Baby booms, periods of increased fertility rates, usually delineated by national border, but not always, are like many

types of boom or bust cycle, be they related to economics or the over or underproduction of corn

or some other crop, are often only recognized and designated after the fact, because in the

moment it's typically difficult to see the big picture

and recognize the steady inflation of whatever type of production, but also the pivot

from one state of being into another, the segue from underproduction or normal production,

into some consistently elevated level of production,

all of which is somewhat strange language to use when talking about the production of babies.

But that's how things tend to be explicated in the world of statistics and statistical analysis.

You collect data, you crunch the numbers, and then eventually, someday, you are able to compare those numbers to other batches of numbers

and say, okay, from this year till this other year, there was a significant slowdown in corn production, or a massive increase

in human production. And those periods are then labeled corn crashes or baby booms, and we can

use that delineation to figure out what led to what and how to calibrate things in the future

to better match our intended outcomes.

One such period that stands out in the West in particular, but which also had some resonance elsewhere

at the time, was a couple of decades during which baby-making hit a high point after several

decades of fairly steady decreases in the same.

Those decreases were caused by many things, but quite a few of those many things were connected

to the consequences of early-stage industrial farming that led to so-called dust-bowl conditions

in the United States and in some other

rapidly industrializing countries in the early 20th century, and the economic collapse that became

known as the Great Depression, which began in the United States but spread around the world,

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