Lyman Stone
Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.
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Where they publish
Newsletter Lyman Stone His newsletter on fertility, family and population data. Has a feed.
Recent
- Speculation: Longevity Threatens Democracy 17 Sept 2026 It's hard to believe, but dictators used to just die sometimes!
- Some Recent Fertility News 16 Sept 2026 Never gamble against Vietnam, India still can’t say the word, Korea and Japan pivoting?
- Should You Trust the “Total Maternity Rate”? 3 Sept 2026 It does not estimate what many people seem to think it estimates
Show 17 more
- College Will Get More Affordable 2 Sept 2026 It’s getting shockingly easy to get into college, and soon may be surprisingly cheap
- Below-Replacement Fertility Is Not New 24 Aug 2026 We’ve been here before. Definitely in the mid-1300s.
- We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Decline 20 Aug 2026 Jesús Fernández-Villaverde’s recent paper has an empty model that tells us nothing
- You Should Know About Surveys to Write About Surveys 14 Aug 2026 Are men happy to be replaced?
- Somalians and Christians 6 Aug 2026 The problem of tolerance
- Two Reasons Why Daycare Isn't the Answer to Low Fertility 31 Jul 2026 Time is the ultimate limit, and expectations reset on social structures.
- Can Sharing a Surname Save Your Marriage? 30 Jul 2026 Updates and responses to critiques
- We Should Have a Mega-Baby-Bonus 7 Jul 2026 Happy Birthday, America.
- A New Measurement of Maternal Mortality 3 Jun 2026 U.S. maternal mortality is low, and most cases of maternal mortality are of women with rather short counterfactual life expectancies.
- Falling Marriage Caused Turkey's Recent Fertility Decline 26 May 2026 And the digital revolution caused falling marriage. 5G won't zap your balls but it will zap your heart.
- The (Fake) Long Decline of Fertility 19 May 2026 There are three fundamental forces shaping fertility in the long run... and also cell phones
- What Will the Build Now Act Do To States? 15 May 2026 18 states will lose money so that 5 states can gain money-- but 90% of the benefits go to just two cities.
- The Mathematical Insanity of the Build Now Act 14 May 2026 Opaque, bizarre, disproportionate, and sometimes just plain stupid. Congress will probably pass it. It's just a scheme to take money from Texas and California and give it to New York City.
- Do Young People Suck? 23 Apr 2026 An exploration of a theory of marital decline
- The Upshot Is Wrong: Completed Fertility Is Not Stable 13 Apr 2026 Age, Period, and Cohort are a heckuva drug
- Fertility News This Month: March-April 2026 10 Apr 2026 What’s the news been this month?
- Has Homicide Actually Fallen? 9 Apr 2026 The true history of American murder
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 16 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
The global fall in births over the past two centuries is mostly explained by falling child mortality, and that part of the question is settled.
The main cause of falling fertility globally over the last 200 years has been declining child mortality.
We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Decline Said 20 Aug 2026
Calling the fall in birth rates a mystery is not humility but obscurantism: there is already a good causal account of it.
we really do have a good causal model of how to think about fertility decline!
We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Decline Said 20 Aug 2026
The theory that birth rates fall because home life has not caught up with women's opportunities at work is not supported by the data.
within societies, more gender-egalitarian people almost never have more kids than less gender-egalitarian people, and in a panel model, changes in the mismatch rate have no relationship to fertility
We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Decline Said 20 Aug 2026
Show 13 more
Ruling out every measurable cause because none explains all the variation, and putting an unmeasured one in their place, is not an explanation.
He ruled out all the actual, measurable variables because they were an imperfect explanation, and instead offers a vague, diffuse variable, for which he has no measure, and which is not actually included in his model.
We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Decline Said 20 Aug 2026
A model fitted only to trends in its own outcome cannot forecast anything, because it contains no variable anyone could change.
The demand for explanations of low fertility is entirely a demand for variables which will reduce these technical trends to near zero.
We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Decline Said 20 Aug 2026
Turkey's sudden fertility collapse after 2013 was caused by a collapse in marriage, not by married couples choosing fewer children.
It just is marriage. Turkish fertility started falling super fast after 2013 because Turkish marriage rates started falling super fast after 2013.
Falling Marriage Caused Turkey's Recent Fertility Decline Said 26 May 2026
The harm done by low fertility is that people end up with fewer children than they wanted, not that a society runs short of workers.
I don’t see population collapse or lack of workers as the central policy problem: the central policy problem is human happiness, human flourishing, and the freedom to live life well.
Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Cost Said 14 Oct 2025
Immigration is irrelevant to the real problem low fertility creates, because that problem is people having fewer children than they wanted.
immigration is mathematically irrelevant to the central policy problem of low fertility
Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Cost Said 14 Oct 2025
Richer countries have fewer children than poor ones, but within a country a boom raises births and a bust lowers them.
Although the cross-sectional relationship between national income and fertility is negative, the longitudinal relationship between national income and fertility is positive: economic booms create baby booms, economic busts create baby busts.
Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Cost Said 14 Oct 2025
Earning more does not make a woman less likely to have children, except at the very bottom of the income distribution.
the shift from 50th to 99th percentile earnings has no negative effect on women’s fertility, and unearned income for women has a neutral-to-positive effect
Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Cost Said 14 Oct 2025
Something is broken in how people pair up in the West, and that shortage of couples and marriages, not money, is why there are too few children.
The empirical evidence strongly refutes the idea that rising opportunity costs of childbearing are driving low fertility. Declining marriage due to exogenous technology and economics shocks is tanking fertility irrespective of child direct or opportunity costs.
Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Cost Said 14 Oct 2025
There is no long decline in human family size: once child survival is accounted for, the two-century downward trend disappears.
What you can see is that the “long decline” of TFR since the late-19th century is… an illusion! It isn’t real!
There Is No Long Decline in Fertility Said 15 Jul 2025
People aim at a number of surviving children rather than a number of births, so falling child mortality lets births fall without anyone wanting a smaller family.
the key point is that as child mortality declines, live births can be allowed to decline without changing desired family size
There Is No Long Decline in Fertility Said 15 Jul 2025
The total fertility rate is a culturally biased measure, because societies substitute between abortion, infanticide and contraception to reach the same family size.
Thus, TFR as an indicator is cross-culturally biased by social preferences between infanticide and abortion, child neglect and abortion, etc.
There Is No Long Decline in Fertility Said 15 Jul 2025
Evolution gave humans no target number of births, because what mattered historically was keeping children alive rather than producing them.
As a result, natural selection is very unlikely to have produced in humans any predisposition or preference for a certain number of births.
There Is No Long Decline in Fertility Said 15 Jul 2025
Birth rates can move in whatever direction a society chooses, whenever it chooses; there is no ratchet.
Surviving fertility rates can go in whatever direction society wants, whenever it wants.
There Is No Long Decline in Fertility Said 15 Jul 2025
Beliefs others hold too
Something is broken in how people pair up in the West, and that shortage of couples and marriages, not money, is why there are too few children. 3 hold this
The empirical evidence strongly refutes the idea that rising opportunity costs of childbearing are driving low fertility. Declining marriage due to exogenous technology and economics shocks is tanking fertility irrespective of child direct or opportunity costs.
Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Cost Said 14 Oct 2025
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Feed
As its own page →Hiding
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20 August
From one piece We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Decline 5 beliefs · lymanstone.substack.com
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Their words
The demand for explanations of low fertility is entirely a demand for variables which will reduce these technical trends to near zero.
We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com
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Their words
He ruled out all the actual, measurable variables because they were an imperfect explanation, and instead offers a vague, diffuse variable, for which he has no measure, and which is not actually included in his model.
We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com
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Their words
within societies, more gender-egalitarian people almost never have more kids than less gender-egalitarian people, and in a panel model, changes in the mismatch rate have no relationship to fertility
We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com
+ 2 more
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Their words
we really do have a good causal model of how to think about fertility decline!
We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com
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Their words
The main cause of falling fertility globally over the last 200 years has been declining child mortality.
We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com
14 August
6 August
31 July
30 July
7 July
3 June
26 May
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Their words
It just is marriage. Turkish fertility started falling super fast after 2013 because Turkish marriage rates started falling super fast after 2013.
19 May
15 May
14 May
23 April
13 April
10 April
9 April
Nothing matches.
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