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Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 Profile picture
Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬
@lymanstoneky
Lutheran Husband Dad Kentuckian Demographer. Please forgive me: my tweets are often accidentally mean. @DemographicNTEL, @FamStudies Pronatalism Initiative
13 subscribers
May 30 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
i'm sorry, but this is nonsense

exactly what share of guys in 1300 do you think had a study or a social club!?!?

i literally wrote a history of social clubs in america and what all scholars basically agree on is they were more-or-less invented in the 18th century and popularized in the 19th and collapsed by late 20th; they had less than a century of real heyday because they were actually a massively inefficient mode of social organization. moreover, their existence was for a specific reason:

male labor productivity had FINALLY broken above subsistence providing some excess leisure opportunities, but this was really just because social norms had prevented women from capturing any of the gains. as soon as women started capturing gains from modernity, the market for male social clubs vanished, because it was an insane arrangement from the beginning.
May 28 • 33 tweets • 6 min read
There's a popular myth that when men get promoted, it causes marriage stability, but when women get promoted, it causes divorce.

This turns out to be wrong, but understanding why it's wrong is surprisingly complicated! So to start with we have to understand something: men usually earn more than women, and this gets more true as marriages go on, as women exit the workforce to raise kids more than men do.
Apr 30 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Amish people have a lot of babies.

But just how many babies exactly?

In a new paper at @DemographicRes , I and some brilliant coauthors use two totally different measures to measure Amish fertility and show that it is likely in decline.Image The blue line is actual registry data on Amish families, the red line is a broad catchment of all Pennsylvania Dutch-speakers. Either is a good proxy for "Amish people generally," and for both, "line go down." Image
Apr 23 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
western Med Punics (think Carthaginians) were basically completely genetically separated from Levantine Punics. Image this kind of casts into doubt some of the argument that Rome's unique advantage was its ability to incorporate disparate peoples via citizenship since this genetic signature is just gonzo, Punics clearly a multiethnic identity despite strong cultural similarity
Apr 18 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
it seems to me many people did not realize that large sections of Decker's post appears to be quotes from founding fathers. i'm not sure how intentional this was on his part but it would have been hilarious watching courts try to be like "quoting the declaration of independence is hate speech" also i will just lay down a marker:

if any election does not occur on its regularly scheduled day, or if government policies cause voter participation to fall more than 30% as a share of the adult population vs. the average of the last 10 elections

i think that's the line
Apr 15 • 29 tweets • 7 min read
reminder: there continues to be zero scientific evidence of harms from the covid vaccination lol at the dumdums responding here

my favorite response is "but Lyman some people had some side effects!"

oh no, side effects! wut will we ever do!

this kind of paranoid safetyism has got to go, folks. we need strong, prosocial, risk-taking behavior, such as getting vaccinated
Apr 10 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The primary use of artificial wombs if they become available will not be by women to free themselves of biological burdens and thus attain liberation, but rather will be by men to free themselves of relational burdens and thus eliminate the need for decent treatment of partners. Yes, there are lots of men who would like to have children and happily hire nannies for them 24/7. I regret to inform you this is indeed A Type of Guy.
Apr 1 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
Today I am dropping some truth bombs.

We should make seniors pay full freight on property taxes. Image The relationship between too-low property taxes and bad demographic outcomes is not subtle. The states with low property tax rates have MUCH larger gaps between fertility preferences and outcomes than states with other kinds of low taxes. Image
Mar 24 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Approximately 15-25% of everything we know about global fertility comes from basically one source: the Demographic and Health Surveys.

The contract funding them seems to have been cancelled.

If you're worried about falling fertility, this is a five-alarm fire. Image This piece is cowritten by me and @MoreBirths . Our take here is basic: the DHS surveys are a well-run program yielding very clear benefits to the U.S. and are a key tool we have on hand to figure out how to tackle low fertility.

Losing this tool is not good at all.
Mar 19 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
raising retirement age reduces fertility

there's a TRADEOFF between "adapting" to demographic decline and "solving" demographic decline!

many strategies that help societies cope in the near term make demographic balances worse later on. Image when grandmas have to work later in life, they provide less childcare Image
Mar 17 • 22 tweets • 7 min read
Today at @FamStudies we released a new study of almost 9,000 reproductive-age Americans showing that the only path to a more family-friendly America is opening up new land for single-family housing (thread). The heart of our study is this graph, which shows the results of a randomized forced-choice (conjoint) experiment where respondents had to choose, between different housing options, in which they'd be most open to having (more) kids. Image
Mar 7 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
are turkish nationalist types aware of how massively homosexual the ottomans pre 1600 or so were? like is this on their radar? have they ever read ottoman love poems? which are literally 95% about little boys?

i'm genuinely curious how aware modern turks are of this we have ottoman sex manuals written for royals and they run on about how excellent it is to have sex with little boys for multiple chapters
Mar 3 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Today the @guardian has a piece out saying that @natalismorg is a conference for fascism and liberal eugenics.

It does include fascists and liberal eugenicists. I abhor and detest both ideologies, and it's insane to act like that's the range of ideologies represented. Knowing many of the speakers listed, I know many of them don't support *any* variety of eugenics, myself included. Many of us are very publicly on record publicly condemning the entire eugenic/dysgenic framing of fertility change!
Feb 27 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
How can we raise fertility?

Today, I and 3 awesome coauthors have a new paper out at the Journal of Population Economics where we show that a huge part of the story has to be ELITE LEADERSHIP.

When one Kartvelian elite decided to change his country, he succeeded. Image For years, I've been saying that the Georgian Orthodox Patriarch boosted his country's fertility by using his superstar status to motivate extra births through a campaign to personally baptize higher parity babies.

I had some evidence, but there were always some skeptics.
Feb 11 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
the Good Samaritan is a story in which a Levite and a priest de-prioritize the needs of their physically close neighbor in order to do the abstract good of maintaining purity for physically non-proximate neighbors

let the reader understand okay i will spell it out for the reader:

the Levite and priest downrate the nearby injured man, plausibly to remain ritually pure, they have duties elsewhere, people who need them more.

the Samaritan says, screw the abstract distant need, this person is right in front of me
Jan 29 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
i am sympathetic to the libertarian paranoia about government surveillance

but then i meet actual libertarians and i realize

they are doing significant crimes at alarming rates and should in general be surveilled my proposal: a sweeping program of surveillance but only for people who complain about it
Jan 13 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Why is fertility declining in rich countries?

Last week, I said it was actually very simple: nobody's getting married.

Today, @jburnmurdoch has followed where that thread leads and shows that around the world, coupling is crashing, and where coupling falls, so do births. Image
Image My post laying out the long-and-short run drivers of falling fertility is here:
substack.com/home/post/p-15…

Link to the new FT piece is here:
ft.com/content/43e2b4…
Jan 8 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
What explains the rise of Christianity?

Was it because we were so nice that everybody converted?

In a new post responding to Astral Codex Ten's recent pieces, I argue, no. Christianity won because we had babies and killed infidels. Image The details on low pagan fertility are paywalled, sorry. Workin on a book about it, gotta get paid.

But here's a fun graph of Egypt's religious history.

When Constantine came to power, Egypt was already >33% Christian. Image
Dec 9, 2024 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
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. Image
Image 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.
Dec 2, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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. Image 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: Image
Nov 24, 2024 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
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. Image 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!