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.

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:

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!

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

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.

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?

It's possible to be more wrong than this.

But you'd have to really work at it!

https://twitter.com/datepsych/status/1851989863580709244

Let's do some math!

We'll use a case of a country we have a long history of high quality data for: Czechia.

Czechia is also interesting because they've had one of the biggest fertility INCREASES in the industrialized world in recent decades.

UN, IHME, VID, all produce population forecasts- and they always seem too optimistic. Human population will start declining much earlier than the UN expects.

This has been obvious for a long time. @jburnmurdoch is right to highlight it--

But why does the error persist?
🧵🧵
You can actually see a defense of the UN's method here:


TL;DR-- the UN's method really is the best-performing forecast method in historic data compared vs. other structural forecasting methods.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Just finished talking on a panel for a nice @BrookingsInst event about REMOTE WORK AND FERTILITY.

Here's a finding I haven't published anywhere on remote work and fertility across 8.6 MILLION employed women in the ACS. Remote-working women have WAY higher birth rates!!! Link to the @BrookingsInst panel is here: brookings.edu/events/could-a…

oh hey the Clark-style malthusian model of the medieval english economy may be totally wrong Source: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

New Study:

Across almost 14,000 2nd-trimester abortions in Quebec over 30 years... fully 1500 of those abortions failed to kill the infant, and the child was born.

ONE IN TEN LATE ABORTED BABIES SURVIVED.

"children born alive after abortion are extremely rare" is a lie. This isn't actually an extremely unusual finding, it's just in a way bigger/better sample:

I do think it's worth noting that about 80% of selection on intelligence occurred exactly between 10,000 BC and 6500 BC, with with much less occurring since, and virtually none since 2500 BC. The fact that Steppe ancestry Europeans actually had lower than Neolithic farmer Europeans is pretty striking, and the fact that PGS scores for income and schooling have been under ~66% less intense selection is also pretty striking!

Mutations at the MTHFR gene are a huge cause of miscarriage.

We can reduce miscarriage due to the most common MTHFR mutation (C677) by ~60% using a decades-old medication.

Doctors don't prescribe it until after recurrent miscarriage.

Even though we can TEST FOR MTHFR. MTHFR is an abbreviation for methofolate or something sciency like that.

But since it's a gene responsible for a huge amount of killed babies and wrecked pregnancies and sad moms, I think of it as standing for, uh, something else.

Abortions after 32 weeks are a very small share of total abortions-- perhaps 0.5%. Let's say half of those are not due to unsurvivable conditions, so 0.25% of abortions are very late + could have survived if born.

Given ~1 million abortions, that's 2500 such abortions.

There were about 23,000 homicides in the US in 2023.

If that teeny tiny share of abortions covering very late abortions of totally viable kids without lethal health issues were counted, those extremely rare abortions would compose fully 1-in-10 homicides in the United States. In 2023, there were only 11,000 deaths of all external causes (accidents, homicides, etc) of people under age 18.

Abortions of health viable children make up 18% of all non-natural-causes deaths of children.

People commonly think that poor people have big families, and rich people have small ones.

They're wrong: most of the supposed high fertility of low-income people is just because of omitted variable bias, and the omitted variable is culture.

🧵🧵🧵 To understand what my point is, imagine two people. One of them wants 6 kids, the other wants 0 kids. Both currently have 0 kids.

Imagine they both win the lottery and become millionaires.

What will happen to their fertility rates?

Continuing a recent theme: some people believe high-fertility groups will eventually create a genetic preponderance in society. This is unlikely, let's explore a basic model of why, using realistic dynamics for genetic heredity of fertility. Here's what we know:

1) In recent cohorts, parent fertility DOES predict child fertility somewhat, and closer-related people do have correlated fertility, suggesting there IS heredity

2) In recent cohorts, 90%+ of heredity is environment-specific

Yesterday I tweeted that heritability of fertility would never lead to sustained fertility increase.

My view is correct, all the people assuming a breeder's hypothesis for fertility are wrong: fertility decline further in the past does not cause high fertility.

🧵🧵🧵 Let's talk about what would need to be true for a given community of people to pass on elevated fertility rates on a time horizon long enough to demographically swamp modern populations. The math here is not terrible complex.

It's amazing the places journalists are credulous and where they are skeptical.

Skeptical: @FT journalists very doubtful Hungary's policies could have worked

Credulous: @FT believing Hungary's claims about what they're spending
ft.com/content/3ea257… OECD's 2019 figures (last for Hungary, alas) say Hungary was spending 2.4% of GDP on family supports. Maybe it's doubled 2019-2024, but most of the programs described were already in full swing in 2019.

What do you call a man who shares in the load of tasks at home, supports his wife's career and other aspirations, and also tries to hold down a stable job to provide for his family?

According to @zackbeauchamp , a "neopatriarch." vox.com/politics/36660… Goofy label that sounds like the name of an obscure gundamsuit from that one series where it's just a giant robot battle tournament aside, @zackbeauchamp 's article is a weird attempt to recast a well-trodden scholarly concept ("flexible egalitarianism") as sexist.

Conservative men are more complimentary of their wives' housework than liberal men are, and conservative women are less critical of their husbands' housework than liberal women are.

Conservatives share housework better. Flipside here shows less difference

Body blows keep coming for UBI fans. $1k/month transfers had no effect on net worth or credit access. All the money was ploughed straight into consumption, recipients actually went more into debt.
nber.org/papers/w32784 For reference: most spending categories rose by similar percents: UBI recipients did NOT necessarily prioritize immediate needs. In fact, they disproportionately gave their UBI away.