PAA History Through the Eyes of Past PAA President Robert Moffitt

PAA HISTORY

Interview with Past PAA President Robert Moffitt

By John Weeks, PAA Historian and the PAA History Committee: Win Brown, Karen Hardee, Dennis Hodgson, and Emily Merchant

At this year’s annual meeting in Austin, the PAA History Committee had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Robert Moffitt, who was PAA President in 2014, for the PAA Oral History Project. Dr. Moffitt is the Krieger-Eisenhower Chaired Professor in the Department of Economics at The Johns Hopkins University. He is also Professor, Depart- ment of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health, School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University. He received his BA in Economics from Rice University, and MA and PhD in Economics from Brown University. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, Brown University, and since 1995 at The Johns Hopkins University.

In the following excerpt, he gives us his overview of how the PAA has changed over time:

I think my first PAA was in the 1980s. I think it wasn’t until I went to Brown and I met all the demographers there. Sid Goldstein had been President of PAA back in 1975 and was very well connected to it and so was Fran Goldscheider and [current PAA President] John Casterline. Of course, PAA is a great organization and not only on scholarship; a great thing about PAA is its collegiality and the personal nature of it, which I’ve never found in any other association.

The field has definitely changed from my initial study of it. When I first got interested in demography back in the Mathematica years [when he was working as a researcher at Mathematica]—so that was the late 1970s— even then, it was pretty much dominated by population control and family planning and related kind of issues. Those were important issues. But the social demography side was really in its infancy and the big change that I see, particularly from my perspective, is the growth of social demography. You come to the PAA this year and the number of sessions on that topic or something related to it is tremendous. And, as a whole, the field of demography has broadened out away from those core issues of fertility, mortality, and migration.

You come to PAA today and you’ve got health and population health, for example. You’ve got applied demographers. You’ve got geographers. You’ve got survey issues and survey statisticians, although the Census Bureau has always been involved. You’ve got economists, of course, here. You’ve got anthropologists. It’s a big tent and that’s a nice thing about demography. Although I have to say that you’ve got to expect a little bit of tension between the traditionalists who say “this is what demography should be” and the younger people who say, “No. I want to do this. It’s not quite the traditional stuff. I want to bring this in.”

The big tent, with a lot of different disciplines represented at the PAA is, I think, very healthy. I also think that it’s one reason for the vibrancy and intellectual excitement of demography. Four thousand submissions this year. It’s amazing how many people come and many young demographers are interested in all different aspects of the field. This is why it is thriving and why the broadening out brings so many people to PAA. It’s the reason that PAA has succeeded.

But demography has gone through a tremendous evolution. Even when I went to Johns Hopkins, it was still Johns Hopkins—a place excelling with demographers working on population control. It still has people like Stan Becker, a distinguished demographer who works on those issues. But [Past PAA President] Andy Cherlin is there, too, and he is representative of social demography—he is concerned with inequality, poverty, and marriage. The tremendous development has been very healthy, in my view.

Moffitt also discussed the way in which his career evolved, leading to his recent participation in a committee of the National Academy of Sciences chaired by Past PAA President Greg Duncan that issued a very important report this Spring on how to reduce child poverty by 50% in ten years.

The entire interview is available on the PAA website.

The Spatial Diversity of Racial Diversity of the United States

My thanks to Rubén Rumbaut for pointing me to a new infographic put together by demographer Bill Frey at the Brookings Institution. These maps show the spatial diversity of racial diversity in the United States, using the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, anticipating what we are likely to find in the upcoming 2020 Census.

The new estimates indicate that, for the nation as a whole, Hispanic residents comprise 18.3% of the population. The shares for black and Asian residents are 12.5% and 5.9%, respectively.[1] But these national numbers change dramatically when you look closer at the country’s 3,100-plus counties.

Here's the breakdown for San Diego County, for example:

As you look at these data, remember that diversity is partly in the eyes of the beholder. As I have discussed before, most Hispanics in the United States identify themselves racially as "white," so if we organized the data differently, we would come to different conclusions about the nature of diversity. Remember, too, that it took people of Irish and Italian origin, as two prominent examples of those who are now in the "non-Hispanic white" category, to become part of the ethnic mainstream--but it did happen. At the same time, each of these broad groups of race/ethnicity has a lot of diversity within its boundaries. An immigrant from Korea is unlikely to think of themselves as ''Asian" (instead of just Korean) until she arrives in the U.S., and immigrants from Chile have probably never heard the term "Hispanic" until they arrive in the U.S.

I admit that one the more interesting demographic facts that Bill Frey puts into the description of data is this:

Among the 100 largest metro areas, only 29 do not contain a highly represented racial minority. These are mostly located in the middle of the country; Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Kansas City are the three largest, with Scranton, Pa. as the smallest. As a group, they are growing more slowly than those with a larger minority presence, but each one has become less white than was the case with the 2010 census.

I highlighted Scranton, because it was the home of Dunder-Mifflin paper company in the hit TV series "The Office." The cast in that program exhibited what we might call a minimal amount of demographic diversity. 

North Carolina Judges Deal With State's Gerrymandered Districts

You may recall that in July of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court said that federal courts had no role to play in dealing with political gerrymandering of districts at the state level. This week, however, a panel of judges in North Carolina showed that courts can act to keep state legislatures from designing district boundaries that defy the demographics of the state. The New York Times has the story, including commentary from its editorial board. 

The existing maps were so effective that they helped entrench Republican majorities even when Democrats won more votes statewide. In 2018, Republican candidates for North Carolina’s House of Representatives won less than 50 percent of the two-party statewide vote, but walked away with 65 seats to the Democrats’ 55. Republican candidates for the State Senate also won a minority of the popular vote, and still took 29 of 50 seats.

This kind of abuse of the democratic process is precisely what courts are designed to fix. But when North Carolina voters begged the United States Supreme Court for relief, arguing that they had been written out of the political process by the very people who were supposed to serve them, the five conservative justices turned their backs. The court could do nothing, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a demoralizing opinion in June — not because the Republicans are innocent, but because the judiciary can’t hold them accountable for what are, in essence, political crimes.

But the North Carolina judges did do something about it, requiring that the legislature redraw boundaries for state offices, and the Republican-led legislature seems to be agreeable to the court's decision. The only caveat here is that so far the ruling applies only to the boundaries for electing representatives to the state government, and not to U.S. Congressional Districts. There's still more work to be done, but this is obviously a move in the right direction. 

Cuba Prepares for an Aging Population

Thanks to Greg Weeks for pointing me to an article just published in Granma, the official newspaper of the communist party in Cuba. The country is in the process of "revolutionizing" its thinking about employment issues. Why? Because the population is aging, and if people stop working, or are not properly trained for the jobs the country needs filled, the economy will be in big trouble.  The article is clear about the demographic underpinnings of these policy initiatives:

With 20.4% of Cuba’s population 60 years of age or older, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics and Information (ONEI), the country is experiencing accelerated aging.Between 2011 and 2025, the population is projected to decrease in absolute numbers; and almost 26% of the population will be 60 years of age or older, with a absolute growth of those aged 80 years or more. By 2030, the population will include 3.3 million older adults, directly impacting families and the workforce.

These numbers are very similar to the estimates and projections of the UN Population Division. They estimate that the current population of Cuba is about to peak at 11.3 million, and it will drop to 11.1 million by 2030, at which point an estimated 30% of the population will be aged 60 and over. In essence, those people need to keep working.

Almost five years ago, Greg and I published an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post in which we felt that the opening up of Cuba by the Obama administration was going to be a big help to Cuba, since its financial aid from Venezuela was clearly in trouble due to that country's huge problems. The Trump administration has reversed that policy, of course, and so Cuba is essentially on its own, having to cope with its demographic situation as best it can. The Granma article notes that the government has even been working with sub-fecund women in an attempt to improve their chances of having a baby and thus raising the birth rate at least a little bit. The TFR is currently estimated to be about 1.6 children per woman, so it is going to take a lot to push the birth rate closer to replacement level. Of course, those kids won't be in the labor force for at least another couple of decades, so these labor force improvements are a must.

Supreme Court Punts Yet Again on Gerrymandering

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on two cases of particular interest to demographers: (1) forbidding for the time being the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 census (as I have already blogged about); and (2) the use of demographic data to draw congressional district boundaries that benefit one political party at the expense of the other. The majority opinion of the Supreme Court on the latter issue was that justices were really not in a position to do much about this.  They argued that this was an issue to be worked out with appropriate legislation, rather than being adjudicated by the courts. Here's how the Washington Post summarized their thinking:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that federal judges have no power to stop politicians from drawing electoral districts to preserve or expand their party’s power, a landmark ruling that dissenters said will empower an explosion of extreme partisan gerrymandering. 

The 5-to-4 decision was written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and joined by the court’s other conservatives. It capped decades of debate about whether federal courts have a role in policing partisan efforts to draw electoral districts in the same way the judiciary protects against racial discrimination. 

“We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” Roberts wrote. “Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.”

The dissenting opinion was read in the court by Justice Elena Kagan who noted that “The gerrymanders here — and others like them — violated the constitutional rights of many hundreds of thousands of American citizens,” she said.

It was about this time last year when the Supreme Court last punted on the gerrymandering issue in cases brought against partisan boundaries drawn in Texas and North Carolina, as I blogged about at the time. This year's decision revisited North Carolina and also included Maryland.

Given the current composition of the Supreme Court, it seems unlikely that we are going to get a different result from them any time soon. It also strikes me as unlikely that Congress will do anything about this any time soon. That suggests that the only way to ensure the drawing of fair congressional district boundaries is for more states to have an independent districting commission, as we have here in California, rather than having the legislature make those decisions (which is typical and which, of course, favors the political party with the majority of votes).