Guest post by Peter Wilson<\/p>\n
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In the last three months, The New York Times<\/a>, the Salt Lake Tribune<\/a>, and The Atlantic<\/a> have all published articles in the last three months about the declining fertility rate among the Latter-day Saints!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The question the articles the New York Times and Salt Lake Tribune want to <\/em>answer is what is going on with Latter-day Saint fertility? <\/em>But because no one knows the Latter-day Saint total fertility rate, they rely on faulty proxies. The New York Times article focuses on Utah\u2019s falling fertility rate, but less than half of Utahns now identify as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.<\/p>\n The Atlantic reports on the church\u2019s massive decline in reported births, but births are only recorded if optional paperwork is filled out in a timely manner by parents and an unpaid volunteer in the local congregation known as \u201cthe clerk.\u201d So the record decline of church-reported births could be driven by decline in church activity or even by an increase in clerk laziness about paperwork!<\/p>\n The Trib\u2019s article relies on lagged measures of fertility that capture how many kids members \u00a0had <\/em>rather than how many they are having. <\/em>For example, The Trib reports on \u201caverage number of children per family that respondents said they were raised in,\u201d which is not a good way to capture a rapidly changing situation.<\/p>\n The gold standard of fertility reporting is the Total Fertility Rate (TFR). TFR represents the average number of children a woman who is currently in her childbearing years <\/em>will have.<\/p>\n In my article at substack, I use\u00a0existing data from the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute and the The Public Religion Research Institute to provide an estimate of the total fertility rate of self-reported Latter-day Saints in Utah.<\/p>\n