Encouraging Poor Americans to Move to Better Places: The Prequel

Yesterday I blogged about an idea (a "new Homestead Act") aimed at encouraging poor Americans (a disproportionate share of whom are African-American) to move to another place where life can be better for them. My son, John, very adroitly produced for me an article by Malcolm Gladwell from the New Yorker back in August, that very nicely sets the table for the discussion of the New Homestead Act, including a few comments about Chicago, which I mentioned largely in passing in yesterday's blog.

Black Americans are much more likely to stay in place and much less likely than whites to engage in what the sociologist Patrick Sharkey calls “contextual mobility”—moves significant enough to change circumstances and opportunities. Robert Sampson once mapped the movement of African-Americans participating in a Chicago housing experiment over a seven-year period starting in the mid-nineteen-nineties, and the graphic consists of tight clusters of very short lines—spanning a few city blocks, or extending one or two neighborhoods over. How often do African-Americans from the poorest neighborhoods of the South Side leave the city of Chicago? “Rarely,” Sharkey said.

But the story is largely about the African-American diaspora from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. 

If a group of poor Americans are stuck in a bad place, then either the place they are stuck in needs to be improved or they need to move to a better place. Over the years, there have been numerous efforts to advance the second of these approaches—experimental projects, government initiatives —but they have been hard to execute on a large scale. Then came the storm.

That disaster (which had a combination of natural and human-induced causes) forced people to find new lives elsewhere, especially in Houston. Guess what? Life is better for most of them. The obvious point is that since we cannot (and should not!) go around creating disasters, something like the New Homestead Act, which provides national, rather than just state or local resources for relocating, is something that genuinely makes sense.   

How Do We Get People in the US to Move to Where the Jobs Are?

The history of human migration is that people move to find work. If there aren't enough jobs where they are right now, or the jobs don't pay enough to live on, you go somewhere else. That is essentially the reason why there are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US--they came to find work (well, OK, most came to find work, while others accompanied those finding work). The other major reason for migration is that life is too dangerous where you are, so you go somewhere else less dangerous. That accounts for much of the migration from Central America to the US, and it accounts for much of the migration out of the Middle East into Europe. In the latter case, the violence led to a loss of jobs, and the combination led to migration. 

These examples are from international migration, but they should apply equally to migration within a country. So, the question would then be: Why is anyone still living in south Chicago, where crime and violence is high and jobs are hard to come by? Henry Olsen, writing for the NationalInterest.org has an answer and a solution. This is a long and complex article and I cannot do it justice in a short blog post, but let me give you the barebones argument. Setting aside Chicago for the sake of the argument, it is of course the case that a lot of people in the US do move to where better jobs are. The better educated you are, the more likely this has happened to you. But, especially among people with only a high school education or less, the local safety net of welfare services discourages people from moving. Olsen argues, though, that the answer is not to get rid of safety nets. We just need to nationalize them, if you will. Currently, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and other kinds of benefits available to people who are either unemployed or underemployed are provided at the state or even local level and are not readily transferable from place to place. So, it is scary to pack up and move somewhere else unless you have some kind of iron-clad good job in the new location, which most people do not. Indeed, most people who really could use a job elsewhere have no way of knowing about jobs in other places, nor the resources to go there and interview for a job, nor the resources to move even if they were offered the job.

As a reminder, then, here's how Olsen sets up the problem:

The Homestead Act of 1862 is one of America’s best-known and beloved laws. By giving away federal land for free to anyone who settled and cultivated it, the act enshrined the governing principle of the newly ascendant Republican Party: government should act to help the average man help himself build a better life. Together with the Land Grant College Act and the Pacific Railroad Acts, the Homestead Act placed the federal government squarely on the side of the average American in his or her quest to live in comfort and with dignity. 

Today we have no frontier, no untapped source of federal lands. We do, however, have the same issue the Homestead Act tried to solve. Millions of low-to-moderately skilled, native-born and immigrant Americans live in places where they can’t find decent work while a vast new economic frontier unfolds in Southern and Western states such as Texas, Florida and North Carolina. These wide open spaces are enticing enough to encourage millions of Latin Americans to undertake dangerous and expensive journeys, yet millions of other Americans remain mired in ghettoes, depressed steel towns and struggling regions like Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta.

The solution of the "new" Homestead Act is aimed at giving people resources to find jobs elsewhere. The idea is as simple as that. Of course, changing the laws that would create such a structure won't be easy, but the idea is so crazy, it just might work.

The Status of Women is a Key "Demographic" for the Future

Today I read one of my Christmas presents--"Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue" by Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz. It is an extremely good, albeit troubling, book. It is an exchange between an avowed atheist (Sam Harris, who holds a doctorate in neuroscience from UCLA), and a "reformed" Islamist (Maajid Nawaz) who was recruited into extremism as a teenager in Britain, but later completed his education at the University of London and LSE and is working to help bring Islam peacefully into the modern era. It is clear that dialogue is necessary, but worrying that the task is not a simple one. Of course, the mess in the Middle East regularly teaches us that lesson. However, I kept seeing an issue in the conversation that resonated with me, as I think it does with all demographers--the status of women. Most--but not all--religions in the world have sanctioned the subjugation of women by men. In my mind the key to the future is for every society to get to the point of genuine legal and social equality of men and women. This is the path to the best kind of civil society, and it is the path to demographic stabilization.

The status of women is obviously not just an issue with Muslims. It is a cultural issue throughout the world. That was reinforced by, among other things, a Christmas present that my wife received: "My Brilliant Friend" by Elena Ferrante. That is the pseudonym of an extremely successful Italian writer. Although her identity is unknown to the public, she did recently consent to an email interview with a writer for the Financial Times. Here is one of her comments that really struck me:

I grew up in a world where it seemed normal that men (fathers, brothers, boyfriends) had the right to hit you in order to correct you, to teach how to be a woman, ultimately for your own good. Luckily today much as changed but I still think the men who can really be trusted are a minority. Maybe this is because the milieu that shaped me was backward. Or maybe (and this is what I tend to believe) it's because male power, whether violently or delicately imposed, is still bent on subordinating us. Too many women are humiliated every day and not just on a symbolic level. And, in the real world, too many are punished, even with death, for their insubordination.

Remember that these kinds of issues among Italian immigrants to New York City (largely coming from southern Italy, keeping in mind that Ferrante is from Naples) were what motivated Margaret Sanger a hundred years ago to find methods of birth control that women could use, so that they didn't have to choose between a beating from their husband or an unwanted pregnancy. It took us a long time in the US and most of Europe to boost the status of women, but these kinds of traditional attitudes hold back progress everywhere we go in the world. 

Migrant Status Update

As I noted yesterday, the flood of migrants into Europe in 2015 has exceeded 1 million people. BBC News covers the story, and has a good summary and a few helpful maps. However, a much more detailed status update has just been made available by the Humanitarian Information Unit of the US State Department. There is a lot of detail in what amounts to one screenful of information, so you need to take your time over this. One thing that struck me, in particular, was the following graph of the age/sex demographics of registered migrants:

Although the focus in the media is often on women and children, the vast majority of migrants to Europe from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, in particular, are young adult males. The refugee camps in places like Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey are teeming with women and children, but it is largely the men who are undertaking the journey to Europe. The expectation, of course, is that once settled there, they will be able to bring family members over to join them. In other words, the current flow is just the beginning...

Enjoy the Holidays--You're Going to Have to Work Longer!

It isn't news to anyone familiar with demography that most populations around the world are aging. In general that is a good thing because it is what always happens when life expectancy increases (that increases the number of people reaching old age) and the birth rate decreases (increases the fraction of the population that is in the older ages). As with anything in life, however, problems occur if you haven't planned for these changes, and most human societies have not done very well when it comes to coping with aging populations. Joseph Chamie, former director of the UN Population Division, reminds us of this in a new article that should be read by all policy-makers in the world.

In 1950 when world population was much younger, with a median age of 23, the global potential support ratio was about 12 people of working age per one person aged 65 years or older. Today, the world PSR has declined to eight and by the year 2050 is projected to decline to four. Although the ratios for individual countries show considerable diversity, the overall trend is both unmistakable and striking: fewer people of working age per elderly person than in the past.

What to do? Chamie reviews various policy options, including the one of "replacement migration" that he made famous when he was at the UN. But not every country wants immigrants--thus the concern over the one million Syrian and other Middle Eastern and African refugees and migrants that headed to Europe in 2015. Other policy alternatives include cutting payments to older people, or cutting other budget items, such as defense, in order to maintain payments to the older population. Chamie offers another approach that I have mentioned before (indeed, it is one of my most popular blog posts) and which is the most reasonable approach, in my view. Raise the retirement age. 

Raising the statutory retirement age simultaneously increases the working age population and reduces the elderly population. Raising the age threshold for the elderly from 65 to 70 years, for example, increases the global PSR from 8 to 13 people of working age per one elderly person – roughly the 1950 level. 

Similarly, to maintain current PSR levels into the future, countries must lift the threshold for the elderly population. To preserve the current global PSR of eight to midcentury, for instance, the threshold age for beginning old age would need to be 73 years. For some countries, however, even higher age thresholds for the elderly would be required to maintain current PSRs through midcentury, such as 80 years for South Korea and 79 for China.

The graph below shows the numbers for select countries:

Of course, this is easier to say than do, but we need to get going on it!