Language Still Divides Canada

It has now been almost two decades since a referendum on secession from Canada was held in the largely French-speaking province of Quebec. As I note in Chapter 10, this was narrowly defeated, largely because of English-speaking immigrants into the province. I note on page 431 that:
"the controversy over language in Canada underscores the power of society to turn any population characteristic into a sign of difference, from which prejudice and discrimination often follow." This week the Economist reminded us of the truth in this statement:

Quebec has strict language laws, zealously enforced by the OQLF [Office québecoise de la langue française0. One statute makes French the "normal and everyday language of work, instruction, communication, commerce and business". It also authorises the OQLF to "act on its own initiative or following the filing of a complaint".

In other words, the OQLF is the language police. 

Just ask Xavier Ménard. Mr Ménard wanted to list his firm with the province's company registrar but was rejected. The reason? His company's name, Wellarc, sounds too English. Mr Menard's protestations that it is a portmanteau of the French words web, langage, logo,artistique and compagnie fell on deaf ears. Such misplaced verbal intransigence last week prompted Mr Ménard to vent his frustration on YouTube (in French). The video has gone viral.

This issue has come to the forefront because the current ruling party in Quebec is the Parti Québécois (PQ):

In 1976, when the PQ, which is responsible for the linguistic legislation, first came to power, around 800,000 of Quebec's 6.2m people were English-speakers. By 2011 that fell to fewer than 600,000, even as the province's population rose to 8m.

This is very reminiscent of the insidious ways by which Latinos are being intimidated in North Carolina, as my son, Greg Weeks, noted a few days ago in his blog.

What Can We Learn From Geographic Variation in Health Costs in the US?

Last year I commented on a website that has county-level data on health outcomes for the entire US. A couple of years I commented on the spatial variability in the US in life expectancy at the county level. Another set of spatial analyses has been ongoing for a couple of decades--the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. It has focused especially on regional differences in the cost of health care, based on Medicare and Medicaid data, and this spatial variation led people to raise important policy questions. In particular, since the assumption is that Medicare and Medicaid patients are getting essentially the same care anywhere in the country, why are some regions of the country able to deliver that care at lower cost than other regions? Can we use these geographic variations to figure out how to lower health care costs in the higher cost regions since, after all, Americans pay more per person for health care than anyone else on earth.

The National Institute of Medicine created a committee to try to answer this question, and their report was just made available today at the National Academies Press website. It is titled "Variation in Health Care Spending." It turns out that it wasn't easy to track down data to answer this question, since Medicare and Medicaid services are provided in the context of a wider commercial health market. But the committee pulled together a lot of data and concluded that:

(1) Geographic variation in spending and utilization is real, and not an artifact reflecting random noise; and

(2) Variation in spending in the commercial insurance market is due mainly to differences in price markups by providers rather than to differences in the utilization of health care services.

Overall, then, the committee could not determine anything within the regional differences that could lead to policies that could lower costs in some places without harming the care provided. The lack of conclusiveness of the findings, however, is bound to lead to more research and more policy analysis. The fact that key regional differences really do exist is too striking a finding for this new report to put the issue to rest.

Africa Rising

Last month I commented on the new population projections recently released by the UN Population Division. They suggested more growth in population than had the previous set of projections, and that has gotten a lot of media attention, including a genuinely excellent blog post by Max Fisher of the Washington Post (and thanks to Abu Daoud for pointing me to this). Fisher was as struck as I was by the fact that the major shift is in the growth in Africa, and he has put together nine killer graphs to illustrate how Africa is projected to compare to the rest of the world over the coming decades. You will have to go to his blog to see the charts, but here are a few of his comments:

If these numbers turn out to be right – they’re just projections and could change significantly under unforeseen circumstances – the world of 2100 will look very different than the world of today, with implications for everyone. It will be a place where today’s dominant, developed economies are increasingly focused on supporting the elderly, where the least developed countries are transformed by population booms and where Africa, for better or worse, is more important than ever.

Nigeria, currently Africa’s most populous country, is poised for one of the world’s most rapid population booms ever. In just 100 years, maybe two or three generations, the population is expected to increase by a mind-boggling factor of eight. The country is already troubled by corruption, poverty and religious conflict. It’s difficult to imagine how a government that can barely serve its population right now will respond when the demand on resources, social services, schools and roads increases by a factor of eight. Still, if they pull it off – the country’s vast oil reserves could certainly help – the rapidly growing workforce could theoretically deliver an African miracle akin to, say, China’s.

Right now, many African countries aren’t particularly adept at either governance or resource management. If they don’t improve, exploding population growth could only worsen resource competition – and we’re talking here about basics like food, water and electricity – which in turn makes political instability and conflict more likely. The fact that there will be a “youth bulge” of young people makes that instability and conflict more likely.

With any luck, the spread of this kind of information will help to create more attention on the world stage for what is happening in Africa, so that the global community can respond in a way that will be beneficial to Africans and the rest of the world--beyond the current pattern of China looking to exploit the continent's resources...

Demography and the Throne--the Wait is Getting Longer

The Economist had exactly the same thought that I did when George Alexander Louis, the Prince of Cambridge, was born a few days ago--he may be heir to the British throne, but it's going to be a long wait, barring some horrible tragedy. Life expectancy is decades longer than it used to be, and not even the infant's grandfather has yet to assume the crown, much less his father. His great-grandmother is a still spry 87 years old and has queen since 1952. Scarcely more than one in five Brits could possibly remember the United Kingdom with any other monarch. And she shows no signs either of dying or abdicating. It is the latter that the Economist thinks might be the way to go. If monarchs won't die, then maybe they should call it quits.

As is often the case, the solution to Britain’s royal problems lies in Europe. In the past, when Britain was short of royals, it used to import a continental prince. Now it has a surplus of them, it needs to import a continental practice. The Netherlands’ Queen Beatrix (aged 75) and Belgium’s King Albert (79) recently announced their abdications. Even Pope Benedict (85) quit. Britain’s monarchs need a way to start doing the same.

Might a sliding scale combine royal dignity with management theory? When the queen (61 years on the throne) is 90, she will have beaten the previous record-holder, Queen Victoria (63 years). At that point, she should bow out. Prince Charles should do so at 80, Prince William at 70. At some point the falling royal retirement age will meet the rising national pensionable age, monarch and subjects will be in synch and George Alexander Louis will claim his crown before his bus pass.

Granted that I am generally in favor of rising ages at retirement, I agree with the Economist that this might be the occupational exception to that rule.

Is "Leaning In" the Key to Increasing Gender Equality?

Sheryl Sandberg is the COO of Facebook and author of the best-selling book "Lean In," which encourages women to increase their level of self-empowerment in order to close the gender gap in power and pay, especially at the top of the corporate ladder, but in more ordinary ways, as well. The popularity of this book, which seems very common-sensical in its approach, has surprised a lot of people, mostly in a good way, and has encouraged a great deal of comment because the root issue here is the gender structure of society and the families that make up society. One of the better written commentaries is by Stephen Marche in this month's online The Atlantic. Just as Sandberg brings a lot of her personal history to bear, so does Marche, trying to bring men more squarely into the conversation.

In 2007, my life was right where I wanted it to be. After the lean misery of graduate school at the University of Toronto, I had, at 31, landed a job on the tenure track at City College in Harlem, as a professor of Shakespeare. My second novel was in the windows of appealing independent bookstores in Brooklyn, it had a good review in The New York Times, and the lead singer of the Decemberists was recommending it in interviews. This was basically all I had ever hoped for. Then I gave it up. My wife was offered her dream job as the editor in chief of Toronto Life magazine (roughly speaking, the New York of Canada), and we returned home.

You could see our departure as the triumph of egalitarianism, and in a way it was. I don’t think my father would have given up a tenure-track job for my mother. But in my marriage, the decision came down to brute economics: My wife was going to make double what I made. Good schools and good hospitals are free in Toronto. These are the reasons we moved. And if I were offered a job where I would make double what she does, we would move again. Gender politics has nothing to do with it.

These comments illustrate two important things: (1) it is smart economically to defer to whichever spouse makes the most money; and (2) as I emphasize in Chapter 10 of my book, child care is really critical for a young two-earner family. At the same time, Marche probably makes too much of the economic argument when he suggests that:

The rise of women is not the result of any ideology or political movement; it is a result of the widespread realization, sometime after the Second World War, that families in which women work are families that prosper. And countries in which women work are countries that prosper. In 2006, a database created by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development demonstrated what common sense tells us: with few exceptions, countries in which women have more economic and political power are richer than countries where women are relatively powerless. Patriarchy is damn expensive. That’s why it’s doomed.

This idea is way too simplistic. There is a huge cultural shift going on here that has much less to do with economics than with the very way that both men and women visualize their respective roles in society. Only within the last century in the US have women had the right to vote, and divorce their husbands, and gain some control over their reproduction. We are only a few decades away from an America in which women would not be hired for many jobs, especially if they were married. We still have not recovered societally from the fact that only a few decades ago the major professional jobs for women were school teacher and nurse. The persistent gender gap in pay, despite the higher educational achievement of women over men in recent years, is evidence of the strength of these cultural issues. The struggle is bigger than just a simple economic one and that is probably why Sandberg's book is so popular.