
Can you predict a recession by looking at pregnancy rates? - MaysonL
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-43195765
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olympus
The graph doesn't look like pregnancy rates precede recessions at all, it
looks like they occur at the same time (and thus aren't good for prediction).
What's going on is that we have a goofy rule for recessions that require
continuous retraction for a recession to be official. In most of these
recessions it looks like the economy peaked the same time as pregnancy rates,
but a tiny upward blip two quarters later prevented us from being officially
in a recession. If you smoothed the idea of a recession into something like
"contraction in 3 out of 4 quarters" you wouldn't have tiny blips delaying the
official recession, and you wouldn't see pregnancy rates preceding anything,
they would just be following the rest of the economy.

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candiodari
You can predict a recession by observing that spending goes down before the
recession actually happens. Observe, for instance, that this happens for many
things, including stock prices : they drop before the recession. People buying
stuff, goes down before recession starts. Etc.

Pregnancies are simply something that get planned out. You make sure you have
room, things have to be going well, you only do it if you feel comfortable
about your employment. And so on and so forth. They're an indicator, sure, but
keep in mind that there's many indicators. From sandwiches eaten to car sales,
everything drops before the recession happens (well, except "sin stocks").

People will reply that that's a recession being predicted by a lot of people.
That's not really true. It's many actors reacting to each other. In many cases
(almost every last example, although there are exceptions), recessions are
caused by the government raising interest rates, after having kept them down.
This forces companies and consumers alike to accept the truth about decisions
they've made in the past few years (since rolling forward debt becomes harder,
and thus at the margin impossible).

By observing what's currently happening with sales figures in a lot of sectors
I would say we're at the beginning of the transition into the recession, 6-12
months before the actual recession in GDP figures. The stock market top is
~now (as in just passed, or perhaps coming up any second now), and everybody
in the financial industry pretty much knows what's coming (but a lot of
players cannot currently act upon that for various reasons).

Given just how low interest rates were (ie. < 0), and for how long (~10
years), the next recession ought to be a doozy. Lots of debt needs to be
worked out of the system.

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WhoIsSatoshi
The title of the article glosses over one significant fact: You cannot know
the pregnancy rate at the precise moment from (1) folks who do not know, (2)
folks who will abort or lose the child (worsening economy, loss of job,
stress...) (3) folks who do not report. It can be argued that you can abstract
those cases out, but the useable data becomes extremely blurry as the early
months of a pregnancy are the riskiest ones for the birth.

In hindsight, looking at the recorded birth and subtracting 9 months will give
you a clearer picture but by then better indicators of recession in progress
might have been more readily observable.

Nevertheless - I find the idea fascinating as the birth of a child is one
where individuals have to take into account a lot of things and
internalize/assess the situation for the immediate future beyond what folks
want to hear or believe.

What I wonder about is the impact of those lost births on future economies (20
years later?) and/or what the impact is on the recovering economy.

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andrewla
From the paper (preprint found here [1]), you are correct in how they
reconstruct this information. They use birth data (including estimates of
gestation period) to derive the pregnancy rate at a moment in the past. They
also attempt to compensate for miscarriages and abortions.

I think your central conclusion is sound, though, namely that this cannot be
used to predict the future because there's no reliable data source to give the
pregnancy rate in the present.

On the other hand, it might be possible to show that even excluding your (1),
(2), and (3), it would still make a reliable predictor. But I'm not sure that
there are datasets that would allow any insight even into the number of
reported pregnancies. Potentially pharmacies would have access to rudimentary
proxies in the form of sales of pregnancy tests, or inverse proxies in the
form of sales of contraceptives. Large companies might have information on
parental leave, but in the lead-up to a recession, you might have the
confounding variable that people are losing their jobs at a higher rate,
leading to a direct correlation that might overstate the phenomenon.

[1]
[https://www3.nd.edu/~kbuckles/BHL_fertility.pdf](https://www3.nd.edu/~kbuckles/BHL_fertility.pdf)

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mcphage
If people are choosing to have fewer babies before recessions, their decisions
must be made based on some information they have. So looking at pregnancies is
interesting, but at best it shows there’s something still missing. And trying
to find that might be a little less intrusive then looking into pregnancies.

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igravious
We could make it a law that if you become pregnant you must report it so that
the government can use the data to protect all citizens against recessions. If
you don't report it it could be made law that you lose your medical insurance
or something.

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thisisdave
This article uses the word “conceptions” throughout, but it sounds like the
only data is about births. These births would have all occurred after the
recessions started.

Did the original paper rule out the hypothesis that the recession actually
affected births via an increase in miscarriages and abortions instead? I can’t
access it.

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alex_hitchins
Birth - 9 months = conception (on average)

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tathougies
Yeah, that misses out on stillbirths and miscarriages.

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alex_hitchins
Miscarriages maybe but I believe stillbirths are legally required to be
recorded. As unpleasant and upsetting as it is, it would be an interesting
data point in it's own regard to observe.

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tathougies
Unfortunately, I have lot of personal experience here. The reporting on still
births varies greatly. Some states require it past week 16, others stipulate a
birth weight, and others set more arbitrary criteria. You would have to
account for a lot of external factors.

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binaryorganic
“We were surprised when we saw [the correlation] and then we were surprised no
one had noticed it before“

Seems like lots of women noticed it. Just sayin’.

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zaarn
Probably not considering the drop on the graph isn't much bigger than some
previous drops after which nothing happened...

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matheweis
Recessions are roughly coincident with unemployment claims, so maybe this is
signal from water cooler talk... ex. things aren’t looking great at the
office, possible layoffs on the horizon, low profits to be announced, or the
like, upend future plans for having children?

~~~
LarryDarrell
To add to your grain of salt, I've had quite a number of quotes (I'm a
consultant) in the last 3 months that have gone nowhere. These are for firms
that I've worked with for years that are all of a sudden very tightfisted
about projects that they would have shoveled money at before.

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woliveirajr
From the chart I just can see that GDP can predict conceptions. GDP falls,
conceptions falls, then came the recesion. GDP begins to recover, get out of
recession, then conceptions begin.

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gruez
How does this compare to say... the consumer confidence index? Assuming that
everyone is accurately stating their confidence, I don't see why conception
data should be ahead of consumer confidence.

>Economists are frequently criticised for failing to accurately predict the
direction of economic growth

OT: Do people honestly think that? I thought the academic consensus is that
boom/bust cycles are pretty much impossible to predict.

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mikeash
I thought it was fairly obvious that they _can’t_ be predicted with any
reliability, because a reliable prediction will change people’s behavior and
break it. Sort of an economic Halting Problem.

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yonibot
Anyone know what kind of data is publicly available on pregnancy rates?

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AznHisoka
You can probably extrapolate from search data such as Google Trends or the
popularity of pregnancy websites through Alexa rankings.

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cliftonk
Here's a time series that updates for anyone interested (although clearly has
a large lag)

