Saudi Arabia is simply not rich enough. If you look at the smaller and richer Gulf emirates, they have a lot more children. Nationals in Kuwait, UAE etc. have more than 3 on average.

The TFR is unaffected by this, as it measures the number of children per woman.

All of them like commieblock highrise developments as well and still build them to a large extent.

Argentina is already below replacement level. Their TFR developed like this:

2013 2.34
2014 2.35
2015 2.32
2016 2.18
2017 2.10
2018 2.03

The differences in fertilitry preferences are lower in Turkey. They range from around 2.2-2.5 in Western Turkey (except Istanbul, where they are at 2.8, thanks to internal migration) to 3.0-3.4 in the Kurdish areas.

Asians are more likely to live in big coastal metro areas that provide higher paying jobs but are also more expensive. I wonder how these income statistics look like when adjusted for local prices.

I think if you include the metropolitan area of both cities, Moscow leads by almost 3:1 compared to St. Petersburg.

Here is my rough sketch (without any claims to be entirely accurate) of how the population including suburbs has developed:

Since people who live abroad can vote as well, I don’t think one can use election data for determining how many people still live in the Ukraine.

This is just too hard to guess, as there are so many different variables. It doesn’t only depend on the fertility and migration trends in the Ukraine itself (which are very hard to predict in the first place), but also on how the country and its regions will develop economically.

At this point, I don’t see the population of Kiev peaking at any point in the foreseeable future. Its lead over the rest of the country in living standards, opportunities etc. is just too great. While it is not a primate city like Paris is in France, it is quickly heading in that direction. And an economic boom in the Ukraine will only let this process continue. So even if the Ukraine shrinks to, say, 25 million, it is entirely possible that Kiev grows to 5 million in the same time.

Another reason why I believe Kiev might be growing very fast since 2014: Kiev’s TFR has not only shot up since 2013 way above Ukraine’s average, but the number of deaths in Kiev has also increased suddently from 28,000 in 2013 to 32,000 in 2018, all the while deaths in Ukraine as a whole stagnated. It looks like most of the discrepance between the official 3.0 million and the now estimated 3.7 million built up after 2013. Based on that, Kiev must have gained more than 100,000 people per year since the outbreak of the war.

A third reason: The Kiev area has around 10% of Ukraine’s population, but more than 25% of housing completions.

I think Kiev is still offering OKish opportunities for many Ukrainians. At leats it is the only city in Ukraine showing decent growth.

Poland used to have pretty high unemployment rates until recently. When there were jobs in Poland, there were always enough Poles available to fill them. Now that Poland is approaching full employment, it has become a much more obvious migration destination.

A lot of Koreans of the former Soviet Union (Koryo-saram) are now migrating back to South Korea, as living standards there are higher and SK finds itself in a demographic crisis with the lowest TFR on Earth. While trying to raise the birth rates should be first priority, SK is now busy luring back its former-Soviet and Chinese diaspora.

It could be worthy to study fertility differentials by race within Mexico. I could imagine the Amerindian Mexicans churning out more kids than White Mexicans, thus the “Reddening” of Mexico.

Saudi fertility is indeed rather low as well, although Saudi citizens are still right above replacement level as the fertility rate of migrants in Saudi Arabia is rock bottom. Saudi TFR also declined much later than that of Iran, so they still have some more demographic momentum left. The same is true for the Shiites in Lebanon (their TFR is higher than that of Sunnis and much higher than that of Christians), although Hezbollah will also find it harder to find more cannon fodder in the years and decades ahead.

Iran still has a pretty youthful population, but it is correct that its demographic window of opportunity is closing fast. Their yout bulge is now around 30, meaning that their demographic resources of leading a war are dwindling rapidly at the moment. In thats ense, their situation is unique in the Middle East as the only other people that are in a similar situation are the ethnic Turks in Turkey. All of Iran’s neighbors except the Azeris are still very youthful and expanding demographically.

I am wondering by how much the Iranian government is aware of this and to what extent it could explain the actions of Iran in the last couple of years. Securing influence and more youthful allies in the region before the demographic window of opportunity shuts speedily?

If you are looking for 2018 TFR data, you can check the newest Demographic Yearbook of KZ 2014-2018 here. The TFR by region is on the 133rd page of the document (page 132).

Turkestan, the newly created oblast of the rural parts of the former South Kazakhstan, tops the list with 4.07 children per woman. Unfortunately, it is also the second dumbest region of the country (may now even be the dumbest, as Shymkent City is now its own region.

http://stat.gov.kz/api/getFile/?docId=ESTAT330530

One needs to be careful while interpreting the average birth sequence and deducting trends of fertility from it. While Anatoly is correct in pointing out that it doesn’t take trends in childlessness into account, there is another caveat:

Average birth sequence is dependent on the population composition of the women in childbearing age. Russia at the moment experiences a huge drop in women aged 20-29, thanks to low fertility in the late 1990s. Women aged 20-29 however are more likely to have a first child than older women, who might already have children. Since there are now many more women aged 30-40 or so than younger women, it is only natural that the average birth sequence rises or stays steady, despite overall fertility declining. So being careful, I wouldn’t bet too much on a rise of Russian fertility being set in stone. I don’t think it will drop further, but it also won’t magically increase beyond 1.8 either in the foreseeable future, unless something changes fundamentally.

That has no effect on the fertility rate though.

About the diaspora: If they don‘t speak Greek, they can‘t be considered Greeks.

I guess you also need to take into account the different rural structure in northern and southern Sweden. The southern parts are classical rural, with a strong agricultural history. The north on the other hand is not suitable for agriculture, and industry has been more prevalent, meaning that from their heritage, northern rural folks are more workers, while southern rural people are more of the farmer kind.

Jobs during the AoMI will require higher IQ floors than farming-era jobs, which will enforce some level of meritocracy which was absent during the farming era… Then, as now, the labor of an engineer will be more valuable than the labor of a manual laborer, and in a natural market his wage would be higher. Because of this, we should expect efforts to suppress the wages for these kinds of jobs, justified by egalitarian rhetoric.

This is also why I expect the “Farewell to Alms” effect to happen quicker after the onset of the AoMI.

Shouldn’t the opposite be true? If engineers and other higher IQ people in such a society are not able to make more money than the lesser IQ workers, how are they supposed to raise more kids on average to get the Clark-Unz effect going again?

Would be interesting to have some population pyramids of these populations to see what is going on.

Don’t you think the world has changed a bit in the last 100 years?

Why would Germans flee to the US, of all places?

Most Ukrainians in Poland are not counted as residents though, and only come there seasonally. According to official Polish statistics, only 204,940 Ukrainians are registered as living in Poland by the end of 2018 ( https://migracje.gov.pl/en/statistics/scope/poland/type/statuses/view/tables/year/2019/ ).

The rest I guess just travels back and forth, but maintain their residency in Ukraine, hence they cannot be considered as emigrated.

Correct, but migrants are mostly in the age range of 20-40 as well. If anything, these age groups are even smaller than official in comparison to the whole population.

One idea: AFAIK, the Ukraine doesn’t actually count births in the LDNR: http://database.ukrcensus.gov.ua/PXWEB2007/ukr/news/op_n_mov.asp

I mean, how could it?

However, if it calculates the TFR based off the total Ukrainian population, while not being able to count LDNR births, then everything is explained. The LDNR cancels out the emigrants.

I just checked their numbers, and it looks like for the TFR calculation, they disregard data from Donetsk and Luhansk completely, so neither their births nor their population is included, which is sound. Numerator and denominator refer to the same area, so the error is not due to wrong calculations.

That makes sense. I get the impression that the gap between Kiev and the rest of Ukraine is larger than the gap between Moscow and the rest of Russia.

I could see myself living and having a good time in Kiev long-term – minus politics, anyway.

I just don’t believe Kiev’s TFR should then be higher than the rest of the country. What I do believe is that since the start of teh war, many people moved to Kiev but didn’t register there because they rent inofficially or etc. etc.

Here’s an interesting discussion regarding Kiev’s true population: https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g294473-i3662-k12390715-Kyiv_population-Ukraine.html

One additional thing on the TFR. If Ukraine’s population is really overestimated by the numbers that are discussed here, it also means that the official TFR is underestimated seriously as well. Instead of the official 1.30 childrne per woman, Ukrainian TFR could be closer to 1.6, which is higher than in Russia or Belarus. Is that really realistic?

Ukrainian data also shows the city of Kiev having a TFR of 1.54, which is well above the Ukrainian average. For a country without any high-fertility migrants, this is very unrealistic. In other words, while the population of Ukraine might be overestimated, it might be underestimated by a long shot in their capital! That also means that Kiev is one of the fastest growing cities in Europe in reality.

I guess that also answers LH’s question about whether population decline will make it easier. It won’t, because more and more Ukrainians concentrate in Kiev.

In 2018, Ukrainian TFR was at 1.30 children per woman, but that uses the official population estimates. The average age is 41.6.

Here is the population pyramid according to official data (42.0 million inhabitants).

For the dysgenic trend, I used the six education groups available. For this table, I grouped no education, incomplete primary, primary and lower secondary into “low”, but in my calculation, I used them separately.

The thing is that fertility acording to education shifts over time, so studies using 20th century data can give little clues about the present situation.

That is rue, which is why I have calculated these “Eugenic index” values, in order to have a measure of what the trend really is. It would be better to have more categories at the higher end of course, but the data is as it is.

I tried to quantify IQ loss as well. In an earlier version of this table, I named it IQ loss per generation, but realized that this is based on the assumption of perfect stratification and 100% heritability, which is of course impossible, so real IQ loss is much lower than my calculated values. So I for now call it “dysgenic index”. The numbers themselves are meaningless, but they are good for a comparison between countries.

In order to calculate them, I sliced the normal distribution in parts according to education levels, so if 40% are low educated, 40% medium and 20% high, I assumed that the lowest 40% of the normal distribution are occupied by the low, the next 40% by the medium and the rightmost 20% by the high educated. I calculated the mean “IQ” value for each slice, and used these to project the next generation. Then I calculated their average again, and compared it to the average of the initial (which is 0 by definition, as we have a normal distribution).

This index takes into account fertility differences between education levels, but also their distribution. If low educated have a TFR of 4 and highe ducated of 2, then it still depends on the percentages of each level. A country with 99% low educated and 1% high educated in this case has less of a dysgenic effect than a country with 70% low educated and 30% high educated. This is important because generally, education categories are not comparable across countries.

Based on this, here are the eugneic indices for some countries (the lower the value, the more dysgenic. Positivee values mean eugenic fertility). I only provide the first decimal, because those are not very precise estimates:

Denmark, Finland, 0.2 (most eugenic trend of all countries)
Sweden 0.1
Canada -0,5
Egypt, Indonesia -0,6
Japan -0,7
Australia -0,8
Germany, Poland -0,9
France, Netherlands, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, Vietnam -1.0
Belgium -1,1
Italy -1,2
Russia, Spain -1,3
USA -1,4
Israel -1,5
Romania -1,8
China, South Africa -2,4
India -2,5
Iran -2,9
Turkey -3,0
Philippines -3,4
Mexico -3,7
Brazil, Peru -3,9
Colombia -4,1
Ethiopia -4,2
Haiti -5,6 (most dysgenic trend)

Interesting contrast between France and Germany. Seems that the Frenchies are more loved by the Americans than the Germans, and even more so among the Blacks/Hispanics.

Nope, the TFR is immune to age structure. Its calculation already takes this into account. Toronto is a sterile city, and even suburbanites don‘t have kids there. The whole 7.5 million people Toronto area has a TFR of 1.3 children per woman, similar to Tokyo.

I am wondering why we don‘t hear stories about hard pressed Torontonians foregoing sex. At least this has been told over Japan all the time.

The parents sound like typical voters of the Greens. Well, that‘s Berlin for you.

I see that danger as well, but the good thing is that “making more vibrants” is very hard, at least when it comes to fertility rates. Outside of Africa, their reproduction is collapsing right now. Mexico has fallen below replacement level not long ago. So did American Hispanics. Arabs will do the same.

All the more to worry about the birth rate collapse in the smart world.

The present rate of emigration coupled with the rock bottom birth rate is already enough to let the Ukrainian population collapse over the coming decades.

Meanwhile, Poland is eating the Ukrainian cake from the western side. In a few decades, the Ukraine will be a void, demographically speaking. Their birth numbers are already collapsing in front of our eyes. So do the Russian ones, but as we see, they want to fill up the ranks with Ukrainians.

It just shows that the fears of air pollution are massively overstated and/or masked by selection effects. Cities draw the highly educated, migrants (healthy migrant effect) and expell the weak and sick. I haven’t seen any fat people when I was once in NYC for example, because the city environment is pretty hostile to them.

What is the differnece between the dashed and the full line for Moscow in the first diagram?

By the way, here’s life expectancy in some rich country metro areas (some values are estimated). The US is another country with comparably large differneces between its biggest metro areas and the rest of the country:

It is a simple euphemism treadmill. Before Asylbewerber (asylum seeker) came up, Asylant (asylant) was used. Now that Flüchtling (refugee) becomes outdated, words like Geflüchtete (escapees) Schutzsuchende (protection seekers) or even Fluchtsuchende (escape seekers) came up.

Those French women born in Algeria are now well beyond their fertile age. Most of them came in the early 1960s.

You do have a point about Germans from KAzakhstan. But for Germany, I used the citizenship of the mother because firstly data was not available by country of births and secondly to keep them out of the non-EU category. Ethnic German migrants from Eastern Europe received German citizenship almost immediately after they arrived in Germany.

I see the same. I think the key in that regard is to keep or create zones that are free from those degenerate trends, preferably in rural areas.

In a sense, this is already happening in itself. The leftist-greens more and more congregate in the big cities, where they are condemned to stay childless due to exorbitant housing prices. It is no wonder that in the last 10 years, when those trends took off and the US dipped below replacement level, fertility declined the most in urban centers and coastal states while it almost stayed constant in the interior.

Are there statistics by region?

Thanks for the update, Anatoly!

Belarus still publishes quarterly birth figures in its Statistical review. In about one week, they should publish the full 2018 figures:

http://www.belstat.gov.by/en/ofitsialnaya-statistika/publications/statistical-publications-data-books-bulletins/public_bulletin/index_12650/

So far, births in Belarus went down by a massive 8.2% in the first three quarters of 2018. Their TFR will likely end up at 1.46 in 2018.

Labor costs make a very small share of overall costs in that industry, so it is only natural that they aren‘t that bothered with bringing them down.

Which restraints are you thinking of?

Very interesting read, as always.

It got me thinking about more aspects:

Firstly, the dysgenic trend across nations is not the same. There are no clear data on that, but one can derive a rough guess of the dysgenic trend by comparing fertility by education level. And more importantly, the degree of dsysgenics seems to be dependent on government policies. The Nordics with their comprehensive family policies suffer from little dysgenics among their native population. They simply provide the environment that makes highly educated women breed as well or even more so than their low educated co-ethnic brethen. Migrants obviously distort that picture, but in Sweden, third world migrants have less kids than in France, which follows a more “blind” pronatalist policy. By far the worst dysgenic trend, when judged by education level (has its shortcomings, I know!), can be observed in the Latin American countries. Their lower classes still have quite some kids, while their educated classes are as sterile as their counterparts in Spain or Portugal. Why? Because public services suck in these countries, and private schools, security and all other additional perks that ar eneeded to lead a first world lifestyle in Latin America cost a lot of money, meaning that even upper middle class families can’t afford to have a bunch of kids in such an environment.

Consequentially, the geopolitics are dependent on that as well. While all countries will eventually feel the breeder rebound, different dysgenic trends will offer different options for different countries. A country with a low dysgenic trend and approaching its carrying capacity is smart enough to stay richer than the rest and will be able to buy necessary food and resources from more dumb nations. Or will be able to colonize/subdue them if it is ruthless enough. I guess, before an IQ 92 Denmark with 50 million inhabitants starves, it can just seize resources abroad, e.g. from an IQ 80 Brazil. Before we see the return of darwinism, we may see a return of colonialism.

There is sense in doing these projections, because the mechanism is there, and more importantly, because few others make these projections. If you want to have projections that stop at 2100, the UN website is full of them. 😉

Gernerally, well written and deeply interesting stuff, as always. So I am really sorry to nitpuck on this one:

On the above chart, the French, the Dutch, and the Anglo-Saxons might be around Generation #5.

Taking the year at which TFR dipped well below 4 children per woman (say, below 3.8 to set a number) is not the perfect, but a good way of telling since when this process started. Why that number? 4 or a bit less than that was the lowest TFRs typically shown in Hajnal-Europe well below the demographic transition, so it is the lowest number attainable in a pre-industrial setting without having the population dying out.

France dipped below that number in the late 1830s, Switzerland in the mid 1880s and all the rest of core Europe (Germany, UK, Netherlands, the Nordics etc.) and their offshoots (US, Canada, Australia, NZ) between 1890 and the onset of WWI. France is two generations ahead of everyone else in that game, playing in its own category.

Considering that even Nazi Germany failed to match peak Weimar fertility levels – an epoch synonymous with debauchery

Debauchery in the Weimar republic was really only widespread in Berlin though, with the deep countryside noticing nothing of that. Consequentially, Berlin’s fertility rate was 1.0 children per woman between 1923 and 1933, while it was over 3.0 in the far East of Germany and conservative catholic regions. The Nazi family policies almost doubled fertility in Berlin to 1.8, but obviously had little effect in those high fertility regions.

Could very well be.

I have the feeling in general that we are going through a period like between WWI and WWII since the crisis of 2009. Slow growing or stagnant economies, birth rates going down, societies having no clue in which direction they want to go, shaky world order, slowing technological progress (visible in leveling off life expectancy for example) etc.

I could imagine that things will improve after 2040, for several reasons:

1. Hydrocarbons by then will have become a lot less relevant than they are now. Hence the threat of Islamism will go away, just as Middle Eastern birth rates will fall with their oil revenues.

2. Population ageing will have come to an end in the Western countries, with the very last baby boomers entering retirement. The continuous worsening of economic prospects will halt as well, as it is not necessary anymore to shove an ever increasing share of the economic pie to feed the elderly. The situation won’t improve after 2040 of course, but at least it can’t get any worse anymore.

3. The world order will stabilize again, with the US having declined from superpower to great power status and vice versa for China.

Could be bullshit of course, just some ideas to share.

I also thought about that, but then you’d expect fertility to drop in every halfway decently developed country, including Israel.

In fact, many of the rich countries had fairly stable fertility rates until 2008. After 2008, they started to fall (most prominent example being the US) and the trend has continued unabated, despite the economic recovery.

Tokyo, alongside Hokkaido, actually has the lowest fertility rate in Japan and are the only prefectures below 1.3 children per woman. Okinawa is at 1.95.

Generally, the rates are a bit higher in the south than in the north.

You can check here the data for 2017 (on page 6/7):

https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/geppo/nengai17/dl/kekka.pdf

Don’t forget that China is also corrupt to the bones. So there are ample ways to circumvent the controls, especially so in the countryside. Many newborn girls were simply not registered and only appear now in the census.

Was Tokyo a population sink before the American population? I kind of doubt it. Probably had lesser fertility than the countryside, but I bet it was above replacement.

Before WWII, Tokyo had a fertility rate of around 3-4 children per woman while Japan was closer to 5.

After the war, fertility collapsed in Japan.

Lately, the situation has improved from extremely bad to very bad:

Current TFR of Iran is around 1.7 children per woman, at a birth rate of 19/100,000. China’s birth rate has been 12/100,000 since the early 2000s. This again makes it consistent with a TFR that is 0.5 children lower than the oft quoted figures.

The age strucures of Iran and China are too different to make that comparison. China had a TFR of 6 until around 1970, while Iran kept that rate until 1990, so Iran’s population is much younger than China’s.

But anyway, here’s my take on it:

The only official and annual data China publishes on births that I am aware of is in their Statistical Yearbook. There they keep a time series on the crude birth rate:

In 2016, this was 12.95 per 1000 people.

Now my idea is, instead of comparing this crude birth rate to Iran, why not compare it to a similar age structure as China actually has? The UN in its world population prospects have a best guess of their age structure, and conveniently deliver their estimate of the crude birth rate and total fertility rate as well. For 2016, they give a CBR of 12.0 per 1000 and a TFR of 1.65 children per woman. This means that hypothetical, with a TFR of 1.0, their CBR should be 7.38. But in reality it is 12.95.

So taking the data from the two sources, we get 12.95/7.38 = 1.75 children per woman. This would be my best guess for China’s TFR at the moment.

Looks like Portugal is really worth visiting.

Btw, Vinho Verde is also availabe in German Aldi’s. It’s my favorite summer wine.

I try to put more stuff on twitter in the future, I promise! 😉

Why is it called Nü-male? Is it because of the Chinese 女, pronounced "nü" and meaning female?

New York and New Jersey aren‘t as low as Massachusetts and Rhode Island as their White TFRs are boosted by Ultraorthodox Jews. Otherwise there’s an even stronger relationship with the share of Catholics.

Another interesting observation is that the TFR of immigrants is not only dependent on their countries of origin, but also policies of the state. Just take Sweden and France. Both of them have huge stocks of Muslims and Blacks and the TFR of native Swedes and French is the same.

Yet those immigrants in Sweden have one child less than those in France. It seems that the Belgo-French family policy model works especially well in encouraging more underclass/muslim/black births. The Nordic model is more geared towards bringing the highest possible number of women/mothers into jobs.

Oh yeah, and I should add to that table that the percentages refer to the share of women, not the share of births. Should have made that more clear. I’ll do that when the data for 2016 will be ready. 🙂

Nice analysis! I am a bit puzzled by the low numbers of Italy. They are close to the performance of Southern Italian students (around 94) instead of being closer to but below 100.

1. Highly fertile religious minorities: Haredim, Amish, Mormons, etc. But they come with well-known problems, their rate of “defections” into the general population decreases as those of their progeny who find their lifestyle non-congenial “boil off,” and in any case Israel is the only country where they constitute a high enough percentage of the population to have a discernible demographic effect.

It’s interesting to note that Mormon fertility has dropped a bit in the last years, in line with the rest of the US. The state of Utah is becoming less Mormon over time (due to immigration of Hispanica and other non-Mormons mostly). Salt Lake City itself is said to lose its Mormon majority soon. Utah county, located south of Salt Lake City however is defying the trend and is 88% Mormon. Utah County also serves as the intellectual heart of Mormonism, hosting Brigham Young University.

Before the crisis, they were solidly at 3 children per woman. In the late 1970s they were even able to mirror the baby boom once more. Now they are hovering around 2.7.

The problem is the lure of the big cities. Big cities are where the fancy stuff is and the high paying jobs (especially so for university graduates!), so people strive to live in them, which automatically increases real estate prices there. Real estate in rural areas in most of the West is dirt cheap, but people don’t even breed there as needed.

Well, when you have in Western Turkey the same TFR as American Whites have (around 1.7-1.8) and in the East you have the Kurds with 3.5 children per woman, you get it. The Kurds may be not as distinct culturally to the Turks as the immigrants in the West are to the netives, but saying that non-Western countries are spared of that fate of cultural replacement is wrong.

Mind you, I am the complete opposite of a supporter of the current mass migration and destruction of the West.

Turkey is. They have more than 3 million Syrians. They are also increasingly having diverse athletes:

The Romanian pro-natalist poicy mostly led to a huge number of unwanted births which then ended up in orphanages:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770

They probably also had a huge dysgenic effect on the Romanian population. Who is more likely to have more children when you outlaw abortions? The highly educated who are smart enough to contracept, or the lower classes who aren’t?

No, there are definitely smarter policies than that, policies that actually benefit the smarts.

That such measures have not already been taken seems conclusive evidence that the European peoples are ruled by treasonous elites engaged in the destruction of their own people, who are being replaced very rapidly by people from elsewhere, Asia and the Middle East now, but increasingly in the future from Africa.

I disagree, and for the simple reason that this extremely low fertility has spread with ease to several non-European societies as well as those European countries most resistant to the multiculti menace. Even in the Middle East you have countries like Iran or the Western part of Turkey having exactly the same problem.

Doesn’t seem to be enough to lift Miami-Dade’s birth rate over the American average…

In Hungary, the decline is small enough that it can be entirely explained by the decreasing number of potential mothers (currently declining at 1.2% per year).

Meanwhile, gentrification is also doing its job to reduce fertility rates of NYC further and further. If the trend continues, it will soon reach the all time low of 1.4 children per woman the Big Apple had in the 1930s:

From the late 1960s to 1994, the year before Rudy Giuliani tidied up the city, NYCs fertility rate was close to the American average.

That’s why I think overindebtedness is a better proxy for IQ than richness, at least on the regional level. In Germany you have dumb but rich regions as well (Hamburg e.g.) and at the same time poor and smart regions (Saxony), but nevertheless the richer Hamburgers more often run into debt than the poorer Saxons.

Another way of looking at the divide between the clever/high functioning and other regions is to map the eprcentage of overindebted households. Overindebtedness in a household is more often than not a proxy for cognitive functioning. When you are clever enough, you are usually also clever enough to know how much money you can spend and don’t run into high debts.

The South-East / North-West divide is evident and will only get stronger, the more Eastern Germany overcomes its communist heritage and converges with the West GDP wise.

Share of households that are overindebted

I guess the biggest myth around is that the welfare state only serves the poor. But that isn’t really the case in Scandinavia. Many of their policies are actually aimed at the middle class. Think of subsidized childcare. Subsidized childcare mostly encourages births in the middle class and among the highly educated, where two parents are working. So a middle class or upper middle class household which might worry whether they could afford a third child in the US with its extremely high childcare costs don’t have to worry about it in Sweden.

Welfare states also help to break up traditional family arrangements that encourage fertility among the poor and discourages it among the rich. When you can count on the state to support you and you don’t have to rely on your big extended family, you can plan your own life instead of having to follow old conventions, which lowers fertility among the poor. A big reason why gypsies have so many kids is because tehy are still caught in those traditions that expect from girls to marry in their early teens. With a welfare state they could run away from their families more easily and get an education.

Thank’s Anatoly for posting my figures again! 😀

I have to add though, that they are unreliable when it comes to developing countries, as I used education as a proxy for IQ. We all know that in developing countries reaching your potential is harder than it is in developed countries, so education level may be a worse predictor of IQ in developing than in developed countries, especially so in countries like Afghanistan.

* White Births A US Majority Again. (Trump is too late to explain that, but one does wonder to what extent both could be viewed as a recovery of White morale).

It’s not so much a recovery of White morale, than a ecline of morale among non-Whites in the US, whose birth rates continue to decline quicker than that of the Whites, ironically since Obama assumed presidency in 2008.

In addition to what Anatoly and reiner Tor said, in the case of the Baltics tehy actually revised earlier fertility rates upwards after they found out in the census of 2011 that they had fewer people than they initially thought. Inbetween, they have improved a bit on their registration systems and show emigration as it happens. Poland, Romania and Bulagria are the notorious countries having inflated population figures, as even in the census they treat people living abroad as living in the country. According to official Polish statistics, there has been no emigration wave at all in the last two decades, while we all know that at least a million Poles left the country. Consequentially, the officially published TFR of Poland is probably 0.1 children too low.

Migrants indeed show elevated fertility once they arrive, but it is not that high, because there are also adjustments to be made, even when, as a refugee, you simply get your ass coated in sugar.

Does this mean that Asians have a lower fertility rate than Germans proper? 25,000 is just 3.3% of the 740,000 births, whereas the 3 million Turks alone are 3.75% of the total population of 80 million. There must be other Asians, too. Or are they counting Turks as Europeans?

Turks are indeed counted as Europeans in that statistic.

Maybe the Russian baby bust of 2017 is not really “Russian”, but rather a phenomenon in the former Soviet Union in general. The Baltic states have reported similar drops for 2017 so far. Here are my estimates for their TFR of 2017 (2016 in brackets, if the sitiation stays during this year)

Estonia 1.50 (1.59)
Latvia 1.65 (1.72)
Lithuania 1.64 (1.69)
Ukraine 1.44 (1.48)

Anyone has data on Belarus?

However, of all developed countries which have reported some birth numbers for 2017, only Poland can expect to have a strong rise, and Hungary+ Japan can expect to stay where they were in 2016. Declines are also seen in the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Israel, South Korea and Taiwan.

Unfortunately there is no data for 2016 yet, but if one looks at what drove the boomlet until 2015, it was mostly births to Eastern European migrants who came and still come in droves since the opening up of the free movement area to the east.

The 200,000 isn’t far off the mark though, as from the 750,000 claims for asylum in 2016, 125,000 were done by women of reproductive age. When we consider that some hundreds of thoudsands of the 1.5 million who came with the recent wave since 2014 already left again (mostly balkans fake refugees, not mideastern rapefugees), 200,000 women look reasonable.

In Germany there are currently 15 million women of reproductive age, who give birth to around 740,000 babies in 2015, or in other words, 50 births per 1000 women, corresponding to a TFR of 1.5. If we assume that the refugees have a TFR of 3.0 (similar to the level in Syria, but lower than in Iraq and Afghanistan), they will bear 100 births per 1000 women, or in other words, they will have 20,000 children in a typical year, so much less than your estimate of 100,000.

The statistics so far suggest less than that. Births to women of Asian citizenship (including the whole continent from Israel to Indonesia), rose from 20,000 to 25,000 between 2012 and 2015. More interesting of course will be 2016, but, as I said, there is no data yet.

The increase in births, although from a low base, is too much to be just explained by (mostly male, hence not influencing the TFR) refugees. Because of changing family policies to a more Scandinavian model of double-earnership and childcare for small children, higher educated Germans are also having more children again.

The birth rate in Sweden is still declining, which means that the rate for ethnic Swedes is declining even faster.

True, there are several examples of very low fertility before the 1960s. You just need to go back to the 1920s and 30s to see cities such as Oslo, Stockholm, Berlin, Geneva or San Francisco that had fertility rates of close to 1.0 children per woman or even below that. Vienna even went as low as 0.7 children per woman in the early 1930s without modern contraceptives or a one-child-policy.

There are actually several countries with a turnaround since the late 2000s. A sustained rise in fertility can be seen in Eastern Europe and the German speaking countries. Fertility declined after the crisis in the whole Anglosphere, Scandinavia, Northwestern Europe and Southern Europe.

The European ethnicities’ share of the population however already peaked in 1959. After 1959, the migration of Europeans wasn’t enough anymore to offset the natural growth of the Kazakhs. From 1959, the share of Europeans in Kazakhstan declined from 60% to 50% in 1989 despite continuous immigration, while the Kazakhs grew their share from 30% to 40%.

The Russians of course could have kept the very northern stripe of Kazakhstan, but even then there is the risk that it might have turned majority Kazakh in the future, with accompanying political ramifications.

In general it is very dangerous to try to cling on territories when you as a people have already crossed your demographic peak of settler potential.

The Kazakhs have been and still are outbreeding the Russians by a huge margin.

I have also thaought about the possibility that latin America at some point will converge to the ultra low fertility rates currently seen in Spain and Italy, or, in other words, around 1.3 children per woman. In the case of Mexico, which is comparably developed, it can’t be ruled out since there are already countries at the same level of development as Mexico having TFRs below 1.5 (Thailand and Mauritius, which are also comparable in human capital to Mexico).

At least in Mexico, birth registration is improving every year and tehy also make a huge effort registering births that even happened 30 years ago.

In the case of the first possibility, does this mean eventual unsustainable growth? I’m not so sure. These high-fertility groups in the West tend to live in relatively sparsely populated areas (Utah, rural areas, Siberia), where having lots of kids doesn’t change one’s lifestyle and environment too much. There is still plenty of room for more people in those places. The idea of eventual massive overpopulation rests on the assumption that high-breeding Westerners such as Mormons, traditional Christians, etc. would tolerate cramped surroundings resembling rural India or Bangladesh in their packed humanity. I strongly suspect this would not be the case. So in the first scenario, I would expect stabilization, several centuries from now. At that time, places such as the USA might have a billion people, Russia 2 billion or so, Canada a billion (assuming warmer climate for the latter two countries). There would never be a global population of 100 billion people.

Utah is actually fairly densely populated if you discount deserts and mountains. Most of Utahns live in the Wasatch front, a valley that is already half built up. Haredi Jews have 7 children per woman even though they live in densely populated Israel and the dense BosWash corridor.

As I have worked quite a bit with the religiosity and fertility question, to me it appears sound, but also from another viewpoint that only applies to modern and liberal conditions. While industrialization has removed the motivation to have kids because they can be workers and has initiated the demographic transition and fertility decline, the stuff that happened in the 1960s and understandably is viewed very negatively here, has removed or at leats decrease the motivation to have kids because of general ideas in society on how families look like. In today’s societies where this standard is questioned more and more, the only motivation that is left to have kids is because of personal reasons. This means that of course only the breeders are left to have many children. Kind of fascinating how the left basically created its own demographic demise.

I disagree though with the negative link between IQ and fertility to be intrinsic. Research has already shown that more educated people on average intend and want to have more children than less educated people. The problem is that they also face more constraints and are more aware of those constraints of course. Policy can however remove these obstacles. Fertility among native Danes and Belgians e.g. is slightly eugenic. I’d even go as far as assuming that the more intelligent of the breeder group will have a higher reproductive success.

There is already evidence in Israel and some counties in the US for that. As the share of Ultraorthodox Jews increases, fertility rates increase by a tiny bit every year, just because of this composition effect. In the US, Haredi Jews are increasingly heading for the suburbs and are creating towns close to NYC where they are on their own, as their expansion in Brooklyn is increasingly limited due to expensive housing. Rockland county, NY is an interesting example for that. In the early 1980s, the TFR in Rockland county was around 1.7, being below the American average. In the meantime however, due to the rising share of Haredi Jews, it has continuously crept up to 2.8. In just a few decades, NYC will be surrounded by many high fertility suburbs as their expansion continues.

The interesting thing though is that these kind of breeder groups so far have only popped up in the West and nowhere else. No breeders so far in Eastern Asia, Africa, or anywhere else.

I know that map btw. 😉 Had lots of fierce debates with the guy who made it on the demographic prospects of France and my dear own country.