What caused the Baby Boom? To fix today's low birth rates, it helps to know how falling fertility was turned around once before.
Economic growth helped. But it turns out there a cultural closeness between men and women unlike anything before or since! A🧵, please share, follow!
A widely read article explained how new appliances, medical progress and more housing all supported family formation.
But this can't be the whole story, because usually as people are better off, fertility goes down.
There was something special in the air at the time. (2/9)
World War II saw young men involved in the war effort at incredibly high rates. In the US, 25% of men and close to 50% of men ages 18-30 served in the military and a further 25% were employed in war work. Other countries had similar or higher rates of deployment. (3/9)
Young men were seen by young women in a glowing light, both during the war and after returning home. Young men also matured quickly. What followed was an era of warm feelings between men and women across society, that infected a generation. (4/9)
In those days, love meant marriage. And so people married more often and earlier than ever before. In the US, women married at a median age ~20 and 94% of men and women married by age 40!
It turns out that lots of marriages at early ages are the key to high fertility. (5/9)
Economic tailwinds helped. But it takes culture to truly explain how births soared in so many different countries around the same time. (Chart from @WorksInProgMag.) (6/9)
If more and younger marriages gave us the Baby Boom, are they an answer for today? Yes, and here is important thread on that! (7/9)
You can get a sense of the very positive atmosphere that existed then between men and women by watching clips of couples from that era.
Here is a couple who married in 1941 and served in the war, talking about love after their 77th anniversary. (8/9)
If you enjoyed or learned something from this thread on the causes of the Baby Boom, and lessons for today, please repost. Also follow and spread the word about this account, which is dedicated to solutions to our fertility crisis. (9/9)
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A major factor hurting fertility, and one that is clearly solvable, is unnecessary C-sections.
On an individual basis C-sections reduce the ability to conceive. At the level of countries, more C-sections result in much smaller average family sizes. A🧵, please share and follow!
WHO reports that "caesarean section rates higher than 10% are not associated with reductions in mortality rates."
Yet many countries have far higher rates. C-section rates are 54% in South Korea, 50% in China, and above 30% in the United States.
But only 15% in Israel! (2/11)
As @lymanstoneky reports in an under-appreciated paper for @FamStudies, a one standard deviation increase in a country's C-section rate was associated with a TFR drop of more than one birth per woman! What is going on? (3/11)
Several futurists have called the low birthrate crisis civilization's greatest threat. One cause is society has moved away from marriage. So, a big way to increase birth rates is by having more marriages and having them at younger ages.
A🧵. [Thanks for RTs and follows!]
First off, I don't want to sound pushy. Marriage is a great option for most (but not all) people. On average, married people are happier, healthier, live longer (both men and women), and become wealthier. (And only minority of marriages end in divorce, not most.) 2/9
Why is more and younger marriage so important for raising birth rates? (1) Many women aren't having the children they hoped to have, and age-related fertility decline (both men and women) is a big cause, and (2) People are much more likely to have children if they are married.3/9
New: A “Twelve Step Program” to revive birthrates around the world, a thread!
A truly important series. Please retweet and follow! Thanks to greats like @lymanstoneky/@FamStudies for work and charts uncovering "fertility factors". (Hoping for his book on this topic one day soon!)
Step 1: Talk about the problem. A lot. Things are trending toward demographic collapse in country after country, with fertility rates now below replacement in most countries, and still dropping quickly.
Two reasons: First, very old data. A long time ago, a scary book called “The Population Bomb” was published. But that was 55 years ago and birthrates since dropped like a rock. Second, many just look at total population when it takes a population *pyramid* to see the collapse.
A thread on some findings of IFS demographer Lyman Stone @lymanstoneky, probably the world’s foremost researcher on factors associated with birthrates. Of paramount importance to those interested in reversing dramatic declines in fertility rates in the US and around the world.
Finding: In most of the world, women are having fewer than their ideal number of children. (Reproductive education and OBGYN care should be very different given that too few children is a greater problem than unwanted children.) ifstudies.org/blog/the-globa…
This bears repeating with another of Lyman Stone’s charts. This chart shows unwanted childbearing is far less common than women having fewer children than they want. (Would you know this, given the rhetoric we hear?) ifstudies.org/blog/no-ring-n…