Populations at Risk From Hurricane Sandy

Hurricane Sandy hit New York and New Jersey head-on with devastating effect, thus far killing 62 people in the US, according to the latest news that I could find at this moment. Here in the US, the news is about the US almost exclusively, but the hurricane left devastation in far less resilient places in the Caribbean, especially Haiti, before it roared up the east coast of the US, as the BBC News points out:

Fears are growing of food shortages in Haiti, after the strong winds and heavy rain of Hurricane Sandy caused extensive crop damage.

Aid workers and officials are also warning that flooding could lead to a sharp rise in cholera cases.

Sandy is blamed for some 70 deaths in the Caribbean. Of these more than 50 were in Haiti.

The cleanup everywhere will be slow, tedious, and costly, but as almost always, it will be the poor who will suffer the most and for the longest.

The Decline in Violence--Things That Don't Kill Us As Much Any More

If there is one thing that we are likely to associate in our minds with civilization it is the control of violence. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has written about this in his recently published book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. This week's Economist has picked up the threads of the book, which are as follows:

The path is from non-state societies (homicide rates around 100 per 100,000) to medieval proto-state societies (tens per 100,000) to early modern society (high-single digits per 100,000) to peaceful modern Europe (around 1 per 100,000), roughly an order-of-magnitude drop each time.

In other words, as people increasingly trust the government to control violence, they are less prone to take it into their own hands. On the other hand, in the United States there are some clear regional differences in the extent to which people trust the government.

Murder rates are about four times higher in America than in western Europe. And guns are not the only reason; murder by stabbing and clubbing is higher, too. The murder rate is higher among blacks, but American whites are more violent than European whites. The South is America's most violent region; both blacks and whites in the South are more violent than those in the northeast. In other words, the murder rate is highest in those states that most disdain the sovereign ("government") and champion self-reliance.

Note, however, that the South tends to have higher death rates from several other causes of disease besides violence, so we always have to be careful of that correlation versus causation thing.

Urbanization is Not Necessarily a Driver of Wealth

Cities have historically been the places where wealth is most likely to be created. That is still true, but it is less true in cities of developing countries than in the richer countries, depending especially upon the geographic region under discussion. The latest World Development Report (2013) from the World Bank focuses on jobs, and in that report there is a comparison of gross domestic product and percent urban over time in richer and poorer countries. The comparison is disheartening, as the Atlantic Wire notes:

Urbanization usually leads to higher GDP because of higher levels of productivity, the report says, which is illustrated in the graph to the left [see the article]. All five of the East Asia and Pacific countries in the graph show a steady increase in GDP per capita as people move to cities. But that did not happen for Sub-Saharan Africa; the graph on the right shows a sporadic relationship between urbanization and GDP. Part of the reason may be because much of non-farm work in Africa is from microenterprises and household businesses that do not earn much. "These businesses make a significant contribution to gross job creation and destruction," the report says, "although not necessarily to net job creation and productivity growth."

With population growth rates being higher in Sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world, these are issues of global concern. Indeed, the front page of the World Bank website features a blog post by Wolfgang Fengler talking about the struggle in Africa to bring its life expectancy up, and a more hopeful story suggesting that Africa could feed itself if the sub-continent were to implement a variety of policy changes outlined by the Bank.

Science Trumps Superstition in the Year of the Fiery Horse

Thanks to Shoshana Grossbard for the link to a recently published paper exploring what really happens to girls born in the Year of "Hinoeuma" (the Year of the Fiery Horse, aka the Fire Horse). You will recall that in the Chinese zodiac calendar used in Japan, the Year of the Fiery Horse occurs every 60 years and it is believed that girls (but not boys) born in that year will have troublesome characters and so will be hard to marry off. Indeed the birth rate dropped dramatically in the last such year--1966--but of course there were some girls who were born that year nonetheless. Hiroyuki Yamada of Osaka University has gone back to see what happened to those women, compared to women in surrounding cohorts, and compared to men. 

We find that there is no evidence of disadvantages to fire horse women in human capital investment, performance in the marriage market, or intra- household allocation of resources after marriage.

One of the important changes that has occurred since these women were born in 1966 is that arranged marriages have been almost entirely overtaken by love marriages. Older parents arranging a marriage may worry about the year in which a girl is born, but her same or similar age lover seems not to care. Furthermore, since there were fewer women born in that year than in the surrounding years, they seemed to have done a bit better in the marriage market than you would otherwise have expected. Another blow to superstition.

Will Waitress Moms Move the Election?

The US presidential election is getting ever closer to election day (although I've already voted, so I guess my personal election day is behind me), and the two candidates are essentially tied in the national public opinion polls. This means that everyone is looking for that group of undecided voters who, if they actually do go to the polls, will make the difference one way or another. This week's favorite demographic group is "waitress moms," as the NY Times explains:

Whether or not the term “waitress moms” endures, it defines a distinct demographic: blue-collar white women who did not attend college. And they are getting a lot of attention from both campaigns as the presidential race barrels toward its conclusion because even at this late date, pollsters say, many waitress moms have not settled on a candidate. They feel no loyalty to one party or the other, though they tend to side with Republicans.

“Blue-collar women are most likely to be the remaining movable part of the electorate, which is precisely why both campaigns are going at them as hard as they are,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, who is advising Priorities USA, a pro-Obama “super PAC.”

About 9 percent of all voters in 2008 were white women without college degrees who had an annual household income of less than $50,000, according to exit polls.

Note that there is a bit of demographic fudging here when calling these women "waitress moms." Most are not waitresses and many are not moms. But who's going to check on that? Maybe the "soccer moms" of the 1996 election, who may or may not have had anything to do with the outcome of that election.