South Sudan Seems to be Sinking Fast

Back in 2011 I commented on the birth of a new nation--South Sudan--which had essentially "divorced" itself from Sudan. Here's what I said about it at the time:

The population of the new country is estimated to be somewhere between 7.5 and 9.7 million, and it is described by everyone as one of the poorest nation's in the world, although it does have oil reserves, and apparently has been getting some direct foreign investment from China. However, there are still rebel groups working in the new nation, so it will probably have a rocky start to life, hampered by very low levels of literacy, and very high rates of infant and maternal mortality.

Sadly, it seems that things are probably worse now than at the country's "birth," as Nicholas Kristof reports in today's NYTimes. 

It’s impossible to calculate the death toll, but it seems to me plausible that as many civilians are dying in the war here in South Sudan as in Syria. One reason it’s hard to estimate is that many civilian deaths here come not from bullets or barrel bombs, but from starvation and disease arriving as a direct result of war and ethnic cleansing.

I’ve been traveling through some of the areas most affected by fighting, in both government- and rebel-controlled areas, and they are in ruins that remind me of Darfur. Villages have been burned, hospitals pillaged, schools closed, boys castrated and women kidnapped and raped. It is easier to find women and girls who have been gang-raped than who are literate; in one village, a traditional birth attendant told me that she had recently assisted with 10 pregnancies caused by soldiers.

Roads are dangerous and often impassable, and there are no real government services — except executions.

It is not the kind of place where the Demographic and Health Surveys can go (nor is Sudan--the most recent DHS there was in 1990), so we can't know for sure what is happening demographically. All we can be sure about from Kristof's first-hand report is that it isn't good.

Japan's Population Really Is Declining

We've been expecting this for quite a while now, but the 2015 census results from Japan confirm that the country's population is in decline. BBC reported the news:

New census figures in Japan show the population has shrunk by nearly one million in the past five years, in the first decline registered since 1920. As of October last year the country has 127.1 million people, 0.7% fewer than in the last census.

Demographers have long predicted a drop, citing Japan's falling birth rate and a lack of immigration. The rapidly ageing population has contributed to a stagnating economy and worries of increasing health costs.

Japan now has 947,000 fewer people than when the last census was conducted in 2010, figures released by the internal affairs ministry show.

Only eight prefectures, including the capital Tokyo, saw a population increase, national broadcaster NHK. reported. The remaining 39 all saw declines, including Fukushima which saw the largest drop of 115,000 people. Fukushima, site of the doomed nuclear power station, was hit especially badly by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

You have to hand it to the demographers at the United Nations, who (of course with help from demographers in Japan) came very close to mark on this. Their estimates and projections suggested that Japan's population peaked at 127,341,000 in 2009, dropped slightly to 127,320,000 in 2010, and they projected that by 2015 the population would be down to 126,571,000. Thus, they projected a decline of 749,000 in the intercensal period between 2010 and 2015, whereas the drop was just a hair more than that, according to these reports.

I've mentioned numerous times that the Japanese government would like the birth rate to rise a bit--to get closer to replacement level. In my view the main impediment is the continuing gender inequality in Japan. Lack of equality keeps the birth rate too high in less developed countries--as I discuss in a blog post on Population Matters--while keeping it too low in richer countries such as Japan.

Demography and Oil in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela

Venezuela and Saudi Arabia have, respectively, the two largest proven reserves of oil in the world, according to the CIA World Factbook. In both cases, the governments have used the income from oil to support the population. Thus, in both countries, there is relatively little going on economically beyond oil production. But there are two problems: (1) the price of oil has dropped, while (2) the populations keep growing. At the moment, the two countries have nearly equal population sizes of 31 million, and in each case 37% of the population is under 20. You can imagine that these young people have expectations. Indeed, here's a list of some of the "perks" for Saudis, according to a CNN Money story from last month:

-Heavily subsidized gas (It used to be 16 cents a liter. Now it's gone up to 24 cents.)
-Free health care
-Free schooling
-Subsidized water and electricity
-No income tax
-Public pensions
-Nearly 90% of Saudis are employed by the government -Often higher pay for government jobs than private sector ones
-Unemployment benefits (started in 2011 in reaction to the Arab Spring)
-A "development fund" that provides interest-free loans to help families buy homes and start businesses.

Venezuela is not quite as generous with its citizens, although I suspect the average Venezuelan wishes it were so. In Venezuela, as in Saudi Arabia, the price of gasoline has risen as the government revenues have declined. This contrasts, of course, with most of the rest of the world, where lower oil prices actually translate to lower prices at the gas pump.

It seems unlikely that oil prices will remain at this low price into the future, but it may be a long time before they reach the levels of just a couple of years ago. For the moment, Saudi Arabia seems to be trying to drive competitors away, especially as Iran re-enters the world market. But all the while both Saudi Arabia and Venezuela have growing numbers of young people--numbers that will continue to increase into the foreseeable future since the TFR in Saudi Arabia is 2.9 and it's 2.5 in Venezuela. The result of population growth in the face of low oil prices in Venezuela will probably be a change of government. It is hard to see how Maduro can hang on. In Saudi Arabia the result will probably be a disgruntled population that has to swallow the consequences. It is not a country that tolerates dissent. Indeed, in Richard Engel's new book, which I discussed yesterday, he suggests that Saudi Arabia has provided a role model of sorts for ISIS.

"And Then All Hell Broke Loose": Understanding the Mess in the Middle East

Rapid population growth in the Middle East, generating in particular a large youth population, has been one of the main underlying reasons for the current mess in the Middle East. But demography needs a spark to set it off, and Richard Engel lays that out in his new book "And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East." Over the years, my wife and I have always perked up our ears when Engel has been on TV as the Chief Foreign Correspondent for NBC News. He seemed consistently to be digging into what was really going on, and then telling it like it is. Now, he has laid it out in a book that is a very insightful memoir of his genuinely amazing reporting from the Middle East for the past 20 years, with an academic-style review of the history of the region. There are lots of good quotes in this book, but here is a particularly good one:

The Middle East I knew under the big men [going back to 1996 when he first arrived in Cairo] was angry, oppressed, and rotten to the core. I like to think of the Middle East back then as a row of decaying houses that looked ornate, impressive, and sturdy from the outside but were full of termites and mold. Like hollowed-out trees, the states that looked strong from the outside could be toppled by a slight push. President George W. bush gave them a hard shove. Through six years of direct military action, by invading, occupying, and wildly mismanaging Iraq, the Bush administration broke the status quo that had existed since 1967. He knocked over the first house. In the years that followed, Obama, elected by a public opposed to more adventurism in the Middle East, broke the status quo even further through inconsistent action.

President Obama encouraged uprisings in the name of democracy in Cairo, turned his back on Mubarak, supported rebels with force in Libya, and then wavered on Syria. Red lines were crossed, Promises were broken. Trust was lost. The combined impact of Bush's aggressive interventionism and Obama's timidity and inconsistency completely destroyed the status quo. The United States didn't create the Sunni-Shia conflict: it began over a millennium before the Declaration of Independence. The United States didn't create ISIS; its brand of backward intolerance and violence has been a part of wars in the Islamic world since the earliest days of the faith and helped found modern Saudi Arabia. The United States isn't responsible for giving the Kurdish people a state or denying them one. Although everyone in the Middle East tends to blame Washington for everything from car bombs to the weather, the United States isn't responsible for the woes of the Middle East. but like old houses that were barely standing, Washington's actions and missteps pushed them off their foundations and exposed the rot within, unleashing the madness of the Iraq war, the bloodbath in Syria, Libya's post-Gadhafi anarchy, and ISIS.

Those insights, and many more within the book, help us to understand headlines like those from today's NYTimes: "Migrant Arrivals to Europe This Year Top 110,000, Up Sharply From 2015."

Another Explanation for the Rise in White Death Rates in the US

Princeton economic demographers Anne Case and Angus Deaton opened up a national discussion recently with their findings that death rates have been mysteriously increasing among whites, especially those with less education. One explanation has been a rise in the use of prescription opioids in this population, as I noted last month. Now another possible explanation has arisen from Andrew Cherlin at Johns Hopkins University, a world-renown sociologist and a Past President of the Population Association of America. He put his ideas out there today in a NYTimes op-ed.

Yet I’d like to propose a different answer: what social scientists call reference group theory. The term “reference group” was pioneered by the social psychologist Herbert H. Hyman in 1942, and the theory was developed by the Columbia sociologist Robert K. Merton in the 1950s. It tells us that to comprehend how people think and behave, it’s important to understand the standards to which they compare themselves.

How is your life going? For most of us, the answer to that question means comparing our lives to the lives our parents were able to lead. As children and adolescents, we closely observed our parents. They were our first reference group.

And here is one solution to the death-rate conundrum: It’s likely that many non-college-educated whites are comparing themselves to a generation that had more opportunities than they have, whereas many blacks and Hispanics are comparing themselves to a generation that had fewer opportunities.

Reference group theory explains why people who have more may feel that they have less. What matters is to whom you are comparing yourself. It’s not that white workers are doing worse than African-Americans or Hispanics.

He goes on to discuss his own research that led him to these conclusions. The value of Cherlin's discussion is that it provides a good theoretical perspective for what, at first, seemed like an otherwise hard to understand phenomenon. To be sure, others had notions that were on the same track, as I previously noted. But they were looking at the proximate causes--such as depression and the use of pain medications. Cherlin's explanation is more systematic and thus potentially testable, increasing the chance of figuring out possible interventions.