Demographics
gregladen | September 20, 2014Climate change may be the existential threat, but underlying this is, of course, population size. And this is a problem that never seems to go away. There are of course two ways, broadly speaking, to limit population growth aside from draconian policies governing reproduction (such as China's One Child policy). One is sometimes called the demographic transition. This is when a combination of factors including so-called modernization which may involve increase quality of health care in combination with increased social equality lead to lower birth rates. The other is when things go badly…
sastyk | September 28, 2012A few years back Stuart Staniford, (who is one of the most brilliant people I know) and I had a lively debate about the future of small scale agriculture over at The Oil Drum. Stuart argued that agriculture would continue to get bigger and more industrialized, because its fossil fuel dependency really wasn't that great. I argued that in fact energy and environmental pressures would push us back to smaller scale agriculture. So it is nice of Staniford to note that at least at this particular moment, there's a small general trend in my direction ;-):
I've circled the 4% increase between 2002…
sastyk | June 6, 2011Hi Folks - Back from the wedding and shivaree, and catching up...slowly. Tired and have much farm stuff to catch up on as well, so bear with me one more day.
In the meantime, Fred Pearce has a great essay in Nature on what's wrong with the UN population revisions that anticipate 10+billion by the end of the century. As you'll remember, I'm pretty dubious about the underlying assumptions of the model as well - it doesn't have anything to do with the real constraints we're facing. The Pearce article is well worth a read, even though I don't agree with all of his assumptions about the…
sastyk | November 19, 2010In yesterday's NY Times Op-ed, Kristof apologized for comparing US income inequity to that of "Banana Republics" - that is, for insulting other nations by comparing them to the US, which has now achieved wholly unprecedented levels of economic injustice.
My point was that the wealthiest plutocrats now actually control a greater share of the pie in the United States than in historically unstable countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. But readers protested that this was glib and unfair, and after reviewing the evidence I regretfully confess that they have a point.
That's right: I may…
sastyk | June 3, 2010 I was struck today by the news that the Italian region of Lombardy is going to start paying women not to have abortions. As a demographic move, it is a comparatively small and insignificant one, in a nation already well below replacement rate. If this resulted in the cancellation of every abortion in the region, it wouldn't matter very much in the great human scheme of things. What matters is whether this has effects on other nation's policies - and of course, that reproductive policies never take place fully in the great human scheme of things.
Generally speaking, I'm strongly in favor…
sastyk | April 8, 2010When Eric and I first wrote a letter to Eric's grandparents, asking them to consider living with us, the response was very mixed. Grandma and Grandpa's generation of friends and family were mostly very pleased and thrilled - given the bad lot of options available to many of them, finding a compatible home with their grandchildren looked pretty good. Most of them had cared for their parents, and so somewhere inside them, this seemed like a normal relationship. Some of my friends were frankly jealous - they'd lost their own grandparents, and wished for something like what we were going to…
sastyk | January 4, 2010Note: This is the beginning of a multi-part series on agricultural education, the farming demographic crisis and the question of who will grow our food - what the problems are, how we will find new farmers, how they will be trained. To me, this is one of the most urgent questions of our time.
A quick, Jay Leno style quiz for the man and woman on the street.
Who will grow your food in the coming decades?
A. My friendly neighborhood agribusinessman will grow my food on a plantation the size of Wyoming using nearly enslaved non-white folks who are deported minutes after harvest. Or maybe…
razib | December 16, 2009White Americans' majority to end by mid-century:
The estimated time when whites will no longer make up the majority of Americans has been pushed back eight years -- to 2050 -- because the recession and stricter immigration policies have slowed the flow of foreigners into the U.S.
Census Bureau projections released Wednesday update last year's prediction that white children would become a minority in 2023 and the overall white population would follow in 2042. The earlier estimate did not take into account a drop in the number of people moving into the U.S. because of the economic crisis and…
razib | October 20, 2009I've gotten a few emails about this new article, The White City, illustrated by this chart:
This isn't news. It's only of interest because people like hoisting others up by their petards. When I lived in Portland I ran into several people who would complain about the city's lack of diversity, but why had they moved from San Francisco in the first place? As for Minneapolis, the most famous black person I can think of from that city is Prince.
But this isn't just white racism. Progressive whites and black Democrats are part of a political coalition which has been fruitful, but that doesn't…
razib | August 12, 2009I was a bit surprised by these data, Political Self-characterization of U.S. Medical Students:
Among these medical students, 5% self-characterized as politically very conservative, 21% conservative, 33% moderate, 31% liberal, and 9% as very liberal." Being male, white, Protestant, intending to specialize in Surgery or anesthesiology/pathology/radiology, or currently or previously being married significantly... increased the likelihood that a student self-identified as very conservative or conservative. Disagreement or strong disagreement with the statements, "I'm glad I chose to become a…
razib | June 2, 2009On a recent diavlog between Dayo Olopade and Reihan Salam the role of minorities as integrators and catalysts for cultural ferment & change was brought up. Minorities being minorities naturally by definition would, one assumes, be the ones assimilating and integrating into the majority matrix. 70% of the American population is non-Hispanic white, so assuming a random mixing situation this segment will be preponderant. But there's a problem I have with this narrative: it ignores population structure. Integration and assimilation are real dynamics of American society, but obviously so is…
razib | May 7, 2009Thabet points me to a new survey of Muslims and the European public. The focus is especially on the UK, France and Germany. In short Muslims in these three nations are more "conservative" than the general population when it comes to social values, but, it is interesting to note that there seems to be an effect of the host culture on the Muslims (i.e., French Muslims track the French, and so forth). But I want to highlight the extreme social conservatism of British Muslims. For example, apparently no British Muslims in the survey thought that homosexual acts were morally acceptable. The…
razib | April 12, 2009Gallup has a new report up, This Easter, Smaller Percentage of Americans Are Christian, which is rather self-explanatory. These data aren't surprising, other surveys report the same general finding. Here's an interesting chart with some long term trends:
I want to point to the numbers for Catholicism. In the early 1990s I remember reading popular press accounts about how Catholicism would become the dominant religion of the United States in the early decades of the 20th century because of immigration. That doesn't seem like it's panning out. Why? The American Religious Identification…
razib | April 8, 2009The New York Times has an awesome interactive map which shows which sectors the foreign born from various countries are concentrated. Nothing too surprising, but nice to see it quantitatively displayed. Below the fold screenshots from "Computer software developers" and "Skilled construction workers."
razib | March 11, 2009The Center For American Progress has a new report out profiling the ideological disposition of the American populace. It simply repeats the old finding that the United States prefers Left-liberal policies a la carte to a far greater extent than the label liberal. This is natural, the electorate tends to favor lower taxes and greater spending simultaneously. I can't but notice the similarity with atheism here; many more Americans adhere to the atheist position than are willing to call themselves atheists. But in the younger cohorts this disjunction seems less noticeable, so I wonder if much…
razib | March 7, 2009The Inductivist had a post up bemoaning the cultural liberalism and secularity of today's youth at the same time that I suggested that the culture wars will continue. My reasoning was that polarization still exists, and in fact is greater among the youth than the older cohorts. On the other hand readers observed that the trend is toward more liberalism.
One of the major changes over the past generation which has gone under the radar of the media is that rapid rise of disaffiliation. After the 20th century seemed to disprove a strong form of the secularization hypothesis, some began talking…
razib | March 2, 2009The answer to the question in the title is no doubt multifactorial. Here are a few possible reasons:
1) Fewer numbers of Muslims proportionately
2) A more diverse population of Muslims, so reducing synergy between ethnicity and religion
3) An immigration policy which has resulted in a foreign-born population with higher educational qualifications than the native population, ergo, lack of synergy between socioeconomic deprivation and religion
4) America's more receptive attitude toward immigrants
5) America's economic system which has a "fluid" labor market, allowing newcomers to break into…