Brazil Has Shifted Rather Dramatically to an Aging Population

Thanks to Duane Miller for linking me to a very interesting story on WorldCrunch about the way in which Brazil has quite dramatically become an aging population. This is a very predictable consequence of a rapid increase in life expectancy accompanied by a rapid decline in fertility--one that has sent birth rates below replacement level. 

While demographic trends indicate an aging population worldwide, Brazil's rate is outstanding for its speed. Countries like France, the United Kingdom and Spain, which are already known for their inhabitants' longevity, needed three times as long as Brazil to double their percentage of older population. By 2040, older people are expected to constitute one-fifth of Brazil's population, up from 10% in 2010.

Among traditional reasons given for demographic changes (fertility, mortality, migration, wars, epidemics), it is the basic fall in fertility rates and rise in life expectancy that best explain the widening of the Brazilian population pyramid. The number of children per woman has dropped significantly in recent years. In 2015 the figure was 1.7, which is considerably less than the average number of children for grandmothers two generations earlier (6.3 per woman).

Now, to be sure, the dramatic drop in fertility in Brazil has been known about for some time. I blogged about it back in 2011, for example. But, it takes any society some time to adjust to the reality of this dramatic demographic shift, and Brazil has had a variety of political and economic crises that tend to drain national attention away from the less obvious, even if dramatic, demographic trends taking place.

The demographic change is among the biggest challenges of modern Brazilian history, alongside such phenomena as accelerated urbanization and the push for universal healthcare and education. The challenge is multiplied by the fact that no government targets can alter its progression. The country needs to design appropriate public policies and create institutions and infrastructures to meet the needs of a growing number of "grandparents" populating the country's cities and countryside. These are long-term challenges that require a serious and rapid response from both the political class and society as a whole.

Every society undergoing a rapid decline in fertility needs to know these things, but most seem to ignore them until the demographic transition becomes the demographic crisis. 

African Immigration is a Good Thing for America

This is a day when the government is threatened by a shutdown because Republicans and Democrats in Congress cannot agree about the fate of "dreamers'" in the DACA program--people brought to the U.S. without documents by their parents, but who have grown up in this country, educated in this country, and are contributing economically to this country. And this is a week when the entire world shuddered at the U.S. president allegedly wondering why we would want immigrants from "s---hole" countries like Haiti and most African nations.

The actual people who have migrated to the U.S. from these countries gives the lie to Trump's derogatory characterization. Thanks to my son, Greg Weeks (Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte) for pointing me to an article yesterday in the Washington Post co-authored by one of his departmental colleagues, Beth Whitaker. She and Christopher Day have used census and other data to draw the following conclusions about immigrants from Africa:

But African immigrants are more educated, on average, than U.S.-born Americans. According to estimates for 2012 to 2016 from the American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau, 41.5 percent of African-born immigrants have bachelor’s, graduate or professional degrees — a higher percentage than immigrants from Europe (40.4 percent) or Latin America (12.4 percent), but lower than those from Asia (50.3 percent). Just 30.5 percent of U.S.-born individuals have such degrees.

Education levels are even higher among immigrants from specific African countries that are top sources of migration to the United States: 63.1 percent of immigrants from Egypt, 59.5 percent from Nigeria and 50.7 percent from Kenya have bachelor’s degrees or higher. In comparison, 43.1 percent of immigrants from Norway have similar degrees.

Whitaker and Day also provide an overview of the immigrant diversity program, the existence of which seems to have prompted Trump's comments. It is aimed at providing opportunities for immigration from countries that were essentially left out of the 1965 Immigration Act, it is limited to 50,000 per year, and it is not a lottery. There are clear stipulations about education and occupational experience, and there is a substantial vetting process before anyone receives a visa to migrate to the U.S.

Supreme Court Lets North Carolina Keep its Gerrymandered Districts For Now

It was only a few days ago that I last blogged about gerrymandering. Things seemed to be going in the right direction in terms of court decisions to slow down the blatantly political redistricting that has been going on over the past several years throughout the country. This evening, however, the U.S. Supreme Court has put a hold on a lower court decision that would have required North Carolina to redraw its Congressional District boundaries prior to this year's election. The Washington Post has the early story:

The Supreme Court said Thursday night that North Carolina does not immediately have to redraw its congressional district maps, meaning the 2018 elections will be held in districts that a lower court found unconstitutional.

The court granted a request from North Carolina’s Republican legislative leaders to put the lower court’s ruling on hold. The decision was not unexpected, because generally, the Supreme Court is reluctant to require the drawing of new districts before it has had a chance to review a lower court’s ruling that such an action is warranted.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor said they would not have granted the request.

So we now have to wait to see whether in fact the lower court ruling will eventually be upheld. In general, though, this does seem like a good sign of things to come. I sincerely hope that I am wrong about that. 

Ancient Killers are Unmasked

Today's news brought new insight into two of history's massively deadly epidemics: (1) what killed the ancient Aztecs in Mexico after the Spanish arrived?; and (2) how did the Black Death spread so quickly in Europe? The Guardian has the story about the Aztecs:

Within five years as many as 15 million people – an estimated 80% of the population – were wiped out in an epidemic the locals named “cocoliztli”. The word means pestilence in the Aztec Nahuatl language. Its cause, however, has been questioned for nearly 500 years.

On Monday scientists swept aside smallpox, measles, mumps, and influenza as likely suspects, identifying a typhoid-like “enteric fever” for which they found DNA evidence on the teeth of long-dead victims.

“The 1545-50 cocoliztli was one of many epidemics to affect Mexico after the arrival of Europeans, but was specifically the second of three epidemics that were most devastating and led to the largest number of human losses,” said Åshild Vågene of the University of Tuebingen in Germany. Vagene co-authored a study published in the science journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

In terms of numbers of deaths, the Aztec losses were nearly as large as those caused by the plague in Europe. BBC News tells us how that spread so fast:

The rodents and their fleas were thought to have spread a series of outbreaks in 14th-19th Century Europe.

But a team from the universities of Oslo and Ferrara now says the first, the Black Death, can be "largely ascribed to human fleas and body lice".

As I noted in a post a few years ago, the rapid spread of the disease through European villages did not seem consistent with bites from fleas carried by rats. And the models utilized by these researchers were consistent with human-to-human spread of fleas and lice.

The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, uses records of its pattern and scale. 

The Black Death claimed an estimated 25 million lives, more than a third of Europe's population, between 1347 and 1351.

These two stories illustrate the incredible scientific advances being made to uncover the past. And they remind us of the incredible importance of continuing governmental and societal support of this kind of research.

 

Measuring Neighborhood Diversity

For decades now social scientists have measured the segregation of neighborhoods. Reynolds Farley at the University of Michigan was a pioneer in this kind of work with his analysis of Detroit. The flip side of segregation is obviously diversity and Leo Castaneda from inewsource here in San Diego was interviewed today on KPBS radio about neighborhood diversity in San Diego, and it turned out that the interview had a few clips from conversations that he and I had as he was putting his story together, for which he was using data from the 2016 American Community Survey.

When two residents in the southeastern San Diego neighborhood of Encanto meet, there’s a 71 percent chance they’re of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. In the coastal community of Cardiff, there’s only a 25 percent chance of that happening.

That makes Encanto one of the most diverse neighborhoods in San Diego County, and Cardiff one of the least diverse. Those findings are based on an inewsource analysis of ZIP codes with at least 10,000 residents.
John Weeks, director of the International Population Center at San Diego State University, said the index results reflect historic migration patterns and housing costs.

At one time, Weeks said, housing laws made it legal to exclude non-whites from buying homes in certain neighborhoods, particularly coastal communities.

“You have a built in, historic almost, lack of diversity along the coast. But these days, mainly it's price,” Weeks said. “That's what keeps you out, if you don't have the money. And the people who are most likely to have the money, still in this country, tend to be non-Hispanic whites.”

Leo also calculated diversity measures at the county level for California and found that Alameda County (which includes Berkeley and Oakland in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area) is the most diverse. It has large African American, Hispanic, and Asian populations, along with non-Hispanic Whites. In fact, the top eight most diverse counties in the state are all in northern California.