On the demographic issues of Puerto Rico in an era of exodus

I was reminded of my post questioning the viability of Caribbean islands in an era of worsening natural disasters when I began reading reports of the devastation wrought on Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria.

Hurricane Maria is Puerto Rico’s worst in nearly a century, a double blow as it follows the destructive Hurricane Irma by just two weeks. The costs, both human and financial, have only begun to come into view. This much is certain: the U.S. territory, bankrupted by runaway debt, now confronts an even deeper economic crisis. Four months after the island’s government sought protection from creditors in the nation’s largest municipal insolvency, the odds of a speedy resolution now appear to be dimming. President Donald Trump said Thursday he plans to visit the island and declared Puerto Rico a disaster zone, which helps clear the way for federal assistance.

[. . .]

Already, the financial aftershocks of Hurricane Maria have begun to ripple through the U.S. financial industry. Prices on Puerto Rico general-obligation bonds maturing in 2041 fell to 48.7 cents on the dollar as Maria raked the island, down from 52.6 cents last week. It was another sign that bondholders increasingly doubt the island’s ability to repay what it owes.

“The human pain and suffering and tragedy is really significant,” said James Spiotto, managing director at Chicago-based Chapman Strategic Advisors LLC, whose firm advises on municipal restructurings. “Certainly for the bankruptcy, this doesn’t help. Puerto Rico needs to recover economically and financially for its residents and to be able to pay the creditors.”

The National Guard and the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency were assisting Puerto Rico in restoring power, Governor Ricardo Rossello told reporters Thursday. He urged residents to stay off the streets and remain calm as many are still unable to communicate with family members. That includes the governor himself, who hasn’t been able to reach his parents. A key priority is reopening the port in San Juan to bring in generators, food and water, Rossello said.

“The communication systems have collapsed in general,” Rossello said. “And what I ask the people for is prudence, patience and calm.”

Legal issues should be put on hold as the island grapples with the aftermath of the storm, a judge advised the parties involved in Puerto Rico’s restructuring, according to Reuters, which didn’t name the judge.

The financial situation was dire before Maria hit. The island’s economy has been contracting for a decade, sending a stream of residents to find work on the U.S. mainland. As Puerto Rico faces catastrophic damage, it must restore the health and safety of its citizens while navigating the bankruptcy process to help it reduce a $74 billion debt load and a broke pension system.

Among the economic questions, one of the biggest is how Puerto Rico can reverse its out-migration. About 400,000 people have left the commonwealth since 2008.

“A declining population doesn’t make it easier to handle the debt that stays behind,” said Matt Dalton, chief executive officer of Rye Brook, New York-based Belle Haven Investments, which manages $6 billion of municipal bonds, including insured Puerto Rico debt. “It stays for everybody else to try to take care of.”

(Note, if you would, the importance placed on demographic issues in the above analysis.)

The seriousness of the emergent humanitarian crisis on the island is only becoming clear, as is the increasingly laggard, even dismissive American official response under Trump. Arguments that Trump's failure to respond as effectively to a disaster impacting four million American citizens as the Obama presidency did to--for instance--the 2010 catastrophe in Haiti are rooted in anti-Hispanic racism have been reported by (among others) the Toronto Star's Daniel Dale. Certainly's Trump mock-Spanish pronunciation of Puerto Rico is unfathomable, as are the many other things he has said. As Puerto Ricans drive around the island for days in search of a cell signal and Puerto Ricans remind the United States that they are also Americans and New York State mounts its own aid effort for want of federal intervention, a catastrophe is unfolding.

Demographic trends are at the heart of many of Puerto Rico's current and potential future issues. As Mark Hugo Lopez and Gabriel Velasco noted for Hispanic Trends at the Pew Research Group, in their June 2011 survey "A Demographic Portrait of Puerto Ricans", though there are eight million people of Puerto Rican descent in the United States, at the time these two were writing only half of them live in the jurisdiction of Puerto Rico.


Half lived on the American mainland, a consequence of heavy migration from the Caribbean island to the mainland United States starting perhaps a couple of decades after the American conquest of the island from Spain in 1898, after Puerto Ricans were granted American citizenship. Until recently, relatively high fertility counterbalanced emigration and allowed for continued population growth. In recent years, however, the island has begun to experience a declining population.



This emigration slowed down in the 1970s and 1980s as Puerto Rican incomes began to converge on those of the mainland United States but accelerating again after the 1990s, when the island's economy began to lag again following the expiration of tax incentives intended to spur industrial development on the island. The Puerto Rican economy has experienced unending recession for the past decade, government debt spiraling as GDP has fallen. The island remains rich by international standards, with GDP per capita roughly on par with that of Poland and Latvia and ahead of nearly all of Latin America. Just as Poles and Latvians, however, have responded to the relative poverty of their homeland by leaving for richer points as soon as they could, so have Puerto Ricans also left. A migration once centered on New York State, especially New York City, began to find other destinations, Florida for instance emerging as a major new destination for Puerto Rican migrants.

Forbes's Tim Worstall is hardly alone in noting that Puerto Ricans could, and in fact are, respond to the inevitable economic deterioration of the island by leaving. That this migration of people, especially of productive workers and young families, will make the island's finances more difficult to manage is inevitable.

While the court proceedings could eventually make the island solvent for the first time in decades, the more immediate repercussions will likely be grim: Government workers will forgo pension money, public health and infrastructure projects will go wanting, and the “brain drain” the island has been suffering as professionals move to the mainland could intensify.

It's that last line which is the truly important point here. Those who are owed the money are going to be screaming blue murder about how much of it they want back. And in one manner they should be able to get most of it back. Puerto Rico does, after all, have taxing rights over a number of people from now off into perpetuity. It's possible to keep squeezing those people for as long as it takes. Except, of course, it isn't as that brain drain points out. As I've mentioned before the people don't in fact have to stay and be taxed to pay the debt:

The population figures, which were released last month, illustrate how Puerto Rico’s fiscal and economic crises are likely to worsen. Puerto Ricans are American citizens, and as they leave the island to seek employment or retirement in the U.S., the island faces a shrinking tax base to pay for debts incurred over the past decade.

The Census Bureau report showed that Puerto Rico’s population fell 1.7% in the year ended June, an acceleration from the 1.6% decline for the year before that. The island’s population has fallen by more than 1.1% for five straight years.

[. . .]

This newer, or perhaps just realised, problem is that the population can just up sticks and leave: but the debts get to stay behind. And an economy that has a shrinking tax base and yet a static debt can all too easily fall into a death spiral. The debt per person, and the taxes needed to pay it, rise ever higher, leading to more of the productive population leaving and that raises the debt per productive capita again and thus the tax rate on those who remain.

This again speaks to Puerto Rico's specific legal status. Anyone and everyone can just get on a plane or a boat to the mainland. No visas are required, there cannot be an exit tax applied to them, they cannot be forced to take a piece of the debt with them. In this sense it's just the same as moving from one US state to another. It isn't like trying to move out of the US Federal tax net, where you do have to pay up all the taxes that you would owe even up to the point of unrealised capital gains and so on. Nope, just go and leave the debt behind.

Demography blogger Lyman Stone observed, looking at data on passenger traffic to and from the island, that the scale of net emigration from Puerto Rico is serious. He has observed that, according to some plausible scenarios, Puerto Rico might be set for a population collapse greater than that experienced by island after the 1840s, with the possibility of the island's population falling by half or more.

All this was before the catastrophe of Hurricane Maria. With the island's infrastructure devastated, and with economic sectors like agriculture wrecked, with no sign of an immediate recovery to a reality that had already been dire, and with Puerto Ricans being American citizens with the right to move, how many people will stay? Megan McArdle's suggestion, based on the precedent of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, that 30% of Puerto Rico's population might leave does not sound obviously implausible. Stone's suggestion of a sharp fall in the population of Puerto Rico does not seem impossible.

What will be done about this? A migration of such a scale will obviously have huge consequences for the United States. New York City may not be suitable for new Puerto Rican migrants--climate refugees--given its dearth of affordable housing, but family connections between Puerto Ricans on the island and the mainland make it a natural destination. Florida, in particular, may also become a major destination. Lauren Ritchie's suggestion in the Orlando Sentinel, based on interview with Puerto Ricans and migration experts alike, that Orlando may be as much remade by Puerto Rican migration as Miami was by Cuban migration certainly sounds possible. How will this effect--for instance--state politics? What will happen to the island of Puerto Rico and the people on it? Will the island finally be integrated firmly into the American federation, as a state as a bare majority of Puerto Ricans wish?

On a devastating hurricane season in the Caribbean and migration futures

Hurricane season this year in the Caribbean is shaping up to be terrible. I had not quite realized how terrible, the imagery of devastation aside, until I learned that the devastation wrought by Hurricane Irma had forced the evacuation of Barbuda, smaller of the two major islands which make up the country of Antigua and Barbuda. The island has been emptied of its population of some eighteen hundred people, breaking a centuries-long history of continuous habitation.

"The damage is complete," Ronald Sanders, the Antigua and Barbuda ambassador to the United States, told Public Radio International. "It's a humanitarian disaster."

"For the first time in 300 years, there's not a single living person on the island of Barbuda -- a civilization that has existed in that island for close to, over 300 years has now been extinguished."

[. . .]

When the storm hit, Antigua received minimal damage but the storm obliterated Barbuda's infrastructure, flattening structure after structure. At least one death was reported. Rescuers evacuated residents to Antigua and a state of emergency has been declared.

"We've tried to make living accommodations as good as humanly possible in these circumstances. Fortunately, we had planned ahead for this hurricane, and we had ordered supplies in from Miami and the United States before the hurricane hit," Sanders told PRI.

He told CNN about 1,700 people were evacuated from Barbuda to Antigua and said others went to Antigua on their own.

The living conditions aren't perfect and they can be "cramped," he said. But the evacuees are safe and the young people from Barbuda will be going to school in Antigua, for the time being.

"It's government facilities in which they are being located. We've opened some others. We've taken a nursing home for instance and converted that into accommodation and Antiguans have been very generous in opening their homes to some of the Barbudans, particularly those with young children," he told PRI.

The government believes that while some Barbudans might choose to stay in Antigua even after their island is rebuilt, many will want to go home.

NBC reports that apparently some hope revenues from online gambling sites based in the island nation could finance reconstruction.

Other islands have not faced such utter catastrophe, but are not far from there. As Jordyn Holman noted for Bloomberg, the US Virgin Islands' fragile tourism-based economy has been wrecked entirely by Irma. Without any way to sustain themselves, many inhabitants are already leaving.

Many local residents are giving up and getting out after losing everything to the category 5 storm, even as the local authorities in the U.S. territory say they are determined to rebuild the islands.

"I have no job, I have no house, I have no money," said Miriam Martinez, who works as a housekeeper and chef on St. John. "I can’t stay here."

The US Coast Guard arrived Tuesday to help transport evacuees and some tourists off the island. Many people are heading to San Juan, Puerto Rico, for medical care, or to reunite with their families and find out where they can go next. Martinez waited on the dock for hours to see her daughter, son and two grandchildren off as she planned to stay another month on the island. She couldn’t afford to leave herself.

Many of the islands’ 100,000 population have come from the U.S. and are now going back to their families on the mainland, said Ian Samuel, a volunteer and resident of St. John, who was helping evacuees this week. Some are comparing Irma to Hurricane Hugo in 1989, which cost the territory about $3.6 billion.

"Our main staple as an economy is tourism and we want folks from the wider U.S. community or the market to visit the U.S. Virgin Islands on a regular basis," the US Virgin Islands Governor Kenneth Mapp said. "We don’t want to be wiped off the list” of tourist destinations.

The New York Times reported similar levels of devastation on the island of St. Martin, divided between France and the Netherlands. The news from across the Caribbean has been grim, with reports coming in of thorough devastation from points as widely separated as Dominica and the Florida Keys. More recently, this evening I have learned that Puerto Rico just hit by Hurricane Maria, may not have electric power running for months.

Is the intensity of this hurricane season a consequence of climate change? Maybe. If it is, there's something of an irony in the fact that it is the islands of the Caribbean, the place that saw the first extension of imperialism beyond Europe--the extra-continental expansion that resulted in, eventually, our globalized industrial age--that it is the place that is starting to get hit most visibly by the negative environmental consequences of this globalized industrialism. The consequences for the peoples of the Caribbean will be severe. Where will they go? When will they be forced to go, in search of viable lives if not in an effort to save their lives?

On a relationship between climate change in the United States and falling birth rates

On my RSS feed, I recently came across a paper looking at the relationship between climate change and (American) demographics. NBER Working Paper No. 21681, "Maybe Next Month? Temperature Shocks, Climate Change, and Dynamic Adjustments in Birth Rates", written by Alan Barreca, Olivier Deschenes, and Melanie Guldi, makes some noteworthy claims. The paper is behind a paywall, but the abstract is at least indicative.

Dynamic adjustments could be a useful strategy for mitigating the costs of acute environmental shocks when timing is not a strictly binding constraint. To investigate whether such adjustments could apply to fertility, we estimate the effects of temperature shocks on birth rates in the United States between 1931 and 2010. Our innovative approach allows for presumably random variation in the distribution of daily temperatures to affect birth rates up to 24 months into the future. We find that additional days above 80 °F cause a large decline in birth rates approximately 8 to 10 months later. The initial decline is followed by a partial rebound in births over the next few months implying that populations can mitigate the fertility cost of temperature shocks by shifting conception month. This dynamic adjustment helps explain the observed decline in birth rates during the spring and subsequent increase during the summer. The lack of a full rebound suggests that increased temperatures due to climate change may reduce population growth rates in the coming century. As an added cost, climate change will shift even more births to the summer months when third trimester exposure to dangerously high temperatures increases. Based on our analysis of historical changes in the temperature-fertility relationship, we conclude air conditioning could be used to substantially offset the fertility costs of climate change.

My source, the Bloomberg article "Climate Change Kills the Mood: Economists Warn of Less Sex on a Warmer Planet" written by Eric Roston, goes into somewhat more detail about the claims made.

An extra "hot day" (the economists use quotation marks with the phrase) leads to a 0.4 percent drop in birth rates nine months later, or 1,165 fewer deliveries across the U.S. A rebound in subsequent months makes up just 32 percent of the gap.

[. . .]

The researchers assume that climate change will proceed according to the most severe scenarios, with no substantial efforts to reduce emissions. The scenario they use projects that from 2070 to 2099, the U.S. may have 64 more days above 80F than in the baseline period from 1990 to 2002, which had 31. The result? The U.S. may see a 2.6 percent decline in its birth rate, or 107,000 fewer deliveries a year.

If this is correct, it's tempting to wonder about the extent this would be replicated in other areas of the world. What about other warming areas? Does cooling have a relationship to fertility?

On cat islands and the wider potential of rewilding

I'm still fond of a old post of mine that I had made back in January 2011, "What the cats of Houtong say about the population of Taiwan". That post, drawing on a September 2010 post I made at my blog, examined how the Taiwanese village of Houtong, located just outside the capital of Taipei, has managed to find new life after its coal mining economy went under thanks to its large feral cat community.

Visitors' raves on local blogs have helped draw cat lovers to fondle, frolic and photograph the 100 or so resident felines in Houtong, one of several industrial communities in decline since Taiwan's railroads electrified and oil grew as a power source.

Most towns have never recovered, but this tiny community of 200 is fast reinventing itself as a cat lover's paradise.

"It was more fun than I imagined," said 31-year-old administrative assistant Yu Li-hsin, who visited from Taipei. "The cats were clean and totally unafraid of people. I'll definitely return."

On a recent weekday afternoon, dozens of white, black, grey and calico-coloured cats wandered freely amid Houtong's craggy byways, while visitors captured the scene with cellphone cameras and tickled the creatures silly with feather-tipped sticks.

I went on to connect this with a variety of phenomena, including the decline of peripheral communities, the rise of international migration and tourism in Taiwan, even the demographic regime of the cats themselves. I had fun.

Last Saturday, I reported on another cat community, this one an entire island, in Japan. Early in March, The Atlantic featured a Reuters photo essay by Thomas Peter depicting the cats of the Japanese island of Aoshima. As one source describes it, Aoshima--located off of the coast of the major Japanese island of Shikoku--is an island with an aging human population and a rapidly growing cat population. This latter gives it some economic heft that it would otherwise ave lacked.

A remote island in southern Japan is home to 22 people and more than 120 cats.

Aoshima is a dwindling fishing community of elderly people who live mainly off retirement benefits. The cats were originally brought over to the island to deal with mice plaguing fishing boats. But they've since multiplied as there are no natural predators.

Tourists have been flocking to the island off Ehime prefecture on a ferry that runs twice twice a day. Cat lover Makiko Yamasaki, 27, said: "I came here looking to relax. And as for how is it? Well there is a ton of cats here, then there was this sort of cat witch, who came out to feed the cats, which was quite fun. So I'd want to come again."

Many more photos are available at the links, if you are curious.

The specific phenomenon of the "cat island" or "cat village" seems to be relatively common in East Asia. I have also read of the Pacific-coast cat island of Tashirohima received attention after being spared by the 2011 tsunami. What these communities, in Japan and Taiwan and perhaps elsewhere, all seem to share in common is a recent sharp decline in human populations, coupled with a growth of cat populations. It's reasonable to imagine that, in decaying human settlements, cats might do reasonably well, taking shelter in human constructions and feeding off of prey. The extent to which this is sustainable may be another question entirely. The cats of Aoshima, at least, seem to depend on regular feedings. Can they count on these indefinitely into the future, as Aoshima further depopulates? Will cat tourism bring in enough income to keep the whole cycle going? Will it lways do so?

This specific phenomenon fits within a broader context of rewilding, of the return of wild animals and ultimately wilderness to peripheral areas experiencing depopulation. One example of this is the return of wolves to East Germany in the past decades, aided in part by the depopulation of much of rural East Germany. Another example I'm personally familiar with is the gradual return of woodland to Prince Edward Island over the past century, as subsistence agriculture has disappeared and marginal lands fallen out of production.

It is estimated that in the early 1800s, forests would have covered some 95 per cent of this province; the average age of these trees would have been in the hundreds of years.

[. . .]

According to the State of the Island’s Forests report in 2002, only 9,000 hectares of this hardwood dominant shade tolerant forest remains in scattered patches throughout the island. By 1900, the population of PEI had drastically increased to 100,000 and only about 30% of the land was left in forests. During those 100 years, much of the best forested land went under the axe or was burned to make room for agriculture. Many species of mammals were extripated from the island forests, such as bears, fisher, marten, and piliated woodpeckers. Of those remaining forests, many had been disturbed by cuttings, fires, and cattle grazing. Another big problem was the introduction of diseases that has devastated the American Beech and American Elm on PEI as well as other areas.

[. . .]

According to the State of the Forest report in 2002, only 9,000 ha of forested area on PEI is in a late sussessional shade dominant forest state, typical of the Acadian Forest. That accounts for less than 2% of the entire island, that at one time, was entirely covered in trees. Since 1900, there was a gradual increase in forest coverage, mostly due to farm abandonment. Today, approximately 50% of the island’s land mass of 560,000 hectares is forested, but much of it is in poor condition, growing on poor worn-out agricultural fields. Much of the this has grown up into what’s termed old-field white spruce. This is an even aged stand of poor quality trees, growing on poor quality soils.

In the decline of the human population of many regions lies the potential for a managed return of wilderness. The Rewilding Europe website goes into great detail about the potential for rewilding projects around Europe. The Landscape Institute's James Richardson looked at eastern Portugal, suggesting that rural depopulation could be environmentally advantageous. (Perhaps also economically, if eco-tourism becomes popular?)

We arranged to meet with Pedro Prata, the lead advisor of the Western Iberia locality of Rewilding Europe in the Coa valley around 3 hours north of Idanha-a-Nova. Rewilding Europe is an organisation that aims to ‘rewild’ areas of Europe undergoing land abandonment. RE see it as an opportunity for the regeneration of land that has been misused for hundreds if not thousands of years and their ideas support many of our own. The Mediterranean climate and soils are actually ill-suited to the kind of agriculture practiced north of the Pyrenees and Alps.

Pedro showed us around their reserve which they have purchased from local landowners, and through planting native trees, grazing by native breeds of horse and cattle (in association with the Tauros Project), as well as reducing fire, are beginning to establish a regenerating ecosystem in the Coa valley. Although Rewilding Europe is mainly focused on nature conservation, its rewilding projects have important associated effects such as local employment in ecotourism, helping to balance the water table through vegetation as well as having a positive effect on game species such as partridge and rabbits which spill over from the reserve; hunting is a very important activity in Iberia.

We were able to learn many things from the visit including the vulnerability of traditional and sustainable cork-oak forests when too high a percentage of trees are harvested, removing their natural fireproofing. We learned that the area generally receives a good deal of water, but that this water falls seasonally and is often stored centrally and not distributed, or is lost to evaporation or surface run-off before it can be captured by the soil. We learned that despite appearances, the local areas do not provide the amenities such as reliable transport, education, employment and health care that would otherwise keep young people in the area.

A key thing that we have come to appreciate is that there are reasons that people have abandoned the land, and that we should not be trying to address the issue by forcing people, through our strategies, back into agriculture in inherently difficult areas. The abandonment will be used in our respective projects as an opportunity to encourage ecological regeneration, and the boost in productivity and economic activity that this can bring through a reconsideration of the value of nature and through outdoor pursuits.

The project prompts questions about areas of the UK that, were it not for subsidies, would also be undergoing abandonment, such as our sheep-grazed uplands and intensively managed grouse moors. In the UK, the positive effects of rewilding on these bleak areas would be easy to appreciate – native reforestation and the benefits to flood reduction, water quality, carbon storage, biodiversity, diverse and increased economic activity, recreational activity to name but a few.

Can we take, from the growth of the cat island phenomenon and the wider context of rewilding, clues as to how we should react to the future of rural depopulation? I am actually being serious when I say that we can and we should.

On the outports of Newfoundland as a globally-relevant paradigm

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine wrote an essay about the outport communities of Newfoundland, an essay titled "On Futility". The outport is a form of community unique to Newfoundland, a densely-populated coastal village with a population in the dozens or hundreds dependent on the once-abundant cod fisheries. A 2008 article by Jenny Higgins for the Newfoundland Heritage site points out how low living standards and the attractiveness of other areas--urban Newfoundland, mainland Canada, maybe even points further--created a tradition of emigration that only intensified after the collapse of the same fisheries in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

[The Newfoundland fisheries] existed for centuries and employed thousands of people, with many more engaged in processing, exporting and transporting the catch.

Then it got overfished. It collapsed in the early 90s, and it crashed hard: in some areas, stocks declined 99% over 50 years.

The fisheries have been under a moratorium for exactly 20 years now. There has been no improvement. Instead, the ecosystem is changing: invasive species are moving in, predators are devastating the remaining populations, and there is little to no evidence of a recovery. The Newfoundland fisheries are, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Large numbers of Newfoundlanders refuse to accept this. They demand that the fisheries be re-opened, as if the fish are merely hiding: the second a boat hits the water, the cod will come leaping out of the surf by the thousands, eager to be caught.

Others have accepted that the fisheries are dead, but insist that the jobs need to find them: they’re going to sit tight and wait for the government to find an industry for each and every teeny, tiny dot on the map. Even the towns with only a dozen residents. Even the towns accessible only by sea. Even the towns without reliable electricity or running water.

The hinky thing is that the young people seem to get it.

The exodus from the outports, and rural Newfoundland, is continuing to this day. There have been news reports of a very partial recovery of cod stocks last year, not nearly enough to justify the revival of the fisheries outports. A 2011 essay by sociologist Deatra Walsh--in Walsh's case, the town of Lewisporte--points out that many rural communities of Newfoundland may survive, service towns and the like, but that the outport is doomed. A 2001 paper (PDF) by Hamilton and Butler, "Outport Adaptations: Social Indicators through Newfoundland’s Cod Crisis", emphasizes that rural Newfoundland managed to retain a fair amount of social cohesion in the decade after the mortatorium in 1992, thanks to off-the-book employment and federal subsidies. In a 2012 opinion piece in the National Post, Newfoundland-born columnist Rex Murphy points out that the collapse of the outport has significant cultural repercussions for Newfoundlanders.

The end of the cod fishery stirred the greatest in-country migration of Newfoundlanders of modern times. Thousands of fishermen and plant workers and their families, scattered through all the towns and villages of Newfoundland’s meandering coastlines, were forced to look elsewhere for sustenance and employment. They were forced to abandon what they knew best, the environment of their families for generations, the peculiar set of skills that goes with fishing, and go out of province to an abruptly new life.

The moratorium brought on a seismic alteration in Newfoundland. The outports have been drained of their most active people; the long chain of continuous living from the sea and living on its very borders has been broken beyond repair. Many of the famous towns and outports — names that have been in songs and stories almost forever — are now whittled to half their size and less. Some old people remain. The younger come back every little while to visit, see parents, or just to savor time close to the water. But the dynamic life of the majority of outports is over with the fishery that gave birth to it.

It’s a striking, very melancholy change. While the outports dwindle into mere picturesqueness, the capital city of St. John’s explodes with activity and commerce from the offshore. There’s a Calgary feel to how fast things are moving in St. John’s. The offshore oil developments came at a very providential time. They also, I think, take the mind away from the stark prospects of Newfoundland outside the city.

[. . .]

Those who have left for good know how deep the change was. Those who remain carry the largely unspoken insight that outport Newfoundland, which gave birth to such a singular culture, rich in humour and pathos, indented with hardship and tragedy, and irresistible to those who felt its appeal, is on the point of vanishing.

All this is true. And yet, I'd suggest that the movement away from the outports towards urban areas--places like the capital city of St. John's, or like any number of destinations in Canada like the big cities of Ontario or Alberta--is a good thing for the people who lived there, or who would have lived there. Isolated one-industry villages capable of providing only marginal standards of living aren't good places to live. I'd question, like Wonkman, if it's a good idea to spend resources keeping non-viable communities alive at an artificial level of activity, as opposed to allowing for a certain amount of planned decline. Certainly the young people of the outports don't seem interested in staying in communities which have outlasted their economic base.

On climate change and migration

The American law blog The Volokh Conspiracy is an unusual place to find guest blogs about migration driven by environmental change, but Matthew Kahn, author of the book Climatopolis does have a guest post there. He argues--as he does here, for instance--that migrations triggered by climate change need not be catastrophic, and in fact can be quite manageable or even net economic pluses. A central point of his analysis is that all cities will not be effected equally.

Not all cities will suffer equally from climate change. There are over 300 major cities to choose from in the United States. A city such as Seattle may suffer much less. An implicit assumption throughout Climatopolis is that there will always be some safe area where our cities can thrive and we can migrate to. If the entire 7 billion people on the planet lived at Hong Kong’s density then we would need 1.1 million square kilometers of habitable land. This represents just .7% of the world’s land mass.

Suppose that California’s coastal cities suffer greatly from climate change due to the combined punch of sea level rise, hotter summers, drought and rising electricity prices. Self interested households will see that California cities are no longer great places to live and they will “vote with their feet” and migrate to other cities that have suffered less from climate change or perhaps even gained due to warmer winter temperatures.

[. . .]

Our ability to migrate means that urban places can suffer while urban people continue to prosper. Within the New York City metropolitan area, New Jersey employment centers may gain if Southern Manhattan and Wall Street are under siege from sea level rise. Land owners in Southern Manhattan will suffer but workers at downtown Goldman Sachs would not.

Kahn even suggests that these migrations, from areas heavily impacted by climate change to areas not-so-heavily impacted, could through the reallocation of labour into more vibrant and/or rejuvenated environs. If the proper human connections exist, of course.

Growth economists have long argued that human capital (attracting and retaining the footloose, skilled) is the key for a nation or a city to enjoy sustainable growth. If a city such as Los Angeles loses its quality of life edge, then the skilled will move elsewhere and firms will be less likely to move to Los Angeles. Similar to a neighborhood with high crime or bad schools, local real estate prices will fall. The owners of such assets will bear the incidence of this “new news”. While real estate values would decline in cities deemed to be increasingly at risk, there are other cities that could actually experience a windfall. Today, you can trade one home near UCLA for 100 Detroit homes. In 2070, will this exchange rate still hold or will there be parity?

[. . .]

Does this same optimism hold in the developing world? In the United States, there are a large number of cities scattered across various geographical regions. In other nations such as Bangladesh, there is unlikely to be the same menu to choose from. As “environmental refugees” seek out safer havens they may cross political boundaries into nations where they are not welcome. Developed countries could ease adaptation in the developing world if they loosen immigration restrictions. Migration also represents an upfront investment that requires resources. The poorest of the poor may be unable to move and not to have the information or social networks concerning potential beneficial destinations.

I agree with Kahn to a certain extent. Back in June 2009 I blogged about climate change-driven migration in West Africa, noting how there were already well-established traditions of migration to and from the Sahel to the West African coast, and these these migrations played a significant role in economic growth in littoral states like Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Could a substantial migration of skilled Californians rejuvenate a Detroit notable for a decent locatino and very low real estate prices? I don't doubt it. If climate change-driven migration isn't a sudden process, but rather takes place on time scales on the order of decades, it needn't be unmanageable.

But. Kahn's analysis assumes that there is little possibility catastrophic runaway change with effects as outlined by Sublime Oblivion's Anatoly Karlin at the link previous, or that if it does happen the consequences will be manageable. This strikes me as optimistic. Le monde diplomatique observed that in 1998 the expected influx of very large numbers of Kosovar refugees into Albania threatened to destabilize an already shaky economy, while in 1999 the consequences of the Kosovo catastrophe weighed heavily on the entire western Balkans region. If, say, the Netherlands is significantly flooded, what would happen? Where would the Dutch go? What would happen to the Eurozone economy? If California enters a long period of economic decline precipitated by a worsening climate, what will happen to the American economy? If Shanghai floods, or has to protect itself, what will happen to the Chinese? Et cetera. The loss in infrastructure investments alone, never mind symbolism/morale, would be serious indeed.

The political and social consequences of migration of this scale also need to be considered. In Côte d'Ivoire, the migrations from the Sahel were eventually used for political and economic reasons to trigger xenophobia among the Ivoiriens de souche, leading to more than a decade of civil war and division. The decades of net migration from the Sahel did benefit Côte d'Ivoire, but the country experienced a meltdown nonetheless. The factor of xenophobia is less of an issue in some countries and regions than in others--the American population may be mobile enough to cope--but it still has to be considered. In the example of Bangladesh, source of perhaps tens of millions of migrants in India who often act as cheap labour, fears of Bangladeshi immigrants' links to terrorism and flee Assam won't help things in the case of future mass migrations.

And then, there is the question of what people who need to migrate but don't have the connections necessary to successfully migrate--or even migrate at all--will do. What will be done?