Sex myths without substance: Mislabelling Japan

[Bonobo]

55. THIS!

"The best explanation of lower birth rates is that people are more educated, they are capable of making choices, and more choose to do other things than raise children."



This figure shows the strong reverse correlation (-0.8 out of -1.0) between countries’ IQ scores and their fertility rates. The x axis represents the IQ scores and the y axis represents the fertility rate. As you can see, if you go to the right side of the figure (high IQ score), the fertility rate gets lower. This is a typical linear correlation.

Japan’s birth rate is not particularly low at all considering the higher the IQ, the lower the birth rate.

Japan is merely following this global trend. If there are true outliers, they are countries like Singapore or Cuba.

IQ is highly correlated to various educational indexes. I also used educational indexes, percentage of secondary education enrolment and literacy rate, and calculated the correlation between them and the fertility rates and got similar results.

While this correlation alone doesn’t necessarily imply that the IQ is the cause of the low birth rate, you can assume there’s some relationship (whether direct, indirect, or through another variable like higher educational level) between them. The correlation is very strong.