Some Demography

In ancient and medieval societies, cities always had higher death rates than the countryside, and only matinained their populations due to immigration. Now urban areas have lower death rates. When did that change? A careful study of French data finds that the switch didn't happen until the 1940s.

And now to the thing demographers mainly talk and tweet about, fertility decline. I am not myself full of doom about declining birth rates, partly because I remember population bomb doomsterism from the 1970s and so don't trust anybody's 50-year projections. But I am tracking the remarkable decline in fertility around the world and wondering what it will mean.

Despite massive government spending to encourage childbirth, Poland now has the lowest total fertility of any EU state, 1.11. The previous front-runner was Spain, which held steady at 1.13.

Meanwhile in the US total fertility is holding steady around 1.62; interesting that white fertility surpassed that of black Americans for the first time ever, 1.534 > 1.529. I would call that a tie, but these are very accurate numbers, and the difference would have been greater except for women born in Haiti. 

Dramatic fertility declines in Latin America over the past decade:

* Argentina 2.25 to 1.25
* Mexico 2.11 to 1.45
* Colombia 1.94 to 1.21
* Chile 1.78 to 0.88

Most of the high birth rate nations in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa, but some demographers have been predicting birth rate collapse in those nations for a decade, it looks to be happening. For example, in Lesotho, total fertility has fallen from 3.5 in 2004 to 2.5 today, and the rate of decrease appears to be accelerating.

And this: "Iran is the greatest example of how superficial traditionalism does nothing. Iran is on the same track regarding metrics like birthrate, GDP, female university attendance, that you would expect if the Shah had never fallen. Average modernizing middle income country." Sometimes, in some ways, stuff like elections matters a lot, but sometimes it seems like everything else is downstream of the basic techno-cultural system.