LDS Births Low and Dropping, 34 YtSK.

As both Zen and Bruce Charlton have pointed out here, having low birth rates is bad but having low birth rates that are dropping is worse.

It’s bad if your expenses exceed your income.  Its worse if every year your income gets smaller and your expenses get larger.

Here’s the bottom line.  Based on recent trends, the really low American birth rates are declining by about 1.5% per year.  Based on recent trends, the low LDS birth rates are declining by 3.43% per year.

At these rates of decline, it will take America 52  years to get to the catastrophically low unprecedented birthrates of South Korea.  YtSK=52.  For the LDS, 34 years.  YtSK=34.

However, there is some small glimmer of hope in the LDS numbers for the last couple of years.

(Figures are based on limited data, should be treated as ballpark and directional only).

From here.  There was another drop in 2023.  The number of births per is now 54.4.

The  implication is that every year more people look around and decide to have less children, or no children.

I don’t believe we will continue to decline at the same rate.  It will slow once we catch up (catch down?) to the Gentile population.  The gospel is true and beautiful but for many LDS in First World countries the fruits of the gospel are increasingly only in areas that are unmeasurable and intangible.

Analysis below for those who are interested.

American birth rates

The beginning of the recent downward trend is in 2007.  There is a steep drop until 2011, then a period of moderation, followed by a steeper drop last year.  Depending on whether you start the analysis in 2007 or 2011, and whether you end in 2022 or 2023, the rate of decline goes from 1.1% (2011-2022) to 1.5% (2007-2023).  I just selected the endpoints, giving me the figure of 1.5%.  In other words,  if you decrease the American birth rate by 1.5% every year starting in 2007, in 2023 you will arrive at a number that is the same as the actual 2023 American birth rate.

I got the YtSK figure by taking the current American crude birth rate (11/1000) and seeing how many years I would have to reduce it by 1.5%/year to reach the South Korean crude birth rate (5/1000).

LDS birth rates

All figures are from the LDS Statistical report which allows me to calculate a crude birth rate (births per 1000).  However, there is quite a bit of reason to believe that the numbers reported through 2007 are actually children of record being baptized.  Some of the statistical reports from that time period explicitly label it as children of record being baptized (e.g.) and those that don’t have consistent numbers with those that do.  See here for more discussion of that point.  In the graph below that explains the huge jump from 2007 to 2008.  It’s why I decided to start with 2008 in my analysis.

I then used the same method as before.  The 15th root of the 2023 birth rate divided by 2008 birth rate gives a 3.45% drop every year.  In other words, if you take the 2008 birth rate and decrease it by 3.43% per year by 2023 you get the actual LDS birth rate number for that year.  To calculate the YtSK I assumed that our activity rate is 1/3, so I tripled the 5.42 number to 16.62 then worked out how many years at 3.43% decline it would take to get to the South Korean number of 5.

The glimmer of good news is that after the huge Covid drop you can see in the graph, the rate of decline has slowed and even reversed a bit.  From 2008 to 2019 we actually declined by 4.22% per year.  From 2022 to last year, we actually increased by 1.03%.  May that trend continue.  Today’s children are today’s happiness and tomorrow’s temple patrons, missionaries, and happy families.  A few words of caution: its hard to tell where the growth is occurring, for those of us in First World countries we should not assume that our people here aren’t continuing to dwindle;  it’s just one year; and at the 1.03% rate to reach a healthy birth rate of 24-30 per 1,000 active members (8-10 per every 1,000 nominal members) would take a minimum of 38 years.

Here’s some interesting historical data I came across in my research.

that 1965-1980 ability to resist US trends is an amazing accomplishment.