CHINA - Largest Baby Boom Generation in the World

"The unprecedented aging crisis that's about to hit China" PBS NewsHour 8/1/2016

COMMENT:  I can see the obvious solution for the Communist Party leaders, increase the retirement age.  This temporarily cures both problems.

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SUMMARY:  China has the largest Baby Boom generation in the world.  But now just years away from a mass retirement, that country is headed toward a severe workforce crisis and retirement cost cash crunch.  Due to the country's one-child policy from 1978 until 2015, the younger generation poised to take over is relatively small.  What's the solution?  Judy Woodruff reports in conjunction with the Atlantic.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  In Southeast Asia, tensions continue to simmer as China claims sovereignty over the South China Sea, a busy international trade route.

The United States and China have both beefed up their naval presence there, leading to fears of a military confrontation.  This is just one example of China flexing its military muscle in recent months, and it coincides with a slowdown in the nation's economy.

Writing in “The Atlantic” magazine, journalist Howard French sees a connection between the two, pointing out that, as China's population ages, the country faces a huge demographic problem that will affect all aspects of its economic and military aspirations.

HOWARD FRENCH, The Atlantic:  China has its own Baby Boom generation.  And China's baby boom generation, because of the size of China itself, is the world's largest baby boom generation.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Howard French, a former Shanghai bureau chief for The New York Times, has written extensively about China, and he's photographed its people.

HOWARD FRENCH:  This baby boom generation in China will start to hit retirement age in the very next few years, let's say by the end of this decade.

And, at that moment, extraordinary numbers of Chinese people will exit the work force, and the Chinese work force, which has already begun to shrink, will shrink in a vastly accelerated way.  And so China's going to face huge retirement costs and Social Security costs, health care costs, related to this immense aging of the population.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  What are the implications for China as a country and for the Chinese economy?

HOWARD FRENCH:  China will have the biggest aging crisis that the world has ever seen over the next generation, and this happens at a time when Chinese ambitions, geopolitically speaking, are expanding.

And at some point, these two phenomena will collide, and very tough decisions will have to be made about guns vs. canes.  In other words, how much can we afford to invest in our geopolitical ambitions, vs. how much must we invest in terms of supporting our population?

POLITICS - More Diversity, What Does That Portend?

"As diversity increases, will U.S. be more or less politically divided?" PBS NewsHour 2/24/2015

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SUMMARY:  The United States is rapidly transforming into a more diverse, more educated and older nation.  Gwen Ifill talks to Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute and Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress about a special collaborative report that analyzes the implications of these changes and what they mean for American politics.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  America is in the midst of rapid change, politically and demographically, as the nation grows dramatically more diverse, more educated, and older.

Two research organizations with normally divergent views combined to produce a new study that shows the far-reaching implications of that shift.

Karlyn Bowman analyzes public opinion for the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute and Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress.

I find this so interesting.  I just want to walk through some of your findings one at a time.

The big one I noticed was that majority minority states, that is, the number of states which have a minority population — a majority minority population, are going to increase.  I think it starts at — right now, we have four states which meet that, California, New Mexico, Texas, and Hawaii.

And by — let me see, let me get this right — it’s be 20 — in 2060, it’s going to account for two-thirds of the country’s population.  That’s 22 states we’re talking about.

Karlyn Bowman, that’s a big change.

KARLYN BOWMAN, American Enterprise Institute:  That’s one of the big takeaways from this work that we have been doing that really in particular has done with Bill Frey of the Brookings Institution.  And I think that’s one of the biggest takeaways from the survey.

GWEN IFILL:  What does it mean?  What’s the significance of that?

KARLYN BOWMAN:  Well, it has both political consequences, economic consequences, and consequences for the private market.  It will affect every aspect of society going forward.

NEW YORK - Upstate Struggles With Population Loss

In this Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013, photo, Melissa Grothues and her fiance John Steele pose at a spot on San Diego Bay Tuesday, in San Diego.  The couple left the Buffalo, New York suburb of Amherst seeking a new life with a new environment and landed in San Diego.

Welcome to my home town.

"Upstate New York struggles as more leave than move in" by MICHAEL HILL (AP), Salt Lake Tribune 1/3/2014

Melissa Grothues and John Steele bailed from Buffalo last year.

Dissatisfied with their bank jobs, the 25-year-old college graduates sold the house in suburban Amherst, posted ads for possessions on Craigslist and drove cross country to San Diego for a fresh start.

"We were ready for a bigger city and to move on.  There just weren’t many opportunities in Buffalo, job-wise," Grothues said.  "It just seemed like day-to-day there, every single person that I worked with would be miserable."

The young couple is hardly alone in exiting upstate New York.  More people are leaving the region than moving into it, contributing to a largely stagnant population.  The trend has helped lead to New York losing four congressional seats in the last two Census counts and is about to cost the state some prestige.  At some point early this year, Florida is expected to surpass New York as the third most populous state, according to projections by The Associated Press.

New York is home to about 19.65 million people, but the state’s slow growth is largely fueled by New York City, which has long attracted a large share of international immigrants and young adults, including many from upstate.

The story is different north of the Westchester-Rockland county line.  The population of the 53 counties of upstate New York was essentially flat, decreasing by 0.1 percent from 2011 to 2012, according to the latest county-level Census estimates available.

Though there have been pockets of growth in the Hudson Valley and some other areas, many upstate areas grapple with a slow but steady loss of people.

Why are people leaving upstate New York?

Some complain that taxes in New York are too high.  Others, like Grotheus, say there are better job opportunities elsewhere.  State and local officials have had mixed success in luring high-tech companies and other new businesses to make up for jobs lost when large employers like Eastman Kodak Co. and Carrier Corp. scaled back or shifted operations elsewhere.

"Part of it is probably due to job loss in the major metropolitan areas like Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Binghamton.  They all had large employers that had to lay off a lot of people," said Jan Vink of Cornell University’s Program on Applied Demographics.

Others blame the weather in upstate New York, where winters can be a trying mix of heavy snow and little sun.

Kyle Songer moved to Tampa from the Saratoga Springs area in early 2013, becoming yet another New Yorker to leave behind cold and snow for sun and sand.  The 45-year-old instructional designer says moving south was his goal since he fell in love with the beach and surfing while growing up and being a life guard on Long Island.

"I needed to get out to a more relaxing environment and sunshine almost every day," said Songer, who now lives in Clearwater, Fla.  "And that’s what it’s been. It’s wonderful."

In recent years, Florida has been the No. 1 destination for people aged 45 and up leaving upstate New York.  The top destination for people aged 20 to 44 is New York City and the surrounding downstate region, according to researchers at Cornell who looked at census data from 2006 through 2010.  The loss of young college graduates — like Grothues and Steele — is especially worrisome to local politicians because it can contribute to a so-called brain drain.  The fear is that the loss of educated workers in an area can make it less attractive to new businesses, creating a cycle of decline.

Politicians in both parties have tried for decades to reverse the migration trend, but the latest county figures show only 10 of 53 upstate counties had positive migration numbers over the year period.  Top-growing Jefferson County is home to the Army’s busy Fort Drum.  No. 2 is Saratoga County, where a state-of-the-art computer chip plant that currently employs 2,100 people is still growing.

New York committed $1.2 billion in aid to land the Saratoga County chip plant, where ground was broken in 2009.  The aid package illustrates the extraordinary lengths state officials have gone to bring jobs into the region.  Supporters of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s policy to create "tax free" zones near college campuses argue they will help stop the brain drain in other parts of the state.

But they also are battling long-term trends that reach beyond upstate New York.  Vink, of Cornell University, notes that young people are especially hard to retain.

"It’s a hard population to keep around," he said.  "They are very mobile."

INDIA - The Preference for Baby Boys, Revisited

Individual men can father many more babies than individual woman can birth, which means in over populated India clinging to this ancient tradition is detrimental to all of India.  It also points out a society that still treats women as chattels to be bargained away.

"Pervasive Preference for Baby Boys Over Girls Prevails Among Parents in India" PBS Newshour 4/23/2013

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JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  Next, from India, worries about the age-old bias favoring male children.

Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro updates a story he did a dozen years ago about the skewed sex ratio of children born in India.

It's another in our Agents of Change series.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO (Newshour):  For some months, Pooja, a 22-year-old mother of three, has been coming to this crisis counseling center in a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Delhi.

Pooja is trying to keep her family together.  Her husband and in-laws have tried to throw her out.  Their problem, all three children are girls.

POOJA, Mother:  The family says they need sons to carry on their name and since I have only three daughters, they tried to trick me into signing divorce papers so that their son could marry again.  That led to some violence when I refused, and I had to run away to my mother's house for safety.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO:  The preference for boys goes back millennia.  Boys performed the last rites at their parents' funeral.  They carry the family name and when they marry they bring a dowry into the family.

Dowries were outlawed 50 years ago, but they're pervasive and mistakenly believed to have roots in Hindu scriptures, says Ranjana Kumari of the Delhi-based Center for Social Research.

AMERICA - Minority Babies the New Majority

"Minority Babies' New Majority an 'Echo' of Immigration Waves" PBS Newshour 5/17/2012

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MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): For the first time ever, white babies account for fewer than half of newborns in the United States. New census data released today showed that on July 1 of last year, just 49.6 percent of babies 1-year-old or younger were of white European ancestry; 50.4 percent were minority.

Latinos are the fastest-growing minority, accounting for 26 percent of all births. African-Americans made up 15 percent, while nearly 5 percent were Asian. The remainder were American Indian, mixed race or other groups. The nation as a whole is still 62 percent white. But minorities make up the majority in four states, Hawaii, California, New Mexico and Texas, plus the District of Columbia.

We explore this tipping point and its implications with William Frey, senior demographer at the Brookings Institution and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, professor of globalization and education at New York University. He's done extensive research on immigrant families and their children.

WORLD - Population 7,000,000,000

"World Population to Hit Milestone With Birth of 7 Billionth Person" (Part-1) PBS Newshour 10/27/2011

JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Next, a milestone for planet Earth.

On Monday, the world's population will officially reach 7 billion. What does that mean for people and planet?

We begin with this report from Lawrence McGinty of Independent Television News.

LAWRENCE MCGINTY: Zachariah Kahn (ph) came into the world at the Rosie Hospital in Cambridge. Around the world, three other babies were born in the same second.

First, the figures. It took all of human history up to 1804 for the world's population to reach 1 billion. But the next billion came only 100 years later, in 1927. And after that, the rate of growth accelerated, 3 billion in 1959, 4 billion 1974, 5 billion 1987, 6 billion 1999, and now 7 billion. We're adding a billion population every 12 years.

Population growth will not be even around the world. In Africa, for example, the current population of 1 billion will increase to 3.6 billion by the end of the century. But, in Asia, yes, population will increase from its current 4.2 billion to 5.2 billion by 2050, but by the end of the century, it will fall to 4.6 billion.

SIR JOHN BEDDINGTON, government scientific adviser: If you go just two decades ahead, all the trends are indicating that we are going to need to be producing something like 40 percent more food, 40 percent more available freshwater, and actually about 50 percent more energy. And, remember, that's clean energy.

LAWRENCE MCGINTY: Famine in Africa shows how hard feeding the population will be. There's enough food in the world to go around, but almost a billion people are undernourished.

Water consumption worldwide has tripled in the last 50 years. And by 2020, half the world's population will live in areas of high water stress. Clean energy also a tall order -- meeting demand in the last decade raised the carbon emissions linked to global warming by 25 percent.

And if all these can be tackled, the world will face a new problem, increasing numbers of elderly people our societies must support.

"World's Population Teeters on the Edge of 7 Billion: Now What?" (Part-2)
PBS Newshour 10/27/2011

WORLD - Population 7 Billion, Brazil

"In Brazil, Women's Changing Roles, Attitudes Leading to Smaller Families" PBS Newshour 8/30/2011

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GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Now we have another story in our series on global population issues. It's a partnership with National Geographic Magazine, which has been reporting on this topic throughout 2011. The September issue examines the declining birth rate in Brazil.

Our report is from special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro.

National Geographic Population 7 Billion photo gallery, series page