Beating the Doom Drum

I have one possible explanation for Utah on this subject: we have had a huge, massive influx of young, rich people moving from Silicon Valley to Silicon Slopes. They are uninterested in religion, here for the hedonism, and obnoxiously rude to the local populace, especially in places like my hometown, which used to be a farming community before developers started buying up all the prime farmland to put in massive, shoddy houses for the commuters.

It’s not totally that the locals are having less children; one contributing factor is that they’re now far outnumbered (and displaced by) the new populace fleeing Babylon but bringing all its vices with them. The never-married-never-will-be crowd and the DINKS.

Anecdotally, the youngish families in my neighborhood have 3-8 children, especially the active members of my home stake.

Incidentally, that corridor where the fertility rate declined the most is where all the Californians flee when their homes get burned down. There are also a huge amount of people moving to my town from NYC for some reason.

This is not an excuse, btw, just one possible explanation for the alarming drop.

Doing my best to boost those utah fertility rates

Examining E.C.’s idea, Utah’s population between 2005 and 2022 grew 38% from 2.46 million to 3.39 million during the same period that the birth rate declined 34%. With the caveat that the denominator for birth rate is women 15-44 years old, not the entire population, if that denominator increased 38% like the overall population, then the absolute number of births in 2022 was 9% lower than the number of births in 2005.

1.38 * (1-0.34) = 0.91