Emissions of the aged

Projections of future carbon-dioxide emissions are complicated. How will energy consumption habits change as societies get richer or more urban? What mix of sources will we be getting our energy from?

My friend and colleague Emilo Zagheni decided we should make the calculus that much more complicated (and informative) by also asking how the aging of the population will influence carbon outputs. A demographer's demographer, which Emilio surely is, is never happy with any calculation that does not include age-structure in one way or another.

This article in the Economist summarizes what he did and what he found. As people get older, they tend to consume more and more, emitting more and more carbon, until 65ish, at which point consumption tends to start declining. See the graph, and the analysis, in the Economist, or the original in the journal Demography (2011) pp 371-399.  The punchline for the carbon-watcher is that the changing age-structure will tend to increase carbon emissions until about 2050, after which point such a large portion of the population will be above 65 (I'll be 73) that the age effect will begin to marginally decrease emissions.

I should finish with a quote from Ron Lee, Professor of both Demography and Economics at UC Berkeley, who both Emilio and I studied under. Ron was one of the inventors of the widely used Lee-Carter method* (1992) for forecasting future mortality patterns. Seventeen years later, I asked Ron how well his forecasts for the first 17 years matched what had actually happened in those years. He cocked his head slightly to the left, sighed sagely and said, "Well, demographers are well aware that our projections don't always fair so well in a complex world. But we console ourselves with the knowledge that we do much better than the economists."


* The original article has been cited more than 1000 times in the peer-reviewed literature, and modifications are used by the US Census Bureau, the UN, and so forth.

Return on Investment in Higher Education

One of the major debates in US politics is usually framed like this: Should we spend more on things that are worth doing, or should we maintain balanced budgets by spending less. The underlying assumption of this type of argument is that spending more necessarily worsens the budget outcome. If the budget outcome income minus spending, doesn't it make sense that spending more worsens the outcome? Only if we can assume that the spending does not spur more income. In other words, only if we assume that investment is impossible. Investment is spending intended to increase income.

After reading Mike Hout's recent article on the importance of public higher education, I was left wondering how public expenditure on higher education compared to other investments in purely budgetary terms. Mike points out that education leads to higher personal incomes, higher rates of entrepreneurship and other good things that increase tax revenues. At the same time education leads to lower rates of things that cost the state money, like imprisonment and needing public assistance through social security/unemployment/health expenditure. So I wondered, how does the expenditure function as a investment. If the state of California could either spend an extra Billion on education, or invest that money in the stock market, how fast would the market have to rise to give better returns than the education (ignoring the non-fiscal benefits of education)?

I wrote to Mike to ask him, and it turns out he is scheduled to give a talk on that very subject here in Rostock some time soon. He sent me a copy of a 129 page report he and colleagues wrote on the subject in 2005. A pdf of that report (or a draft of it) is here.


The concluding summary of the report says:

The state devotes a substantial portion of its budget to supporting education in
California. That support is not wasted: the costs of neglecting education are
high, and the return this investment brings to the state is equally high. Laudable
though it may be, California’s investment in higher education is insufficient. If
things stay as they are now, that is, if future students progress through their
educational careers at the same rates as their ethnic counterparts did in 2000, the
state will suffer a net loss, and that loss will increase as years pass. With no other
changes, the state will forgo revenues from the increased earnings that education
encourages, and pay more to support a population in a situation of increased
poverty and incarceration. If, rather than maintaining the per-person level of
educational support and access, the state were to limit capacity, the situation
would become even more dire.
However, based on existing trends in educational demand, we expect that high
school graduation rates and college going rates will increase, and demands on
state support for education will climb commensurately. California will have to
invest in community colleges and universities in the short run, but both the state
and its residents will benefit handsomely from this additional support in the long
run. Our calculations suggest net savings to the state will exceed the additional cost by three-fold or four-fold, while its population will enjoy lower levels of poverty, crime, and dependency, and higher levels of average income and political participation.

(Emphasis mine)

The report also specifies in great detail the time scale on which these returns occur, and the majority of returns are "realized in the first ten years after investment because the benefits it buys -- lower welfare, less crime, and healthier children -- are problems/ benefits that disproportionately affect 18-34 year olds."

Now this suggests that we are getting 300% return within the first ten years. So let's just say our $1Billion turns into $3Billion by the end of ten years. That is about 11.5% annual return on investment (1.115^10= 2.97), better than the 11% average rise in the Dow Jones from 1926 through to its pre-dot com bust peak in 1999.

I am a strong believer in the value of education, and would gladly quadruple expenditure on education, but I find this purely monetary claim incredible. This is such an extraordinary claim that we are forced to consider the background of the person making it. The only one of the authors I know is Mike, and what I know about him is that he is the Chair of the best Demography graduate program in the Western Hemisphere, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a careful scholar. Mike does not go around spouting grand pronouncements. If he makes a claim like this it is because his analysis tells him it is true. There really is a strong argument to be made that in purely fiscal terms, investment in higher education pays off better and more consistently than investment in stock.

In that light, two things surprise me. First, that I haven't heard that argument made before. I hang around with a lot of people distraught about the direction American (and particularly Californian) higher education is going, and no one has ever mentioned this. Second, I'm amazed that Wall Street hasn't tried to securitize this yet.

I'm eager to hear what new work on the subject Mike will be presenting at his talk.

Finally, and sadly, I've just heard that Berkeley's demography department won't be able to accept any new graduate students this year. The lack of funding makes it impossible for them to hire faculty to replace those who have retired or left for better funded institutions. If this does not improve in the next few years, I would guess the department will have to close its doors.

Education, hippies and commies

Iris: This guy is writing about a pipe dream:

Me: True, but it is a good pipe-dream. A well reasoned and researched pipe-dream with a firm empirical basis and deep social wisdom.

Iris: You mean he's a hippy.

Me: Actually, he's the Demography Department Chair at Berkeley.

Iris: Difference?


Prof. Mike Hout's recent piece on Rationing College Opportunity is timely and worth a read. One question he doesn't address, but I will likely write to him and ask: How long does it take for government investment in college level education to budgetarily* repay the government through taxes and avoided expenditures due to all the economic benefits he discusses? I would guess someone has made such an estimate, and if they haven't they certainly should.

The piece was published in The American Prospect. The subtitle of The American Prospect is "Liberal Intelligence" which Iris takes as further proof that only hippies or possibly communists** write for it.

Anyway, Mike writes well and I suggest you give his pipe-dream a read.


* Yes I know that budgetarily isn't a word, but my Grandma Esther, one of the finest kindergarten/1st grade teachers New York City has ever known, told me that because the English Language does so much for us, we have to do what we can for it. Therefore, to her thinking, we have the responsibility not only to use it well, but to give it new words that it should have but somehow doesn't have yet. 'Budgetarily' for example.

** Note that Iris was raised among hippies, and is the only person I know who waxes poetical about Soviet architecture, so she means the terms "communists" and "hippy" in the fondest possible senses. Further note that my Grandma Esther was a socialist with strong communist leanings, and would have agreed with Iris that Prof. Hout sounds like some kind of commie.

Emails from the Chancelor

UC Berkeley is having a bad day:

From: Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor
to "Academic Senate Faculty, Staff, All Academic Titles, Other Members of the Campus Community, Students,"
date Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 9:02AM
subject URGENT: Wheeler Hall


The campus police are working to resolve a protest action that is occurring in Wheeler Hall. Staff, faculty and students who would normally be working in Wheeler Hall are asked to remain out of the building until further notice. Employees who can contact their supervisors should talk to them if possible to determine whether telecommuting or relocation to another work area is an option. Those in the building right now are advised to leave until the situation has been resolved.

Employees who remain on campus may check in at Dwinelle Plaza at 10am. for further information.

Thank you to all of the members of the campus community for your patience in this matter.

And at 10:42AM California time:

Campus police continue to work to resolve the protest action at Wheeler Hall. Campus police are striving to end the occupation of Wheeler Hall with the safety of our campus community, including all those involved in this action, as an uppermost priority.

Wheeler Hall will remain closed until further notice. Instructors who teach in Wheeler Hall will be contacted shortly by e-mail.

And at 11:30 local time:

Approximately 200 protestors are continuing to demonstrate on the south side of campus in the area around Wheeler Hall. Wheeler Hall is occupied by protestors and the building remains locked.

All classes at Wheeler are suspended until further notice and employees who work in Wheeler Hall are advised that they should plan on not being able to enter the building for the remainder of the work day. Employees should confirm alternative work arrangements with their supervisor, as possible. Instructors who teach in Wheeler Hall are being contacted by e-mail.

Fire alarms have been intentionally set off in several buildings including Barrows, Dwinelle, and Sproul Hall. The fire department is verifying that these are false alarms and will allow people to reenter buildings when it is safe to do so.

The safety of our campus community, including those involved in this protest, are an utmost priority of our police as they work to resolve the situation.

Thank you to all members of the campus community for your continued patience in this matter. Please check for updates throughout the day on the Berkeley home page http://berkeley.edu

Demographic Decline

There are no national rankings for departments of Demography in the US. If there were, UC Berkeley would certainly be near the top, and would likely rank first. Four of the five core faculty members have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and the last is relatively young. (The entire Academy has about 2100 members, out of perhaps a million PhDs who could potentially have qualified). I had the good luck to stumble into association with this department, benefited greatly, and was tremendously impressed.

This department contributes tremendously not only to Berkeley, and the field of Demography, but to our civilization's progress in understanding how populations function, how populations are likely to change in the future, and what effects these changes have on our economy, society and environment. Methods developed at Berkeley are at the core of the United Nations' understanding of population trends and their importance. Alumnae of Berkeley's rather small program in Demography can be found in almost every important institution making use of demographics, from the US Census Bureau to every major branch of the UN, to departments of Economics, Sociology, Anthropology and Epidemiology at most major universities, to think tanks, research organizations, and major corporations. The people that come out of this program are predictably smart, creative, quantitatively talented and know how to ask important questions and answer them convincingly. It is everything that graduate education should be. There are not many rooms full of people in which I feel slow, but discussing research with a bunch of Berkeley demographers required me to manufacture a fair bit of bravado. Among Berkeley's graduate programs, so many of which are at the top of their field, Demography stood out to me as a bastions of professionalism and brilliance.

Unfortunately, like so many of Berkeley's programs, Demography is in clear and present danger from the current fiscal crisis, and several of its students have hinted to me that it could easily cease to exist in a relatively few years. This happened once before. The following is an excerpt from a 1991 interview with Albert H. Bowker, Berkeley's sixth chancellor (1971-1980):

Q: I don't want to skip over some of your other activities with various departments, if you'd care to pick up on that again. Let's see, we had Department of Demography.

Bowker: Demography was a small group, and it had a lot of trouble recruiting faculty, largely because it was dominated by Judith Blake. I just decided to abolish it, largely because it was just one person, really, on permanent position. It's just something you can have or have not, not an important subject. There are some subjects that every university must have-- mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, English, philosophy, some of the languages, and others. Demography is not one of them, and criminology is not one of them. If you have it, it ought to be good and large. They kept bringing it back, and apparently that was not so much on intellectual grounds. It's a silly subject and the group there couldn't be very effective. Then Judith left, and somebody revived it, not in my day.

Q: Do you remember the Department of Design?

Bowker: Vaguely. Yes, we abolished that for the same reason, I guess. I've forgotten now what design was.

Demography was brought back by a group of faculty who are themselves now of an age where even many dedicated academics retire. The Demography department is, as a professor in another department put it "highly age structured." Beyond this older group, they brought in a few younger faculty, shared with the Department of Sociology. One of these recently left for a better offer in Texas. The department is unable to replace her because of the budget crisis. Another scheduled faculty search was cancelled. If recruitment remains frozen for longer than the faculty's more senior members care to continue teaching, (which is quite possible) the department could easily be back to one or two professors. One of these has already said that if this were to happen he could simply join another department. The current administration, may or may not remember what Demography is, or care whether it is important, and is unlikely to make any particular effort to save the department from attrition.

This department is of course just one casualty of the budget cuts to the University, which is in turn only one portion of the destitution of California's public education system, which is in turn only one piece of the general collapse of governance in California. To me, of course it means more than that. I wasn't actually a student in the department, but I spent enough time there to know I was surrounded by the best humanity can produce finding out things that humanity desperately needs to understand. This department is one of the best pieces of the best school in what was once the most ambitious public education system in the world, and it hurts to see it left to atrophy. This abandonment of greatness symbolizes for me what ails California, and America.

The University that Was

The University of California at Berkeley has long claimed, with reasonable justification, to be the world's top public University. The University of Massachusetts has some very good campuses, but they have never been any challenge to Harvard. The University of Connecticut is no Yale. But Berkeley and Stanford have often been considered on equal footing (or rather people at Berkeley thought Berkeley was clearly better and people at Stanford held the opposite opinion). In terms of prestige of faculty, Nobel Prizes won, National Academy members, number of important scientific publications, number of top-ranked programs and so on, Berkeley has long been among the US's top universities and far and away the best among the public institutions. California, historically a big wealthy state with a high standard of living and strong emphasis on education, made Berkeley the jewel of its enormous system of public education.

Berkeley now has this wonderful global reputation, amazing arsenal of high-powered faculty, several former faculty in high positions in the Obama administration and world-class facilities. It also has a crushing budget shortfall coming on top of several years of budget cuts, pay for grad students and many staff that is well below what the university considers a living wage, the expectation of massive staff layoffs in the near future, vanishing budgets for maintenance, supplies and support and deep sense that things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better.

The voters of California, in their wisdom, have used the state's mechanisms for direct democracy to require spending increases, but forbid tax increases. They have amended the state constitution to dictate budget items and make it enormously difficult to pass a budget. They have elected politicians based on looks and swagger and reacted with petulance when those politicians had more looks than brains. The state government has deteriorated to the point that most state spending not mandated by ballot initiatives will need to be completely cut. The budget for higher education is expected to be cut by about $1 Billion for the next school year. Similar shortfalls are expected until the global economy has rebounded, or the state constitution has been scraped and more workable one written.

Berkeley, I think it is safe to say, will not retain its reputation for excellence if this goes on for long. For some years now, as the budget has worsened, Berkeley has had a tougher time attracting the most competitive faculty. Many faculty searches have been canceled, and those which weren't often ended up offering positions to researchers who went for much better deals at private institutions. Berkeley has also been having trouble recruiting grad students. My department this year had six first year grad students enter and 17 PhDs graduate. Administrative departments are being eliminated or combined. Journal subscribtions are being scalled back. Phone lines are being turned off. Scholarships are being eliminated. It's ugly, and likely to get uglier fast.

I suspect that given a few years the economy will improve, and the budgetting process in California will be reformed, and Berkeley's budget will start to improve. I fear that by the time that happens Berkeley will have lost its global reputation, many of its most famous faculty, and its culture of intellectual greatness. UC Berkeley may from now on be just a very good public university.

Tour of Science!

Walking back to the Valley Life Sciences Building this afternoon, I passed a large tour group of high-school students and their parents being led by an undergraduate. One mother, snickered into her cell phone, "they have an heeeeerb lab. They study herbs. This place is crazy. Crazy! No, no, no, the tour guide said they had a whole museum of herbs. I'm like what, parsley?!"

It took me an instant to figure out that she was talking about the University and Jepson Herbaria, a research museum dedicated to the study of plants generally, not culinary herbs in particular.

I emailed this story to the other grad students in my department. Many of them responded that they had heard the tour guides telling the tour groups all sorts of misleading and false information, including that a herbarium is a museum for studying cooking herbs.

Here are some other examples of overheard falsehoods made up by university tour guides to impress their tour groups and relayed to me by other grad students. Several of these things were independently reported by more than one observer:

- The Cretaceous display in front of the Herbaria contains extinct plants... Berkeley scientists rediscovered their ancient DNA, amplified it, germinated seedlings, and planted them there for museum visitors. (The display is of plants of types similar to those which existed during the Cretaceous, none of which have ever been extinct)

- The T. rex may be as many as 5 million years old. (It is at least 65 million years old)

- The T. rex came to the paleontology museum in a giant puzzle
box and when it got here, the paleontologists didn't know what to do with
it. One of the employees was about to get fired but he was able to figure
out how to put it back together so he was able to save his job. This man
is now the assistant director of the museum. (A complete fabrication, truth here)


- The T. rex is named "Osborn". (Sue)

- T. rex (the species) was discovered by Berkeley paleontologists. (False)

- Most of the UCMP fossils are actually in the Campanile. (False)

- UCMP geologists discovered asteroids. (False)

- The giant ammonite in the first floor south hallway is from a time on
Earth where everything was giant, even the snails. (Hilarious and false)

- The Herbaria is home to the world's largest pinecone, but they don't put
it on display because they are worried someone will steal it. (Goofy and false)

- The Herbaria has one example of every plant species known to man. (They wish)

- The plants outside the herbaria went extinct around the time T. rex went
extinct. (False)

- MVZ scientists save stem cells from each animal they capture in order to
help genetically engineer new animals to save endangered species from
going extinct. (And then we take over the world!)

- The Eucalyptus tree is native only to Berkeley, Australia, and New Zealand. (actually only Australia, New Guinea, eastern Indonesia and the Philippines)

- The Eucalyptus grove is protected by an Act of Congress and can never be
cut down for any reason. (Pure fabrication)

- Strawberry Creek used to flow all the way to the Ocean but then they
built roads over it and then there wasn't enough water so all the
strawberry plants that used to grow next to it died off. (A large portion of Strawberry creek between campus and the bay has been undergrounded. The rest is false.)

- The pterodon skeleton is hanging above the T-rex because they always flew over the T-rexes to keep them in view so the T-rex couldn't sneak up on them. (Awesomely hilarious)

Carnival of Science!

The lead story on the BBC New's Science and Environment page is on the research of one of the post-doctoral researchers in my professor's lab. The idea is rather simple, the process was complex.
We know that climate changes over time, and that where one can find a particular type of habitat changes with the climate. Recently, using a wide range of data sources, scientists have been constructing both a detailed history of how climate has changed over time and what climate parameters limit the extent of particular habitats, such as South America's Atlantic Rainforest. My lab-mate, Ana Carnival (along with several collaborators) combined the climate history data with the climate requirement data to make maps of how the extent of the Atlantic forest has changed over the last 20,000 years. She found that there were a few relatively small areas that had been rainforest the whole time, even when climate shifts caused the rest of it to change to other habitat types, such as grassland. She identified these as 'rainforest refugia,' areas where rainforest species could survive through the millenia when the climate was inhospitable elsewhere. She then predicted that these refugia should be the centers from which genetic diversity spread to the rest of the forest once its borders once again grew. To test these predictions, she gathered genetic samples from three species of frogs which can survive only in the rainforest. Sure enough, the frog's DNA told the story she had predicted, confirming the refugia she had identified based on climate models. This is not only cool science, it has significant conservation implications. These refugia should house a large portion of the diversity found in the rainforest, because at some points in the last 20K years, all the rainforest species lived there. This suggests that if we are forced to make choices about which land to preserve (which we are) we might do well to preserve these refugia. And both the methods and the conclusions are potentially generalizable to other thretened habitats around the world.

One final thought: This is very cool work, and very much in line with what most people in my adviser's lab study, but it is so far from my own work that I barely understand the details. This may be why I don't notice any glaring errors in the BBC article, or maybe the UK press are not as bad at writing about science as the American press.

Scientist Poitical Humor

me: Obama has appointed two Berkeley professors.
Karen: Who are the Berkeley professors?
me: Christina Romer and Steve Chu
Karen: Do you know them?
me: No, but I know people who know them, which is the square root of as good.

40,000 Senegalis or My Building

The building I work in has a yearly energy bill of over $1,000,000 dollars a year. That translates to about 10 Million Kilowatt-Hours per year, the same as about 100 average American houses or 40,000 Senegalis. Granted, it is a big building, with a greenhouse on the roof, four elevators, large water dionization systems, lots of -80C freezers, class rooms, laboratories and offices. Still, that seems like a lot of electricity for one building. The building manager emailed everyone to ask if we had ideas for cutting that down some. I suggested getting a smaller autoclave. The building has three autoclaves, each big enough to park a Mini in. Hundreds of different people use these, each setting them to their own specifications, usually to autoclave one or two bottles or one tray of equipment. A machine with 1/100 of the internal volume would work for most of these jobs, and get it done faster. I emailed to suggest installing a smaller autoclave, and the building manager wrote back that, "buying and installing one would cost over $50,000, which is about $50,000 more than is available at the moment." I am sure he is right, still I can't help thinking that if we saved even 0.1% of the building's energy usage, the thing would pay for itself in five years. Different budget line though.

On a related note:

University of California's endowment loses $1Billion in value.

"UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said that if the financial markets continue their downward slide in coming years, there could be future reduction in endowment support for scholarships, research and funding to recruit and retain faculty, among other things."