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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Isn't this just a matter of sex ratio? The denominator in TFR is the number of women and ignores men. Societies as a whole have a 1:1 effective sex ratio, so this doesn't normally matter when comparing. But individual communities which don't reproduce biologically can have unbalanced sex ratios. Oil towns and military base communities have a lot of surplus men, so if the limiting reagent for family formation is mostly rather than entirely female, then they will naturally have more kids per woman.

In Western culture, polygyny and bastardy are (very) low status, and the main reason women give for having fewer children than they claim to want is a lack of quality men to have them with. If this is even partly true, then it is obvious how "have enough spare men around that all women who want kids can get a man who wants kids, and a crappy woman can nail down a mediocre man and a mediocre woman can nail down a decent man" increases births-per-woman.

I suspect something similar is going on in the other direction with collapsing Mormon fertility. Monogamy norms are even stronger in post-1904 Mormonism than in the wider society, and the Church has a problem with male defection meaning that the sex ratio is female-heavy. Anecdotally, babies-per-marriageable-couple is still high among Mormons, but babies-per-woman is falling off a cliff as not every woman can get married.