Armenian Genocide Remembered

Yesterday marked the remembrance of the massive Armenian genocide in Turkey 100 years ago. BBC News reminded us of the essential facts:

Friday marks the 100th anniversary of the day the Ottoman Turkey authorities arrested several hundred Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople, today's Istanbul, most of whom were later killed. Armenians regard this as the beginning of the Ottoman policy of mass extermination of Christian Armenians suspected of supporting Russia, the Ottoman Empire's World War One enemy. Many of the victims were civilians deported to barren desert regions where they died of starvation and thirst. Thousands also died in massacres.

Armenia says up to 1.5 million people were killed. Turkey says the number of deaths was much smaller. Most non-Turkish scholars of the events regard them as genocide - as do more than 20 states, including France, Germany, Canada and Russia, and various international bodies including the European Parliament.

The Turkish government continues to deny that it was a genocide, although to its credit the lower house of the German Parliament has pushed Turkey to own up to what really happened:

The Bundestag president [Norbert Lammert] called on the present Turkish government to accept responsibility for what had resulted from the genocide, while stressing that it was not directly responsible. Lammert also referred to the role of Germany - a World War One ally of the Ottoman Empire - whose troops were said to have been involved in planning and even implementing deportations.

As I noted earlier this year, the Armenian diaspora that came in the wake of the Turkish genocide against them means that about a half million people of Armenian descent live in the U.S., with the biggest concentration being in Los Angeles. In that city, a march along Wilshire Boulevard to the Turkish consulate was one of the local remembrance events. Like many people my age, the Armenian situation was a part of my youth. While it may sound trite that my mother chastised me to "think about the poor starving Armenians" if I wasn't finishing my dinner, it did in fact invoke in me a sense of the importance of thinking about the suffering of others. And, as a species, we have sadly seen too many millions of people die an early and painful death at the hands of others for no other reason than that they were somehow "different."

Dangerous Xenophobia in South Africa

Even as Europeans are trying to deal with an influx of undocumented immigrants crossing over the Mediterranean, at the other end of Africa xenophobia has turned violent. The Economist reports on the anger aimed at immigrant workers by some South Africans.

A STREET vendor from Mozambique, Emmanuel Sithole, lay begging for his life in a gutter as four men beat him and stabbed him in the heart with a long knife. Images of his murder have shaken South Africa, already reeling from a wave of attacks on foreigners, mostly poor migrants from the rest of Africa. Soldiers were deployed on April 21st to Alexandra, a Johannesburg township, and other flashpoints to quell the violence, though only after seven people had been killed. Thousands of fearful foreigners, many from Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, have sought refuge in makeshift camps. Others have returned home.

The latest violence flared up in the Durban area earlier this month after King Goodwill Zwelithini, the traditional leader of the Zulus, reportedly compared foreigners to lice and said that they should pack up and leave.

His comments poured fuel on an already-smouldering fire. Jean Pierre Misago, a researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society in Johannesburg, estimates that at least 350 foreigners have been killed in xenophobic violence since 2008. But Mr Misago says he has heard of only one conviction for murder. Attacks on foreigners and foreign-run businesses have been committed with virtual impunity; few cases ever make it to court. “Migrant lives are low-value lives,” says Marc Gbaffou, chairman of the African Diaspora Forum in Johannesburg.

When, after an outcry, King Zwelithini held an anti-xenophobia imbizo, or assembly, in a Durban stadium, some of the audience booed African ambassadors and religious leaders, chanted that foreigners should leave, and waved spears, axes and clubs. Meanwhile President Jacob Zuma, who has made only an emotionless plea to halt the violence, blamed journalists for publicising the death of Mr Sithole. “This makes us look bad,” he said. His eldest son, Edward (born in Swaziland), agreed foreigners should leave, saying that “we are sitting on a ticking time-bomb of them taking over the country.”

This is the problem with immigrants, of course. They are perceived as somehow threatening the current way of life. Those sentiments seem to me to be behind xenophobia everywhere. In today's world, though, the presence of immigrants is more likely to indicate that the current way of life is already changing, and the immigrants are more the consequence, and less the cause, of those changes.

Earth Day 2015

This is the 45th anniversary of Earth Day. As I have been saying for the past few days, every day needs to be earth day, but it is still helpful to celebrate it annually. My own involvement in Earth Day goes back to the very first one in 1970. As a PhD student in Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, I was invited to address what turned out to be a very large outdoor gathering on the campus of California State University, Fresno. Fresno County is the most productive agricultural county in the United States, although its current biggest crop, almonds, takes a huge--almost certainly unsustainable--amount of water. At the time, though, few of us were thinking about water scarcity. The truth was that growing food was an unabashedly good thing, since we knew there were going to be lots of new mouths to be fed in the future. My talk was "Who Lit the Fuse on the Population Bomb?" and of course the answer was "look in the mirror":

Europeans and Americans are responsible for the world's population problems. It all began 200 years ago in the early days of European and American economic development...[you know the rest of the story if you've read my book]. 

I used the opportunity to push for change, keeping in mind that in 1970 the average woman in the United States was giving birth to 2.5 babies, virtually all of whom would survive to adulthood. Fertility was on the way down, to be sure, but it wasn't clear in 1970 whether or not that was a long-term trend.

We should definitely advocate for the immediate removal of all discriminatory barriers in education and in the professions [remember that this was the first year that women had been admitted as undergraduates at Princeton]. If you can get a woman out of the house and reward her with financial gain and social and economic prestige, then the social and economic costs of having additional children are going to increase for that woman and she is far more likely than ever before to prefer a small family.

You will recognize the importance of that theme in almost everything that I have written since then. Keep in mind that between then and now we have added 115 million people to the U.S. population, although the birth rate has dropped to just below replacement level. At the same time the world's population has almost exactly doubled--from 3.7 billion in 1970 to 7.3 billion in 2015. Fortunately, the global birth rate is also on the way down from about 4.6 children then to 2.5 children now. We're not out of the woods yet, though. There will be many more Earth Days before we can relax.

Mediterranean Migration Is Ever More Deadly

Undocumented migration from North Africa to Europe has increased dramatically with the mess in the middle east. And since Libya is largely ungoverned it has become a migrant smugglers paradise, even though it is not the physically closest spot to southern Europe. Still, as the map below shows, there is a lot of activity from Libya. The result of packing too many people onto poorly maintained boats is a high death rate, exemplified yesterday by a major disaster off the Italian coast. The NYTimes noted that:

Hundreds of people were feared dead on Sunday after a ship crowded with migrants capsized and sank in the Mediterranean, as the authorities described a grisly scene of bodies floating and submerging in the warm waters, with the majority of the dead apparently trapped in the ship at the bottom of the sea.

The fatal shipwreck may prove to be the Mediterranean’s deadliest migrant disaster ever and is only the latest tragedy in Europe’s migration crisis. Warmer spring weather has unleashed a torrent of smuggler boats, mostly from Libya, bearing migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa, often fleeing war and poverty for a foothold in Europe.

Death at sea has become a grimly common occurrence: Even before this weekend’s sinking, humanitarian groups estimated that 900 migrants had already died this year, compared with 90 during the same period a year ago. That figure could rise sharply, as officials estimate that 700 people may have drowned in the weekend disaster.

BBC News reported today that Italian authorities had arrested the Tunisian captain of the ship, along with his Syrian first mate. They were among the few survivors.  

The arrests come after the EU set out a package of measures to try to ease the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. Search and rescue operations will be stepped up and there will be a campaign to destroy traffickers' boats.

At the same time, BBC News noted that there other rescues yesterday, one by Italians and another by Greeks. Cutting down on the supply of ships may help, although it is likely also to cause even more dangerous journeys, since the supply of people who would like to get to Europe is growing in tandem with violence in the region. The US State Department's Humanitarian Information Unit released a map last week detailing where the 2.7 million internally displaced persons in Iraq are estimated to be living. The problem is getting worse, not better.

A Path to a Sustainable Future? Part 3-Population

Population growth is inevitable for the next few decades, but we will have a more sustainable future with fewer, rather than more people. Population growth over the past half century is intimately bound up with the ecological disaster that we face in a world of business as usual. Bringing population to a halt sooner rather than later is important for all of us and there

is some good news on this front from researchers at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Human Capital in Vienna, which is a collaboration of IIASA and the Vienna Institute for Demography. They have published a new book with accompanying online resources to help us understand their new population projections that take not only age and sex into account (per the United Nations projections), but also education (a major component of human capital). When they take into account the rising level of education among young women around the globe, their medium projection suggests that population size could peak at about 9.4 billion in the 2060-2080 period. This is a sooner peak and a smaller number of people than implied by the United Nations’ projections, which do not take educational attainment into account. Fertility is closely associated with female education, so as education increases, we can reasonably project that fertility will also go down.

Note, by the way, that these are the same sets of projections from which estimates of the population by religious affiliation were prepared by Pew Research in collaboration with IIASA and VID, as I discussed earlier. Remember that religion per se is not a hindrance to a decline in fertility. There are numerous Muslim majority countries, for example, with below replacement fertility, most notably Iran. And, of course, Catholic Christians have dramatically lowered their fertility over the past few decades, with Catholic majority countries of Southern Europe having among the lowest levels of fertility in the world. As I have said repeatedly, it is not religion, but rather the fundamentalists within a religion group that tend to promote high fertility, almost always in the context of second-class status for women. Education for women is the key remedy. 

At the same time, the Wittgenstein Centre researchers argue that an increasingly better educated older population (which the world has been experiencing over the past century) means that an increasing fraction of the population that is older is not predictive of a decline in productivity and thus of economic malaise. Indeed, the opposite very well may prevail, suggesting that aging and eventually declining populations are not the end of the world. Indeed--they are signs of sustainability.