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I agree that's likely a factor, but I think there's something deeper going on, which is that Jewish people were the very first group to get whacked full-on by modernity and its effects on fertility. So that in the early 19th century, Jewish people were heavily concentrated in urban areas while other groups had large segments working in the countryside in agriculture. And the urban areas were where fertility declines due to modernity have always hit the hardest.
Logically, what happens when a group experiences some kind of fertility shock like this? Logically, it's going to be roughly the same thing that happens when an antibiotic is put into a colony of bacteria. It will have a big effect at first, but over time, the colony will develop resistance. And arguably what's what happened with Jews, i.e. Jewish people developed cultural (and possibly genetic) defenses. In fact, it was around this time that Haredi Judaism caught on. And in the last 200-300 years, these types of groups have grown to the point where they will soon be a majority of world Jewry.
It's interesting to note that in the last 5-15 years, Jewish fertility in Israel grew to the point where it exceed Arab fertility. Which is very interesting, since Arab leaders have been promoting population growth as a way of winning a demographic war. And certainly Arabs are not suffering from any kind of "Arabs are bad" delusion.
The difference, in my opinion, is that Arabs have hard far less time than Jews to demographically adjust to modernity. So that their TFR is dropping like every other group that encounters modernity.
Cities are IQ shredders theory I believe, except Jews were hit by it early so those with the highest fertility in urban environments have survived and now produce higher.
I think you mean to say that cities are fertility shredders. And yeah, I think it's very reasonable to hypothesize that (1) for hundreds if not thousands of years before the 20th century, if you lived outside of the city, chances are you and your family worked in agriculture; (2) if your family works in agriculture, there's a lot of incentive to have a lot of children since it means a very inexpensive source of labor for the farm; (3) if most of the community works in agriculture, then the culture will tend to value high fertility; (4) if a person (or a family) moves to the city, there is far less incentive to have a large family (and in fact there is the opposite incentive); (5) city culture can be expected to reflect this after a while, until of course cultural and genetic selection get you people and cultures who value large families even though it means cramped living conditions and spending a lot of time and money without much economic return; and (6) one would expect to see this change first in groups which have gone through the "fertility shredder."
That's why I think the idea of just copying Israel might not be all that effective as one might expect. Besides which, a large and fast-growing subset of the Israel population consists of ultra-religious types who don't contribute all that much to Israeli society.
I’ve seen the term IQ shredders but it’s close to what you are referring as fertility shredders. Cities also attract higher IQ folks. Then the population shredding kicks in. Which makes them at a society level IQ shredders since the new city folks are higher IQ then the people that stayed rural.
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They're called IQ shredders (by those who do) because the smart people move to the city and don't reproduce there, thus providing selection against IQ on a population basis.
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