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France's baby bust

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Re: France's baby bust

#91

Post by barry-cotter »

swarnie wrote: post #59
dmurray wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe its harder to see from the inside... As an example I've pulled up the last state of the union address which appears to be a regular and semi-important thing across the pond. God is mentioned 11 times by my count. That would be considered OOT for a priest over here.

> That would be considered OOT for a priest over here.

Only in the Churches where the religion part is seen with faint embarrassment. Established Churches are the best way to drive religiosity down yet discovered besides banning.

Re: France's baby bust

#92

Post by Retric »

barry-cotter wrote: post #75
MakeUsersWant wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is why Europeans were able to colonize the entire world roughly in the 1700s.

The Industrial Revolution was why they were able to colonise the world. Being much, much more productive means you can afford a lot more bullets/cannon/artillery/small arms and you need less of your population as a share growing food. Europeans were better at war than anyone else because Europe was always at war somewhere. It was geographically fragmented enough that any one power becoming hegemonic never happened ag…

That line of thinking only goes so far, industry also allows one to simply buy resources from foreign locations without the bother of conquest and administration. It’s really a combination of many factors including Europe’s relatively high population that made it both viable and desirable.

Re: France's baby bust

#93

Post by ciphol »

makeitdouble wrote: post #67

The 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…

> how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ?

He gives several data points for secularization, such as the language people chose to use in their wills. Since there is a strong general correlation between low fertility and low religion, it seems likely that these are causally linked in 18th century France, rather than coincidentally happening at the same time.

It's a harder question why France in particular secularized at this time. The argument he very tentatively proposes is that freedom from religious coercion leads people to tend to become more religious (as can be seen by comparing the US to Europe over the last few centuries) and that France, due to its strong counter-reformation, had an unusually high level of religious coercion.

> Why wouldn’t it the other way round, with the core causes of the French decline also triggering less religiousness ?

What do you mean by "French decline"? Its loss of status as a superpower starting in 1815? That postdates the decline in religiousness.

Re: France's baby bust

#94

Post by ciphol »

woodruffw wrote: post #87
barry-cotter wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Modernization drew a lot of people away from traditional religion. But Hasidim and the Amish etc are "post modern". They have developed various cultural features to "immunize" themselves against the temptations of modernity. There is no reason for this to start failing at any particular point, except perhaps when they become too much of an imposition on the rest of society, which pushes back on them.

Re: France's baby bust

#96

Post by rayiner »

swarnie wrote: post #23
langsoul-com wrote: post #6

The book, "shall the religious inherit the world" is relevant. I'd be interested what happens when general birthrate declines and a religious group, that massively encourages tons of children, take larger voting percentages.

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.

Religion can play a major role without becoming a point of conflict if everyone agrees. For example, many European countries still have established Christian churches and (possibly opt-out) religious education in schools. If Muslims in Sweden were filing lawsuits to prevent public money from being used to support religious education, or to force Denmark to disestablish the Lutheran Church, I suspect you would see religion becoming a point of contention.

In France, Muslim immigration has made religion a major campaign issue. The French frame it as a matter of secularism versus Islam, but French secularism is better described as a form of Enlightenment-flavored post-Catholicism: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/10/02/the-catholic-nes...

Re: France's baby bust

#97

Post by inawarminister »

Retric wrote: post #92
barry-cotter wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Industrial Revolution was why they were able to colonise the world. Being much, much more productive means you can afford a lot more bullets/cannon/artillery/small arms and you need less of your population as a share growing food. Europeans were better at war than anyone else because Europe was always at war somewhere. It was geographically fragmented enough that any one power becoming hegemonic never happened ag…

That line of thinking only goes so far, industry also allows one to simply buy resources from foreign locations without the bother of conquest and administration. It’s really a combination of many factors including Europe’s relatively high population that made it both viable and desirable.

And tbh the European demographics expansion between 1500-1800, before industrialization properly spread out from Britain [0], was the Columbian Exchange.

Potatoes unlocked lots of land in the northern part. And the other unsung botany, too.

And the ability to send surplus men (and women) to an empty (because of disease) continent instead of having them warring against each other like pre-Columbian Europe and East Asia (looking at Sengoku) is also decisive...

[0] Remember one reason why Britain was able to fight Napoleon even when the entire continent was conquered was because of industries.

Re: France's baby bust

#98

Post by t0bia_s »

> Today, the political and economic prospects of an empty planet are a worry for many, as more and more countries reach fertility rates below replacement levels.

Yea, it looks like another poltical topic that vary with party. Alarmism about overpopulation is also quite popular.

Re: France's baby bust

#99

Post by kasey_junk »

hinata08 wrote: post #48
twelve40 wrote: post #25

Interesting. Also funny that this pioneer of the child-free movement has actually the best fertility rate in Europe currently. Not by much, and still in the negative, but.

it's pretty easy to have children in France, like you have typically 25 + 9 paid days off per year (I personally can't use so many, being a company drone. So I have to take days off to see friends and family) And it's ok to leave work on time to take care of your children _your coworkers understand that they are more important to you, and they make you happy. You get a lot of assistance and encouragement from both th…

In the US (and probably the rest of the world) number of children per household is inversely correlated with income[1]. Every time a discussion of birthdates comes up people claim it’s too expensive to have children, but the actual evidence suggests that isn’t a factor.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

Re: France's baby bust

#100

Post by lordnacho »

zwirbl wrote: post #65
mamonster wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will get to see this within the next 50-60 years in Israel. AFAIK the expectation is that Haredi+Israeli Arabs will be 50% of the population by like 2070.

With so many orthodox jews there will also be barely any workforce left

Do they not work? How is that possible with such large families?
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