Demography on Big Muddy

Getting citizenship just got a lot harder for those of Italian descent

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 22:18:00 -0400

Many people in the Americas would probably be surprised to learn that, in much of the rest of the world, being born in a country does not by itself make you a citizen. In most of the Americas, citizenship is automatically granted on the basis of jus soli (“right of soil”): birth on the territory. Elsewhere, citizenship is more often based on jus sanguinis (“right of blood”): descent. This is the case in most of the EU.

Citizenship in an EU country is considered unusually desirable because of the mobility rights and powerful passport it confers. However, the rules concerning exactly what kind of descent confers citizenship varies widely among member states. Italy used to be considered among the easiest, requiring only that an applicant prove they had an Italian ancestor alive after March 17, 1861, when the Kingdom of Italy was founded. That changed last year, when the country passed a new law significantly tightening the requirements for citizenship, which was recently upheld by the country’s Constitutional Court. The new law brings requirements more in line with norm among EU member states:

Now, only individuals with at least one parent or grandparent born in Italy will automatically qualify for citizenship by descent. The amended law does not affect the 60,000 applications currently pending review. Additionally, dual nationals risk losing their Italian citizenship if they “don’t engage” by paying taxes, voting or renewing their passports.

Homeownership rate doesn't mean what you think it does

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:15:00 -0500

This thread from demographer Lyman Stone on the definition of the US homeownership rate has stuck in my head for a couple of years now. Reading it produced a pretty profound “oh” for why this particular metric didn’t line up with my perception of the issue.

To put it simply, the definition of the homeownership rate is:

Take the number of households where the home is owned by the household head, divide by the total number of households.

The homeownership rate is based on households, not individuals. If an adult child lives with their parents (and their parents own their own home), they are counted as “homeowners” for the purpose of the homeownership rate. If more and more people in their 20s and their 30s move in with their parents (or never move out in the first place) rather than renting an apartment, this has the effect of increasing the homeownership rate, because you have reduced the denominator (number of households) without changing the numerator (number of owner-occupied households).

Canada uses the same definition:

The homeownership rate refers to the proportion of all households that are owner occupied.

The CIA World Factbook has been memory holed

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:37:00 -0500

Another staple of my childhood is gone, this time the CIA’s World Factbook. I have fond memories of consulting the World Factbook for school projects in my elementary school computer lab. But as of yesterday, the entire publication along with all of its archives have been suddenly and unceremoniously wiped from the agency’s website. At least archives of the website are still available on the Internet Archive, with complete zip files up to 2020 and Wayback Machine snapshots thereafter.

Remember that a lot of numbers are fake

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 23:20:00 -0500

David Oks wrote an essay reminding us that in many countries, even the most basic statistic—the population—is often shockingly uncertain or even outright fabricated. It’s a good reminder that many of the numbers we rely on for international comparisons, like crime rates and economic indices, are similarly troubled by incompatible definitions, uneven measurement, and varying degrees of manipulation. Ask Google what the population of Afghanistan is, and it will happily show you an annual timeline of population since 1960, but the tidiness of the chart belies the murkiness of the estimate.

One of the drawbacks of easily accessible international datasets from organizations like the World Bank and Our World in Data is that they paper over the huge differences among the underlying source datasets. Ultimately, you end up with one number from each country and the implication that they are all pointing to a single construct. This makes it far too easy to draw confident comparisons between countries that simply aren’t measuring the same thing. Without being forced to assemble these datasets yourself, it’s difficult to appreciate how messy it is to measure “the same thing” across different places (or even to measure the same thing over time within one place).

When evaluating a statistical claim, it’s always worth asking where the numbers come from and how they were measured. It’s easy to take figures at face value, especially when they’re rarely presented with any explicit uncertainty, which may be large. This goes double for more esoteric constructs like freedom scores or corruption indices, which often show up in social media posts cheerleading (or doom-mongering) one country over another. I remember one slickly produced video uncritically comparing COVID-19 statistics between Australia and Niger on the basis that they have the same population (do they?). Niger is one of the poorest and youngest countries in the world, and differences in demographics and health infrastructure alone invalidate any straightforward comparison with a wealthy Western country.