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.

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An interesting article I was linked recently about Israeli TFR (decent) has led to some speculative, preliminary thoughts on why the LDS TFR is what it is (bad).

First of all, don’t just accept everything the article says, at least when applied to non-Israeli fertility.  I’m just using it as a jumping off point to look at various explanations folks have offered for low fertility and see whether they apply to us.  This is more an attempt it is to find possible causes than it is a call for action.  Just because something is a root cause doesn’t inherently mean that it ought to be fixed or can be fixed.

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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.

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“Due to an aging population, non-Hispanic whites last year recorded more deaths than births.” (link)