Where You Live Matters

Every human geographer I know understands that where you live matters. Indeed, it is one of the foci of my own research. So, it was good to see a recent study confirming this, as reported in detail in a New York Times piece this week. The Equality of Opportunity project at Harvard has utilized the anonymized tax records dataset to follow people who have moved out of low-income areas into places where more opportunities exist, and more generally to compare movers with non-movers.

Based on the earnings records of millions of families that moved with children, it finds that poor children who grow up in some cities and towns have sharply better odds of escaping poverty than similar poor children elsewhere.

The feelings heard across Baltimore’s recent protests — of being trapped in poverty — seem to be backed up by the new data. Among the nation’s 100 largest counties, the one where children face the worst odds of escaping poverty is the city of Baltimore, the study found.

Beyond Baltimore, economists say the study offers perhaps the most detailed portrait yet of upward mobility — and the lack of it. The findings suggest that geography does not merely separate rich from poor but also plays a large role in determining which poor children achieve the so-called American dream.

“The data show we can do something about upward mobility,” said Mr. Chetty, a Harvard professor, who conducted the main study along with Nathaniel Hendren, also a Harvard economist. “Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter.”

So, being stuck in a poverty-ridden place is bad for you, as Doug Massey helped us to understand in his PAA Presidential Address 19 years ago. Getting out is good for you, but the unanswered question is how many can get out. If we accept the premise of Steve Ruggles' PAA Presidential address this year, we are heading into a time when there will be fewer wage jobs because of the invasion of technology into the workplace. We are going to have re-engineer the economy, which may influence the spatial options that people have. None of this is likely to happen on its own, however. It is going to require some federal initiatives. The politics will almost certainly be ugly, given the influence that the very wealthy currently have over government decision-making.

Sex Imbalances and the Housing Market in China

Thanks to Shoshana Grossbard for pointing me to an article talking about how the "search for love" has helped to fuel China's housing bubble. The article refers to the underlying problem which is, as Shoshana has written about for a long time, the unbalanced sex ratio in China. The strong son preference in China (as in all of East Asia), combined with the one-child policy that has encouraged sex-selective abortion, has pushed up the "bride price" in China.

If you want to marry an attractive Shanghainese girl, the myth goes, you are expected to first own a nice apartment, preferably within the city’s inner ring road and with little or no debt. Otherwise, she’ll dump you.

Indeed, a new survey revealed that the majority of Chinese women believe the man should buy a house before getting married. More than 60% of female respondents polled in ten major Chinese cities wanted a house before marriage, the Sharpen Research Institute and Guangzhou Youth Weekly survey showed. One-fifth of the women went even further and said a house was an essential requirement before saying “I do.”

Consequently, it is widely understood that the groom will already have – or be prepared to buy – a house when he is getting married, said Brian Jackson, senior China economist at IHS Economics. He added that a man’s “potential bargaining power in the local marriage market” is further eroded by the country’s large sex imbalance.

In fact, if a man takes up a wife without first offering her a house, it is referred to as a “naked marriage.” A 2013 online survey showed that about 80% of men supported the idea of naked marriages – 70% of women did not.

Thus, the "demographic dividend," which received a lot of attention at the recent Population Association of America meetings, has its downside as well as the upsides, especially when you factor in cultural variations such as gender equality. In China, we have the paradoxical situation in which women, who are culturally less valued than men, are in a superior bargaining position for marriage precisely because of the consequences of gender inequality. Many would call that justice. 

It Will Take Time to Put Nepal Back Together

The massive earthquake in Nepal is now known to have killed more than 7,500 people and injured thousands more, but the threat of more disease and death is very real. As BBC News has reported (and the whole world has been concerned about) cholera is a huge problem.

A lack of shelter, contaminated water and poor sanitation could lead to cholera, dysentery and other water-borne diseases, the charities said. The UK's Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) said in some areas people were living and defecating in the open. The umbrella organisation, formed of 12 charities, said immediate action was needed to tackle the problem.

The scale and cost of this aspect of the response are still being assessed but it was clear action was needed now before the rainy season starts in June, a spokesman said. "Cholera is endemic in Nepal, so an outbreak would not be unprecedented; last year 600 people caught cholera and in 2009 a major outbreak affected more than 300,000 people," he added.

Cholera is always a possibility in situations where a clean reliable water supply is not available. But when cholera is already present, the threat is very real. You may recall that after the earthquake in Port au Prince, Haiti, cholera was brought into country by peacekeepers from....(wait for it)...Nepal.

Saving Children's Lives--The Key to Low Fertility

On Friday, my colleague and former PhD student, Magdalena Benza, presented a paper at the PAA meetings on which I was a co-author. Her paper was excellent, focusing on how we can create an urban gradient using satellite imagery, from which we can draw key inferences about fertility levels in different parts of a country. One of the other papers in the session examined causes of the stall in the decline of fertility in Kenya. A key element is the fact that child mortality has not declined enough for couples to feel comfortable about limiting fertility. Indeed, as John Casterline of Ohio State University pointed out in his discussion of the papers in that session, Africa is perhaps the best example in the world of a region where the demographic transition has followed the expected model that fertility declines in direct response to a decline in mortality. The flip side of that, of course, is that if mortality is not dropping quickly, then we cannot expect fertility to be declining.

I thought of that when Debbie Fugate today linked me to a story at BBC News about the success that Rwanda has had in lowering their child mortality rate. To be sure, lowering child mortality has been one of the UN's Millennium Development Goals developed in 2000 as targets for 2015.

And one of the biggest success stories is Rwanda. Between 2000 and 2015, it achieved the highest average annual reduction in both the under-five mortality rate and the maternal mortality ratio in the world. The UN estimates that 590,000 children have been saved.

Dr. Fidele Ngabo, head of the division for maternity, child and community health in Rwanda explained how this came about:

"We had four top killers - malaria, diarrhoea, pneumonia, and malnutrition - diseases which can be treated by simple intervention. So we selected 45,000 community health workers at each village so when the children are sick, instead of spending one or two hours going to a health facility, the community health workers can give the treatment in less than 10 minutes.

"They are elected by the community. The only criteria we give is they can read and write. We give them basic training like how to screen for malaria, how to take temperatures, how to check respiration. For complicated treatment, they are obliged to transfer patients to the health facility."

The workers are not given a regular salary, but are paid for what they achieve. "The most important thing is to bring service closer to the community, that's what people can really learn from our country."

This actually sounds a lot like the "barefoot doctor" program in China that helped bring down death rates in the Chinese countryside several decades ago. At the same time, the story points out that there are new technological elements to this that allow community members to be in close touch with health providers. 

The only problem I have with the story is that it is not clear what the source is for the information on child mortality. According to the Demographic and Health Survey website, there is a survey being conducted at the moment, and maybe these data are pre-release findings from that survey, but that is not stated and the website of the National Institute of Statistics in Rwanda does not have any information about the newest survey. So, here is the story we know about: in 1992, 163 out of 1,000 babies born in Rwanda died before their 5th birthday, and the average woman was having 6.2 children. By 2010 (the most recent survey for which we have data), the child mortality rate was down to 102 out of 1,000 and the TFR was down 4.6. Sadly, both of these numbers are still extremely high.

Patriarchy, Power, and Pay

Tonight was the Presidential Address at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America by this year's PAA President, Steven Ruggles of the University of Minnesota. He is an historical demographer (although perhaps more famous as the creator of the immensely useful IPUMS database). The title of the talk (which will be published this fall in Demography) was "Patriarchy, Power, and Pay: The Transformation of American Families, 1800-2015." Naturally, it made excellent use of the IPUMS data. While the title might not indicate this, the paper could have been--"Age of Extremes Revisited 19 Years Later." In essence, he put Doug Massey's PAA Presidential address of 19 years ago into historical perspective. That is my interpretation, by the way, since Ruggles didn't actually mention Massey. 

The point is that in the past two hundred years, we have gone from almost all families being agricultural family businesses that were patriarchal in nature, to the male breadwinner system, to the dual wage earner family, to the current situation in which wage and salary labor is rapidly diminishing, especially among the lower strata of society. This has raised the age at marriage, raised the incidence of childlessness, and raised the rate of out-of-wedlock births. But, Ruggles, argues, this is not necessarily bad. We just have to adjust. We adjusted to the loss of family farms as the basis of the economy (only 1% of workers are now employed in agriculture, yet we grow more food than ever), and we adjusted to the demise of the breadwinner system, which was part and parcel of women's liberation. Now, we must adjust to the fact that robots and other forms of automation can do a lot of the menial work that we as humans used to do. 

That should lead to the happy situation of humans having to do less work, while being freed to do things that are more enjoyable. The only sticky wicket is that, as Massey had noted many years ago, we have rising inequality. What to do? Ruggles left us with a reference to Keynes, implying that his solution, like Massey's, is for government to institute regulations that shift a bit of wealth (not all--just a reasonable amount) from the affluent to the rest of society. Now, how do we go about doing that? There lies the big challenge. We have the diagnosis and the cure. Can we implement it?