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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Argentina, Turkey, Mexico, and Israel are the industrialized countries that have spent significant amounts of time at above replacement fertility in the recent past.

Argentina and Mexico are not really first world societies. Turkey and Israel both use fairly oppressive religions to control women's reproductive behavior.

Argentina and Mexico are both industrialized middle income societies, and in Argentina’s case was an upper income society fairly recently. In the specific case of Mexico the idea that the fertility advantage is all peasant farmers in the third world states in the far south is militated against by the declining incidence of the Mongolian spot in Mexican hospitals, which absent outside immigration from Europe indicates a higher white(that is, the Mexicans most likely to be exposed to the industrial economy, as opposed to those southern subsistence farmers) birthrate. It’s plausible that relatively high religiosity coupled with very strong remnants of the actual patriarchy is the reason for this fertility advantage, but not anything I have more than anecdotal evidence for.

I’m not well versed on the details of Turkish or Israeli religiosity, but if what you’re saying is true, that’s more or less 3/4 examples where patriarchal religion is the reason for higher than average fertility- Argentina’s is driven by a crazy-high teen pregnancy rate.

I can't produce stats right now but at this point Turkish fertility rates are about to go (or already gone) below replacement, and a large chunk of this is actually the rural Kurdish population. On the positive side, we are at these rates with virtually no teenage pregnancies or out of wedlock births. On the negative side, in the next decade we will almost definitely be dipping obviously below replacement level and in my lifetime the country might become half-half Kurdish.

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