European births, Q1 2023 update
Genesis 45:6
Most European countries on my list have published monthly births figures for the first quarter of 2023 by now, so it is time for an update. Here is the full record:
The countries included are Germany, France, Switzerland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Israel, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.
Austria, England & Wales and Norway do not seem to publish monthly data, or only much later. They are included in the 2022 data but not in the 2023 data (Austria has published a cumulative figure for the first quarter of 2023). Some data on Bulgaria (until Q3 2022) and Ireland (only data until the end of 2022, only by quarter) and a few other countries are in the file as well. Be careful with the Switzerland data; monthly figures seem to be incomplete, even for 2022 (I excpect final figures for 2022 by the end of June).
Now that we have more than one year to study, my cumulative presentation is less instructive. Instead, I plotted monthly births against the 2017-2020 median (in the Excel file, “vs_4”; “vs_5” means 2017-2021 median), and computed quantiles of the resulting distributions of quotients:
For example, in January of 2021 around half of the countries in the sample saw numbers of births below around 94% of the 2017-2020 median for January, and the other half above 94%. For around 80% of the countries (90% minus 10%, light grey), the numbers of births fell between 80% and 100% of that median value.
Altogether, 2021 was not that bad. Around half of the countries saw more births than in the preceding years, and around half saw fewer births - a completely unremarkable year. This changed right in the beginning of 2022. The median dropped to around 93%, and it stayed there throughout the year. The first months of 2023 seem to be even worse, below 90% of the 2017-2020 median (April is bad as well, as far as figures are available, see the Excel file). Of course, some of the figures might be preliminary; we will see as the year progresses.
Note also that there do not seem to be compensatory effects in the data. For all but one country (Portugal), 2022 was worse than 2021, and for all but two countries (Denmark and, again, Portugal), 2023 so far has been worse than 2022 (see columns AH to AL on the “months_vs_4” sheet).
Some stories are rather depressing. Think of Lithuania, for example. On the one hand, the country seems to do well regarding digitization, being the first to have published figures for May. On the other hand, what is the future of a country with 20,000 births per year, and 40,000 deaths?
Feel free to do your own analysis on the data. I would also be grateful if you could point me to additional data sources.
Genesis 4:5-6? A fallen countenance.
El Gato Malo posted
https://open.substack.com/pub/boriquagato/p/wildfires-bad-policy-is-ensuring?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=rp6n5
In this he has two interesting charts. The first is acres of forest burned in the US over the past 25 years and it clearly shows that global warming is causing more forest fires. The second chart is acres burned in the US over the last 125 years. And this chart shows how everyone was fooled by the first chart because when you look over a longer time period you see more excursions from 'normal'.
So, given this idea of zooming out, have you looked at other time periods to compare them with your 'normal' years? This might not make sense to do because society is different today than say 30 years ago.
But I wonder if we are seeing what we 'expect' to see in this data.
Just a thought.