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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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What's significantly more complicated is that the two developed countries with the lowest female LFPR are Italy and Japan. Clearly, there's more going on here.

The only truly developed country with above replacement fertility is Israel. Georgia is a much poorer second world country with replacement-ish and stably rising fertility. There are regions and social strata elsewhere in the developed world with high fertility(Eg the Dutch bible belt), but nowhere else in the industrialized world is above replacement on the national level unless you count the gulf countries as industrialized, although a few Latin American countries and Turkey were fairly recently. These countries vary vastly. More than likely there's no magic bullet.

F-LFPR doesn’t tell us what the Japanese woman or the Italian woman values, how she sees her identity in the world, whether she was nurtured at a young age to want to nurture children, and whether she feels pride/shame relative to her participation in fertility, all of which relate to status. It’s not clear that there is more going on, I don’t think, at least not from F-LFPR. If there is something more complicated than this, we should see the answer in the Hasidim, who raise lots of children while living near-exclusively in urban and suburban environments. This eliminates any diet or environmental toxin -related etiology. What is left? There’s money, but the experiments in paying women to have kids don’t amount to anything. So what’s actually left besides “pro-fertile culture” which relates to female status?

(Israeli non-orthodox fertility is complicated by the existence of the ultra-orthodox, who raise up the religious scholars, affect culture, and a percent of the ultra-orthodox become merely “religious”. The Jewish religion probably also increases female fertility as a status signifier because it’s so worldly / material regarding “existence of the Jewish people” etc.)

How much did those experiments actually pay them? I would expect the pay to be a drop in the bucket compared to how much the cost of successfully raising children who "make it" has increased in the last 20 years, because otherwise we could have UBI (top-tier US college tuition fees can easily pay for three adults to have a comfortable life!). There's also the matter of inflation in attention and supervision children are expected to be given, which can't be made up for by just pouring in money. This is most obvious in the US near-prohibition on leaving even 12 year olds unattended, but even an Austrian family friend (young academic mother of two) reports malicious gossip from parents of classmates about her never picking up the kids after primary school because she has to work. What I gather from her stories is that mothers helicopter-parenting their children has become a status thing (it's naturally a luxury, since it means foregoing one income), even as legally it continues to be okay for children to be classic European levels of unattended.

The hasidim truly and genuinely believe in a religion which forbids birth control, same as the tradcaths but without the latter's marriage rate problems.

the two developed countries with the lowest female LFPR are Italy and Japan

... the latter of which, curiously enough, has the highest TFR of any country/territory in developed East Asia.

I'd actually forgotten that both of those countries had the highest TFRs in their respective regions(East Asia and Southern Europe- I'm excluding France from the latter), and the stablest ones too. But they're still a long way from replacement; a baby bonus of .1-.25 from 'women mostly stay home' does seem supported, but the average developed country needs much more than a .25 boost.