Demographics, Migration, Housing, Regional Inequality

Puerto Rico population projection: “Fertility, aging/mortality, and lowest-low inflows are the real story here.“

Jeffrey Williams, from 1998: A “more accurate narrative of globalization experience in the decades prior to the World War I would read like this: A spreading technology revolution and a transportation breakthrough led first to a divergence of real wages and living standards between countries; the evolution of well-functioning global markets in goods and labor eventually brought about a convergence between nations; this factor price convergence, however, planted seeds for its own destruction because it created rising inequality in labor-scarce economies [the US] and falling inequality in labor-abundant economies [Italy, Sweden]. The voices of powerful interest groups who were hit hard by these globalization events were heard, generating a political backlash against immigration and trade. 
A late-19th-century globalization backlash made a powerful contribution to interwar de-globalization. … history does supply a warning: a backlash against globalization can be found in our past, so it might reappear in our future."

Good paragraph from Citylab: "Perhaps the central problem of housing affordability is one of scale: the number of units that we're able to provide is too small. That's true whether we're talking about Section 8 vouchers (that go to only about 1 in 5 eligible households), or through inclusionary zoning requirements (which provide only handfuls of units in most cities). The very high per-unit construction costs of affordable housing only make the problem more vexing: the pressure to make any project that gets constructed as distinctive, amenity-rich and environmentally friendly as possible, means that the limited number of public dollars end up building fewer units. And too few units—scale—is the real problem here."

Sarah O'Connor in the FT writes: “[I]n Britain, it is increasingly on the country's physical edges, in its seaside towns, that you find people on the outside of the economy looking in. Blackpool exports healthy skilled people and imports the unskilled, the unemployed and the unwell. As people overlooked by the modern economy wash up in a place that has also been left behind, the result is a quietly unfolding health crisis. More than a tenth of the town's working-age inhabitants live on state benefits paid to those deemed too sick to work. Antidepressant prescription rates are among the highest in the country. Life expectancy, already the lowest in England, has recently started to fall. … For Jonathan Portes, chief economist at the DWP between 2002 and 2008, … "There's an argument for saying you can't do [welfare reform] separately from having some sort of place-based economic strategy as well — and we never really had that.”