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The Haredi are parasites; they support themselves by stealing from others through the welfare state. We need to find a sustainable, productive population with positive TFR and emulate it. I was hoping the Mormons would be it, but apparently their fertility has collapsed as well?
There's no shortage of religious sects with very high fertility rates. The dutch bible belt has many problems but it mostly supports itself while maintaining a 2.5ish TFR. Rad trads have a TFR of 3.6 and we don't use welfare other than social security.
But for a secular example, check the fertility rates of military or oil towns.
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I’m aware of every criticism against the Haredi but their TFR isn’t related to their welfare beneficiary status. The reason for their high beneficiary status is that the men insist on studying for an exceedingly long time. (That and they lobby well). Very little of their studying plausibly impacts their TFR because only like 1% of the readings are about having children or getting married. If they had normal education and normal work, but retained the pro-fertility cultural elements, which is possible, then they would still have a high TFR. In Israel you have the conservative / modern orthodox who have a high TFR while living a very productive technology-forward life.
I don't think you can assume that the cult will continue to function the same with a reduced emphasis on cult study and maintenance.
It probably does give them +10 points in allegiance and +20 in conformity, but you have very allegiant evangelicals all over America who do not have such TFR because they don’t have the pro-fertile cultural requirements
The evangelicals got mind-fucked by the combination of biblical traditional sexual mores and the middle class status competition games of suburban America. Having sex or children outside of marriage is a grave sin, but you can’t get married until you’ve gone to college and gotten established in your career. No I am not helping you financially if you drop out of college and have three kids in your 20s buster, you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. So you are leaning on your kids to maintain virginity until their 30s, a psychologically unsustainable position, and not a very good outcome for quantity of children either.
Evangelicals do not marry in their thirties(although nor do they marry in their teens, there's an entire decade in between), nor do normie evangelicals make a huge deal out of avoiding premarital sex.
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Maybe not for Haredim but there are others ways to create adherence and allegiance if you were going to copy Haredi TFR values.
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Typically, more education doesn't correlate with being more likely to be on the dole.
Until very recently even secular Jews in Israel had above-replacement fertility so this proves little.
The so-called National-Religious having a consistent TFR of 4 actually proves a lot.
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I mean, the haredi cultural model seems very dependent on welfare fraud. I'm not sure you can separate the extremely high fertility rate from their whole way of life.
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Would they? If they had to work for a living, maybe they'd be less desiring of children (who, when you're a working person, cost money and make more work for you)
Also, in modernity, when people work for a living, their work (and their income) become a huge source of social status. In modern, secular, society, if you give people a choice between being (1) a successful doctor, lawyer, or business executive with 2 children; or (2) being a building porter with 4 children, most people will choose the first option.
If I've learned anything from my time on lesswrong, slatestarcodex, and themotte, it's that human beings are heavily motivated by the desire for social status. Even when they seem to be pursuing money, pleasure, and/or sexual gratification, there is usually a huge social status component lurking under the surface.
I'm pretty confident that in Haredi culture, having a large family brings social status in a way that's lacking in other subcultures.
I think your framing of the doctor/lawyer vs. building porter choice contains a hidden assumption worth examining, that this is actually a choice available to most people.
For the median building porter, "successful doctor, lawyer, or business executive" was likely never on the menu. The choice wasn't between high-status career + 2 kids versus low-status career + 4 kids. The realistic choice set was always constrained by cognitive ability, conscientiousness, family resources, and other human capital factors. The hypothetical only feels like a meaningful trade-off for people in roughly the 115+ IQ range with adequate executive function, maybe 15% of the population. For everyone else, the actual revealed preference is more telling. Given their realistic options, many still choose smaller families. This suggests status-seeking has become decoupled from its evolutionary function.
You're right that status motivation runs deep, but it's worth noting why it runs deep evolutionarily. For men, status-seeking is largely instrumental, it's the primary mechanism for attracting mates.
The Vox Day socio-sexual hierarchy (sigma/alpha/beta/gamma/etc.) captures this, there's a cohort of men who pursue visible status markers specifically as mating strategy, while others (the "sigma" archetype) achieve reproductive success through different pathways.
In an environment where status no longer reliably converts to reproductive success (because high-status people have fewer children), what exactly is being optimized for?
The drive persists, but it's become maladaptive, a stimulus disconnected from its original function.
Women competing for status in traditionally male professional hierarchies, is arguably doubly maladaptive. Professional status competition directly trades against peak fertility years. The opportunity cost is measured in children never born.
Unlike male status, female professional status doesn't meaningfully increase attractiveness to potential mates, and may actively reduce the pool of acceptable partners (since female hypergamy means high-status women often won't "marry down").
Women in this track pay the fertility cost that men pay, without receiving the mate-attraction benefit that men receive. They're running on hardware optimized for a different game.
This is why the Haredi example is so instructive. They've maintained a status system where large families are the status signal, aligning the status drive with rather than against reproductive fitness. It's not that they've suppressed the desire for status; they've just pointed it in a direction that doesn't defeat its own evolutionary purpose.
The secular West has essentially created a status game that selects against the players most committed to playing it.
I agree, which is why men going to actual productive jobs might seriously undermine the system. It's also worth noting that part of the Haredi "success" is likely to be in their genes. They seem to be okay with a life which, for most people, would be pretty miserable.
I like the idea of being reproductively successful, but there's a lot of things I would not do in order to achieve that success: Sexually assaulting someone; going to jail; lying to a woman in order to get her pregnant; etc. And that probably includes devoting my life to full time religious study.
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It's still above replacement, but yes it is dropping as well. Our new prophet (Dallin H. Oaks) mentioned the dropping fertility issues in both society as a whole and among members of the church in our most recent General Conference (back in October), so it's very possible the church will be trying to enact some changes (both culturally and policy-wise) to counteract this. We'll see what happens I suppose.
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