Revisit Of Loomis'S Growth Predictions 10-Years Later

[mfbukowski]

An atheist proselyting for scientism would do well not to start a game of "whose ideology did the most harm," because he will lose before he starts.

Regards,

Pahoran

Wish I could give you a dozen rep points for that one!

[mfbukowski]

The scriptures don't mention an exponential growth.

1 Nephi 14:12. "their dominions upon the face of the earth were small."

Math 24:14

And this

a

gospel

of the

b

kingdom

shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the

c

end

come."

So if you believe the entire world will be converted to Mormonism - or it should have outstanding growth, continually or exponentially - as evidence of its truthfulness - before the Second Coming, sorry.

But missionary work is progressing worldwide so all will have the chance to accept.

Please don't confuse us with the truth

[Okrahomer]

And it is an assertion supported by the available data. The fact is the birth rates have nearly doubled over the past decade, and I was always very clear that the past decade was the point of interest.

The available data do not in fact support your assertion. The birth rate in 2001 was 6.1/1000, and that was also the "low point" for the decade. If I understand your assertion correctly, the birth rate should have been "near" 12.2/1000 at some point during the next 10 years. The available data, however, show this never happened. The birth rate in 2011 it was 8.3/1000. The "nearest" it has ever come to "doubling" was in 2008, when it was 9.1/1000. The birth rate has actually declined in each of the three years since 2008.

[Okrahomer]

In reality, there are only around 4-6 million people on this planet who consider themselves LDS.

Have you tested this theory recently? The PEW U.S. Religious Landscape Survey indicates the percentage of U.S. adults (18 years-old and older) who self-identify as LDS is 1.6%, ±0.6%. While the University of North Carolina study of U.S. Teens indicates that 2.5% of U.S. teens self-identify as LDS. Extrapolating from current U.S. census estimates and adjusting for non-teen children, apparently somewhere between 5 – 6 million people identify themselves as LDS—in the U.S. alone. Allowing for David Wright’s worst case estimate for LDS retention rates outside the U.S. (20%), one would still need to include another 1.7 million in the total. So, it would probably be more accurate to say “there are only around 6 - 8 million people on the planet who consider themselves LDS.” There also seems to be quite a high correlation between officially-reported U.S. LDS membership and the "self-identified" estimates.

[why me]

Critics have been maintaining that the drop in conversion rates has occured over the past decade, primarily due to easier access to critical information about the Church. The Church has circumvented this problem to some extent by expanding mission efforts to countries where internet access it extremely limited.

This may be true that the internet has had a huge effect on people being converted. But I also think that it goes along with this scenerio: a person goes to the internet and begins to read critic sites about mormonism. They read all sorts of pastes and copying about church history and who said what. Then, lacking critical thinking skills, they accept what was written as truth without realizing the biasness of the information and who is behind it. This would tend to go along with the idea that the internet has hampered critical thinking because most people are surfing quickly for information without analysimg the information read. No time for reflection and questioning which is all apart of the equation. They then close their mind to the mormon perspective or don't believe it.

The church has not circumvented this problem at all. The only way to circumvent it is to fight fire with fire and it is beginning to do this. The internet is across the globe and very few places are without it. The internet cafe is available to most people in the world.

The problem: the internet complete with facebook, twiitter, and surfing is killing critical thinking skills and the questioning process of information. I believe that there was also a study that showed that most people surf the internet to confirm their biasness in general and not to challenge it.

[Xander]

I usually only have time to post once a week on the weekends but exceptions can be made...

The available data do not in fact support your assertion.

Yes, it does.

The birth rate in 2001 was 6.1/1000

No it wasn't. Your numbers are bogus because they are based on bad data and bad math. Utah and Idaho lead the nation in birth rates by a substantial margin every year, and yet you would have us believe that Mormons have fewer children than non-Mormons? The birth rate in the USA for the year 2001 was 14.1 per thousand. And you want us to believe the LDS birth rate was not only lower, but more than 50% lower? Anyone who has had any amount of exposure to LDS culture knows that Mormons typically have more children than non-Mormons. I can think of five families off the top of my head with more than 8 kids, and they are all LDS. Two of them have more than 10! I can't think of a single non-LDS family with more than five kids.

But back to your problematic math.

First of all, the annual number posted for children of record are naturally going to come from active families, which only represents a fraction of that larger figure you're taking for granted from the annual statistical report. Ex-Mormons and inactive Mormons typically do not put their newborns on Church records. So the main problem with your methodology is that you're assuming the overall membership figures presented by the Church, accurately represent a real "Mormon" population from which your birth rates can be derived. Naturally, the rate of birth figure is going to be substantially lower when you divide these births into a much larger number that is constantly being jacked up by the Church every year. The only solid data they provided was the number of children born into the Church, which has gone up substantially over the past decade, from a low of 69,000 in 2001 to a high of 123,000 (nearly "double") in 2008 and that has been roughly the same over the last three years (119,000 in 2009 and 120,000 in 2010).

That the overall membership figure is faulty as an accurate representation of "active" Mormons, is easily demonstrated by the fact that (as David Stewart has shown, and the Encyclopedia of Mormonism concurs) roughly 35-40% of the global Church is in any sense, "active." So while you're taking the 69,000 children of record from 2001 and dividing that into the claimed 11,394,522 members from that same year, what you should really be doing actually two things:

1) Take the membership numbers from the previous year since it is unrealistic to include the 300,000 converts among those who were giving birth to new Mormon children, during the same year of their own conversion. I'm sure this has happened on occasion, but it is by far the exception to the rule (I don't remember anyone in my mission ever baptizing a pregnant woman who gave birth that same year).

2) Take into account the 35-40% activity rate among that group. So of the 11,068,861 members on record going into that year, roughly 4.2 million of them were active (11,068,861 x .38) and could have attributed to the 69,000 children of record.

Once we factor in the above, suddenly the LDS birth rate for the year 2001 becomes roughly 16 per thousand, which is only slightly higher than the national average of 14.1.

Using the same method, we get an LDS birth rate of 24 per thousand for 2008 and a rate of 22 per thousand for 2010, both of which is substantially higher than birth rates from previous years. Now considering Utah's birth rate for 2008 was 20.3 per 1000, my numbers make much more sense. Yours don't even come close, and the reason Utah's birth rate is slightly lower than the ones I posted above is probably because Utah is only about 70% LDS whereas my figures come from strictly LDS samples.

Furthermore, according to the Deseret News, in 2010 "Utah had 81 children for every 1,000 women during the year, compared with a national average of 58." That is 40% higher than the national average, and active LDS represent probably just half of the Utah population. This means that the actual figure is probably higher than that, but again, you want us to believe that Mormon birth rates are substantially lower than that of non-Mormon families?

I'll explain the problems with your other argument later, but I just wanted to point out the absurdity of your claim that there are 6 million self identifying Mormons in the USA. That's essentially every single Mormon the Church claims to have in this country! You don't see any problems with this argument? Are you sure you don't want to edit that post before I have time to respond to it?

"Pew located many of its Mormon respondents through oversampling in core areas of the Mormon culture region, where attendance rates trend higher"

(link).

To expand that figure from such a small sampling (1,019 Mormons!) and apply it across an entire country of more than 300,000,000, is nothing short of ridiculous.

There also seems to be quite a high correlation between officially-reported U.S. LDS membership and the "self-identified" estimates.

LOL!

Tell that to Brazil and Chile, whose national census's proved that self-identifying LDS constituted just a fraction of the number claimed by the Church. I don't have the exact figures in front of me right now, but it was something like 18-21% of the number the Church claimed it had in those countries. These national census's are infinitely superior to these small sample surveys done by Pew and others, because everyone in the country is required to participate.

Edited April 11, 2012 by Xander

[wenglund]

And it is an assertion supported by the available data. The fact is the birth rates have nearly doubled over the past decade, and I was always very clear that the past decade was the point of interest. Critics have been maintaining that the drop in conversion rates has occured over the past decade, primarily due to easier access to critical information about the Church. The Church has circumvented this problem to some extent by expanding mission efforts to countries where internet access it extremely limited. They've been shuffling the mission field a lot over the past twenty years, trying to find that "sweet spot" but the fact is the number of missions has decreased because of limited success in membership retention in these areas. There was the flood of missionaries into Eastern Europe in the 90's, and then the mass exodus once the Church realized how hard it was in that area. It can always expect increases in conversion rates by funneling more missionaries to countries like Mexico or Africa. But it also knows now that retention rates in these countries are ridiculously low.

It does no such thing. Schaalje hasn't even begun to support his point that I addressed. That LDS conversion rates must be going up. All indicators suggest the exact opposite. Notice that I also provided data from David Stewart that flies in the face of Schaalje's assumption, which is not data driven. All he has done really is point to decreased birth rates compared to the pre-1960 era, but so what? How does this change the fact that converts per missionary has dropped dramatically, as has the number of missionaries and now even the missions? These three categories are those that weigh on the question of conversion rates.

You might want to take a look at this chart I created about ten years ago. Somehow it ended up on this website and someone has been updating the information.

So I'm fully aware of the data, but I do not see Schaalje making a good argument that conversion rates have been on the increase. The fact is the Church has been nothing short of dishonest in its annual Statistical Report, claiming that there are many more "millions" of people in the Church, than there really are. Back in 1997 I remember the Hinckley interviews prompted numerous media appearance by LDS PR spokespersons who claimed there were "10 million strong" at the time. In reality, there are no more "10 million strong" today than there were back in 1997.

Schaalje has been complaining that Roger's analysis wasn't academic enough for his taste, but he still cannot change the fact that Roger's predictions were dead on. So who cares if it was academic, when we know now that he was right in his projections? That means something.

I am sorry, but your lack of academic acumen and your unfamiliarity with the rigors of social science research, particularly in the area of statistics, is showing. The issue isn't with the accuracy of the projection, but rather the time periods being measured and the explanations proffered for the decrease in growth during a given time period.

You said that the "critics have been maintaining that the drop in conversion rates has occurred over the past decade, primarily due to easier access to critical information about the Church." Would you please provide statistical evidence in support of this causal claim (hint: anecdotes and possible correlative patterns wont suffice, academically speaking)?

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[Analytics]

To wrap-up my thoughts on the issues Dr. Schaalje has raised, let me comment on one more thing:

To see a more sophisticated and less agenda-driven church membership projection (carried out in 1957, before modern computers were available),see a discussion of Howard Nielson’s 1957 projection in the most recent issue of BYU Studies (see here).

I took the graph you uploaded from this "more sophisticated and less agenda-driven" projection, and added a blue line that shows the church's actual birth rate.

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

As you can see, while Nielson projected the birth rate would remain at a constant 35 births per thousand, it sank like a rock to 7, which is barely higher than the church's death rate. This dramatic drop in the birth rate isn't caused by the ebbs and flows of demographics or anything else, and gives a powerful insight into the nature of the church's membership and the fact that it shouldn't be expected to grow exponentially.

When you divide the number of new "members of record" by the church's total membership, the church's birth rate is much lower than the birth rate of Russia, China, Germany, and Japan, and is barely larger than the church's death rate. Thus, virtually all new growth has to come from the church's missionary efforts.

It's hard to get a really good grip on the missionary effort, but it would seem that many, if not the majority, of the church's converts quickly become inactive. The church's "conversion rate" (new converts divided by total membership) has dropped from 41 per-thousand in 1989 to about 20 in 2011. This drop shows no sign of slowing down--regardless of how big it gets, the church continues to baptize about 300,000 new converts. Slowdowns in the previous century were rightly attributed to things like wars and great depressions. This slowdown is categorically different, taking place during a time of unprecedented missionary effort.

There just aren't any good reasons to believe the exponential growth the church enjoyed in the last century is going to continue in this century. This isn’t based upon a simplistic, agenda-driven analysis. It’s carefully looking at the nature of exponential growth and the changing nature of the church’s membership. 50 years ago, a median church member was a dedicated Utah latter-day Saint. Is the median member now a Brazilian who was baptized 10 years ago but self-identifies as a Catholic? Maybe not yet, but the membership profile is shifting in that direction. This is why exponential growth can’t continue. Rebutting this point with a time series of the church's growth rate for the last 100 years obfuscates the truth about what’s going on.

A futurologist would be more qualified to peer-review my forecast than a statistician. Are there any futurologists at BYU who take issue with my analysis?

Edited April 11, 2012 by Analytics

[Xander]

I am sorry, but your lack of academic acumen and your unfamiliarity with the rigors of social science research, particularly in the area of statistics, is showing

As always wade, coming from someone with your non-academic background, I'll take that as a compliment. To say the least, your opinion of my "academic acumen" runs contrary to that shared by a number of professional academics, many of whom hail from BYU. If you properly understood the arguments from either side then you'd know that it is Schaalje who has refused to back up his claim that conversion rates are on the rise. Roger has been rather gracious in his responses, and he is still hit with all the usual apologetic snipes about his so-called "agenda," as if there were no reasonable basis whatsoever for his opinion on the matter. In the meantime, you and yours are free to opine baselessly at your leisure.

Sigh!

I requested evidence for his claim and so far he's presented none. Where is the "academic acumen " in that? He complains that Roger's model was too simplistic, but it doesn't really get any more simplistic than saying birth rates have gone down and membership has gone up, therefore conversion rates must be up! I'm stunned that he would make such an assertion based on such a simplistic model, while at the same time complain to Roger because he didn't consider other possible drivers of Church membership. So far Schaalje has considered only two factors before jumping to this agenda-driven conclusion, and one of them is the bogus membership figure that doesn't account for inactivity. Has he considered a more sophisticated approach to determining a more realistic membership number based on actual activity? David Stewart has, but why hasn't Schaalje?

Schaalje wants a "sophisticated academic" paper from Roger, though he is unwilling to play by those same rules of sophistication. Again, his conclusion about conversion rates on the rise is based entirely upon a dubious anecdote about decreased birth rates, which, as I have shown, is based on bogus numbers produced by the church. No statistician outside BYU would ever leap to such a ridiculous conclusion, and only a Mormon apologist would make the ludicrous claims made by Okrahomer. I've demonstrated this thoroughly in my last post and all you've done so far in response is attack me.

But that's par for the course.

The issue isn't with the accuracy of the projection, but rather the time periods being measured and the explanations proffered for the decrease in growth during a given time period.

,

Yes, I'm aware of that. And quibbling about these things appears to be nothing more than an attempt to highlight a sideshow over the impressive fact that Roger's predictions were proved to be spot on a decade later. Someone with this kind of insight should be given more credibility than the apologists who keep attacking him just because they don't like the fact that he's an apostate who keeps getting it right. And your post here is just another example of apologetic frustration with the fact that another critic corrects an apologist's wild assertions.

You said that the "critics have been maintaining that the drop in conversion rates has occurred over the past decade, primarily due to easier access to critical information about the Church." Would you please provide statistical evidence in support of this causal claim (hint: anecdotes and possible correlative patterns wont suffice, academically speaking)?

So from now on no one on this forum is permitted to opine on anything without presenting it in the form of an academic paper? Apologists here are experts at baseless assertion and disproved predictions, yet the second a critic dares to share his opinion that disrupts your apologetic view of the Church, you try to undermine it by pointing out that it isn't "academic" enough. LOL! Just listen to the stuff Okrahomer has been saying. He thinks there are 5-6 million self-identifying Mormons in the United States alone, and he bases this on his unsupported belief that taking a survey of less than 2,000 Mormons, which focused on Mormon-heavy areas of the country, can somehow be applied evenly across a diverse demographic area covering more than 300 million! With an academian on watch, you'd think that correcting Okrahomer's misuse of the Pew study would be first on his agenda. And with your so-called concern for the "rigors of social science research, particularly in the area of statistics," one might expect a correction coming from your end as well. But we both know that you've never really been concerned with any of this and you're certainly not going to correct one of your own religious cohorts. Your sole purpose here is to offer rhetorical support for a couple of apologists who have inadvertently put their feet in their mouths.

Regarding my claim about the reasons for decreased growth rates, the fact is exposure to the internet is still in its infancy and studies have not been produced to confirm or deny this thesis. But the downward trend in Church growth rates is perfectly consistent with it. It has always been the argument of the critic that a more informed investigator is less likely to join the Church, and all the available evidence is consistent with that thesis. Mormon missionaries enjoy more success in parts of the world where ignorance of Mormonism runs rampant and access to critical information runs low. This, and the fact that the Church makes an effort to keep prospective converts in the dark on the critical issues, is evidence enough that this is a primary driver for determining an accurate model for conversion rates. Critics know this because they've experienced it first hand and they're confident that science will eventually catch up and confirm what they already know to be true.

As of yet there is no clear "statistical" evidence regarding the internet, only correlation along with a plethora of anecdotal evidence. That you do not like this is irrelevant that such evidence exists. And that you of all people are demanding academic rigor from Roger and I, while turning a blind eye to the ridiculous things asserted by Okrahomer and Shaaelje, tells us plenty about your own agenda here. In any event, our projections have been shown to be credible. Whether or not you like our reasons for these predictions is irrelevant to the fact that we're still getting it right and you're still getting it wrong. Church growth has dropped dramatically, and the only reason you keep spouting off these figures about the 14+ million Mormons is because you place your trust not in statistics or the "rigors of academic research", but rather your faith is in the Church that provides these numbers for you.

Is it really too much to ask that you at least admit that the actual number of self-identifying Mormons is most likely less than half the number provided by the Church? The Church has already admitted its activity rate is less than half in the USA and even lower in the rest of the world. As we keep reminding everyone, virtually all the critics and ex-Mormons on these forums are still members in good standing according to Church's records. The Church's "statistical report" is an insult to statisticians everywhere. But you're going to attack the critics for pointing this out, simply because our claims aren't published by an academic press!

Edited April 11, 2012 by Xander

[Xander]

Roger, the dramatic drop in birth rates (using the membership figures pumped out by the Church on an annual basis), is further evidence for high inactivity in the Church. After all, does anyone really believe the Church's birth rate is at 7% when the national average is at 14% and LDS-heavy Utah is above 20%?

I mean, really?

The only way to explain this discrepancy is with the dramatic increase in inactivity/apostasy, and the Church's failure to adjust its numbers accordingly.

Edited April 11, 2012 by Xander

[Analytics]

Roger, the dramatic drop in birth rates (using the membership figures pumped out by the Church on an annual basis), is further evidence for high inactivity in the Church. After all, does anyone really believe the Church's birth rate is at 7% when the national average is at 14% and LDS-heavy Utah is above 20%?

I mean, really?

The only way to explain this discrepancy is with the dramatic increase in inactivity/apostasy, and the Church's failure to adjust its numbers accordingly.

Exactly. The 14.4 million people listed on the rolls of the church probably had well over 250,000 children last year. A birthrate of 8.3 per thousand doesn’t indicate that Mormons typically have smaller families than the Japanese. Rather, it indicates that many LDS parents, probably most, don’t register the births of their children with the church.

[Okrahomer]

But back to your problematic math.

First of all, the annual number posted for children of record are naturally going to come from active families, which only represents a fraction of that larger figure you're taking for granted from the annual statistical report. Ex-Mormons and inactive Mormons typically do not put their newborns on Church records. So the main problem with your methodology is that you're assuming the overall membership figures presented by the Church, accurately represent a real "Mormon" population from which your birth rates can be derived. Naturally, the rate of birth figure is going to be substantially lower when you divide these births into a much larger number that is constantly being jacked up by the Church every year. The only solid data they provided was the number of children born into the Church, which has gone up substantially over the past decade, from a low of 69,000 in 2001 to a high of 123,000 (nearly "double") in 2008 and that has been roughly the same over the last three years (119,000 in 2009 and 120,000 in 2010).

That the overall membership figure is faulty as an accurate representation of "active" Mormons, is easily demonstrated by the fact that (as David Stewart has shown, and the Encyclopedia of Mormonism concurs) roughly 35-40% of the global Church is in any sense, "active." So while you're taking the 69,000 children of record from 2001 and dividing that into the claimed 11,394,522 members from that same year, what you should really be doing actually two things:

1) Take the membership numbers from the previous year since it is unrealistic to include the 300,000 converts among those who were giving birth to new Mormon children, during the same year of their own conversion. I'm sure this has happened on occasion, but it is by far the exception to the rule (I don't remember anyone in my mission ever baptizing a pregnant woman who gave birth that same year).

2) Take into account the 35-40% activity rate among that group. So of the 11,068,861 members on record going into that year, roughly 4.2 million of them were active (11,068,861 x .38) and could have attributed to the 69,000 children of record.

Once we factor in the above, suddenly the LDS birth rate for the year 2001 becomes roughly 16 per thousand, which is only slightly higher than the national average of 14.1.

Using the same method, we get an LDS birth rate of 24 per thousand for 2008 and a rate of 22 per thousand for 2010, both of which is substantially higher than birth rates from previous years. Now considering Utah's birth rate for 2008 was 20.3 per 1000, my numbers make much more sense. Yours don't even come close, and the reason Utah's birth rate is slightly lower than the ones I posted above is probably because Utah is only about 70% LDS whereas my figures come from strictly LDS samples.

Furthermore, according to the Deseret News, in 2010 "Utah had 81 children for every 1,000 women during the year, compared with a national average of 58." That is 40% higher than the national average, and active LDS represent probably just half of the Utah population. This means that the actual figure is probably higher than that, but again, you want us to believe that Mormon birth rates are substantially lower than that of non-Mormon families?

Thank you for the explanation which does make sense to me now: the actual birth rate is likely much higher. I see it now, and I apologize for "enticing" you out of your normal practice of once-weekly posting.

[Okrahomer]

...but I just wanted to point out the absurdity of your claim that there are 6 million self identifying Mormons in the USA. That's essentially every single Mormon the Church claims to have in this country! You don't see any problems with this argument? Are you sure you don't want to edit that post before I have time to respond to it?

"Pew located many of its Mormon respondents through oversampling in core areas of the Mormon culture region, where attendance rates trend higher"

(link).

Yes, I can see your point on this as well. I had not been aware of the oversampling issue. Again, I apologize for forcing you out of your normal posting cycle.

[Pahoran]

Yes, I can see your point on this as well. I had not been aware of the oversampling issue. Again, I apologize for forcing you out of your normal posting cycle.

Actually you have nothing to apologise for. You "forced" him by having the awful temerity to disagree with him. I know; how dare you, right?

And Xander is the last person to have any basis to complain about "oversampling." He's made it clear in a number of related threads that he wants to count everyone who wasn't at Sacrament Meeting last week as an "ex-Mormon," and yet without a trace of irony, he periodically erupts with rage, accusing the Church of overstating its membership.

Regards,

Pahoran

[Okrahomer]

Actually you have nothing to apologise for. You "forced" him by having the awful temerity to disagree with him. I know; how dare you, right?

And Xander is the last person to have any basis to complain about "oversampling." He's made it clear in a number of related threads that he wants to count everyone who wasn't at Sacrament Meeting last week as an "ex-Mormon," and yet without a trace of irony, he periodically erupts with rage, accusing the Church of overstating its membership.

Regards,

Pahoran

I had wondered about that very thing--whether we were discussing "activity rates" or actual membership; and if we are discussing "activity rates"--what does that actually mean? And that will be my FINAL two-cents on this thread, because I think I've already shown too much of my ignorance.

[Pahoran]

Thank you for the explanation which does make sense to me now: the actual birth rate is likely much higher. I see it now, and I apologize for "enticing" you out of your normal practice of once-weekly posting.

Incidentally, I think it might help to clarify this whole issue if we knew whether "New Children of Record during 2011" was a net or a gross figure. That is, does it represent all newborns added, or the surplus of births over deaths, or the surplus of newborns over eight-year-olds being baptised?

Regards,

Pahoran

[wenglund]

Hi Kevin,

Let me clear away the remarkably dense and distracting billows of smoke in your post and see if there are any embers of intelligence still aglow:

So from now on no one on this forum is permitted to opine on anything without presenting it in the form of an academic paper?

No. I am just looking for sound and valid evidence for your as yet baseless claim. Is that too much to ask?

Regarding my claim about the reasons for decreased growth rates, the fact is exposure to the internet is still in its infancy and studies have not been produced to confirm or deny this thesis. But the downward trend in Church growth rates is perfectly consistent with it. It has always been the argument of the critic that a more informed investigator is less likely to join the Church, and all the available evidence is consistent with that thesis. Mormon missionaries enjoy more success in parts of the world where ignorance of Mormonism runs rampant and access to critical information runs low. This, and the fact that the Church makes an effort to keep prospective converts in the dark on the critical issues, is evidence enough that this is a primary driver for determining an accurate model for conversion rates. Critics know this because they've experienced it first hand and they're confident that science will eventually catch up and confirm what they already know to be true.

In other words, as yet you have absolutely no statistical support for your claim. Instead, you have strung together a number of dubious and baseless assertions, and without warrant, trumped them as "consistent," "fact," and "truth." Some might call this blind faith, while others might call it obfuscative fog.

You could have saved yourself the embarrassment and me the waste of time, by just simply and honestly admitting "what we already know to be true," that you don't know what you are talking about in regards to the specific request I made. Really, who do you think you are fooling--besides yourself?

However, as always, we are made better by your participation. Your vacuous snarls, dogmatic barks, and uncharitable nipping at our apologetic heals, keep up lively, if not provide enlightening contrast and opposition that is needful in all things.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[Areabird]

However, as always, we are made better by your participation. Your vacuous snarls, dogmatic barks, and uncharitable nipping at our apologetic heals, keep up lively, if not provide enlightening contrast and opposition that is needful in all things.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

Hold it. Wait. I thought you two were friends.....

[Bruce Schaalje]

This is why exponential growth can’t continue. Rebutting this point with a time series of the church's growth rate for the last 100 years obfuscates the truth about what’s going on.

A futurologist would be more qualified to peer-review my forecast than a statistician. Are there any futurologists at BYU who take issue with my analysis?

So, rebutting the obvious truth with data is obfuscation. I agree that this truly is beyond my acumen as a statistician. Since we have entered the realm of futurology and historical determinism, I don't have anything more to add.

Bruce

[Analytics]

So, rebutting the obvious truth with data is obfuscation. I agree that this truly is beyond my acumen as a statistician. Since we have entered the realm of futurology and historical determinism, I don't have anything more to add.

Bruce

The way I'd phrase it is that rebutting a detailed analysis with misleading and largely irrelevant data is obfuscation.

After an essentially declining growth rate for the first 35 years of the 20th century, the growth rate rebounded and the church grew from 1 million members to 10 million over a 50-year period (1947 to 1997). Could that happen again? Could the church's growth rate rebound again and grow 10-fold over 50 years? It's conceivable. But growing a 10-milion member church into a 100-million member church is extraordinarily more difficult and categorically different than growing a 1-million member church into a 10-million member church. That's why the data you focus on are misleading.

Furthermore, the profile of the church has changed--as the church gets bigger and bigger, a smaller and smaller percentage show any real dedication to it. Exponential growth requires the new converts to cary their weight with as much zeal as the established members. That just isn't happening, as is illustrated so dramatically by the graph of the church's birth rate.

In any case, thanks for weighing in on this thread. You haven't caused me to change my mind, but you have helped me see how I could have explained my ideas better.

Of course I'm not an historical determinist. Maybe things will turn around and the church will see 100 million members in my lifetime. And I'll hold onto my Confederate dollars--maybe the South will rise again!

Edited April 12, 2012 by Analytics

[Analytics]

Incidentally, I think it might help to clarify this whole issue if we knew whether "New Children of Record during 2011" was a net or a gross figure. That is, does it represent all newborns added, or the surplus of births over deaths, or the surplus of newborns over eight-year-olds being baptised?

Regards,

Pahoran

My understanding is that it represents only newborns who were added. So, the formula looks like this:

Membership(t) = Membership(t-1) + Converts(t) + NewChildren(t) - Decrements(t)

What I'm calling "Decrements" is the implicit catch-all bucket--deaths, excommuncations, resignations, children of record who pass a certain age without having been baptized, members in the "address unknown" file who are eventually removed, and other adjustments.

As Kevin Graham mentioned, a question related to this came up a few years ago--the implicit "Decrement" number was negative. Kevin picked up the phone, called the gentleman who gave the statistics report, and got a fairly detailed response.

[wenglund]

Hold it. Wait. I thought you two were friends.....

Just a second...you think we aren't still friends?

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[Bruce Schaalje]

The way I'd phrase it is that rebutting a detailed analysis with misleading and largely irrelevant data is obfuscation. . . But growing a 10-milion member church into a 100-million member church is extraordinarily more difficult and categorically different than growing a 1-million member church into a 10-million member church. That's why the data you focus on are misleading.

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.

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Furthermore, the profile of the church has changed--as the church gets bigger and bigger, a smaller and smaller percentage show any real dedication to it. Exponential growth requires the new converts to cary their weight with as much zeal as the established members. That just isn't happening, as is illustrated so dramatically by the graph of the church's birth rate.

Roger,

That’s kind of harsh, but you can phrase it however you want. We will have to just agree to disagree about this. The data are neither largely irrelevant nor misleading, they just didn’t agree with what you wanted to say. You admitted that your emphasis on changes in the growth rate only since 1979 was based on non-statistical considerations. There was no good data-based reason to restrict the training data to data post-1978. You gave some (unreferenced) reasons relating to the growth of other large organizations, and you hinted strongly but non-quantitatively about defection rates and unprecedented missionary efforts. But that is just unconvincing talk until you can back it up with a model, based on justifiable parameter values, that shows the growth rate can never stabilize again. You also claim that growing a 10-million member church is “categorically” different from growing a 1-million member church. You sound sure of yourself, but I don’t see why this is unquestionably the case. This is like so much of your model – based on folk logic and preconception rather than data.

You also admitted that dynamic age structure and random economic forces were not built into your model, and that you lost your interest in it because you didn’t have the data to add needed sophistication. (But obviously you had enough interest in it to start this thread). You admitted that you could not attach any measure of uncertainty to your predictions.

Your predictions revolve around talk (not real mathematics) about shrinking dedication of converts and about unprecedented but unsuccessful missionary efforts (which you admit that you cannot measure). But at this point, your reasoning seems to shift to absolute numbers rather than relative numbers. Sure there are more missionaries now and sure there are more inactives on church membership rolls, but are there proportionately more of them? If so, how much more (proportionately)? My preliminary look at the missionary/member ratio actually shows a decrease.

If I understand correctly, you and he-who-must-not-be-named believe that because he knows some people with 8 children, the birthrate among active Mormons has gone up. But you don’t know how much. So you then conclude that the decreasing crude birth-rate in the church is due solely to a high rate of defection. I disagree, but If you believe this so strongly, why not demonstrate that this could be the case. I'll even help you. Even though the model really needs to involve age and gender specific birth, death, conversion and defection rates, you could explore crude a difference equation model like

T_t = Y_t + X_t

Y

t

= Y

t-1

(a)(b +1-d1 + c

t-1

)

X

t

= Y

t-1

(1-a)(1-d1) + X

t-1

(1-d2)

where T_t is the total reported number of members in year t, Y_t is the number of active members on the rolls in year t, X_t is the number of inactive members on the rolls in year t, a is the yearly activity rate (and therefore 1 – a is the defection rate), b is the yearly birth rate for active members, d1 is the death rate for active members, d2 is the death rate for inactive members on the rolls (different from d1 because some of these are left on the rolls until they hit a maximum age), and c_t is the per-active-member convert baptism rate in year t. Any of the rates might be year-specific, but I think your idea is that only the conversion rate changes over time.

Does this express what you and what’s his name are getting at? If so, see if what you are proposing really holds water.

Bruce

Edited April 12, 2012 by Bruce Schaalje

[zielkee]

Stark hasn't been alone in his prediction about the role of the lds church in the future of the world. How about the one saying the church will have a global cultural influence? (I can neither remember nor find the source) but it wasn't 10 years ago.

[zielkee]

Attached (I still don't know how to make them show up here) are 2 interesting graphs. They are from a church growth projection commissioned by the church and BYU in 1957. The first shows the projected birth and death rates of the church, Utah and the USA from 1957 to 2000. I superimposed the actual USA and Utah birth rates in red and green. The projected death rates for Utah and the USA were dead on (so to speak).

The second shows the age distribution of the church and of the USA in 1957. I superimposed the age distribution of the USA in 2000.

Bruce

Your charts do reveal that people world wide are refusing to have babies. That is not good. Have you seen the BYU production Demographic Winter? Very insightful.