Progress Daily

For the third successive year, America’s Border Patrol reports a sharp drop in arrests on and near the frontier. In 2006 the figure dropped 8% to around 1m. Last year it dropped by a full fifth. The six months to March showed a year-on-year drop of 17%. By the (imperfect) measure of border arrests, the migrant flow today is roughly half that of 2000, when 1.6m arrests were made.

Mexico’s central bank reports that, after years of rapid growth, the amount of cash sent home by migrants inside America is falling. Last year such flows were worth $24 billion (more valuable than tourism). But in the first quarter of this year the year-on-year figure was down 2.9%.

A poll of migrants across America published by in April confirmed that fewer are sending money back regularly: in 2006 three-quarters of migrants did, this year only half report doing so. Brazil, the second-largest recipient of remittances in the region, saw them slide by 4% last year, to $7.1 billion.

A study by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) this year noted that of the 1m or so East Europeans who came to Britain since 2004, around half have already left. The inflow of migrants to Britain from this region has also dropped sharply, by 17% last year.

In Britain the economy is slowing, and the sharp drop in the value of the pound has cut the attraction of the country to foreign workers. Every pound a Pole sent home in May 2004 earned him seven zloties; today he gets little more than four.

East European economies have grown relatively fast in recent years, their labour forces are shrinking fast (partly because of emigration, partly because of ageing populations) and unemployment has dropped quickly in the past half-decade.

Kathleen Newland suggests that based on the experience of countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece and South Korea, emigration usually slows when income per person approaches a threshold level in relation to income in the richer countries where the migrants are heading. The tipping point is when the ratio of incomes reaches about 1:4 or 1:5, especially if the upward trend seems stable. For migrants looking to go to western Europe and North America, this would imply a threshold level of $6,000-7,000.

“A turning tide?,” The Economist

Katherine Kinzler has demonstrated that preverbal infants as young as 5-6 months of age “prefer” their own native speakers. She found that American infants look longer at someone speaking with an American accent than someone with a French accent, and the opposite pattern occurs with French infants. And when two adults simultaneously offer a 10-month-old the same toy, the baby usually reaches for the one being given to them by the native speaker.

In the ancestral past, neighboring communities were often at war with each other, and the most reliable marker of an out-group member wasn’t what they looked like but how they sounded.

“Babies Don’t Like Foreigners,” by Jesse Bering

Richard Sosis analyzed two hundred 19th-century US communes: 88 religious and 112 secular. He found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.

In a follow-up study, Sosis focused on 83 of these communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the behaviour of their members.

He found that the more constraints a religious commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, after 149 years). But the same did not hold true of secular communes, where the oldest was 40.

Ara Norenzayan has conducted experiments using what is known as the “dictator game,” a test used to gauge altruistic behaviour. Participants receive a sum of money — $10,in this case — and are asked if they would like to share it with another player.

Norenzayan and Azim Shariff primed half of their volunteers to think about religion by getting them to unscramble sentences containing religious words such as God, spirit, divine, sacred and prophet. Those thus primed left an average of $4.22, while the unprimed left $1.84.

An experiment by Jesse Bering subjected a bunch of undergraduates to a quiz. His volunteers were told that the best performer among them would receive a $50 prize. They were also told that the computer program that presented the questions had a bug in it, which sometimes caused the answer to appear on the screen before the question. The volunteers were therefore instructed to hit the space bar immediately if the word “Answer” appeared on the screen. That would remove the answer and ensure the test results were fair.

The volunteers were then divided into three groups. Two began by reading a note dedicating the test to a recently deceased graduate student. One did not see the note. Of the two groups shown the note, one was told by the experimenter that the student’s ghost had sometimes been seen in the room. The other group was not given this suggestion.

The so-called glitch occurred five times for each student. Bering measured the amount of time it took to press the space bar on each occasion. He discarded the first result as likely to be unreliable and then averaged the other four. Those who had been told the ghost story pressed the space bar in an average of 4.3 seconds. That compared with 6.3 seconds for those who had only read the note about the student’s death and 7.2 for those who had not heard any of the story concerning the dead student.

“Where angels no longer fear to tread,” The Economist

Economists have repeatedly found that the better the rule of law, the richer the nation. (The chart below, by Daniel Kaufmann, shows the results of three studies). Every rich country with the arguable exceptions of Italy and Greece scores well on rule-of-law measures; most poor countries do not.

Some new research finds only a weak link between the rule of law and recent economic growth. The connection with wealth is well established but that is different: it has been forged over decades, even centuries.

As usual, correlation does not imply causation. Perhaps growth helps the rule of law, not vice versa. Perhaps countries can afford the luxury of the rule of law only after they have grown rich.

“Order in the Jungle,” The Economist

In China 25 years ago, over 600m people — two-thirds of the population — were living in extreme poverty (on $1 a day or less). Now, the number on $1 a day is below 180m. Worldwide, 135m people escaped dire poverty between 1999 and 2004. This is more people, more quickly than at any other time in history.

In 2007 Unicef said that for the first time in modern history fewer than 10m children were dying each year before the age of five. That represents a fall of a quarter since 1990. Three-quarters of people aged 15-25 were literate in 1975; now the rate is nearly nine-tenths.

The fertility rate in low- and middle-income countries has crashed. In East Asia and the Pacific, the rate was 5.4 in 1970. Now it is 2.1. In South Asia, the fertility rate halved (from 6.0 to 3.1). In the world as a whole, fertility has fallen from 4.8 to 2.6 in a generation (25 years).

The biggest decline is in those countries that are most involved with globalization (especially in East Asia, though China is a special case because of its one-child policy). With the exception of Yemen, all the countries with fertility rates over 5.0 are in Africa.

In closed agrarian societies, families need a lot of children as insurance against disaster. But in countries that have opened themselves up, families can rely on other sorts of protection, such as urban jobs or trade.

These demographic changes help to create a virtuous circle of growth. When fertility rises then falls, you get a bulge of people at and just after the inflection point. Between 1960 and 1990 Europe and America had relatively few old people (because mortality rates had earlier been high), relatively few children (because fertility had fallen) and a disproportionately big number of economically active adults.

Developing countries are seeing a similar confluence now.

A World Bank study of 19 poor countries concluded that every 1% increase in national income per head translates into a 1.3 point fall in extreme poverty.

Last year the global economy entered its fifth year of over 4% annual growth — the longest period of such strong expansion since the early 1970s. Unlike previous expansions, inflation remained relatively tame.

During this boom, according to the World Bank, national income in the European Union rose slightly more than in America for the first time in a decade. Growth in East Asia was 10%, in South Asia over 8%, in eastern Europe almost 7% and in Africa, thanks to the commodity boom, over 6%. Almost half of humanity, spread over more than 40 nations, lives in countries growing at 7% a year or more (a rate that doubles the size of an economy in a decade). This is twice the number of fast growers that existed in the years between 1980 and 2000.

The world’s economic balance is tilting from rich industrialized countries to emerging markets. Their share of world output in 2006 was just below half, and rising.

Since the mid-1990s, the incomes of the poorest fifth have risen everywhere except, marginally, in Latin America, where they have been affected by the after-shocks of debt crises. In Asia, the real incomes of the poorest fifth rose 4% a year; in Africa, by 2% a year, faster than the rise for other income groups.

The World Bank labels as “fragile” (as opposed to “failed”) troubled countries where the government has partial control of territory (Sudan), where it cannot deliver basic services (Zimbabwe) and places with high levels of political conflict (Nigeria).

Fragile states contain roughly half the developing world’s childhood deaths. About a third of their people are undernourished and more than that do not have access to drinking water. Most of the countries with fertility rates over 5.0 are fragile. They are much more likely to be affected by wars, refugees and every sort of political crisis.

“Somewhere over the rainbow,” The Economist

The cost of developing drugs for rare and common diseases are about the same, but the revenues aren’t. Pharmaceutical companies concentrate on drugs with larger markets because larger markets mean more profits.

As a result, patients diagnosed with rare diseases — those ranked at the bottom quarter in terms of how frequently they are diagnosed — are 45% more likely to die before age 55 than are patients diagnosed with more common diseases.

If China and India were as wealthy as the U.S., the market for cancer drugs would be 8 times larger than it is today.

Cancer is now China’s leading killer, with spending on treatment increasing by 17% per year. AstraZeneca and Novartis are building major research facilities in China, which will benefit patients everywhere.

There are only about 6M scientists and engineers in the entire world, nearly a quarter of whom are in the U.S. If the world as a whole were as wealthy as the U.S. and were devoting the same share of population to research and development, there would be more than 5 times as many scientists and engineers worldwide.

Even small changes in economic growth rates produce large benefits. At current income levels, with an inflation-adjusted growth rate of 3% per year, America’s real per capita gross domestic product would exceed $1 million per year in just over 100 years, more than 22 times higher than it is today.

“Dismal Science Sees Upbeat Future,” Alexander Tabarrok

Givers are happier people than non-givers. According to the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, a survey of 30,000 American households, people who gave money to charity in 2000 were 43% more likely than non-givers to say they were “very happy” about their lives.

Similarly, volunteers were 42% more likely to be very happy than non-volunteers. It didn’t matter whether gifts of money and time went to churches or symphony orchestras — givers to all types of religious and secular causes were far happier than non-givers.

According to the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics, people who gave money away in 2001 were 34% less likely than non-givers to say that they had felt “so sad that nothing could cheer them up” in the past month. They were also 68% less likely to have felt “hopeless,” and 24% less likely to have said that “everything was an effort.”

15% of Americans donate blood at least once each year.

According to the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, in 2002, 43% of the American adults who gave blood 2 to 3 times during the year said they were very happy versus only 29% of those who did not give blood.

Researchers have conducted experiments in which people are queried about their happiness before and after — sometimes long after — they participate in a charitable activity, such as volunteering to help children or serving meals to the poor. The result: giving has a causal impact on happiness.

In one 1998 experiment at Duke University, adults were asked to give massages to babies — the idea being that giving a baby pleasure is a compassionate act with no expectation of a reward, even a “thank you” — in return. After they performed the massages, the seniors were found to have dramatically lower levels of the stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine in their brains.

“Why Giving Makes You Happy,” by Arthur Brooks

Humans have spent most of their time as hunter-gatherers — from at least 85,000 years ago to the birth of agriculture around 73,000 years later.

Human height shrank by nearly six inches after the first adoption of crops in the Near East.

Farmers also had more skeletal wear and tear from the hard work, their teeth rotted more, they were short of protein and vitamins and they caught diseases from domesticated animals: measles from cattle, flu from ducks, plague from rats and worms from using their own excrement as fertiliser.

From the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. Usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.

Richard Wrangham says that chimpanzees and human beings are the only animals in which males engage in co-operative and systematic homicidal raids. The death rate is similar in the two species.

Constant warfare was necessary to keep population density down to one person per square mile. Farmers can live at 100 times that density.

Notice a close parallel with the industrial revolution. The urban poor were overworked and underfed. But 18th-century rural England was a place where people starved each spring as the winter stores ran out, and where where the “putting-out” system of textile manufacture at home drove workers harder for lower pay than the factories would. The industrial revolution caused a population explosion because it enabled more babies to survive.

There is no longer much doubt that hunter-gatherers were the cause of the extinction of the megafauna in North America 11,000 years ago and Australia 30,000 years before that.

At first, modern humans around the Mediterranean relied almost entirely on large mammals for meat. Then they switched their attention to smaller animals, and especially to warm-blooded, fast-breeding species, such as rabbits, hares, partridges and smaller gazelles. The archaeological record tells this same story at sites in Israel, Turkey and Italy.

Human population densities were growing too high for the slower-reproducing prey such as tortoises, horses and rhinos. Only the fast-breeding rabbits, hares and partridges, and for a while gazelles, could cope with such hunting pressure. This trend accelerated about 15,000 years ago as large game and tortoises disappeared.

The belief that hunter-gatherers have plenty of free time turns out to be a bit of a myth. The measurements of time spent getting food by the !Kung omitted food-processing time and travel time, partly because the anthropologists gave their subjects lifts in their vehicles and lent them metal knives to process food.

Even 40,000 years ago, technology and lifestyle were in a state of continuous change, especially in western Eurasia. By 34,000 years ago people were making bone points for spears, and by 26,000 years ago they were making needles. Harpoons, bone spear throwers, and string appeared 18,000 years ago.

15,000 years ago people first domesticated another species — the wolf. 12,000 years ago came agriculture.

Just as we rebounded from the extinction of the megafauna and became even more numerous by eating first rabbits then grass seeds, so in the early 20th century we faced starvation for lack of fertiliser when the population was a billion people, but can now look forward with confidence to feeding 10 billion on less land using synthetic nitrogen, genetically high-yield crops and tractors.

“Noble or savage?,” The Economist

Place a rat in a cage with an electrified floor and subject it to repeated shocks; it will show many signs of stress, at first flinging itself against the walls with each shock. But after a while, it just sits there apathetically, showing no inclination to escape from its painful prison. When autopsied, it will be found to have oversized adrenal glands and, frequently, stomach ulcers, both indicating serious stress.

Now repeat the experiment, but with a wooden stick in the cage alongside the rat. When shocked, the rat chews on the stick, and as a result, it can endure its experience much longer without burnout. At autopsy, its adrenal glands are smaller, stomach ulcers fewer.

Put 2 rats in the electrified cage. Shock them both. They snarl and fight. At autopsy, their adrenal glands are normal, and, even though they have experienced numerous shocks, they have no ulcers.

Recently physiologists have uncovered the hormonal basis for such behavior. Animals and people subjected to attack or threat experience “subordination stress,” as a result of which their adrenal hormones go up, along with blood pressure and the probability of developing ulcers. But when given the opportunity to “take it out” on someone else, victims show no sign of stress.

“The Targets of Aggression,” by David P. Barash

The ultimatum game brings out conflicting impulses: a researcher offers two players a set amount of money and explains that if they agree on how to divvy it up they will keep that money for themselves. If they don’t, neither will get anything. One player then offers the other a split. Most players reject a patently unfair division — such as offering only $4 out of a total of $20. Yet, self interest would argue that even $4 is better than nothing, which is what will otherwise result.

Daria Knoch and economist Ernst Fehr studied 52 young men in the ultimatum game. The researchers specified the amounts that could be offered - ranging from four to 10 Swiss francs out of 20 - and had computers randomly select some of the offers. This helped distinguish between the recipients demand for reciprocity - only applicable when another human being is in control - and a general resistance to unfair offers. The scientists divided the recipients into 3 groups: those who would receive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to suppress electrical activity in the right side of their prefrontal cortices, those who would receive the treatment on the left side and, as controls, those who would receive no stimulation.

45% of the men who experienced TMS on the right side of their prefrontal cortex accepted the most unfair offers - a split of 16 to 4 - compared with just 15% of those whose left side had been stimulated and 9% of the controls. 37% of those who underwent right side stimulation accepted all unfair offers - judged as any split less than 10 to 10 - whereas no one was so accepting in the other groups. And they made the decision to accept an unfair offer as quickly as a fair one, while their colleagues needed much longer to decide. This marks the first time that brain researchers have controlled a specific behavior by using TMS on a specific region of the brain. It takes at least 15 minutes of direct application to the skull to induce the changes, and they only last a short while.

“Selfish Impulse Set Free by Magnetic Pulse to Brain,” by David Biello