctly," says The Saudi Gazette in an editorial. All the government has to do is let women drive. "Society will not break down if women are mobile." The ban is unofficial, anyway — there is no law saying women can't drive. So all it will take to settle this is educating men that the women in their lives need more freedom if they — and Saudi society — are to reach their full potential.

The gender divide may be Saudi Arabia's genuine weak point--the true clash of civilizations.

The Politics of Global Climate Change

The Associated Press reported this week that Republican candidates for President in the United States are rapidly distancing themselves from any support they may have shown in the past for the idea that the surface of the earth is warming and that we humans are the reason that is happening.

One thing that Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have in common: These GOP presidential contenders all are running away from their past positions on global warming, driven by their party's loud doubters who question the science and disdain government solutions.

All four have stepped back from previous stances on the issue, either apologizing outright or softening what they said earlier. And those who haven't fully recanted are under pressure to do so.

It's an indicator of a shift on the issue among conservative Republicans, who have an outsized influence in the party's presidential primary elections. Over the last few years, Gallup polling has shown a decline in the share of Americans saying that global warming's effects have already begun — from a high of 61 percent in 2008 to 49 percent in March. The change is driven almost entirely by conservatives.

It's a marked turnaround for a party that just three years ago gave its presidential nomination to Sen. John McCain, who long has supported cap and trade to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and who campaigned on the issue even though it put him on the same side as his opponent, Barack Obama.

In fact, the whole idea of a market to trade pollution credits came from the Republican Party. It emerged in the late 1980s under the administration of President George H.W. Bush as a free-market solution to the power plant pollution that was causing acid rain. It passed Congress nearly unanimously in 1990 as a way to control emissions of sulfur dioxide.

The exponential growth of humans over the past two centuries has gone hand in hand with an exponential use in carbon-based energy resources and an exponential increase in the number of pollutants thrown into the atmosphere. To think that this is having no effect on the environment is silly, of course, but many people mainly just don't want to have to pay for the mess we have made. This is not helped by the fact that people point to cold winters and say that this must prove that there is no such thing as "global warming." NASA has suggested that it prefers "global climate change" to global warming and that is probably good advice to follow. It won't change the minds of people who just don't want to own up to the damage we humans are doing to the environment, but it might help steer the conversation to what is really happening.

US Census Data Confirm That Married Couples Are Not in the Majority

The 2010 Census data released today confirm the findings from the ACS (see Figure 10.2 in my 11th edition) that married couple households are no longer the majority type of household in the US. The New York Times reports the story with help from William Frey at the Brookings Institution:

Married couples represented just 48 percent of American households in 2010, according to data being made public Thursday and analyzed by the Brookings Institution. This was slightly less than in 2000, but far below the 78 percent of households occupied by married couples in 1950.

What is more, just a fifth of households were traditional families — married couples with children — down from about a quarter a decade ago, and from 43 percent in 1950, as the iconic image of the American family continues to break apart.

The biggest change for the decade was the jump in households headed by women without husbands — up by 18 percent in the decade. The next largest rise was in households whose occupants were not a family — up by about 16 percent, Mr. Frey said.

Households are changing in other ways. Americans are living longer than ever, so households now include a growing number of elderly singles, said Andrew J. Cherlin, a demographer at Johns Hopkins University. Other factors have been the large influx of immigrants, who tend to be single people in their 20s and 30s, and the growing number of young people who live together without being married.