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Just saw this geographic fertility map of Turkey on reddit. The statistics were released yesterday:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ctccjz/turkish_fertility_rate_20162023_comparison_oc/
Population map for comparison (urban rate is a whopping 75%):
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Visualizing-Population-Density-in-Turkey-Full-Size.html
In 7 short years FTR crashed from 2.11 in 2016 to 1.5 in 2023.
https://ilkha.com/english/health-life/turkiyes-birth-rate-declines-despite-ranking-high-in-europe-393736
Women get children later (average is now 29 years; which is older than in the US (27 years in 2021)) and there is an increase in one-person households (14.4% -> 19.7%)
And despite President Erdoğan being more powerful and way more conservative (out of touch?) than other leaders:
https://www.turkishminute.com/2024/05/16/turkey-records-dramatic-decline-in-its-fertility-rate-official-data/
The solution is simple. If the state wants women to give up their careers, their education, their financial independence so that they will have and raise children then the state needs to adequately compensate those women for what it is asking them to give up. No state on earth is prepared, or could afford, to do this, which is why functionally all efforts to increase fertility fail.
We might further ask: why can't states do this? The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value. The issue at the heart of raising fertility by having women work less is that society will be poorer, which people are generally opposed to.
Why could this work historically? Partially because much more of women's labor was needed inside the home (and so unavailable for work outside the home) and partially because there were actual legal restrictions on the work women (especially married women) could do outside the home.
If you take a plot of land with a healthy ecosystem and burn it all down, you'll create farmland that is incredibly productive for a few cycles, after which it becomes a barren wasteland in which nothing can grow.
Feminism is civilizational slash-and-burn.
Feminism is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is more fundamental: human want. People want nicer houses, nicer cars, nicer food. They want financial security and control over their own lives. Human wants are unlimited and they are the fundamental force pushing towards the efficient utilization of human labor.
Did humans just suddenly start wanting recently? Do humans not want in places and cultures where they still have significantly higher fertility rates? This seems like it has poor explanatory value.
No, humans have wanted forever. Another key ingredient is technological development. Specifically labor saving devices that reduce the number of hours required to maintain a household and make women more productive outside the home.
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Those aren't wants, they're needs, from a genetic and generational standpoint. High-quality mates are positional goods and everyone is in competition with everyone else for those. It's not the bigger house or the nicer car that they want -- not enough to sacrifice all the amazing things only made possible by non-working women -- it's the status which will enable them and their offspring to outcompete others for high-quality mates and thus progeny which will outcompete others in turn. It is survival itself.
Competition for scarce resources is what defines almost every aspect of human reality. It's not somehow decadent for a person to pursue status symbols if that means ensuring a better future for their children, and as I said above, status symbols are positional. These needs cannot be satisfied without fundamentally altering human nature, turning us into something... else.
Within this hellscape, we can coordinate to make things better, c.f. Meditations on Moloch. People want other things, too, such as stable families, well-raised children, healthy food made with love, thriving communities, and so on. Women are the social fabric that enables all of these things, which they can't do if they're working full-time. Just like we coordinate to prevent children from being put to work too early or too rigorously, we could coordinate to protect women and safeguard all the many wonderful things which flow from recognizing that hammering women into masculine-style productivity is putting them to poor use.
I did not intend to denigrate them by calling them wants instead of needs, sorry if it came off that way. I agree those things cannot be satisfied without some kind of fundamental change in human nature. I'm interested in what this coordination end looks like.
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