Lack of Pregnancy as Economic Indicator.

• Position: SOCIOLOGY - Brief article

We should keep an eye on mothers-to-be, as their numbers foretell the strength of the economy. "You would think that people would begin to put off having kids after a recession has already begun, but the data shows that people in the aggregate actually tend to start conceiving fewer children before the onset of recessions," says Matt Lampert, director of research at the Socionomics Institute, Gainesville, Ga., and coauthor of The Socionomic Theory of Finance and Socionomic Causality in Politics: How Social Mood Influences Everything from Elections to Geopolitics.

If that sounds counterintuitive, consider this: the National Bureau of Economic Research has posted a working paper that shows declines in conceptions preceded the three most-recent U.S. recessions. That study confirmed similar work that one of Lampert's colleagues, Robert Prechter, conducted 19 years ago. Prechter charted data from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Dow Jones Industrial Average going back to 1908.

The data reveals that conceptions tend to rise and fall with the...