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Notes -
The coming Ukraine/Russia baby boom?
There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:
Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.
It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern femininist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.
You know what raises the status of men? Fighting in wars. It's no secret that women love men in uniform. And many will confess to being aroused by male violence. For better or worse, violence raises male status.
Nearly all nations had a baby boom after WWII. And this wasn't merely making up for lost time. In the United States, the fertility rate peaked at 3.74 children/woman in 1957. Even Russia had a fertility rate near 3 despite a ridiculously lopsided gender ratio where more than 80% of men born in 1922 didn't survive until 1946.
So anyway... I predict that Russia and Ukraine will experience a similar (but smaller boom) in the decade following the end of the war.
There was also a baby boom in countries like Sweden and Switzerland that stayed neutral.
Something really interesting to me, in a casual way, is that we don't see extremely different cultural and historical trajectories between countries that were involved in WWI and WWII in Europe and countries that weren't.
I can't speak about Switzerland but while Sweden was officially neutral it was far from unaffected - the Nazis were very interested in the country's natural resources and there there was also a lot of Nazi transit through Sweden between Germany and Norway.
There's also the fact that sharing a continent with countries that overwhelmingly were actively involved in the conflict means you probably get swept along in whatever cultural changes the rest of them experience.
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