Coupling between death spikes and birth troughs. Part 1: Evidence

TL;DR

This paper investigates historical and recent evidence of a consistent pattern where massive death spikes are followed by birth troughs and rebounds, revealing underlying factors influencing birth rate fluctuations after catastrophic events.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of multiple death-birth coupling events across different crises, highlighting the role of collateral sufferers and proposing a unified explanatory framework.

Findings

Death spikes are followed by significant birth troughs and rebounds.

The 1918 and 1920 influenza pandemics caused notable birth dips, unlike 9/11.

The coupling phenomenon can predict birth rate effects from various crises.

Abstract

In the wake of the influenza pandemic of 1889-1890 Jacques Bertillon, a pioneer of medical statistics, noticed that after the massive death spike there was a dip in birth numbers around 9 months later which was significantly larger than that which could be explained by the population change as a result of excess deaths. In addition it can be noticed that this dip was followed by a birth rebound a few months later. However having made this observation, Bertillon did not explore it further. Since that time the phenomenon was not revisited in spite of the fact that in the meanwhile there have been several new cases of massive death spikes. The aim here is to analyze these new cases to get a better understanding of this death-birth coupling phenomenon. The largest death spikes occurred in the wake of more recent influenza pandemics in 1918 and 1920, others were triggered by the 1923 earthquakes in Tokyo and the Twin Tower attack on September 11, 2001. We shall see that the first of these events indeed produced an extra dip in births whereas the 9/11 event did not. This disparity highlights the pivotal role of collateral sufferers. In the last section it is shown how the present coupling leads to predictions; it can explain in a unified way effects which so far have been studied separately, as for instance the impact on birth rates of heat waves. Thus, it appears that behind the random appearance of birth rate fluctuations there are in fact hidden explanatory factors.