Drinking Yourself to Death

Russian men have the lowest life expectancy of any group in the "global north." It has long been assumed that this is the result of excessive use of alcohol, especially vodka, and a study just published in The Lancet and reported on BBC News lends substantial weight to that idea.

The researchers summarize their methods as follows:

In three Russian cities (Barnaul, Byisk, and Tomsk), we interviewed 200 000 adults during 1999—2008 (with 12 000 re-interviewed some years later) and followed them until 2010 for cause-specific mortality. In 151 000 with no previous disease and some follow-up at ages 35—74 years, Poisson regression (adjusted for age at risk, amount smoked, education, and city) was used to calculate the relative risks associating vodka consumption with mortality. We have combined these relative risks with age-specific death rates to get 20-year absolute risks.

And the BBC succinctly summarizes the findings:

The study, in The Lancet, says 25% of Russian men die before they are 55, and most of the deaths are down to alcohol. The comparable UK figure is 7%. Causes of death include liver disease and alcohol poisoning. Many also die in accidents or after getting into fights.

The researchers also drew on previous studies in which families of 49,000 people who had died were asked about their loved ones' drinking habits.

The study also showed that alcohol-related deaths fluctuated in tandem with tighter or looser restrictions on, and higher or lower prices of, vodka in Russia, helping to establish a model of cause and effect. So, just as public policy has led to a decline in smoking in the US and now elsewhere, so it seems that public policy will be required to bring excess vodka drinking under control in Russia. This will probably happen after the Winter Olympics, rather than before.

Pakistan's Birth Rate Not Declining as Quickly as Expected

The 2013 Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) results were released this week, but the report seemed not to attract much attention. This is both strange and unfortunate. Pakistan is the world's 6th most populous nation, and UN Population Division projections suggest that it will still be 6th by mid-century. However, those projections estimate that even now the total fertility rate in Pakistan has declined from 6 children each all the way into the 1990s to 3.2 children each now. The US Census Bureau's projections suggest an even lower birth rate. The problem is this: The 2013 Pakistan DHS revealed that the TFR is 3.8, not 3.2. Yes, it is coming down, but not very fast, especially considering that infant and child mortality rates--while still among the highest in the world--are declining. Women start having children young, and are very unlikely themselves to use contraception until relying on sterilization after reaching (or exceeding) the number of children wanted.

The proportion of currently married women who are currently using any method of contraception rises with age from only 10 percent among women age 15-19 to 48 percent among age 35-39. The use of contraception then declines for women who are 40 years and above. The most popular method among women under 35 years is condoms, followed by the withdrawal method; among women age 35 and above, female sterilization is the most widely practiced method. 

These low levels of contraceptive use among younger women, in particular, are somewhat at odds with the survey finding that men and women alike are interested in at least delaying, if not avoiding, additional births. This suggests that there is a nearly classic case in Pakistan of an unmet need for birth control. This is typically the result of governmental ambivalence, if not antagonism, to the provision of fertility control methods.

The UN medium variant projections suggest that Pakistan will add more than 80 million people between now and 2050, whereas the high fertility projection suggests the addition of 120 million, but even that high variant assumes lower fertility than was found in the latest DHS survey. Back to the drawing board, I think. The future is going to be a bit different than we thought.

Does Your Brain Slow Down as You Age?

One of the big issues of an aging population is the belief that older people are, by nature, less productive than younger people. One of the symptoms often presented to support that idea is that older people tend to be a bit slower in response to some mental activities. But now comes research, reported by the National Geographic, that puts a different spin on this. The story begins with Michael Ramscar, a linguistics researcher at the University of Tübingen in Germany:

His research, published in the January 2014 issue of Topics in Cognitive Science, argues that studies on memory ask the wrong questions. It could be that older, wiser heads are so chock full of knowledge that it simply takes longer to retrieve the right bits. (It's important to note that the research is aimed at healthy, aging brains, not those afflicted with Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia, which rob the brain of memory and other abilities.)

There's no denying that older people have acquired more experience and information than younger people, says Denise Park, co-director of the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas, whose research focuses on how the mind changes and adapts as people age. "As we age we accrue knowledge, have a higher vocabulary score, and know more about the world," says Park. "There's a reason we don't have 20-year-olds running the world."

Her conclusion: "I strongly believe that our everyday performance does not decline with age." That's because as the ability to retrieve memories quickly declines, the brain is still building up stores of knowledge from which to draw.

This all makes a lot of sense to me. Now, let's see, what was I saying?

Is There Hope for the Passage of an Immigration Bill in the US?

The New York Times led with a headline today (prior to President Obama's State of the Union Address) that top Republicans in Congress were calling for legal status (albeit not citizenship) for at least some undocumented immigrants. Furthermore, I noticed that during the State of the Union Address this evening there were Republicans, notably Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who were clapping when President Obama talked about getting immigration reform through Congress. However, a more careful reading of the NYTimes article dampens (but does not destroy) one's enthusiasm for the idea that anything will, in fact, get through Congress this year.

With concern already brewing among conservatives who call any form of legal status “amnesty,” the document has the feel more of an attempt to test the waters than a blueprint for action. House Republican leaders will circulate it at a three-day retreat for their members that begins Wednesday on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Several pro-immigration organizations that have been briefed on the guidelines say they are not intended to serve as a conservative starting point for future negotiations, but as a gauge of how far to the left House Republicans are willing to move.

The principles say that Republicans do not support a “special path to citizenship,” but make an exception for the “Dreamers,” the immigrants brought into the country illegally as children, quoting a 2013 speech by Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader. “One of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents,” Mr. Cantor said at the time. “It is time to provide an opportunity for legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children and who know no other home.”

On the Democratic side, a major question is whether those pushing for a broad immigration overhaul would accept any Republican proposal that falls short of full citizenship for immigrants who are now here illegally. President Obama has said he wants any new immigration legislation to include a path to citizenship for both children and adults.

My own view is that governance is about compromise, and if legal status rather than citizenship is the compromise that will get the legislation passed, and will bring people out of the shadows and into a position where they can defend their rights, then I think that's a good start. 

A "New" View of What it Takes to Get Ahead

One of the themes of the recent World Economic Forum in Davos was income inequality, and it is anticipated that President Obama's State of the Union Address tomorrow will also have that as a theme. Into this discussion has come a new book titled "Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America." Although the book will not technically be out for a week or so, it is featured in this week's TIME and the authors have an article in yesterday's New York Times Sunday Review. The authors have bona fides as successful people. Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rubenfeld both graduated from Harvard Law School and both hold named chairs at Yale Law School. First, though, is the critical view from Suketu Mehta in TIME:

Her new book, co-authored with her husband, widens its aim [from her previous book on being a "Tiger Mom"], purporting to explain why not just Asians (like Chua) but also seven other groups--Cubans, Jews (like Rubenfeld), Indians (like me), Nigerians, Mormons, Iranians and Lebanese--are superior when it comes to succeeding in America.

The book claims that these groups thrive because of three traits: a superiority complex, insecurity and impulse control. The ones lacking the "Triple Package" are African Americans, Appalachians, Wasps and pretty much everybody else.

Now, the authors themselves:

MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time. The fortunes of WASP elites have been declining for decades. In 1960, second-generation Greek-Americans reportedly had the second-highest income of any census-tracked group. Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.

The authors are lawyers, not social scientists, but their scholarship did nonetheless lead them to my good friend, Rubén Rumbaut, at the University of California, Irvine:

A central finding in a study of more than 5,000 immigrants’ children led by the sociologist Rubén G. Rumbaut was how frequently the kids felt “motivated to achieve” because of an acute sense of obligation to redeem their parents’ sacrifices. Numerous studies, including in-depth field work conducted by the Harvard sociologist Vivian S. Louie, reveal Chinese immigrant parents frequently imposing exorbitant academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”), making them feel that “family honor” depends on their success.

My own view--based on a WASP heritage, from both sides, of immigrants from England and Wales in the 19th century--is that there is only one element at work, and that is self-discipline. Children might learn this on their own, but mainly they are going to learn it from their parents. Immigrant parents are self-selected in this regard and so we can expect a higher fraction of them than the general populace to be tuned in to this. But it transcends culture in the abstract, and gets us down to the culture in the home. That's a big story...one for another day.