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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32048 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Back in September a commenter here on the TheMotte posted an argument about fertility trends claiming that among rich countries fertility actually increases with feminism. I did not have time to respond at the time, but this is something that I have heard many times, so I wanted to make an effort post explaining why I don't believe the claim. Here are some examples of prestige outlets making the same claim, from a New York Times op-ed:

The culture of misogyny and gender inequality [in South Korea] may be affecting family life, in a country facing predictions of population collapse. Research shows that a low fertility rate in developed countries reflects backward attitudes over female gender roles. source

And here is the United Nations Population Fund:

Want to increase birth rates? Try gender equality. Many countries in Eastern Europe face what is often perceived as a population crisis....There is broad consensus on what needs to be part of such a policy package: Quality, affordable childcare starting from an early age. Flexible and generously paid parental leave for both parents (with incentives for men to take what they are entitled to). Flexible work arrangements, and providing equal pay for women. Programmes to encourage men and women to equally share care and household work. And affordable housing as well as financial support for low-income families. source

The original TheMotte commenter wrote:

However, what I have noticed is that rich female friendly nations do far better in terms of birth rate than rich conservative strict gender role societies. For example - France has a fertility rate around 1.8. 1.7 for the US. Germany 1.4. In the east with more strict gender norms the rich societies however have far more abysmal fertility rates - Japan 1.3, South Korea 0.8, Taiwan 1.1, Singapore 1.2.

I will address three big problems with the argument, and then I want to talk about the elephant in the room.

The first problem is that this is cherry-picking examples. We could just as easily cherry-pick other countries that show a reversed trend: Spain has a parliament that is 50% women but a fertility rate of merely 1.3. Finland ranks number one on female empowerment, sharing many of the same policies as Sweden, but has a a very low fertility rate of 1.3. In Ireland, where men only do 43% of the housework (which is low for Europe), women have a fertility rate of 1.6.

You might think we could get around the problem of cherry-picking by running regressions against a broader dataset. But turns out there are still too many researcher degrees of freedom. In playing with the data myself, and in reading about others who have played with the data, I could get anything from a massively negative impact of female empowerment on fertility, to no impact, to modestly positive. Here are some charts I made:

That parental leave or subsized childcare has no correlation with fertility rates should dispense with any notion that these are the magic policies that will fix fertility while reconciling child bearing with women pursuing careerist paths.

The second problem is that fertility rate itself is confounded by sub-cultures within a country. The poster children for feminist family polices with high birth rates are Sweden and France. However, their fertility stats are hopelessly confounded by the fertility of more patriarchal subcultures -- that of non-European immigrants. Unfortunately, it is fiendishly hard to find accurate statistics on how much this impacts the numbers.

France, for instance, bans collecting statistics by race. But this report showed 38% of new births in the cities were considered high-risk for sickle cell anemia -- meaning the parents are of Arab or African origin. That's a huge number.

In the United States, fertility is boosted by less feminist groups, such as recent immigrants, Amish, Mormons, and evangelical Christians. Israel's fertility is boosted by ultra-Orthodox Jews who have a fertility rate three times that of secular Israelis.

(continued in the replies due to excess word count)

Want to increase birth rates? Try gender equality.

I find this point interesting, because I distinctly remember a zeitgeist a few decades back in which "gender equality" was being pushed specifically because it would reduce birth rates to ward off Malthusian catastrophe. This was specifically in the lens of low Western birthrates being preferable to higher ones in largely Third-World nations. Admittedly, "the zeitgeist" is hard to cite, so perhaps I didn't really understand the full situation at the time.

I'm not particularly convinced that either direction is unilaterally correct: it's quite possible that the results are contextual based on a number of other variables, but it does provide an example of how "more feminism and gender equality" seems to be pushed (primarily by the Left) as a cure for all societal ills. That last part I think is a drastic oversimplification, but probably also a bit of a weakman of the actual arguments.

We are quite specifically in the year when the global fertility trends - if you follow the closest trends through, say, this account - will reach the point where global fertility rate, ie. the average number of children per women, will go under the global replacement rate needed to keep a stable population level, which is somewhere around 2.3 (I would actually guess the replacement rate will rise a bit if the food crisis has the expected famine effects in African countries). In other words, pretty near the specific point where we can fairly conclusively say that the population boom is cancelled, that we know the level at which the population will peak, and after that level global population will start coming down, perhaps not even coming down all that slowly.

As such, one might expect that, consciously or unconsciously, in the coming years the arguments that we need to prevent overpopulation will generally start losing credence and arguments that we should instead be concerned about underpopulation will start gaining it, and indeed the process has probably already started! It won't involve most people admitting they're wrong or that they have changed their viewpoint or anything like that, just barely perceptible social indicators.

I remember that as well. It was essentially secular population reductionists against often religious pro-natalism types.

The fashionability of Westerners telling people in the Global South to have fewer babies has diminished since then, weirdly putting progressives closer to Catholic conservatism stateside that hated the efforts of the United Nations etc.

Here is a citation that of thinking from Scientific America in 2009 "How Women Can Save the Planet: [Empowering young women through education will help reduce overpopulation in areas that cannot support it and avoid extremism in the children they raise"

Or United Nations University in 2019: "Female Education: a Solution for a Crowded Planet"

Time Magazine in 2013: "Why Empowering Poor Women Is Good for the Planet Overpopulation isn't the great environmental fear that it once was, but there are still parts of the planet where large family sizes are a problem. Female education can help change that"

The most charitable explanation is that they honestly believe that empowering women will lead to a more optimal level of child-bearing -- thus more children in countries who are rich and encountering problems of low fertility and less children in countries that are poor and already overcrowded.

A less charitable explanation is that these arguments aren't made by the same people, but since "feminism good" is the only acceptable opinion if over-population is presented as a problem Cathedral editors signal-boost writers who believe that feminism can prevent over-population and if population decline is presented as a problem then they signal boost writers who can take some subset of the data to show how feminism can help with under-population.

It reminds me of the debate surrounding torture. It can't be admitted that feminism has downsides/torture can in some situations work. No, just world demands that the morally preferable solution is also better in every other way than the alternative.

Noah Millman notably avoids this trap, writing,

There is surely still scope for both policy and cultural arguments, but the starting point for any discussion of fertility decline has to be that it is a global, cross-cultural phenomenon. The factors that correlate most-strongly with fertility decline are female literacy and urbanization. As a country urbanizes, and as it modernizes to the point where most women learn to read, fertility declines dramatically. As I’ve said before, if the alternatives to a low-fertility world are ISIS or the Khmer Rouge, I’m sticking with a low-fertility world.

As I’ve said before, if the alternatives to a low-fertility world are ISIS or the Khmer Rouge, I’m sticking with a low-fertility world.

That works until you are below replacement. At which point the alternative you are choosing is extinction, unless you have a good reason to think the fertility rate will increase before then.

As a country urbanizes, and as it modernizes to the point where most women learn to read, fertility declines dramatically. As I’ve said before, if the alternatives to a low-fertility world are ISIS or the Khmer Rouge, I’m sticking with a low-fertility world.

What if the alternative to low-fertility world was something like the 1950s United States of America ... why cannot that be an alternative vision?

As I’ve said before, if the alternatives to a low-fertility world are ISIS or the Khmer Rouge, I’m sticking with a low-fertility world.

Is Israel, a country in which even secular indigenous population has above replacement TFR, also likely to be perceived to be an example of a state to avoid? Probably not, but it goes unmentioned.

Sure, there is criticism of Israel's treatment of Arabs, but for Jews the Israeli government and society doesn't seem oppressive.

Argentina has also had high fertility rates for a while as a developed and not particularly religious country.

Millman mentions "if it stays much higher, as, for example, Israel’s has" but seems to consider it an outlier. Not sure why he wouldn't consider murderous theocrats or communists to be equally outliers, though.

TFR for secular Israeli women isn't quite above-replacement; it's only around 2.0, typically a little below. It's not plummeting the way it is in most countries, though, it's even back up a bit since the 1990s. Secular Israelis do seem to qualify as a completely-modernized-but-yet-stable demographic. There's also the Mormons, who I'd guess Millman might find objectionable (patriarchy: not just a metaphor!) but who at least ought to be considered a more tempting alternative than ISIS.

On the other hand, just using the word "alternative" seems to be assuming a level of agency that we see in the Hari Seldon books, not so much in real life. In particular:

I’m sticking with a low-fertility world.

That's ... not how the differential equation works.

Yeah, I was reminded of the debate here regarding torture watching this Breaking Points video earlier, where torture comes up in the conversation with the implication that actually yea, it works. I think when that issue is not salient everyone falls back on "of course torture works." And introspection certainly tells me it does. The idea that it doesn't work was a weird 2000s era blip born of disliking George W Bush and company.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lS3vyB7gcNA (a little past 3:30 in)

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