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.

Liberty and equality, stoics and epicureans

Just as there is an enormous amount of tension between the consular ideals of liberty and equality, so too is there in aspiring to provide the best health care available while simultaneously striving to make health care ubiquitous and universally accessible. Anti-Gnostic does a great job succinctly articulating as much, with the following excerpt of demonstrating particular perspicacity:

The whole point is that *old people are going to die* with probability 1. So let's take those evil capitalists out of the question, and assume for now that no innovative entrepreneur could figure out something win/win for his own grandpa. ... 

We are in the realm of social justice. Sounds so nice, until we answer the question: how much of your children's money do you want to spend on futile care for 83 year old Emma in Ohio? For 74 year old Bill in Texas? For countless, endless, unnamed others? 

Because you can spend ALL of your money on futile care [or, by extension, the government can spend it for you]. Literally every last penny.

Worth reading in full.

Abstractly, the strong appeal of liberty--potentially even stronger than that of equality in the much of the public's mind--is why, despite actual policy disagreements on crucial issues like immigration, I'm still excited by the rise of guys like Rand Paul.

Anyway, Heartiste first brought the above to my attention. Speaking of the galactic overlord, he gently censured his occasionally inimical dux for insinuating that the Game approach to classifying males has it backwards due to the tendency of betas to outbreed alphas (which should mean even more cleaning up by the remaining alphas!). At the risk of getting lost in semantic weeds, I'm fine granting the Manosphere its preferred terms and consequent definitions and then making empirical observations free of normative judgments from within this framework. Hopefully it's illuminating or at least interesting. All the better if it keeps our hero's skills at their sharpest.

To the extent that I'm grated at all by Heartiste, it's in his seeming celebration of what amounts to an ennui-inducing mix of realized hedonism and nihilism. His meaning is often as nuanced as his tongue is silver, and I suspect that beneath all the veils lies a volition more inclined towards using sexual conquest as a means to an end rather than an end to indulge in for it's own sake, despite protestations to the contrary. Oh yes he doth protest, but I don't buy it, which is why I'm compelled to play the role of affectionate gadfly rather than whiny hater.

This isn't all merely a philosophical rehashing of Stoic vs. Epicurean, either. You might not care about propagation, but propagation cares about you. It's plausible to imagine that in the not-so-distant future pleasure surpassing that coming to a "Super Alpha" on an A-game night will be made available to all on demand without any real life human interaction being required at all. Just as the reproductive edge has shifted away from alphas and towards betas over at least the last half century, so another seismic shifting in fecundity may be just around the bend. I want kindred souls to be ready for it.

Finally, a post like this wouldn't be complete without an added wrinkle or two. The data are a couple of decades old, but the GSS queried respondents in 1994 on whether or not they'd watched any pornography in the preceding year. Cross-referencing this with reported sex frequency, we find that men who had sex less than once a month over the same period of time were considerably less likely to have viewed pornographic material than men who had sex more frequently than that were to have viewed any (18.2% and 38.1%, respectively, N = 183). For more contemporary, if proxied, relevance, using male respondent data from 2000 onward, we find that men who report not having sex at all in the last year are more than twice as likely as men who enjoy it 4+ times per week to support an outright ban on pornographic material (36.9% and 16.5%, respectively, with a sizeable chunk of that 16.5% of 4+ times per week group presumably being comprised of social and religious conservatives). Pornography, at least from this angle, appears to be more of a supplement to real life carnality than a substitute for it.

Undoubtedly there are a lot of frustrated betas out there who would love to possess an alpha prowess with women, but there are also a lot of them who just aren't that interested in recreational sex (and I suspect the latter has been and continues to increase as a proportion of the total male population). This probably goes some way in explaining why the unending comment threads Heartiste generates are mostly populated by alphas echoing the taunts and diminutions of the beta no shows, who, while constituting a majority of the population, are far less likely to be found than sheer numbers would suggest. How much attention is this Silent Majority paying?

GSS variables used: XMOVIE1, SEXFREQ(0-2)(3-6)(0)(6), YEAR(2000-2012), SEX(1), PORNLAW(1)(2-3)

Expendables are more interesting

Genetically, men are more expendable than women are. Historically for our species around 40% of men and 80% of women reproduced. Alphas ruled the past. But the biological world isn't static and significant evolutionary changes can occur in the geological blink of an eye. Today in the US the gap has narrowed substantially. The GSS shows that 81% of men and 86% of women who've made it through their reproductive careers have procreated. Genetic continuance is a lot more egalitarian than it used to be, especially for men. Fecundity is now a beta trait. Still, while we're not the same people who lived during ancient Roman times, let alone the same people as the first neolithic agriculturalists, we're not an alien species to them, either. Grok is relevant to us, even if he isn't exactly us.

If men are more expendable than women are, a presumable corollary is that, from a woman's perspective, characteristics of sexual attraction in men are more varied, more numerous, and less ubiquitous than the characteristics of sexual attraction in women are from the perspective of men. It takes a lot of time and effort for women to reproduce, and we need just about all of them to do it if the species is going to survive and prosper. Consequently, men overwhelmingly focus on signs of maximum fertility: Waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7, healthy and supple skin, perky breasts that appear to defy gravity, lack of current impregnation, etc. The rest is mostly marginal stuff.

We can afford to be less conservative when it comes to men's contributions, which works out well since male contributions are the stronger drivers of evolutionary changes. Women aren't primed to detect signs of fertility in men. They aren't any better at identifying said signs than (disinterested) men are, and it's presence is usually uncertain (though presumed to be there) unless the last stages of intimacy reveal otherwise. Yes, older and fatter guys are more likely to have issues, but even among these 'at risk' categories, most are capable. Pubescence is just about the only prerequisite--once that box is checked off, female attraction moves on to assess a whole host of other characteristics: Status (ie command of resources and of other people, not evincing a need of approval from other people whether they be male or female, etc), humor, height and general physical fitness, intelligence, kindness, self-confidence, etc, with different women putting varying amounts of emphases on different dimensions of a more variegated (and sometimes seemingly contradictory) suite of desirability markers. Men are more interesting, if not necessarily more infatuating.

Tell me if I'm missing something, merely stating the obvious, or being overly presumptive with an amateur's understanding of evolutionary psychology.

GSS variables used: CHILDS, SEX, AGE(40-65), YEAR(2000-2012)

Good old fashioned family values, on which we used to rely

Pew Research delivers some inspiring Saturday morning reading, of the diversity-is-strength variety:

Never married mothers are significantly younger, disproportionally non-white, and have lower education and income. Close to half of never married mothers in 2011 (46%) are ages 30 and younger, six-in-ten are either black (40%) or Hispanic (24%), and nearly half (49%) have a high school education or less [sic*]. Their median family income was $17,400 in 2011, the lowest among all families with children.

In fidelity to the blog's raison d'etre, let's look at the risk factors among women of becoming never-married single mothers by comparing non-whites to the non-Hispanic white rate of bastard birthing. The following table shows the rates of this strain of alternative family formation (that is, one in which the state and/or extended family serve as substantial providers, since no one is providing for themselves and their spawn on less than $20k a year) relative to the non-Hispanic white rate:

Illegitimacy	vs. whites
Black	608.5%
Hispanic	258.2%
Asian/PI	49.6%

The Pew figures excluded those aged 65 or older, so I've made the necessary corresponding adjustments using 2010 Census data.

Look, my fellow Republicans, if we stop comparing Hispanics to our own voters and instead compare them to other minorities--which, since we must exclude Asians as they are too inconvenient to think about when we use the term "minority", means blacks--we see that indeed they do display both a penchant for traditional family values and a propensity to vote for the GOP. We need to pass the comprehensive immigration reform now, or, as Bill O'Reilly argues so convincingly, we'll "lose the Hispanic vote and never win another national election, ever!"

It's Marge Simpson's weight loss logic at work: "For low-fat, this pudding is pretty good. Mmm, mmm, I can just feel the pounds melting off."

* This probably should read "less than a high school education", compared to a national high school graduation rate of nearly 80%. As is, it insinuates that 51% of single mothers have gone to college, which, in a country where one-fourth of the population has a bachelor's degree or higher, would be quite 'impressive' (at least from the contemporary education-as-panacea viewpoint).

Fruitcakes and fertility

The correlation between the percentage of a state's population that identifies as LGBT and its fertility rate is an inverse .31 (p = .03). This modest relationship means that one-tenth of a state's fertility rate is 'attributable' to the proportional size of its LGBT population. Conjecturing irresponsibly, with about 3.5% of the population identifying as LGBT nationally, let's say one-third of that 10% queer push comes from the gays themselves and the other two-thirds comes from the environments they prefer and help create which are not especially conducive to procreative family formation.

Where to be born vs. where people are being born

The Economist's "sister" company has made an earnest, contemporary attempt to determine which countries are the most and least propitious ones to be born into. Check out the list and notes on the methodology there.

The first thing that jumps out at me is that the best places to be born are doing the least birthing, while the worst places are doing more than their fair share of it. The correlation between a country's where-to-be-born index score and its total fertility rate is a statistically significant .49. A couple of tweaks could easily make that moderately robust relationship considerably stronger still.

Firstly, give sub-Saharan Africa more reasonable representation. Of the 80 countries included, only four--including the 'crown jewel', South Africa (#53)--make the cut. The other three--Angola, Kenya, and Nigeria--rank 76th, 79th, and 80th on the ranking of where it's best to be born, respectively. They rank 1st, 3rd, and 2nd when it comes to procreation, however.

Secondly, reduce Eastern Europe's and central Asia's representation. There are a lot of old Soviet countries included that tend to be, rather uniquely, both crappy places to be born and places where there isn't much birthing occurring. A lot of attention is given to the question of which countries will be the globe's prime movers in the 21st century, but a less frequently inquired about question (and one with a clearer set of answers) is which places will be bit players.

That said, as constructed an observable pattern still emerges:

At one remove, the list paints a dysgenic global picture. Of course, the right-thinking editors at the august magazine don't actually mention anything about fertility (the closest they come is a parenthetical "demography", devoid of any expounding), but Economist readers can surely read between the lines (with quantification to boot if they visit this our humble online outpost here!).

It has become unfashionable for the Establishment to push population reduction as a policy goal even with the ascent of green thinking because of the rather obvious implication that the hardest hit if such a goal was realized would be NAMs--especially immigrants--domestically and third-worlders internationally. Even when the subject is bandied about in the more politically incorrect parts of the media world, the racial and ethnic ramifications are often glossed over.

Recently, Randall Parker wondered how to best sell leftists on how to cut the demand for low-skilled labor and, by implication, thus reduce illegal immigration from south of the border. Similarly, how best to sell them on promoting eugenic birthing?

Egalitarianism seems like the most plausible avenue to pursue. A simple thought experiment demonstrates. In the real world scenario, Mr. and Mrs. Rich, worth $10 million, have one kid, while Ms. Poor, worth $10k, has five. Kid Richie gets $10 million passed on to him, while each of the Poories get $2k. He's worth 5,000 times more than they are. In the Ideal World, Mr. and Mrs. Rich have five kids while Ms. Poor has one. Each of the Richies get $2 million, while Poorie gets $10k. Now a Rich kid is only worth 200 times as much. Presto, a 25 fold reduction in the wealth gap!

The left's anti-natalism

Commenter "Dan" wrote the following in a couple of places:

Here are 10 areas off the top of my head where ‘liberal’ theology is anti-natalist: 

1 – Pro-Life versus pro Choice (duh) 

2 – Worshiping the Cathedral (specifically higher education); the more time you are in higher ed, the less time you have to have children 

3 – Feminist careerism – can’t be in the kitchen cooking dinner for your kids if you are in the corporate boardroom, or most any demanding job 

4 – Antagonism toward religion – most religions are pro natalist to varying degrees 

5 – Feminist insistence in the sameness of men and women – makes women much less attractive to men 

6 – View of marriage as a patriarchal instrument of oppression – Children are much more likely to spring forth from married people 

7 – Upholding birth control as a fundamental human right (and forcing every institution to give it away for free) 

8 – The environmentalists view of humans basically as a scourge on the planet 

9 – Liberals’ attachment to urban living puts them in a setting not conducive to having children 

10 – Young liberals’ belief that they have a human right to pursue a field that is not economically viable means of course that they will not be able to, you know, support anybody.  

Oh, gosh and I forgot the most obvious ones of all! 

11 – Male homosexuality as the holiest and most righteous form of goodness that there is. 

12 – Lesbianism as the other holiest and most righteous form of goodness that there is.

Great list. How about a contrarian perspective? In what ways could it be argued that the contemporary left is pro-natalist (even if its adherents don't always put the putatively preferred behavior into practice)? Here's off the top of my head:

- More supportive of alternative fertility methods like IVF than many socially conservative organizations are 

- Minimal hostility for 'statutory' rape between consenting people (think the Roman Polanskis of the world) 

- Hostility towards Project Prevention and similar efforts 

- Supportive of the welfare state, which plays the provider role for absent fathers (and deadbeat parents in general) 

- Relatedly, exhibits lesser to non-existent condemnation of single motherhood and teenage pregnancy 

- In favor of more lenient sentencing for convicted criminals, meaning thugs are back out scouring the street sooner 

- Supportive of unrestricted immigration, with one consequence being lots of highly fertile settlers from south of the border making babies in the US

Additions/suggestions for both lists are solicited in the comments section, please.

Only the first item could be considered both pro-natalist and eugenic, or at least not blatantly dysgenic. That Dan's list of anti-natalism characteristics is primarily directed at the white middle and working classes, while the pro-natalist list is especially relevant to NAMs is not a coincidence. Don't misconstrue a little devil's advocate work on my part as indicative of support for the civilizational destructiveness cheered on by the left.

Providing procreation predictors, pronto

++Addition++See Jason Malloy's work in the comments.

---

"Have kids" wasn't exactly the right answer to the question of how one finds his way to happy happy village, though "don't have kids" doesn't get the peregrinator any closer, either. But happiness doesn't echo through time, it expires along with its bearer. A question of greater consequence is how we get people to have more (or fewer) children. Okay, it's obvious in a technical sense. But what about a behavioral one?

By way of ordinary least squares, here are the absolute multiple regression coefficients for eleven variables that may reasonably be assumed to have substantial predictive power in terms of realized fertility. For contemporary relevance and to avoid racial confounding, responses are from 2000 onward and only non-Hispanic whites are included. Asterisks indicate statistical significance at 95% confidence.

First, for men, with parenthetical indications of what is associated with greater fecundity:

Marital status -- .37* (marriage = procreation)
Age -- .33* (time = procreation)
Church attendance -- .10* (churchgoing = procreation)
Education -- .07* (less = procreation)
Number of female partners -- .04 (fewer = procreation)
Political orientation -- .03 (conservatism = procreation)
Social class -- .03 (lower = procreation)
IQ (wordsum) -- .01 (intelligence = procreation)
Income -- .01 (less = procreation)
Happiness -- .00 (no relationship)
Belief in God -- .00 (no relationship)

The older a person is, the more time he's had to have kids. Surely age is the strongest predictor of the number of children a man has sired, isn't it? False. Marital status is even more powerful than age is, at least for those with a y-chromosome. Despite rising illegitimacy and declining marriage rates, there is no better* way to get a man to spread his seed than to have him tie the knot. Churchgoing and school-avoiding also push a man towards fatherhood. Nothing else matters much--getting around hurts a smidgen, being conservative helps a bit, but these things only marginally so.

Tangentially, a note to those interested in this sort of stuff: Religious activity tends to be more important than stated religious belief is. Speaking in broad generalities, the man who believes in God but doesn't pray, worship, or otherwise do anything else meaningful as a consequence of that stated belief is behaviorally more similar to an atheist or an agnostic than to a pious person who can reliably be found in the pews on Sunday.

For women:

Age -- .32* (time = procreation)
Marital status -- .24* (marriage = procreation)
Education -- .18* (less = procreation)
Class -- .11* (lower = procreation)
Church attendance -- .07* (churchgoing = procreation)
Political orientation -- .06* (conservatism = procreation)
Belief in God -- .06 (belief = procreation)
IQ (wordsum) -- .04 (stupidity = procreation)
Income -- .02 (less = procreation)
Happiness -- .02 (unhappiness = procreation)
Number of male partners -- .01 (fewer = procreation)

The variables are a more even keel than they are among men, with the only three not mattering much being how much a woman gets around, how happy she is, and how much money she (or her partner) makes. Age is the biggest predictor, followed by marital status, education (a killer of kid creation in the Western world), and then social class, all of which are notably influential.

Affordable family formation (and expressive piety!) isn't just the route to a Republican resurgence, it's the pathway to procreation, too. Societally, of course, we're moving in the opposite direction, as marriage and religious attendance declines while years spent accumulating debt in school instead of creating value in the workforce is still the predominant advice proffered to American youth. Forty more years!

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000-2010), SEX, RACECEN1(1), MARITAL, AGE, EDUC, CLASS, ATTEND, POLVIEWS, GOD, WORDSUM, CONINC, HAPPY, NUMMEN, NUMWOMEN

* With the obligatory qualification that correlation does not necessarily prove causation and is in this context best thought of as merely suggestive.

Intelligence and fertility by class, over time

Channeling Charles Murray, Randall Parker comments on the increasing social stratification that has come to define the contemporary Western world:

This isn't the 1950s when people could expect to pair up with a husband or wife and get a factory job that put them at similar status level to a large portion of the total population. We've got a much wider spread of classes and far more cognitive sorting. The poor are dumber on average and the upper classes are smarter on average. The classes have less in common: less shared understanding, fewer shared values, fewer shared experiences with cultural products such as TV and radio shows.

On the one hand, inequality has been public enemy number one for multiple generations now. On the other hand, one major consequence of a shrinking world is that cognitive sorting keeps getting easier to do and is continually approaching ubiquity in practice.

I wondered what insights the GSS might offer. The survey has a question for which respondents are asked which of four social classes they feel they belong to--lower, working, middle, or upper. The following graph shows mean wordsum scores by self-identified class membership over time. The three variables have not been cross-referenced for every year the survey has been conducted (not sure why, as each has independently been included since its inception, but it is what it is), which is why the years displayed jump around as they do. To avoid issues of English language fluency, the foreign-born are excluded:

Steady as she goes. Of course, this doesn't necessarily speak to potential changes in material or cultural class differences over the last several decades per se, but the cognitive sorting by class isn't blatantly obvious, at least not by this measure.

And because detecting dysgenic trends is a hobby horse here, the mean number of children by class over time:

Sample sizes are smaller for the lower and upper classes (self-assessment rates split about 5%-45%-45%-5%) so their respective lines bounce around more, but the pattern over time is pretty consistent--higher class means somewhat lower (and later) fertility, and people across the social spectrum are having fewer children today than their parents had.

GSS variables used: BORN(1), YEAR, CLASS, WORDSUM, CHILDS

Baby makers scorn porn?

Dennis Mangan has posted the transcript of an especially thought-provoking talk he recently gave. Essentially his hypothesis is that because of our biological predilections, contemporary processed food and the easy accessibility of sexual stimulation by virtual means have really screwed with our lives. Dennis speculating on the consequences of ubiquitous, cheap porn:

When pornography was being legalized throughout the Western world, those opposed to its legalization were scorned as people living in the past, and were told that since porn involved “consenting adults” only, that it was a “victimless crime”, legalization could only bring benefits. It does seem to be correlated to declining rates of sexual violence. But it also turns out that pornography may be connected to a decline in fertility rates. Writing in The Occidental Observer, Reginald Thompson showed that those countries which had banned pornography had highly significant differences in TFR, i.e. the fertility rates were greater than in countries with legalized pornography, and this held true even when Western nations were excluded from the analysis. 

Comprising about 35% of the population, those in the US who feel pornography should be illegal are firmly in the minority. Legally, the issue seems to be a settled one. But patriarchy sympathizers do a pretty good job breeding, so the case might not be closed forever. The following table shows the average number of children respondents have by whether or not they think pornography should be legal. To avoid racial confounding, only whites are considered. To allow family formation to have taken place, responses come from those aged 35 or older. For contemporary relevance, all responses are from 2000 onward (n = 4,200):

Pornography	Kids
Legal	1.94
Illegal	2.55

My immediate reaction is to assume this is a reflection of broader value differences, specifically with regards to religiosity. Pious people are a lot more supportive of banning pornography than the irreligious are (65% wanting to ban, 35% opposed and 29% wanting to ban, 61% opposed, respectively), and the correlation between religiosity and fecundity is a strong one.

Yet significant differences in fecundity are detectable among both the religious (defined here as those who attend religious services at least once a week) and irreligious (defined as those who attend religious services no more than once per year) when members of each group are sorted according to their position on outlawing pornography. The same racial, age, and time parameters used above are employed here (n = 2,947):

Pornography	Kids
Religious
Legal	2.72
Illegal	2.41
Irreligious
Legal	1.71
Illegal	2.34

This doesn't prove, of course, Dennis' hypothesis that the ubiquity of pornography has had a depressing effect on fertility rates to be true. There are surely people who say they want to see pornography made illegal who are nonetheless consumers of it. Conversely, there are those who never watch the stuff but don't think it should be banned, myself among them. That said, it's an interesting and surprising result. There are sizable differences in fertility among the most pious and least religious depending on whether or not they see pornography as being socially intolerable.

Now please take a moment to view this important public service announcement:



GSS variables used: PORNLAW(1)(2-3), AGE(35-89), YEAR(2000-2010), RACECEN1(1), ATTEND(0-2)(7-8), CHILDS

Education, religiosity, and fecundity

++Addition++Heartiste speculates that differences in the joy children bring people correlates inversely with intelligence, especially among men. On the one hand, there's not much in the way of a relationship between intelligence and fecundity among men, with the pronounced dysgenic trend happening primarily on the female side. Yet my own personal experience is similar to Heartiste's--around children they are unrelated to, the more intelligent a person is, the less he tends to be interested in or care about the kids. Parenthetically, the opposite seems to happen when the objects of attention are pets.

---

Dan poses an interesting question:

Have you looked at they effect of religiosity on fertility when intelligence is held constant? 

This strikes me as a very important question. It is well-established, I think, that religiosity is positively correlated with fertility. But what is the specific impact of religiosity on the fertility of the really smarts, averages and dumb specifically? 

The significance of intelligence in predicting fecundity vanishes when education is controlled for. In the US, high IQ people have fewer children than those of more modest intelligence do, but it's a consequence of the fact that more intelligent people spend more time in school than less intelligent people do. Smart people who don't go to college have nearly the same fertility rates as dull people who don't, and low IQ folks who pursue post-secondary education don't have more children than high IQ people who do so end up having.

What, though, of the relationship between fecundity and religiosity when educational attainment is taken into account? Before delving into the data, it needs to be noted that the measure of religiosity I'm employing is frequency of attendance at a house of worship, which doesn't necessarily shed light on how fervently or literally respondents adhere to the precepts of their religions or the levels of credulity they display towards their faiths.

Marx's famous labeling of religion as the "opiate of the masses" aside, as Charles Murray points out in Coming Apart, the more intelligent and well-educated people are, the more likely they are to go to church (an assertion that the GSS affirms). At first blush, this may appear to present a conundrum: Religious worship and educational attainment are positively correlated, religious worship and fertility rates are also positively correlated, but educational attainment and fertility rates are negatively correlated. For those of some acquaintance with statistics, of course, we'd only necessarily be trying to square a circle here if all three of the aforementioned correlations were perfect, which they are not.

The following graph shows how religiosity and fecundity are related among those with similar levels of educational attainment. For purposes of contemporary relevance, avoiding racial confounding, and allowing time for family formation to occur, data are from 1990 onward, the respondent pool is limited to whites, and those under the age of 35 are excluded:

At each level of education, the trend is one of religiosity and fecundity moving in the same direction, even as fecundity drops among all cohorts as educational attainment increases. The only irreligious people out-procreating the Russ Johnsons and Inductivists of the world are high school dropouts.

From eyeballing the graph, it is difficult to ascertain whether education or religiosity is the stronger predictor of fertility rates. That's because they're about equally predictive. When it comes to predicting fecundity, the OLS standardized regression coefficients (with IQ included for purposes of reiteration) are as follows:

Educational attainment -- (.19)*
Worship attendance -- .15*
Wordsum score -- .00

* Statistically significant

As far as I'm aware, it appears that educational attainment and religiosity are the two strongest predictors of fecundity in the US (and the rest of the Western world?) today.

GSS variables used: CHILDS, EDUC(0-11)(12)(13-15)(16-17)(18-20), YEAR(1990-2010), BORN(1), RACE(1), AGE(35-89), WORDSUM, ATTEND(0)(1-3)(4-6)(7-8)6370726

++Addition++A reader asks:

What happens to the relationship between church attendance and fertility when you hold wordsum constant instead of education?

That would give the clearest picture of all as to whether religious attendance is eugenic...

Here's the graph:

It looks pretty similar to what we get with the education graph in the body of the post, but the association between fecundity and and religiosity is less pronounced, as the regression coefficients mentioned above predict to be the case.

Education, IQ, and fertility

Reading some of Inductivist's work on fertility and political orientation among wealthy white women, I was struck by the following:

Education's effect is not the influence of IQ. Among this demographic, IQ is unrelated to fertility. The correlation between IQ and number of kids is .02--basically zero. Education's influence appears to be cultural.

I previously did my best to portray the strong, inverse relationship between educational attainment and fecundity in the US. The correlation is indisputable, but that, of course, does not necessarily inform us about causation. The fear of dysgenic dystopia in the future is usually premised on the notion that IQ, not schooling, and fertility run in opposite directions.

Inductivist's statement made me wonder how much IQ matters once education is taken into account. It's easy to conceptualize why contemporary education and procreation don't mesh well. Young men and women spend their most fertile years accumulating debt and squandering assets (if they have any to begin with). By the time they've graduated, established themselves in their careers, and fixed their personal balance sheets (if they ever manage to do these things, and increasing numbers of them do not), their biological clocks, especially women's, are past noon.

It's more difficult to do the same with intelligence. Popular culture does not particularly celebrate childbearing, but procreation isn't public enemy number one, either. The world-shrinking consequences of technological progress means there are more things than ever for intelligent people to pursue, of which having and raising kids is just one of an ineluctably growing many, and not a seemingly attractive or intellectually 'actualizing' one at that. But total fertility rates in the West were well above replacement for several decades after children had clearly become economic, time-consuming 'burdens' rather than an extra pair of hands to help on the farm. Intelligence and education are linked, often confusedly, in the public mind, but a plausible explanation is that more intelligent people tend to pursue more education, and end up having fewer children as a result.

Using the GSS, let's consider just that. In the following graphs, respondents are categorized into five groups* based on educational attainment and into five groups based on IQ as measured by wordsum scores. For contemporary relevance, only data from the last two decades are considered, and all respondents included are at least 35 years age to allow time for family formation to have occurred.

In the first graph, we see how educational attainment and fecundity relate among those of similar IQ:


So, among those who scored in the 0-3 range on the wordsum test (the real dumbs), those with less than a high school education (black bar), average just over three kids. Those real dumbs who graduated high school (brown bar) and those who spent some time in college without graduating (white bar), average about 2.5 each, the real dumbs with a bachelor's (yellow bar) about 1.75 kids, and those with post-graduate degrees (baby blue bar) 1.5.

For all IQ groupings, education is a strong predictor of fecundity. Even among the really smarts, obtaining a college degree reduces total fertility by 0.5. Among those of modest intelligence, staying in school means staying out of the delivery room. I'm sure there's a cute phrase like "Yale or jail" applicable here, but it's not coming to me at the moment (soliciting suggestions in the comments).

In the second graph, we see how IQ and fecundity relate among those of similar educational attainment:


The relationship here is considerably weaker. The effect of education on average total fertility rates among those of similar IQ is five times as large^ as the effect of IQ on average TFRs is among those of similar educational attainment. This is detectable in the latter graph by noticing how there is a clear decline in fecundity as we move up from one level of educational attainment to the next, but there is not much difference across the IQ spectrum among those of similar educational attainment.

While aware that it is an erroneous oversimplification to argue that the demographic transition in the West has been driven primarily by the increasing duration of formal educational attainment, the latter is strongly associated with the former. The more I look into it, the more difficult it becomes to think about the developed world's inverting age pyramid without considering educational romanticism.

We need methods to speed up the educational process, like self-paced coursework and subject-specific standardized testing (think AP tests for those in college) that allows autodidacts to receive credit as soon as they've demonstrated proficiency in a subject rather than after four inefficient months of spending three hours per week having it delivered to them at varying levels of effectiveness. Ideally, passing the bar would be the only requirement for practicing law and passing the CPA exam the only requirement for becoming a CPA. If this results in a perceived glut of lawyers and accountants, the respective tests can simply be made more difficult. While the relative value of high parental socioeconomic status will decrease and higher conscientiousness might as well, higher intelligence would be rewarded with more precision and young professionals would be able to get to work years earlier and with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars less debt on their shoulders.

Necessity being the mother of innovation, here's to hoping the impending popping of the education bubble ushers in changes along these lines.

GSS variables used: AGE(35-89), BORN(1), EDUC(0-11)(12)(13-15)(16-17)(18-20), WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10), YEAR(1990-2010), CHILDS

* Groups are mutually exclusive, so those who are listed as having graduated high school went exactly that far but no further. Obviously, those who have doctorate degrees also graduated from high school, but they are only represented in the "post-graduate" grouping here.

For IQ, 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%).

^ Ordinary least squares standardized regression coefficients are (.16) for educational attainment and (.03) for intelligence as measured by wordsum score. My thanks to Inductivist for walking me through the process of how to determine these.

White, black, and Hispanic birth rates by state

In the comments of a previous post, I wondered to what extent intra-state birth rates correlated across racial groups. That is, in states where white fertility is high, are black and Hispanic fertility rates also high?

I am unable to find birth rates broken down by race at the state level, but the Kaiser Family Foundation (which maintains a fantastic, data-rich website) does provide live births by race at the state level with data as recent as 2008 and accompanying data from 2009 on population by race at the state level. From that, I was able to compute birth rates per 1,000 people for whites, blacks, and Hispanics in each state*. For the handful of states with insufficient data on black population sizes, the US Census quick facts page is used as a supplemental.

Turns out the correlations are pretty weak: White and black birth rates correlate at a statistically insignificant .14, white and Hispanic birth rates at .27, and black and Hispanic birth rates at a statistically insignificant (.03).

White birth rates (map here) are highest in the Rocky Mountain states and the Midwest, middling in the South, and lowest on the coasts. The one seeming outlier is Hawaii, which shows the highest white fertility rate of any state in the country. Hawaii's population is not young (although I'm not able to find age broken down by race, and a majority of Hawaii's population is Asian or Pacific Islander), so I'm not sure if this is the result of a data transcription error, or if the relatively large percentage of Hawaii's whites who are in the military has something to do with it. Hawaii's overall birth rate is tied for ninth highest in the nation, and its black and Hispanic birth rates are also correspondingly high, so it might be accurate. Far less surprisingly, Mormon Utah comes in at #2.

Black birth rates (map here) are highest in Upper Midwestern states where blacks receive large welfare distributions relative to whites compared to black/white welfare recipient rates in other states. I'm bemused by Maine's high rate, only being able to point out that numbering fewer than 14,000, the black population there is extremely small. The South, where the largest share of the country's black population is concentrated, in contrast, has relatively lower and more middling rates, while birth rates for blacks are lowest in Rocky Mountain states and the Southwest.

Hispanic birth rates (map here) are probably the least reliable and also the least geographically consistent due to states with small Hispanic populations not accurately accounting for the sizes of their respective illegal residents, which may partially explain why rates show up as being astronomical in South Carolina. In contrast, states with large Hispanic populations--most notably the border states--have relatively low fertility rates. It should be noted, though, that Hispanic birth rates are generally considerably higher than black and especially white birth rates across the board. Nationwide, the Hispanic birth rate is nearly double the white birth rate.

* The rates are a bit lower than I'd expect based on national figures across the board (about 80% of states come in with a birth rate among whites that is lower than the national average), for reasons I'm not exactly sure of. Take the maps in more for comparative purposes than for exacting fertility rate measurements by race and state.

Changes in birth rates by age cohort, 1980 to 2008

It's no secret that fertility rates in the Western world outside of Israel and the United States are below replacement level, and the populations in some developed countries like Japan and Germany have already began contracting. The US, at 2.06 children per woman, would be treading water if not for the country's net immigration level.

Sifting through new Census data, I came upon a file containing data on fertility rates by several characteristics of the mother. Although whites, blacks, and Asians have all become less fecund over the last thirty years [or not--please see Hail's comment below], their declines have been almost exactly offset by a rapid increase in the size of the more procreative Hispanic population, such that the total fertility rate in the US today is right where it was in 1980.

Also of interest are shifts in fertility patterns by age that have occurred over the last three decades. The following table shows the percentage changes in birth rates by the mother's age from 1980 to 2008:

Age	Change
10-14	(45.5%)
15-19	(21.7%)
20-24	(10.5%)
25-29	+1.9%
30-34	+60.4%
35-39	+136.9%
40-44	+151.3%
45-54	+250.0%

Women are having children later than they did a generation ago. The bulk of all birthing is still done by women in their 20s (see below), so the large percentage changes among women in their teens and thirties is less impactful on the whole that it might appear at first glance.

Educational romanticism and the accompanying societal desire that everybody receive higher education means more and more women are delaying childbirth or foregoing it entirely. The consequences are not only demographic, they are also health-related, as several risk factors for the child increase alongside the age of the delivering mother.

Now for the percentage of total births by age range of the mother in 1980 and 2008. Data are not available for women 40+ in the earlier period, so I estimated using simple algebra to get the total for the 40-44 and 45-54 age ranges, and then split that number proportionally in accordance to the most recent year in which births for women in those age ranges are recorded:

Age	1980	2010
Under 20	15.6%	10.4%
20-24	33.9%	24.8%
25-29	30.7%	28.2%
30-34	15.2%	22.5%
35-39	3.9%	11.5%
40-44	0.7%	2.5%
45-54	0.03%	0.2%

A plurality of births are now to women aged 25-29, a change from three decades ago, when women aged 20-24 gave birth most frequently. In 1980, women in their 20s accounted for 64.6%--nearly two-thirds--of all live births, while women in their 30s accounted for 19.1%, or less than one-fifth of the total. Today, at 53.0% of all births, women in their 20s account for just over half. Women in their 30s now account for 34.0%--over one-third. If these trends continue, in another generation it will be more common for babies to be born to mothers in their 30s than to mothers in their 20s.

Those who don't want the world to have more kids don't have their own

One of those fun troll roles to play involves telling secular leftists that irreligious Darwin lovers exhibit the least Darwinian fitness and telling pious creationists that they are winning the Darwinian race. While liberal atheists and agnostics aged 40+ average 1.78 kids, firmly theistic conservatives in the same age range average 2.69.

I suspected when it came to worries about overpopulation, however, stated beliefs would be far more aligned with actual behavior than in the case of evolution by means of natural selection. Expressed concerns about sustainability and the like aside, people who would see it as just rewards if homo sapiens go extinct in the next century hail more frequently from the ranks of those who think the human population needs to be reduced than from among those who want humanity to be fruitful and multiply.

Indeed, the GSS shows that tends to be the case. The following table (n = 1,520) displays the percentage of people aged 40+ who agree with the Malthusian concern that "the earth cannot continue to support population growth at its present rate" by the number of children they have:

Kids	Agree
0	65.6%
1	60.0%
2	54.5%
3	45.9%
4	46.6%
5+	52.7%

But maybe I'm following the wrong scent in my hunt for hypocrisy. If the rapture occurs in the near future and only those judged unworthy of heavenly entry are left behind to expire, the fulfillment of prophecy will have happily occurred and the result will be one in which the earth certainly will no longer be able to sustain it's current growth rate, yet you'd be correct to think that most believers ignore this when they fail to express concern about indefinite population growth in the future!

The following table (n = 2,392) reveals their hypocrisy by showing the percentage of people who don't think the earth can sustain current levels of human population growth by confidence in God's existence:

Belief	Agree
Atheist	68.4%
Agnostic	62.8%
Uncertain believer	62.1%
Firm believer	47.6%

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000-2010), AGE(40-89), POLVIEWS(1-2)(6-7), GOD(1)(2)(3-5)(6), POPGRWTH(1-2)

Catholic and Protestant fertility over time

Talking to my dad and brother, we somehow got into Catholic fertility in the US. After describing a family with five or six kids, it's still fairly common to hear the quip, "Are they Catholic?" I'm aware of the stereotype, though it wasn't formed from actual firsthand experience. The more noticeable distinction I've picked up on is between those who are genuinely religious and those who are only nominally so (or not at all). My dad guessed greater Catholic fertility remained the case today, though maybe not as pronounced as it had been when he was growing up.

Fortunately, the GSS contains relevant self-reported data on the question extending back to the early seventies. The following graph shows the mean number of children among white Protestants and Catholics in the US over time. To avoid issues with uncompleted procreation while simultaneously trying to minimize unnecessary overlap, only respondents in their forties at the time they participated in the survey are included. The question does not specifically inquire exclusively about biological children, but it insinuates as much. A handful of respondents likely included adopted or step children, but the number is probably insignificant and anyway presumably effects both Protestant and Catholic respondents equally:


Looks like the fecundity gap exists and was a bit wider a generation ago than it is now, but over the last four decades at least has not been very significant and is barely existent at all today.

From the view of the churches, though, Catholics do have the upper hand, since among Hispanics in the US Catholics outnumber Protestants by about five-to-one, and Hispanic birthrates are far higher than white birthrates are.

GSS variables used: RELIG(1)(2), YEAR, RACE(1), CHILDS, AGE(40-49)

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.

Devon's doing less of it now, too

After this, I'm off the fecundity kick for awhile, promise. In the following graph, GSS respondents are broken up into five categories; 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 Really Dumbs (0-3, 12%). The average number of children middle-aged adults in each category have are shown by year. To avoid English language fluency issues, only those born in the US are included:


No surprises. There is some expected year-to-year bouncing around due to randomness, but the societal patterns are clear: Those on the left side of the IQ spectrum have more children than those on the right side do, and everybody has been having fewer and fewer of them over the last four decades.

GSS variables used: WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10), YEAR, BORN(1), AGE(36-62), CHILDS

TUJ parses fertility data and makes remarkable discovery

Writing for OneSTDV's blog, The Undiscovered Jew takes a look at fertility rates by age range and finds that from the age of 30 onward, IQ and white fertility correlate positively at the state level. That is, the smarter the state, the more fecund its 30+ population. The conclusion TUJ arrives at from this is that efforts to extend the span of viable female reproductive capacity using artificial reproductive technologies are the answer to below-replacement white fertility. Aubrey de Grey's drive to retard (and ultimately reverse) the aging process promises to carry eugenic consequences with it.

In the comments, Richard Hoste points to the same concern Francis Galton had 150 years ago; if one group breeds earlier than another group does, even if the total fertility rate of each group is identical, the early-breeding first group will outnumber the late-breeders of the second group.

A simple thought experiment demonstrates this. If hobbit couples have two children at age 20 and elf couples have two children at age 40, their TFRs (2.0) are identical. However, after 80 years, there are ten hobbits but only six elves. At age 20 (year 20), the first generation of hobbits have two kids. Twenty years later (year 40), their second generation offspring have two kids of their own, just as the first generation of elves are finally having their children. So after 40 years, we have two 40 year-old hobbits, two 20 year-old hobbits, and two newborn hobbits, to just two 40 year-old elves and two newborn elves.

But total population share and realizing replacement fertility are two separate (albeit related) issues. TUJ shows that if the fertility of white women in their late thirties doubled and fertility of white women in the early forties increased eightfold, without any other change in the fertility rates of white women under the age of 35, total white fertility would be above replacement. Although the white population would not grow as fast as the Hispanic population, the absolute number of whites would accrete over time. The formidable problem of an inverted age pyramid already facing Russia and Japan, with Western Europe not far behind, would thus be averted.

The desire for well-adjusted, industrious young people to get to work making babies instead of spending their twenties and thirties obtaining academic and then professional success may be hopelessly quixotic. A la Idiocracy, it's not going to happen on a largescale among those of European descent. For those concerned about the sustainability of white populations, extending female reproductive spans and getting the aging clock to tick in a counterclockwise direction are two of the most potentially fruitful strategies available.