The democratic Earth

Many people have envisioned Democratic Earth, where the whole earth is under the morden democratic system. Unfortunately, with the reality, the possibility seems remote.

As I have constantly promoted, Education is very enssential to the successs of a Democratic system. The sole of the Education must be more than the hard science, the technoledge, etc. But the understanding the brace of the sole of the democratic value.

Many of today's education fails the essential ingradient of teaching our young the value and the practice of democratic systems. The fail of the democratic education results the notions of self-centered value. The values most people see are those surrounding them. People can careless things happened remote from their surrounding. Even though that are human natures, which is also an animal nature. The reason human being the human is the ability to see past the animal nature.

Even though in all practical senses, people have to take care of things near home before extended their good will to the far. The worry these days is it will never reach far. When the education failed, more people are concerned about their near then the far. The majority will prevent the good will ever reached far since it is against their immediate interest. Without the education to change that, the self centered consideration will become stronger and stronger and narrower and narrower. Simple evil act of bribary would conquer the narrow society one by one.

The narrow mind exist in many current events. The refuse to stand up for justice is one. We all know that there are many society in the world that are violating the human rights, but many of us choose to be scilent - because it is far and is not in our immediate interest.

As of today, we begin to see the result of our self-centered narrow mind. Countries relied on forceful control of their citizen was able to squesd out the efforts of their citizen and produces enough resource to influence many democratic system around the world while the democratic systems continuing their narrow minded self-interest.

The other demonstration of the situation is the COVID-19. The world is connected. Many western countries have been focused on their vaccinate their own citizen, which isn't really wrong. However, on the ohter hand, if you totally ignored the other part of the world, the virus got the chances to exist for a longer time and got more chances to evolve and become more lethol. So, to really control the virus, a worldwide vacination is necessary.

Education, Democratic, and the Covid-19

I do not have time and would just like to take quick notes and I can elaberate it later.

As I mentioned in many of my previous post, the education is very important for democracy and the Covid-19 demonstrates how our education systems have faired us.

Personally, I have stated many times that a very important thing in education is to suspend the democratic system. If we can't teach our citizen how to suspend the democratic system, many thing we have build on will colaps.

In the case of COVID-19, the issue of govering power of elected officer are clashed with the individulism a lot.

As demonstrated by the Mainland China, many of us in the demoncratic system may begin to doubt the value of the demoncratic system when it failed to protect its citizen as China did. Fortunately, there are success stories in the democratic systems: The Taiwan, the New Zealand.

However, the goal of this article is not about who did well and who did not. But is to focused on the resolving of the issue of the governing power and the individulism.

Democratic systems need be supported by few pillors to principle. For one, the idea of governing by the people. For two, the freedom of will of the individual. There are few others that are important to the success of a democratic system.

For the first principle above, the governing by the people, it usually take the form of people electing officers and the officers inherited the power from the people and execute the power in terms of the people and for the people. Usually, every elected officer are bound by certain laws that provide guide lines on what is or is not under the officer's execute power. However, in a practical sense, it is hard for these laws to specify every applicable cases. The gray areas, therefore, exist. However, as is the basic practice of democratic systems, the legislature are giving the power to establish laws while the elect officers are to follow the laws. Many elected officers were given emergency authorities to help resolve the slow response issues of democratic system. However, these emergency authorities are, as is implied, for emergencies only. Eventually, the power comes from the law established by the legislature body.

Based on the operational principle described in previous paragraph, the executive orders issued by elected officers should be temparary. To held those orders extensively, laws should be passed by legislature. Obvering the pratices during the COVID-19 period, many few elected officers relyed the executive orders to the legilature body. Many of the legilature body did not take these issues in their hands either. Without the endorsment of the legislature body, these executive orders are and should be temparary and be considered the will of the officer and not that of the people.

Proceeded with the second principle of individualism. Democratic systems allowed and protected individuals to free to express their opinions and free to gather and try to get their idea heard. However, all democratic systems also has the underline under-wrote that majority rule. These usually carried out in legilature bodies, where votes on laws are conducted. Even though laws are not to depress the the opinions of the individual, other behaviors are to be guided by the law.

In the case of COVID-19, elected officers should have seeking supports from legislature bodies to endowse his/her executive orders. The endowsment and the law would provide executive officers the power to enforce the law.

In a democratic system, even though the system is govern by individual citizen, which does not give each individual the right to do whatever they wanted. They were given the full rights to express their opinions but beyond that, individuals' behavior are governed by the group consenses.

Migration of Nebraska Working Age Population via 2011-07 ACS PUMS

20180504 Update: This is a data set that is prepared explicitly for Nebraska Coordinating Commission for Postsecondary Education (Nebraska CCPE) so that they can proceed with their 2018 Progress Report. The reason for this note is  to increase the chance so people can find the data because CCPE refused to cite this web article as the source of the data

This is simply a release of migration data for Nebraska working age population based on the ACS (American Community Survey) 2011-2007 5-year PUMS (Public Use Microdata Sample) data released by US Census Bureau.

Last year, after publishing the serials of articles about the population migration in the US, I re-examined what I did and spent times in revise the approach using more R codes than manually preparing and running SQL queries. This year, after comparing my R process for 2015-2011 and 2010-2006, I decide to restructure the R codes in an attempt to extract most of the common code to be shared and, hopefully, it will reduce the time spend in maintaining the code in the future. I intended to create R code to replace last year's process for education attainment too.

For this data release, the working age is defined as 22 to 64, inclusive.

Education Degree	Net (In) Migration	90% MOE	Possible Range
1. No High School Diploma	2,130	1,037.3	1092 to 3167
2. Has High School Diploma	35	1,247.1	-1213 to 1282
3. Some College Exp. - No Degree	1,501	1,493.2	7 to 2994
4. Associate's Degree	153	824.8	-672 to 977
5. Bachelor's Degree	89	1,260.9	-1172 to 1349
6. Graduate Degree	-1,733	935.0	-2669 to -798

As can be seen from the above table, for every year during that five-years period, there are, in net, estimated 1,733 people with graduate degree moved out of Nebraska. Since the number is derived from sampling, with 90% of certainty, the true number can lie between 2,669 and 798. So it is very likely (90% certainty) that Nebraska loses about 2,669 to 798 people with graduate degree every year during the five year period.

For population with bachelor degree, the net migration pattern isn't as clear cut as those with graduate degree since, with 90% certainty, the net can vary from 1,172 moving out to 1,349 moving in.


The released data file can be accessed here through Google Drive. The released data includes all weights that is needed to combine education categories if so desired. For data concerning other states, please follow this link.


Related articles: 
Nebraska Brain Drain Migration and Ed. Attainment, 2015 United States ACS 

Education Enrollment and Adult College Enrollment by Age - 2016 ACS

In my previous article, we look at the total adult college enrollment for each state. In this, I would like to take one step further to look into the enrollment by age. In this article, ages are presented in an interval of 3. An age label of 25 is actually the sum of age 24, 25, and 26.

Again, the analysis is post on my public tableau website.

The first chart presents few basic numbers that provided background information for discussion. In the chart, the variable zTtl represents the total population. When select all states, the Millennial's bump at age 25 can clearly be seen. The curve zAttnmntUndr+ represent all people with education attainment of undergraduate degree (associate or bachelor) or above. As shown in the chart, the curve first take a large gain at age 25 when most college students obtained their undergraduate degrees. The curve then peaked at age 31 when few more students finishing their undergraduate degrees and others obtained their graduate degrees. However, keep in mind that, in this age chart, the total population trend also contributes.

Education Attainment and Enrollment by Age - United States ACS 2016

The line zAttnmntNoCllgDgr represents the number of people do not obtained undergraduate degree or above. As can be seen in the chart, the line begins to drop once students begin to obtain their undergraduate degrees. Again, keep in mind, the population trend has its effect as show in the bump around age 55, where, due to the population bump,  the population do not have college degree also show a bump. The remaining two green-blueish lines display the college undergraduate (zEnrllUndr) and graduate (zEnrllGrdt) enrollment. These two lines peaked at age 19 and 25 respectively.


The second chart provide basic information on college-education attainment by age for each state. The variable zpctAttnmntUndr+ shows the percent of population obtained undergraduate degree and above. With all states selected, the United States shows a highest rate of 46% at the age of 34. The other two lines on this chart, zpctAttnmntUndr and zpctAttnmntGrdt, represent the percent of population with the highest degree attainment of undergraduate or graduate degrees.

Education Attainment By Age - United States ACS 2016

The third chart displays two education attainment lines from the first chart (zAttnmntUndr+, and zAttnmntNoCllgDgr) along with a college enrollment line (zNoUndrEnrllUndr+). The college enrollment line counts all students enrolled in both undergraduate and graduate but haven't obtain an undergraduate degree yet. By taking the ratio of zNoUndrEnrllUndr+ against zAttnmntNoCllgDgr we arrived at the forth chart.

Education Attainment and Enrollment By Age - United States ACS 2016

As mentioned above, the forth chart display the ratio between zNoUndrEnrllUndr+ and zAttnmntNoCllgDgr. It shows the fraction of non-college degree earner enrolled in college classes. Conferred to chart three, since at the age of 18, 19, and 20, there were relatively few people (313,517) obtained college degrees, the peak at the age 19 shows that, in US, about 50% of that age group went to college. Also observed on the chart is that, after the peak, the percentage of non-college-degree bearer enrolled in college decreased monotonically. Meaning that the older the people are, the less likely they will enrolled as an adult student. For Adult college enrollment at age 25 (aggregates age 24,25, and 26), the rate are about 15% nationally, and dropped fast to 9% at age 28 ( aggregates 27, 28, and 29).

Non-Degree Bearer Enrollment By Age - United States ACS 2016

Brain Drain - 2015 ACS State Migration for Working Age

Updated on Feb. 27, 2017:
An attempt has been made to rank states by brain drain indexes based on migration. See article Brain drain - ranking and analysis with 2015 ACS data.

As will be discussed in my upcoming article about various possible conception/perceptions about the idea of 'brain' in the context of 'brain drain', one of the definition or interpretation would be the education attainment of the workforce, hence, the age range of 22 to 64 years old.

As mentioned in my previous article: Population migration derived from ACS 2015 5-year PUMS dataset, I was in the process of producing a more detailed result from the ACS 2015 5-year PUMS dataset and here it is. For this article, we ignored the in-migration from foreign counties, which was included in the previous article. Time allowed, we will look into foreign country migration in details.

Basically, we look at all samples with age between 22 and 64 years old in the PUMS file along with each sample's education attainment level and the state of residing a year ago. By analyzing these data, we can estimate the number of people moving in and out of a state and with what kind of education attainment level.

It happened that I was attending a Tableau promotion meeting recently and decided to give it a try even though I would have preferred an open source solution, which I did try to look up, but did not have enough time to evaluate them yet.

The rest of this article will simply provide notes to the presentation since I have the baggage of an old IT worker that abbreviates almost everything.

First, the cite of the data source: ACS 2015-2011 5-year PUMS file processed by Dr. Duncan Hsu.

The Brain Drain Migration between states presentation can be found at Tableau Public and below are some of the summaries: 

The first tab/page/slide, "Map - Migrated to To_State", is the in-migration map for the state of interest specified by the right-hand side dropdown control: the To_State. The map will show the number of people moving from each state to the To_State, with the education attainment level you specified by the second dropdown list labeled EdAttnmnt. To see the numbers, hover your mouse above a state of interest. For example, the following chart show that there were 724 people moved from Kansas to Nebraska, which was selected as the 'To_State'. Possible values for the EdAttnmnet dropdown are: Less than High School Degree (LssHsDgr), High School Degree or Equivalent (HsDgrEqv), Some College Experience/Course-work but no degree (SomeCllg), Associate Degree (AssctDgr), Bachelor Degree (BchlrDgr), Master Degree (Mstr), First Professional Degree (FP), and Doctor's Degree (Drs).

In-Migration to Nebraska

The second tab, "Map - Migrated out From_State", is the out-migration map for the state of interest. Operational wise, this is very similar to the first tab. In the map below, it shows that there were 421 people migrated to Iowa from Nebraska, which was selected as the 'From_State'.

Out-Migration from Nebraska

The third tab, "Map - Net migration", shows the net migration. By hover over each state, it shows three numbers, the HdCnt (head count; negative for out-migration and positive for in-migration) and the upper and lower bound for the 90% confidence level. The dropdown to the right displays 6 education attainment levels with the Graduates (Grdts) encompassing  Master, First Professional, and Doctor's degree.

Net-Migration for Nebraska

The fourth tab, is the net migration bar chart for each state where the bar indicated the Margin of Error (MOE) at the 90% confidence level. Again, dropdowns are on the  right.

Net-Migration with 90% MOE

The fifth tab provides the data used in the fourth tab in table format with the upper and lower bound of the 90% MOE.

Net-Migration for Nebraska's neighboring states

The Sixth tab allows selecting states with the map.

Selecting States with Map