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Notes -
I think the decline in fertility below 2.1 (replacement rate) can be directly linked to modern day feminism and women's rights. 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.
Now one may argue that the decline in fertility rate is not due to feminism and women's emancipation but rather due to improvements in wealth of society. However, a counterpoint to this is that faster modernizing societies; in terms of becoming more feminist, tend to have declining fertility rates even when not wealthy nations.
Example- Nepal - 1.8, India - 2.0-2.1.
Based on the above data I would posit that feminist societies result in fertility rates declining to below replacement rates, but once a country is wealthy it is far worse for the population to remain conservative than for it to be a feminist nation due to the fact that conservative rich nations do far worse on population growth than feminist nations.
Conclusion - modern feminism doomed/ saved human civilization to constant steady population decline and that's the best case scenario for population demographics from all the options currently available.
Thoughts?
Interesting point. Another example would be Russia, which has had severe fertility rate issues that it recently overcame a bit, but it seems like are going to become an issue again.
A counterpoint to this would be Israel, which is somewhat conservative but has seemed to surmount its fertility issues. Israel is a special case, though, of course.
However in Israel there is an extreme poverty rate which would explain the high fertility rate. The rich israeli's aren't the ones reproducing a lot, its the majority poor ones.
The most fecund in Israel are also the most religious, a relationship that holds elsewhere as far as I know. They just happen to have a comparatively large class of Amish-like hyper-religious types relative to other industrialized nations.
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