Turkey's President Erdogan Wants a Higher Birth Rate

Yesterday's big demographic news was the speech by Turkish President Erdogan in which he urged women to avoid birth control and have more babies. Well, not just any woman. As BBC News reported, he was specific about the call for babies going out to Muslim women.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called on Muslims to reject contraception and have more children. In a speech broadcast live on TV, he said "no Muslim family" should consider birth control or family planning. "We will multiply our descendants," said Mr Erdogan, who became president in August 2014 after serving as prime minister for 12 years. His AK Party has its roots in Islamism and many of its supporters are conservative Muslims.

To be sure, fertility has fallen to replacement in Turkey in very recent years, but the population is still very young and so there will continue to be more babies born than people dying for several decades. The UN demographers project Turkey's population to grow from its current 78 million to 94 million by mid-century. But that obviously is not the issue with Erdogan, who made a similar proposal last year, as I noted then. Last year's pronatalist proposal by Turkey was matched by one from its next-door neighbor, Iran. Despite Turkey being predominantly Sunni Muslim and Iran being predominantly Shia Muslim, the two countries have nearly identical population sizes (right around 80 million in each case), and at or below replacement fertility. The real issue in both countries, at least in my view, is that low fertility is associated with greater education and labor force participation for women, which raises their status in society and raises their expectations about their role in society. The male leaders of Iran and Turkey do not seem to appreciate this trend, even though in the long run we know that it will create better societies in both nations.

Refugees at Risk

The usual idea of a refugee is someone who is seeking safety because of violence or threats of violence against them and their family members in the place where they were living. But getting to a place of safety is not a sure thing, as we are repeatedly reminded. In the past three days there have been at least 700 deaths of refugees, largely from Africa, trying to reach Europe from Libya via the Mediterranean.

Three days and three sunken ships are again confronting Europe with the horrors of its refugee crisis, as desperate people trying to reach the Continent keep dying at sea. At least 700 people from the three boats are believed to have drowned, the United Nations refugee agency announced on Sunday, in one of the deadliest weeks in the Mediterranean in recent memory.

The latest drownings — which would push the death toll for the year to more than 2,000 people — are a reminder of the cruel paradox of the Mediterranean calendar: As summer approaches with blue skies, warm weather and tranquil waters prized by tourists, human trafficking along the North African coastline traditionally kicks into a higher gear.

It just incomprehensible to me that human traffickers can be so callous and essentially murderous, based on stories of towing a loaded boat into the sea and then cutting the rope and letting the boat drift. 

The Mediterranean is not the most dangerous refugee route, however, as Tracy Moran reminds us, writing for OZY. The waters in Southeast Asia are even worse, at least on a per person basis.

According to a recent UNHCR report, roughly 33,600 refugees and migrants — primarily Rohingya and Bangladeshis en route from Myanmar and Bangladesh to Malaysia — traveled through the region by sea last year, mostly through the Bay of Bengal. Of these, 370 died before reaching land, falling victim to “starvation, dehydration, disease and abuse,” the report says. This means roughly 1.1 percent of those setting off perished, while in the Med, 3,771 of an estimated 1.4 million died, for a rate of .375 percent, according to U.N. figures.

Again, the problem is not rough seas, but the people smugglers who abuse and take advantage of people who are trying to flee abuse and discrimination.

Will a SuperBug Get You?

For all of us born since the end of WWII, the likelihood of dying from bacterial diseases has dropped dramatically because of the widespread use of antibiotics. The news resurfaced recently that we are overdoing it on antibiotics, and even scarier news emerged yesterday with the announcement that a woman in the U.S. was attacked by a bacterial disease resistant to what health scientists call the "last antibiotic." This was obviously a big story, covered by BBC and the NYTimes, among many others.

American military researchers have identified the first patient in the United States to be infected with bacteria that are resistant to an antibiotic that was the last resort against drug-resistant germs.

The patient is well now, but the case raises the specter of superbugs that could cause untreatable infections, because the bacteria can easily transmit their resistance to other germs that are already resistant to additional antibiotics. The resistance can spread because it arises from loose genetic material that bacteria typically share with one another.

The bacteria are resistant to a drug called colistin, an old antibiotic that in the United States is held in reserve to treat especially dangerous infections that are resistant to a class of drugs called carbapenems. If carbapenem-resistant bacteria, called CRE, also pick up resistance to colistin, they will be unstoppable.

What I found particularly interesting is that the gene for resistance to colistin was first noticed just this past November in China, where it is used in pig and poultry farming--exactly the problem associated with overusing antibiotics. We can attribute this almost directly to the rise in the standard of living in China and its associated increase in demand for pork among the Chinese, as I noted a couple of months ago. 

More Young Adults are Hanging Around With Their Parents

Pew Research just released a report on living arrangements of young adult Americans (ages 18-34) showing that an increasing fraction are living with their parents. The title of the report is "For First Time in Modern Era, Living With Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds," and the NPR story about it has the headline "For First Time In 130 Years, More Young Adults Live With Parents Than With Partners." Neither headline is technically inaccurate, but they can be misinterpreted. For example, as you can see in the graphs below from the Pew report, it is still the case that a majority of young people--whether male or female--are NOT living with their parents, even if the percentage has been increasing since 1960.

The explanations offered for this trend, such as the Great Recession, also miss two important demographic trends: (1) the cohort size phenomenon within the U.S.; and (2) the population growth in developing countries phenomenon [and, yes, I still use that phrase even if the World Bank doesn't]. The birth cohort issue is that in 1960 the young adult population in the US was comprised largely of the small cohorts of people born in the Depression, who were pushed along in life by being too young for involvement in WWII but old enough to be catering to the baby boomers. They were the "Lucky Few" that Woodie Carlson has written about (an excellent book--I recommend it). They were a fluke, not really part of a trend that has somehow reversed itself. And, of course, part of their luck was in becoming adults just before developing countries like China, in particular, created a cheap labor market, building on the drop in death rates produced by the spread of medical technology--especially antibiotics--after WWII, as I discuss in detail in the book and have mentioned in this blog before because it is so important to world history.

Seen in proper historical context, the increase in young adults living at home is part of the global demographic transition, not a uniquely odd event.

The Demographics of the Austrian Presidential Election

On Sunday voters in Austria went to the polls to decide who would be their next President--a far-right candidate (Norbert Hofer) or the Green Party economics professor (Alexander Van der Bellen). Let's hear it for the economics professor, who won by a very slim margin, as noted by the NYTimes:

The result averted the prospect of the first right-wing populist head of state in post-Nazi Europe taking office in a democratic election. Yet the close result illustrated how deeply divided Austria is between left and right, and how thoroughly the centrist elites who have run the country since 1945 have fallen from public grace.

Those divisions are demographic and spatial. The NYTimes summarizes them as follows:

Polling experts said Mr. Van der Bellen had won the election with support from city dwellers — particularly in Vienna, which voted 61 percent for him — women and the highly educated.

Thanks go to PopulationData.Net for linking us to the details of that demographic analysis, which appears in the French paper, Le Monde. Graphs in the story show the rather remarkable divide between men and women in their support for the candidates (see below), with women more likely to vote for Van der Bellen while men were more likely to go for Hofer. 

The higher the level of education, the more likely were people to vote for Van der Bellen, and the map below shows that support for Van der Bellen came from the urban part of Austria, whereas the rural populations were more likely to support Hofer.