Can the Government of Iran Raise the Birth Rate?

Not long ago I noted that the low birth rate in Iran is likely due to the economic uncertainty facing the country, in combination with a well-educated population of men and women who know that a small family can be economically beneficial. The Iranian government has been worried about this for some time and has just outlawed permanent contraception, except for medical emergencies (an enlightened caveat that probably would not have been allowed had the bill been designed by Republican right-wingers in the US).

Ayatollah Khamenei expressed alarm last winter about the conspicuous decline in births in Iran, saying he was “shaking with fear” about demographic trends that could reduce population growth to zero. The number of children per couple has fallen to 1.3 from a peak of 3.6 in the years after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Many young couples have said they are fearful of bringing children into the world, given Iran’s weak economy and isolation from Western sanctions.

Of course, this is unlikely to do much for the birth rate, since couples seem to be waiting to have children in an uncertain economy, rather than necessarily deciding now that they want no more children.

Ebola's Gone Viral

Only a short while ago, I was noting that two American health workers in Liberia had contracted the Ebola virus in the process of aiding Ebola patients. Since then, they have been flown back to the US--to Emory University in Atlanta--to be treated with what CNN first called a "mystery drug" but then revised that to an experimental drug (or combination of drugs) that so far have kept them alive. At the same time, the spread of the disease has continued unabated, and today's New York Times suggests that the disease might even destabilize the region because of the fear that it instills, making it harder to control than might even otherwise be the case. Citing a paper just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the NYTimes story suggests that the current outbreak may have occurred in Guinea, right at the intersection of that country with Sierra Leone and Liberia, along a well-paved and well-traveled route (see map below):

The experimental drugs being used to treat the Ebola virus have a San Diego connection, as it turns out, and today's San Diego Union-Tribune has a lengthy description of the role that labs in San Diego have played in combating this and other viruses. Indeed, the story has a good history of the milestones in our historically short battle to control the spread of viruses. 

As the ongoing Ebola outbreak sweeps across national borders, the biotechnology industry has finally assembled the tools that could cure the deadly viral disease. And preventing the infection itself may very well be in sight.
The innovation can only be described as dizzying. For thousands of years, humanity struggled with viruses — without even knowing that they existed. But starting with the discovery of viruses at the end of the 19th century, medical researchers have refined their understanding of these mysterious entities on the edge of life.

With each new victory over viruses, bacteria, and protozoa, we edge life expectancy a little closer to the human lifespan. However, victories require not just medicines and vaccinations, but changes in human activity:

Health experts have grown increasingly confident in recent years that they can control Ebola, Dr. Frieden [Director of CDC] said, based on success in places like Uganda.
But those successes hinged on huge education campaigns to teach people about the disease and persuade them to go to treatment centers. Much work also went into getting people to change funeral practices that involve touching corpses, which are highly infectious.

Migrant Children Questions and Answers

PRI'a "The World" radio program asked Elizabeth Kennedy (one of our PhD students who is currently in El Salvador on a Fulbright Fellowship researching unaccompanied child migrants) to do a Q&A session on their Facebook page. There are lots of good questions from people along with her excellent responses--as she tries to navigate a situation that is heavy politicized and therefore subject to a lot of misinformation. Here is one of the more cogent exchanges on the Facebook page:

Kevin Hopson I think the most loving thing you can do for these kids and the other people who are with them is to safely and securely fly them back to their homes.

If the country's laws are not enforced, the risk of more children enduring the same abuse becomes escalated.

In fact, many assert that this crisis began with the President claiming that he would not enforce our laws and in doing so gave incentive for illegal migration to the United States.

Elizabeth G. Kennedy The US-Mexico border is more secure than it has ever been. We are spending more money on walls, drones, agents, towers, etc. than we ever have. President Obama has deported more migrants than any other president. You can read more here:http://www.wola.org/.../after_the_buildup_security_and.... Thus, this is NOT an enforcement issue. This is a humanitarian issue and a refugee crisis partially of the U.S.'s making by irresponsible and short-sighted foreign policy decisions historically and presently. While some of these children (and Central American adults) could return to their homes without being harmed, many have fled to the U.S. because they were in great danger. I encourage you to watch this CBS news piece (http://www.cbsnews.com/.../child-immigrants-face-grave.../). The 15 yo recounts how he, his father and mother tried to flee to the U.S. They were detained in Mexico and deported. His father was murdered days later. This is not an isolated case, and I encourage you to look at my Twitter account (EGKennedySD), where I retweet news articles about murdered U.S. deportees. It is not loving to return people to their death. It is wrong, inhumane and against international law.

Demography and Infrastructure Collide in the Philippines

A story in the business section of the New York Times today caught my eye because it was discussing the need for more infrastructure development in the Philippines if the country's economy is going to improve. I was thinking about the fact that the US also needs infrastructure development--even though the current Congress does not want to pay for it--but the difference is that in the Philippines the rapid rate of population growth must be addressed, rather than ignored or even misunderstood.

The stakes are high for the Philippines, said Frederic Neumann, a managing director and co-head of Asian economic research at HSBC.
Mr. Neumann noted that the country was in what some economists call a demographic sweet spot, in which millions of young people will be entering the work force. That makes the country a competitive destination for investments in export-driven manufacturing, which have propelled many countries in East Asia to prosperity.
“This is the Philippines’ moment,” Mr. Neumann said. “China has been extraordinarily competitive in the last 20 years, but it is now — with rising labor costs — moving toward other types of production. The Philippines has low labor costs. It could pick up where China leaves off.”

The HUGE difference between China and the Philippines is that China experienced a dramatic drop in fertility, whereas the Philippines has not. Thus, China created a demographic dividend, but the Philippines is not on that path. The TFR in the Philippines is still over 3 children per woman, and the number of young people moving into the 15-24 age group is projected by the United Nations Population Division to keep growing well beyond the middle of this century. That is not an opportunity--it is a disaster in the making. It is going to take more than just infrastructure improvement for the country to cope with the ever larger cohorts of young people moving into the labor force ages.

Migration "Movie" Traces Cultural Shifts

A very interesting video of the expansion of Western culture has been posted online, using data on births and deaths of well-known persons, comparing the place in which they were born with where they died. The data come from FreeBase, which is owned by Google, but were assembled by Maximilian Schich, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas, and his colleagues. A description of the project was just published in Science, where the authors summarize the project as follows:

The emergent processes driving cultural history are a product of complex interactions among large numbers of individuals, determined by difficult-to-quantify historical conditions. To characterize these processes, we have reconstructed aggregate intellectual mobility over two millennia through the birth and death locations of more than 150,000 notable individuals. The tools of network and complexity theory were then used to identify characteristic statistical patterns and determine the cultural and historical relevance of deviations. The resulting network of locations provides a macroscopic perspective of cultural history, which helps us to retrace cultural narratives of Europe and North America using large-scale visualization and quantitative dynamical tools and to derive historical trends of cultural centers beyond the scope of specific events or narrow time intervals.

The video is available through an article by Alison Abbott in Nature.

Historians tend to focus in highly specialized areas, says Schich. “But our data allow them to see unexpected correlations between obscure events never considered historically important and shifts in migration.”

In the end, then, demography is the key to understanding the world. What a concept!