US fertility rate

For twenty years, as Americans bowled less, they also produced fewer children, which raises the profound question of what exactly was happening in bowling alley back rooms. The r of 0.97 across 21 years is the kind of number that makes statisticians either weep or buy shares in Brunswick. Perhaps bowling, with its emphasis on aiming carefully and picking up spares, was functioning as a subtle metaphor for family planning. The gutterball, it turns out, may have been an omen.

Both fell sharply in 2020, and both for pandemic-specific reasons. Bowling centers closed en masse under lockdown orders with many never reopening, while the US fertility rate dropped as uncertainty, unemployment, and cohabitation chaos pushed would-be parents to wait. Two different countings of things that didn't happen that year.

Sometimes two things decline together not because one causes the other but because they were both expressions of the same moment in cultural history. The real correlation is between the data and a civilization quietly changing what it values.