The Great Migration

There has been a big movement of people within developing countries from rural to urban areas. Absorbing the new arrivals from the countryside into already overburdened cities is a challenge:

Mega-cities, mega-problems, by Nicolas P. Retsinas, Commentary, LA Times: The world has reached a point of hyper-urbanization: 2007 marks the first year when more than half the global population is "urban," not "rural." Indeed, this is the era of the "mega-city" — metropolises of 10 million-plus. ... Today there are 20 mega-cities, including Mexico City, Karachi, Manila, Dhaka, Lagos, Jakarta and Chongqing.

This type of drastic population shift isn't without precedent. During the Industrial Revolution, concentrations of people in U.S. and European cities were part and parcel of a factory economy. But that economic and technological progress came with a price — decades of fetid slums, horrific child mortality, raging epidemic disease. This time around, with cities 10 times bigger and demand for workers uncertain, the costs could be exponentially larger.

In general, an optimist might cheer urbanization as a sign of modernization; Residents of developed countries are much more likely to live in cities... The city, after all, is the hub of culture, a magnet that draws artists, writers, musicians — the place where creative spirits create. ... The city is, likewise, the hub of industry, generating the bulk of most countries' gross domestic product. Most important, the city is the hub of ideas. The mingling of people spurs the intellectual innovation that fuels thriving societies, at least in the developed world.

But urbanization historically also has spawned an impoverished underclass of the marginally employed, or unemployed, living in a cruel despair. Think of Charles Dickens' London: Scrooge wanted to diminish the "surplus population."...

Cholera, typhoid, influenza — all cut a swath through 19th and early 20th century urban populations. Yet in time those horrors abated as infrastructure — clean water, enclosed sewers, labor laws, public education, medical advances — was created. In time, the 19th century cities morphed into exciting places. ...

The newly ascendant mega-cities in the developing world ... can dishearten even the most persistent optimist. They are relentless agglomerations of people, drawn not so much by the promise of prosperity as by the hope of survival.

It is internal migrant populations that are pouring into most of these exploding urban areas. In China, for instance, 150 million people have left their rural homes in the last 10 years, leaving a dearth of workers in the agricultural sector. Political and war refugees, too, flow in steadily. A fortunate few may realize a steady income, ... but most live in slums whose filthy water, political chaos and nonexistent municipal infrastructure would startle Dickens and Marx.

The United Nations estimates that, today, 2.8 billion people live on less than $2 a day. And it is this huge, desperate underclass that is filling these mega-cities. ... Cholera and typhoid — diseases listed as "rare" in Western textbooks — are endemic. ... Parts of these cities are modern, with the familiar skyscrapers, highways and BlackBerry-toting workers. Yet they are surrounded by rings of shocking poverty where millions live in paper-covered hovels.

Without some concerted action from nations and international institutions, these mega-cities will grow larger and more desperate. ...

There is no quick panacea to improving the lot of billions of people; it took more than 50 years to address the slums of the 19th century. But there is an urgency to today's task. The slum dwellers of Lagos and Manila and Karachi are part of the global economy, bound to the rest of the world. Their misery will spill beyond their borders...

Any thoughts on how economic, political, social, and institutional factors are changing and interacting to bring about this massive population shift in developing countries?

Comments

[ken melvin]

I glad to see this writ out. I've spoken to the need for a new model, one to replace the one that evolved consequent the industrial revolution. Try to imagine a model that move one-half the world's population into the middle class.

[mobile]

Sure, I've got a though: whats the BFD? People move from rural to urban areas because they think it will improve their lives, and for the most part they are right. One explanation for new and growing slums would could be that the economic opportunities of rural living are deteriorating, forcing people into the cities as economic refugees. But another explanation is that rural areas were already hotbeds of poverty, and that the growth of urban slums is actually a sign that economic opportunities are improving. As an "optimist" (which is to say, I believe that all things considered, "things are getting better"), and as someone who finds the statistics about economic growth and the prevalence of the middle class in developing countries credible, I favor the latter explanation.

Perhaps Retsinas finds poverty more "shocking" when it is concentrated in urban areas (and maybe more visible).
I don't see it that way, and give two-and-a-half cheers to urbanization.

[Noni Mausa]

Rural areas are traditionally hotbeds of poverty, but a very rich and labour-intensive poverty. Like this:

I live in a rural area. Everyone here has a car (or else they can do nothing - shopping, church, even access to social services requires a car). There are few if any who do not have a roof over their head, simply because there's quite a shortage of hot air vents and cardboard box homes out here.

Most people out here can raise a cow, chickens, a few pigs, some vegetables. Many have off-farm jobs in order to afford to keep the farm, but they have the farm too.

They work hard, but they're falling behind every year. They work hard to compensate for the fact that farm income isn't enough, sometimes, to pay the property taxes. They work hard and take pride in it -- and that's good because pride is all that's keeping them on the land.

The land pays them back with its quiet coolness and its bounty, but every year a few more people lose the balancing act and fall off the edge of the raft, death, illness, bankruptcy, whatever. But they stay on the land to the breaking point, and we're lucky they do.

When too many people fall off the land, who will be left to grow food? Business, with bussed in crews of migrant farmers? And what will our food cost then?

Not to mention the problem of living in a country where the cities are interspersed with hundreds of miles of unoccupied land. Drive from Centreville to Bigtown, and if you run out of gas or blow your engine, look out.

Noni
rather dystopian this morning

says...

"When too many people fall off the land, who will be left to grow food? Business, with bussed in crews of migrant farmers? And what will our food cost then?"

Less than now.

[cm]

Mark Thoma: Off-topic, but I have been noticing that in the "recent posts" side tab posts are showing out of order w.r.t. their chronological appearance. I'm not sure whether you are aware of that and whether it can be "fixed", and it's also a quite minor point.

[johnchx]

Nicolas Retsinas writes: But that economic and technological progress came with a price — decades of fetid slums, horrific child mortality, raging epidemic disease.

Fortunately, 21st century megacities contain people familiar with the germ theory of disease and possessing a working knowledge of public sanitation.

A fair portion of the death toll of 19th and early 20th century urbanization was incurred because elites persuaded themselves that the poor contracted tuburculosis and cholera through loose morals and a fondness for liquor.

These afflictions didn't mysteriously "abate," we figured out how they worked and we fixed them. Yes, that pesky Progressive magic formula (genuine expertise plus government action in the public interest) really does work sometimes.

Retsinas also writes: But urbanization historically also has spawned an impoverished underclass of the marginally employed, or unemployed, living in a cruel despair.

Cities may have been the locale of a (newly visible) underclass, but I don't think there's any evidence that they "spawned" such a group. I may be wrong, but I don't believe that any major urbanization trend has been associated with an increase in fertility. Quite the opposite.

Urbanization converts rural poverty -- far away from "us" -- into urban poverty, which urban elites find both distasteful and menacing. But there's a difference between making poverty visible to "us" and creating poverty.

[piglet]

""When too many people fall off the land, who will be left to grow food? Business, with bussed in crews of migrant farmers? And what will our food cost then?"

Less than now."

What our food will cost is really not so relevant. The danger is to food security in the long run on the one hand, and to the masses of people "falling off the land" on the other hand, masses of people who are condemned to lives in misery in urban slums because farming doesn't sustain themselves any more. In countries like India, more than half the population still depends on farming.

Western economists say of course that their farming is inefficient and their agriculture should be industrialized like in the US. What this will do to the land, to the environment, to the people, and to the economy, these ignorant idiots don't even consider. Imagine hundreds of millions of Indians losing their agricultural livelihood. They won't all become software developers. The sensible thing to do is help the rural communities so that people can stay and live there. We are doing, of course, the opposite, ruining local agriculture in poor countries by trade liberalization and export subsidies. This is one of the big stupid things we do, with horrible consequences.

[piglet]

"I may be wrong, but I don't believe that any major urbanization trend has been associated with an increase in fertility."

Oh yes, they have. The 19th century industrialization and proletarization has been associated with Europe's greatest population explosion.

[piglet]

"A fair portion of the death toll of 19th and early 20th century urbanization was incurred because elites persuaded themselves that the poor contracted tuburculosis and cholera through loose morals and a fondness for liquor."

Well, the tubercle bazillus was discovered in 1882. Richard Lewontin argues (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/7929) that scientific medicine actually had neglible part in the decline of mortality from infectious diseases. "The most likely explanation, both for the historical trend and for the differences between regions of the world today, is in nutrition, although hard evidence is not easy to come by. It is at least suggestive that in the State of Sao Paulo during the last twenty years, fluctuations in the infant mortality rate are paralleled exactly by inverse fluctuations in the minimum real wage." Very interesting.

[anne]

Interesting comments, indeed.

[ken melvin]

I understand these squattervilles to be centers of abject poverty. Has something changed? Weren't those in Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro resultant displacement of subsistence farmers? Ten years ago I was following Rio pretty closely and at the time women were having to decide which of their children were worth raising. To me, such cities as these are measures of failure; governmental, economical, and social.

[just the messenger]

Cheers for pointing out the fallacies aplenty in this article.

[Noni Mausa]

Me: ""When too many people fall off the land, who will be left to grow food? Business, with bussed in crews of migrant farmers? And what will our food cost then?"

Nameless: "Less than now."

A great number of variables come into this, but let me bring up two points.

-- A recent report on rural poverty, "Understanding Freefall: The Challenge of the Rural Poor" shows that our rural people now have a negative income. It can be seen here: http://www.parl.gc.ca/39/1/parlbus/commbus/senate/com-e/agri-e/rep-e/repintdec06-e.htm

They raise crops and sell them, and also work off-farm to keep it all afloat. Is it possible that if corporations take over farming, they will charge less for their services? or would you expect them, with ownership of the industry, to begin hiking the prices? Economies of scale be damned - I would expect them to do so.

-- What we bought for food 100 years ago is not the same as we are getting now. Nutritive values have fallen, though food safety is higher.

But you do not buy food only in order to be safe - a 2x4 would serve that purpose just fine. You buy it for its nutrition.

I can't find the reference at the moment, but haven't nutrient values of vegetables and fruits fallen drastically in the past 75 years or so? If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck but doesn't nourish like a duck - it's not a duck.

Noni

[piglet]

"I can't find the reference at the moment, but haven't nutrient values of vegetables and fruits fallen drastically in the past 75 years or so?"

I'm not sure, but what ahs definitely fallen is diversity. This is a big problem for ecological and food safety reasons, but it also brings an impoverishment of taste and quality. Here's an excellent article about the extinction of the English apple:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/10/30/fallen-fruit/

Fowler and Mooney also explained the loss of food plant diversity in their book Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity.

says...

Mike Davis "Planet of Slums" deals with this issue and is a good reference point.

One area Davis talks about is the great rates of return earned by the landlords of these slums, and how only a few families control a disproportionate amount of the real estate. This post should really be tied with the "Enough is not Enough" thread and journalists should be looking not at Gates and Buffet but the oligarchs controlling the 20 cities.

[mrrunangun]

Piglet says,
"Well, the tubercle bazillus was discovered in 1882. Richard Lewontin argues (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/7929) that scientific medicine actually had neglible part in the decline of mortality from infectious diseases."

Tuberculosis was still the leading cause of death in the developed world, including the USA, until 1952 when isoniazid became available. Soon after, para-aminosalicylate and streptomycin became available and the combination was effective against all forms of TB then extant. It was only after effective treatment became available that mass public screenings by chest x-ray, another successful progressive government initiative, were organized to find cases. Case-finding would have been pointless without effective treatment.

Only a few years later, the Salk vaccine for polio became available and another huge and hugely successful government-orchestrated public health campaign conquered another fearsome urban scourge. Richard Lewontin must be a very young man or have a very short memory.

[Peter Schaeffer]

All,

I won't argue that China is any kind of paradise for its own internal migrants. However, China produces and consumers 1 billion tons of cement per year. China is definitely building the infrastructure and housing its own people need.

That 11X the United States with only 4.3X the population. China will be reasonably housed in less than a generation.

Does any other developing country come close? Perhaps Malaysia and Thailand.

[piglet]

mrrunangun, please read the reference provided.

[mrrunangun]

Piglet,
I find Lewis Thomas's reply far more convincing. Dr. Lewontin dismisses medical treatment without adducing another explanation except to claim that TB would have died out naturally. Indeed it's enjoying a bit of a resurgence also as a result of changes in the way we live.

[piglet]

The fact remains that most of the decrease in TB mortality happened before treatment was discovered. Moreover, Lewontin points to other diseases, like measles, that used to be life-threatening but aren't any more without any treatment. I understand that you find Lewontin a bit extreme. That is because he's trying to correct a very common myth. Who would guess that, as he says, "the expectation of life at age forty has increased by a paltry two months since 1955".