Total fertility rate

It seems to be a widely accepted fact among demographers--professionals and amateurs alike (and of amateurs taking an interest in demography, too)--that, assuming net migration of zero, a TFR of 2.1 is the threshold a society must reach if it is to maintain its current population size going into the future. A TFR lower than that portends a numerically attenuated future; a TFR higher than that a correspondingly accentuated posterity. Since first seriously thinking about differential fertility rates after reading Pat Buchanan's Death of the West as undergraduate, I've lazily accepted the 2.1 figure without making an effort to grasp why it is such instead of being the putatively far more easily comprehensible 2.0. People much smarter than myself took no issue with the figure, so why should I?

Resolved to have at least three kids so that I can go to grave knowing that while my side has lost the war of the womb (yeah, I'm engaging in some oh-so audacious augury, I know) at least I'll know that on my little square of turf I advanced the cause, fait accompli be damned. Still, natal thoughts prodded me to finally want to understand why having two apparently wouldn't even qualify as fighting the forces of desolation to a draw.

Well, for fans of industrialized, developed, first-world East Asian- and European-descended modern market-oriented countries, the news, at least with regards to the figure required for replacement (actually realizing said slightly reduced figure is another story entirely) is good. Our replacement figures actually fall in between 2.0 and 2.1, and are, sans immigration, moving closer to the former and away from the latter with each passing day, thanks in large part to steadily increasing life expectancies and declining infant mortality rates. On the other hand, in more vibrant parts of the world, 2.1 doesn't cut it. In sub-Saharan Africa, in fact, it doesn't come close.

The lower maintenance mark for Icy places relative to Sunny spots results because TFR is a synthetic figure (meaning it is a statistical artifice rather than a measure of any specific population segment at any given time) defined succinctly by Wikipedia as "a measure of the fertility of an imaginary woman who passes through her reproductive life subject to all the age-specific fertility rates for ages 15–49 that were recorded for a given population in a given year". In other words, women who live to at least their fiftieth birthdays not only have to pull their own weight but also have to pick up the slack of those who bite the dust before hitting the half-century mark; more slack for the unfortunate ones who die in infancy and in prepubescence, but also some slack accounted for by those, in decreasing order, who die in their teens, twenties, thirties, and forties.

In the US, more than 95% of women who were born fifty years ago are still alive today (so those of you Xers and millennials who spend an inordinate amount of time speculating on eschatological matters--you know who you are!--stop it, there'll be plenty of time for that later, for now, worry about breeding). A societal collapse notwithstanding, the percentage of those born today who will reach the big 5-0 will be even higher than that. And while 19 in 20 American women born fifty years ago are still around today, nearly 199 in 200 babies born in the US today will make it through infancy.

Sex-selective abortions are another factor pushing the TFR replacement threshold up in other places relative to where it rests in the West, a non-negligible factor in the world's two most populous countries, China and India, nations where the total population sex ratio is more skewed in favor of men over women than nearly any other country on earth, the few exceptions being mostly small islands with large laboring populations like Bahrain (and the norm being a total sex ratio favoring women over men). Oversimplifying, if your tribe has 60 men and 40 women, if each woman has two kids during her lifetime, when the next generation turns over, your population will have declined from 100 people to 80. Conversely, if your tribe has 40 men and 60 women, and each woman has two kids, your tribe will have grown from 100 to 120. The female sex is the limiting factor when it comes to reproduction, after all.

Fewer cribs beneath brick and cold steel piping

As a small supplement to Jayman's neat post on population density and fertility in the developed world, here's what the GSS shows us regarding the mean number of children among whites aged 40-65 when the question was asked in the mid-nineties and again in 2000 by the type of community they live in. The descriptions are pretty self-explanatory, but to avoid unnecessary confusion are listed from the most densely populated to the least so:

Community	Kids
Big city	2.07
Suburbs, outskirts	2.20
Small town	2.32
Country village	2.45
Farm, country home	2.33

Cities have historically been population sinks and that trend continues in the present (actual TFR numbers are a little lower across the board than what is shown here, as the question on children includes step- and adopted kids as well as biological ones).

GSS variables used: COMTYPE, RACE(1), AGE(40-65), CHILDS

Unyoked alphas and bountiful betas

The GSS has a great question that, according to the Game narrative, gets right at a crucial distinction between alphas and betas: Alphas do not put the objects of their affection before themselves, while betas do.

The question asks the respondent if he agrees with the statement that he would rather suffer himself than have a woman he is in a relationship with suffer. Being openly willing to suffer for a lover is clearly the mark of a beta. If you're engaged in pumping-and-dumping, the girl is in the process of suffering for your pleasure even as the GSS question is being considered. Your answer is obvious.

Responses are on a five point scale, from strongly agreeing to strongly disagreeing. Not surprisingly, a majority of men strongly agree--chivalrous ideals are not dead, and by definition betas outnumber alphas. Where the alpha-beta dividing line among the four other responses is placed is contingent upon what percentage of the total male population is alpha and what percentage is beta. Of course the Game narrative does not maintain that an absolute dichotomy exists, but for empirical purposes distinctions have to be made somewhere.

In his definitive post on what constitutes an alpha, Heartiste puts the low end ("lesser") alpha at 7 on the 0-10 point scale, while Adonis ("greater alpha") is obviously at 10. Since it's actually an 11 point scale, the 0-6 beta and omega range comprises 64% of the population while the 7-10 alpha range comprises the remaining 36%. Separating the "strongly agree" beta response from the other four yields a 69.3%/30.7% split, corresponding very well to the chart included in Heartiste's post.

As Heartiste is one of the Game narrative's intellectual giants, this is how I'll define the alpha/beta split for the purposes of considering differences in fecundity between alphas and betas. The following table shows the mean number of children for alpha and beta males. To avoid racial confounding, only non-Hispanic whites are included. To allow adequate time for procreation to occur, men aged 40-65 are considered. As the question was posed in 2004, it has contemporary relevance:

Status	Kids
Alphas	1.68
Betas	2.08

Betas make more babies than alphas do. This should be warmly received by everyone! From the beta perspective, their chivalrous instincts are out propagating the caddish tendencies of alpha males, which presumably indicates a virtuous cycle of increasing chivalry in the future. From the alpha perspective, this portends a future where the jungle is increasingly populated by inept beta hunters, allowing alphas to poach kittens and cougars with ever greater ease.

Parenthetically, why is so much scorn heaped upon betas by alphas? The basic concept of supply and demand suggests that the relatively fewer alphas there are, the easier their pickings become. Every man may need a harem, but the math doesn't work out for every man to have one!

Also, see here for a detailed look at the profile of today's alpha male.

GSS variables used: AGAPE1(1)(2-5), RACECEN1(1), AGE(40-65), SEX(1), CHILDS

Steady studs, dysgenic dolls

Examining eugenic and dysgenic trends is a bit of a hobby horse here. Levels of educational attainment, religiosity, alpha vs. beta, and monogamy vs. getting around are a few of the angles we've explored. Jayman recently took a thorough look at fertility trends among blacks, simpliciter style, without adding in a bunch of variables, prompting me to want to do the same with whites and Hispanics. Unfortunately, the sample sizes are too small for the former to have much contemporary relevance, so we'll just consider whites.

The following graph shows the mean number of children among non-Hispanic whites aged 40-65 by wordsum grouping*. All data are from 2000 onward:

Jayman found that among black men, the trend is neutral, while a pronounced dysgenic trend exists among black women. The story is similar among whites, although the dysgenic tilt among white women is gentler than it is among black women.

GSS variables used: CHILDS, SEX, YEAR(2000-2010), RACECEN1(1), WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10)

* Respondents are broken up into five categories that come to roughly resemble a normal distribution; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Real Dumbs (0-3, 12%)

Fewer marriages, fewer children

++Addition++I'd cued this up but not yet published it ahead of a similar post by Inductivist. So this is complementary to and somewhat overlaps that.

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Inductivist's posts on fecundity and marital status among women in the US got me wondering if and how this has changed over time. Citing Roger Scruton's argument that the societal movement away from marriage leads to declining fertility rates that eventually drop society below replacement level, Inductivist turns to the GSS to see whether or not Scruton's assertion that marriage and children travel together is accurate. Not surprisingly, it is.

The question this raises in my mind is to what extent is the drop in US fertility is attributable to a decline in marriage rates? If fertility holds pretty steadily over time among those who are married and the overall decrease comes not from married couples having fewer children but from fewer people getting married, it certainly becomes plausible that protecting the institution of marriage is critical if the US is going to perpetuate itself.

The following graph shows the mean number of children for women aged 30-45 by marital status over the last four decades. To avoid racial confounding a la Charles Murray, only whites are considered:

The percentage of married women dropped continuously over the four decades, while the percentage of divorced and never married women increased, so the decline in marriage is, as Scruton claims, associated with a decline in fertility rates. It's not the entire story, though. Married women have become less fecund over the last couple of generations while never married women have become more so. The gap is still far from closed, but it's narrowing.

With illegitimacy rates around 70% among blacks and 50% among Hispanics, there is ample evidence that in 21st century America, procreation doesn't need marriage. Whether or not the US is able to retain a semblance of its former self if the two become decoupled, however, is another question entirely.

Hispanic birth rates declining more steeply than non-Hispanic birth rates

The Arizonan trend showing a steeper decline in the Hispanic fertility rate than in the non-Hispanic black and white fertility rates over the last several years is not an anomaly, but instead illustrative of the same sort of fertility pattern at the national level. Over the three year period from 2007-2009, Hispanic fertility declined at three times the rate of the non-Hispanic white fertility decline. The rates for non-Hispanic blacks, Asians, and Native Americans declined at at a slightly faster clip than for non-Hispanic whites:


This is not to confuse the pace of declines with absolute fertility rates. Hispanics, even in 2009, were still considerably more fecund than non-Hispanics. The following table shows the total fertility rate of women by race in 2007 and also in 2009:


If trends continue at the same pace for each classification (which strikes me as highly unlikely), there will be near birthrate parity, at 50 births per 1000 women, for all five racial groups in 2031--a situation in which the TFR for all groups would be well below what is needed for population replacement to occur.

Thanks to Mark Wethman, who keeps a keen eye on these things, for the heads-up.

Hispanic births decreasing in Arizona, and likely the rest of the US as well

Mark Wethmen, who formerly blogged at Congenial Times (since deleted and then reincarnated, though not obviously related to its previous life), graciously sent me data from the Arizona Department of Health Services showing birth trends by race in the state over the last decade. Consequently, I'm going to take one more shot from the fecundity elixir, and then I'll really put down the bottle, honest.

Like The Undiscovered Jew, Mark has also noticed that since the onset of the economic recession, the number of live births by Hispanic women in Arizona has steadily declined. I added data for blacks, Asians and Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans:


Even before the recession, Arizona was a top destination for internal migration among whites (primarily those fleeing California), but it was similarly so among Hispanics. Over the last few years, however, it appears that Hispanics have been, in some combination, leaving the state (and the country) at greater rates than non-Hispanics have and experiencing a decline in fertility at faster rates than non-Hispanics have.

In wondering if Arizona might serves as a microcosm for what is occurring in the rest of the country, Mark gathered data on births in 2008 and 2009 by state from the CDC. Looking at where states ranked in terms of the relative sizes of their Hispanic and black populations, he thought crude though the measure may be (the data are on total births and are not broken out by race), it appeared to indicate that Arizona's was part of a larger trend, not merely an outlier.

To add more precision to that observation, I correlated racial composition with the 2008-2009 change in births by state using 2009 Census data. The phenomenon is real. The correlation between the percentage of a state's population that is Hispanic and the change in the number of births in 2009 from 2008 is a moderate but statistically significant inverse .33. Correlation runs in the other direction for whites and blacks (.14 and .10, respectively), but not at any level of statistical reliability.

While skyrocketing foreclosure rates, the massive loss of wealth in baby boomer retirement accounts, and a near-doubling of the unemployment rate are tragedies in their own regard, if the browning of the US becomes a casualty of the 'Great Recession', I think that's worse. At worst, though, I'd guess the process has just decelerated a bit.

Of the corpulent and their kids

Last Thanksgiving, Half Sigma posted about an enjoyable online FAQ regarding turkey farming. In reading it, one discovers that domesticated turkeys have become too fat to mate naturally and consequently have to be artificially inseminated. HS wonders if there's anything for the turkies' persecutors to take away from this:

People have also been, allegedly, getting fatter. I think we need to look into whether there’s a genetic explanation. Are fat people having more children than thin people? It’s well established that married people weigh more than single people, and traditionally married people have children and single people don’t. Maybe people are getting fatter for the same reason that turkeys have gotten too fat to mate. It’s all in the breeding.

Jokah Macpherson looked at the GSS for confirmation or lack thereof, but only briefly summarized what he found, so I'll quantify it. In 2004, interviewers assessed participants' weights, placing them in one of four categories. The following table shows the number of children members of each category average:

	Kids
Weight	Men	Women
Slim	0.69	1.77
Average	1.61	1.89
Stocky	1.86	1.84
Fat	1.66	1.87

Among women, there is little difference across weight groups. To the extent that we're breeding ourselves into corpulence, it is on account of the Y's contribution. Guys who are thin as rails get a lot less action and have far fewer kids than men with meat on their bones do. Two-thirds of skinny guys do not have any children at all. Women want men who are able to bench press them, not be bench-pressed by them!

Parenthetically, notice how women report having more children in aggregate than men do. Women are always aware of when they procreate. In contrast, some guys will go to their graves without knowing.

GSS variables used: INTRWGHT, SEX(1)(2), CHILDS

Not too skinny, not too fat, but just right

Last winter, Half Sigma pointed to an online FAQ where it was revealed that commercial turkeys have, through selective breeding, developed breasts too large to allow for natural breeding to occur. Consequently, they must be artificially inseminated. He wondered if there was something applicable to humans in this:

People have also been, allegedly, getting fatter. I think we need to look into whether there’s a genetic explanation. Are fat people having more children than thin people? It’s well established that married people weigh more than single people, and traditionally married people have children and single people don’t. Maybe people are getting fatter for the same reason that turkeys have gotten too fat to mate. It’s all in the breeding.

In 2004, GSS interviewers were asked to assess respondents' weight and place each into one of four categories. The following table shows the mean number of children by weight class. To exclude those whose reproductive life is still ahead of them, only respondents who were at least 40 years old at the time of the interview were included:

Weight	Kids
Thin	1.93
Average	2.31
Heavy	2.22
Really Heavy	2.11

This provides a pretty crude measure of heftiness, but it doesn't support the assertion that humans are getting fatter because the corpulent have more kids than healthy folks do. Those who are noticeably slender, a designation that applies to less than 7% of the population (probably indicating skinniness to the point of apparent emaciation), aren't popping out a lot of kids, either.

I find the table above to be encouraging!