Showing all posts tagged: demographics

The GOP Is Over

The GOP is demographically challenged. This was the last time they could mount a serious run for the presidency, and they lost handily. Romney had a 20% advantage among white Americans, and lost all the swing states.

Kevin Sack and Sarah Wheaton, First, Republicans Must Find Common Ground Among Themselves - NYTimes.com

The longer-term concerns for Republicans were revealed in exit polling. While Mr. Romney won the votes of 59 percent of whites, 52 percent of men and 78 percent of white evangelicals, Mr. Obama claimed 55 percent of women, 60 percent of voters under 30, 93 percent of African-Americans and more than 70 percent of Latinos and Asians.

Although the president’s majority shrank nationally, he won a larger proportion of Latino and Asian votes than in 2008. Among Latinos, Mr. Romney’s share of the vote fell 17 percentage points below the 44 percent won by George W. Bush in 2004.

Perhaps most ominous, the Latino share of the total vote rose to 10 percent from 8 percent in 2004, and the Asian share rose to 3 percent from 2 percent. The electorate is now 28 percent nonwhite, more than double the figure from two decades ago. That growth is certain to continue; in 2011, births to nonwhites outnumbered births to whites for the first time.

To the extent that the GOP is the party of the 1950s — of white electoral dominance — it’s over.

The clamor about the loss is falling into two categories:

  1. The GOP has to become more inclusive, and reach out to women, latinos, asians, and blacks. Only problem is that the platform doesn’t match up, because those groups don’t agree with intrusive social policies, small government, and rolling over for the rich folks.
  2. The GOP has to shift its policies to attract these groups. In essence, that translates to moving left, away from extremist craziness, but the most committed republicans are ideologically averse to that.

What’s going to happen? 

I’m betting that — in the medium term — the libertarians of the GOP will gain control. This is the quadrant of the American political map that believes in small government and no government intrusion into personal affairs. This will be a GOP that goes along with abortion, gay marriage, and marijuana legalization, while arguing for low taxes and staying out of asian wars. This will be a GOP that could bargain with a liberal democrat in the White House, which Obama isn’t, by the way, but Hilary might be.

Subdivisions go urban as housing market changes – Haya El Nasser via USATODAY.com

There are big changes brewing in US building: is it fallout from the econolypse, or a cultural shift?

Haya El Nasser via USATODAY.com

Why are the giants of the building industry, the creators for decades of massive communities of cookie-cutter homes, cul-de-sacs and McMansions in far-flung suburbs, doing an about-face? Why are they suddenly building smaller neighborhoods in and close to cities on land more likely to be near a train station than a pig farm?

A housing industry slowly shaking off the worst economic conditions in decades is rethinking what type of housing to build and where to build it. It’s a response to a new wave of home buyers who have no desire to live in traditional subdivisions far from urban amenities.

The nation’s development patterns may be at a historic juncture as builders begin to reverse 60-year-old trends. They’re shifting from giant communities on wide-open “greenfields” to compact “infill” housing in already-developed urban settings.

The market slowdown has given builders time to assess sweeping demographic changes that are transforming the way Americans want to live.

Young Millennials and older Baby Boomers are rejecting traditional suburban lifestyles in favor of urban living and shorter commutes. Many want to live near city centers so they can walk to work, shops and restaurants or take public transportation.

[…]

The shift is not temporary, says Gregory Vilkin, managing principal and president of MacFarlane Partners, a San Francisco-based real estate investment company building 170 units on the site of former parking lots and auto repair shops in South Lake Union, a new urban project in Seattle.

Vilkin headed one of the nation’s largest urban redevelopments while at the helm of Forest City Enterprises’ residential real estate division: Stapleton, a cluster of neighborhoods built on 7.5 square miles on the site of the old Stapleton International Airport in Denver. Developers built 11 units per acre compared with four per acre in traditional suburban subdivisions.

“I reject the premise that (the shift) is just because of the recession,” Vilkin says. “It’s no longer the American dream to own a plot of land with a house on it and two cars in the driveway.”

Adds Leinberger: “This is a structural change, not a cyclical downturn.”

I agree with Vilkin and Leinberger. This is exactly why I now live in Beacon NY instead of Reston VA.

Main Street, Beacon NY

We are now officially past peak suburbs:

Haya El Nasser via USATODAY.com

“For the first time in history, Americans have stopped pushing development to the edge,” says Robert Lang, professor of urban affairs at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and author of Megapolitan America. “The shift is from the old crabgrass frontier to the new Main Street.”

I now live two blocks from Main Street.

Connected Kids

I pulled some data from a presentation from the K5 Learning Blog. Kids today are amazingly connected, but less involved in the physical world:

  1. More US kids aged 2-5 can play a computer game than ride a bike.
  2. 19% of kids aged 2-5 know how to play a smartphone app; 9% know how to tie their shoelaces.
  3. More kids aged 2-5 can open a browser than swim unaided.
  4. Kids aged 0-8 spend an average of 1 hour 44 minutes watching TV or video daily, 29 minutes reading, 29 minutes listening to music, 25 minutes playing computer or video games, and 5 minutes using new mobile devices.
  5. Kids aged 8-18 spend 7 hours 38 minutes using entertainment media daily: more than 53 hours per week. That’s an hour more than 2004 (6 hours 30 minutes). Because they multitask [non-rivalrous media] they pack 10 hours 45 minutes into those 7 hours and 38 minutes.
  6. 65% of kids aged 0-8 watch TV at least once per day. That’s 37% of kids aged 0-1, 73% of kids aged 2-4, and 72% of kids aged 5-8.
  7. Kids under 2 spend twice as much time watching TV and videos than being read to (1 hour 54 minutes versus 53 minutes per day).
  8. For kids aged 8-18, live TV consumption declined by 25 minutes from 2004 to 2009, but total TV consumption went up thanks to the Internet, cell phones, and iPods. 59% (2 hours 39 minutes) consisted of watching live TV, and 41% (1 hour 50 minutes) consisted of time-shifted TV, DVDs, online, or mobile.
  9. 53% of kids aged 2-4 have used a computer, 90% of kids aged 5-8 have.
  10. 25% of kids are going online daily by age 3, 50% by age 5.
  11. Cell ownership among kids 8-18 rose from 39% in 2004 to 65% in 2009.
  12. 7-12th graders spend an average 1 hour 35 minutes per day sending and receiving texts.
  13. 51% of kids aged 0-8 have played a console game, 81% of kids aged 5-8. 17% of kids aged 5-8 play console games at least once a day, 36% play then at least once per week.
  14. 27% of kids aged 2-5 screen time is used with new digital devices.
  15. 29% of parents have downloaded apps for their kids aged 2-5 to use.
  16. iPod ownership for kids aged 8-18 rose from 18% in 2004 to 76% in 2009.
  17. 23% of kids aged 0-8 watch educational TV shows, 8% use educational programs on the computer, 7% play education games on new mobile devices.

sources: AVG (2010), Kaiser Family Foundation (2010), Joan Ganz Cooney Center (2011), Sesame Workshop (2010), Common Media Research (2011)

It’s a pile of data and no analysis, aside from the implied negatives of kids not knowing how to ride bikes, swim, or tie their shoelaces, or their sketchy parents downloading apps for them but not reading to them as much as they might.

related

Americans’ Migration Patterns Shifting - Jennifer Medina and Sabrina Tavernise

I’m tired of discussions about internal US migration that doesn’t take into account growing urbanization, global warming, water availability, and the future costs of energy. This relatively dumb piece is implicitly based on the premise that nothing is at work on migration than the current economic situation.

Jennifer Medina and Sabrina Tavernise via NY Times

Essentially, millions of Americans have become frozen in place, researchers say, unable to sell their homes and unsure they would find jobs elsewhere anyway.

An analysis of new data from the Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire confirms earlier census assessments of a migration slowdown, but also offers a deeper, state-by-state look at the impact of this shift, which upends, however temporarily, a migration over decades from the snowy North to the sunny South.

The institute’s study compared three years’ worth of data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which was released early Thursday and covered 2008-10, with the data from 2005-7. Since the survey’s findings are released in three-year increments, this was the first time that researchers had a set of data that included only years since the financial collapse began, allowing them to make a direct comparison to a similar period before the collapse.

Using this and other data from the I.R.S. that many researchers consider even more comprehensive, they found that migration into formerly booming states like Arizona, Florida and Nevada began to slow as soon as the recession hit and continued to shrink even into 2010, when many demographers expected it to level off. At the same time, Massachusetts, New York and California, which had been hemorrhaging people for years, and continued to do so in the three years before the financial collapse, suddenly saw the domestic migration loss shrink by as much as 90 percent.

And what about climate to Arizona and Nevada, like increasingly hot and dry weather? No a word.

William H. Frey, America Reaches Its Demographic Tipping Point

The new Census results show 49.8 percent of infants under age one are members of a race-ethnic minority – up from 42.4 percent in 2000. Given this trajectory, and the fact that the Census was taken well over a year ago, it is almost certain we have now “tipped” racially, and more than half of all national births are minorities. More than a quarter of infants are Hispanic, Blacks and Asians comprise 13.6 and 4.2 percent, respectively. Nearly one in twenty births were reported to be two or more races.

The geography of this change is important. Our larger, most urbanized states – magnets for immigrants and “new minorities” as well as major settlements for Blacks – are leading the way toward this transformation. Minority infants now represent the majority of births in 14 states, up from 7 in 2000; the newest ones include New York, New Jersey and Florida (Table 1). California and Texas had already reached this status, and Illinois just missed out.

Yet the new census shows a spread well beyond these areas (see Map 1 below). Minorities now comprise at least 40 percent of infants in more than half of all states, with the white share of infants declining in all of them, with the exception of the District of Columbia. Especially large minority gains occurred in New England states, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, as well as rapidly growing states like Florida, Nevada and Georgia.

(via Brookings)

89 percent of the Whole Foods stores in the United States were in counties carried by Barack Obama in 2008, while 62 percent of Cracker Barrel restaurants were in counties carried by John McCain.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, You Want Compromise? Sure You Do

Generation F*cked

The UN’s first ever report on the state of childhood in the industrialized West made unpleasant reading for many of the world’s richest nations. But none found it quite so hard to swallow as the Brits, who, old jokes about English cooking aside, discovered that they were eating their own young.

According to the Unicef report, which measured 40 indicators of quality of life – including the strength of relationships with friends and family, educational achievements and personal aspirations, and exposure to drinking, drug taking and other risky behavior – British children have the most miserable upbringing in the developed world. American children come next, second from the bottom.

(Source: futuramb, via emergentfutures)

White Working Class No Longer The Majority

In 2005, the white working class dropped below 50% mark in the US population for the first time: now, that group is 48% and dropping. Still the largest demographic group, but becoming smaller all the time, and now, the most pessimistic group in America:

Ronald Brownstein,  Eclipsed

The demographic eclipse of the white working class is likely an irreversible trend as the United States reconfigures itself yet again as a “world nation” reinvigorated by rising education levels and kaleidoscopic diversity. That emerging America will create opportunities (such as the links that our new immigrants will provide to emerging markets around the globe) and face challenges (including improving high school and college graduation rates for the minority young people who will provide tomorrow’s workforce).

Still, amid all of this change, whites without a four-year college degree remain the largest demographic bloc in the workforce. College-educated whites make up about one-fifth of the adult population, while minorities account for a little under one-third. The picture is changing, but whites who have not completed college remain the backbone of many, if not most, communities and workplaces across the country.

They are also, polls consistently tell us, the most pessimistic and alienated group in American society.

The latest measure of this discontent came in a thoughtful national survey on economic opportunity released last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project. If numbers could scream, they would probably sound like the poll’s results among working-class whites.

One question asked respondents whether they expected to be better off economically in 10 years than they are today. Two-thirds of blacks and Hispanics said yes, as did 55 percent of college-educated whites; just 44 percent of noncollege whites agreed. Asked if they were better off than their parents were at the same age, about three-fifths of college-educated whites, African-Americans, and Hispanics said they were. But blue-collar whites divided narrowly, with 52 percent saying yes and a head-turning 43 percent saying no. (The survey, conducted from March 24 through 29, surveyed 2,000 adults and has a margin of error of ±3.4 percent.)

What makes these results especially striking is that minorities were as likely as blue-collar whites to report that they have been hurt by the recession. The actual unemployment rate is considerably higher among blacks and Hispanics than among blue-collar whites, much less college-educated whites.

Yet, minorities were more optimistic about the next generation than either group of whites, the survey found. In the most telling result, 63 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they expected their children to exceed their standard of living. Even college-educated whites are less optimistic (only about two-fifths agree). But the noncollege whites are the gloomiest: Just one-third of them think their kids will live better than they do; an equal number think their children won’t even match their living standard. No other group is nearly that negative.

And the most easily brought to the polls by anger and divisiveness. And likely to be a key element in the rise of trade populism.

This is not really about demographics of birth and death in the US. This is about urbanization, and migration. The people that used to live in these former manufacturing and rural areas have moved to the cities, and the Sunbelt. Meanwhile, young immigrants to the US do not move to rural Appalachia or northern Maine.

(via Mapping Birth Rates - NYTimes.com)

There is no way that Africa can support 3.5B people, when they are struggling now. There isn’t sufficient water, and therefore food, to reach these numbers in Africa. These projections also don’t include the likelihood of war, plague, and famine.

(via Population Projections - NYTimes.com)

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