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That's crazy that an overwhelmingly catholic country can also have such a low birth rate!
Catholicism can lower birth rates.
Getting married is a big barrier to having children. Men aren't marriageable until they have finished their education, have a job and a place to live. In a country where 29 year old men can't afford their own place and are working as interns few men are going to be married at a fertile age. Unless young women start marrying substantially older men having a high fertility rate becomes unfeasible if marriage is a requirement.
There are really only three solutions:
Lower the social requirements to having kids. Aka single motherhood.
Make becoming a husband more achievable. Aka make it possible for young men to get a stable job and buy a four bedroom home.
Adapt to a middle income country lifestyle. This is common among high fertility immigrants. They can live with six kids in a small apartment, never eat in a restaurant, live off rice and beans and pull teeth out by themselves instead of going to a dentist. Their lifestyle is still materially superior to the vast majority of humans who ever lived. With free school lunches, the children can stuff themselves and get enough calories to cover most of their needs. Humans can survive on a tiny fraction of what middle class people assume to be the limit of survival.
The combination of high requirements and a Catholic view of family means that a sizeable portion of men will never be fathers and those who do will only meet the requirements after age 35.
It seems like a simple intervention would be to massively increase property taxes for people with no children.
This would bring property prices down a lot.
In my opinion, the housing bubble is mostly caused by inflation expectations. If your house can only go up in value, then the best time to buy is always right now. The government should send a clear and unambiguous message that you will lose money by buying a home. It will accomplish this by applying a ratchet effect to property taxes. Any time that annual appreciation exceeds X%, the property tax rate will be raised.
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I don't know about Catholics in Europe, but in America most sexually active Catholics use birth control. The hard ban on birth control is not much respected.
I take it many American Catholics are Catholic in name only and mean to say they are Catholic in a vague cultural sense but not in any way that inconveniences their lives.
Yeah, I guess I just associate catholicism with latin America, where it's a lot more strict. Plus just a general culture of big families. Ireland used to be like that too, and I think some Irish-Americans are still like that.
If you take a look at Brazil for example and compare it to the US, I think it seems likely that Catholicism, at least in its modern 20th century and onward form, has done essentially nothing to give Latin America higher fertility rates than the US. It is a non-factor, at least in Brazil. Same for Ireland.
All these graphs appear to be dominated by economic factors, with religious factors being very minor. Religion can definitely increase fertility rates, for example among Orthodox Jews, but 20th century and onward Catholicism seems to have only a minor effect.
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While Catholicism probably suppresses promiscuity rates at lower levels of religiosity than Protestantism does, only particularly religious Catholicism has any effect on fertility rates, same as Protestantism. AFAIK the only example within Europe of this happening at scale is the Byzantine-Catholic belt in eastern Poland and Slovakia and western Ukraine having higher TFR’s than the rest of the country(and at least for Ukraine this was demographically visible pre-war, the Catholic percentage was rising due to high fertility rates). The tfr in rural Galicia was still pretty similar to that in the Dutch Bible Belt and the faroes, though, so we can assume that aside from the IRL tradcaths religious Catholicism and Protestantism have similar effects on fertility. And while American tradcaths have a claimed tfr of 3.6 with the possibility of it being an underestimate, it’s worth noting we’re a small, selected minority group everywhere in the country except for two towns, the larger of which is less than 10,000 people, and that we recruit partly by being attractive to pre-existing large families.
Ave Maria is one, but what's the second?
St Mary’s, Kansas is roughly 2/3 SSPX parishioners.
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