Data for the Public Good
Data tells important stories about our country. We should treat it with more respect.
These days, the very word “data” elicits fear and suspicion in many of us — and with good reason. DNA-testing companies are sharing genetic information with the government. A firm hired by the Trump campaign gained access to the private information of 50 million Facebook users. Hotels, hospitals, and a consumer credit reporting agency have admitted to major breaches. But while many of us are rightfully concerned about the misuse of our personal data by private entities, we should be just as worried about the important national stories that aren’t told when our fellow citizens don’t feel secure enough to share theirs with researchers.
Part of the reason so many of us are nervous about our data and who has access to it is that pieces of our data can be combined to paint a detailed picture of our lives: how much money we make, what we’re interested in, what car we drive. But in a similar way, individual experiences become data points in sets that shape our understanding of what’s happening in this country.
This is especially true in the public health context. One death of a black woman in a maternity ward may be dismissed as an isolated case, until it is combined with thousands of other cases and compared to white maternal morbidity rates. When residents of Flint, Mich., repeatedly complained about getting sick from orange-tinged tap water, they were largely ignored and dismissed as paranoid, only to be vindicated when Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha published a study showing that children in Flint had elevated levels of lead in their blood after the city’s water source had been switched.
Data collected by the Census Bureau — including on education status, employment, housing status, food security, income — is particularly important. It informs decisions about resource allocation and, crucially, political redistricting.
Without this kind of data, our ability to understand the world around us is restricted. Canada, where publicly available data is relatively limited in size and scope, provides a cautionary tale. Dr. Arjumand Siddiqi of the University of Toronto, tried to conduct a study similar to one done in the United States that showed middle-aged white Americans without a college degree were dying at higher rates in recent years, especially of deaths caused by alcohol and drugs. But her efforts were frustrated because death records in Canada, shockingly, do not record information on race or education.
Even in the United States, there are gaps in the data. The artist Mimi Onuoha curates “On Missing Data Sets” — a list of pieces of information that are absent from the public record. This includes things like the number of people who are excluded from public housing due to a criminal record, poverty statistics that incorporate incarcerated people and the number of police departments that use stingray technology.
When it comes to data collected by the state, those who do not appear in data sets are often marginalized people who decline to share their data because of fear and distrust. This was the concern when, in 2018, the Trump administration announced that it would put a citizenship question on the census: Critics worried that the question would stoke fear and depress responses from noncitizens as well as their family members. The administration ultimately walked back the proposal after it was struck down by the Supreme Court.
To encourage data collection that protects the rights of people, we need basic restrictions on data sharing between agencies. While there are some laws that govern the collection of data, few place restrictions on access to existing databases. Those of us who do research on health care, for instance, are governed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
(HIPAA), which dictates how we can use and gain access to sensitive patient information, while keeping the privacy of patients paramount. Law enforcement are generally exempt from provisions in HIPAA and, in those cases, can view data rather easily.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/opin ... d=45305309
SOCIAL TRENDS
Software Is Reorganizing the World
FOR THE FIRST time in memory, adults in the United States under age forty are now expected to be poorer than their parents. This is the kind of grim reality that in other times and places spurred young people to look abroad for opportunity. Indeed, it is similar to the factors that once pushed millions of people to emigrate from their home countries to make their home in America. Our nation of immigrants is, tautologically, a nation of emigrants.
>These emigrants weren’t Going Galt or being unpatriotic by leaving.
These emigrants, our ancestors, didn't bear enmity towards the countries they left – quite the contrary. They weren't “Going Galt” or being “unpatriotic” by leaving, as they often left out of sadness and melancholy, not anger. In many cases they remained homesick for the rest of their lives, leaving only because they had to, not because they wanted to.
Yet while our ancestors had America as their ultimate destination, it is not immediately obvious where those seeking opportunity might head today. Every square foot of earth is already spoken for by one (or more) nation states, every physical frontier long since closed.
With our bodies hemmed in, our minds have only the cloud – and it is the cloud that has become the destination for an extraordinary mental exodus. Hundreds of millions of people have now migrated to the cloud, spending hours per day working, playing, chatting, and laughing in real-time HD resolution with people thousands of miles away ... without knowing their next-door neighbors.
>The concept of migrating our lives to the cloud is much more than a picturesque metaphor.
The concept of migrating our lives to the cloud is much more than a picturesque metaphor, and actually amenable to quantitative study. Though the separation between our bodies is still best characterized by the geographical distance between points on the surface of the earth, the distance between our minds is increasingly characterized by a completely different metric: the geodesic distance, the number of degrees of separation between two nodes in a social network. Importantly, this geodesic distance is just as valid a mathematical metric as the geographical. In fact, there are entire conferences devoted to cloud cartography, in which research groups from Stanford to Carnegie Mellon to MIT present the first maps of online social networks – mapping not nation states but states of mind.
Perhaps the single most important feature of these states of mind is the increasing divergence between our social and geographic neighbors, between the cloud formations of our heads and the physical communities surrounding our bodies. An infinity of subcultures outside the mainstream now blossoms on the Internet – vegans, body modifiers, CrossFitters, Wiccans, DIYers, Pinners, and support groups of all forms. Millions of people are finding their true peers in the cloud, a remedy for the isolation imposed by the anonymous apartment complex or the remote rural location.
Yet this discrepancy between our cloud subculture and our physical surroundings will not endure indefinitely. Because the latest wave of technology is not just connecting us intellectually and emotionally with remote peers: it is also making us ever more mobile, ever more able to meet our peers in person.
And so these cloud formations of mind are beginning to take physical shape, driving the reorganization of bodies. In the technology space, we have already seen this transpire at small scale: a cloud formation of 2 people coming together for 10 years facilitated by Match.com, a formation of 10 people for a year in a hacker house, a formation of 100 people for a few months at a startup incubator, and a formation of 1000 people for a few days at an open-source gathering like RailsConf. More recently we saw the thousands that occupied Wall Street for a month, the ten thousand Redditors involved in Jon Stewart's Rally, and the tens of thousands that took Tahrir Square at the height of the Arab Spring. Those trivial photo-sharing apps seem far less trivial in this light.
More...
https://www.wired.com/2013/11/software- ... l-nations/
FOR THE FIRST time in memory, adults in the United States under age forty are now expected to be poorer than their parents. This is the kind of grim reality that in other times and places spurred young people to look abroad for opportunity. Indeed, it is similar to the factors that once pushed millions of people to emigrate from their home countries to make their home in America. Our nation of immigrants is, tautologically, a nation of emigrants.
>These emigrants weren’t Going Galt or being unpatriotic by leaving.
These emigrants, our ancestors, didn't bear enmity towards the countries they left – quite the contrary. They weren't “Going Galt” or being “unpatriotic” by leaving, as they often left out of sadness and melancholy, not anger. In many cases they remained homesick for the rest of their lives, leaving only because they had to, not because they wanted to.
Yet while our ancestors had America as their ultimate destination, it is not immediately obvious where those seeking opportunity might head today. Every square foot of earth is already spoken for by one (or more) nation states, every physical frontier long since closed.
With our bodies hemmed in, our minds have only the cloud – and it is the cloud that has become the destination for an extraordinary mental exodus. Hundreds of millions of people have now migrated to the cloud, spending hours per day working, playing, chatting, and laughing in real-time HD resolution with people thousands of miles away ... without knowing their next-door neighbors.
>The concept of migrating our lives to the cloud is much more than a picturesque metaphor.
The concept of migrating our lives to the cloud is much more than a picturesque metaphor, and actually amenable to quantitative study. Though the separation between our bodies is still best characterized by the geographical distance between points on the surface of the earth, the distance between our minds is increasingly characterized by a completely different metric: the geodesic distance, the number of degrees of separation between two nodes in a social network. Importantly, this geodesic distance is just as valid a mathematical metric as the geographical. In fact, there are entire conferences devoted to cloud cartography, in which research groups from Stanford to Carnegie Mellon to MIT present the first maps of online social networks – mapping not nation states but states of mind.
Perhaps the single most important feature of these states of mind is the increasing divergence between our social and geographic neighbors, between the cloud formations of our heads and the physical communities surrounding our bodies. An infinity of subcultures outside the mainstream now blossoms on the Internet – vegans, body modifiers, CrossFitters, Wiccans, DIYers, Pinners, and support groups of all forms. Millions of people are finding their true peers in the cloud, a remedy for the isolation imposed by the anonymous apartment complex or the remote rural location.
Yet this discrepancy between our cloud subculture and our physical surroundings will not endure indefinitely. Because the latest wave of technology is not just connecting us intellectually and emotionally with remote peers: it is also making us ever more mobile, ever more able to meet our peers in person.
And so these cloud formations of mind are beginning to take physical shape, driving the reorganization of bodies. In the technology space, we have already seen this transpire at small scale: a cloud formation of 2 people coming together for 10 years facilitated by Match.com, a formation of 10 people for a year in a hacker house, a formation of 100 people for a few months at a startup incubator, and a formation of 1000 people for a few days at an open-source gathering like RailsConf. More recently we saw the thousands that occupied Wall Street for a month, the ten thousand Redditors involved in Jon Stewart's Rally, and the tens of thousands that took Tahrir Square at the height of the Arab Spring. Those trivial photo-sharing apps seem far less trivial in this light.
More...
https://www.wired.com/2013/11/software- ... l-nations/
The world's favorite cities people are fleeing
Major urban areas residents are moving away from
If you live in a major metropolis and have had enough of the steep living costs, poor air quality, rampant crime and other negatives, you're not alone. A slew of big cities around the globe are seeing an exodus of residents who are leaving the bright lights behind for a quieter, less stressful life elsewhere. Click through as we look at 15 popular urban areas that people are fleeing in their droves and reveal exactly why they are relocating.
Slide show:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstor ... ut#image=1
Major urban areas residents are moving away from
If you live in a major metropolis and have had enough of the steep living costs, poor air quality, rampant crime and other negatives, you're not alone. A slew of big cities around the globe are seeing an exodus of residents who are leaving the bright lights behind for a quieter, less stressful life elsewhere. Click through as we look at 15 popular urban areas that people are fleeing in their droves and reveal exactly why they are relocating.
Slide show:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstor ... ut#image=1
The End of Babies
By Anna Louie Sussman
Nov. 16, 2019
In the fall of 2015, a rash of posters appeared around Copenhagen. One, in pink letters laid over an image of chicken eggs, asked, “Have you counted your eggs today?” A second — a blue-tinted close-up of human sperm — inquired, “Do they swim too slow?”
The posters, part of a campaign funded by the city to remind young Danes of the quiet ticking of their biological clocks, were not universally appreciated. They drew criticism for equating women with breeding farm animals. The timing, too, was clumsy: For some, encouraging Danes to make more babies while television news programs showed Syrian refugees trudging through Europe carried an inadvertent whiff of ugly nativism.
Dr. Soren Ziebe, former chairman of the Danish Fertility Society and one of the brains behind the campaign, believes the criticism was worth weathering. As the head of Denmark’s largest public fertility clinic, Dr. Ziebe thinks these kinds of messages, fraught as they are, are sorely needed. Denmark’s fertility rate has been below replacement level — that is, the level needed to maintain a stable population — for decades. And as Dr. Ziebe points out, the decline is not solely the result of more people deliberately choosing childlessness: Many of his patients are older couples and single women who want a family, but may have waited until too late.
But the campaign also notably failed to land with some of its prime targets, including Dr. Ziebe’s own college-age daughter. After she and several classmates at Copenhagen University interviewed him for a project on the campaign, Dr. Ziebe sought answers of his own.
“I asked them, ‘Now, you know — you have gained a lot of information, a lot of knowledge. What are you going to change in your own personal lives?’ he said. He shook his head. “The answer was ‘Nothing.’ Nothing!”
If any country should be stocked with babies, it is Denmark. The country is one of the wealthiest in Europe. New parents enjoy 12 months’ paid family leave and highly subsidized day care. Women under 40 can get state-funded in vitro fertilization. But Denmark’s fertility rate, at 1.7 births per woman, is roughly on par with that of the United States. A reproductive malaise has settled over this otherwise happy land.
It’s not just Danes. Fertility rates have been dropping precipitously around the world for decades — in middle-income countries, in some low-income countries, but perhaps most markedly, in rich ones.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... 3053091117
By Anna Louie Sussman
Nov. 16, 2019
In the fall of 2015, a rash of posters appeared around Copenhagen. One, in pink letters laid over an image of chicken eggs, asked, “Have you counted your eggs today?” A second — a blue-tinted close-up of human sperm — inquired, “Do they swim too slow?”
The posters, part of a campaign funded by the city to remind young Danes of the quiet ticking of their biological clocks, were not universally appreciated. They drew criticism for equating women with breeding farm animals. The timing, too, was clumsy: For some, encouraging Danes to make more babies while television news programs showed Syrian refugees trudging through Europe carried an inadvertent whiff of ugly nativism.
Dr. Soren Ziebe, former chairman of the Danish Fertility Society and one of the brains behind the campaign, believes the criticism was worth weathering. As the head of Denmark’s largest public fertility clinic, Dr. Ziebe thinks these kinds of messages, fraught as they are, are sorely needed. Denmark’s fertility rate has been below replacement level — that is, the level needed to maintain a stable population — for decades. And as Dr. Ziebe points out, the decline is not solely the result of more people deliberately choosing childlessness: Many of his patients are older couples and single women who want a family, but may have waited until too late.
But the campaign also notably failed to land with some of its prime targets, including Dr. Ziebe’s own college-age daughter. After she and several classmates at Copenhagen University interviewed him for a project on the campaign, Dr. Ziebe sought answers of his own.
“I asked them, ‘Now, you know — you have gained a lot of information, a lot of knowledge. What are you going to change in your own personal lives?’ he said. He shook his head. “The answer was ‘Nothing.’ Nothing!”
If any country should be stocked with babies, it is Denmark. The country is one of the wealthiest in Europe. New parents enjoy 12 months’ paid family leave and highly subsidized day care. Women under 40 can get state-funded in vitro fertilization. But Denmark’s fertility rate, at 1.7 births per woman, is roughly on par with that of the United States. A reproductive malaise has settled over this otherwise happy land.
It’s not just Danes. Fertility rates have been dropping precipitously around the world for decades — in middle-income countries, in some low-income countries, but perhaps most markedly, in rich ones.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... 3053091117
International Men’s Day 2019
International Men’s Day 2019
What is it and why does it matter?
There have been calls for an International Men’s Day since the 1960’s and in this era of empowering gender equality, you may have even thought to yourself “Why do women have an international celebration and not men?” or “Men’s contributions and concerns deserve a day of recognition in their own right” and not merely creating an equivalent of International Women’s Day.
Following a series of small events in individual countries in the US, Europe and Australia, International Men’s Day (IMD) was initiated on 1991 and revived on 19th November 1999 in Trinidad and Tobago by history lecturer Dr. Jerome Teelucksingh. The Caribbean initiative is now an annual international event celebrated in over 70 countries with rapidly increasing interest.
International Men’s Day encourages men to teach the boys in their lives the values, character and responsibilities of being a man. It is only when we all, both men and women, lead by example that we will create a fair and safe society which allows everyone the opportunity to prosper.
There are six specific objectives of International Men’s Day:
1. To promote positive male role models; who are living decent and honest lives, not just movie stars and sports men but everyday men
2. To celebrate men's positive contributions to society, community, family, marriage, child care, and to the environment
3. To focus on men's health and wellbeing; social, emotional, physical and spiritual
4. To highlight discrimination against men; in areas of social services, social attitudes and expectations, and law
5. To improve gender relations and promote gender equality
6. To create a safer, better world; where people can be safe and grow to reach their full potential
"The concept and themes of IMD are designed to give hope to the depressed, faith to the lonely, comfort to the broken-hearted, transcend barriers, eliminate stereotypes and create a more caring humanity.” - Dr. Jerome Teelucksingh
There are many inspiring men leading by example in our community and we are fortunate to have a diverse set of role models for the Ismaili youth to emulate. Yet some of the national statistics around Gender Equality are distressing. They prove that the perceptions and attitudes in the wider societies in which we live still have a long way to go to overturn negative gender stereotypes.
At the recent Preparing for Parenthood workshop run by WAP, we discussed that only around 1% of eligible fathers in the UK took Shared Parental Leave and that it can still be perceived as strange for men to be involved with childcare. Anecdotes arose about adults at kids events or appointments casually questioning "Where's Mum?" or the hesitation husbands may feel taking time away from work when a man’s role is expected to be the “sole breadwinner” of the household.
Equally concerning is that studies show men are less likely to acknowledge illness or to seek help when sick. Men aged 20-40 are half as likely to go to their GP as women of the same age and are even less likely to be honest about their symptoms when they do go. The figures are even lower for the likelihood of men to seek help for concerns related to their mental health. A message sometimes heard by young boys is “real men sort out their own problems” which holds them back from accepting the emotional or physical support they need and often from aspiring to be role models themselves.
Communities need to build awareness and create safe environments for every individual to feel empowered to make their own choices in prioritising their family, work, health and wellbeing, rather than simply allowing gender stereotypes to take control.
Our leading example, Mowlana Hazar Imam said in a discussion with Harvard University Professor Diana L. Eck on November 12, 2015:
“Leadership qualities is not gender driven so actually, if you don’t respect the fact that both genders have competencies, outstanding capabilities, you are damaging your community by not appointing those people.”
As we reflect on the themes of International Men’s Day, let us think about how we can enable our community to continue to grow and reach its full potential. Let us respect, support and celebrate all men, women and children as we redefine social stereotypes for the benefit of ourselves and our future generations.
References and further information:
www.internationalmensday.com
www.menshealthforum.org.uk
www.sharedparentalleave.campaign.gov.uk
https://the.ismaili/united-kingdom/inte ... s-day-2019
International Men’s Day 2019
What is it and why does it matter?
There have been calls for an International Men’s Day since the 1960’s and in this era of empowering gender equality, you may have even thought to yourself “Why do women have an international celebration and not men?” or “Men’s contributions and concerns deserve a day of recognition in their own right” and not merely creating an equivalent of International Women’s Day.
Following a series of small events in individual countries in the US, Europe and Australia, International Men’s Day (IMD) was initiated on 1991 and revived on 19th November 1999 in Trinidad and Tobago by history lecturer Dr. Jerome Teelucksingh. The Caribbean initiative is now an annual international event celebrated in over 70 countries with rapidly increasing interest.
International Men’s Day encourages men to teach the boys in their lives the values, character and responsibilities of being a man. It is only when we all, both men and women, lead by example that we will create a fair and safe society which allows everyone the opportunity to prosper.
There are six specific objectives of International Men’s Day:
1. To promote positive male role models; who are living decent and honest lives, not just movie stars and sports men but everyday men
2. To celebrate men's positive contributions to society, community, family, marriage, child care, and to the environment
3. To focus on men's health and wellbeing; social, emotional, physical and spiritual
4. To highlight discrimination against men; in areas of social services, social attitudes and expectations, and law
5. To improve gender relations and promote gender equality
6. To create a safer, better world; where people can be safe and grow to reach their full potential
"The concept and themes of IMD are designed to give hope to the depressed, faith to the lonely, comfort to the broken-hearted, transcend barriers, eliminate stereotypes and create a more caring humanity.” - Dr. Jerome Teelucksingh
There are many inspiring men leading by example in our community and we are fortunate to have a diverse set of role models for the Ismaili youth to emulate. Yet some of the national statistics around Gender Equality are distressing. They prove that the perceptions and attitudes in the wider societies in which we live still have a long way to go to overturn negative gender stereotypes.
At the recent Preparing for Parenthood workshop run by WAP, we discussed that only around 1% of eligible fathers in the UK took Shared Parental Leave and that it can still be perceived as strange for men to be involved with childcare. Anecdotes arose about adults at kids events or appointments casually questioning "Where's Mum?" or the hesitation husbands may feel taking time away from work when a man’s role is expected to be the “sole breadwinner” of the household.
Equally concerning is that studies show men are less likely to acknowledge illness or to seek help when sick. Men aged 20-40 are half as likely to go to their GP as women of the same age and are even less likely to be honest about their symptoms when they do go. The figures are even lower for the likelihood of men to seek help for concerns related to their mental health. A message sometimes heard by young boys is “real men sort out their own problems” which holds them back from accepting the emotional or physical support they need and often from aspiring to be role models themselves.
Communities need to build awareness and create safe environments for every individual to feel empowered to make their own choices in prioritising their family, work, health and wellbeing, rather than simply allowing gender stereotypes to take control.
Our leading example, Mowlana Hazar Imam said in a discussion with Harvard University Professor Diana L. Eck on November 12, 2015:
“Leadership qualities is not gender driven so actually, if you don’t respect the fact that both genders have competencies, outstanding capabilities, you are damaging your community by not appointing those people.”
As we reflect on the themes of International Men’s Day, let us think about how we can enable our community to continue to grow and reach its full potential. Let us respect, support and celebrate all men, women and children as we redefine social stereotypes for the benefit of ourselves and our future generations.
References and further information:
www.internationalmensday.com
www.menshealthforum.org.uk
www.sharedparentalleave.campaign.gov.uk
https://the.ismaili/united-kingdom/inte ... s-day-2019
Are Liberals Against Marriage?
Debating the decline of wedlock, again, in the shadow of the baby bust.
The continued plunge in the American birthrate, amid prosperity and low unemployment, has finally made fertility a topic that’s O.K. to worry about even if you aren’t a deep-dyed reactionary.
This is a very good thing, since the question of why the world’s wealthiest societies are failing to reproduce themselves is far too important to be left to weirdo Catholic columnists like myself. The tangle of questions involved doesn’t map neatly onto the existing lines of liberalism and conservatism, and the more the left and center engage with what Anna Louie Sussman’s recent essay in these pages calls “The End of Babies,” the better our chances of averting a P.D. Jamesian destination, a permanent civilizational old age.
Still, there is one key fact about the recent decline in the American fertility rate that inevitably revives, rather than transcends, a long-running right-left argument. While marital fertility fell in the 1970s after the baby boom ran its course, the baby bust of the last 10 years hasn’t affected married couples, whose fertility rate has stayed level or very modestly increased.
So while it’s important to debate questions like how the cost of child care affects childbearing decisions within marriages, the question of why marriage has declined so precipitously in the first place still looms over the fertility discussion. And with it comes a longstanding liberal-versus-conservative disagreement about how much to emphasize economic trends versus cultural transformations — or, more tersely, neoliberalism versus cultural liberalism — to explaining the waning of wedlock.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/opin ... 0920191203
Debating the decline of wedlock, again, in the shadow of the baby bust.
The continued plunge in the American birthrate, amid prosperity and low unemployment, has finally made fertility a topic that’s O.K. to worry about even if you aren’t a deep-dyed reactionary.
This is a very good thing, since the question of why the world’s wealthiest societies are failing to reproduce themselves is far too important to be left to weirdo Catholic columnists like myself. The tangle of questions involved doesn’t map neatly onto the existing lines of liberalism and conservatism, and the more the left and center engage with what Anna Louie Sussman’s recent essay in these pages calls “The End of Babies,” the better our chances of averting a P.D. Jamesian destination, a permanent civilizational old age.
Still, there is one key fact about the recent decline in the American fertility rate that inevitably revives, rather than transcends, a long-running right-left argument. While marital fertility fell in the 1970s after the baby boom ran its course, the baby bust of the last 10 years hasn’t affected married couples, whose fertility rate has stayed level or very modestly increased.
So while it’s important to debate questions like how the cost of child care affects childbearing decisions within marriages, the question of why marriage has declined so precipitously in the first place still looms over the fertility discussion. And with it comes a longstanding liberal-versus-conservative disagreement about how much to emphasize economic trends versus cultural transformations — or, more tersely, neoliberalism versus cultural liberalism — to explaining the waning of wedlock.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/opin ... 0920191203
The Chinese Population Crisis
How Communist cruelty and Western folly built an underpopulation bomb.
In recent days both this newspaper and The Wall Street Journal have carried reports on one of the most important geopolitical facts of the 21st century: The world’s great rising power, the People’s Republic of China, is headed for a demographic crisis.
Like the United States and most developed countries, China has a birthrate that is well below replacement level. Unlike most developed countries, China is growing old without first having grown rich.
Of course China has grown richer: My colleague David Leonhardt, who spent time in China at the beginning and the end of the 2010s, just wrote a column emphasizing the “maturing” of the Chinese economy over that period, the growth of start-ups and consumer spending and the middle class.
But even after years of growth, Chinese per capita G.D.P. is still about one-third or one-fourth the size of neighboring countries like South Korea and Japan. And yet its birthrate has converged with the rich world much more quickly and completely — which has two interrelated implications, both of them grim.
First, China will have to pay for the care of a vast elderly population without the resources available to richer societies facing the same challenge. Second, China’s future growth prospects will dim with every year of below-replacement birthrates, because low fertility creates a self-reinforcing cycle — in which a less youthful society loses dynamism and growth, which reduces economic support for would-be parents, which reduces birthrates, which reduces growth …
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/opin ... 0920200120
How Communist cruelty and Western folly built an underpopulation bomb.
In recent days both this newspaper and The Wall Street Journal have carried reports on one of the most important geopolitical facts of the 21st century: The world’s great rising power, the People’s Republic of China, is headed for a demographic crisis.
Like the United States and most developed countries, China has a birthrate that is well below replacement level. Unlike most developed countries, China is growing old without first having grown rich.
Of course China has grown richer: My colleague David Leonhardt, who spent time in China at the beginning and the end of the 2010s, just wrote a column emphasizing the “maturing” of the Chinese economy over that period, the growth of start-ups and consumer spending and the middle class.
But even after years of growth, Chinese per capita G.D.P. is still about one-third or one-fourth the size of neighboring countries like South Korea and Japan. And yet its birthrate has converged with the rich world much more quickly and completely — which has two interrelated implications, both of them grim.
First, China will have to pay for the care of a vast elderly population without the resources available to richer societies facing the same challenge. Second, China’s future growth prospects will dim with every year of below-replacement birthrates, because low fertility creates a self-reinforcing cycle — in which a less youthful society loses dynamism and growth, which reduces economic support for would-be parents, which reduces birthrates, which reduces growth …
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/opin ... 0920200120
Older, longer: The super-aging of Canadians has taken everyone by surprise
Every generation is having fewer children than the one before it, leaving fewer and fewer people to care for us in our increasingly long lives. It is a crisis we ignore at our own peril
The oldest of the baby boomers will turn 75 next year. The generation that defined us all, that fought for peace and cheap drugs and no-fault divorce, that gave us the personal computer and the internet and the culture wars and the war on terror, that is responsible for the best and the worst of the human condition as we live it today, is getting old. And as always – always – they’re making it all about them.
The boomers are living inconveniently long lives. Over the course of the next three decades, the number of people aged 85 and older will more than triple.
“More and more people are living into their 80s and 90s than were ever expected to,” says Parminder Raina, Canada research chair in geroscience at McMaster University. “The rapidity of aging is the real issue for policy makers.”
And just as you’d expect, the boomers haven’t saved enough. Which means looking after them will cost younger generations a great deal of time and money.
Worst of all, because the boomers were also the first generation to stop having enough children to replace themselves, there are fewer young people available to look after the old.
Every generation is having fewer children than the generation before. Things are going to be even harder for Generation X. And harder still for the millennials.
“This is a fundamental, paradigmatic shift in society, and for too long we’ve buried our heads,” says Michael Nicin, executive director of Ryerson University’s National Institute on Ageing.
More...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
Every generation is having fewer children than the one before it, leaving fewer and fewer people to care for us in our increasingly long lives. It is a crisis we ignore at our own peril
The oldest of the baby boomers will turn 75 next year. The generation that defined us all, that fought for peace and cheap drugs and no-fault divorce, that gave us the personal computer and the internet and the culture wars and the war on terror, that is responsible for the best and the worst of the human condition as we live it today, is getting old. And as always – always – they’re making it all about them.
The boomers are living inconveniently long lives. Over the course of the next three decades, the number of people aged 85 and older will more than triple.
“More and more people are living into their 80s and 90s than were ever expected to,” says Parminder Raina, Canada research chair in geroscience at McMaster University. “The rapidity of aging is the real issue for policy makers.”
And just as you’d expect, the boomers haven’t saved enough. Which means looking after them will cost younger generations a great deal of time and money.
Worst of all, because the boomers were also the first generation to stop having enough children to replace themselves, there are fewer young people available to look after the old.
Every generation is having fewer children than the generation before. Things are going to be even harder for Generation X. And harder still for the millennials.
“This is a fundamental, paradigmatic shift in society, and for too long we’ve buried our heads,” says Michael Nicin, executive director of Ryerson University’s National Institute on Ageing.
More...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake
The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.
Excerpt:
This is the story of our times—the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn’t seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.
If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.
This article is about that process, and the devastation it has wrought—and about how Americans are now groping to build new kinds of family and find better ways to live.
More...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... MDU2NzM4S0
The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.
Excerpt:
This is the story of our times—the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn’t seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.
If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.
This article is about that process, and the devastation it has wrought—and about how Americans are now groping to build new kinds of family and find better ways to live.
More...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... MDU2NzM4S0
Where Being a Single Woman Is Not OK
Dating is hard. A government campaign to get you married is worse.
“Sheng nu” (“leftover women”) is a term used to describe single women who are 27 or older in China. Most of these women live in cities and lead rewarding professional lives. The term was coined in 2007 by a government organization responsible for the protection and promotion of women’s rights and policies. That same year, the Ministry of Education added “sheng nu” to the official lexicon.
In this Op-Doc, based on the Independent Lens feature documentary “Leftover Women,” we follow one of those women — Qiu Huamei, contending with the stigma and social pressure forcing her to go on a grueling quest in search of a husband. She grew up in a small village five hours south of Beijing and is the second youngest of five sisters. Ms. Qiu is a successful lawyer, fluent in English and opinionated — but those qualities do not outweigh one key flaw: She is not married.
In recent years, the Chinese government has been waging an aggressive campaign to pressure women into marriage. Single women are caricatured in news reports, editorials and social media. The orchestrated campaign is a byproduct of China’s one-child policy, which created a great gender imbalance in the population.
Ms. Qiu does all she can to comply with expectations and find a partner. But the search sometimes feels incompatible with the life she envisions for herself. When she goes on dates, she hears again and again how a woman’s place is at home. Her intellectual and professional achievements are irrelevant. She is measured only by traditional values. And so with every year that passes, her value in the marriage market diminishes.
Video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/opin ... 0920200211
Dating is hard. A government campaign to get you married is worse.
“Sheng nu” (“leftover women”) is a term used to describe single women who are 27 or older in China. Most of these women live in cities and lead rewarding professional lives. The term was coined in 2007 by a government organization responsible for the protection and promotion of women’s rights and policies. That same year, the Ministry of Education added “sheng nu” to the official lexicon.
In this Op-Doc, based on the Independent Lens feature documentary “Leftover Women,” we follow one of those women — Qiu Huamei, contending with the stigma and social pressure forcing her to go on a grueling quest in search of a husband. She grew up in a small village five hours south of Beijing and is the second youngest of five sisters. Ms. Qiu is a successful lawyer, fluent in English and opinionated — but those qualities do not outweigh one key flaw: She is not married.
In recent years, the Chinese government has been waging an aggressive campaign to pressure women into marriage. Single women are caricatured in news reports, editorials and social media. The orchestrated campaign is a byproduct of China’s one-child policy, which created a great gender imbalance in the population.
Ms. Qiu does all she can to comply with expectations and find a partner. But the search sometimes feels incompatible with the life she envisions for herself. When she goes on dates, she hears again and again how a woman’s place is at home. Her intellectual and professional achievements are irrelevant. She is measured only by traditional values. And so with every year that passes, her value in the marriage market diminishes.
Video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/opin ... 0920200211
What Women Who Criticize Plastic Surgery Don’t See
The “natural” body movement is unfairly exclusive.
Young black people have, in theory, embraced the concept of “body positivity,” which encourages self-love and acceptance of “natural” features. I wish this movement was a capacious one that not only critiqued unrealistic beauty standards but also embraced all kinds of bodies. Instead, it has been co-opted by women who uphold the status quo by celebrating only conventionally attractive bodies and policing how women can achieve them.
It may be surprising, but the conversation that dominates the body positivity movement is not about hair but about plastic surgery, which has become popular among black millennials, some of whom even go abroad for their procedures or seek underground alternatives to save money.
There are two factions in this conversation. On one side are women like Cardi B, who are candid about undergoing procedures to obtain exaggerated hourglass proportions. The beauty elites of black Instagram, Amber Rose, Blac Chyna and Summer Walker, have all acknowledged having surgical procedures, in some way or another. Plastic surgery, once the province of wealthy white women who sought to keep their procedures secret, is now a trend among black millennials.
On the other side, the much louder one, are those who are adamant that women should have only “natural” bodies. This camp has co-opted the language of body positivity to shame women, including Cardi B, who use plastic surgery to get hourglass figures. Those on #TeamNatural claim that the reality TV star Angela Simmons and the rappers Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion, who both described themselves as “natural,” have ideal bodies.
But these women are all conventionally attractive with flat stomachs and round derrières. The truth is, the adherents of #TeamNatural are upholding the beauty hierarchy that has always existed. They are content to keep the narrow body standard just wide enough to accommodate women like them, but not to radically challenge the standard itself.
The singer Lizzo, for example, is often praised for bringing much-needed plus-size representation to pop culture as a fat black woman. She is heralded for being confident and visible, despite her size. But I’ve never seen anyone bother to comment on whether her body is “natural.” And when she’s smeared with fatphobic comments, #TeamNatural doesn’t rush to her defense. Marginalized bodies — those that are fat, differently abled or trans — are notably absent from the natural camp’s rhetoric. It seems that the so-called honor of being natural seems to be reserved for bodies that uphold existing norms and ideals.
Like many of the things that millennials dive into, plastic surgery has been oversimplified as unnecessary, self-obsessed and harmful. But conventional plastic surgery is remarkably safe. Still, horror stories about women left disfigured or dead after undergoing black market surgeries occasionally go viral; people latch onto them as cautionary tales or exploit them in an effort to publicly shame others. Rather than encourage women to choose only safe options for surgery, those who oppose these procedures condemn women for wanting to pursue them in the first place.
I don’t think that the women who are staunchly against plastic surgery are worried about women’s health or self-esteem; I think they are motivated by fear that their pretty privilege — the benefits they get to enjoy for meeting those standards without the help of a doctor — is at risk. If beauty becomes democratized by more people simply paying surgeons for it, the proverbial finish line gets pushed further away. But upholding a limited body ideal and rewarding the cluster of folks closest to it isn’t the solution. Embracing autonomy and a variety of body aesthetics is.
The notion of beauty is fueled, in part, by exclusivity. Those relatively few who have it are revered. Whether we like it or not, we are all subject to privileges and disadvantages based on our appearance. We enhance ourselves with makeup, hair extensions and fake nails because we are all under pressure to achieve the unattainable standards of Beyoncé and the Kardashians. We adjust our bodies with shapewear and strategic clothing choices. Singling out plastic surgery as both unnecessary and unnatural is missing the bigger picture.
People with marginalized bodies are acutely aware of the consequences of not meeting the standards of physical beauty. Black women’s bodies are constantly policed, targeted for violence, marked as deviant or excessive and mined for cultural appropriation. Fatphobia, transphobia and ableism are part of our daily realities, especially for women of color.
While some of us choose a path of radical self-acceptance and reject the beauty ideals that we’ve been told we haven’t reached, many of us have instead found ways to leverage those standards for our own survival and success. We adopt certain beauty practices, from fake lashes to cheek fillers, in order to pass, to survive and to thrive.
There is no shame in any of these choices when the systems of oppression will always render black femme bodies less valuable than others. A ‘natural body’ movement that doesn’t include all of us is the real danger. We need to make room for weave, highlight and contour alongside wheelchairs, fatness and full 360 liposuction with Brazilian butt lifts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/opin ... 0920200305
The “natural” body movement is unfairly exclusive.
Young black people have, in theory, embraced the concept of “body positivity,” which encourages self-love and acceptance of “natural” features. I wish this movement was a capacious one that not only critiqued unrealistic beauty standards but also embraced all kinds of bodies. Instead, it has been co-opted by women who uphold the status quo by celebrating only conventionally attractive bodies and policing how women can achieve them.
It may be surprising, but the conversation that dominates the body positivity movement is not about hair but about plastic surgery, which has become popular among black millennials, some of whom even go abroad for their procedures or seek underground alternatives to save money.
There are two factions in this conversation. On one side are women like Cardi B, who are candid about undergoing procedures to obtain exaggerated hourglass proportions. The beauty elites of black Instagram, Amber Rose, Blac Chyna and Summer Walker, have all acknowledged having surgical procedures, in some way or another. Plastic surgery, once the province of wealthy white women who sought to keep their procedures secret, is now a trend among black millennials.
On the other side, the much louder one, are those who are adamant that women should have only “natural” bodies. This camp has co-opted the language of body positivity to shame women, including Cardi B, who use plastic surgery to get hourglass figures. Those on #TeamNatural claim that the reality TV star Angela Simmons and the rappers Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion, who both described themselves as “natural,” have ideal bodies.
But these women are all conventionally attractive with flat stomachs and round derrières. The truth is, the adherents of #TeamNatural are upholding the beauty hierarchy that has always existed. They are content to keep the narrow body standard just wide enough to accommodate women like them, but not to radically challenge the standard itself.
The singer Lizzo, for example, is often praised for bringing much-needed plus-size representation to pop culture as a fat black woman. She is heralded for being confident and visible, despite her size. But I’ve never seen anyone bother to comment on whether her body is “natural.” And when she’s smeared with fatphobic comments, #TeamNatural doesn’t rush to her defense. Marginalized bodies — those that are fat, differently abled or trans — are notably absent from the natural camp’s rhetoric. It seems that the so-called honor of being natural seems to be reserved for bodies that uphold existing norms and ideals.
Like many of the things that millennials dive into, plastic surgery has been oversimplified as unnecessary, self-obsessed and harmful. But conventional plastic surgery is remarkably safe. Still, horror stories about women left disfigured or dead after undergoing black market surgeries occasionally go viral; people latch onto them as cautionary tales or exploit them in an effort to publicly shame others. Rather than encourage women to choose only safe options for surgery, those who oppose these procedures condemn women for wanting to pursue them in the first place.
I don’t think that the women who are staunchly against plastic surgery are worried about women’s health or self-esteem; I think they are motivated by fear that their pretty privilege — the benefits they get to enjoy for meeting those standards without the help of a doctor — is at risk. If beauty becomes democratized by more people simply paying surgeons for it, the proverbial finish line gets pushed further away. But upholding a limited body ideal and rewarding the cluster of folks closest to it isn’t the solution. Embracing autonomy and a variety of body aesthetics is.
The notion of beauty is fueled, in part, by exclusivity. Those relatively few who have it are revered. Whether we like it or not, we are all subject to privileges and disadvantages based on our appearance. We enhance ourselves with makeup, hair extensions and fake nails because we are all under pressure to achieve the unattainable standards of Beyoncé and the Kardashians. We adjust our bodies with shapewear and strategic clothing choices. Singling out plastic surgery as both unnecessary and unnatural is missing the bigger picture.
People with marginalized bodies are acutely aware of the consequences of not meeting the standards of physical beauty. Black women’s bodies are constantly policed, targeted for violence, marked as deviant or excessive and mined for cultural appropriation. Fatphobia, transphobia and ableism are part of our daily realities, especially for women of color.
While some of us choose a path of radical self-acceptance and reject the beauty ideals that we’ve been told we haven’t reached, many of us have instead found ways to leverage those standards for our own survival and success. We adopt certain beauty practices, from fake lashes to cheek fillers, in order to pass, to survive and to thrive.
There is no shame in any of these choices when the systems of oppression will always render black femme bodies less valuable than others. A ‘natural body’ movement that doesn’t include all of us is the real danger. We need to make room for weave, highlight and contour alongside wheelchairs, fatness and full 360 liposuction with Brazilian butt lifts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/opin ... 0920200305
Our ‘Digital Selves’ Are No Less Real
‘Social distance socializing’ isn’t just a temporary stopgap. Online gatherings are the culmination of a broader shift.
Last week, I went to the opera with a few friends. We dressed up, exchanged pleasantries, and toasted with prosecco at intermission. A day later I went to my favorite queer singalong piano bar, Marie’s Crisis, in the West Village, tipping my favorite pianist, the regular Friday bartender. I planned a workout class with a friend who lived in the neighborhood, a brunch and play reading with a group of theatrically minded friends. I said Compline — a traditional Christian nighttime prayer — with friends from church.
I did not leave the house.
Over the past two weeks, as the first wave of closures of bars and restaurants gave way to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s full-on stay-at-home order, I’ve watched the contours of my social world move steadily, inexorably, into the digital. Some of this transformation is economic. Using videoconferencing platforms like Zoom or Facebook Messenger, friends and colleagues whose livelihoods have been affected by the spread of coronavirus and its attendant lockdowns, have sought out newly disembodied sources of income: A jazz musician I know is crowdfunding an E.P. on which every instrumentalist will self-record separately; a vintage hairstylist is offering video-conferenced hair and makeup tutorials. Local trainers are offering video-conferenced barre and yoga classes. Those of us who can work remotely do.
But, no less integrally, our social lives, too, are embracing through necessity the possibilities of digital presence. We live-stream films and operas (the Metropolitan Opera’s nightly free streaming options have become a highlight of my week) over Zoom. We meet for regular cocktail hours and cocktail breaks. We dial into the “happy hour” of our favorite bars — Marie’s Crisis offers its nightly song-request hour via Facebook Live, with Venmo details easily visible for all the staff that would be working that night. We keep in touch with our parish — which is posting videos of prerecorded services, and with friends through the practice becoming known as “Zoom Karaoke.”
It would be easy to dismiss the rise of “social distance socializing” as a product of pure necessity, a stopgap until we are, hopefully, able to safely congregate in person again. But these online gatherings are the culmination of a much broader cultural shift: the revelation that so much of our lives is already lived online. What we might call our “digital bodies” — our online avatars, the words we write on Twitter or Facebook, the photos we post on Instagram — are not artificial projections of who we are into an artificial space, but rather part and parcel of our identities. Our “digital bodies” are as much part of us as our legs or our fingers.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
‘Social distance socializing’ isn’t just a temporary stopgap. Online gatherings are the culmination of a broader shift.
Last week, I went to the opera with a few friends. We dressed up, exchanged pleasantries, and toasted with prosecco at intermission. A day later I went to my favorite queer singalong piano bar, Marie’s Crisis, in the West Village, tipping my favorite pianist, the regular Friday bartender. I planned a workout class with a friend who lived in the neighborhood, a brunch and play reading with a group of theatrically minded friends. I said Compline — a traditional Christian nighttime prayer — with friends from church.
I did not leave the house.
Over the past two weeks, as the first wave of closures of bars and restaurants gave way to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s full-on stay-at-home order, I’ve watched the contours of my social world move steadily, inexorably, into the digital. Some of this transformation is economic. Using videoconferencing platforms like Zoom or Facebook Messenger, friends and colleagues whose livelihoods have been affected by the spread of coronavirus and its attendant lockdowns, have sought out newly disembodied sources of income: A jazz musician I know is crowdfunding an E.P. on which every instrumentalist will self-record separately; a vintage hairstylist is offering video-conferenced hair and makeup tutorials. Local trainers are offering video-conferenced barre and yoga classes. Those of us who can work remotely do.
But, no less integrally, our social lives, too, are embracing through necessity the possibilities of digital presence. We live-stream films and operas (the Metropolitan Opera’s nightly free streaming options have become a highlight of my week) over Zoom. We meet for regular cocktail hours and cocktail breaks. We dial into the “happy hour” of our favorite bars — Marie’s Crisis offers its nightly song-request hour via Facebook Live, with Venmo details easily visible for all the staff that would be working that night. We keep in touch with our parish — which is posting videos of prerecorded services, and with friends through the practice becoming known as “Zoom Karaoke.”
It would be easy to dismiss the rise of “social distance socializing” as a product of pure necessity, a stopgap until we are, hopefully, able to safely congregate in person again. But these online gatherings are the culmination of a much broader cultural shift: the revelation that so much of our lives is already lived online. What we might call our “digital bodies” — our online avatars, the words we write on Twitter or Facebook, the photos we post on Instagram — are not artificial projections of who we are into an artificial space, but rather part and parcel of our identities. Our “digital bodies” are as much part of us as our legs or our fingers.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
America’s Biggest Cities Were Already Losing Their Allure. What Happens Next?
The urge among some residents to leave because of the coronavirus may be temporary. But it follows a deeper, more powerful demographic trend.
Even before the coronavirus, Nina Brajovic wasn’t so sure about her life in New York. As a consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers, she spent most weeks out of town traveling for work. She often wondered whether she could do her same job for cheaper — and more easily — while based in her hometown, Pittsburgh.
Over the past month, she has gotten a sneak peek of that life, moving back in with her parents to avoid the wall-to-wall density of New York and working out of her childhood bedroom. She is now savoring life’s slowness, eating her father’s soup and watching movies on an L-shaped couch with her mom.
“Part of it feels like, why am I even living in New York?” said Ms. Brajovic, 24, who pays $1,860 in rent each month for her share of an apartment with two roommates in Manhattan. “Why am I always paying all of this rent?”
With her lease up for renewal, she is contemplating whether to make the move more permanent.
“I have no idea what I am going to do,” said Ms. Brajovic. “But it is a thought in my mind: the potential of not going back.”
The pandemic has been particularly devastating to America’s biggest cities, as the virus has found fertile ground in the density that is otherwise prized. And it comes as the country’s major urban centers were already losing their appeal for many Americans, as skyrocketing rents and changes in the labor market have pushed the country’s youngest adults to suburbs and smaller cities often far from the coasts.
The country’s three largest metropolitan areas, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, all lost population in the past several years, according to an analysis by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. Even slightly smaller metro areas, like Houston, Washington, D.C., and Miami grew more slowly than before. In all, growth in the country’s major metropolitan areas fell by nearly half over the course of the past decade, Mr. Frey found.
Now, as local leaders contemplate how to reopen, the future of life in America’s biggest, most dense cities is unclear. Mayors are already warning of precipitous drops in tax revenue from joblessness. Public spaces like parks and buses, the central arteries of urban life, have become danger zones. And with vast numbers of professionals now working remotely, some may reconsider whether they need to live in the middle of a big city after all.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/us/c ... 778d3e6de3
The urge among some residents to leave because of the coronavirus may be temporary. But it follows a deeper, more powerful demographic trend.
Even before the coronavirus, Nina Brajovic wasn’t so sure about her life in New York. As a consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers, she spent most weeks out of town traveling for work. She often wondered whether she could do her same job for cheaper — and more easily — while based in her hometown, Pittsburgh.
Over the past month, she has gotten a sneak peek of that life, moving back in with her parents to avoid the wall-to-wall density of New York and working out of her childhood bedroom. She is now savoring life’s slowness, eating her father’s soup and watching movies on an L-shaped couch with her mom.
“Part of it feels like, why am I even living in New York?” said Ms. Brajovic, 24, who pays $1,860 in rent each month for her share of an apartment with two roommates in Manhattan. “Why am I always paying all of this rent?”
With her lease up for renewal, she is contemplating whether to make the move more permanent.
“I have no idea what I am going to do,” said Ms. Brajovic. “But it is a thought in my mind: the potential of not going back.”
The pandemic has been particularly devastating to America’s biggest cities, as the virus has found fertile ground in the density that is otherwise prized. And it comes as the country’s major urban centers were already losing their appeal for many Americans, as skyrocketing rents and changes in the labor market have pushed the country’s youngest adults to suburbs and smaller cities often far from the coasts.
The country’s three largest metropolitan areas, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, all lost population in the past several years, according to an analysis by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. Even slightly smaller metro areas, like Houston, Washington, D.C., and Miami grew more slowly than before. In all, growth in the country’s major metropolitan areas fell by nearly half over the course of the past decade, Mr. Frey found.
Now, as local leaders contemplate how to reopen, the future of life in America’s biggest, most dense cities is unclear. Mayors are already warning of precipitous drops in tax revenue from joblessness. Public spaces like parks and buses, the central arteries of urban life, have become danger zones. And with vast numbers of professionals now working remotely, some may reconsider whether they need to live in the middle of a big city after all.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/us/c ... 778d3e6de3
What’s Really Behind the Gender Gap in Covid-19 Deaths?
When in doubt, look to social factors first, not biology.
More men than women are dying of Covid-19. The numbers are striking. In Italy, men in their 50s died at four times the rate of women in their 50s. Globally, twice as many men than women may be dying of Covid-19.
When a sex difference is observed with some magnitude in deaths across diverse populations, it is commonly assumed that factors in women’s and men’s bodies drive the difference. This assumption has even led some clinicians to experiment with injecting estrogen into men suffering from Covid-19. However, early indicators and past experience with similar diseases suggest that social and other demographic factors, including age, race or ethnicity and class, and comorbidities, not sex, most likely explain a far greater portion of variation in Covid-19 outcomes between women and men. Appreciating the role of these factors is important, because understanding what’s really driving these outcomes helps better target both the research and the public health efforts that can save lives.
As we report this week, emerging Covid-19 data already shows an important role for social context in generating sex disparities. In Connecticut and Massachusetts there is no sex difference in confirmed Covid-19 fatalities, while in New York and Florida, men account for about 60 percent of Covid-19 deaths. Globally, the male-to-female death ratio varies from a staggering 2:1 in the Netherlands to 1:1 in Iran and Canada. It’s too early to say what accounts for these levels of variation; what they do seem to indicate is that sex difference alone isn’t meaningful without incorporating other factors.
During the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, with which the coronavirus pandemic has been widely compared, men also died in larger numbers in many places. But this wasn’t because of sex alone. It was because of sex and gender-related differences in both occupations — a social variable — and pre-existing health conditions. During the Spanish flu, men in the military and unskilled manual laborers working outside the home died at far higher rates than the general population, probably because they had less freedom to engage in social distancing; it’s noteworthy that nonmilitary and upper-class males perished at rates similar to women overall. For similar social reasons — they were less able to social distance than women — men in 1918 already carried a significantly higher burden of tuberculosis relative to women when the pandemic began. This, when combined with influenza-induced pneumonia, proved deadly.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
When in doubt, look to social factors first, not biology.
More men than women are dying of Covid-19. The numbers are striking. In Italy, men in their 50s died at four times the rate of women in their 50s. Globally, twice as many men than women may be dying of Covid-19.
When a sex difference is observed with some magnitude in deaths across diverse populations, it is commonly assumed that factors in women’s and men’s bodies drive the difference. This assumption has even led some clinicians to experiment with injecting estrogen into men suffering from Covid-19. However, early indicators and past experience with similar diseases suggest that social and other demographic factors, including age, race or ethnicity and class, and comorbidities, not sex, most likely explain a far greater portion of variation in Covid-19 outcomes between women and men. Appreciating the role of these factors is important, because understanding what’s really driving these outcomes helps better target both the research and the public health efforts that can save lives.
As we report this week, emerging Covid-19 data already shows an important role for social context in generating sex disparities. In Connecticut and Massachusetts there is no sex difference in confirmed Covid-19 fatalities, while in New York and Florida, men account for about 60 percent of Covid-19 deaths. Globally, the male-to-female death ratio varies from a staggering 2:1 in the Netherlands to 1:1 in Iran and Canada. It’s too early to say what accounts for these levels of variation; what they do seem to indicate is that sex difference alone isn’t meaningful without incorporating other factors.
During the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, with which the coronavirus pandemic has been widely compared, men also died in larger numbers in many places. But this wasn’t because of sex alone. It was because of sex and gender-related differences in both occupations — a social variable — and pre-existing health conditions. During the Spanish flu, men in the military and unskilled manual laborers working outside the home died at far higher rates than the general population, probably because they had less freedom to engage in social distancing; it’s noteworthy that nonmilitary and upper-class males perished at rates similar to women overall. For similar social reasons — they were less able to social distance than women — men in 1918 already carried a significantly higher burden of tuberculosis relative to women when the pandemic began. This, when combined with influenza-induced pneumonia, proved deadly.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Study of 17 Million Identifies Crucial Risk Factors for Coronavirus Deaths
The largest study yet confirms that race, ethnicity, age and sex can raise a person’s chances of dying from Covid-19.
An analysis of more than 17 million people in England — the largest study of its kind, according to its authors — has pinpointed a bevy of factors that can raise a person’s chances of dying from Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
The paper, published Wednesday in Nature, echoes reports from other countries that identify older people, men, racial and ethnic minorities, and those with underlying health conditions among the more vulnerable populations.
“This highlights a lot of what we already know about Covid-19,” said Uchechi Mitchell, a public health expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was not involved in the study. “But a lot of science is about repetition. The size of the study alone is a strength, and there is a need to continue documenting disparities.”
The researchers mined a trove of de-identified data that included health records from about 40 percent of England’s population, collected by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. Of 17,278,392 adults tracked over three months, 10,926 reportedly died of Covid-19 or Covid-19-related complications.
“A lot of previous work has focused on patients that present at hospital,” said Dr. Ben Goldacre of the University of Oxford, one of the authors on the study. “That’s useful and important, but we wanted to get a clear sense of the risks as an everyday person. Our starting pool is literally everybody.”
Dr. Goldacre’s team found that patients older than 80 were at least 20 times more likely to die from Covid-19 than those in their 50s, and hundreds of times more likely to die than those below the age of 40. The scale of this relationship was “jaw-dropping,” Dr. Goldacre said.
Additionally, men stricken with the virus had a higher likelihood of dying than women of the same age. Medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes, severe asthma and compromised immunity were also linked to poor outcomes, in keeping with guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. And the researchers noted that a person’s chances of dying also tended to track with socioeconomic factors like poverty.
The data roughly mirror what has been observed around the world and are not necessarily surprising, said Avonne Connor, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study. But seeing these patterns emerge in a staggeringly large data set “is astounding” and “adds another layer to depicting who is at risk” during this pandemic, Dr. Connor said.
Particularly compelling were the study’s findings on race and ethnicity, said Sharrelle Barber, an epidemiologist at Drexel University who was not involved in the study. Roughly 11 percent of the patients tracked by the analysis identified as nonwhite. The researchers found that these individuals — particularly Black and South Asian people — were at higher risk of dying from Covid-19 than white patients.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/heal ... 778d3e6de3
The largest study yet confirms that race, ethnicity, age and sex can raise a person’s chances of dying from Covid-19.
An analysis of more than 17 million people in England — the largest study of its kind, according to its authors — has pinpointed a bevy of factors that can raise a person’s chances of dying from Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
The paper, published Wednesday in Nature, echoes reports from other countries that identify older people, men, racial and ethnic minorities, and those with underlying health conditions among the more vulnerable populations.
“This highlights a lot of what we already know about Covid-19,” said Uchechi Mitchell, a public health expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was not involved in the study. “But a lot of science is about repetition. The size of the study alone is a strength, and there is a need to continue documenting disparities.”
The researchers mined a trove of de-identified data that included health records from about 40 percent of England’s population, collected by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. Of 17,278,392 adults tracked over three months, 10,926 reportedly died of Covid-19 or Covid-19-related complications.
“A lot of previous work has focused on patients that present at hospital,” said Dr. Ben Goldacre of the University of Oxford, one of the authors on the study. “That’s useful and important, but we wanted to get a clear sense of the risks as an everyday person. Our starting pool is literally everybody.”
Dr. Goldacre’s team found that patients older than 80 were at least 20 times more likely to die from Covid-19 than those in their 50s, and hundreds of times more likely to die than those below the age of 40. The scale of this relationship was “jaw-dropping,” Dr. Goldacre said.
Additionally, men stricken with the virus had a higher likelihood of dying than women of the same age. Medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes, severe asthma and compromised immunity were also linked to poor outcomes, in keeping with guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. And the researchers noted that a person’s chances of dying also tended to track with socioeconomic factors like poverty.
The data roughly mirror what has been observed around the world and are not necessarily surprising, said Avonne Connor, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study. But seeing these patterns emerge in a staggeringly large data set “is astounding” and “adds another layer to depicting who is at risk” during this pandemic, Dr. Connor said.
Particularly compelling were the study’s findings on race and ethnicity, said Sharrelle Barber, an epidemiologist at Drexel University who was not involved in the study. Roughly 11 percent of the patients tracked by the analysis identified as nonwhite. The researchers found that these individuals — particularly Black and South Asian people — were at higher risk of dying from Covid-19 than white patients.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/heal ... 778d3e6de3
The Fight for Fertility Equality
A movement has formed around the idea that one’s ability to build a family should not be determined by wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.
While plenty of New Yorkers have formed families by gestational surrogacy, they almost certainly worked with carriers living elsewhere. Because until early April, paying a surrogate to carry a pregnancy was illegal in New York state.
The change to the law, which happened quietly in the midst of the state’s effort to contain the coronavirus, capped a decade-long legislative battle and has laid the groundwork for a broader movement in pursuit of what some activists have termed “fertility equality.”
Still in its infancy, this movement envisions a future when the ability to create a family is no longer determined by one’s wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.
“This is about society extending equality to its final and logical conclusion,” said Ron Poole-Dayan, the founder and executive director of Men Having Babies, a New York nonprofit that helps gay men become fathers through surrogacy. “True equality doesn’t stop at marriage. It recognizes the barriers L.G.B.T.s face in forming families and proposes solutions to overcome these obstacles.”
The movement is led mostly by L.B.G.T.Q. people, but its potential to shift how fertility coverage is paid for could have an impact on straight couples who rely on surrogates too.
Mr. Poole-Dayan and others believe infertility should not be defined as a physical condition but a social one. They argue that people — gay, straight, single, married, male, female — are not infertile because their bodies refuse to cooperate with baby making.
Rather, their specific life circumstances, like being a man with a same-sex partner, have rendered them unable to conceive or carry a child to term without medical intervention. A category of “social infertility” would provide those biologically unable to form families with the legal and medical mechanisms to do so.
“We have this idea that infertility is about failing to become pregnant through intercourse, but this is a very hetero-centric viewpoint,” said Catherine Sakimura, the deputy director and family law director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “We must shift our thinking so that the need for assisted reproductive technologies is not a condition, but simply a fact.”
Fertility equality activists are asking, at a minimum, for insurance companies to cover reproductive procedures like sperm retrieval, egg donation and embryo creation for all prospective parents, including gay couples who use surrogates. Ideally, activists would also like to see insurance cover embryo transfers and surrogacy fees. This would include gay men who would transfer benefits directly to their surrogate.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/styl ... 778d3e6de3
A movement has formed around the idea that one’s ability to build a family should not be determined by wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.
While plenty of New Yorkers have formed families by gestational surrogacy, they almost certainly worked with carriers living elsewhere. Because until early April, paying a surrogate to carry a pregnancy was illegal in New York state.
The change to the law, which happened quietly in the midst of the state’s effort to contain the coronavirus, capped a decade-long legislative battle and has laid the groundwork for a broader movement in pursuit of what some activists have termed “fertility equality.”
Still in its infancy, this movement envisions a future when the ability to create a family is no longer determined by one’s wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.
“This is about society extending equality to its final and logical conclusion,” said Ron Poole-Dayan, the founder and executive director of Men Having Babies, a New York nonprofit that helps gay men become fathers through surrogacy. “True equality doesn’t stop at marriage. It recognizes the barriers L.G.B.T.s face in forming families and proposes solutions to overcome these obstacles.”
The movement is led mostly by L.B.G.T.Q. people, but its potential to shift how fertility coverage is paid for could have an impact on straight couples who rely on surrogates too.
Mr. Poole-Dayan and others believe infertility should not be defined as a physical condition but a social one. They argue that people — gay, straight, single, married, male, female — are not infertile because their bodies refuse to cooperate with baby making.
Rather, their specific life circumstances, like being a man with a same-sex partner, have rendered them unable to conceive or carry a child to term without medical intervention. A category of “social infertility” would provide those biologically unable to form families with the legal and medical mechanisms to do so.
“We have this idea that infertility is about failing to become pregnant through intercourse, but this is a very hetero-centric viewpoint,” said Catherine Sakimura, the deputy director and family law director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “We must shift our thinking so that the need for assisted reproductive technologies is not a condition, but simply a fact.”
Fertility equality activists are asking, at a minimum, for insurance companies to cover reproductive procedures like sperm retrieval, egg donation and embryo creation for all prospective parents, including gay couples who use surrogates. Ideally, activists would also like to see insurance cover embryo transfers and surrogacy fees. This would include gay men who would transfer benefits directly to their surrogate.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/styl ... 778d3e6de3
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swamidada_2
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- Joined: Mon Aug 19, 2019 8:18 pm
01:24 GMT, Jul 29, 2020
Netanyahu's son apologizes for offending Hindus with photoshopped meme of goddess giving the middle finger
28 Jul, 2020 15:35
Yair Netanyahu (far right) shared the controversial meme (left) on Twitter. © THOMAS COEX / AFP
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s eldest son Yair has once again been forced to apologize for an untoward tweet, after he shared a meme of the Hindu goddess Durga making a rude gesture.
In the meme, the face of Liat Ben Ari, the prosecutor in one of his father’s ongoing corruption cases, has been superimposed on the body of the multi-armed Hindu goddess of war.
The goddess’ many arms were photoshopped to flip the bird, while Attorney General Avichai Mandelbit’s face was placed on a tiger at her feet, alongside a caption that read “Know your place you despicable people.”
RT
© Twitter/ Yair Netanyahu
“I’ve tweeted a meme from a satirical page, criticizing political figures in Israel. I didn’t realize the meme also portrayed an image connected to the majestic Hindu faith. As soon as I realised it from comments of our Indian friends, I have removed the tweet. I apologize,” Netanyahu said, before tweeting a pandering nationalist slogan used throughout India.
Ben Ari is the presiding judge in the case against Netanyahu senior, who stands accused of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes. The Israeli prime minister would likely have been vexed by his son’s nonchalant social media posts, as he has made strengthening ties with India one of his top foreign-policy priorities.
ALSO ON RT.COM
Netanyahu advises Israelis to use India's ancient 'Namaste' greeting to fend off germs amid coronavirus epidemic
Yair, who is Netanyahu's eldest son, has become known for repeated, high-profile social media gaffes in recent years. Some of his noted controversies include insinuating that a top TV news anchor had slept her way to the top, as well as shaming a female supporter of his father’s political rival Benny Gantz.
He also called a police chief autistic, claimed the Knesset speaker was plotting a coup and has been embroiled in multiple libel suits, both as a plaintiff and a defendant.
https://www.rt.com/news/496440-netanyah ... ng-hindus/
Netanyahu's son apologizes for offending Hindus with photoshopped meme of goddess giving the middle finger
28 Jul, 2020 15:35
Yair Netanyahu (far right) shared the controversial meme (left) on Twitter. © THOMAS COEX / AFP
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s eldest son Yair has once again been forced to apologize for an untoward tweet, after he shared a meme of the Hindu goddess Durga making a rude gesture.
In the meme, the face of Liat Ben Ari, the prosecutor in one of his father’s ongoing corruption cases, has been superimposed on the body of the multi-armed Hindu goddess of war.
The goddess’ many arms were photoshopped to flip the bird, while Attorney General Avichai Mandelbit’s face was placed on a tiger at her feet, alongside a caption that read “Know your place you despicable people.”
RT
© Twitter/ Yair Netanyahu
“I’ve tweeted a meme from a satirical page, criticizing political figures in Israel. I didn’t realize the meme also portrayed an image connected to the majestic Hindu faith. As soon as I realised it from comments of our Indian friends, I have removed the tweet. I apologize,” Netanyahu said, before tweeting a pandering nationalist slogan used throughout India.
Ben Ari is the presiding judge in the case against Netanyahu senior, who stands accused of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes. The Israeli prime minister would likely have been vexed by his son’s nonchalant social media posts, as he has made strengthening ties with India one of his top foreign-policy priorities.
ALSO ON RT.COM
Netanyahu advises Israelis to use India's ancient 'Namaste' greeting to fend off germs amid coronavirus epidemic
Yair, who is Netanyahu's eldest son, has become known for repeated, high-profile social media gaffes in recent years. Some of his noted controversies include insinuating that a top TV news anchor had slept her way to the top, as well as shaming a female supporter of his father’s political rival Benny Gantz.
He also called a police chief autistic, claimed the Knesset speaker was plotting a coup and has been embroiled in multiple libel suits, both as a plaintiff and a defendant.
https://www.rt.com/news/496440-netanyah ... ng-hindus/
The Poly-Parent Households Are Coming
We’re on the cusp of a technological revolution in baby making. What it means to be a family could be next.
Consider the following scenario: Anna and Nicole, 36 and 39 years old, have been close friends since college. They each dated various men throughout their twenties and thirties, and had a smattering of romantic relationships that didn’t quite work out. But now, as they approach midlife, both women have grown weary of the merry-go-round of online dating and of searching for men who might — or might not — make appropriate fathers for the babies they don’t yet have. Both Anna and Nicole want children. They want to raise those children in a stable, nurturing environment, and to continue the legacy of their own parents and grandparents. And so they decide to have a baby — a baby that is genetically their own — together.
Such an idea may sound fantastical. But technologies that could enable two women (or two men, or four unrelated people of any sex) to conceive a child together are already under development. If these technologies move eventually from the laboratory into clinical use, and the history of assisted fertility suggests they can and they will, then couples — or rather, co-parents — like Anna and Nicole are likely to reshape some of our most fundamental ideas about what it takes to make a baby, and a family.
To date, most major advances in assisted reproduction have been tweaks on the basic process of sexual reproduction. Artificial insemination brought sperm toward egg through a different, nonsexual channel. I.V.F. mixed them together outside the woman’s body. Little things, really, in the broader sweep of life.
And yet even these have had profound consequences. Humans are reproducing in ways that would have been truly unimaginable just several decades ago: Two men and a surrogate. Two women and a sperm donor. An older woman using genetic material from a much younger egg.
Each turn of the technological screw has been generated by the same profound impulse — to allow people to conceive babies they desperately want, and to build families with those they love. Each development has, in many ways, been deeply conservative, intended to extend or re-create life’s most basic process of production. But as these technologies have expanded and evolved, their impact has become far more revolutionary; they’ve forced us to reconceptualize just what a family means, and what it can be.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/opin ... ogin-email
We’re on the cusp of a technological revolution in baby making. What it means to be a family could be next.
Consider the following scenario: Anna and Nicole, 36 and 39 years old, have been close friends since college. They each dated various men throughout their twenties and thirties, and had a smattering of romantic relationships that didn’t quite work out. But now, as they approach midlife, both women have grown weary of the merry-go-round of online dating and of searching for men who might — or might not — make appropriate fathers for the babies they don’t yet have. Both Anna and Nicole want children. They want to raise those children in a stable, nurturing environment, and to continue the legacy of their own parents and grandparents. And so they decide to have a baby — a baby that is genetically their own — together.
Such an idea may sound fantastical. But technologies that could enable two women (or two men, or four unrelated people of any sex) to conceive a child together are already under development. If these technologies move eventually from the laboratory into clinical use, and the history of assisted fertility suggests they can and they will, then couples — or rather, co-parents — like Anna and Nicole are likely to reshape some of our most fundamental ideas about what it takes to make a baby, and a family.
To date, most major advances in assisted reproduction have been tweaks on the basic process of sexual reproduction. Artificial insemination brought sperm toward egg through a different, nonsexual channel. I.V.F. mixed them together outside the woman’s body. Little things, really, in the broader sweep of life.
And yet even these have had profound consequences. Humans are reproducing in ways that would have been truly unimaginable just several decades ago: Two men and a surrogate. Two women and a sperm donor. An older woman using genetic material from a much younger egg.
Each turn of the technological screw has been generated by the same profound impulse — to allow people to conceive babies they desperately want, and to build families with those they love. Each development has, in many ways, been deeply conservative, intended to extend or re-create life’s most basic process of production. But as these technologies have expanded and evolved, their impact has become far more revolutionary; they’ve forced us to reconceptualize just what a family means, and what it can be.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/opin ... ogin-email
HOW CLIMATE MIGRATION WILL RESHAPE AMERICA
August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air-conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth — 130 degrees in Death Valley — and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire.
This article, the second in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Read Part 1.
Over the next two weeks, 900 blazes incinerated six times as much land as all the state’s 2019 wildfires combined, forcing 100,000 people from their homes. Three of the largest fires in history burned simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. Another fire burned just 12 miles from my home in Marin County. I watched as towering plumes of smoke billowed from distant hills in all directions and air tankers crisscrossed the skies. Like many Californians, I spent those weeks worrying about what might happen next, wondering how long it would be before an inferno of 60-foot flames swept up the steep, grassy hillside on its way toward my own house, rehearsing in my mind what my family would do to escape.
But I also had a longer-term question, about what would happen once this unprecedented fire season ended. Was it finally time to leave for good?
I had an unusual perspective on the matter. For two years, I have been studying how climate change will influence global migration. My sense was that of all the devastating consequences of a warming planet — changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions — the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most important. I traveled across four countries to witness how rising temperatures were driving climate refugees away from some of the poorest and hottest parts of the world. I had also helped create an enormous computer simulation to analyze how global demographics might shift, and now I was working on a data-mapping project about migration here in the United States.
So it was with some sense of recognition that I faced the fires these last few weeks. In recent years, summer has brought a season of fear to California, with ever-worsening wildfires closing in. But this year felt different. The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear, and the pandemic had already uprooted so many Americans. Relocation no longer seemed like such a distant prospect. Like the subjects of my reporting, climate change had found me, its indiscriminate forces erasing all semblance of normalcy. Suddenly I had to ask myself the very question I’d been asking others: Was it time to move?
I am far from the only American facing such questions. This summer has seen more fires, more heat, more storms — all of it making life increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation. Already, droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West, while destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas to Maryland, collapsing dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands of miles of American shoreline nearly uninhabitable. As California burned, Hurricane Laura pounded the Louisiana coast with 150-mile-an-hour winds, killing at least 25 people; it was the 12th named storm to form by that point in 2020, another record. Phoenix, meanwhile, endured 53 days of 110-degree heat — 20 more days than the previous record.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... ogin-email
August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air-conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth — 130 degrees in Death Valley — and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire.
This article, the second in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Read Part 1.
Over the next two weeks, 900 blazes incinerated six times as much land as all the state’s 2019 wildfires combined, forcing 100,000 people from their homes. Three of the largest fires in history burned simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. Another fire burned just 12 miles from my home in Marin County. I watched as towering plumes of smoke billowed from distant hills in all directions and air tankers crisscrossed the skies. Like many Californians, I spent those weeks worrying about what might happen next, wondering how long it would be before an inferno of 60-foot flames swept up the steep, grassy hillside on its way toward my own house, rehearsing in my mind what my family would do to escape.
But I also had a longer-term question, about what would happen once this unprecedented fire season ended. Was it finally time to leave for good?
I had an unusual perspective on the matter. For two years, I have been studying how climate change will influence global migration. My sense was that of all the devastating consequences of a warming planet — changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions — the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most important. I traveled across four countries to witness how rising temperatures were driving climate refugees away from some of the poorest and hottest parts of the world. I had also helped create an enormous computer simulation to analyze how global demographics might shift, and now I was working on a data-mapping project about migration here in the United States.
So it was with some sense of recognition that I faced the fires these last few weeks. In recent years, summer has brought a season of fear to California, with ever-worsening wildfires closing in. But this year felt different. The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear, and the pandemic had already uprooted so many Americans. Relocation no longer seemed like such a distant prospect. Like the subjects of my reporting, climate change had found me, its indiscriminate forces erasing all semblance of normalcy. Suddenly I had to ask myself the very question I’d been asking others: Was it time to move?
I am far from the only American facing such questions. This summer has seen more fires, more heat, more storms — all of it making life increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation. Already, droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West, while destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas to Maryland, collapsing dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands of miles of American shoreline nearly uninhabitable. As California burned, Hurricane Laura pounded the Louisiana coast with 150-mile-an-hour winds, killing at least 25 people; it was the 12th named storm to form by that point in 2020, another record. Phoenix, meanwhile, endured 53 days of 110-degree heat — 20 more days than the previous record.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... ogin-email
Considering a Coronavirus Divorce? You’re in Good Company
A lot of families are going to need restructuring by the time this is over. They probably needed it before.
One of the few good things about a deadly pandemic is that if you are a person who enjoys talking on the phone, as I am, you will now have lots of time to do this, far more time than you did during regular life.
When I was a teenager, it was always a challenge to find the time and space for phone calls. Somehow my parents always seemed to have something important to do in the room where I was talking. After I got married, my husband would get annoyed by my phone talking.
So it’s only recently that I find myself talking on the phone as much as I want, in part because of Covid-19 and in part because, shortly after our lockdown began, my husband, Pete, moved across the street and we began the process of divorce.
Our two kids spend half their time in their father’s home and half their time in mine, wandering between the two houses as though we are living in some kind of kibbutz. When the kids are with me, I try to give them my full attention. When they’re not, I can talk to my friends while I walk the dog or mow the lawn, while I cook or fold laundry or empty the dishwasher. After a while, it begins to feel as though my friends are with me here in my house, rather than marooned on the other side of town or in faraway states.
Sometimes I get a lot done while I talk to them, but other times, I’ll sit on the back porch and smoke a cigarette in plain sight of all the neighbors, which is also a thing you get to do when you’re a divorced woman, even if it brings on a migraine. When you’re divorced, you’re free to smoke and induce your own migraine without anyone saying anything about it.
Also, no one can ask you what you’ve been talking about on the phone for two hours. No one can ask why you have so much to say to the people you don’t live with. No one can hover nearby or wonder aloud if, at some point in the near future, you plan on rejoining the family unit. When you’re divorced, you’re no longer a part of a family unit, or really, of any unit at all. You become a unit unto yourself.
“Maybe I should get divorced, too,” a few of my still-married friends have said during our pandemic phone calls. “Just to get a few hours alone.” Some of them are joking and some of them are half-joking and some are not joking at all.
It’s too soon to say for sure what effect the pandemic will have on divorce rates. I know there are many couples who are going through hard times and just can’t afford to split up. But my lawyer, a very nice woman who is trying to maintain her law practice while raising three children who have been remote schooling for the past six months, says that for her, business is booming.
When I asked her if people find it depressing when she tells them what she does, she said, “I don’t call myself a divorce lawyer. I say that I work in family restructuring.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/opin ... 778d3e6de3
A lot of families are going to need restructuring by the time this is over. They probably needed it before.
One of the few good things about a deadly pandemic is that if you are a person who enjoys talking on the phone, as I am, you will now have lots of time to do this, far more time than you did during regular life.
When I was a teenager, it was always a challenge to find the time and space for phone calls. Somehow my parents always seemed to have something important to do in the room where I was talking. After I got married, my husband would get annoyed by my phone talking.
So it’s only recently that I find myself talking on the phone as much as I want, in part because of Covid-19 and in part because, shortly after our lockdown began, my husband, Pete, moved across the street and we began the process of divorce.
Our two kids spend half their time in their father’s home and half their time in mine, wandering between the two houses as though we are living in some kind of kibbutz. When the kids are with me, I try to give them my full attention. When they’re not, I can talk to my friends while I walk the dog or mow the lawn, while I cook or fold laundry or empty the dishwasher. After a while, it begins to feel as though my friends are with me here in my house, rather than marooned on the other side of town or in faraway states.
Sometimes I get a lot done while I talk to them, but other times, I’ll sit on the back porch and smoke a cigarette in plain sight of all the neighbors, which is also a thing you get to do when you’re a divorced woman, even if it brings on a migraine. When you’re divorced, you’re free to smoke and induce your own migraine without anyone saying anything about it.
Also, no one can ask you what you’ve been talking about on the phone for two hours. No one can ask why you have so much to say to the people you don’t live with. No one can hover nearby or wonder aloud if, at some point in the near future, you plan on rejoining the family unit. When you’re divorced, you’re no longer a part of a family unit, or really, of any unit at all. You become a unit unto yourself.
“Maybe I should get divorced, too,” a few of my still-married friends have said during our pandemic phone calls. “Just to get a few hours alone.” Some of them are joking and some of them are half-joking and some are not joking at all.
It’s too soon to say for sure what effect the pandemic will have on divorce rates. I know there are many couples who are going through hard times and just can’t afford to split up. But my lawyer, a very nice woman who is trying to maintain her law practice while raising three children who have been remote schooling for the past six months, says that for her, business is booming.
When I asked her if people find it depressing when she tells them what she does, she said, “I don’t call myself a divorce lawyer. I say that I work in family restructuring.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Muslim school girl feels 'bullied' after school sent her home for wearing a skirt that was 'too long'
Jamie Johnson
The Telegraph Mon, January 11, 2021, 12:09 PM CST
A Muslim schoolgirl says she is being “bullied” for her religious beliefs after she was sent home from school for wearing a skirt that was “too long” and her parents were threatened with legal action.
Siham Hamud, 12, says she was sent home from Uxbridge High School every single day during term time in December and told to come back with a shorter, school-issue skirt.
The young girl’s father, Idris, said that his family follow a traditional branch of Islam, which means they "want to believe in their religion in a pure way", which means women should only wear long skirts.
Because of these beliefs, Siham refused to return to class in a shorter skirt, and now the school has threatened the family with legal action for her unauthorised absences.
Siham, who is currently studying from home due to Covid lockdown restrictions, said: "It feels like bullying because of what I believe.
"I think they should just let me wear my school uniform to school.
"I like school normally, and English, drama and RE are my favourite lessons but I couldn't attend.
"I find it annoying because I've missed a month of school, so I have to catch up a lot. I wish I could just have gone to school as normal.
"It makes me feel left out, because I can't see my friends either. They aren't accepting me for my religion and that's wrong.
"I feel confused and annoyed that I can't wear what I want for my religion. I hope they'll change their rules so that girls like me wear skirts to school."
Idris, an athletics coach, added: "My daughter is being denied an education because of her religious beliefs.
"All Siham wants to do is to wear a skirt which is a few centimetres longer than her classmates - and I don't know why the school has such a problem with this.
"She is sent home to change into a shorter skirt then return to school later that day - but she isn't going to change her beliefs in an hour.
"The school is threatening to take legal action against me, but I'm not forcing her to wear a longer skirt - it's her faith and her decision to make.
"She used to love school, but now she goes to school crying because of this - it's heartbreaking."
Siham’s older sisters Sumayyah, 19, and Ilham, 17, both wore longer skirts to school without issue, but new rules brought in two years ago state that school-branded skirts or trousers must be worn.
The school sent her parents a letter threatening legal action against them for their daughter's alleged unauthorised absences on December 9.
It said: "Siham's absence is being recorded as unauthorised. Unauthorised absence may result in a fine being issued, or legal action being taken against the adults who have parental responsibility or day-to-day care of your child.
"Legal action can be in the form of a penalty notice or a summons to the magistrates' court.
"I must ask that you support the school and your daughter by ensuring that she attends school in full school uniform with immediate effect."
But Mr Hamud says he will fight any action taken.
"Siham makes her own decisions about her religion, and I can't make her wear clothes she doesn't want to wear, so neither should the school,” he said.
"She is being denied an education because of her religious beliefs, and I don't know how anyone can get away with that."
While Siham has been learning from home since the new term began, Mr Hamud expects the issue to return once face-to-face teaching resumes.
He said the issue is due to be discussed on a complaints panel with the school governors later this month.
The school's principal, Nigel Clemens, said: "This matter is currently subject to examination through the formal school complaints policy. It would therefore not be appropriate to comment further at this time."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mu ... 04756.html
Jamie Johnson
The Telegraph Mon, January 11, 2021, 12:09 PM CST
A Muslim schoolgirl says she is being “bullied” for her religious beliefs after she was sent home from school for wearing a skirt that was “too long” and her parents were threatened with legal action.
Siham Hamud, 12, says she was sent home from Uxbridge High School every single day during term time in December and told to come back with a shorter, school-issue skirt.
The young girl’s father, Idris, said that his family follow a traditional branch of Islam, which means they "want to believe in their religion in a pure way", which means women should only wear long skirts.
Because of these beliefs, Siham refused to return to class in a shorter skirt, and now the school has threatened the family with legal action for her unauthorised absences.
Siham, who is currently studying from home due to Covid lockdown restrictions, said: "It feels like bullying because of what I believe.
"I think they should just let me wear my school uniform to school.
"I like school normally, and English, drama and RE are my favourite lessons but I couldn't attend.
"I find it annoying because I've missed a month of school, so I have to catch up a lot. I wish I could just have gone to school as normal.
"It makes me feel left out, because I can't see my friends either. They aren't accepting me for my religion and that's wrong.
"I feel confused and annoyed that I can't wear what I want for my religion. I hope they'll change their rules so that girls like me wear skirts to school."
Idris, an athletics coach, added: "My daughter is being denied an education because of her religious beliefs.
"All Siham wants to do is to wear a skirt which is a few centimetres longer than her classmates - and I don't know why the school has such a problem with this.
"She is sent home to change into a shorter skirt then return to school later that day - but she isn't going to change her beliefs in an hour.
"The school is threatening to take legal action against me, but I'm not forcing her to wear a longer skirt - it's her faith and her decision to make.
"She used to love school, but now she goes to school crying because of this - it's heartbreaking."
Siham’s older sisters Sumayyah, 19, and Ilham, 17, both wore longer skirts to school without issue, but new rules brought in two years ago state that school-branded skirts or trousers must be worn.
The school sent her parents a letter threatening legal action against them for their daughter's alleged unauthorised absences on December 9.
It said: "Siham's absence is being recorded as unauthorised. Unauthorised absence may result in a fine being issued, or legal action being taken against the adults who have parental responsibility or day-to-day care of your child.
"Legal action can be in the form of a penalty notice or a summons to the magistrates' court.
"I must ask that you support the school and your daughter by ensuring that she attends school in full school uniform with immediate effect."
But Mr Hamud says he will fight any action taken.
"Siham makes her own decisions about her religion, and I can't make her wear clothes she doesn't want to wear, so neither should the school,” he said.
"She is being denied an education because of her religious beliefs, and I don't know how anyone can get away with that."
While Siham has been learning from home since the new term began, Mr Hamud expects the issue to return once face-to-face teaching resumes.
He said the issue is due to be discussed on a complaints panel with the school governors later this month.
The school's principal, Nigel Clemens, said: "This matter is currently subject to examination through the formal school complaints policy. It would therefore not be appropriate to comment further at this time."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mu ... 04756.html
For 50 Years, I Was Denied the Story of My Birth
All adoptees deserve better.
In 1968, a woman appeared for an interview at the Children’s Bureau, an adoption agency in Indianapolis. She was in her 20s and alone. A caseworker noted her name, which I am withholding for reasons that will become apparent, and her appearance: She was “a very attractive, sweet looking girl,” who seemed “to come from a good background” and was “intelligent.” She had “blue eyes and rather blonde hair,” though the woman said her hair was getting darker over time, like that of her parents.
Her reason for coming was obvious. She was around 40 weeks pregnant. She told a story that the caseworker wrote down and filed in a cabinet, where it would rest for decades unseen. The expectant mother said she had grown up in Eastern Kentucky’s mountains, then migrated north as a teenager to find work after her father died. She was an office worker in Ohio when she became pregnant by a man who wasn’t going to marry her. The most remarkable part of her story was this: When she knew she was about to give birth, she drove westward out of Ohio, stopping at Indianapolis only because it was the first big city she encountered. She checked into a motel and found an obstetrician, who took one look and sent her to the Children’s Bureau. She arranged to place the baby for adoption and gave birth the next day.
The baby was me. If she’d driven farther, I’d be a native of Chicago or St. Louis, but Indianapolis it was. Life is a journey, and I was born on a road trip. I spent 10 days in foster care before being adopted by my parents, Roland and Judith Inskeep, who deserve credit if I do any small good in the world.
My parents told me early that I was adopted, but that was all they knew. Indiana, like most states, practiced closed adoption, meaning birth families and adoptive families were allowed no identifying information about each other. Secrecy was considered best for all concerned. In recent decades, open adoption has been replacing this practice, but rules governing past adoptions change slowly, and I was barred from seeing my birth records. Everything I just told you about my biological parents was unknown to me growing up; they were such a blank that I could not even imagine what they might be like.
I accepted this until I became an adoptive parent in 2012 and a social worker suggested that my adopted daughter might want to know my story someday. She’s from China, and like many international adoptees, she also had no story of her biological family. So I requested my records from the State of Indiana and was denied. Next I called the Children’s Bureau, where a kind woman on the phone had my records in her hands, but was not allowed to share them.
It still didn’t bother me excessively until after 2018, when Indiana law changed. Many adoptees or biological families may now obtain records unless another party to the adoption previously objected. In 2019 the state and the Children’s Bureau sent me documents that gave my biological mother’s name, left my biological father’s name blank and labeled me “illegitimate.” On a hospital form someone had taken my right footprint, with my biological mother’s right thumbprint below it on the page.
Typed notes from the Children’s Bureau recorded a visit with my biological mother in the hospital. Asked how she felt, she cried. And when she went to the Children’s Bureau for follow-up meetings, she was clearly trying to hold herself together. A caseworker encouraged her to process her emotions, but she was “adept” at conversing with “seeming openness” while “maintaining a wall around her feelings.” For her final meeting, after shopping downtown, she wore “a pink sheer shirtwaist and heels,” with “a tiny waist,” as if she had never been pregnant. The one emotion she expressed was feeling “trapped” in Indianapolis. She was so desperate to sign the paperwork and leave town that she was half an hour early for her appointment. She planned to visit her family in Kentucky, but not to tell them of her experience: She’d been calling home without saying where she was.
It’s been nearly two years since I first read those documents, and I’m still not over it. Knowing that story has altered how I think about myself, and the seemingly simple question of where I’m from. It’s brought on a feeling of revelation, and also of anger. I’m not upset with my biological mother; it was moving to learn how she managed her predicament alone. Her decisions left me with the family that I needed — that I love. Nor am I unhappy with the Children’s Bureau, which did its duty by preserving my records. I am angry that for 50 years, my state denied me the story of how I came to live on this earth. Strangers hid part of me from myself.
While I now have the privilege of knowing my information, many people’s stories are still hidden. About 2 percent of U.S. residents — roughly six million people — are adoptees, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A majority were adopted domestically, with records frequently sealed, especially for older adoptees. Gregory Luce, a lawyer who tracks adoption laws, reports that only nine states allow adoptees unrestricted access to birth records. Indiana is among those that have begun to allow it under certain conditions, while 19 states and the District of Columbia still permit nothing without a court order. California and Florida remain closed; Texas surrenders a birth certificate only if you prove you already know what it says. If my biological mother had stopped in a different state back in 1968, I might know nothing today.
This spring, more than a dozen states are considering legislation for greater openness. Bills in Florida, Texas and Maryland would ensure every adoptee’s access to pre-adoption birth records. Proposals in other states, like Arizona, would affirm the rights of some adoptees but not others. The legislation is driven by activists who have lobbied state by state for decades. Many insist on equality: All adoptees have a right to the same records as everyone else.
Equality would end an information blackout that robs people of identity. Throughout life, I have met people who spent years searching for birth parents, complicating their struggles to come to terms with their past. While that was not my experience, I was never able to tell a doctor my family medical history when asked. It’s one of those little things that never bother you until it does. I attended college in Eastern Kentucky, living there for years without the slightest idea that my biological mother grew up there.
The people who blocked me from learning my past must have thought their motives were pure. Closed adoption began as “confidential” adoption in the early 20th century, enabling parents and children to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy. Records were sealed to all but people directly involved. In a further step, by midcentury, even parties to the adoption were cut out. Agencies offered adoptive parents a chance to raise children without fear of intrusion by biological parents, and biological parents a chance to start over.
But nobody asked if I wanted my identity hidden from me. Jessica Colin-Greene, writing in The Connecticut Law Review in 2017, observed that “access to information about one’s genetic background, heritage, and ancestry is a birthright denied only to adoptees.” An adoptee “is expected to honor a contract made over his or her body and without his or her consent.” Someone might argue that the state had to decide for me as a newborn — but the state’s original plan was to deny my identity for life, and even deny it to my children.
Should adoptees and biological families contact each other, after the law forbade it for so long? Not without mutual consent: It’s an intensely personal decision. But information alone is powerful. When Indiana finally made its records more accessible in 2018, so many people requested documents that state employees were overwhelmed. A 20-week backlog of requests built up and has persisted — a testament to how many human lives were affected. As records are opened, people’s privacy should be respected; that’s why I’m withholding my biological mother’s name and any details that might identify her. But my story is mine, and other adoptees have a right to recover theirs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/opin ... 778d3e6de3
All adoptees deserve better.
In 1968, a woman appeared for an interview at the Children’s Bureau, an adoption agency in Indianapolis. She was in her 20s and alone. A caseworker noted her name, which I am withholding for reasons that will become apparent, and her appearance: She was “a very attractive, sweet looking girl,” who seemed “to come from a good background” and was “intelligent.” She had “blue eyes and rather blonde hair,” though the woman said her hair was getting darker over time, like that of her parents.
Her reason for coming was obvious. She was around 40 weeks pregnant. She told a story that the caseworker wrote down and filed in a cabinet, where it would rest for decades unseen. The expectant mother said she had grown up in Eastern Kentucky’s mountains, then migrated north as a teenager to find work after her father died. She was an office worker in Ohio when she became pregnant by a man who wasn’t going to marry her. The most remarkable part of her story was this: When she knew she was about to give birth, she drove westward out of Ohio, stopping at Indianapolis only because it was the first big city she encountered. She checked into a motel and found an obstetrician, who took one look and sent her to the Children’s Bureau. She arranged to place the baby for adoption and gave birth the next day.
The baby was me. If she’d driven farther, I’d be a native of Chicago or St. Louis, but Indianapolis it was. Life is a journey, and I was born on a road trip. I spent 10 days in foster care before being adopted by my parents, Roland and Judith Inskeep, who deserve credit if I do any small good in the world.
My parents told me early that I was adopted, but that was all they knew. Indiana, like most states, practiced closed adoption, meaning birth families and adoptive families were allowed no identifying information about each other. Secrecy was considered best for all concerned. In recent decades, open adoption has been replacing this practice, but rules governing past adoptions change slowly, and I was barred from seeing my birth records. Everything I just told you about my biological parents was unknown to me growing up; they were such a blank that I could not even imagine what they might be like.
I accepted this until I became an adoptive parent in 2012 and a social worker suggested that my adopted daughter might want to know my story someday. She’s from China, and like many international adoptees, she also had no story of her biological family. So I requested my records from the State of Indiana and was denied. Next I called the Children’s Bureau, where a kind woman on the phone had my records in her hands, but was not allowed to share them.
It still didn’t bother me excessively until after 2018, when Indiana law changed. Many adoptees or biological families may now obtain records unless another party to the adoption previously objected. In 2019 the state and the Children’s Bureau sent me documents that gave my biological mother’s name, left my biological father’s name blank and labeled me “illegitimate.” On a hospital form someone had taken my right footprint, with my biological mother’s right thumbprint below it on the page.
Typed notes from the Children’s Bureau recorded a visit with my biological mother in the hospital. Asked how she felt, she cried. And when she went to the Children’s Bureau for follow-up meetings, she was clearly trying to hold herself together. A caseworker encouraged her to process her emotions, but she was “adept” at conversing with “seeming openness” while “maintaining a wall around her feelings.” For her final meeting, after shopping downtown, she wore “a pink sheer shirtwaist and heels,” with “a tiny waist,” as if she had never been pregnant. The one emotion she expressed was feeling “trapped” in Indianapolis. She was so desperate to sign the paperwork and leave town that she was half an hour early for her appointment. She planned to visit her family in Kentucky, but not to tell them of her experience: She’d been calling home without saying where she was.
It’s been nearly two years since I first read those documents, and I’m still not over it. Knowing that story has altered how I think about myself, and the seemingly simple question of where I’m from. It’s brought on a feeling of revelation, and also of anger. I’m not upset with my biological mother; it was moving to learn how she managed her predicament alone. Her decisions left me with the family that I needed — that I love. Nor am I unhappy with the Children’s Bureau, which did its duty by preserving my records. I am angry that for 50 years, my state denied me the story of how I came to live on this earth. Strangers hid part of me from myself.
While I now have the privilege of knowing my information, many people’s stories are still hidden. About 2 percent of U.S. residents — roughly six million people — are adoptees, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A majority were adopted domestically, with records frequently sealed, especially for older adoptees. Gregory Luce, a lawyer who tracks adoption laws, reports that only nine states allow adoptees unrestricted access to birth records. Indiana is among those that have begun to allow it under certain conditions, while 19 states and the District of Columbia still permit nothing without a court order. California and Florida remain closed; Texas surrenders a birth certificate only if you prove you already know what it says. If my biological mother had stopped in a different state back in 1968, I might know nothing today.
This spring, more than a dozen states are considering legislation for greater openness. Bills in Florida, Texas and Maryland would ensure every adoptee’s access to pre-adoption birth records. Proposals in other states, like Arizona, would affirm the rights of some adoptees but not others. The legislation is driven by activists who have lobbied state by state for decades. Many insist on equality: All adoptees have a right to the same records as everyone else.
Equality would end an information blackout that robs people of identity. Throughout life, I have met people who spent years searching for birth parents, complicating their struggles to come to terms with their past. While that was not my experience, I was never able to tell a doctor my family medical history when asked. It’s one of those little things that never bother you until it does. I attended college in Eastern Kentucky, living there for years without the slightest idea that my biological mother grew up there.
The people who blocked me from learning my past must have thought their motives were pure. Closed adoption began as “confidential” adoption in the early 20th century, enabling parents and children to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy. Records were sealed to all but people directly involved. In a further step, by midcentury, even parties to the adoption were cut out. Agencies offered adoptive parents a chance to raise children without fear of intrusion by biological parents, and biological parents a chance to start over.
But nobody asked if I wanted my identity hidden from me. Jessica Colin-Greene, writing in The Connecticut Law Review in 2017, observed that “access to information about one’s genetic background, heritage, and ancestry is a birthright denied only to adoptees.” An adoptee “is expected to honor a contract made over his or her body and without his or her consent.” Someone might argue that the state had to decide for me as a newborn — but the state’s original plan was to deny my identity for life, and even deny it to my children.
Should adoptees and biological families contact each other, after the law forbade it for so long? Not without mutual consent: It’s an intensely personal decision. But information alone is powerful. When Indiana finally made its records more accessible in 2018, so many people requested documents that state employees were overwhelmed. A 20-week backlog of requests built up and has persisted — a testament to how many human lives were affected. As records are opened, people’s privacy should be respected; that’s why I’m withholding my biological mother’s name and any details that might identify her. But my story is mine, and other adoptees have a right to recover theirs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/opin ... 778d3e6de3
How Does a Baby Bust End?
Three scenarios for a more fertile American future.
The declining American birthrate is a frequent preoccupation of this column, and over the years that I’ve been writing about the problem it’s only gotten worse, with the apparent Covid-19 baby bust a punctuation mark.
But with the pandemic’s end inspiring various forms of optimism, hopes of faster growth and scientific breakthroughs, it’s worth considering what optimism about the future of fertility might look like. Because if you assume that dynamism and growth are desirable things (not everyone does, but that’s a separate debate), then for the developed world to be something more than just a rich museum, at some point it needs to stop growing ever-older, with a dwindling younger generation struggling in the shadow of societal old age.
So what would it take for our demographic decadence to end — for sub-replacement fertility to climb back to replacement levels, for the gap between desired family size and actual births to close, for Americans to have enough kids to sustain our country’s population?
Let’s consider three possible scenarios. In the first one, it’s all about financial and professional security: If you give young people confidence in their economic future and their ability to achieve work-life balance, they’ll be much more likely to have the kids they say they want, which would be enough to pull the birthrate all the way back up.
The crude version of this hypothesis, that America has a baby bust because we don’t spend enough on the social safety net, is clearly wrong: Many European countries have lower birthrates than ours despite more generous child allowances and maternity benefits. There’s decent evidence that direct spending on families pushes birthrates up, but on the margins rather than dramatically.
Likewise, economic growth alone isn’t enough, since U.S. fertility rates continued falling even once the post-Great Recession economic recovery accelerated.
But maybe what you need is both — to give families more money and parental benefits and to give them a long economic expansion whose gains are widely shared. Call this the Joe Biden-baby-boom hypothesis, which we may be about to test: If you spend on family benefits and run the economy hot enough, maybe fertility rates will finally begin to float back up.
This is the ideal scenario for pronatalist liberals, because it would mean more kids without more social conservatism. The second scenario for a fertility recovery, though, involves exactly that: a kind of neo-traditionalist turn, answering the socially liberal swing of the last two decades, that leads to people marrying earlier and having more kids for reasons of values rather than just economics.
Something like this arguably happened in the Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton years. U.S. birthrates fell precipitously during the social revolutions of the 1960s, but they stabilized and began to rise again, nearing replacement level in the 1990s, a trend that overlapped with a modest religious recovery and a mild backlash against liberalism. (And also, as I noted last week, with the Meg Ryan-Julia Roberts silver age of the romantic comedy.)
You can read a prophecy of what a new conservative shift might look like from the pseudonymous Substack writer Default Friend, who offers a number of suggestions for how younger Millennials and Generation Z might begin flirting with traditionalism — via a sudden fascination with “wholesome” cultures like the Mormons and the Amish, an anxiety about fertility-disrupting chemicals and the sex-robot dystopia, a vogue for matchmakers, a revolt against the professional-class expectations around delayed childbearing and more.
All of these possibilities, though, imply a certain amount of cultural conversion — people raised with liberal social norms consciously making a choice for a different way of life. Whereas a third possibility is that a deep fertility decline is more likely to end gradually, through a kind of slow selection process rather than abrupt conversion.
By selection I mean that as fewer people have children, the ones who do have kids will be an increasingly distinctive population — not specifically conservative or religious, necessarily, but couples who will have written new scripts for romance, discovered new models for child rearing and burden-sharing, in a cultural and technological landscape that’s torn the older models up.
So then the children and grandchildren of these trailblazers, inheriting both the new models for family formation and the world itself, would be the ones who drive some future baby boom.
But if the Biden boom is a short-term scenario for fertility recovery, and the conservative turn a 10- or 15-year scenario, this selection-driven scenario would take multiple generations to show up. And in the meantime, America’s present birthrate is by no means the lowest imaginable: South Korea, for instance, now averages less than one child per woman — half replacement rate, with unprecedented depopulation looming.
So that’s a crucial reason to hope for recovery on a quicker timeline: not just because more babies sooner would be better, but because on the current cultural trajectory, there’s a lot of distance left for us to fall.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Three scenarios for a more fertile American future.
The declining American birthrate is a frequent preoccupation of this column, and over the years that I’ve been writing about the problem it’s only gotten worse, with the apparent Covid-19 baby bust a punctuation mark.
But with the pandemic’s end inspiring various forms of optimism, hopes of faster growth and scientific breakthroughs, it’s worth considering what optimism about the future of fertility might look like. Because if you assume that dynamism and growth are desirable things (not everyone does, but that’s a separate debate), then for the developed world to be something more than just a rich museum, at some point it needs to stop growing ever-older, with a dwindling younger generation struggling in the shadow of societal old age.
So what would it take for our demographic decadence to end — for sub-replacement fertility to climb back to replacement levels, for the gap between desired family size and actual births to close, for Americans to have enough kids to sustain our country’s population?
Let’s consider three possible scenarios. In the first one, it’s all about financial and professional security: If you give young people confidence in their economic future and their ability to achieve work-life balance, they’ll be much more likely to have the kids they say they want, which would be enough to pull the birthrate all the way back up.
The crude version of this hypothesis, that America has a baby bust because we don’t spend enough on the social safety net, is clearly wrong: Many European countries have lower birthrates than ours despite more generous child allowances and maternity benefits. There’s decent evidence that direct spending on families pushes birthrates up, but on the margins rather than dramatically.
Likewise, economic growth alone isn’t enough, since U.S. fertility rates continued falling even once the post-Great Recession economic recovery accelerated.
But maybe what you need is both — to give families more money and parental benefits and to give them a long economic expansion whose gains are widely shared. Call this the Joe Biden-baby-boom hypothesis, which we may be about to test: If you spend on family benefits and run the economy hot enough, maybe fertility rates will finally begin to float back up.
This is the ideal scenario for pronatalist liberals, because it would mean more kids without more social conservatism. The second scenario for a fertility recovery, though, involves exactly that: a kind of neo-traditionalist turn, answering the socially liberal swing of the last two decades, that leads to people marrying earlier and having more kids for reasons of values rather than just economics.
Something like this arguably happened in the Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton years. U.S. birthrates fell precipitously during the social revolutions of the 1960s, but they stabilized and began to rise again, nearing replacement level in the 1990s, a trend that overlapped with a modest religious recovery and a mild backlash against liberalism. (And also, as I noted last week, with the Meg Ryan-Julia Roberts silver age of the romantic comedy.)
You can read a prophecy of what a new conservative shift might look like from the pseudonymous Substack writer Default Friend, who offers a number of suggestions for how younger Millennials and Generation Z might begin flirting with traditionalism — via a sudden fascination with “wholesome” cultures like the Mormons and the Amish, an anxiety about fertility-disrupting chemicals and the sex-robot dystopia, a vogue for matchmakers, a revolt against the professional-class expectations around delayed childbearing and more.
All of these possibilities, though, imply a certain amount of cultural conversion — people raised with liberal social norms consciously making a choice for a different way of life. Whereas a third possibility is that a deep fertility decline is more likely to end gradually, through a kind of slow selection process rather than abrupt conversion.
By selection I mean that as fewer people have children, the ones who do have kids will be an increasingly distinctive population — not specifically conservative or religious, necessarily, but couples who will have written new scripts for romance, discovered new models for child rearing and burden-sharing, in a cultural and technological landscape that’s torn the older models up.
So then the children and grandchildren of these trailblazers, inheriting both the new models for family formation and the world itself, would be the ones who drive some future baby boom.
But if the Biden boom is a short-term scenario for fertility recovery, and the conservative turn a 10- or 15-year scenario, this selection-driven scenario would take multiple generations to show up. And in the meantime, America’s present birthrate is by no means the lowest imaginable: South Korea, for instance, now averages less than one child per woman — half replacement rate, with unprecedented depopulation looming.
So that’s a crucial reason to hope for recovery on a quicker timeline: not just because more babies sooner would be better, but because on the current cultural trajectory, there’s a lot of distance left for us to fall.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Why are many now migrating permanently to the Philippines?
Hello. I am a lawyer in the Philippines and I have had a lot of clients who are from the US and the UK who have migrated to the Philippines. They are living as permanent residents and have made the Philippines their retirement home. Here are some of the reasons they gave me which I will share here:
- The standard of living is low in the Philippines so their retirement money buys more in the Philippines than it would in their home country. If they get a basic pension of about $2000 a month, that is like P100,000.00 in the Philippines.
- They can buy a condo or rent one and live in comfort. They can even hire someone to do the household chores.
- They love the weather here. It's mostly sunny, and when it gets too hot, they can usually afford air conditioning in their homes. When it does rain, it does so for just a few days at a time. Most of them hate the thought of coping with winter at their age, shoveling snow from the driveway or shoveling their car out from being buried under a ton of snow.
- They settle outside Manila, some in the provinces where the beach is a 5-minute walk away, the mountains are in their backyard. The Philippines is a country of great biodiversity and it doesn't cost too much to experience natural wonders here. Some retirees who have worked hard all their lives want to explore nature, enjoy the beauty of nature, and live near it.
- I know a few expatriates who have established businesses in the Philippines. I know one who has built a bar and restaurant. I know one who started a small sushi place. I know one who runs a bed and breakfast. They find it easy to start a business using their retirement money as capital. Some of them marry Filipinos and run the businesses with their spouses or partners.
- Some retirees actually find love in the Philippines. They marry Filipinos and have children. It is easier to support a family and to raise children in the Philippines. A good education costs cheaper in the Philippines than in their home countries.
- For foreigners who have found partners and spouses in the Philippines, they usually also find an extended family. In the Philippines, we have very few nursing homes. We tend to care for the elderly members of our families in our intergenerational homes. The extended family system is the Filipinos' social support. Some foreigners without immediate families in their native countries, because they are divorced or widowers, want to grow old surrounded by some kind of family, even if it is an adoptive family or a family by affinity. They do not want to die alone in a nursing home so they establish a family in the Philippines.
- It is easy to get medical treatment in the Philippines. Again, hospitalization in the Philippines is a fraction of what it would cost in other Western countries. Medications here do not cost as much, either.
- It is easy for foreigners to live in the country because Filipinos understand English. One of the official languages of government is English. TV programs are in English. The news is in English. Traffic signs are in English, as well.
- Most Filipinos are hospitable and welcoming to foreigners. We are not generally hostile to foreigners. Foreigners find it easy to be socially mobile in the Philippines.
- The food in the Philippines is cheap and there is a great variety of cuisines they can enjoy. The Philippines has local as well as imported food available in the market.
- The Philippines has been marketed as a retirement destination. It is more fun in the Philippines.
https://www.quora.com/
Hello. I am a lawyer in the Philippines and I have had a lot of clients who are from the US and the UK who have migrated to the Philippines. They are living as permanent residents and have made the Philippines their retirement home. Here are some of the reasons they gave me which I will share here:
- The standard of living is low in the Philippines so their retirement money buys more in the Philippines than it would in their home country. If they get a basic pension of about $2000 a month, that is like P100,000.00 in the Philippines.
- They can buy a condo or rent one and live in comfort. They can even hire someone to do the household chores.
- They love the weather here. It's mostly sunny, and when it gets too hot, they can usually afford air conditioning in their homes. When it does rain, it does so for just a few days at a time. Most of them hate the thought of coping with winter at their age, shoveling snow from the driveway or shoveling their car out from being buried under a ton of snow.
- They settle outside Manila, some in the provinces where the beach is a 5-minute walk away, the mountains are in their backyard. The Philippines is a country of great biodiversity and it doesn't cost too much to experience natural wonders here. Some retirees who have worked hard all their lives want to explore nature, enjoy the beauty of nature, and live near it.
- I know a few expatriates who have established businesses in the Philippines. I know one who has built a bar and restaurant. I know one who started a small sushi place. I know one who runs a bed and breakfast. They find it easy to start a business using their retirement money as capital. Some of them marry Filipinos and run the businesses with their spouses or partners.
- Some retirees actually find love in the Philippines. They marry Filipinos and have children. It is easier to support a family and to raise children in the Philippines. A good education costs cheaper in the Philippines than in their home countries.
- For foreigners who have found partners and spouses in the Philippines, they usually also find an extended family. In the Philippines, we have very few nursing homes. We tend to care for the elderly members of our families in our intergenerational homes. The extended family system is the Filipinos' social support. Some foreigners without immediate families in their native countries, because they are divorced or widowers, want to grow old surrounded by some kind of family, even if it is an adoptive family or a family by affinity. They do not want to die alone in a nursing home so they establish a family in the Philippines.
- It is easy to get medical treatment in the Philippines. Again, hospitalization in the Philippines is a fraction of what it would cost in other Western countries. Medications here do not cost as much, either.
- It is easy for foreigners to live in the country because Filipinos understand English. One of the official languages of government is English. TV programs are in English. The news is in English. Traffic signs are in English, as well.
- Most Filipinos are hospitable and welcoming to foreigners. We are not generally hostile to foreigners. Foreigners find it easy to be socially mobile in the Philippines.
- The food in the Philippines is cheap and there is a great variety of cuisines they can enjoy. The Philippines has local as well as imported food available in the market.
- The Philippines has been marketed as a retirement destination. It is more fun in the Philippines.
https://www.quora.com/
A Graying China May Have to Put Off Retirement. Workers Aren’t Happy.
Most Chinese workers retire by 60. But with the population aging and pension funds running low, the government says that must change.
For Meng Shan, a 48-year-old urban management worker in the Chinese city of Nanchang, retirement can’t come soon enough.
Mr. Meng, who is the equivalent of a low-level, unarmed law-enforcement official, often has to chase down unlicensed street vendors, a task he finds physically and emotionally taxing. Pay is low. Retirement, even on a meager government pension, would finally offer a break.
So Mr. Meng was dismayed when the Chinese government said it would raise the mandatory retirement age, which is currently 60 for men. He wondered how much longer his body could handle the work, and whether his employer would dump him before he became eligible for a pension.
“To tell the truth,” he said of the government’s announcement, “this is extremely unfriendly to us low-level workers.”
China said last month that it would “gradually delay the legal retirement age” over the next five years, in an attempt to address one of the country’s most pressing issues. Its rapidly aging population means a shrinking labor force. State pension funds are at risk of running out. And China has some of the lowest retirement ages in the world: 50 for blue-collar female workers, 55 for white-collar female workers, and 60 for most men.
The idea, though, is deeply unpopular. The government has yet to release details of its plan, but older workers have already decried being cheated of their promised timelines, while young people worry that competition for jobs, already fierce, will intensify.
And workers with blue-collar or physically demanding jobs like Mr. Meng’s, who still make up the majority of China’s labor force, say they’ll be worn down, left unemployed or both.
The announcement was made during the annual meeting of the national legislature, and afterward retirement-related topics trended for days on Chinese social media, racking up hundreds of millions of views and critical comments.
Around the world, raising the retirement age has emerged as one of the thorniest challenges a government can take on. Russia’s attempt to do so in 2018 led to President Vladimir V. Putin’s lowest approval ratings in years. Mr. Putin eventually pushed the plan through but granted concessions, a rare move for him.
A pension reform plan in France prompted a prolonged transportation strike last year, forcing the government to shelve the proposal.
The Chinese government itself abandoned a previous effort to raise retirement ages in 2015, in the face of a similar outcry.
This time, it seems determined to follow through. But it has also acknowledged the backlash. Officials appear to be treading gingerly, leaving the details vague for now but suggesting that the threshold would be raised by just a few months each year.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Most Chinese workers retire by 60. But with the population aging and pension funds running low, the government says that must change.
For Meng Shan, a 48-year-old urban management worker in the Chinese city of Nanchang, retirement can’t come soon enough.
Mr. Meng, who is the equivalent of a low-level, unarmed law-enforcement official, often has to chase down unlicensed street vendors, a task he finds physically and emotionally taxing. Pay is low. Retirement, even on a meager government pension, would finally offer a break.
So Mr. Meng was dismayed when the Chinese government said it would raise the mandatory retirement age, which is currently 60 for men. He wondered how much longer his body could handle the work, and whether his employer would dump him before he became eligible for a pension.
“To tell the truth,” he said of the government’s announcement, “this is extremely unfriendly to us low-level workers.”
China said last month that it would “gradually delay the legal retirement age” over the next five years, in an attempt to address one of the country’s most pressing issues. Its rapidly aging population means a shrinking labor force. State pension funds are at risk of running out. And China has some of the lowest retirement ages in the world: 50 for blue-collar female workers, 55 for white-collar female workers, and 60 for most men.
The idea, though, is deeply unpopular. The government has yet to release details of its plan, but older workers have already decried being cheated of their promised timelines, while young people worry that competition for jobs, already fierce, will intensify.
And workers with blue-collar or physically demanding jobs like Mr. Meng’s, who still make up the majority of China’s labor force, say they’ll be worn down, left unemployed or both.
The announcement was made during the annual meeting of the national legislature, and afterward retirement-related topics trended for days on Chinese social media, racking up hundreds of millions of views and critical comments.
Around the world, raising the retirement age has emerged as one of the thorniest challenges a government can take on. Russia’s attempt to do so in 2018 led to President Vladimir V. Putin’s lowest approval ratings in years. Mr. Putin eventually pushed the plan through but granted concessions, a rare move for him.
A pension reform plan in France prompted a prolonged transportation strike last year, forcing the government to shelve the proposal.
The Chinese government itself abandoned a previous effort to raise retirement ages in 2015, in the face of a similar outcry.
This time, it seems determined to follow through. But it has also acknowledged the backlash. Officials appear to be treading gingerly, leaving the details vague for now but suggesting that the threshold would be raised by just a few months each year.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/worl ... 778d3e6de3
How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life
Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. How did we do it? Science mattered — but so did activism.
Excerpt:
All those brilliant solutions we engineered to reduce or eliminate threats like smallpox created a new, higher-level threat: ourselves. Many of the key problems we now face as a species are second-order effects of reduced mortality. For understandable reasons, climate change is usually understood as a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution, but had we somehow managed to adopt a lifestyle powered by fossil fuels without reducing mortality rates — in other words, if we had invented steam engines and coal-powered electrical grids and automobiles but kept global population at 1800 levels — climate change would be much less of an issue. There simply wouldn’t be enough humans to make a meaningful impact on carbon levels in the atmosphere.
Runaway population growth — and the environmental crisis it has helped produce — should remind us that continued advances in life expectancy are not inevitable. We know from our recent history during the industrial age that scientific and technological progress alone do not guarantee positive trends in human health. Perhaps our increasingly interconnected world — and dependence on industrial livestock, particularly chickens — may lead us into what some have called an age of pandemics, in which Covid-19 is only a preview of even more deadly avian-flu outbreaks. Perhaps some rogue technology — nuclear weapons, bioterror attacks — will kill enough people to reverse the great escape. Or perhaps it will be the environmental impact of 10 billion people living in industrial societies that will send us backward. Extending our lives helped give us the climate crisis. Perhaps the climate crisis will ultimately trigger a reversion to the mean.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/maga ... 778d3e6de3
Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. How did we do it? Science mattered — but so did activism.
Excerpt:
All those brilliant solutions we engineered to reduce or eliminate threats like smallpox created a new, higher-level threat: ourselves. Many of the key problems we now face as a species are second-order effects of reduced mortality. For understandable reasons, climate change is usually understood as a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution, but had we somehow managed to adopt a lifestyle powered by fossil fuels without reducing mortality rates — in other words, if we had invented steam engines and coal-powered electrical grids and automobiles but kept global population at 1800 levels — climate change would be much less of an issue. There simply wouldn’t be enough humans to make a meaningful impact on carbon levels in the atmosphere.
Runaway population growth — and the environmental crisis it has helped produce — should remind us that continued advances in life expectancy are not inevitable. We know from our recent history during the industrial age that scientific and technological progress alone do not guarantee positive trends in human health. Perhaps our increasingly interconnected world — and dependence on industrial livestock, particularly chickens — may lead us into what some have called an age of pandemics, in which Covid-19 is only a preview of even more deadly avian-flu outbreaks. Perhaps some rogue technology — nuclear weapons, bioterror attacks — will kill enough people to reverse the great escape. Or perhaps it will be the environmental impact of 10 billion people living in industrial societies that will send us backward. Extending our lives helped give us the climate crisis. Perhaps the climate crisis will ultimately trigger a reversion to the mean.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/maga ... 778d3e6de3
China’s ‘Long-Term Time Bomb’: Falling Births Stunt Population Growth
Only 12 million babies were born last year, the lowest number of births since 1961, providing fresh evidence of a looming demographic crisis that could complicate Beijing’s ambitions.
China’s population is growing at its slowest pace in decades, with a plunge in births and a graying work force presenting the Communist Party with one of its gravest social and economic challenges.
Figures from a census released on Tuesday show that China faces a demographic crisis that could stunt growth in the country, the world’s second-largest economy. China has long relied on an expanding and ambitious work force to run its factories and achieve Beijing’s dreams of building a global superpower and industrial giant. An aging, slow-growing population — one that could even begin to shrink in the coming years — threatens that dynamic.
China’s aging-related challenges are similar to those of developed countries like the United States. But its households live on much lower incomes on average than in the United States and elsewhere.
In other words, China is growing old without first having grown rich.
“Aging has become a basic national condition of China for a period of time to come,” Ning Jizhe, the head of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, said at a news conference announcing the results of a once-a-decade census.
While most developed countries in the West and Asia are also getting older, China’s demographic problems are largely self-inflicted. China imposed a one-child policy in 1980 to tamp down population growth. Local officials enforced that policy with sometimes draconian measures. It may have prevented 400 million births, according to the government, but it also shrank the number of women of childbearing age.
China’s population has now reached 1.41 billion people, according to the census, which was taken last year. Since the previous census, in 2010, China’s population grew by 72 million people.
That increase is larger than the population of Britain or France, but in percentage terms it is the smallest increase recorded since the Chinese government conducted its first census, in 1953.
A dearth of new births suggests that the trend will continue. Only 12 million babies were born in China last year, according to Mr. Ning, the fourth year in a row that births have fallen in the country. That makes it the lowest official number of births since 1961, after a widespread famine caused by Communist Party policies killed millions of people, and only 11.8 million babies were born.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/chin ... 778d3e6de3
Only 12 million babies were born last year, the lowest number of births since 1961, providing fresh evidence of a looming demographic crisis that could complicate Beijing’s ambitions.
China’s population is growing at its slowest pace in decades, with a plunge in births and a graying work force presenting the Communist Party with one of its gravest social and economic challenges.
Figures from a census released on Tuesday show that China faces a demographic crisis that could stunt growth in the country, the world’s second-largest economy. China has long relied on an expanding and ambitious work force to run its factories and achieve Beijing’s dreams of building a global superpower and industrial giant. An aging, slow-growing population — one that could even begin to shrink in the coming years — threatens that dynamic.
China’s aging-related challenges are similar to those of developed countries like the United States. But its households live on much lower incomes on average than in the United States and elsewhere.
In other words, China is growing old without first having grown rich.
“Aging has become a basic national condition of China for a period of time to come,” Ning Jizhe, the head of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, said at a news conference announcing the results of a once-a-decade census.
While most developed countries in the West and Asia are also getting older, China’s demographic problems are largely self-inflicted. China imposed a one-child policy in 1980 to tamp down population growth. Local officials enforced that policy with sometimes draconian measures. It may have prevented 400 million births, according to the government, but it also shrank the number of women of childbearing age.
China’s population has now reached 1.41 billion people, according to the census, which was taken last year. Since the previous census, in 2010, China’s population grew by 72 million people.
That increase is larger than the population of Britain or France, but in percentage terms it is the smallest increase recorded since the Chinese government conducted its first census, in 1953.
A dearth of new births suggests that the trend will continue. Only 12 million babies were born in China last year, according to Mr. Ning, the fourth year in a row that births have fallen in the country. That makes it the lowest official number of births since 1961, after a widespread famine caused by Communist Party policies killed millions of people, and only 11.8 million babies were born.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/chin ... 778d3e6de3
From India, Brazil and Beyond: Pandemic Refugees at the Border
Fleeing virus-devastated economies, migrants are traveling long distances to reach the United States and then walking through gaps in the border wall. The Arizona desert has become a favorite crossing point.
Excerpt:
The Biden administration continues to grapple with swelling numbers of migrants along the southwestern border. In April alone, 178,622 people were encountered by the Border Patrol, the highest number in 20 years.
Most of them are from Central America, fleeing gang violence and natural disasters.
But the past few months have also brought a much different wave of migration that the Biden administration was not prepared to address: pandemic refugees.
They are people arriving in ever greater numbers from far-flung countries where the coronavirus has caused unimaginable levels of illness and death and decimated economies and livelihoods. If eking out an existence was challenging in such countries before, in many of them it has now become almost impossible.
According to official data released this week, 30 percent of all families encountered along the border in April hailed from countries other than Mexico and the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, compared to just 7.5 percent in April 2019, during the last border surge.
The coronavirus pandemic has had far-reaching consequences for the global economy, erasing hundreds of millions of jobs. And it has disproportionately affected developing countries, where it could set back decades of progress, according to economists. About 13,000 migrants have landed in Italy, the gateway to Europe, so far this year, three times as many as in the same period last year.
At the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months, agents have stopped people from more than 160 countries, and the geography coincides with the path of the virus’s worst devastation.
More than 12,500 Ecuadoreans were encountered in March, up from 3,568 in January. Nearly 4,000 Brazilians and more than 3,500 Venezuelans were intercepted, up from just 300 and 284, respectively, in January. The numbers in coming months are expected to be higher.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/us/m ... iversified
Fleeing virus-devastated economies, migrants are traveling long distances to reach the United States and then walking through gaps in the border wall. The Arizona desert has become a favorite crossing point.
Excerpt:
The Biden administration continues to grapple with swelling numbers of migrants along the southwestern border. In April alone, 178,622 people were encountered by the Border Patrol, the highest number in 20 years.
Most of them are from Central America, fleeing gang violence and natural disasters.
But the past few months have also brought a much different wave of migration that the Biden administration was not prepared to address: pandemic refugees.
They are people arriving in ever greater numbers from far-flung countries where the coronavirus has caused unimaginable levels of illness and death and decimated economies and livelihoods. If eking out an existence was challenging in such countries before, in many of them it has now become almost impossible.
According to official data released this week, 30 percent of all families encountered along the border in April hailed from countries other than Mexico and the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, compared to just 7.5 percent in April 2019, during the last border surge.
The coronavirus pandemic has had far-reaching consequences for the global economy, erasing hundreds of millions of jobs. And it has disproportionately affected developing countries, where it could set back decades of progress, according to economists. About 13,000 migrants have landed in Italy, the gateway to Europe, so far this year, three times as many as in the same period last year.
At the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months, agents have stopped people from more than 160 countries, and the geography coincides with the path of the virus’s worst devastation.
More than 12,500 Ecuadoreans were encountered in March, up from 3,568 in January. Nearly 4,000 Brazilians and more than 3,500 Venezuelans were intercepted, up from just 300 and 284, respectively, in January. The numbers in coming months are expected to be higher.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/us/m ... iversified
The World Might Be Running Low on Americans
The world has been stricken by scarcity. Our post-pandemic pantry has run bare of gasoline, lumber, microchips, chicken wings, ketchup packets, cat food, used cars and Chick-fil-A sauce. Like the Great Toilet Paper Scare of 2020, though, many of these shortages are the consequence of near-term, Covid-related disruptions. Soon enough there will again be a chicken wing in every pot and more than enough condiments to go with it.
But there is one recently announced potential shortage that should give Americans great reason for concern. It is a shortfall that the nation has rarely had to face, and nobody quite knows how things will work when we begin to run out.
I speak, of course, of all of us: The world may be running low on Americans — most crucially, tomorrow’s working-age, childbearing, idea-generating, community-building young Americans. Late last month, the Census Bureau released the first results from its 2020 count, and the numbers confirmed what demographers have been warning of for years: The United States is undergoing “demographic stagnation,” transitioning from a relatively fast-growing country of young people to a slow-growing, older nation.
Many Americans might consider slow growth a blessing. Your city could already be packed to the gills, the roads clogged with traffic and housing prices shooting through the roof. Why do we need more folks? And, anyway, aren’t we supposed to be conserving resources on a planet whose climate is changing?
Yet demographic stagnation could bring its own high costs, among them a steady reduction in dynamism, productivity and a slowdown in national and individual prosperity, even a diminishment of global power.
And there is no real reason we have to endure such a transition, not even an environmental one. Even if your own city is packed like tinned fish, the U.S. overall can accommodate millions more people. Most of the counties in the U.S. are losing working-age adults; if these declines persist, local economies will falter, tax bases will dry up, and local governments will struggle to maintain services. Growth is not just an option but a necessity — it’s not just that we can afford to have more people, it may be that we can’t afford not to.
But how does a country get more people? There are two ways: Make them, and invite them in. Increasing the first is relatively difficult — birthrates are declining across the world, and while family-friendly policies may be beneficial for many reasons, they seem to do little to get people to have more babies. On the second method, though, the United States enjoys a significant advantage — people around the globe have long been clamoring to live here, notwithstanding our government’s recent hostility to foreigners.
This fact presents a relatively simple policy solution to a vexing long-term issue: America needs more people, and the world has people to send us. All we have to do is let more of them in.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/opin ... icans.html
The world has been stricken by scarcity. Our post-pandemic pantry has run bare of gasoline, lumber, microchips, chicken wings, ketchup packets, cat food, used cars and Chick-fil-A sauce. Like the Great Toilet Paper Scare of 2020, though, many of these shortages are the consequence of near-term, Covid-related disruptions. Soon enough there will again be a chicken wing in every pot and more than enough condiments to go with it.
But there is one recently announced potential shortage that should give Americans great reason for concern. It is a shortfall that the nation has rarely had to face, and nobody quite knows how things will work when we begin to run out.
I speak, of course, of all of us: The world may be running low on Americans — most crucially, tomorrow’s working-age, childbearing, idea-generating, community-building young Americans. Late last month, the Census Bureau released the first results from its 2020 count, and the numbers confirmed what demographers have been warning of for years: The United States is undergoing “demographic stagnation,” transitioning from a relatively fast-growing country of young people to a slow-growing, older nation.
Many Americans might consider slow growth a blessing. Your city could already be packed to the gills, the roads clogged with traffic and housing prices shooting through the roof. Why do we need more folks? And, anyway, aren’t we supposed to be conserving resources on a planet whose climate is changing?
Yet demographic stagnation could bring its own high costs, among them a steady reduction in dynamism, productivity and a slowdown in national and individual prosperity, even a diminishment of global power.
And there is no real reason we have to endure such a transition, not even an environmental one. Even if your own city is packed like tinned fish, the U.S. overall can accommodate millions more people. Most of the counties in the U.S. are losing working-age adults; if these declines persist, local economies will falter, tax bases will dry up, and local governments will struggle to maintain services. Growth is not just an option but a necessity — it’s not just that we can afford to have more people, it may be that we can’t afford not to.
But how does a country get more people? There are two ways: Make them, and invite them in. Increasing the first is relatively difficult — birthrates are declining across the world, and while family-friendly policies may be beneficial for many reasons, they seem to do little to get people to have more babies. On the second method, though, the United States enjoys a significant advantage — people around the globe have long been clamoring to live here, notwithstanding our government’s recent hostility to foreigners.
This fact presents a relatively simple policy solution to a vexing long-term issue: America needs more people, and the world has people to send us. All we have to do is let more of them in.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/opin ... icans.html
Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications
Fewer babies’ cries. More abandoned homes. Toward the middle of this century, as deaths start to exceed births, changes will come that are hard to fathom.
All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.
Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can’t find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks.
Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.
A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments.
The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older. Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Fewer babies’ cries. More abandoned homes. Toward the middle of this century, as deaths start to exceed births, changes will come that are hard to fathom.
All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.
Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can’t find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks.
Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.
A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments.
The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older. Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/worl ... 778d3e6de3