None of it is bad but all of it is change

Hans Rosling does some really interesting work with global measures of well-being, both past, present and projected into the future.

I watched this video of his Dr. Hans Rosling: Facts and Fiction on Global Health NMD 2014 which is, as usual, both entertaining and enlightening. I was struck by the importance and materiality of his work in terms of demographics in comparison with the triviality of some similar themes that are bandied about in the US in highly irresponsible ways.

There are groups in the US that are particularly interested in fostering division by race, and income, and gender. You can speculate as to their motives but it is not hard to judge them as irresponsibly fostering divisiveness that is unlikely to have a happy outcome.

You hear in many forums arguments that are often grounded on the assertion that the face of America is changing and we need to do X because of that. In a country founded on the idea of natural rights and the equality of man, it is a little hard to see the philosophical connection between race and policy. But it is a given in many corners.

What is ironic is the logical inconsistency of many of the arguments. Many attempt to use scare tactics such as "People of Color are growing fast and will at some time in the nearer future be the majority population". That argument is not much more than racial fear-mongering of the worst sort and oddly has the embedded assumption of negative and positive race attributes. Yuck.

It is indisputably true that the face of America is changing. It has always been changing. It likely will always be changing. It is a beacon of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I suspect it will always exert an attraction.

So how is the changing face a threat? The only significant challenge is the danger that we import the divisiveness of other cultures and that we admit new people faster than they can be acculturalized and assimilated.

And is it really changing all that much. African-Americans are basically at steady-state as are Native Americans. The only growth areas are among Asian Americans and Hispanics. Asian Americans are proving both hugely successful (on average) and with an enormous capacity to acculturalize and assimilate. I don't think there is anyone particularly concerned about those sets of changes. Hispanics in turn are a somewhat different circumstance in that it is not a race at all but a geographic construct. Yes there are assimilation issues but likely not unachievable. In terms of race, if you accept the self-identification of Hispanics, the overall race distribution in the US, for all the global admissions since the 1965 reforms, is a remarkably stable 80% white, 13% Black, 6% Asian and 1% Native American. Everyone fears change but there are some who are trying to stoke that fear in the basest of terms.

There have been a couple of articles recently that have sought to deflate the paranoia and fear these advocate groups seek to foster. Why Hispanics Don’t Have a Larger Political Voice by Nate Cohn is one and Republicans’ increasing reliance on white voters may not spell electoral doom just yet by Chris Cillizza is another. Cillizza is right, I think, to call into question whether a strategy of race based electioneering is in the interests of the commonweal.

What does this have to do with Hans Rosling? Watch the video. He debunks a lot of false information and he sheds light on where the real demographic changes are known to be occurring. What's going on in the US is small, small potatoes compared to what is happening at the global level. None of it is bad but all of it is change and change is what we all tend to most fear.