From Stark
Calculated Risk has a post on the 2010 U.S. Census data, noting that the number of births declined in 2010, the third consecutive year of decline.
The blog notes that families just naturally postpone additions to the family during times of economic distress and uncertainty.
During the Great Depression, blogger Bill McBride notes, the number of births declined 23 percent from the peak in the 1920s. At this point we’re only seven percent off the peak from the bubble years.
If I were a Social Security recipient, I would view these data with trepidation and immediately begin to lobby for increased immigration.
You can’t escape the numbers.
Really? We’re going to bury discussion about major issues with a post about this, which could have been a footnote in some other post (say, the way, you handled the termination of ongoing settlement talks about GPT?).
Fully expect this post to be deleted, too.
Pardon me?
It is incorrect to say “families just naturally postpone additions to the family during times of economic distress and uncertainty.” Just the opposite is true. People in poverty have MORE births. There are a number of cultural and psychological factors for this. Anyone who has taken even one intro course in anthropology as a college freshman would know this.
The traditional trigger for lowering the birth rate is increasing the standard of living for poor families. In the post-WWII and postcolonialist world, empowerment for women has also become a trigger. Another factor in ghetto/barrio environments is the number of shooting victims, whether by gang violence or by police. As usual, there are a multiplicity of factors and a smarmy headline based on faulty reading of a rather innocuous statistic does more harm than good.
That should have been “smarmy subtext.”
Well if you can’t work, you sure do have more hay time.
I wonder how much impact the abortion rate has on the birth rate?
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Walter–I learned all that stuff in college, just like you say. But how do you account for the similar drop in the number of births during the Great Depression? While it is well-known that birth rates tend to be high among the poor, it also seems to be true that the overall birth rate in society does decline during economic downturns.
John – First of all, I don’t have to account for what is essentially a random blip generated by multiple variables encapsulated in someone else’s study. Let me tell you a story instead. My mother and father got married in 1928 and had their first child the next year. The Depression hit that year but they continued to have 8 more children. The reason they had so many children was because of 1) cultural pressure to have large families after WWI as well as the general expansionist pressure to “fill up the continent” in their own parents’ (my grandparents’) time, 2) ethnic pressure from their Scandinavian heritage, 3) their own individual desires, and 4) the need for boys to milk the cows and run farm machinery, and 5) the lack of birth control. If I could query them on this subject there would probably be other factors.
As you probably know, there are “lies, damn lies and statistics.” (Disraeli quoted by Mark Twain.) Extrapolating from the specific to the general is bosh and the blogger cited by Stark is in way over his head. Even extrapolating from the general to the specific is fraught with danger. In the latter case, even though anthropologists make the claim of poverty increasing birth rates from multiple cross-cultural studies, it is NOT a certainty. However, it provides enough evidence that we should not place any credence in the statement “families just naturally postpone additions to the family during times of economic distress and uncertainty.” It is bad enough that social scientists don’t get enough credit from policy makers. To accept uncritically what some blogger says from a cherry-picked study of a unique period shows poor judgment.
Okay. Your facts are overwhelming: Your parents had a lot of kids during the Depression. That proves that the Census bureau’s statistics showing a nationwide decline must be wrong.
I’m still sticking with the possibilty of idle hands leading to others parts of the body being more active!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
AFY,
Don’t you have a golf tournament or a revival meeting or somewhere else to go this afternoon??
They’re serving up too many of those lime shooters at the home.
John – If you don’t want to take a critical look at your own biases, that’s your business. But buying into a new demographic myth is not good science. Keep your snide attitude to yourself.
Camille, it was yachting last weekend, may I recommend Rosario Resort and Spa for everyone who needs or deserves a weekend getaway.
BTW you don’t need a yacht to get there, take the ferry, and make sure you catch the presentation at the museum, the old pipe organ is really neat!
Revival is this weekend, it’s always the middle of the month at the home!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Here’s a picture of me dinghy!
http://sidoxia.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/yacht.jpg
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!