I mean I guess it might. And there is a fair amount of momentum built into demographic trends. But this seems an awful lot like an unwarranted straight line projection.

This gap is driven by two demographic factors—youth and non-citizenship. More than one third of Latinos (34.9%) are younger than the voting age of 18. And an additional 22.4% are of voting age, but are not U.S. citizens. As a result, the share of the Latino population eligible to vote is smaller than it is among any other group. Just 42.7% of the nation’s Latino population is eligible to vote, while more than three-in-four (77.7%) of whites, two-thirds of blacks (67.2%) and more than half of Asians (52.8%) are eligible to vote.

Yet, even among eligible voters, Latino participation rates lag those of other groups. In 2010, 31.2% of Latino eligible voters say they voted, while nearly half (48.6%) of white eligible voters and 44.0% of black eligible voters said the same.

Obviously, progressives in general and Latino groups in particular should try to work on closing that turnout gap. But I think a lot of people underestimate the extent to which these demographic factors make a difference in driving our politics. A hugely disproportionate share of the poor people in the United States are children. And a hugely disproportionate share of the poor adults in the United States are non-citizens. The fact that poor eligible voters tend not to turn out and don’t possess the social capital and money needed to impact the system through non-electoral means all make a difference. But the fundamental base on which all the other inequities are layered is the simple fact that the electorate is substantially richer than the population.

The number of non-Hispanic whites fell in 46 states and 86 of the 100 largest metropolitan areas. In 10 states, white children are now a minority among their peers, including six that tipped between 2000 and 2010. Others will follow soon: In 23 states, minorities make up more than 40% of the child population.

The number of black and Native American children declined as well, but by a far smaller degree than whites, according to an analysis of 2010 Census data to be released Wednesday by the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning think tank in Washington. The Census Bureau released the first results of its once-a-decade head count of U.S. residents, regardless of citizenship, late last year; over subsequent months, Census released state and local data.

I think this is a widely misreported trend. When the New York Times recently did a piece on me, Ezra Klein, Brian Beutler, and Dave Weigel exactly zero people complained about the massive over-representation of people of Latin American ancestry that reflected. People saw it as a profile of four white dudes. Which is what it was. But my dad’s family is from Cuba, Ezra’s dad’s family is from Brazil, and Brian’s mom’s family is from Chile. That’s kind of a funny coincidence, but the combination of continued immigration and intermarriage means that over time a larger and larger share of American people will be partially descended from Latin American countries. That will probably change various aspects of American life in various ways. But we’re not going to become a predominantly Spanish-speaking country, race isn’t going to stop being a social construct, and it won’t cease being the case that the primary “race issue” is the gap between black people (almost all of whom are in part descended from white people) and a fairly miscellaneous group of socially dominant whites.

The result is a state becoming radically less rural as remote areas decline in population while central cities and (especially) suburbs boom at an incredible rate.

I used to hold to the view that the growing non-white share of the electorate would, over time, tip elections to Democrats. I now think the system will remain near equilibrium and what we’ll instead see is white voters growing more Republican as Democrats are more and more seen as the party of non-whites. Mississippi and Arizona, after all, have very large minority votes but they’re hardly hotbeds of liberalism. Instead they’re hotbeds of very conservative white people. This does mean, however, that politics will become even more abstracted away from “the issues” and questions of identity will become even more central.

Historically, the South was home to roughly 90 percent of the nation’s blacks from 1790 until 1910, when African-Americans began to migrate northward to escape racism and seek jobs in industrial centers such as Detroit, New York and Chicago during World War I. After the decades-long Great Migration, the share of blacks in the South hit a low of about 53 per cent in the 1970s, before civil rights legislation and the passage of time began to improve the social climate in the region. [...]

The nation’s black population grew by roughly 1.7million over the last decade. About 75 per cent of that growth occurred in the South – primarily metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami and Charlotte, N.C. That’s up from 65 per cent in the 1990s, according to the latest census estimates.

To me that mostly sounds like black people are moving to the same metro areas as everyone else. Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami, and Charlotte in the south and Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas outside the south. After all, the basic dynamic of weak job opportunities in the midwest and no affordable housing in the northeast applies regardless of skin color. What’s more, this is really not a reversal of the Great Migration in any meaningful sense. Texas wasn’t a major historic African-American population center and it strains credulity to describe Miami as part of the south. If black people start leaving Chicago to move to rural Mississippi that be a reversal, but this is the same sun/permit-driven migration that everyone’s doing.

Union status, roughly speaking, is less important than race or religion but more important than the rest.

(cc photo by twicepix)

Engines of upward opportunity for woman and minorities:

As millions of Americans dine out this Valentine’s Day, new research from the National Restaurant Association shows that nearly 50 percent of restaurants are now owned by women. The research also shows that restaurants employ more minority managers than any other industry, and that Hispanic restaurant ownership has increased 42 percent in the past five years.

Once again, in my view these people are “making things.”

That’s a strong showing for Barrett but not nearly as strong as, say, his pull of 87 percent of the African-American vote. Had unions delivered 70 percent of the union household vote to Barrett, he would have won. Russ Feingold pulled 59 percent of the union household vote in his failed re-election bid. Nationally, 61 percent of union household voters pulled the lever for a House Democrat in 2010.

One of the most important facts about present-day American politics is that poor people have essentially no political “voice” in Washington. They do, however, vote. And they’re also human beings with moral worth and interests who count. What often winds up happening is that you get liberal bloggers, whose opinions about things are easy to find out since we publish them on the Internet, used as a generalized proxy for a huge swathe of the electorate. Hence this kind of thing from Michael Shear:

One liberal supporter who listened to the [conference] call described it as “mostly boring,” an indication that the president’s base was not particularly upset about the budget. During the call, Mr. Plouffe also offered some comfort to the bloggers by suggesting that Mr. Obama is not interested in big reductions in Social Security.

As a colleague of mine snarks, “because if one thing is indicative of how poor people feel about cuts, it’s white upper class bloggers.”

Right. As best I can tell the electoral base of the Democratic Party continues to be low-income people and racial minorities. Obviously better-off white people with idiosyncratic ideological motivations also play an important role in progressive politics on a practical level. But I often thought during the health care debate that poor people would be saying “hell no I’m not going to give up this Medicaid expansion so you can hold out indefinitely for a public option.” Conversely, the political tactics of calling for an overall discretionary budget freeze while insisting on investments in energy, infrastructure, and education has a lot of merit but it necessarily entails taking the hammer to programs that subsidize consumption for poor people. I kind of doubt that all that many LIHEAP recipients eagerly downloaded the budget yesterday morning and then blogged about it in the afternoon and got on a press call in the evening.

Apparently gay marriage in a handful of states has already ruined things.

Joking aside, I’m not sure people always take due account of this sort of thing when looking at trends in recent American history. I’m not the type to get nostalgic about the good old days of patriarchy, but the fact of the matter is that from a strictly economic point of view a married couple household is a much more efficient arrangement than the one-adult alternative. So if you look at any kind of strictly economic trend, part of what you’re seeing is a growing tendency for lower-efficiency, but possibly higher happiness, living arrangements—divorce, extended singledom, etc.

For comparison’s sake, St Martin is like Taiwan or the Palestinian Territories—very dense, denser than any American state. Puerto Rico is about as dense as New Jersey, Lebanon, or South Korea. Jamaica is more like Germany, and Cuba is sparser than Pennsylvania but denser than California. The Bahamas are way down near the bottom, presumably because it’s an archipelago rather than an island, but still denser than 18 states.

My assumption is that for islands there would be major advantages to obtaining very high density. It’s extremely useful to have decent road and rail links to a major container port, but you probably wouldn’t build such a port on an island unless a ton of people lived there.

Here’s the US by way of comparison. I’m thinking Italians would do well to start feeling a lot more positive about immigration.

This is an under-contemplated subject in international comparisons. If you want to know about what living standards a country is able to achieve, you want to talk about GDP per capita. That’s output over people. But if you want to know about how mighty a country is on the world stage, you just want to talk about GDP. And if you want to talk about how efficiently a country’s economy is working, you probably want to talk about GDP divided by working age population. Daniel Gros cites GDP/WAP to say that Japan’s economic decline is largely an illusion. But I think this illusion is, in turn, a bit of an illusion. The bottom line about Japan is that if your working age share of the population declines, this drags average living standards down. What we’re seeing in China recently is in part huge efficiency gains, but in part a big increase in the working age share of the population driven in part by anti-natalist policies. Declining birth rates offer a one-time demographic dividend followed by rapid population aging.

As Kevin Drum notes, this means China will run into a serious demographic headwind pretty soon:

By 2030 they’ll have a greater proportion of the elderly than the United States. This is one reason why I’m skeptical of alarmism about China’s imminent takeover of the world. I don’t doubt that China will continue to grow and flex its muscles, but in the long term they have a demographic time bomb to deal with that’s worse than ours, and they’ll have to tackle it as a considerably less wealthy country than us. It doesn’t mean they’re doomed, but it does mean that their path to world domination has a few roadblocks in its way.

Very true, but what I think this misses is that China surpassing the United States in aggregate GDP terms is likely to happen much sooner than people realize. The Economist says it’s likely to occur during Jeb Bush’s first term around 2019 or so. You’ll then have a situation in which the mightiest economy on earth is also quite poor (think Mexico) and facing a rapidly darkening future economic outlook. I think it’ll make the 2020s and 2030s a pretty hairy decade in East Asia.

The first thing I looked at, personally, was the racial breakdown in the DC neighborhoods where I’ve been living for the past 7 years. I’m always hearing about what a divided, segregated city this is and that’s never really been my personal experience. And, indeed, it turns out that Census Tracts 43 and 44 where I used to live are very mixed. Census Tract 47 where I live now measures as 84 percent African-American, but I think that data’s probably out of date and the area’s whiter than that now.

If you zoom out, though, you’ll see that the conventional wisdom about a segregated city isn’t false. Whites live on the west, blacks on the east, and there’s a Hispanic cluster in the middle.

Interestingly, this is not your classic “early adopter” demographic heavily weighted toward white dudes. Instead, women and non-whites seem disproportionately interested. Personally, I love Twitter so for these purposes will classify myself as Hispanic in order to better fit the model.

The point here is just to attend to the basic stability of the dynamic as well as to the fact that contrary to boatloads of conventional wisdom, the Clinton/Gore/Kerry era Democrats did better with this demographic than has been the postwar norm.

South Korea is training thousands of people, including children, as “dementia supporters,” to recognize symptoms and care for patients. The 11- to 13-year-olds, for instance, were in the government’s “Aging-Friendly Comprehensive Experience Hall” outside Seoul. Besides the aging simulation exercise, they viewed a PowerPoint presentation defining dementia and were trained, in the hall’s Dementia Experience Center, to perform hand massage in nursing homes.

“ ‘What did I do with my phone? It’s in the refrigerator,’ ” said one instructor, explaining memory loss. “Have you seen someone like that? They may go missing and die on the street.”

As is often the case, I think too much of the discussion in the United States about population aging is about the purely budgetary aspects of it. More elderly people plus a commitment to give money to elderly people = higher taxes or benefit cuts. True enough, but the harder questions concern real resources. More people with the distinctive problems of the elderly, and more need to find better ways of coping with them.

Now the median American household makes $50,222 so this vote split should generate a pretty even division of the electorate. But 63 percent of voters came from households with above-average incomes. In part that’s because two-adult households are more common in the above-average bracket, in part that’s because non-voting non-citizens are more common in the below-average bracket, and in part it’s because high-income people turn out at higher rates.

This not only partially explains the election results, it shapes the larger political climate. You can’t win an election on the basis of the votes of children and immigrants. You need actual voters. And the median voter is quite a bit richer than the median person over and above all the other ways in which higher income people have more political influence.

“People who need to retire early — and they need to — are folks that start working in their late teens, whereas people who are promoting raising the retirement age are people who were in graduate school or professional school and got into jobs that would logically take them into their late 60s and 70s,” she said.

There’s also the fact that life expectancy is stratified by class:

A world where we expect people to retire at seventy is a world in which poor men can expect to work for 52 years followed by about five years of retirement. Highly educated workers, by contrast, might put in 45 years or so of work followed by about ten years of retirement. That’s perverse.

It’s worth noting, however, that it’s already the case that relatively few workers—especially those in physically taxing fields—wait until 65 before claiming their Social Security benefits. Instead the tendency is to take “early retirement” at 62, which pays you lower annual benefits. Proposals to “raise the retirement age” are typically proposals to raise the full benefits eligibility age. People who have physically taxing jobs or who get laid off will generally still retire at 62 (in general, firms are not usually looking to hire unemployed 60-somethings) it’s just that their benefits will be even lower than they are today. This is normally discussed in terms of “raising the retirement age” to create a false atmosphere of common sense about the thing, but we’ll get clearer thinking about the policy options if you call proposals for benefit cuts what they are—proposals for benefit cuts.