I decided to look at the GSS and see if there was anything interesting about fertility of white Americans of various ethnicities. There's a big wide range, with the lowest numbers for national-origin groups dominated by Jews in the United States (e.g., Russia, Lithuania) and southern Europe (Italy, Greece). As it happens, Italy and Greece have low fertility, so I plotted TFR for European nations on the Y axis and CHILDS (the GSS variable) on the X. TFR is not necessarily going to be the same as the mean number of children per woman in the GSS, but it should be close and the rank order will likely stay the same. So is there any trend?
There's no correlation. Actually, there is, 0.19, which means than less than 4% of the variation of Y can be explained by variation in X. In other words, worth mentioning only to dismiss.
