Some Demography

In ancient and medieval societies, cities always had higher death rates than the countryside, and only matinained their populations due to immigration. Now urban areas have lower death rates. When did that change? A careful study of French data finds that the switch didn't happen until the 1940s.

And now to the thing demographers mainly talk and tweet about, fertility decline. I am not myself full of doom about declining birth rates, partly because I remember population bomb doomsterism from the 1970s and so don't trust anybody's 50-year projections. But I am tracking the remarkable decline in fertility around the world and wondering what it will mean.

Despite massive government spending to encourage childbirth, Poland now has the lowest total fertility of any EU state, 1.11. The previous front-runner was Spain, which held steady at 1.13.

Meanwhile in the US total fertility is holding steady around 1.62; interesting that white fertility surpassed that of black Americans for the first time ever, 1.534 > 1.529. I would call that a tie, but these are very accurate numbers, and the difference would have been greater except for women born in Haiti. 

Dramatic fertility declines in Latin America over the past decade:

* Argentina 2.25 to 1.25
* Mexico 2.11 to 1.45
* Colombia 1.94 to 1.21
* Chile 1.78 to 0.88

Most of the high birth rate nations in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa, but some demographers have been predicting birth rate collapse in those nations for a decade, it looks to be happening. For example, in Lesotho, total fertility has fallen from 3.5 in 2004 to 2.5 today, and the rate of decrease appears to be accelerating.

And this: "Iran is the greatest example of how superficial traditionalism does nothing. Iran is on the same track regarding metrics like birthrate, GDP, female university attendance, that you would expect if the Shah had never fallen. Average modernizing middle income country." Sometimes, in some ways, stuff like elections matters a lot, but sometimes it seems like everything else is downstream of the basic the techno-cultural system.

Isabel Wilkerson, "The Warmth of Other Suns"

Between 1915 and 1970, about 6 million black Americans migrated out of the south to cities in the north or on the west coast. Demographers call this the Great Migration, and it was a big, powerful, and very important event. The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) is a wonderful book about it.

The Warmth of Other Suns has four interleaving elements. There is, first of all, a general narrative of the event, drawn from demographic, sociological and historical studies. That general narrative is made specific through the lives of three migrants who represent the three main flows that made up the movement: from Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas to the northeast, from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, and from Texas and Louisiana to the west coast. Ida Mae Gladney was a sharecropper's daughter who moved from Mississippi to Chicago in 1937. George Starling moved from Florida to New York City in 1943, where he found a job working on the New York to Florida trains that had carried him north along with a million others. Robert Foster was a physician who left Louisiana for Los Angeles in 1953, where he eventually became a celebrity surgeon and big-time gambler who could stay and eat free at any casino in Las Vegas; after he repaired damaged tendons in Ray Charles' hand, Charles wrote a song about a doctor named Foster stealing his girlfriend that was a big hit in 1962.

The migration began during World War I, when manufacturers, cut off from immigrant flows – migration from Europe fell by 90% during the war – and needing to ramp up production sent agents to travel through the south recruting sharecroppers to come north and work. Southern planters were so alarmed by this threat to their labor supply that they passed crazy laws against the recruiters, some imposing fines of up to $10,000 for enticing laborers to leave the state and others requiring a recruiting license that would cost up to $75,000. But word spread anyway, and half a million blacks moved north between 1916 and 1920. Many people expected that the movement would die down after the war, but instead it accelerated, and it never really slackened until after the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the mechanization of agriculture gave southern blacks hope that their lives might improve at home.

Active recruiting by northern companies only happened during the World Wars. What kept the migration going the rest of the time was ties of kin and neighborhood between folks in the south and those already set up in the north. People kept moving to wherever the first people to leave their district had ended up; one sociologist noted that every person who had gone north from one South Carolina county went to Philadelphia. One Mississippi county sent hundreds of people to Beloit, Wisconsin. People in big cities like Chicago or Los Angeles formed clubs with people from their own towns or districts, like the Monroe, Louisiana club in LA that endured into the 1990s.

To me one of the most interesting themes of the book is the relationship between individual choice and social change. Wilkerson asked many migrants, starting with her own mother, if they were aware that they were part of a major national movement. Did knowing that millions of blacks were moving to the north influence their own choices? All said no, her mother quite indignantly. To them these were personal choices made for narrow, personal reasons. For Ida Mae it was bound up with her choice of husband, which fell on a man determined to move north over another suitor who stayed in Mississippi and was still a farmer in the 1970s. In 1943 George Starling had been organizing pickers in the orange groves to demand higher wages during the wartime labor shortage when a friend tipped him off that a group of growers might be planning to have him killed. To him, there was no choice, just a flight out of the county in the dark of the night. Robert Foster had the kind of dreams that drove millions of people from small towns to the big city, dreams of hitting the big time and being somebody, with a Cadillac and flashy clothes and capital R Respect from everybody around him.

And yet they added up to a mass movement. 

How this happens is, I think, the key question of sociology. One of the causes of the Great Migration was certainly Jim Crow. Many, many people told interviewers that they went north to "breathe free" or "live like men," and plenty of others fled from assaults or threats. Sociologists think, although this has been hard to prove, that the departure rate increased whenever there was a lynching in the county. The promise of higher wages was certainly another cause.

One of the Wilkerson's themes is that the Great Migration was much like the migrations from Europe and Mexico to the US, and that migrants to the north lived through some of the same patterns as migrants from outside the US. But the migrants themselves, she discovered, hated this kind of thinking; they were Americans, and they resisted any comparison between themselves and Irish or Mexican migrants.

There is too much in The Warmth of Other Suns for any summary to do it justice. Wilkerson covers the real estate wars of the 1960s and 1970s – Ida Mae Gladney bought a house in a mostly white neighborhood of Chicago only to have all of her new white neighbors leave within a few months – the rise of drugs and crime in northern cities, the slow fading of Jim Crow barbarism in the south, and much more. The amount of research behind this book is simply staggering. Wilkerson says she interviewed 1200 people, and I believe her. Her interviews with her three main subjects must have added up to hundreds of hours; she lived with her subjects (by then all elderly), drove them to their medical appointments, met their families, attended their Thanksgiving dinners. She interviewed their friends and co-workers, went to their home towns to check on their recollections, verified every verifiable claim with newspaper stories, birth and death certificates, and whatever other records she could find.

I think the great acclaim this book has received (second on the NY Times best books of the century list) comes from the positive story it tells about the black migration. Much of this story will make black readers proud: the defiance of segregation, the determination to live free, the humanity and dignity of Wilkerson's subjects. But to me the most moving part of the book came at the end, where Wilkerson chronicles the final illnesses, deaths and funerals of the three people she had befriended. These were good deaths, people who were surrounded by friends and kin, who were members of churches where people gathered to mourn them with full ceremony. And yet they overwhelmed me with sadness. It seemed to me that in the face of death, the whole story shifted; does it matter where we live out our short times on earth? Whether we work in offices or cotton fields? Whether we can vote? I would say that it does matter, but I do not know how I would refute an argument that says it does not. The shadow of death is deep and dark, and the way decay slowly overwhelms our bodies, stripping from us one thing after another that we fought and struggled for, has an awesome and awful finality.

I give The Warmth of Other Suns my highest recommendation, but if you are uncomfortable with intimate recountings of death you might want to stop before the end.

World Population Prospects 2024

The latest from the UN. Key points:

1. The world’s population is expected to continue growing for another 50 or 60 years, reaching a peak of around 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s, up from 8.2 billion in 2024. After peaking, it is projected to start declining, gradually falling to 10.2 billion people by the end of the century.

2. One in four people globally lives in a country whose population has already peaked in size. In 63 countries and areas, containing 28 per cent of the world’s population in 2024, the size of the population peaked before 2024. In 48 countries and areas, with 10 per cent of the world’s population in 2024, population size is projected to peak between 2025 and 2054. In the remaining 126 countries and areas, the population is likely to continue growing through 2054, potentially reaching a peak later in the century or beyond 2100.

3. Women today bear one child fewer, on average, than they did around 1990. Currently, the global fertility rate stands at 2.25 live births per woman, down from 3.31 births in 1990. More than half of all countries and areas globally have fertility below 2.1 births per woman, the level required for a population to maintain a constant size in the long run without migration.

4. The population of China is likely to fall by more then 200 million by 2054, that of Japan by 21 million, that of Russia by 10 million. In percentage terms the biggest declines will be in the Balkans, where Albania, Moldova, and Bosnia are all likely to lose more than 20 percent of their people. By 2100 China's population may fall by 55%.

5. The UN expects a "rebound" in birth rates in countries where fertility has fallen below 1.4, but not up to replacement level; perhaps up to 1.8. They say this has been observed in some countries already. However, this won't slow population decline, since the declining number of potential mothers means the population would fall even if fertility rose back up above 2.

6. Most of the growth in global population will happen in sub-Saharan Africa; growth will also continue in a few other countries (Yemen, Afghanistan, central Asia). Latin America and East Asia are already shrinking; Europe and North America would be, except for immigration.

And note that many demographers think these projections understate fertility decline, which they think is accelerating almost everywhere.

Population Peaks

Via Birth Gauge on Twitter/X, a map showing when each US county peaked in population. Dark blue means the population is still rising. 

Lots of people have left the plains.

You have to love Nassau County in western Long Island, where the population would be booming if it were legal to build any kind of housing there.

Fertility Rates by Housing Type

US total fertility by housing type, from the 2021 Community Survey:

Single-Family Home
   2.12   Trailer
   1.95   Single-family detached house
   1.93   Single-family townhouse
Apartment building
   1.74   2 units
   1.80   3-4 units
   1.53   5-9 units
   1.52   10-19 units
   1.39   20-49 units
   1.33   50+ units

This was proposed as a partial explanation for the very low fertility rates in places like Seoul and Bangkok, where most people live in large apartment buildings. Since much of South Korea has very low population density, people could in theory spread out, but of course that has other costs.

But what South Korea and Taiwan obviously need is lots of trailer parks.

And this, from the same source: "Unplanned childlessness is now far more common than unplanned pregnancy!"

Fertility Decline

Preliminary data for 2023 shows that worldwide fertility continued its precipitous decline. The 2015 to 2023 period has probably seen the biggest change in human fertility in our history.

The UN is projecting that global fertility fell to 2.3 last year, which is one of the estimates for the replacement rate, so we may have achieved a stable human population.

But this is humanity we're talking about, and we don't do stability; instead we seem to be shooting past it toward very rapid population decline. I'm not as alarmed about this as some, because I remember the 1970s and the panic about rising population, and I can't take fifty-year projections of anything very seriously. But this is quite a remarkable thing to see.

No Deaths of Despair in Italy

Interesting to note that in Italy, where the economy has been much worse than in the US, and the political scene even more chaotic, life expectancy has risen well above the level in the US. The obvious difference is the availability of opiods, although one might also point out that in Italy nobody has any sense of decline, since things there have never been particularly stable or prosperous. (Compared to the US or the rest of Europe, I mean.)

Chinese Fertility Collapse

Chart from Kevin Drum. Remarkably rapid collapse in the past seven years, to a rate lower than anywhere but South Korea.

Comparable rates for other nations: 

South Korea:  0.8
Japan 1.3
Vietnam  2.0
North Korea  1.9
India  2.0
US 1.7

South Korea's Fertility Collapse

South Korea has the lowest fertility in the world, with total fertility falling below 0.8 last year; that means each generation would be only 40% the size of the previous one. Birth rates are falling across most of the world, but the reason East Asia nations and South Korea in particular are leading the collapse seems to be miserable relations between the sexes. Korean feminists are full of outrage about their second-class treatment, while Korean conservatives (like the new president) regularly say things about feminists that in the US nobody but misogynist trolls would dare to utter. 

As in Japan, the expectation that white collar workers will put in very long hours plays a part; the demands placed on executives are almost impossible to bear without a supportive spouse, so a marriage between two people with careers has no room for parenthood. Korean women complain that their husbands refuse to be any help with children, so they are saddled with the whole burden.

Hawon Jung in the NY Times:

A 2022 survey found that more women than men — 65 percent versus 48 percent — don’t want children. They’re doubling down by avoiding matrimony (and its conventional pressures) altogether. The other term in South Korea for birth strike is “marriage strike.” . . .

Young Koreans have well-documented reasons not to start a family, including the staggering costs of raising children, unaffordable homes, lousy job prospects and soul-crushing work hours. But women in particular are fed up with this traditionalist society’s impossible expectations of mothers. So they’re quitting. . . .

Discrimination against working mothers by employers is also absurdly common. In one notorious case, the country’s top baby formula maker was accused of pressuring female employees to quit after getting pregnant.

And gender-based violence is “shockingly widespread,” according to Human Rights Watch. In 2021, a woman was murdered or targeted for murder every 1.4 days or less, according to the Korea Women’s Hotline. Women have dubbed the act of ending a relationship without getting a vicious reaction a “safe breakup.”

But women haven’t passively accepted the toxic masculinity. They’ve organized raucously, from Asia’s most successful #MeToo movement to groups like “4B,” which translates to the “Four no's: no dating, no sex, no marriage and no child-rearing.”

“The birth strike is women’s revenge on a society that puts impossible burdens on us and doesn’t respect us,” says Jiny Kim, 30, a Seoul office worker who’s intent on remaining childless.

I suppose one underlying factor here is the extremely rapid economic and technological development of South Korea, which has outrun social change and left many people feeling bewildered.

But I am fascinated by this dynamic: that the richer societies get, the more people feel that they can't afford to have children. It is simply not true that having a child in Korea today is a greater economic burden than it was 25 years ago, and yet people feel this to be true. Part of this has to be that however fast our incomes rise, or expectations rise faster, leaving us always behind. Another part is our placement of the "career" at the center of life; more and more people can't imagine life without one, which means other things have to be shoved to the side.

What good is getting richer if it leaves us feeling less able to afford the things we want to do?

Global Migration

Circles represent the number of migrants in each country, from UN data

Reading a NY Times story about the latest exodus from Cuba – 250,000 have left over the past year, more than 2% of the population – I got to wondering about the scale of worldwide migration. It seemed to me that it has gone up a lot lately, but I wanted to check the numbers.

Well, the basic picture looks like this: in 1990, 151 million people lived in a country other than the one they were born in, 2.9% of the world's population; in 2020, 281 million did, 3.6%. Continuing with 2020 numbers, there were 87 million migrants in Europe, 86 million in Asia, and 59 million in North America. Migrants made up 16% of the population in North America and 12% in Europe. The number of migrants was growing fastest in Asia. Remittances sent home by migrants totalled $702 billion. 

There is a graphic here that allows you to trace flows between source and destination nations. Incidentally you will note that numbers on migration don't always add up very well, because it is hard to count migrants and there are different ways of counting foreign born students, guest workers, refugees, and so on. I'm just passing on official figures.

In the US, there were 2.8 million people from Mexico, 2.7 million from India, 2.2 million from China, and 2.1 million from the Philippines; the total foreign born population was around 45 million, 14%. 

In Saudi Arabia, there were 2.5 million from India, 1.7 million from Indonesia, and 1.5 million from Pakistan; in 2020 there were more than 13 million immigrants, about 37% of the population of 35 million, which is one of the official figures I think might be way off. In the United Arab Emirates, migrants make up 88% of the population of 10 million; people from India alone outnumber natives.

Meanwhile the UN estimates that 7 million people have fled from Venezuela, 23% of the population; 6.8 million have fled Syria, or 32%; 5.9 million have fled Afghanistan, or 15%. The largest migrant population comes from India at 18 million, but that's only 1.2% of India's population. (Meanwhile 2.5 million people from Bangladesh live in India, along with over a million from Afghanistan. Russia is another country with major migrant flows both in and out: out to western Europe, in from central Asia.) 

The world is in the midst of three great demographic events: a population explosion, from 5 billion in 1987 to 8 billion today; falling birth rates in most of the world, down to replacement or below; and migrant flows from poor, violent countries to safe, rich ones. All of this is shaking up global politics. What terrifies many people in western Europe and the US is the confluence of plunging native birth rates with surging migration.

These changes are massive and what they will mean in the long run is unclear to me. Looking toward the future, there are two things that I think cloud any ability of ours to imagine what the world will be like in 2100: the stunning rise of artificial intelligence, and the massive shocks created by rapid demographic change.

One Thing Uniting Red and Blue America is Falling Birth Rates

Since the start of the Great Recession in 2008, the US birth rate has fallen from about 68 per 1,000 women to 54, a decline of 21%. As the graph above shows, the biggest decline was among Hispanic women, who are becoming more and more like black women, who in turn are becoming more and more like white women.

The decline has taken place in every state; in every religious, ethnic, and political group; in rural areas, suburbs, and cities. And while the overall birth has declined in all those groups, the birth rate for women over 30 has risen in all of them.

When it comes to what people believe; Americans seem to be radically divided against each other. But in terms of how we live, we are more and more the same.

US Covid-19 Case Rate vs. Population Density

Above, average daily number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed last month per 100,000 inhabitants; below, population density. The extent to which these are mirror images is quite remarkable. I suppose that's partly because places like New York and Los Angeles had many more cases in the first wave. But you have to think that given how spread out people are in most of Alaska, even a little bit of caution could easily have given them the lowest rate.

US Census 2020

Overall population up 7.4%, to 331 million.

This is the slowest growth since the 1930s, and 52% of counties lost people.

The numbers on ethnicity are complicated, because the way race is counted and reported has been "evolving." Now we have complications like "Hispanic, white," "Hispanic, non-white", and "Hispanic, more than one race," and a lot more mixed-race people. The various tables presented by the Census Bureau don't even agree with each other.

But, anyway, the numbers seem to show that the white-only population shrank 8.6%, to 204 million.

The multiracial population grew 276%, to 33.8 million. This has to be mainly due to people reclassifying themselves.

The Hispanic population grew 23%, to 61 million. 

The Asian population grew 32%, to 24 million.

The black population grew 6%, to 47 million.

This table from CNN shows their interpretation of the ethnic breakdown:

Mitt Romney's Family Plan

Up until around 2008, the United States stood out among wealthy nations for its high birth rate. Unlike the Europeans, the East Asians, and even most nations in Latin America, the US was producing enough children to keep its population from falling, and given strong immigration our population was actually rising. Then came the Great Recession, and something changed. Birth rates usually fall in recessions, so nobody was alarmed at first, but then the economy came roaring back the birth rate did not. In fact total fertility has continued to decline ever since and is now around 1.7. If our birth rate had held steady at the 2008 rate, there would now be 5.8 million more children in the US.

Of course people do not agree on how to feel about those 5.8 million missing children. Environmentalists generally cheer; libertarians say, "who cares, it's none of our business how many people decide to have." But others are worried. The number of children that women say they want to have has held stead at around 2.5, so the declining birth rate represents another way our lives are falling short of what we want them to be. There are plenty of mainstream liberals, feminists, and so on who decry this and think we need stronger government action to support parenthood. What is government for if not to help us live the lives we want?

Plus there are the racists and the immigration skeptics who see that with the native born population falling and many immigrants coming from Asia and Africa, the white population is going to fall in both real and percentage terms. Some of the anxiety driving the "we will not be replaced" rhetoric on the right comes from these statistics.

But there is no ethnic group in the US that is currently reproducing itself at the replacement rate. Native born blacks are very close to whites, and native born Hispanics are just a shade higher. African and Hispanic immigrants do have higher birth rates, but the difference disappears in a single generation. The one group that falls any real distance from the norm is American Indians, whose total fertility is around 1.3. 

Other conservatives, especially but not only religious conservatives, mourn the decline because they just like families and babies and think people are better off raising children than whatever it is childless yuppies get up to in New York and Dallas. 

Enter Mitt Romney. Still in his heart a business consultant, he has a Plan, complete with a detailed PowerPoint that he carries everywhere on the iPad in his briefcase and will show to anyone who asks:

Romney's office rolled out a big proposal to reform the current hodgepodge of programs that help parents, the mix of tax credits and welfare benefits, by rolling them into a single family benefit that would provide $350 a month for kids 5 and under, and $250 a month for kids up to 17, up to a certain income level and benefit cap. (The cap effectively discriminates against large families, which means Romney can’t be accused of Latter-day Saint self-dealing.)

In keeping with the opportunity described above, the Romney plan offers something to left and right alike. It would significantly reduce child poverty, a core left-wing ambition. At the same time it reduces the current system’s penalties for marriage and its tacit bias against stay-at-home parents, both social-conservative goals, and raises the current subsidy for middle-class families, usually a Republican-leaning constituency. Finally, it’s both deficit neutral and softly pro-life, with a benefit that starts while the child is still in utero.

Since Romney is about the only person in the Senate who cares about the deficit, the plan pays for itself. The two big sources of funding are phasing out a long list of current programs and tax credits and ending the deduction for state and local taxes. Neither is likely to be popular with Democrats.

Many conservatives will object to softening the work rules enacted in the 1996 welfare reform, which both Republican politicians and many economists think helped to promote work and reduce poverty, plus ending the deduction for state and local taxes without cutting tax rates amounts to tax hike.

But people who are very worried about the birth rate, like Ross Douthat and Ramesh Ponuru, think none of that matters compared to the imperative to help families raise more children.

I would not really be opposed to any of this, but I doubt very much that it will work. Romney's plan is still less generous than what Denmark and the Netherlands provide and their birth rates are lower than in the US. It is the basic structure of our economy and society, especially the two-career marriage, that is driving birthrates down, and nobody wants to mess with that.

Georgia as a Purple State

As I write the latest count shows that Biden has crept into the lead in Georgia. If that holds up he would be the first Democrat to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1992. But it isn't really surprising, since elections over the past decade have seen Democratic candidates for governor and senator getting ever closer to winning. Right now it looks like both Georgia senate races will go to run-offs, and though Republicans would have the edge in both races they are very close, which shows the state becoming truly competitive again.

As to why, the experts mostly point to demographics. Georgia has about 10 million people, 6 million of whom live in metropolitan Atlanta. The population has more than doubled since 1970, with most of that growth in the Atlanta metro. 

The racial breakdown is about 52% non-Hispanic white, 32% black, 6% Hispanic, 4% Asian; this totals to only 94%, which leaves 600,000 people of other, mostly mixed, ethnicity. 

Besides immigrants from outside the US, Atlanta has had more than a million white and black Americans move there from other states, mostly in the northeast or midwest. It is the black migration back toward the south that attracts my notice, reversing 120 years of movement in the other direction. Those black people move to Atlanta for the same reason white people do, because they think they can make money, but also because it has a large black community that has produced many state and national leaders. It's a place where many black people are thriving, and where racial tensions are fairly muted, certainly no worse than in most northern cities. 

For all intents and purposes, Atlanta is a national or world city like most big places in the US, having more in common with Houston, Indianapolis, or Denver than it does with rural Georgia. Because it so dominates the state, that moves the whole state away from old Dixie and toward national norms. 

Building a New City for Hong Kong Refugees

Tyler Cowen posted something on his blog about investors from Hong Kong seeking to build a "charter city" in Ireland and got this response from Mark Lutter:

Thanks for sharing the article about the Victoria Harbor Group. We, me being Chief Strategy Officer, are in discussions with Ireland. However, it is important to note that the information mentioned is dated. As any early stage company, our ideas have rapidly evolved. While the term we are using is ‘International Charter City’, we are not pursuing full scale autonomy. Our priority is to acquire land and build political support in the host country to build a city for the Hong Kong people with the target population being 50% HKers and 50% citizens of the host country.

Our key assumptions are as follows

1. The next 10-15 years will see 1m to 2m Hong Kongers migrate, the first mass migration of high skilled labor in the last 40 or so years.

2. There is value from coordinating this migration, keeping network effects, ensuring housing supply, etc

3. We see this as an opportunity to build the city of the future, cutting edge urban design, welcoming of new technology, self-driving cars, drone delivery, etc.

4. We are in discussions with several countries, not just Ireland, which we will make public when possible. We prefer English speaking countries with common law traditions, but are open to considering others.

5. Our goal is to acquire 50,000+ acres within 2 hours of an airport to build a new city for several hundred thousand residents. Obviously this depends on the political support in the host country. Smaller countries like Ireland would have smaller developments.

6. Political support from the host country is crucial. We are not asking for independence or autonomy. Of course, we wouldn’t say no to tax and regulatory relief, but that is less important than land availability and domestic buy in.

7. The city will fit in the national plans of the host country. The Hong Kongers excel in finance and manufacturing, as well as education and healthcare. While little manufacturing is done in Hong Kong, Hong Kongers own many factories in the Guangdong province. Any country looking to revive their manufacturing base could do so by attracting a bunch of talented HKers. Additionally, a good location could become a top 10 global financial center in 10 years by attracting HK financial talent.

8. We believe this is a great opportunity for any country which wants to attract a talented, hardworking, entrepreneurial population.

9. I have seen a lot of charter city projects and this is the first one I wanted to become part of the leadership team of.

There's a fascinating possibility, but count me as skeptical that this will really come off.

It did set me wondering what countries might be interested in this project. I  have rejected most of the places that came to mind because they already have racial tensions between Chinese and others: the Phillippines, Malaya, Australia, South Africa. New Zealanders are too eco-conscious to want a million more people of any sort. I have a hard time seeing the Irish accepting this; they like being Irish and are comfortable enough not being rich to be hard to bribe.

Canada? The Canadian west coast already has a big Chinese population and it seems like a natural destination. People have already suggested this in the comments to Cowen's post, so the idea has occurred to others. It seems to me British Columbia could have this if they wanted it.

Jamaica? They could use the money, and they are not much concerned about race. But I guess that would mean clearing the locals off 50,000 acres, since the island is already densely populated.

What about some parts of the US? All those business boosters in Texas might like the idea, and the race problem they worry about is Mexicans. An old rust belt state, like Michigan? One of my favorite offbeat ideas has always been to let a few hundred thousand extra refugees into the country on the condition that they settle in Detroit. I can't see California finding the room, since they have trouble finding the room for new apartment buildings. On the other hand a new thriving city in the Central Valley might take some of the pressure off the Bay Area, and people from Hong Kong are already used to conserving water.

Anyway for anyone interested in geography and city building it's a fabulous thing to daydream about.

European Emigration, 1880-1914

These days European politics have been turned upside down by immigration, but a century ago the continent had the opposite problem. Consider that Germany has been convulsed by Angela Merkel's commitment to take in a million immigrants, a number dwarfed by the flow out of Europe around 1900. Below are the numbers of emigrants to the United States from selected nations, 1880-1914:

Italy:                       4,033,000
Ireland:                   1,591,000
Scandinavia:          1,789,000
German Empire:    2,527,000
Austria-Hungary:  4,005,000
Russia:                    3,241,000
Greece:                   358,000

Remember this is only part of the total flow, since many emigrants went to other parts of the New World.

Some of these people came back, but probably only one out of ten; the rest never returned. Not only are these numbers enormous, they came primarily from certain districts. Much of the total for the German Empire, Austria Hungary, and Russia was made up by 3,800,000 Poles, and most Italian emigrants came from the south. The impact on those districts was profound:

Emigration to the New World sometimes had a dramatic effect on Europe itself and bizarre political hopes were fostered by the links that grew out of it. During the 1930s officials in the Polish foreign ministry fantasized about the prospect that emigrants from their country might found a colony in Latin America, while in 1945 some Sicilians proposed that their island might become a part of the United States. More seriously, central European nationalism was cultivated. During the First World War, a legion of Polish volunteers was raised among emigrants in the United States, and the influence of emigrants on eastern European politics was to persist for the whole of the twentieth century. In 1990, Franja Tudjman's campaign to become president of Croatia was said to have raised around $5 million from emigre supporters. In the same year, Stanislaw Tyminski, who had made his fortune in Canada, returned to Poland to run for president.

Emigration had less obvious effects on parts of Europe. It increased literacy, because families needed to keep in contact by letter. It also created imbalances of gender and age as young men left: between 1905 and 1916, 4.86 million Italian men emigrated, but only 1.14 million women accompanied them; in early twentieth-century Calabria, there were three young women for every two young men. Sexual imbalance may have produced a self-perpetuating cycle. Carlo Levi suggested that extra-marital sexual relations in parts of the Italian south were common because there were not enough men to provide all women with husbands. Illegitimate children in turn were particular prone to emigrate – in one well-studied village, three quarters of them did so.

Migration increased prosperity in home countries as money was sent back or as emigrants returned to buy cherished plots of land. The economic impact of emigration was particularly great in Italy, where links between emigrants and their places of origin remained close – it was said that Italy gained $100 million from emigrants who returned between 1897 and 1902. An enquiry of 1931 showed showed that 2 million hectares of land were bought by Italians returning from America. . . .

Emigration was often linked to political conservatism. Generally the areas that sent emigrants abroad during the early twentieth century remained on the political right for the rest of the century.

– Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (2000), pp. 17, 20.

According to Vinen's numbers, Italy lost 6 million emigrants in eleven years, from a population of around 32 million. According to wikipedia the total outflow of people from Europe over the period 1810 to 1932 was at least 60 million, and most of that happened after 1880.

Archaeology and Demography in Eastern North America

What does archaeology tell us about the past?

It's a question I ask myself all the time. Often when digging up artifacts of indeterminate date from soils of indeterminate origin I feel like the answer is, "not much." People were here, sure; they made pots or stone tools; they built fires and cooked things. What else?

My nagging sense of how little we sometimes learn from archaeology is what drew me to a 2010 paper in American Antiquity by George Milner and George Chaplin. They push the archaeological data to its limit in an attempt to answer an important question about the past, and they may have discovered something of value.

There is a long-running, sometimes bitter debate about how many people lived in the Americas before Europeans arrived. The bitterness comes from a sense that the low count faction is somehow minimizing European crimes, the high count faction trying to play them up, hence everybody is playing politics in one way or another.

How would you count anyway? One way is to start from those Native polities that were encountered by Europeans when they were still strong and healthy -- the Aztecs, for example, or the Timucuans of Florida who welcomed De Soto's men. You start from the explorers' or conquerors' population counts, look at how much the population of those areas fell by 1800, and then extrapolate to areas about which you have no data. Problems with this method include knowing how far to trust population estimates made by explorers and a sort of sampling error, in that Europeans were drawn to the most populous and dynamic Native communities for trade or conquest.

How might one go about estimating the population of areas that no ethnographically-minded outsiders visited until after their populations had been decimated by disease? Well, how about archaeology?

Alas, archaeology is a bad way to estimate populations; all you can really do is excavate a village and then look at historical records and see how many people explorers thought lived in similar communities, which means you are back to worrying about the accuracy of those estimates anyway.

But maybe archaeology can make a contribution here. Because to archaeologists one striking thing about North America circa 1500 AD is how many vast areas had, so far as we can tell, no inhabitants at all. The record indicates that population was quite dense in certain areas -- for example, the Mohawk Valley of New York, around the Chesapeake Bay, in the southern Appalachians, on Florida's Gulf Coast -- while other areas that look at least as good for settlement to our eyes were empty. One of these is what archaeologist have taken to calling the "Empty Quarter" around the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, a place that a few hundred years earlier had been home to Cahokia and other major towns.

When Milner and Chaplin plotted the areas in eastern North America where archaeology indicates significant Native settlement in the early 1500s, they got the map above. The size of the blobs is not very important, because by and large the bigger the blob, the lower the population density. But anyway you can see that, based on archaeological data, vast stretches of North America were unsettled. This doesn't  mean that Native Americans didn't use these areas; they did, for hunting and the like. They just didn't build villages or plant corn there.

If you take those population estimates I mentioned before and apply them to this data set, taking account of all the area where it seems nobody lived, you get a radically smaller estimate of Native populations. Of course you have to consider that some villages were probably missed or mis-dated or what have you, but anyway this is the data we have.

Milner and Chaplin produce a range of estimates from their data, but their best figure for the population of the whole of eastern North America is between 800,000 and 1.6 million. This matches quite well with the lowest estimate anybody ever cites, Ubelaker's figure of 1 million, which was reached using a completely different method. Other estimates for the population of this area go as high as 5 to 8 million, so archaeology points to a figure on the low side of historical estimates.

As I said, I like this because it takes the archaeological data seriously: this is what we have, so what does it tell us?

Population Decline in Rural Texas

From 1940 to 2010 the population of Texas grew by 392%. Even so the state has 37 counties where the population has fallen by more than 40%, including 10 that have shrunk by 70%. This even includes a couple of counties in the Permian Basin oil patch. Across north Texas hundreds of town have completely disappeared.

I pass this on because I have a strong sense that the ongoing emptying out of rural America and the concentration of more and more people in suburban agglomerations like Houston, Atlanta, and Washington, DC are driving our politics every bit as much as racial change.

New Data on Rising Death Rates in the US

Study of census data from 2010-2017 suggests that deaths in the 25-64 age group have risen for the country has a whole, not just one group:

According to the new study, the death rate from 2010 to 2017 for all causes among people ages 25 to 64 increased from 328.5 deaths per 100,000 people to 348.2 deaths per 100,000. It was clear statistically by 2014 that it was not just whites who were affected, but all racial and ethnic groups and that the main causes were drug overdoses, alcohol and suicides.

“The fact that it’s so expansive and involves so many causes of death — it’s saying that there’s something broader going on in our country,” said Ellen R. Meara, a professor of health policy at Dartmouth College. “This no longer limited to middle-aged whites.” . . .

Dr. Woolf said one of the findings showed that the excess deaths were highly concentrated geographically, with fully a third of them in just four states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana.

The only states where the death rate actually fell were California and Wyoming.

Statistically this has two components: the rising death toll of suicide and drugs, and a slowing in the decline of the death rate from heart disease, cancer, and vehicle accidents. If the death rate for those causes had continued to fall at the rate we saw from 1950-2000, that might have outweighed the increase in "deaths of despair." But the general medical progress we got used to has been slowed by many changes, including increased obesity, diabetes, and distracted driving.