Posts Tagged ‘migration’
“The only people who can fix Africa are talented young Africans. By unlocking and nurturing their creative potential, we can create a step change in Africa’s future.”*…
And there are about to be a great many of those young people… As we exit the Holidays looking forward, our global foci tend to be the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and East Asia. In an updated re-post (the original of which was featured here), the estimable Noah Smith reminds us not to neglect Africa…
Africa has been mostly out of the news in the U.S. these days. But if you think about the rest of this century, and what that’s going to look like, it’s impossible not to think about the world’s second-largest continent. The two reasons, simply put, are 1) population, and 2) poverty. Africa’s fertility rate is shrinking, just like everywhere else, but it started doing so much later. So population momentum is going to make Africa VERY populous by the time it peaks (which some forecasters think will happen at around the end of the century). [See the chart above, taken from this IMF report.]
You’ll notice that these estimates are quite a bit lower than the ones in my first graph in the [original post]. This is because Africa’s fertility rates have been falling a lot more than people expected. But even with these lower estimates, Africa is projected to be absolutely huge by the end of the century. And its fraction of the young population will be far higher still. There will come a time, not too long from now, when countries around the world are clamoring for African migrants instead of trying to keep them out.
The other reason Africa is important is poverty; it’s now clear that Africa will be the last major world region to escape a subsistence standard of living. The question of whether and how it can escape this fate is the subject of the post below. But notice that the flip side of poverty is potential; being poor means you have a lot of room to grow, and by the end of this century, most labor-intensive tasks will probably be done in Africa.
And growth is actually doing well. Despite all the talk of decoupling and the big slowdown in China, and despite the occasional hand-wringing in the Western press, growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has been pretty robust in 2022 and 2023. And that’s projected to continue this year…
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Just how to jump-start productivity growth in African manufacturing is a difficult question. Should countries make their exchange rates cheaper? Improve infrastructure? Spend more on education and health? Are free trade agreements important here? Do industrial policies and/or export promotion have any role to play? Or does the rise of automation simply mean that countries can’t get rich with labor-intensive manufacturing anymore?
I don’t know. But… the fact that Africa has some productive manufacturers and the fact it has managed to shift more people into factory work are both good signs. And though Asia’s growth boom is still going strong, it can’t last forever, and Africa’s day as the workshop of the world may come soon.
But economists, leaders, policymakers, businesspeople, and international organizations need to be focusing on this challenge more than they are. The fate of humanity in the 21st century and beyond hinges on whether African countries can figure out the riddle of industrialization…
Smith may be over-optimistic… in which case, economic, political, and climate migrants will stream out of Africa. Or, it may be that Africa’s development will follow a new and different social, political, and economic logic (see. e.g., here, here, and here).
In any event, Africa matters absolutely: “All futurism is Afrofuturism,” from @Noahpinion.
See also: Reynaldo Anderson‘s contribution, “In a post-American world order, Africa becomes a power player,” to Politico‘s “The Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events That Could Throw 2024 Into Turmoil” (all of which are provocative).
If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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As we devote ourselves to development, we might recall that it was on this date in 1912 (the anniversary of the 1806 Battle of Blaauwberg, as a result of which the British gained sovereignty over the Dutch Cape Colony, which we now know as South Africa) that the African National Congress was founded. Originally known as the South African Native National Congress, it began as a liberation movement, then became a political party. It has governed South Africa since 1994, when the first post-apartheid election resulted in Nelson Mandela‘s election as President of South Africa.
“Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.”*…
When Columbus landed in 1492, the Americas had been settled for tens of thousands of years. He wasn’t the first person to discover the continent. Rather, as Nick Longrich explains, his discovery was the last of many discoveries…
In all, people found the Americas at least seven different times. For at least six of those, it wasn’t so new after all. The discoverers came by sea and by land, bringing new genes, new languages, new technologies. Some stayed, explored, and built empires. Others went home, and left few hints they’d ever been there…
From last to first, here’s the story of how we arrived in the “New World”: “Seven times people discovered the Americas – and how they got there,” from @NickLongrich in @ConversationUS.
* James Joyce
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As we ponder precedent, we might that it was on this date that about 300 Seneca warriors defeated a detachment of the British 80th Regiment of Light Armed Foot in the Battle of Devil’s Hole (near Niagara Gorge in present-day New York state). The action was part of what is known as Pontiac’s War, which had begun earlier that year when a loose confederation of Native Americans dissatisfied with British rule in the Great Lakes region following the French and Indian War moved to reclaim control of the land they had historically occupied.
Warfare on the North American frontier was brutal, and the killing of prisoners, the targeting of civilians, and other atrocities were widespread. In an incident that became well-known and frequently debated, British officers at Fort Pitt attempted to infect besieging Indians with blankets that had been exposed to smallpox. The war ended the following year after peace negotiations; and while the Natives were unable to drive away the British, the uprising prompted the British government to modify the policies that had provoked the conflict.
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”*…
As Dylan Matthews explains, 80 percent of young Americans still live within 100 miles of where they spent their teenage years…
A new paper by Harvard’s Ben Sprung-Keyser and Nathaniel Hendren, and the Census Bureau’s Sonya Porter, takes an in-depth look at young adults leaving home. The big takeaway is … they do not.
At age 26, the authors find, 30 percent of Americans live in the census tract they lived in at 16. Fifty-eight percent live less than 10 miles away;80 percent live less than 100 miles away; 90 percent live less than 500 miles away. Census tracts are tiny, hyper-local designations, with populations between 1,200 and 8,000 each; mine is only 0.2 square miles in area. The small town where I grew up has three tracts within it. Staying within your tract is an extreme level of residential stasis, but 30 percent of young adults do just that…
As the demographers and sociologists reading this are likely to point out, the finding that people mostly stay put is not new. Indeed, residential mobility inside the US has been cratering for years, and kept falling even during the pandemic, despite narratives about city residents fleeing…
How race and class play into this trend, how distant job opportunities don’t, and what might be done to change the pattern: “The great millennial migration that wasn’t,” from @dylanmatt at @voxdotcom.
* Albert Einstein
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As we get moving, we might recall that it was on this date in 1610 that explorer and navigator, Henry Hudson and his crew sailed into (what we now know as) Hudson Bay in (what we now know as) Canada. While Hudson is rightly remembered for this and his other explorations and chartings of the northern reaches of North America, it was at the time a disappointment: Hudson initially believed that he had finally found the Northwest Passage through the continent. Months of further exploration and mapping, of course, proven him wrong.
“In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some apelike creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite point where the term ‘man’ ought to be used”*…
Homo sapiens finger bone, dating back some 86,000 years, found at a site called Al Wusta in Saudi Arabia
Darwin turns out to right about the difficulty of dating the emergence of man, not only for the reason he intended (that our emergence from prior species was so gradual as to be indetectable as an “event”) but also because it’s turning out to be difficult to date the earliest examples we can agree are “man” and to figure out when they reached the places they settled…
The Nefud Desert is a desolate area of orange and yellow sand dunes. It covers approximately 25,000 square miles of the Arabian Peninsula. But tens of thousands of years ago, this area was a lush land of lakes, with a climate that may have been kinder to human life.
On a January afternoon in 2016, an international team of archaeologists and paleontologists was studying the surface of one ancient lake bed at a site called Al Wusta in the Nefud’s landscape of sand and gravel. Their eyes were peeled for fossils, bits of stone tools, and any other signs that might remain from the region’s once-verdant past.
Suddenly, Iyad Zalmout, a paleontologist working for the Saudi Geological Survey, spotted what looked like a bone. With small picks and brushes, he and his colleagues removed the find from the ground.
“We knew it [was] important,” Zalmout recalled in an email. It was the first direct evidence of any large primate or hominid life in the area. In 2018, lab tests revealed that this specimen was a finger bone from an anatomically modern human who would have lived at least 86,000 years ago.
Prior to this Al Wusta discovery, evidence in the form of stone tools had suggested some human presence in the Nefud between 55,000 and 125,000 years ago. To anthropologists, “human” and “hominin” can mean any of a number of species closely related to our own. The finger bone was the oldest Homo sapiens find in the region.
The bone’s dating contradicts a well-established narrative in the scientific community. Findings, particularly from the area of modern-day Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon, known as the Levant region, have led to the understanding that H. sapiens first made their way out of Africa no earlier than 120,000 years ago, likely migrating north along the Mediterranean coast. These people settled in the Levant and their descendants—or those from a subsequent early human migration out of Africa—traveled into Europe tens of thousands of years later.
Only later, that story goes, did they journey into parts of Asia, such as Saudi Arabia. By some estimates, then, anatomically modern humans would not have been in what is now Al Wusta until about 50,000 years ago.
The fingerbone, then, adds a twist to the tale of how and when our species left the African continent and, with many starts and stops, populated much of the rest of the earth. A new crop of discoveries, particularly from Asia, suggest that modern humans first left Africa some 200,000 years ago, taking multiple different routes…
Politics, geography, and tradition have long focused archaeological attention on the evolution of Homo sapiens in Europe and Africa. Now, new research is challenging old ideas by showing that early human migrations unfolded across Asia far earlier than previously known: “Will Asia Rewrite Human History?”
* Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
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As we return to roots, we might spare a thought for Jean-Léon-François Tricart; he died on this date in 2003. A physical geographer and climatic geomorphologist known for his extensive regional studies in numerous countries of Africa.
Tricart was a pioneer in many fields of physical geography including the study of a phenomenon central to the migration of early Homo Sapiens, the major dynamic role of climate in landscape evolution.
“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself”*…
So … what if everyone went back where they came from?
The always-illuminating Nathan Yau, of Flowing Data, demonstrates that in the U.S., almost everyone comes from somewhere else. See his explanation at “If We All Left to ‘Go Back Where We Came From’.”
* Maya Angelou
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As we contemplate commonality, we might recall that it was on this date in 1648 that Mehmed IV became Sultan of the Ottoman Empire… at the age of 6 (as a result of his father’s overthrow). He went on to become the second longest reigning sultan in Ottoman history (after Suleiman the Magnificent). Under his reign the empire reached the height of its territorial expansion in Europe.
The Ottoman Empire at its greatest extent in Europe, under Sultan Mehmed IV in the late 17th century
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