I decided to look at the GSS and see if there was anything interesting about fertility of white Americans of various ethnicities. There's a big wide range, with the lowest numbers for national-origin groups dominated by Jews in the United States (e.g., Russia, Lithuania) and southern Europe (Italy, Greece). As it happens, Italy and Greece have low fertility, so I plotted TFR for European nations on the Y axis and CHILDS (the GSS variable) on the X. TFR is not necessarily going to be the same as the mean number of children per woman in the GSS, but it should be close and the rank order will likely stay the same. So is there any trend?
There's no correlation. Actually, there is, 0.19, which means than less than 4% of the variation of Y can be explained by variation in X. In other words, worth mentioning only to dismiss.
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I wonder if the proportion of men who never father a child is less in the US.
In as much as childbearing is a behavior, I have often wondered if people who leave any country have more in common with each other than they do with the society they are leaving. I mean if their personality were a good fit with the culture in their country of origin, why leave? Since immigrants coming to the US to some extent know what kind of system they will be dealing with when they get here, it is possible that they have something in their personalities that is similar. Kind of like chess players from all over the world all have one thing in common; they play chess. To take that one step further why is it that chess appeals to them enough to practice and spend their time attending tournaments? Perhaps there is an underlying facet or facets to their personalities that sort of disposes them to both the game and practice/study of the game and competition.
The graph, as you point out, shows no correlation, so I wonder if the numbers would be different if we were only looking at women who were themselves immigrants. For example, hispanics who immigrate to the US have a higher birth rate than Mexico whose birthrate is down to about 2.0. That is a limited example since hispanicâ Mexican and it would take more data mining to construct a graph which only included immigrant women from certain countries or ethnic groups. Do women or couples who move to the US from Europe have more interest in having more children than their respective ethnic group in either Europe or US? This is really a tangent, but the graph brought to mind this question.
More than dismiss. This is a theme in a lot of conversations. (I was asked about this at a public presentation yesterday, in fact). Nice post, good data, interesting conclusion.
The fertility rates of white Americans probably has more to do with where they are in the country. If an ethnicity is urban and Democrat-voting, its fertility will be quite a bit lower than those who are rural and Republican-voting. Italians, Greeks, and Jews piled into the big cities, with comparatively few in small-town America, which is mainly the domain of Northwestern Europeans such as British, Irish, German, etc... something similar is the case in Australia too! This also explains the Swede-Norwegian dichotomy: Swedes in the upper Midwest are more urban, Norwegians more rural. There's also religion: a lot of Danes are Mormons, and Mennonites and Hutterites are of mainly Swiss and Austrian background. As for the two biggest outliers: most people with background in "Spain" are Hispanics who would be better compared to Mexico I think, and French-Americans with Quebec rather than France. I don't know what's up with Finnish-Americans...