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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31277 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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The argument that high birthrate societies are more willing to take casualties because they don’t value the individual lives of their children mostly makes sense to people who, no offense, don’t interact with high-fertility rate people. The afghani parents who sold their kids to be suicide bombers did it because they were shitty parents in ways that affect people in low-fertility rate cultures too(eg, drug addiction), not because they had a large family.

I do think the Russo-Ukraine war has disproven the more defensible hypothesis that low fertility rate societies(like both sides in this conflict) will have sufficient difficulty putting together an army for demographic reasons that they will never go to war, but, well, Mexico got more violent as the fertility rate declined, and Russia hadn’t exactly been pacifistic prior to invading Ukraine, and the USA goes on adventurism regularly despite low fertility.

Mexico got more violent as the fertility rate declined

You'd expect individual people to become more prone to criminal violence as fertility rate declines, since there are more childless men (children ending up eating up time and energy that you might use for crimes instead). However, the theory is that it's the states that would avoid violence, due to the demographical impact.

The cartels are at least proto-states at this point and Russia launched multiple aggressive wars despite a low fertility rate, though.

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