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BACKGROUNDHuman development is historically associated with fertility declines. However, demographic paradigms disagree about whether that relationship should hold at very high levels of development. Using data through the late 2000s, Billari (2009, 2011) found that very high national levels of the Human Development Index (HDI) were associated with increasing total fertility rates (TFRs), at least at high levels of gender parity.
OBJECTIVEThis paper seeks to update that finding and to introduce the Human Life Indicator (HLI) as a novel measure of development within this debate.
RESULTSAmong the countries that reached HDI 0.8 before 2010 (n = 40), there is no clear relationship between changes in the HDI and the TFR at HDI > 0.8 through 2018. Conditioning on high levels of gender parity does not change this finding. This negative result is closely tied to the sharp declines in fertility seen in most highly developed countries since 2010 -a median decline of 0.125 in tempo-adjusted TFR through the most recent available year (n = 23). Furthermore, the longer historical coverage of the HLI shows that at all high levels of development, at least one country has exhibited almost every level of TFR between 1.2 and 2.0.
CONCLUSIONSFertility declines over the last decade mean that the previous suggestion that very high levels of development and gender equality foster fertility increases is no longer supported on the national level.
Recent research has suggested that the social distancing mandates introduced in the United States during the main waves of the 1918–20 influenza pandemic caused an increase in suicide rates. However, that finding relies on poor-quality, temporally mismatched data and has signs of omitted variable bias. Similarly, a long-standing finding that American suicide rates in 1918–20 were also boosted by the influenza mortality of the time has gone unquestioned in the literature, despite the original research admitting its risk of ecological fallacy. Using higher-powered mortality data, I cast doubt on both findings by analyzing the experiences of the pandemic in 43 of the largest American cities of the time. In line with some populations’ experiences of COVID-19, I report tentative evidence that social distancing mandates during the 1918–20 pandemic may have been associated with decreased suicide rates. Larger, cross-national investigations of the effects of historical pandemics and social distancing mandates on mental health and suicide are needed.
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