Demographic facts for students: 2022

Updating a series I started in 2013. Despite what people in my generation were told, it's not true that, "facts are useless in an emergency." Knowing basic facts is the key to detecting bullshit, which thrives in conditions of basic ignorance. In this post I suggest you and your students memorize a small number of…

What’s the story? Family demography at the end of progress

Against a perception of normal modernity that is on some kind of track that we can try to get a handle on while we work around distractions like a pandemic, climate change, diverging and growing inequality, the centrifugal tendency of identities to be fragmenting, and policy incoherence.

Black and White women’s lifetime marriage projections

Projections show 86.2% for White women, and 61.7% for Black women, eventually marrying for a cohort born and living through conditions prevailing in 2019.

Science says: Get married at age Whatever You Want (and these are the odds of divorce)

Divorce odds are lowest for women who marry later, and for people who've been married a long time.

The median mother is 30, TV interview edition

When you look at what has happened since the recession in 2008, the decline in birth was pretty dramatic, but it was all among women under age 35.

What’s the story (with the future of family demography)

Do family demography in light of disasters, inequalities, identities, and policies as messy, incoherent, unpredictable features of society – not bugs in the ointment of modern progress.

Ukraine’s refugee crisis is a demographic crisis, too

If one-half of the 2.2 million refugees are children, that's 1.1 million, which is 13% of the Ukraine's children. This is two weeks in, with no end in sight.

Demographic facts all students should know right now

If anyone tells you that "facts are useless in an emergency," give them a bad grade.

Hard times and falling fertility in the United States

The text and figures of this short paper are below, and it's also available as a PDF on SocArXiv, in more citable form. The Stata code and other materials are up as well, here. It's pretty drafty -- very happy to hear any feedback. Preamble: When Sabrina Tavernise, Claire Cain Miller, Quoctrung Bui and Robert…

Open letter to the Pew Research Center on generation labels

I posted a draft of this, with a discursive preamble, yesterday. To see all the posts on generations, here's the tag. Sign the letter here. We are demographers and other social scientists, writing to urge the Pew Research Center to stop using its generation labels (currently: Silent, Baby Boom, X, Millennial, Z). We appreciate Pew’s…