Earlier quoted context omitted.
France's population exploded sooner.
But it should have kept exploding.
Why?
There are diminishing returns on industrialising.
France's baby bust
81–90 of 263 posts
Re: France's baby bust
#82The more I read this, the less I get his point on the religious influence. > It is unclear why the Catholic Church’s influence waned so quickly and why France was the first country to secularize. But then, if he doesn’t know enough about what’s happening in France during that period, how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ? What if it was a completely different reason t…
I'm not sure about France, but the catholic church has definitely been a huge factor in population growth here in Québec.
It's a widely accepted fact in academia here, though I agree the linked article does not make a great argument for a possibly similar effect in France.
Re: France's baby bust
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand this is an America-centric forum but does religion play a major role in politics in the rest of the western world? I'm counting back though prime ministers and i can't recall one who made religion a major part of their platform in my lifetime.
> does religion play a major rile in politics in the rest of the western world? Hasn’t the growth of Islam in Europe been a large and growing political issue for the past decade? France in particular has had lot of debates about religious clothing at schools, what kind of criticism of religious ideas is and isn’t acceptable, etc. From my POV, it looks like religion is a bigger deal in European than American politics.…
> Hasn’t the growth of Islam in Europe been a large and growing political issue for the past decade?
Probably more like two decades by now :-) The political parties in Europe that pride themselves on anti-Islamism are themselves not religious all. And no one (of any significance) in Western Europe is arguing for a return to Christianity. Some parties advocate “Judeo-Christian values” but the various incarnations of this concept are nebulous at best and mostly completely unrecognizable to Jews and Christians.
At the same time, many Western European countries are now majority atheist or at least majority unaffiliated with organized religion, so, no, religion is not at all a bigger deal in European politics at all.
Re: France's baby bust
#84> she declined over the next 250 years to be just another European power. Why would we want 300 millions inhabitants in France ? That's what we would have with the density of the Netherlands. Why couldn't France be on top of leisure, urban transports, ecology, natural ecosystems, technology, political innovation, and even military defense, with 70 million inhabitants ? Worlwide politics are biased, always considering…
>with 70 million inhabitants Because capitalists want more. More workers, more consumers, more sales, more demand for housing, more demand for goods, more profit.
That, an also race supremacists and nationalists. It all stems from the idea that a category of people should grow and dominate the world.
Re: France's baby bust
#85The more I read this, the less I get his point on the religious influence. > It is unclear why the Catholic Church’s influence waned so quickly and why France was the first country to secularize. But then, if he doesn’t know enough about what’s happening in France during that period, how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ? What if it was a completely different reason t…
Catholic families tend to be very large. They tend to use contraception less and also have greater number of children per family.
It’s still true today: https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secula...
Re: France's baby bust
#86> In 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth, and one in five in Europe, was French. Today, less than a percent of humanity is French. Why did France’s population decline in relative terms so dramatically, and did it really mark the decline of France? It seems far-fetched to use global population as a relative indicator of France's "decline", where the global population exploded after the industrial revolution.
If the explosion of the global population is driven by the industruial revolution, then it would've impacted France's population the same way. So it makes sense to compare this way.
The industrial revolution did not impact everywhere at the same time nor with the same magnitude of improvement.
One could even say that the power shifts due to the industrial revolution were detrimental for the influence of France by favoring other nations and populations to a greater degree.
Re: France's baby bust
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a handful of modern religious and fundamentalist groups that sociologists study for this purpose: Mormons, ultra-orthodox Jews, evangelicals, etc. The interesting thing about these groups is that they exhibit “carrying limits”: they get to particular community sizes and begin to experience attrition through secularization.
This does not accord with the Israeli experience. The Haredim have grown enough as a proportion that they shifted the Israeli median voter substantially to the right.
I didn’t say attrition overwhelmed the overall growth pattern. Most evidence suggests that it’s a proportion that increases with overall religious population, with compounding or confounding. factors (e.g. increasing or decreasing participation in a broader secular society).
Haredim “get away” with minimizing participation in many ways, which makes their attrition rates lower than comparable religious groups. But that doesn’t last forever; compare the secularization of Jews in Austro-Hungary in the late 19th century.
Re: France's baby bust
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand this is an America-centric forum but does religion play a major role in politics in the rest of the western world? I'm counting back though prime ministers and i can't recall one who made religion a major part of their platform in my lifetime.
I don't see American presidents making religion "a major part of their platform" either. They get some photo ops in church just like British leaders, and they side with their voters on things like abortion, which breaks down roughly along religious lines without being explicitly so. But a major policy decision directly targeting religion? The closest I can think of in the US is Trump banning immigration from majority…
Abortion and homeschooling are religion driven. Also, the evangelical fundamentalists are quite influential in USA.
Re: France's baby bust
#89The more I read this, the less I get his point on the religious influence. > It is unclear why the Catholic Church’s influence waned so quickly and why France was the first country to secularize. But then, if he doesn’t know enough about what’s happening in France during that period, how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ? What if it was a completely different reason t…
Catholic families tend to be very large. They tend to use contraception less and also have greater number of children per family. It’s still true today: https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secula...
I don't know if there's a direct line between this and the post ww2 service / office career for all (including women) so that people invested all their thoughts and time in work.