Chicken Little
Or why the sky is NOT falling
Okay, in the substack posting world I am a very little fish in a very big pond. I discovered this platform during the winter lockdowns and restrictions of the 2nd pandemic winter from my home in Germany. And reading people like Eugyppius, El Gato Malo, Charles Eisenstein, Epimetheus and others became a important lifeline for me in the maelstrom of fearmongering and scapegoating in the public.
For those who don’t know, Chicken Little is the title of a classic children’s folk tale in which a little chicken becomes convinced the sky must be falling because a little acorn fell on its head. Chicken Little excitedly tells all the other animals it meets along its way about this impending calamity and manages to also convince the others that the sky is falling. Needless to say, this causes a great deal of alarm and panic for everyone. Depending on which version you hear, the moral varies and it ends sometimes quite happily, and sometimes not.
As I mentioned, I consider myself more of a little fish and thought I have been hearing a lot of exicted chatter along the internet highway from a black cat, and a big mouse fan, and some others about the sky (births) falling. I found the implications of what they were saying so horrifying I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Yet, there was a nagging feeling I couldn’t shake that something wasn’t quite right about the data and the correlation they were highlighting.
My nagging feelings have a little form, for example, it also happened to me during the 2nd pandemic winter when local politicians started screeching about a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. I similarly set to work exploring the data with a little help from some substack posts and that time I also discovered that my statistical gut feeling was right and the chicken little voices were mistaken. On a curious historical note, Disney made a film based on the Chicken Little folk tale in 1943. Wikipedia states it was intended as an anti-nazi film, warning of the evils of mass hysteria.
As far as I am concerned the fall in marriages seen in countries around the world duing the pandemic is very exceptional. And make no mistake, this abrupt disruption to many couples planning their new lives together and starting a family has been more due to the lockdowns and restrictions of the pandemic response than the Covid-19 illness. So chalk this one up on the growing list of unintended consequences of the pandemic response. They wanted to save the vulnerable and elderly from a coronavirus and they have succeeded in putting a bigger dent in global births than any other event in decades. How many were restricted during the pandemic from starting their families???
A disruption to marriages on this scale will have a long tail of repurcussions. But claiming the births (sky) is falling because of the vaccines is not necessary to explain the phenomenon we are observing. In the story of Chicken Little the acorn bounces away out of sight and with no other evidence in sight, the chicken assumes it must have been the sky falling. As I have mentioned before, I have been reading many substackers and others highlighting issues about these vaccines’ safety around fertility, but what I have read so far does not (for me) point to the scale and suddenness of the fall in births we are seeing. The size of the fall in marriages on the otherhand is at least in the right order of magnitude.
For example, the black cat is currently telling us about the situation in Sweden again. The word marriage does not appear once in the discussion. The black cat tells us that births have fallen by roughly 10% in Sweden this year. Whereas I have tried to reason that marriages in Sweden fell by over 20% in the first pandemic year! And note, it only recovered by a measly 3.5% the second pandemic year.
Normally 45% of Swedish births are to married couples. I contend the ticking time bomb of the “missing marriages” started to go off in Q1 2022. What do you think is most plausible?
People’s resistance to my theory was puzzling at first, and that’s when I remembered the story of Chicken Little and how willingly we sometimes embrace forecasts of calamity despite simpler explanations lying around.
I am happy to say that my favourite mouse fan (Igor Chudov) has responded to my theory and so maybe we can at least start to have a wider discussion about plausible alterrnative explanations despite our favourite correlation staring us in the face (it’s usually my favourite correlation too).
Well, who knows, until we have more detailed demographic information about the births data from this year (and last year) I won’t be able to confirm my gut feeling. At any rate, I will be ready to abandon my hypothesis if the data is a dead end. And I confess that I certainly hope I am right, because believing the sky is falling does not always end well. Some versions of the folk tale end with Chicken Little and the other animals being eaten by a fox.
Why do so many others not hope I am right?
Any feedback is very welcome.
Chicken Little is not so much part of the canon here in Germany, but "Vom kleinen Maulwurf, der wissen wollte, wer ihm auf den Kopf gemacht hat" is (there's a translation into English; I don't know how well known the book is in English-speaking countries: "The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit" - the German title contains more information, actually). If there's something on your head, first check if it is really an acorn. Then check other people's heads for similar phenomena. Then talk to them, compare, formulate hypotheses, collect data, reject, confirm.
Of course you might be right that the drop in birth rates is largely a consequence of people refraining from starting (or enlarging) a family. But this would actually be much worse than a purely medical explanation. Is there hope for a society (or even humanity) that commits suicide when faced with a minor pandemic (while, at the same time, repeating the mantra that each death is one too many)? Is there hope for a society that only discusses these issues at the fringes? I bet that, before the vaccines are being put on the public table as possible explanation, somebody will attribute the effect to climate change.
I think 'why do so many others not hope I am right' may be the wrong perspective. Some of us are unhappy with how hope was used against us during the pandemic. *** Let's all get treated with an new sort of injection, marketed as a vaccine! Because we _hope_ it will be safe, reduce transmission, prevent hospitalisations and end the pandemic! ***
This is the great secret of psychological warfare -- you use your enemies emotions against them. And the only solution is to teach people to feel less and think more critically. Now, here in Sweden, there won't be much problem asking people to think more and feel less, as there is a cultural aversion to expressing strong feelings in the first place. I suspect that you could get Germans to go along with a less emotional approach to living as well, you tell me?
However, I think the chances of getting the Americans to buy into this idea is vanishingly small. I keep meeting Americans who cannot tell the difference between 'you hurt me' and 'you hurt my feelings' and 'you hurt my ego'. It's never come up. Rational thinking is reviled as a 'white supremacism', and whenever somebody feels badly or threatened by something, that is considered enough, to prove damage regardless of the intent of the person who said or did whatever was deemed threatening, or whether they told the truth.
This means reform in the USA is driven by getting people to stop feeling strongly about X and feel strongly about Y instead. In such a climate, 'calm down, it may not be as bad as all that' is seen as a step in the wrong direction. There is a distinct risk in the USA that they will get more mandated vaccines, especially for their children. Thus any bad news about the vaccine is good news for the 'stop mandatory vaccination' project. This produces a good number of people who hope that you are correct, but think that things will be better for society if you are mistaken, because the first step in getting rid of the regulatory capture of the health agencies is broad consensus that we were wrong to hope and trust these people. And they want to get started on that project as soon as possible.