Boko Haram and the Demography of Nigeria

The world has been riveted and repulsed this week by the kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria by a radical Islamic group known locally as Boko Haram, which in the Hausa language means "western education is forbidden." BBC News has a very good article describing the group and providing some background on its origins, which is quite recent.

Boko Haram promotes a version of Islam which makes it "haram", or forbidden, for Muslims to take part in any political or social activity associated with Western society. This includes voting in elections, wearing shirts and trousers or receiving a secular education.

Since the Sokoto caliphate, which ruled parts of what is now northern Nigeria, Niger and southern Cameroon, fell under British control in 1903, there has been resistance among the area's Muslims to Western education. Many Muslim families still refuse to send their children to government-run "Western schools", a problem compounded by the ruling elite which does not see education as a priority.

The kidnapped girls had made the mistake, so to speak, of wanting a western education--realizing that it is the key to success everywhere in the world. Local resistance to this idea, which has obviously existed for a long time, wouldn't be such a problem if death rates were still very high and the population was not growing rapidly. Despite the fact that northern Nigeria is a region where death rates are currently high by world standards, they are still much lower than they used to be and since fertility remains very high there, population growth is high, creating a situation where local economies offer few opportunities to improve one's life--except through western education as a way up and/or out. As I noted a couple of years ago, this is a prime situation in which a large group of young men without good job prospects can create the fuel for rebellion and violence.

The man who founded Boko Haram in 2002 was killed by the Nigerian police forces in 2009, and it was thought that this would shut it down. Instead, they regrouped and are making themselves known. Nigeria has already seen one bloody civil war in its post-colonial history, and we have to hope that this group can be permanently shut down without it going to that extreme.

Maternal Mortality Declining--Mostly

A couple of days ago I commented on the new Lancet article about child mortality from researchers at the Institute of Health Metrics at the University of Washington. The other article in that issue dealt with maternal mortality--deaths associated with childbearing. [As a sidebar, I should note that these two articles may show up in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest number of co-authors!] Anyway, the news about maternal mortality is that it is generally on the decline in the world, although there is still substantial global variability, as shown in this map:

On the basis of recent data and a refined understanding of the association between HIV and maternal mortality, we have shown that worldwide maternal mortality has decreased by 1·3% per year since 1990. Despite reductions in the number of maternal deaths—from about 376000 in 1990 to about 293000 in 2013—only 16 countries, seven of which are developing countries, are expected to achieve the MDG 5 target of a 75% reduction in the MMR by 2015. We noted two different patterns in developing countries: sustained substantial decreases in most of Asia and Latin America, and stagnation or increases from 1990 to 2003 in sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. Increases in some high-income countries such as the USA are a deviation from the general trend downwards in developed countries. However, the substantial acceleration in the decreases since 2003—especially in sub-Saharan Africa—provides hope that more countries can achieve rapid and sustained reductions.

As you might expect, the finding that the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) had increased in the US caught the media's attention. The Washington Post, for example, noted that:

The researchers estimated that 18.5 mothers died for every 100,000 births in the U.S. in 2013, a total of almost 800 deaths. That is more than double the maternal mortality rate in Saudi Arabia and Canada, and more than triple the rate in the United Kingdom.

It is not entirely clear why this has happened, although on explanation seems to be an increase in the number of pregnant women who have diseases that contribute to a higher-risk pregnancy, such as hypertension and diabetes. In other words, the very fact that we are becoming less healthy as adults may be playing a role in putting women at higher risk of death associated with pregnancy.

Remembering Gary Becker

Gary Becker of the University of Chicago died this weekend at age 83. He was a Nobel Prize winning economist who redefined our way of thinking about the relationship between families and demographic behavior. Although I did not know him, my good friend and colleague here at SDSU, Shoshana Grossbard, Professor of Economics, was one of his students at the University of Chicago and wrote these comments today, which I quote in full.

I arrived at Chicago with the intention of specializing in economics of education. But after starting Gary Becker’s course in graduate price theory and hearing about his innovative ideas at the cusp economics and sociology I decided to switch gears. I had doubled-majored in economics and sociology and this was too good to be true: an opportunity to combine the disciplines! With his approval I took a special field in anthropology of the family as part of my Ph D in economics. In 1974 I started writing my doctoral dissertation under his supervision, an economic analysis of polygamy [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237702900_An_Economic_Analysis_of_Polygyny_The_Case_of_Maiduguri]. Becker had just published his first article on the theory of marriage and was interested in the topic. That was the beginning of 40 years of his mentoring. I am so sad that today, upon his untimely death, this relationship ended.

Everything I have written was inspired by Becker to some degree. He founded the economics of marriage, the topic of most of my research. Milton Friedman called Becker the greatest social scientist who has lived and worked in the last part of the 20th century. [http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2014/05/04/gary-s-becker-nobel-winning-scholar-economics-and-sociology-1930-2014?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+UChicago+%28The+University+of+Chicago+News+Office%29&utm_content=FaceBook] My work on economics and other social sciences also owes much to Becker. 

As famous as he is, I think that some of Becker’s best theories about the family have received insufficient recognition. I have fought for more recognition of Becker’s contribution to the economic analysis of decision-making in households, e.g. by addressing the myth that his work on the family assumes an all-encompassing altruism. Gary appreciated that and wrote that this myth “has been addressed by the economist Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman and others. A major part of my book on the family are the chapters discussing the division of labour in families, and marriage in both monogamous and polygamous societies. Yet the predominant assumption in these chapters is that both husbands and wives are completely selfish, and not at all altruistic.” [Gary Becker’s letter on Family Models, in response to an article by Martha Nussbaum. Times Literary Supplement, May 29, 1998].

Becker’s Treatise on the Family uses the term “economic’ profusely, but as I wrote in a review for a sociology journal in 1981, it may be better to replace “economic” approach with ‘optimization model’, ‘market theory’ or other more specific concepts that he used. [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259196885_Gary_Becker%27s_theory_of_the_family] This would lead to even more widespread realization of the power of Becker’s ideas.

“Keep up good work!” are the last words Gary Becker wrote me on March 13 this year. His words still resonate. I will continue to try to demonstrate the value of Becker’s theoretical ideas about family, not necessarily using ‘economic’ the way he does, and not always sharing his ideas about ideal gender roles. But as long as I can I plan to pursue a Beckerian research agenda. Thanks, Gary, for all you did for me.

Child Mortality Declining--Mostly

Today's Lancet features two articles from the Global Burden of Disease project at the Institute for Health Metrics at the University of Washington. One of the articles focuses on child mortality and the other on maternal mortality (related to Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5). Overall, the news was good. Deaths rates among children under 5 have been going down in most areas of the world, although there is still wide, and predictable, regional variation. They range from a high of 152.5 deaths under age 5 per 1,000 live births in Guinea-Bissau to 2.3 in Singapore. The news was not happy for the United Kingdom, however, as BBC News reported. Although child mortality is still very low by world standards, nonetheless:

In 2013, the mortality rate for under-fives in the UK was 4.9 deaths per 1,000. Poverty and smoking in pregnancy are two of many factors cited by experts.

...the UK had worse rates than nearly every other western European nation for early neonatal deaths - between zero and six days, post-neonatal deaths (death between 29 and 364 days), and for childhood deaths (death between one and four years). The UK's rate is comparable with Serbia and Poland.

The fact that poverty is put forth as a key reason for the UK's higher than expected child mortality rates is, of course, a reminder that poverty is pervasive in those parts of the world, especially Africa, where rates are globally the highest.

Watering Hong Kong

Infrastructure is a huge--maybe the biggest--issue faced by cities. This is obviously important since we are now an urban-majority species and cities are absorbing most of the planet's population growth. We all need water and food and neither of these resources is automatically available in cities. Lorena O'Neil, writing for Ozy.com, has found that one of the world's richest cities--Hong Kong--may be about to overshoot the supply of water needed for its 7 million, and growing, population.

On the one hand, Hong Kong has been progressive and forward-thinking with water — it was the first city in the world to use seawater for toilet-flushing and one of the earliest adopters of seawater desalination. On the other hand, water experts are now sounding the alarm that Hong Kong is at great risk of running very low on water in the future. Hong Kong’s reliance on imported water leaves it vulnerable: 70% to 80% of the city’s water comes from the Dongjiang river in the Guangdong province of China. And that early desalination plant? It was dismantled in 1992.

Any and all solutions will require consumers to pay more for water. There seems to be little question about that. Although this may not hurt too much in Hong Kong, there are a lot of other places in the world where the rising cost of water simply creates a bigger gap between the rich and the poor, and more conflict among those competing for finite water sources.

A Civic Exchange report on Hong Kong’s water management system says this foreshadows “a future in which demand will exceed supply” and an increase in competition for water among the cities. HK is not an isolated instance. Water shortages are a rising source of conflict between cities in Brazil, Ethiopia, Jordan, India and the United States. Hong Kong is a harbinger of how other modern cities will find themselves struggling to meet water demands.