What's Your Label?

As the population of the United States has become increasingly diverse, the Census Bureau has added to the list of categories that you might label yourself in terms of "race" or "ethnicity." As you might expect, a lot of people don't want to be pigeon-holed in the way that the Census Bureau had in mind. The Associated Press had a look at some of the responses that people had to the 2010 census:

When the 2010 census asked people to classify themselves by race, more than 21.7 million — at least 1 in 14 — went beyond the standard labels and wrote in such terms as "Arab," "Haitian," "Mexican" and "multiracial."
The unpublished data, the broadest tally to date of such write-in responses, are a sign of a diversifying America that's wrestling with changing notions of race.
The figures show most of the write-in respondents are multiracial Americans or Hispanics, many of whom don't believe they fit within the four government-defined categories of race: white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander or American Indian/Alaska Native. Because Hispanic is defined as an ethnicity and not a race, some 18 million Latinos used the "some other race" category to establish a Hispanic racial identity.

This latter point is not news, as it turns out. In every census since 1980, when the Census Bureau started asking this question, people of Latin American origin have been the vast majority of people who have indicated "some other race" beyond the ones listed on the census form.

More than three million write-ins came from white and black Americans who appear to have found the standard race categories insufficient. They include Arabs, Iranians and Middle Easterners, who don't fully view themselves as "white" and have lobbied in the past to be a separate race category. They are also Italians, Germans, Haitians and Jamaicans who consider ancestry a core part of who they are.

This is one of the problems of the separation of the short form from the American Community Survey. The latter includes questions about ancestry, where people can let that hang out, whereas the short form does not.

Roughly half a million black Americans — between 1 and 2 percent of their total population — wrote in answers to signify their preferred term for black. Among them: African-American, Afro-American, African, Negro, mulatto, brown and coffee. More than 36,000 described themselves as "Negro" in whole or in part. The term, which was listed as an example on the 2010 census form, drew criticism from some black groups for being outdated and insensitive.
While the issue of racial identity can be deeply individual, it is also highly political: census data are used to enforce anti-discrimination laws, to distribute more than $400 billion in federal aid for roads, schools and health care, and to draw political districts based in part on a community's racial makeup. Over the past decade, the number of people identifying as "some other race" jumped by 3.7 million, or 24 percent. Experts say an increase in the write-in responses could signify limitations to the form and potentially skew government counts.
In an interview, Census Bureau officials said they have been looking at ways to improve responses to the race question based on focus group discussions during the 2010 census. The research, some of which is scheduled to be released later this year, examines whether to include new write-in lines for whites and blacks who wish to specify ancestry or nationality; whether to drop use of the word "Negro" from the census form as antiquated; and whether to possibly treat Hispanics as a mutually exclusive group to the four main race categories.

World is Running Out of Food and the Japanese

Two demographic news stories popped up from the Associated Press today and they are oddly related. The first is a summary of a new UN report suggesting that we don't actually have enough food and fuel for the projected population increase over the next few decades.

As the world's population looks set to grow to nearly 9 billion by 2040 from 7 billion now, and the number of middle-class consumers increases by 3 billion over the next 20 years, the demand for resources will rise exponentially.
Even by 2030, the world will need at least 50 percent more food, 45 percent more energy and 30 percent more water, according to U.N. estimates, at a time when a changing environment is creating new limits to supply.
And if the world fails to tackle these problems, it risks condemning up to 3 billion people into poverty, the report said.
Efforts towards sustainable development are neither fast enough nor deep enough, as well as suffering from a lack of political will, the United Nations' high-level panel on global sustainability said.
"The current global development model is unsustainable. To achieve sustainability, a transformation of the global economy is required," the report said.

These are things I've been saying for quite a while, but as a species we tend not to want to think long-term. We are more into short-term gain and long-term pain, than the other way around.

However, at the same time, the Japanese are doing their part to help, so to speak, because they are essentially on the road to demographic extinction. 

Japan's population of 128 million will shrink by one-third and seniors will account for 40 percent of people by 2060, placing a greater burden on a smaller working-age population to support the social security and tax systems.
The grim estimate of how rapid aging will shrink Japan's population was released Monday by the Health and Welfare Ministry.
In year 2060, Japan will have 87 million people. The number of people 65 or older will nearly double to 40 percent, while the national work force of people between ages 15 and 65 will shrink to about half of the total population, according to the estimate, made by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

Since older people eat less and have a smaller carbon footprint, this should be an environmentally good thing for the world, even if it will present enormous challenges for Japanese society.

A London Baby Boom

Can that be right? A baby boom in one of the world's largest cities? That's the news from this week's Economist.

Births in the capital each year have soared by 25% since 2002, as British women who delayed childbearing finally got down to it and London’s many immigrants produced in Stakhanovite quantities. London contributed fully 37% of England’s natural population increase (the surplus of births over deaths) between 2009 and 2010. Many parents are now staying put, thanks to a sticky mortgage market that makes it hard for buyers to get a loan and a sticky labour market that makes it hard for anyone to be sure of a job. Half as many London properties were sold in 2010 as in 2004. Grandparents, too, are less keen on leaving than they were. Black and Asian immigrants who settled in London in the 1960s and 1970s are disinclined to move away from their families in London for the pleasures of, say, Margate.

I admit that I did a genuine double-take at this news, since this kind of phenomenon goes entirely against the grain of most demographic theory. But it seems to be true, and as with all baby booms there will have to be adjustments in London to accommodate these babies as they grow up.

Primary schools have been the first to cry havoc. Since 2008 London Councils, a lobbying group representing London’s 32 boroughs, has warned of the coming gap between the number of wriggling young bodies and the number of school places available for them. Now it is undeniable. School places are in short supply all over England, but the problem is especially acute in the capital. By 2015-16 greater London will need around 70,000 more school places, London Councils says. In November central government agreed to give the capital £250m ($390m) to increase school places—a step in the right direction, but nothing like what is needed.

We would expect that the next step will be a flight of young families to the suburbs, but perhaps London is enough of a world leader to defy that expectation. The Economist is not sure what to expect:

How permanent are these new demographic trends? Will birth rates turn down again as the daughters of immigrants adopt British ways? Will foreigners find greener economic fields elsewhere? Will native Londoners? Flyers touting emigration services are beginning to appear in parts of town.

What do you think? 

The Demographics of Your Ecological Footprint

Ecological footprints are an important set of algorithms by which we are able to put a number on our environmental impact. Our use of resources (and the resulting pollution of the environment from the use of those resources) obviously rises with income. The more of us there are who are economically well off the worse it is for the environment. The Economist reports on a paper published recently in Demography, the prestigious journal of the Population Association of America, dealing with a new twist on this issue. Emilio Zagheni of the Max Planck Institute in Rostock, Germany, has shown that carbon footprints (a key indicator of resource use) rise steadily by age from the teen years until peaking in the mid-60s and then declining a bit after that. This demonstrates that it is not simply a matter of how many people there are, if we want to know the environmental impact--the age structure also matters.

Carbon emissions ebb as people enter old age. Because most rich countries are ageing, demography should therefore reduce atmospheric pollution. And it will—eventually. But the reduction does not begin until people are in their mid-60s and for the next decade or so, the number of people in the most polluting age group (60 to 64) will rise even more than the number of less-polluting geriatrics. In America in 2020 there will be 2.4m more people aged 75-79 than at present; but there will be 4.4m more 60- to 64-year-olds.
The growth of heavily polluting age groups will be still more marked in younger countries which are beginning to reap the economic benefits that come from an increase in the relative size of the working-age population. Members of this cohort will produce more pollution until they retire, meaning that the climate-change benefits of ageing populations will not kick in until 2050 at the earliest.

The Decline (and Fall?) of Chinatown in the US

Ethnic enclaves have traditionally served as local gateways for new immigrants, allowing them to learn enough about the new environment so that they can successfully negotiate their new life. Some immigrant groups have been more obvious about this than others over time--think of Little Italy and Chinatown. With time, however, immigrants become part of the mainstream--at least if the host society allows that to occur (which doesn't happen all over the globe), and those places lose their principal function. A story in the Washington Post (and Washington DC has a famous Chinatown) suggests that as Asians join everyone else heading for the suburbs, Chinatowns are losing their importance.

“The traditional Chinatown is changing, and in most cities it is no longer the residential, political and cultural center of Asian-American life that it once was,” said Wei Li, an Arizona State University professor [of Geography] who chairs the Census Bureau’s advisory committee on the Asian population.
She explained that urban Chinatowns continue to serve a role for newly arrived immigrants with less education or lower skills who seek entry-level work, as well as for elderly residents with poor English skills who can’t drive. But middle-class families are almost nowhere to be found, and in many cities, rising downtown property costs and urban gentrification threaten their traditional existence.
“Some have become functional as tourist attractions,” Li said.

Of course, there are new ethnic attractions in the 'burbs:

Signs of Chinatown decline can be seen in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, home to the nation’s largest Asian-American population at 1.9 million. There, Monterey Park, deemed part of an “ethnoburb” outside Los Angeles after it became majority Asian-American in the 1990s, has long been a first stopping point for newly arrived Chinese seeking bigger houses away from downtown Los Angeles.
Due to fast growth, the Asian-American suburban population has spread to other areas of California’s San Gabriel Valley and more recently to Irvine, where their share of the population jumped from 30 to 39 percent over the last decade.
“Irvine is one of the new wave of Asian communities, but it is not overtly Chinatown,” said Ralph Lee, 28, of Irvine. Lee, whose immigrant parents reared him in the affluent seaside community of Newport Beach, Calif., has never been to the Los Angeles Chinatown.

My own experience of Irvine contradicts that latter view, if truth be known. My daughter and son-in-law live in that area and we have been to strip shopping malls where every sign was only in Chinese (or some other Asian language).