 the pandemic and the family demography edition. I added demography edition because I realized there's just an infinite number of things related to the family and the pandemic that I'm not talking about. And I'll mention a few of those later. How might we expect the pandemic to be affecting families in the broadest sense? I kind of broke it down into the direct effects, which are people getting sick and dying within families. I'm not going to talk very much about that. We don't really have data on where we can say things about mortality rates and infection rates and hospitalizations and so on, but we don't have data to put those people in families or situate them yet. So I'm setting that aside. For context, I want to talk about the social metabolism sort of what is euphemistically but incorrectly referred to as the lockdown, but just how everything has slowed down. And I'll talk about that and try to put it in the context of what might be happening in families. And then the unemployment and economic insecurity that has followed and what has really turned into a seismic inequality event. I don't want to say we've never seen anything like this, but I've never seen anything like this that I can think of that has been not only this big, but this unequally experienced. And so the family consequences of that are only one aspect of it, but the scale of the inequality event is huge. OK. So in demography edition of this, I'm going to talk about births. Seems odd given that it is October. If you start in March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, we shouldn't be seeing births affected by the pandemic. But maybe we are. But we can talk about other things that are related to births, like contraception, sex, pregnancy. So I'll talk about that. Marriage, we have some good data on, including from a number of different places. So I'll talk about that. And then divorce some interesting, very preliminary kind of things we can think about. The hypothesis is basically there's less of everything demographic happening. And so what does that mean for families and the future of families and life experience and the aftertimes that we're living in now? I wish I had more wisdom on that, but that's my empirical observation to summarize is that there's less of everything. The data here is some early vital statistics from various sources and then some random other things and then a bunch of Google search data, which I'll talk about the possible weaknesses of that. It's at best speculative to use that, but I should say best suggestive. So I think it's suggestive. So the social metabolism, Google mobility, Google puts out this great data, which they update every week, which is how much people are moving around. And it's basically it's aggregated up from the number of pings at categories of places that they use, groceries and pharmacies, transit stations, retail and recreation, residential and workplaces. And they put it out at the county and state, at the county level, and actually for regions all around the world. So I just took the states, I took the counties and I aggregated them up unweighted to create county averages. So don't hold me to this methodology exactly, but I think the point is pretty clear here. Compared to the pre-pandemic levels of January, you can see that by March, by the end of March, mobility in the country had crashed down anywhere between 20 and 40% or between 15 and 38% or so across the states. Then you have the big rebound of the reopening and then now some are declining again now in terms of people staying home more. So this is a general sort of measure of how much people are moving around. You can see some idiosyncratic things that kind of give you some face validity like Hawaii. There are fewer people in Hawaii because of tourism. So it makes sense that Hawaii is not recovered as much. You can also see that big bump in the middle there is that giant motorcycle rally in South Dakota. So you can see some other major events that happened and the states that are at the top now, South Dakota, Wyoming, not Maine, but Montana, Idaho, Iowa, these are the places with catastrophic outbreaks now. Okay, so there was a huge drop in just people moving around sort of like social metabolism. Some other ways I kind of thought like, how can we think about the social aspects of life and how just had the scale of how much has been diminished? So I poked around with a bunch of different searches. And again, let me just say, this is not a very, this is for suggestive purposes. I didn't keep a record of all the things I tried that didn't look good. And Google is not very transparent with how they released this data. So let's just say it looks like searches for things like breathalyzers, which people get concerned about when they're drunk or pulled over, party invitations weekend. I think people, I was trying to think of what people might Google when they're getting ready to go out weekend, possibly they stop searching when something pops up anyway. So that weekend is a search that has dropped a lot and happy hour just decimated. So all those, I put the line on there for March 9th and you can see the big drop in all those things. You could do a million of these, just sort of things that are way off their seasonal where they should be seasonally in our social life. Not surprising if you've been alive for the last six months, but just to quantify it a little. More demographic, young adults living at home and this has generated some attention in various quarters. We normally have about 42% of people aged 18 to 29 living at home. That's from according to the current population survey and by home here, I mean living in their parents, within the home of their parents or the home of their grandparents or the home of their in-laws that is their married to a person who's living with their parents. So it should be about 42%. It spiked up to almost 50% at the peak in June. So that was about 3 million young adults living at home that should not have been. I mean, I don't know, we can't say from this if they were moving back or this could also have been achieved just by people who normally move out, not moving out. But I think in terms of adulthood, independence, autonomy whatever is happening in the lives of young adults we can say it was retarded in this case. It slowed down, okay. In terms of economic, the economic shock which is also related to the overall social metabolism issue these are the top occupations for men in the blue and women in the orange. Just the top nine occupations for each gender group and a couple of things to point out here this is the percent change since January in the number of people employed in each occupation. So the first thing is the class difference that jumps out. So chief executives, that includes small business owners, managers, software developers actually increased. Thank you, Zoom. These, they were much less impacted than the working class jobs, janitors, retail sales, construction workers, that's among men. Among women, you can bracket the teachers because that's a lot of that is seasonal but retail sales, cashiers, customer service representatives, secretaries, big drops in employment, which I'm sure most of you know. I highlighted the retail sales people, there aren't too many occupations to compare among but to compare men and women in the top occupations because of segregation. But it is interesting that almost 60% of women and retail sales jobs were out of work in April compared to only 40% of men. And now it's still 20% of women compared to about 5% of men. So the other thing to see on this is the gender difference. So women have lost more jobs than men unlike the man's session of 2009, for example. Sorry, the heek man's session. Yes, the man's session and the hee recovery that was last time. Okay, here it is just for black men and women and A, these are bigger shocks than it was for the general population. And then you can see this class element again, janitors, retail sales, laborers, stock order fillers, just huge drop, personal carriers, almost 60% of black women in those fields were out of work at the worst. Okay, so catastrophic shock that we can imagine, now we're being asked to imagine what this might mean for families. One more take on the employment family interaction is labor force participation. This is a little different from employment because this includes employed and unemployed. And these are people who are neither employed nor well, people who are employed or unemployed. Thank you. So you can see a big drop in labor force participation, 4% of all people age 18 to 55. And then it recovers more quickly for men. This is, these are with children. So these are fathers and mothers with co-resident children recovers more quickly for men. And now the fall decline in labor force participation for both fathers and mothers quite a bit steeper for mothers. So this may have to do with school and kids being at home and mothers being out of the labor force for that reason, but that's a pretty big difference. So we've got some, we have clear class race and gender disparities in this massive seismic inequality event. Just to zoom in on this inequality angle again, the US Census Bureau has launched this household pulse survey they've been doing sort of two week cycles and asking a few questions over and over and seems to be pretty good quality. They asked for if you or anybody in your household lost income as a result of the pandemic. And this basically is just an indicator of every kind of inequality increasing. So at the top, so overall it's about 45% of people they were a household member lost income, which is insane. White's the least Hispanics and blacks the most, never married or divorced people the most, poor people the most, people in bad health the most, people with less education, people with children and younger people. So these are huge numbers of people that lost income and big disparities according to these common indicators. Gender incidentally is a wash on this and I think that's because I haven't looked at the micro data so I'd have to sort this out but gender is a wash I think because you have old women on fixed incomes who haven't lost income and young women single mothers who have lost income and so it balances so men and women are about the same on this so I didn't include them. Okay, so how do we expect this kind of thing to affect families in the sense of decision-making? That's one way to look at it is to use sort of this framework of the theory of planned behavior that has been applied to families and family decisions especially fertility but we can think about it in terms of other family processes also. You have this model of sort of, while there's background factors, the individual characteristics like personality and general attitudes, then you've got their demographic characteristics and then social context, things like norms and culture in the economy. All these things shape people's beliefs. What are the consequences of having a child? How much social support will I have for having a child? Will I be able to or will be something come between me and this goal? So what are the perceived control over the decision or the process of having a child? All that leads into an intention and then eventually a birth. So if we think about what the pandemic is doing in a rough illustration, these are a few of the places where I could imagine pandemic impact. Emotions, shot, income, devastated, the economy and the social context pretty well wiped out. Beliefs about the consequences, who knows, social support out the window, enabling or interfering factors everywhere, actual control, I don't know. Do people, people aren't meeting, people aren't having new partners, people aren't in control of lots of aspects of their health and mobility and economic status and so on. So this is just to say like a giant red splotch flies onto this graph. And when we try to imagine what the pandemic is doing to these family, to family processes, birth and other things. So let's talk about births. Oh, by the way, it's also an opportunity for me to show off my pictures. So these are pictures I got from when I came out of my basement once and took some pictures. Let's talk about births. Like I said, it's too early to see the real birth effects but maybe not. So let's look a little. First of all, I don't know if you remember that charming era six months ago when people were saying things like, oh, there'll be a pandemic baby boom because people are all stuck at home. That was an idea, it was a hypothesis. It was not well grounded and I don't think it's going to bear out. However, this is interesting. Condom companies are in the tank. Direct condom sales slumped. The company that owns Trojan, double digit consumption declines in the second quarter. And then when they were bouncing back in July, all but two brands, Trojan, one of the brands that's not bouncing back quite the way they would like. We're waiting for the Q3 earnings call is next week. I never usually pay attention to this but I didn't know how else to quantify this. So, okay, this is interesting. People are buying less condoms. Maybe they're throwing caution to the wind and they're just gonna, or they're deciding to have children so they don't want condoms anymore. I don't think that's what's happening, right? So it's a great, actually, if this is a great methods assignment, condoms prevent births. If there are fewer condoms, will there be more births? No, discuss. So I think people are not having as much sex. That's what I'm getting at. The Gutmacher Institute fielded a survey at the end of April, beginning of May and they asked people this question. It's a unique kind of question. Like they basically said, because of the pandemic, have you decided to delay childbearing or decided that you want fewer children? So it's different from a longitudinal study than asked people like every month, how many children do you plan to have? So take the quantities with a grain of salt and let's just say it's big. Something like a third of women, 18 to 49, said either delay or fewer children as a result of the pandemic. So at least at this moment in time, a third of women were in the category of, at least wanting to say, I'm putting the brakes on this. You can see again, the inequality, it tracks on inequality, black and Hispanic women, queer women and poor women more, being more likely to be in that category of saying delay or fewer children. Okay, so this sort of doesn't go along with the idea that the condom sales decline is because people want to have more children. Okay, not surprising. Interestingly for, they also compared this to a question that was asked in 2008. So this gives us a little bit of a sense of scale. The effects to the extent that we trust this comparison and met the methodology, the effects are larger now than they were in the 2008 recession. And interestingly, the second panel here, more careful than previously about contraceptive use, 39%. More worried than previously about affording contraception is 25%. And then delayed or canceled sexual reproductive health or contraceptive care. So a big care gap opening up at the same time that there's more worry and concern. So this is not a recipe for happy family development in the sense of sexuality and children. Okay, so what can we do with our Google data to see if we can track any of this contraception? So I poke around on the Google Trends website. Basically what it gives you is a score for every search you enter. It gives you a score from zero to 100 of how much search traffic there is each week. So this goes back five years. I just chose a five-year window arbitrarily. And then looked at items that I thought might be correlated in terms of time. So the searches for, and these are the literal searches, birth control, condoms and depot shot, which hormonal birth control. So when you line those up by week, each one has a hundred in the week when that thing was searched the most. And then so they're all on a relative scale like a Z score type scale. The alpha for this index of contraceptive searches is now 0.7. So how does it behave over time? Well, fairly drastically for this year. What I wanna point out, so here I have three gray lines which are to that 2016, 17 and 18. And then 2019 is highlighted in black in 2020 in red. I do that to just show you that we already had a decline in 2019 and this is a theme we have, which is declining fertility in the US. So that's gonna complicate our interpretation of all of these, but then a very big shock in the contraceptive search and the world of contraceptive terms searching after a March of this year. So again, Google doesn't tell you the number of searches but we can say a very big drop and it is not recovered, although it's maybe recovered some by October. So a lot less searching for other people, apparently presumably searching for contraception or to learn about contraception. What about sex itself? Well, I think Instagram or Facebook or Google could tell us a lot more. They probably know all these things that I'm trying to figure out. And if they're smart, they're playing the stock market accordingly. What would people Google if they were sexually active? Well, I don't know, what about problems? Like premature ejaculation, pain during sex, pain after sex, orgasm during sex, just things that people might be Googling when they're having sex or like the next morning. And these all show declines to varying degrees this year compared with last year. Orgasm during sex, it's not, I realize later maybe that's actually porn searches. I'm not sure who searches, but hopefully pain during sex is not so much porn searches, but who knows that you never know. But anyway, some decline in sex search traffic. So we've got the declining condom sales, declining contraception, possibly less sex. I'm sure we could get at this other ways. Okay, so all of this may lead to a certain amount of pregnancy. So what about pregnancy? Again, we're waiting for the birth data. So this is very ephemeral, this whole talk. Soon it will be obviated by the birth data that will come around. So I did the same thing. I took a handful of searches that I thought would, that would track each other contemporaneously. Chronologically, what is the word for in time? Track each other in time over the weeks. Am I pregnant? People Google that a lot. Pregnancy test, morning sickness, missed period. These things held together week by week pretty well in an index with an alpha 0.74. I mean, let's see how this pregnancy tracker behaves in the Google searches. Again, a pretty big drop already in 2019 compared to the earlier years. You know, we've been talking a lot about falling fertility in the country and a lot of concern about that. So maybe that was just happening anyway. But there's a big blip on the seasonality, which is that big drop in March and April when we don't get what looks like a normal bounce in March and April for pregnancy searches. So a pretty big drop in the pregnancy searches, I'm not surprised at all. You never know. Maybe people are just Googling other things and not bothering to think about whether or not they're pregnant. But with the sex and the contraception and the common sales and all this, like I think there's less sex and less pregnancy. That's where I'm going with that. Interesting rebound in the last few weeks. We'll have to follow that. But I think it's getting close to the point where this will all be set aside when we start to have birth data, which is where I'm going next. What about births? Well, it's too early, right? It's just too early. I mean, it's too early except what about miscarriages and abortion? Is it possible that we're already seeing a noticeable number of miscarriages and abortions? I'm not expert on either of those. We don't do a very good job measuring abortions or miscarriages. There's great interesting new research using, for example, period tracker information and other stuff where people are trying to figure it out. What's going on with miscarriages? But we don't know. But it's conceivable and there's a reasonable hypothesis that with all this stress and disruption there would be more miscarriages. But anyway, that's purely speculative. However, for the two states where I can find a regularly updated month-to-month sort of rolling birth data are Florida and California. And again, we're seeing a decline fertility anyway, but these are noticeable declines in fertility, impossible to be the pandemic, right? Unless we don't know. How big are these declines? They're next to each other. You see these are on different scales to show in terms of percentages, the horizontal line on each here is the average annual decline over the last three years. So if, you know, in Florida we would expect a decline of about 0.7% based on just the annual change. In California, closer to 3% decline based on the year-to-year change. And then you can see what's happened in those two states through September. California just put the September numbers up on Sunday. And who knows? 10% drop in births in September compared with last September in California is pretty large. That's September. Are we already having fewer premature births and more miscarriages or are immigrants going home or is there something else going on? But it looks like fewer births. What I think, again, this is gonna be obviated when we see probably a catastrophically giant crash in births in December and January and February and so on. So if that happens, we won't remember this talk. But I think it's worth wondering what might be driving down birth rates a little bit even now. Okay, marriage. If you were walking around the mall on the day I went down to the mall in Washington, D.C. I'm sorry that you ended up in the pictures for topics that might or might not have anything to do with you. I don't even know if these people know each other but I just stuck them on the marriage slide. Okay, so what's going on with marriage? Here we have, again, a couple of different kinds of research. A couple of different kinds of data. Google trends. These four wedding searches seem to be things that people search around the same time in the wedding cycle. The very high correlation here with an alpha 0.94. Wedding searches, wedding invitations, wedding shower, bridal shower, wedding dresses, people Google these things at a very correlated extent in terms of time. So how does this scale, this Google search wedding scale, look over time? A catastrophic crash of wedding searches in 2020 compared with the average from previous years. There I just combined the previous years. Well, not surprising. You weren't allowed to have weddings. You weren't allowed to have large public events in a lot of places. So we don't know, does this mean maybe people were still sneaking down to the courthouse and getting married? Maybe they were still filling out all the paperwork for their marriage license and just not pulling the trigger or maybe to some degree, their relationships were falling apart. Their long distance relationships are not working out. They've changed their mind about marriage. We don't know, but there's a lot less literal wedding activity, at least on Google. That's about as far as I can say. And it has continued to the present. Like there's some rebound after that huge drop that matches the mobility drop we saw earlier, but still quite a bit down. Okay, not surprising. Probably everybody knows somebody who had a wedding postponed or canceled this year. In the land of fertility, every for every hundred births delayed, some are foregone, some never occur. Relationships break up. People's bodies get older. There's a recovery of delayed births that's less than a hundred percent. We don't really know. I don't really have the basis for guessing what the recovery on delayed marriages will be. And that'll be a super interesting question as we go forward on this. Okay, just in case this marriage license was not well correlated with the other ones. So I didn't put it in the index. Is it possible that people are just going down to the courthouse with their marriage license and getting married? Because what really matters is being married, not the wedding. Well, again, big drop in the first quarter of the year. And then quite a bit of recovery. So maybe some of these, if you look at the last few weeks when this actually seems to have recovered, maybe some people are pulling the trigger on their marriage without really doing the wedding. But, and here we have Kate Troy in the audience here. I'm blocking the URL with my head. Brandon Wagner, Kate Troy and I have put together data from a few states and written this short paper called Decline in Marriage associated with the pandemic, giving away the punchline there, Decline in Marriage. So we looked at a few different places. Here's Florida, again, Florida with the nice monthly reports, just going through July here. You see on the left is the cumulative number of marriages recorded by the vital statistics. So that's a drop of roughly 25%. And you can see that difference on the right. Sharp Decline, a little bit tapering now. So not falling behind as far every month in June and July as it did in March and April. Okay, but very big decline in weddings in Florida. Hawaii is an interesting case. This is really big. This is more like a 50% drop, almost in the cumulative number of marriages in Hawaii. A lot of people go to Hawaii to get married. We have a supplemental figure in the paper that shows that most of this drop is actually non-residents, not getting married in Hawaii. Then the other way, the other place we looked was Seattle where we have marriage applications. And here's interesting, the decline is less, more like 10% in the cumulative a number of marriage applications. And you can also see that rate of falling behind has tapered a little bit in August and September. I'm falling behind at a slightly slower rate than it was in the earlier months. So some evidence that the decline in weddings is gonna be greater than the decline in marriage. So maybe some people are managing or deciding to execute their marriage without having the wedding they dreamed of. And in that sense, that tells us something about the, that gives a hint about that some of these lost marriages may be recovered, right? In the sense that a lost wedding may still become a marriage, which we don't know how they will turn out, but that's at least a marriage. Okay, finally divorce with apologies to this couple. They're just walking down the street. What is going on with divorce? You probably have seen or heard, if you were paying attention to this kind of stuff. Oh, a big news story that broke awhile ago, marriages are rocketing up during the pandemic. I'm sorry, divorces are rocketing up during the pandemic. I don't believe that that story that was going around was based on a company press release that sells an online divorce kit and their downloads went up. But it seems pretty likely that people who are considering divorce would be shifting from in-person to online divorce processing or something. And this company is like a new company. And so there's lots of reasons why their sales of divorce kits may be up that are not reflecting an actual increase in divorces. Divorces take time. They take a processing. There are waiting periods in some states. Like I do not expect, even if as we have reason to believe this pandemic is catastrophic for marriages and families and more people want to get divorced, I wouldn't expect to see more divorces yet. So it may very well be that's not unlike the Great Recession, decline in divorces, possibly followed by some rebound as the people who had to put off their divorce because of housing and the expense and the moving and the kids and all the reasons that people who kind of want to get divorced don't get divorced. That may rebound when the logistics become more practical. Okay, but we have some indicators. I did a Google, a little bit of a Google analysis again here for divorce ideation. People Googling divorce lawyer, divorce attorney or get a divorce. How do I get a divorce? These hang together pretty well in terms of our index. And the pattern is who knows, interesting. Compared to previous years, there is that decline in divorce ideation at least as expressed in Google searches and then a rebound which puts it above. So it's possible that people were distracted and stuck in whatever was going on. They were not thinking about divorce. Maybe they were just so they were just really realizing the benefits of interdependence and how great their partnership actually is. And then reality came back or whatever. This is very speculative, but it does fit my presumption which is probably why I'm showing it to you which is that decline followed by rebound. So we'll see what happens with divorce. Again, like with the birth data, this is complicated because our overall expectation is there is a time trend in divorce which is actually down. So I would expect all us being equal. I would have expected a decline in divorces because of what's going on in marriage, but that may be undermined now. So we'll see. Okay, a little bit of divorce data back to my favorite vital statistics state page, Florida. You can see that decline in divorces, the cumulative annual total. I grouped three year bins here just because I was going back to 2006 for Florida anyway. So you can see those darker lines as we would say it's rotating clockwise, rotating clockwise, which means there's fewer divorces each year in Florida. And then 2020, wow, a huge drop in divorces. And these are actually recorded by the state. So maybe they're not pressing them, maybe they're closed, although according to Brandon and Kate, most of these county clerks are not closed, but maybe people just weren't processing them or maybe they weren't processing them. So divorces actually went down quite a bit in Florida. Then however, if you look at, if you track on the right side, the percent difference, you do see that rebound starting. They're not as far behind in September as they were in, in August. And so the big drop was before May. So who knows if we see a big rebound in the next few months, that'll be pretty interesting, but it still would have to get all the way back up of zero to actually be recouping the lost divorces of the pandemic. The lost divorces of the pandemic. Okay, some conclusions. The basketball court near my house where they had to take the hoops off to stop people from playing now. They just play soccer there. So everything slowed down. The question is what's gonna recover in the sense of recouping lost births, marriages, divorces or whatever. I mean, we don't really have the models to answer that versus what will get worse, like for example, divorces or the uncertainty and security and inequality issues that motivate people to reduce their fertility, aspirations may get worse. The fact that the unemployment rate has come back a little or the economic shock is not as bad now as it was a few months ago. That doesn't mean that the shock to the decision-making system of families deciding whether or not to have children is reduced. Maybe they're catching their breath and thinking it over and thinking definitely not having children. So we don't know. And we don't know back to normal as a concept we're gonna forget about soon. Birth rates were already falling, but I think the big demographic story of 2021 is likely to be the very large decline in births. That I just think everything points that way. And I think that's gonna be quite shocking when we see how big that is. The non-demographic things that are very active in this space that I'm not talking about today, violence and abuse. We've reasoned to believe there's more violence and abuse being detected less. And also less intervention. So detected and prevented less. So that's a terrible story that we can't quite tell yet. The yawning education disparities that we're already seeing are huge just in terms of time and attention that kids online and wifi and all that. There's a whole emerging story about the gender division of labor which is quite complicated. A lot of men are actually doing more housework in childcare than they used to but a lot of stuff has moved into the home. The home is generally not the place where you find the most gender equality. So it's gonna take some time to sort that out. And then a giant steamrolling mental health catastrophe with 11% of adults having seriously contemplated suicide in the last 30 days over like a quarter of young adults. And then the opioid epidemic, which has never gone away and which is merging with these things catastrophically especially as we're seeing now the pandemic in rural areas and so on. So it's a disaster, it's a catastrophe. If you're studying anything in this space you're gonna be studying this for a long time. I expect to be studying this for the rest of my career however long that is. Anyway, so thank you very much for listening. I'm gonna turn off my slide so I can hear your questions and I look forward to your questions. Thank you.