Imagine a contrived scenario where all women have twins sometime during their 30th year of age, and no children in any other age bracket.

Now imagine that you have two states, one in which all the women are 29 years old, and one in which they are all 28 years old.

Now tell me what the absolute birth rate would be in those two states.

Now tell me what the absolute birth rate would be in the following year, for both states.

For extra credit, calculate whether the states in this example are over or under the replacement fertility.

In the real world, of course, both the demographics and the fertility distribution by age are much messier than in the nice, clean example above. Hence the need for spending an hour or two poking about in BLS data.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.