A theory im playing around with that the apparent Vulgarity and crudeness of American country/redneck/Conservative culture is actually an adaptive mode of Counter signaling akin to Orthodox Jewish or Amish cultural adaptations to maintain high birth rates and internal cultural coherence in the face of the homogenizing anti-natalist effects of Mainstream Global-liberal-urban monoculture...
American redneck/conservative culture, and Orthodox Jews especially are unique in being the only wealthy cultures to maintain high birth rates beyond the global middle-income, and that both adapted and are defined by their hostile largely hostile relationship with the the most advanced strains of the global mono-culture found in Urban America and the Urbanized anglo-world.
Nations as far afield as Hungary, China, and Iran are trying to save themselves from declining birthrates... Should they try to import American Country culture?
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Countries will try what they can to reverse declining birthrates, but it won't save them ultimately. There are macro reasons for declining birthrates, larger than countries or culture. You can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. You'll eventually run out of resources and/or your toxic byproducts will kill you. And people are already feeling both. Everything is becoming more expensive. That trend won't stop. People want to maintain their standard of living. So they'll have fewer children. Because children are expensive. And they might actually care about the quality of life of their children. And of what use are children if there is no environment to sustain them?
This is true.
This is dubious. Every income quintile is still growing (even inflation-adjusted). Some things are becoming more expensive faster, but they're things like "hospital services" and "college tuition" that are obviously due to social-structural issues, not due to the planet running out of insulin or chalk.
Varying your fertility according to your wealth and income is generally the smart thing to do, which makes it a little sad that approximately nobody does so. "There is generally an inverse correlation between income and the total fertility rate within and between nations." (flabbergasted highlighting mine) There's a bit of an uptick in the number of children that the very rich have, but for the most part poorer people have more kids than richer people, and poorer countries have way more kids than richer countries.
Their calibration of quality-of-life might be part of the paradox. In the modern developed world most of your economic value doesn't come until after your fertility does. If you're following the exact same average economic trajectory your parents are, then when you're 25 and they're 50 they're making twice what you do, and that sure doesn't feel like "exact same", it feels like "Everything is becoming more expensive".
I have a theory to partly explain the fertility pattern we see: Fertility depends on both the means to support children, and the intellectual capacity to carry out family planning.
-Low income people generally rate lower in IQ and self-control, and may be more likely to fail at using birth control or fail to realize that they can't afford kids. So even if they don't have the means to support children, they end up having children anyway.
-Middle class people generally have the IQ and self control to assess their finances and control their fertility. So they end up having 1-2 kids, which is ideal if you want to follow the strategy of pouring all your money into your kid's education.
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