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The Mysterious Fertility Strip Running Down the Center of the USA
Join in this intriguing discussion as the hosts delve into the perplexing phenomenon of a high-fertility strip running from Texas to North Dakota. They explore various theories and data, including maps of fertility rates, immigration patterns, income levels, religious census, and more. Does this strip represent America's final frontier or a hub of conservative, religious communities? Tune in to explore the intersection of demographics, geography, and culture in the U.S.
The song:
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be discussing a bizarre B, bizarre, bizarre phenomenon where there is, if you look at the county level, total fertility rate in the United States.
There is an extremely high fertility, I mean, extremely high fertility. When you look at the rest of the map, nothing comes close to the strips. Fertility rate strip down basically like where the west side of Texas is. Mm-hmm. All the way up to the top of the United States.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Like from the Texas panhandle up basically directly up from there is this weird blue strip.
Malcolm Collins: And so like, obviously I'm gonna have a map on screen here that you guys can look at and be like, what is going on here? One of the people who dug into it was friend of the show, Robin Hansen. 'cause of course, like if somebody's looking at interesting questions, it's like always gonna be one of our like small friend groups.
I sometimes wondered, it's like not everyone else programmed in [00:01:00] this simulation like Uhhuh because it like 20 people who are fully programmed and they're all guests of the show. And then everyone, you gotta save
Simone Collins: processing power. This stuff's expensive. I mean, so yeah, I'm very, so if, okay, what, before we go into what he thinks is going on, what are you gonna guess?
Is it that like these are very low population rural states? I mean, we're looking at North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas a little bit. There's
Malcolm Collins: lots of low population rural states that would not explain this at all.
Simone Collins: Okay. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: So. I'm gonna guess it's either one of two things.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Thing number one that it could be is it could be actually a mistake in the data.
Okay. It could be something about how these are like near a date line or how these are near, some lines are done. So some zone
Simone Collins: where measured twice because of like weird, it's causing
Malcolm Collins: things to be measured twice. That's hypothesis number one. Hmm. Because it just [00:02:00] doesn't seem realistic when I look at other things here.
But then I think, okay, like I'm from Texas, right?
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: These districts do not, not make sense as to why they would be higher fertility. They are incredibly rural districts. Yeah, that's
Simone Collins: what I was thinking too rural and that's where you get those, I mean, it's, it's, there's a selection bias there, right?
You're getting. People who want big families who are probably more likely to be religious conservative, who have this space. And of course there's all these pretty advocate space
Malcolm Collins: problem. Problem was this explanation.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: The districts actually remind me most of places like Arizona or Western California, which is way below these districts in terms of fertility rate.
Simone Collins: That's true. Yeah. Why would those not also show up as Y
Published on 7 months, 2 weeks ago