One thing to understand about the post-2008 rich-world fertility decline is it happened to the very-conservative formerly-high-fertility subgroups too:
Here's the Amish. Amish TFR is down from about 7 in 2008 to under 5 in 2020.

The Amish!
And tbh the Amish decline looks like it began in the 1970s and has just been slowly falling every since
As an aside, Finland's long-term birth data is always really interesting. Here's share of babies in Finland born in wedlock. You can see a slow rise from 1760s to mid-19th century, but then WOW the post-war period!
You get a significant pivot away from unwed motherhood immediately postwar, but then a huge increase in the 1970s.
And here's Finland's fertility rate since 1776, in raw terms and also adjusted for how many of those kids likely survived to puberty.
One thing I like about mortality-adjustments like this is they help us understand a key curiosity: if human survival was predicated on 5 or 6 or 7 kids each, why don't we have more deeply-rooted and hard-to-change preferences for 5 or 6 or 7 kids?
My answer is that what we actually have is a very historically deeply-rooted average norm of 2-4 kids, that that was the actual "efficient family size" for almost all of human history, but that high mortality rates drove the high TFRs we observe.
So "growing up with 7 surviving siblings" was probably *never* the norm except for basically 2 generations around early modernity.

Of course now we're way below even that 2 level, but still.
The 1950s is 200 years after the beginning of demographic modernity.

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More from @lymanstoneky

Feb 16
the funny thing here is that the Canadian system actually is really awful, because any *province* can suspend basically *any* right for however long they want.
imagine if texas could decide they dislike due process, and so they will be suspending it

now stop imagining: this is how the canadian system *actually works*
in canada, you have rights*
Read 8 tweets
Feb 15
Conditional on Russia invading Ukraine, do you think prominent pro-Russian tweeters in the west will mostly say...
Also, while we're at it...

Will Ukraine experience ANY battlefield casualties at the hands of uniformed Russian troops in the next 24 hours?
Conditional on a shooting war beginning...

Will uniformed Russian soldiers arriving via land successfully enter Maidan square in within the first 72 hours of fighting?
Read 9 tweets
Feb 15
it's just wild to me that anybody thinks public schools *should* be teaching kids about sex and gender identity

this is very clearly not their job, at least not until they can get math and reading scores up to par for all kids.
there's just a cultural divide here about what we believe public schools are supposed to be doing. one side sees this as gagging a legitimate function of schools, the other sees schools being reigned in from going into totally illegitimate functions.
idk man, i kinda don't want the school i pay tax dollars to to spend the money teaching my child to hate the things i believe? and i think this is a perfectly reasonable sentiment that actually almost everybody shares?
Read 48 tweets
Feb 14
Here's a thing I don't know:

Does the US ever complain about other countries having missile *defense* systems?

Nukes yes, but do we pitch a fit over countermeasures like Russia does?
I honestly have no idea! Like if Brazil started developing a missile defense system or something.... would the US complain? Is there any precedent here we can look to?
China and Russia routinely claim that the US setting up missile defenses is a provocative move even though US missile defenses are basically worthless against an actual peer power threat.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 14
I mean in principle Ukraine wants to keep as many civilians in the sky above them as possible, as it complicates Russia's PR issue. It's not exactly a dignified move but when you're the underdog you use what you've got.
The big question to me in an invasion is really just the will to fight. If Ukraine's people and army and police *want* to resist, they won't be able to beat the Russians in a head to head fight, but they can make it prohibitively costly and extremely bloody for the Russians.
But despite years of war in the east, it really seems like a big question mark on how much resistance Russia will face. It's not like there's a determined years-long insurgency ongoing in Crimea or something.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 14
Torn about this piece.

On the one hand, there's some basic truth to it: ex-Trump admin folks hawking conspiracy theories are packing events at some churches.

On the other hand, interpreting that requires more care.
First and foremost, selling out thirty churches doesn't even sell you enough books to get on NYT's bestseller list for a week. America is a big place and this kind of rally tour ends up covering a shockingly small share of people.
So the first thing I think worth noting is that human psychological intuitions about crowd size are misleading. We see huge crowds and imagine them to be majorities; but America is a country of hundreds of millions, crowds of people the mind cannot even imagine.
Read 18 tweets

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