data.bythebay.io: Dimitri Gusev - Quantifying Democracy and Freedom with Human Rights Metrics
a good afternoon thank you very much for the introduction I'm Dimitri gusev am an associate professor of computer and information technology at Purdue University and the state of Indiana and it's great to be here today in San Francisco data for democracy a conference with in data by the bay and let's begin this talk about how we can quantify democracy and freedom by taking into account to human rights including the right for education especially secondary education and perhaps counter-intuitively compare that to some important fertility metrics so we'll begin with a thought-provoking quote i guess it's cool to be extinct though from a prominent comics artist accompanied by some other artists cartoon where the dinosaurs are saying to Noah no thanks we got a good deal on the Carnival Cruise we will briefly introduce a quote a famous quote from the United States Declaration of Independence that mentions the on a label rights to life liberty and pursuit of happiness I am that's combined here with a graph showing the pretty rapid growth of the world population and the question can we even afford two out of three in this triad life liberty and pursuit of happiness can we be happy and die happy that doesn't sound all that optimistic right like those dinosaurs on the Carnival Cruise so let's look and find out what the inspiration for the study was let me quote George Bernard Shaw I was I will talk about some solutions here I am we cannot be certain about how good those solutions truly are because there is a large degree of uncertainty in what we're dealing with fortunately or unfortunately maybe that's where the fun is but George Bernard Shaw once said for every complex solution there is a sorry for every I watched that for every complex problem there is a simple solution that is wrong and the inspiration for this study is this book the end of poverty by Jeffrey Sachs a Nobel Prize winning economist published back in 2005 you may have noticed that poverty has not been eradicated yet since 2005 that is not to say necessarily why those solutions that were proposed here we're an equivocal be wrong it's just it's difficult even to have the countries that would have to contribute to the proposed solutions to do it so the graph from Jeffrey saxes work is here and it shows the dependency of the gdp per capita and to the total fertility rate in children per woman I am considering that this is per capita you realize that if some of these folks contributing to the per capita side and the denominator are little children then or even older children even if they work hard in a sweatshop that doesn't contribute a whole lot to the GDP considering that they're working for peanuts if they're working so no surprise that their countries for which we have a high fertility and very low GDP per capita and unsurprisingly is related to the amounts of education that people get in these respective countries so a Jeffrey Sachs himself illuminates numerous factors especially why girls education has impact on the situation with fertility because first of all it allows women once they get the education to more easily join the labor force in their respective countries or maybe go somewhere else where the jobs are but you know they join the labor force and that increases the cost of staying home to bear children so they would then give a second thought to the notion that they would once they started to work stop working and instead decide to rear children right another factor is that once they get education then in the countries that provide such opportunities to women to get good education they're also laws and social action factors that would empower those women too let's phrase it the way he did to more easily make fertility choices then another factor in those countries is that in those countries the chances of the children that are born to actually survive are better because they don't have such high mortality so the parents then may have to be able to you know they may have an opportunity to decide that they can have fewer children because they have a good hope that those children's will survive so that lowers the so-called replacement rate which is a very important parameter for this study this is the rate in children per woman that a given country has to sustain in order not to have its population decrease assuming that it's not some over populated country that would actually like that population to decrease there are other problems with having a decrease is likely population would get older and who would support the older folks let's for the moment say that globally it's estimated the replacement rate it's not easy to estimate at 2.3 and in developed countries like the United Kingdom for example it's down to 2.1 the latest estimate I saw for the United Kingdom is 2.0 75 for biological reasons pretty much we can conclude that the replacement rate cannot possibly be lower than two because if in a hypothetical situation a woman would bear two children and one of them as a girl another one is a boy and let's say they're from the same biological father than the growing places the mother the boy replaces the biological father it gets a bit more complicated if they're two biological father is involved because then there are three people to replace assuming that the third by a third parent would not have other children but in the ideal situation it doesn't seem like we can go lower than to another contributing factor is that Jeffrey Sachs does not mention but which is easy to deduce from other data that I'm quoting here is that the teen pregnancy is lower for girls that stay in school and we can argue that it works both ways because in twenty percent cases according to that paper of the high school dropouts pregnancy and motherhood play a role in the girls decision not to stay in high school and drop out but in a poor country where there is no school for that girl to drop out of to begin with in the poor community it only works one way toward getting married and having children right away or soon afterwards so well there are alternatives to the education factor in how the government's in other countries might choose to control fertility they would include administrative ban on having more than a certain number of children like one child until recently nowadays they're allowing couples to have up to two children and China this is a recent development there or perhaps promotion of or enforcement of sterilization of girls which happened not just in India at some point of time but earlier there was a case precedent in the US Supreme Court the case of Carrie buck buck vs bill where the United States Supreme Court back then headed by Oliver Wendell allowed the forced sterilization of a girl who was considered the court decided she was too feeble minded to have children I am The Hurt child that was born prior to that actually showed good results in school before she unfortunately died young so this was a case that was quite unfortunate but it's the present president that actually also to some extent it's no longer valid there's things there that still stand so I have decided to test the statements by Jeffrey Sachs on the impact of education course the interesting education here to consider is upper secondary education to explain that quickly okay primary education is primary education a lower secondary education is middle school upper secondary education here is high school the so-called tertiary education in terms of this international terminology is what we call higher education College and such plotted data for 147 countries some of them are small countries like San Marino and may not be very interesting to us others are large and important countries and developed countries and we will look into that and I plotted that data on fertility against no I plotted the data for fertility from World Bank against the upper secondary education completion data from two main sources unesco institute for statistics you is and the report by barrow and lee published a bit earlier in 2010 for 86 countries so we're taking the countries for which we have both kinds of data both fertility data and secondary education upper secondary education completion data for girls with one exception for Vietnam for which I took the data from a report as there is on completion of upper secondary education by both girls and boys but with the note in that report and the data on their enrollment that shows that the similar percentages of girls and boys are enrolled in high school education in Vietnam and therefore we can take the joint rate of completion and the plot as shown here we can see the United States near the top here in terms of education education is this axis the vertical axis the horizontal axis is fertility in terms of children per woman we see very high fertility over here in this corner combined with very low level of high school completion for girls and as a matter of fact for all countries here with the exception of Dominica which is an island in a small island and they don't probably intend to have high fertility wherever we have low completion of high school education for girls we tend to also have a pre high fertility the important threshold of fertility being about 2.1 2.3 depending on the country so you can see the United States offer is ninety percent of the girls high school education but at the same time we see now the most up-to-date fertility rate below the replacement rate and there is a big cluster of such countries including Japan Korea Germany Denmark that are in this situation there are a few exceptions like the glorious nation of kazakhstan that gives a lot of diplomas to girls and yet they have high fertility one of the possible explanations is can we trust their stats another better explanation is perhaps in that country even if you get a high school diploma you still cannot find a job and then that explains why they maintain relatively high fertility so we don't want to take them as an example especially considering that Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are not considered particularly democratic or free countries so taking them as an example doesn't sound like a good idea we see China in this corner importantly because they control their fertility administrative Lee so even though they don't have a good record on upper secondary education for girls they still managed to have low fertility but that's again not the method that we would like to adopt so let's take a look we are prepared to take a look at Israel which is prominently featured here with fertility above 3 and the good record on upper secondary education for women the overall trends I mean this was a static slice we want to know that trends over time how are things doing overall you can see that Africa is trending down this is the data from the United Nations we can see the whole world trending down we can see developed nations supposedly trending up a little bit but this was a graph made back in two thousand eight so we're talking about projections and extrapolation and i would like to immediately attract your attention to the dangers of extrapolation in that if you cut off at 2008 you will see that you are not really guaranteed the soft landing maybe you're slowly but surely nose-diving nobody knows all right but these are the trends overall will find out that Israel disagrees with that trend locally and since we mentioned before some countries like Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan whatnot then we would like to also look at the metrics of democracy and freedom before we jump to any conclusions for that I found data in two major ratings one is the democracy indexed published annually by the economist intelligence unit eiu for 167 countries another one rates not democracy but freedom which is a bit different thing freedom in the world by freedom house they've raided 211 countries so that includes some small countries like I mentioned the final San Marino and there are other countries like Lichtenstein and whatnot luxembourg etc so they rated countries and dora you see let's make the observation that before we see the graph that even though education is indeed essential to democracy because we don't want in you know Pendley incompetent the poorly educated people to make important choices we hope that people have the right amount of information that would enable them to make conscious choices when it comes to making their decisions as part of the democracy right but not the other way around countries are known to have provided their citizens good education but no major freedoms Human Rights democracy and such so then the next question as well we have two ratings do they even or late does this democracy from one sink tank correlates with freedom according to another think tank so this is the new thing that I've done not the most important thing but it shows you something about how you would work with data and priority that I did compare how well the data correlated on secondary education completion from those two sources that I mentioned and that correlated very well and this correlates very well as well they may have some disagreements on guinea-bissau right here but overall they correlate very well and in particular the data on Israel puts Israel somewhere here with one rating being 7.7 of the on the democracy scale another one being 80 points on the freedom scale so there's somewhere they're not too far away from countries like italy france etc all right so we have a good correspondence between the democracy and freedom indices developed by two different organizations but with people in those organizations that have reasonably good common notion of what these things constitute and we will perhaps look now in more details on their criteria that will further illuminate the fact why this correlates that correlates not just because they have this general idea of freedom and democracy it matches they are looking at some of the common things the democracy index is four fifths based on the government the educational sorry the electoral process the functioning of the government the political participation and political culture and then one fifth or twenty percent of the democracy index is compiled based on civil liberties and that is a sixty percent of the freedom in the world scores and forty percent of the freedom in the world scores are based on the political rights which against a electoral process again they say political pluralism just like pluralism is there and participation and you see participation here functioning of government same thing as here so no wonder it correlates and when it comes to civil liberties categories you will see as promised human rights collective and individual you will see freedom of expression associational rights such as this is a collective rights rule of law and personal autonomy and individual human rights so yes no wonder these two metrics correlate let's now plot fertility against democracy that's where we see a big clump the border of 84 the democracy index is the border above which they consider a country a full democracy below that they consider it a flawed democracy so they find some flaws rating at 7.7 in the Israeli democracy but still not a bad rating here UK is over us sorry UK is over here United States is over here so there is a cluster of countries that are considered full democracies by e EU I and they're all noticeably below the replacement rate and there is a bunch of a kind is right here that are considered flawed democracies and there is still below the replacement fertility rate the other country here next to Israel is botswana botswana i would consider an outlier the GDP of Botswana is about seven thousand per capita compared to thirty-three thousand dollars per capita for Israel about a quarter of population of botswana as HIV infected so taking botswana as an example doesn't seem like a good sign we will look at israel and more details because also we could have looked at the trends are they trending up or they're trending down but Swanna would be trending down many other countries would be trending down like there was some more there who I don't think want to have fertility at for because they're islands again where will they go then but they are reported to be pretty good at education whatnot but we will concentrate on Israel once we also plot before we plot against freedom let's pose the question though we just saw that the countries that are rated to be full democracies all have currently the fertility rate below the replacement rate does democracy equate behavioral sync the term behavioral sink is taken from John Calhoun a person who studied behavior and the survival in the groups of mice and rat and this is by the way is not a fertility rate track this is a population of rats but if you remember the population of the world growing about linearly by now not so much exponentially and the world trends trending down almost uniformly we will think of okay maybe the population will peak and then it will nosedive and here it says last born here so that means that their fertility nosedive before the population down and the rats died same with mice back way back this was done we could not even blame GMO on the feed that was provided to the mice and rap they were provided ample food they were provided a lot of room they formed though overpopulated clusters near the places where they were fed we see here John Calhoun observing his well lab rats or lab mice and back then he was so famous that he met the enrollment Pope to discuss the problem of the behavioral sink there were some behaviors that he observed in rats and mice that developed as their population increased that then contributed to them dying off so now that we're all scared let's look at the plot of fertility versus freedom do we see the same thing as fertility versus democracy given how well they correlated we do we see some other countries that were not taken into account by the democracy rating we see here however that these are small island countries like Micronesia kiribati Marshall Islands we still see Israel prominently enough here there's some other countries that obscure the graph like Ghana or Baneen ending up having pretty good freedom scores with high fertility but if you look at their trends they're trending down while Israel is trending up more human rights aspects exist other than the right for education especially for secondary education that I mentioned before and this has to do with the would be right to have children and to not have children neither of which we see in the international documents in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights we see the right to marry and to quote unquote found the family which implies the right to have at least one child but does not constitute a right to have more than one child which would be a right to be pushing us above the replacement rate so that right to found a family is also codified in the European Convention on Human Rights I am the there is a paper with more details on that subject that I'm quote that I'm referencing here there's also an article that entitles motherhood and childhood to special care all children whether they're born in or out of wedlock remember they said Marianne found and family in and out of wedlock once the children are born they shall enjoy the same social protection but obviously not before and it does not even implicit and for a right per se to bear children out of wedlock or in wedlock for that matter not in this article then of with the right not to have children there's a different set of complications in 2012 we had the first president when the UN Population Fund in its annual report explicitly described family planning as a human right never before and even so the report isn't binding it doesn't have any it's not a document like the convention on human rights it doesn't have any legal effects on national laws whatsoever it does not list abortion among the family planning measures so they're all sorts of human rights aspects that in the current framework are not resolved at all more fertility trends here we see Israel's so-called demographic miracle there's an article that's entitled Israel's demographic miracle this is the trend for Israel they've been going up since nineteen ninety one or two reasonably consistently that is unusual the other countries that I plotted are the top 10 most populous countries you see Nigeria on top trending slightly down we see other countries hear us meandering a little bit here going down up and now trending down so that indicates actually you know it's difficult to interpret let's not so at least it's trending down now below the replacement rate many of them are below the replacement rate the ones above we see India there are other problems in India that we will not try to take on we will ask how did they achieve this miracle in Israel you have a question please perfect question thank you so much for this question first of all here's a list of sources on Israel's demographic miracle starting with the dog Friedlander article from 2002 and feed Lander worked on this problem before there were several articles that he authored before a very useful article by afghani abyss drove from 2012 a recent article from 2016 but it says from 1992 2010 so it looks like a secondary source I really like the other see sources better yes the problem they were working on as shown in this graph where they're showing that the Jewish population share was getting was trending down and it's shown trending down all the way down to two thousand nine and the share of Muslims increasing because of what you've alluded to with higher fertility among the Israeli Arabs speaking of their democracies there is a party that represents Israeli Arabs so no wonder they were worried quoting a delayed yasser arafat who told them that the womb of the Arab woman is my strongest weapon I am the they worked on that Friedlander indicated that it was unwise to discriminate against Arab women in terms of their right to get education and get jobs because that forced them to stay home and marry and have babies and offer them no alternative I am the yeah they try to address that and they help them somewhat but what is more important that they manage to achieve is that the most they achieved an increase in Jewish births and most of that increase because for the ultra-orthodox part of the population they were already maxed out at about seven they achieved the growth from 2.0 2.2 children per woman in the non ultra-orthodox Jewish sector up to 2.6 this is the really interesting thing about the Israeli demographic miracle part of the solution was yes thank you that Goldman points out that their exceptional fertility stems from religious commitment rather than ethnicity there's a data here to support that from the US Jewish population the second part of the solution was that now with medical advances more Jewish women decided to give birth at ages in their 40s and because of the medical treatment peculiarities more of them had twins and triplets that could be corrected in the future but for now we have a contribution from that they decided to have children late they use the medical treatment instead of one child they had two or three children that's one second part of this the third part that you've gained a beast you've identified was that there was an increase of percentage of non-marital childbearing so few women including those in the ages of 40 plus decided well so it's getting late let's still have a child even if I'm not married and the conclusions here are that the problem of increasing the fertility rate in the non ultra-religious population from 2.0 to 2.6 is solvable by example in a free democratic country the problem though has to be addressed explicitly in this society because they really were concerned about what was going on we have to study more aspects of what the solution really was to see if there were other factors that contributed to the fact that this increased i am the the impact of higher education which is tertiary in the international terminology ought to be investigated as well for instance about thirty percent of German women with higher education are reported according to european union statistics to be childless with the figure pretty alarming so even a yesterday on my twitter feed i noticed a headline that said literally a muslim scholar celebrates extinction of blonde blue-eyed Germans now I I mean fine this is alarming and he just follows the footsteps of Yasser Arafat here but maybe the lessons from Israel could be ported to help out Germans solve their problem and I would like to emphasize that any extended such solution of this kind would have to be firmly grounded in the Human Rights framework so that would take work by the international community to fix their human rights framework thank you it's okay thank you very much for your patience you