Pretending correlation is causation: pot and babies

Last updated on: August 12, 2016 at 8:51 am by Jane the Actuary

Pretending correlation is causation: pot and babies 2016-08-12T08:51:03-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Two statistics from the past week:

First, a Gallup poll that reported that 13% of Americans reported being current users of pot. That’s up from 7% in 2013 — a startling increase. Has usage always been higher than the 7% and only now, with partial legalization, are users willing to admit to anonymous pollsters that they use the drug? Or has usage increased that dramatically as a result of its legalization and normalization — a normalization that’s been so dramatic that even Malia Obama was willing to be caught on camera smoking pot in public? And how much higher will that 13% climb?

Second, a report that the U.S. fertility rate, which dropped with the recession, is not recovering but continuing to drop further, and is now at a historic low. Here’s a report by ABC. The drop in the birth rate is viewed by the CDC as so extraordinary that they have even moved from annual to quarterly reporting on the issue.

The article further notes that

The report also found a continued decline in birthrates for women ages 15 to 29 and a drop in teen birthrates. The birthrate for those 15 to 19 declined from 22.7 per births per 1,000 women in the first quarter of 2015 to 20.8 births per 1,000 in the first quarter of 2016.

While teen pregnancy is decreasing, the birthrate among women 30 to 44 is increasing, from 95.6 per 1,000 women in the first quarter of 2015 to 97.9 per 1,000 for the same period this year — part of an ongoing trend.

And while teen pregnancy rate decreases are good news, the shift in births to older women is concerning, especially as it concerns women at the upper end of that range or even older ages, because of the increased risk of complications.

Now, you and I could both spend far more time than either of us have, digging into the research into the causes behind the fertility drop. There are easy claims that children are too expensive, and this points to the need for heavily amped up state subsidies for parents. But I doubt it’s really gotten financially more difficult than in the past, especially the recent past. I haven’t seen any good numbers on whether it’s the number of unplanned pregnancies that are shrinking, or the numbers of planned pregnancies — and vaguely remember reading an article or two that disputed the impact of Obamacare’s free contraception.

So are young people too busy getting stoned to make babies? Or, more likely, are both these data points coming from an underlying cultural shift?

image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWoman_smoking_marijauana.jpg; By ashton (Flickr: When in Amsterdam…) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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