Thursday, October 10, 2013

[ytrlfcey] Measuring fertility

First idea: fertility as a proxy for "happiness" of a population.  Unhappy people, especially those unhappy because of uncertain future economic outlook, tend to have fewer babies.

The first idea seems problematic.

Mean fertility is skewed by outliers.  But the standard more robust metric, median, does not work because of very low discrete values.  Everyone has 0, 1, or 2 babies per year.

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