Link Banana

The Financial Times recently ran an interesting story profiling seven “average” people from the country of 1.1 billion.

A generation ago, the “Indian dream” would almost certainly have involved a ticket to Vancouver, London or New York. That is less true today. Daru, like so many of her peers, thinks she can best build her future here. “India now has enough opportunities for my generation,” she says. “I have friends who have gone to the US and to the UK to earn some money, but then they come back. I see a lot of youngsters thinking of coming back to their friends and family.”

(via MeFi)

In an excellent overview of suburbs in the United States, The Economist recently pointed to an interesting fact: while suburbs are increasingly diverse, urban areas are becoming whiter.

According to William Frey, a demographer, the white population of big-city suburbs grew by 7% between 2000 and 2006. In the same period the suburban Asian population grew by 16%, the black population by 24% and the Hispanic population by an astonishing 60%. Many immigrants to America now move directly to the suburbs without passing through established urban ghettos. Having conquered suburbia, ethnic-minority groups are now swiftly infiltrating the more distant “exurbs”.

As the suburbs become more mixed, some inner-city areas are turning less so. Los Angeles, which markets itself as the city “where the world comes together”, and New York (“the world’s second home”) both added whites and lost blacks between 2000 and 2006. So many blacks moved out of Los Angeles that, were the exodus to continue unabated, they would disappear from the city around 2050. Manhattan and San Francisco lost Hispanics as well as blacks, which is remarkable given that group’s speedy growth in the country as a whole. Meanwhile, the world came together on their fringes.

The Economist compares the cost of living in cities around the world. I was rather surprised that neither London nor New York came out on top. As proof of my ignorance they say Norway’s Oslo has topped the list since 2005.

Also, this map of American cities and their singles sex ratio has been floating around. It appears to have originated on The Daily Dish. It appears to be related to Richard Florida’s recent Who’s Your City?

I’ll leave the analysis of this interesting data to Mr. Yglesias:

You’ll see that Los Angeles, despite its reputation, is surprisingly dense. Conversely, transit-friendly Portland isn’t especially dense (less so than Houston or Dallas or Las Vegas) which goes to show how much smart policy matters — if all 23 denser-than-Portland cities on the list were as savvy as Portland about bikes, pedestrians, and transit we’d have a much better environmental situation in the country without constructing any new, denser urban areas.

Maybe I’m the only one who enjoys discussions about demographics and voting patterns, but I thought this was interesting:

America’s suburbs used to be bastions of Republicanism. No longer. Robert Lang of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, examined the voting behaviour of metropolitan counties and found that close-in suburbs now reliably vote for Democrats. That should be expected: as they become more urban, their residents care more about public transport, schools and other government-sponsored activities—and they attract more city types, often of a liberal bent, from the urban centres.

So emerging suburbs and exurbs, the farthest-out among them, are the new political battleground. George Bush poured resources into this urban fringe in 2004, says Mr Lang, running up larger margins there than when he lost the popular vote in 2000. The result was Mr Bush’s more impressive re-election.

This week’s Economist makes the argument that total GDP, which is usually used for measures of growth from country to country doesn’t work very well. Because it ignores the direction of population size, it distorts the picture in favor of growing countries — and misses the fact that the US is already in a recession.

Once you accept that growth in GDP per head is the best way to measure economic performance, the standard definition of a recession—a decline in real GDP over some period (eg, two consecutive quarters or year on year)—also seems flawed. For example, zero GDP growth in Japan, where the population is declining, would still leave the average citizen better off. But in America, the average person would be worse off. A better definition of recession, surely, is a fall in average income per person. On this basis, America has been in recession since the fourth quarter of last year when its GDP rose by an annualised 0.6%, implying that real income per head fell by 0.4%.

There’s a fascinating and — to me — counter-intuitive article in March’s The Atlantic. Christopher Leinberger makes this interesting contention:

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.

The Economist says black is the new white. At least as far as fleeing poorer urban neighborhoods in California is concerned.

Since 1990 the city’s black population has dropped by a quarter, from 488,000 to 364,000, even as the overall number of residents rose. The exodus is most noticeable in areas where blacks were once concentrated, such as Compton and Crenshaw. The population of the 35th congressional district, over which the old-fashioned race warrior Maxine Waters holds sway, is now less than one-third black. “It’s becoming hard to find black neighbourhoods,” says Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California.

There is also the important point that this movement, like most movement affected by real estate prices, has stalled with the recent mortgage crisis.

The Economist has an interesting look at the way internal migration is changing the density of the interior United States. If you do nothing else, click the link and see the map.

Two-fifths of all counties are shrinking. In general, people are moving to places that are warm, mountainous or suburban. They are leaving many rural areas, with the most relentless decline in a broad band stretching from western Texas to North Dakota. In parts, the Great Plains are more sparsely populated now than they were in the late 19th century, when the government declared them to be deserted.

The Economist has an interesting story about the new dynamics within Germany’s rapidly-growing Jewish community.

By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Germany’s Jewish community had only 30,000 ageing members and was dwindling rapidly. Today it is the third-largest, and the fastest-growing, Jewish population in western Europe, after France and Britain. Between 1991, when the country was unified and immigration rules relaxed, and 2005, more than 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union emigrated to Germany. (At the same time, more than a million emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel and about 350,000 to America, leaving only about 800,000 behind.) In some parts of Germany, immigrants—usually referred to as “the Russians”—make up 90% of the local Jewish population.