New diversity research scares its author

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer.[...]

Putnam writes: “Across local areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden Canada and Britain, greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust and, at least in some cases, lower investment in public goods.” [...]

From City Journal. Previous post here, other references and discussion on Stumbling and Mumbling.

George Borjas’ blog

Welcome to George Borjas new blog! George Borjas is a labor economist, the leading expert on the economics of immigration, and the author of Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy.

Via Dani Rodrik.

Better lives

In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby writes about Indur Goklany’s The Improving State of the World,

Take food. Since 1950, the world’s population has soared by more than 150 percent. Yet food has become so abundant that global food prices (in real terms) have plunged 75 percent. Over the past generation, chronic undernourishment in poor countries has been slashed from 37 percent to 17 percent, while in the United States, staples such as potatoes and flour have dropped in price (relative to income) by more than 80 percent.

Or take infant mortality. Before industrialization, children died before reaching their first birthday at a rate exceeding 200 per 1,000 live births, or more than one in five. “In the United States as late as 1900,” Goklany writes, “infant mortality was about 160; but by 2004 it had declined to 6.6.” In developing countries, the fall in mortality rates began later, but is occurring more quickly. In China, infant mortality has plunged from 195 to below 30 in the past 50 years.

Life expectancy? From 31 years in 1900, it was up to 66.8 worldwide in 2003.

Health? We are more likely to be disease-free today than our forebears were a century ago. And the onset of chronic illness has been significantly delayed — by nearly eight years for cancer, nine years for heart diseases, and 11 years for respiratory diseases.

Education, child labor, clean air, freedom, famine, leisure time, global poverty — Goklany shows that by almost any yardstick you choose, humanity thrives as never before. Living standards do not fall as population rises. On the contrary: Where there are free markets and free minds — economic growth and technology — human progress and hope are all but guaranteed.

“Humanity, though more populous and still imperfect, has never been in better condition,” he writes.

Ben-Ami on Sachs

Daniel Ben-Ami reviews Jeffrey Sachs’ first Reith Lecture on Spiked.

Sachs has played a key role in transforming the contemporary mood of pessimism into a coherent intellectual system.

Gardening is good for you

Gardening is good for you; you are physically active without doing strenuous labor, you are outdoors, you work with beautiful plants, and you can clearly see the results of your work.

Here is an additional reason why gardening might be good for you: A bacterium that lives naturally in the soil, Mycobacterium vaccae, might alleviate clinical depression.

Read here.

Mortality rates explained

An important non-technical contribution to the understanding of differences in male-female mortality rates…

Mass urbanization

On Economist’s View Mark Thoma writes about the millions of people moving from the countryside to the cities in poor countries, quoting an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times,

Mega-cities, mega-problems

Billions in the developing world are shifting from rural to urban areas, bringing poverty to dangerous new levels…

Their misery will spill beyond their borders, and if that happens, our urban age risks becoming a global nightmare.

The writer has got it wrong. It is not migration to cities that bring poverty to dangerous levels. People move from country to city because they are less poor in the city. Poverty is more visible in cities, but is is extremely rare to see starving people in cities even in very poor countries. When you see starving people, it’s in the countryside.

One reason that the urban poor are better off than the rural poor is that ruling elites are afraid of angry urban slum dwellers “spilling beyond their borders”. Rural slums are no threat.

Too many people on the planet?

Tim Haab on Environmental Economics quotes a strangely retro article from Columbus Dispatch. It is like reading something from the days of the Club of Rome, Limits to Growth, and The Population Bomb,

“Right now, Earth’s carrying capacity is thought to be somewhere in the range of 4 billion to 5 billion people.

There are 6.5 billion of us.”

The Earth’s land surface is 148,939,100 km². If we were all still Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, we would need at least 10 km² per person. So the carrying capacity of Planet Earth was at most 14,893,910 people using hunting and gathering technology.

Technology doesn’t remain constant.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse

John Hawks observes that Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto is basically a novelization of the Maya part of Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.

Diamond pushes this simplified version of Maya history as an allegory for U.S. ecological hubris…

…if you’re looking for the social zeitgeist behind this Apocalypto phenomenon, it would seem to derive from these widespread assumptions about Maya ecology and political structures that Diamond has helped to popularize. Collapse itself already simplifies vastly to make his point about ecologies and social regulation. The entire book is a case of “imposing an accessible scheme on a faraway time and place.”

Here is a fair 2005 review of Collapse by Jared Diamond. Partha Dasgupta writes,

…I think he has failed to grasp both the way in which information about particular states of affairs gets transmitted (however imperfectly) in modern decentralised economies – via economic signals such as prices, demand, product quality and migration – and the way increases in the scarcity of resources can itself act to spur innovations that ease those scarcities. Without a sympathetic understanding of economic mechanisms, it isn’t possible to offer advice on the interactions between nature and the human species…

There is no evidence that he even realises he doesn’t have the equipment to hand with which to study our interactions with nature...[emphasis added].

Ouch.

More on Collapse in a review by Ronald Bailey in Reason, here. More on Apocalypto by Tyler Cowen here.

The Borna Disease Virus Tragedy

The Robert Koch Institute in Berlin (remember Koch’s Postulates?) earlier this year cancelled its research into Borna Disease Virus (BDV). That is really regrettable, because BDV, a neurotropic virus, may cause depression and bipolar disorder. BDV may be transmitted by blood transfusions; research on this is being carried out in Australia. There may even be an effective cure; an antiviral drug, amantadine sulfate, approved for use against the common flu.

Given the prevalence of depression and bipolar disorder, you should have thought that a decent randomized trial would have been carried out. A small trial would not cost more that a couple of hundred thousand dollars. But amantadine is a 30 year old drug, no longer covered by patents. There is practically no incentive for pharmaceutical firms to finance such a study. So far there has been none. Given the potential huge benefits and the low cost, that is a tragedy.

In the meantime, German and Austrian doctors are using amantadine and reportedly getting good results. However, we still need the solid evidence we would get from a well-designed randomized controlled trial.

For background, read this article in Discovery, a more recent paper here. See also

No limits to life expectancy?

If you haven’t already seen it, take a look at this amazing graph illustrating the steady 3 months per year increase in life expectancy (and the errors of experts who thought that life expectancy was hitting a ceiling).

Fig. 1. Record female life expectancy from 1840 to the present [suppl. table 2 (1)]. The linear-regression trend is depicted by a bold black line (slope = 0.243) and the extrapolated trend by a dashed gray line. The horizontal black lines show asserted ceilings on life expectancy, with a short vertical line indicating the year of publication (suppl. table 1). The dashed red lines denote projections of female life expectancy in Japan published by the United Nations in 1986, 1999, and 2001 (1): It is encouraging that the U.N. altered its projection so radically between 1999 and 2001.

Source: Oeppen, J. and J. W. Vaupel: Broken limits to life expectancy. Science 296, 1029-1031 (2002). They conclude,

Three Findings
This mortality research has exposed the empirical misconceptions and specious theories that underlie the pernicious belief that the expectation of life cannot rise much further. Nonetheless, faith in proximate longevity limits endures, sustained by ex cathedra pronouncement and mutual citation (1, 8, 9). In this article we add three further lines of cogent evidence. First, experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is approaching a ceiling: these experts have repeatedly been proven wrong. Second, the apparent leveling off of life expectancy in various countries is an artifact of laggards catching up and leaders falling behind. Third, if life expectancy were close to a maximum, then the increase in the record expectation of life should be slowing. It is not. For 160 years, best-performance life expectancy has steadily increased by a quarter of a year per year, an extraordinary constancy of human achievement.

Diversity and Trust 2

Thomas Sowell wrote in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal,

…the Iraq war has some special lessons for our time, lessons that both the left and the right need to acknowledge, whether of not they will. What is it that has made Iraq so hard to pacify, even after a swift and decisive military victory? In one word: diversity.

…Iraq is only the latest in a long series of catastrophes growing out of diversity. The include “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan, the million lives destroyed in intercommunal violence when India became independent on 1947 and the even larger number of Armenians slaughtered by the Turks during the First World War.

Despite much gushing about how one should “celebrate diversity”, America’s great achievement has not been in having diversity but in taming its dangers that have run amok in many other countries.

Diversity has other, less dramatic effects than ethnic cleansing or genocide. One is a loss of trust. Some years ago, in 1997 I believe, Reader’s Digest ran an experiment. They dropped 10 wallets in each of a number of cities around the world, with the equivalent of $50 in each wallet. All 10 wallets were returned intact in only three places; Oslo, Norway; Odense, Denmark; and Moncton, Canada. I don’t know Moncton, but Wikipedia says,

Historically, the population of the city has been racially very homogenous with almost all residents originating from northwest Europe (United Kingdom, France and Ireland). This is slowly changing but it still remains a challenge to attract visible minorities as new immigrants to the city.

The Reader’s Digest experiment was not rigorous, but anecdotal evidence is also evidence. Oslo and Odense are both much more diverse now than they were then, and I don’t think there is any doubt that the level of trust and cooperation in both cities has declined. That is a shame, and the decline has great social and economic costs. If the people who return lost wallets believe that no one else will do so, they will also not do so. To maintain cooperation, the upholding of the belief that all or most people will cooperate is decisive.

After the First and Second World Wars, borders were redrawn and European countries became much less ethnically diverse. That happened for very good reasons. Now that diversity is increasing again, how should we handle it? Very, very carefully.

The Underclass

A sign of the times. This week both The Economist and Der Spiegel carry stories about the underclass. Der Spiegel writes,

The new proletariat as a homogeneous class first came into existence in the last 10 years. And it is by no means an exclusively German phenomenon: An underclass is emerging in every self-described leading industrial nation. The modern political economy clearly has nothing to offer to those who possess little knowledge.

It is no mere coincidence that the rise of the new underclass is happening in tandem with the erosion of industry jobs. In Europe, the process of de-industrialization may end up being more influential than the common currency or the effort to forge a shared constitution. The disintegration of society threatens the West today more than international terrorism, even if politicians are focusing on combating the latter.

The Economist,

Muslims and blacks get more attention. But poor whites are in a worse state.

 

Apart from election campaigns, when rising support for far-right political parties in areas such as Dagenham causes alarm, the traditional working class is largely overlooked. When politicians say that some communities are failing to integrate with mainstream society, they mean Muslims from the Indian subcontinent. When campaigners complain that schools are failing some children, they often cite black boys. Yet the nation’s most troubled group, in both absolute and relative terms, is poor, white and British-born.

Rwanda Genocide: French Role under Investigation

Did French troops facilitate the 1994 slaughter of some 800,000 in Rwanda? A military tribunal is currently addressing accusations that they did.

Not only did French soldiers fail to prevent the massacre, says the Rwandan government, they actually facilitated it.

The story is here (via EU Referendum).

The Evolution of Work

Source: Alexandra Spitz, Are Skill Requirements in the Workplace Rising? Stylized Facts and Evidence on Skill-Biased Technological Change, Table 5.

Nice paper from Germany. Activities are classified in five skill categories: non-routine analytical tasks such as research, planning or evaluation activities; non-routine interactive tasks such as the coordination and delegation of work; routine cognitive tasks such as double-entry bookkeeping and calculating; routine manual tasks such as machine feeding or running a machine and non-routine manual tasks such as housekeeping or restoring houses.

What we are seeing here are the effect of two industrial revolutions.The first industrial revolution made it cheaper to make and transport things. The second, based on information technology, made it cheaper to manipulate and transport information. The first leads to a decrease in routine manual tasks, the second to a decrease in routine cognitive tasks.

We are left with non-routine manual jobs (when, oh when, will they come up with a device that can iron and fold clothes?), and jobs on the “ought” side of the is-ought divide. On the “ought” side, in the non-routine analytic and interactive jobs, we pay people for their judgments and preferences. Since these are based on trained emotional reactions, I don’t see any prospects at all for replacement of people by machines in these jobs.

Population Aging and Carbon Emissions

As populations age, lifestyles and consumption patterns change. Here is an interesting paper (hat tip Tim Worstall), Population aging and future carbon emissions in the United States. The paper shows that under reasonable assumptions (e.g. population living in elderly households increase from 10% to 20-40% in the long term), aging effects on emissions can be as large, or larger, than technology effects, leading to dramatic reductions in CO2 emissions.

Abstract

Changes in the age composition of U.S. households over the next several decades could affect energy use and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, the most important greenhouse gas. This article incorporates population age structure into an energy–economic growth model with multiple dynasties of heterogeneous households. The model is used to estimate and compare effects of population aging and technical change on baseline paths of U.S. energy use, and CO₂ emissions. Results show that population aging reduces long-term emissions, by almost 40% in a low population scenario, and effects of aging on emissions can be as large, or larger than, effects of technical change in some cases…

Does the welfare state make you soft?

Percent Willing to Fight for Country

DEFINITION: Percentage in 1990s surveys responding that they are willing to fight for their country.

SOURCE: World Values Survey, via NationMaster

Maybe not, when it comes to national defense. The Scandinavian countries have the most extensive welfare states, and the highest proportion of their populations willing to fight for their countries.

It is probably the quasi-tribal nature of Scandinavian societies, characterized by strong social solidarity, that explains both the popularity of their welfare states and the willingness of their citizens to fight for their countries. Scandinavian societies are, or were till recently, homogenous, high trust, principles-based, high context societies. In more heterogenous societies there is less trust, and since diverse populations do not share the same values, they tend to be low-context, rules-based societies.

This can be seen in a number of disparate things, e.g. accounting standards and technical manuals. American accounting standards are rules based, and European standards are principles based. Technical manuals are much better when written by someone from a low-context society. The writer is used to the idea of explaining things to someone with no shared experiences. Japanese technical manuals are unreadable, even when the English is correct. American manuals are the best.

How will Scandinavian welfare states develop? We have an interesting natural experiment. Denmark and Finland restrict immigration, while Sweden have lots of unemployed, welfare-receiving immigrants. When welfare recipients are visibly different, they tend to be perceived as being less deserving. The future prospects for the welfare state are probably better in Denmark and Finland than in Sweden.

Human Capital in Europe

Source: Innovation at Work: The European Human Capital Index by Peer Ederer.

The Economist calls this report a “brave stab at measuring knowledge and skills, broadly defined”. That is right, the author had to make a number of heroic assumptions, and you can quibble with some of the details (e.g. Sweden’s large investment in “adult education” includes a substantial amount of unemployment hidden in less than credible adult education schemes). But by including parental education, adult education, and learning on the job, as well as demographic effects, Peer Ederer has made a real contribution to the debate about the knowledge economy.

Clever Brain Parasite

Toxoplasma gondii is in the news again. It is a really interesting brain parasite. It lives in the guts of cats. Eggs are shedded with excrement, and inhaled by animals that are eaten by cats, e.g. mice and rats. T. gondii then form cysts in their brains. And here is the clever part. When a mouse or rat is infected, it is no longer afraid of the smell of cats, and it is therefore more likely to be caught and eaten.

Toxoplasma also infects people, and therefore pregnant women are adviced not to handle cats or cat litter.

Fuller Torrey has been saying for years that schizophrenia may be caused by toxoplasmosis, e.g. in this paper and in his book Beasts of the Earth: Animals, Humans and Disease.

Carl Zimmer has a number of really interesting posts about toxoplasmosis.

Now an article in the Guardian reports that pregnant women with high levels of infection by the T. gondii parasite are more likely to give birth to boys. The parasite infects around 15% of Britons, but up to 80% of the population in some countries. Women whose antibody count is high - suggesting a substantial infection - has a much higher chance of having baby boys. In most populations the birth rate is around 51% boys, but women infected with toxoplasma had up to a 72% chance of a boy.

Diversity and Trust

From Financial Times,

When Robert Putnam published “Bowling Alone” six years ago, the book brought the Harvard professor such fame he was invited to speak at Camp David, 10 Downing Street - and Buckingham Palace.

When he arrived to meet the Queen, he found Her Majesty absent but her top courtiers anxious to hear his advice for a multi-racial Britain. Noting that great royal houses had often used marriage to forge important political alliances, he advised them to “go look for a nice Bangladeshi girl for one of the royal princes”. There was dead silence. “No-one spoke,” he said. “Later, the man from Downing Street who had taken me there said, ‘Bob, maybe that wasn’t quite what they wanted to hear.’ ”