Not tonight, dear
You’ve got to hand it to a group of economists for redefining “hot sex.”
I’m having a little fun here with what is actually a serious study that looked at fertility and birth rates amid “temperature shocks,” or heat waves, which the authors noted is relevant to “present-day fiscal and public-health policy.”
This recent study published by the Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research takes on added urgency given the mounting concerns over climate change.
(And how often do you get sex and fiscal policy in the same discussion? But, hey, you could take fiscal policy out of the discussion, and presumably you’d still rather have a surplus than a deficit.)
It’s a study by Alan Barreca, Melanie Guldi and Olivier Deschenes of the economics departments at Tulane University, the University of Central Florida and the University of California, Santa Barbara, respectively.
(I ran across it in a tweet from Slate. Really, how can you not read “No, climate change will (probably) not deprive you of hot sex.”)
The economists studied “the effects of temperature shocks” on birth rates in the United States over a long period, from 1931 to 2010. It’s a thorough academic look at not only fertility rates, but also how high temperatures can affect the health of infants in utero and after birth.
“We find that additional days about 80 degrees F cause a large decline in birth rates approximately eight to 10 months later,” they wrote.
“The initial decline is followed by a partial rebound in births over the next few months implying that populations can mitigate the fertility cost of temperature shocks by shifting conception month.”
And this is key: “First, given we do not observe a full rebound in births in the medium term, we project that climate change could exacerbate the already below-replacement birth rates in the United States and other developed countries.”
Infant health is affected because of the rising proportion of births during the hotter summer months, as well as higher temperatures in the third trimester.
(The authors refer to sex only infrequently. It’s a study about birth rates and timing, remember, but I put two and two together.)
They also warned that policy makers and scientists “should reconsider fertility as an important and underexplored cost of climate change.”
Looking, too, at historical information, they concluded that air conditioning could “substantially offset” the problem.
To be clear, the economists made no jokes about what is a serious topic, using phrases like “a causal link between temperature and coital frequency in humans.”
(Though I must admit I wondered at first about “a robustness check” in this line: “As a robustness check, we also test for impacts using a polynomial spline in the daily mean temperature.”)
Quote of the day
“Why would you buy a PC any more? No, really, why would you buy one?”
Apple CEO Tim Cook
Cineplex profit, sales up
Canadians love a night out at the movies. The popcorn, too.
Cineplex Inc. today posted a jump of almost 35 per cent in third-quarter profit to $21.4-million, or 34 cents, from $15.9-million or 25 cents a year earlier.
Total sales climbed almost 10 per cent, attendance by 7.6 per cent and concession revenues per patron by 6.3 per cent to $5.43.
Box office revenue per patron, though, dipped 1.3 per cent to $8.89.
Chart of the day
As The Globe and Mail’s Tamsin McMahon reports, a new Toronto-Dominion Bank study finds that British Columbia, Ontario and Alberta are the most vulnerable in Canada when it comes to household finances.
“Households in these three provinces report having the highest debt-to-income ratios, devote the greatest share of income to making debt payments and have built up the highest degree of froth in their housing markets over the last decade,” said TD economist Diana Petramala.
“Moreover, their vulnerability substantially surpasses that of the other provinces by a large margin.”