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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   27026 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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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 alarming decline in Turkey’s birth rate comes against the backdrop of frequent calls from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who advises families to have at least three children to boost the country’s population, drawing the ire of feminist groups and women’s rights associations. He also advises “Muslim families” not to use birth control or family planning and opposes C-sections as well, angering the same organizations.

The fertility problem continues to defy the desire to blame it on a political hobby horse. People try to draw correlation lines with feminism, secularism, diversity, urbanization, high cost of housing/education. To some extent, they succeed; those are all correlated with modernity. But look closely and you'll see outliers for your chosen culprit. Low fertility is hitting everyone regardless of regional particularities, just on a time lag of how deep they are in the boonies.

Yep.

The temptation is to assume its multicausal and there are several inputs all interacting at once to produce the outcome, and some countries have a different mix than others but on net it all puts downward pressure on fertility.

Even so, I FEEL as though there's probably some singular root cause that could be discovered. Discovering still doesn't mean we can address it effectively, though.

It would be really nice if we could figure out it was all because of something like leaded gasoline or cigarette smoke and keep on.

It being caused by a pollutant could definitely square with the fact the effect diffuses with population density, but then again everything does that.

But that seems unlikely given how widespread the problem is.

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