Japan: Only the Son Rises

I note in the book the old saying that while Japan is the land of the rising sun, only the son rises. There has historically been egregious discrimination against women in Japan. The Schumpeter column in this week's Economist calls Japan the "Land of the Wasted Talent"for the way in which it effectively ignores the talent of the female half of the labor force, even in the face of aging and a long-term recession. The opinion piece carries the provocative (and almost certainly true) subtitle "Japanese firms face a demographic catastrophe. The solution is to treat women better."

UNLIKE an earthquake, a demographic disaster does not strike without warning. Japan’s population of 127m is predicted to fall to 90m by 2050. As recently as 1990, working-age Japanese outnumbered children and the elderly by seven to three. By 2050 the ratio will be one to one. As Japan grows old and feeble, where will its companies find dynamic, energetic workers?

The article in the Economist is inspired by a new report just out from the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York City.

Japanese firms are careful to recycle paper but careless about wasting female talent. Some 66% of highly educated Japanese women who quit their jobs say they would not have done so if their employers had allowed flexible working arrangements. The vast majority (77%) of women who take time off work want to return. But only 43% find a job, compared with 73% in America. Of those who do go back to work, 44% are paid less than they were before they took time off, and 40% have to accept less responsibility or a less prestigious title. Goldman Sachs estimates that if Japan made better use of its educated women, it would add 8.2m brains to the workforce and expand the economy by 15%—equivalent to about twice the size of the country’s motor industry.

There was a time when this might have been true throughout Asia, but that is less true now than it used to be. Japan seems now to be something of an outlier on its attitudes towards women in business.

Japanese companies have much to learn from the gaijin [foreigners]. IBM Japan encourages flexitime. BMKK, the Japanese arm of Bristol-Myers Squibb, a drug firm, has a programme to woo back women who have taken maternity leave. Why can’t native Japanese firms do likewise? A few, such as Shiseido, a cosmetics firm, try hard. But apparently small concessions to work-life balance can require a big change in the local corporate mindset. Working from home should be easy: everyone has broadband. But Japanese bosses are not used to judging people by their performance, sighs Yoko Ishikura, an expert on business strategy at Keio University.

Redistricting Battles Head to Court

You will recall that the Constitutional mandate for the US census is to apportion seats to the House of Representatives (that's done and agreed to), and to provide data for Congressional redistricting. The new redistricting maps have been drawn in almost every state (but not yet in Colorado or New Mexico), and now the court battles over them has begun. The New York Times reports that "[L]awsuits related to redistricting have been filed in more than half the states, asking judges to decide issues that include whether the new maps take partisan gerrymandering too far or discriminate against minority voters."


The most bizarre incident, though, has taken place in Arizona, where Governor Jan Brewer actually was able to oust the head of the state's non-political redistricting commission, apparently because the new redistricting maps were not sufficiently favorable to Republicans. As the New York Times reports:

Following the recommendation of Ms. Brewer, a Republican, the Republican-controlled Senate voted 21 to 6 on Tuesday night to remove Colleen C. Mathis, chairwoman of the Independent Redistricting Commission. Lawyers raced to court in a long-shot effort to overturn the decision.
“I will not sit idly by while Arizona’s Congressional and legislative boundaries are drawn in a fashion that is anything but constitutional and proper,” said Ms. Brewer, who has condemned the maps proposed by the commission as biased toward Democrats.
Arizona voters decided in 2000 that a citizens’ commission of two Republicans, two Democrats and an independent chairman would draw political lines and that commissioners could be removed by a two-thirds vote of the Senate only for “substantial neglect of duty, gross misconduct in office or inability to discharge the duties of office.”
Ms. Brewer accused Ms. Mathis, who is registered as an independent, of improperly conducting commission business out of public view and of skewing the redistricting process toward Democrats.
Paul Charlton, a former United States attorney who is representing Ms. Mathis, dismissed those accusations and said Ms. Brewer and other Republicans were politicizing the process because they were frustrated that they could not control it.

One of the problems with Arizona's commission is probably its small size, which lends itself to the appearance of partisanship, even if none was involved. California, which created an independent commission more recently than Arizona, and whose first work was this round of redistricting, created a 19-member commission, which is likely to bring in more diversity of opinion about the redistricting process and thus have a greater chance of appeasing critics. Of course, that hasn't kept lawsuits from being filed in California:

A lawsuit filed by Republicans charges that the maps violate the Voting Rights Act by eliminating some majority black districts in south Los Angeles.
Kathay Feng, the executive director of California Common Cause, who helped lead the fight for the independent commission, said the lawsuit was a cynical attempt to get a more favorable map. “This is night and day from what we had before, which was a dog-and-pony show where the Legislature pretended to have negotiations,” Ms. Feng said. “What they really did was to entrench themselves.”

Climate Change is Only Making Things Worse

It has been a tough week for anyone who still believes that climate change is just something made up by some wrong-headed scientists. An important step was an analysis of data by a UC Berkeley professor who previously had been one of those nay-sayers:

Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight.“Global warming is real,” Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.

At the same time, the United Nations Development Program issued a report warning that:

...if drastic measures are not taken to prepare nations for the impacts of climate change, the economic progress of the world’s developing countries could stall or even be reversed by 2050.
This year’s annual report, approaches the issue of climate change and environmental degradation from the standpoint of economic development and the eradication of poverty,. “Even if someone’s a climate skeptic, this report says, ‘Put that aside for a second,’ ” said William Orme, a spokesman for the United Nations agency. “If you believe in something like a moral commitment to the global community and in getting people out of poverty, we must address these environmental problems.”

And a group of British and Americans scientists published a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society suggesting that we could easily be in for a global temperature rise of four degrees centigrade by the year 2100, and offering up thoughts about the possible consequences of such a change (not good, as you might imagine):

An interesting dynamic emerges between the potential impacts of climate
change and the rate at which climate change occurs. First, many population
scenarios project that world population will peak at about nine billion in the
2050s, with the largest increases between now and then concentrated in emerging economies. Demand for food and water will rise (and possibly peak) in parallel with this. If climate warms rapidly—as might occur with a steep rise in emissions, with a high peak emissions rate, perhaps exacerbated by a post-peak reduction that fails to keep to a 1 TtC budget—a temperature of anywhere between 2◦C and 4◦C might be reached by the 2050s or 2060s, precisely at the time when vulnerability as a result of population demands for food and water is highest.

Because cities now host the majority of the world’s population, and may somewhere between 30 and 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, they have the potential to make a substantial contribution to reducing the risks of climate change—both in terms of emission reductions and as keysites for adaptation to a warmer world.

Sadly, beyond these few comments about the interaction of population growth and emissions there is little discussion in these reports of climate change about the potential value of pushing down the pace of population growth. A growing population is simply taken for granted, and the policy prescriptions are related entirely to reducing emissions.

Birth Control Can Buy Breathing Room

Generally lost in the discussion about the population reaching 7 billion has been the question of how long it will take us to reach 8 or 9 or 10 billion. Slowing down the pace of population increase even a little bit can go a long way toward providing enough breathing room to figure out how to cope with a world inhabited by so many people. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof put the issue on the table today with his op-ed advocating that more attention be paid to bringing down the birth rate at a faster pace. He reminds us that in the United States the discussion about family planning has been hijacked by the abortion issue:

Traditionally, support for birth control was bipartisan. The Roman Catholic hierarchy was opposed, but Republican presidents like Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush provided strong support. Then family planning became tarnished by overzealous and coercive programs in China and India, and contraception became entangled in America’s abortion wars. Many well-meaning religious conservatives turned against it, and funding lagged. The result was, paradoxically, more abortions. When contraception is unavailable, the likely consequence is not less sex, but more pregnancy.
Contraception already prevents 112 million abortions a year, by U.N. estimates. The United Nations Population Fund is a bête noire for conservatives, but its promotion of contraception means that it may have reduced abortions more than any organization in the world.
Republicans are seeking to cut more money from global family planning — which, in poor countries, would mean more abortions and more women dying in childbirth. Conservatives have also sought to slash Title X Family Planning programs within the United States. The Guttmacher Institute estimates that in a year these domestic programs avert 973,000 unintended pregnancies, of which 406,000 would end in abortions.
Finally, a ray of hope: A group of evangelical Christians, led by Richard Cizik of The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, is drafting a broad statement of support for family planning. It emphasizes that family planning reduces abortion and lives lost in childbirth.
“Family planning is morally laudable in Christian terms because of its contribution to family well-being, women’s health, and the prevention of abortion,” the draft says.
Amen! Contraceptives no more cause sex than umbrellas cause rain.

A breakthrough on this policy discussion would be immensely beneficial because environmentalists have been frustratingly reluctant to connect population control to things like limiting the impact of climate change. More on that tomorrow...

Immigrants to the Rescue

Lost in the haze of important publicity about the seventh billion person, and in the flurry of stories about draconian state laws against undocumented immigrants, was a good story about immigrants to the rescue. The Associated Press reports from Dayton, Ohio that the city has just made a very rational official decision to actively encourage immigrants into their community in order to boost the economy.

It has adopted a plan not only to encourage immigrants to come and feel welcome here, but also to use them to help pull out of an economic tailspin.
Dayton officials, who adopted the "Welcome Dayton" plan unanimously Oct. 5, say they aren't condoning illegal immigration; those who come here illicitly will continue to be subject to U.S. laws.
While states including Alabama, Georgia and Arizona, as well as some cities, have passed laws in recent years cracking down on illegal immigrants, Dayton officials say they will leave that to federal authorities and focus instead on how to attract and assimilate those who come legally.
City leaders aiming to turn Dayton around started examining the immigrant population: Indian doctors in hospitals; foreign-born professors and graduate students at the region's universities; and owners of new small businesses such as a Turkish family's New York Pizzeria on the city's east side and Hispanic-run car lots, repair shops and small markets. They say immigrants have revitalized some rundown housing, moving into and fixing up what had been vacant homes.
"This area has been in a terrible recession, but it would be even worse without them," said Theo Majka, a University of Dayton sociology professor who, with his sociologist wife Linda Majka, has studied and advocated for Dayton's immigrants. "Here we have this underutilized resource."

Anyone looking at the demographics of the US has to realize that this is the way forward (if you'll pardon that overused term--but it seems to fit here).