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Iran & Saudi Arabia are having big drops in fertility. The only places that aren't are Israel (who has a national story about being attacked on all sides) and some very poor African countries. That's it.
You can educate women + have accessible modern medicine or you can have high fertility. That's it. It's not society or anything else, it's that it turns out the number of women who become even mildly educated and want to have lots of children isn't that large.
I wonder if it's the education, or just keeping a closer watch on teen girls? As I understand it, a huge chunk of the fall in fertility rates comes from fewer teen pregnancies. Those aren't highly educated career woman choosing whether or not to have one baby, they're 14 teen year olds having multiple babies because they're bored and making impulsive decisions.
I mean, that might explain the drop in rural America (along with longer-acting contraceptives like IUD's and shows like 16 & Pregnant), but not in other previously less-educated countries. I realize there's a meme in communities like this that education is just signaling and OK, fine, I'll believe you when it comes to high-level college education and such if it'll help you listen to my point, but on the lower levels, no access to it is pretty impactful.
I guess my point is, it's not a tension between higher education and fertility. It's between lower education and fertility.
One possible compromise would be to offer a sort of Amish Rumspringa where teens are allowed a lot of freedom to run around and find themselves, combined with a strong welfare state that pays for childcare and also free higher ed. Plus make it easy to get into universities even if you've been out of school for a while.
Even better compromise would be burn to the ground the scam called "higher ed" and liquidate academics as a class.
The Plagiarism War Has Begun: Claudine Gay was taken down by a politically motivated investigation. Would the same approach work for any academic?
Good question, only way to find out is to try.
Time to sharpen the scalping knives and get to work.
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As far as can be told, that explains most of the drop in fertility in Latin America.
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I suspect that there was a near zero contribution of unmarried teens to Iran and Saudi Arabia’s birthrates.
because they got married after getting pregnant, not that they never (in the past) had unmarried sex
In Iran and Saudi Arabia? You are aware that these are not just sand Alabama, right?
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Yeah, taxing the childless or atrificial wombs being used by the state to raise the next generation are basically inevetable. People also really liked smoking 70 years ago, but through taxation and shame we got them to cut down on a destructive behaviour. We can do the same here.
Except, even a lot of smokers were disgusted with being smokers before there was much social pressure at all. Considering more and more people are childless, and most of that is choice, going to be kind of hard to get people to tax themselves to help people they largely politically disagree with happier.
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