demographics

Staving off demographic decline will require more than supreme court precedent or policy cocktails of carrots and sticks.

Just stop and think about it for a second. Seriously.

Don’t stress about just one poll – fundamentals still favor Republicans in Texas

White people love Subarus. Google's spy cars have documented the "street view" of much of the United States (and the rest of the world). But what are some applications of all of this data scientists could use? Google's folks decided to analyze the types of cars parked on the street to see if they…

In a desperate ploy for attention to their newish, clickbaity opinion section, THINK (check out the “hot take” rubric on its description of the GOP tax plan as a “dumpster fire”), NBC News has turned to a reliable source of outrage with a column by Travis Reider titled, “Science proves kids are bad…

For all the millennials “feeling the Bern,” Time has come to a startling realization: “Young Americans Are Actually Not Becoming More Progressive,” the magazine announced last week (with a parental sigh). Republicans, you’ll remember, were predicted to have a “young-people problem” in 2016, but 37…

For all the millennials “feeling the Bern,” Time has come to a startling realization: “Young Americans Are Actually Not Becoming More Progressive,” the magazine announced last week (with a parental sigh). Republicans, you’ll remember, were predicted to have a “young-people problem” in 2016, but 37…

President Trump has another Russian problem. Like other American presidents since 2001, Trump has been following in the footsteps of the failed Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979-1989).

Before there was Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, and Bill Mitchell's Yard Signs, there was Vigo County, Indiana. The half-urban, half-rural area about 80 miles southwest of Indianapolis has voted for the winner of the presidential race in 30 of the last 32 elections, and…

Legend has it that during the Black Plague, superstitious Europeans started killing cats. The idea was that witches had caused the plague and cats were disguised devils, serving as the witches' "familiar spirits," ergo killing them would hurt the witches and hopefully spare people from the disease.

Over the last several years people have been led to believe a number of ineluctable demographic truths, most of which turn out to be almost exactly wrong. (I wrote a book about this a few years back, which can loosely be summarized as: "Everything you think you know about demographics is wrong.")

AEI reports that Ben Wattenberg has died. I met him only once but had admired him for years, and it strikes me that he stands as a particularly important figure today. Not for his intellect, though it was keen; or for his energy, though it was abundant. No, what marked Wattenberg foremost was his…

Hillary Clinton is a fairly weak candidate for the presidency, in many ways:

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert writes about Jonathan V. Last's book What to Expect When No One's Expecting and gets it completely wrong.

Last month The Scrapbook reported on a slightly arcane, but important, change being proposed for the American Community Survey. The ACS is an annual survey conducted by the Census Bureau; it goes out to 3 million households and is one of the most robust tools we have for gathering demographic data…

The Internet had a conniption last week when Jeb Bush spoke at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference and made the following remark:

The 2012 national election continues to be a puzzle. Barack Obama won reelection with a solid 51 percent of the vote, and Democrats picked up 2 Senate seats, expanding their majority to 55-45. Yet the House of Representatives remained in Republican control, 234-201, yielding the divided government…

In 2005, Steve Sailer wrote a cover story for the American Conservative theorizing that the divide between red and blue states was driven in large part by the cost of family formation. Sailer dubbed this the “Dirt Gap” (referring to the price of homes with yards), and his general thesis was that…

Over at Real Clear Politics, Jean Yarbrough has a response to a New York Times op-ed defending Michael Bloomberg's soda ban. The Times piece was written by Sarah Conly, a Bowdoin College professor who seems to specialize in coercive paternalism.

Nick Gillespie reviews Jonathan V. Last's book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Jonathan V. Last, hosted by Michael Graham:

The Scrapbook is delighted to announce that our colleague Jonathan V. Last’s brilliant essay, “America’s One-Child Policy,” which appeared in these pages two-and-a-half years ago, has grown into an even more brilliant new book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic…

This week Russian president Vladimir Putin brought Boyz II Men to Moscow to "hopefully [give] Russian men some inspiration ahead of St. Valentine's Day," according to the Moscow Times. That is, Putin brought the music group to town to encourage love-making, and, he hopes, baby-making to offset…

In a new book on demographics set to be published next week, Jonathan V. Last writes that pets now outnumber children 4 to 1 in America. The book is titled What to Expect When No One’s Expecting.

Ross Douthat has gotten himself in trouble for writing about demographics and the latest Pew report on the decline of America’s birth rate. Douthat has the temerity to suggest that having babies is important for public welfare, that Americans aren’t having enough of them, and that the root cause of…

As hard as it is to believe, it’s been only a little over three weeks since Election Day. But there are already plenty of signs that Republicans are learning many of the wrong lessons from that debacle. For starters, there’s been a lot of excessive emphasis on racial demographics, which actually…

Elections these days are determined in part by the swing of unaffiliated voters, which both sides closely contest. They also hinge on how strongly each party’s base turns out to vote.

It's demographics time again! Last week, the CDC released its preliminary birth data for 2011. Much of the analysis focused on the raw number of births, which declined for the fourth straight year. America's general fertility rate is now the lowest it's ever been. Which is not great news.

The world is heading for demographic catastrophe. Fertility rates have been falling across the globe for 40 years, to the point where, today, Israel is the only First World country where women have enough babies to sustain their population. The developing world is heading in the same direction,…

Ramesh Ponnuru: "Obama Health Rule an Affront to Religious Groups"

Joel Gehrke: "Tina Brown: Professor Obama 'doesn't like his job'"

There is gloom and then there is doom. We Americans have plenty of reason for the former as we say goodbye to summer on this holiday weekend on which I am told the last gin and tonic of the season is consumed by those so inclined. Confidence in the economy is plunging at the fastest rate since the…

If you obsess about demography for long enough, eventually you find all sorts of off-speed proposals to deal with the world's falling fertility rate. One of which is called "Demeny voting."Named for demographer Paul Demeny (who is now the editor of the Population Council's Population and…

Jennifer Rubin: "Gates's spokesman does damage control"