Demographics of Driving in Texas

The young and the old are the worst drivers in the world. Those are the facts, although to be fair the younger drivers (under 25) have a higher fatality rate than older drivers (70+). This matters, of course, as the age structure changes, as it is in the US. Today's New York Times carries an Op-Ed piece about this issue from the Texas Tribune. It is based largely on an interview with Steven Murdock, former Director of the US Census Bureau and current State Demographer of the State of Texas, while also teaching at Rice University. In Texas, the population is growing, and it is aging at the same time.

And the fastest growth of any age group will be the gray-hairs — drivers 65 or older. Depending on the growth model for Texas — what you think migration will do, whether you think the state will be as magnetic as it has been for the last two decades — the over-65 driving population will grow by anywhere from 218 percent to 268 percent between 2005 and 2040.

Put another way, a population that numbered about 1.8 million in Texas in 2005 will grow to somewhere between 5.7 million and 6.6 million in 2040.

That group is part of a bigger issue: if the state continues to grow like it has, we will need more roads. “We’re adding lots of bodies to roads that are already congested,” Dr. Murdock said.

Luckily for the fatality rate, it seems, a disproportionate share of those added bodies will be aging Baby Boomers, rather than young people, but the population projections do suggest that a state that has a strong ethos of keeping the government out of things may have to get the government involved to keep the state from strangling on its traffic.

Census Contemplates Change to Race and Ethnic Questions

The US Census Bureau is contemplating making changes in the way in which it asks about race and ethnicity, especially by combining those into a single questions. Elizabeth Aguilera of the San Diego Union-Tribune has done a nice job of examining the issue in today's paper:

Among the proposed revisions, the potentially new Hispanic designation is receiving the most public scrutiny. Latino advocates worry that counts of Hispanic Americans might drop, while demographers and other researchers welcome the possible change.

“We tend to identify ourselves by how society responds to us,” said John Weeks, a demographer at San Diego State University. “I think allowing people in one question to give all their options is what we want. It’s the best possible approach.”

In past census counts, including the one in 2010, respondents were first asked whether or not they were Hispanic, Latino or of Spanish origin. Then they were asked to select a race, such as white, black, Asian or two or more races.

Nearly every person who self-identified as Hispanic went on to choose the white or some-other-race option because they didn’t know where they fit in racially, Weeks said.

Most Americans, he added, view race and ethnicity as the same thing despite legal and anthropological distinctions.Census Bureau officials do not expect a dramatic shift in results if the survey form changes, said Nicholas Jones, chief of the racial statistics branch at the Census Bureau. He said the outcome of an experimental census study conducted in 2010 — which had some changes to race and ethnicity labels — was similar to that of the traditional form.

The Demographics of Election Year Polling

The proliferation of news media in the United States has been accompanied by a proliferation of public opinion polls, which are all now trying to tell us how the presidential election is going to turn out. Indeed, Nate Silver, surely one of the smartest people tracking elections, complained recently that 

Following the polls on Wednesday reminded me of the aphorism: “If you don’t like the weather in Chicago, wait five minutes.” When there are twenty or more polls published in day, as there were on Wednesday, there are necessarily going to be some stronger or weaker ones for either candidate.

A real problem with polling is that the world has gotten very complicated. It is not as easy as it used to be get people on the phone, and the country has more demographic differences than there used to be. For this reason, pollsters get ahold of whomever they can and then they weight the results by various demographic categories, including age, sex, race/ethnicity, and in some cases political affiliation. The results then reflect not only how good a polling firm is in getting people to answer their phone (and several firms now have cell phones in their database), but also on the way in which they weight those demographic factors. This became an issue this week because on Fox News, Dick Morris (who advised Bill Clinton when he was President, but now has turned on Democrats) claimed that Mitt Romney was actually ahead in the polls, rather than losing, because undecided voters never vote for the incumbent. As David Weigel noted on Slate, this was a a knee-slapper:

According to Morris, literally 100 percent of "undecided" voters will eventually vote against Barack Obama. Leaving aside how the theory ignores spillover to write-ins and third-party candidates, this is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. Nate Silver, bless him, has already explained why the "incumbent rule" doesn't actually exist.

The lesson in all of this is that polling results are not easy to disentangle on our own, so we really need some professional guidance. In my opinion, the best guide continues to be Nate Silver, whose NY Times blog continues its geography of the election series, which I mentioned previously, when the series began this summer.

"Show me your papers" is Not Dead Yet

Yesterday the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco (traditionally a rather liberal court) ruled that Arizona's "Show me your papers" law can be implemented, even though it is currently under appeal. Reuters reminds us that:

The provision requires police to verify the citizenship or immigration status of people arrested, stopped or detained if there is a reasonable suspicion that they are in the country unlawfully.

It went into effect on September 18 after a U.S. district judge lifted an injunction blocking it.

Parts of the Arizona law have been struck down by the US Supreme Court, but not all of it, including, at least for the time being, the provision that in Arizona you may have to prove that you belong there. This is not good news, I'm thinking, for the farmers whose crops are withering on the vine, as I mentioned yesterday.

Jobs? We've Got Jobs

One of the biggest issues in this year's presidential race in the US is who will generate more jobs in the American economy. This week's Time points out that there are jobs going begging in the American agricultural sector.

With the harvest season in full bloom, stringent immigration laws have forced waves of undocumented immigrants to flee certain states for more-hospitable areas. In their wake, thousands of acres of crops have been left to rot in the fields, as farmers have struggled to compensate for labor shortages with domestic help.

“The enforcement of immigration policy has devastated the skilled-labor source that we’ve depended on for 20 or 30 years,” said Ralph Broetje during a recent teleconference organized by the National Immigration Forum, adding that last year Washington farmers — part of an $8 billion agriculture industry — were forced to leave 10% of their crops rotting on vines and trees. “It’s getting worse each year,” says Broetje, “and it’s going to end up putting some growers out of business if Congress doesn’t step up and do immigration reform.”

There's plenty of blame to go around. At the state level it has largely been Republican legislatures and governors that have clamped down on immigrants, while at the federal level the Obama administration has deported an alarming number of Latin American immigrants. But at a time of record unemployment that shouldn't be a problem. Aren't there unemployed people who will step in to do the work?

Farming operations nationwide, from New York to Georgia to California, are reeling from similar labor shortages despite offering domestic workers competitive packages that include 401(k) plans and health insurance. Almost in unison, farmers complain that even when they are able to lure domestic workers to what often amounts to high-skilled, grueling work, it’s not long before they abandon the job.

This is a true conundrum. Americans don't want the jobs that immigrants are hired to undertake, but then we also don't want the immigrants to come do those jobs. Guest worker programs are offered as the solution, but they carry a lot of political baggage (mainly that it is hard to send them back home when we're through exploiting them). So, in the meantime we have a higher than necessary unemployment rate, and a food supply that is at risk.