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The ultra orthodox are just stuck in a failure mode for civilization. It’s a rare (although I’m not sure if it’s unique) failure mode relative to the usual kind, but it is a failure nonetheless. I’m reminded of our discussion a few months ago on how awful South Korean society seems from the inside, an endless awful, grinding rat race where children are forced to study into the night for endless tests, parents pour all their resources into a single child etc even though all of this is completely unnecessary for the functioning of a country of smart, relatively wealthy people. But they can’t get out of it, seemingly, by themselves.
Similarly, the deep and enduring ugliness and squalor of Chareidi society is impossible to ignore. The ugly, colorless clothes. The lack of concern for architecture, for style, and for art. The adherence to the (secular) styles of dress and music that just happened to exist in Poland 150 years ago for no real reason other than inertia and a lack of care to change. The rejection of material comfort and prosperity, of science. The refusal to fight for their own people and homeland. The parasitic tendency to do whatever it takes to minimize the amount of productive labor done so that they can maximize the amount of pointless, regurgitated religious commentary produced while they wait endlessly for the messiah to come.
The Amish, at least, have a certain (sometimes overstated) folksy, pastoral charm. Squint and - divorced from the fact that they ultimately rely on the world’s most powerful and advanced nation to defend them - they live well, or at least fine. The Chareidim do not. Whatever happens in the current conflict, Israel will either forcibly secularize them or it is doomed, likely the latter. Fecundity aside, they have dug themselves into an aesthetic pit they can’t get out of. If Jewish civilization has any hope of further greatness, and I hope that it does, it must deal with them in the harshest way.
Israel is going to be country #110 isn't it.
Expulsion wouldn’t work (they have nowhere to go) and would be unnecessary. The ultra-orthodox just need to be forcibly secularized, which is likely possible (mandating IDF service for all young men and women at gunpoint, closing all kollels, ending all welfare, banning Yiddish in schools, forcibly enrolling them in secular education, killing or imprisoning their leaders if and when they try to rebel, banning their style of dress). It would be spicy, but it’s technically possible, not that it will happen (sadly).
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The Amish do fine when the government doesn’t protect them- there are flourishing Amish communities in cartel controlled Mexico. They have to pay taxes to the cartels, sure, but it turns out the things they produce are easy to sell and very fungible, and the cartels literally recruit Mexican soldiers by promising better rations so they can use agricultural products to begin with.
‘Farmer’ is a job that’s literally never going away. Subsistence farming communities aren’t dependent on an industrial civilization having an inexplicable soft spot for them- everyone needs food, and very few people particularly want to grow it themselves because it’s a lot of hard work. They can trade for outside inputs in any conceivable threat environment pretty easily because, again, there is no one on earth who doesn’t need what they produce.
Their society can’t make microchips, but the things they do make are infinitely fungible so it doesn’t matter. If they for whatever reason need microchips the people who do make them need what the Amish have to sell.
It's already reduced by about 50x, and I'd claim that subsistence farming isn't really feasible in much of North America, or won't be soon, because of high land taxes on all the good farmland.
If I were a cartel, I'd rather have at least semi-industrialized farmers on my land than subsistence farmers. "Subsistence" means you don't produce much more than you need to subsist, which means you can't produce much taxes for the local cartel / government.
I don't know why you think this is an either/or, though - there are other insular Amish-like groups with high fertility that are also fully modern when it comes to production, e.g. the Hutterites and Mennonites.
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