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Haredim are satisfied customers of the welfare states they live in.
Haredim are cynically exploiting the welfare states they live in.
I don't see the distinction.
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Sure, and there are other ultra-niche groups like French tradcaths (who avail themselves very effectively of the generous incentives for children), those in the Dutch Bible Belt and so on for whom the same is true. But that takes an extraordinarily high-pressure traditionalist religious subculture that has had a lot of filtering and leaving. Many, possibly most descendants of shtetl dwellers secularized. Most descendants of Swiss mennonites in 1800 secularized. So did most high-tfr Catholics. This evaporation left highly fertile populations that survived.
We might say that unless you have an ultra-strong core of religious devotion to a community such that it persists even after it is no longer economically necessary, it seems that the arrival of the welfare state typically coincides with declines in fertility rates as other communal organizations and institutions like the extended family suffer.
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