Singaporean Xenophobia

It was almost a year ago that I commented on a plan by the government of the wealthy city-state of Singapore to bring in more immigrants to shore up its faltering demographics. Singapore's total fertility rate has dropped from 3.1 in 1970 to 1.3 in 2012, according to official government statistics. At the same time, life expectancy is very high, and the population is aging, thus leading to the government's decision to bring in "new recruits." Well, it seems that things haven't been going so well. Thanks to Peyton Dobbins for alerting me to a story in Stratfor discussing recent riots in Singapore--not this time by Singaporeans upset at new immigrants, but by Indian immigrants upset at their poor treatment. 

Tensions came to the fore Dec. 8 during an episode of uncharacteristic violence. Some 400 immigrants, most of whom were Indian, Bangladeshi and Nepalese workers, rioted after an Indian national was hit and killed by a bus. They set fire to nearby vehicles and attacked police and emergency services workers. Violence subsided only after roughly 300 police officers were deployed to the area. Two days later, authorities charged 24 temporary workers from India with inciting riots.

Although Singapore occupies a peninsula at the southern end of Malaysia, only 13 percent of the population is Malaysian. More than three-quarters of the population is ethnic Chinese, and Indians represent less than 10 percent of the population. These ethnic differences, which manifest themselves in different languages and religion, create xenophobic strife. Like their co-ethnics in China, the Chinese Singaporeans are not having many children, choosing to have scarcely more than one, but investing a lot of time and energy into the success of that child. The Indian population, like co-ethnics in India, have a slightly different view of the world, and this doesn't seem to go down well. Xenophobia is never pretty, no matter where it pops up. Still. as the article notes, Singapore does not have many choices, given the very low birth rate:

Once a fishing village and now one of the world's wealthiest polities, Singapore owes much of its economic success to liberal immigration policies. That many of these policies coincided with economic duress created concern among the public, forcing the government to maneuver accordingly. Though no one expects the ruling party to lose its hold on power, the government will probably be forced to appease voters further in the run-up to 2016 elections. Singapore will thus continue to try to balance the political consequences of high foreign populations with future economic vitality.

It seems likely that the Singapore of the future will be a different country, in a very real sense... 

Health and Planetary Benefits of a Plant-Based Diet

As the world's population heads toward 9-10 billion by the middle of this century, the issue of feeding everyone becomes ever more important. At the moment, we are not only increasing numerically, we are increasing our per capita meat consumption. This means that we raise an ever greater number of animals for slaughter. Forgetting for the moment the ethical issues associated with that, there are two key problems: (1) feeding them takes food directly off the human table and very inefficiently reroutes it through animals; and (2) too much meat is not healthy. This latter concern may be why we are getting sicker over time, even as life expectancy goes up.

There is a popular conception (misconception, really) that eating meat is a sign of wealth and well-being. In fact, the evidence suggests that a largely plant-based diet is better for you, and a paper just published online today in Nature, led by a team of researchers at Harvard, emphasizes the incredible ability of the human gut to adapt quickly to different diets:

In concert, these results demonstrate that the gut microbiome can rapidly respond to altered diet, potentially facilitating the diversity of human dietary lifestyles.

The point is that your body adjusts rapidly to your diet, so moving from an animal-based diet to a plant-based diet is not a huge adjustment, as far as your gut is concerned. That story has a link to another recently published article from researchers in Australia suggesting that people were generally aware of the health benefits of a plant-based diet. The younger and better educated you are, the more likely you are to share this view of the world. I find that to be very encouraging for the future. Another encouraging development is a recently published book by Vaclav Smil, one of the world's foremost authorities on the world's food supply. His book is titled: "Should We Eat Meat? Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory." Here's a snippet from his website about the book:

The heart of the book addresses the consequences of the “massive carnivory” of western diets, looking at the inefficiencies of production and at the huge impacts on land, water, and the atmosphere. Health impacts are also covered, both positive and negative. In conclusion, the author looks forward at his vision of “rational meat eating”, where environmental and health impacts are reduced, animals are treated more humanely, and alternative sources of protein make a higher contribution.

Staying off a Mosquito's Radar Screen

If you are never bitten by an infected mosquito, you won't get malaria. That seems pretty simple. The trick, though, is to avoid being bitten, which is not easy in places infested with mosquitos. Bed nets and repellents are good preventive measures, but what is it that repels mosquitos? Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have been working on that problem, but from the opposite angle. What smells attract mosquitos, so that we can avoid them? The answer was published in the journal Cell:

Female mosquitoes that transmit deadly diseases locate human hosts by detecting exhaled CO2 and skin odor. The identities of olfactory neurons and re- ceptors required for attraction to skin odor remain a mystery. Here, we show that the CO2-sensitive olfactory neuron is also a sensitive detector of human skin odorants in both Aedes aegypti and Anopheles gambiae. We demonstrate that activity of this neuron is important for attraction to skin odor, establishing it as a key target for intervention.

Note that the Anopheles gambiae is the mosquito that tends the carry the particularly deadly plasmodium falciparum parasite in sub-Saharan Africa. A story in today's San Diego Union-Tribune decodes some of the scientific jargon:

Mosquitoes use carbon dioxide in exhaled breath to sense that people are near. But when they get close to a person, the bloodsucking disease-carriers ignore CO2 and hone in on skin odors to find a fleshy landing strip. Skin emits hundreds of chemicals into the air. Even sweaty socks will attract mosquitoes. How this mechanism works was a mystery.

The new study identified the cells that detect skin odors, along with chemicals that block the most important skin odors. Researchers also found pleasant-smelling attractants that can serve as decoys.

As is true with most such research, there is a still a lot of work to do before these decoy scents hit the market, but every little battle against mosquitos is worth it in terms of lives saved.

Paths to Gender Equality

A major theme surrounding below replacement fertility is that women have a tough time juggling both a career and domestic life when men aren't much help around the house. So, if a woman wants to have a career, she winds up having fewer children. Today's New York Times offers lengthy stories discussing two alternatives to this world view: (1) stay-at-home Dads; and (2) lowering the standards with respect to housework.

In the first story, Jodi Kantor and Jessica Silver-Greenberg review a set of interviews that they conducted in several places in the US with women who are the bread-winners largely because they have high-powered jobs in finance, making more money than their husband could have. Instead of two incomes and a smaller family, the women are married to men who are staying home to take care of the kids.

In an industry still dominated by men with only a smattering of women in its highest ranks, these bankers make up a small but rapidly expanding group, benefiting from what they call a direct link between their ability to achieve and their husbands’ willingness to handle domestic duties. The number of women in finance with stay-at-home spouses has climbed nearly tenfold since 1980, according to an analysis of census data, and some of the most successful women in the field are among them.

The article is careful to point out that is not a choice available to most couples. Two-earner families are often a requirement in order to maintain what we think of as an acceptable standard of living. The comments at the end of the article also point to the many issues involved in trying to increase the level of gender equality in the workplace and family both at the same time. This is obviously not a simple issue...

The second article, written by a man, takes a different view--increase gender equality in housework by doing less housework (no mention of the kids, however).

The solution to the gender divide in housework generally is just that simple: don’t bother. Leave the stairs untidy. Don’t fix the garden gate. Fail to repaint the peeling ceiling. Never make the bed.  A clean house is the sign of a wasted life, truly. Hope is messy: Eventually we’ll all be living in perfect egalitarian squalor.

The fact that there was little mention of who takes care of the kids is important because, in my experience, it is the kids who make the biggest contribution to squalor. For adults, a little self-discipline should be all that's necessary.

The WorldPop Project

Demographic data for the entire world are most readily available from the United Nations Population Division, but they work almost exclusively at the national level. Trying to get some information at a more local level requires the combination of a variety of resources, including satellite imagery along with georeferenced census and survey data. LandScan (from Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and the Gridded Population of the World (from Columbia University) are two such attempts to do this. Now a group at the University of Southampton in the UK, headed up by geographer Andy Tatem, has launched a new website called WorldPop. 

The WorldPop project was initiated in October 2013 to combine the AfriPop, AsiaPop and AmeriPop population mapping projects. It aims to provide an open access archive of spatial demographic datasets for Central and South America, Africa and Asia to support development and health applications. The methods used are designed with full open access and operational application in mind, using transparent, fully documented and shareable methods to produce easily updatable maps with accompanying metadata.

Databases like these are especially important in times of emergency, as I and my colleagues noted a few years ago in a report for the National Research Council, and the WorldPop data were featured recently in a story about typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.

Large-scale natural disasters such as typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti can bring stark reminders of the importance of knowing how many people are living in which locations in order to rapidly assess and provide relief. These disasters have also shown that a range of existing datasets can be used to rapidly improve available information on where people live.

I have not yet had a chance to compare the different kinds of information available from WorldPop with the other databases, but the ability to compare among several different resources is itself a key element in improving our demographic knowledge about local places anywhere in the world.