Consider in this light the upper reaches of the workforce. During the 20th century, white Americans monopolized the highest-paying jobs. In 2000, nearly 85 percent of the baby-boom workers occupying the top quarter of occupations (ranked by annual salary) were white.

But, since the beginning of the new century—and as a consequence in part of the demographic decline in the numbers of young whites entering the labor market—the young adults starting these jobs have increasingly been non-white or Hispanic. (These figures are derived from the Census, so I use the Census term “Hispanic” in that context.) Now, one-third of the new job entrants are minorities. That means not just more persons of color with good incomes, but fewer whites in positions of authority—to decide who gets hired or promoted.

But there’s a catch. The minority individuals benefitting from upper-level opportunity are predominantly from recent immigrant backgrounds—they are mainly Asian Americans, both immigrant and native-born, and U.S.-born Latinos. But the share of Black Americans in these good jobs has budged just slightly over time and hovers around 5 percent.

A similar disparity appears in the surging diversity at colleges and universities, which is likewise dominated by immigrant-origin minorities. The 2019 report of the American Council on Education highlights a steep rise in the number of Latino graduates—including a doubling of the annual number earning baccalaureates in 2004-14 alone. Correspondingly, the share of whites among graduates dropped from 73 to 64 percent in the same period. At elite universities, the white share of students has fallen sharply over several decades.

But for Black Americans, the decades of the new century have not brought such good news. Their college graduation rates grew strongly during the second half of the 20th century but have slumped recently. That same ACE report notes that Black students have relatively high rates of dropout from baccalaureate programs, and have the highest level of student indebtedness. At a time of rapidly growing diversity among college students, the stagnating fortunes of Black students are an unacknowledged crisis.

These patterns resonate with U.S. history. During the quarter century following World War II—a period of momentous ethnic change, when mass assimilation ushered previously marginalized eastern European Jews and Irish and Italian Catholics into what had been an Anglo-Saxon Protestant mainstream—immigrant-origin groups leapfrogged over African Americans.

On a smaller scale, a similar assimilation seems to be happening today.

American society continues to operate in two registers for minority Americans, as it has done historically. The registers, taking the term in its musical sense, refer to the notes, or signals, that people, especially young people, perceive in their everyday environments and in contacts with institutions such as schools and the police.

In one register, bright notes outweigh dissonant ones and encourage many youth to strive for the mainstream. In that register, ethnic and racial distinctions diminish in importance; and there’s a chorus of voices proclaiming that we live in a meritocracy where young can be whomever they want to be. In the other register, the notes are more uniformly somber. The tune here is that only the most exceptional will escape the severe disadvantages of their minority status; everyone else need not try.

The common view holds that this disparity among non-white minorities is connected with skin color. But in reality, it has more to do with the different ways that groups have arrived, either through immigration or through conquest and enslavement. Embedded in the nation’s historical psyche are preferences for immigrants as individuals who have chosen America to improve their lives. But also embedded are prejudices against the descendants of enslaved and colonized peoples—because of the continuing influence of moral justifications used by whites during slavery and conquest. Some immigrants and their children also feel this prejudice, especially those with very dark skin, and those who have been denied legal status despite long residence.

The increasing inclusion of minorities in mainstream settings is now reaching into, and altering, American families. A widely noted trend of recent decades has been the steady increase in intermarriage: Since the Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967, the percentage of intermarriages among newlyweds has risen from 3 percent to 17 percent, or one out of every six marriages. The great majority of them unite a white partner with a minority one.

The mixing in families is the most revelatory indicator of the quiet ethno-racial reshaping of the societal mainstream. It is impacting America’s child population in ways that have profound long-run implications. According to my analysis of birth certificates, almost 15 percent of the babies born in 2018 had parents from different ethnic or racial groups, and 11 percent—or one of every nine—had a white parent and a minority one. The most common combination by far involves whites partnering with Hispanics.

The obvious question is where children from multiple backgrounds fit in a still racially divided American society. This question holds particular import for those children with white and minority parentage.

The evidence about mixed minority-white Americans that we have to date, though far from complete, is broadly consistent. It includes census data, large-scale surveys (especially by Pew), and in-depth interview studies. The bulk of these (mainly) young people appear to be participating in diverse social worlds. They have grown up with whites and count whites among their close childhood and adult friends; they have high rates of marriage to whites as well, which is perhaps most telling. In addition, their educational attainment is greater, on average, than would be the case if it was determined mainly by their minority origin.

The self-identities of this growing cohort of mixed minority-white Americans are unusually fluid, but typically incorporate their white ancestry. As the sociologist Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl describes Asian-whites in her insightful study, they feel “white enough,” but not exclusively white.

Americans with mixed Black and white parentage are the hugely important exception. By and large, they grow up in less affluent circumstances and are exposed to more severe individual and institutional discrimination (evidenced by, among many other things, their frequent complaints of mistreatment at the hands of the police). They are more comfortable with Blacks than with whites and usually identify with the Black sides of their family heritage. Yet, despite the racism that impacts their lives, they too exhibit a level of integration with whites that exceeds that of other African Americans: they are as likely to marry whites as to marry Blacks.

The mainstream in many parts of the U.S. is tilting away from exclusive whiteness. The naming of Kamala Harris as the Democratic vice presidential candidate is one more indicator of this tilt. But Harris’s background cuts another way, too, and is a reminder of the dual registers of our society. In this century, both major-party nominees of color for national office—the California senator, and President Obama—had an immigrant parent and came from racially mixed families, reminding us of the selectivity of the processes diversifying the mainstream.

As these inclusive processes advance, they may call into question the harshness of racism. But as long as American society continues to operate in the second register, where the individual and institutional processes of racism stifle Black Americans and some other minorities, the country will not succeed in overcoming racism.

The post Who’s Left Out of the New American Mainstream? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nation-centric programs have gained considerable support recently, particularly from older people. In the United States, in election after election, the Republican Party has enjoyed higher support from older voters (ages 65 and above). About 53 percent of this group voted for Republicans in 2016, but only 37 percent of young adults (ages 18 to 29) joined them.

The young and the old are not only spread differently across the political spectrum, but in certain cases, they also seem to be moving away from each other. In the United Kingdom, young voters traditionally leaned toward the Labour Party, and older voters toward Conservatives, but, until recently, these differences remained small. In 2010, for example, younger voters were almost evenly split, while older ones favored the Conservatives by 13 points. By last year, however, the political spectrum was much more polarized. In general elections, Conservatives had a three-point lead in the overall national average. Young voters favored Labour by 51 points above that average, while those over 65 favored Conservatives by 32 points more than the average.

A year earlier, the Brexit referendum exhibited a similarly stark contrast, when only a quarter of British youth (ages 18 to 24) voted for the “leave” camp. In comparison, six out of 10 seniors (ages 65 plus) wanted to leave. It appears that a rising nationalist sentiment in British society, which peaked during the Brexit referendum, has deepened the age-based polarization of the “progressive” and “conservative” continuum.

These observations raise fundamental questions. Why are older populations more prone to nationalism? And how can political strategists take this tendency into consideration?

In explaining nationalist tendencies among the old, it can be tempting to resort to cognitive factors. For instance, “making our country great again” could sound like a good idea to those whose health, energy, and sex drive peaked decades ago, when, coincidentally, nations were not as integrated or diversely populated. Thus, nostalgia for the good old days might result from voters confusing the public and personal aspects of the past.

Nevertheless, we can’t dismiss the possibility that people are making rational choices, even when those choices do not seem intuitive at first sight. In this case, the relationship between age and nationalism may have something to do with how people deal with risk. Older people are commonly known to be more risk-averse than the young. A recent study provides convincing evidence for this hypothesis. By using self-reported risk attitudes of a large sample of individuals over years, the study shows that willingness to take risks decreases over the course of life. This reduction is equivalent to a 2.5 percent diversion from stock-market investments, which are considered risky, to safe assets even in the absence of financial advice. Such an age-driven increase in risk aversion could be explained by biological changes or behavioral adaptation to a shorter lifespan ahead and a longer one behind.

Either way, when nationalism favors the familiar landscape of the past—an asset that is owned disproportionately by the old—and dismisses the uncharted waters of an ever more integrated and diverse world in the future, which comes with unfamiliar faces and change, the outcome is predictable. It could be that the old embrace a more nationalistic position than the young solely because they are risk-averse.

Because nationalist rhetoric often objects to free trade and migration, we should also consider the possibility that nationalist bias among senior citizens stems from economic preferences that change with age. For instance, the old consume more services like long-term care, while the young consume more goods like smartphones. Therefore, the higher the share of old people in the population, the higher the demand for services which cannot be imported, and the lower the demand for goods that can.

In a previous study, my colleagues and I tried to explain how this variation in taste could translate into a more protectionist trade policy in an aging society. When demographic aging boosts demand for services, which cannot be imported, some domestic firms could cease producing other goods and start providing services, while others might move overseas where demand for their goods remains strong. This shift could be particularly large if trade barriers are low, because those who move overseas could still freely ship back their products to their home market.

Moving out of one’s country and closer to a larger overseas market becomes more appealing for a company if it doesn’t have to give up its domestic market. However, if the aging country imposed high tariffs on imports, smartphone producers might be more inclined to stay where they were. In addition, because an aging society would import fewer smartphones than young societies, high tariffs would not hurt consumers as much. Therefore, temptations to introduce “fair” trade policies, such as higher tariffs, may sound more appealing in an aging society, at least in the short-term.

The good news is that cognitive factors, risk aversion, and economic preferences are not always aligned with each other to drive a nationalist attitude in old people. Many services consumed by old people, such as healthcare and long-term care, rely heavily on immigrants in advanced economies, including the United States and U.K. The access to affordable health care, in this case, presents an economic rationale that could work against favoring a monoculture society.

Similarly, conservative risk aversion is not always pro-nation, strictly speaking. In the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, older voters were strongly against secession, including 67 percent of those aged over 70, and 59.5 percent of those between 60 and 69. Even without a rigorous study, it is not difficult to see risk aversion working against a nationalist sentiment in this case. Considering Scottish secession, the “uncharted waters” argument applies to independence after a prolonged period of unity.

Although some drivers of nationalism may eventually cancel each other out, a bumpy road lies ahead. The next few decades will bring an even higher proportion of older people in the most advanced economies, including all member states of the European Union and the United States. These countries constitute the engines of globalization and the core members of the democratic world. If not managed well, the demographic dynamics of their aging populations could introduce unilateral policies that will have harmful long-term effects.

Nationalism and opposition to free trade do not exist in a vacuum. When one country erects barriers, other countries will respond similarly. When a trade war is triggered, the aging country will be hurt more than its partner. While some firms may come back home, the losses from paying more for imports and earning less from exports are likely to be much greater than gains.

Similarly, the drive toward isolationism could be detrimental to political institutions. This recent wave of nationalism has already coincided with a decline in democracy around the globe. The Democracy Index of the Economist Intelligence Unit, which measures the state of democracy in 167 countries by using 60 indicators, has registered a worldwide deterioration in the past few years. The worst decline in global democracy in years was reported in 2017: Not a single region of the world observed an improvement. The regression in advanced economies has been particularly notable; the overlap between the rise of nationalistic agendas and democratic degradation is evident.

Given these grim trends, three lessons emerge from the discussion so far. First, more effort needs to be devoted to understanding the deep connections between demographic change and political inclination. Second, policymakers need to anticipate these trends. In many countries, an aging population can block any policy that does not have significant support from it. Thus, policymakers should carefully analyze the decision-making processes of various demographic groups to understand what it would take to gain their support.

Third, communication is important, but it needs to address reality on the ground. The short-termism of nationalist programs should be communicated clearly to all citizens: One may wish to cut in line while others wait, but when everybody does so, nobody gets to eat the cake.

As the emerging class of politicians and their nationalist agendas have shown, the use of a centrist approach across economic and political spectrums does not always work. A “free trade benefits everyone” message will hardly resonate with a person who lost her job a few years before retirement.

In fact, the mainstream message on free trade needs to be changed, emphasizing that it is beneficial overall but only works for everyone when those gains are redistributed, suggesting that the economy needs more redistribution, not less. Coming from the left side of the political spectrum, this message has been somewhat suppressed, but again, the centrist position—one tilted against this kind of redistribution—misses the chance to address reality on the ground and the effects of globalization on voters.

Blind commitment to a centrist approach can backfire with aging populations, who are already prone to finding a nationalist program appealing. Mapping out policy responses that take into account the multiple drivers of political attitude is a daunting challenge, but one that is essential for developing a sensible strategy. Politicians who ignore demographic trends do so at their peril.

The post Why Older Voters Are Prone to Nationalism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the worst, we are told, is yet to come, because both countries have extremely low birth rates. Harvard sociologist Mary Brinton calls this “a demographic time bomb.” Italian Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin says simply, “We are a dying country.”

Could all the experts be wrong?

Yes, and the reason is robots.

Conventional wisdom has long held that countries need enough young people to fill all the jobs left behind by retirees, and to create macroeconomic growth to finance all those retirements. A shrinking nation will have a very difficult time achieving any of those aims.

What does it mean to be shrinking? To sustain a developed country’s population, the birth rate needs to be 2.1 children per woman. In Japan, the rate is 1.4. In Italy, it’s 1.39, the lowest in Europe. In the United States, the rate is 1.86, but that’s supplemented by significant immigration. So while much of the developing world is experiencing an unsustainable population explosion, the conventional wisdom is that many Western industrialized countries face a sustainability problem from too few births.

That’s certainly the perception in Japan. This summer, the Japanese government made headlines by reporting that its population fell a record amount in 2016, by a total of 308,084 people, to 125.6 million. But the truly eye-catching number was this: Annual births dropped below one million for the first time since the government began its survey in 1979. By 2045, Japan is projected to lose 900,000 people a year, which is more than the total population of Indianapolis. Compounding the labor shortage, Japan has very strict immigration controls.

The Italian picture also is bleak, but in different ways. In Italy, fewer Italian babies were born in 2014 than in any year since the country was unified in 1861. This has been offset, recently and partially, only by an inflow of migrants, mainly fleeing Africa and the Middle East. For the last three years, the number of arrivals has been 580,000, but that’s still less than one percent of Italy’s 60 million population. Then there’s the unanswered question of where the new arrivals will work. Italy’s stagnant economy has produced high rates of unemployment, particularly among the young.

And that’s before another future trend takes hold: a devastating loss of employment due to exponential technological advances. In a groundbreaking paper published in 2013, Oxford’s Michael Osborne and Carl Frey concluded that 47 percent of all U.S. jobs are at risk of being taken over by “computerization” in the next decade or two. The futurist Martin Ford framed the problem in more frightening terms, proclaiming, in a popular book, “The Rise of the Robots.”

But while these two trends—declining births and new robot “births”—might be regarded as individually ominous, the fact that they are happening at the same time offers reason for hope. Could robots replace the workers who aren’t being born in Italy, in Japan, and across the developed world?

Such a replacement is not a radical idea—or a new one. As early as 1933, legendary economist John Maynard Keynes predicted the replacement of workers by machines, with massive unemployment “due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”

The 2013 Oxford study was motivated by this prediction. It assessed the probability of job loss over the next decade or two in 702 detailed occupations in the United States. The least vulnerable jobs (less than 1 percent at risk) include athletic trainers, oral surgeons, and anthropologists. The most vulnerable jobs (at 99 percent risk) include telemarketers and data entry keyers.

The CEO of Daimler-Benz has been more explicit, predicting: “In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans” and “70-80 percent of jobs will disappear in the next 20 years.” There also will be some new jobs created by new technologies—but it’s unclear how long it will take them to materialize.

If this vision of the future proves true, there will be casualties, as no revolution is bloodless. The Industrial Revolution terrorized textile and agricultural workers, and the computer revolution hollowed out the middle class of most Western industrialized nations.

But the best kind of country to be during the rise of the robots is a country with a declining population. In Italy and Japan, rather than having massive numbers of human workers displaced, robots may do the work that otherwise would have gone undone.

Of course, it will be crucial for countries to strike a balance—to make sure the robots come on line at roughly the same rate that populations decline. This could mean imposing heavier taxes on families that have too many children, or excise taxes on firms that automate too quickly. The revenues would go to retrain workers for jobs that can’t easily be automated. In some cases, nations could mandate human labor for some jobs, or guarantee a universal basic income, as some countries are now debating.

The 2013 Oxford study says that workers also will have to acquire creative and social skills, areas in which computers lag behind. The bad news is that few countries are adjusting their schools and training centers in order to meet the needs of today’s technology, much less the technology of the future. Across the Western world, companies report having millions of jobs for which they cannot find qualified candidates.

If societies don’t educate people to take those new jobs, they will be filled by robots. Or by nothing at all.

The post How Robot Laborers Could Restock Italy and Japan’s Dwindling Workforce appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Barcelona is a great place to have a kid. Max is in his first year of free preschool offered at the same primary school he’ll attend to age 12, before heading to one of the public high schools and maybe the $1,500-a-year public university. Add a park every two blocks and free public health care and you have paradise for raising children. Which is what makes it odd that hardly anyone is having any. Anyone except foreigners.

When we’re not crocodiles, I am American and my wife is from here, from a Catalan town 40 miles outside of Barcelona. Among her local friends, she is the rare one who’s had a child. Among Max’s friends—the other three-year-olds at Diputacio—our binational marriage seems like a trend. About a quarter of his 26-child class seems to have a similar story: a Catalana mother, and one parent from elsewhere in Europe, Africa, South Asia, or the Americas. At least in our school, children with one parent from abroad appear to outnumber classical migrant families.

This caught my eye because Spanish fertility is at historically low levels. Earlier this year, the local census figures showed that women of my wife’s generation—the generation just hitting 40—have so far had the fewest children per capita of any Spanish generation since the 1870s. According to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical service, Spain has the second-lowest birth rate on the continent. For every four women in Spain there are just five kids. My wife’s mother had three children, which was almost exactly the average for 1975, when four women gave birth to 11 kids.

Fertility matters for a lot of wonky reasons—who will pay the pensions? But, lately the conversation in Europe has been less about intergenerational economics than about politics. The trope, flatly racist, is that foreigners come and they breed like an invasive species, imposing foreign cultural norms and draining the public service budgets. The discussion feeds a lot of European paranoia (and increasingly American, too) that lives around the intersection of biology and borders, in which everything from abroad is framed as potentially viral: poverty, extremism, Zika, Ebola. My work as a journalist has me accustomed to hearing these accusations around the edges of refugee camps in Calais, France, and along a border wall dividing the EU from Morocco. But when I come home from those places, I’ve also seen the start of a more hopeful discussion about Europe’s future, by walking into Max’s school.

I am not a demographer. Numbers on European migration are easy to get, but a sense of how many newcomers end up starting families with locals is a bit too esoteric a number to nail down, so far.

But I see my family fitting into some kind of change. Our social life has broken down by national as well as procreative lines—and that’s turned out to be the same line. Like many new parents, Max’s arrival has meant new relationships with parents of kids of the same age, and more often then not one of them is from outside Spain and usually outside Europe. Our Catalan friends, meanwhile, are the ones we need to get a babysitter to see; they don’t have kids, so they go out later. When we recently saw an old university friend of my wife’s for lunch with her new beau, Max did have a playmate his age there. The beau was from Argentina, and has a small son.

What has happened here? My wife is part of a baby boom generation that has faced a historical whipsaw, from excessive optimism and sudden affluence to a failure of confidence in Europe and a sudden loss of security. When Franco, that crusty old Spanish fascist, died in 1975, my wife’s mother and her friends could finally join the 20th century. They had large families. Those kids grew up in an era of social reconstruction and torrid economic expansion. Jobs were easy to find, and growth seemed inevitable. In the 1990s, people ascribed falling birth rates in Spain to an embrace of modernity and prosperity.

But by the early 2000s, that boom overheated. Spain’s young men left high school to work as builders. In 2004, a young man could make $40,000 a year swinging a hammer, double what his father earned.

Compared to the men, the women stayed in school, targeting secure jobs in the public sector. Career counselors would tell new college grads to earn the equivalent of tenure within about a decade, and in many cases such new opportunities for women delayed childbirth. A 30-year-old woman could then settle down with her future assured. When my wife and I met in 2006, she was working for the government as a librarian, patiently acquiring “points” toward her tenure.

Three years later—about the time we started thinking about kids—the bubble had popped. Spanish unemployment soared to Depression-level numbers: 50 percent for under-25s. All those guys who’d dropped out of school had neither jobs nor degrees. My wife and her friends were the age their mothers were when Franco died and the Spanish miracle began; now they were going to watch it unravel.

As the crisis dragged on, the future failed to materialize. Unemployment was still nearly 30 percent in 2012. If you were single, you had to be very lucky to meet a man or woman capable of being an equal partner in the family’s financial or emotional stability.

Max came along when the crisis was nearly five years old. We weren’t necessarily more optimistic than most Catalans, but you can’t always let macroeconomics dictate your life. Plus, mixed marriages like ours do have the advantage of a hedged, diversified bet. Our family would live in Barcelona, but I would not be solely dependent upon the local economy—I am able to work for clients abroad.

I do not believe my wife married me in 2009 for my blue passport, or agreed to have a child with me in 2012 for it. Nor did I marry her for the free health care or automatic residency in the rest of Europe. But I can certainly report that we married with the understanding that her passport gave us access to European social services, and mine gave us access to the United States and its economy.

We’re betting that being binational will be an advantage in the future. Where my New York grandparents went out of their way not to teach me any of the Russian, Romanian, and Yiddish they spoke, we are insisting Max speak Catalan, English, and Spanish. Rather than encourage him to have a national identity, we are encouraging him to have a transnational one. He’ll need to find stability for himself over and around borders.

I also want him to be able to see both his homes with a foreigner’s optimism. When his mother complains that ticket prices for Spanish trains have soared 200 percent, I want him to marvel, as I do, at how well they work anyway. Spain, even in its lowest moments, still feels like a miracle to me, with its low crime rate, healthy diet, and long, generally happy lives. And I hope he has a European’s fascination with American indifference to obstacles, the can-do culture that feels like a cliché to me, but is clearly part of my makeup.

I’d like to think that as Max moves on from his crocodile phase, the EU will move on from these vicious discussions about borders, migrants, and viruses. Someday there will be enough Maxes in the schools to make the borders—and the arguments—less meaningful.

The post My Transnational Son Has a Passport to Optimism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Her name is Poland.

No joke.

I see by the look on your face, California, that you are a bit shocked at this news. I realize that, when you think about your place in the world, you compare yourself to other big states, like Texas (economically) or New York (culturally). And when you’re feeling proud, you trot out the gross domestic product figures that put you in the top 10 of all countries around the world, up there with Italy and Russia and ahead of India.

But I’ve gotta tell you: These usual points of comparisons are too different to be instructive. Texas, for example, is a much bigger place in area, and has more than 10 million fewer people, than California. And the countries with similarly sized economies are much too big—think of Russia’s nine time zones or India’s more than 1 billion people—to make comparisons to California all that useful.

If you really want to understand who you are, California, you need to examine the country that most resembles you in size and population. And that country is Poland. Like you, Poland is home to 38 million people. And California is just slightly bigger in land area, but not by much (160,000 square miles for you, 120,000 square miles for them).

And that’s not all these two places have in common. For all their differences in history, today Poland and California are both crossroads that sit on global dividing lines between major regions. Poland and California each look West hopefully, and see the potential for growth by trading with prosperous continents (Western Europe and Asia, respectively). And—let’s face it—both look nervously East toward oil-rich, war-mongering, fading empires that aren’t nearly as democratic as they claim to be (Russia and the United States, respectively).

There has never been a better time than right now to take a hard look at Poland. Few countries have had a better time of it over the last quarter-century. Capitalizing on the end of the Cold War and the expansion of the European Union, Poland has experienced extraordinary growth, averaging 4 percent a year. (The social transformations have been nearly as stunning in this conservative, Catholic country; the northern city of Slupsk recently elected an openly gay mayor, something San Francisco hasn’t yet managed.) Most strikingly, Poland was the only major European economy to avoid a recession during the financial crisis; its economy is more than 20 percent larger now than it was in 2007. Long-term projections show Poland growing faster than other European countries through at least 2030.

What could you, California, hope to learn from examining Poland?

The most obvious—and important—lesson is how absurdly rich California remains. For all its growth, Poland’s economy, at $520 billion in GDP, is barely one-fourth the size of California’s $2 trillion economy. Despite being poorer, Poland’s recent investments in infrastructure dwarf California’s—Poland is now spending three times more in actual dollars on infrastructure than it did in 2006. That disparity should put the lie to the popular notion in California that the state doesn’t have the money or resources to make bigger investments in its future.

Comparing the two places on education also holds lessons. In K-12, Polish kids actually do better on measures of reading, math, and science than California kids. But California’s advantage in the quantity and quality of our universities more than compensates for that earlier deficit. Only two Polish universities show up in global rankings, while the outsized economic impact of California’s universities—in the workers they educate and the innovations they spur—is a big reason why California is so prosperous. In this context, Gov. Jerry Brown’s miserly attempt to limit state investment in the University of California looks—to use a Polish word—glupi.

The contrast on jobs is instructive. California business types tend to oppose efforts to raise wages and complain that it costs too much to employ people here. But when you look at Poland, you’re reminded that cheap labor—while useful to Western European companies that outsource work there—means that people have less money to pump into the economy. On the other hand, California labor unions routinely push to restrict how companies hire and fire their workers. Among Poland’s biggest handicaps are burdensome labor regulations and protections that discourage hiring, firing, and switching jobs. The takeaway: California’s combination of very high wages and more flexible labor markets—features of your economy since the 19th century—help make the state great.

Another big difference involves globalization. California is home to far more global companies than Poland. And California, despite recent declines in immigration, far surpasses Poland in attracting and keeping immigrants. Poland will have to change that if it wants to catch up with places like California economically.

The good news: Polish eyes already have turned to California to try to figure out how the country can improve itself. Late last year, the Polish government even held a Polish American Innovation Week in the Golden State, with events in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Stanford.

Much of the conversation was about how to build universities, innovative companies, and labor markets that are more like California’s. I dropped by and chatted with Polish Undersecretary of State Katarzyna Kacperczyk, who speaks seven languages and studied economics at Columbia University. I asked her a lot of questions about Poland. She asked me much better questions about California—the kind of questions you get from people who, while they may lag behind, are gaining on you.

I wish Californians thought as much about our European sister as the Poles think about us.

The post Were California and Poland Separated at Birth? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In advance of the Zócalo event “What is the California Dream Now?,” we asked that very question to people who study, live, and work around the state.

The post A Humbler California Dream appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One of us used to live in a neighborhood near the intersection of Westwood and Santa Monica boulevards that exemplifies the sort of development spawned by the streetcar. The boulevards are lined with commercial structures and surrounded by blocks of multi-family housing, where Leah lived as a UCLA graduate student. Slightly further away from the major streets are single-family homes.

Today, we think of the streetcar’s impact on Los Angeles as a matter purely for the past. As early as the late 1910s, Angelenos began abandoning streetcars for increasingly affordable cars. The very last streetcar tracks were pulled out of the ground in 1963.

But in a very profound way, the streetcar retains a hold over Los Angeles. In recent research, we found that places near now-extinct streetcar stops remain notably denser today.

As economists who study cities and local governments, we wanted to understand how cities evolve over the long run. The project was sparked in part by a conversation we had walking down Hollywood Boulevard with an architect friend who pointed out some still-visible influences of the streetcar. How much of a city’s development can be explained by market forces? And how much is due to the long reach of the past?

To answer these questions, we calculated the shortest distance to the now-extinct streetcar for each of Los Angeles County’s 2.3 million properties. We then assigned to each property the population density of its neighborhood, and sorted properties by their distance to the streetcar.

Now look at the figure below. Take the first 400 properties–those closest to the streetcar. For those 400 properties, we find the average population density and average distance to the streetcar. This is the left-most blue dot in the below picture. Each subsequent blue dot reports the average for the next 400 properties by proximity to the streetcar.

The 6,000 blue dots in the picture draw out the close relationship between current population density and distance to streetcar stops. Locations less than half a kilometer from the extinct streetcar are more than twice as population-dense as locations two kilometers from the extinct streetcar.

Does this density come from many people in each housing unit, or from having many units–apartments or houses–on a piece of land? The figures below–using the same analysis as the one above–show clearly that population density near streetcars comes from having many housing units on land, not from having more people per housing unit.

Using neighborhood-level Census data going back to 1940, we found that L.A. County is denser than it used to be, but that places near streetcars were denser then–and remain denser now.
You can see this in the figure below. The top line traces population density at 0.3 kilometers from streetcar routes between 1940 and 2010. In 1940, places very close to streetcar routes have somewhat more than 3,000 people per square kilometer; today these areas have just under 6,000 people per square kilometer. But the difference in population density between places very close to streetcar routes and those farther away (2.7 kilometers) has remained the same from 1940 to 2010–a difference of about 3,000 people per square kilometer.

Why, after almost 100 years and the addition of literally millions of people to the metro area, does the population density of neighborhoods still reflect the extinct century-old transportation system?

One explanation is that streetcars were built in particularly nice places–and that this niceness, and not the streetcar, caused and continues to cause the density. But when we used statistical techniques to correct for this, we found that things specific to where the streetcar was located, such as the distance to a major road, or the location of modern transit nodes, account for only about one-third of what you see in the pictures above.

An alternative explanation for the density near streetcars is lingering old structures. In this explanation, places near the streetcar are getting less dense, but it’s a slow process as new, smaller and shorter structures replace older, larger and taller ones. Figure 6 above hints that this isn’t likely to be the case, since everywhere gets denser over time. When we look directly at whether old or new buildings near the streetcar are constructed more densely, we find no difference.

This leaves two remaining potential culprits for the density at extinct streetcars: land use regulation and the self-reinforcing economic benefits of density, which economists call agglomeration.

Both of these explanations suggest that near the streetcar we should see more clustering of businesses or dense residential construction, and regulations that allow greater density. And this is just what we find. Places near the streetcar are roughly 45 percent more likely to be in non-residential use, and are 40 percent more likely to be zoned non-residential. For residential properties, the zoning of land near the streetcar allows 25 percent more units.

In fact, we found that the correlation between streetcars and density can be explained almost entirely by the correlation between streetcars and zoning. About half of the density near streetcars comes from properties near the streetcar having zoning designations that do not appear far from the streetcar, or vice versa. The rest of the difference between properties near and far from the streetcar comes from a different distribution of the same designations. For example, areas near and far from the streetcar may both be zoned for some multi-family residential units, but the area near the streetcar is zoned more heavily this way. In short, once we account for zoning, there is no difference in density between properties near and far from the streetcar.

Is this zoning pattern a relic of the past, too? Los Angeles had its first zone code in 1922, well after the streetcar’s heyday. Using the digitized 1922 zone map, we see that 1922 zoning allowed more construction at places near streetcars. This means that when zoning appeared, it codified what was already happening on the ground.

But we also learn that zoning has changed—about 30 percent of properties have a different zoning designation today than in 1922. Of those properties that did change, about two-thirds changed to a designation that permits less dense construction. However, all of these changes in zoning are uncorrelated with distance to the streetcar and therefore have no impact on the relative leniency of zoning near streetcar stops.

It’s hard to draw firm conclusions about what this tells us. Some economists view zoning as a requirement to build things people would not otherwise build in the absence of the regulation. Others argue that zoning is simply window dressing: the outcome of a political process in which cities yield to their constituents’ demands.

If zoning is a hard and fast rule, then it could cause density near streetcars. If zoning is, instead, just the outcome of political or economic maneuvering, then we care about the underlying politics or economics that drive the density we see. We can’t distinguish between these two explanations, and certainly the possibility remains that other forces are changing zoning.

So perhaps the real culprit behind zoning change and density is agglomeration, which economists use to explain, for example, why businesses continue to locate in Manhattan, even though the real estate is so expensive. Businesses could benefit from locating near other businesses, sharing customers or even parking lots. And when people move into apartment buildings near others, they can enjoy more coffee shops and restaurants.

But if agglomeration is causing density along old streetcar routes, it’s probably not the kind of creative-type agglomeration of which Richard Florida sings praises. Florida has championed a view of cities in which growth is created by a creative class, made up of highly educated workers, artists and bohemians, whose interactions spawn innovation. As far back as we can measure (1950), relatively lower income people live close to the extinct streetcar.

Although it’s tempting to think of the built city as a record of the past, we know that not all of the past gets preserved. The clear imprint of the old streetcar on today’s city tells us that regulation and economic forces worked together to ensure the past informs the present.

The post Long Dead Streetcars Still Shape L.A. Neighborhoods appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The prevalence of this kind of hiring—particularly in California, America’s most populous and most diverse state—suggests that the Civil Rights Act needs to be updated. California in 2014 certainly looks nothing like Alabama and Mississippi of 1964, which were Congress’ focus when it passed that year’s Civil Rights Act. The main question then was how to provide equal opportunity for African-Americans. A century’s worth of experience since the Civil War showed that whites in the Deep South could not be trusted on matters of race. Congress therefore prohibited, through Title VII of the act, racial discrimination in employment. Over the next several years, courts and administrators issued rulings to allow affirmative action in order to ensure that African-Americans were being offered the opportunity to be hired and promoted in all jobs for which they were qualified.

Today, however, employers have come to value racial differences in ways that were unheard of in 1964, and do not fit with traditional conceptions of affirmative action. Organizations of all kinds today hire and place workers using a practice I have called “racial realism”: seeing color as a real and significant part of workers’ identities, a qualification that is good for business.

As with the Lakers and Lin, employers use racial realism to make customers of different backgrounds feel comfortable and welcome. As Wells Fargo, the San Francisco-based bank, explains on its website: “To know our customers and serve them well, the diversity of team members throughout our ranks should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve.” The Walt Disney Company similarly states, “When our people reflect the communities we serve, it enhances the way we connect to our guests, audiences and consumers.”

Government employers, including police departments and school districts, also have invoked racial realism, seeking to mirror the populations they serve to deliver more effective services. For example, California’s Education Code declares that the state traditionally employs a “disproportionately low” number of racial minority teachers, and should rectify this situation so that “the minority student [has] available to him or her the positive image provided by minority classified and certificated employees.”

And in low-skilled jobs, racial realism is often linked to perceived variations in abilities, rather than customer reactions. Sociologists Roger Waldinger and Michael Lichter’s study of Los Angeles employers found a common pattern of preference for Latinos due to their perceived diligence in manufacturing, food service, and other jobs.

While racial realism lacks the animus that characterized the racism of the Deep South 50 years ago, it is still problematic—both legally and for minority opportunity. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act provides no authorization for race to be a job qualification. And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has denied the legality of motivations of firms such as Wells Fargo and Disney’s. If employers in Alabama could claim they preferred white workers because their customers preferred white workers, the cause of equal opportunity would never have gotten off the ground. This is why courts have ruled that firms should have their workforces mirror their job applicant pools, not their customer bases.

Court interpretations of the Constitution allow for racial realism in policing. Courts have argued that the “operational needs” of police departments require race-based hiring to serve and protect nonwhite publics. But these decisions make no allowances for teaching. California’s rationale for teacher diversity would seem to have been precluded by a 1986 Supreme Court decision, which explicitly stated that hiring teachers to be racial role models was impermissible racial discrimination because it could go on forever, with no remedial purpose.

Moreover, the employer preference for Latino workers, often immigrants, provides opportunities for eager workers, but is often propelled by stereotypes that Title VII was supposed to eliminate, and often at the expense of other workers stereotyped differently, especially African-Americans. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has initiated action against employers who use this strategy, grouping the cases under the heading no one would have considered in 1964: “Hispanic Preference.”

For high-skilled nonwhite workers, racial realism can be a double-edged sword. They may have ready access to jobs—then find themselves stuck in positions where they deal with same-race clients or citizens. For example, sociologist William Bielby’s analysis of Merrill Lynch found nonwhites were continually limited to positions where the firm thought their presence could help penetrate minority markets. The problem can be exacerbated when compensation is linked to sales or other measures of effectiveness, and certain employees are pigeonholed into less profitable outlets or divisions in poorer African-American and Latino neighborhoods. African-American managers sued Walgreens drugstores on this basis, claiming lost promotion and advancement opportunities, and won $24 million as compensation.

Why the shift from equal opportunity to racial realism? Demographics. Beginning in the 1960s, American birthrates declined as the country became more educated. By the 1980s, these factors had created a great demand for low-skilled immigrant labor—first in California, where history, geography, and network ties combined to attract newcomers—and then the country as a whole. Immigrants brought or started families in California and followed one another here; as a result, the state’s Latino and Asian immigrant communities grew rapidly. By 2000, California was a majority-minority state where nonwhites outnumbered whites; in March 2014, Latinos became the single largest ethno-racial group in California. The authors of the Civil Rights Act could not have anticipated this shift—and included no provisions for it.

Employer demand for labor brought immigrant workers here, but now immigrants themselves, and their descendants, are shaping employment patterns as consumers of private and public goods. Employers are feeling pressure to balance the rights of their workers, especially those workers of color who for too long have faced unequal opportunities, and the interests of customers and citizens, including those of color, who rightfully expect the best service from businesses and especially from government.

The Civil Rights Act, as written, puts employers and employees alike in a bind. It is time to revisit the law, and make adaptations that fit our new demography—and the law’s original goal of equal opportunity for America’s most disadvantaged.

The post The Civil Rights Act Is Broken appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event marked not only the rebirth of the Crystal Cathedral—but also the total reversal of everything I once thought I knew about L.A.’s spiritual landscape. And as a reporter covering religion, I thought I knew at least something.

Last year, after declaring bankruptcy, Robert H. Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral Ministries sold its signature glass church to Orange County’s Catholic diocese, one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing. The diocese, whose 1.3 million Catholics comprise more than 40 percent of Orange County’s entire population, promptly announced plans to rename the church “Christ Cathedral” and transform it into a Catholic worship space and cultural hub with a year-round schedule of concerts, lectures, and art exhibitions. The Crystal Cathedral, long mocked as being neither a cathedral nor made of crystal, would become real at last, with a consecrated altar, baptismal font, and Catholic iconography to replace the elaborate stagecraft of Schuller’s worldwide television ministry, which included lavish Easter and Christmas pageants with flying angels and live animals.

The bankruptcy of Schuller’s church wasn’t just another spectacular televangelist flameout. The Crystal Cathedral’s demise was a symptom of a wider decline in American evangelical Christianity that has been quietly gathering speed for the last decade and, at last, is being noticed outside church circles. When Schuller began his Southern California ministry in the 1950s, he famously preached to worshippers in their cars from the snack bar rooftop of a Garden Grove drive-in movie theater. At the time, Schuller was lauded as a visionary for leading Christianity into America’s suburban future. He reaped the rewards of his prescience, building a church empire with thousands of Southern California worshippers, an ecclesiastical compound larded with architectural monuments (the Crystal Cathedral campus includes noteworthy buildings by Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra, and Pritzker Prize winner Richard Meier) and a television ministry with millions of viewers on nearly every continent of the globe.

As it turned out, Schuller’s gaze into the future of American Christianity only reached so far. Demographic changes began nibbling at his congregation as early as the 1980s, when waves of Vietnamese refugees settled in Orange County, and a go-go housing industry imported thousands of migrant Mexicans to build master-planned subdivisions. Soon the aging neighborhoods surrounding the Crystal Cathedral were unrecognizable from Schuller’s drive-in movie days. Today, more than three-quarters of the roughly 1 million residents living in Orange County’s central core—the cities of Garden Grove, Westminster, Anaheim, and Santa Ana—are non-white, according to the U.S. Census. Little Saigon, the area’s Vietnamese community, is home to the world’s largest population of Vietnamese outside Vietnam. In Santa Ana, 80 percent of residents speak a language other than English at home, mostly Spanish. These newcomers might have settled close to Schuller’s church, but they didn’t go there. Their parents and grandparents were Catholics or Buddhists in their home countries, and most of them stayed that way.

That explains the rebirth at the Crystal Cathedral—and the opportunity it represents. Since 1976, when Orange County Catholics were split from Los Angeles into their own diocese, the Catholic presence in the county has steadily grown from less than one-fifth of the population to nearly half, according to church statistics. The diocese doesn’t track the ethnicity of members. But a church spokesman told me that roughly three-quarters of parishes in the diocese celebrate at least one Mass in Spanish. A quarter celebrate Mass in Vietnamese. Last year, the diocese installed a bishop who speaks fluent Spanish and passable Vietnamese.

The failure of Schuller’s church to keep up with Southern California’s ethnic transformation is now being writ large across America. As the nation’s demographics move closer toward L.A.’s, American evangelicals find themselves suddenly and uncharacteristically in decline. After decades of growth, the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest evangelical denomination, began losing members 10 years ago, with the pace of decline accelerating each year. In the most recent Pew Research Center survey of America’s religious attitudes, the number of white evangelical Protestants reached a new low (19 percent), and for the first time was surpassed by the number of Americans claiming no religious affiliation at all. Evangelical mega-churches like Saddleback Church in Orange County have seen their once explosive growth plateau and, in some cases, reverse. Younger evangelicals tell pollsters they are leaving the faith because they’re tired of its public hostility to homosexuality and its focus on corporate-style growth.

Meanwhile, the fastest growing faith in America today is Islam, with roughly 2.5 million adherents in the U.S., one-fifth of them in Southern California, according to Shakeel Syed, executive director of the Shura Council of Southern California, a Muslim umbrella organization. We are now home to one of America’s largest mosques, just a few miles from the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, and some of the nation’s youngest, most progressive imams, who refer to rap lyrics in their sermons and are forging links with local Christian pastors. Thirty-year-old Jamaal Diwan, who leads the rapidly growing Islamic Center of Irvine (up to 6,000 attending Friday prayer services), works with local Christians on a regional interfaith council, plays basketball with his mosque’s 200-member youth group, and regularly speaks at Muslim student club meetings in Irvine high schools.

The only major variety of Christianity currently growing in America is Pentecostalism, an international movement expanding even more rapidly in Africa, South America, and other parts of the developing world. This year, leading evangelicals made headlines by reversing their earlier position and vocally backing comprehensive immigration reform—a belated attempt to respond to the same demographic changes that helped undo the Crystal Cathedral.

It’s one thing to read the poll numbers documenting these changes. It’s quite another to experience the changes firsthand. I was an Orange County religion reporter early in my career as a journalist. I took a long break from the beat, first to cover Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in Sacramento (definitely not a religious experience), then to move to New York when my wife—who’s an Episcopal priest—got a job at a large church in Manhattan. We moved back to California two years ago (Kate’s job again) and I resumed writing about religion, which truly is my favorite beat. As a clergy spouse I’m never out of touch with spiritual issues. But I was totally unprepared for what I found as I began delving back into religion in California. When I left the beat in 2003, Catholics were on the ropes (on the verge of paying $100 million in Orange County to settle claims of priest sexual abuse) and evangelicals were ascendant (poised to reelect George W. Bush and outlaw gay marriage in 11 states). Now everything is reversed.

The lesson I draw from the death and rebirth of the Crystal Cathedral is that patterns of religious worship in a nation as dynamic and unstable as America are never as immutable as they seem at any given moment. Change can be unsettling for many people of faith, who turn to God for stability and comfort. But change can be good, too. Southern California was once a spawning ground for wacky, flaky religious fads of every kind. These days, it’s pioneering a multiethnic religiosity unburdened by blind triumphalism and closely linked to the world’s vast array of religious expression. The Crystal Cathedral is dead. Long live Christ Cathedral.

The post How On Earth Did Crystal Cathedral Go Catholic? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s not merely the opinion of my proud father, the usual author of this Connecting California column. And that’s not the idle boast of a 7-day-old infant. My value is a hard demographic and economic fact for California—and a huge burden for me.

Few Californians know it, but our state has a shortage of children. California’s birth rate has fallen to 1.94 babies per woman—below the 2.1 babies-per-woman fertility standard necessary to maintain a population over the long term. And migration to California from other states and countries is down. The result: Over the past decade, the state’s number of children under the age of 10 declined by 187,771. This decade, California is projected to lose another over 100,000 of us. While children were one-third of all Californians in 1970, they will be only one-fifth by 2030, according to a recent report on this shortage from University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers.

This older California is a problem both for you—those Californians old enough to read this—and for me.

For you, having fewer kids around means you have a smaller talent pool from which to develop the adults needed to replace you as employees, citizens, and consumers. And you’ll need plenty of replacements, since the state is seeing unprecedented growth in the number of retirees. Indeed, with the number of old people growing and the number of kids shrinking, each new child born in California is more valuable than the last. We infants will need to support you and buy your houses.

For me, the child shortage means greater pressure than you’ll ever know. According to the USC report, I will have to be nearly twice as productive economically and socially as my aunt Katie, a newly minted California lawyer born in the mid-1980s. Call me precocious in taking over my dad’s column, but I don’t have any time to waste.

You would think that the state would be grateful for my arrival, with brass bands, a donation to my college fund, maybe a public statement from the governor praising the fertility of my mother and prodigious virility of my father as a model for all Californians (did I mention he’s editing this?).

But no. I suspect some of my fellow Californians wish I’d never been born.

For those who see overpopulation as a great threat, families with one or two children are at best tolerable nuisances. I am the third child in my family.

On the right, many people complain about all the taxes being paid to support my education. On the left, especially in environmentally conscious enclaves along the coast, it’s practically an article of faith that couples should have no more than one child. Their argument: I consume too much, pollute too much, and accelerate climate change.

My reaction: You can’t keep taxes low and save the planet without me. Yes, consumption practices must change to slow climate change, but improving the environment is expensive. Without enough children to produce economic growth, there won’t be enough resources to do it.

Big families are also, in many ways, more efficient. I can testify that I’m wearing nothing but ratty hand-me-downs from my big brothers. My family’s friends Jim and Agnes McAllister have 11 kids and say they often encounter people who are indignant about the size of their family. “What I sometimes say is: My 13 people in my Ford Econoline van are more efficient than your three or four people in your Mercedes-Benz by a long shot,” Jim tells my dad. “Economies of scale really do kick in.”

And those on the right who call us children “tax eaters” talk as though having a kid is downright profitable. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it will cost $241,080 to raise a child born last year for 18 years; when my dad plugged estimates for my health, education, and child care into the USDA calculator, the figure for me was nearly $500,000, not including college.

When you consider those high costs, it’s my parents who are subsidizing the state’s future—and its future taxpayers, especially those who can’t or won’t have as many children as they do. Maybe my parents should take us three little economic assets someplace where we’d get a better deal.

Many countries offer payments to children via parents or special accounts. In the United Kingdom, Prince William will get what is called the child benefit for baby George. Singapore tries to encourage family formation by increasing its payments for additional children; if I had been born there, my parents would have received $8,000 as a “baby bonus” and a special savings account—the Child Development Account—with a government match for their contributions.

So am I saying that California should open a savings account for me and send me a big check?

Yes.

Short of that, treat me like the rare and precious resource I am in this graying state and tie more benefits to me.

And if you won’t make policy changes, there is at least one other thing those of you of childbearing age could do to ease my burden. My fellow Californians, for your future and for mine, I beg you: Get busy.

The post I’m a Rare and Precious Baby. So Pay Me. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.