New Video on the Census from UNFPA

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) provides financial and technical assistance to governments undertaking censuses around the world. This is obviously a crucial task in our quest to know what is happening demographically in the world. They have created a video that highlights census activities in six very different kinds of countries.

As the film shows, conducting a census requires overcoming an array of different challenges in very different circumstances.

• In Chad, it has meant mapping vast, sparsely populated regions in the midst of political upheaval.

• In the Occupied Palestinian Territory, it involved overcoming barriers that restricted mobility.

• In Bolivia, or the Plurinational State of Bolivia as it is now so aptly named, conducting the census required fine-tuning questions and translating them into multiple languages to meet the needs of dozens of ethnic groups.

• In Indonesia, the census tracks extremely rapid growth and urbanization.

• In Belarus, it counts the nation’s dwindling population.

Counting the World, which was produced through the generous support of the Government of Luxembourg through the Demographic Evolutions project, documents the many stages of the census process, from deciding what technologies to employ, mobilizing and training legions of enumerators, conducting public awareness campaigns, canvassing all households, collecting individual information, compiling hundreds of thousands or millions of completed questionnaires, monitoring procedures and results, and analyzing and disseminating the data.

It is available in a 21-minute version as well as a shorter 4-minute trailer

If you click on either of the links in the above line you should be taken directly to the online video.

Migration to the US is Good for Mexico--For a While Yet

Remittances home have dramatically changed the dynamics of migration over time. Migrants don't just help the families in the place of origin by getting out of the way, they help the local economy back home by sending money. This is the not-so-surprising, but still important, lesson from a new report published by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC. The authors of the study, Raymundo Campos-Vazquez and Horacio Sobarzo, are professors at the prestigious El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. Of particular interest is their insight that this pattern is unlikely to continue into the future:

The dynamics of migration from Mexico to the United States are rapidly evolving. Mexico’s population is growing more slowly than in the past and its youth are better educated than ever before. At the same time, US economic growth is slowing — in part due to the recent recession and preceding consumption bubble, but also due to shifting demographics and the exit of the large baby boom generation from the workforce. The US economy is expected to slow in the coming years and the flow of migrants from Mexico has responded to these more limited prospects. Individual migrants are likely to continue sending remittances to their families back home even after new inflows slow. But in the long term, as the Mexican population in the United States shifts from a population primarily born in Mexico to a population primarily born in the United States, these cross-border ties will inevitably weaken. The consequences of these changing migration dynamics for Mexico’s development prospects will be an important trend for the next decade.

In other words, the demographic fit between the US and Mexico is changing and it is dangerous to try to generalize from any short-term trends that we are seeing right now.

The Interaction of Environment and Population in the Arab Spring

Thomas Friedman recently had a very interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times discussing some of the potentially important underlying causes of the Arab Spring. He focuses attention on the environment. The Middle East is not an area that has the natural resources to easily accommodate a large population. Yet, the population is growing, and the environment is deteriorating. The interaction of these two things is undoubtedly at the root of the Arab Spring. Importantly, the situation is not likely to be getting better any time soon.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, the executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development in London, writing in The Beirut Daily Star in February, pointed out that 12 of the world’s 15 most water-scarce countries — Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Israel and Palestine — are in the Middle East, and after three decades of explosive population growth these countries are “set to dramatically worsen their predicament. Although birth rates are falling, one-third of the overall population is below 15 years old, and large numbers of young women are reaching reproductive age, or soon will be.” A British Defense Ministry study, he added, “has projected that by 2030 the population of the Middle East will increase by 132 percent — generating an unprecedented ‘youth bulge.’ ”

As Lester Brown, the president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of “World on the Edge,” notes, 20 years ago, using oil-drilling technology, the Saudis tapped into an aquifer far below the desert to produce irrigated wheat, making themselves self-sufficient. But now almost all that water is gone, and Saudi wheat production is, too. So the Saudis are investing in farm land in Ethiopia and Sudan, but that means they will draw more Nile water for irrigation away from Egypt, whose agriculture-rich Nile Delta is already vulnerable to any sea level rise and saltwater intrusion.

If you ask “what are the real threats to our security today,” said Brown, “at the top of the list would be climate change, population growth, water shortages, rising food prices and the number of failing states in the world. As that list grows, how many failed states before we have a failing global civilization, and everything begins to unravel?”

There is an increasing amount of research on the effects of climate change on migration--environmental refugee movements. To be sure, a lot of people have migrated out of the Middle East, but another recent story in the New Scientist quotes David Thomas of the University of Oxford reminding us that most people will not migrate, and it is the people who stay behind who bear the full brunt of the interaction of population growth and environmental degradation. This would certainly buttress Friedman's argument about the Arab Spring.

Do We Get Wiser As We Grow Older?

Populations are aging throughout the more developed world--low mortality means that a greater fraction of people born are reaching the older ages, and low fertility means that a greater fraction of the population is older. Does that mean that these societies will be increasingly wiser? Maybe. This week's Economist features research by Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Canada, that builds on his doctoral dissertation in Psychology at the University of Michigan. He and his colleagues have created scenarios to which subjects of different ages give responses that are then rated by a panel of experts in terms of how "wise" those responses are judged to be, based on a set of "wisdom" criteria. Grossmann's first study looked only at Americans and found that older people were generally wiser. The latest study, referred to by the Economist, but not yet available online, replicated the study in Japan and found that age differences were less obvious there than in the US sample. However, since the studies are cross-sectional, rather than longitudinal, we cannot really say that higher wisdom scores among older people in the US are a function of increasing wisdom. They could be due to cohort differences arising from educational attainment and/or changes in the educational systems or cultural/world view systems of the respective countries. 


What struck me, in particular, though, was the set of criteria used by the authors to define wisdom or, more specifically, "crucial aspects of wise reasoning":

willingness to seek opportunities to resolve conflict; willingness to search for compromise; recognition of the limits of personal knowledge; awareness that more than one perspective on a problem can exist; and appreciation of the fact that things may get worse before they get better.

If you compare this list with current political rhetoric in the US, you will see that there is not very much wise reasoning in today's political arena.


On a happier note, it is encouraging that these studies at least show that, on balance, we can expect an older population to be at least as good at wise reasoning as a younger population.

Is There Such a Thing as Sustainable Agriculture?

The bottom line for any effort to "sustain development" relates to feeding the population. Nothing else matters if people don't have enough nutritious food to eat. So, it was helpful that a New York Times editorial this morning pointed out a new report by a prestigious international body detailing a "road map" for agricultural sustainability.

Commissioned by Cgiar — a research alliance financed by the United Nations and the World Bank — it recommends essential changes in the way we think about farming, food and equitable access to it, and the way these things affect climate change.

In the Foreword to the report "Achieving Food Security in the Face of Climate Change," which should probably be mandatory reading for everyone, the Chair of the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change lays out the case very nicely:

Humanity faces difficult tradeoffs in producing sufficient food to feed our growing population and stabilizing our climate system. Globally our food system is not sustainable, does not provide adequate nutrition to everyone on the planet and, at the same time, changes to our climate threaten the future of farming as we know it. Agriculture is both part of the problem and part of the solution to climate change. We must seize every opportunity to shift away from inefficient farm practices, supply chains and diet choices towards long-term sustainability, profitability and health.

The message over and over again in this report is that we cannot simply continue with business-as-usual. The "marketplace" will not solve the problem in some automatic way. This is partly because we probably lack the resources on earth for everyone in the world to have the kind of diet "enjoyed" by those living in rich countries. The sharp shift in diets away from vegetables to meat, in particular, has devastating effects: "A high proportion of animal products in diets translates into larger land areas required for food production and greater impacts on the climate."

There is little in this report that is actually new--there is no magic solution to feeding a growing population. Rather, the report carefully outlines different strategies for different parts of the world--strategies that need to be worked on starting yesterday...