Social Mood is Extremely Negative: Crashing Mormon Fertility Edition

Mormon fertility has been collapsing.

Eternal Anglo: Mormon Fertility: 6 indicators

There are a few things I've been "wondering" about Mormons and their famously-high fertility since I saw this report which said the white fertility in Utah fell below replacement-level in 2017. So I queried the data for 3 representative geographies: the first obvious one being Utah (the Mormon Mothership) but Utah is pretty multicultural these days so you can't get an accurate picture of what's happening with the Mormons just by looking at Utah. Two much better geographies are Utah County, Utah (home of Brigham Young University) and Bonneville County, Idaho (neighbor of Brigham Young University - Idaho). These two yuge 99% Mormon universities make both of these counties nearly Mormon-monocultural so they should be great indicators of the current fertility rate in the Mormon community. Here are the results:

Mormons are known for having larger families. For fertility to crash in the past decade-plus, a force large enough to overwhelm entrenched religious and cultural customs must have emerged.

Looking at things such as transgenderism, political polarization, secession and so on, the stock market is the only indicator that isn't screaming "great depression." I invoke Goodharte's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The Federal Reserve has been targeting equity markets since 2008, hence stocks have ceased to function as a mood indicator. Speculative mood around the markets are probably still positive. It makes people happy to see their account values rise, but it isn't reflective of what's happening in society. The ruling class also seems to be clueless because they are perhaps too wrapped up in stock prices. Both President Trump (ceaselessly) and President Biden have invoked daily fluctuations in stock prices as justification for their policies. As discussed here and elsewhere, the stock market is the Fed's balance sheet.

Something has to give eventually. Maybe sunshine and rainbows suddenly emerge in the culture, and everyone is suddenly hapopy with the ruling class again. Or maybe stock prices (or their real value) sink into an abyss from which they cannot escape, and the ruling class joins them soon after.