Sorta–but it’s more like religious and rich. Louisiana, Mississippi, and surrounding areas are pretty churchy and rural, but are also poor, and don’t have an impressive fertility rate.
Quite a few of those are unsourced. Nasty habit.
Only two out of five are unsourced. Granted, one of them is the important one. The OP is this person, but they don’t give a further source. However, this link shows essentially the same thing and does come with full cites:
FWIW.
Really interesting data there.
Frankly, it’s looks like a “places where it’s bad to be a woman” map.
No one will like this answer, but maybe we should be giving incentives to central Bible Belt folks. Great Plains folks already have good fertility. And rich non-religious types probably won’t respond to incentives. But poor religious people in Mississippi, etc.? They’re probably inclined to have lots of kids but can’t afford them. Focus the spending there.
Yes, exactly. I feel the same. Except here those high-fertility religious groups, who are already making the country less liberal, are a subset of the immigrants. The cultural changes I’m worried about aren’t curry places and kebab shops for god’s sake, they are the import of conservative religious attitudes, and the clannishness and corruption which are prevalent in the third world and are a major reason for its poverty. Given that it’s exactly our wealth and liberal values that are lowering the birthrate, immigrants will increasingly have to come from countries that are very poor, religious, and conservative, exacerbating the problem. If we bring in enough to replace the ‘missing’ population, the natives will become a minority in just two or three generations. And two or three generations after that, those barely-integrated immigrants will again become the minority as new ones must continue to arrive. Whether already-present conservative religious people become the majority, or conservative religious people move in from elsewhere, your descendants end up living in a poorer, conservative, and religious country.
The US is in a more favourable position than Europe right now, because you get immigrants from Latin America, which is comparatively developed and culturally similar. But almost all those countries are below replacement tfr now too; will their governments allow the relatively few young people in future generations to move to the USA, given the negative effect on their own economies? Future waves of refugees might be increasingly grey.
In any case, we need a better solution for the long term, unless you want to purposely keep some countries poor and oppressive to act as a population reservoir for the wealthy liberal ones.
We need to be looking for ways to increase the birthrate that don’t involve giving up the things we value most, and we need to be doing it yesterday. No country is taking this problem seriously; there are still plenty of options that haven’t really been explored.
It’s interesting how the answer always comes around to “oppress women more”, explicitly or implicitly.
Subsidizing child care is oppressing women?
The majority of women like kids. And there is a subset that want them but for various reasons can’t. Narrowing this gap is hardly oppression.
Subsidizing a group for which abusing, raping and oppressing women is a core value is.
It’s not news that raped women who are denied access to birth control and abortion are more likely to have children. That doesn’t make it less oppressive. And you won’t get very good “child care” out of it, such women are much less likely to emotionally bond to children that were forced on them in the first place.
CDC data indeed shows a widening gap between fertility rates in rural and urban areas:
The question is whether that is due mostly to cultural or to practical differences (eg the increasing difficulty of finding affordable housing in most cities). Do cities with cheaper housing have higher fertility rates?
You can see from the charts above that purely being religious is not a sufficient condition for having a high fertility rate, suggesting that your comments about birth control and abortion are untrue. It’s religious and wealthy that leads to a high fertility rate, which actually argues the opposite–people not in poverty can afford birth control and can go out of state for abortions if needed.
Or they are more able to make it harder for women to escape across the border. Or terrorize them into not daring to try. Those are wealthier regions, not individuals.
According to this article, it’s true that counties with the fastest rises in house prices suffered the biggest drops in fertility:
Even though cheaper housing wouldn’t reverse the trend, it’s still worth doing things that ameliorate it. The US is going to suffer a lot less with a TFR of 1.62 than South Korea is with 0.72, and if you can get it up to 1.8 it would be better again. It’s much more sustainable to plug a small gap with immigration than a large one.
I really think ignorance and a defeatist attitude are half the problem here.
WAG: (or maybe not so W, because it’s based on people I know-- too small a group for extrapolation, but enough to propose further research)
People with health issues move to places where they can get care. California and New York have the best programs for caring for people who are ill, or have conditions that disable them. This includes people with mental health issues, and mental health issues get the worst care on all in the places with the low suicide rates.
Places with large populations of people with medical conditions are going to experience high suicide rates, because people with mental illness commit suicide at much greater rates that the gen pop, and people who are ill or have chronic conditions often tolerate them to a point, then either they are so disabled, on in so much pain, that they make a rational decision to end their lives.
To bring this around to the topic:
I don’t go around saying who can and can’t have children. I know disabled people who are great parents. I know families where the kids inherited their parent’s disability, and everyone is happy.
However, when you are talking about a group that includes disabled people, chronically I’ll people, acutely I’ll people, and mentally ill people, again, I do not judge-- but, I would not encourage people in these Venn diagrams to be fruitful and multiply. That is an entirely different thing from leaving them be to do what they want.
It may be a good thing that those places have low birthrates.
WAG
Nitpick: was there really a drop in fertility? producing few children is a drop in fecundity, or proliferativeness, or something. A drop in fertility would mean more people are seeking medical help to conceive, or adopting children because they can’t have them.
People who are able to have children, but choose not to, are not infertile.
Albeit, I have read that postponing becoming parents until one’s late 30s or early 40s has spiked the need for conception intervention. But those people are still not infertile, if they are physiologically progressing normally.
It’s called fertility rate. That’s the actual term used in scientific papers.
With Haredi Jews again as an exception, above average in both fertility and poverty (even if their communities tend not to look stereotypically “poor”).
That’s due in part to their maximizing their use of government benefits. Which demonstrates that if poor people can find a way to cover part of the cost of raising large families it can affect the fertility rate.
The other thing is that many religiously conservative communities they purchase fewer gadgets, accept what’s considered a lower standard of living, and so forth.
The Amish are another group that appear poor (and some are), have a “lower” standard of living in a material sense, and have large families. Although due to frugal practices some do amass significant wealth.
Talking about cultural dilution? I’d far rather increase the number of college educated Indian programmers, thanks.