Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Should the U.S. Govern Lagos? Dhaka? Kinshasa?

April 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The Real Population Bomb

From 1950 to 2015, as projected by the United Nations, the population of Lagos will rise from 1 million to 25 million; Dhaka, from 400,000 to 22.8 million; and Kinshasa, from 200,000 to 10.5 million. These are among the places the authors of the new book The Real Population Bomb describe as “Category 5 Megacities.” In a riff on Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 classic, Peter Liotta and James Fiskel argue that exponential urban growth is a danger to human survival. The problem, however, is not simple overpopulation but massive suffering and chaos in places where corruption and poverty ... Read More

More like this: Politics
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Law of the Jungle: Powerful Men Have More Children

August 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Two generations after the beginning of the feminist revolution, men still dominate positions of power in the United States. Why are men still over-represented in corporate board rooms, halls of government, and other places where decisions are made? One reason might be that men are evolutionarily programmed to seek positions of high status, as a means of upping their reproductive output. In the podcast, Christopher von Rueden, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, talks about his research into the connections between status and reproduction among the Tsimane, an ... Read More

More like this: Curiouser
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U.S. Seeking LGBT Health Data in Future Surveys

July 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The Department of Health and Human Services last week announced a seemingly small change in the way it will collect population health data going forward. If you’ve ever participated in some of the government’s extensive efforts to track the nation’s health, such as the National Health Interview Survey, you’ve probably answered a question or checked a box about your race and gender. Come 2013, government surveys will begin asking for the first time about another characteristic: sexual orientation. And for researchers and advocates of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered ... Read More

More like this: Health, The Idea Lobby
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Will Hispanics Take Over American Politics?

April 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Party Identification among Eligible Hispanic Voters in Midterm Elections

The rapid growth in the U.S. Hispanic population over the last 40 years — both in terms of raw numbers and percentage of the population — is probably the most important emergent force in American politics today. The evidence is around us: In 2008, each party conducted an entire presidential primary debate in Spanish. In 2009, the first Hispanic judge, Sonia Sotomayor, was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. And in 2010, for the first time ever in a single election, three Hispanic candidates won top statewide offices: Republican Brian Sandoval became Nevada's first Hispanic governor; ... Read More

More like this: Culture, May-June 2011, Miller-McCune Research Essay, Politics
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Immigrant Flow Shifts to Smaller Cities

December 1, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The Pew Hispanic Center has predicted that the U.S. population will grow by more than 100 million over the next 40 years solely as a result of immigration — legal and illegal — and the children born to immigrants already here. Those numbers are in line with several other forecasts based on Census Bureau data, and certainly sound right to associate professor Gary Painter, director of research at the University of Southern California Lusk Center for Real Estate. Where will all those people live? Painter, a specialist in urban economics, homeownership and housing markets, has a pretty ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Culture
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Bad Times Help Rust Belt Retain Power

November 23, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The state of New York has a lot to mourn in the wake of the Great Recession. The area, like many in the United States' Northeast and Midwest, has been shedding jobs and racking up home foreclosures. The downturn in the economy, though, may leave at least one positive legacy: The Empire State stands, as a result, to lose less of its political power in Washington — for now. The Census Bureau is set to release new state-level population data on Dec. 31 after this year's headcount, and congressional seats will then be reapportioned in the once-a-decade adjustment. Northerners who had been ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Energy Outlook Offers Grim Fossil Fuel Forecast

June 10, 2010 • By • 5 Comments

As the U.S. Senate today debates whether to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases, it's worth considering what would happen if every country in the world failed to pass laws and policies curbing the use of fossil fuels. The latest International Energy Outlook, an annual forecast by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, provides a cautionary "what if" for the global energy future if current policies remain unchanged. Driven by population and economic growth in developing countries, the world in 2035 would be more dependent on fossil fuels than ever, ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Environment
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More Power? No, More Empowerment!

February 11, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Few sectors have weathered the economic storm as well as renewable energy. During 2009, America's wind power capacity increased by an enviable 39 percent, and the global wind energy market was expected to grow 25 percent. Wind energy has been on the up and up for years now, and solar power has made similarly impressive gains. If those trends continue, wind and solar power could together be the world's dominant energy source by 2021, according to Nobel laureate-turned-clean-energy-crusader Walter Kohn. "It's something I foresee and hope for," says Kohn, a nuclear physicist who has ... Read More

More like this: CAROUSEL, Education, Environment, Findings, Science & Environment
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Let’s Try Cap-and-Trade on Babies

October 15, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

Andrew Revkin, an environmental reporter for The New York Times and author of the paper's Dot Earth blog, warns that the math is pretty depressing. There are about 6.8 billion people on the planet today, a number projected to get to 9 billion by 2050. Americans, the world's greatest per-capita emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, produce about 20 tons of the stuff per person, per year. If we were to cut that in half, as emissions rose with the quality of life in much of the Third World, and everyone on the planet met around 10 tons per person, per year, simple multiplication says we'd ... Read More

More like this: The Idea Lobby
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Go East, Young Man (Oh, You Already Are)

September 24, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

Get your pens. Write it down. Something big has happened. The westward expansion of the United States is over. The phrase "Go West, young man," attributed to New York newspaperman Horace Greeley that heralded movement of people, livestock, capital and ideas across a continent has reached its logical conclusion. After two centuries of westward expansion, with California being a choice settling spot (there was no more continental west, after all), general U.S. migration patterns now are changing. It seems parts of the West have become what the settlers were leaving: too crowded, too ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society
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