Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 Profile picture
Lutheran Husband Dad Kentuckian Demographer. Please forgive me: my tweets are often accidentally mean. @DemographicNTEL, @FamStudies Pronatalism Initiative
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Jun 25 32 tweets 9 min read
It's a mystery what's happening here! Such a mystery! Science has no answer for why dog deaths have risen 240% since 2017! Image My prior on trend breaks like this is the same as @cremieuxrecueil : they're usually due to a change in data generation.

But in this case it's not. The ICD code rules did not change. The reporting system did not change.

And other animal deaths didn't change as much:Image
Jun 20 4 tweets 2 min read
I think it would be great to have the BLM+NFS produce a GIS map that shades out all the lands which are 1) outside the states of eligibility 2) covered under wilderness protection rules, 3) covered under ongoing rights rules, 4) not buildable, 5) excessively remote

But in practice, the reasons against this are:
1) The point of the nomination-and-consultation process is to leave discretion to states and localities! That's literally the point! DC deciding which lands are right for disposal would defeat the point of the policy!
2) Rule changes for federal lands are implemented routinely via statute, federal land sales do already occur (public purpose rules, etc), changes in land statuses do occur (upgrades of NPS lands, etc), and AFAIK none of these have ever been paired with an expectation that a Senator's office should hire an ArcGIS team to work up an interactive parcel-level map of half of the land area of the United States

It's actually plenty to just have the statute say what the rules are! "Point at the map exactly what's for sale."

Nothing. Literally nothing. This law establishes zero acres for sale.

It mandates the BLM and NFS to find acreage which fits the rules stipulated.

Now, a totally fair critique is: "What if they can't find enough acreage to fit the rules stipulated?"

And I think that's definitely a weak point in the drafting! I hope they fix it in conference!

In practice I don't think it will be an issue.
Jun 20 21 tweets 6 min read
The thing about the conservatives opposed to selling Federal lands (e.g. I noticed @L0m3z ), is that they clearly have not actually read @BasedMikeLee 's actual bill. Massive failure of literacy on the part of the based right.

So let's look at the bill! First, what kind of land can be sold?

This turns out to be complicated. The answer is basically Bureau of Land Management Land or Forest Service Land (with exceptions). So what kind of land CANNOT be sold? Image
Jun 17 9 tweets 2 min read
Nice work highlighting a cool study showing a Gene-Environment interaction!

Kids with "bad genes" for schooling who have the "good luck" to be born in a rich household do just fine!

Unless the parents divorce, in which case they regress to genetic expectation. Paper abstract. Image
Jun 10 13 tweets 4 min read
This article is circulating again.

In the ensuing 5 years, I'm not sure 100% of the article is correct. The scale of historic under-reporting of police-related homicides was probably larger than I allowed for here.

But the basic thesis that police violence is escalating holds up in more recent data. Here are CDC estimates of "deaths of legal intervention" exclusive of executions. These should overwhelmingly be deaths involving police officers, though I think they might include some deaths involving prisoners. Image
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