OK, I was wrong...  

Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but my previous conviction concerning global population growth just isn't panning out. I was convinced continued economic growth would trigger lower fertility rates pretty much everywhere, but it's looks like Africa remains the exception.

This just in: Humanity is growing faster than we thought.
In advance of World Population Day, United Nations demographers have once again revised official projections -- upward. This meticulous band of number crunchers doesn’t mean to be alarmist, but its statistics can be startling:
--Nigeria, the West African nation slightly larger than Texas, is on track to surpass the United States as the world’s third-most populous country by 2050. The size of its population may rival that of China by the end of the century, unless something dramatic happens.
--The number of people living on the African continent is set to nearly quadruple by the end of the century, rather than merely tripling, as previously projected.
--The world’s population is on track to reach 9.6 billion by midcentury and nearly 11 billion by 2100, which is 700 million more than was projected two years ago.
The reason for the higher figures? A slew of recent household surveys in African countries revealed the average number of children per woman was higher than previously estimated, said Francois Pelletier, chief of the U.N.’s population estimates and projections section.
In some countries, “a high level of fertility appears to have risen even higher,” Pelletier said. In others, “we realized the earlier estimates were too low.”
A seemingly modest change from an average of four children per woman to five, he said, can produce a dramatic upswing in coming decades due to the power of compound growth.
The prospect of Africa’s population of 1.1 billion exceeding 4 billion has surprised some demographers, because Africa is not following the pattern of falling fertility around the world.  Women on average around the globe have half as many children as they did in the 1960s. [More]

To put it graphically:

[Source, with the mislabeling]

After yet another "demographic surprise", I doubt this is the last word, but still the evidence points to a much higher number for the end of the century that we now expect.

We're not going to 10...  

We may not make 9 billion. And we'll peak sooner than expected.

I write about this every now and then, because human fertility is falling faster then most demographers expect.  Using the CIA Factbook for data, the present total fertility rate for the world is 2.47 births per woman that survives childbearing.  Last year it was 2.50, and in 2006 it was 2.90.  2.10 is replacement rate.  At the current trend, the world will be at replacement rate in 2022.  That’s a lot earlier than most expect, and it makes me suggest that global population will top out at 8.5 Billion in 2030, lower and earlier than most expect.
Have a look at the Total Fertility Rate by group:

 [More]

This is more evidence we are throwing the "9 billion by 2050" around in agriculture too casually. As wonderfully explained by this chart and better by this video.

I would suggest not only will we have enough land and water, less intensive diets in the developed world will ease the food squeeze on poorer countries. A little less waste and presto the food shortage hysteria is revealed as overhyped. One caveat: I hope Canada and Siberia can gear up to be the new grain producing centers as the climate changes.

It is hard for us to imagine a falling population in the US, but we farmers can kinda sense it as rural America depopulates. My sons and grandchildren could experience it in a completely new kind of world - a demographically top-heavy world of too many geezers and too few teenagers.

All you need to know about...  

 Population, religion and fertility in less than 15 minutes.  Simply brilliant.



This information certainly did not match my supposedly informed views on demographic trends,  but I think I have a much better handle on the problem than before.

While I have long since wearied of PowerPointless presentations, succinct talks and stunningly explanatory charts such as above are lifting our power to transmit even complex information to  more people more accurately.

Peak Child - who'd have thunk it?

Graph of the Day...  

We've got the room.

 [More]

Babysitters cause babies...  

Or at least, higher fertility rates in populations.

Conventional wisdom suggests that in developed countries income and fertility are negatively correlated. We present new evidence that between 2001 and 2009 the cross-sectional relationship between fertility and women's education in the U.S. is U-shaped. At the same time, average hours worked increase monotonically with women's education. This pattern is true for all women and mothers to newborns regardless of marital status. In this paper, we advance the marketization hypothesis for explaining the positive correlation between fertility and female labor supply along the educational gradient. In our model, raising children and home-making require parents' time, which could be substituted by services bought in the market such as baby-sitting and housekeeping. Highly educated women substitute a significant part of their own time for market services to raise children and run their households, which enables them to have more children and work longer hours. Finally, we use our model to shed light on differences between the U.S. and Western Europe in fertility and women's time allocated to labor supply and home production. We argue that higher inequality in the U.S. lowers the cost of baby-sitting and housekeeping services and enables U.S. women to have more children, spend less time on home production and work more than their European counterparts.  [More] [My emphasis]

Whoa - this complicates matters, but the data seem to support this hypothesis.


The implications are considerable.

Peak people will be an age when jobs compete for workers rather than vice versa. The cheapest labour will vanish. We’re already seeing this: Because China is ageing very fast, its dwindling working-age population is turning down the lowest-paid jobs and pushing up the minimum wage sharply, as well as the once-minimal costs of social services: Stuff from China will stop being cheap, because the Chinese aren’t young.
This can have larger consequences than we imagine. For example, the United States appeared to be escaping the worst of the ageing trend because it has an unusually high fertility rate (averaging almost 2.1 children per family, half a child more than Canada and Europe). Most analysts assumed that this was the result of American religion or prosperity. But an important new study by economists Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi has found that the real reason for larger families is the unusually large supply of low-cost babysitters and child-care workers in the US – - mainly due to immigration, much of it “illegal,” from Latin America. But those Central American countries and Mexico are themselves ageing fast, which will soon choke off that cheap labour supply and drive up the cost of having extra kids – which will cause the US to become less fertile and more elderly.
Peak people will also be an age when countries will be competing for immigrants rather than trying to limit them. Immigration has spared Canada from the worst of ageing, but immigrants adopt host-country family sizes very quickly, so they’re a temporary fix. And if their home countries are competing to keep them, then we’ll have a harder time finding young people who want to come. It will require nimble and clever policies to prevent us from becoming old and lonely. [More]

People of a certain age like myself may never be able to get over our "population is a burden" thanks to Malthusian overexposure early in life, as well as our industry's fascination with the always looming "food shortage".

I have considerable confidence we, and our professional counterparts around the globe will find enough ways to grow calories to support all the people comfortably. The diets/crops may change, but we do that all the time.

And we always have ethanol acres in reserve.

Tale of two charts...

First consider this surprising new population estimate.

 But the most dramatic changes are national, not global. America's population, now 310m, is likely to rise to 400m in 2050 and 478m in 2100. China's is forecast to fall by 400m between now and 2100. Russia’s population is now 142m; Afghanistan’s slightly more than a fifth of that; Niger’s barely a tenth. But by 2100, Afghanistan is forecast to have the same population as Russia (111m) and Niger will be larger. Such forecasts need to be taken with a bucketload of salt: tiny shifts in today’s birth rate extrapolated over 90 years produce huge changes. But the general picture is probably right.[More]

Ominously, it is not about Asia (China and Russia). In fact, the projection for China is mind-boggling.

It's about Africa, and I think it is one more indicator of what we are overlooking most often about the future. Africa has been easy to ignore, but just like the wholly unexpected uprisings in Tunisia, Syria, Libya, Egypt, etc. it is more a case of casual indifference from the West than lack of evidence.

It is hard to say we need to get over China, but for certain longer time frames, this suggests we should widen our view.

Now combine that with this growing uneasiness.

Why is food production slowing down? This is from Michael Roberts:

Is this because of changes at the intensive or extensive margins? That is, is the slowdown due to declining productivity on existing land, e.g. from bad luck with the weather for several years in a row, or a more permanent change like global warming? Or is it because world growth is bringing marginal, less productive land into production? Whatever the cause, Michael Roberts thinks it's likely a permanent rather than a temporary problem:
There are many reasons for high commodity prices. But recent data from FAO shows a pretty rapid slowdown in productivity growth. The price spike in 2008 occurred in a particularly bad year in which yields declined on a worldwide basis for three of the four largest food commodities. In 2009 all four of the majors saw yield declines, something that hasn't happened since 1974. 2010 couldn't have been much better and was probably worse, given how bad things were in the U.S, the world's largest producer and exporter (worldwide data for 2010 isn't available yet).
The yield slowdown comes at a particularly unfortunate time, with accelerating demand from emerging economies like China and subsidy-driven expansion of ethanol. Keep in mind: we need productivity growth to accelerate considerably to keep up with projected demand growth. FAO says we need 70 percent higher yields by 2050. (Although I'd like to do my own projections, and will one of these days...)
Maybe it's just bad luck with the weather. But I think it just may be a longer run phenomenon.
Yeah, resource scarcity will be in the news for awhile yet. [More, with apologies for the generous extract]

These are not two compatible trends, folks. It may take a few more production years like 2008-2010 for growers to question how soon we'll get to "800 bushels per acre", even if we do buy every seed, machine and chemical being touted to get us there.

Personally, I think it is the extra moisture in the atmosphere, but the idea this could be what the crop future looks like is becoming less unthinkable.

To cap it off, there was this alarming "Dr. Drought" comment in this week's ProFarmer:

That means there’s still a chance for “normal” corn yields in the Corn Belt — but that’s not what Taylor anticipates. Based on current conditions  and his summer weather outlook, he puts 70% odds on below-trendline yields with his “most likely” current yield at an eye-popping 147 bu. per acre

All these are simply projections, and population estimates 90 years out should be taken as possibilities not prophesies. Still this is the first I have seen of 1) the staggering change in Africa's demographics and 2) the equally unexpected sharpness of China's decline.

All in all, those who confidently predict the current commodity boom is another brief interlude between overburdening surpluses need to provide their own data, not simply history, to buttress their conclusions from now on.

Jeez - just think of the fallout from a 147 bpa crop!

How long...

Will acres vote? Certainly the US Senate will continue to over-represent rural America, but this tide seems to be inexorable.

Ponder this map of Texas - our fastest growing state.

 

[Source]

Check your state results here.

We are an urban country and becoming more so. Higher gas prices may be accelerating this flight.

Take a breath, dude...

Population hysteria is all the rage, but this one tops any I have seen to date.

To meet the food and fiber needs of a world population projected to double just 20 years from now will require a more productive agriculture and an increased utilization of technology, says Russ Green.
“By 2030, we’ll have to feed twice as many people as today,” the president of Claas of America, Inc., said during a recent Mid-South visit. “We’ve broken about all the land we can — which means we’ll have to do better with what we have, using technology and science to produce more on available land.” [More]

First, let's examine the assertion here.  No matter how I read it, Mr. Green seems to be under the impression that in 2030 our population will be over 13 billion people.  (Today = 6.8B, 2X = 13+B)


WTF???


Let's look at some other population projections for perspective.


First, from the UN 2004 Estimates and the US Census Bureau.

Notice that 13B by 2030 is mildly off the map of even the highest expert estimate.

OK, maybe those UN lefties are low-balling the chart.  Let's see what our own Yankee-Doodle Demographers estimate.

I could go on, but you get my point. The central point of Mr. Green's remarks, I think, was to blast the HSUS, but while that always plays well with farmers, doing it with fatuous numbers won't cut it in the Google information universe.  Either the guy is badly misinformed, or the reporter didn't bother to research and ask the obvious question, "What do you base that statement on?"

Either way it is a shabby performance all 'round, IMHO.

Yo - Penton. Hire a fact-checker.

Maybe the rhuburbs are over...

Even though the flood of 1031 money seems to have abated with the recession, enough pure investment dough has poured in to make up the difference, if not add to, the non-farmer demand for ownership of land.

Early in the decade, so-called 1031 land swaps — named after the section of the IRS code allowing land exchanges to avoid capital gains taxes — fueled the land market in many areas, even though commodity prices didn't justify them.

“I was more concerned about land prices tumbling then than now,” Schnitkey says. “As the urban market for neighboring farmland dried up 1031 exchanges, we could have seen the market decline markedly.” [More]

But oddly, even while observers saw alarming losses of farmland to housing encroachment, it would appear the outmigration of urbanites was already reversing.

A new study by the Brookings Institute offers an analysis farmers need to ponder.

D. Migration to exurban and newer suburban counties dropped substantially, while it brought about unexpected “windfall” gains in many large urban cores.

Within metropolitan areas, suburban and exurban areas often benefited most from the mid-decade housing boom. There, new housing construction flourished as easy credit became available, especially in the Sun Belt where new jobs were plentiful. Yet the most recent migration data show that these same outer portions of metropolitan areas took the greatest hits as overall migration dried up.
Based on a system that classifies large metropolitan counties by the relative urbanization of their populations, throughout the entire 2000–2008 period, emerging suburban and exurban counties expe- rienced greater domestic in-migration than typically closer-in, mature suburban counties (Figure 8).11 Core and high-density counties actually lost domestic migrants on net each year.
But the disparity between the urban and suburban counties reached its peak in 2005–2006, and narrowed greatly in the following two years. Growth from in-migration declined significantly in both emerging suburban/exurban and closer-in mature suburban counties. Meanwhile, the rate of domes- tic out-migration from core and high-density counties more than halved, as these areas apparently retained more residents who might have previously decamped for fast-growing suburbs.
These broad patterns, aggregated from all large metropolitan areas, play out more distinctly in par- ticular areas (Figure 9). Among large urban areas, the cities of New York and Boston, and Cook County, IL (which contains Chicago), all showed marked reductions in net out-migration after 2004–2005. Philadelphia’s net migration decline eased over the course of the decade. Outflow from Los Angeles County (which contains the city of Los Angeles) moderately significantly as well, though more recently. And San Francisco actually shifted from net out-migration throughout the decade to net in-migration in 2007–2008.
In contrast, fall-offs in domestic migration are evident in peripheral suburban counties within the metropolitan areas of Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Dallas, and Houston, among others. New York’s suburban counties counter this pattern as they tend to show either reduced migration losses or increased gains in 2007-2008. At the other extreme is Atlanta—an area that displayed metropolitan- wide migration declines in 2007–2008. There, 21 of 26 metropolitan counties showed reduced migra- tion gains over the period.
Overall, these patterns reflect broader trends occurring within major metropolitan areas nationwide, wherein cities and core counties are either losing fewer or gaining more migrants than at mid-decade, when the hot housing market seemed to accelerate a rush to the suburbs and exurbs. Some of these shifts involved new migrants from outside the metro area landing in the exurbs and suburbs. However, the bulk of the movement to newer outer suburbs and exurbs represented local movers, from inner parts of the same metropolitan area, radiating outward. [More]

The graph they included is note worthy for when the peak occurred - not after the collapse of the stock market, but closer to the time of increased transportation (fuel) costs. It could also be the distance/value ratios reached their tipping point, and houses could not be priced low enough to compensate for commuting costs.

[The black line is most pertinent to farmland]

To be sure, outmigration still is occurring, but at a decreasing rate, lowering the pressure on farmland conversion. My guess is, at least for the next decade or two, the flamboyant "swap ratios" for farmers in the paths of development will become much tamer, perhaps even rare, as enormous inventories of land still need to be utilized.

Yet to be measured well is how the singular durability of farmland prices encourages outside investment for asset value protection in wealthy portfolios.

Brains with feet...

A mobile society means people can move, if they want, to better their living.  It would appear at the top we are certainly becoming more restless.  After years of importing brainpower from Asia especially, the flow has reversed, turning our brain gains into a brain drain.

"What was a trickle has become a flood," says Duke University's Vivek Wadhwa, who studies reverse immigration.

Wadhwa projects that in the next five years, 100,000 immigrants will go back to India and 100,000 to China, countries that have had rapid economic growth.

"For the first time in American history, we are experiencing the brain drain that other countries experienced," he says.

Suren Dutia, CEO of TiE Global, a worldwide network of professionals who promote entrepreneurship, says the U.S. economy will suffer without these skilled workers. "If the country is going to maintain the kind of economic well-being that we've enjoyed for many years, that requires having these incredibly gifted individuals who have been educated and trained by us," he says.

Wadhwa surveyed 1,203 Indian and Chinese immigrants who had worked or been educated here before returning to their homelands and found the exodus has less to do with the faltering U.S. economy than with other factors:

•Career opportunities. At NIIT, an information technology company based in New Delhi, about 10% of managers in India are returnees, mostly from the U.S., says CEO Vijay Thadani.

Most go into mid- to senior management and make "excellent employees," he says. "They're Indian, so they understand India, and they have lived outside the country."

China's government entices some skilled workers to return with incentives such as financial assistance and housing, says Wang Baodong, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington. "China needs a lot of well-trained personnel" in fields such as finance and information technology, he says.

•Quality of life and family ties. People return to India to reconnect with their families and culture, Dutia says. "They have a support system there, family and friends."

Purchasing power is greater, he says, which allows returnees to afford more luxuries than they did in the U.S. Dutia describes a complex of "magnificent homes" in Bangalore. In the club room, there were "all these Americans and Europeans and expats on the treadmills with iPhones, watching CNN and BBC," he says. "Things have changed."

•Immigration delays. Multinational companies that belong to the American Council on International Personnel tell Executive Director Lynn Shotwell that skilled immigrants are discouraged by the immigration process, she says. Some can wait up to a decade for permanent residency, she says. "They're frustrated with having an uncertain immigration status," she says. "They're giving up." [More]

One possible consequence of this change is pressure on salaries for folks with the needed skills. This will only skew the education-based income inequality further, I would guess. It will also add fuel to rural America's own brain drain.

The most dramatic evidence of the rural meltdown has been the hollowing out—that is, losing the most talented young people at precisely the same time that changes in farming and industry have transformed the landscape for those who stay. This so-called rural "brain drain" isn't a new phenomenon, but by the 21st century the shortage of young people has reached a tipping point, and its consequences are more severe now than ever before. Simply put, many small towns are mere years away from extinction, while others limp along in a weakened and disabled state.

In just over two decades, more than 700 rural counties, from the Plains to the Texas Panhandle through to Appalachia, lost 10 percent or more of their population. Nationally, there are more deaths than births in one of two rural counties. Though the hollowing-out process feeds off the recession, the problem predates, and indeed, presaged many of the nation's current economic woes. But despite the seriousness of the hollowing-out process, we believe that, with a plan and a vision, many small towns can play a key role in the nation's recovery.

Civic and business leaders in the places most affected by hollowing out will tell anyone willing to listen how it is their young people, not hogs, steel, beef, corn, or soybeans, that have become their most valuable export commodity. Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning observer of small town life, believes that any story of small-town America is, at its core, the story of the people who stay and the ones who go. Yet, what is different at this moment is how, in a postindustrial economy that places such a high premium on education and credentials, the flight of so many young people is transforming rural communities throughout the nation into impoverished ghost towns. A new birth simply cannot replace the loss that results every time a college-educated twentysomething on the verge of becoming a worker, taxpayer, homeowner, or parent leaves. And as more manufacturing jobs disappear every day, the rural crisis that was a slow-acting wasting disease over the past two decades has evolved into a metastasized cancer. [More]

I could have written about this same phenomenon forty years ago, and the trend has been unfazed by good times and bad, well-intentioned and well-funded measures, and relentless hand-wringing.  Somehow we can't get the image of idyllic small town America from our minds, and have decided it somehow represents the optimal choice of demographic dispersal.  But I'm no longer sure that is even close to the truth, much less real expectations.

The depopulation of my county (Edgar) is typical.

1969 - 21,752
2000 - 19,657
2007 - 18,831

I have wandered though various reactions to this very obvious trend in my life.  But after this long, it begins to dawn on you this is occurring for powerful reasons and strongly presages the future.

Maybe it's just mental adaptation, but I'm not quite as alarmed by it as I was. To begin with depopulation makes this area a great place to farm.  Let's face it, industrial ag works best all by itself without sharing roads or odors, to name two examples.

There is virtually no urban expansion pressure on farmland prices, other than secondhand 1031/investor bargain hunting. The tiny number of farmers exert oversized political influence, and the elderly population so typical of our very-low-cost towns make a pool of savings available for local banks to lend to agriculture.

So just speaking in terms of a good place to farm, this ain't the worst.  But what about the social aspects of withering communities?

I am worried about the schools. There are simply no resources to improve them and size alone rules out many advantages such as AP classes. In fact, the day may come when those who can affor better will consider boarding schools for promising students.  But that problem I lay squarely at the feet of the absolute refusal to consolidate even the high school level.  In short, our schools are failing because we prefer bad local schools to better schools 10 miles away, not because we don't have a manufacturing base.

The other problems of thin populations may be exaggerated.  Between phones and e-mail active friendship groups are possible. We drive 60 miles for dinner with friends without complaining.  Shopping has been largely replaced with Amazon, et al.

Even my church, which I had frankly given up on two decades ago, is showing remarkable grace is its quiet decline. Besides, given upcoming demographics, I'm not sure more population would be the answer there either.

In 1990, 8 percent of Americans reported that they had no religious beliefs. Twenty years later, that's 15 percent. But when you look at younger Americans, you see that the proportion of "nones" is reaching 22 percent. The 1990s were the boom years for the Nones; and a huge 35 percent of the new Nones are ex-Catholics. No doubt, some of this is a reflection of the sex abuse crisis. But the intellectual collapse of Christianity under the leadership of Protestant fundamentalists and Catholic theocons is surely relevant. The well-deserved inability of literalists to win many converts among educated people is also surely salient. The emergence of the politicized Christianist right - and its assault on Christianity as a freely chosen spiritual process - will surely lead to a continued and accelerating flight from organized religion.


But the Nones are not Ditchkins atheists. They express their position primarily as a form of skepticism and Deism. They are agnostics who do not dismiss the religious life but remain at a cool distance from it. This is, of course, one of the deepest American religious inheritances:

"American nones are kind of agnostic and deistic, so it's a very American kind of skepticism," says Barry Kosmin, director of Trinity's Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture. "It's a kind of religious indifference that's not hostile to religion the way they are in France. Franklin and Jefferson would have recognized these people."

The study estimates that in twenty years, the Nones will make up 25 percent of Americans. [More]

So looking back over 60 years of concern over the "decline" of rural communities, I have mixed emotions. The futility of bucking this trend is now apparent, even for those towns that enjoyed a period of success.

The presence of a college, hospitals, and a significant government employer seems to be the key to those towns that are growing by cannibalizing places like Chrisman.  Meanwhile, my home area will be a place for the poor, elderly and agriculture - all of which have to be somewhere.  The idea we will reverse the loss of young bright minds is far-fetched, I think.

I like living here, and am willing to cope with the circumstances and manage the disadvantages.  And I have wearied of grieving over something that was lost fifty years ago.

[Thanks, Mark]

I really hate it ...

When reality steps all over a beautiful theory.  Just when I was smugly comfortable I knew what the world population trends were and what the possible implications for life in the future were, those stooopid humans change their behaviors.

 Just a few things that I thought I knew and now I don't:

• White folk were unpopulating themselves from the future.

The falling fertility rates in large segments of the Islamic world have been matched by another significant shift: Across northern and western Europe, women have suddenly started having more babies. Germany’s minister for the family, Ursula von der Leyen, announced in February that the country had recorded its second straight year of increased births. Sweden’s fertility rate jumped eight percent in 2004 and stayed put. Both Britain and France now project that their populations will rise from the current 60 million each to more than 75 million by ­mid­century. Germany, despite its recent uptick in births, still seems likely to drop to 70 million or less by 2050 and lose its status as Europe’s most populous country.

In Britain, the number of births rose in 2007 for the sixth year in a row. Britain’s fertility rate has increased from 1.6 to 1.9 in just six years, with a striking contribution from women in their thirties and ­forties—­just the kind of hard-to-predict behavioral change that drives demographers wild. The fertility rate is at its highest level since 1980. The National Health Service has started an emergency recruitment drive to hire more midwives, tempting early retirees from the profession back to work with a bonus of up to $6,000. In Scotland, where births have been increasing by five percent a year, Glasgow’s Herald has reported “a mini baby boom.”

Immigrant mothers account for part of the fertility increase throughout Europe, but only part. And, significantly, many of the immigrants are arrivals from elsewhere in Europe, especially the eastern European countries admitted to the European Union in recent years. Children born to eastern European immigrants accounted for a third of Scotland’s ­“mini ­baby boom,” for ­example.

In 2007, France’s national statistical authority announced that the country had overtaken Ireland to boast the highest birthrate in Europe. In France, the fertility rate has risen from 1.7 in 1993 to 2.1 in 2007, its highest level since before 1980, despite a steady fall in birthrates among women not born in France. France’s National Institute of Demographic Studies reports that the immigrant population is responsible for only five percent of the rise in the ­birthrate. 

• Asians will overrun the world with staggering population growth.
  

The various demographic changes I have described arrived with remarkable speed. At the turn of this century, the conventional wisdom among demographers was that the population of Europe was in precipitous decline, the Islamic world was in the grip of a population explosion, and Africa’s population faced devastation by HIV/AIDS. Only a handful of scholars questioned the idea that the Chinese would outnumber all other groups for decades or even centuries to come. In fact, however, the latest UN projections suggest that China’s population, now 1.3 billion, will increase slowly through 2030 but may then be reduced to half that number by the end of the ­century.

Because there are so many assumptions embedded in it, this forecast of the Chinese future could well be wrong. There is one area, however, in which demography relies on hard census data rather than assumptions about the future, and that is in mapping the youth cohort. All of the teenagers who will be alive in 2020 have already been born. So a strong indication of the eventual end of China’s dominance of world population statistics is apparent in the fact that there are now 372 million Indians under the age of 15, but only 270 million Chinese. This gap will grow. India seems very likely to become the world’s most populous country by 2030 or thereabouts, but only if nothing ­changes—­China maintains its ­one-­child policy and India does not launch the kind of crash program of birth control that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi so controversially attempted in the ­1970s.

There is another development that could affect future Indian and Chinese birthrates: the use of sonograms to ascertain the sex of a fetus. Wider availability of this technology has permitted an increase in ­gender-­specific abortions. The official Chinese figures suggest that 118 boys are now being born in China for every 100 girls. As a result, millions of Chinese males may never find a mate with whom to raise a conventional family. The Chinese call such lonely males “bare branches.” The social and political implications of having such a large population of unattached men are unclear, but they are not likely to be ­happy. 

•  Social Security and its foreign counterparts are doomed by too many old guys.
  

But these sorts of projections don’t capture the full picture. There are at least three mitigating factors to be considered, which suggest that the German welfare state and others in Europe might not have to be dismantled ­wholesale.

The first is that the traditional retirement age of 60 in Italy, France, and Germany is very early indeed, especially considering that life expectancy is approaching 80 and that modern diets and medicine allow many elderly people to continue working well into their seventies. An increase of the retirement age to 65, which is being slowly introduced in France and Germany, would sharply reduce the number of ­non­workers who depend on the employed for support, as would more employment for people below the age of 20. A retirement age of 70 in Germany would virtually end the problem, at least until life expectancy rose as high as 90 ­years.

Second, the work force participation rate in Germany (and much of continental Europe) is relatively low. Not only do Germans retire on the early side, but the generous social welfare system allows others to withdraw from work earlier in life. An increase in employment would boost the revenues flowing into the social security system. For example, only 67 percent of women in Germany were in the work force in 2005, compared with 76 percent in Denmark and 78 percent in Switzerland. (The average rate for the 15 “core” EU states is 64 percent; for the United States, 70 percent.)

David Coleman, a demographer at Oxford University, has suggested that the EU’s work force could be increased by nearly a third if both sexes were to match Denmark’s participation rates. The EU itself has set a target participation rate of 70 percent for both sex­es. Reaching this goal would significantly alleviate the fiscal challenge of maintaining Europe’s welfare system, which has been aptly described as “more of a labor-market challenge than a demographic crisis.”

The third mitigating factor is that the total depen­d­ency ratios of the 21st century are going to look remarkably similar to those of the 1960s. In the United States, the most onerous year for dependency was 1965, when there were 95 dependents for every 100 adults between the ages of 20 and 64. That occurred be­cause “dependents” includes people both younger and older than working age. By 2002, there were only 49 dependents for every 100 ­working-­age Americans. By 2025 there are projected to be 80, still well below the peak of 1965. The difference is that while most dependents in the 1960s were young, with their working and saving and contributing lives ahead of them, most of the dependents of 2009 are older, with more dependency still to come. But the point is clear: There is nothing outlandish about having almost as many dependents as working ­adults. 

[More of the brilliant article I liberally excerpted]

Shoot.  I honestly thought I had a handle on the apocalyptic population problem.  It turns out too many people around the world can figure stuff out for themselves and make rational decisions as well.

This will not improve my chances of becoming a full-fledged "pundit".

 

An honest count...

A reader asks the Agricultural Sphinx Riddle:

Love your blogs, read them daily. I have an FFA speech-giving daughter that needs a bit of help.
She needs to know the % of the US population actively engaged in production agrigulture. It's 2% or less, but she needs a link or some such to cite in her works. I've plowed-no pun- through all the USDA stuff I could stomach, to no avail....

And here we go...

First, we don't agree on what "production agriculture" means. While farm organizations and the USDA love to bloat the number like cat fur before a fight to make themselves seem representatives of enormous constituency, we know the vast majority of farm output comes from very few farms.  So if we're counting for political reasons, the number includes apparently anyone with a tomato plant.

That said, the emergence of a vigorous agrarian or artisinal sector sector (local, organic, etc.) should not be entirely dismissed IMHO.  They do produce ag products, just not nearly as much as most folks think.

Now notice that Farm Bureau uses the weasel-term "member families".  The more accurate term is "insurance customers".   No help there.

Furthermore, all my career farmers themselves have been wrangling about what the necessary qualifications for being a "real farmer" are. No progress on that front, so I've moved on.

So my rule of thumb is to use some arbitrary benchmark of say, 80% of [insert crop/product here] is produced by X thousand growers. An example:

In terms of farm sales, 125,000 farms account for 75 percent of production, compared to 144,000 farms accounting for 75 percent of production in 2002. [More]

 What this allows is an accurate, and I hope non-judgmental measure of product originators.  These numbers can be parsed out from USDA (2007 Census of Ag) production numbers and for program crops from the EWG database, since subsidy payments are a pretty good analog for farm size/output.

As as for the concept of active engagement, that is currently a subject of intense legal scrutiny.

Gentle readers: please feel free to help this young lady with her homework or pose a different angle in how to count farmers.  Honestly, I really don't know the "right" answer.  Put you suggestions and links in the comments.


I do know it ain't "2%" of the population.  Crimony, that's 6 million people!

Bottom line:  you can make the number anything you want to fit your purpose. But the reality is not very many and rapidly getting less. 

Update:  The original sender came up with this from the Census and NASS:

Without the beating of the proverbial dead horse, here it is straight from the horse's mouth, or typing little hooves:
From the Census Bureau we had 303,824,650 souls living in the US in 2007. So, doing the math, it comes to .726%  of the US population "actively engaged in production agriculture"  [my quotes].
 

Thank you for your inquiry to the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) regarding the percent of the population involved in agriculture.  According to the 2007 Census of Agriculture, there are 2, 204,792 farm and ranch operators engaged in production agriculture.

You would need to contact the Census Bureau to find out the number of the entire population.  Regrettably, NASS only captures crop and livestock statistics for the U.S.  We hope this information is useful to you.  Please send our best to your daughter with her speech.

Thanks for the additional input, Mark!

For all my fellow Illini...

In case you're a downstate resident, you might want to review this graph of Illinois population distribution and then ask why we even bother to send anyone to Springfield.

[More]

And then the cheapest shot of all - and I'm counting the Wright fiasco - choke on this reminder to baseball fans:

Jubilation if and when Obama wins the Presidency, culminating in a rally in Chicago's Grant Park that may draw one million souls. It's not a Cubs' World Championship, but most Illinoisans will take it; what kind of odds could you have gotten in 1908 that a black dude would get elected president before the Cubs won the Series again? [My emphasis]

Ouch.

On the positive side, we haven't had to watch/listen to hardly any national political ads - only the increasingly strident and caustic local races.

Illinois - it's not about farms.

Why we are moving beyond race...

For all the kefuffle over the "race card" in this election, it is really whistling in the wind. The demographic trends are clear and accelerating.

 [More]

The real secret is agriculture is on the front lines of this shift. I have heard from tobacco farmers, dairymen, and irrigated growers who have tapped into the Hispanic labor pool and found great advantages.

Not to mention our meat industry , hog producers, and horticulture industry.

Good workers soon make labels disappear.

Sometimes graphs say it best...

For those of us handicapping the election, the turnout for younger people has been of great interest.  Will it actually happen (for once)?

Many a political campaign has been premised on the idea of motivating and turning out young voters; most have failed. If the young voter ruled American politics, George McGovern would have walloped Richard Nixon, and Howard Dean would be finishing up his first term.

Indeed, youth turnout rates in recent elections have been downright pathetic. In 1972, the first year 18-year-olds had the right to vote, nearly half of citizens aged 18-24 turned out to the ballot box. But by 1976, with the Vietnam War off the table, the turnout rate plummeted to 42%. It has since fallen as low as 32% in 2000 before rebounding slightly in 2004.  [More]

[More of a concise analysis]
In a superbly straightforward explanation of who is how old and what they do with their votes, Political Arithmetik sheds much needed light on the subject.

The Obama campaign may be right that they can gain votes by mobilizing the young. But the old play a bigger role in elections, and they are not imovable in their vote preferences. Indeed, they make the youngest group seem a bit static by comparison. It is not the candidate's age that will be the key to winning the votes of those 60 and over. Issues and personality will play a large role. Any candidate would be well advised to recognize that the dynamic swings among older voters coupled with their substantial over-representation makes them a potent force for electoral change.

A large turnout of younger voters has to occur eventually. But if it begins this year to shift the focus of political campaigning, I think we look experience modestly longer planning horizons for once, insted of what are you doing for me right now.  Squeezing baby boomers out of the spotlight would be a relief to all the other age cohorts and I suspect, even a relief to many of us.

China's other people problem...

Too many of them are males. I posted about this long ago, I think, but here is an update.

By the time these newborns reach puberty, war games may seem like a quaint relic. In the 2020s, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Zheng Zhenzhen, estimates in a People's Daily interview that 10 percent of Chinese men will be unable to find wives, which could have a huge impact on Chinese society. Historian David Courtwright suggests in Violent Land that sexually segregated societies in the United States--frontier towns flush with unmarried men, immigrant ghettos in early twentieth-century cities, mining camps--are behind our propensity toward violence. The immigrants and westward migrants who shaped early America, Courtwright says, were largely young single men, who are-- today as well as then--disproportionately responsible for drug abuse, looting, vandalism, and violent crime. A long-term study of Vietnam veterans in 1998 may explain exactly why: The subjects' testosterone levels, which are linked to aggression and violence, dropped when they married and increased when they divorced. Eternally single men, by extension, maintain high levels of testosterone--a recipe for violent civil unrest.

The one-child policy was instituted in an attempt to hamper the wild growth of the Chinese population. But, in the process of plugging one hole, the government may have left another open. The coming boom in restless young men promises to overhaul Chinese society in some potentially scary ways.

Lianyungang, a booming port city in a Jiangsu province economic belt, is ground zero for some of these changes. According to the China Family Planning Association, it's the city in China with the most extreme gender ratio for children under four--163 boys for every 100 girls. One sunny Saturday morning at verdant Cangwu Park, I count six boys and three girls bouncing on the inflatable castle. Near the ice-cream stand are a dozen sticky-faced kids, seven boys and five girls, feeding pigeons. The children running after kites adorned with Olympics mascots and China's Shenzhou VII spaceship: three and two. The drivers of the cheerful little tanks circling an electric track: three and one.

These numbers work fine on the playground, but, for China's many match- making services, they may prove troublesome. At the Good Luck Marriage Introduction Agency, in a town a few hours' drive west from Liangyungang, two whiteboards mounted on the wall advertise the age, height, and income of available singles. On the day I visit, founder Tao Hui, a fortysomething woman with a bouffant, is watching soap operas in her sweatpants. She hasn't felt the shortage yet, she says. On the whiteboards, a few dozen nameless men line up nicely to a few dozen nameless women. For now, many in the early wave of surplus men are marrying younger women.

"We'll see real problems in eight or ten years," Tao predicts. Her 17-year- old son, she assures me, has good prospects. But she already turns away a lot of single males from outlying villages with no money or education. "If they're ugly and can't find work, there's nothing I can do. No one wants them." [More]

My first reaction to this article was "Marriage lowers your testosterone??"

But enough about me. 

It would not be good to be a neighbor to China in the next few decades.  It also sheds new light on their aggressive foreign worker program in Africa and Italy for example.  While we see it as leaving home, they may see it as a chance for a wife.

The next place to be...

Look at the advantages:

• Highest social capital of any state in the US
• More native Congresspersons per capita
• More people over 85 per capita

And now, just in time to mess with all these economic and demographic trends, it appears there is a fair bit of oil under those semi-arid plains.

His new wealth springs from the Bakken formation, a sprawling deposit of high-quality crude beneath the durum wheat fields of North Dakota, Montana and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The Bakken may give the U.S. -- the world's biggest importer of oil -- a new domestic energy source at a time when demand from China and India is ratcheting up the global competition for supplies and propelling average U.S. gasoline prices to almost $4 a gallon.

And unlike the tar from Canada's oil sands, Bakken crude needs little refining. Swirl some of it in a Mason jar and it leaves a thin, honey-colored film along the sides. It's light - -almost like gasoline -- and sweet, meaning it's low in sulfur.

Best of all, the Bakken could be huge. The U.S. Geological Survey's Leigh Price, a Denver geochemist who died of a heart attack in 2000, estimated that the Bakken might hold a whopping 413 billion barrels. If so, it would dwarf Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, the world's biggest field, which has produced about 55 billion barrels. [More]

Even if this estimate is optimistic, it looks to me like a far better bet than ANWAR. Now reduced to a flag-pin political litmus test, drilling in the Arctic strikes me as enormously more problematic than turning North Dakota into the next Texas.

While energy development will not re-establish hundreds of small towns and rural social structures, developing resources in places like ND seems to meet every criteria used to measure a solution to our spiraling energy costs.

Would it change the culture of ND? I would think so, but I'm not too sure that hasn't already been irreversible shifted from its old trajectory by population mobility and fertility changes, farm policy, ag technology, and warmer climate (for whatever reason).

Perhaps ND is on it's way to being renamed "New Dakota".

Feel first, think later..

A recent report in the journal Science corroborates something most of us have suspected for some time. We are basically moral weasels.

In a review to be published in the May 18 issue of the journal Science, Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, discusses a new consensus scientists are reaching on the origins and mechanisms of morality. Haidt shows how evolutionary, neurological and social-psychological insights are being synthesized in support of three principles:

1) Intuitive primacy, which says that human emotions and gut feelings generally drive our moral judgments;

2) Moral thinking if for social doing, which says that we engage in moral reasoning not to figure out the truth, but to persuade other people of our virtue or to influence them to support us; and

3) Morality binds and builds, which says that morality and gossip were crucial for the evolution of human ultrasociality, which allows humans - but no other primates - to live in large and highly cooperative groups.

"Putting these three principles together forces us to re-evaluate many of our most cherished notions about ourselves," says Haidt, whose own research demonstrates that people generally follow their gut feelings and make up moral reasons afterwards. "Since the time of the Enlightenment," Haidt says, "many philosophers have celebrated the power and virtue of cool, dispassionate reasoning. Unfortunately, few people other than philosophers can engage in such cool, honest reasoning when moral issues are at stake. The rest of us behave more like lawyers, using any arguments we can find to make our case, rather than like judges or scientists searching for the truth. This doesn't mean we are doomed to be immoral; it just means that we should look for the roots of our considerable virtue elsewhere - in the emotions and intuitions that make us so generally decent and cooperative, yet also sometimes willing to hurt or kill in defense of a principle, a person or a place." [More]

The line about the lawyers was painful, but I suspect Haidt may be right. More intriguing is the possibility that science may make this problem even more divisive in our culture.

When offspring genetic engineering becomes possible I expect parental choices to produce bigger differences in how people morally reason. Conservative-leaning people will make their children morally reason even more strongly in the conservative style. The liberals will do likewise. So the size of the center will shrink. This will lead to deeper political divisions and perhaps civil war in some countries and wars between countries.

I also expect offspring genetic engineering to produce more other styles of moral reasoning including ones that are rare today and others that do not exist at all today. Who knows, maybe genetic engineering will move libertarianism up in the ranks of moral reasoning styles. [More]

The most alarming prospect of genetic engineering of humans for me is, while we are busy deciding which traits and predispositions we want in our children, other cultures are out-reproducing us. We're overplanning - they are taking potluck, and getting on with business.

Which system sounds like a winner to you?

Even trickles can make a difference...

As the world quietly passes a milestone of becoming more urban than rural, the most rural of all - peasants in China - may slowly be gaining ground.

Most of the houses have obviously been newly rebuilt, with brick walls and higher roofs. (Feng Shui and the cost of land may explain why houses stay on the same plots.) This is entirely typical for the area. It's dangerous to generalise about a huge country from anecdotal evidence; still, it is evidence that at least one substantial group of Chinese peasants are doing absolutely better than before, whether or not they are falling relatively behind the city-dwellers. [More and great photos of stuff other than tourist sites]

The billions of trade dollars pouring into China are of course being sopped up mostly by a few entrepreneurs (to use the polite word) and a growing middle class in the cities, but to be fair, the Chinese government is taking some steps to help the vast countryside and rural population live better lives.

It is both sad and hopeful that only a few dollars can make such a big difference there.

Sound investments...

While many suppressed a gasp, the US population passed a numerical milestone: 100 million minority citizens.

The nation’s minority population reached 100.7 million, according to the national and state estimates by race, Hispanic origin, sex and age released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. A year ago, the minority population totaled 98.3 million.

“About one in three U.S. residents is a minority,” said Census Bureau Director Louis Kincannon. “To put this into perspective, there are more minorities in this country today than there were people in the United States in 1910. In fact, the minority population in the U.S. is larger than the total population of all but 11 countries.”

But wait, there is more to get your attention:

Hispanics accounted for almost half (1.4 million) of the national population growth of 2.9 million between July 1, 2005, and July 1, 2006.

and

With a 3.4 percent increase between July 1, 2005, and July 1, 2006, Hispanic was the fastest-growing minority group. Asian was the second fastest-growing minority group, with a 3.2 percent population increase during the 2005-2006 period. The population of non-Hispanic whites who indicated no other race grew by 0.3 percent during the one-year period.

It should be clear that we in the present majority have an unworkable business plan. While we think of children in terms of expense and hassle, other cultures see their future in progeny. Though the argument can be made that rising prosperity will temper fertility rates of the most fecund groups, it seems clear that laws alone cannot preserve a culture which fails to heed the basic biologic imperative: propagate life.

My greatest regret as a parent is not being more of one - we stopped too soon. Perhaps having the ability to choose will doom us to the melancholy land of fulfilled wishes. I do not join critics who use this trend to condemn those who have made the choice to not have children - a particularly unkind group - but to note the all too obvious consequences, and speculate on their possible meaning.

At the same time, how shall we raise those children we did make time for? A great experiment on a grand scale is providing an illuminating insight:

In Shanghai — or Beijing, or Shenyang, or Hangzhou — children not in school are seen in the presence of one and usually more adult supervisors: parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles, people from the neighborhood. But in this one afternoon in Mumbai we came across many scenes of what can only be called roving bands of kids. They were playing cricket in dirt lots. They were throwing stones. They were playing tag. They were running around without watchful adults immediately in sight. [More]

As the immigration debate rages today, it is fair, I believe, to grant fuller hearing to those who will actually populate the future - not just the present.