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Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

@lymanstoneky

Dec 9

The @nytimes has a striking piece on intimate partner homicide during pregnancy. It's a terrible tragedy.

They also don't seem to actually present any data on it. Look at these charts and see if you can spot what's missing.

First, obviously, none of the actual data shown indicates the person committing the homicide was a partner. Undoubtedly, much of it was! But it's not easy to guess how much of it.

Second, this graph has multiple errors.

First, the correct denominator for pregnancy-associated deaths is not per live birth, but per person-year spent pregnant.

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Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

@lymanstoneky

Dec 2

https://twitter.com/AlpacaAurelius/status/1862912099665494484

What happened is NHANES changed their sample.

Here's the data by age of man with standard errors, 1999-2023. You can see from the big standard errors in 1999 and 2003, and the incorrect age gradient in 2003, that the early samples were small and perhaps unreliable.

https://twitter.com/AlpacaAurelius/status/1862912099665494484

The NHANES documentation does change between the 2003/04 and the 2011/12 editions for the lab methods section on sex hormone assays, but I'm not science nerd enough to know if it was really a substantive change.

But what I can say is sample size changed massively:

Practically speaking, what happened here is simple.

The 1999-2004 samples were almost trivially small and perhaps not very well done. Methods changes to 2011-12, which resulted in a lower estimate.

Methods have been more consistent since 2011, and overall T levels have RISEN.

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Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

@lymanstoneky

Nov 24

There are not many places on earth where we have detailed cause-of-death data from before the era of widespread vaccination.

Massachusetts is one of those places.

From 1842-1877, 70% of all deaths were from diseases which we today have vaccines to prevent.

cc @RichardHanania this feels like it's up your alley

huge pain in the butt to hand-copy all these historic vital stats, but I did it a few years back and have never regretted it!

For example, here's typhoid. Vaccine available 1896. You could try to say there was a pre-vaccine decline, but it's hard to know for sure. Certainly absolutely no shot of falling to <500/yr pre-vaccine.

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Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

@lymanstoneky

Nov 22

the cost to raise a child is approximately:

Annual individual consumption * Years Child Remains Dependent

in industrialized countries, AIC can be proxied using something like GDP per capita, and years-dependent is now approximately 20-30. call it 24.

note that the approximation in the formula is based on more careful calculations from the small list of countries we have data from on actual parental spending, government spending on kids, parental time use, motherhood earnings penalties, etc

it's an all-in cost

actual family budgetary costs are a lot lower.

in the US, I estimate that the all-in cost of rearing a child to economic independence is about $2 million in total private and public costs in both money, opportunity cost, and time.

Read 25 tweets

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

@lymanstoneky

Nov 1

It's clear that @propublica 's strategy is to spam stories of alleged deaths due to abortion bans, and never actually engage with any of the arguments about how they're actually running a cover operation for medical negligence.

From the latest one.

They want to blame Texas' abortion ban for a hospital sending away an actively miscarrying women WHO ALREADY TESTED POSITIVE FOR SEPSIS.

everybody agrees this was a case of the hospital failing to provide basic, obvious standard of care.

nobody has evidence this failure was caused by the abortion law.

and yet you get quotes like this:

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Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

@lymanstoneky

Nov 1

Finland's fertility is falling fast.

But why? What's the source of this decline?

To begin with, some basic facts: Finland's total fertility rate was around 1.87 children/woman as recently as 2010. It did NOT decline during the "great recession" after 2007, but actually ROSE.

Since 2019, Finland's fertility has bounced around a lot, but the decline 2019-2024 was just 0.08 children per woman, vs. the decline from 2014-2019 of 0.36. So clearly the pace of decline has slowed, even if not stopped entirely.

But you may wonder: what drove Finland's decline? Did big families get rarer, or did people stop having families at all, or what was it?

Here's parity-specific birth rate indicators:
You can see they all decline after 2010. Here's each indicator, its 2022 value expressed as a ratio of its 2010 value:

You can see that 3rd births rates fell the most, down almost 30%, then 1st birth rates, down about 27%, then 5th, then 4th, then 2nd, down about 15%.

But they're all down. Finnish women became less likely to have an extra birth at every single parity.

What does this look like in terms of total birth count?

Well, it looks like appreciable declines for every birth order. And indeed, births fell 25-33% at every parity.

So did Finland's fertility decline because of a broad-based shift away from kids across all families? Perhaps!

But now let's ask this another way:

Comparing 2010 to 2022 births, what share of the decline in births was 1st vs. 2nd vs. 3rd, etc?

37% of the decline is due to lost first births, 36% second births, 17% third births, 5% fouthr, and 5% 5th+.

So more than a third of the total decline was due to a drop in first births, and more than half was due to a drop in first or second births. Low-parity births accounted for the lion's share of decline.

I think some open questions in the Finnish case are:
1) Why was Finland so resilient to the Great Recession?
2) Why the drop then at 2010?
3) Why was the drop so broadly shared across parities?

For the curious, here's Korea.

Korea's big drop post-2010 coincided with NO CHANGE in rates of progression to higher-parity births! People with 2 did NOT become less likely to go on to 3 (or 4, or 5).

The entire decline was falling rates of progression to 1 and 2.

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More from @lymanstoneky

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬

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