It has been known for some time that one has to be careful with the connection between storks and births, at least as far as the direction of the connection is concerned. Statisticians have long spread myths about this that were not backed up by the data. Unfortunately, lateral thinkers have been contributing to renewed confusion about the role of storks in births for some time now by naively blaming corona vaccinations for the drop in births in 2022, just because they explain everything they don’t understand.
However, one has to admit that the storks, whose role in the transport of ordered children is of course fundamentally undisputed, do not provide any plausible explanation for the drop in births in 2022. But an approach that takes a more holistic view of the logistics of newborn children helps here: When it comes to the connection between storks and births, you have to take online trading into account these days.
If you look at Amazon’s sales in Germany, for example, it is striking that this is surprisingly parallel to the trend in births and that, after years of increasing numbers, there was a massive slump in 2022 compared to 2021. In 2021, Amazon still had sales of $37.3 billion in Germany, but in 2022 it was only $33.6 billion. The correlation coefficient of the two time series in the last 10 years is 0.63 – a clear connection. We leave the problem of non-stationary time series aside, since the content-related connection, especially with a view to the slump in 2022, is clear and speaks against a spurious correlation: Amazon simply had delivery bottlenecks in 2022. The fact that, according to the PEI, all studies also speak against the claim of the lateral thinkers that the corona vaccinations would reduce the fertility of women or men must be interpreted as additional evidence for the extended logistics thesis.