Crowstep
11hr ago
Seems like this might be worth a top level post in the culture war thread. 'Affirmative action for men to solve the fertility crisis' is a fairly big topic.
Crowstep
13hr ago
Perhaps it's smartphones, perhaps it's a whole host of things reaching some critical point of delaying family formation. Who knows?
The Nordics, like most countries, saw a collapse in marriage that caused the collapse in fertility. The timing does suggest that smartphones were the cause (although this demographer thinks that the pre-2012 collapse was due to the recession whereas post-2012 is due to dating apps and shortform video). Interventions in the US would probably be more effective because there is a population of religious Americans that already want to marry and have children, so the incentives would be more effective. Whereas in secular Scandinavia paying people more money to have children won't do much if kids interfere with their expressive individualism.
A more charitable take is that she is describing Britishness as it has been promoted by the British political class for decades (some of them might even believe it). Melanie Phillips didn't invent the 'Britishness is queueing and Paddington and chicken tikka masala' model of national identity, she's just describing it.
And she's right that British ethno-religious-national identity genuinely is different from Jewish identity. Judaism is an ethno-religion, Anglicanism, as a branch of Christianity, is universalist (as evidenced by the fact that we sent missionaries to our colonies when we had them). And when the only people in Britain who still believe in Christianity are pensioners and Africans, then it doesn't work very well as a pillar of our national identity.
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