A Truly Amazing Dot Density Map of the US Population

My older son alerted me to a blog post by Chris Welch about a recently created dot density map of the US using 2010 census data. Now, to be sure, the Census Bureau has created one of its own, which you can download in PDF format, but this new Census Dotmap is truly amazing. It is online, it allows you to zoom in to micro-level areas, and it has a background map so that you can orient yourself. It was created by Brandon Martin-Anderson, a student in the MIT Media Lab, and the website he created for the map includes details of how he created it. You simply have to see this to believe it.

The Fiscal Cliff Connection Between Death and Taxes

The familiar old saying is that the only two things that are certain in life are death and taxes. In many countries, including the US, the two are linked together by the inheritance tax, which is a widely used scheme to redistribute wealth. When you die, the government gets some of your estate and your heirs get the rest. There is typically a minimum amount of wealth, however, below which taxes are not collected. If you aren't very wealthy, the government won't tax your estate. The big question is--what is that minimum? This is one of the issues involved in the so-called "fiscal cliff" that Congress set up for itself to resolve before the end of 2012, but so far has chosen not to resolve. NBC News has figured out the consequence of inaction:

In 2010, after a year in which the estate tax was zeroed out altogether, Congress passed a law that set the estate tax at 35 percent and exempted all estates under $5 million, adjusted for inflation. That law expires in January 2013 when the exemption will fall to $1 million and the tax will rise to 55 percent.

Many families are faced with a stark proposition. If the life of an elderly wealthy family member extends into 2013, the tax bills will be substantially higher. An estate that could bequest $3 million this year will leave just $1.9 million after taxes next year. Shifting a death from January to December could produce $1.1 million in tax savings.

So, we know especially from the work of David Phillips at UCSD that people are capable of delaying their death day, at least a little bit. But can we speed things up without a bit of outside help? Will we have a spate of late night suicides on the 31st? Would we do that for sake of tax savings for our heirs? It will take a few months to know for sure whether there was, in fact, a statistically significant jump in deaths over the last few days of December 2012, so we will have to revisit this question later.

Dissing the Elderly in China

I note in Chapter 8 that filial piety seems to be on the decline in China. This is the Confucian concept of respect that children are expected to have for their elders and it has been interpreted in everyday life to mean that children should be caring for their aging parents. This was, as I have argued, much easier to think about in a world where only a small fraction of parents actually survived to old age and thus needed to be cared for. Modern China, on the other hand, now has a life expectancy of 71 years for females, and we can expect that 77 percent of girl babies born will still be alive at age 65. In modern China these girl babies will likely have had only one child each, so the burden of dealing with an older parent is not only higher than at any time in history, but there are also fewer children per older woman than at any time in history. The net result is that some children have been neglecting their parents, and the government has been forced to step in and force a bit of filial piety on the younger generation. AP News has the story:

Visit your parents. That's an order.

So says China, whose national legislature on Friday amended its law on the elderly to require that adult children visit their aged parents "often" — or risk being sued by them.

The amendment does not specify how frequently such visits should occur.

State media say the new clause will allow elderly parents who feel neglected by their children to take them to court. The move comes as reports abound of elderly parents being abandoned or ignored by their children.

My guess is that this is unlikely to have much impact, especially for those younger people living in cities while their parents are back in the rural areas from which they came. This doesn't mean that they don't respect and love their parents, but everyday life has a tendency to trump those good intentions about getting back "home" to see the old folks.

We're a Little Less Likely to Take This Job and Shove It

You probably won't be surprised to learn that one effect of the Great Recession is that people are hanging onto their jobs a bit longer than they used to. This information comes from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), which analyzed data from the January 2012 supplement to the Current Population Survey. NBC News picked up on the story.

It's not that we love our jobs so much, said Craig Copeland, the study's author and senior research associate at EBRI. "It seems like people who have jobs in this economy are holding onto them if they have a choice," he said. When the economy is thriving, people switch jobs more often in search of better pay and benefits or more room for advancement. In this economy, we're happy just to have our jobs.

What did surprise me, actually, was the relatively short period of time that most people hold jobs. 

The median length of time people have been at their jobs is 5.4 years, compared to 5.2 years in 2010 and 5 years nearly three decades ago.

Furthermore, the data over time seem to suggest that careers are built on a succession of jobs, rather than staying at the same job for a long time.

Only around 20 percent of workers aged 60 to 64 have been at their jobs for 25 years, Copeland said. That's not very many, but it's a drop of only around 3 percentage points since 1983. "The majority of people do change their jobs, either by choice or being forced to," he said.

The data also show that there is no longer any difference in workforce behavior between males and females in the US.

Foreign Population on the Rise in Britain

Mark Easton, the Home Editor of BBC News, has a Boxing Day tradition of posing a bunch of "family puzzlers," the answers to which most people are unlikely to know (he has a link to the answers, so you don't have to remain in ignorance). This year quite a few of those are drawn from the 2011 Census in the UK, and that drew my attention to a recent report of his focusing on rise in the foreign-born population in Britain between the 2001 and 2011. What percent of the population of England and Wales was foreign-born in 2011? The answer: 13 percent--pretty similar to the US. While the foreign-born population from India and Pakistan makes sense, the biggest increase was among people from Poland--with more than a half million arriving during the past decade, pushing Poles to second position among the foreign-born. The census also revealed that the proportion of the population in England and Wales describing themselves as both British and white dropped from 87 percent in 2001 to 80 percent in 2011. Still, they are the majority in every locality except London, where about one in three people is foreign-born and less than half identify as both British and white.