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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Any theories as to what would be causing this? Was this just a temporary decline? What I see around me socially is still a strong expectation of a 3 kid family (especially if you're more rural*), perhaps 2 if you're urban and too poor to afford the third (or a single mother by choice, where 2 also seemed to be the default number they all wanted).

*(The same rural/urban split seems to appear - again, by anecdotal observation only - among religious non-haredi families, where 4 or 5 is an acceptable urban amount but sad and small in a rural context. However, there's too much noise coming from

  1. If you want to have a larger family and "quality family life" you are more likely to move out of the city (ads for rural areas explicitly target this)

  2. Zionist religious families strongly tend to be more religious the more rural they are)

You're right, I meant to reply to your original comment. My mistake.

I'll delete and repost where it is meant to go.

I don't appreciate the vitriol, especially from a day-old account. Maybe lurk more before breaking out the invective.

Even though you claim you didn't mean to reply to this comment, you quoted the question I asked in this comment, not in my original comment.

And it felt like a very obvious attempt at a derail, hence my lack of patience with it. I have, nonetheless, deleted my comment, and we can continue the discussion where you say you intended it to be.

I looked a source up, ignore the tweets, the picture with the graph is from the Economist:

https://twitter.com/NxlAnglo/status/1616874516566736900

You are right, Jewish fertility are astonishingly stable if one looks at the last 40 years instead of zooming into recent trends. In the 90s secular fertility also dipped under 2.0, so is not a new thing. But 10 years ago it was again slightly above.

The discrepancy between the normalcy of 3 kids families and a fertility rate of a third less, is I guess because childless women are less visible? Maybe they also emigrate?

This website (that I found via Google and don't know anything else about, so no clue re reliability) claims childless rate in Israeli Jewish women is only 6.4% (in a sample of women aged 45-60)

https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptional-fertility/

That only gets us from 3 to 2.8 or so

But for example if 44% of women have 3 kids, 30% have 2, and the remaining non-childless have 1, we'd get reasonably close to 2.1, while still having 3 kids be the plurality most common number. (in practice I'm cheating since I'm excluding 3+, which obviously also exists although IME is pretty rare in secular circles. Whatever, it's just a general example.)

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