Geography, Demography, and the Presidential Election

You may already have seen this map because it has been making the rounds on the internet, but it tells the story of the geography and demography of the Presidential election. To be sure, the map reflects voting at the county-level for the 2012 contest between Obama and Romney. But this is the road map for the current Clinton - Trump election:

The map was put together by Nate Cohn and Toni Monkovic of the Upshot feature of the NYTimes, and the two of them have a great discussion about what this all means. Here's a snippet:

Toni One way to understand Blue America is to follow the water. The oceans, the Great Lakes and the major rivers were obvious places for small settlements to become major cities. And these big metro areas are where Democrats dominate.The population of rural counties as a whole has been declining, and metro areas are growing. Over time, this will help Democrats, no?

Nate The Democrats do tend to do best in metropolitan areas. All of the major demographic and cultural changes that have helped the Democrats over the last decade are concentrated in these diverse and often well-educated areas. In this election, I’d guess Hillary Clinton will fare even better in metropolitan areas than President Obama did.

The red parts of the country tend to be rural, predominantly white, less-well educated--Trump country. The blue parts in the southern states reflect counties that historically had plantations with large slave populations and they are still predominantly African-American. Blue areas in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona are counties with high percentages of Latinos and/or Native Americans. Blue counties along the two coasts reflect the better-educated urban populations--these tend to be Clinton country.

Habitat III Underway in Ecuador: Can Cities Become More Sustainable?

This week has witnessed a huge gathering in Quito, Ecuador called Habitat III--the Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development. Almost all of the world's population growth is showing up in cities and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This is due to the combination of migration out of rural areas (where jobs aren't increasing as fast as the population) and natural increase in cities (where even relatively low births in developing countries still generate an excess of births over deaths). The focus is obviously on cities in developing countries because they have the most fragile infrastructure and are increasing at the most rapid rates. The U.S. State Department's project on Secondary Cities will be on display at the meetings, emphasizing the complexity of urban life.

When I think of urban sustainability, I'm first concerned about the basics--getting a consistent supply of food and clean water to people, coupled with good sewerage and electricity--all associated with adequate housing structures and low levels of ground, water, and air pollution. But the "New Urban Agenda" of the UN goes beyond that to incorporate improvements in the quality of social and economic life in cities. Indeed, the limited coverage in the media of the event seems mainly to have focused on those urban residents who feel disenfranchised from the mainstream of urban life. 

In truth, we are getting very close to the point at which urban life is mainly what human existence is all about. So, we are not just studying cities--we are really studying the evolution of human society. If cities cannot be sustained in every way, then human society is sunk.

Middle Age Comes Earlier in Young Countries

Middle age is usually thought of as an individual characteristic and is generally defined as that period of time between youth (however you define that) and old age (however you define that). But there is an aggregate perspective, as well, as Marilyn vos Savant (reportedly the world's smartest woman--I'm not making that up!) pointed out in this week's Parade magazine (a ghost of its former self, but it still shows up in the Sunday paper). It is reasonable to define "middle age" as that age at which half of the population is younger and half older (otherwise known as the median age). By that definition, the middle is a lot younger in developing countries with high fertility than in countries with low fertility. We know this because birth rates are the principal driver of the shape of the age structure. So, in the West African country of Niger, which I noted a few years ago had the world's "worst" demographics,  and where women are having a whopping 7.6 children each, the median age is 14.8 years. Uganda, Chad, and Angola are close to that.

At the other end of the extreme is Japan, where the median age is pretty close to what we think of as "middle age" at the personal level--46.5, and where women are having only 1.5 children each. Close to Japan are other low-fertility countries including German, Italy, and Portugal. The United States is several years lower at 38 years, whereas the world average is 29.6, which is almost exactly half way between the youngest and oldest median ages. These data, by the way, come from the Population Division of the United Nations, and they are consistent with what Marilyn vos Savant used in her short piece, so it is good to know that the smartest woman in the world understands where to go for demographic information.

Gases That Cool Us and Our Food Heat Up the Planet--We've Got to Stop These Guys!

...And a new global treaty is aimed at doing just that. Yesterday in Kigala, Rwanda, 170 nations reached a legal agreement to cut the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)--gases that are used extensively in refrigeration and air conditioning. As the NYTimes notes:

HFCs are just a small percentage of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but they function as a sort of supercharged greenhouse gas, with 1,000 times the heat-trapping potency of carbon dioxide.

The Kigali deal was seven years in the making, and is a compromise between rich nations and poorer, hotter ones, including some where rising incomes are just starting to bring air-conditioners within reach. Wealthier nations will freeze production of HFCs more quickly than poorer countries, though some nations, including those in Africa, elected to phase the chemicals out more rapidly than required, citing the grave threats they face from climate change.

Refrigeration and air conditioning have been around for only a few decades--within my lifetime, but they have revolutionized how and where we live. This wouldn't be a huge problem for the planet except for the fact that the population has tripled in size over this period of time, and almost everyone has more income than they used to. This latter point is a good thing in the abstract, but it means that the demands on resources have been growing even faster than the population, leading to the global worry about key side-effects such as global warming. 

The deal is an amendment to the Montreal Protocol, the landmark 1987 pact designed to close the hole in the ozone layer by banning ozone-depleting coolants called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. That means the Kigali amendment maintains the legal force of a treaty, even if that treaty was ratified by the Senate during the Reagan administration.

Chemical companies responded to the 1987 agreement by developing HFCs, which do not harm the ozone layer but do trap heat in the atmosphere.

Fortunately, the chemical industry appears to be on board, and so there is a lot of work going on to find appropriate substitute for HFCs.

Top officials from the chemical industry were in Kigali to push for the deal. “Our industry is hard at work doing the research on the HFC alternatives,” said Stephen Yurek, the chief executive of the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, an advocacy group. “Getting that right is certainly as important as reaching agreement.”

This is all very encouraging, especially in the current political environment where there are so many people who seem to want to deny that climate change is happening or, at the least, that humans have anything to do with it. 

Supreme Court Case on Racial Bias Is All About Jury Demographics

This week the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado. NPR gives us the background, the essence of which is this: An Hispanic man in Colorado was accused in 2010 of molesting two girls at a race track where he trained horses. Although one of his co-workers testified that he was elsewhere at the time, he was nonetheless convicted of misdemeanor charges (albeit not the more serious felony charges) by a jury that apparently was influenced by one of its members who was a former policeman and clearly had racist views:

With the trial judge's permission, the lawyers then obtained affidavits from the jurors, in which the jurors quoted H.C. as saying that, from his experience as an ex-policeman, he knew that the defendant was guilty "because he's Mexican" and "Mexican men ... think they can 'do whatever they want' with women," and that where he used to patrol, "nine times out of ten Mexican men were guilty of being aggressive toward women and young girls."

The affidavits also quoted H.C. as saying that the alibi witness was not credible because, among other things, he was "an illegal."

In fact, the witness had testified at trial that he was a legal resident of the United States.

Mr. Peña-Rodriguez appealed his sentence to the Colorado Supreme Court, which turned him down on the grounds that jury deliberations cannot be part of the appeals process. So, he took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court which seemed to look favorably on his argument and it seems at least possible that that they will reverse the conviction.

All of this probably would have been avoided had there actually been a jury of his peers in the courtroom in Arapahoe County, Colorado. I've been looking at these issues for a long time, as I've noted before, and using data from IPUMS-USA, provided by the University of Minnesota Population Centers, I just calculated that in 2010 the percent of the jury-eligible population of that county  (i.e., 18 or older, a U.S. citizen, who speaks English well) that was Hispanic was 10%. Thus, at least one of the jurors should have been Hispanic, had this truly been a jury of his peers. And, of course, had there been an Hispanic on the jury, the racist comments probably would not have been uttered, Mr. Peña-Rodriguez might have been acquitted, and SCOTUS could have been saved a lot of time and trouble.