Cultural Convergence in Fertility Statistics
by David Archibald
25 July 2025
Our country is maintained by the stories of our culture. It is evident that our national narrative has gone bad. This article was inspired by a graphic from the Financial Times, of the total fertility rate of some Latin American countries:
South American fertility has been falling much faster than predicted by pundits. The total fertility rate is the average number of children per female of a country over her lifetime. It is said a country’s population will hold steady at a total fertility rate of 2.1. At a total fertility rate of 1.5, a country’s population will fall by 1.1% per annum, for a 29% decline over 30 years. At a total fertility rate of 1.0, a country’s population will fall by 2.4% per annum, for a 52% decline over 30 years. The populations of South Korea and Japan, with total fertility rates of 0.7 and 0.87 respectively, are shrinking fast. At that rate, South Korea’s population will halve every 19 years.
Back to South America. The countries in the graph above were plotted on one chart to see if covid has had an effect on fertility:
It appears that covid had an marked effect in Ecuador, Mexico and Chile, with steep declines from 2022 to 2023. What is more interesting is that all these countries had been in a shallow dive up until about 2017 when the decline in fertility became steeper. Something had happened in their culture prior to covid. Following is what is happening in Australia and New Zealand:
Australia and New Zealand have maintained their shallow glide slope towards oblivion.
In China, the signal is big:
China’s population is now halving every 30 years. We don’t know how much of that decline is due to Xi’s mismanagement of the economy and how much is due to covid’s impact on fertility. China is now an unhappy place. Once their population falls to 600 million, they could feed themselves a balanced diet from what is grown in the country.
It may be that a total fertility rate well in excess of 2.1 is needed to maintain a stable population. The 0.1 in that 2.1 is 4.7%, which is supposed to make up for accidents before people have had time to reproduce. But homosexuals make up 1.4% of the male population and 0.8% of the females, leaving only a 3% margin for accidents. A great chunk of the population is too mentally unwell to be having children, and that proportion has been rising since 2010:
The upper, orange line is for females; the blue line is for males. The inflection point in 2017, evident in the South American total fertility rates, is also evident here. Two thirds of American female high school students are now no longer fun to be around.
This figure shows that the percentage of the US population with a major depressive episode in the past year:
Depression in the younger age groups is up three-fold since 2011. Depressed people can’t be expected to be thinking of family formation. If the depressed proportion of the population settles down at 20%, that means that maintaining a stable population would require the women bearing children to have at least 2.6 of them on average.
But there is also good news in the statistics. Lefties have a much higher rate of mental illness than conservatives. This graph shows the percentage, by political persuasion, answering yes to the question “Has a doctor or healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition?”:
Young female lefties are three times as likely to be declared mentally ill as young female conservatives. That ratio also holds in the males. As political persuasion is heritable, this means that our population will become more conservative, even as the population shrinks. Joy!
Covid Addendum
While the evidence for a covid effect in fertility statistics is still equivocal, there is a strong signal in UK National Health Service statistics — that is, in the health of their staff. This graph shows staff sick days from April 2009 to August 2024:
Staff averaged four sick days per annum up to 2019. Sick days are now 25% higher. This is the beginning of an uptrend because organ damage from covid is cumulative. This graph shows annualised deaths of National Health Service staff from 2011 to 2024:
Deaths in service are now 50% higher. That will also continue to rise. AI and further automation have come along just in time because we will be seeing a staff shortage similar to the effect of the Black Death on medieval labour hire rates.
What is needed is a study of long covid patients measuring both covid viral load and lymphocyte levels over a year.
David Archibald is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia.