My first substack posts in July last year looked at the issue of the dramatic fall in wedding rates in 2020-21 and a possible connection with the dramatic fall in birth rates in 2022:
Interesting that you settled on a 43 week lag correlation - I found it very difficult to find data on the average time between first births and marriage. (Data on the average time between subsequent births and first births is more readily available. As is data on the proportion of live births which are a mother's first, second, third etc child.)
Oh wow, I hadn't seen that before. This deserves more attention, whatever the reasons are. I personally have a hunch that the vast majority of the decline can be explained by the agitation campaign and the successive decline in new relationships. I have a number of friends who have practically removed themselves from society, some of whom are still suicidal.
So I should have probably said this. When Christian and I had the idea for marriages, we thought of it as an indicator of newly formed relationships, a "romance indicator" if you will.
I expect that a decline in marriages runs parallel to a decline in newly formed romantic relationships.
If you look at the last year in the first picture, Germany 2022, you can see easily see how I determined the lag. I first looked at monthly data and figured it was somewhere between 10 and 11 months. After stretching to weekly intervals it became clear the delay is 43 on average in Germany.
Of course! Your posts must have found a place in the subconscious regions of my brain; that's why I suddenly thought of marriages. I just re-read the posts, and they have aged really well. Until November 2022 (I hope destatis releases data for the whole of 2022 soon) we had drops of 5.9%, 8.2% and 4.2% in first, second, and third+ children.
There´s a big difference in vaccination rates between West and East Germany. So you would expect less negative excess in East Germany. But that clearly isn´t the case. I wonder whether the confounder might be the proportion of immigrant young women. In West Germany it approaches 40% in some states whereas in the East it is much lower. On the other hand the proportion of vaccinated is much lower among immigrants. So maybe the number of immigrants in the West offsets the lower vaccination rate in the East? Mr. Spieker, has that thought occured to you and do you have any idea how to tease out these numbers?
Destatis has already pointed to the dynamic of the preexisting different demographics in East Germany leading to a long term trend of currently lower birthrates in East Germany - the current discrepancy is (partially) attributable to a generation of East Germans that left after reunification in1989 and a dramatic drop in East German births directly after reunification (those missing East German babies from 1990 would be ~32 now).
Good point, yes. Immigration has been off the charts. The thought has occurred, but I haven't put my thoughts into order for lack of better words.
I am not sure how immigration plays into this. I will have to look at more data.
I think the German government releases data stratified by nationality as well, so I might have to look into that next. Not sure yet.
This was more or less just a visualization of the data. I was gonna mark the article as "Just The Charts", but ended up running a few regressions on top.
I am an avid antivaxxer and self not a total German. The Poles in my catholic parish didn´t get the vaxx, nor did the Russian-Germans I know and finally among the Turks and Arabs scepticism was very widespread as well. It is a well known fact that in these circles fake vaxx certificates were to be had for on average 200€. Hope you find some way to tease out the data. Possibly a comparison between Schleswig Holstein and Hamburg would work. Both are highly vaxxed but the population of Schleswig Holstein has much less immigrants and a higher average age (immigrants skew younger).
Hi Fabian, thanks for the post, I'm still not sure what this means.
In demography, almost everything is age-dependent. East-west comparisons often ignore the confounder that populations in eastern states of Germany are the oldest. Because age and vaccination rate are related, one cannot decide whether there is an age influence or a vaccination influence.
Very good point. You're suggesting there might bea Simpsons paradox, right? When we stratify vaccination data by age we might see the correlation flip?
Alas I don't think the required data is available.
We really need the vaccination data from the Bundesdruckerei GmbH. They don't answer to FOIA requests though because they're a private company.
As far as I know, the classical Simpson paradox means a falsification of correlations when two groups are aggregated to one group.
It is probably simpler here. One has to use the vaccination rates in the fertile age group.
Presumably, such figures do not exist for Germany. I still remember that the Ministry of Health was unable to provide information on vaccination rates in response to a parliamentary question in the Bundestag. Therefore, it is questionable whether the current figures are correct.
The data do exist, but they are in possession of private companies in most places.
These same companies probably also know almost exactly how many people died after their vaccination.
For all administered doses the Bundesdruckerei has:
- passport number
- address
- age
- gender
- dose series
- batch id
- date of administration
They are just not giving it to the RKI. Well they are preparing an anonymized dataset to the RKI, but the RKI is only releasing snapshots with very little information, not even historical vaccination rates.
There really is no way around sueing the Bundesdruckerei for these data if we want to have clarity.
Just another idea. Anyone taking the injection had to sign an agreement protocol. So my question is, who archived these protocols? Of course it would be a work of some yrs to go through these papers.
An analyst should know that Aggregating 1 child per family average Germans with 6 child per family migrants will confound the birth rate data.
Aggregating datasets that you shouldn't is an old trick - famous as a foundation for Keynesian PseudoEconomics. It is used to hide things.
As a German, I'm not interested at all in the aggregate indicators for "people in Germany", but the data for *my* People. Does the 'German' government break down the numbers by ethnic Germans vs non? A GERMAN government would.
A neutral, scientific analyst would know that squashing together the 85+% vaxxed demographic with the 85+% unvaxxed obscures the real story playing out in Germany and Europe.
Hi Fabian,
My first substack posts in July last year looked at the issue of the dramatic fall in wedding rates in 2020-21 and a possible connection with the dramatic fall in birth rates in 2022:
https://lostintranslations.substack.com/p/why-is-there-a-sudden-drop-in-german
Interesting that you settled on a 43 week lag correlation - I found it very difficult to find data on the average time between first births and marriage. (Data on the average time between subsequent births and first births is more readily available. As is data on the proportion of live births which are a mother's first, second, third etc child.)
Oh wow, I hadn't seen that before. This deserves more attention, whatever the reasons are. I personally have a hunch that the vast majority of the decline can be explained by the agitation campaign and the successive decline in new relationships. I have a number of friends who have practically removed themselves from society, some of whom are still suicidal.
So I should have probably said this. When Christian and I had the idea for marriages, we thought of it as an indicator of newly formed relationships, a "romance indicator" if you will.
I expect that a decline in marriages runs parallel to a decline in newly formed romantic relationships.
If you look at the last year in the first picture, Germany 2022, you can see easily see how I determined the lag. I first looked at monthly data and figured it was somewhere between 10 and 11 months. After stretching to weekly intervals it became clear the delay is 43 on average in Germany.
Of course! Your posts must have found a place in the subconscious regions of my brain; that's why I suddenly thought of marriages. I just re-read the posts, and they have aged really well. Until November 2022 (I hope destatis releases data for the whole of 2022 soon) we had drops of 5.9%, 8.2% and 4.2% in first, second, and third+ children.
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Geburten/geburten-aktuell.html
There´s a big difference in vaccination rates between West and East Germany. So you would expect less negative excess in East Germany. But that clearly isn´t the case. I wonder whether the confounder might be the proportion of immigrant young women. In West Germany it approaches 40% in some states whereas in the East it is much lower. On the other hand the proportion of vaccinated is much lower among immigrants. So maybe the number of immigrants in the West offsets the lower vaccination rate in the East? Mr. Spieker, has that thought occured to you and do you have any idea how to tease out these numbers?
Destatis has already pointed to the dynamic of the preexisting different demographics in East Germany leading to a long term trend of currently lower birthrates in East Germany - the current discrepancy is (partially) attributable to a generation of East Germans that left after reunification in1989 and a dramatic drop in East German births directly after reunification (those missing East German babies from 1990 would be ~32 now).
Good point, yes. Immigration has been off the charts. The thought has occurred, but I haven't put my thoughts into order for lack of better words.
I am not sure how immigration plays into this. I will have to look at more data.
I think the German government releases data stratified by nationality as well, so I might have to look into that next. Not sure yet.
This was more or less just a visualization of the data. I was gonna mark the article as "Just The Charts", but ended up running a few regressions on top.
I am an avid antivaxxer and self not a total German. The Poles in my catholic parish didn´t get the vaxx, nor did the Russian-Germans I know and finally among the Turks and Arabs scepticism was very widespread as well. It is a well known fact that in these circles fake vaxx certificates were to be had for on average 200€. Hope you find some way to tease out the data. Possibly a comparison between Schleswig Holstein and Hamburg would work. Both are highly vaxxed but the population of Schleswig Holstein has much less immigrants and a higher average age (immigrants skew younger).
Yeah you are absolutely right. Our immigrants are the last people wise enough not to trust the industry or government.
Not a bad idea comparing Hamburg and SH. I'm from Pinneberg by the way ;)
Thank you VERY MUCH
I will read this essay and think before answer .
If we understand why people obey so easily we can find the solution.
The history repeats since the dawn of time .
You might find this interesting:
http://www.ditext.com/strauss/lib2.html
Hi Fabian, thanks for the post, I'm still not sure what this means.
In demography, almost everything is age-dependent. East-west comparisons often ignore the confounder that populations in eastern states of Germany are the oldest. Because age and vaccination rate are related, one cannot decide whether there is an age influence or a vaccination influence.
Very good point. You're suggesting there might bea Simpsons paradox, right? When we stratify vaccination data by age we might see the correlation flip?
Alas I don't think the required data is available.
We really need the vaccination data from the Bundesdruckerei GmbH. They don't answer to FOIA requests though because they're a private company.
As far as I know, the classical Simpson paradox means a falsification of correlations when two groups are aggregated to one group.
It is probably simpler here. One has to use the vaccination rates in the fertile age group.
Presumably, such figures do not exist for Germany. I still remember that the Ministry of Health was unable to provide information on vaccination rates in response to a parliamentary question in the Bundestag. Therefore, it is questionable whether the current figures are correct.
The data do exist, but they are in possession of private companies in most places.
These same companies probably also know almost exactly how many people died after their vaccination.
For all administered doses the Bundesdruckerei has:
- passport number
- address
- age
- gender
- dose series
- batch id
- date of administration
They are just not giving it to the RKI. Well they are preparing an anonymized dataset to the RKI, but the RKI is only releasing snapshots with very little information, not even historical vaccination rates.
There really is no way around sueing the Bundesdruckerei for these data if we want to have clarity.
Just another idea. Anyone taking the injection had to sign an agreement protocol. So my question is, who archived these protocols? Of course it would be a work of some yrs to go through these papers.
That's an excellent thought. Thank you.
At least the RKI has the vaccination rates for the age group 18-60 for each federal state. Perhaps you can use these as a substitute.
These are vaccination rates by place of residence, not vaccinations by place of vaccination right?
Sorry, don't know. Aren't these rates nearly congruent?
The love is gone definitely from our world.
But not indefinitely. :)
Industry and governments literally drove people mad and not for the first time either.
Very interesting indeed. Thanks Fabian
You're welcome.
An analyst should know that Aggregating 1 child per family average Germans with 6 child per family migrants will confound the birth rate data.
Aggregating datasets that you shouldn't is an old trick - famous as a foundation for Keynesian PseudoEconomics. It is used to hide things.
As a German, I'm not interested at all in the aggregate indicators for "people in Germany", but the data for *my* People. Does the 'German' government break down the numbers by ethnic Germans vs non? A GERMAN government would.
A neutral, scientific analyst would know that squashing together the 85+% vaxxed demographic with the 85+% unvaxxed obscures the real story playing out in Germany and Europe.