Progress Daily

Africa is the fastest-growing and fastest-urbanising continent. Its population has grown from 110m in 1850 to 1 billion today. The average African woman born today is expected to have about 5 children, compared with just 1.7 in East Asia. In 1950 there were two Europeans for every African; by 2050, on present trends, there will be two Africans for every European.

The past 15 years have seen Africa’s fastest-ever period of economic growth, & it appears to be following the rest of the world through a demographic transition (falling birth rates as people get richer), which should increase the size (relative, as well as absolute) of their working-age population.

According to a study by the Harvard Initiative for Global Health (”Realizing the Demographic dividend: is Africa any different?” By David E. Bloom), the share of the working-age population will rise in 27 of 32 African countries between 2005 and 2015. On other continents this phenomenon has led to increased productivity.

Africa today produces less food per head than at any time since independence. Only 4% of Africa’s farmland is irrigated.

According to the UN Population Division, Africa’s overall population is 8% lower today than it would have been if its fertility rate had stayed at its 1970s level.

The use of modern contraceptives in sub-Saharan Africa is only 12% (though it has doubled since 1994). The rate in Asia and Latin America is over 40%, so contraceptive use is likely to rise sharply.

“The baby bonanza,” The Economist

The Evil-Mongering Of The American Medical Association

According to a 2007 study by McKinsey&Company, physician compensation bumps up health care spending in America by $58 billion annually,on average, because U.S. doctors make twice as much as their OECD peers.

Excessive physician salaries contribute nearly three times more to wasteful health care spending than the $20 billion or so that defensive medicine does. Other studies have found that doctors’ salaries contribute more to soaring medical costs than the $40 billion or so that the uninsured cost in uncompensated care.

In 1910, the Flexner report, commissioned by the AMA, declared that a surplus of substandard medical schools in the country were producing a surplus of substandard doctors. The AMA convinced lawmakers to shut down “deficient” medical schools, drastically paring back the supply of doctors almost 30% over 30 years. No new medical schools have been allowed to open since the 1980s.

The AMA convinced Congress to limit the number of residencies it funds to about 100,000 a year. Even foreign doctors with years of experience in their home countries have to redo their residencies–along with taking a slew of exams–before they are allowed to practice here.

Midwifery, once a robust industry in this country, has been virtually destroyed, thanks to the intense lobbying against it by the medical industry. In 1995, 36 states restricted or outright banned midwifery, even though studies have found that it delivers equally safe care at far lower prices than standard hospital births.

In most species, improved circumstances increase reproductive effort, yet as economic development gets going, country after country has experienced the “demographic transition,” in which fertility (the number of children borne by a woman over her lifetime) drops from around 8 to one-and-a-half.

Unless trends change, by the middle of the century, populations in the most developed countries will have shrunk and the number of retired individuals supported by each person of working age will increase significantly.

A study by Mikko Myrskyla, Hans-Peter Kohler, & Francesco Billari (”Advances in development reverse fertility declines“) suggests that the trend may change: as development continues, the demographic transition goes into reverse.

The researchers looked at two years 1975 and 2005, and analyzed countries using two factors, total fertility rate (the number of children that would be born to a woman in a particular country over the course of her life if she experienced the age-specific fertility rates observed in that country during the calendar year in question) and human development index or “HDI” (a measure used by the UN that includes life expectancy, average income per person, and level of education), which has a maximum possible value of one.

In 1975, of the 107 countries analyzed, the best was Canada, with an HDI of 0.89. By 2005, two dozen countries (of 240 analzyed) had HDIs above nine. In 1975, a graph plotting fertility rate against the HDI fell as the HDI rose. By 2005, though, once the HDI rose above 0.9 or so, it turned up, producing a “J-shaped” curve (the mirror image of a letter J).

In many countries with very high levels of development (around 0.95) fertility rates are now approaching two children per woman.

The nadir of fertility appears to be 1.3 children per woman but this new data suggests the ultimate outcome of development may be zero population growth.

“The best of all possible worlds?,” The Economist

Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that lives in the guts of cats, where it sheds eggs in cat feces that are often eaten by rats. The parasites increase their odds of getting back to cats by changing the infected rats’ brains, making them less scared of cats (and so more likely to be eaten).

A new study by Jaroslav Flegr, Jan Havlíček, et. al, (”Increased incidence of traffic accidents in Toxoplasma-infected military drivers and protective effect RhD molecule revealed by a large-scale prospective cohort study“) found that subjects with high titers of anti-Toxoplasma antibodies had a probability of a traffic accident (17%) more than 6 times higher than Toxoplasma-free subjects.

“The Return of the Puppet Masters,” by Alex Tabarrok