What Lies Ahead Demographically?

The end of one year and the start of the next are traditional times for taking stock of where we are where we're headed. Joseph Chamie, former director of the UN's Population Division, has done a nice job of setting the table for us demographically--not just for the coming year, but for the next several decades. Here is his top ten list:

1. Larger world population
2. Population growth concentrated in developing regions
3. Population decline in many countries
4. More urbanization and larger cities
5. Lower mortality and higher life expectancies
6. Lower fertility and more countries below replacement
7. Population aging and increased longevity
8. Progress in women's equality
9. Changing family composition and household structure
10. Increased international migration

He provides numbers and other facts about these trends in his article, and I encourage you to read these details. Of course, you could write a whole book about these. Oh, wait a minute--I already did that!!

The Rich Keep Getting Richer

The latest version of the World Inequality Report shows the unmistakable fact that the rich just keep getting richer. This is true not just in the U.S., but in most of the world. The Guardian has a summary of findings.

The richest 0.1% of the world’s population have increased their combined wealth by as much as the poorest 50% – or 3.8 billion people – since 1980, according to a report detailing the widening gap between the very rich and poor.

The World Inequality Report, published on Thursday by French economist Thomas Piketty, warned that inequality had ballooned to “extreme levels” in some countries and said the problem would only get worse unless governments took coordinated action to increase taxes and prevent tax avoidance.

As I noted yesterday, the general consensus is that the tax bill that Congress is now considering will contribute to ever more inequality in the U.S., pushing the global trend in income and wealth inequality, as the graph below illustrates.

The economists said wealth inequality had become “extreme” in Russia and the US. The US’s richest 1% accounted for 39% of the nation’s wealth in 2014 [the latest year available], up from 22% in 1980. The researchers noted that “most of that increase in inequality was due to the rise of the top 0.1% wealth owners”.

While inequality was high in north America and Europe, the researchers warned that the problem was even more acute in Africa, Brazil and the Middle East, where they said “inequality has remained relatively stable at extremely high levels in recent decades”.

“The top 10% receives about 55% of total income in Brazil and sub-Saharan Africa, and in the Middle East, the top 10% income share is typically over 60%,” the report said. “These three regions never went through the postwar egalitarian regime and have always been at the world’s high-inequality frontier.”

The current tax bill shows us that there is not yet a movement afoot to worry about much of anybody except the very wealthy. This is not a good thing.

Paul Ryan Thinks That Raising the Birthrate is What the US Economy Needs

It is no secret that the tax plan about to be voted on by Congress will massively increase the federal debt, despite the Republican Party's historical aversion to higher national debt. It also seems well established that in a few years Congress will push to lower the debt by slashing government benefits such as Medicare and Social Security. If we are to listen to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, this could be avoided if only Americans had more babies. Here is the report of his press conference today, courtesy of TheHill:

“This is going to be the new economic challenge for America: people. Baby boomers are retiring — I did my part, but we need to have higher birth rates in this country,” Ryan, a father of three, told reporters as he riffed on how Republicans will tackle entitlement and welfare reform in 2018. “Baby boomers are retiring and we have fewer people following them in the workforce.

The comment came at least partly in response to the news last summer that the birth rate had dropped a bit in the U.S., as I noted at the time. Of course, a big problem with the idea that babies will bail out the tax reform is that the tax plan will in fact make it harder to have kids, as elitedaily.com reported today:

As having and raising children becomes increasingly more expensive in the United States, year over year, many of Ryan's legislative proposals would compound that difficulty by slashing social programs and raising taxes on average Americans. So, even aside from the fact that women's bodies are not factories to be used to pump out productive workers and taxpayers, Ryan is actually de-incentivizing what he says is one of the key factors to keeping the American economy afloat. 

During his Dec. 14 press conference, Ryan was discussing entitlement programs like Social Security when he told reporters that the American economy will only function properly if the nation's birth rate increases.

The reality is that if Congress passes the current tax reform bill that is being considered, the economy is very unlikely to get better. The rich will get richer, but the economy will not get better. That scenario is not going to be affected by the birth rate. On the other hand, passage of the bill may push the birth rate even lower.

India Says No to Condoms and Yes to Abortion

The New York Times reports today that India has banned condom ads from prime-time TV, saying that they are not appropriate for children.

Conservative groups were outraged by recent ads, including one that featured a former porn star undressing piece by piece, and they pressured the government to step in.

But progressive social groups said it was a bad move. India, they argue, desperately needs more condom use, not less. “We need to reach out to more people with more and more advertising, not less,” said Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, a private organization. ‘‘Condoms are one of the few methods of birth control which prevent H.I.V. and unwanted pregnancies. And they have no side effects.”

The NYTimes piece refers to a recent Deutsche Welle article about the unpopularity of condoms in India.  

While European countries have an overall 30 percent condom usage, India has less than six percent, even when it ranks third in the number of HIV cases worldwide.

Abortion, on the other hand, is very widely used in India as a means of fertility limitation, according to a paper just published in Lancet Global Health. 

We estimate that 15·6 million abortions (14·1 million–17·3 million) occurred in India in 2015. The abortion rate was 47·0 abortions (42·2–52·1) per 1000 women aged 15–49 years. 3·4 million abortions (22%) were obtained in health facilities, 11·5 million (73%) abortions were medication abortions done outside of health facilities, and 0·8 million (5%) abortions were done outside of health facilities using methods other than medication abortion. Overall, 12·7 million (81%) abortions were medication abortions, 2·2 million (14%) abortions were surgical, and 0·8 million (5%) abortions were done through other methods that were probably unsafe. We estimated 48·1 million pregnancies, a rate of 144·7 pregnancies per 1000 women aged 15–49 years, and a rate of 70·1 unintended pregnancies per 1000 women aged 15–49 years. Abortions accounted for one third of all pregnancies, and nearly half of pregnancies were unintended.

The authors conclude that the demand for abortion currently exceeds the capacity of the health system to provide safe abortion services. Of course, if more people used condoms, this problem would be lessened.

Can We Save the Census? Part Two

The problems surrounding the upcoming 2020 census came under additional scrutiny in today's NYTimes. Michael Wines has a lengthy piece covering the issues I mentioned a couple of days ago, but going into even greater depth than had the previous articles. In particular, he discusses some of the planned changes to the administration of the census that could be problematic if there is too little money to go around, especially if that were to be coupled with an inexperienced person at the helm.

The bureau has been working on the 2020 count since the 2010 census was completed. The complete overhaul now underway seeks to shrink the count’s costliest and toughest task: sending hundreds of thousands of enumerators to find and interview the millions of people who fail to fill out their census forms.

An online head count, the reasoning goes, should reach more households more efficiently than mailed forms. The enumerators who track down those who do not respond (in 2010, almost 3 in 10 households) will use smartphone apps that instantly send data to the bureau’s computers and track the canvassers’ progress.

The bureau also hopes to mine federal databases and even satellite images for information that could reduce wasted trips by enumerators — to vacant buildings, for example — and automatically fill in personal data like addresses and ages.

The consequences of a flawed census are, of course, enormous and the Times article points out a scary political scenario:

A marked undercount, especially one that appeared driven by partisanship, could spark an unsettling battle between the census’s political winners and losers. There is precedent: Article 1 of the Constitution requires a decennial census for reapportionment purposes. But after Republicans took control of Congress and the White House in 1920, the House of Representatives refused to allow reapportionment of House seats, fearing that the rapid urbanization the census had documented would shift political power from rural areas to cities.

The last word in the article goes to one of the very best directors that the Census Bureau has ever had:

“The record of the census in counting people from all income groups, all racial and ethnic groups, is really extraordinary,” said Steve H. Murdock, a Rice University sociologist who led the Census Bureau under President George W. Bush. “Once you break that belief in the activity, it’s hard to replace.”