December 15, 2011

Good news that nobody knows

The black teenage birthrate has fallen sharply since the annus horribilis of 1991. Back at the peak of the Crack Era, 86 of every 1000 black girls from 15 to 17 gave birth, versus only 32 in 2009:

It's important, however, to note that the 1991 number represented a spike in teen fertility among blacks, up over the 1980s and well above the late 1990s. Nobody seems to know why that happened. One guess is that black girls in 1991 found crack dealers sexy, but changed their minds rather quickly. Another is that the FDA's approval of the Depo-Provera shot in 1992 was the turning point. The welfare cutbacks of the mid-1990s certainly played a role. 

Among 18-19 year olds, the fall hasn't been quite as steep:
The subprime bubble of the middle of the last decade appears to have inflated Hispanic teen fertility -- thus the sharp drop among Hispanics from 2007 to 2009.

Nobody these days seems to know anything about fertility trends, although it's hard to think of anything more important.

36 comments:

Truth said...

Hitch is dead at 62!

Hey, what was the "Turning Point"?

G.L.Piggy said...

We often think of technology and social networks as being corrupting, but perhaps the increased use of texting, sexting, and Facebook have led to a decrease in face-to-face hook ups.

I get the sense looking around some of the younger people I work with, that hook-up culture is not what it used to be. Some will disagree with me on that though.

Steve Sailer said...

I suspect the crime decline of the last half decade or so has something to do with better communications technology. Everything goes on your permanent record now, so it's hard to get a phony alibi to stand up. What's the point of being a thug if you can't brag about it on Myspace?

Anonymous said...

I have generally been anti-illegitimacy of any race, but now I feel that it's ok for white girls to have illegitimate white babies if the alternative is for whites not to breed at all.

Anonymous said...

Steve, great news for your friend!

Anonymous said...

Good news!

Chicago white market on the right path to recovery.

Anonymous said...

Rap in a nutshell.

Hump ma ho,
Thump u mo.

Anonymous said...

Maybe more black teens are having sex with white teens.
More black men are in jail.

Anonymous said...

Spread of section 8 housing may have lowered the concentration of young black people in a single community.
But it may have rates of interracial teenage pregnancy rates.

Rainforest Giant said...

Something that most of your readers probably don't know is that meth can make someone very horny. Worse it seems to drop inhibitions more than alcohol.

We got a spike in weird sex cases after meth showed up that we never got with other drugs.

Rainforest Giant said...

Sorry Steve,

But the 'Myspace' type cases are as rare as they are visible. They're like the US drone that got safely landed in Iran.

You heard about that one but not all the others that didn't get handed over to the mullahs, Chinese and Russians.

Most criminals quit committing crimes because they are in jail, dead, or too old to run from the cops. A minority quit committing crimes because they straighten up and fly right, get a job, etc.

Most crimes are solved not by parsing Myspace or lurking around surveillance cams waiting for someone to snatch a purse. They get solved because in small areas, cops know who did it and either catch them in the act next time or lean on their 'friends' to give them up. In big areas, somebody always snitches. The rest of the evidence just confirms what they already know.

Great Britain maybe with its bijillion cameras might have some crime solved that way. We might go that way in ten years or so. But for now we are still at the snitch stage of law enforcement. A model that has worked well for over a hundred years (except for time we treated criminals like psychology cases). We're still dealing with the fallout from the sixties and seventies.

Jeff W. said...

I am sure that some of the top strategists of the Democratic party are very much aware of the black birth rate. That is one reason why they are doubling down on immigration.

One of their latest tactics is to give free housing to immigrants by giving them foreclosed Fannie/Freddie-owned houses. The immigrants are described in this article as "refugees," but perhaps the program can soon be expanded to include all illegals.

http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2011/12/homesteading_plan_to_put_refug.html

The $50,000 "kicked in" by Fannie Mae for repairs actually comes from Ben Bernanke's magic printing press, as Fannie is several trillion dollars in the red.

David Davenport said...

What's the point of being a thug if you can't brag about it on Myspace?

Gangs turn to Facebook to plan, recruit
2:36 PM, Dec. 13, 2011

As Metro [Nashville] police investigated the murder of Jeremy Green, they took to the streets, interviewed witnesses and turned to a different source that is quickly becoming routine in gang investigations: Facebook.

As social media gains prominence in everyday life, police are finding it a useful tool for tracking criminals’ activities. Many, particularly gang members, are wont to publish photos of themselves holding money, guns and drugs. But while criminals haven’t been shy about publishing their exploits for the Internet to see, authorities here and across the nation are seeing gangs in particular begin to use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to organize their activities and recruit new members.
...

Green was murdered Jan. 29 in what police suspect was a robbery. Police have arrested three suspected members of the 5 Deuce Hoover Crips, in part using information obtained from the Facebook page of Jose Hall, who is charged with first-degree murder. Hall’s attorney could not be reached for comment.

A detective wrote in a search warrant that Hall’s associates may have been using Facebook, “in an effort to plot, coerce and/or fabricate any evidence or witnesses as it relates to this investigation.” They were particularly worried that it was being used to retaliate against Victor Johnson, who was also arrested in the murder but was thought by gang members to have been a snitch in the case.

Police and prosecutors say that gangs are also using social media as a recruiting
tool...


Gangs turn to Facebook to plan, recruit

Ed said...

I think "G.L. Piggy" and Steve both make good points in the above comments. Technology and social networks have put urban populations in a version of Bentham's panopticon (sp?) where everyone is being watched all the time. They also seem to have decreased spontaneity in the remaining face to face social encounters.

I hate this, but it would be dishonest to say that there weren't some good effects.

And Hitchen's death deserves its own blog post.

Anonymous said...

Interesting. The Hispanic rate is now higher then the black. So much for Bush and his "family values" crapola.

Anonymous said...

I have generally been anti-illegitimacy of any race, but now I feel that it's ok for white girls to have illegitimate white babies if the alternative is for whites not to breed at all.


BINGO!!!

We have a winner.

Being a Paleocon & pro-life & whatnot, if it were my daughter, then all I would care about was that my grandchild not get murdered in an abortuary.

Beyond that, I would love to become a grandfather at as young an age as possible.

Kylie said...

"Most criminals quit committing crimes because they are in jail, dead, or too old to run from the cops. A minority quit committing crimes because they straighten up and fly right, get a job, etc."

In other words, most criminals don't stop. They have to be stopped.

No surprise there.

That whole "blank slate" crowd has a lot to answer for.

agnostic said...

The entire West has seen falling teen birth rates over the past 20 years, after the same brief blip in the late '80s / early '90s. Graph halfway down the screen:

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/05/1/gr050107.html

So the cause must apply to the entire West, not something unique to us. Canada's rate dropped faster than other countries did:

http://www.canada.com/health/Canadian+teen+pregnancy+rate+dropping+faster+that+Sweden+England/3077442/story.html

There is no explaining a decrease without also explaining an increase. If a drop in A is caused by a drop in B, then a surge in A should be caused by a surge in B. Yet everybody only tries to explain a one-way trend, which is meaningless because any other variable that moved in a steady direction over that time can be pointed to.

Here is the full data back to 1940 when the government began collecting stats:

http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/1-usteenbirthr.jpg

If that pic doesn't work, there's a rise from 1940 to an all-time peak in 1957 (that kind of music just soothes the soul). It plummets steadily from then until the early '80s. There's a swing upward from the mid-'80s through the early '90s, and a decline since then.

None of the causes for the recent decline also explain the decline from the late '50s through the early '80s. And flipping the cause around doesn't explain the rise from the early '40s through 1957, or the brief swing from the later half of the '80s and early '90s.

In general, trying to explain fertility changes is a black hole. The only way people do so is by restricting the time period so narrowly that their cause is causal, ignoring the fact that zooming out even a little bit shows that their cause is unrelated to fertility changes.

The more productive way to look at fertility changes is to take those changes as given, coming from who knows where (exogenous), and looking at how a younger vs. older population will look and behave. Mortality strips off layers of the age pyramid more or less evenly, but fertility pumps up the bottom half disproportionately.

agnostic said...

On a historical note, there was no social media in the early-mid 1990s. Facebook, MySpace, and 90% of teenagers owning cell phones is more like the mid-2000s.

Back in 1994, there was only those boring chat rooms on AOL, and only some teenagers lived in a house with AOL. I had to hang out at my friend's house before we got AOL in 1996 or so.

Even the instant message feature wasn't very widespread in the mid-late '90s, in terms of how much time we spent on it. It seems like 2000 and after that college kids became glued to IM or MSM.

In general, the types of technology that we choose to adopt, and the ways that we use them, are not determined by the technology itself. Those choices reflect our pre-existing drives and tastes.

So the fact that every young person today spends most of their time hunched over a laptop, plugged into a home video game console (always alone, no friends over to play with them), or fiddling with their iPod or smart phone, tells us how dorky their preferences have become. Otherwise they would have found little appeal in these things, or would have used them in a less anti-social way.

For instance, Walkmans and Discmans, even portable radios, were widespread back in the '80s and early '90s. But you didn't see every other teenager with headphones on when they were out in public. That would have been anti-social, so the outgoing teenagers of that time never thought to use Walkmans in that way.

Shoot, if anything they brought out their boom box to play cheerful music for everyone else to hear, and to invite them over to socialize with an ice-breaker. "Hey, cool tunes, who is that?"

I only remember Walkmans being used for long trips when either there was no tape player (like a school bus ride), or when you wanted your own tape player (like in the car on a family trip). Maybe for jogging / gym work-outs too. But never when you were out and about.

Anonymous said...

Being a Paleocon & pro-life & whatnot, if it were my daughter, then all I would care about was that my grandchild not get murdered in an abortuary.

On the other hand, blacks abort at a higher rate than whites, so from paleocon perspective it's probably wise to approve of mechanisms that allow blacks to self-regulate their birthrate downwards.

Anyway, one has to be born before one can be murdered. :) (Okay, forget I said that.)

Silver

Anonymous said...

...so from paleocon perspective it's probably wise to approve of mechanisms that allow blacks to self-regulate their birthrate downwards...


Sadly, being pro-life means that you are obligated to try to stop even your own worst enemies from murdering themselves.

OTOH, if people really are determined to write themselves right out of the history books, then there's not a whole heckuva lot you can do about it [and still respect those old Paleocon marquis-of-queensbury ideals, like "freedom of the will"].

helene edwards said...

Great Britain maybe with its bijillion cameras ...

The Walgreens closest to me, outside San Francisco, has just remodeled, and man have they ramped up the surveillance. Now, instead of those randomly placed ceiling bubbles that may or may not have contained a working camera, each and every aisle has a naked camera looming 8' overhead. I guess the cost of that equipment has gone way down.

Anonymous said...

yeah, breeding by teenage females is very effective as far as making more white babies is concerned. But it isn't all that great for the males involved. Even without children the young men are on the government's radar as potential criminals, "terrorists" and military draftees. With child support they are blatantly converted into government-owned serfs.

Kylie said...

"Because idiocratic trash are so much more bearable if Caucasian. Not."

They've gotten even less bearable since adopting aspects of thug/ghetto culture.

And they can be more easily reined in than non-whites if for no other reason than thefact that charges of racism don't apply.

Anonymous said...

""Because idiocratic trash are so much more bearable if Caucasian. Not."

They've gotten even less bearable since adopting aspects of thug/ghetto culture.

And they can be more easily reined in than non-whites if for no other reason than thefact that charges of racism don't apply."

We can re-educate the wayward members of our folk, but they need to be born first.

as said...

agnostic:

For instance, Walkmans and Discmans, even portable radios, were widespread back in the '80s and early '90s. But you didn't see every other teenager with headphones on when they were out in public.

Great point about the headphones. I hate this. You can't ask for directions or anything. They have to take off their stupid earbuds.

Anonymous said...

Kylie - And they can be more easily reined in than non-whites if for no other reason than the fact that charges of racism don't apply.

We saw this in the English riots earlier this year.

The majority of London looters/rioters were black and thus the police spent a lot of time cowering in fear.

Once the wiggers thought about having their own riot in Manchester the police had no compunction in beating them down on sight.

Anonymous said...

Look at the low Asian birthrates - another proof we are the master race.

Anonymous said...

Steve, this might be off topic, but the OECD just released the 2009 PISA result from two states of India

http://www.oecd.org/pages/0,3417,en_32252351_32235731_1_1_1_1_1,00.html

The result is stunning and prove your view on India almost spot on.

Anonymous said...

We can re-educate the wayward members of our folk, but they need to be born first.

You think a folk is nothing but the body, the genetic heritage? You sad, sad little man.

Whiskey said...

Given that politics is a game of numbers, votes, and resources being taken by the biggest group, I'm all in favor of Whites having more kids.

Why? Its to my advantage. I gain when my group gains, and lose when it loses. Since again all politics is spoils.

Anonymous said...

"You think a folk is nothing but the body, the genetic heritage? You sad, sad little man."

I know many Ashkenazi Jews, and they absolutely draw a line between themselves and everyone else, largely based on shared ancestry. I think Northwest Europeans need to be doing more of the same.

Anonymous said...

Boy, it's really weird to see SWPL hatred of middle- and lower-class whites at a [or an ostensible] Paleocon site like iSteve.

Really, really weird.

I guess maybe once the nihilism of modernity gets its tentacles into you, it must be mighty difficult to turn away from it, huh?

rob said...

Boy, it's really weird to see SWPL hatred of middle- and lower-class whites at a [or an ostensible] Paleocon site like iSteve.

Lucius, this here cha is a biocon/evolcon site.

Anonymous said...

Boy, it's really weird to see SWPL hatred of middle- and lower-class whites at a [or an ostensible] Paleocon site like iSteve.

That's because it's not really a matter of race, it's a matter of class; and btw; nobody is complaining about middle class whites. It all boils down to: Who do you want moving in next door? There are probably not many regulars of this site who would honestly object to a black or Hispanic family living next to them, if that family truly espoused and lived the middle class values that are associated with safety and stability. In that regard, wiggers are no better than any of the dregs of society. They are just as likely to play crap music all night, park their vehicles on the lawn, and engage in loud, foul mouthed front yard cell phone conversations as their more dusky counterparts.

It's the reason that European aristocracy can hold family reunions with the relatives being Italian, French, German and Russian, and, despite not sharing the same language or country, all the cousins get along just fine - because they are of the same class.

Anonymous said...

I guess maybe once the nihilism of modernity gets its tentacles into you, it must be mighty difficult to turn away from it, huh?

Maybe yes, maybe no. It's hard to be sure.

But, sidestepping that entire conundrum, there's another perspective that simply contends: "'Demographics is destiny' will be the 21st century governor's holiest phrase."

Perhaps we'll marvel that anyone could have ever thought otherwise or that it was ever controversial. Future historians will recall that at some point in the 20th century intellectuals became traumatized and frightened out of their skins by the idea and made it impossible to discuss intelligently (ensuring that it was discussed mostly unintelligently). They'll regale people with tales of how it was possible to reduce the most learned of late-20th century to babbling incoherence by looking them in the eye and uttering any of these statements: "Race matters. Heredity matters. Demopgraphics is destiny." Alarm would spread across the faces of the learned. They would begin by babbling incoherently, to no avail. Then they would begin gasping for air. Their eyes bulging they would drop to their knees, one hand clutching their throats, the other shooting skywards in a vain plea for a help that was not forthcoming. Then they would collapse in a heap, defeated by naught but their own delusions.

Er, okay, my lurid prognostications aside, this stuff matters, so it really shouldn't be surprising that some people are going to talk about it as thought it matters. Whether that's "nihilism" or whatever is beside the point (and isn't even a very interesting question).

Silver