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Florida’s Interstate-Adjacent Fantasy

As 2015 wanes, many swimming in Florida’s new wave of growth are still being carried by a swift current. Everywhere one gazes, new apartments can be seen that accommodate some of the million-plus new residents who have moved here in the last five years. With over 140,000 people migrating to Florida from other states during 2014, and over 100,000 people moving to Florida from other countries, Florida’s GDP is predicted to have grown 3.2% in 2015, the highest in the country and well ahead of the national average. The tide has definitely come in.

For natives and long-term residents, it feels like everyone up north woke up one Tuesday morning and said, “Hey honey, let’s quit our jobs, move to Florida, and get an apartment overlooking the interstate.” From Tampa to Daytona, mid-rise wood frame structures loom over semi-trucks and cars that whizz by, a new voyeur culture in the making.

At first glance, the recent growth seems low quality and monolithic, blandly designed and structured to meet a uniform real estate development formula. The land along Interstate 4 is cheap and available for development. Like coral reefs that grow on the poisonous crags of undersea volcanoes, however, these apartments are an infrastructure for an ecology of both dreams and nightmares. Dispossessed by capitalism, many laid-off Americans seek a new start in the apartments of the Sunshine State. In these drywall-lined niches grow polyps of hope.

Some newcomers come to Florida with job offers. Along with those taking advantage of the economic climate, there are others who show up without employment; many without jobs move to Florida and fill apartments only with the hope of a new life and prosperity. Such is the Florida of the nation’s imagination, a place of such bountiful employment opportunities that one can pick a job off a tree, like a wild orange. Do-over dreams hang in the air around these giant rental reefs, interwoven with expectations of an easy, low-cost retirement lifestyle. “I have several friends,” writes one retiree, “who all went south from Connecticut to Ft. Lauderdale years ago, and drifted north to Melbourne over the years… it seems like a nice place to live.” An image of retirees drifting around the state, like so many jellyfish drifting along a reef face, seems idyllic.

Many have suffered more severe economic hardships. The third busiest bankruptcy court in the nation none other than the Middle District of Florida, housed in sunny Ft. Myers. Those without the means or the qualifications for a mortgage often retreat into Florida’s apartment culture, licking their financial wounds. Setting one’s sights a little lower and squeezing into a small apartment cosigned by a family member may be a humiliating, but necessary step towards a new beginning. The symbiotic relationship between debt and dreams can be seen through the glass walls of these buildings.

Quite a few renters are also paying off student debt. “We cannot afford a house right now. Maybe not ever,” writes Selena in Florida about the student loans she and her husband have. The rental life, tinged with a very bitter dose of recent reality, is the color of all of the aspirations that swirl around the stucco, false mansard roofs, clubhouses and glittery swimming pools.

The Florida resort lifestyle, jammed up against the interstate highway, is an unlikely scaffold for dreams. Percolating between the swaying palms are new beginnings, fresh starts, and resolutions to do better. Some of these dreams may blossom and grow out of the balconies and windows of these monolithic blocks of monthly rent, making these apartments a nomad’s brief sanctuary on the journey back to prosperity. These are the lucky ones, the temporary renters; those who stay in an apartment for a year or two while getting back on their feet.

As viewed from the middle lane of I-4, these giant rental shoals, and the thought of the imagination that supports them, seem at once reassuring and terrible. Reassuring, because the idea that Florida is universally beloved still makes Floridians smile. Terrible, because this new biodiversity is voracious, and brings with it congestion. These mid-rises inhale a dense population, only to exhale them out onto Florida’s flat expanse of rooftops that spread ever further into Florida’s vanishing natural environment.

Like coral reefs, which grow in the ocean where the surf is most active, these apartments grow in Florida where the weather is most active. The hurricane capital of America, the lightning capital of the world, and the humid heat are the real parts of the lingering illusion of a tropical wilderness that comes with this postcard paradise. Once arrived, many of the newcomers find the weather intense. Hopes and dreams cling to the apartments like barnacles, fluttering from the windows and balconies, despite the heavy summer rains.

Apartment dwellers are a transient lot, often staying not longer than their lease term. When one moves out, workers clean and repair the unit to be ready for the next. Each new dweller from out-of-state brings his or her own illusions of Florida. Others bring a more grounded reality from their previous Florida experience. Either way, the dwellers’ new impressions blend with the redolent ecosystem of hopes and dreams surrounding the edifice.

These Florida apartments are inspiration-gardens, attracting migrants seeking a better life. Only the individuals who dwell within them can activate their hopes. As rather expensive offerings, they are not analogous to the New York tenements of the nineteenth century, which were full of families crowded off of the European boats. Instead, these are high amenity, middle-income places to live. They act in the same way, as a distribution system for dreams, but are far more luxurious and appointed than the slums of old.

The urgent, massive dream-reef construction project that has gone up alongside I-4 is in its peak phase, with a few nodes already complete between Tampa and Daytona. Apartments are clustered like a gigantic fringe along the denser population centers: Lakeland, Lake Buena Vista, Orlando, and Winter Park. Those living in earshot of the interstate’s mighty roar of traffic must have an ironic, contemporary sense of place. As a concrete reality, the I-4 corridor is not a particularly prestigious address. But as an abstraction that speaks of today’s politics, it has an importance of the first magnitude. If these two opposites— the dream of the America we desire and the reality of the America being constructed now — can be reconciled, then Florida’s growth is a healthy ecosystem that offers hope for the future.

Richard Reep is an architect with VOA Associates, Inc. who has designed award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects. His work has been featured domestically and internationally for the last thirty years. An Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, he teaches urban design and sustainable development; he is also president of the Orlando Foundation for Architecture. Reep resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family.

Photo by Cooper Reep: Typical new mid-rise on I-4 in Florida

December 15, 2015
Can GOP Fatten Up Around the Middle?

At a recent breakfast in Washington, D.C., a rising young Republican senator explained the divisions in his party in a particularly succinct manner: a conflict between the donor base and the GOP rank-in-file.

“The donor class,” this senator told me, “really cares about one thing: lower taxes. Most in the party don’t see this as the most crucial issue.”

Although some donors care about other issues, including Israel and, sometimes, social issues, the big money in the party is focused on reducing tax burdens. After all, if you are an investment bank, pharmaceutical firm or oil company, your concerns involve finding ways to avoid, or at least slow down, the taxman.

In the past, many grass-roots Republicans may have shared this concern, but other issues – like a weak economy, rising inequality and crime, as well as terrorism – increasingly may become more important. The very nature of the current recovery, beneficial to the donor class but not so much for the vast majority of Americans, works against the traditional antitax focus of the GOP. Does anyone on Main Street believe lower capital-gains taxes, which would preserve more of the wealth of hedge funders, corporate hegemons and venture capitalists, helps them?

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Donald Trump) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

December 14, 2015
Black Friday: Scenes From A Mall

It’s Black Friday and I thought I’d do something out of character for me, but entirely in keeping with the season. I went to a shopping mall. For those of you not used to the customs of the United States, the day after Thanksgiving is the official start of the Christmas present purchasing period. Most people have off from work, kids don’t have school, so everyone hits the malls.

This mall is pretty typical with all the usual chain stores. Families were out in force. Young people were milling about. Old folks were enjoying a leisurely walk in the climate control since the weather outside was a bit harsh.

And of course there’s a food court with a Texas Roadhouse, a P.F. Chang’s with the trademark fiberglass horse statue, a Tim Horton’s, a little Italian, a little sushi, a little Mexican, and a few upscale white tablecloth places.

The twist? This mall happens to be in Dubai. Go figure.

John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He’s a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

December 12, 2015
2010-2012: More Modest Dispersion Within Metropolitan Areas

American cities seemed to be re-centralizing in the years immediately following the Great Recession, but new American Community Survey data indicates that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Americans continue to disperse though at a much reduced rate. The Census Bureau has just released the five year American Community Survey (2010-2014) small area data used by the City Sector Model to report on population trends within functional sectors of metropolitan areas. The City Sector Model classifies small areas as the urban core, suburban or ex-urban without reference to the more traditional analysis method that relied on core cities and suburbs (Note 1). The principal purpose is to compare finer-grained data and trends in parts of the metropolitan area that are more reflective of pre-World War II urban forms and lifestyles (the Urban Core: CBD and the Urban Core Ring) and the balance of the metropolitan area, which is automobile oriented (the Earlier Suburbs, Later Suburbs and Exurbs).

These data were collected over a five year period, with the middle year being 2012. General trends can be examined in comparison to the 2008-2012 American Community Survey, with a middle year of 2010. At the same time, caution is warranted since the American Community Survey is not a count, such as is collected in the decennial censuses. For simplicity, this article refers to the 2010 to 2014 data as 2012 and the 2008 to 2012 data as 2010.

More Modest Dispersion

The continuing dispersion was most evident in the rising 0.4 percentage point share (from 26.9% to 27.3%) in the Later Suburbs – with mid-point construction dates of 1980 or later. Two of the other four functional city sectors experienced declines in their shares, with the higher density, transit-, walking- and cycling-oriented Urban Core Ring dropping from 13.5% to 13.4% and the Earlier Suburbs dropping from 41.9% to 41.6% of the major metropolitan population. The earlier suburbs are automobile oriented and have houses with median construction dates of 1946 through 1979. The Urban Core CBD sector and the exurbs have retained their previous share of the population since 2010 (Figure: Growth Share by City Sector: 2010-2012 and Population Share by City Sector).

Overall the Urban Core, which consists of the CBD and Ring dropped from 14.8% of the population to 14.7%. If this rate were to continue through the 2020 census, the Urban Core share of the major metropolitan area population would drop by 0.5 percentage points, considerably less than the 1.7 percentage point loss between 2000 and 2010. Nonetheless, the suburbs and exurbs accounted for nearly 90% of the growth between 2010 and 2012 (Figure: Population by City Sector). Suburbia, even exurbia, is where the growth is

The new data also suggests that much of that growth was in the suburban areas of the historical core municipalities (newer and automobile oriented). For example, large areas of core cities are functionally suburban, such as in Phoenix, Dallas, Los Angeles, Portland, Atlanta, Charlotte, and elsewhere.

The bottom line , as we have indicated in previous articles, is this: the data shows virtually no “return to the city.” Between 2010 and 2012 the suburbs and exurbs gained 3.5 million residents, while the Urban Cores gained 400,000. The Exurbs alone gained more population than the Urban Core (CBD and Ring combined). This has also been evident in each year of this decade by the continuing domestic migration to suburban and exurban counties, which has exceeded that of counties that contain the urban cores.

New York, Other Legacy Cities and the Balance

There is considerable variation in the size and growth of Urban Cores among the major metropolitan areas. The Urban Cores in the “legacy cities” are far larger and are capturing a far higher share of their metropolitan area growth. The legacy cities are the six metropolitan areas that have downtowns (central business districts or CBD’s) with more than 200,000 jobs (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston and Washington), These are generally older cities and the strength of their Urban Cores is illustrated by the fact that, combined, the core cities of these metropolitan areas account for 55% of the destinations of transit committing trips in the nation.

Even among the legacy cities, strong distinctions exist. New York, with central business district employment of nearly 2 million, has nearly 4 times the jobs that of its Chicago counterpart. Indeed, New York’s central business district employment exceeds that of the combined employment in the downtowns other five legacy cities. Thus, as in other indicators of intense urbanism (such as transit ridership and the share of the national transit ridership increase), New York is in a “league” of its own.

As of 2012, New York’s Urban Core included approximately 53% of the metropolitan area population. This is more than double the 26% share of the metropolitan population in the urban cores of Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston and Washington (Figure Legacy Cities and Others: Population).

The difference between the legacy cities and the other 46 metropolitan areas is even more stark. On average, other metropolitan areas have on average only approximately seven percent of their populations in their urban cores, compared to 53 percent in New York and 26 percent in the other five.

There are even greater disparities in population growth. Between 2010 and 2012, 73% of the population growth in the New York metropolitan area was in the Urban Core. This is 2.7 times the average 27% of metropolitan growth in the urban cores of the other five legacy cities. Thus, by two measures, population concentration and population growth in the urban cores, Chicago, Boston and the other legacy cities cannot even present themselves as “little New York’s”.

Most other cities are not even in the same league as Chicago or Boston. None achieved a 20 percent Urban Core growth percentage, though St. Louis was close (19.8 percent), and Seattle was next (15.0 percent). The urban core growth in the other 46 cities was less than 6% (Figure Legacy Cities and Others: Growth). Even in Portland, with its strong densification policies biased toward urban core development and discouraging towards suburban development, no more than average 10% of its growth took place in its Urban Core. Nearly 90 percent of Portland’s growth was in the suburbs and exurbs.

Back to Normalcy?

The 2010-2012 data does not indicate a return to the near monopoly on growth enjoyed by the suburbs and exurbs in the 1990s and 2000s. But more recent data suggests stronger suburban performance, as chronicled by William Frey at the Brookings Institution and Jed Kolko at Trulia. At the same time, it is good to see the upward trends in the in the urban cores, which as metropolitan areas as diverse as St. Louis and Seattle show, do not depend on suburban misfortune to prosper. The cores are an important part of a healthy metropolitan system, although in most places they are far smaller in population, and growth, than the suburban rings.

Note: The “City Sector Model” provides data for areas (Zip Code Analysis Zones) within metropolitan areas, as opposed to data based on jurisdictional boundaries, such as city limits. The data is based on small areas, Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTA’s). The criteria for classification is indicated in the Figure: City Sector Model Criteria.

Wendell Cox is Chair, Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California) and principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm.He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photo: New York’s Growing Skyline by Citizen59 (Own work) [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

December 11, 2015
Losing the Narrative of Their Lives

A study released a few weeks ago, conducted by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, documented a significant increase in the death rate among the white working class in the US, much of it due to suicide and substance abuse. In one interview about the report, Deaton suggests that the reason for the increase is the increasing economic insecurity this group faces. As he told Vox’s Julia Bellus, they have “lost the narratives of their lives.” Not surprisingly, op-eds flew right and left about this report, from Rod Dreher in The American Conservative and R.R. Reno in First Things to Paul Krugman in the New York Times and Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post. This study is the latest contribution to an expanding public discussion about changes in white working-class culture, which Jack Metzgar has traced in a series of posts here about books by Andrew Cherlin, Robert Putnam, and others.

As both Ross Douthat and Krugman note in their New York Times columns responding to the study, the rising death rate cannot be explained solely in economic terms. Douthat rejects the claims of some conservatives, including Reno, that the report reflects the consequences of liberal policy and moral decline, arguing that we must recognize that “stagnating wages” play a part in changing social patterns. But, he argues, what matters most is how economic changes have left white working-class people with “a feeling thatwhat you were supposed to have has been denied you.” As Krugman puts it, they were “raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.”

While, as Metzgar has pointed out, recent studies of white working-class culture often begin with problematic assumptions, they nonetheless (and sometimes inadvertently) make clear that economic restructuring has social consequences that extend far beyond the factory floor or corporate offices. We are rightly concerned not only with what this means for income inequality and social justice but also for the quality of people’s lives and the way working-class experience translates into politics. As Dreher argues, we can draw a clear connection between the “dispossession” of the white working class and the popularity of Donald Trump. The “politics of resentment” that John Russo and I traced in Youngstown twenty years ago seems to have become a national pattern.

If we want to understand the social and cultural patterns fully, I would argue, we must consider not only the material conditions or social structures that shape economic experience but also how people interpret those experiences and construct their identities in response to them. We would do well to attend not only to statistical evidence but also to stories, which provide insight into how people experience and make sense of economic and social changes. This is the kind of insight that literature can provide. By representing the social world through the stories of individuals, fiction, especially, can help us understand what large-scale change looks and feels like on a personal, subjective level.

The long-term effects of deindustrialization – what I refer to as its half-life – have generated not only measurable social patterns like rising death rates but also a growing body of literature. If you want to understand the “lost narrative” of contemporary working-class lives, you might well begin with these books.

In Coal Run, by Pennsylvania writer Tawni O’Dell, we meet a character who exemplifies the lost sense of self as well as the addiction, anger, and self-destructive behavior reflected in the rising death rates. Ivan Zoschenko is a former high school and college football star who has returned to his home town, where the last of the local mines is about to shut down. He feels like a failure, especially in comparison with his hard-working miner father, who taught him the importance of finding a sense of purpose through one’s work. Working as a deputy sheriff, Ivan mediates domestic disputes spurred by the town’s economic struggles, and in the process he reconnects with his working-class community and gains a renewed sense of purpose and belonging.

Philipp Meyer offers a less hopeful story in American Rust, which follows two young men in a former steel town, both struggling to figure out their futures. One, known as the smartest kid in his high school class, dreams of escaping his hometown, studying astrophysics, and working at a research institute, but as the sole caregiver for his father, who was seriously injured in an accident in the steel mill, he cannot bring himself to leave. His dream remains beyond his reach. His best friend, Billy Poe, can’t even imagine a future for himself, and when he is jailed for a murder he didn’t commit, he gives up. In his eyes, “this place had been waiting for him. There were those who had capabilities and those who didn’t and even in his glory days he had known it, known they would figure it out one day, a bullet he would never dodge.” Meyer’s characters are younger than the middle-aged white working-class people whose death rates Case and Deaton tracked, but they display a similar sense of hopelessness.

Indeed, deindustrialization literature suggests that – as Jennifer Silva found in her study, Coming Up Short – younger working-class people have inherited a feeling of being at once trapped and betrayed, though often with a fuzzier idea of exactly how they have been let down. Two contemporary novels focused on workers in service jobs highlight this well. In Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, we follow restaurant manager Manny DeLeon through his last shift at a suburban Red Lobster that is about to close. He takes pride in his work, but that provides only partial compensation for the conflicts he experiences in his interactions with both the corporation and the other workers, yet he sees no other options for himself.

Finally, one of the most entertaining but also troubling novels I’ve read about contemporary working-class life is Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör. Designed as a mock-Ikea catalog, the novel highlights the soul sucking working conditions of corporate retail through the encounters of the “partners” (sales clerks) of Orsk, an Ikea knock-off, with a horde of zombies. The zombies were imprisoned on that site in the 1830s, when it was the Cuyahoga Panopticon, run by a sadistic warden who believed that hard labor was a “moral treatment that will mend your degraded minds,” while also generating profits for him. While readers may laugh at the line drawings of torture devices like the Alboterk treadmill desk, complete with spikes and shackles, the novel also critiques the limitations that working-class people face when working conditions are exploitative and wages stagnant. As the main character laments, “for all the fighting, all the struggle, all the scrimping, and saving, and double shifts” of recent years, she never has enough money to buy gas and food, and she is always in debt. Rather than recognizing the external causes of her difficulties, however, she internalizes the situation and accepts her fate, believing that this is what she deserves, what “she’d been born to do: wear a uniform and work a register. . . . to answer phones in call centers, to carry bags to customers’ cars, to punch a clock, to measure her life in smoke breaks.” Reading this novel, it’s easy to understand why some might turn to drugs and alcohol, or even to suicide.

Among the most troubling insights from these novels is this: most of these novels focus on characters who are younger than the subjects of Case and Deaton’s study, which suggests a disturbing pattern as the next generation of working-class people come of age. High rates of addiction, depression, and suicide may well continue as some struggle with what has become a long-term “dispossession,” while others accept low expectations as a new normal, as Silva observed in her study. Like the protagonist of Horrorstör, working-class people may come to believe that low wages, poor working conditions, and perpetual struggle are what they deserve. And that is the stuff of tragedy.

This article first appeared at Working-Class Perspectives.

Sherry Linkon is a Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Georgetown University. She is co-author, with John Russo, of Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown(Kansas 2002) and is working on a book-length study of contemporary American literature about deindustrialization.

December 10, 2015
Los Angeles: City Of Losers?

When I arrived in Los Angeles four decades ago, it was clearly a city on the rise, practicing its lines on the way to becoming the dominant metropolis in North America. Today, the City of Angels and much of Southern California lag behind not only a resurgent New York City, but also L.A.’s longtime regional rival, San Francisco, both demographically and economically.

Forty years ago, San Francisco was a quirky, backward-looking town, a haven for the gilded rich and hippies, a quaint but increasingly insignificant town. The Dodgers and the Lakers ruled the California sporting world.

Today things couldn’t be more different. San Francisco and its much bigger southerly neighbor, Silicon Valley, have morphed into the global epicenter of the technology industry, with 25 tech companies on the Fortune 500. In contrast, Los Angeles County, which has almost twice as many people, is home to only 15 Fortune 500 firms total.

Meanwhile, the Giants and the Golden State Warriors have become consistent winners while the Dodgers, Angels and Clippers disappoint and the Lakers are painfully unwatchable.

Although there is a desire to repeat L.A.’s success with the 1984 Olympics and bring football back to town, that would only put a happy veneer over the city’s core problem: the long-term decline of its business sector. In 1984, the city had a strong and highly motivated business elite highlighted by 12 Fortune 500 companies, who could help sponsor the games and provide management expertise. Now there are only three within city limits, with the departure of major corporations such as Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Occidental Petroleum and Toyota, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

In contrast, the Bay Area is full of thriving companies and successful entrepreneurs, many of them astoundingly young. Of the 30 richest people in the country, five live in the Bay Area; Southern California has only one, the Irvine Company visionary Chairman Donald Bren, and he’s in his eighties. The Bay Area accounts for the vast majority of American billionaires under 40; if not for Snapchat’s founders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, as well Elon Musk, who lives in L.A. but spends much of his time working in Northern California, where Tesla and Solar City are located, L.A. would be off the list.

This unfavorable contrast with the Bay Area, sadly, is not just a recent development. Since 1990 Los Angeles County has added a paltry 34,000 jobs while its population has grown 1.2 million. In contrast, the Bay Area, which added roughly the same number of people during the same time, gained a net 500,000 jobs, mostly in the suburbs. In 1990 Los Angeles had around the same number of private-sector jobs per person as the Bay Area, roughly 410 per 1,000; today Los Angeles’ private-sector jobs to population ratio has dropped to 364 per 1,000 while the Bay Area’s has grown to 415. Worse yet, while the Bay Area has increased its share of high-wage jobs to 33 percent since 1990, Los Angeles percentage fell to 27.7 percent.

How L.A. Blew It In Technology

As recently as the 1970s, as UCLA’s Michael Storper has pointed out, L.A. stood on the cutting edge not only in hardware, but also software. Computer Sciences Corp. was the first software company to be listed on a national stock exchange. In 1969, UCLA’s Leonard Kleinrock invented the digital packet switch, one of the keys to the Internet.

In 1970, IT’s share of the economy in greater Los Angeles and in the Bay Area was about the same (in absolute terms it was bigger in L.A.). By 2010, IT’s share was four times bigger in the north than in the south.

Storper links the decline in large part to the strategies of the biggest high-tech companies in the L.A. area: Lockheed Martin, Rockwell and TRW focused on defense and space, essentially becoming dependent on government spending. In contrast, the Bay Area technology community, although also initially tied to Washington, began to move into more commercial applications. In the process they also developed a huge network of venture capitalists who would continue to help found and finance fledgling firms.

Today the San Jose area enjoys the highest percentage of workers in STEM (science technology engineering and mathematics-related jobs) in the country, over three times the national average. San Francisco and its immediate environs, largely as a result of the social media boom, now has a location quotient for STEM jobs of 1.75, meaning it has 75% more tech jobs per capita than the national average. In contrast, the Los Angeles area barely makes it to the national average.

Southern California remains an attractive to place to live, but it’s hard to imagine it as the next Silicon Valley. L.A. had its chance, and, sadly, it blew it.

The Growing Demographic Crisis

Storper and other critics suggest that Los Angeles failed in part because it tried to maintain high-wage blue collar industries while the Bay Area focused on information and biotechnology. The problem now, however, are the factors in L.A. that drive industry away, such as ultra-high electricity prices and a high level of regulation. Even amidst the recent industrial boom in many other parts of the country, Los Angeles has continued to lose manufacturing jobs; Los Angeles’ industrial job count stands at 363,900, still the largest number in the nation, but down sharply from 900,000 just a decade ago.

This decline places L.A in a demographic dilemma. Like the Midwestern states that lured African-American to fill industrial jobs during the Great Migration, L.A. attracted a large number of largely poorly educated immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America. These people came for jobs in factories, logistics and home-building, but now find themselves stranded in an economy with little place for them outside low-end services.

Although inequality and racial disparities also exist in the Bay Area, the issue is far more relevant in Southern California. The Bay Area’s population is increasingly dominated by well-educated Anglos and Asians. San Francisco’s population is 22 percent black or Hispanic; in Los Angeles, this percentage approaches 60 percent.

Poverty and lack of upward mobility are the biggest threats to the region. In Los Angeles, a recent United Way study found 35 percent of households were “struggling,” essentially living check to check, compared to 24 percent for the Bay Area.

A recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality found that, once adjusted for cost of living, Los Angeles has the highest level of poverty in the state, 26.1 percent. Rents are out of control for many people who are struggling in an increasingly low-wage dominated economy. In fact, Los Angeles now is the least affordable city for renters, based on income, according to a recent UCLA paper.

Is There A Way Out?

Despite these myriad challenges, Los Angeles, and indeed all of Southern California, is far from a hopeless case. It is unlikely to become the next Detroit and is better positioned by natural and human resources than it’s similarly troubled big city competitor Chicago. It still enjoys arguably the best climate of any major city in the world, remains the home of Hollywood, the nation’s dominant ports and a still impressive array of hospitals and universities.

At least some of the city’s leadership has begun to recognize the challenges facing the region. “The city where the future once came to happen,” a devastating blue ribbon report recently intoned, “is living the past and leaving tomorrow to sort itself out.”

This recognition might be the first step toward a turnaround, but the area really has increasingly little control over its own fate. Today San Francisco and its immediate environs, despite its much smaller population, is home to virtually every powerful politician in the state: both its U.S. Senators, the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor and the Attorney General. Not surprisingly, state policies on everything from greenhouse gases, urban density and transit to social issues follows lines that originate in, and largely benefit, San Francisco.

Most troubling of all, the local leadership seems clueless about how to resuscitate the economy, or even how this vast region actually operates. Neither another Olympics nor getting a football team or two will make a difference. Even worse is the effort by Mayor Eric Garcetti to densify the city to resemble a sun-baked version of New York.

This has been part of the agenda for developers, greens and most local academics for the better part of 30 years. But the problem remains: Los Angeles, and even more so its surrounding region, is notNew York, nor can it ever be. It is, and will remain, a car-dominated, multi-polar city for the foreseeable future. After all the vast majority of Southern California’s population growth — roughly 75 percent — came after the Second World War and the demise of the Red Cars, L.A.’s much lamented pre-war transit system.

Some outside observers such as progressive blogger Matt Yglesias now envision L.A. as “the next great transit city.” Yet in reality, despite spending $10 billion on new transit projects, the share of transit commuters has actually dropped since 1990; today nearly 31 percent of New York area commuters take public transportation, while 6.9 percent do so in Los Angeles-Orange County.

People take cars because, for most, it’s the quickest way to work. Few transit trips take less time, door to door than traveling by car, not to mention the convenience of working at home. The average transit rider in Los Angeles spends 48 minutes getting to work, compared to people driving alone, at 27 minutes.

This reflects L.A.’s great dispersion of employment, which is not compatible with a transit-driven culture. In greater New York, 20 percent of the workforce labors in the central core; in San Francisco, the percentage is roughly 10 percent. But barely 2 percent do so in Los Angeles. The current, much ballyhooed revival of downtown Los Angeles then is less a reflection of economic forces, than the preferences of a relatively small portion of population for a more urban lifestyle and as market for Asian flight capital. Its population of 50,000 is about the same as Sherman Oaks or the recently minted city of Eastvale in the Inland Empire.

Rather than seek to become someplace else, Los Angeles has to confront its key problems, like its woeful infrastructure, particularly roads, among the worst in the country, and a miserable education system. These are among the likely reasons why people with children are leaving Los Angeles faster than any major region of the country.

Yet Los Angeles is not without allure. Overall Los Angeles-Orange has grown its ranks of new educated workers between 25 and 34 since 2011 as much as New York and San Francisco and much more than Portland.

Perhaps most promising is the region’s status as the number one producer of engineers in the country, almost 3,000 annually. This raw material is now being somewhat wasted, with as many as 70 percent leaving town to find work.

What Los Angeles needs to do is to provide the entrepreneurial opportunities to keep its young at home, particularly the tech oriented. As the Bay Area has shown, it is possible to reshape an economy based on pre-existing strength. For L.A. the best regional strategy would be based on a remarkably diverse economy dominated by smaller firms, a population that, for the most part, seeks out quiet residential neighborhoods and often prefers working closer to home than battling their way to what remains a still unexceptional downtown.

One place where Los Angeles could shine is in melding the arts and technology. Unlike New York, which has relatively few engineers, Los Angeles still has the largest supply in the country. The Bay Area may be more appealing to nerddom, but is unexceptional in the arts. This revival will not come from the remaining suits in L.A.; roughly half of workers in the arts are self-employed, according to the economic forecasting firm EMSI.

This entrepreneurial trend will continue since, with the studio system clearly in decline, as large productions go elsewhere, digital players such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple as well as Los Angeles based Hulu have become more important. Los Angeles could expand its arts-related niche by supplying the content that these expanding digital pipelines require.

Given the corporate exodus, and the difficult California business climate, overall L.A.’s recovery must come from the bottom up, and be dispersed throughout the region. According to Kauffman Foundation research, the L.A. area already has the second highest number of entrepreneurs per 100 people in the country, just slightly behind the Bay Area.

The next L.A. can succeed, but not by trying to duplicate New York or San Francisco. Instead there’s a need for greater appreciation why so many millions migrated here in the first place: great weather, beaches, suburban-like living and entrepreneurial opportunities. Only when the local leadership rediscovers the uniqueness of L.A.’s DNA can the region undergo the renaissance of this most naturally blessed of places.

This article first appeared at Forbes.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: Downtown Los Angeles toward the Hollywood Hills and the San Fernando Valley (by Wendell Cox)

December 9, 2015
How Oklahoma City Decided to Change Its Image

I was in Oklahoma City for the first time earlier this year. I got to see a lot of the things I’d heard about, such as the in-progress Project 180, a $175 million plan to rethink and rebuild every downtown street.

OKC is not yet where it needs to be in a number of respects. Very little of the side has sidewalks, for example. But they are pedaling in the right direction, and making some smart choices about what to do – and equally as importantly, how to pay for it. If you visit you’ll also get a sense of the city’s ambitions for more.

I have a short piece in the most recent City Journal about OKC, which is now available online. Here’s an excerpt:

In 1991, Oklahoma City lost out to Indianapolis in the competition for a United Airlines maintenance base. Mayor Ron Norick wanted to know why. He was certain that Oklahoma City had put the most compelling financial deal on the table for United. The company answered that its decision had nothing to do with the subsidy package. Rather, United simply couldn’t imagine its employees living in a place as bleak as Oklahoma City. “The quality of life had sunk so low we couldn’t buy someone’s attention,” as current mayor Mick Cornett puts it. “No matter how many incentive dollars we put in place, corporate America wasn’t interested in us.”

Click through to read the whole thing.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Contributing Editor at City Journal. He writes at The Urbanophile, where this piece originally appeared.

December 8, 2015
Paris and the Politics of Climate

To some, particularly in the green movement, this month’s Paris climate change summit represents something like the great synods of the early Christian era, where truth and policy, for example, on pastoral celibacy, were determined by the princes of the church. Some others, largely marginalized on the fringes of the Right, insist the whole extravaganza is part of a vast left-wing conspiracy to delude people into accepting a world government.

Lost in translation is that the Paris conference is largely a sideshow camouflaging a potentially epic struggle among national, regional and economic interests. This mundane reality is often lost amid the apocalyptic rhetoric, such as employed by Gov. Jerry Brown, that insists draconian action is necessary to avoid the species’ imminent “extinction.”

In the real world, everything boils down to the winners and, arguably, the many more losers from the relentless drive to “decarbonize” the economy. Economist Bjorn Lonborg suggests that, by 2100, climate change policies will cost about a $1 trillion each year. Although scientists, bureaucrats, nonprofits and connected corporatists might actually benefit from decarbonizing quickly, it’s hard to see how most people will benefit from such an upheaval.

Not surprisingly, a growing number of people in key countries have become increasingly less interested in sacrificing their lives for some impending but not-yet-occurring catastrophe. In fact, a recent BBC poll covering some 20 countries found a decreasing interest in the climate agenda in all but three – Russia, Turkey and Spain. In many countries, including the United Kingdom, despite almost incessant media coverage, the public has become more skeptical about paying for far-reaching climate policies.

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo by Flickr user presidenciamx.

December 7, 2015
Traffic: Rome’s Not-So-Smart Car Squeeze

Who would have thought that city planners in Oklahoma City would be more bike and pedestrian friendly, and better at taming car traffic, than those in Rome? In Oklahoma City, Mayor Mick Cornett has reordered the city’s transportation priorities away from cars, and toward exercise and fitness. Speaking of OKC’s car-centric era, the mayor said “We had built an incredible quality of life, if you happen to be a car. But if you have to be a person, you are combatting the car seemingly at every turn.” By contrast, Rome remains wedded to the automobile, to the point that it’s turning into the Eternal Parking Lot.

Cornett has added sidewalks and bike lanes, and even put in some kayak parks downtown, leading OKC residents through a collective weight loss campaign that he estimates to have totaled one million pounds. Rome, meanwhile, must rank with Moscow, Dubai, and Lagos as one of the most automobile-dominated cities in the world.

What madness possessed me to take a bicycle into Rome? I had biked from Florence to Siena, across the heart of Tuscan wine country, and was simply continuing on two wheels. The reason I know: I went there on a bike.

Outside the classical city I could skirt cobblestones and ride in bus lanes (Rome has a few bike paths, but they begin and end nowhere, a bit like the country’s politics).

Once inside the famed city gates, slick cobblestones made biking feel like a ride on a roller-coaster off the rails. As I headed into central Rome I knew the cobblestones and the taxi drivers might make it a rough journey, but I had forgotten the extent to which Rome is the world capital of lane-changing, that frantic need to get around every slow or parked car.

Knowing Rome fairly well I switched to back alleys and one-way streets, where I discovered that not only does the city’s traffic have aspects of colliding atoms, but that the emergence of economical Smart Cars and small electric vehicles has made it possible for many more Romans to squeeze their motorized vehicles into the city’s historic corners.

No matter which historic piazza I crossed or which road I took I came face-to-face with one of the motorized creatures — some the size of golf carts — that Romans drive literally everywhere.

If Caesar’s assassins were now to stalk him near the Forum, I am sure they would do so in tiny Fiats and, while stabbing him, park on the sidewalk with their emergency lights flashing.

Everywhere I went in Rome, cars were littered. There were cars all around the Vatican, in the small squares of Trastevere, around the Colosseum, and up against the Forum.

Not only is Rome the empire of errant cars, its sidewalks — perhaps laid out to confuse invading Huns — have to be the worst in Europe. Walking two abreast is impossible. Instead, between the cars careening around medieval piazzas or parked against doorways, pedestrians must walk single-file, like a retreating army.

The solution to Rome’s clogged arteries is to ban (during the waking hours) cars, trucks, motor scooters, tour buses, four-by-fours, and Harleys from the historic downtown, and to return the small cobblestoned streets to their rightful owners: classical architecture and pedestrians.

For traveling through and outside the original city center, Rome has an underground metro, trams, and many buses which could stick to the main avenues. It might inconvenience some, but for the majority, and that includes the global heirs of the Roman republic, the city would again be a delight.

Venice solved the problem of burdensome traffic by filling its streets with water. Other European cities — the old town of Dubrovnik, Orleans in France, and Copenhagen come to mind — have successfully put pedestrians and bicycles first.

If its cars were evicted, Rome would become one of the world’s great open air museums, on a par with the old city of Jerusalem, parts of Marrakech, and with some sidewalk areas in Paris, although I doubt Rome will ever break with the automobile.

Rome is sinking under the weight of its exhaust pipes not only because of its traffic. The city shares the nation’s political problems: one hundred and fifty years after its independence, Italy is still best understood as a fragmented state, the Yugoslavia of the European Union, with a dysfunctional judiciary, parliament, executive branch, and treasury, and the fear that the center will not hold.

To understand the level of executive and parliamentary incompetence, consider that, since the Fascist government was toppled in World War II, about forty-three men have served as prime minister, and the parliament has had more than sixty changes to its governing coalition. Only one government in this period has served out its five-year term.

The biggest reason for Italy’s political stalemate is that the country’s north-south divide has remained unresolved, some would say since Garibaldi marched on Rome in 1862.

Northern Italy has a prosperous manufacturing base, a balanced budget, low debt to its GDP, dynamic cities (Milan, Turin, Venice, Bologna), and strong tourist and export revenue. The south, which includes Naples and Sicily, is a huge consumer of government subsidies, heavily reliant on inefficient agricultural systems, and has less manufacturing than the North. Rome is a nether world between the two blocs.

Youth unemployment in Naples is said to be 50 percent, and GDP per capita is some $40,000 less in the south than in the north. Sicily today may have less to fear from the mafia, but greater danger from joblessness.

The specter of Italy dividing along its north-south seam — as if after an earthquake in the Apennines — is, I believe, the reason that no one wants a strong federal government in Rome. Little government is thought to be less offensive to most than at even some degree of functional government would be.

Rome is the symbol of this fragmented state, with its allure of past and future greatness, and its present vanishing under a layer of soot, corruption, and waste.

David Gilmour ends his excellent history, The Pursuit of Italy, with, “Yet the millennia of [the Italians] past and the vulnerability of their placement have made it impossible for them to create a successful nation-state.”

In Oklahoma City, my favorite mayor can expand the sidewalks and lay down more bike lanes, much as he can argue for a balanced budget. In Rome, however, no one can take on the car lobby because no one, politically, is out strolling arm-in-arm. For one thing, the sidewalks don’t allow it.

Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author most recently of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays, and Whistle-Stopping America. His next book, Reading the Rails, will be published in 2016. He lives in Switzerland.

Flickr photo by Andrew Moore: Parking, Italian Style — A Fiat 500 in Rome

December 5, 2015
How Many People Will Live in Africa in 2050 and 2100?
Large declines in fertility will depend on raising female literacy above 80%.

Every few years, the United Nations Population Division releases demographic projections for the entire world and for every country, region and continent. Although the UN’s database is the most used source on demographics, the data is not equally reliable for all countries.

Countries in the developed world conduct regular censuses and produce detailed numbers that are considered reliable. Less developed countries conduct censuses on an irregular basis or are completely unable to conduct them and have instead to rely on demographic sampling. In the poorest countries of the world, most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa, censuses are infrequent or nonexistent and even sampling can be irregular and unreliable.

This poses a problem today because the biggest population growth by far is expected to take place in these same poor countries. In order to get a fair picture of the world population in the 21st century, we need to get reliable data from the fastest growing region.

François Pelletier who heads the UN’s Population Estimates and Projections Section told populyst that he considers the data for the next 35 years, that is the projections for the years 2015-2050, to be fairly reliable, with greater confidence in the near years than in the later years. The further the horizon of the projections, the greater the uncertainty. In this regard, Pelletier suggested that the projections beyond 2075, especially those focusing on the median trajectory at the country level, be treated with some degree of caution.

This makes perfect sense because a small change in the assumptions for child mortality and total fertility ratios (TFR = average children per woman) will have a relatively small impact in the near years and a cumulatively larger impact in the later years.

For example, if we assume for sub-Saharan Africa a low variant fertility ratio of 4.02 children per woman in 2020-2025 instead of a medium variant closer to 4.42, the cumulative impact of this change adds up to a difference in population size of ‘only’ 80 million people after ten years, a 5% deviation, but of as many as 600 million after fifty years, a 20% deviation.

Another source of demographic projections is the Vienna-based Wittgenstein Centre and it has cast doubt on the UN’s projections for world and Africa populations. In a note written by Samir KC, the Centre argues that the UN’s projections are too high because the fertility ratio in Africa is likely to fall faster than the UN predicts.

The Centre’s rationale is reached through analogy with the Asian fertility decline between 1970 and 1990 which was steeper than is predicted by the UN for Africa. Samir KC writes (our emphasis):

Once countries urbanize and citizens become wealthier, fertility declines everywhere.

The most important factor is women’s education. Already today, an Ethiopian woman with secondary education has on average only 1.6 children, compared to a woman with no education who has 6 children.

This relationship is true across Africa (see figure).

We know that access to education is expanding across Africa. There is even talk of an education dividend.

Once all girls go to school and stay there longer, they will have fewer children, especially as they will also be exposed to a more modern lifestyle, be it through TV, the cell phone and the fact that Africa is urbanizing rapidly.

This has also been the experience in Asia. It took about 20 years in Asia for its fertility to decline from more than 5 children per woman during early 1970s to less than 3 children per woman in early 1990s.

Similarly, India took about 20 years for its fertility to decline from 4.7 children per woman in early 1980s to 3.1 by early 2000s.

With new development and the plans for the better future in the making, it won’t be a surprise if the average African family would have only three children as soon as 2035.

If that assumption bears out, then Africa cannot reach 4 billion — and the world would peak this century at below 10 billion.

So who is right, the UN or the Wittgenstein Centre?

First, let us look at what each party is projecting. Second, let us examine in greater depth the correlation between fertility ratios and female literacy. Finally, let us see if the Wittgenstein Centre’s use of the Asian precedent makes sense for Africa.

Running the Numbers

The adjoining tables (click to enlarge) show the UN’s projections for its low and medium variants. We ignore the high variant and other variants for now because our main purpose is to discuss whether the medium variant is too high, as alleged by the Wittgenstein Centre.

If we look at the two variants for the year 2050 in the table below, we can see that the difference in population size in sub-Saharan Africa is about 200 million or approximately 10% of the total, a non negligible deviation but one that does not fundamentally alter one’s view of the future. Looking further out to 2100, the difference is much more significant at nearly 1.2 billion or about 30% of the total.

Going through the same comparison for the whole world, the difference is 1 billion in 2050 and a big 4 billion in 2100, respectively 10% and 50% of the total. Also highlighted are figures for India, another high growth country.

The Wittgenstein forecast is a bit lower than the UN’s low variant and assumes a sub-Saharan fertility ratio of 3.0 instead of 3.25 for the UN. Its population estimates for Africa in 2100 is 2.6 billion people, marginally lower than the UN’s low variant which is at 3 billion. We say “marginally” only in the sense that this difference looks large but it results from a small change in assumptions starting now 85 years earlier.

Female literacy and Fertility Ratios

Looking at women’s education, it is clear that female literacy, the cornerstone of Wittgenstein projections, is further behind in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other region of the world. The Indian subcontinent and the Middle East/North Africa also lag the rest of the world. Table 1 below shows that the lag in female literacy has been most pronounced in Southern Asia, Africa and the Middle East (Western Asia). Encouragingly, table 2 shows that the lag is significantly narrower among younger people.

It is clear that literacy is improving in Africa. The Oxford economist Max Roser compiled this map from UNESCO data and published it on his site Our World in Data. Click on the map to use the interactive feature.

The data shows solid progress in the literacy rate for youth aged 15-24, compared to older groups. For example, 66% of Nigeria’s youth (15-24) are literate, compared to 51% for the overall adult population (defined as 15+ here) and only 22% for the elderly population (65+). Other sub-Saharan countries show a similar progression.

The countries with the highest literacy rate among the youth group are also the ones with the lowest fertility ratios. Botswana and South Africa have youth literacy rates of 95% and 99% and TFRs of 2.9 and 2.4, respectively.

One surprising data point is Kenya with a literacy rate of 82% and a TFR of 4.4. Though lower than the 5.1 sub-Saharan average, Kenya’s TFR is still quite high, suggesting that the biggest decline in fertility may occur at a literacy rate that is higher than 80% or 85%. It may be that the TFR falls slowly as literacy rises from 50% to 85% and falls rapidly as it rises from 85% to 100%.

In order to examine this hypothesis, we compiled the following tables and charts.

The table shows rates of female literacy for all sub-Saharan countries (except Congo, Somalia and South Sudan). Many of these figures may not be reliable but the trend is clear that female literacy is improving all over the African subcontinent.

Plotting these figures, we reach the most important conclusion which is that the biggest decline in total fertility takes place after female literacy rises over 80%. Under 80%, the fall in TFRs and correlation with literacy is very weak. Excluding all countries with female adult literacy over 80%, the regression has an r-squared of only 0.29 (0.21 if the outlier Niger is also removed). Data from Burundi, Equatorial Guinea and Uganda look somewhat suspect with literacy over 80% and TFRs at 6.5, 4.97 and 6.1.

There may be cultural factors that may slow down this dynamic. In order to get a fuller picture, we looked for data on gender inequality. The United Nations Development Programme ranks countries by gender inequality. As shown in the table below, sub-Saharan African countries dominate the bottom of the ranking. It is not surprising that countries ranked lowest on the Gender Inequality Index also have the lowest female literacy and highest fertility ratios. Niger, Mali, Chad, DR Congo, Mozambique, Liberia, CAR all still have youth female literacy well below or barely above 50%. Niger looks especially challenging with a TFR of 7.7 and very low female literacy.

Non-African countries among the bottom 30 include lowest-ranked Yemen (152nd), Afghanistan (149th), Papua New Guinea (135th), Haiti (132nd), Egypt (130th), Pakistan (127th), India (127th) and Syria (125th). Nigeria and a number of others were not ranked in the latest data.

Analogy with Asia 1970-1990

Finally, does the Wittgenstein’s use of the precedent of Asia in 1970-1990 make sense for Africa now? We can see in the tables above that the fertility ratio in Asia fell from 5 in 1970 to 3 in 1990.

We can also see that China played a big role in this decline with its own TFR falling from 5 to 2. The one-child policy contributed to this accelerated decline but a big leap in literacy from about 50% to well over 90% was also a big contributor. Our hypothesis that fertility falls modestly under 80% female literacy, and collapses precipitously above 80% is supported by the Chinese experience. Literacy rose in the 1950s and 1960s but the TFR was still at 6.3 children per woman in 1965-70, very close to the 1950-55 TFR of 6.11. But twenty years later in 1985-90, female youth literacy exceeded 90% and the TFR fell to 2.75.

India is following a similar path with its female youth literacy ratio rising from 67.7 in 2001 to 87.2 in 2015 and its TFR falling from 3.3 in 2001 to 2.48 now. In the case of India however, the decline appears more gradual and is not obviously faster above the 80% literacy threshold. The table and graph below show that in the case of India the correlation holds well for literacy rates that are well below 80%.

Other considerations

Another way to gauge the validity of the Asia analogy is to see whether Asia was more or less developed in 1970 than sub-Saharan Africa is today. If Asia was more developed, then the analogy may not be valid and the decline in African TFR will likely be slower. In order to answer this question, we look at electricity consumption per capita as a proxy for development.

According to the World Bank, electricity consumption per capita in 1970 was 150 kilowatt hour (kWh) in China and 95 kWh in India. Below are the figures for the most populous countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Per capita electricity consumption in Kenya and Nigeria in 2012 (most recent World Bank data) looked roughly in line with China in 1970, while DR Congo and Tanzania in 2012 looked closer to India’s consumption in 1970. In the absence of a more robust method, we could say that the TFR in Kenya and Nigeria could decline like China’s in 1970-90, while the TFR in DR Congo and Tanzania could decline like India’s, and the TFR in Ethiopia and Uganda could decline even more slowly.

Under this scenario, the TFR for Kenya and Nigeria would fall to 2 by 2035, while in DR Congo and Tanzania, it would fall to only around 4, and in Ethiopia and Uganda to a still higher level.

In a similar vein, we could look at urbanization since people living in urban areas tend to have fewer children. With the exception of Uganda, all the countries in the table appear more urbanized than China was in 1970. The percentages shown for DR Congo (42%) and Nigeria (46.9%) look suspect because they are not far below China’s current percentage of urbanization 54.4%. It looks like definitions of urbanization differ across countries and we may fall back on electricity consumption as a more reliable indicator.

Conclusion

All in, the answer to how fast African TFRs will decline remains elusive. We can however draw the following conclusions:
- Demographics are not on automatic pilot. Proactive intervention to raise female literacy, to invest in infrastructure and to improve governance will all have a significant impact on future fertility rates. Absent these measures, it should not be assumed that TFRs will decline in Africa as fast as they did in Asia. They may remain high or they may decline for other reasons such as food or water scarcity.
- The correlation between female literacy and fertility ratios is neither linear nor gradual. In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, TFRs seem to decline rapidly above 80% female literacy. Below 80%, the correlation is negligible or nonexistent.
- The recent history of Asian fertility may or may not be a reliable precedent for Africa. China’s evolution in particular was greatly impacted by government policy, including the one-child policy, the literacy campaigns and the expansion of global trade.
- Data from Africa and other less developed countries is generally unreliable. For example, it is possible that literacy rates and/or fertility rates for some African countries are inflated. It is also possible as a consequence that the relationship between literacy and fertility is in fact quite linear, as seen in the case of India.
Sami Karam is the founder and editor of populyst.net and the creator of the populyst index™. populyst is about innovation, demography and society. Before populyst, he was the founder and manager of the Seven Global funds and a fund manager at leading asset managers in Boston and New York. In addition to a finance MBA from the Wharton School, he holds a Master’s in Civil Engineering from Cornell and a Bachelor of Architecture from UT Austin.

Some sources used in this article:

UNESCO Institute for Statistics: ADULT AND YOUTH LITERACY: National, regional and global trends, 1985-2015

UNESCO Institute for Statistics: ADULT AND YOUTH LITERACY: Global Trends in Gender Parity

Population Institute: How Female Literacy Affects Fertility: The Case of India

Sreemarti Chakrabarti: Women and Adult Literacy in China

World image by BigStockPhoto.com.
December 4, 2015