Teen birthrate hits all-time low, led by 50 percent decline among Hispanics and blacks

The historic and uneven decline in teen births

New evidence from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this morning points to the ongoing and significant drop in the U.S. teen birth rate over the past 2o-plus years. The birth rate for teenagers ages 15-19 was 26.6 births per 1,000 in 2013, down 57 percent from the rate of 61.8 births per 1,000 in 1991, according to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. The CDC attributes the 20-year decline to decreased sexual activity among teens, as well as more frequent use of contraception. As you would imagine, this historic decline in the teen birth rate has looked differently across states, races and age. The CDC report highlights some important ways in how this decline hasn't played out quite evenly.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday **The age difference**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday The birth rates for the 10-14, 15-17 and 18-19 age brackets were all at record lows in 2013. The decline has been much greater though, for girls 15-17. The 12.3 birth per 1,000 rate for teens 15-17 fell 68 percent since 1991, compared to 50 percent for teens 18-19, whose rate is 47.3 births per 1,000. More recently, the decline in birth rates since 2007 has also been greater for the 15-17 group (43 percent compared to 34 percent). **Which groups have seen the biggest declines?   **    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday The teen birth rate has declined across all racial groups since 1991, but the steepest declines have been recorded among Asian-Pacific Islanders (64 percent) and non-Hispanic blacks (63 percent). API teens currently have the lowest birth rate overall (9.7 per 1,000), while Hispanic teens have the highest rate among the racial groups (46.3 percent). Still, the rate for Hispanic teens has fallen the fastest since 2007 (39 percent), and the CDC notes that the birth rates across most racial and Hispanic ethnicity groups is narrowing, as the following chart shows: **Uneven declines across the states**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday States have taken different approaches to reducing teen births, with differing results. Every state has seen a decline since 1991, but rates continue to be lowest in the Northeastern states and higher in the South. New England states all had teen birth rates under 20 per 1,000, with New Hampshire's the lowest at 13.8. Eight states had rates above 40 per 1,000, with New Mexico recording the highest at 47.5. The District of Columbia joined four states in seeing declines of more than 60 percent since 1991. **The United States could do better**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday The good news for America is somewhat tempered by the fact that our teen birth rate still ranks among some of the highest for developed countries. While countries like Denmark, Switzerland and Japan recorded teen birth rates under 5 per 1,000, the United States finds itself among seven of 31 countries highlighted by the CDC with rates exceeding 20 births per 1,000 teens. **What the U.S. progress means**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Though the United States lags behind other countries, the CDC says the progress made since 1991 has amounted to 4 million fewer teen births. Citing research from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, the CDC says this also saved taxpayers an estimated $12 billion alone in 2010 from costs associated with government-funded health care, child welfare and higher incarceration rates for the children of teen moms. And having fewer babies born to teen mothers, the CDC points out, is good for other reasons. Teen motherhood comes with a higher health risk for the baby, educational limits for the mother and limited resources, since about 90 percent of teen births are to unmarried mothers. And babies born to teen mothers are more likely to eventually become teen mothers themselves. _Correction: An earlier version of this story said teenage mothers had higher incarceration rates. It's actually the children of teenage mothers with higher incarceration rates._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday

Teen birthrate is higher in small U.S. towns than in cities

The teen birthrate in America’s small towns is 63 percent higher than in its biggest cities, a new government report reveals. In 2015, there were 18.9 births for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 19 living in counties with large urban areas, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That compares with 30.9 births per 1,000 women in the same age group who lived in rural counties, the report said. In between were counties with small- and medium-size cities and suburbs. There, the birthrate was 24.3 babies per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19. Although the teen birthrate varied widely among cities, towns and hamlets, municipalities of all sizes had one thing in common: All experienced steady declines between 2007 and 2015, federal data show. Large urban counties recorded the biggest drop over those eight years. In 2007, the birthrate for 15-to-19-year-olds was 38.1 per 1,000 women. It has since plunged by 50 percent. Next came counties with smaller urban areas, where the teen birthrate is now 44 percent lower than the 43.1-per-1,000 rate seen in 2007. Rural counties started out with the highest birthrate — 49.1 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19 — and saw it fall 37 percent over eight years. Here’s another way to appreciate the change: Urban counties in every state (along with the District) recorded a decline in the teen birthrate between 2007 and 2015. In 17 states, the rate in urban areas was cut at least in half. These states included Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. Likewise, the teen birthrate for rural counties fell in all 46 states that reported reliable data. Two states — Colorado and Connecticut — recorded a decline of at least 50 percent between 2007 and 2015. (New Jersey, Rhode Island and the District do not include any rural counties.) Across racial and ethnic groups, the researchers consistently found that the more urban a county, the lower the teen birthrate. For non-Latina white women, the 2015 teen birthrate in rural counties (26.8 per 1,000) was 2.5 times as high as the rate in large urban counties (10.5 per 1,000). For non-Latina black women, the rate in rural counties (39.6 per 1,000) was 36 percent higher than in large urban counties (29.1 per 1,000). And for Latina teens, the birthrate in rural counties (47 per 1,000) was 50 percent greater than in large urban counties (31.4 per 1,000), according to the report. The authors of the report don’t know why the teen birthrate was lower — and falling faster — in large urban areas than in rural ones. They did not study abortion rates between 2007 and 2015, nor did they examine whether schools in some counties were more or less likely to promote the use of birth control or abstinence. The study was based on data collected by the National Vital Statistics System and from the National Center for Health Statistics’ Urban-Rural Classification Scheme.

Census: Minority babies are now majority in United States

For the first time in U.S. history, most of the nation’s babies are members of minority groups, according to new census figures that signal the dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority. Population estimates show that 50.4 percent of children younger than 1 last year were Hispanic, black, Asian American or in other minority groups. That’s almost a full percentage point higher than the 49.5 percent of minority babies counted when the decennial census was taken in April 2010. Census Bureau demographers said the tipping point came three months later, in July. The latest estimates, which gauge changes since the last census, are a reflection of an immigration wave that began four decades ago. The transformation of the country’s racial and ethnic makeup has gathered steam as the white population grows collectively older, especially compared with Hispanics. The census has forecast that non-Hispanic whites will be outnumbered in the United States by 2042, and social scientists consider that current status among infants a harbinger of the change. “This is a watershed moment,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in family issues. “It shows us how multicultural we’ve become.” Although minorities make up about 37 percent of the U.S. population, the District and four states are majority minority — California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas. Metropolitan Washington, where whites are in the minority, is far ahead of the curve. Among children younger than 5, there are more minorities than whites in virtually every jurisdiction except Arlington and Loudoun counties. Statewide, Virginia has just barely more white children under age 1 than minorities, but they are on the verge of falling below half. One of the biggest factors in the demographic change is age. Whites are by far the oldest group. Their median age is over 42, so many are beyond their prime childbearing years. In contrast, the median age for Hispanics is under 28. Blacks and Asians have median ages in their early 30s. As the number of white women in their 20s and 30s declined over the past decade, the number of white children dropped in most states, said Kenneth Johnson, a sociologist with the University of New Hampshire. “The population is literally changing before us, with the youngest replacing the oldest,” he said. “This is the first tipping point. The kids are in the vanguard of the change that’s coming.” Places that serve Hispanic mothers and children are experiencing a baby boom. Mary’s Center, which started in Adams Morgan in 1988 to provide immigrant women with prenatal care, opened its fifth center Wednesday in Adelphi. “The people who migrate are the young and healthy people,” said Maria Gomez, founder of the center. “They are fertile, and that’s the cycle of life.” Dozens of women who are pregnant or pushing strollers streamed into Mary’s Center on Georgia Avenue on Wednesday to see doctors or social workers. Fourteen toddlers listened to stories narrated in English and Spanish while their parents attended English lessons. “There are a lot of kids now, and many of them are Latinos,” said Mayra Jacinto, a native of Guatemala who arrived two hours before her doctor’s appointment, holding her 5-month-old daughter, Ivonne. In the short term, it’s not clear whether the baby boom will continue. Immigration from Mexico, the country of origin for the vast majority of Hispanic immigrants in the United States, has come to a standstill and may be moving in reverse. William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, said the slowdown in immigration may delay the nation’s transformation to a majority-minority society from 2042 to 2050 or beyond. But he said it will not prevent it. “Eventually, when the economy returns, we’re going to get more immigrants, maybe not from Mexico but from other parts of the world,” he said. Without so many youthful immigrants, he added, the United States would look more like Japan, with its disproportionate share of elderly citizens. “We were already seeing a declining youth population in large parts of the country,” Frey said. “Without immigrants, we’d be essentially youthless. We had a perfect storm. We got them all coming, younger immigrants having children, at a time when we really needed them.” The future is here, in Northern Virginia, where several hundred thousand immigrants have settled over the past 25 years from societies as different as Vietnam, El Salvador, Ethiopia and Iraq. The backgrounds of children enrolled in Head Start programs in the area have changed with each wave of immigrants. From 2010 to 2011, Hispanics held steady, but the number of children of Asian and African origin jumped more than 30 percent, while those with roots elsewhere, such as from the Middle East, doubled. “The face of Head Start here has changed, but not the earnest desire of these families to see their children do the best they can,” said Melinda Langford, the Arlington Head Start director for Northern Virginia Family Service, a private nonprofit agency that serves 2,400 children younger than 11. At Langford’s program, six in 10 preschoolers have parents who were born in another country. Colorful drawings line the halls and classroom walls, signed with names such as Francisco, Dayana, Khadija, Ureal, Lavand, Betel, Estefany, Brittany and Seid. Program officials describe their mission as an affirmation of diversity as well as an educational boost for struggling kids. Sometimes they face cultural challenges, such as parents accustomed to disciplining their children more harshly than U.S. laws allow. To help with communication, Head Start employs class assistants and family advocates who are native speakers of a wide range of languages. Cherlin said the immigrant baby boom will eventually taper off. Studies suggest that the children and grandchildren of the newest immigrants will have birthrates much closer to those of non-Hispanic whites. “The changes to the country may not be as huge as some people think,” he said. “Immigrants will change our society, but our society will change the immigrants.” The new census estimates also offered a glimpse of a region that reflects national trends and in some cases defies them. The District continued its rebound, attracting 16,000 new residents from all age groups — in one year gaining almost as many people as the 20,000 it added the entire previous decade. Although the number of African Americans rose by more than 2,000, their proportion dipped below 50 percent for the first time in decades. Whites had the biggest increase, at 8,000. But among babies, the number of Hispanic infants rose the most as a percentage, up 70 percent, to 1,700. The number of infants who are white also rose sharply, while there were fewer African American babies. In both Maryland and Virginia, the numbers of Hispanics and Asians continued to grow sharply. The number of blacks increased modestly, while the number of whites was virtually unchanged. In Prince George’s County, one of the most affluent majority-black counties in the nation, the number of African Americans declined slightly, while Hispanics and whites gained. Staff writers Pamela Constable and Luz Lazo contributed to this report. **Read more fromThe Washington Post:** Former D.C. teacher on FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ list Prosecutor: Marine’s fatal stabbing a hate crime Income tax hike passes in Maryland

Teen birth rates have plunged but many concerns remain about 15- to 17-year-olds

The plunge in teenage birth rates to historic lows has been well-documented, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weighed in Tuesday with its own report on progress over the past 20 years. During that period, births to girls aged 15-19 dropped from 84.1 per 1,000 teens in 1991 t0 29.4 in 2012.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University That's very good news, and it shouldn't be minimized. But the CDC report issued Tuesday also contains some facts that should chill any parent buoyed by the overall results. The CDC's message Tuesday was that more than one-fourth of those children -- some 86,423, or 1,700 a week -- were born to girls aged 15 to 17 in 2012. That represents a healthy decline of 63 percent in the past 21 years as well. But giving birth that young is associated with a variety of medical risks and emotional, social, and financial costs, including the likelihood that the mother will not finish high school or earn a GED.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University From there the information gets more troubling. I'll pick out a few nuggets for you: • Hispanics (25.5 births per 1,000 girls ), blacks (21.9), American Indians/Alaska Natives (17.0) are _much_ more likely (emphasis mine) to give birth between the ages of 15 and 17 than whites (8.4) and Asians/Pacific Islanders (4.1).    *[WSU]: Wayne State University • There's a huge disparity in the birth rate among these youngsters across the country, from a high of 29 per 1,000 in Washington, D.C. to a low of 6.2 in New Hampshire. The report offers no reasons why, and in a telephone news conference, CDC officials said they didn't have enough information to draw conclusions. Kathryn Kost, a demographer for the Guttmacher Institute, which works on sexual and reproductive health issues, said that figure probably reflects a wide variety of factors including race, poverty, sex education, availability of contraception and abortion, attitudes toward giving birth at a young age and more.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University • Kids are using the least effective contraceptives. Only 1 percent used an IUD or hormonal implant the last time they had sex; 22.7 percent used nothing at all. Sixty-two percent used less effective methods such as condoms, cervical caps, sponges, the rhythm method, withdrawal and responses marked “other.” • Among sexually active teens in this age group, 83.3 percent did not receive formal sex education before the first time they had sex. That contrasts with the 90.9 percent of all 15- to 17-year-olds who received formal education on birth control or how to say no to sex. "We are missing opportunities to deliver prevention messages before younger teens begin having sex" -- both how to say 'no' to sex and the proper use of contraception, said Ileana Arias, the CDC's principal deputy director.

White deaths outnumber births for first time

More white people died in the United States last year than were born, a surprising slump coming more than a decade before the Census Bureau says that the ranks of white Americans will likely drop with every passing year. Population estimates for 2012 released Thursday show what’s known as a natural decrease — a straightforward calculation of births minus deaths — of about 12,400 people among the nation’s 198 million non-Hispanic whites. Although the percentage is small, several demographers said they are not aware of another time in U.S. history — not even during the Depression or wars — when there was such shrinkage among the dominant racial group. No other group showed a similar falloff. The decrease was offset by 188,000 white immigrants, most from Canada and Germany but also from Russia and Saudi Arabia. And non-Hispanic whites remain the single largest group, making up 63 percent of the country. But demographers were surprised by the outsize drop in births compared with deaths, which the Census Bureau projects will begin happening with regularity by 2025. “We’re jumping the gun on a long, slow decline of our white population, which is going to characterize this century,” said William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. “It’s a bookend from the last century, when whites helped us grow. Now it’s minorities who are going to make the contributions to our economic and population growth over the next 50 years.” A number of demographic and economic factors are behind the slowdown that has been underway for several years. As a group, non-Hispanic whites are considerably older than anyone else, with a median age of 42. The median age for Asians is 34. For African Americans, it’s under 32; for Hispanics, it’s under 28. Women with college degrees of all races have been delaying marriage and childbearing to the end of their 20s and beyond, until they have finished their educations and established careers. Once they settle down, they tend to have fewer children. Census figures also show that white women are far more likely to be childless than Hispanic or African American women. The recession that began in late 2007 exacerbated those long-term trends. Fertility rates have been slowly dropping since 2007. For white women, they are now below the level considered necessary to keep the population at a stable level. During the recession, researchers found that women who had lost health insurance or whose partners were unemployed were reluctant to have more children when they could least afford them. This latest demographic fall is not the first harbinger of the future: Earlier this year, census figures showed that for the first time in U.S. history, a majority of babies were minorities. Ken Johnson, a demographer with the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, said the demographics suggest that many people are deciding whether to have children as if the recession had not ended. Even if fertility rates pick up, he said, there will be just a temporary lull before people born in the 1940s and 1950s start dying in large numbers. “Once this recession has waned, we’re probably going to see at least a temporary uptick in births until death rates start to rise,” he said. The decline in the non-Hispanic white population has happened more quickly than demographers with the Census Bureau have been predicting. That’s because births and immigration levels, which can counter the drop, have slowed more than expected in recent years, said Jennifer Ortman, a Census Bureau demographer in the bureau’s population projections division. Census demographers expect the growth rate for non-Hispanic whites to resume rising — slowly — when the economy improves. The number for whites should peak in 2024, when the oldest baby boomers, who are overwhelmingly non-Hispanic whites, are well into their 70s and dying in larger numbers. The decrease for whites has little significance in the short term, said Dowell Myers, a demographer and urban planner who teaches at the University of Southern California. “In California, we roll our eyes at this,” he said. “Whites have been a minority here since 1999. But whites are still a majority of voters. Babies don’t vote. Older people vote. So it doesn’t have any direct functional meaning.” But Frey said the natural decrease in whites suggests that aging whites will increasingly come to rely on the younger, mainly minority population to underwrite social programs that will sustain them. “Last year, we saw the majority of babies are minorities,” he said. “Now we see more whites are dying than being born. Together, that tells us a lot about where we’re going as a country.”

U.S. birthrate plummets to its lowest level since 1920

The U.S. birthrate plunged last year to a record low, with the decline being led by immigrant women hit hard by the recession, according to a study released Thursday by the Pew Research Center. The overall birthrate decreased by 8 percent between 2007 and 2010, with a much bigger drop of 14 percent among foreign-born women. The overall birthrate is at its lowest since 1920, the earliest year with reliable records. The 2011 figures don’t have breakdowns for immigrants yet, but the preliminary findings indicate that they will follow the same trend. The decline could have far-reaching implications for U.S. economic and social policy. A continuing decrease could challenge long-held assumptions that births to immigrants will help maintain the U.S. population and create the taxpaying workforce needed to support the aging baby-boom generation. The U.S. birthrate — 63.2 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age — has fallen to a little more than half of its peak, which was in 1957. The rate among foreign-born women, who have tended to have bigger families, has also been declining in recent decades, although more slowly, according to the report. But after 2007, as the worst recession in decades dried up jobs and economic prospects across the nation, the birthrate for immigrant women plunged. One of the most dramatic drops was among Mexican immigrants — 23 percent. The fall didn’t occur because there are fewer immigrant women of childbearing age but because of a change in their behavior, said D’Vera Cohn, an author of the report, which uses data from the National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. Cohn added that “the economic downturn seems to play a pretty large role in the drop in the fertility rate.” Although the declining U.S. birthrate has not created the kind of stark imbalances found in graying countries such as Japan or Italy, it should serve as a wake-up call for policymakers, said Roberto Suro, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California. “We’ve been assuming that when the baby-boomer population gets most expensive, that there are going to be immigrants and their children who are going to be paying into [programs for the elderly], but in the wake of what’s happened in the last five years, we have to reexamine those assumptions,” he said. “When you think of things like the solvency of Social Security, for example . . . relatively small increases in the dependency ratio can have a huge effect.” The average number of children a U.S. woman is predicted to have in her lifetime is 1.9, slightly less than the 2.1 children required to maintain current population levels. The falling birthrate mirrors what has happened during other recessions. A Pew study last year found that the current decline in U.S. fertility rates was closely linked to hard times, particularly among Hispanics. “The economy can have an impact on these long-term trends, and even the immigrants that we have been counting on to boost our population growth can dip in a poor economy,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. He noted that Hispanic women, who led the decline, occupy one of the country’s most economically vulnerable groups. Historically, once the economy rebounds after a recession, so does the birthrate, Cohn said. But other factors may also be affecting the decline and may not change much once the economy recovers. Almost half of all immigrants to the United States are of Hispanic origin. But in recent years, immigration from Mexico, the biggest contributing country, has dried up; for the first time since the Great Depression, the net migration from Mexico has been zero. Latino immigrants who have been here longer tend to adopt U.S. attitudes and behavior, including having smaller families, Suro said. He added that the decline in the birthrate among Mexican immigrants is probably so sharp because the rate was so high that there was more room for it to fall. Although the Hispanic birthrate may never return to its highest levels, immigrants who have babies will probably continue to boost overall fertility rates, said Frey, who considers the current decline a “short-term blip.” Immigrants from Asia, he said, continue to move to the United States, although their birthrates are not likely to approach that of Hispanic immigrants at their peak. The recent birthrate decline among Latino women may also be related to enhanced access to emergency contraception and better sex education in recent years, said Kimberly Inez McGuire, a senior policy analyst at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. At Mary’s Center, an organization in the District that provides social services to low-income people, the waiting room on a recent morning was filled with immigrants, many with swollen bellies. But not all were planning large families. Elsa Mendez, 22, a single Guatemalan immigrant who lives in Petworth, is set to give birth to her first child in December, but she said that after this one, she plans to go on birth control because she wants a better life. “Sometimes [Hispanic] people — they have a lot of kids, and no talk about family planning,” she said. “I have neighbors who have nine kids — they come from El Salvador and are all together in the same room.” But Mendez, a sales clerk, said she sees American families with fewer children and wants to emulate them. “I want to have more money for her,” she said, referring to her unborn child. Mindy Greenside, director of midwifery at Mary’s Center, said many more immigrant women are asking about contraception than did so five years ago. One of them is Elizabeth Rosa, 37, a Salvadoran who lives in Langley Park. Pregnant with her third child, she said it will be her last. “To have more babies, it costs more,” she said as her 2-year-old son Emanuel played nearby. Pointing to her belly, she said she plans to have her tubes tied after giving birth. “The factory is closing,” she said with a smile.

Teenagers have never been a smaller portion of our population

As I was putting together the article about America's future demographics, I showed the last chart to a colleague.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "Whoa," she responded. "Teen death." That's a bit strong, but the point is an interesting one: By 2050, teens (does that need a hashtag?) will make up a small percentage of the population. But then I looked at the long-term trend and discovered something alarming. _There are currently fewer #teens as a percentage of all Americans than at any point on record._ And it will keep dropping.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Here's the total number of 13-to-19 year olds over the past 50 years. (The most recent data from the Census Bureau is an estimate from 2013.) Up and down and up again. The most recent up is the so-called Millennials. In general, it's pretty flat, thanks to the dropping birth rate.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The problem for teen density is that the rest of the country keeps getting older and the population keeps growing. Meaning that the percentage that is #teen keeps getting lower. Since the number of #teens ebbs and flows, so does the percentage of Americans that are teens. It's at a low for the past 50 years ... ... but it's also at a low since 1900. The previous low came in 1953, when the babies of the Baby Boom hadn't yet hit their teenage years. Before 1900, the percent of the country that was #teen was almost certainly higher -- since American life expectancy wasn't as long. Fewer old people means that young people make up more of the population. There are still #teen pockets. Out west, there are more #teens, thanks to high birthrates among Mormons and Hispanics. In general, though: crisis. Can American culture survive this #teen #crisis? Let's look at it another way: We have more #teens per capita right now than we're likely to for decades. Let's make the most of it.

How MTV’s ’16 and Pregnant’ led to declining teen birth rates

Since they premiered, MTV reality shows “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” have raised whoa-so-many eyebrows. A very vocal contingent of dismayed adults feared the shows glamorized teen pregnancy. That the young moms on the show often graced the covers of magazines such as Us Weekly only further proved that point: teenagers watching the show, the thinking went, would be jealous of the teen moms’ lives and celebrity. Bring on the pregnancy pacts! Unprotected sex for everyone, everywhere! As it turns out, though, “16 and Pregnant” didn’t inspire viewers to have kids; it inspired viewers to use contraception. “Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV’s 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing,” a study conducted by Professors Melissa Kearney of the University of Maryland and Phillip Levine of Wellesley College released early this year, finds that the MTV “Teen Mom” franchise did far more good than harm. Using data from Google Trends, Twitter, Nielsen ratings and Vital Statistics birth data, Professors Kearney and Levine found that teens who watch “16 and Pregnant” immediately go online to search for (and tweet about) birth control and abortion. Through some very impressive and fascinating dot-connecting, Kearney and Levine found that “16 and Pregnant” led to a 5.7% reduction in teen births — a percentage that accounts for one-third of the total decline in teen births: 20,000 fewer teen births a year.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Some background from the study: In 2012, 29.4 out of every 1,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19 gave birth in the U.S. It’s a good number and a bad one, depending on how you look at it: that’s a much higher rate than in any other developed nation (typical rates in the rest of the first world: 5-10 births per 1,000 girls) but it’s much lower than rates were in the U.S. 20 years ago, when there were a whopping 61.8 births per 1,000 teen girls. (Imagine the Facebook feeds, everyone.) As Kearney and Levine, who have been working on teen birth rates for more than 20 years, write in the study: “[T]he realities of the lives of teen mothers are presented in ways that may have been unknown or difficult to imagine for other teens viewing the show.” By shattering whatever cutesy, tiny-sock-wearing fantasy would-be mothers may have had before watching the show, “16 and Pregnant” revealed teen parenting as it actually is: grueling, expensive, exhausting, and, without an incredibly support system, often lonely. For a more detailed analysis of the study — how it was constructed, why most conventional wisdom about changing teen birth rates is wrong, and what these findings really mean, I reached out to Professor Phillip Levine. Below is a condensed and edited version of our conversation. **How did you decide to look into the impact of “16 and Pregnant” in the first place?**   Teen childbearing has been mostly declining at a relatively slow pace for the past couple of decades. In 2008, it started falling a lot more quickly… [Professor Kearney] and I were very interested in thinking about what was happening. We read all the press accounts about the decline, and we knew the literature well enough to know that most of the conventional wisdom answers aren’t right.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **What are some of those conventional wisdom answers?**   Like, “We finally learned how to do sex education better,” or “abstinence-only programs are finally starting to work,” or “we have better ways to distribute contraception.” Sort of all the standard answers. Regardless of their effectiveness, they aren’t going to be able to explain a huge decline over the course of a year. And we read a press report through The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy [that] said [the decline] was partly about labor market predictions, where there are cyclical patterns, and partly about “16 and Pregnant.” That was novel and it was a plausible explanation. So we decided to investigate it.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **How familiar were you with “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” before you began your study?**   At that point, I knew absolutely nothing about the show. I kind of knew that it existed, I think I spent 10 minutes watching one in a hotel room that time. But I knew next to nothing about it. Of course the first thing [Professor Kearney and I] did, was, we Googled it. And it took about five minutes to realize that there was a controversy about the show, that a bunch of people thought it glamorized teen birth … And as the show progressed a little bit, and the teen birthrate dropped at the same time, people offered this conjecture that it was depressing teen birth as well.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **How do you go about connecting those two things: the birthrate and the TV show? Because it would be easy to point out that they aren’t necessary affected by one another.**   The easy criticism is that people learn somewhere along the line that correlation is not causation; just because teen births are falling when the show was starting doesn’t mean one caused the other. We are very familiar with that point of view.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **So what kind of data do you use?**   The simplest version is, we have Nielsen ratings about MTV shows, and we want to know, in the places where MTV shows are more popular, is it the case that at the moment when “16 and Pregnant” started, [the teen birth rate dropped]? You should expect to see a bigger reduction in teen birth in the places where more people are watching the show. And it’s got to be about the changes in birth rate, because if it’s always high or always low, we don’t care. We want to know, did the birth rate drop. And we find that the timing of the decline is very tightly intertwined with the airing of the first show, and we see that it has an effect on the age group [that watches the show]. It gets a pretty big following up to about age 24, so you see an effect on birth through age 24 but not beyond.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **How do you get from people watching the show to teen birth rates dropping in real life? Because even the best TV isn’t actually birth control.**   We know where babies come from. So can we find something to show that that behavior is changing as well? It would be great to get data directly about contraceptive use and sexual behavior, but that’s very difficult to do. So we decided to try out new data sources. In terms of social policy research, the use of Google Trends data and Twitter data is pretty novel…and it allows the researcher to actually get inside the heads of the viewer of the show to see what is changing about what they’re thinking about immediately afterwards. And it’s amazing.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **What did you look for?**   Apparently, when kids are watching TV these days, they have their phone in their hand. And when they see things that are meaningful to them, they tweet about them, or they search for another idea. So we see these huge spikes in searches and tweets immediately following the airing of a new [episode]. The first thing they’re searching on is the show itself and making some comment: “I just saw ’16 and Pregnant,’ blah blah.” But you can also link that to searches for birth control and abortion.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **What specific search terms did you use?**   In tweets, the search terms we used were “birth control” and “abortion.” In Google, where you can be a little more specific, we used “how do you get birth control,” “how do you get birth control pills,” “how do you get an abortion.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **What did you find?**   What we were able to find was a very large number of tweets that literally said “’16 and Pregnant’ is the best form of birth control.” Thousands of tweets say that, or some variant of that. “Just watched ’16 and Pregnant,’ remembered to go take my birth control.” [We] also [saw] this apparently big movement of binge watching, mother-daughter “16 and Pregnant” marathons, which would never have occurred to me, except there’s people tweeting about it. So it opens up the possibility of this dialogue between mothers and daughters.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **In the grand scheme of factors that influence the decline in teen birth rates, how big a contributor are these TV shows?**   The economic conditions and the severity of the recession definitely contributed. During periods in which it’s difficult for a teen to get a job, and it’s difficult for the teen’s boyfriend and the teen’s parent to get a job, people are sitting there thinking, “It’s not obvious whether there’s going to be any support for this kid. It may not be a good time to get pregnant.” That happens across the age distribution, [not just to teenagers]. That was actually the biggest factor. We calculate that over half the decline is contributable to [the economy]. “16 and Pregnant” accounts for about a third.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **Now that you’re a “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” expert, what do you think about the shows? Just as a viewer, are you hooked?**   I think it’s incredibly compelling. I don’t know how anyone could possibly watch an episode of “16 and Pregnant” and think that it glamorizes teen pregnancy. It’s a very honest portrayal of the difficulties that these girls face. Anyone who thinks they’re going into this with a high probability that their boyfriend is going to stick around, or that they’ll continue their education, or maintain their friends, or continue going out and socializing, and maintain strong family relationships: there’s conflicts everywhere in these girls lives.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University I think what “16 and Pregnant” is so successful at doing is portraying images that seem very real. And that’s why it works. It has exactly the right combination of, it’s MTV and they know what kids like, and they can market the show in a way that draws in large numbers of viewers — because if nobody sees it, what difference does it make? — and including messages which are very honest and realistic.

Pregnancy rates slide, near record lows

Fertility rates in the United States are continuing their decades-long decline, due in large part to a steep slide in teenage pregnancies down to historic lows, according to a new government report released Thursday. The National Center for Health Statistics said the pregnancy rate of 102 pregnancies out of every 1,000 women is 12 percent below the 1990 peak of about 116 per 1,000. Only once in the past 30 years, 1997, has it been lower, and only marginally, the center said. Since 1990, the report said, pregnancy rates are down in almost every category. The only exception is among women over 30, whose pregnancy rate has increased steadily with every passing year. But the rate is declining among women in their 20s, who form the single largest group of pregnant women, and among teenagers of all races and ethnicities. The abortion rate also has dropped, reflecting a continuous slide since peaking in 1990. The report only examined the trajectory of pregnancy rates through 2009, stopping there because more recent data on abortions is not available yet. But newer statistics on birth rates suggest the decline is continuing, though not as quickly as it did in recent years when the recession accelerated trends well underway. Women already were having fewer children than women of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, so those under 30 could postpone childbirth until the economy improved without affecting their longstanding goals of having a first or second child. “What happened was a postponement of births among younger women with a longer time horizon,” said Andrew Cherlin, a Johns Hopkins University sociologist specializing in family issues. “Women over 30 couldn’t wait that much longer.” While the decelerating decline in birth rates since 2009 reflects the easing of the recession’s impact, the striking drop in teenage pregnancies shows little sign of abating. The teen pregnancy rate in 2009, of about 38 per thousand girls, was 39 percent lower than the 1991 peak of 62. Just four years later, in 2012, it reached a record low of about 29. Sally Curtin, one of the report’s authors, said the historic drop is being driven by a long, downward trend of fewer teenagers having sex, and among those who do, a sharp increase in their use of contraceptives. “It’s as if both sides in the debate over teen pregnancy were right,” said Cherlin, noting that concerns over the AIDS epidemic may have played a role in the growing use of condoms among teenage boys. “AIDS has forced many school districts to talk about contraception, even if they didn’t want to,” he said. The national trends are evident in the Washington area. Teenage pregnancy rates have plummeted in the District, down to less than a quarter of where they were two decades ago, said Brenda Rhodes Miller, director of the DC Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. In 1993, the pregnancy rate for teenagers aged 15 to 19 was about 239 per 1,000. By 2011, it was under 55. “The decline has been amazing,” she said, adding that the reasons for it are not clear. Teen pregnancy rates are declining in every ward, she said, though more slowly in wards 7 and 8, which have the city’s lowest income levels. More than 500 of the 879 births to District teens in 2011 were to residents of those two wards. The one-year drop was relatively small. In more affluent wards, the teen pregnancy rate dropped by double digit percentages. Even with declining pregnancy rates, the United States still has one of the highest overall birth rates among industrialized countries. The 10 nations with the highest birth rates in the world are all in Africa.

Why are birthrates falling around the world? Blame television.

"I find it extraordinary that the massive global drop in human fertility has been so little noticed by the media," writes Stanford geographer Martin Lewis, "escaping the attention of even highly educated Americans." Lewis has a fascinating, chart-heavy essay over at the Breakthrough Institute pointing out that birthrates are dropping rapidly almost everywhere around the world — with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa, mostly. Here's a map of the current state of affairs:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University *[WSU]: Wayne State University One notable bit here is how many developing countries now have lower birthrates than even some European nations. "Chile (1.85 children per woman), Brazil (1.81), and Thailand (1.56) have lower birthrates than France (2.0), Norway (1.95), and Sweden (1.98)," Lewis writes. The same goes for India. Back in 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich famously warned about a coming population explosion in India that would lead to mass famine and catastrophe. Yet today, India's fertility rate (2.5) is only slightly higher than the United States' (2.1). In India's southern states, the birthrate is actually below replacement level, meaning that the next generation will be smaller than the current one.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University So what happened? Lewis examines a number of hypotheses, from rising incomes to growing female literacy. Those are all moderately correlated with the decline in birthrates and could help explain the shift. But, curiously enough, nothing seems to match up with the trends as neatly as the growth in TV ownership and media exposure: *[WSU]: Wayne State University This isn't as bizarre as it seems. A 2009 paper (pdf) by Robert Jensen and Emily Oster found that the introduction of cable television "is associated with significant decreases in the reported acceptability of domestic violence towards women and son preference, as well as increases in women’s autonomy and decreases in fertility." It's far from certain that television alone is driving these changes, but the evidence is suggestive.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University A separate 2008 study (pdf) by Eliana La Ferrara found that the popularity of soap operas seems to have had a similar effect in Brazil, where birthrates have dropped from from 6.25 to 1.81 in the past 50 years. The idea here is that television helps alter certain cultural norms that, in turn, lead to women choosing to have fewer kids. (Again, though, it's possible that soap- opera exposure is simply an outgrowth of some other factor, like rising incomes.)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University In any case, this is a story with big implications. Environmentalists have long warned that if the global population keeps soaring — we're at about 7 billion right now — that'll put a huge strain on the Earth's natural resources. But in much of the world, the population is no longer soaring. And, if the soap-opera hypothesis is correct, birthrates in places like Africa might end up dropping far more rapidly and easily than anyone expects.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **Further reading:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University — ****How to fit 7 billion people on the planet. Note that a 2010 paper found that slowing population growth could provide “16-29% of the emissions reductions suggested to be necessary by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University — Also note that falling birthrates aren't inevitable. In Egypt, birthrates appear to be rising again as the new government gets rid of various family- planning services.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Ruth Marcus: New York tells the truth about teen pregnancy

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) is at it again — this time on an issue even more explosive than infringing the right to a Big Gulp. Bloomberg’s latest target is teen pregnancy, with a sharp-edged advertising campaign that features pictures of crying babies and warns prospective teenage parents of the difficult path ahead. You might think that — unlike the soda ban — this message, displayed in subways and at bus stops, would be unobjectionable. After all, no one argues that having a baby as a teenager is a good idea. “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen,” says one poster, featuring a picture of a crying baby. “If you finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children, you have a 98 percent chance of not being in poverty,” says another. “Honestly Mom . . . chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me?” asks a third. Good question. The answer is: You are more likely to be born prematurely and at low birth weight, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. More likely to be abused or neglected; less likely to complete high school. If you are a boy, you are twice as likely to end up in prison as are the sons of mothers ages 20 and 21. If you are a girl, you are three times as likely to become a teen mother yourself compared with daughters born to mothers ages 20 and 21. Statistics for teenage mothers themselves are similarly daunting. Only half obtain a high school diploma by age 22, compared with 89 percent of women who did not give birth as teenagers. Less than 2 percent of mothers who give birth before age 18 obtain college degrees by age 30. Half live below the poverty line — and as their children grow older, the family’s chances of living in poverty _increase_. But pointing out these facts apparently transgresses the boundaries of political correctness. “This campaign seems laser-focused on shaming already struggling teen parents or, ludicrously, convincing teens not to get pregnant because really bad things will happen,” said state Sen. Liz Krueger (D). Teenage mothers across the city, lamented city councilwoman Annabel Palma (D), herself once a teen mother, will feel “shamed and stigmatized.” Most disappointing was the griping from Planned Parenthood of New York City, where vice president Haydee Morales complained that the ad campaign “creates stigma, hostility and negative public opinions about teen pregnancy and parenthood.” Excuse me, but we’re not supposed to have a negative opinion about teen pregnancy and parenthood? Isn’t that the planned part of Planned Parenthood? I’m not arguing for 21st-century Hester Prynnes equipped with iPhones and Snuglis. Teenagers who become pregnant and choose to have the baby need support, not finger-pointing. But to say that we shouldn’t shame pregnant teenagers is different from saying that it’s a shame anytime a teenager gets pregnant. It is, and the squeamishness about saying so does teenagers no favor. In fact, we suffer from undue squeamishness about criticizing out-of-wedlock births in general. As detailed in a new report, “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America,” the country “is at a tipping point . . . into a new demographic reality where the majority of first births in the United States precede marriage.” There are many devoted single parents but, overall, this is an unhealthy development. On average, the report noted, children of unmarried mothers “suffer more school failure, behavioral problems, drug use, and a greater likelihood of becoming single parents themselves.” For me, then, the question about the New York program is whether it will work. The city has an aggressive anti-pregnancy campaign that includes making the Plan B emergency contraceptive available in some schools. Teen pregnancies have dropped by 27 percent over the past decade but remain higher than the national rate. Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, which once had the second-highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, teen pregnancies have dropped five years in a row — and faster than the national average — since the city instituted a program that used similar “shock advertising.” “Cultural messages do matter, whether it’s smoking or drunk driving or obesity,” Robert Doar, head of New York City’s Human Resources Administration, told me. “Teen pregnancy is a problematic thing, for the teenager and the child. . . . I don’t think that’s stigmatizing. I think that’s the truth.” What better role for the nanny state than to help young girls with scant prospect of ever being able to hire one. _Read more fromRuth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook._ ****

The U.S. fertility rate just hit a historic low. Why some demographers are freaking out.

The United States is in the midst of what some worry is a baby crisis. The number of women giving birth has been declining for years and just hit a historic low. If the trend continues — and experts disagree on whether it will — the country could face economic and cultural turmoil. According to provisional 2016 population data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday, the number of births fell 1 percent from a year earlier, bringing the general fertility rate to 62.0 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44. The trend is being driven by a decline in birthrates for teens and 20-somethings. The birthrate for women in their 30s and 40s increased — but not enough to make up for the lower numbers in their younger peers. A country's birthrate is among the most important measures of demographic health. The number needs to be within a certain range, called the “replacement level,” to keep a population stable so that it neither grows nor shrinks. If too low, there's a danger that we wouldn't be able to replace the aging workforce and have enough tax revenue to keep the economy stable. Countries such as France and Japan that have low birthrates have put pro-family policies into place to try to encourage couples to have babies. The flip side can also be a problem. Birthrates that are too high can strain resources such as clean water, food, shelter and social services, problems faced by India, where the fertility rate has fallen over the past few decades but still remains high. The debate now is about whether the United States is headed toward a “national emergency,” as some have feared, or whether this is a blip and the birthrate will level off soon. “It's about millennials,” says Donna M. Strobino, a professor of population, family and reproductive health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Those supposedly entitled young adults with fragile egos who live in their parents' basements and hop from job-to-job — it turns out they're also much less likely to have babies, at least so far. Some experts think millennials are just postponing parenthood while others fear they're choosing not to have children at all. Strobino is among those who is optimistic and sees hope in the data. She points out that the fall in birthrates in teens — an age when many pregnancies tend to be unplanned — is something we want and that the highest birthrates are now among women 25 to 34 years of age. “What this is is a trend of women becoming more educated and more mature. I’m not sure that’s bad,” she explained. Indeed, as fertility treatments have extended the age of childbearing, the birthrates among women who are age 40 to 44 are also rising.  Frey attributed the decline in birthrates to a women's “lifestyle” choice as well as the fact the economy has been in a funk. Times of economic downturn or uncertainty tend to cause a drop in birthrates, but when things turn around they tend to bounce back in a kind of catch-up period.

Graph(s) of the day, part II: U.S. birthrate falls to lowest on record

Yes, Dylan already posted a graph of the day. But are you really going to object to another? Particularly when it's this important? "The U.S. birth rate dipped in 2011 to the lowest ever recorded," 63.2 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, reports the Pew Research Center for Social and Demographic Trends, citing preliminary data from the National Center for Health Statistics:  Why? Largely because of "a plunge in births to immigrant women since the onset of the Great Recession," the report said. Between 2007 and 2010, the birthrate for U.S.-born women decreased 6 percent, but "the birth rate for foreign-born women plunged 14%—more than it had declined over the entire 1990-2007 period."  A key contradiction in American public opinion is that many people simultaneously think that immigration is bad for the economy ("they're taking our jobs!") and that a low birthrate is bad for the economy. But they basically lead to the same economic problem: too many old people, not enough young people. The United States is lucky in that much of the world -- including many people with lots of skills -- wants to come here. The fact that our birthrate is dropping only strengthens the case for letting them in.

Fertility rates in U.S. appear to be leveling off

Fertility rates are leveling off for the first time since before the recession began as more American women are having babies in an improving economy, according to statistics in a National Center for Health Statistics report released Friday. The fertility rate of 63 births for every 1,000 women of childbearing age was still an all-time low, the report said. But after six years of steep decline, the downturn in 2012 was imperceptible. With almost 4 million babies born to American women in 2012, essentially the same number as the year before, the fertility rate was down just a small fraction of a percentage point. In contrast, the fertility rate plummeted by almost 3 percent every year between 2007 and 2010 and was down an additional 1 percent in 2011. The report does not pinpoint reasons for the decline, largely because the government does not ask new mothers their motivations for having babies now, said Brady Hamilton, an NCHS statistician who wrote the report. But demographers point to the recession that began in December 2007, and estimate that 1.3 million babies were not born because their parents chose to delay having them amid a severe economic downturn. The latest figures suggest that a turnaround is underway. “Birthrates are stabilizing after years of dropping and dropping and dropping,” said Ken Johnson, a demographer with the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. “It’s more evidence the effect of the recession is beginning to wane.” The report, based on birth certificates issued throughout the United States in 2012, shows a notable increase in births to women in their 30s. The number of births to women between the ages of 30 to 34 was up 3 percent. After three straight years of decline, there was a 2 percent rise in the number of babies born to women ages 35 to 39. At the same time, both the number and the birthrate for women in their 20s continued to drop last year. Carl Haub, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, said that reflected a long-term trend of women delaying childbirth until they finish their college educations and start their careers. A striking drop in the birthrate for Hispanic women, however, continued in 2012, when it declined an additional 1 percent. Between 2007 and 2012, the Hispanic birthrate is down by almost a third, compared with a 17 percent decline for non-Hispanic white women. “The numbers show that people with less economic security have become more reluctant to have children now,” said Haub, attributing the Hispanic birthrate decline to the recession. “Three years from now, who knows? You sort of expect it to return to what it was.” Birthrates also plummeted during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and did not start ticking up until the early 1940s. After the war ended, the baby-boom generation was born.

Five startling facts about pregnancy and abortion in America

**Fewer women are getting pregnant.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The pregnancy rate for American women between 15 and 44 dropped 12 percent between 1990 and 2009, according to a new Center for Disease Control report out today on pregnancy and abortion. In 2009, there were 102.1 pregnancies per 1,000 women, a drop from 115.8 pregnancies per 1,000 women in 1990.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **Much of the drop is due to a huge decrease in teen pregnancies.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The teen pregnancy rate has steadily tumbled downwards over the past two decades, aside from a small uptick in the mid-2000s. It has been cut in half over the past decade, from 61.8 births per 1,000 women between 15 and 19 to 29.4 births. Weirdly though, this is one statistic that has trouble making its way into the public sphere: When the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unintended Pregnancy surveyed on the issue, it found that 50 percent of Americans thought teen pregnancy had been getting worse in recent years.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **Racial disparities on teen pregnancy are getting smaller but still pretty bad.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Black and Hispanic teen birth rates are still double the the size of the Non-Hispanic white teen birth rate. At the same time, there were much larger disparities when the CDC began tracking teen births in the 1990s. From 1990 to 2009, the birth rate for black teens has fallen by 51 percent and by 40 percent for Hispanic teenagers. **The only women having more pregnancies are older than 30.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Women between 30 and 44 are the only ones seeing higher rates of pregnancy. Overall, the age of pregnancy is shifting upwards, and quickly. Just a decade ago, in 2000, women between 20 and 24 had the highest rate in of pregnancy. In 2009, the most recent year for which CDC data is available, that has shifted to women between 25 and 29, who now have a birth rate of 162 per 1,000 women. **The abortion rate has fallen by one-third in the past two decades.**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Long-acting birth control could help stabilize the single parenthood trend

Imagine that all women in the United States, upon becoming sexually active, were automatically fitted with an intrauterine device or other form of long-acting birth control. This scenario sounds creepy, with its undertones of Big Brother and eugenics; framed this way, it would be neither a realistic nor a desirable development. But this thought experiment, provoked by a new book by Brookings Institution scholar Isabel Sawhill, illuminates two important societal and technological realities. First, as Sawhill describes in “Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage,” single parenthood is becoming the unhealthy “new normal.” Once, single parenthood was the consequence of divorce or the province of the poorest and least educated. Now, divorce rates are edging down. The prevalence of single parenting is largely a function of the never-married. The average woman today has her first baby before she is married. Meanwhile, single parenthood is invading the ranks of the middle class, often involving children with multiple partners. The stereotypical single mother used to be a high school dropout. No more. In 2010, Sawhill notes, 58 percent of first births to those with high school diplomas or some college were out of wedlock. (The comparable figure for those with a college degree was just 12 percent.) The paradox of the growing rate of single parenthood is that teenage pregnancy and birth rates have plummeted since the 1990s. But 20-somethings are the new teens: Unwanted pregnancies soared in this cohort during that same period. Among single women under 30, about 70 percent of pregnancies are unplanned; just under half of these pregnancies are carried to term. The resulting children are the product of unstable relationships. In one study of 5,000 newborns in large and midsize U.S. cities, half the parents were living together at the time of birth; another third were dating. But by the time the children were age 5, only one-third of those couples were still together — compared with 80 percent of their married counterparts. More disturbing, many of those single mothers went on to have additional children with other partners, introducing new layers of instability into their children’s already complicated lives. Certainly, single parents can be dedicated and capable caregivers. Yet the broader trend toward single parenthood is undeniably bad for the children involved. If marriage rates returned to their level in 1970, according to Sawhill’s calculations, the rate of child poverty would be about 20 percent lower. Still, there is no reversing the inexorable trend against marriage. This acceptance reflects a shift for Sawhill, who just a couple of years ago was asserting that “Dan Quayle was right” when he criticized television character Murphy Brown for choosing unwed motherhood. Marriage, Sawhill argued then, should be celebrated as “the best environment for raising children.” She still thinks so. “Marriage is beneficial,” Sawhill writes. “But when marriage has virtually collapsed among so many members of the youngest generation, the fact that it is still alive and well for the elites does not leave much room for optimism.” Consequently, the more effective argument to sexually active 20-somethings is not to hurry up marriage — it’s to slow down the decision to have a child. Which leads to the second point: There is a relatively easy and inexpensive (compared with child-bearing) technological solution at hand. The most popular contraceptive methods have high failure rates, due more to misuse (or non-use) than to product shortcomings. Thus, 18 percent of condom users and 9 percent of those who take birth control pills will become unintentionally pregnant in the course of a year. The smarter alternative is encouraging young women to switch to LARCs — long-acting reversible contraceptives such as IUDs, which can remain in place for as long as 12 years, or implantable birth-control, which can last for three years. The insights of behavioral economics are at work here: To achieve the desired outcome, switch the default, from having to take active steps to prevent pregnancy to having to take action to achieve it. These methods, Sawhill writes, “are forgiving of human frailty.” Government can’t and shouldn’t force young women to use LARCs. It can — thank you, Affordable Care Act — make them readily and affordably available. Turning drifters into planners, in Sawhill’s phrase, would not only be far better for Generation Unbound. It would give their wanted children the opportunity they deserve. _Read more fromRuth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook._ **Read more about this topic:** The Post’s View: Over-the-counter availability of ‘the pill’ is no panacea Ruth Marcus: Hooey and hype over the birth-control mandate Catherine Rampell: Many life milestones are out of millennials’ reach Kathleen Parker: To defeat poverty, look to marriage Robert Samuelson: Family meltdown and economic decline Ruth Marcus: New York tells the truth about teen pregnancy

Most Americans think teen pregnancy is getting worse. Most Americans are wrong.

Teen births and pregnancies have plummeted over the past two decades, down 42 percent from 1990. Most Americans, it turns out, have no idea that we're actually in the midst of a big public health success story. In a new survey from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 50 percent thought the teen pregnancy rate had gone up over that period. Eighteen percent correctly answered that it has declined.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University *[WSU]: Wayne State University CDC data, meanwhile, show that the teen birth rate has fallen to its lowest level since the 1940s. Researchers did see a small uptick in 2006 and 2007, but have seen rates falling steadily since then.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

David Ignatius: A demographic shift in the Muslim world

Something startling is happening in the Muslim world — and no, I don’t mean the Arab Spring or the growth of Islamic fundamentalism. According to a leading demographer, a “sea change” is producing a sharp decline in Muslim fertility rates and a “flight from marriage” among Arab women. Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, documented these findings in two recent papers. They tell a story that contradicts the usual picture of a continuing population explosion in Muslim lands. Population is indeed rising, but if current trends continue, the bulge won’t last long. Eberstadt’s first paper was expressively titled “Fertility Decline in the Muslim World: A Veritable Sea-Change, Still Curiously Unnoticed.” Using data for 49 Muslim-majority countries and territories, he found that fertility rates declined an average of 41 percent between 1975-80 and 2005-10, a deeper drop than the 33 percent decline for the world as a whole. Twenty-two Muslim countries and territories had fertility declines of 50 percent or more. The sharpest drops were in Iran, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Libya, Albania, Qatar and Kuwait, which all recorded declines of 60 percent or more over three decades. Fertility in Iran declined an astonishing 70 percent over the 30-year period, which Eberstadt says was “one of the most rapid and pronounced fertility declines ever recorded in human history.” By 2000, Iran’s fertility rate had fallen to two births per woman, below the level necessary to replace current population, according to Eberstadt and his co-author, Apoorva Shah. A July 2012 Financial Times story placed the Iranian fertility rate even lower and cited a U.N. report warning that Iran’s population will begin to shrink in two decades and will decline by more than 50 percent by the end of the century if current trends continue. Big cities in the Muslim world have seen especially sharp drops. Eberstadt notes that only six states in the United States have lower rates than Istanbul. In Tehran and Isfahan, Iran, fertility rates are lower than those of any state in the United States. Eberstadt argues that the fertility decline isn’t just a result of rising incomes and economic development, though these certainly played a role: “Fertility decline over the past generation has been more rapid in the Arab states than virtually anywhere else on earth.” The CIA’s World Factbook reports Muslim fertility rates slightly higher than Eberstadt’s estimates but generally below those of many sub-Saharan African, Latin American and Asian countries. Accompanying this fertility decline is what Eberstadt calls a “flight from marriage,” which he described in a paper presented last month in Doha, Qatar. His data show that in many areas of the world, men and women are getting married later or remaining unmarried. Divorce rates are also rising, especially in Europe, along with the percentage of extramarital births. The decline of marriage in Europe is well-known but still striking: The female marriage rate fell in Germany from 0.98 to 0.59 from 1965 to 2000; it fell in France over that period from 0.99 to 0.61; in Sweden from 0.98 to 0.49; in Britain, from 1 to 0.54. Marriage is also plummeting in Asia: In Japan, the percentage of women between 30 and 34 who have never married rose from 7.2 percent in 1970 to 26.6 percent in 2000; in Burma, it rose from 9.3 percent to 25.9 percent; in Thailand, from 8.1 percent to 16.1 percent; in South Korea, from 1.4 percent to 10.7 percent. Marriage rates in the Arab world are higher, but they’re moving fast in the same direction. What’s “astonishing,” says Eberstadt in an e-mail explaining his findings, is that in the Arab world, this move away from marriage “is by many measures _already_ as far along as was Europe’s in the 1980s — and it is taking place at a vastly lower level of development than the corresponding flights in Europe and developed East Asia. “Something really big is under way — and practically no one has noticed it, even in the Arab world,” argues Eberstadt. These studies are a reminder that the big demographic trends shaping the world are mysterious and often overlooked. The Arab world may be experiencing a youth bulge now, fueling popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. But as Eberstadt notes, what’s ahead over the next generation will probably be declines in the number of working-age adults and rapidly aging populations. The Arab countries are now struggling with what Eberstadt calls their “youthquake.” But the coming dilemma, he notes, is “how these societies will meet the needs of their graying populations on relatively low income levels.” **_davidignatius@washpost.com_ ** _Read more fromDavid Ignatius’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook._ **Read more from Opinions:** David Ignatius: The never-ending war in the Middle East Jackson Diehl: Wading into the Middle East morass Robert Kagan: The United States can’t pivot away from the Middle East

Opinion: Three simple rules poor teens should follow to join the middle class

Policy aimed at promoting economic opportunity for poor children must be framed within three stark realities. First, many poor children come from families that do not give them the kind of support that middle-class children get from their families. Second, as a result, these children enter kindergarten far behind their more advantaged peers and, on average, never catch up and even fall further behind. Third, in addition to the education deficit, poor children are more likely to make bad decisions that lead them to drop out of school, become teen parents, join gangs and break the law. In addition to the thousands of local and national programs that aim to help young people avoid these life-altering problems, we should figure out more ways to convince young people that their decisions will greatly influence whether they avoid poverty and enter the middle class. Let politicians, schoolteachers and administrators, community leaders, ministers and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children. Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class. Consider an example. Today, more than 40 percent of American children, including more than 70 percent of black children and 50 percent of Hispanic children, are born outside marriage. This unprecedented rate of nonmarital births, combined with the nation’s high divorce rate, means that around half of children will spend part of their childhood — and for a considerable number of these all of their childhood — in a single-parent family. As hard as single parents try to give their children a healthy home environment, children in female-headed families are four or more times as likely as children from married-couple families to live in poverty. In turn, poverty is associated with a wide range of negative outcomes in children, including school dropout and out-of-wedlock births. It is sometimes said that Americans are turning their back on the marriage culture. The high divorce rate, soaring nonmarital birth rate and consequent rise of single-parent families are certainly weakening marriage as an institution. But look again and discover that college-educated women have high marriage rates, low nonmarital birthrates, and low divorce rates. The marriage culture seems to be alive and well for those with a college degree. These families usually not only have enough money to afford good schools for their children, but they also provide a stable family environment that allows children to flourish. The recent attacks by Planned Parenthood on Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor, for launching a campaign designed to inform teenagers of the consequences of teen pregnancy provides a good example of how many in our society face the effects of nonmarital births on teen mothers and their children. In one of the campaign posters, a baby with tears rolling down his face says: “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen.” Another shows a girl saying to her mom: “Chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me?” Planned Parenthood criticized the ads, displayed in the subway and bus shelters, for ignoring racial and economic factors that contribute to teen pregnancy. Other critics say the ads stigmatize teen parents and their children. Granted, most teen moms are from low-income families and face a number of barriers to success. Along comes Bloomberg with a direct message to get the attention of teenage girls and warn them not to make their situation worse and to think more about their future. If the mother wants to improve her future by continuing her education, being a teenage parent is precisely the wrong way to do it. As for blaming the victim, no one is blaming the baby — yet the baby will also bear long-term consequences. Teenagers are capable of understanding principles and of using them to help make decisions. Anyone who delivers messages to teens about the consequences of decisions that could affect them and others for many years should be praised not criticized. Bloomberg should next launch a public campaign about the value of marriage to adults, children and society. There will be at least as many critics of this message as the message that young people should avoid teen pregnancy. Good. The bigger the controversy, the more the media will cover the debate, and the more the nation will have the opportunity to reflect on what is at stake. I am confident that most Americans will conclude that organizations like Planned Parenthood have it wrong, and Bloomberg has it right.

Nonprofit group hopes education can reduce Latina teen pregnancy rate

The 15-year-old girl blushed when she explained the most important parts of her day to the instructor. “I’m glad because I got good news today,” she said, as she averted her eyes from the other ninth- and 10th-graders sitting in a circle. “I’m sad, because I’m afraid my mom might find out.” “Ohh,” the instructor, Reyna Trinidad, replied. “You’re in love.” Trinidad and her co-instructor, Jonathan Bibb, have gathered this group of 10 Latino students at Wheaton High School after classes to aid them on their journey of self-actualization. On this cold March day, a simple question — _Como estas, tu?_ — would open another week of discussions about listening to emotions, having a sense of self-worth and handling the feelings that can make an adolescent’s cheeks redden. They hope these sessions will help fix a stubborn problem affecting some of the region’s most affluent suburbs: the great disparity in birthrates between Latino teenagers and other groups. For every 1,000 adolescent females in Montgomery County, an estimated 23 Latinas between 15 and 17 give birth. Even as the Latino birthrate has fallen in Montgomery over the past two decades, it remains more than 2.5 times higher than the rate for the county’s black girls in that age group and more than three times the rate for white girls. Similarly high rates are found in Alexandria. They are presumed to be similar in Fairfax County, officials there said, even though the county’s health department does not parse birthrate data for Hispanics. Since 1996, the earliest year in which Montgomery officials have published data, the great disparity between birthrates for Latino and white teenagers has hardly changed. Meanwhile, the gap between black teenagers and Latino teenagers has increased. This has perplexed local officials at a time when teen pregnancy rates in the nation are plummeting and the gaps between all races and ethnic groups continue to shrink. For advocates, the disparity has come to symbolize the socioeconomic gulf between Latinos, largely a population of new immigrants, and more established populations in one of the country’s most affluent counties. “If the gap between Latino and other groups continues to widen in terms of teen pregnancy rates, we can expect the cycle of poverty to continue in these communities, in addition to other negative consequences for the children and higher economic costs for taxpayers,” said Diego Uriburu, the co-chairman of Montgomery’s Latino Youth Collaborative Oversight Committee and director of the nonprofit Identity. In 2011, Identity and the social services agency Mary’s Center began using an annual $1 million federal grant for a coed, bilingual pregnancy prevention curriculum tailored to Latino youths, part of a national push to invest in teen pregnancy prevention. The program is held at 12 schools in Montgomery, including Wheaton High. Working with professors from the George Washington University School of Public Health, they are trying to scientifically measure the program’s success. The first results will be available later this year. The partnership is trying to test whether holistic discussions using examples germane to the experiences of being a Latino in Montgomery will delay “the sexual debut” of Latino girls and boys. So, yes, there will be discussions in the sessions about condom use and birth control. But first, there is discussion about the difference between an avocado and an orange. The orange, Trinidad and Bibb remind them, might look gorgeous on the outside. Still, it will collapse under pressure. The avocado, though, might look bruised. But the core — its “pit” — remains strong and untarnished. “Always remember your pit,’’ Trinidad tells the group. “That is the person who you are, your inner self.” Meanwhile, researchers and nonprofit groups are trying to discover the core of disparity in Montgomery. When Genevieve Martinez- Garcia, now a senior researcher at the Healthy Teens Network, studied Montgomery’s Latino youth in the mid-2000s, the birthrate was nearly twice what it is today. Those teenagers were a part of the wave of immigration from Central America that transformed the makeup of some cities in Montgomery, such as Wheaton. The pregnancy rates in that age group began to fall as those young people became more likely to take sexual education in schools, she said. “But what I found is that there needed to be more than sexual education,’’ Martinez-Garcia said. “You have to look at what’s going on in the kid’s life. Where they live, go to school and where they play matters. Having two-parent households matters.” Even so, Latina teenagers in the county are far less likely to get pregnant when compared with the national average of an estimated 46.9 births to Latina girls for every thousand adolescent girls. But those averages have fallen so rapidly that there is now only a slight difference between the rate for Latinas and blacks, while nationally, the gap between Latinas and whites has decreased. Bill Albert, chief program officer at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, called the declines “one of the nation’s great success stories of the past two decades,” a result of “a magic combination of less sex and more contraception.” Still, he said, “only in the past several years has the sex education business caught up with [educating] Latinos.” In Montgomery, the gap remains more outstanding because Latino youths are more likely to live in impoverished areas than white teenagers in the county, Martinez-Garcia said. The poverty rate for Latinos is nearly four times higher than it is for whites, county data show. They are also more likely to live in households with less-traditional family structures. For example, teenagers frequently live with extended family while a parent lives in Central America, leading to less supervision at home. In focus groups, Martinez- Garcia said, she began to notice that young girls were often dating boys who were two or three years older. Those older teenagers were pressuring the girls into sex, Martinez-Garcia said, leading to girls losing their virginity as early as 12. Meanwhile, some held on to myths that birth control might cause cancer. “A disturbingly high number of them had an early initial sexual debut,” Martinez-Garcia said. “And the parents were not giving them the skills or the self-esteem to say ‘No.’ ” This program doesn’t pitch itself to teens as a pregnancy prevention program. Instead, students volunteer for the camaraderie and the planned camping trip. “I joined because my friends told me how fun it was,” said Aristides Garcia, 15. “And, I don’t mean to be racist, but it’s good to spend some time with other Latinos because it is a way to feel more comfortable when talking about things.” So they gather for nearly two hours after school, sitting around a table drinking water and eating chips and salsa. They warm up playing games of “Huggy Bear.” At this session, instructors conducted exercises about listening to others and how frustrating it is to not be heard. Bibb then glided the conversation into another type of listening. “What do you think happens when you don’t listen to your pit?” Bibb asked. “You won’t be happy,” Wendy Flores, 15, volunteered. “And when you don’t listen, maybe sometimes you make the wrong decision.” Then the two facilitators handed out three scenarios about fictional teens in situations all too real. All three were from countries in Central America living with either one parent or no parents at all. All three were in relationships, one of them secret, in which the girlfriend was younger than her boyfriend. Each of the scenarios ended in pregnancy. Working in pairs, the teenagers tried to figure out how they might feel in the situation. “Seventeen is okay to have a kid, if [the father is] working,” Aristides said. “But not with a 16-year-old. That’s too young.” “I guess he’d be happy for bringing a life into this world, but how could he afford the child?” said Steven Villacorta, 15. “He has no money.” As the program goes on, the facilitators have deeper discussions about pregnancy and sexuality. But they said the first step was to have the group learn to make decision on their own. “This is really tough,” added Wendy, who said she needed more time to figure everything out. “I joined to meet new people and make friends. But I’m learning about how to think for myself, and how to be me.”

White Christian America is dying

The chart below reveals just how quickly the proportions of white, non-Hispanic Christians have declined across generations. Like an archaeological excavation, the chart sorts Americans by religious affiliation and race, stratified by age. It shows the decline of white Christians among each successive generation. Today, young adults ages 18 to 29 are less than half as likely to be white Christians as seniors age 65 and older. Nearly 7 in 10 American seniors (67 percent) are white Christians, compared to fewer than 3 in 10 (29 percent) young adults. Although the declining proportion of white Christians is due in part to large-scale demographic shifts — including immigration patterns and differential birth rates — this chart also highlights the other major cause: young adults’ rejection of organized religion. Young adults are three times as likely as seniors to claim no religious affiliation (34 percent versus 11 percent, respectively).   Up until about a decade ago, most of the decline among white Protestants was confined to mainline Protestants, such as Episcopalians, United Methodists, or Presbyterians, who populate the more liberal branch of the white Protestant family tree. The mainline numbers dropped earlier and more sharply — from 24 percent of the population in 1988 to 14 percent in 2012, at which time their numbers generally stabilized. But over the last decade, we have seen marked decline among white evangelical Protestants, the more conservative part of the white Protestant family. White evangelical Protestants comprised 22 percent of the population in 1988 and still commanded 21 percent of the population in 2008, but their share of the religious market had slipped to 18 percent at the time the book went to press, and our latest 2015 numbers show an additional one-percentage-point slip to 17 percent. These indicators of white evangelical decline at the national level are corroborated, for example, by internal membership reports during the same period from the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest evangelical Protestant denomination in the country. It has now posted nine straight years of declining growth rates. As a result, both white mainline Protestants and white evangelical Protestants are graying. In 1972, white Protestants’ median age was 46 years old, only slightly higher than the median age of the American population (44 years old). Today, white Protestants’ median age is 53, compared to 46 among Americans as a whole. Notably, by 2014, there was no difference between the median ages of white evangelical and mainline Protestants.  Catholics simply do not fit neatly into the story of White Christian America. In the book, I use White Christian America as a metaphor for the dominant cultural and institutional world built primarily by white Protestants, which until recently set the terms and tone for national debates and served as a kind of “civil glue” for the country, to borrow a term from E.J. Dionne. While anti-Catholic sentiment has generally cooled today, it remained strong up through the 1960s, as President John F. Kennedy’s campaign demonstrated. In the 19th and early 20th century, many Catholics were seen as neither “white” nor “Christian.” For example, Irish immigrants were often classified by U.S. immigration officials not as “Caucasian” but as “Celts.” And even the more liberal mainline Protestants saw Communists and Catholics as the twin threats to American democracy up through the middle of the 20th century.   Looking ahead, there’s no sign that this pattern will fade anytime soon. By 2051, if current trends continue, religiously unaffiliated Americans could comprise as large a percentage of the population as all Protestants combined — a thought that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. The reasons for the growth of religiously unaffiliated Americans are complex. First, it should be noted that the growth of this group has come almost entirely at the expense of white Christian denominations, both Protestant and Catholic. African American Protestants have maintained their market share, and the ranks of Latino Catholics, Latino Protestants and Asian-Pacific Islander Protestants have been growing.   The rising number of religiously unaffiliated Americans has more to do with people being less likely to claim a formal connection with organized religion than it does with widespread doubts about the existence of God. While there has been an uptick in the number of Americans who identify as atheist or agnostic, this has not been the main driver of growth of the religiously unaffiliated. As the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans has increased, so has the internal diversity of this group. PRRI’s 2014 American Values Atlas identifies three distinct subgroups among the unaffiliated: about half (52 percent) who describe themselves as secular or not religious, about one-quarter (24 percent) who describe themselves as religious (“unattached believers”) and about one-quarter (24 percent) who identify as agnostic or atheist. This is an evolving and complex group. Many unaffiliated Americans, for example, still believe in God, even as they are happily unconnected to any church and show little interest in seeking out institutionalized religion. PRRI actually has a survey in the field right now to get a better portrait of this important group and should have updated numbers by the end of the month. Stay tuned.  I’m certainly critical of the way that white evangelical Protestants have historically intertwined racial segregation and Christianity. That’s a normative perspective, but I don’t take it to be a controversial one. White evangelicals have themselves started disentangling Christianity and racism, albeit slowly and recently. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention did not get around to apologizing for the role slavery played in the denomination’s founding and for its consistent failure to support civil rights until 1995. And only this year, 2016, did the SBC vote to officially disavow the display of the Confederate battle flag. There are important leaders, such as Russell Moore, the president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, leading the way here, but there is a long road ahead toward anything like racial reconciliation. There is some progress, and at least a motivation among key white evangelical leaders, to take seriously the demands of addressing centuries of racial inequality. While the issue of racial inequality has without a doubt driven political polarization, I don’t see it as one necessarily owned by the political left. The issue of LGBT equality is more complicated and more divisive. But even here, attitudes are shifting. Generational differences make it clear that opposition to gay rights will ultimately lose its power as the culture war weapon of choice. Anti-gay rhetoric is unlikely to appeal to younger religious Americans, regardless of their religious affiliation. For example, 45 percent of young evangelicals (ages 18-29) and 43 percent of young Mormons favor same-sex marriage, compared to only 19 percent of white evangelical seniors and 18 percent of Mormon seniors. Most notably, the data show that young Republicans have passed the tipping point: 53 percent of young Republicans now support same-sex marriage.  Embedded in this question is whether being concerned about the equal treatment of African Americans by police and supporting the equal application of laws to gay and lesbian citizens is circumscribed to a progressive political agenda. I think younger evangelicals and younger Republicans are increasingly challenging the assumption that equality before the law is a progressive value. Also, it’s important to note that neither of these two churches started off as successful multiracial congregations and neither historically held particular concerns about racial inequality or gay rights. The key decision for both churches was that, as the areas were changing around them, they decided to stay put and be committed to being a neighborhood church, regardless of the racial and ethnic composition of the neighborhood. For example, in 1963, the then all-white Oakhurst Baptist Church received an award from the Southern Baptist Convention for being the model church of the year — certainly not an award given for being progressive. But the decision to stay in the neighborhood slowly transformed the membership’s conceptions about racial inequality and, later, LGBT rights. In other words, they didn’t start off with an ideological commitment but with a basic decision to be a church to the neighborhood. The other changes flowed organically from that basic commitment.  I completed the final text of the book in the early fall of 2015, just as Donald Trump was announcing his candidacy, and the book does not mention Trump at all. But I do think the book casts some much-needed light on white evangelicals’ attraction to Trump.  The surprising ascendancy of Trump in the Republican primary, with his strategy of making strong appeals to a white Christian base, is also shaping up to be a test of a key argument I make in the book — that Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign was the last campaign that could plausibly follow a “white Christian strategy” to the White House. So it looks like we’ll see whether I called that one too early or not! But even if Trump somehow manages to pull off a win by bringing out unprecedented numbers of white Christian voters, the patterns in the electorate are clear. Every four years, there is a shrinking pool of white Christian voters; if current trends continue, 2024 will be the first year white Christians will not make up a majority of voters nationwide.  One preliminary point: The supposedly strong link between church attendance and partisanship deserves an asterisk. First, this relationship holds most strongly only among white, non-Hispanic Americans. It’s virtually nonexistent among African Americans, who attend religious services at comparable levels to white evangelicals and identify overwhelmingly as Democrats. The relationship is also is significantly muted among Hispanics. Second, at least among Protestants, the top end of the traditional response categories this question employs (“more than once a week”) is biased toward evangelical Protestants. White evangelical churches offer multiple services per week and have internal expectations of higher attendance levels, while many white mainline churches only offer one service per week and the internal expectations are generally lower. A person who attends religious services once a month might be considered a solid member at a mainline congregation, but they might be put on the backsliding visitation list at an evangelical congregation. The upshot is that this measure may be capturing more identity than behavior.  Of course, the Trump campaign has completely ignored these recommendations, so we are not seeing the impact of this new playbook. However, if the GOP wants to have a future as a national party, and not just the party of white Christian nationalism, it will have to find a way to move in these directions. Particularly if Trump loses, the Republican Party will almost certainly revisit these big-tent recommendations. And if they get implemented, it will provide some new openings for realignments along racial and religious lines.  I begin the book with an obituary for White Christian America, and I conclude the book with a eulogy. This construction is consistent with the book’s stark title. My argument in the book is that we have already experienced the passing of White Christian America. While this claim is grounded in demographic changes, it is also supported by the fading power of major institutions, such as the National Council of Churches or the Christian Coalition of America. There are no indicators that the country will see the likes of White Christian America as a dominant cultural force again. None of that analysis precludes the possibility of religious reawakening. But rather than a reassertion of any single religion’s power and influence, we would — and do — see that expressed today in a variety of ways: in diverse churches, but also in synagogues, mosques, temples, meditation centers and others.

White Christian America is dying

White Christian America is dying

White Christian America is dying

White Christian America is dying

White Christian America is dying

Not quite half of American teens have had sex by 18. That’s actually low.

American teens may be becoming more conservative about sex. According to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report reflecting data from 2011 to 2015, about 42 percent of girls and about 44 percent of boys ages 15-19 reported that they'd had sex. Both numbers continue a gradual decades-long decline: In 1988, 51 percent of girls and 60 percent of boys in the same age group answered affirmatively on the question of sexual activity. The latest report, published Thursday, is based on a nationally representative sample of about 4,100 teens. Eighty percent of them used contraception during their first sexual experience, it found. Previous studies on teens' sexual attitudes and behavior also reveal how today's teens differ from older brothers and sisters as well as parents who grew up in the more permissive 1970s and '80s. Teen pregnancy and birthrates have been falling since the early 1990s and reached a historic low in 2015. Public health experts credit a combination of widespread access to contraception, plus the decrease in the percentage of teens having sex.

Using data can put a laser-like focus on efforts to reduce teen births

_Kate Welti is a research scientist for Child Trends. Jennifer Manlove is an area director for Child Trends._ Does geography equal destiny? For many of the District’s teens, it sure appears that way. More than 1 in 3 teenage females living in the District’s poorest neighborhoods will become a mother before age 20, compared with 1 in 10 in other areas of the city, based on recent estimates from Child Trends, a national, nonpartisan research center. Teen parenthood has been linked to poorer well-being, both for teen mothers and their children. While teen parenthood is a symptom of neighborhood poverty, it may also perpetuate poverty in the most disadvantaged wards of the city. Examining teen birth rates for each ward provides a detailed look at which teens in which parts of the city are at the greatest risk of becoming teen mothers. This information can guide the city, its schools and groups, such as the DC Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, in their efforts to reduce the incidence of teen pregnancy. There are dramatic differences in the likelihood of teen motherhood across the District’s eight geographic wards. A striking proportion of young women in wards 7 and 8, based on analysis of birth data from 2010 to 2012, will give birth before they turn 20, including one-third of teenagers in Ward 7 and almost 4 in 10 in Ward 8. Although wards 7 and 8 together hold just a third of the District’s teenage females, the wards account for more than half of all the city’s births to females ages 15 to 19. Equally noteworthy are the high rates of teen births among Hispanic females. In Ward 4, almost half of Latina teenagers will become mothers; in Ward 1, the likelihood is more than a third. Targeting pregnancy prevention efforts to the highest-risk areas, then, can help the District make the best use of limited resources. If the number of teen births in wards 7 and 8 were halved, even with no decline in any other areas of the city, the estimated percentage of females in the District becoming teen mothers would drop by almost one-third. Why are teen birth rates so high in wards 7 and 8? Some suggest that the higher teen birth rates in these wards are because of their higher concentration of African American teens. Nationally, the teen birth rate for blacks is twice as high as for whites. But the difference in teen births by ward should not be attributed solely to racial-ethnic differences. Other environmental factors are at play. Scholars have linked poverty, high unemployment, violent crime and a high dropout rate to higher rates of teen childbearing. Child Trends ranked the District’s wards across a range of these factors, and wards 7 and 8 consistently ranked last. And recent focus groups commissioned by the DC Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy found that youth in wards 7 perceive that there are fewer teen pregnancy prevention efforts in their neighborhoods and a lack of opportunities for youth in general. Teen pregnancy prevention efforts targeted to the highest-risk geographic areas in the District and tailored to the needs of the high-risk youth in these wards could accelerate the decline in teen births in the District. For many of the city’s young women and men, avoiding early parenthood could be the path out of poverty and toward more education and better career prospects. **Read more about this issue:** Ruth Marcus: New York tells the truth about teen pregnancy Krishna Upadhya: Contraceptive coverage can prevent teen pregnancy Colbert I. King: Teen pregnancy perpetuates D.C. poverty

How things have changed for teens in the 25 years since ‘Saved by the Bell’

“The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” delivered a blast from the past last night, when Fallon returned to the set of “Saved By the Bell” along with two-thirds of the original cast. The cast understandably had a few more lines on their faces and pounds around their middles than they did 25 years ago – except for Mario Lopez, who weirdly looked almost exactly the same as teenage A.C. Slater. Mario Lopez aside, America has changed a lot since "Saved by the Bell" went on the air in 1989. High school today is far different from the Bayside of yore: Nerds with glasses have been reborn as hipsters, teens are more concerned with cyber bullies than guys like Zack Morris, and TV shows are more likely to cast captains of the football team or cheerleading squad as villains than heroes. As "Saved by the Bell" passes a quarter-century-old milestone, here are four ways life has changed for teenagers in America since Zack Morris ruled school. In "The Tonight Show," a pregnant Kelly Kapowski (Tiffani Thiessen) plays off her real-life baby bump, announcing that Zack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) has gotten her pregnant. But Zack and Kelly would have been a lot more likely to have gotten pregnant in 1990 -- and not just because they were 16 then.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. has fallen to a record low in recent years. In 2012, an average of 29.4 live births occurred per 1,000 15-19 year old women, less than half of the rate in 1991, according to the CDC. For non- Hispanic white women, the rate is about 20 live births per 1,000 women.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Sex education has generally improved, and teens are waiting longer to have sex. But the biggest cause has been a shift from condom use alone to more effective methods like the pill. There’s also some evidence that reality shows like “Teen Mom” and “16 and Pregnant” are scaring kids straight. Perhaps "Saved by the Bell" was just too innocent.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico We’ve come a long way since Zack Morris’ giant cell phone. Our phones have shrunk a lot, before getting a little larger in recent years. Motorola's DynaTAC, which debuted in 1983, came in at an impressive 14 inches. By 1999, the Nokia 3210 measured fewer than 5 inches, as this chart from Quartz shows.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Research by Pew showed that, as of 2013, 78 percent of teens had a cell phone. Overall, 37 percent of teens had smartphones, up from just 23 percent in 2011. And one in four teens are “cell-mostly” Internet users, meaning they mostly go online using their phone rather than a laptop or a computer. That's led to new pressures for teens, including cyber bullying and sexting.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In the "Saved by the Bell" era, jokes about homosexuality and cross-dressing were commonplace on network TV. For audiences and network executives, men behaving like women -- Mario Lopez’s ballet dancing, Zack dressing up as a girl named “Bambi,” and Screech’s cross-dressing as the Pineapple Princess, a cleaning woman named “Sinead O’Connor,” and other fictitious ladies -- was generally regarded as comedy gold. There's still a lot of jokes and bullying based on gender and sexual orientation today, both in real life and on the small screen. But many shows that are popular with teenagers -- including "Gossip Girl," "Glee," "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," "One Tree Hill" and "Ugly Betty" -- feature gay characters. And polls show that younger Americans consistently show more acceptance toward homosexuality than older generations.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Trends in drug use have fluctuated a lot since Jessie Spano was hooked on caffeine pills. Far fewer teens are using alcohol and cigarettes today than they were in the early 1990s -- though the use of e-cigarettes and hookahs is creeping upward. Fewer than 15 percent of 12th graders reported using cigarettes in the past month in 2014, down from over 35 percent in the late 1990s. Monthly alcohol use dropped from nearly 55 percent of high school seniors in 1992 to fewer than 40 percent in 2014.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The use of marijuana and drugs overall has risen since the early 1990s, though it leveled off in recent years. No one is really sure why this is, but it probably has little to do with Bayside High's “No Hope With Dope” posters. A lot has changed since Bayside High, but one thing is similar -- the fashion has gone full circle.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Robert Samuelson: America’s menacing mega-trends

_“There is no parallel in history to the [American] experiment of free government on this scale. The scale accounts for a great deal, including. . . pessimism about the present or the future of America.”_ — Scottish historian D.W. Brogan in “The American Character,” 1944 Just why is American politics so dysfunctional? One answer is that both parties, for different reasons, have created self-serving mythologies that reward them for not dealing with pressing problems that, though daunting, are hardly sudden or secret. For proof, see Paul Taylor’s new book, “The Next America.” Taylor oversees many of the Pew Research Center’s opinion surveys. His masterful synthesis of polls shows that three familiar mega-trends lie at the core of America’s political and social stalemate. First, immigration. By 2050, immigrants and their U.S.-born children are projected to represent 37 percent of the population, slightly higher than in 1900, when the country last experienced mass immigration. Between now and mid-century, immigrants and their children will generate two-thirds of population growth. The question is whether newcomers are constructively assimilated or whether — to use Taylor’s acid characterization of popular fears — they “take our jobs, drain our resources, threaten our language . . . and import crime.” Either way, America’s profile changes. In 1960, 85 percent of Americans were white and 10 percent were black. Now, 63 percent are white, 13 percent black, 17 percent Hispanic and 5 percent Asian. In 2050, those shares are projected to be 47 percent white, 13 percent black, 28 percent Hispanic and 8 percent Asian. Second, family breakdown. In 2011, unmarried women accounted for 41 percent of U.S. births, up from 5 percent in 1960. The trend affects all major groups. The rate is 29 percent for whites, 53 percent among Hispanics and 72 percent among African Americans. Although 60 percent of single mothers have live-in boyfriends, half of these relationships end within five years. Single parenthood’s stigma is gone. This may shape the future middle class because growing up in a single-parent home puts children at a disadvantage. Children in two-parent homes — despite millions of exceptions — are “healthier, do better academically, [and] get into less trouble as adolescents,” writes Taylor, summarizing social-science research. Finally, aging. Every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 65. The retiree flood is swamping the federal budget. By 2022, Social Security, Medicare and the non- child share of Medicaid will exceed half the budget, up from 30 percent in 1990, projects an Urban Institute study. To make room for the elderly, defense and many domestic programs are being relentlessly squeezed. There’s no generational justice, argues Taylor: “The young today are paying taxes to support a level of benefits for the old that they themselves have no prospect of receiving when _they_ become old.” America’s future rests heavily on how these mega-trends play out. Democracy works best when the political system can mediate between the often-inconsistent demands of public opinion and larger national needs. This, America’s leaders can’t or won’t do. Faced with immutable trends, they have not adapted to change. Instead, they pander to partisans with soothing, though outdated, stereotypes. Nostalgia poses as policy when it is actually a marketing strategy. Liberals won’t come to terms with aging. Believing that spending on the elderly and near-elderly constitutes the essence of progressivism — and ignoring the affluence of many elderly — some liberals even support raising these benefits. The paradoxical result is that the pro-government party has become an instrument of anti-government policies, because accommodating all the elderly’s benefits means quietly condoning deep cuts in most other programs. By its nature, this brand of liberalism discriminates against the young. To be sure, their economic problems stem heavily from the Great Recession (in 2012, 40 percent of men ages 18 to 31 lived with their parents). But shrinking government services and looming tax increases compound the damage. Conservatives have parallel hang-ups. They can’t adapt to the permanence of Big Government or the presence of so many immigrants, including an estimated 11 million who are here illegally. Even if unworthy government programs are cut, federal spending will easily exceed one-fifth of national income, which is more than today’s taxes will cover. Higher taxes, contrary to GOP dogma, will be needed. Similarly, illegal immigrants won’t conveniently vanish. Government can’t do much about the decline in marriage. But it isn’t handcuffed elsewhere. What’s needed is a bargain in which Democrats trim retiree benefits (Social Security and Medicare) and, in exchange, Republicans deal forthrightly on immigration and taxes. This seems unlikely, because it would require both parties to accept the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. Appraising America’s democratic prospects in the mid-1940s, historian Brogan wrote that “the pessimists have always been wrong.” Maybe, but they’re looking prescient now. _Read more fromRobert Samuelson’s archive._ **Read more on this topic:** Robert J. Samuelson: The true state of the elderly Ruth Marcus: On fiscal issues, silence The Post’s View: Mr. Obama backpedals on entitlement reform

America’s baby bust

Call them the missing recession babies. Births across the nation took a tumble during the economic downturn, and both the number of births and the birth rate have not recovered much since 2007. This small reverse baby boom will leave a faint but lasting dent on America’s population pyramid: Expect kindergartens to be a little less crowded in the next couple of years, Little League rosters a bit more condensed. The recession, of course, did not have an impact on every state to the same degree. Places like Arizona saw the biggest leaps in the unemployment rate, and, correspondingly, the biggest drop in the rate of babies being born. Likewise, states that weathered the recession well, like North Dakota and Alaska, did not see much in the way of falling birth rates. Younger women, especially those in their early 20s, had the biggest declines in childbearing. This is in line with a long-term cultural shift. Young Americans are taking longer to settle down and start families, and the average age of motherhood has been rising along with the average age of first marriage. This recession, which has been especially hard on millennials, sharpened these trends. If you’re unemployed and living with your parents, how can you have a baby? If recent history is any measure, the dip will be temporary. The recessions in the early ’70s and early ’90s also shocked the birth rate, which in both cases fell quickly but slowly rose again. That’s what recessions do: They delay the decision to have a baby. As soon as things start to look up, the crib and the car seat will follow.

Census update shows more diverse society as baby-boom generation ages

A new Census Bureau report shows the baby-boom generation fading further into the gray and giving way to millennials in a country whose younger generations are also becoming more diverse. The white population in the United States reached an all-time high median age of 43, while those younger than 5 were outnumbered by minority children. “That’s a reflection of how the U.S. is aging,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic research at the Pew Research Center. At the same time, the latest census data reflect earlier findings that China has replaced Mexico as the chief source of U.S. immigrants. Hispanic immigration has slowed overall as Asian migration chugs along. “At the national level, a lot of these trends we see now tend to be continuations of older trends,” said Ben Bolender, chief of the Census Bureau’s population estimates branch. The annual update of population estimates released Thursday includes changes by age, sex, race and Hispanic origin nationwide and by states and counties between April 1, 2010, and July 1, 2014. Although the report is short on dramatic shifts, it offers a snapshot of further changes in long-term trends, especially as the nation becomes more diverse. “In a sense, 2015 marks the demographic passing of the baby-boom generation, and it will continue to be an ever-smaller part of the total U.S. population until it disappears altogether later this century,” said   C. Matthew Snipp, a sociology professor at Stanford University. The question now, he said, is whether the rise of the millennial generation will produce the same cultural revolution attributed to boomers. William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America,” said the report shows the white population is growing older and shrinking in proportion to minority groups, with whites experiencing a higher number of deaths than births. Non-Hispanic, single-race whites were the only group for which deaths exceeded births between 2013 and 2014. Minority children younger than 5 now make up 50.2 percent of that population group, the report found. “This year is the first time the 0-to-4 population is minority-majority,” Bolender said. It was a shift long expected: In 2013, the rate was close enough — about 50-50 — that young minority children were on the cusp of outnumbering white children. Nevada moved closer to becoming a minority-majority state — where minorities make up more than 50 percent of the population — joining a club including Hawaii (77 percent), California (61.5 percent), New Mexico (61.1 percent) and Texas (56.6 percent). Bolender said the data also reflect a shift in patterns. Immigration from China and other Asian countries has gradually increased while Mexican immigration, which began slowing in 2004, fell sharply in the Great Recession. The 2013 American Community Survey found that the United States received 1,201,000 immigrants, with China the top sending country at 147,000. Immigrants from India numbered 129,000, compared with Mexico’s 125,000 — a difference that was not statistically significant. In the Washington area, the proportion of black and multiracial black people has remained steady, at about 27.8 percent, since around 2000, Bolender said. But within the District, the proportion has been declining. In 2000, the District was about 62 percent black or black in combination. By 2010, that number dropped to 53 percent. Today, it’s 50.6 percent. “So if those trends were to continue, we would expect that to drop below 50 percent in the next few years,” Bolender said. The report also showed that the District experienced an increase in the percentage of its under-20 white population. At the same time, the nationwide under-20 population is 52.2 percent white. Thirteen states now have minority-majority under-20 populations, up from five in 2000, Frey said. None showed an increase in the under-20 white population. While the Census Bureau report groups the District with states, many demographers say that the most apt comparison is with other U.S. cities.

New report reveals surprising facts about Hispanic children and teens

Hispanic children, the largest minority group in public schools as well as the fastest growing, are increasingly showing up in preschool programs,  have made significant gains on national math tests, and are posting record high school graduation rates, according to a new study released Wednesday. But they still lagged behind their white peers in academic achievement and were more likely to live in poverty and not finish college. Child Trends, the non-partisan, non-profit research organization, analyzed a wealth of recent Census data regarding the country’s 17.5 million Hispanic children and teens, and the group identified some surprising facts. The vast majority of Hispanic children in 2013 – more than 90 percent — were born in the U.S. Most of those children had family connections to Mexico, and the rest were connected to Puerto Rico, followed by El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and other countries in Central America, and South America. A majority of Hispanic children — 58 percent — live with two married parents. Latino children are more likely than their white or black counterparts to eat a meal with their families six or seven days in a week. And those meals are more likely to be home-cooked in Hispanic households, compared to meals eaten in black and white households, according to the report. Sixty-two percent of Hispanic children are considered low income, living in families that earn just enough money to cover basic needs, the report said. Roughly one out of every three Hispanic children meets the federal definition of poor, compared with 38 percent of black children and 11 percent of white children, researchers at Child Trends found. Hispanic parents are less likely to read to their babies and toddler than parents of white children, and Hispanic children are not adequately prepared when they start school, the report found. But there has been a recent jump in enrollment in early childhood education programs among Hispanic children, from 39 percent in 2007 to 52 percent in 2012. And, as a group, Hispanic students are making gains, though they lag behind their white peers. Twenty-one percent of Hispanic eighth graders were proficient in federally administered math tests in 2013, a leap from eight percent in 2000. The on-time high school graduation rate for Hispanics also has surged, and college enrollment is at an all-time high. But Hispanics lagged behind whites and blacks in college completion in 2013. One area where Hispanics outpaced other racial or ethnic groups is in smartphone use. In 2012, 43 percent of Hispanic teens between 12 and 17 owned a smartphone, compared to 35 percent of whites and 40 percent of blacks in the same age group. More white teenagers owned cell phones, followed by black teens and then Hispanics. Read the report below: Americas Hispanic Children    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Robert Samuelson: Family meltdown and economic decline

The discouraging March employment report, with a job increase of only 88,000, raises questions well beyond the dreary state of today’s labor market. Prolonged high unemployment may be silently shredding the social fabric in ways that last for decades. Even before the Great Recession, men with a high school diploma or less faced lower wages and a harder time finding work. This made them less attractive as husbands, contributing to the growth of single- parent families. Stubbornly high unemployment almost certainly aggravates these destructive trends. It’s hard to overstate the breakdown of marriage and the rise of single-parent families. Consider out-of-wedlock births. In 1980, about 18 percent of births were to unmarried women; by 2009, the proportion was 41 percent. Among whites, the increase was from 11 percent to 36 percent; among African Americans, from 56 percent to 72 percent; among Hispanics, from 37 percent (1990) to 53 percent. Or look at the share of children living with two parents. Since 1970, that’s dropped from 82 percent to 63 percent. Among whites, the decline is from 87 percent to 73 percent; among African Americans, from 57 percent to 31 percent; among Hispanics, from 78 percent to 57 percent. Just what caused these changes remains controversial. In his 2012 book “Coming Apart,” Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute cited shifts in cultural norms. Having a child out of wedlock became more common and acceptable; the sexual revolution enabled men to get sex without marriage. The waning power of religion undermined the importance of family. Feminism and expanding welfare programs made it easier for women to survive — through jobs or aid — on their own. Liberalized divorce led to more breakups. But there’s also a more strictly economic case. In a paper for Third Way, a liberal think tank, economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attribute the decline of marriage — which, like Murray, they say is concentrated among the poorly educated — to the eroding economic heft of men compared with women. Women are more independent economically; men are weaker. Marriage has lost much of its pecuniary pull. To this hypothesis, they bring much statistical evidence. From 1979 to 2010, inflation-adjusted hourly wages for men age 25 to 39 with only a high school diploma fell 20 percent, while the wages of similar women rose 1 percent. Among those with some college (but no bachelor’s degree), women’s wages were up 8 percent; men’s were down 8 percent. As important, fewer men and more women proportionally have jobs. From 1979 to 2007 — prior to the recession — the share of male high school graduates with jobs fell 9 percentage points; job-holding by similar women rose 9 percentage points. For those with some college, men were down 6 percentage points, women up by 12 percentage points. Women have adjusted better than men to an economy with more office work and less factory, construction and transportation activity. Autor and Wasserman fear these changes are now feeding on themselves. On average, children in single-parent homes do worse — have lower grades, do more drugs, have higher arrest rates — than similar children raised by two parents, who can devote more money and time to their offspring. Boys seem especially at risk because they often lack “a positive or stable same-sex role model,” say Autor and Wasserman. So boys will do less well in school and less well (later) in the labor market. They will then be less appealing as husbands. “Over the last half-century,” writes Murray, “marriage has become the fault line dividing American classes.” Autor and Wasserman reach the same conclusion: Their data show a tight correlation between the falling earnings of poorly educated men and declining marriage rates. Today’s dismal labor market may now further aggravate family meltdown. It’s harder for men to get jobs or higher wages. Since 2007, there’s been a huge exodus of people from the labor force. In March, the number was 496,000. Perhaps two-thirds of the dropouts leave because they’re discouraged that they’ll ever find work, estimates Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. (The remaining third reflects lifestyle choices and aging, including the retirement of baby boomers.) Counting many discouraged workers as jobless would raise the unemployment rate close to 10 percent instead of the reported 7.6 percent, she says. “There are no easy public policy answers to the issues raised [here],” candidly write Elaine Kamarck and Jonathan Cowan of Third Way. And yet, there’s a sliver of hope: The economic logic of marriage hasn’t completely collapsed. A family consisting of one worker earning $35,000 and another $30,000 is much better off than either separately. Perhaps hardship will cause people to rediscover the cliche: Two can live more cheaply than one. _Read more fromRobert Samuelson’s archive._ **Read more about this issue:** Ruth Marcus: The marriage gap presents a real cost Michael Gerson: Economic inequality is the wrong issue Kathleen Parker: Un-hitching the middle class E.J. Dionne Jr.: Two-paycheck couples, working because they must Michael Gerson: The economic debate we should be having

In 49 states last year, babies were more more likely to be Hispanic than the population

For some time, it's been expected that the population would slowly grow less white, thanks in part to higher birth rates among Hispanics in particular. In 2014, every group except Native Americans saw an increase in the number of births. But compared to representation in the population as a whole, the number of babies born in non-white groups was overrepresented. Non-Hispanic whites are 62.6 percent of the population, but were only responsible for 53.9 percent of babies. Hispanics are 17.1 percent of the population, but were 22.9 percent of births. Interestingly, the group that had the biggest increase in number of births wasn't Hispanics. It was Asians. The number of births among Asians increased 6.4 percent, compared to 1.5 percent for Hispanics and 1.4 percent for whites. The increase in non-Hispanic white births from 2013 was about 17,300. Among Asians, a much smaller percent of the population, the CDC reports an increase of 17,000. In every state but one -- Vermont -- the percentage of all babies born who were Hispanic exceeded the percentage of Hispanics in the state's population. The difference was most pronounced in the Southwest, but also in the area immediately around New York City. (Among Asians, interestingly, the per-state differences were generally much smaller -- except in Hawaii.) We're not going to overlay the politics here. That's certainly been done enough, and this is a small data point in a long trend. It does, however, reinforce that this politically important trend is underway.

Abortion rates are declining in developing countries worldwide. What’s the cause?

Last year, when data emerged showing that the teen pregnancy rate, the overall unintended pregnancy rate and the abortion rate in the United States declined — in some cases to record lows — lots of hands shot up across the political spectrum.   In fact, in developed countries around the world, the abortion rate among girls and women ages 15 to 44 (which is generally considered childbearing age) declined significantly from 46 per 1,000 in 1990 to 27 in 2014. In the United States, both the teen pregnancy and abortion rates have dropped across all racial and ethnic groups since the 1990s. And in a separate study of the most recent U.S. data available, conducted by Guttmacher alone, researchers found that both the teen pregnancy and teen abortion rates in the United States hit a record low in 2011. Now, back to that joint Guttmacher/WHO study of abortion rates around the world. When researchers looked at the data more closely, they found two other very big things. First, despite the overall decrease, there was no decrease in the abortion rate in developing countries where access to contraception and abortions tends to be difficult if not unstable or tightly restricted. The abortion rate dropped in developing countries from 39 abortions per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44 in 1990 to 37 in 2014. That change is so small that it isn’t statistically significant and regarded by researchers as no change at all. Worldwide, that means that the annual number of abortions grew from about 50.4 million in the period between 1990 and 1994 to 56.3 million between 2010 and 2014, largely because of population growth. Second, when researchers grouped countries by the types of laws governing abortion — trying to figure out whether restrictive laws helped or hurt — they did not find a significant difference in the abortion rate where abortion is illegal and where it is not. In countries that ban abortion except to save a woman’s life, the abortion rate between 2010 and 2014 sat at 37 per 1,000 women of childbearing age. But in parts of the world where abortion is legal, the abortion rate was just slightly lower, at 34 per 1,000. Again, mathematically, that difference is too small to be considered scientifically significant.  There’s a lot of information emerging about trends in teen and adult pregnancy that people with a wide variety of views on abortion may well find difficult to process.  This is what the researchers said,  in their own words, about their conclusions and how they reached them. The emphasis in bold below is ours. Politics and policy changes, it seems, are only part of the prescription for lowering abortion and teen pregnancy rates.

More young women give birth without wedding rings, census study shows

Fewer women are married when they give birth to their first child, although a growing number are living with the baby’s father without being wed, according to a report on women’s fertility released Tuesday. The study on long-term trends in childbearing shows a “rise in cohabitation as a family form,” said the report written by two demographers in the Census Bureau’s fertility and family statistics branch. Roughly 6 in 10 of all women between ages 15 and 50 are mothers. Overall, there has been a steady decline in the percentage of women who are married when they have their first child, from 70 percent in the early 1990s to just 55 percent since 2005, the report said. The slide is even steeper among young mothers, those under the age of 23 at first childbirth: Since 2005, married mothers accounted for just 1 in 4 births among women in that age bracket. But that doesn’t mean those who were unwed were necessarily single mothers, raising their newborn in a home in which the father was absent. About 25 percent of all first-time mothers are living with their partners, up from 14 percent two decades ago. “The growth in cohabitation as a context for first birth has roughly paralleled the decline in marriage,” the report concluded, noting that among young mothers more babies are being born to men who are living with their partners than married to them. The trend is partly due to long-running changes in childbearing, particularly among women who go to college. More women are delaying childbirth until they complete their education, and their birth rates spike when they are in their early 30s. In contrast, birthrates for women who never finished high school peak in their early 20s. The census report also noted striking differences by race. In 2012, the year the study analyzed, the lowest fertility rate was among non- Hispanic white women, with 49 births for every 1,000 women. Black and Asian women had a birth rate of 57 per 1,000 women. Hispanics, one of the fastest-growing groups in the country, had 66 births among every 1,000 women. More than half, 52 percent, were to women who were born in the United States. Asian women had the highest rates of childlessness, and Hispanics had the lowest.

The birth rate went up in the U.S. last year for the first time since 2007

For nearly a decade, the number of babies born in the United States has been on the decline. But last year, for the first time since 2007, the country saw more women give birth, an increase that was pronounced across racial groups and older women. There were 3.9 million births in 2014, an increase of 53,000 babies over a year earlier, according to preliminary data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So what happened? Who was having these babies? Overall, the fertility rate — the number of births per women between ages 15 and 44 — increased to 62.9 births per 1,000 women, also the first time that has gone up since 2007. Fewer teenage women were having babies, while the birth rate for women in their early 20s was down to a record low of 79 births per 1,000 women. But birth rates went up for women in their early 30s and 40s, continuing trends that have existed for years for both age groups. _[Fewer young Americans are getting married]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And many of these women were becoming mothers for the first time. Notably, while the rate of first births went down slightly to reach a record low, it actually went up for women in their 30s. The rate was down or flat for women younger or older than that group, which was the only age group to see an increase in the rate of giving birth for the first time. Meanwhile, the rate of second, third, fourth and so on births increased. Most racial groups saw an increase in the number of births — white, black and Hispanic women saw a 1 percent uptick over 2013, while Asian or Pacific Islander women saw a 6 percent jump — while births to Native American women was down 2 percent.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico As we noted above, this was the first year-to-year increase since 2007, when 4.3 million babies were born. Since then, each year has seen a drop in the number of births, a trend that persisted through a recession as well as a halting recovery. This decline in births brought with it some notable milestones; in 2012, for example, more white people died in the United States than were born.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _[Life expectancy in the U.S. continues to climb]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico We want to mention this teenage birth rate thing again, because it seems worth highlighting: In 1991, teens were giving birth at a rate of 61.8 per 1,000 women between ages 15 and 19. Last year, that rate was down to 24.2 births per 1,000 women, a drop of more than 60 percent; the rate has solidly fallen each year since 2007. While this decline has been attributed to things like teens waiting to have sex and teens using birth control, health officials are still worried about the quarter of a million babies born to teens each year. The CDC released a report earlier this year urging teens who did have sex to use long-term contraception methods like intrauterine devices, echoing similar recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Related:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico How poor fathers who owe child support try to help their children    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

The stunning chart that explains the next four decades of American politics

Here's the graph. The most common age for white Americans last year was 55 -- meaning they were born in 1960, at the tail end of the Baby Boom. In ten years, the most common age for whites will be 65 or thereabouts (depending on how well those years go). In 20, 75 -- and so on. This is the graying of America, the shift toward a much older population that's been forecast for a long time. At some point, the Boomers will make up less of the population of white Americans (sorry, Boomers) and the most common age for whites will jump down a few decades, to that millennial peak that's now at about 24 or so. But this isn't the only trend that's happening. The most common age for Hispanics in 2015 was 8. In ten years, the most common age will be -- 18, just old enough to vote. In 20 years, they'll be 28 or so -- except that the trend for the Hispanic population has been that there are more young Hispanics than there are old. So the most common age in 10 years might again be 8, or 5 or 11.  This is that same map for Hispanics. (Bits of Appalachia were missing data.) By 2050, the Census Bureau predicts, the racial and ethnic composition of the country will look like this. This is why the Republican party, in the wake of Mitt Romney's loss in 2012 when he took only 27 percent of the Hispanic vote (down from the 31 percent John McCain had won four years earlier), put new emphasis on reaching out to Hispanic voters. If the country is trending more Hispanic, after all, the party would need to bolster how it does with that population if it wants to be successful over the long run. Instead, the party's presumptive 2016 nominee went the other direction -- playing hard for the still-large white vote, which tends to be older and tends to be more Republican. That strategy may work this year, but it will work less well in 2020 -- and even less well in 2024 and so on. Today's 8-year-old Hispanic will be voting for president for the first time in 2028. Today's 55-year-old white will be 77. The uncaring nature of human existence means that one of those groups may be a better long-term political bet than the other.

Life expectancy for white females in U.S. suffers rare decline

Life expectancy at birth for white, non-Hispanic females in the United States declined slightly from 2013 to 2014, a change that could be a statistical blip but still represents a rare drop for a major demographic group, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.   Arias said another study by her agency, to be published soon, will document the sharp increase in suicides, alcoholism-related diseases and overdoses. “Despite the positive influences of declines in heart disease and cancer and stroke, increases in other causes like suicide, chronic liver disease and unintentional poisonings were so large that they had a negative effect on life expectancy," she said.  Amid the bleak news for whites have been the improving numbers for African Americans and Hispanics, the new study indicates. Hispanic life expectancy rose from 81.6 to 81.8 years between 2013 and 2014; gains were seen for both males and females. Life expectancy for blacks rose from 75.1 to 75.2 years, driven by a particularly large jump among black males, from 71.8 to 72.2 years. "The gap between the white and black populations is quickly closing, and it's mainly because the black population is experiencing a great drop in mortality," said Arias, who authored the accompanying brief.   Urban Institute researcher Laudy Aron, who has written extensively on the "health disadvantage" of Americans compared to citizens of other affluent countries, said the new CDC data is "more confirming evidence of this larger phenomenon." "We continue to deviate from what these other high-income countries are doing, especially among women," Aron said. “Equally important will be what happens next year and the year after, and seeing if we are on some kind of new trend line.” Life expectancy is not a prediction for any given person; it's a statistical construct. As the new report puts it, "Life expectancy represents the average number of years that a hypothetical group of infants would live at each attained age if the group was subject, throughout its lifetime, to the age-specific death rates prevailing for the actual population in a given year." This CDC chart shows females' life expectancy at birth in 2013 and 2014 in the United States. And this chart shows males' life expectancy at birth in those same years:

Childhood obesity mirrors the nation’s racial divide

The nation is celebrating a new study reporting that the obesity rate for children ages 2 to 5 has plummeted over the last decade. But one of the sadder parts of the study released Wednesday was that the U.S. obesity rate is a reflection of the nation's racial divide: Blacks and Hispanics suffer much higher levels of obesity compared with whites.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University As you can see in the chart above, obesity rates among babies are fairly similar across racial lines. But the disparities rapidly emerge. A black child age 2 to 5 is more than three times as likely to be obese as a white child that age. Hispanic children in that age group are nearly five times as likely to be obese. Put another way: We're celebrating the fact that for all kids ages 2 to 5 childhood obesity has declined from 13.9 percent to 8.4 percent over 10 years. Yet, 11.3 percent of black children ages 2 to 5 and 16.7 percent of Hispanic children that age are obese. Just 3.5 percent of white children ages 2 to 5 are obese.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Why the disparity? Income certainly plays a central role, though this study didn't look at that factor. Researchers have other ideas, including the fact that black and Hispanic children eat solid foods earlier than doctors recommend, watch more television, have a higher intake of sugar-sweetened and fast foods and have mothers who face higher levels of maternal depression. It's not a hopeless situation -- breastfeeding by black and Hispanic children has increased, and government programs are fighting the disparity -- but the gaps are vast.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University As you can see in the chart below, the disparity narrows but persists over time. It makes sense: As black and Hispanic children enter the school system, their nutrition should improve and their physical activity should increase. The challenges of American education notwithstanding, schools still tend to have a harmonizing effect. After high school, the racial disparities widen again, reflecting the harsher economic conditions faced by blacks and Hispanics relative to whites.

Graph of the Day: Women are having more babies, but later in life

noted declaration That sounds pretty bad. But before we start assigning world-historical import to this number, we should ask if it's actually the one we ought to be looking at. Stephen Bronars, an economic consultant and former chair of the University of Texas - Austin's economics departments, argues convincingly that it's not. The birth rate could be lower, he notes, because women are choosing to have fewer babies. But it could also be lower due to the recession, or simply because random fluctuations in births 20 to 30 years ago mean there are fewer women at peak child-bearing age than there used to be. The second problem is amplified by the fact that women are, thanks to more widely available contraception and other reproductive care, choosing to delay child-rearing until later in life. So Bronars compared birth rates for women at different points in their lives: when they're 20, or 25, or 30, etc. He then compared those birth rates to what you'd expect if a given generation followed the previous one's patterns. What he found was that women are actually having more children than their predecessors. It's just that they're having them later on:

Republicans have a major demographic problem. And it’s only going to get worse.

It's no secret that Republicans have a demographic problem when it comes to national elections. In 2012, roughly nine in every ten people who voted for Mitt Romney were white -- even as the white vote continued its steady decline as a percentage of the overall electorate. He got crushed among Hispanics and African American voters.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Writing at Commentary magazine on Monday, former Bush Administration official Pete Wehner concludes:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The problem Wehner -- and many other senior strategists and some elected officials within the GOP -- identify is not only incredibly serious as it relates to the party's ability to win national election but is also almost certain to get worse unless something big changes. As in, the 2016 presidential election will be a tough one for Republicans to win given the demographic changes in the country but it won't be nearly as difficult for them as the 2024 or 2028 elections could be.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University A new study from the Carsey Institute, a non-partisan public policy thinktank housed at the University of New Hampshire, makes that fact abundantly clear. Using data from the 2012 Census, the report showcases just how fast the minority population is growing among young people -- those under aged 20 -- even as growth in that same age group among whites is basically stagnant. They write: "In 1990, 32 percent of the population younger than age 20 was minority, increasing to 39 percent in 2000. By July of 2012, 47 percent of the 82.5 million people under age 20 in America were from minority populations."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University What that massive growth among young minorities means is that those under 20 are now significantly more diverse than the rest of the population.  Minority youths make up 47 percent of the overall population under 20 while minorities comprise jusst 33 percent of 20-and-over population. The math isn't complicated. Winning 27 percent of the Hispanic vote and six percent of the African American vote -\- as Romney did in 2012 \-- makes it hard to win a majority of the overall vote when those groups represent 10 percent and 13 percent of the electorate, respectively. If Hispanics grow to 20 percent of the electorate by 2024 or 2028 and the Republican presidential nominee performs roughly equivalent to Romney's 2012 showing, it will be impossible -- or damn close to impossible -- for that GOP nominee to win a national majority.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University And, it's not just the raw numbers that should concern Republicans. It's where the under 20 minority populations live that could prove politically problematic going forward. Check out this map courtesy of the Carsey Institute. The concentration of young minority population in the Southwest and South means that states like Texas and Arizona as well as Georgia and South Carolina -- all of which have been conservative redoubts at the presidential level for decades could be in real jeopardy for the party in the medium and long term. Republicans have a demographic problem. And it is going to get way, way worse unless they find a way to improve their numbers among Hispanics.

Trump’s candidacy is severely damaging GOP efforts to court Hispanic voting bloc

No matter what happens in Tuesday’s presidential election, the candidacy of Donald Trump has been an absolute demographic disaster for the Republican Party. Why? Because Trump is running historically poorly among Hispanic voters, according to a new Washington Post-Univision national poll. Hillary Clinton is winning 67 percent of Hispanic voters, compared with just 19 percent for Trump If Trump continues to get somewhere in the neighborhood of one of every five Hispanic votes, it would mark a new low for Republicans in that critical voting bloc. George W. Bush got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in his 2004 reelection race. John McCain got 31 percent in 2008. Mitt Romney took 27 percent in 2012. That’s, um, not a good trend. Especially when every projection of where the country is headed shows the continuing decline of whites and the continued growth of the Hispanic population. According to projections by the Pew Research Center, whites will make up 46 percent of the U.S. population in 2065. Hispanics will be 24 percent at that time, while African Americans will make up 14 percent of the population. By comparison, 62 percent of the U.S. population in 2015 was white, while 18 percent was Hispanic and 12 percent was black. Need a more real-world example? In 1984, Ronald Reagan won the white vote by 20 points — and the election with 525 electoral votes. In 2012, Romney matched Reagan’s margin among white voters; he won just 206 electoral votes. In 1984, 86 percent of all votes were cast by whites; that number dipped to 72 percent in 2012 — and is projected to drop to 70 percent (or maybe even lower) on Tuesday. In the wake of that 2012 loss — and the demographic problems it portended — the Republican National Committee issued an autopsy report that had one central recommendation: Find a way to pass some sort of comprehensive immigration reform or else. It read (emphasis mine): “We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. **If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only**. We also believe that comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.” “Our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” Remember those words. Instead of finding a way to get behind comprehensive reform, rank-and-file Republicans killed even the consideration of such a bill — even after it had passed the Senate. And then the party chose Trump as its presidential nominee. That’s the same Trump who rose to prominence within the Republican Party on a pledge to build a wall on our southern border and make Mexico pay for it. And the same candidate who has openly embraced the sort of grievance politics that led him to, among other things, question whether a judge of Mexican heritage was fit to oversee a case regarding Trump University and to propose a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country. In short: It’s hard to conceive of a candidate who would run more contrary to the party’s stated goal of expanding its coalition than Trump. Actually, it’s not hard. It’s impossible. What Republican strategists are desperately hoping is that Hispanics will view Trump as an outlier, an isolated case who does not represent the broader views of the GOP. Again, the Post-Univision poll suggests that may be a false hope. Seventy-six percent of likely Hispanic voters have an unfavorable view of Trump; 66 percent hold that same unfavorable view of the broader Republican Party. Those numbers compare horribly with the way Latino voters regard the Democratic Party: 71 percent have a favorable opinion, compared with 24 percent who have a negative one. Yes, Hispanics view Trump more unfavorably than they view the Republican Party as a whole. But two-thirds of Hispanic voters have an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party, and that is still disastrously bad. Those numbers suggest that Trump is not being viewed as something separate from the GOP and that the negative way Hispanics view him is rubbing off on the party he represents. To go back to where I started: Yes, it is still possible that Trump could win the 270 electoral votes he needs to be president on Tuesday. (The white vote will still make up about 7 in 10 voters in this election.) But, win or lose, Trump has set back his party among Hispanic voters in ways that may well be irreversible in the near to medium term. The current composition of the Republican Party’s electorate is a winner for 1984. It’s a near-certain loser for 2024 and beyond.

America’s destiny has never been so obvious

Fifteen years ago, only four states — Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia and Florida — were members of this club. Since then, the white non-Hispanic population has aged. As the researchers note, half of the nation’s whites are now older than 43, up from 39 in 2000.         To get a glimpse of the future, just look at the nation’s toddlers. Among children younger than 5, minorities already outnumber whites in the United States as of 2015. These children are not evenly distributed — they mostly live in the coastal states or in the Southwest. But more and more, they will become the image of the typical American.

America’s biggest advantage over the rest of the world, in one graph

For all its troubles, the U.S. economy does have one major advantage over the world's biggest industrialized nations over the next few decades: demographics. "Within four decades the U.S. will likely have one of the lowest percentages of elderly citizens, and one of the highest rates of working-age bodies among large economies," the Motley Fool points out. It's largely because of America's big immigrant population: Hispanics, for instance, have a higher birth rate than average, and the influx of immigrants in the late 20th century will continue to have a major impact in the 21st. "China, meanwhile, will see its working-age population plunge and its elderly ranks soar -- an echo of its one-child policy. Europe falls deeper into age-based stagnation. Alas, Japan becomes the global equivalent of Boca Raton," the Motley Fool explains. Joel Kotkin argues, accordingly, that Americans should fear a slowdown in immigration to the United States rather than the opposite if they truly care about the country's economic prospects.

Esther J. Cepeda: Education is for parents too

When I saw a recent Pew Hispanic Center report with the sunny title, “Hispanic High School Graduates Pass Whites in Rate of College Enrollment,” I thought, “What’s the catch?” There was none on this exact point. A record 69 percent of Hispanic high school graduates in the class of 2012 enrolled in college that fall. But this was the only bright spot in the Pew survey. The high school dropout rate is falling, but it is still far above the rate for whites. In 2011, 14 percent of Hispanics ages 16 to 24 were dropouts. This was half the level in 2000. White students, in comparison, had a 5 percent dropout rate in 2011. And all those college-going Latinos don’t have such great prospects for earning a degree. According to Pew, Hispanic students are much less likely than their white counterparts to enroll in a four-year college (56 percent versus 72 percent). They are less likely to attend a selective college, less likely to be enrolled in college full time, and less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree. In 2012, a similar 56 percent of all Hispanic students enrolled in undergraduate programs were studying in community colleges, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. And, as The Century Foundation recently noted, two-year schools are buckling under the weight of educating a more diverse and low-income student body with ever-scarcer resources. You can sense my frame of mind as I attended my oldest son’s eighth-grade promotion ceremony last week from a school where 72 percent of the students come from low-income families, and also 72 percent are Hispanic. Walking up to the school, I tried to put the event into perspective. For many of the parents in attendance, this was going to be the last time they’d see their son or daughter don a cap and gown and collect a certificate of academic achievement. Based on our secondary school’s graduation rate, about one out of every four of the promoted eighth-graders won’t graduate from high school. But my gloom lifted. Such dire statistics don’t stop all underprivileged children from putting hefty down payments on dreams of Ivy League educations and stellar careers. In addition to the many students who were honored for high scholastic achievement and commitment to the school community, almost all of whom were minorities, the two academic achievement award winners — a Latino and an African-American — were true superstars. Each already had higher grades and more community involvement and school volunteer experience than most student can claim throughout their academic careers. These youngsters were overachievers by any standard, not just in comparison to students who have not been exposed to lifelong enrichment activities. Both these kids, despite all the crime and poverty that surround our school, will someday make their communities better places. And for all the handwringing over school funding, teacher competency, curriculum standards, standardized testing and cultural competency, the secret to Hispanic academic achievement — all academic achievement, really — comes down to parents. The names of the high achievers are as well-known to us as the faces of their families. They’re the same people we see over and over again, at every fundraiser, every parent meeting, every school celebration and awards ceremony. These parents — immigrant and native, middle-class and struggling, Spanish-only speakers and bilingual alike — have figured out the one silver bullet that overrides bad teaching, poor programs, and limited resources: passionate involvement coupled with high expectations. As a whole, Hispanics have much ground to gain. Though there are many entities trying to engage parents in their children’s academic life — cognitive stimulation, minimal parent-youth conflict, and academic involvement are bona fide keys to academic success — we’re nowhere near reaching a critical mass. Poverty is a barrier and so, to an extent, is culture. Widespread beliefs about school and teacher authority in Latin American countries posit that it’s rude for a parent to intrude into school life because it is the school’s job to educate and the parent’s job to nurture — and the two do not mix. Yet if our nation wants want Hispanic students to succeed, we have two jobs: We must educate Latino kids _and_ their parents. A parent’s role in championing students can supersede the conditions of the education systems they’re stuck in and be the almost-magical key to academic excellence. _Follow Esther Cepeda on Twitter, @estherjcepeda._ **Read more:** Michael Gerson: Republicans shouldn’t fear the Common Core George Will: The Education Dept.’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ coercion The Post’s View: Student loan reform is off to a strong start Esther Cepeda: The GOP’s Hispanic problem

The amazing, surprising, Africa-driven demographic future of the Earth, in 9 charts

The United Nations Population Division, which tracks demographic data from around the world, has dramatically revised its projections for what will happen in the next 90 years. The new statistics, based on in-depth survey data from sub-Saharan Africa, tell the story of a world poised to change drastically over the next several decades. Most rich countries will shrink and age (with a couple of important exceptions), poorer countries will expand rapidly and, maybe most significant of all, Africa will see a population explosion nearly unprecedented in human history.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University If these numbers turn out to be right – they're just projections and could change significantly under unforeseen circumstances – the world of 2100 will look very different than the world of today, with implications for everyone. It will be a place where today's dominant, developed economies are increasingly focused on supporting the elderly, where the least developed countries are transformed by population booms and where Africa, for better or worse, is more important than ever. Here is the story of the next 90 years as predicted by UN demographic data and explained in nine charts. The charts are interactive; move your cursor over them to track and compare the data. **(1) The big story will be Africa**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Right now, with a couple of exceptions, Africa's population density is relatively low; it's a very big continent more sparsely populated than, say, Europe or East Asia. That's changing very quickly. The continent's overall population is expected to more than quadruple over just 90 years, an astonishingly rapid growth that will make Africa more important than ever. And it's not just that there will four times the workforce, four times the resource burden, four times as many voters. The rapid growth itself will likely transform political and social dynamics within African countries and thus their relationship with the rest of the world. (More on this further down.) Asia will continue to grow but its population growth, already slowing, is expected to peak about 50 years from now then start declining. As has happened in the West, rising economies will lead to declining birth rates. And that downturned curve could represent some problematic demographic issues; more also on this further down. The story in those three little lines at the bottom is less promising. Europe will continue to shrink, which is worsening its economic problems. South America's population will rise until about 2050, at which point it will begin its own gradual population decline. North America is the least ambiguous success story: it will continue to grow at a slow, sustainable rate, surpassing South America's overall population around 2070. **(2) China shrinks, India plateaus; Nigeria is a very big deal**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University This chart shows the futures of what are, today, the world's five most populous nations. The two big stories here are China and Nigeria, the latter of which will have almost a billion people by 2100 and will be within range of surpassing China in population. Given that Nigeria is about the area of Texas, that's a truly astounding possibility. Nigeria, currently Africa's most populous country, is poised for one of the world's most rapid population booms ever. In just 100 years, maybe two or three generations, the population is expected to increase by a mind-boggling factor of eight. The country is already troubled by corruption, poverty and religious conflict. It's difficult to imagine how a government that can barely serve its population right now will respond when the demand on resources, social services, schools and roads increases by a factor of eight. Still, if they pull it off – the country's vast oil reserves could certainly help – the rapidly growing workforce could theoretically deliver an African miracle akin to, say, China's. Chinese leaders know their demographic crisis is coming. It's not a mystery: the country's massive working-age population is only allowed to have one child per couple, which means that when the current generation retires, there will be a rapidly growing pool of retirees just as the workforce starts to shrink. Those aging retirees will be an enormous burden on the Chinese economy, which is just beginning to slow down. As China ages and shrinks, its workforce will get smaller at precisely the moment that it needs them most. Make no mistake, China will continue to be an enormous, important and most likely very successful country, but its demographics are going to quickly shift from a big help to a major hindrance. Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you that China is about to take over the world. As for the other three: India's rapidly growing population, which the country has somewhat harnessed but in many ways failed to serve, will finally plateau around 2065. Indonesia will grow moderately. The United States will grow as well, a bit more quickly than Indonesia but not a boom like India's. Again, that's good news for the U.S. **(3) Africa is the next Asia, maybe**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University This chart shows Asian and African populations from 1950 through today and projected ahead to 2100. This isn't just a big deal because Africa will be almost as populous as Asia by 2100, after a very long time of being just a fraction of Asia's size. It's a big deal because it's a reminder that growth this rapid changes everything. Pause for a moment to consider Asia's boom over the last 50 years – the rise of first Japan, then South Korea, now China and maybe next India – and the degree to which it's already changed the world and will continue to change it. Africa is expected to grow even more than Asia. Between 1950 and 2050, Asia's population will have grown by a factor of 3.7, almost quadrupling in just a hundred years. Africa's population, over its own century of growth from 2000 to 2100, will grow by a factor of 5.18 – significantly faster than Asia. In demographic terms, it seems, the Asian century could be followed by the African century. That's an amazing thing. But Asia's remarkable economic, cultural, political and social progress had to do with more than just demographics. And even that growth could end up being a curse for Africa if it doesn't have two things that have been crucial to Asian successes: good governance and careful resource management. Right now, many African countries aren't particularly adept at either governance or resource management. If they don't improve, exploding population growth could only worsen resource competition – and we're talking here about basics like food, water and electricity – which in turn makes political instability and conflict more likely. The fact that there will be a "youth bulge" of young people makes that instability and conflict more likely. It's a big, entirely foreseeable danger. Whether Africa is able to prepare for its coming population boom may well be one of the most important long-term challenges the world faces right now. **(4) Africa's boom will be sub-Saharan**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Digging in to the data on African population growth finds that it's mostly in the continent's sub-Saharan region. These are the five most populous African countries today (excluding Nigeria, which grows so large that it made the other chart lines unreadably small). The growth looks even more eyebrow-raising when it becomes clear that it will mostly leave culturally distinct North Africa behind: it's all focused in the sub-Saharan countries. South Africa also will grow more slowly. Take a look at Tanzania, which is today one of the poorest countries in the world. As of 2000, it had 34 million people; California's population was the same that year. Today, Tanzania has about 45 million people. By 2100, its population is projected to be 276 million – almost the size of the entire United States today, and by then one of the largest countries in the world. The stories of other African countries may be similar: Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo are projected to be almost as large. Even if this demographic prediction does turn out to be accurate, we have no way of knowing what a massively populous Tanzania of 2100 would look like. If it remains as poor and troubled as it is today, it doesn't bode well: water and food resources will only get scarcer as it's divided among more and more people, as will whatever money the government makes exporting natural resources. That typically leads to instability and a higher risk of conflict. But, as in Asia, there's also a real opportunity for the future Tanzania to put its growing population to work building the economy. The question of how to get there, though, is not an easy one. **(5) Systemic shift to developing and least-developed countries**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University First, the definitions: the "developed" countries, the blue line, include Europe, the United States, Japan, South Korea and other Western countries. The "developing countries," the green line, includes countries such as Mexico or Russia or Brazil; China and India would normally be in this category but I've pulled them out. The "least developed," in purple, includes, for example, Haiti, Bangladesh and much of Africa. What's clear looking at this chart is that for all the rapid growth seen in India and China, both countries are about to be outpaced by the rest of the developing world. The poorest countries will grow especially rapidly, from 663 million people to almost 3 billion; if those countries stay stuck in their current state of development, many may be unable to handle the population booms. The biggest question may be that green line: do those developing countries continue to develop, following earlier success stories like South Korea and Taiwan? What happens when Southeast Asian or Middle Eastern or Latin American countries see South Korea-style success stories? Look at how much Korea's successes have already changed the world. We may be seeing a lot more of that in the next century. **(6) The future of the developed world is American**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Whether or not you believe that the U.S.'s global dominance will be challenged by "the rise of the rest," as Fareed Zakaria describes the coming global development, the demographics strongly suggest that U.S. leadership within the developed world will only strengthen. In Europe, Northeast Asia and the broader Anglosphere, most countries will be seeing demographic stagnation or outright decline, which in turn will make those countries less competitive, especially as the rest of the world booms. Populations will continue aging and shrinking or will stay, at best, basically level. The one really hopeful case is the United States, which, as you can see, expects pretty healthy, sustained growth. Immigration to the U.S. is the big factor here, the thing that helps inure the U.S. to the demographic decline haunting the rest of the developed world. Usually, countries see their populations decline as soon as they get rich, making their success almost self-defeating. Immigration helps the U.S. to do what very few other countries, including China, has yet figured out: how to be a rich country with a growing population. **(7) Immigration slows Western stagnation**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University If you take the U.S. out of the above chart, that makes it a little easier to see the distinction between developed countries that have robust immigration and those that don't. Germany, Japan and South Korea – which, like most of the developed world, tightly restrict immigration – all see declines. But the United Kingdom and France, which allow some immigration from their former colonies, are projected to enjoy modest but healthy population growth. It's not quite as pronounced as in the United States, but it will likely help them avoid some of the demographic-led economic decline projected in the rest of Europe. It's an irony that more than 150 years after the end of colonialism, its two widest practitioners will continue to benefit. **(8) Narrowing, but not closing, the life expectancy gap**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University This is one of two major factors in Asia's ongoing population boom and Africa's coming boom. The average lifespan on both continents is going way, way up. In Africa, it will increase by 50 percent over just a century. That's a remarkable accomplishment. By the end of this century, African life expectancy is expected to approximate the North American average today – but it will still be the lowest in the world. Europe's average life span is projected to be 87.6 and North America's will be 89. That's an amazing medical accomplishment, but gives economists panic attacks: how do you sustain your economy if the average worker spends a third of his or her life on retirement? The second factor driving Africa's population boom is birth rates. Here is the big number that the UN's new population data uncovered: the average African fertility rate between 2005 and 2010 was 4.9 children per woman. That's an extremely high number and will cause the sort of youth bulge that developmental economists warn can be economically and politically destabilizing. But it's tough for policymakers to slow this down, for cultural and religious reasons as well as because, even if too-high fertility might be bad for the region, individual families have every economic incentive to have lots of children. **(9) This is the most important chart on this page**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Don't close the page yet! This is a big one. The "dependency ratio" is the ratio of people under age 15 or over age 64 to the number of people age 15 to 64. The idea is that people who are very young or very old are dependent on others to provide for them. If the "dependency ratio" is 40 percent, that means that there are 40 children or elderly to every 100 working age people. Another way of putting it is that 40 out of every 140 people is a child or elderly person. The higher this ratio, the more people depend on the government, the higher the rest of society's burden for supporting them. Right now, Africa's dependency ratio is high. Really high: about 80 percent. This means that only 56 percent of Africans are working-age. That's a huge burden on society and a big contributor to poverty. And most of those "dependent age" Africans are very young. (If you've ever wondered about the proliferation of child soldiers in Africa, this is part of why: there just aren't enough 20-something men, but there are lots of children.) But as the birth rate slows and those young dependents enter the work force, the dependency ratio is going to fall, dropping to 60 percent by 2055. That's huge. It increases the share of the population that can contribute and lowers the share that uses resources without contributing. The flip side, though, is that having a lot of young people – specifically, young men – can worsen any political instability and can create instability if resources are scarce. Look, for example, at the Arab world today, where a youth bulge contributed to the protests that became revolutions in some cases and civil wars in others. It's chancy. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is going to see the opposite trend, and that's bad news. As birth rates fall, people age and life expectancy rises, we're going to see dependency ratios increase not just across the developed world but across, save for Africa, basically all of it. Europe will get the worst of it, with the average dependency ratio hitting an Africa-style 76 percent in 2055. A generation later, South America's is expected to reach a deeply worrying 82 percent by 2100. Asia has a few decades to prepare: its dependency ratio, currently low, will stay low until it starts to rise around 2050. And that's the story of the world's demographic future, nine decades of population booms and declines that will have unforeseeable but surely transformative political and economic consequences. These numbers aren't destiny, of course, and lots of people are already trying to change them: developmental economist warning Africa it's not prepared for the coming boom, European leaders trying to spur population growth, Chinese officials who may overturn the one-child policy and lots of others. But this is the direction the data points today. Whatever happens, it should be quite a century.

In a third of the U.S., more white people are now dying than being born

In around one-third of U.S. states, more white people are now dying than being born — a major shift that is expected to continue and has significant implications for government policy. Seventeen states — home to 121 million people, or roughly 38 percent of the country’s population — had more deaths than births among non-Hispanic whites in 2014, up from just four states a decade earlier, according to research released Tuesday by the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy. The trend, which cuts across blue and red states and can be found in both urban and rural areas, is expected to expand to more states in the near future, including Vermont, South Carolina, Tennessee and Oregon, the report said. White “natural decrease” — when births fail to keep up with deaths — is due largely to the aging of the baby-boom generation and declining white fertility rates, particularly since the Great Recession, the report found. Nationally, the ratio of non-Hispanic white births to deaths is nearly at par, at 1.04 births for every death. The ratio is much higher for minority groups, particularly among Latinos, whose rate is 5.4 births for every death. The ratio for blacks is 1.94 births for every death, and for Asians, it is 1.75 births. The influx of immigrants from minority groups, who tend to be in their childbearing years, helps fuel the birthrate. The findings are particularly trenchant in the wake of an election that was often framed in terms of white Americans feeling threatened by the demographic rise of minority groups. While the country is still about two-thirds white, the proportions are shifting. 2011 was the first year in which more minority babies than white ones were born, and demographers expect the country to become majority minority in 2044. Its growing young immigrant population puts the United States on a different path than European countries, which are facing a looming crisis because of their aging populations. As aging white Americans rely more on Social Security and Medicare, they are expected to be shored up by the influx of young minorities into the workforce. “What government and politicians need to pay attention to is that it’s the younger part of the population that’s going to be contributing to the economy,” said Bill Frey, demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “All of the growth in the labor force is going to be racial minorities. Investing in this next generation in terms of their education and being able to contribute to the labor force and pay into Social Security, Medicare, etc. is going to be to the benefit of that older white population.” Kenneth Johnson, an author of the University of New Hampshire study, agreed but noted that not everyone sees it that way. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be competitive, but, boy, the rhetoric of recent times tells me that that’s the way it certainly has been,” he said. Despite the rapid shift in the number of states with white natural decrease, the absolute size of the non-Hispanic white population continues to be large in many parts of the United States. The share of the population that is white decreased from 79.6 percent in 1980 to 61.9 percent in 2014, according to the report. The share of the nation that is Latino rose from 6.4 percent to 17.3 percent during the same period. (While Hispanics are considered a minority group in the United States, the term “Hispanic” refers to ethnic origin regardless of race.) “It is going to be a long time before the white people aren’t a very powerful political force,” Johnson said. Still, he said, he was struck by the speed and scope of the increase, particularly in highly populated states such as California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Among the 17 states noted in the study, all but two, Maine and West Virginia, are seeing more births overall because of growing nonwhite populations. The Latino population is particularly young, with a median age of 28.4 in 2014, and Latino births exceeded deaths by a large margin in all states and the District of Columbia that year. Even so, the immigration rate from Mexico has declined since the recession, and so has the Latino birthrate, factors that could slow the decline of whites as a percentage of the total population in some states. Along with the aging of baby boomers, the change is driven largely by a decline in the number of white women of childbearing age, combined with a decline in the white fertility rate. The number of white women between 15 and 44 decreased by 4.7 million, or 12 percent, in the United States between 2000 and 2014. The Great Recession also changed the trajectory of the birthrate in the United States, Johnson said, noting that if it had continued as it was going before the downturn, there would be around 3.5 million more children in the country. It is unclear whether the women who did not have those babies delayed having them or will never have them. If the latter is true, it could accelerate the rate of white natural decrease, whereas an uptick in births could slow it. Either way, nationwide, the number of white deaths is expected to overtake the number of white births by the mid-2020s. The study also cited an uptick in drug-induced deaths among working-class whites. Such deaths outnumbered motor-vehicle-accident deaths in 41 states in 2014, compared with 10 states in 2004, and could accelerate the transition from natural increase to natural decrease in some states, the study said.

Abortions hit historic low, but only in developed countries

A new analysis of global abortions shows a stark and troubling divide between what's happening in wealthier, developed countries and their poorer and less developed counterparts.  The numbers are significantly smaller than a decade earlier -- from 1990 to 1994, there were on average 40 abortions annually per every 1,000 women -- and should be a cause for celebration for many in the reproductive-health field and for those who oppose abortion. But Gilda Sedgh, a principal research scientist with the Guttmacher Institute in New York and lead author of the study, cautioned in a call with reporters that "the global picture masks differences between the developed and developing world." No matter how you crunch the numbers about the developed world, which includes the United States, abortion rates are falling. Rates have been declining for 25 years and are now at a historic low. There were 27 abortions per 1,000 women in 2010 to 2014, down from 40 per 1,000 in 1990 to 1994. Likewise, the total number of abortions fell from 12 million to 7 million. But in developing countries during the same period, abortions went from 39 to 37 per 1,000 women while the total number of procedures spiked from 39 million to 50 million annually -- a situation that the authors blame on lack of access to modern methods of contraception that could have reduced unwanted pregnancies. "We think this is because the desire for small families and precisely timed births has outpaced the uptake of contraceptive use," Sedgh said. The study was based on statistical modeling of information collected from national surveys, official government statistics, and other published and unpublished studies, and it was funded by various countries as well as the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the United Nations. Among the other major findings are that three-fourths of abortions took place among married women, challenging the popular notion that most abortions are sought by unwed teens. Eastern Europe was the standout with the biggest drop in abortion rates, from 88 to 42 per 1,000 women. Rates also fell in Southern Europe, from 38 to 26; in Northern Europe, from 22 to 18; and in North America, from 25 to 17. Researchers said western Europe was the only studied region with an increase in its abortion rate, which they said might have been because of a growing foreign-born population.   In a commentary piece also published by the Lancet, associate professor Diana Greene Foster of the University of California at San Francisco was critical of this reasoning. "The obvious interpretation is that criminalizing abortion does not prevent it but, rather, drives women to seek illegal services or methods. But this simple story overlooks the many women who, in the absence of safe legal services, carry unwanted pregnancies to term," Greene Foster said. She argued that it does not make sense to assume "a one-for-one exchange of illegal abortion for legal abortion." The paper's findings are consistent with other data released in recent years that show a positive trend in the reduction in unwanted pregnancies and births. This month, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the birthrate among American teenagers -- which was at crisis levels in the 1990s -- had fallen to an all-time low and that the decline affected all regions and all races. While various cultural, educational and economic factors have been debated as reasons why some groups have higher rates of abortion than others, many physicians, researchers, women's right advocates and public health officials appear to now agree on a core factor: access to modern methods of birth control. The past 10 years have been breakthrough ones for contraceptive innovations; women can now avail themselves of all kinds of  long-lasting, low-risk implantable and injectable alternatives to the daily pill. Yet much of this information and the availability of the new methods haven't filtered down to developing parts of the world. "Clearly, efforts have to focus on these regions," said Bela Ganatra of the World Health Organization, who co-authored the study. She added that health officials recognize that not all unsafe abortions can be prevented by increasing access to contraception because some women are seeking the procedure due to rape or the failure of contraceptives or other factors. Another study is underway to try to ascertain more information about the situations that result in a safe or unsafe abortion, she said.

Where life expectancy is falling (in one map)

Sabrina Tavernise reported in the New York Times this morning on the drops in life expectancy for less-educated, white Americans. The country's least- educated whites are now expected to live four years less than they were two decades ago. Demographics is one way to look at life expectancy; geography is another. Aaron Carroll posts this map that looks at where women's life expectancy is going up - and where it's dropping. The red areas show a decrease, while all others show some level of an increase.

New York’s teen pregnancy ads play fast and loose with statistics

Regarding Ruth Marcus’s March 23 op-ed column, “Teens deserve the truth about parenthood”: This latest in a stream of responses to the controversial New York City ads about teen pregnancy documents the negative reception to this campaign. Though I find the ads deplorable, I do not wish to argue about their tone. Instead, I take umbrage with the manipulation of research findings to deliver messages that are a long way from the “truth.” Take the poster of the crying baby, which reads, “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen.” Even those who have taken only Statistics 101 know that correlation is not causation. In fact, studies have found that when one adequately controls for preexisting poverty and disadvantage among teen parents, there is no evidence that teen childbearing itself causes negative educational outcomes for children. Those who become teen parents in the United States are already, on average, poorer and more disadvantaged. To suggest that teen childbearing itself causes such negative outcomes is to ignore this reality. If we really want to tell the truth about teen pregnancy, we will start with an honest conversation about economic and social inequality and stop manipulating research to further a policy agenda. ****Julia Kohn** , New York**

Life expectancy improves for blacks, and the racial gap is closing, CDC reports

African Americans have made significant gains in life expectancy, and the mortality gap between white and black Americans has been cut in half since 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday. Blacks experienced a 25 percent drop in their overall death rate, compared to a 14 percent decrease for whites, between 1999 and 2015. Deaths from heart disease, cancer and stroke declined sharply among blacks 65 and older, and in that age group, blacks now have a lower death rate than whites, the CDC said. But its report shows that the United States has a long way to go before it achieves health equity. Blacks in every age group under 65 continue to have significantly higher death rates than whites. Black life expectancy at birth is about 3½ years lower than that of whites.  The CDC looked at multiple health and mortality trends among blacks and whites and found that, over the 17-year period, the racial disparity in “all-cause” mortality among whites and blacks had narrowed from 33 percent to 16 percent. The report does not address to what extent the change was affected by eroding health and rising death rates among midlife white Americans, much of which has been attributed to “diseases of despair” such as drug overdoses, suicide and alcohol-related liver diseases. Embedded within the trends for African American health are some troubling statistics. Although blacks are now far less likely to die of HIV than in 1999, they are seven to nine times more likely than whites to succumb to the disease. And blacks have seen no significant improvement in the rate of deaths from homicide during the period examined. They still are far more likely than whites to live in poverty, be unemployed, and/or lack home ownership. They're also more likely to report that they can't afford medical care. Their obesity rate is higher. At relatively young ages — in their 20s, 30s and 40s — blacks have relatively high death rates from diseases such as diabetes and heart disease that among whites are found more commonly at older ages, according to the report. “For example, blacks in age groups 18-34 and 35-49 were nearly twice as likely to die from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes as whites,” it notes. “These findings are generally consistent with previous reports that use the term 'weathering' to suggest that blacks experience premature aging and earlier health decline than whites, and that this decline in health accumulates across the entire life span and potentially across generations, as a consequence of psychosocial, economic, and environmental stressors.” Stressed Liburd: “We know there is more work to be done.” Laudan Aron, a senior fellow with the Urban Institute, said researchers will need to dig more deeply into the data to get a full understanding of what's happening with American mortality trends. "It’s great that the all-cause mortality gap between blacks and whites fell from 33% in 1999 to 16% in 2015, but much of this narrowing appears to have happened prior to 2009," she said in an email. "The opioid epidemic, increases in suicide, a drop in U.S. life expectancy for the first time in two decades are all pointing to dramatic changes in the health and survival of Americans. The real story, including disparities by race, is much more complicated than this report suggests." Ellen Meara, a professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice, also had a mixed response to the new report. "My enthusiasm for these impressive gains in mortality is dampened by the stunning mortality gap between blacks and whites that remains in 2015," she wrote in an email. "Combined with an uptick in deaths due to external causes (accidental injuries, homicides, drug poisonings and related causes) between 2014 and 2015 offsetting some of the mortality gains since 1999, those reading this report should be vigilant to ensure continued survival gains among black Americans."

Harold Meyerson: Electing the future or the past?

The 2012 presidential election is fundamentally a contest between our future and our past. Barack Obama’s America is the America that will be; Mitt Romney’s is the America that was. And the distance between the two is greater, perhaps, than in any election we’ve had since the Civil War. The demographic bases of the rival coalitions couldn’t be more different. Monday’s poll from the Pew Research Center is just the latest to show Obama with a decisive lead (in this case, 21 percentage points) among voters younger than 30. Obama’s margin declines to six points among voters ages 30 through 44, and he breaks even with Romney among voters ages 45 through 64. Romney’s home turf is voters 65 and older; among those, he leads Obama by 19 points. Age polarization is not specific to the presidential election. On a host of issues, as diverse as gay and lesbian rights and skepticism about the merits of capitalism, polls have shown that younger voters are consistently more tolerant and well to the left of their elders. Nor is age the only metric through which we can differentiate our future from our past. The other is race, as the nation grows more racially diverse (or, more bluntly, less white) each year. While the 2000 Census put whites’ share of the U.S. population at 69.1 percent, that share had declined to 63.7 percent in the 2010 Census, while the proportion of Hispanics rose from 12.5 percent to 16.3 percent. In raw numbers, total white population increased by just 1.2 percent during the decade, while the African American segment grew by 12.3 percent and the Hispanic share by 43 percent. Demographers predict that the white share of the U.S. population will fall beneath 50 percent in the 2050 Census. Rather than trying to establish a foothold among America’s growing minorities, however, Romney and the Republicans have decided to forgo an appeal to Hispanic voters by opposing legislation that would grant legal status to undocumented immigrants brought here as children and by backing legislation that effectively requires Hispanics to carry documentation papers in certain states. Republicans seek a majority through winning an ever-higher share of white voters. The Washington Post reported last week that its polling showed the greatest racial gap between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates since the 1988 election, with Romney favored by 60 percent of white voters and Obama by 80 percent of minority voters (a figure that may prove low, if three-quarters of the Hispanic vote goes to Obama, as some other polls suggest it will). The problem for Republicans, of course, is that the minority vote is a far larger share of the total vote today than it was 24 years ago. By repeatedly estranging minorities and opposing social policies favored by the young, the Republicans have opted for a King Canute strategy: standing on the shore and commanding the tide to stop. Republicans with an eye toward the future, most notably George W. Bush and Karl Rove, have urged the party to embrace immigration reform, but the base is rabidly anti-immigrant and its antipathy is reinforced daily by talk radio hosts and Fox News chatterers who depict an America under siege by alien forces. Should Republicans prevail in this election and seek to build a more-than-one-term plurality, they will confront a stark choice: Either Romney must persuade his party to reverse its stance on immigration, or the party must seek to extend the scope of its voter-suppression efforts. Put another way, they must try to either accommodate the future or suppress it. Accommodation with diversity and modernity, however, is simply not part of the Republican DNA. Today’s Republican Party has largely cornered the market on religious fundamentalists, even as the number of GOP scientists has dwindled (a 2009 Pew poll of scientists found that just 6 percent self-identified as Republicans, while 55 percent said they were Democrats). Many of the largest Republican funders come from economic sectors hardly distinguished by significant productivity increases or their contributions to mass prosperity (casino gambling, Wall Street), while Silicon Valley remains more Democratic turf. (By the way, all those messages Republican CEOs have been sending their employees , predicting layoffs should Obama be reelected? Have any of them promised raises if Romney wins? Just askin’.) Two Americas are facing off in next week’s election. By their makeup, the Democrats are bound to move, if haltingly, into the future, while the Republicans parade proudly into the pre-New Deal past — some of it mythic, lots of it ugly. The differences could not be clearer. **_meyersonh@washpost.com _ ** **Read more from Opinions:** Eugene Robinson: Which America will we pick? Robert J. Samuelson: Pollsters’ moment of truth Charles Lane: Will the GOP again compromise on affirmative action?

More Asians than Hispanics will be heading to U.S. by 2065, study finds

In a major shift in immigration patterns, Asians will surge past Hispanics to become the largest group of immigrants heading to the United States by 2065, according to estimates in a new study. An increase in Asian and Hispanic immigration also will drive U.S. population growth, with foreign-born residents expected to make up 18 percent of the country’s projected 441 million people in 50 years, the Pew Research Center said in a report to be released Monday. This will be a record, higher than the nearly 15 percent during the late 19th-century and early 20th-century wave of immigration from Europe. Today, immigrants make up 14 percent of the population, an increase from 5 percent in 1965. The tipping point is expected to come in 2055, when Asians will become the largest immigrant group at 36 percent, compared with Hispanics at 34 percent. White immigrants to the United States, 80 percent in 1965, will hover between 18 percent and 20 percent with black immigrants in the 8 percent to 9 percent range, the study said. Currently, 47 percent of immigrants living in the United States are Hispanic, but by 2065 that number will have dropped to 31 percent. Asians make up 26 percent of the immigrant population but in 50 years that percentage is expected to increase to 38 percent. Pew researchers analyzed a combination of Census Bureau information and its own data to develop its projections. Part of the reason for the shift is that the fertility rate of women in Latin America and especially Mexico has decreased, said Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew’s director of Hispanic research. In Mexico, Lopez said, women are having about two children, when in the 1960s and 1970s, they were having about seven children. “There are relatively fewer people who would choose to migrate from Mexico, so demographic changes in Mexico have led to a somewhat smaller pool of potential migrants,” he said. “At the same time, we’ve seen a growing number of immigrants — particularly from China or India — who are coming for reasons such as pursuing a college degree or coming here to work temporarily in the high-tech sector.” Despite the increase in Asian immigrants, Hispanics will still make up a larger number in the United States, Lopez said. “Hispanic population growth is coming from people born here in the United States,” he said. “It is really U.S. births that are now the driver of Hispanic population growth, and that’s a recent change from what we saw in the ’80s and ’90s.” By 2065, no racial or ethnic group will hold a majority in the United States, with whites holding 46 percent of the population, Hispanics at 24 percent, Asians at 14 percent and blacks at 13 percent. Currently, the country is 62 percent white, 18 percent Hispanic, 12 percent black and 6 percent Asian. Pew also asked Americans surveyed for one word to describe immigrants in the United States today. Twelve percent said “illegal,” 5 percent said “overpopulation,” 4 percent said “legality (other than illegal),” and “jobs,” “deportation,” “Americans” and “work ethic” were at 3 percent each. Forty-nine percent offered general descriptions, and of those 12 percent were positive, 11 percent negative and 26 percent neutral, according to the report. Americans also said immigrants are likely to make the country better, with 45 percent agreeing with that statement and 37 percent saying they make things worse. Eighteen percent said they don’t have much effect one way or the other. The survey was conducted online from March 10 to April 6. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points. ** — Associated Press  **

Bad news for older folks: Millennials are having fewer babies

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage. These days, with the proliferation of niche dating apps and sexting platforms, there’s no shortage of innovations to help secure the first milestone in that sequence. But while romance may still blossom, the other two signposts seem to be in short supply. And the dearth of the last one — childbearing — may have ominous consequences for the economy. A report released last week by the Urban Institute found that millennial women are reproducing at the slowest pace of any generation in U.S. history. Childbearing fell steeply in the years immediately following the “Great Recession,” with birthrates among women in their 20s declining more than 15 percent between 2007 and 2012. This shouldn’t be surprising. Previous periods of financial turmoil have encouraged women to, at the very least, delay childbearing. Such delays can also lead to permanently lower fertility rates, meaning that women not only postpone having children for a few years while the economy is rocky but never “catch up” by having additional kids later on. The Great Depression, for example, led to a great baby bust. The cohort of women who were born in 1909 — and therefore turned 21 in 1930 — had the highest share of childless women of any group we’ve been able to track through the end of their reproductive years, according to Kenneth M. Johnson, a sociology professor and demographer at the University of New Hampshire. About 22 percent of this cohort never had a baby, nearly twice the rate of the generation that reached its 20s during the height of postwar prosperity (a.k.a. the baby boom). Johnson estimates that roughly 500,000 fewer babies are now being born per year than would have been the case had the higher fertility rates of the mid-2000s continued. He says it’s too soon to say whether millennial women will take after the lastingly lower fertility rates of their Great Depression-era predecessors or whether they’ve simply put off childbearing temporarily while they get their finances, careers and educations in order. Fertility decisions, of course, are affected by a lot of factors besides the economy, including cultural norms and access to birth control. But while declining birthrates have spawned lots of think pieces about the selfie- generation just being anti-procreation, survey data suggest that young Americans’ desires to have children remain strong. In 2013, Gallup found that only about 6 percent of American adults age 18 to 40 neither have kids nor want them, virtually the same as the share a decade earlier. And, somewhat unexpectedly, younger Americans seem to prefer slightly bigger families than their older counterparts. Asked to name “the ideal number of children for a family to have,” Americans younger than 30 gave an average response of 2.7. That’s higher than any other age group and much greater than the country’s total fertility rate of fewer than 1.9 children per woman. On one level, lower birthrates might be worth celebrating. Perhaps today’s young women are behaving more “responsibly” by putting off their procreative desires, especially if they’re not fully ready to have children yet. One important reason that childbearing fell in the years following the Great Recession is that unmarried women had fewer kids. This factor was responsible for the vast majority of the decline in birthrates for young African American and Hispanic women. Given that children of single parents tend to experience higher rates of poverty, this trend seems like a good thing. But for economic reasons — including cultivating the next generation of Americans to work and pay for the benefits of their many, many elders — we still need more babies. Preferably, these will be babies born within wedlock, if for no other reason than the greater financial stability usually associated with having two married parents. Unfortunately, however, another key driver of lower birthrates — especially among non-Hispanic whites — is that young people are putting off marriage, too. The key force behind the decline in marriage, as with childbearing, seems to be finances, not dramatic changes in young people’s aspirations for marital bliss. As a recent Pew report showed, a plurality of never-married Americans age 25 to 34 say the main reason they haven’t tied the knot is that they aren’t yet “financially prepared” to do so. In other words, if we want millennials to achieve all the traditional milestones of adulthood — for moral, sentimental or economic reasons — we have to give them the financial opportunities to responsibly do so. That achievement, alas, still feels like a long way off. **Read more about this issue here:** Wonkblog: Millennial women are the slowest to have babies of any generation in U.S. history Jeff Guo: America’s baby bust U.S. birthrate plummets to its lowest level since 1920

Baby boomers had better embrace change

_William H. Frey is a demographer and senior fellow with the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. He is co-author of “America by the Numbers” and author of the forthcoming “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics are Remaking America.”_ Long associated in the popular mind with social and political change, the baby boomers are about to confront the biggest change in the American fabric in their lifetimes: our country’s new demographics. And they’re not ready. Recent census numbers show that white babies are, for the first time, a minority of all births, putting an exclamation point on a trend that has been building for decades. A glance around schoolyards and community centers shows that children are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse than ever. It is this diverse youth population that the largely white baby boomers will rely upon in their retirement years to keep paying into Social Security and Medicare. Yet a Pew Research Center survey published in November showed only 23 percent of baby boomers regard the country’s growing population of immigrants as a change for the better. Forty-three percent saw it as a change for the worse. Almost half of white boomers said the growing number of newcomers from other countries represented a threat to traditional U.S. customs and values. Older whites in general tend to be less favorable to more government programs, except Social Security, a significant change from their views in the late 1980s. Nowadays, younger minorities hold the views that boomers used to have, supporting government programs they see as important for their upward mobility. What’s emerging is a cultural gap between the largest generation and the youngest. That divide is created by the size and cultural dominance of the 78-million- member baby-boom generation. A generation that once expressed distrust for anyone older than 30 is now itself isolated from a younger, far more diverse America. Boomers were born to parents whose upward mobility was aided by sweeping public programs such as the GI Bill. They benefitted from a wide array of programs supporting higher education and became a highly educated generation. Still, this generation — which will swell the ranks of senior citizens in the coming years — seems to be having trouble letting go, showing more than a little antipathy toward today’s diverse, younger Americans. Why is this happening? Part of the reason is that boomers grew up in an era when immigration was at its nadir. From 1946 to 1964, the share of immigrants was at the lowest level in the 20th century, and most of the immigrants were white Europeans. So boomers had minimal involvement with people other countries. Today, immigrants are 13 percent of our population, and they are far more diverse. That created an isolation that persists. Among Americans older than 50, 76 percent are white, and the black population, at 10 percent, is the largest minority. Among those younger than 30, 55 percent are whites. Hispanics, Asians and other nonblack minorities account for 31 percent of that age group. Younger people are much more likely to be first- and second-generation Americans of non-European ancestry and able to speak English and other languages. Yet, no matter the disconnect, the youngest and the oldest generations are inextricably linked. The 2010 Census told us we would have faced an absolute decade-long decline in our under-18 population, had it not been for the gain of 5.5 million Hispanic and Asian youths. Between now and 2030, there will be an absolute decline of 10 million (mostly baby-boom) whites from the ranks of our working-age population. Those ranks can be replenished only by the growing minority youth population. Much of this growth will occur because of births, regardless of immigration trends. The contributions these people make will depend heavily on the opportunities they receive, particularly through education. Barriers are especially challenging for many minority children with talent and high aspirations, who continue to attend segregated, underfunded school systems. Currently, high school dropout rates for Hispanics are more than twice as high as those of non-Hispanic whites. More than a third of Hispanic and black children live in poverty. Advancement of our young people into middle-class jobs at all skill levels is essential to future economic growth. That growth is, in turn, essential to our country’s ability to provide opportunities and social supports. Absent these investments, we are looking at a society whose members will be fighting over pieces of a shrinking pie. Because of their numbers and clout, the voices of baby boomers will be heard. Let’s hope they, in turn, hear the message that their future, as well as the nation’s, is tied to the well-being of today’s diverse, striving younger Americans. **Read more on this debate:** Maggie Severns: Why better educations are critical for minority children Eli Hager: Racial injustice in Mississippi schools The Post’s View: America’s changing demographics

The rapid demographic shift of American public schools

Pew has produced a good chart today, seen below, of U.S. Department of Education projections showing that the nation's public schools this fall will for the first time be majority-minority:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday The demographic shift in public schools since just the late '90s has been remarkable, driven both by the decline of white enrollment and population growth among U.S.-born Hispanic and Asian children (this is not, Pew points out, a demographic story primarily about immigration). According to Pew's analysis of Census data, the number of U.S.-born Hispanic children aged 5 to 17 in the U.S. nearly doubled between 1997 and 2013. White children, by comparison, make up nearly three-quarters of private school enrollment today. It's important to note, though, that the increasing diversity of public school enrollment in America won't necessarily mean that public school _classrooms_ will soon be more diverse. We have to look at demographics through geography — and education policy through housing patterns — as Pew demographer Conrad Hackett points out with this interesting suggestion:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday How's that possible? If minorities are largely concentrated in nearly all-minority schools as a result of housing segregation, the number of majority-white schools could still outnumber them (imagine what would happen, for instance, if we had 55 minority children and 45 whites ones in a district with five schools, and two of those five schools were 100 percent minority). As I've written before, school-aged children in America are more segregated than the population at large, making this a real possibility. In some parts of the country, black children are now more likely to attend nearly all-black schools than they were in the 1960s. Nationwide, the share of blacks attending majority-white schools has been falling. Data also suggest that the average Hispanic student today attends a school that's majority-Hispanic (scroll down in Niraj Chokshi's post here for a great interactive).    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday There are a lot of implications to this, but here's just one: If children continue to attend schools full of other children who look just like them, even as the demographics of the country shift, they may get few of the educational benefits that could come from that diversity.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday

Watch the rapid decline of “white America” over three decades

In 1980, nearly half of U.S. counties -- 1,412 of them -- had populations that were almost exclusively (98 percent or more) white. Thirty years later, only 149 counties -- fewer than five percent -- fit that same description. The maps below chart this transformation, decade by decade. It's no secret that America is becoming less white. According to Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, whites are on track to lose their majority status by 2042 or thereabouts. Driving this trend are immigration and intermarriage: the white share of the population is projected to shrink by 6 percent between 2010 and 2050. But the Hispanic population will grow by 102 percent, and the share of people identifying as two or more races will see a nearly 200 percent increase. The broad contours of these trends are outlined in a short video produced by Brookings.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Part of how we react to these changes as a country will be driven by what our communities looked like before them. And here, the decline of the all-white county is instructive. Surveys by the Public Religion Research institute show that nearly 40 percent of Americans say that newcomers from other countries threaten traditional American customs and values. Thirty one percent of white people say that "the idea of America where most people are not white bothers me."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This discomfort with growing diversity is generally most evident among Americans who are older and more conservative. To understand it, it helps to understand where they're coming from. The census data show that roughly half of white Americans lived in a county where 9 out of 10 people were white in 1980. Today, just over a quarter do. Raising our threshold to 98 percent white, as in the maps above, shows that 15 percent of white Americans lived in these near-exclusively white areas in 1980, while less than one percent do today. Of course, these thresholds are somewhat arbitrary. A county that goes from 98.1 percent white in 1980 to 97.6 percent white in 2010 is not necessarily experiencing a demographic revolution. But the sharp drop in the aggregate number of these nearly all-white counties makes for a useful marker of demographic change. This 30-year timespan is within living memory for many of the people expressing unease with racial changes. They can look back on a time when literally everyone around them looked like them, and compare it to the present day, where people are becoming more and more different from each other -- at least at the level of skin color. It may partially explain -- although not excuse -- the notion among some whites that they are besiege. These changes may also animate some of the white resentment that periodically flares up in the aftermath of episodes like the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In short, to understand the demographics of where we're going and how we'll get there, it's useful to understand where we came from -- and in how short a time period.

Twin birth rates hit an all-time high in the United States

The CDC has released a final report on births in the United States in 2014, showing an all-time record number of twins. We're not talking about a monumental increase, here - 2014 saw 33.9 sets of twins per 1,000 births, versus 33.7 in 2013 - but several factors suggest this increase could become a trend.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico STAT points out that mothers continued to get older in 2014. The average age for a first-time mother is now 26.3, up from an even 26 in 2013. The teen birth rate is dropping sharply (9 percent in 2014 alone, with some states seeing decreases higher than 50 percent since 2007) due to better efforts to educate teens and provide them with longterm birth control like IUDs. Births for women in the first few years of their twenties are on a slower (but still steady) decline. Meanwhile, the birth rate for women in their 30s, 40s and even 50s have increased over the years to varying degrees.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Why does this mean more twins? There are actually a couple of factors likely at play here. For starters, even though conceiving is generally more difficult for older moms, these women are actually _more likely_ to have twins, at least according to some research. As women reach the end of their reproductive years, their bodies produce higher quantities of the hormone that triggers the maturation of an egg-producing follicle. That means a woman is more likely to have two eggs available for fertilization during a single cycle in her 30s than she is during her 20s. This doesn't always result in fraternal twins, because older eggs are also more likely to be unviable. But when enough women in this age group get pregnant, a significant portion of them can be expected to have fraternal twins.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The second factor is that many of these older mothers are using IVF to conceive. In the past, IVF caused a sharp increase in the number of births with three babies or more, because doctors would implant a high number of embryos in the hopes of creating at least one viable pregnancy. As of 2013, more than one-third of U.S. twins and three-quarters of triplets (and higher) births could be linked to IVF. But now triplet (and higher) births are at a 20-year record low, even as twins continue to rise.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This shift is almost certainly due to a 1998 change in guidelines that discouraged doctors from implanting more than two embryos at a time. Now that IVF success rates are so high, implanting just two embryos (or even just one) is often sufficient, and implanting more than that puts mothers at a high risk of carrying a dangerous multiple pregnancy. For more information on how births have changed in recent years, check out the rest of the CDC's report.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Read More:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Newborn girl might have been carrying her parasitic twins    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Bees naturally vaccinate their babies, scientists find    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico More evidence that the key to allergy-free kids is giving them plenty of dirt — and cows    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Conjoined from chest to pelvis: 3-D printing helped save these babies    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Why giant panda cubs are so incredibly tiny    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The world’s oldest bird is ready to do the unthinkable – have yet another baby    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

The NRA will fall. It’s inevitable.

The recent deadly shooting at an Oregon community college, like so many before it, isn’t likely to lead to new federal laws designed to curb dangerous people’s access to guns. While this understandably frustrates supporters of gun safety legislation, there is reason for them to be hopeful. The National Rifle Association’s days of being a political powerhouse may be numbered. Why? The answer is in the numbers. Support for, and opposition to, gun control is closely associated with several demographic characteristics, including race, level of education and whether one lives in a city. Nearly all are trending forcefully against the NRA. The core of the NRA’s support comes from white, rural and relatively less educated voters. This demographic is currently influential in politics but clearly on the wane. While the decline of white, rural, less educated Americans is generally well known, less often recognized is what this means for gun legislation. Polls show that whites tend to favor gun rights over gun control by a significant margin (57 percent to 40 percent). Yet whites, who comprise 63 percent of the population today, won’t be in the majority for long. Racial minorities are soon to be a majority, and they are the nation’s strongest supporters of strict gun laws.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico An overwhelming majority of African Americans say that gun control is more important than gun rights (72 percent to 24 percent). While the African American population shows signs of slow growth, other racial minority groups are growing more rapidly — and report even greater support for gun control. The fastest-growing minority group in America is Latinos. Between 2000 and 2010, the nation’s Latino population grew by 43 percent. Hispanics, which make up 17 percent of the population today, are expected to grow to 30 percent of the population in the coming decades. Gun control is extremely popular among Hispanics, with 75 percent favoring gun safety over gun rights. Asian Americans also represent a growing anti-gun demographic. Although only about 5 percent of the population today, the Asian American population is predicted to triple over the next few decades. A recent poll of Asian American registered voters found that 80 percent supported stricter gun laws. After the 2012 election, Republican officials said the party needed to do more to appeal to the growing population of racial minorities. Yet the party’s refusal to bend on gun legislation highlights the difficulty of such efforts. If the GOP compromises on guns to appeal to minorities, it might lose support among its core of white voters. Rural Americans tend to oppose gun control, with 63 percent saying that gun rights are more important than gun control. The country, however, is becoming less rural and more urban. Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the number of people living in cities, with big metropolitan areas experiencing double-digit growth. This shift, like that on race, is a boon for gun control. Urban residents strongly prefer gun control to gun rights (60 percent to 38 percent), for reasons that aren’t hard to understand. When gun violence is on your television news every night and police are commonplace, people may come to view guns more as a threat than a savior. Support for gun control is correlated, too, with levels of education. Gun rights are favored by a slim majority of those who attended only high school (50 percent to 47 percent). Among those with a college degree, however,  58 percent favor gun control, compared with 38 percent for gun rights. This demographic is also trending in a favorable direction for gun control advocates. Between 2002 and 2012, enrollment in degree-granting institutions increased by 24 percent. Other changes occurring in the United States further complicate matters for the nation’s leading gun rights organization. For years, the NRA focused on the interests of hunters and recreational shooters. As hunting declined precipitously after 1970 (when over 40 million Americans had hunting licenses, compared with 14 million today), the NRA’s justification for gun ownership shifted toward self-defense. During the 1970s and ’80s, when crime rates were skyrocketing, the self-defense argument easily found an audience. Yet recent years have seen a drastic reduction in crime; today the crime rate is half of what it was in 1980. Given that this drop coincided with a serious economic downturn, which is usually a predictor of an increase in crime, it is not unreasonable to predict that crime rates aren’t likely to climb significantly anytime soon. There is one demographic change that helps the NRA. Americans are aging, and older people tend to favor gun rights over gun control by a slim margin (48 percent to 47 percent). Yet these numbers aren’t radically different from young people (48 percent to 50 percent), so even an aging population won’t be nearly enough to counter the other, stronger demographic shifts. Of course, the NRA will continue to fight, and fight hard, against gun control. But the heart of the organization’s power is the voters it can turn out to vote, and they are likely to decline in number. Unless the organization begins to soften its no-compromises stance on gun safety legislation, it’s likely to become increasingly marginalized in a changing America.

The coming Republican demographic disaster, in 1 stunning chart

Start here.   What does this have to do with politics? A HUGE amount.   The white vote as a percentage of the overall electorate has been in steady decline since the 1980s and, judging from birth patterns as illustrated by the Pew chart above, that trend seems very unlikely to change. Need more evidence of just how white the Republican party is today?  In 2012, just one in every 10 people who voted for Mitt Romney was not white. Forty-four percent of the people who voted for Barack Obama weren't white. If you are a Republican party strategist trying to elect a president down the road, here's what you are faced with: 1. The white vote, which you are increasingly dependent on,  is getting older — and shrinking. 2. The non-white vote, which is moving progressively further and further away from your party, is growing by leaps and bounds. At some point in the not too-distance future — 2016 may be that future — winning the white vote by 25 or even 30 points, which is very, very hard to do for any candidate, may not be enough to make up for the massive losses Republicans are experiencing among the growing contingent of non-white voters.  If nothing changes — in terms of the booming growth among non-white voters and the GOP's inability to communicate with them — the 2016 election may only be the tip of the demographic iceberg for Republicans. The 2020 and 2024 presidential elections could be blowouts.

How Latinos are changing American Christianity

Will wonders never cease? In the midst of an unprecedented avalanche of negative media against traditional religious values and the groups espousing them, a strongly pro-traditional religious values story made the cover of the most recent  _Time_ (April 15, 2013). Titled “The Latino Reformation,” the story’s subtitle, “Inside the new Hispanic churches transforming religion in America,” describes how the tremendous upsurge in Latino “born-again” evangelicals is transforming not only Latino culture, but American Christianity. The reporter, Elizabeth Dias, profiles some leading Latino evangelical churches to chronicle the transformation being wrought in Latino and American Christianity. _Time_ points out that while Latinos made up 17 percent of the U.S. population in 2011 they will be 29 percent of the population by 2050. Millions of Latinos came to America seeking a better material life for themselves and for their families. Once they arrived, many were “evangelized” and had their spiritual lives transformed by evangelicals, and have become Pentecostals, Baptists and other denominations of evangelicals by the hundreds of thousands. For example, there are 40,800 churches in the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, 3,200 Latino Southern Baptist churches and 2,500 Latino Assemblies of God. These Latino converts say their faith is “very important in their lives” at much higher percentages (92 percent) than the general U.S. population (58 percent). They are also more socially conservative, with 70 percent of Latino evangelicals “opposed to abortion in all or most cases” as opposed to 41 percent of the general U.S. population. _Time_ also points out that Latino evangelicals are opposed to same-sex marriage by a 66 percent to 25 percent margin. As evangelicals of all ethnicities evangelize and as Latino evangelicals become a higher percentage of the increasing Latino population, traditional, evangelical Christianity in America will inevitably assume a new, more Latino profile. The Southern Baptist Convention alone expects to double the number of Hispanic Southern Baptist churches by 2030. And the Latino transformation of American Christianity is part of an international trend in which Latino Evangelicals are transforming Latin America as well. _Time’s_ article reports that evangelicals have more than tripled in Latin America between 1996 (four percent) and 2010 (13 percent). This phenomenon is just one dramatic part of the transformation of the worldwide Christian faith. Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, is on the march in Africa and Asia. Unless extraordinary revival breaks out in Europe and North America, the majority of Christian disciples worldwide will be Asian, African, or Hispanic, not Anglo or European, by 2050. A reformation indeed. _Dr. Richard Land is president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission._ ****

There’s a devastatingly simple explanation for America’s economic mess

Ever since the financial crisis, the U.S. economy has grown at a stubbornly slow rate, far less than the 3 percent that was widely considered a sign of good health. This disappointing outcome — the Federal Reserve expects the economy to grow only about 1.8 percent this year — has been blamed by economists on many factors: the financial crisis in 2008, fiscal fights in Washington, Europe's repeated debt crises, China's slowdown and more. But according to provocative new research from Fed economists, there might be a simple explanation for the slow growth — and there might not have been much policymakers could have done about it. If the new explanation is true, it might also explain why efforts to boost economic growth — including trillions of dollars in monetary stimulus and near-zero interest rates — haven't worked that well.  The researchers — Etienne Gagnon, Benjamin Johannsen and David Lopez-Salido — created a model of the economy that shows how changes in births, deaths, aging, migration, labor markets and other trends have affected the U.S. economy since 1900. Using that model, they find that most of the decline in economic growth and interest rates since 1980 has been due intractable factors like the aging and retirement of baby boomers, lower fertility rates and longer life expectancy for Americans. They find that these demographic changes account for a 1.25 percentage point decline in annualized economic growth since 1980, which is essentially all of the decline we’ve seen in that metric, according to some estimates. What’s really remarkable is that we might have seen this coming. The macroeconomics effects of this kind of demographic transition “have been largely predictable,” the economists write in their paper. In fact, most of the relevant changes that have weighed on growth and interest rates took place before the 1980s. The biggest drag on the economy has been the aging and retirement of America’s baby boomers, the researchers say. The boomers are by far the largest American generation on record, with 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964. They are substantially more numerous than the 47 million members of the Silent generation that preceded them, as well as the 55 million Gen Xers, the 66 million millennials and the 69 million post-millennials, according to Pew Research Center. Their generation is so large that it's easy to see their impact as they move through the American age distribution, as the chart below from the U.S. Census Bureau shows: As the boomers reached working age in the 1960s and 1970s, they greatly drove up the supply of labor in the United States, and that in turn boosted economic growth and interest rates. The effect was especially strong because boomer women went to work in much larger numbers than their mothers did, due in part to the women’s rights movement and more readily available birth control. The U.S. economy enjoyed the benefit of a demographic dividend, as the number of workers relative to the total population reached a historic high. But the boomer generation also ended up having fewer children than their parents did. And as they aged and retired, they left fewer people in the American workforce, and that reduced the country’s economic output. The aging and retirement of the boomers also put downward pressure on America’s interest rates, the economists say. Interest rates that stay low for a long time are a problem in that they indicate an economy in which growth is slow and there is little willingness to invest. Low interest rates also leave central bankers with little capacity to stimulate growth in the future by cutting interest rates. The retirement of the baby boomers has meant that what economists call capital — machines, factories, roads and buildings — has become relatively abundant compared to labor. That has depressed the return investors receive for investing in capital, and led to our era of lower investment. And that in turn led to a fall in the interest rate. In line with their model, the real interest rate in the United States rose through the 1960s and 1970s, peaked around 1980s, and has gradually declined since then, the economists say.  In the last decade, the effect of these trends has become even more pronounced, they say, as more boomers have retired and effects of the IT boom have faded. And their model suggests that low interest rates, low economic growth and low investment are here to stay, since America’s working population is not set to grow much in coming decades. Other countries in Europe and East Asia, are undergoing similar transitions, with rapidly aging populations, too. Because of the timing of this trend, the economists say, many have confused it with the lingering effects of the financial crisis. The financial crisis undoubtedly had a powerful effect on the economy. Actions like the massive bond-buying programs undertaken by central banks around the world to lift their economies are powerful, too. But both may pale in comparison to the economic power of demography.

The Republican problem with Hispanic voters — in 7 charts

Much of the document is dedicated to addressing the demographic problems that confront Republicans with a shrinking white population and rising number of Hispanics entering the electorate. "We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform," reads the report. "If we do not, our party's appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only."  Below we tell that story in 7 charts. 1. The white vote continues to be a smaller and smaller share of the electorate.    3.  Republicans have had very limited success in winning over Hispanic voters in presidential election. By far the best showing was George W. Bush in 2004 when he won 44 percent of the Latino vote. In 2012, Mitt Romney won just 27 percent of Hispanics.  4. Hispanics continue to identify more and more with the Democratic party.    6.  Latinos don't think Republicans care about them -- and that empathy gap is getting wider not narrower.

Why South Korea predicts its end will come in 2750

South Korea may be doomed. A recent study, conducted by the National Assembly Research Service in Seoul, predicts that the country will reach zero inhabitants by 2750.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The report makes it clear where the country's problem lies: A remarkably low birth rate of 1.19 children per woman. But what's really striking is the speed at which it could happen: South Korea's population (currently larger than Spain) could shrink to a level comparable to tiny Switzerland within only a few generations. By 2136, South Korea is predicted to lose 40 million of its 50 million inhabitants, according to the research, which was conducted by a government agency upon request by opposition politician Yang Seung-jo. Some areas of South Korea would be affected earlier than others. Buzan – currently the second largest city in South Korea after Seoul – would be the first to have zero inhabitants by 2413, an interesting detail that suggests large cities would feel the repercussions of the demographic change early on. South Korea isn't the only country in east Asia fearing its demise. An earlier report from 2012 had found similar problems in Japan, though they had a little longer to fix it (1,000 years).    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico So what's the problem? It largely comes down to fertility rates. A fertility rate measures how many children a woman bears on average. While the world's average number is estimated between 2.33 and 2.50, a ratio of 2.1 is necessary for a population to maintain its population levels. However, some East Asian countries as well as many other developed nations (for example France, the United States or Sweden) suffer from low birth rates. Low birth rates don't have to be synonymous with a population decrease. Countries such as the United States, for example, have been able to counteract their low fertility rates with immigration. Germany, which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, is increasingly attracting foreigners from all over Europe.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico South Korea, however, has an extremely closed immigration system and only recently has there has been a growing consensus that at least some adjustment to the strict laws are needed. As of June 2013, the number of people without Korean citizenship staying in the country for three months or longer amounted to just a little less than 3 percent of the total population. According to one 2008 study, nearly half of South Korea's population had never even spoken to a foreigner.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Of course, that wouldn't be such a problem if fertility rates were higher. So why are they so low? Thomas Anderson, a demographics researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks that East Asia's low birth rates are related to "social and economic barriers." In a study published last year, Anderson argues that "couples in East Asia are more likely than their Western counterparts to have just one child in order to invest heavily in that child's human capital." Essentially, parents would prefer one successful child over a number of low-achieving children.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Other factors also play into the decision on whether to raise children or not. According to Minja Kim Choe, a senior research fellow at the East-West Center, "the view that 'it is necessary to have children' has declined substantially." Choe explains that an "increasing proportion of women will be evaluating costs and benefits of having children" and compare it to alternative options such as spending more time on work or hobbies.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico South Korea's problem hasn't come out of nowhere – a gradual societal transformation has taken place. This chart, included in a paper by the Korea Economic Institute, shows how things have changed over time:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The South Korean government has tried to respond to this shift by pursuing policies such as a more attractive maternity leave and subsidies for childbearing. In 2008, the South Korean government spent $3.8 billion on programs to increase the birthrate. The Korea Economic Institute's Elizabeth Hervey Stephen examined the effect the money had four years later and came to the conclusion that "to date, the policies have not been effective, which in large part is due to the country's work culture and gendered society."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Of course, South Korea has more than 700 years to reverse this trend, so take the 2750 time line with a pinch of salt – Even if this research's findings are accurate, many factors are likely to change _a lot_ during that time frame. In the meantime, South Koreans can take solace in their pets: In 2013 the Wall Street Journal reported that total private expenditure on pet supplies had annually increased by more than 14 percent since 2000, despite their demographic woes.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Japan is shrinking, in two alarming charts

Japan's national health ministry has released the latest population stats, and it's more bad news for the world's third-largest economy and tenth-most-populous country. The Japanese population dropped by 212,000 people last year, the largest decrease on record for the country. The birth rate is still falling – there were only 1.03 million live births last year, a record low and dramatic decrease from 1.21 million the year before. And Japan is aging – with almost 40 percent of its population 65 or older, it is one of the most elderly nations on Earth. Here's what that looks like as part of Japan's big shrink, a combination of declining birth rates and an overwhelmingly elderly population. These data, from Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs, include projections into 2050. The first chart shows Japan's population over time, and the second shows the percentage annual population change. The picture is not pretty: The implications of Japan's demographic crisis are potentially severe. The Economist called it "the first big country in history to have started shrinking rapidly from natural causes." The basic problem is that a greater and greater share of Japan's population will retire – a particularly expensive prospect in the country, given the high median age and health-care standards – just as the workforce begins to shrink. Debt and trade deficits are already serious issues in Japan, and the demographic crisis could make them much worse. The economic implications of a Japanese slowdown are potentially global. But how do you argue with demographics?

What the end of white Christian America has to do with Trump (Part 1)

Right Turn, regular readers know, has been investigating this subject and trying to understand its correlation to the current election. I sent a series of questions to Jones, who was good enough to send extensive answers that go to the heart of some of the issues raised in the 2016 election. We would caution here that the end of White Christian America’s grip on American society is not a political event but a much broader social, economic and cultural trend; we cannot understand it just as a political phenomenon (“The Trump voter”). Rather, it is a broader societal phenomenon showing up — dramatically so — in the 2016 election.  I think the principal reason white evangelical Protestants are reacting more viscerally to the end of White Christian America is because they represented the last phase of its health and vitality. While the decline among their more northern mainline Protestant cousins began in the 1970s and continued through the turn of the twenty-first century, the decline among white evangelical Protestants did not occur until the last decade. As a result, there was a significant period of about four decades where white evangelicals adopted a fairly self-congratulatory posture, concluding that their more conservative theology was what had protected them from decline. But over the last decade, the evidence showing that white evangelicals are declining and graying has become irrefutable. Just between 2007 and 2015, white evangelical Protestants have slipped from being 21 percent of the population to 17 percent of the population. Like their white mainline Protestant cousins, they are now significantly older than the general population. And if you look at their distribution across age groups, the future is pretty clear. White evangelical Protestants account for nearly three in ten seniors but only one in ten adults under the age of 30. The Southern Baptist Convention, which is not only the largest evangelical denomination but the largest Protestant denomination of any kind, has now posted nine straight years of negative growth rates. Most importantly, it was this second wave of decline among white evangelical Protestants that pushed the country from being a majority white Christian nation (54 percent white Christian in 2008) to a minority white Christian nation (45 percent white Christian in 2015). While white mainline Protestants have had decades to adjust to their diminished power, white evangelical Protestants are feeling the loss in a more acute way, which often get expressed as denial, anger, or both.  I’m white and grew up in Mississippi in the 1970s and 1980s, and “my people,” as we say in the South, have roots in Georgia’s Bibb County going back into the 1700s. So I can say with some certainty from both the data and personal experience that white southerners, and white southern Christians in particular, have hardly begun to deal with the legacy of racism and prejudice that has shaped their identity and institutions and that continues to shape their attitudes today. That reality, it seems to me, is simply a given. But the issue of racism is a partial manifestation of a larger dynamic. White southern Christians, at least since the Civil War, have been vulnerable to the siren song of nostalgia. One of the most illuminating survey questions PRRI has asked recently is about perceptions of the 1950s. When asked whether American culture and way of life has changed for the better or changed for the worse since the 1950s, the general public is fairly divided. But more than seven in ten white evangelical Protestants say things have changed for the worse since the 1950s. So what do the 1950s represent for many conservative whites? It’s an idealized vision of a pre-civil rights, pre-women’s rights, pre-gay rights world where races didn’t mix and social roles were fairly rigidly defined. It’s Andy Griffith and Mayberry, and not the later Technicolor episodes. It’s this sentiment that is captured so well in the lyrics sung by Archie and Edith Bunker from the opening song of the 1970s sit-com, “All in the Family,” which was so far ahead of its time: “And you knew who you were then/Girls were girls and men were men/Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again/People seemed to be content/$50 paid the rent/Freaks were in a circus tent/Those were the days.” So race, particularly the sense of a loss of white power and a sense of unquestioned white ownership of power in local communities, certainly figures prominently here. It would be hard to overstate the lingering power of race in white Christian communities. But it’s also important to remember that these racial attitudes were set within what seemed to many white conservative Christians to be an ordered, hierarchical world that now seems to be in chaos. For example, Phyllis Schlafly, one of the few female leaders of the Christian Right, just died this month. She rose to prominence, somewhat paradoxically, as the outspoken, anti-feminist opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. Schlafly was a strong backer of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and toward the end of her life, she was an early and outspoken supporter of Donald Trump. Trump was invited to speak at her funeral, where he called her a “hero” to the conservative movement. Imagining Schlafly looking down on the funeral, Trump vowed, “We will never, ever let you down.” Yes, racial attitudes—and, yes, some unvarnished racism—are certainly at work. But I think it’s more accurate—and more illuminating—to understand this broader sense of loss and nostalgia when describing the anxieties among the descendants of White Christian America. We will post the next portion of our conversation on Sunday.

The ‘next America’ is now

The political paralysis in Washington is often ascribed, depending on partisanship, to Republican obstructionism or President Obama’s arrogance. But there are deeper causes. Both parties have had a hard time creating agendas that appeal across ideological, racial and ethnic lines. There has been a fragmentation of power and purpose that transcends the defects of political leaders. A partial explanation comes in a report issued last month that describes the changing nature of the American electorate. It’s less white, more minority, older and less dominated by any one generation. Fascinating in their own right, these shifts also illuminate the larger origins of the political impasse. If democracy responds to voters, then voters preoccupied with their own narrow agendas inhibit the creation of durable coalitions capable of legislating. The report, “States of Change: The Demographic Evolution of the American Electorate, 1974-2060,” was sponsored by three think tanks of differing politics: the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the liberal Brookings Institution and Center for American Progress. The study identifies 10 transforming trends, which — considering the overlap — I’ve condensed to five. Here they are: _1) The rise of minorities — and decline of whites_ _._ In 1980, 80 percent of the U.S. population was white. Now, that’s 63 percent; by 2060, it’s projected to be about 44 percent. Meanwhile, Hispanics have gone from 6 percent in 1980 to 17 percent and are projected to reach 29 percent by 2060. Asian Americans (and “others”) are expected to double from 8 percent now to 15 percent by 2060. The proportion of African Americans, now 12 to 13 percent, is estimated to stay stable. _2) A graying America._ People age 50 and older now represent one-third of the population, up from one-fourth in 1980. By 2060, their share is forecast to exceed two-fifths. By contrast, those age 18 to 39 are then expected to be about a quarter of the total. _3) Generational shifts._ These are inevitable, of course. The World War II generation is mostly gone (it’s 1 percent of the population). And baby boomers, born from 1946 to 1964, no longer dominate. They’re 24 percent of today’s population, slightly behind “millennials,” born from 1981 to 2000, at 27 percent, and slightly ahead of Generation X, born from 1965 to 1980, at 21 percent. _4) The rise of unmarried voters._ This is perhaps the most surprising finding. In 1974, 70 percent of eligible voters were married, 30 percent unmarried. Now, the split is 52 percent married, 48 percent not, reflecting fewer and later marriages, more divorces and more widowed elderly. _5) The gap between voters and the population._ In 2012, slightly more than one-fourth of voters were minorities — well below their population share of about 37 percent. The reasons are clear. Many immigrants aren’t eligible to vote, either because they’re children or not citizens. Also, turnout is low among eligible voters. With time, this gap should close. None of these groups, of course, is a monolith. But if power ultimately derives from the people, then these changes are not just electoral curiosities. They condition how the system operates: Power is being redistributed in ways that breed widespread frustration. As a group, whites still have the most power, but it is waning. Hispanics’ power is on the rise, but it has been (so far) insufficient to pass desired immigration legislation. Crafting political campaigns that resonate with most of the population has become harder. Helping married couples (with, say, a new tax break) may offend the equally large pool of unmarried people. Baby boomers may be able to defend their Social Security and Medicare benefits, but their good fortune is partially paid by taxes on struggling millennials. The “next America” — to borrow writer Paul Taylor’s phrase, from the title of his book — has arrived, and its beginning is not auspicious. Both parties are struggling to find themes that bridge differences. “Middle-class economics” is Democrats’ latest effort. To be sure, this next America is hardly fixed. Time passes; social and political realities shift. At a conference on the report, Brookings’s Elaine Kamarck sensibly wondered whether the children and grandchildren of today’s immigrants will continue to identify themselves as Hispanic. “As people intermarry, will it matter that the United States is a majority-minority society?” she asked. But some things don’t change. The central problem of American governance is how to create a political system that advances the nation’s long-term interests even though politics is dominated by groups avidly pursuing their short-term self-interest. Power may derive from the people, but it must be tempered in ways that allow for the future. This is a challenge every generation faces — and one that we are arguably failing. _Read more fromRobert Samuelson’s archive._ **Read more on this topic:** The Post’s View: Changing demographics should mean policy changes Ryan D. Enos: How the demographic shift could hurt Democrats, too Robert J. Samuelson: America’s menacing mega-trends

Why demographics are still a concern for some Israeli Jews

January is often a popular time for news about population data, and this time around, there are few surprises: Out of Japan is a new report showing that its population declined by 212,000, the biggest drop on record and further evidence of the perils of its rapidly-aging, increasingly childless citizenry. In Switzerland, a group called Ecopop has forced a national referendum that would put a limit on annual immigration to the country of 0.2 percent of the resident population -- an initiative prompted largely by the fact that the country's population is almost 25 percent foreign. And in Israel, Jewish policymakers are heralding the fact that the country's Jewish population has passed the 6 million mark for the first time -- a historically significant number, they say, because that's the number of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. "It's a great joy to know there are more than 6 million Jews in Israel," Dina Porat, chief historian of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, told the Guardian. It's cause for celebration, but the 6 million figure doesn't entirely put Israeli Jews at ease. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released its own figures this week, predicting that the number of Arabs in Israel and Palestine will equal the number of Jews by 2016 and exceed it by 2020, buoyed in part by the Palestinians' overall higher birthrate. There are 5.8 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and Israel, and "the number of Palestinians in historical Palestine will total 7.2 million compared to 6.9 Jews by the end of 2020," the Palestinian report proclaims. That may be an overly rosy prediction -- other demographers have pegged the majority-Palestinian year at 2035 or even 2048 \-- but the disparity between the number of Jewish and Palestinian births is interesting because it has been among Israel's main arguments against a one-state solution. If Palestinian population growth continues to outpace that of Israeli Jews, the thinking goes, Israel would no longer be a Jewish state, a problem some Jewish commentators have called a "demographic timebomb." Of course, those are just projections, and a number of societal changes could keep Israel's demographics just as they are. The Palestinian birth rate is currently 4.4, compared with 3.0 for Jews, but it's possible the Palestinian rate could decrease as the country develops and modernizes. Ben Moscovitch, the Israel blogger for the Foreign Policy Association, told the International Business Times that ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have historically high birthrates, might also bolster the Jewish population there: Israel continues to aggressively encourage fertility, spending more than $60 million a year on publicly funded fertility treatments and operating more fertility clinics per capita than any other country in the world. “Anyone who lives here is expected to have children,” Sigal Gooldin, a Hebrew University medical sociologist told the New York Times. “In casual conversation you will be asked how many children you have, and if you say one, people will ask why only one, and if you say two, why only two?”

Why educated women are having more babies

Around the globe, statistics show that as education levels for women rise, fertility levels drop. Sociologist Philip Cohen puts it this way: “Women with more education have more opportunities for productive lives doing work other than childbearing.” Some conservative writers and politicians have warned ominously that this presents a “reverse Darwinism,” and a survival of the weakest.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But a new report by the Pew Research Center has found something surprising: more highly educated women in the United States are becoming mothers than ever before. And they’re having bigger families.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Childlessness among women age 40 to 44 is at its lowest point in a decade. And among the most highly educated -- women with medical degrees or PhDs -- the share of childless women has dropped from 35 percent in 1994 to 20 percent. “That’s a stunning turnaround,” said report author Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center, who analyzed fertility over a woman’s lifetime in the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey data. “It was a most surprising finding.” Livingston attributed said the drop in childlessness was likely due to the fact that more women are highly educated than in the past and  more of them are likely to be married (since married women are more likely to become mothers). Plus, she said, advances in reproductive technology have helped the trend too. Not only are a greater share of educated women becoming mothers, they’re also having larger families than before. The share of mothers with at least a master’s degree who have just one child fell from 28 percent to 23 percent. While those having three or more children rose from 22 percent to 27 percent. “Of all educational groups, this was the only one that showed clear declines in small families and increases in multi-child families,” Livingston said. “I wasn’t expecting to see that at all.” Overall, the average family size is smaller now than in the 1970s. In 1976, four in 10 mothers had had four or more children by the time they reached 40 to 44. Now, 41 percent of mothers have two children by the time they hit 44, and only 14 percent have four or more. Women with less education, Hispanic and African American women are still less likely to be childless and more likely to have larger families than mothers with more education and white and Asian mothers. But the childless gap between educational groups has narrowed significantly, Livingston said. Not only are highly educated women having more children, but for mothers with a high school diploma, the share having two children dropped, while those having just one child increased. Fertility patterns remain unchanged for women with bachelor’s degrees. On the surface, the numbers may seem to contradict widely-reported data from the National Center for Health Statistics showing that the U.S. fertility rate in 2013 was an all-time low?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But that general fertility rate, of births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, reflects the fact that women in their 20s and 30s have delayed childbearing and there's been a slight decline in recent years in the share of women who are in their peak childbearing years.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The surprising findings could signal that as more women have become educated, workplaces are getting more used to accommodating working mothers, or that by delaying childbirth, older women have established their reputations as good workers and have more control over their schedules. “If there are women benefitting from changing work policies, I’m guessing it would be highly educated women,” Livingston said, “And not women with less education.” Which could explain why women with less education, who work in hourly jobs with little power or control over their schedules, are having fewer children.

The baby recession isn’t over. But the days of early motherhood might be.

As teen birth rates plummet, women in their thirties and forties appear to be driving America’s baby bump \-- but don’t expect the recent uptick to become an upswing.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Births in the United States rose by 53,743 from 2013 to 2014, the first increase in seven years, following a stretch of decreases since the recession, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Steven Martin, who studies social demography at the Urban Institute, said the country isn’t necessarily entering a time of tremendous growth or even exiting what he calls the “baby recession.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The slightly higher number of births, he said, can probably be attributed to a larger population of women in their childbearing years. The birth _rate_ , or annual number of births per 1,000 of the population, hasn’t significantly budged: 53,743 more births represents a 1.4 percent relative increase in fertility, according to the Urban Institute.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Last year, to put our current amount of tiny human creation into perspective, 3,985,924 babies were born, compared with 3,932,181 in 2013. That’s still 330,309 fewer births than the 4,316,233 in 2007, before the recession rocked household budgets.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The latest numbers more realistically reflect a “new baby normal,” Martin said, or a slow transformation of what the average American mom nowadays looks like. In previous decades, she was much younger, either in her late teen years or early twenties. Now she’s closer to 30, married and more likely to be adding to her family by choice and not surprise. The long-term implication, Martin said: “If family formation keeps moving  to older ages, U.S. fertility could decrease even more in the future.” In 1991, for example, teens gave birth at a rate of 61.8 per 1,000 women between ages 15 and 19. Last year, that rate fell to 24.2 births per 1,000 women. Last year, 40 percent of births arrived to unmarried mothers, a slight dip from the 41 percent share seen since 2008, and only the third one-year decrease in this measure since World War II, according to the Pew Research Center. (The last drop happened in 1995 _.)_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Family formation rates for women 25 to 29, meanwhile, have actually declined. Millennial women have been the slowest generation of potential moms to start having babies. First birth rates for women age 30 through 34, and 35 through 39, however, increased fr om 2013 to 2014. Now, 43 percent of births are to women older than 30. In 2000, that share was only 36 percent.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The reasons are complicated: More young women than ever have access to birth control. They’re also outpacing men in college enrollment and dominating nearly half of the workforce. This miniature birth boost comes with a healthier economy; babies, after all, are expensive. But moms who gave birth last year weren’t overwhelmingly bringing their first bundle of joy into the world. Many of these new babies already have older sibling. “A lot of women in couples started having families before the recession and just put the brakes on when times got hard," Martin said. "These families just started having children again.”

Trump’s repeated claim that more Hispanics are in poverty under Obama

This is another factoid Donald Trump has been using that we previously covered in a fact-checking roundup. But since it keeps turning up in his speeches, we decided it was time for a full-fledged fact check.  First of all, Trump starts by using a raw number — there are 2 million more Hispanics in poverty. But that’s doesn’t tell you much. The U.S. population — especially in an ethnic group with a high birthrate like Hispanics — keeps growing, year after year. So what’s more important is the poverty rate.  Given that Obama took office Jan. 20, 2009, the most logical thing to do would be to use the figure for 2009. But Trump reaches back to 2008 as his base. What’s the difference in the number of Hispanics in poverty between 2008 and 2009, as the Great Recession was hitting in full force? Nearly 1.4 million people, or 70 percent of the number Trump uses on the campaign trail. This is known as cherry-picking to get the result you want. From March 2009 to March 2014, the most recent year available, the number of Hispanics in poverty has grown by 754,000. But as we said, the poverty rate is actually the more important number, as the number of Hispanics overall grew by nearly 7 million people.  In other words, the poverty rate has improved — exactly the opposite of what Trump suggests with his reliance on raw numbers.  But again, what’s important is the poverty rate, as the number of Hispanic children increased by more than 1 million between 2009 and 2014. The poverty rate for Hispanic children actually has fallen by 1.2 percentage points from 2009 to 2014. On one level, we should be pleased that Trump’s statistics are based on an official government report. But he cherry-picks the year to inflate the figures — and then uses raw numbers, which is misleading, especially when discussing a fast-growing population such as Hispanics.

How the GOP became the party of less-educated whites — and Donald Trump

It was an event in Republican Party history that has been a long time in the making.  It bears emphasizing at the top here that Americans as a whole have become more educated in recent decades, and both parties now have fewer voters with less formal education. But these voters have shifted much more to the GOP and remain a much bigger portion of the Republican pie today, relatively speaking. According to Pew data, white registered voters with a high school degree or less leaned toward the Democratic Party by a 50-41 margin back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected to his first term as president. And Democrats still led among this demographic as recently as the late 2000s. Today, though, they have taken a sharp turn for the GOP, and they currently lean Republican by a whopping 26 points — 59 percent to 33 percent. That's a net shift of 35 points between 1992 and today (see the first graph on the left below). And it's not just voters whose formal education stopped at high school. Republicans have also gained a bigger advantage among white voters who have attended at least some college but not graduated (the middle graph). They led by single digits in 1992 and as recently as 2008, but today that lead is 21 points — 57 percent to 38 percent. A large portion of these shifts, you might notice, began basically as Barack Obama was elected president for the first time. The GOP's growing advantage among white voters, though, comes to an abrupt halt when you talk about whites with college degrees or more. In fact, Democrats have actually closed the gap among this group (the third graph), drawing even after trailing by as much as double digits in the 1990s and early 2000s. The shifts are less significant when you look at all voters by education level — not just whites — because Democrats have maintained their dominance among black voters and done increasingly well with Hispanic and Asian American voters. But even when you include non-white voters, those with a high school degree or less have clearly moved Republican, while voters with a college degree or more have clearly moved toward Democrats. As noted above, both parties have technically become more educated over the last two decades. But that's much more the case with the Democratic Party.   Even if you include non-white voters — and Democrats' rising fortunes with the fast-growing Hispanic population — the portion of the GOP that has less than a college degree has remained much steadier than the Democratic Party. While the share of all GOP-leaning voters without a college degree dropped just 4 points between 1992 and today — from 72 percent to 68 percent — it has dropped by 17 points among Democrats — from 79 percent to 62 percent. Less formally educated voters have lost clout in American politics in recent years, but they have largely kept their clout in the Republican Party, and the less-educated American voters who remain have moved sharply toward the Republican Party. Had they not, it's less likely that Donald Trump would be the Republican Party nominee today.

Hispanic high school graduates pass whites in college enrollment rate

*[WSU]: Wayne State University resigned for suggesting    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Pew Research Hispanic Center released    *[WSU]: Wayne State University In a report by Richard Fry and Paul Taylor, the center says that “a record seven-in-ten (69%) Hispanic high school graduates in the class of 2012 enrolled in college that fall, two percentage points higher than the rate (67%) among their white counterparts.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Furthermore, the center’s analysis of new data from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that according to the most recent available data, in 2011, “only 14% of Hispanic 16- to 24-year-olds were high school dropouts, half the level in 2000 (28%).” The high school dropout rate among whites  also declined during that period — from 7 percent in 2000 to 5 percent in 2011, but not as much as the Hispanic rate. *[WSU]: Wayne State University The Hispanic college enrollment rise is a trend that accelerated with the onset of the recession in 2008, the report says. As recently as the high school graduating class of 2000, only 49 percent of Hispanics immediately enrolled in college the following fall. The authors suggest these as possible causes for the rise in Hispanic college enrollment:   It is possible that the rise in high school completion and college enrollment by Latino youths has been driven, at least in part, by their declining fortunes in the job market. Since the onset of the recession at the end of 2007, unemployment among Latinos ages 16 to 24 has gone up by seven percentage points, compared with a five percentage point rise among white youths. With jobs harder to find, more Latino youths may have chosen to stay in school longer.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Another factor, however, could be the importance that Latino families place on a college education. According to a 2009 Pew Hispanic Center survey, 88% of Latinos ages 16 and older agreed that a college degree is necessary to get ahead in life today (Pew Hispanic Center, 2009). By contrast, a separate 2009 survey of all Americans ages 16 and older found that fewer (74%) said the same (Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends, 2009).    *[WSU]: Wayne State University In October 2012, 66 percent of all recent high school graduates were enrolled in college, the report says. You can read about the resignation of Jason Richwine, from the Heritage Foundation here.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The co-author of a controversial Heritage study that has invited an avalanche of blistering criticism, has resigned from Heritage, the first step in what will be an effort to contain the damage arising from the report.

Friday exit poll highlights: Cellphones and more

Four exit poll tidbits to end the week, and one reminder ... 1 -- Fully one-in-three Election Day voters nationally said they do not have land-line telephones, up from 20 percent four years ago and 7 percent eight years ago. Preelection polls that exclude these voters may have yield "good" final estimates, but they are missing more and more of the electorate on other all matters, not just presidential votes.  2 -- Obama’s biggest percentage point drop-off among white voters was among those ages 18-29.  3 -- African American support for Obama was again overwhelming, but a down-tick from 95 to 93 percent stemmed entirely from a decline among black men. In 2012, black male voters backed Obama at a similar level to John Kerry in 2004, according to the exit poll.  4 -- Obama did poorly among Mormon voters, getting just 21 percent in 2012. But that was basically on par with his take in 2008 against a non-Mormon candidate (24 percent) and Kerry's from 2004.  5 -- Exit polls have margins of sampling error, just like any survey. One should remember that when making big story lines out of small differences. The national exit poll interviewed a lot of people -- 22,157 on Election Day and an additional  4,408 with early voters via telephone -- but the margin of sampling error for a typical characteristic (e.g. young voters) has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points. (All of the differences described above pass a basic test of statistical significance.)

A new crisis in the Muslim world: Is it too young?

JAKARTA, Indonesia — In early August, when leaders of several dozen Muslim countries gathered in Jakarta for an annual economic conference, some of the speakers acknowledged that things are not looking good for their global community. Chaos continues to grip their heartland in the Middle East, they noted, and anti-Muslim politicians are drawing unprecedented support in Europe, the United States and elsewhere. When Indonesian President Joko Widodo spoke, however, the World Islamic Economic Forum’s host offered a bracing dose of optimism. Citing data from a landmark 2015 Pew study showing that the number of Muslims worldwide is expected to grow by 73 percent from 2010 to 2050, the head of the world’s most-populous Muslim-majority nation told his counterparts that their countries must seek to leverage their “fundamental strength”: a huge and expanding youth population. “Muslim societies have the best demographics of any demographic group in the world, with the highest proportion of young people,” he said. According to Pew, Muslims are expected to outnumber Christians by about 2070. The data Widodo cited was sound; demographers largely consider the Pew study’s forecasts reasonable. But his main contention — that the Muslim world’s comparative youthfulness and high fertility rate represent a strength — is a matter of debate among economists, and his assertion last month sparked discussion in Indonesia and beyond about how much youth is too much. The “youth bulge,” seen when infant mortality drops while fertility rates remain high, can indeed boost economies by increasing the number of people available to work, experts agree. But it also can lead to social instability if the masses of working-age youths are unable to find productive jobs. “The youth bulge can be both a gift and a curse,” said Ragui Assaad, a professor who specializes in labor economics at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. “You either generate good jobs or a lot of people fall into unemployment, creating the possibility for unrest and frustration.” The Muslim world as a whole, of course, is unlikely to swing in just one direction, as every Muslim-majority country faces particular economic and social circumstances that will affect whether it can productively integrate its youths. A handful of Muslim countries, such as Iran and Malaysia, have implemented strong birth-control policies to lower their birthrates to below-replacement levels, lessening the challenges facing young job seekers. Still, the overall trend is of a global Muslim community that has lowered its birthrate at a much slower pace than the rest of the world, according to Pew senior demographer Conrad Hackett. “That Muslims are growing twice as fast as the world’s population is really striking and remarkable,” he said. When young people lack economic opportunities and the prospect of being able to support families of their own, experts say, they are especially susceptible to the lure of anti-establishment ideology. In Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s, when countries in the region were experiencing youth bulges, that draw often was Marxism, Assaad noted. But it could take the form of austere varieties of Islam for disgruntled Muslim youths today. Egypt, Tunisia and Syria during the Arab Spring — when restive youth-led movements challenged (and in the first two cases, toppled) the ruling order — are taken as recent textbook cases of the link. Assaad suggested there is a connection between the recent drop-off in political violence in Latin America and demographic changes. “Now the last rebel-group movement is declaring peace,” he said, alluding to Colombia’s FARC. “Latin America basically crossed its youth-bulge period some time back, so it does have less of a risk factor” now. Richard Cincotta, a political demographer at the bipartisan Stimson Center who advises the National Intelligence Council on how demographic trends influence the geopolitical landscape, also acknowledged the appeal of radical, often violent, groups to disaffected youths. “You can’t just generalize to say all these young guys will become terrorists or something,” he said. “But you can say they are available, and vulnerable, and they are in a part of their life where you want to impress your friends when you’re ideologically naive, and you’re searching for an identity that [the groups] are good at providing.” Another reason experts are wary of Widodo’s optimism about soaring Muslim population numbers is that advances in technology and automation appear to be removing jobs from economies faster than they are adding them — which only exacerbates the problem of youth employment. “There’s always been a neoclassic assumption [that] economy needs labor, [that] labor and economic growth go together,” Cincotta said. “Now they’re becoming disassembled.” In Widodo’s Indonesia, which currently is seeing a youth bulge, concern is growing that the generally poor quality of public education, combined with the effects of a sky-high youth smoking rate, will make it hard for the country to capitalize on the surfeit of young people in the way the president envisaged. “There is a trade-off between quality and quantity,” said Aris Ananta, a professor of demography at the University of Indonesia. “Indonesia still needs to raise productivity and improve education and health.” Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Muslim leaders’ pride in their faith’s population surge is not only about economics. “There’s a sense that Islam has a vitality that other religions don’t,” he said. “It could be that this significant increase in population could be a negative thing economically for the Muslim world, but some Muslims might be proud of that fact irrespective of the economic outcome.” The one thing demographers are clear about is that demography is not economic destiny, either way. “As an academic, I will say the president is half-right and half-wrong,” said Assaad. “It is called window of opportunity, not demographic gift. You can make use of it if you can grow fast and develop jobs. But that has not materialized in the Middle East, and for Africa it’s still an open question.”

This chart should terrify Republicans

I've written many times -- including in the best-selling(ish) "Gospel According to The Fix" -- that Republicans are staring a demographic disaster straight in the eye. That disaster is the party's increasing inability to win over Latino voters at the same time that Hispanics are comprising an ever- larger portion of the overall population and electorate.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico A terrific new study called "States of Change" conducted by the Center for American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings, of which I will have LOTS more to say in this space later (and that Dan Balz has written eloquently on already), contains a chart of the tipping point at which states will become majority-minority. The results are striking -- and should be terrifying for Republicans. Here's the chart:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico At the moment, there are only four states -- California, Texas, Hawaii and New Mexico -- that are majority-minority in population. But the trend line is remarkable. The study's authors write: Think about that for a minute. By 2060, 11 of the 15 largest states will be majority-minority \-- states that includes electorally critical battlegrounds such as Florida, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. When you consider that Mitt Romney won 27 percent of the Hispanic vote nationally (13 points worse than George W. Bush did eight years earlier), you begin to see that if things continue in their current direction, Republicans will be hard- pressed to be competitive in national elections in a decade or two.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But, wait, you say. Texas is ALREADY majority minority by population, and Republicans won overwhelmingly there in 2014. True. But it's worth noting that the Hispanic population, nationally and in Texas, is younger and less registered to vote as a percentage of its eligible voting population than any other demographic group. As that community ages and gets more acclimated with the voting process, those numbers are likely to change. New Mexico provides a recent example. In 1994, New Mexico became a majority-minority population. And yet, Bush was able to be extremely competitive in the state in 2000 (he lost the state to Al Gore by about 350 votes) and 2004 (he won by a point over John Kerry). By 2006, New Mexico became a majority-minority state by eligible voter population, and you began to see it shift heavily away from Republicans at the federal level. Barack Obama won the state by 15 points in 2008 and 10 points in 2012. Democrats won open Senate seat races in the Land of Enchantment in 2008 and 2012. Now, demographics isn't entirely destiny. Witness this tweet from Republican consultant Brad Todd:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And Brad is right, in that Martinez won and got reelected as a Republican in New Mexico. But, two points: (1) State elections (such as for governor) are not the same as federal ones (like for president) and (2) Martinez is Hispanic. The simple fact is that Republicans can't simply hope that that the trend line on the Hispanic vote magically changes. While the party has done a very good job at the state level electing Hispanics -- Martinez and Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval are two major stars -- the fight over immigration reform happening in Congress and in the early stages of the 2016 presidential race could very well set back the party's attempts to make inroads with voters who are absolutely critical to their future as, well, a party. Demographics might not be destiny. But Republicans are staring at the wrong end of a demographic transformation that threatens to upend the current political map.

A bright future for Hispanics

A LITTLE MORE than one-third of the adult children of immigrants in this country are Hispanics, and it turns out that like previous generations of immigrants, they are generally doing well. That’s good news, and further evidence that the descendants of millions of undocumented immigrants, currently in the cross hairs of the national debate over immigration reform, will assimilate and become productive citizens. A new study by the Pew Research Center, examining census data for millions of second-generation immigrants, throws cold water on suggestions that Hispanics are somehow different from past immigrant communities — a permanent underclass in the making, wedded to government handouts. To the contrary: A staggering 78 percent of second-generation Hispanic adults say that they believe hard work pays off in success. That’s a higher percentage than the 72 percent of their Asian American counterparts who profess such faith in hard work or indeed the 58 percent of all American adults. To be sure, second-generation Hispanic immigrants have a way to go to catch up to their non-Hispanic white and Asian American counterparts. Both those groups have higher median household incomes and lower poverty rates than adult Americans as a whole. But the gap is not as large as some might assume. The median household income for second-generation Hispanic immigrants ($48,400), is only slightly lower than the overall national figure (about $50,000). And the poverty rate for that group of Hispanics (16 percent) is virtually the same as the nation’s (15 percent). One area where second-generation Hispanics badly lag comparable immigrant groups is in educational attainment. Just one-fifth of them have completed college, compared to two-fifths of white second-generation immigrants and more than half of Asian Americans. But the percentage of second-generation Hispanics with college degrees is double that of foreign-born Hispanic immigrants — a sharply favorable trend that suggests steadily rising future prosperity. That progress is mirrored in other areas of the Pew report, which shows that compared to first-generation Hispanics, second-generation Hispanics are much more likely to speak English; have friends and spouses from outside their own ethnic group; and consider themselves as “typical Americans.” That, along with improving economic circumstances, suggests a promising path toward assimilation for the country’s largest and fastest-growing minority. None of that should be particularly surprising — except perhaps to ardent fans of conservative talk radio and other media that like to portray Hispanic immigrants as imminent perils to American’s demographic integrity and public health. About 44 million immigrants have arrived in America since the mid-1960s, and about half of them are Hispanic. The Pew study is further proof that their children — children like Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who is nudging his party toward immigration reform — will make a critical contribution to the nation’s future. **More on this debate:** The Post’s View: The GOP’s non-plan. Dana Milbank: Marco Rubio’s immigration ‘reality’ show Jamelle Bouie: Immigration reform won’t save the GOP Daniel M. Kowalski: Five myths about the immigration ‘line’ Elizabeth Cohen: Let’s ask the founding fathers

High school graduation rates are on the rise in most states

High school graduation rates ticked up in a majority of states in 2014, and graduation gaps between white and minority students narrowed in most states that year, according to new federal data. Though nationwide data is not yet available, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that the preliminary state numbers suggest that the country is on track for a rise in graduation rates for the third year in a row. Eighty-one percent of the Class of 2013 graduated on time, the highest figure since states began calculating graduation rates in a uniform way in 2010. “It’s for me very, very encouraging,” Duncan told reporters Monday morning. “By all indications, it looks like the nation will take another step in the right direction.” _[High school graduation rates tick up for the third year in a row]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Graduation rates rose in 36 states, with the biggest increases in Delaware (where 87 percent of students graduated on time in 2014, up 6.6 percentage points from 2013); Alabama (where 86.3 percent graduated on time, up 6.3 percent); and Oregon, which has had one of the lowest graduation rates in the nation. Oregon’s rate rose 3.3 percentage points to 72 percent. Among the states that saw smaller increases were Maryland, where 86.4 percent of students graduated on time in 2014, and Virginia, where 85.3 percent graduated on time. Five states saw a decline, as did the District of Columbia, where 61.4 percent of students graduated on time in 2014, a dip of nearly one percentage point compared to 2013. Minority students have been closing gaps with their white peers in recent years, but those gaps remain substantial: In 2013, 86.6 percent of white students graduated on time, compared with 75.2 percent of Hispanic students and 70.7 percent of black students, according to the annual GradNation report. In 2014, the gap between white and black students narrowed in 28 states, and the gap between white and Hispanic students narrowed in 32 states. But fewer than half of states saw gaps shrink between low-income children and their more affluent peers; between English language learners and native English speakers; and between children with disabilities and all students. “To be clear, there are still hundreds of thousands of kids every year who are dropping out. What chance in life do they have?” Duncan said. “Progress is good, but we’ve got to get better faster.” Duncan, who recently announced that he will step down in December, said that graduation rates are a particularly important metric of progress at a time when most states are administering new Common Core-aligned tests with results that aren’t comparable to previous years. He and his successor, John King, also said Monday that rising graduation rates are evidence that the Obama administration’s education policies are working, and that Congress should stay the course as it works on rewriting No Child Left Behind, the main federal education law. _[The next education secretary: Polarizing, powered by personal story]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The House and the Senate have each approved their own versions of a rewritten law. Each would significantly scale back the federal role in public education, giving states far more latitude to determine which schools are failing to serve students and what should be done about them. The two chambers are now negotiating a compromise that will have to pass both houses and win the president’s signature before becoming law. On the right, conservatives want to shrink the federal footprint in education even further; on the left, the civil rights community and the Obama administration have argued that federal government must have the power to keep states from hiding achievement gaps or ignoring struggling schools. The fate of the negotiations, never certain, became even more tenuous after Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced his resignation as Speaker of the House, a sign of deepening fault lines within the Republican conference. Here are the state-by-state graduation rates in 2013 and 2014, with states that saw declines in red: 2012-13 and 2013-14 Graduation Rate Data    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Graph of the day: The United States has a really high infant mortality rate

The Institute of Medicine is out with a sweeping look at how the American health care system stacks up against other industrialized countries. The big takeaway is similar to other research: While the United States spends more on health care, patient outcomes lag behind peer nations. That's especially true, it turns out, with infant morality. The infant mortality rate in the United States is more than twice that of countries like Japan and Sweden.   "Although U.S. infant mortality declined by 20 percent between 1990 and 2010," the report notes, "other high-income countries experienced much steeper declines and halved their infant mortality rates over those two decades."  As to what explains the high infant mortality rate, the researchers aren't quite sure. They say it is not explained by ethnic diversity in the United States. While U.S. minorities do tend to have a higher infant mortality rate, non-Hispanic whites in the United States also have worse outcomes than those in peer nations.

Five charts that help explain Sweden’s youth riots

The violent youth riots that spread across Stockholm's suburbs this week seem at odds with the public perception of Sweden as one of the world's most liberal and tolerant countries.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University But the racially charged riots, which have taken place largely in poor immigrant communities, actually expose deep social divisions that have threatened Sweden for years. There is, essentially, the Sweden of legend -- and then there are large, poor immigrant communities where unemployment is rampant, especially among young people, and political participation is down. One key to understanding that community is grasping its size -- according to Reuters, roughly 15 percent of Swedish residents are now foreign-born. As Malmö University's Pieter Bevelander laid out in a 2010 paper, Sweden has always played host to a large immigrant population, largely from other Nordic countries. But immigration spiked in the early '00s after an influx of asylum- seekers, thousands from eastern Europe and Iraq.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Much of this massive immigrant population hasn't integrated into the Swedish mainstream, Bevelander argues. This chart, from Sweden's official statistics agency, indicates the 2009 employment rate for Swedish (dark grey) and foreign-born (light grey) residents in 2009. The rates are further divided by gender (man = men, kvinnor = women) and age group (16-24 years, 25-34 years, 35-54 years and 55-64 years).    *[WSU]: Wayne State University For foreign-born women, the disparity is particularly striking -- their employment rates fall more than 20 percent less, in some age groups, than their native-born peers. Further complicating this economic picture is Sweden's youth unemployment rate -- which, at three times the adult unemployment rate, is the OECD's worst youth-to-adult unemployment ratio. That problem is educational, not economic, the United Nations concluded in a recent report. As many as one in four Swedish youth don't graduate with the skills they'll need in the workforce.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Political participation among immigrants, a key sign of enfranchisement, is also down. While Sweden's immigrant voting rate was initially quite high, according to Bevelander -- aided by liberal citizenship policies and rules that let non-citizens vote in local elections -- it has fallen by more than 20 percentage points since the late '70s. The result of all this is that many in Sweden feel they have been left behind. And according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development, the inequality gap is increasing: Sweden's income inequality is still low, versus other OECD members, but it has trended up for the past 20 years.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Whether the Swedish government will work to address that population remains to be seen. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has roundly condemned this week's riots as the work of "young angry men" and has said he will not visit the area.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University But that seems like a risky social calculus -- especially since Sweden's statistics agency forecasts that the foreign-born population will only continue to grow in the future.

It was an event in GOP history that has been a long time in the making.  It bears emphasizing at the top here that Americans as a whole have become more educated in recent decades, and both parties now have fewer voters with less formal education. But these voters have shifted much more to the GOP and remain a much bigger portion of the Republican pie today, relatively speaking. According to Pew data, white registered voters with a high school degree or less leaned toward the Democratic Party by a 50-41 margin in 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected to his first term as president. And Democrats still led among this demographic as recently as the late 2000s. Today, though, they have taken a sharp turn for the GOP, and they currently lean Republican by a whopping 26 points — 59 percent to 33 percent. That's a net shift of 35 points between 1992 and today (see the first graph on the left below). And it's not just voters whose formal education stopped at high school. Republicans have also gained a bigger advantage among white voters who have attended at least some college but have not graduated (the middle graph). They led by single digits in 1992 and as recently as 2008, but today that lead is 21 points — 57 percent to 38 percent. A large portion of these shifts, you might notice, began basically as Barack Obama was elected president for the first time. The GOP's growing advantage among white voters, though, comes to an abrupt halt when you talk about whites with college degrees or more. In fact, Democrats have actually closed the gap among this group (the third graph), drawing even after trailing by as much as double digits in the 1990s and early 2000s. The shifts are less significant when you look at all voters by education level — not just whites — because Democrats have maintained their dominance among black voters and done increasingly well with Hispanic and Asian American voters. But even when you include nonwhite voters, those with a high school degree or less have clearly moved toward the Republican Party, while voters with a college degree or more have clearly moved toward the Democratic Party. As noted above, both parties have technically become more educated over the past two decades. But that's much more the case with the Democratic Party.   Even if you include non-white voters — and Democrats' rising fortunes with the fast-growing Hispanic population — the portion of the GOP that has less than a college degree has remained much steadier than the Democratic Party. While the share of all GOP-leaning voters without a college degree dropped just 4 points between 1992 and today — from 72 percent to 68 percent — it has dropped by 17 points among Democrats — from 79 percent to 62 percent. Less formally educated voters have lost clout in American politics in recent years, but they have largely kept their clout in the Republican Party, and the less-educated American voters who remain have moved sharply toward the Republican Party. Had they not, it's less likely that Donald Trump would be the Republican Party nominee today.

Portugal’s birthrate plummeting, a signal of more economic trouble ahead

LISBON — For an enterprise in the business of welcoming life, the birthing ward in Portugal’s largest maternity hospital is eerily quiet. On a recent morning, not a single expectant father nervously paced the orange laminated floors. Unhurried nurses passed rows of darkened rooms with empty beds, busying themselves with paperwork and a mere three women in labor. Elsewhere in the hospital, signs of Europe’s crisis within a crisis are everywhere. Serving a country that was battling a low birthrate even before the region’s economy fell off a cliff, Alfredo da Costa Maternity Hospital delivered about 7,000 babies a year until recently. But with economic uncertainty causing young couples to rethink family plans or leave these shores for other countries, the number of births crashed last year to 4,500, leading the hospital to mothball an entire wing and slash 20 percent of the staff. The recent decline in births across Portugal — to 89,841 babies in 2012, a 14 percent drop since 2008 — has been so acute that the national government is moving to close a slew of maternity wards nationwide. In an increasingly childless country, 239 schools are shutting down this year and sales of products such as baby diapers and children’s shampoos are plummeting. At the same time, in the fast-graying interior, gas stations and motels are being converted into nursing homes even as stores selling toys and baby clothes close their doors. Here in Lisbon, Alfredo da Costa — founded in 1932 when this once-great maritime nation still commanded a global empire — is on the chopping block, set for closure this year. “We used to hear the best kind of cries in these halls, of babies,” said Teresa Tome, Alfredo da Costa’s head pediatrician, as she strode through the quiet birthing ward. She later added: “The recent decrease in births has been dramatic. This is because of the economic crisis, all the unemployment, all the uncertainty about the future. It is making a bad problem for the country worse.” Portugal is at the forefront of Europe’s latest baby bust, one that is shortening the fuse on a time bomb of social costs in some of the world’s most rapidly aging societies. As in many corners of the industrialized world, Europe has faced a gradual decline in birthrates since the 1960s. But in a number of the region’s hardest-hit countries, a modest rebound during the 2000s — when European governments welcomed immigrants and rolled out cash benefits for young couples starting families — has now gone into reverse. Birthrates are falling again in several nations that are confronting massive unemployment, including Portugal, Spain, Greece, Ireland and Cyprus. The baby shortage, economists say, is set to pile on the woe for a swath of the continent that may already be facing a decade or more of economic fallout from the debt crisis that started in 2009. By 2030, the retired population in Portugal, for instance, is expected to surge by 27.4 percent, with those older than 65 predicted to make up nearly one in every four residents. With fewer future workers and taxpayers being born, however, the Portuguese are confronting what could be an accelerated fiscal reckoning to provide for their aging population. Portugal is ahead of other nations in Europe in planning for those explosive costs. But some government officials here concede that far deeper cuts — as well as a push toward a united social security system within the European Union — may be needed to cope with what is turning out to be a worse-than-expected demographic crisis. The diminishing number of young Portuguese could lead to a vacuum of dynamism and innovation in the years ahead, signaling what could be a long-term decline in the fortunes of nations in a region harboring some of the United States’ largest trading partners and closest political allies. The U.S. birthrate has also come down sharply since the 1960s. But the United States is projected to have a generous influx of immigrants in the years ahead while also maintaining a more robust birthrate than those European nations hit the hardest. With deaths regularly outpacing births and both native-born Portuguese and immigrants from former colonies such as Brazil and Angola departing the country in large numbers, the population is falling. Some hold out hope that the birthrate will bounce back if and when the economy improves and young Portuguese feel more secure about their future. But experts predict that the population loss ahead could be beyond even the worst-case predictions of nearly 1 million inhabitants fewer — or almost 10 percent of the current population of 10.56 million — by 2030. That has many here bemoaning the “disappearance” of a nation and asking: Who will be left to support a dying country of old men and women? “This is one of the biggest problems we face as a nation,” said José Tavares, a political economics professor at the Nova School of Business and Economics in Lisbon. “If we don’t find a way to fix this, we will be facing a disaster.” Along the narrow, hilly streets of the inland municipality of Vila Velha de Rodao, Mafalda Diogo Sabino’s fame is already legendary. The local newspaper heralded her arrival in September with a half-page spread and a goody basket of oils and lotions delivered to her door. Every day since, seemingly everyone has wanted a piece of the fickle little celebrity, with her adoring fans shadowing her in the hopes of pinching an unsuspecting cheek or catching a glimpse of her now-fabled smile. In this graying corner of the Iberian Peninsula, the 9-month-old’s claim to fame is merely being born. Communities such as this one, a conglomeration of villages with a population of 3,600 — nearly half what it was in the 1970s — have become ghosts of Portugal’s future. Mafalda’s mother, Susana Diogo, 27, had to travel two hours by car in the summer heat to give birth at the nearest hospital able to handle an expectant mother with diabetes. Diogo and her husband, Mario Sabino, 32, worry about their daughter’s future in a town with only three other newborns and just one school. “I wonder what Portugal will look like for both her and us by the time she gets older,” said Diogo, who lost her job when a nearby call center closed after she became pregnant. Here, care for the elderly is the largest single public expenditure. Recent national cuts have reduced the number of seniors the town is able to help in its main adult day-care facility. Local officials have sought to lure back young people, offering cash subsidies for new home buyers in an attempt to stem years of losses of working-age residents to inland cities and more prosperous countries. The town is providing preschool for next to nothing, using a corner of a nursing home for the children. Seniors living at the home, such as Maria Jesus Rodrigues, 87, relish the contact with children. “We used to have children everywhere when I was young. We never thought about the economic side; we just had them,” Rodrigues said. “But there are not so many now. Young people today are thinking more about how they will pay for children with so few jobs. I guess I understand.”A few minutes later, Rodrigues, who moved to the home from her nearby village, where the youngest resident is 57, burst into a local folk song. “I have to sing now,” she crooned, “because when I die, there will be no one left to sing for me.”

The family deficit

We Americans believe in progress, and yet progress is often a double-edged sword. The benefits and adventures of change often vie with the shortcomings and disruptions, leaving us in a twilight zone of ambiguity and doubt about the ultimate outcome. Few subjects better illustrate this than the decline of marriage, as Isabel Sawhill shows in her sobering book “Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage.” Even those who know marriage is on the skids — presumably, most of us — may be surprised by the extent of its decline. A little history helps. To Americans coming of age in the 1950s, the expectation was that most would marry. It was part of society’s belief structure. And most did. Now these powerful social pressures have faded and, for many, disappeared. Consider. In 1960, only 12 percent of adults ages 25 to 34 had never married; by the time they were 45 to 54, the never-married share had dropped to 5 percent. Now fast forward. In 2010, 47 percent of Americans 25 to 34 had never married. Based on present trends, this will still be 25 percent in 2030 when they’re 45 to 54, estimates the Pew Research Center. The stranglehold that marriage had on middle-class thinking and behavior began to weaken in the 1960s with birth control pills, publication of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” — an assault on women’s traditional housecleaning and child-rearing roles — and the gradual liberalization of divorce laws. The resulting expansion of personal choice has been breathtaking. Those liberalized divorce laws have freed millions of women and men from unsatisfying or abusive marriages. (From 1960 to 1980, the divorce rate rose nearly 150 percent; it has since reversed about half that gain.) Taboos against premarital sex and cohabitation have virtually vanished. So has the stigma of out-of-wedlock birth or, for married couples, of not having children. With more job opportunities, women flooded the labor market. Naturally, there was a backlash. These changes spawned new discontents. Balancing home life and work is stressful and often guilt-ridden. Women and men alike worry they are not devoting enough time to children and/or their jobs. Women resent men who don’t do enough around the house, even though they do much more than they once did. In 1965, wives spent almost seven times as much time on household and child-rearing as husbands; now women do only twice as much, while men still spend more time on the job. The flight from marriage may also have subtracted from personal happiness. Sawhill quotes from one respected study that “married women and men live longer; they are less likely to be disabled. . . . [They] have better sex than the unmarried and they are less likely to be lonely.” But the biggest social cost of less marriage involves children. “New choices for adults,” Sawhill writes, “have not generally been helpful to the well-being of children.” Single-parent families have exploded. In 1950, they were 7 percent of families with children under 18; by 2013, they were 31 percent. Nor was the shift isolated. The share was 27 percent for whites, 34 percent for Hispanics and 62 percent for African Americans. By harming children’s emotional and intellectual development, the expansion of adult choices may have reduced society’s collective welfare. It is not (as Sawhill repeatedly says) that all single-parent households are bad or that all two-parent families are good. But the advantage lies with the approach that can provide children more financial support and personal attention. Two low-income paychecks, or two good listeners, are better than one. With a colleague, Sawhill simulated the effect today if the marriage rates of 1970 still prevailed. The result: The child poverty rate would drop by about 20 percent — a “huge effect” compared with most government programs. There are other drawbacks. Social commentators Jonathan Rauch and Charles Murray, among others, have argued that marriage is becoming “the great class divide,” as college graduates continue to marry and less-educated couples increasingly don’t. More than 40 percent of births now go to the unwed. Some of these mothers, says Sawhill, will have multiple partners and subject their children “to a degree of relationship chaos and instability that is hard to grasp.” Sawhill doubts that either liberals or conservatives have workable remedies for these problems. More social services (the liberals) could be “very expensive” and ignore Bill Clinton’s dictum: “Governments don’t raise children; parents do.” Reviving marriage (conservatives) presumes — unrealistically, she says — that many anti-marriage norms can be reversed. Her own preference is that young women better use contraceptives to prevent unwanted pregnancies. This, too, sounds wishful. Along with the budget deficit, we have a family deficit. It explains some stubborn poverty and our frustrations in combating it. We’ve learned that what good families provide cannot easily be gotten elsewhere. For the nation, this is the deficit that matters most. _Read more fromRobert Samuelson’s archive._ **Read more about this topic:** Catherine Rampell: Is sex only for rich people? Robert Samuelson: Family meltdown and economic decline

Why American women are having fewer babies than ever

Another driver of America's increasingly late parenthood, however, has little to do with feminist empowerment. Many women who want a child or more children choose not to try for them. Some fear they can’t afford a baby, researchers say. They’re instead working toward stability, an uphill battle for many with student debt or bleak job prospects.  “We have to see the declining fertility as being economic,” said Nan Astone, senior fellow at the Urban Institute. “The coincidence of decline and recession is hard to ignore.”  Young women, it turns out, are behind much of America’s plummeting fertility rate. From 2015 to 2016, the fertility rate among teens shrank from 75.2 babies per thousand women to 72.5. The rate for women in their 20s decreased from 100.3 to 98.4.  Building a family, regardless of age, is expensive.   Democrats say female breadwinners deserve more support. Hillary Clinton said the government should cover up to 12 weeks of paid family leave and create more subsidized child care. "The more we do to help working families," she said recently, "the more our entire economy will benefit."