Dogs Are People Too, Revisited

A little over a year ago I wrote about our new "fur baby" Larry, whom we adopted from Coastal German Shepherd Rescue. He is truly a cherished member of the family, and I still find it hard when I run across people who think of dogs (and other animals) as just pieces of property with no feelings or emotions. Research that I discussed last year focused on the fact that dogs (and certainly other animals such as chimpanzees and gorillas) experience hormonal responses of bonding that are similar to what happens among humans. New research just published in Science has concluded that dogs are able to understand more than most people thought they could. This was widely covered in the media, but I will link to the NPR story:

"Dogs process both what we say and how we say it in a way which is amazingly similar to how human brains do," says Attila Andics, a neuroscientist at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary.

When dogs hear speech, he explains, they seem to separate the meaning of words from the intonation, and each aspect of speech is analyzed independently. The left hemisphere of the brain processes meaning, while intonation is analyzed in the right hemisphere.

In other words, even though dogs can't speak, they do process human language in a way that goes beyond learning behavioral commands ("training"). In a tightly controlled experiment conducted with each dog trained to lie still in a scanner, researchers discovered that dogs responded not just to words, and not just to intonation, but to both.

The reward pathway in the dogs' brains lit up when they heard both praising words and an approving intonation — but not when they heard random words spoken in a praising tone or praise words spoken in a flat tone...

The research leads to the conclusion that dogs are even more like humans than we previously thought. And, from a demographic perspective, this shouldn't be surprising. After all, dogs and all other mammals have similar patterns of birth and death and age structures as do humans. Different lifespans mean that demographic events occur at different times, but just as with humans, the highest risk of death for dogs is right after birth. Then they go through their healthy adolescence leading to reproduction. Then, as they age, they become susceptible to non-communicable disease, just as we humans do. As all dog lovers know, the hardest part is, indeed, the shorter lifespan. 

Congratulations to Professor Wendy Manning

Wendy Manning has been elected President-Elect of the Population Association of America, and of course a big round of congratulations is due. The PAA has a very useful practice of presidents serving on the Board for three years--first as President-Elect (as Wendy will be officially as of 1 January 2017, replacing Amy Tsui of Johns Hopkins, who is the current President-Elect), President (currently Judith Seltzer of UCLA, to be followed by Amy Tsui) and Past-President (currently Steven Ruggles of the University of Minnesota, to be followed by Judith Seltzer--and so it goes). The three-year span on the board provides a broader scope of the discipline and more opportunities for input than might otherwise be the case. You can get a feel for that by reading the oral histories of Past-PAA Presidents that I and the other members of the PAA History Committee have put together over the years.

Wendy is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She and her colleagues have produced a lot of really important research over the years, as I have noted in this blog, and as you can see by visiting the Center's website. Please join me, then, in congratulating Professor Manning.

The Economist Gets it Wrong on the Birth Rate

I have subscribed to The Economist for a long time and I generally feel that I am getting an intelligent and relatively unbiased view of what's happening in the world. However, this week's Economist has a couple of articles, and a leader article introducing them, about the fact that many couples in the world are having fewer children than they want. In the extreme case of people who are unable biologically to have a child, but would like to have a child, I don't know anyone who would argue against the idea that it would be great if an inexpensive solution could be found for that issue. However, when the Economist notes in its leader that this would avoid the situation where men attack their wives because the wife is unable to conceive a child, I say hold it! First, the problem may be the man, not the woman, and secondly, any man who would do that shouldn't be become a father.

For some reason or another, the Economist employed a firm to survey couples in 19 countries to show that, on average, couples are having fewer children than they "want." OK, we know that from Demographic and Health Surveys in developing countries, and from other surveys in richer countries. Nothing new there. What is troubling is the interpretation of these data by the Economist to mean that we should be encouraging couples to have more children. NO! We need to encourage couples to want fewer children. No matter what the writer(s) at the Economist may think, the world's population cannot just keep growing forever. We are running out of resources and the attitude that I'll just take mine now, thank you, is one of the reasons this is happening. The Economist puts down "Malthusians" who are worried about population growth, and sneers at Paul Ehrlich because the birth rate has dropped and food production has increased since he published his dire views on population growth in the Population Bomb back in the 1960s. Well, guess what? That book and the discussion he started helped to push along efforts already underway at the time to reduce the birth rate and grow more food (whether or not you like genetic modification, that was one of the solutions). But, the birth rate is still declining less quickly than the death rate and so we are on track to add 2-3 billion more people and we really don't know how we are going to feed them and find them jobs. 

This was a completely irresponsible Op-Ed published as news by the Economist and I am very disappointed. I noticed in the comments published on the Economist website that some people were ready to unsubscribe and I saw too that Sir David Attenborough, the force behind Population Matters in the U.K., weighed in with a short but to the point comment: “All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder — and ultimately impossible — to solve with ever more people.”

Finally, the Economist claims that family planning programs need to pay more attention to infertility issues, not just providing birth control. In fact, every family planning program of which I am aware does both. However, most can only provide medication to deal with STDs that prevent a woman from conceiving. Almost everything else is too expensive. A dose of reality on these issues is what we need, not uninformed and incorrect statements presented as facts.

The World is Especially Messy in the Mid-Latitudes

Last Friday was World Humanitarian Day. I admit that I missed it at the time, but the Humanitarian Information Unit of the U.S. State Department did not. Indeed, they created a very useful, even if somewhat dispiriting global map showing the various humanitarian "situations" that currently exist. To my knowledge, none of these situations is caused solely and directly by demography, but of course demographic trends underlie everything going on in the world, in some way or another. In most of these instances, a history of rapid population growth has combined with insufficient economic growth to create environments in which political instability and violence can fester and erupt. Note, in particular, that the mid-latitudes are way over-represented in this map. The problems created in those places, especially Africa and South Asia, but also Latin America, then spread over into neighboring countries.

Next week's European Population Conference, taking place in Mainz, Germany, has the theme of "Demographic Change and Policy Implications". With any luck, this map will be a centerpiece for much of the conference's discussion.

PRB's 2016 World Population Data Sheet is Out--Don't Leave Home Without It!

The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) in Washington, D.C. has been an important resource for demographers for more than half a century. They have expanded the scope and depth of what they do over the years, but the signature product is still their annual World Population Data sheet, and the 2016 model just came out. You can download it as a PDF file or get a paper copy in the mail, as I have done for a long time. There aren't necessary any surprises in the latest version, but here are some highlights that PRB has put together:

* Over 25 percent of the world's population is less than 15 years old. The figure is 41 percent in least developed countries and 16 percent in more developed countries. 

* Japan has the oldest population profile, with over a quarter of its citizens older than 65. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are at the other end of the spectrum, with each having only 1 percent over 65. 

* The top 10 fertility rates in the world are in sub-Saharan African countries, with nearly all above six children per woman, and one topping seven. In Europe, the average is 1.6. 

* The fertility rate in the United States is 1.8 children per woman, down from 1.9 in 2014. “Replacement” fertility in the United States—that is, the rate at which the population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next, excluding the effects of migration—is 2.1 children per woman.

* Thirty-three countries in Europe and Asia already have more people over age 65 than under 15.

You can see that fertility rates, and the changing age structures they bring about, remain key factors in the world's demographic picture.