I've always found fertility discourse to be a bit strange because most parents I talk to say "we'd probably have had more kids if we could just get stable help during the first few years" and yet on here people speculate about potential causes like fragments of a lost language.
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I think the point that the last decade of fertility collapse is almost entirely driven by coupling rates going down dramatically everywhere in the world and *not* by couples having fewer kids is clarifying and cuts through a lot of the culture war stuff on this
I think the primary mechanism is probably that smart phones + Covid is making everybody mentally unwell
It’s not my area of expertise but it makes sense to me that rapid erosion of mental health would lower coupling rates
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David Shor
@davidshor
Replying to @StefanFSchubert
It is really striking how different very young adults are from everyone else in personality data.
0.8 standard deviations is a lot!
I wonder if we're just seeing different ecological errors with these comparisons
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Derek Thompson
@DKThomp
This is essential to understand the decline of marriage/partnership (and fertility) in America
It’s not just that avg age of marriage is rising, as college-degree folks put education & career before matrimony.
It’s also that the marriage rate among non-college women (who, via
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I'm quite concerned with a lot of the worldwide fertility numbers using period TFRs not cohort fertility. Very very possible this is a huge effect in a country like Colombia.
“18 year olds becoming as lonely as 70 year olds” is a pretty different thing than women choosing to delay childbirth until their 30’s IMO, but who knows
Both things can be true!
It seems reasonable to ask if you're seeing weird period vs cohort effects when you get sudden changes in data, especially in places you don't expect it.
The turning point for me was the Luigi data, where you see 14% support for Mangione over Thompson for people over 30 and 51% support for people under 30 (40% for young Trump, 60% for young Harris)
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David Shor
@davidshor
Replying to @LudditeHacker and @politicalmath
These two plots together make the case pretty clearly no?
We’ve seen:
1) a dramatic short term increase in diagnosed mental illness and N-linked psychometric items first among teenagers and then among young adults
2) highly cohort specific bipartisan support for cold blooded murder mediated by (1)
3) A sudden and dramatic shift in preferences toward making money and away from family after ~30 years of stability
4) probably the fastest change in media consumption in the history of the world
5) Dramatic increases in time spent alone across and simultaneous declines in coupling rates and fertility rates in nearly every country in the world.
I think (5) is probably related to all of the other things and the broader context points to this being something bigger than a misspecified period-cohort model.
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I think you have to consider that it’s popular & even trendy to claim mental illness now. We don’t like objectively know that rates are really higher than in previous generations
Agreed! However, all of this can be overridden by the Pareto principle. cc
3 kids = no income tax until $150K in married households.
4+ kids = $50K more per kid.
David, undoubtedly, 80% of future economic growth comes from the kids of the top 20% of
Preferences toward money partly driven by watching shows like mr. beast?
They spend a lot of time online now and are exposed to a lot of bullying.