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Comment by spacebanana7 | Hacker News Reader

Every suggested cause of low fertility has problematic exceptions.

Religiosity generally increases fertility, but countries like Poland have both high religiosity and low fertility.

Urbanisation generally decreases fertility, but Israel has a high population density and high fertility.

Economic growth tends to decrease fertility, but periods of recession also decrease it. Moreover, Western Europe has both more wealth & fertility than Eastern Europe.

Social programs like benefits & maternity leave intuitively make it easier to have children - but many European & Asian countries have these with less fertility than the US & Australia (for whom social support is generally lower).

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> Religiosity generally increases fertility, but countries like Poland have both high religiosity and low fertility.

Religious traditions differ in how pro-fecund they are.

Israel’s high fertility: Haredi Jews view large families as a religious duty; religious Zionists view the state as spiritually significant, and children are necessary for its future

Poland: in practice, mainstream Catholicism doesn’t really encourage large families any more. Pope Francis even tells Catholics “not to breed like rabbits”. Even with the opposition to contraception, many Catholics just ignore that, and for those who take it seriously, there is always NFP. There are subgroups of Catholicism for which this is different - the trads, Opus Dei. But the vast majority of Polish Catholicism is mainstream conservative, not trad or Opus Dei

It isn’t really an exception if one understands it as needing high religiosity and pro-fecundity religious traditions. Poland has much more of the first than the second.

I find the idea of pro-fecundity traditions appealing as an explanation because it seems to also intuitively explain why more patriotic countries like France have a higher fertility rate than Germany.

But I fear it becomes a bit circular - can we really say our explanation for countries having a high fertility is merely their cultural/religious desire to have big families?

I think the right unit of analysis is culture not country. Every country has multiple cultures within it, and some of these cultures are larger than others.

Both the US and Israel have high fecundity countercultural religious minorities, such as ultra-Orthodox/Haredi/Hasidic Judaism. The difference is, that minority in the US is such a small percentage of the population, that even though they are growing exponentially, they are still a rounding error in the demographics of the country as a whole (it may be a very different story by the time the 22nd century comes around, but we won't live to see that); whereas, in Israel, they are over 13% of the population, and will likely be 16% by the end of this decade [0] – so their impact on national demographics is much more substantial.

[0] https://en.idi.org.il/media/20567/annual-statistical-report-...

It’s a bit more nuanced than the examples you raise. It’s more a continuum than a binary attribute and there is large differences within national borders.

For example: Israel does have a high fertility, but it’s more to do with religiosity than urbanization. The Orthodox and Arabs are more fecund than secular Jews.

Most of the fertility in America is due to Bible Belt Americans (who also generally happen to be in rural areas) and newly arrived immigrants (who also tend to be religious) and less to do with social support programs.

> Israel does have a high fertility, but it’s more to do with religiosity than urbanization.

Women of Jewish descent who identify as secular in Israel still have a high fertility rate.

Religiosity works well statistically in the US but it really breaks down in Europe, where it’s hard to see any substantial correlation in the interstate data.

> Women of Jewish descent who identify as secular in Israel still have a high fertility rate.

Above average compared to Germany but still exceptionally low compared to most middle and lower income countries. However the Haredim would give Nigeria a run for its money.

> Religiosity works well statistically in the US but it really breaks down in Europe, where it’s hard to see any substantial correlation in the interstate data.

I think this is proving the point that there are many of the factors listed in the parent that matter and it’s a continuum.

Why is that problematic? Doesn't the fact that is has very exceptions make it a rule? This basically means there is a wide set of confouding factors at play...

It’s problematic because it suggests we don’t really understand why low fertility happens, or what to do about it.

Vast amounts of money might be wasted by governments in Poland, Hungary & elsewhere on fertility boosting programs that likely won’t work.

And academically, our dataset of countries is relatively small to begin with, so it only takes a few exceptions to break any statistical confidence.

> Urbanisation generally decreases fertility, but Israel has a high population density and high fertility.

But exclusively with the highly religious population, no?

Even women of Jewish descent who identify as secular have a fertility rate of 2.2, much higher than in any other developed country.

Christians & Muslims also high fertility in Israel.

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

> Even women of Jewish descent who identify as secular have a fertility rate of 2.2, much higher than in any other developed country.

Possible explanation: Secular people in a society with large numbers of highly religious people, some of the habits of the highly religious will rub off on them. Whereas, secular people in a more secular society, that is less likely to occur.

Also, “secular” is a broad spectrum ranging from hardcore atheist at one end to “I believe in a religion in theory but I ignore it in practice” at the other. People at the latter end of the spectrum are still open to being influenced by the religious, sometimes without even realising it

My money is on easy access to contraceptives and the fact that childbirth really sucks.

In France & Norway there’s abundant access to contraceptives, yet the fertility rate is much higher than Poland or Italy.

Looking through the EU, it’s hard to see any relationship between access to contraception/abortion and fertility [1]

[1](fig 2) https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...

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