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Notes -
Noah Millman notably avoids this trap, writing,
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.
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What if the alternative to low-fertility world was something like the 1950s United States of America ... why cannot that be an alternative vision?
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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.
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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:
That's ... not how the differential equation works.
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