Note: The present thrust of world demography is beautifully simple: the developed world is applying every bar to breeding adequately through devices which range from improved technology to freeze eggs annd sperm for later use to creating materioal conditions which make it ever more difficult for people on ordinary incomes to afford childtren.
At the same time, those with power is the developed world continue to rob their own people to engage in their vanity project of Aid which increases populations in the third world, primarily by providing food, populations in the third world who will increasingly invade the first world through the other favourite liberal project: mass immigration.
The British experience is broadly representative of the problems of the First World. RH
Note: This is being driven primarily by immigrants and their descendants. RH
Telegraph
Primary school population to hit a 50-year high
The equivalent of more than 3,200 new primary schools will be needed by the end of the decade as the pupil population soars to a 50-year high, it emerged today.
Figures show almost 800,000 additional children aged 11 or under will be in state education by 2020 because of rising birth rates and the effects of immigration.
According to the Department for Education, the primary population is set to soar by a fifth – reaching its highest level since the early 70s.
The disclosure underlines the crisis facing local authorities in some areas that are being forced to cope with the biggest surge in school applications.
It also prompted fresh claims that Labour ignored repeated warnings over the looming population boom by cutting primary school places.
Local authorities in parts of London, the West Midlands and South West have already been forced to install mobile classrooms and educate children in church halls in recent years because of a shortage of space.
Today, the DfE said it was spending £4bn in areas with the tightest squeeze on places over the next four years to create additional primary school capacity.
But Gavin Williamson, the Conservative MP for South Staffordshire, criticised the last Government for failing to deal with the problem. He obtained data in a Parliamentary question showing that Labour cut funding for primary school places, despite warnings as early as 2007 that demand would rise by 110,000 in six years.
“Labour didn’t just ignore clear warnings of a surge in the primary school population, but they actually went against them – cutting funding for extra school places and ordering councils to cut surplus places,” he said.
“Thanks to Labour’s inaction, thousands of children could have been left without a place in the coming years.”
According to projections published today, there are currently 4,025,000 pupils aged under 11 in state-funded nursery and primary schools.
Numbers are expected to grow year-on-year to 4,824,000 by 2020 – an additional 799,000. It will be the biggest number of pupils in the system since the early-70s.
The rise would be equivalent to around 3,260 average-sized primary schools or an additional 26,600 classes of 30 pupils.
Earlier figures show that some 440,000 primary school places are unfilled nationally – but they are not in the areas expected to face a squeeze.
Despite a declining secondary school population in recent years, figures also show that numbers will start to increase again in 2016 because of the effect of rising birth rates.
In total, the Government estimate that the primary and secondary school population combined will rise by 810,000 by the end of the decade. Around 105,000 of these pupils are believed to be from immigrant families.
Stephen Twigg, Labour’s shadow education secretary, said the latest figures showed the Government neded to "respond to real need in our education system, not just promote pet projects" such as academies and free schools which primarily cater for secondary pupils.
“There is an urgent crisis in our primary school system that the Government is ignoring," he said. "Ten per cent more places are needed before the election. By contrast, secondary school numbers are expected to be five per cent lower than in 2011.
“The majority of need is for primaries yet half the funding from the Autumn Statement will go on pet projects like free schools.
"Only a third of free schools in the pipeline are primaries, and the areas with the biggest need will not get a free school. This shows how out of touch the Tory-led Government is with real need on the ground."
The BBC presenter, most famous for his 1984 television report on the Ethiopian famine, said politicians and broadcasters shy away from the subject because the population explosion is focused on Africa and Asia and they fear being branded as racist.
Buerk said the population of Africa is expected to triple by the end of the century, contributing to a “demographic disaster” in which nations have to struggle to survive with enough food and resources.
“Population is the invisible issue of the 21st century,” he said.
“We are supposed to think it’s almost immoral to question the idea of climate change – that we are responsible for it, that the overall consequences will be profoundly detrimental – without conclusive evidence, just on the shaky balance of scientific probability.
“Yet the root cause, the exponential growth of the human population that is already making life uncomfortable and threatens to make it impossible, does not seem to be up for discussion.
Buerk has spent years researching the subject and delivered a lecture at the Telegraph Ways With Words literary festival in Dartington, Devon.
He said: “Not much is off-limits these days – we wallow in the trite and the tasteless – yet the fate of humanity, the possibility that we may be breeding ourselves into extinction, or at least widespread misery, is somehow better left unsaid.
“I’m struck in particular by the great, well-meaning wedge of Guardian readers, the environmentalists, the guilt-mongers forever warning us how we’re putting the earth at risk when we ask for a shopping bag, but who shy away from the obvious conclusion that the more of us there are, the more demands are made on the planet.
“They shuffle their moccasins and look away.”
The birth of the world’s seven billionth baby last year “is a very significant landmark on the road to demographic disaster”, Buerk said.
He set out figures showing that the global population is increasing at the rate of 211,000 people per day.
There were 2.5 billion people on earth in 1950, which has almost tripled to seven billion today. By the end of the century, it is projected, the population will rise to 10 billion.
By 2100 – according to figures Buerk cited from the United Nations – one in three humans on the planet will be African. The population of India is expected to hit 1.5 billion in the next 20 years.
Buerk, presenter of The Moral Maze and The Choice on BBC Radio 4, said broadcasters and politicians would not tackle the issue.
“When I talk about it, I get three different types of answer,” he claimed.
“A very substantial number of my colleagues and also politicians say, ‘This is nonsense, it’s all going to taper off’. They act as if you’re being politically incorrect, some kind of racist, certainly anti-humane.
“Then you get the opposite attitude that is, ‘Yes, you’re quite right, but I just can’t raise the subject at all because it’s politically sensitive. It’s something that would put my political career at risk.’
“You get very few politicians saying, ‘Yes, I think that too and I think we ought to do something about it.’
“It’s either denial or keep your head down as far as the political classes are concerned, in my limited experience.”
Responding to those who say no over-population crisis exists, Buerk said: “Come to some of the places where I’ve worked – to the pullulating slums of Dhaka, to Mexico City where whole towns have been built on rubbish dumps… fly almost anywhere at night and see the orange glow of our metastasising cities.
“Try to get into London from Heathrow in the Monday morning rush hour and still say there’s no problem."
Buerk's powerful report on the Ethiopian famine brought the plight of the country's starving to worldwide attention and prompted Bob Geldof to set up Live Aid.
But the presenter said that Ethiopia is now more dependent on international aid than it was in 1984.
Iran scraps birth control programme in baby boom bid
Iran has scrapped its birth control programme in a radical policy reversal intended to produce a baby boom that could more than double its population.
The health ministry confirmed the shift days after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, said that the two-decade-old policy of controlled growth must end and that Iran should aim for a population of 150 to 200 million.
A recent census revealed the country currently has just over 75 million inhabitants. According to data published by the UN in 2009, Iran topped the global list of countries experiencing the greatest drop in fertility rates since 1980.
The reduction was achieved with the help of an extensive publicly-backed initiative that included vasectomies, health ministry-issued contraceptives, statutory family planning advice for newly-weds and even a state-owned condom factory.
It was introduced in the early 1990s when officials feared a population explosion that occurred after the 1979 Islamic revolution could stretch resources to breaking point.
But the health minister, Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi, told Iranian journalists that funding had been withdrawn and that 190 billion rials (£10 billion) would instead be devoted to encouraging bigger families.
Her announcement came after Ayatollah Khamenei, in a nationally televised speech, invoked the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the revolution, to declare current birth control practices no longer appropriate.
"The policy of population restriction should definitely be revised and the authorities should build the culture in order to abandon the current status of one child, two children [per family]," he said.
"The figure of 150 or 200 million was once stated by the Imam [Khomeini] and that is the correct figure that we should reach."
While around half of Iranians are under 35, officials fear the low growth rate – currently 1.2 per cent compared with 3.2 per cent in 1986 – would eventually lead to an ageing and eventually decreasing population.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has previously called on Iranians to have more children, saying it would help Iran to defeat the West. Three years ago, he introduced a scheme that deposited £600 in a bank account for every new born baby, topped up with £60 every year until they reached 18.
However, experts have warned the population drive will founder on the reluctance of couples to marry and have children in an economy blighted by unemployment, inflation and the effects of Western sanctions aimed at combating Iran's nuclear programme.
Ali Reza Marandi, a former health minister and current member of the parliamentary health committee, told Arman newspaper that abolishing the birth control programme "would not add a single baby" to the population.
He added: "Our problem is that our young people either don't marry or marry late and in Iran, as long as there is no marriage, there are no babies. And those people who marry late suffice to only one child."
Telegraph
India to jail families who coerce women into abortions
Entire families of women who abort a female foetus could be jailed for up to seven years under an Indian government move to ease the pressure for male children.
By Dean Nelson in New Delhi
3:06PM BST 18 Sep 2012
The initiative is an attempt to halt the growing gender imbalance in India where girls are considered a financial burden and families fear the cost of paying illegal but common dowries when they marry.
Campaigners believe upto eight million unborn girls were aborted in India in the last decade, while UN figures show that female infants are twice as likely to die in India before the age of five. The number of girls born per thousand boys has declined from 976 in 1961 to 914 in 2011, according to census statistics.
Current laws to prevent 'sex selection' and female feticide, clinic doctors who perform the operations or the ultrasound tests to determine whether the sex of the foetus face punishments ranging from a 1000 Rupee fine (£12) to three years imprisonment.
But in the last ten years only 463 people have been prosecuted and the government's Ministry for Women and Child Development wants to turn the focus on the family networks which put pressure on women to abort unborn girls.
A senior ministry official, who asked not to be named, said the government wants all those who pressurise a woman into having an abortion to bear the punishment.
"It is important to make families equally accountable. The families go to clinics performing sex selection tests, so logically they initiate the process of sex selection and female foeticide. We are seeking amendments in the present law to make families equally liable for the offence," she said.
"Nothing has been decided but it is likely there will be a jail sentence between 6 months to 7 years. The jail term will depend on whether the family was just involved in sex selection or both selection and subsequent abortion of the foetus," she added.
The ministry's proposals have now been sent to the Law ministry for detailed drafting but campaigners have already voiced their fears that the proposals will leave women even more vulnerable and doubly victimised.
Ranjana Kumari of the Council for Social Research said pregnant women already suffer intense harassment, and sometimes violent attacks, from the husbands and in-laws they live with, to have ultra-sound sex determination tests and abortions. Under the new proposals for collective punishment they will also be blamed by their husbands' families if they are prosecuted.
"This should be looked at with great care. The woman is blamed for producing a female child. She faces discrimination, desertion and to some extent violence. So to talk about punishing the family is a risky proposition. The mother will be blamed because she is the one who has gone for abortion. She will be threatened by her family and husband - who will you criminalise? It is very difficult to establish. The women will get the blame and be penalised," she said.
"The fundamentals of female empowerment will be absolutely tampered with," she said. "Control over our own bodies is a fundamental right for women," she added.
Telegraph
Danish nurseries offer free childcare so parents can make more babies
A group of Danish nurseries has come up with a novel way to help the country's low birth rate – offering parents an evening of free child care so they can go home and make more babies.
Seven Danish kindergartens are taking part in the scheme, offering two free hours in the hope it will encourage parents to procreate.
Employees at Grasshoppers kindergarten in north Fyn, about six miles from Odense, hoped the scheme would draw attention to the country’s dwindling number of births and encourage parents to do something about it.
The first free evening was on Thursday night, and was designed as a party for the children, complete with music and a tea party.
“We have 42 children in the kindergarten, and we’ll be looking after 20,” Dorte Nyman of the Grasshoppers kindergarten in North Fyn, said on Thursday.
“If the children ask what the party is for, we’ll tell them it’s to give the parents a chance to speak at home,” she added.
Many parents have apparently said they will take advantage of the evening, but not for the reason intended.
“Lots say, 'We’ll bring our children to the party but you won’t be getting any more children out of us’,” Ms Nyman said.
Demographers fear the declining population could undermine the welfare system.
Denmark’s birth rate is 185th in the world and in 2011, 4,400 fewer Danish children were born than in 2010. For the first three months of 2012, the number declined even further with this year due to be the lowest birth rate in the country since 1988.
Hans Oluf Hansen, former professor of Economics at the University of Copenhagen, said: “Our fertility rate is well under the replacement rate. In the long run, there will be fewer young people to provide for the elderly.”
According to experts, the continued decline in birth rates in Denmark is because fewer families are having a third and fourth child, which would help compensate for those with one or no children.
For the population to remain at a constant level, experts say that the fertility rate must be slightly above two children per woman, but last year, the fertility rate was 1.76 per woman.
Ms Nyman said the lack of children meant the future funding of local nurseries was uncertain.
“Without money we can’t look after the children well, and if there aren’t enough children, there are not enough jobs for our workers.”
Telegraph
A quarter of women 'wish they'd tried for children earlier'
One in four women wish they had tried to start a family earlier, according to a survey that illustrates the scale of those turning to IVF for a baby.
The poll of more than 3,000 women aged 28 to 45 found 24 per cent regretted having waited so long, and 17 per cent were worried about being too old to conceive.
In addition, almost one in 10 (nine per cent) had already resorted to fertility treatment because of difficulties in getting pregnant naturally.
And one in five wanted to have a child so much they said they would consider purposefully becoming a single mother, either through donor sperm or another route.
According to results of the 2012 Modern Motherhood Report, commissioned by Red magazine, more than three-quarters who had undergone fertility treatment had paid for some or all of it themselves.
Although IVF is available on the NHS, provision is notoriously patchy, with local health authorities setting their own criteria as to who is and is not eligible.
The Red survey found the average spend on fertility treatment was £7,236, with a small minority spending over £15,000.
Women’s fertility falls rapidly after 35 - although it varies from person to person - and while IVF improves the chance of conceiving in one’s late 30s and 40s, it is no guarantee of success. IVF pregnancy rates also fall fast with age. Male infertility, although less associated with age, is also a growing problem.
Brigid Moss, health director at Red, said: “It’s not surprising that nine per cent of women say they’ve had fertility treatment.
“It’s becoming more common, and so more accepted. In our study a quarter of women said they’d had problems trying to conceive.”
She said their finding that a fifth of respondents would consider becoming a single parent showed that “for some women, having a child is as important as, or more so, than a relationship”.
Dr Mark Sedler, of Care Fertility, a Manchester IVF clinic, said too many women did not understand how their biological clocks made it harder to get pregnant with age.
He was not surprised that one in 10 said they had undergone fertility treatment, saying: "Patients are coming to us earlier than before, after trying to conceive naturally for a shorter period.
"They are saying 'I at least need to know what's going on.'
"I think it's better to be investigated earlier rather than late, and wasting precious time."
Telegraph
Genetic screening of unborn babies 'may be inaccurate'
New tests for genetic screening of unborn babies will not be 100 per cent accurate and may scare parents into believing their children will be born with a disability when they are healthy, Lord Robert Winston warns.
But the researchers recognised that the ability to predict the genetic code of a foetus at just 18 weeks could raise "many ethical questions" because of the likelihood it would lead to more abortions.
Now some British experts have cautioned that the test – which is still many years from being used in clinics – may do more harm than good because in many cases it would be very hard to predict how a mutation would affect a child and how severe their disability might be.
Others argued that any information which parents can be given to help them prepare for a possible eventuality after their child is born, or to decide to terminate their pregnancy, should not be withheld.
Lord Winston, the fertility expert, said that examining a child's entire genome was ethically no different to current tests for conditions like cystic fibrosis which doctors routinely carry out in families with a history of the disorder.
He said: "The biggest ethical issue might be that we are going to cause a great deal of worry unnecessarily to a great deal of women who are pregnant. I am uneasy about it because I think it is unlikely to be absolutely accurate and we may raise more concerns in parents than are justified.
"I am fundamentally uneasy about all screening tests. I think that most of the time we are diagnosing things that really are not there and screening like this is probably going to be something where we are going to harm more people than we can help. I am a bit sceptical that it is going to be of value."
Prof John Harris, director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, said parents should have the right to know if their unborn child was at risk of a genetic abnormality, provided they were given accurate and practical information on the likelihood of it occurring and the possible severity of the condition.
He said: "I believe one should be in favour of would-be parents getting the maximum information about the child that they might be having, either to prepare for eventualities they may face or to take the decision, if it is early enough, not to continue with the pregnancy.
"No potential being has a right to become an actual being – abortion is not a “wrong” to the individual because the individual in question will never have existed.
"We would be negligent and reckless if we paid no attention to the health care of future generations and future people. The ability to protect future individuals from terrible conditions that will blight their lives seems to me to be an absolute moral responsibility and a duty that we should not shirk."
Dr Robin Lovell-Badge, head of developmental genetics at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research, said: "While we know the role of many genes and understand how certain mutations can affect the function of some of these in a way that leads to disease, we are still only scratching the surface when it comes to understanding the complexity of the genome.
"So while it is very impressive to be able to predict the genetic code of a developing embryo, in the vast majority of cases we will still be unable to predict how the child will turn out and the nature and severity of any genetic disease he or she may carry.
"We will gradually improve the predictive power of genome sequences, but this is a massive undertaking that will take many scientists many years before we can have any certainty.
Telegraph
Unborn babies could be tested for 3,500 genetic faults
Scientists could soon be able to routinely screen unborn babies for thousands of genetic conditions, raising concerns the breakthrough could lead to more abortions.
A team has been able to predict the whole genetic code of a foetus by taking a blood sample from a woman who was 18 weeks pregnant, and a swab of saliva from the father.
They believe that, in time, the test will become widely available, enabling doctors to screen unborn babies for some 3,500 genetic disorders.
At the moment the only genetic disorder routinely tested for on the NHS is Down’s syndrome.
This is a large-scale genetic defect caused by having an extra copy of a bundle of DNA, called a chromosome.
Other such faults are sometimes tested for, but usually only when there is a risk of inheriting them from a parent.
However, they warned it raised “many ethical questions” because the results could be used as a basis for abortion.
These concerns were last night amplified by pro-life campaigners, who said widespread use of such a test would “inevitably lead to more abortions”.
The American scientists were able to map the baby’s genetic code principally from tiny traces free-floating DNA, which makes its way into the mother’s blood.
Blood sample DNA from the mother was also studied as well as DNA extracted from the father's saliva.
Fitting pieces of the genetic jigsaw together, scientists in the US were able to reconstruct the entire genetic code of an unborn baby boy.
They were then able to see what spontaneous genetic mutations had arisen.
Such natural mutations - called ‘de novo’ mutations - are responsible for the majority of genetic defects.
By checking their prediction of the baby’s genetic code with actual DNA taken after the birth, the team from the University of Washington in Seattle, found they were able to identify 39 of 44 such mutations in the child.
De novo mutations are thought to play a role in a number of complex conditions such as autism and schizophrenia.
The team also tested their approach on a woman who was earlier in her pregnancy than 18 weeks, and found it still worked.
Dr Jay Shendure, the lead scientist, said: "This work opens up the possibility that we will be able to scan the whole genome of the foetus for more than 3,000 single-gene disorders through a single, non-invasive test."
Jacob Kitzman, who worked on the project, added: “The improved resolution is like going from being able to see that two books are stuck together to being able to notice one word mis-spelled on a page.”
In future, a more refined and less costly version of the procedure could make pre-natal genetic testing far more comprehensive than it is now, the scientists say.
The research is reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
The scientists said the test would be a considerable improvement on current techniques, which involve inserting a probe into the womb to take fluid from the foetal sac or placental samples. This can be dangerous for both mother and child.
Such existing methods only enable doctors to check for a relatively small number of genetic disorders.
These include Down's syndrome and cystic fibrosis - which are both large-scale genetic defects - as well as muscular dystrophy and spina bifada, which can have hereditary elements.
As well as testing for thousands of genetic defects, the scientists said their test could give a wealth of information on the baby’s future health.
However, they warned: “The less tangible implication of incorporating this level of information into pre-natal decision-making raises many ethical questions that must be considered carefully within the scientific community and on a societal level.
“As in other areas of clinical genetics, our capacity to generate data is outstripping our ability to interpret it in ways that are useful to physicians and patients.”
Josephine Quintavalle, founder of the Pro-Life Alliance, put it more baldly.
She said: “One always hopes, vainly, that in utero testing will be for the benefit of the unborn child.
“But, whilst this new test may not itself be invasive, given our past track record, it is difficult to imagine that this new test will not lead to more abortions.”
Telegraph
Middle class couples 'risking the family name' with few kids
Middle class couples may have more successful children but their family names are more likely to die out over the generations, say academics examining the role of natural selection in society.
They found children in smaller families tended to do better in life - getting better grades, tending to end up in university, and securing better jobs than those from large broods.
But, over the course of successive generations, these families shrink in size while those where many children is the norm get progressively bigger.
British and Swedish academics said the research, based on four generations of Swedes who lived throughout the 20th century, pointed to the thorny conclusion that ‘success’ in the modern world did not equate to ‘success’ in evolutionary terms.
Dr Anna Goodman, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “Under natural selection, you would expect organisms to use their resources to produce more genetic descendants, and so increase their Darwinian fitness.”
The “puzzle” of modern societies was that this tended not to happen, she said. People appeared to trade off the evolutionary benefit of leaving lots of descendents, for the short term benefit of “socioeconomic success”.
“Poorer households in contrast have relatively little to gain by limiting fertility, perhaps because the success of their children is more determined by broader societal factors, rather than investment and inheritance from parents, which is in short supply,” he added.
Thus, while poorer families appeared to be the short term losers, in the long term they were the evolutionary winners.
These trends are apparent at a global scale.
Historically wealthy western European countries have for decades experienced slowly declining populations, while populations in poorer nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America have surged. Now, much of the population growth in European countries is driven by immigration.
However, globally, fertility is declining fast, in poor countries as well as rich ones.
Telegraph
Rise in women having repeated abortions: official figures
More than a third of women having an abortion are having the procedure for at least the second time, official figures show.
There has been a jump in the proportion of women having repeat abortions to reach 36 per cent, equating to around 63,300 women, it has been found.
In 2010, 34 per cent of terminations were for women who had already undergone at least one.
This was the biggest rise ever recorded in one year, the figures from the Department of Health show.
Although the total number of women having an abortion has dropped for the last four years, the proportion of them having the procedure more than once has increased.
The figures also reveal that more women are having multiple terminations.
Campaigners said the rise in repeat abortions was 'particularly disturbing'.
The figures will raise fears that abortion is being used as form of contraception and doctors and nurses are not doing enough to counsel women about family planning methods when they request a termination.
It is thought around £1m is spent on repeat abortions every week.
Across England one in four repeat abortions to women under the age of 25 were repeat abortions. In North East Lincolnshire almost half of abortions carried out on women in this age group were for at least the second time.
Overall the figures show a slight increase in the number of women born in England and Wales having an abortion to reach 189,931 in 2011.
The abortion rate peaked in 2007 and has dropped since then but remains more than double that of 1970.
The figures also show the abortion rate in under 16s, below the age of sexual consent, has dropped from 3.9 per 1,000 girls in 2010 to 3.4 per 1,000 last year.
However this masked a wide variation with nearly eight girls under the age of 16 per 1,000 in Southwark having an abortion compared with two per 1,000 in nearby Kensington and Chelsea.
Michaela Aston from the anti-abortion group, Life, said: "We should be shocked and concerned by these latest statistics, especially given the apparent decline in overall conception rates in 2011, which means that the proportion of all pregnancies that end in abortion has risen considerably.
"This is despite contraception being more widely available than ever before.
“It is particularly disturbing that repeat abortions rose again, with 36 per cent of women seeking abortion having had at least one previous abortion. This is a clear indication that the original intent and spirit of the Abortion Act is being widely flouted and ignored.”
Abortion services have been under scrutiny after the Daily Telegraph revealed doctors were agreeing to perform abortions on the basis of the gender of the feotus, which is illegal in Britain.
Julie Bentley, chief executive of the fpa, formerly the Family Planning Association, said: “Although there’s been a very slight increase, the number of abortions hasn’t changed significantly in the past few years and this is to be welcomed.
"However we do know that cracks are beginning to appear in contraception services. Shockingly some parts of the NHS deliberately ban women from having certain contraceptive methods and there are over three million women who don’t have access to comprehensive services.
"If we are going to bring down abortion numbers, this needs to change. Contraception is an essential not a luxury.”
A spokesman for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), said of repeat abortions: "We are talking about very small numbers overall, and that the women who are in this situation are generally leading very difficult and chaotic lives in which unwanted pregnancy is only one of a number of difficulties.
"There are no easy answers here, these women need all the support they can get but ultimately they cannot be compelled to accept an (contraceptive) implant or a coil – and there would be ethical implications of doing so.
"The number of women having more than one abortion in England and Wales is in keeping with other developed countries – and indeed lower than countries such as Sweden.
"It is reflective of the fact that women expect to be sexually active these days throughout their reproductive lifetimes – and may have an unwanted pregnancy as a young woman and then again once they have completed their families or because a problem is detected with a wanted pregnancy."
She added that because women are putting off motherhood into their 30s and 40s they are sexually active and using contraception for a longer period meaning there is a greater risk overall of it failing.
Public Health Minister Anne Milton said: "Having an abortion can be a very difficult and traumatic experience so we want the number of women having repeat abortions to reduce. It is very important that every woman who has an abortion is offered information about contraception.
"There are many types of contraception available to suit women's needs from the pill to long acting reversible contraceptives such as the contraceptive implant."
Women are having fewer children than their mothers did: research
Women are having fewer children and at an older age than a generation ago, new statistics show.
1:34PM GMT 16 Dec 2011
Women born in the 1960s have had fewer children than a generation ago to women born in the 1930s, new data has revealed.
Figures from the Office of National Statistics show that women are choosing to have smaller families and later in life.
Comparisons were made between women born in 1965 and their mother's generation who were born in 1938.
Greater use of contraception after the development of The Pill and women choosing to put their careers ahead of starting a family are likely to be the reasons, experts said.
Strikingly there are more women born in the 1960s who have remained childless, with one in five having had no children compared with one in nine women born in the 1930s.
This may be due to better contraception, increased infertility or a combination of both.
There were also fewer large families born to women of the 1960s.
One in ten women born in 1965 had four or more children compared with one in five women born in 1938.
Women born in 1980 have had slightly fewer children on average (1.03) by their 30th birthday than women born in 1965 who had 1.18 children by the same age.
A spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said: "This new data indicates that women today are having fewer children compared to their mothers in the 1930s.
"There are a number of reasons why. These include social factors such as more women entering the workplace than in previous generations and better career opportunities which may delay childbearing.
"Lifestyle factors such as the effects of maternal obesity, the effects of alcohol and smoking may all cause fertility problems. In addition, better access to contraception have helped women to plan their family size.”
It comes after other figures showed that more than one in four young women first have sex below the age of 16 – a greater proportion than previous generations.
Data from the Health Survey for England showed 27 per cent of women aged 16 to 24 first had sex under the age of consent, compared with 22 per cent of men of the same age.
The 2010 report suggests sexual behaviour has changed over the generations, with the proportion of women who first had sex below the age of 16 increasing over time.
Just 15 per cent of men and four per cent of women aged 55 to 69 said they first had sex under the age of 16, alongside 18 per cent of men and 10 per cent of women aged 45 to 54.
Among those aged 35 to 44, 21 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women first had sex under 16.
Published by the NHS Information Centre, the report found that one in 10 young people aged 16 to 24 have had 10 or more sexual partners.
But more than a quarter of women and almost a third of men aged 16 to 24 said they have never had sex.
Telegraph
US population growth slowest since 1940s
The population of the United States grew at its slowest rate in more than 70 years, the U.S. Census Bureau said on Wednesday.
The country's population increased by an estimated 2.8 million to 311.6 million from April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011. The growth rate of 0.92 per cent was the lowest since the mid-1940s.
"The nation's overall growth rate is now at its lowest point since before the Baby Boom," Census Bureau Director Robert Groves said in a statement.
Texas gained more people than any other state in the 15-month period, at 529,000, followed by California at 438,000, Florida at 256,000, Georgia at 128,000, and North Carolina at 121,000, according to the latest Census estimates.
These five states accounted for more than half of the total US population growth, the bureau said.
The only three states to lose population in the period were Rhode Island, down 1,300 or -0.12 per cent; Michigan, down 7,400, or -0.08 per cent; and Maine, down 200, or -0.01 per cent.
The District of Columbia experienced the fastest growth rate, at 2.7 per cent, in the period. Following D.C. in terms of percentage increase were Texas at 2.1 per cent, Utah at 1.9 per cent, Alaska at 1.8 per cent, Colorado at 1.7 per cent and North Dakota at 1.7 per cent.
North Dakota was 37th in percentage growth between the 2000 and 2010 censuses. The data showed its population has reached a record high of 683,932, beating the previous record set more than 80 years ago.
"After years of population decline, it's welcomed news to see that our economic growth over the last decade continues to keep North Dakotans home," Governor Jack Dalrymple said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Nevada, the fastest-growing state between 2000 and 2010, ranked only 27th in growth in the latest report. rising only 0.8 per cent.
The 10 Fastest Growing US States from April 1, 2010, to July 1, 2011: State/District Per cent Change
1. District of Columbia 2.70
2. Texas 2.10
3. Utah 1.93
4. Alaska 1.76
5. Colorado 1.74
6. North Dakota 1.69
7. Washington 1.57
8. Arizona 1.42
9. Florida 1.36
10. Georgia 1.32
http://rt.com/news/prime-time/population-decline-census-russia-015/
Russia's population continues to fall, as indicated by newly-published census results.
With a population of 142,857,000, the country has dropped one place in the list of the world’s most populous countries since the last census in 2002. The population has fallen by 2.3 million.
Now Russia is in eighth position after China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is the biggest drop in 13 years, including the turbulent 1990s.
The biggest drop is registered among the rural population. The census showed that not only people vanish, but entire settlements do. Since 2002, as many as 8,500 villages have ceased to exist. Many of them have been incorporated into nearby towns and cities, while others have been deserted after their inhabitants moved out.
There are 19,400 villages that exist on paper but actually have no inhabitants – 48 per cent more than in the previous census.
The census also shows that Russia’s population is ageing with an average age of 39, while in the 2002 census it was 37. The number of women is still significantly greater than the number of men (by 10.7 million).
The number of married couples fell from 34 million in 2002 to in 33 million in 2010. Thirteen per cent of them are not officially registered (9.7 per cent in 2002). The number of divorces is also on the rise.
As many as 80.9 per cent respondents identified themselves as ethnic Russians (80.64 per cent in 2002). The percentage of ethnic Tatars remained practically the same at 3.87 per cent, while the number of Ukrainians has dropped from 2.05 per cent in 2002 to 1.41 per cent in 2010. The census also showed a growth in the number of ethnic Chechens, Avars and Armenians.
A total of 5.6 million people refused to answer questions regarding their nationality (some 1.5 million in 2002).
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Telegraph
Death rate in Britain at lowest level as most live into 80s
The death rate in Britain has reached the lowest level on record as most people now live into their eighties.
Mortality rates for men have fallen by almost half over the past three decades, according to the Office for National Statistics, and by more than a third for women.
The drop is down to better medical care and healthier lifestyles, which has particularly affected deaths from heart disease.
As a result, the ONS data show that more men and women now die in their eighties than at any other age.
The independent statistical body said: “Throughout recent years, UK mortality rates have generally fallen due to medical advances in the treatment of various illnesses and diseases, illustrated by the reduction in age-standardised mortality rates for many causes of death. In recent years circulatory diseases, as a cause of death, have seen the greatest fall in age standardised mortality within the UK.”
The new figures, published on Friday, show that in 2010 the age-standardised mortality rate in Britain was 655 deaths per 100,000 population for men and 467 for women – “the lowest rates ever recorded”.
Scotland had the highest rate (785 deaths per 100,000 population for men and 552 for women) in the United Kingdom and England the lowest (639 and 456), while the rates have also declined the least north of the border.
Back in 1980, more than half of all men and just under half of all women died between 60 and 79 years of age.
But by 2010, increasing longevity meant that 43.3 per cent of men and 62 per cent of women died after their 80th birthday.
“As the UK population continues to age, the percentage of all UK deaths at age 80 and over is also expected to continue increasing,” the ONS said.
At the same time, the number of children dying has fallen so that girls and boys aged under 15 now account for just 1 per cent of deaths in Britain, now from 2 per cent in 1980.
Telegraph
Pensioners enjoying more healthy years in retirement than ever before
Female pensioners in England can now expect to live to almost 77 before experiencing serious health problems, according to newly released official figures.
The Office for National Statistics has found pensioners south of Hadrian’s Wall can look forward to more years of healthy retirement than ever before.
The years of failing health are being compressed, especially in wealthier areas, with more and more people remaining active well into their late 70s, their 80s and even beyond.
Women in England who turned 65 between 2008 and 2010 could expect another 11.8 years of ‘healthy life expectancy’ on average, found the ONS. They will then experience eight years of poorer health, until death at 85.8 years.
Their male husbands, friends and relatives of the same age are not doing much worse: for them, another 10.3 years of good quality life await them, taking them to 75.3 years, before dying at the average age of 83.2 years.
Experts said better lifestyles and improved healthcare was leading to a surge in the number of healthy years of retirement for today’s pensioners.
The ONS data show that healthy life expectancy for pensioners has jumped in recent years, particularly for women.
Between the period 2005-07 and 2008-10, the years of healthy life expectancy a 65-year-old woman in England could expect has leapt from 11.0 to 11.8 years. For men, it has increased from 9.9 to 10.3 years.
Dr Ros Altmann, director-general of Saga, said the news was cause for celebration.
She said: “The latest figures showing that more of us are staying healthy into later life these days are really something to celebrate.
"Medical advances have brought such success in helping people live longer. That does also mean re-evaluating our lives too.
"Working longer, keeping active - and saving more if you can - are vital ingredients of managing the ageing population. We need to help older people look after themselves where possible and help younger people appreciate the value of elders.”
The statistics will no doubt be leapt on by ministers and Treasury officials, keen to justify moves to raise the pension age.
However, the statistics also hide an uncomfortable truth: that the age dividend is mainly being reaped by the more wealthy in society.
A recent ONS analysis found the difference in healthy life expectancy for 65-year-olds between the richest and poorest areas was almost five years.
In addition, north of the border the situation is not so rosy.
Between the periods 2005-07 and 2008-10 healthy life expectancy for 65-year-olds in Scotland actual fell.
For women, it fell from 11.3 to 10.8 years. For Scottish men it fell sharper still.
Whereas they used to be on a par with their English compatriots - having another 9.9 years of health life to look forward to - since then it has slipped to 8.6 years.
Northern Ireland and Wales continue to lag England in terms of healthy life expectancy for pensioners, although unlike Scotland both have avoided regression.
The picture in Northern Ireland is static. For 65-year-old women in the region it rose slightly, from 10.7 to 10.8 years, while for men it dropped from 9.6 to 9.5 years.
For Welsh women there has similarly been very little change, rising from 9.9 to 10.0 years, but among Welsh men it has risen from 9.8 to 10.3 years.
Ed Jessop, Vice President of the Faculty of Public Health, said of the new UK statistics: "These figures are encouraging. They show that action on public health works. There is particular success for people living in England.
"But the gap between the health "haves" and "have nots" has widened.
"There are many complex reasons for this, because our health is affected by a range of factors - not just what we eat or drink, and how active we are, but also our work, housing and access to all sorts of facilities.
"We need action now to address the root causes of these health inequalities."
Michelle Mitchell, director general of Age UK, said: “We welcome the improvement in healthy life expectancy which sees people in good health for longer than ever before.
"In part this must come from continuing improvements to the levels of healthcare that people in England have access to throughout their lives, as well as wider improvements in public health and people living healthier lifestyles.
“However, the gap between healthy life expectancy for people in different areas across the UK is still a major cause for some concern."
Telegraph
Record numbers reach retirement age as baby boomers turn 65
A record number of people in Britain are retiring this year as the post-war “baby boom” generation draw their pensions, official figures show.
The first detailed analysis of returns from the 2011 census show that the overall number of people turning 65 this year has leapt by 30 per cent in a single year.
That means that more than 169,000 more people have reached – or are about to reach – their 65th birthday this year than last.
Separate figures for Scotland have yet to be published but those released yesterday represent the bulk of the UK population.
With the population of the country steadily rising and life expectancy dramatically improving in recent decades, it means that there are more 65-year-olds in the UK than at any point in history.
And although the numbers retiring will then reduce slightly, there will still be well over 600,000 people turning 65 each year until at least 2018 and overall 3.3 million people are poised to hit state pension age in the next five years.
The figures include both sexes but although the pension age for women is lower than for men, the proportion of men in the workforce is also higher.
The sudden spike in numbers of people drawing their pensions for the first time reflects a surge in the birth rate after the end of the Second World War.
Those reaching 65 this year were part of the first wave of the so-called baby boom, born in 1947.
It followed mass demobilisation of servicemen the previous year, which transformed family life in Britain after six years of war.
The spike in the number of people reaching retirement has long been predicted but the effects are being felt unevenly across the country.
An area-by-area breakdown of census findings published in the summer shows a major demographic transformation over the last 10 years with younger people coming to dominate in cities, especially London, and the elderly increasingly concentrated in rural and coastal areas.
“There is a fundamental change in society already with more older people, but fit and healthy older people, alive,” said Dr Ros Altmann, director general of Saga.
“That is very good news as long as we are prepared to take advantage of their talents and that they have prepared for their later life.
“We know that a lot of people have not necessarily prepared enough but working longer will have to be the answer.”
She added that the sharp divide in the age make-up of the population in different areas meant that the provision of social care would have to be overhauled to share the burden between different areas.
“There is going to be a very different population profile, and their local services need to be geared very differently from areas which don’t have such a high concentration of ageing population,” she said.
“It has implications for housing policies, health services and social care services."
Steve Lowe, director of the specialist pensions provider Just Retirement, said: “Recent research shows that most people have completely unrealistic expectations of how much income they can expect in retirement.
“Those approaching retirement anticipate an income of £17,000 from their savings, but the reality is that they will receive a sum closer to £10,000 leaving a worrying income gap.
“The Government should ensure that older home owners have access to high-quality advice which addresses their housing, finance and care needs and makes best use of all the resources available to them, including equity release, state benefits, pensions and savings.”
The data published yesterday also gave a more precise estimate of the population of England and Wales – which stands at 56,075,912.
Together with census figures for Northern Ireland and the most recent estimate for Scotland, the total population of the United Kingdom now stands at 63,141,575.
Census 2011: one in six people in Britain now over 65
Figures from the 2011 census paint an extraordinary picture of a country increasingly divided by age as younger people and older people become concentrated in different areas.
A total of 9.2 million people across England and Wales are now over the age of 65, up more than 10 per cent in the past decade, but the figures show that millions more are due to retire in the next few years.
The number of people in their late 80s and 90s rose sharply in the first decade of the 21st Century, while the number of peple more than a century old is up by two thirds.
But an area-by-area breakdown of the figures paints an extraordinary picture of the shifting population over the past decade.
The figures show how younger people are coming to dominate in cities, especially London, while older people are increasingly concentrated in rural and coastal areas.
Today, the entire South West of England, almost all of Wales, half of East Anglia and the much far north of England all have substantial populations of pensioners.
It comes as figures show falling populations in some former industrial areas, suggesting that younger people are being forced to move away to find work just as older people are chosing to retire there.
The census results are the first figures to set out the impact of the post-war “baby-boom” generation beginning to reach retirement.
But a more detailed breakdown of the results released by the Office for National Statistics shows that the headline figures fall far short of demonstrating the full scale of the challenge the country faces in care and pensions in the coming years.
Last year 557,600 people in England Wales reached the age of 65, but this year and next the number will be far higher, as more and more baby boomers prepare to draw their pensions.
Overall another 2.1 million people are due to reach state retirement age in the next three years alone, analysis of the results by individual years of age shows.
At the upper end, the number of people over 90 rose by more than a quarter to 430,000 in the 10 years since the last census – a 26-fold increase in the last century.
And there are now around 11,100 people more than 100 years old - two thirds more than a decade ago - starkly illustrating the effects of recent medical advances on the shape of modern Britain.
The ageing population also means that the notion of “middle age” is likely to be redefined in the coming years.
The median age of a person in England and Wales now stands at 39 overall, and for women it has crossed 40 for the first time. A Century ago it stood at just 25.
The ONS added that this upward trend in ages would have been even more marked but for the surge in births in recent years which has modified the average age.
Traditionally men have had a lower life expectancy than women.
While there are signs that men too are living longer, at the upper end of the age spectrum there are still almost three times as many women over 90 as men.
Medical advances in recent years have been the main driver of the ageing population. While there were 6.6 million people born in England and Wales last year, there were only 500,000 deaths. Separate recent figures show that the death rate has fallen to its lowest level on record.
While more areas of the country showed a significant population of over 65s, there were wide variations across country.
In the North East, for example 17.3 per cent of the population is now over 65.
By contrast in London, with its higher property prices and rapid immigration in recent years, only just over one in 10 are retired.
The figures come just days after the Government set out its plans to overhaul care for the elderly.
But despite an agreement in principle to the central recommendations of the landmark Dilnot Commission report, by capping the cost of care, the Government has made clear that it is unable to commit the funds to implement it.
Michelle Mitchell, director general of Age UK, said: “These figures show the emergence of a new generation of people in their late eighties and nineties.
"Better health means greater numbers of people over 65 able to contribute to their communities, families and the economy, but these statistics also illustrate the huge challenge of care and support for vulnerable older people.
"Most of those using social care services are over 85, underlining the urgent need for a social care system that is fit for its increasingly core purpose of supporting the oldest and frailest members of our society.
"That’s why Government must rethink the decision it announced last week to delay reforming the funding of social care.”
Number of mothers over 40 trebles in two decades
The number of women giving birth in their forties has trebled in past two decades, with surge in older mothers last year, official figures show.
An increase in couples delaying having children for financial or career reasons has combined with a greater availability of fertility treatment to transform the face of family life.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that 29,350 women over 40 gave birth last year, compared with 9,835 in 1991.
The trend is continuing to grow, with a sharp rise in babies born to women in their thirties and forties last year.
The number of women between 35 and 40 giving birth rose by 3.4 per cent and by 6.7 per cent among those over 40, while the figure was down by 8.7 per cent among girls and women under 20.
The number of births in England and Wales rose to 723,913 in 2011 from 723,165 the previous year, and the average age of a mother shifted to 29.7 from 29.6 in 2010.
A spokesman for the ONS said: “The rise in 2011 represents a continuation of increasing age of mother since 1975.
“These trends reflect the increasing numbers of women delaying childbearing to later ages. This may be due to a number of factors such as increased participation in higher education, the desire to establish a career, getting on the housing ladder and ensuring financial stability before starting a family.
The trend reflects a desire among women not to have their careers curtailed by motherhood, according to Justine Roberts, the co-founder of Mumsnet, the parenting website. “There are lots of different reasons why parents are getting older: some want to live a bit before having their career wings clipped by motherhood, others are just waiting until they are able to afford it,” she said.
Louise Silverton, the deputy general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives, said not enough midwives were being trained to keep pace with rising birth rates.
“Over the last decade, the number of births in the country is up by over 22 per cent,” she said. “Over the same period, however, the number of midwives has risen by less than 17 per cent. The RCM’s view is that in order to deliver high-quality maternity care for mothers and babies proposed by the Government we need 5,000 more midwives.”
The death rate fell to the lowest level on record as a result of medical advances, but starkly illustrated the challenge of Britain’s ageing population.
Last year there were 484,367 deaths registered in England and Wales, down from 493,242 in 2010. Until 2009 the figure had not dropped below half a million in a single year since 1952.
2 July 2012 Last updated at 13:30 Funding of IVF in the UK 'is feeble' By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News, Istanbul Money A cycle of IVF costs around £3,000 It is harder for couples in the UK to get financial help with their fertility treatment than in almost any other European country, experts say. Only Russia and Ireland have worse access to IVF treatment, according to work presented at the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology. The lead author said many NHS trusts had been "feeble" at providing IVF. The British Fertility Society said some NHS trusts needed to do more for infertile couples. Dr Mark Connolly, from the University of Groningen, analysed fertility policies across 23 European countries from 2007 onwards. Those with the highest ratings for funding or reimbursement were Belgium, France and Slovenia. Italy, Montenegro and Portugal all had higher levels of funding than the UK. Data presented to the meeting in Turkey showed this affected the chances of treatment. Nearly 2,500 IVF cycles took place per million people in Belgium compared with a figure of 825 cycles in the UK. Dr Connolly said: "If one considers medical need is similar across countries then the data here suggest a great unmet need in those countries with limited reimbursement." Official guidelines from the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) say women should be allowed three free courses of IVF treatment. Each cycle costs around £3,000. The latest draft guidelines < http://guidance.nice.org.uk/CG/WaveR/90> also recommend widening access to older women. However, the decision about how much IVF is funded is taken locally by individual primary care trusts. "I think most trusts were feeble in their ability to provide that [IVF]," said Dr Connolly. Dr Allan Pacey, chairman of the British Fertility Society, said: "It just makes me depressed. "If primary care trusts would sign up to the level of provision NICE says we should, we'd be up there in the statistics. "But some PCTs won't budge on it." Dr Connolly also warned that IVF could become a victims of the economic turmoil in Europe. He said all health funding was being appraised and that "in many cases assisted reproduction is subject to the whims of various budget authorities trying to decide what they can fund and what they cannot." The International Federation of Fertility Societies said: "In many states the pendulum is swinging towards the need to increase fertility which underlines the need to improve access to cost effective and safe IVF." Clare Lewis-Jones of the National Infertility Awareness Campaign said: "It is totally unacceptable that many other European countries have better service provision for infertility patients than the UK, where IVF was pioneered. "Infertility treatment has for too long been seen as a low priority, failing the one in six couples who live with the devastating impact this illness has on their lives." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18675858
Telegraph
Non-white births outnumber white births for the first time in US
White births in the United States are no longer in the majority, according to new data from the US Census Bureau.
Minority races - Hispanics, blacks and Asians and other mixed races - accounted for 50.4 percent of births over the year to July, accounting for a majority for the first time in US history.
The demographic milestone had been expected for years in a country founded by European whites and that early on relied heavily on the work of enslaved African populations, then went through a civil war and civil rights battle over issues of race.
In recent years, the growth of Hispanic populations immigrating from Latin America has hastened a decline in the majority status of white births, the census data suggested.
"This is an important landmark," said Roderick Harrison, a former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau who is now a sociologist at Howard University. "This generation is growing up much more accustomed to diversity than its elders."
As a whole, the nation's minority population continues to rise, following a higher-than-expected Hispanic count in the 2010 census. Minorities increased 1.9 percent to 114.1 million, or 36.6 percent of the total U.S. population, lifted by prior waves of immigration that brought in young families and boosted the number of Hispanic women in their prime childbearing years.
The annual growth rates for Hispanics and Asians fell sharply last year to just over 2 percent, roughly half the rates in 2000 and the lowest in more than a decade. The black growth rate stayed flat at 1 percent.
Racial and ethnic minorities make up more than half the children born in the US, capping decades of heady immigration growth that is now slowing.
New 2011 census estimates highlight sweeping changes in the nation's racial makeup and the prolonged impact of a weak economy, which is now resulting in fewer Hispanics entering the U.S.
The report comes as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legality of Arizona's strict immigration law, with many states weighing similar get-tough measures.
"We remain in a dangerous period where those appealing to anti-immigration elements are fueling a divisiveness and hostility that might take decades to overcome," Harrison said.
As a whole, the nation's minority population continues to rise, following a higher-than-expected Hispanic count in the 2010 census. Minorities increased 1.9 percent to 114.1 million, or 36.6 percent of the total U.S. population, lifted by prior waves of immigration that brought in young families and boosted the number of Hispanic women in their prime childbearing years.
But a recent slowdown in the growth of the Hispanic and Asian populations is shifting notions on when the tipping point in U.S. diversity will come - the time when non-Hispanic whites become a minority. After 2010 census results suggested a crossover as early as 2040, demographers now believe the pivotal moment may be pushed back several years when new projections are released in December.
The annual growth rates for Hispanics and Asians fell sharply last year to just over 2 percent, roughly half the rates in 2000 and the lowest in more than a decade. The black growth rate stayed flat at 1 percent.
Pointing to a longer-term decline in immigration, demographers believe the Hispanic population boom may have peaked.
"The Latino population is very young, which means they will continue to have a lot of births relative to the general population," said Mark Mather, associate vice president of the Population Reference Bureau. "But we're seeing a slowdown that is likely the result of multiple factors: declining Latina birth rates combined with lower immigration levels. If both of these trends continue, they will lead to big changes down the road."
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The immigrants staying put in the U.S. for now include Narcisa Marcelino, 34, a single mother who lives with her two daughters, ages 10 and 5, in Martinsburg, West Virginia. After crossing into the U.S. from Mexico in 2000, she followed her brother to the eastern part of the state just outside the Baltimore-Washington region. The Martinsburg area is known for hiring hundreds of migrants annually to work in fruit orchards. Its Hispanic growth climbed from 14 percent to 18 percent between 2000 and 2005 before shrinking last year to 3.3 percent, still above the national average.
Marcelino says she sells food from her home to make ends meet for her family and continues to hope that one day she will get a hearing with immigration officials to stay legally in the U.S. She aspires to open a restaurant and is learning English at a community college so she can help other Spanish-language speakers.
If she is eventually deported, "it wouldn't be that tragic," Marcelino said. "But because the children have been born here, this is their country. And there are more opportunities for them here."
Of the 30 large metropolitan areas showing the fastest Hispanic growth in the previous decade, all showed slower growth in 2011 than in the peak Hispanic growth years of 2005-2006, when the construction boom attracted new migrants to low-wage work. They include Lakeland, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; Atlanta; Provo, Utah; Las Vegas; and Phoenix. All but two - Fort Myers, Florida, and Dallas-Fort Worth - also grew more slowly last year than in 2010, hurt by the jobs slump.
Pointing to a longer-term decline in immigration, demographers believe the Hispanic population boom may have peaked.
"The Latino population is very young, which means they will continue to have a lot of births relative to the general population," said Mark Mather, associate vice president of the Population Reference Bureau. "But we're seeing a slowdown that is likely the result of multiple factors: declining Latina birth rates combined with lower immigration levels. If both of these trends continue, they will lead to big changes down the road."
William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the census data, noted that government debates over immigration enforcement may now be less pressing, given slowing growth. "The current congressional and Supreme Court interest in reducing immigration - and the concerns especially about low-skilled and undocumented Hispanic immigration - represent issues that could well be behind us," he said.
Minorities made up roughly 2.02 million, or 50.4 percent of U.S. births in the 12-month period ending July 2011. That compares with 37 percent in 1990.
In all, 348 of the nation's 3,143 counties, or 1 in 9, have minority populations across all age groups that total more than 50 percent. In a sign of future U.S. race and ethnic change, the number of counties reaching the tipping point increases to more than 690, or nearly 1 in 4, when looking only at the under age 5 population.
The counties in transition include Maricopa (Phoenix), Arizona; King (Seattle), Washington; Travis (Austin), Texas; and Palm Beach, Florida, where recent Hispanic births are driving the increased diversity among children. Also high on the list are suburban counties such as Fairfax, Virginia, just outside the nation's capital, and Westchester, New York, near New York City, where more open spaces are a draw for young families who are increasingly minority.
According to the latest data, the percentage growth of Hispanics slowed from 4.2 percent in 2001 to 2.5 percent last year. Their population growth would have been even lower if it weren't for their relatively high fertility rates - seven births for every death. The median age of U.S. Hispanics is 27.6 years.
Births actually have been declining for both whites and minorities as many women postponed having children during the economic slump. But the drop since 2008 has been larger for whites, who have a median age of 42. The number of white births fell by 11.4 percent, compared with 3.2 percent for minorities, according to Kenneth Johnson, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire.
Asian population increases also slowed, from 4.5 percent in 2001 to about 2.2 percent. Hispanics and Asians still are the two fastest-growing minority groups, making up about 16.7 percent and 4.8 percent of the U.S. population, respectively.
Blacks, who comprise about 12.3 percent of the population, have increased at a rate of about 1 percent each year. Whites have increased very little in recent years.
Other findings:
-The migration of black Americans back to the South is slowing. New destinations in the South, including Atlanta, Charlotte, North Carolina, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Orlando, Florida, saw sharp drop-offs in black population growth as the prolonged housing bust kept African-Americans locked in place in traditional big cities. Metro areas including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco had reduced declines or gains.
-Nine U.S. counties in five states saw their minority populations across all age groups surpass 50 percent last year. They were Sutter and Yolo in California; Quitman in Georgia; Cumberland in New Jersey; Colfax in New Mexico; and Lynn, Mitchell, Schleicher and Swisher in Texas.
-Maverick County, Texas, had the largest share of minorities at 96.8 percent, followed by Webb County, Texas, and Wade Hampton, Alaska, both at 96 percent.
-Four states - Hawaii, California, New Mexico and Texas - as well as the District of Columbia have minority populations that exceed 50 percent.
The census estimates used local records of births and deaths, tax records of people moving within the U.S., and census statistics on immigrants. The figures for "white" refer to those whites who are not of Hispanic ethnicity.
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/25/us/us-census-interracial/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn
Number of interracial couples in U.S. reaches all-time high
f the birth rate falls again, we're in serious trouble
Collapsing in number
In 1968, a Stanford University professor, Paul R Ehrlich, warned that by the 1980s, humanity would be starving to death thanks to overpopulation. Time has turned the book, and its author, into a economists' joke; almost nothing he predicted has come to pass. While the world's population certainly has grown, human ingenuity more than kept up. The average human is now better fed than at any point in history.
Indeed, curiously, in the developed world, we now face the opposite problem: ageing. Italy, the total fertility rate has fallen to 1.23 children per woman, and one in five Italians is now over the age of 65. At one point, Russia's population was actually falling at a rate of 800,000 per year – though the decline has now slowed. Japan's working age population is expected to decrease by 20 per cent over the next 20 years, as is Germany's. These are only the extreme examples.
And the problem with ageing populations is that they are expensive. All of these countries provide tax breaks, benefits, pensions and so on to the elderly, and they all subsidise healthcare one way or another. As we report this morning, in the United Kingdom, rising life expectancy could eventually add another £750 billion to the national debt through the cost of pensions alone. Add the extra 5 per cent of GDP that the Office for Budget Responsibility says we'll have to spend on healthcare, and suddenly you can see why we're stuck on what my colleague Benedict Brogan calls the "great tax escalator".
But in this country, things aren't so bad, because unlike in Italy and Germany, the birthrate has actually increased quite a lot over the last 15 years. One of the reasons why is that New Labour's attempt to reduce child poverty through tax credits made it a lot cheaper for people to have children. Predictably enough, the result was that they are now having more of them. Thanks to this baby boom, our long term fiscal prospects are less bleak than they otherwise would be – more taxpayers means less tax per payer.
But that raises an interesting point. As I have pointed out before, this Government's austerity measures are being targeted primarily at young families with children. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies found in a study for Ed Balls, the average family will be £500 worse off as a result of the Chancellor's changes to the tax and benefits systems. For people on low-to-middle incomes, having children is now a lot more expensive than it was.
And what if the result is that people of my generation stop having children? Combined with a squeeze in immigration, the result could well be that the total fertility rate, which has been rising for a decade, may begin falling. If that happens, then our long-term fiscal prospects would get a lot more bleak. Has the Chancellor, in attempting to cut the national debt, actually made it just a little less sustainable?
Telegraph
The dangers of our ageing population
7:53PM BST 12 Apr 2012
We are not so much living in an age of crisis as facing a crisis of age. Its latest manifestation was the warning from the International Monetary Fund that demographic pressures will impose unexpectedly onerous financial burdens on industrialised countries. For Britain, the IMF calculated that on the “not unreasonable” assumption that the entire cost would fall on taxpayers, the country’s public debt would rise from 76 per cent of gross domestic product to as much as 135 per cent – or £750 billion at today’s prices. This is clearly unsustainable and has not been planned for, not least because we have persistently underestimated the speed with which average lifespans are rising. As a result, government pension policies – which are difficult enough as it is to frame – tend to lag three years behind the demographic reality.
By any historical standard, the rapid ageing of the population represents a great economic and social transformation. There are more people over 65 than under 16. In future, the numbers aged over 65 will be far greater than now, and whereas until fairly recently four people of working age supported every pensioner, that ratio is set to decline dramatically. It is a good thing that people live longer and do, by and large, stay healthy and fit well into old age. But the implications are enormous; and while the Government is addressing some of the issues that arise, there is none of the urgency that is needed. If nothing is done, age-related spending, particularly on health care and pensions, will start to increase very significantly from the mid 2020s, but tax revenues will not be growing to match.
To be fair, the Government is not oblivious to the dangers. As Steve Webb, the Minister for Pensions, explained in this newspaper on Monday, private sector pensions have had to adjust to the new realities, with most closing down final salary schemes. But more is needed. Management fees must be controlled because they erode the value of private pensions and discourage people from saving; and without adequate savings, many will face a penurious old age with little state support to fall back on. In addition, public sector pensions must come into line with those in the private sector, to release more money for people to provide for themselves. It is hard to believe that the teachers’ unions, among others, are still threatening to strike over pensions, despite being offered a generous deal. It will also be necessary automatically to link the state pension age to life expectancy and to publish regular actuarial calculations of where the dates might fall. This would reintroduce a small element of certainty into what is otherwise a very uncertain future.
Telegraph
Healthcare timebomb as pensioner numbers rocket
Pensioners now spend almost half of their retirement in ill-health, according to official figures, intensifying the pressure on the Government to solve the elderly care crisis.
7:00AM GMT 17 Feb 2012
A rapidly ageing population will make the situation far worse in years to come, in a scenario that experts warned “should be keeping the Government awake at night”.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said that of the 17 and a half years that a typical man spends in retirement, only ten of these are “healthy” years. For a woman, just 11-and-a-half of the 20 years she spends in retirement are healthy.
This means that every pensioner spends almost a decade with fading health, heaping pressure on already-stretched NHS resources.
According to the ONS’s flagship report into population trends, the number of pensioners is expected to surge in the coming decades as post-war baby-boomers reach retirement age.
Currently one in six people in Britain is over 65 however this will increase to almost one in four by 2051.
Joanne Segars, chief executive of the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF), which represents retirement schemes with 15 million members, said that Britain is facing “both a pensions and a care crisis”.
She described it as “an immense, two-pronged problem for our society” that “should be keeping the Government awake at night”.
Ms Segars said: “It’s a sad fact that only around half of the average retirement is spent in good health. Many retirees are understandably very scared about the costs of care. Strong savings and a good pension can help bring some peace of mind, but this is a huge issue.”
The ONS figures showed that people are already working for longer. Between 2004 and 2010 the average age at which men retired rose from 63.8 years-old to 64.6 years-old. For women, it rose from 61.2 to 62.3 over that period.
Recent research found that 40,000 people this year alone will delay their planned retirement because they can not afford the cost of retiring, including the cost of care in later life.
Steve Webb, the Pensions Minister, said that the ONS’s figures “lay bare the dramatic speed at which life expectancy is changing and how we need to rethink our perceptions about our later lives.”
He said that Britons can “no longer look to our grandparents’ experience of retirement as a model of our own”.
“We will live longer and many of us will work for longer. Getting people into workplace pensions will be a step in the right direction and will get millions of people saving for their retirement,” said Mr Webb.
Pensions industry insiders warned that the ageing population will heap pressure on pensions providers.
Steven Baxter, a consultant at pensions specialist Club Vita, said that the ONS’s figures “highlight the challenges of rising life expectancy, and the strain that increased longevity will continue to put on the state pension”.
He said that life expectancy will continue to rise by around 2.5 years every decade. Although the state pension age will be increased in the coming years, it will not rise at the same speed as life expectancy, Mr Baxter said.
Ms Segars of the NAPF said that the “key problem” is that people are not “putting enough aside for their old age”.
“We need to get more people saving for their retirement, and to encourage them to start as early as possible. The state pension is also in need of urgent reform, and we need a much simpler and more generous system,” she said.
Telegraph
'Dramatic progress' as global infant mortality falls nearly 40%
Infant mortality has fallen by almost 40 per cent across the world since 1990 largely because of better health care and vaccinations, according to Save the Children.
4:54PM GMT 15 Feb 2012
Justin Forsyth, chief executive, hailed "dramatic progress" in reducing the number of children dying before their fifth birthdays, but warned that this will only continue if more is done to combat child malnutrition.
Some 12 million infants under the age of five died in 1990, when the world's population was 5.3 billion. By 2011, however, the number of child deaths had fallen by 37 per cent to 7.6 million.
Over the same period, the global population increased by 1.5 billion, meaning that there were many more children, but an absolute fall in the number of deaths.
"Because of a combination of aid, government action and the private sector, we've made this big step forward," Mr Forsyth told the Daily Telegraph. "This is actually dramatic progress and the question is can we maintain this momentum?"
Mr Forsyth said this would impose a "surprisingly big economic cost" because malnourished children often miss school and "are unable to contribute as much to the country" when they reach adulthood.
Next year, Britain is set to achieve the United Nations target of spending 0.7 per cent of national income on aid. Mr Forsyth, a former special adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, commended the Government for keeping this promise, noting that David Cameron chaired a summit on vaccines last June that helped to protect millions of children from preventable diseases.
Mr Forsyth added that he "completely" trusted the Conservatives on aid and development, saying: "I think David Cameron, George Osborne [the Chancellor] and Andrew Mitchell [the International Development Secretary] really believe in this and I think they've made a massive difference. They've stuck to the promise on aid, they've delivered on vaccines and I have nothing but good things to say about them on this."
Centenarians 'healthier than younger pensioners'
People who live to reach 100 are often healthier than those many years younger than them, research suggests.
6:00AM GMT 29 Nov 2011
A study of centenarians, whose numbers in Britain are predicted to “explode” to reach 500,000 over the next few decades, found that many avoid developing common diseases such as cancer.
Others remain fit and well until the last few months of their long lives, having enjoyed healthy lifestyles when younger, and they often report better health than younger pensioners, who may not live as long.
However some studies have indicated that the oldest people in society - currently mainly women - may be at greater risk of degenerative conditions such as dementia as well as blindness.
In addition those who reach their 100th birthday are prone to be lonely as friends and spouses may not survive as long as them, while even their children are likely to be less mobile.
Centenarians are likely to live in communal housing and are at risk of falling into poverty, not least because they will have spent as long in retirement as they did in their working careers.
Developers should help them live independently as long as possible, while energy companies should devise special tariffs for them and they should be helped to take part in social activities and access the internet in order to avoid isolation.
The Government is also urged to develop a “care voucher” scheme, similar to that available for childcare, so that the children of 100 year-olds are able to ensure they are looked after without jeopardising their careers.
David Sinclair, ILC-UK assistant director, policy and communications, said: “Whilst reaching 100 years of age is an aspiration for many, it is one which few people have achieved.
“With significant growth in the numbers of centenarians ahead, it is vital now that our efforts are focused on understanding how we support and deliver improvements in quality of life for the oldest old.
“Government and other policy makers must begin to better adapt services to address this huge demographic change ahead of us.”
The study, published on Tuesday, states that becoming a centenarian is one of the most celebrated achievements in our society yet is little understood.
Last year there were estimated to be 12,640 people in Britain who had reached the milestone – still marked by the arrival of a birthday message from the Queen.
But it is predicted that there will be a twelve-fold increase in their number over the next 30 years, and a quarter of children born today can expect to reach 100.
The study goes on: “Some research appears to suggest that centenarians continue to enjoy better physical health than ‘younger’ cohorts of older people into their centenarian years and avoid many of the non-communicable diseases associated with older age.
“This pattern is even thought to extend to supercentenarians (those aged 110+) who are found to be no more susceptible to illness and disability than nonagenarians and showed similar levels of independence.”
Centenarians have been divided by some researchers into “survivors” of diseases such as cancer and heart problems, “delayers” and “escapers”, while one study found that some types of tumour are particularly rare among the oldest patients.
One study found a “significant acceleration” in cognitive decline in the six months before centenarians died, suggesting they remained healthy until the very end.
However the risk of developing other conditions, such as deafness and blindness, increases with age, putting independence at risk.
Telegraph
Fortysomething: the new mid-life crisis
Today's young professionals, who delay starting a family until they are able to buy their first home on the verge of middle age, can only hope that life really does begin at 40.
7:00AM GMT 27 Nov 2011
Hannah Sutherns’s life should be following a time-honoured path. A graduate, aged 29, she works as a personal trainer in west London and has been with her boyfriend Rob Pittaway, a maintenance manager, for five years.
“I thought that my life would go a certain way: leave university, meet someone, get married, buy a house and start a family,” she says.
Yet, while Sutherns has attained the first two of these five goals, the last three remain far out of reach. Even though she and Pittaway earn “fairly decent money”, they live in a rented two-bedroom flat in Teddington, south-west London, and their chances of clambering on to the property ladder are virtually non-existent.
“There’s no hope of us finding the money to buy a home. Even if we looked in a worse area, the cheapest place we’d find would be around £250,000 and we’d need to put down a £50,000 deposit, which is just impossible. Rob and I would like to get married but the average cost of a wedding is now £16,000 and there’s no way we’re spending that when it could go towards a house. We’re starting to save but we’ll definitely be 40 before we have enough for a deposit.”
Hannah is far from alone. The recession may have been tough for most of us, but for those dreaming of buying a home, its effects have been devastating. Lenders are cherry-picking low-risk customers with impeccable credit records and demanding huge deposits. Ten years ago, an average first-time buyer needed a deposit worth 16 per cent of their annual income. In 2009, that figure was 64 per cent.
No wonder that one third of those surveyed recently by the Moneysupermarket website said they had resigned themselves to never owning a property, while 80 per cent of first-time buyers under 30 access the bank of mum and dad. One in three British men aged between 20 and 34 still lives with his parents, and one in five women.
The shift has brought an entirely new meaning to the phrase “Life begins at 40”. A generation ago, we applied it to professional couples who, having reached that milestone, could expect to be living in a large house with a garden.
Their mortgage would be nearly repaid, their children teenagers or students. Middle age might be approaching, but they were embarking on a period free from financial and family cares.
Today, however, our reluctant Peter Pans can mark their fifth decade by shackling themselves with a huge debt. Rather than looking forward to being grandparents, this generation is increasingly unlikely to have started families at all.
By the time they do have children, their parents’ health may well be declining, creating a growing “sandwich generation,” with parents caring simultaneously for the very old and the very young.
This generation also have little chance of recreating their own comfortable childhoods. “I grew up in a large house with a lovely garden that my parents bought in the Sixties and quickly owned outright,” says Sutherns.
The comparison between my situation and Sutherns is harsh. Because I was born 13 years before her, I graduated with no debt bar a small overdraft. She, on the other hand, left university with a large student loan to repay before she could start saving for a deposit.
My first flat in central London, bought during the Nineties slump, cost around three times my salary and required a 10 per cent deposit. I negotiated a mortgage in 15 minutes. The boom allowed my husband and me to end up in a family house similar to the homes we grew up in.
My contemporaries have similar stories, though there’s still an uncomfortable gap between those who bought young and those who delayed. The first lot are now living in expansive Georgian piles in fashionable squares. The second have found themselves on the verge of middle age, squashed in minuscule terraced houses in insalubrious suburbs.
That situation, however, is luxurious, compared with the plight of today’s young professionals. Oxford graduate Edward Foster, 35, an artist, is keen to start a family. But he and his partner, who works in theatre administration, live in a studio flat in Southgate, north London.
“The only friends I know with their own places have had their parents pay the deposit,” he says. “My father’s finally said he’ll help us with that, but as my work’s precarious I’m not sure we’ll be awarded a mortgage.”
Meanwhile, his partner is desperate to have a baby. “She’s 36 and broody and panicking about reports of fertility declining with age. But I say to her: 'How can we have a baby; we haven’t even got room for a gerbil?’”
In the past 10 years, maternity wards have seen a 70 per cent rise in babies born to women aged over 40. Last week, the Royal College of Midwives warned that this was stretching maternity services to the limit, as births for women in this age group have a far greater chance of needing medical intervention.
Even couples with homes and children are adjusting their expectations. Charlotte Woodward, 33, a registrar, bought a small, two-bedroom house in Cheltenham with her husband James, a communications officer, in 2006, the peak of the housing boom.
“I don’t want to whinge because I know we’re very lucky to have a house and children at all,” says Charlotte. “We never envisaged staying here for more than 18 months but then the market collapsed and we’re unable to move. It’s put paid to us having a third child.
“My parents’ generation were all living in big houses by the time they were 40, but now they’re holding on to all the money and making it impossible for our generation to afford any of that. We’re just making do.”
So what will be the psychological effect of being denied these rites of passage? According to the National Health Service, prescriptions for antidepressants have risen by more than 40 per cent over the past four years, the result – mental health charities believe – almost entirely of economic pressures.
Steven Sylvester, a coaching psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society, has several clients who are finding it hard to reconcile the difference between their professional status and humble living arrangements.
“I have clients who are doing life-saving surgery but living in tiny rented flats,” he says. “If our system isn’t giving us what our parents had, it shakes our confidence to the core.
“People in their twenties and thirties can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. We need to make the transition from young adult to fully functioning member of society, but if you can’t buy a house before 40 then that transition is delayed.”
Penny Anderson, who has been a tenant in Glasgow and Manchester for more than 20 years, and writes about her experiences in her blog Rentergirl, says she would love to own her own home.
“I’m around 40, certainly at an age where that ought to have happened, but it never will,” she says. “My employment is precarious, I don’t have family who can bail me out or a nest egg or trust fund. It makes me feel insecure that I’m always living in a place that someone else regards as their home and that I may have to leave with two months’ notice.”
Perhaps the answer, then, is to foster a new culture. In Italy, 59 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds live – seemingly happily – with their parents. In Germany, famously, almost two-thirds of private homes are rented with no stigma attached.
“In Germany, the culture is completely different,” Anderson says. “There you move into a completely empty flat but you can do whatever you like with it. Here, I’ve heard stories via my blog of landlords going through tenants’ underwear drawers – they can arrive at any time without notice.”
Damian Barr, author of Get it Together: Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis, believes that embracing the European way would merely infantilise us. “You may be nearly 40, but how can you feel like a grown-up if you’re having to ask your landlord about painting your walls or telling your mum what time you’ll be back? When you feel you can be moved at any time, that you can only have enough belongings to fit in the boot of a car, you are not in possession of your own life and it leaves you disenfranchised.
“People shouldn’t live in such high density, they need space and privacy,” he continues. Some people have been so lucky and bought their houses and can relax, while others are standing outside the gates totally disempowered.
“It sounds juvenile to say the situation isn’t fair. But it isn’t, it just isn’t.”
Telegraph
Women able to delay motherhood through ovary freezing
Women will be able to delay motherhood by freezing parts of their ovaries at the first specialist fertility clinic to be opened in Britain.
Those in their twenties and early thirties will be able to “bank” their ovarian tissue when it is most fertile, and have it re-implanted years later.
The procedure, which could cost as much as £16,000, is expected to be available within the next six months. At present only a few countries, including the United States, Denmark and Belgium, offer the option. To date, 19 babies have been born as a result.
Yesterday, experts said the controversial treatment will soon become commonplace as it has been shown to be more effective than egg freezing and even IVF.
It involves extracting about a third of the tissue of one of the two ovaries which usually contains around 60,000 eggs.
It is stored in liquid nitrogen in temperatures of minus 190c until the woman decides she is ready for children, when it is thawed and re-inserted into the ovary. Within a few months it should begin producing eggs.
But British doctors are planning to offer the procedure to other women who may want to put off having children for other reasons.
Costs are likely to range from £5,000 to £10,000 to remove and store the tissue with another £6,000 to re-implant it. This compares with £4,000 for a cycle of IVF and £5,000 for egg freezing plus £100 for every year eggs are stored.
Experts say the ovarian tissue method is far more successful as it can potentially yield thousands of eggs against a maximum of 12 normally produced through egg freezing.
Dr Gedis Grudzinskas, a leading consultant in infertility and gynaecology, is planning to open a clinic in central London offering the treatment by the end of this year.
He said: “This technology is so much more efficient than we thought it would be.Women in their late twenties might consider freezing their eggs until they meet Mr Right.”
Once Dr Grudzinskas’s licence is approved by the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority and the Human Tissue Authority, British doctors will carry out the first operations under the supervision of a team from Denmark.
Some doctors believe that having the tissue removed early in life could impair a woman’s chance of having a baby.
Dr Gillian Lockwood of Midland Fertility Services, near Walsall, said: “In the case of cancer patients who’ve got nothing to lose it has great potential.
“But for social reasons I don’t believe it should be recommended. It could cause scarring or damage to the pelvis that could make it difficult to conceive naturally.”
CCNet – 27 April 2012
The Climate Policy Network
1) Tim Worstall:The Royal Society's Appallingly Bad Report On Population And Consumption - The Daily Telegraph, 26 April 20122) Raheem Kassam: And Now The Redistribution Of Consumption - The Commentator, 26 April 20123) Mark Lynas: The Royal Society gets it wrong on people and the planet - Mark Lynas Bog, 27 April 20124) Steven Hayward: The Next Big Green Thing - Power Line, 26 April 20121) Tim Worstall:The Royal Society's Appallingly Bad Report On Population And ConsumptionThe Daily Telegraph, 26 April 2012The Royal Society has released a report on what they call the joint problems of consumption and population. It has one excellent bit, some good bits – but unfortunately, given that the people writing one half of the report seem to have failed to read the other half, as a whole it's a dismal failure. The Royal Society should withdraw this report and work on fixing both the factual and logical errors before trying to tell the rest of us how to live our lives.![[]](http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/files/2012/04/Screen-shot-2012-04-26-at-13.04.34.png) Don't trust the Royal Society on the future of the planetThe excellent bit first. Their cover illustration comes from Nasa's "Earth City Lights" series, the lights you can see from satellites at night. This is excellent because it shows the influence of one Tim Worstall on the planet. I've been told by one inside Nasa (but cannot prove in any manner) that 50 per cent of that light comes from street lighting using the sodium/scandium cycle. As I've been supplying the global lighting industry with their scandium for the past 15 years, that's me you're looking at there. So now you know what I do for a living. The good bits are the economics parts of the report. They should be good, as the lead economist is Sir Partha Dasgupta and he's a very good economist indeed. We get told the correct general stories: what is a resource depends upon price and available technology, when we're going to run out of anything depends upon both those and the possibility of substitution and so on through the correct economics of resources and reserves. Reserves, for example, are not the total stock of anything that we might be able to use: they're the total stock of what we know is where, can extract with current technology and would bother to do so at current or likely prices. Which is, as you should know, where all the screaming jeremiads from Limits to Growth go wrong. They don't understand that "reserve" is an economic concept, not a description of how many of certain types of atoms there are available for our use. We're also told, on the subject of population, that it isn't just handing out condoms to all and sundry that reduces growth. It's actually a complex interaction of rising incomes, falling child mortality rates and even opportunity costs: as other things in life, such as education, interesting work, films, books, whatever, become more available, then the time and effort we're prepared to divert from these to raising children declines. However, when we come to the other parts of the report, the discussions of what we should actually do, it appears that we really are running out of "reserves" and that we should hand out condoms to all and sundry. That last isn't all that surprising, as Jonathan Porritt is part of the team and he's incapable of saying anything else on the subject. On that availability of contraception point, there is a good case for handing it out: people like being able to plan their families, contraception makes people's lives better. However, it doesn't do much about population growth. For 90 per cent of fertility is explained by desired fertility – that is, people actually want the brats and it's not just that someone missed a beat in the rhythm. The mismatch between the discussions of economic growth and resource consumption in the report is almost schizophrenic. In the economics section, we've got recognition that these issues go beyond the simplistic stuff that the environmentalists parrot. Yet when we come to the summary and the suggestions, we find that resource constraints are binding in a manner that the economics section says they're not. For example, we are told this: Material consumption is currently closely related to economic consumption. Economic consumption is a key component of GDP. Thus, growth in the GDP tends to drive increasing material throughput (see Chapter 3). There is a clear need to address the underlying economic model and go beyond the GDP in the measurement of economic progress. This task may be challenging in the short term – for political and structural reasons. But there are some powerful reasons for beginning to tackle it now. Irrespective of this need, immediate attention has to be focussed on dematerialising economies – decoupling economic activity from material consumption. Considerable reduction in global material consumption is required to avoid going further beyond the planetary limits described in the previous Chapter. The necessary scale of reduction requires changes in the consumption patterns of individuals, businesses and governments through a combination of approaches.Which is really very odd indeed, for other than the ability of the atmosphere to absorb CO2 without causing climate change or the addition of nitrogen to the environment, there is no planetary limit described that we're in any danger of breaching. So it rather appears that the same old codswallop has been inserted by someone who didn't actually bother to read or understand what the resources chapter is describing. We also get this: The concept of a steady-state economy is to take a different path to achieve sustainable, healthy, and equitable lifestyles for citizens. This alternative to continued economic growth is a non-growing or steady state economy (Daly 1991; Meadows et al. 1972).Here I find my flabber entirely ghasted. For it appears that I understand what a steady-state economy is better than the Royal Society does – something that surprises me and should absolutely petrify you. As it happens, Professor Daly and I touched on this subject only last week, here. A steady-state economy is not one in which economic growth stops. It is one in which the abstraction of resources is limited to whatever is the long-term sustainable level. This does not mean the absence of economic growth, however, because technology changes. We tend to describe economic growth as an increase in GDP. It's not perfect but it's what we've got. GDP is the value at market prices of all final goods and services produced. We can indeed increase it by making more goods and services: this is what Daly calls quantitative growth and this is what must be curbed to be sustainable. So he says, and we can argue about that another time. But what Daly calls qualitative growth is still possible: making better things out of those limited resources. In fact, there is no environmental or resource limit to such growth at all – and that's the same as growing GDP by increasing the value rather than the quantity produced. Thus, a steady-state economy is not one in which growth stops: it is one in which resource use is limited but economic growth carries on indefinitely as we find new ways to add value to our limited resources. And do you know what? I really would have hoped that the Royal Society understood that better than some scandium trader scribbling for a newspaper website. I do have to say, though, that I found Recommendation 1 very amusing indeed. The international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today. This will require focused efforts in key policy areas including economic development, education, family planning and health.For there's been another report that talks about such things. It's the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, which contains the economic models on which the whole global warming story is based. And we have an economic model in there which achieves this poverty elimination: The global economy expands at an average annual rate of about 3% to 2100, reaching around US$550 trillion (all dollar amounts herein are expressed in 1990 dollars, unless stated otherwise). This is approximately the same as average global growth since 1850, although the conditions that lead to this global growth in productivity and per capita incomes in the scenario are unparalleled in history. Global average income per capita reaches about US$21,000 by 2050. While the high average level of income per capita contributes to a great improvement in the overall health and social conditions of the majority of people, this world is not necessarily devoid of problems. In particular, many communities could face some of the problems of social exclusion encountered in the wealthiest countries during the 20 th century, and in many places income growth could produce increased pressure on the global commons.And it gets better, for this economic model solves almost all the problems that the Royal Society is complaining about: Energy and mineral resources are abundant in this scenario family because of rapid technical progress, which both reduces the resources needed to produce a given level of output and increases the economically recoverable reserves. Final energy intensity (energy use per unit of GDP) decreases at an average annual rate of 1.3%. Environmental amenities are valued and rapid technological progress "frees" natural resources currently devoted to provision of human needs for other purposes.We also break free from those pesky resource limits and, as I'm sure you'd like to know, this A1 economic model produces – so long as we move to low carbon energy sources – one of the lowest emissions paths of all that the IPCC has studied. It even solves climate change as well. And what is it that we have to do to reach this nirvana, of aboliushing poverty, having the resources to have more gew gaws and not boiling the oceans in the meantime? Strong commitment to market-based solutions. High savings and commitment to education at the household level. High rates of investment and innovation in education, technology, and institutions at the national and international levels. International mobility of people, ideas, and technology.That is, essentially, market-based globalisation. So I searched through the Royal Society report for the word "globalisation" – and, if my .pdf is to be believed, it only uses the word twice, and neither time as a suggestion for action. So the report seems not to mention, and even to reject, the very thing which will abolish the poverty, reduce the emissions and increase the resource availability that it desires: global capitalism, red in tooth and claw. There is also, I'm sorry to say, a disturbing lack of attention to detail. We're told that the report took 21 months to compile, so how did this crawl into it? Platinum is one metal for which absolute scarcity is likely (Bloodworth pers comm), because of its unique catalytic properties (eg car exhaust cleaning and process chemistry). The related metals palladium, rhenium and osmium may also become limiting.Rhenium is not a platinum group metal. Rhodium is, and it is rhodium that might become in limited supply. Or this? Demand for rare earth elements has undergone a sharp rise in recent years. The price of lanthanum oxide has risen from US$5 per kilogram in early 2010 to US$140 per kilogram in June 2011 (DOE 2011).Didn't they notice? Demand for lanthanum hasn't risen at all: supply has been curtailed, as the Chinese Government insists upon export quotas. This is a price rise as a result of a supply squeeze, not a rise in demand. About 15000 tons per year of the lanthanides are consumed as catalysts, in magnets and in the production of glasses.No: 150,000 tonnes, not 15,000. Now perhaps you might think these trivial – but seriously, if this is a document from the finest scientific brains in the country, a document which is trying to tell us how to run the entire global economy, a document that has been pawed over for 21 months, you'd think they'd get this sort of stuff right. And I'm only spotting the errors from my own speciality. If I can spot mistakes, then what can experts in other fields manage? But there's more, and worse: Phosphate is essential for intensive agriculture, and concerns have been raised about the reserves, the greater part of which are in Morocco.This is simply wrong. The figures for resources are here. We've 71 billion tonnes as reserves (you know, what we know is there, can dig out and make money from) and we use 190 million tonnes a year. A 340-year supply then, and total resources are 300 billion tonnes – so that's a problem for the next millennium, then. Although the report does say that recycling can be done, as indeed it already is. One more really quite serious error: Many resources are subject to collective action problems: if each actor pursues what is in his or her short-term interest, things will go much less well than if all agree to abide by rules that are in the common interest. Collective action problems are sometimes thought to arise inevitably from common ownership of resources, but this is not the case. Hardin (1968), in coining the phrase the “tragedy of the commons” assumed that common ownership of physical resources such as fields and lakes is problematic because it will be in the interest of each to consume more of the resource than is sustainable. Thus, on Hardin’s analysis, shepherds will tend to overgraze a field which is held in common, as each shepherd seeks to ensure that he or she has as many sheep as possible, and that each sheep is well-grazed. If all (or most) shepherds behave in this way, then the commons will become overgrazed, and its ability to support sheep will soon be destroyed.However Hardin was mistaken to assume that all commons are open access, and can be used by anyone without control or rules. Almost all commons are closed access, with distinct rules and norms. Closed commons are and can be regulated in such a way that they can be successfully protected and sustained. (Ostrom 1990). Look, guys, I'm sorry but if you want to talk about the Tragedy of the Commons – something you ought to, for it's at the heart of most environmental problems – then it really does behove members of the Royal Society to get it right. For Garrett Hardin did not assume that all commons are open access. He didn't believe anything so damn stupid. His set-up was very different indeed. It was that if you have an open access commons and then demand for that resource exceeds the regenerative capacity of the resource, then you have to move away from a Marxian (his word) open access commons to some form of limitation of access. This limitation of access could be social (socialist) or private property (capitalist) but some form of limitation there must be. Otherwise the commons will be exhausted and there won't be a commons. What Elinor Ostrom has studied (and gained a Nobel prize for) is how this access has been limited. She's been studying extant commons after all, so by Hardin's logic the fact that a commons still exists proves that access has been limited. Those that did not have limits placed upon access would not be around for Ostrom to study: like dodos, passenger pigeons and damn nearly the whales and buffalo. These sorts of errors would lead to a marking down in an undergraduate essay and to the failure of a PhD defence. The Royal Society should withdraw this report and work on fixing both the factual and logical errors before trying to tell the rest of us how to live our lives. 2) Raheem Kassam: And Now The Redistribution Of ConsumptionThe Commentator, 26 April 2012Edmund Burke’s prescience regarding the French Revolution and the inherent nature of ‘radicalism’ – that is to say the inevitability of spending, debt and tyranny inflicted by leftist ideals – is just as relevant in the 21 st century as it was at the time of his writing ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’.One of Burke’s most crucial points in my mind is the remarkable nature of populist rhetoric and how the ideas of ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ would result in further subjugation of the masses at the hands of Robespierre and subsequently, Napoleon. Sold to the French in 1789 terms as, “We are the 99%”, the doctrine of maximum pricing (the ‘General Maximum’) led not only to rampant social discord as citizens squealed on their wealth creating neighbours, but further throttled the economy, the will to produce and made unfair scapegoats of those who had previously contributed the most to the French economy. Sound familiar? With this in mind I write for you, incensed about the new General Maximum all but suggested by ’23 eminent academics’ that The Independent has quoted as calling for a radical ‘rebalancing’ of global consumption. That’s right. Put down that latte. Based on what can only be described as the irresponsible usage of population growth predictions, the Royal Society has sanctioned a report that both undermines its credibility and attempts to dupe Western consumers into remorse over our ‘lavish’ lifestyles. Before we go any further, even United Nations statistics show that while the global population is set to grow between now and 2050 to over 8 billion, this will be an average at which the Earth sticks to for the next 250 years after that. More junk science and manipulation of data thus ensues. The report suggests, like the farcical carbon trading scheme, a pseudo-market in consumption trading, albeit on a voluntary basis (for now – we know it never stays that way). Apparently, Westerners or those in developed nations should be expected to level their consumption and then reduce it so that those in developing countries can pick up the slack and have their own era of growth. But this is the very kind of folie à deux that modern scientists pass along – usually on the basis that ‘it sounds about right’ to those less in the know, or the public at large. This 'robbing Peter to pay Paul' attitude reduces economics from a science to idealism and must be rejected. This kind of Bolshevist propaganda (there, I said it) is predicated on the idea of finite resources, one that these very same scientists would tell you we don’t have to stick to if we switch to ‘sustainable’ living and renewable resources? So which is it? To the informed moderate, the solution lies somewhere in-between, with natural resources playing a significant role up until the advent of secure, safe, affordable and technologically advanced energy and food creation methods. Raising the prices of natural resources in order to make renewables look cheap is not a morally sound option. This also applies to food and other resources. Some people are already thinking up ways to endow Earth with moreto supply growing demand while the Royal Society simply wants to shrink demand altogether. This is backwards economics supported by unaccountable non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like WWF who have recently taken to telling people how to eat.For developing economies to grow, it does not require developed economies to give up their prosperity or growth but rather for developed countries and their partner NGOs to release their strangle hold from the throats of developing nations. From the common agricultural policy to attempted ‘green’ mandates and blocking routes to international markets for developing nations who fail to adhere to arbitrary standards, the developed world has much blood on its hands. Now the anti-growth lobby not only want you to curtail your own consumption to attempt to ‘right’ this wrong imposed by you and your taxes in the first place – but they also want to limit the growth of nations so as to reflect a more ‘hospitable’ planet. There was a time when pioneering and ingenuity was rewarded. Today we seem to have regressed back to 1789, demonising market-driven growth and attempting to replace it with tick boxes and failed economic and development theories. Just yesterday The Independent publicised another curtailment on the development of fracking for shale gas in the United Kingdom – a strategy that will leave us reliant on foreign energy sources, entangled in foreign wars and most pertinently to you and I – with much higher energy prices. In a final blow to common sense, the Royal Society reports that ‘GDP is a poor measure of social well-being and does not account for natural capital’. Yes – that statement does makes as little sense as it first appears. A further explanation lies in the fact that this is yet another organisation that partly relies on government subsidy to promote an anti-growth agenda as best reflected in the below video which has gone viral on YouTube in the past few days. They want countries to be gauged by their green credentials and wind farms rather than per capita output. The society boasts that Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Hodgkin, Francis Crick and James Watson were life members. It is my contention that these innovators and pioneers would be embarrassed of the pessimistic approach taken by modern scientists, many of whom see themselves as activists and are indeed children of ideology rather than professionals with a commitment to the scientific method. The new ‘redistribution of consumption’ idea will in no way lead to enhanced economic growth in the developing world, as shrinking and protecting our economies will leave them no one to trade with. The best thing the West can do for the developing world is to lower barriers to entry, scrap targets and mandates and give innovators around the world a chance to bring about a new industrial revolution. 3) Mark Lynas: The Royal Society gets it wrong on people and the planetMark Lynas Bog, 27 April 2012The Royal Society – Britain’s premier scientific institution – has just released a major report called People and the Planet, arguing that per capital resource consumption in the richest parts of the world needs to come down dramatically if the poorest 1.3 billion are to be lifted out of extreme poverty whilst protecting the Earth’s environment from irreparable harm. (Do join Leo Hickman’s debate on the Guardian site here, and my thanks to him for prompting this piece.) I wouldn’t argue with most of the data underpinning this report, but I do have problems with some of the assumptions. The first is that population growth is necessarily a bad thing, and that there is therefore a pressing need to reduce the rate of growth in developing countries. The report states early on: “At a time when so many people remain impoverished and natural resources are becoming increasingly scarce, continued population growth is cause for concern.”What it fails to acknowledge however is that population growth is correlated with economic growth – and therefore if developing countries are to continue to escape from poverty then reducing their rate of population growth should not be the initial priority. In a recent blogpost the World Bank’s Wolfgang Fengler starts by reminding us: Africa’s population is rising rapidly and will most likely double its population by 2050. Depending on the source of data, Africa will soon pass 1 billion people (and it may already have) and could reach up to 2 billion people by 2050 [ I am using the UN’s 2009 World Population Prospects, which projects Africa to exceed 1.7 billion by 2050 based on sharply declining fertility rates]. This makes it the fastest growing continent and Africa’s rapid growth will also shift the global population balance.Sounds scary. But what no-one mentions is that in terms of population density Western Europe is far more over-populated than Africa: If we look at Western Europe – where I come from – there are on average 170 people living on each square km. In Sub-Saharan Africa there are only 70 today. This gap will narrow in the next decades but even by 2050, Western Europe is expected to be more densely populated than Africa.He then concludes: …population growth and urbanization go together, and economic development is closely correlated with urbanization. Rich countries are urban countries. No country has ever reached high income levels with low urbanization. And this is critical for achieving sustained growth because large urban centers allow for innovation and increase economies of scale. Companies can produce goods in larger numbers and more cheaply, serving a larger number of low-income customers.Population growth may therefore put us on the edge of a “golden age of development” for Africa – hardly the message from the gloomy Royal Society report. As the excellent book Emerging Africa, by Steven Radelet, shows, seventeen sub-Saharan African countries have seen sustained economic growth since 1995, vastly improving their prospects and – I suspect – further reducing fertility rates in the process. Whilst using a lot of dark language about increasing numbers of humans globally, the report nowhere acknowledges that the current median level of total worldwide fertility has fallen dramatically from 5.6 in the 1970s to only 2.4 today. In other words we are already close to natural replacement levels in terms of total fertility – the reason that the absolute population will continue to grow to 9 billion or more is that more children are living long enough have their own children. To my mind a reduction in infant mortality and an increase in life expectancy are self-evidently good and desirable – and their impact on world population levels should be celebrated, not bemoaned. Secondly, the report seems to be largely predicated on a neo-Malthusian version of economics, where resource use is a zero-sum game, and therefore the rich need to get poorer if there is to be any increase in comsumption for the poorest. It states: Human impact on the Earth raises serious concerns, and in the richest parts of the world per capita material consumption is far above the level that can be sustained for everyone in a population of 7 billion or more. This is in stark contrast to the world’s 1.3 billion poorest people, who need to consume more in order to be raised out of extreme poverty.Therefore: The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels…This redistributive model has been shown in the real world to be completely wrong: China, India and now many African countries have seen rapid and sustained economic growth (and the concurrent lifting out of poverty of hundreds of millions of people) not because we have had to reduce our own wealth and consumption in an absolute sense, but through trade and other globalisation-related liberalisation benefiting both parties (and the poorest most). Moreover, a dramatic decline in inequality is already actually happening, because the richest countries are either not growing now (due to the post-2008 economic crisis) or are growing very slowly, whilst the emerging economies and even many sub-Saharan African countries are growing at 5% or more per year. The big Malthusian error – which was repeated by the Limits to Growth approach of the 1970s, and many times afterwards – was to see ‘natural resources’ as some kind of absolutely-limited cake which would have to be shared equally if all were to exit from poverty. In actual fact the stock of natural resources (natural capital) change both both because of consumption patterns and technology. Take fisheries – it is often assumed that because many are over-exploited at the moment then there will never be enough fish for everyone’s wants to be satisfied. However, as a scientific report only last week showed, if fisheries and aquaculture are properly managed there can be at least the same levels of per capita fish consumption by 2050 as today (for a 9.5 billion population). There is no reason to assume collapse is inevitable. Similarly for energy – if we deploy sufficient clean energy resources (renewables, nuclear and gas with carbon capture) there is no fundamental limit on human potential energy consumption. Energy is essential for water supply (increasingly with desalination), agricultural production, urbanisation and so on – and here the Limits to Growth assumptions are both anti-development and nonsensical. To conclude: I would love to see a much more positive approach from scientists on these issues, one acknowledging human development as a much more positive prospect, and treating environmental resources not as a fixed quantity but as a dynamic part of a rapidly-changing (and in many ways improving) world. This does not mean denying biophysical limits (‘planetary boundaries’) insofar as they can be scientifically determined, but it does mean taking a radically-different, and much more human-centred, approach to tackling them. 4) Steven Hayward: The Next Big Green ThingPower Line, 26 April 2012With the slow fade of the climate change issue toward political oblivion, the green authoritarians need a new bandwagon to jump on and flog. And so this headline in Scientific American online is manna from heaven: “ World Governments Establish Biodiversity Panel.” It’s clearly from the “if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed-at-the-UN-try-try-again” school: Governments from more than 90 countries have agreed to establish an independent panel of scientists to assess the very latest research on the state of the planet’s fragile ecosystems. The decision, which will create a body akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was made in Panama City this weekend, after years of negotiations.The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) will be responsible for producing international scientific assessments on issues such as ocean acidification and pollination, to help policy-makers to tackle the global loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystems.“I hope that this body will allow biodiversity to be better taken into account in sustainable-development strategies, as the IPCC has for climate change over the past 20 years,” says Irina Bokova, director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), based in Paris.There’s more, but this is enough. (And yes, this would be the same UNESCO that has proposed UN censorship of the media, among other tyrannical ideas.) Now, as I have said here on Power Line in the past, I think the bundle of issues we lump under the “biodiversity” banner (species extinction/habitat fragmentation/ecosystem health) are the most serious environmental issues on the global scalemuch more so than climate change, but two things need to be kept in mind. First, as always, environmentalists overestimate the magnitude of the problem (though in this case we really don’t have a solid grasp of the dimensions of the problem even the BBC gets this), and second, environmentalists will politicize the science and propose their usual authoritarian, centralizing, power-grabbing solutions that will maximize political conflict, and fail to solve the problem, when it doesn’t make the problem worse. As I like to say, the environment is too important to leave to environmentalists; they’ll just make a mess of things, as they have with climate chance. forward to a friend Copyright © 2012 Global Warming Policy Foundation, All rights reserved. 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