Teen Birth Rate Continues its Decline in the US

The US Centers for Disease Control yesterday released a report showing that the teen birth rate in the U.S. is continuing to decline. Here's the trend over time:

The Washington Post has nice coverage of the story:

The decline of the past decade has occurred in all regions in the country and among all races. But the most radical changes have been among Hispanic and black teens, whose birthrates have dropped nearly 50 percent since 2006.

Theories on the reasons for the dramatic shift include everything from new approaches to sex education to the widespread availability of broadband Internet. But most experts agree on the two major causes.

Theories on the reasons for the dramatic shift include everything from new approaches to sex education to the widespread availability of broadband Internet. But most experts agree on the two major causes.

The first is the most important and may be obvious: Today's teens enjoy better access to contraception and more convenient contraception than their predecessors, and more of them are taking advantage of innovations like long-acting injectable and implantable methods that can last years over a daily birth control pill. But the second cause is something that goes against the conventional wisdom. It's that teens -- despite their portrayal in popular TV and movies as uninhibited and acting only on hormones -- are having less sex.

This is all obviously good news, but the chart above also shows that the rates remain higher among black and Hispanic teenagers than among whites, so there is still a lot of work to do.

Planning for an Aging World

The U.S. Census recently published an excellent and detailed volume on "An Aging World: 2015." This should be required reading for everyone (it is a nice supplement to my Chapter 8, for example), and one person who has read it and ruminated on it is John Mauldin, whose free newsletter I subscribe to. I don't always agree with his perspective, but he is one of those people who is constantly trying to figure out how the world works, and where we are going. His motives are largely economic (he sells investment advice, for example), but that may simply sharpen his thinking. In all events, his latest newsletter combs the Census report and brings in other sources to contemplate the consequences of an increasingly aging population. 

As Mauldin notes, an aging population would not be overly problematic if it weren't for retirement. I have mentioned this before, of course, but it bears continual repeating. Retirement is a new concept in human society. For most of history, people worked until they dropped because they couldn't afford anything else and, on top of that, life was short anyway. Improved health has meant that more people live to old age and people live to ever older ages. Since better health is associated with higher standards of living, societies have had the option, at least for a while, of paying the elderly not to work. Most people don't save enough for retirement, and most people don't have children who are able to willing to support them. So, without government subsidies, there isn't much retirement for the average person. What to do? Work longer, save more when young, and tax workers a bit more to make up for the fact that there are fewer workers per older people than there used to be. Of those three options, working longer is probably the easiest to accomplish. Europeans, in particular, have resisted that, and Mauldin comments on this fact:

Much of Europe is going to be going through dramatic changes in their entitlement and retirement programs as budgets and debt get blown out in the coming five years. Ask a retiree in Greece how life is going. Greece’s situation is going to be visited on more than a few countries in Europe. And if the United States doesn’t get its fiscal act together, sometime in the middle of the next decade a very nasty reality will come crashing down upon us.

Greece was even more egregious than most other European countries in terms of allowing early retirement, despite a low birth rate and rising life expectancy. More than five years ago, as the Greece financial crisis was heating up, I commented on the demographic winter in Greece created by the average age at retirement of 61. That is an object lesson for all us. As Mauldin says, we (meaning everyone, not just the U.S.) need to get real about the consequences of population aging and what we can do about them.

A Theme Song for Demography!

You have gotta love this!! Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau has created a "Pop" song called "Break it Down." Demography has a theme song--finally 😀 

Here are the lyrics, but you need to go to the video to catch the words and tune together:

Here’s a song about population
With births and deaths and some immigration.
Demography is a key foundation
For understanding our world and nations.

Break it down.

What’s the population in your town?
Take the number and then break it down.
Count by age, gender, race and then,
Add the births and deaths and movers,
And then you start again.

Babies make the population grow,
But people come and sometimes people go.
Some will die and others move away.
Millions of people come and go every day.

Break it down, break it down,
That’s demography.
Break it down like they do at PRB.
Break it down, break it down,
It’s 1-2-3.

To balance the equation
For your town or for your nation,
Add the births, subtract the deaths,
And don’t forget about migration,
And through this simple computation
You will know what makes the population grow.

Seven billion people on the Earth,
But there are fewer deaths than there are births.
That’s what makes the population grow,
But if the birth rate keeps on falling
The growth will start to slow.

Break it down, break it down,
That’s demography.
Break it down like they do at PRB.
Break it down, break it down,
It’s 1-2-3.
Here’s a song about population,
Break it down.

It’s a ‘Pop Song,’
Come and sing along
To the ‘Pop Song,’
Come and sing along.

I still carry around a book bag handed out at one of the annual meetings of the Population Association of America describing demographers as "broken down by age and sex." Mark Mather has put this idea to music and it's music to my ears. Hmm--I wonder if Mark was influenced by Prince.

Every One Is In Favor of Getting Rid of Malaria

Malaria is an ancient disease whose name is derived from the earlier notion that it was caused by bad air (mal aria in Italian). It is startling sometimes to think about how recently in human history we have figured these things out. The Enlightenment and the rise in popularity of scientific thinking has brought us a long way. Once we figured out that the big problem with malaria was its vector--the mosquito--science began to make good headway to combat the disease, aided by large-scale government funding (such as USAID) and private funding (especially the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). On today's World Malaria Day, the World Health Organization issued a very positive report. Despite 214 million new cases of malaria in the world in 2015, accompanied by 438,000 deaths from malaria last year, WHO thinks that we can reduce malaria incidence by 90% by 2030, and USAID adds the possibility of getting rid of it altogether by 2040. The Economist reminds us, however, that this won't happen without a lot of hard work and vigilance.

Humanity has much to celebrate on World Malaria Day. But as public-health experts will be reminding politicians, these victories are fragile. Prevention and treatment are patchy in the worst-hit regions, and international aid has flat-lined as rich-world economic growth has slowed. As the parasite evolves, some treatments become less effective. Researchers worry about “monkey malaria”, carried by macaques in Borneo. It used to affect humans only mildly. Now it seems to be evolving into something deadlier, just as deforestation and palm-oil plantations bring humans and other primates into closer and more dangerous contact.

So, for sure let's celebrate, but let's also not let down our guard. Remember, that's why we have the Zika virus...

Is There a "Middle Way" to Integrate Immigrants?

The New Scientist has a special issue this month devoted to migration. Now, in truth, you won't find anything in there that's not in my text, but it's a well written and interesting set of articles with the major themes that most people don't move, migrants and xenophobia do go together, but overall migration should be seen as an opportunity to be seized by both sending and receiving countries, rather than as a huge political and cultural issue. The cultural issues go along with the xenophobia, of course, and there is always the genuine fear that society will be different because of who moves in (and, to a lesser extent, who moves out--we worry much less about the latter even though it too can have dramatic consequences).

Given the concern that European societies, for example, will be turned upside down by an influx of Syrian refugees, an article by Branco Milanovic (a visiting scholar at NYU) in the Financial Times this week raises an interesting argument. He suggests that granting immigrants legal status that does not necessarily include a path to citizenship could be a winning proposition. These are ideas that have been unsuccessfully kicked around the U.S. Congress, to be sure, but he lays out the argument succinctly:

The arrival of migrants threatens to diminish or dilute the premium enjoyed by citizens of rich countries, which includes not only financial aspects, but also good health and education services, and public goods like the preservation of national culture and language.

Can that threat be defused? I believe it can, so long as we redefine citizenship in such a way that migrants are not allowed to lay claim to the entire premium falling to citizens straight away, if at all. Restricting the citizenship rights of migrants in this way would assuage the concerns of the native population, while still ensuring the migrants are better off than they would be had they stayed in their own countries.

This would require significant adjustments to traditional ways of thinking about migration and citizenship. We should stop thinking of migration as a voyage of reinvention in which an African, say, “becomes” a European, and start viewing it simply as a way of finding a better job in a foreign country. Moving from a Nigerian village to work in London should not be seen as any different from working in Lagos while one’s family stays in the countryside.

Indeed, this is exactly how many professional ex-pats live in the world--living in one place for short or long periods of time, while still retaining their foothold in the country of origin. 

It is not clear that the old conception of nation-state citizenship as a binary category that in principle confers all the benefits of citizenship to anyone who happens to be physically present within a country’s borders is adequate in a globalised world.

In effect, there is a trade-off between such a view of citizenship and the flow of migration. The more we insist on full rights for all residents, the less longstanding residents will be willing to accept more migrants. 

If graduated categories of citizenship were created — ranging from those that grant almost no benefits other than the right to temporary work, to those that are close to full citizenship, like the US green card system — we would be able to reconcile the objective of reducing world poverty with reducing migration to acceptable levels.

The big issue that Milanovic sidesteps is that of the children born to migrants in the host country. My own view is that they should be granted citizenship in the country of birth--either immediately as in the U.S. or after some continuous period of residence after birth, as in most countries.