mindstalk | Entries tagged with demographics

So there's this website (a one post blog), claiming to dispel the "myth" that the UK is more violent than the US. It talks a bit about the methodology problems of different definitions, and uses both police reports and crime surveys. It calculates per capita rates a bit oddly, but seems okay. The summaries, trying to compare like to like:

You are thus 1.1x (135.7 / 113.7) more likely to suffer robbery in the UK than in the US.

You are thus 4.03x (4.6 / 1.14) more likely to be murdered in the US than in the UK.

You are thus 1.27x (58.3 / 45.8) more likely to be knifed in the UK than in the US.

You are thus 35.2x (3.17 / 0.09) more likely to be shot dead in the US than in the UK. [I haven't been checking all the math, but that actually seems low, we have more gun homicides than his figure.]

You are thus 1.02x (26.7 / 26) more likely to be raped as a female in the US than in the UK.

You are thus 6.9x (241.05 / 34.7) more likely to suffer aggravated assault in the US than in the UK.

Also two non-violent ones:

You are thus 1.52x (702.1 / 460.1) more likely to suffer burglary in the US than in the UK.

You are thus 1.29x (229.5 / 176.9) more likely to suffer theft of a vehicle in the US than in the UK.

So, more likely to be killed or shot-killed in the US; we knew that. (You're also a bit more likely to be killed even without a gun in the US than in the UK, roughly 1.4 to 1.05), More likely to suffer property crime in the US, but those don't count here. Rape is about equal, FWIW. Somewhat more likely to be knifed or robbed in the UK, that's not good for them. And massively more likely to be assaulted in the US.

Except that if you look carefully, the definitions are still incomparable. The UK is using Grievous Bodily Harm, which as far as I can tell requires actual serious injury. Meanwhile the US's aggravated assault requires no injury at all! An assault is aggravated if it results in serious injury *or* if it involved a weapon that could have resulted in serious injury: if I slash at or shoot at you, that's agg assault, even if I fail completely and you're unarmed.

Comparing those seems... poor. Completely invalid, even.

I tried writing the listed e-mail address, but it bounced; the thing seems abandoned, not to mention anonymous, for all that someone slung it around in a recent online debate.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/451640.html

Economics profession swings left http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-07/economics-stars-swing-left

Cracked on prostitution myths. Anecdotal, but consistent with studies I've read and possibly linked to in the past. http://www.cracked.com/article_21862_5-ways-life-as-prostitute-nothing-like-you-expect.html

Pew on the religions of Asian-Americans. Christian 42%, 26% none, 14% Buddhist, 10% Hindu. http://www.pewforum.org/2012/07/19/asian-americans-a-mosaic-of-faiths-overview/
As a group, they range from the least religious unaffiliated to the most evangelical Protestants. Majority of Korean-Americans are Protestant; I think back in South Korea only 25% are Christian, with 50% having no religion.

Idea on why Charlie Hebdo was attacked:
http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-satirists.html
"France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world (ex-Soviet ethnic Muslims often also have low rates of belief and observance). Many Muslim immigrants in the post-war period to France came as laborers and were not literate people, and their grandchildren are rather distant from Middle Eastern fundamentalism, pursuing urban cosmopolitan culture such as rap and rai. In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France.

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination."

Westeros-world map updated for Worlds of Ice and Fire http://awoiaf.westeros.org/images/1/10/WorldofIceandFire.png
GRRM deconstructing war, dark Daenerys (spoiles for whole series https://meereeneseblot.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/untangling-the-meereenese-knot-part-iv-a-darker-daenerys/ )
Dornish vengeance (ditto) https://meereeneseblot.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/water-gardens-and-blood-oranges-part-iv-it-ends-in-blood/

no to Boston Olympics
http://m.thenation.com/blog/194529-dear-boston-its-protest-time-say-hell-no-olympic-games
http://www.nobostonolympics.org/

experience of black atheists http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/12/black-atheists-representation/

Attack on Titan/Frozen AMV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXR0WIbubB0

Saudi Arabia and 9/11 http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/new-questions-raised-about-u-s-saudi-relationship-1.2890528

America's poor vs. those in other rich countries http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/01/05/america_s_poor_vs_the_rest_of_the_world.html

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/418434.html

What the heck is with the multiple 50+ comment posts on James's LJ today? Gah.

Drawback of 4 cats: when food falls on the floor, it doesn't seem worth the bother of washing it off -- and sure wouldn't eat it without washing it off. Also, why are three of them attacking the plastic bags and boxes beneath the microwave?

Today was a bunch of errands. Medical, then accessories. Repaired sandals, new shoes, new supports, new eyeglasses case -- free for the asking! wow, guess they're trivial compared to the cost of eyeglasses -- micro SD card for the phone (8 GB is $22, 16 GB $60, 8 seems better value but then I figured I want it to live in my phone, so get as big as possible. Also, no 32G thumb drives yet? I'm surprised), screen protector, foreign plug converters, $10 for 4 4-packs of AA batteries at Radio Shack anyone need some?

Mall food court had amusing free samples competition going, Little Tokyo vs. the Chinese place next to it. LT's chicken and shrimp teriyaki wasn't bad, though I didn't realize the tea wasn't part of the combo, and I'm not big on sweet tea. Though maybe all that liquid helped the next paragraph.

Then biking straight from Target to Ch's for mahjong. 22 minutes via Covenanter. 22 miserable and sweaty minutes -- seems another way I can tell I'm gaining unwanted weight is sweating more, i.e. retaining heat more or generating more because there's more of me -- but interesting, not horribly miserable. I was glad to stop and splash cold water on me and guzzle ice water, but I wasn't staggering in on the verge of collapse, despite the 90+ heat and humidity levels. And my blood pressure earlier at the clinic was 115/73, despite having just biked up hill. 14 minutes back from Ch to A&L's, via Lincoln and First.

Some demographic posts of note:
European TFR is a tricky statistic, it assumes constant patterns but in fact age of first birth has been rising, but births are postponed, not wiped out. This is talking about birth and development i.e. something else, but has related graphs. Sadly, "adjusted fertility rate" is not a fruitful google within my patience. (Edit: just up, Randy's post on Iran's women and family size.)

Anne Rice has left "Christianity", i.e. conservative Christianity by what she describes, but not Christ.

Little tidbits of Tron.

Once again, reality has a liberal bias. Mentions rfmcdpei.

Summary: the %age of Muslims is small, and most of them aren't observant -- secular escapees from religious countries. (Blinding flash of the obvious: what kind of "Muslim" would be most likely to go to a strange and non-Muslim country?) Their birth rates drop quickly to those of the surrounding populations, or even lower. The European countries with the lowest birthrates are the ones with the biggest church influence, most observant and furthest from social democracy. Poland, Italy. NW Europe has the highest cohort birth rates. And finally:

I agree with Mr. Steyn on one point: Islamic faith is bad for people, and political Islam is a threat that deserves to be likened to fascism. But, unlike him, I realize that, as threats go, it's up there with the neo-Nazi threat to England.

Europe once faced a genuine fundamentalist threat, in the face of a declining population. From 1345 to 1750, the continent's population barely grew, and the church, a murderous, terrorist, woman-hating force, seized considerable power. It was not Christian culture, but rather the opposition to this Christian threat, that made Europe great: The Enlightenment not only destroyed the church as a power, but also created the fertility boom.

If Europeans, under similar demographic distress, were able to fend off a threatening political movement within a faith that was then held by almost 100 per cent of the population, they shouldn't have much to fear from a vanishing movement inside a 4-per-cent minority.

Europe already defeated its own virulent religions.

Source material, which Saunders distorted a bit by doing cross-country comparisons. In any particular country, the Muslim immigrant birth rate is higher. But that differential has been dropping rapidly. And "Muslims" aren't uniform, with initial immigrant birth rate correlation to country of origin (shock!) and local poverty or development.

In Pakistan, the Indo-Asian News Service recently reported that mosques "will soon distribute contraceptives and literature to spread awareness about the importance of family planning and safe sex" (18 December 2006). Some 22,000 clerics "will be appointed to spread the message of the benefits of a small family" according to the federal population planning minister. This approach is said to be borrowed from Bangladesh, which for decades has promoted aggressive family planning policies. Contraceptive practice is widespread in many Muslim countries, and fertility has declined substantially in Indonesia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Iran, and several North African countries (Eltigani 2005). The large majority of Muslim countries support provision of family planning services.

One review of Muslim reproductive behavior (Karim 1997) concluded: "There seems to be no typical pattern of reproductive behavior which could be described as 'Islamic'. Islam as such seems to be neither a hindrance nor a stimulating factor in fertility decline at the global level."

So, Islam is friendlier to birth control low birth rates than the Catholic Church, not that Church is helping Poland and Italy.

Although fertility for all women is highest for Muslims, the fertility of married Muslims is the same as that of married Catholics and Protestants. Among married women aged 35-44 Muslims have had 2.3 births, Catholics 2.2, and Protestants 2.3

More Muslim women are married. There's more nuance as well, with immigrant fertility perhaps being inflated by births shortly after migration, but not repeated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate
to quickly look at fertility rate by country, and see how France, Nordics, and Netherland lead Europe, with in fact southern and eastern Europe at the bottom.