Why Is Demography Important?
The demographic foundation of our lives is deep and broad. As you will see in this book, demography affects nearly every facet of your life in some way or another. Population change is one of the prime forces behind social and technological change all over the world. As population size and composition changes in an area—whether it be growth or decline—people have to adjust, and from those adjustments radiate innumerable alterations to the way society operates.
Nearly Everything Is Connected to Demography
It may sound presumptuous, even preposterous, to suggest that nearly everything is connected to demography, but it really is true. This is very different, however, from saying that demography determines everything. Demography is a force in the world that goes hand in hand with every improvement in human well-being that the world has witnessed over the past few hundred years. Children survive like never before, adults are healthier than ever before, women can limit their exposure to the health risks involved with pregnancy and still be nearly guaranteed that the one or two or three babies they have will thrive to adulthood. Having fewer pregnancies and babies in a world where most adults reach old age means that men and women have more “scope” in life; more time to develop their personal capacities and more time and incentive to build a better world for themselves, their children, and everyone else. Longer lives and the societal need for less childbearing from women means that families and households become more diverse. The changes taking place all over the world in family structure are not the result of a breakdown of social norms so much as they are the natural consequence of societies adapting to the demographic changes of people living longer with fewer children in a world where urban living and migration are vastly more common than ever before. These are all facets of demography affecting your life in important ways. There is no guarantee, however, about how a society will react to demographic change. That is why it is impossible to be a demographic determinist. Demographic change does demand a societal response, but different societies will respond differently, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Nonetheless, it turns out that population structures are sufficiently predictable that we can at least suggest the kinds of responses from which societies are going to have to choose. The population of the world is increasing by more than 200,000 people per day, as I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter, but this growth is much more intense in some areas of the world than in others. In those places where societies have been unable adequately to cope, especially with increasing numbers of younger people, the fairly predictable result has been social, economic, and political instability. Population growth is obviously not the only source of trouble in the world, but its impact is often incendiary, igniting other dilemmas that face human society (Davis 1984). Without knowledge of population dynamics, for example, we cannot fully understand the roots of terrorism and conflict from the Middle East to Southeast Asia; nor can we understand why there is a simultaneous acceptance of and a backlash against immigrants in the United States and Europe; nor can we understand why Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography
A Demographic Perspective
the world is globalizing at such a rapid pace. And, we cannot begin to imagine our future without taking into account the fact that the population of the world at the middle of this century is expected to be half again larger than it is now, since the health of the planet depends upon being able to sustain a much larger number of people than are currently alive. Because so much that happens in your life will be influenced by the consequences of population change, it behooves you to understand the causes and mechanisms of those changes. Let’s look at some examples.
Terrorism and Regional Conflict
One reaction to population growth is to accept or even embrace the change and then seek positive solutions to the dilemmas presented by a rapidly growing younger population. Another reaction, of course, is to reject change. This is what the Taliban was trying to do in Afghanistan—to forcibly prevent a society from modernizing and, in the process, keeping death rates higher than they might otherwise be (you will learn in Chapter 5 that Afghanistan has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the world, not to mention the deaths from the violence there), and maintaining women in an inferior status by withholding access to education, paid employment, and the means of preventing pregnancy. The difficulty the Taliban faced (besides active military intervention to stop them) is that it is very hard, if not impossible, to put the genie back in the bottle once you have given people access to a longer life and the freedoms that are inherently associated with that. Very few people in the world prefer to go back to the “traditional” life of harsh exposure to disease, oppression, and death. Throughout the Middle East we can see with special clarity the crucial role that demography has played. The migration of poor rural peasants to the cities of Iran, especially Tehran, contributed to the political revolution in that country in 1978 by creating a pool of young, unemployed men who were ready recruits to the cause of overthrowing the existing government (Kazemi 1980), and this pattern has been repeated throughout the region. It has been said that the “dogs of war” (with no disrespect meant to dogs) are young and male (Mesquida and Wiener 1999), and this description applies especially to the Middle East, where large fractions of the population are young, and where males are routinely accorded higher status than females. The impact of the “youth bulge” has been the subject of research for a long time (Cincotta et al. 2003; Moller 1968; Staveteig 2005), but having a large population of young men does not automatically lead to conflict. Rather, the evidence suggests that such a demographic situation is incendiary (Choucri 1984), ripe for exploitation by those who choose to take advantage of it. And, of course, the very existence of Israel is openly threatened by the more rapid growth rate of, and particularly the youth bulge in, the neighboring populations, which are predominantly Muslim. I discuss this in the accompanying essay. Sub-Saharan Africa is another part of the world where population growth has been increasing faster than resources can be generated to support it—despite the devastation caused by HIV/AIDS—increasing the level of poverty and disease, and encouraging child labor, slavery, and despair. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the large number of children, enmeshed in poverty and often orphaned because their parents have died of AIDS, provides recruits for rebel armies waging warfare against Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography 7 one government or another (Corder 2006). Those children who resist the army recruiters may find themselves sold into slavery (The Economist 2001), which is part of a larger global problem of child trafficking (International Labour Office 2003). This kind of abuse of children is not caused by demographic trends, but the demographic structure of society contributes to the problem by creating a situation where children are available to be exploited (Bell 2006).
Embracing and Hating Immigration
The youthful age structure produced by high fertility may engender violence, but low fertility is not without its problems. The transition from higher to lower fertility in North America, Europe, and East Asia, as well as Australia and New Zealand, has created a situation in all of these parts of the world in which the younger population is declining as a fraction of the total population, creating holes in the labor force and concerns about who will pay the taxes needed to fund the pensions of the older population. For a variety of reasons that I will discuss in Chapter 6, women in the richer countries are choosing to have fewer children than are required to replace the population. But, since each of the rich countries has jobs available and needs people to pay taxes, one answer in the short term is immigration. Canada has been the country most welcoming of immigrants, at least on the basis of immigrants per resident population, with Asians being the largest group entering Canada (a pattern followed also in Australia). The United States has been the most accepting of all countries in the world in terms of absolute numbers of immigrants, including both legal and undocumented, with Mexico leading the list of countries from which immigrants to the U.S. come. Like it or not, the countries sending migrants have their own demographic issues that complement those of the richer countries. For example, in Mexico, fertility has not declined as quickly as mortality, and the resulting high rates of population growth have made it impossible for the economy to generate enough jobs for each year’s crop of new workers. Underemployment in Mexico naturally increases the attractiveness of migrating to where better jobs are. This happens especially to be the United States, not just because the United States is next door, but because low rates of population growth there have left many jobs open, particularly at the lower end of the economic ladder. These positions provide foreign laborers with a higher standard of living than they could have had in Mexico. The North American Free Trade Agreement, passed in 1994, promised new and higher-wage jobs in Mexico that would eventually reduce the need for Mexicans to leave their country to find work (Cornelius 2002). That promise has been sideswiped, however, by the fact that rising wages in Mexico have led many companies to take their manufacturing businesses to other countries where wages are still low, particularly China, whose population outnumbers Mexico’s by a ratio of 10 to 1. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it has been more difficult for undocumented immigrants to enter the United States. As a consequence, many Latin American migrants have been going to Europe instead, both legally and illegally (Caramés 2004; Millman and Vitzthum 2003). The open-border policy within the European Union (EU) means that once a person enters Europe they are free to travel to any of the other EU countries in search of a job. Not surprisingly, Spain is the 8 Part One A Demographic Perspective At the end of World War I, the British took control of Palestine from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, which was defunct and had been shrunk back geographically to its origins in Turkey. At that time, Palestine under the British mandate included the territory of modern Israel and Jordan. In 1922, it was divided into the mandates of Transjordan, east of the Jordan River, and Palestine, west of the river. Under the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British had already agreed to help establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, although later they were sorry they had done so (Oren 2002). In the 1930s and 1940s, European anti-Semitism encouraged the migration of Jews to Palestine and, despite the drop in support from the British, the changing demographics were leading inexorably in the direction of a Jewish state. Not unexpectedly, this trend was resisted first by Palestinian Arabs, and subsequently by virtually all Arab states. In 1946, at the end of World War II, Transjordan was granted full independence and became the modern state of Jordan, which had in fact been ruled by the great-grandfather of the current King Abdullah II since the end of World War I. Britain handed the decision about Palestine to the United Nations, and in 1947 the UN passed General Assembly Resolution 181. “This provided for the creation of two states, one Arab and the other Jewish, in Palestine, and an international regime for Jerusalem. The Zionists approved of the plan but the Arabs, having already rejected an earlier, more favorable (for them) partition offer from Britain, stood firm in their demand for sovereignty over Palestine in full” (Oren 2002:4). The stage was thus set for the continuing struggle for control of the region. The nascent state of Israel was immediately attacked by armies from all surrounding Arab nations, but managed to prevail, and when hostilities ended in 1949, Israel had claimed more territory than originally allotted to it by the UN. Because as many as 750,000 of Palestine’s Arabs (who came to be known simply as Palestinians) had fled the area when fighting broke out, the Jewish population emerged as the demographic majority. The Palestinian population was effectively cordoned into the Gaza Strip (controlled by Egypt) and the West Bank (controlled by Jordan), as shown on the accompanying map, with the remainder of what had been Palestine being the state of Israel. To the north of Israel and Jordan lie Lebanon and Syria. They too had been part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries prior to World War I, and at the end of that war they came under the French Mandate of Syria (Salibi 1988). The Maronite Christians in Lebanon lobbied the French for, and were granted, a state of “Greater Lebanon,” although nearly half the population in the region was Muslim or Druze (who are neither Christian nor Muslim)— religious/ethnic divisions that continue to plague the country. The remaining territory was divided into four parts, which were later consolidated into modern Syria and by the mid-1920s Lebanon and Syria were separate republics, although both were under French control. They were granted political independence by France at the end of World War II. In 1950, the population of Israel accounted for 43 percent of the region’s population (excluding Syria for the moment), as you can see in the accompanying table. Israel accepted large numbers of immigrants early in its existence and by 1970, shortly after the 1967 war (the “Six Day War” to Israelis and the “June 1967 War” to Arabs), Israel accounted for 57 percent of the population in the 9 area.
THE DEMOGRAPHY OF CONFLICT IN THE MIDDLE EAST
After each round of hostilities between Israel and its Arabs neighbors, Jordan received a new flood of Palestinian refugees, which explains why between 1950 and 1970 the population of Jordan was growing much more quickly than the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Gaza and the West Bank). In 1970 a group of Palestinians attempted to overthrow the government of Jordan in order to establish it as the Palestinian state. Jordan is thus a very important part of the picture and, in fact, in 1983, Benjamin Netanyahu, then a member of the Israeli mission to the U.S., but later Prime Minister of Israel, wrote that “the Arabs of Palestine already have a state, called Jordan, in eastern Palestine” (Netanyahu 1983:30). Jordanians do not share that view, of course. This comment came shortly after Israel had twice invaded Lebanon in the early 1980s and had established a “buffer zone” in southern Lebanon, all in response to attacks on Israel by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which was based at the time in Lebanon. Thus, Lebanon was drawn into the picture, although it was largely Syrian forces, not Lebanese, that the Israelis were worried about. Year Total Population 1950 1970 1990 2010 2030 Israel 1,258 2,898 4,514 7,315 9,156 Occupied Palestinian Territory 1,005 1,096 2,154 4,330 7,171 Jordan 472 1,623 3,254 6,338 8,672 Lebanon 1,443 2,390 2,741 3,773 4,428 Syria 3,495 6,378 12,843 21,432 29,983 Total in region 7,673 14,385 25,506 43,188 59,410 Israel as % of neighbors (excluding Syria) 43% 57% 55% 51% 45% Percent under age 25 Israel 49 53 49 43 37 Occupied Palestinian Territory 63 64 67 64 54 Jordan 63 65 69 54 42 Lebanon 53 60 55 44 36 Syria 60 47 68 56 43 Number of children born per woman Israel 4.2 3.8 2.9 2.5 2.1 Occupied Palestinian Territory 7.4 7.7 6.5 4.4 2.8 Jordan 7.4 7.8 5.1 2.8 2.0 Lebanon 5.7 4.8 3.0 2.1 1.9 Syria 7.2 7.5 4.6 2.8 2.0 Infant Mortality Rate (per 1,000 live births) Israel 41 22 9 5 4 Occupied Palestinian Territory 160 82 27 15 10 Jordan 145 82 33 17 10 Lebanon 87 43 31 16 10 Syria 144 83 31 14 9 Source: Compiled from the United Nations Population Division, “World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision, Population Database,” http://esa.un.org/unpp/, accessed 2006. (continued) 10 Part One A Demographic Perspective In the meantime, Yasser Arafat, who had emerged as the primary leader and spokesperson of the Palestinian population through his role as Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was applauding the high birth rate among Palestinians, calling it their “secret weapon” to beat back the Israeli challenge (Waldman 1991), and he urged women to have babies for the cause (the Intifada or uprising against Israel) to replace the young male fighters who were being killed fighting the Israelis (Sontag 2000). To be sure, Palestinians in the region have consistently had fertility rates that are the highest, or close to the highest, of any group in the world. As you can see in the accompanying table, Palestinian women in the occupied territories were averaging nearly 8 children each in 1970 and more than six per woman as recently as 1990. Furthermore, as a result of major public health efforts by UNICEF, the infant mortality has dropped dramatically among Palestinian refugees. In 1950, 160 out of every 1,000 babies born died before reaching their first birthday, but by 2010 it is expected to be less than one-tenth of that figure, at 15 per 1,000. As we will see throughout this book, the inevitable consequence of high fertility and rapidly declining infant and child mortality is a huge increase in the number of young people. The Arab population in general, but especially the Palestinian population, has experienced an enormous largest recipient of predominantly Spanish-speaking immigrants, but there are growing communities of Latin Americans in Switzerland and Italy as well. There is a certain amount of symmetry, one might say, in the fact that the migration of Spaniards to the New World created “Latin America” from the mixing of Europeans with the indigenous population; now, five centuries later, the current is reversing. There is, in fact, a bigger vacuum of laborers in Europe than in North America, because birth rates there have been declining for several decades and are now considerably lower than in the United States. There is thus the “sucking sound” of people from developing nations, notably former European colonies, filling the jobs in Europe who would otherwise go begging. The United Kingdom has large immigrant populations from India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean, while France has immigrants from Algeria and Senegal, Germany has immigrants from Turkey (not a former colony, but a sympathizer in both World Wars), the Netherlands has immigrants from Indonesia, and Spain has immigrants from Morocco (along with those from Latin America). Europeans, however, are not necessarily in favor of this trend. Semyonow and associates (2006) have used survey data in Europe to document the rise in anti-foreigner sentiment in Europe, and politicians throughout Europe are increasingly being forced by voters to take a stand on immigration issues. Given the needs in European countries for laborers and the complementary surplus of laborers in developing countries, we can expect that immigration will quite literally change the face of Europe in your lifetime. The “demographic time bomb” of an aging European population (Kempe 2006) means that these countries may need immigrants in place of the babies that aren’t being born, but the problem is always that immigrants tend to be different. They may look different, have a different language, a different religion, and differ in their expectations about how society operates. Furthermore, since the immigrants tend to be young adults, they will wind up contributing disproportionately to the birth rate in their new countries, leading to a rapid and profound shift in the ethnic composition of the younger population. These differences create problems for all societies, and create situations of backlash against immigrants.
THE DEMOGRAPHY OF CONFLICT IN THE MIDDLE EAST (CONTINUED)
baby boom over the past several decades (Tabutin and Schoumaker 2005). Two out of every three Palestinians is under the age of 25, putting tremendous pressure on all societal resources. The fact that there are far more young Palestinians each year than there are new jobs being created means that there is a pool of discontent waiting to be tapped by any group interested in overturning the present social order (Fargues 1995). Adding to the demographic complexity is the fact although the fertility levels in Israel have always been lower than among Palestinians, fertility rates among the ultra-orthodox Jewish population are nearly as high as for Palestinians (Courbage 2000). Furthermore, Arab Christians tend to have the lowest fertility of any group in Israel, whereas Muslims in Israel have the highest fertility (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics 2006). This pattern has also been observed in Lebanon and as Christians have migrated out of the area, the demography of Lebanon has begun to merge with its Muslim neighbors, as can be seen in the accompanying table. Overall, the high fertility and steadily declining mortality will produce a projected population for the region (including Syria) in 2030 of more than 54 million—nearly eight times what it was in the middle of the twentieth century. The demographics continue to be incendiary, and keep in mind that we haven’t even talked about the water scarcity already existing in that part of the world . . . American history is replete with stories of discrimination against immigrant groups for one or more generations until the children and grandchildren of immigrants finally are accepted as part of mainstream society. This process produces children who would not be recognizable to their ancestors and a society that is in certain ways a foreign country relative to the past. Just as in the United States, European nations have highly visible anti-immigrant groups, but the immigrants keep coming anyway because jobs are available and they need the jobs. This is less true in Japan because the level of anti-foreign sentiment is so high. The Japanese simply take it for granted that people from other countries will not become permanent members of Japanese society. This means that Japan has had fewer immigrant workers per person than in North America or Europe, and it is not unreasonable to think that the Japanese economy has been moribund for several years now because it has not been invigorated by immigration. Globalization Most broadly, globalization can be thought of as an increasing level of connectedness among and between people and places all over the world. However, the term has taken on a more politically charged dimension since many people interpret it to mean a penetration of less-developed nations by multinational companies from the more-developed nations. This trend is promoted by the removal of trade barriers that protect local industries and by the integration of local and regional economies into a larger world arena. The pros and cons of this process invite heated debate, but an important, yet generally ignored, element of globalization is that it is closely related to the enormous increase in worldwide population growth that took place after the end of World War II. Control over mortality, which has permitted the growth of population, occurred first in the countries of Europe and North America, and it was there that population first began to grow rapidly in the modern world. However, after World War II, death control technology was spread globally, especially through the work of various United Nations agencies, funded by the governments of the richer countries. Since declines in mortality initially affect infants more than any other age group, there tends to be a somewhat delayed reaction in the realization of the effects of a mortality decline until those people who would otherwise have died reach an age where they must be educated, clothed, fed, and jobs and homes must be created for them on a scale never before imagined. As huge new cohorts of young people have come of age and needed jobs in developing countries, their willingness to work for relatively low wages has not gone unnoticed by manufacturers in North America, Europe, and Japan. Nor have big companies failed to notice the growing number of potential consumers for products, especially those aimed at younger people, who represent the bulk of the population in developing countries. Given the demographics, it should not be surprising to us that jobs have moved to the developing countries and that younger consumers in those countries have been encouraged to spend their new wages on products that are popular with younger people in the richer countries, including music, fast food, cars, and mobile phones. Globalization exists, in essence, because of the nature of world demographic trends. Degradation of the Environment As the human population has increased, its potential for disrupting the earth’s biosphere has grown in tandem. We are polluting the atmosphere (producing problems such as global warming, acid rain, and holes in the ozone layer); the hydrosphere (contaminating the fresh water supply, destroying coral reefs, and fishing out the ocean); and the lithosphere (degrading the land with toxic waste and permitting topsoil loss, desertification, and deforestation). This degradation is caused by our intensive use of resources, which has dramatically increased our standard of living over the past 200 years. That very same use of resources has permitted us to bring mortality under control, launching the world on its course of a huge increase in the number of people alive on the planet. The task we will confront in the future is to maintain our standard of living while using many fewer resources per person. Keep in mind that international agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank have suggested, through the Millennium Development Goals, that long-term sustainability of the planet requires that we lift all people out of poverty so that everyone can be a better steward of the planet. So, the challenge is really to maintain our own standard of living, while increasing that of people everywhere else in the world, and doing so while not using resources in an unsustainable fashion. This is not going to be a simple project, based on data from the United Nations Human Development Report released in 2006 indicating that the richer countries became even richer in the 1990s, but “In 2003, 18 countries with a combined population of 460 million people registered lower scores on the human development index (HDI) than in 1990—an unprecedented reversal” (United Nations Development Program 2006:3). The number of people living in extreme poverty has increased nearly in lockstep with population growth, and poverty is one of the major reasons why millions of children in less-developed nations are forced to work, jeopardizing their health, their education, and their future. Worldwide, the gap has been increasing between rich and 12 Part One A Demographic Perspective poor countries, especially between the very richest and the very poorest. Reducing poverty is a worthwhile goal in all events, but the Millennium Development Goals do not really reckon with how this can be accomplished given the huge increase in numbers that the United Nations itself (through its Population Division) projects will be sharing the planet by the middle of this century. Can we reduce worldwide poverty and not further degrade our environment in the face of continued population pressure? No one really knows the answer to that question. None of the basic resources required to expand food output—land, water, energy—can be considered abundant today. This especially affects the food security of people in less-developed countries with rapidly rising food demands and small energy reserves. Even now, in sub-Saharan Africa food production is not keeping pace with population growth, which raises the fear that the world may have surpassed its ability to sustain current levels of food production. Genetically modified foods (GMF) may not be the answer, but some other solutions that we currently don’t know about will have to come forth if we are not only to feed nine billion people, but also to meet the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s goal of reducing malnutrition throughout the world. In other words, we want to feed more people, and feed them better than we are currently doing. It is often argued that there is, in fact, plenty of food in the world, but it is just not properly distributed to the places that need it. However, Jenkins and Scanlan (2001) have argued convincingly that even when these other factors are taken into account, population pressure has undermined the supply of food and the access to food in less-developed nations, thus aggravating problems of food security in much of the world. Keep in mind that every person added to the world’s population requires energy to prepare food, to provide clothing and shelter, and to fuel economic life. Each increment in demand is another claim on energy resources (and creates problems of what to do with the by-products of energy use), forcing further global adjustments in the use of energy. Water is also an issue. More than half a billion people already face water scarcity, and an additional two to three billion live in areas that are water-stressed. Paradoxically, it turns out that in order to grow enough food for the expected party of nine billion, we need fewer people in agricultural areas, not more. Humans are poor converters of energy, and machines are required to increase production. This means that cities will be absorbing an increasing fraction of the world’s population. A safe and healthy urban environment requires the infrastructure necessary to provide clean water and to treat sewage and waste, and a growing economy requires transportation and communications infrastructure. However, rapidly growing countries routinely find that their “demographic overhead” is too great just to maintain what they already have, much less to keep up with the demand for new infrastructure. The Danger of Demographic Fatigue In the face of nearly relentless population pressure, as we continue to add tens of millions of people per year to the world’s total, there is the danger that those of us who live in more-developed countries will tire of and turn our backs on the lessdeveloped countries, where population growth continues to create one problem Chapter 1 Introduction to Demography 13 after another. After all, much of the population news that we hear refers to declining birth rates and laments how low fertility in rich countries creates problems such as the need for immigrants. Our rates of growth may be low, but the “silent explosion” (Appleman 1965) continues in the rest of the world. Although we live in a demographically divided world, we in the rich countries were the ones who lit the fuse on the population bomb, and increasing globalization demands that we remember that there is no such thing as “their” problem—all problems are ours (and theirs) to deal with together. How Will You Use This Information? It is my hope that you will use the demographic insights in this book to improve your understanding of how the world works. In that general way, a demographic perspective can be personally empowering for you. But it is also no exaggeration to say that much of what you will glean from the book is potentially very useful in more mundane, but not necessarily less important, ways. Demographics is the term that has become associated with practical applications of population information and this can be a veritable treasure trove for you to mine. Because you live in a social world, many if not most of the decisions that you have to make about life involve people, and when the issues relate to how many people there are, and where they live and work, and what they are like, demographics become part of the decision-making process, allowing you to lay out a systematic strategy for achieving your own goal whether your challenges relate to business, social, or political planning. We can talk simply about the numbers and characteristics of people (their “demographic”), but we are more often interested as well in where they live or work or play. When we add this spatial element we are talking about geodemographics, geodemography, or spatial demography, which is the analysis of demographic data that takes into account the location of the people being studied. As you will see in the next chapter, demography is an inherently spatial science because cultural similarities lead to similarities in demographic behavior and culturally similar people often live close to one another. The advent of high-powered desktop computers has revolutionized our ability to analyze massive demographic data sets and this has allowed the spatial component of demographic analysis to come into its own and further improve our knowledge of how the world works. Demographics of Politics Demographics are central to the political process in the United States. The constitutional basis of the Census of Population is to provide data for the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives, and this process reaches down to the local level. Legislators also ask questions about how population growth and distribution influence the allocation of tax dollars. Will the increase in the older population bankrupt the Social Security system? Would federal subsidies to inner-city areas help lower the unemployment rate? Are undocumented immigrants creating an undue
