Activity Rate versus Birth Rate

Here’s a follow up to yesterday’s 2023 LDS Birth Update.

Like Mansfield pointed out, the summary of our data and rough analytical methods is either we have comically low activity rates, comically low birth rates, or a combination of low activity and low birth rates.

My guess is that our actual TFR is around 2.4 – 2.7, since we seem to track Gentile TFR with a plus one.

Let’s see what that implies for our activity rates as a rough and ready plausibility check.

Although TFR doesn’t correlate extremely well with births per 1000 because population pyramids aren’t all uniform, my pretty rough method is going to be to look at the births per 1000 of countries that have TFRs of 2.4 – 2.7.  That should at least give us a ballpark.

The upper range of 22 births per 1000 suggests that with 93,594 children born of record last year, our semi-active population (active + connected enough to the church to get a kid blessed) is 4.3 million.

The lower range of 14 births per 1000 suggests a semi-active population of 6.7 million.

The middle figure of 18 births per 1000 suggests a semi-active population of 5.2 million.

If folks normally estimate our activity rate is somewhere around 15-30%, as Zen points out, lets calculate semi-activity rates as a further plausibility check.  Granted, semi-activity isn’t the same as activity, but we think they would at least be within shouting distance of each other.

The hypothesis that we have quite low but still slightly above replacement TFR of 2.4-2.6, along with a semi-active membership somewhere in the 4-7 million range seems to be plausible.

It is also possible with increased membership in Africa in particular that our semi-activity rates are even lower but that our worldwide birthrates are higher.