1.71 in urban areas vs 1.95 in rural areas in the US.
In 2017, the total fertility rate for rural counties was 1,950.0 births per 1,000 women compared with 1,778.0 in small or medium metro and 1,712.0 in large metro counties.
I think the main correlation between urban/rural and TFR is as a nation sees their per capita income go up, people stop engaging in subsistence farming and move to cities for factory work and service work. TFR drops dramatically as a nation moves up to $5000-10000 per capita income.
Yes, this is the persistent centrist sneer. People who care too much about anything are always on the wrong side so the only solution is to enlightenedly not care. Having any political position is a suspect place to be, instead centrists default back to process. An overarching belief that larger principles like the free marketplace of ideas, the democratic process, free market capitalism and the ilk, if tweaked enough, will magically produce desired outcomes without ever having to consider ideology.
It’s the type of thinking that says there are kooky people against climate change but also kooky people for climage change so who can say which is correct, let’s let the free market decide.
But of course, the shallow no-ideology of centrism isn’t no ideology, it’s just smuggled ideology. This was demonstrated most clearly when all the centrists were shouting “Vote Blue, no matter who” during the Kamala campaign and with downballot centrist candidates on the ballot, a fundamentally procedural argument, and then when Zohran won the democratic primary, all that solidarity disappeared and there was manifestly no attempt to coalesce the party around a democratically chosen candidate.
I originally made my case against centrism as a deliberately exaggerated satire but your response is highlighting how the truth can match the fiction. You’ll abide any ideology as long as it’s accidental ideology. Rather than trying to find the best arguments from either the pro or anti-natalist side and forming your own opinion, you’d rather feel superior to both sides. And, by doing so, you’re actually markedly inferior to both sides because it allows you to be trivially mugged by anybody who is barely coherent enough to smuggle their own preferred ideology into the “oops, it was an accident” camp and you’ll go along wherever they lead you.
She commented on both China and Romania as anti and pro natalist nations in the OP. Both have been massive failures. China is now facing a labor shortage, and Romania gave birth to tons of kids that nobody wanted who grew up with severe psychological issues.
I’m not talking about any of that other stuff. I’m firmly a left liberal progressive when it comes to politics, but this isn’t a left-vs-right political issue. All that other stuff you brought in doesn’t apply here. I gave due consideration to both sides, noted where their arguments failed, and concluded that the middle is best in this case. I don’t assert that the middle is always correct in everything (that would be stupid), the way you’re asserting that the middle must always be wrong. In fact, your post has even departed from the matter of natalism altogether to expand into a general rant about all of politics. This is unhelpful. I want to stick to the subject.
Interestingly, that graph shows a wide spread of fertility rates per capita income, especially a HUGE spread at the lower income side of the graph. Which country is that at almost the same GDP as Niger, only with a rate of ~ 2 instead of ~7 ? And what is so magic about a GDP of ~15 that the plot essentially elbows there?
Italy, Spain, and Taiwan are really low, too. With lots of Asian and European nations not doing much better. Honestly, it looks to me like the Scandinavian countries are doing really well at cushioning the demographic drop.
And i think it’s because of their strong social safety net and generous parental leave policies.
Why do poor rural people have more kids? Partly because farm kids are a source of cheap labor, and if there’s no social safety net, kids are your only source of retirement income. Why do people who move to cities have fewer kids? Because kids take time and space. If you are an employee, time caring for kids if time you aren’t paid. If you live in a city, space for kids is space you need to pay for.
Back in the 1970s and before, high birth rates were the problem and the proposed solutions often involved controls on women. Now the problem is supposed to be falling birth rates - but people are proposing the same solution, which is kind of suspicious.
No, but look at the form of the argument you made. Both sides are stupid, therefore the middle is the path. Do you really think there is, across the entire spectrum of all beliefs about natalism, only stupidity to be found? That there aren’t arguments that, when weighed against each other, force you to take a position? No believer in any ideology doesn’t believe there are stupid people making stupid arguments on their side of the ideology. They persist in the ideology because all the stupid arguments are background noise, and it’s worth engaging with the serious remainder that is not stupid to see which side is actually correct.
But that takes work and the enlightened centrist sneer is that they can get to a similar place of authority without any of the work by pre-declaring that both sides must have stupid people and then finding the stupid people that confirms their beliefs that neither side is worth looking into further. This is the same attitude South Park gave with their “manbearpig” episode where the primary critique against Al Gore and climate change was that he simply cared too much and thus, must be wrong because anyone who cares too much is an extremist who holds wrong positions. South Park is notable for finally capitulating and making an apology several decades too late.
And look at the other side of your argument, you go seeking for the stupidity in the pro and con side but then automatically assume that the middle must not contain any stupidity as a result of that. The difference between ideologies and centrism is the stupidity of the middle is structural: The pro-Iraq war Bush politicians are religious fanatics but the anti-war crowd is annoying so I support “limited intervention” in the middle east. The trans haters are a bunch of religious bigots but trans people care too much about their cause so I only support “reasonable” restrictions like banning trans bathroom visits and trans sports and children being exposed to trans topics because of “ROGD”. In some cases, one side is straightforwardly right but the other understands the logic of centrism so they deliberately make things confusing enough that it allows them to smuggle their true ideology under the guise of being “reasonable”. What they rely on is centrists structurally unable to listen to one side about how obvious the truth is from the lies and smugly declaring that the middle path must be correct from a position of ignorance and not knowledge.
And the argument in the natalist case is the exact same: Principles like TRUST WOMEN, PROTECT CHOICE sound amazing on paper but don’t account for how choice is only choice downstream of material circumstances. The choice of a immigrant woman growing up in a overwhelmingly Roman Catholic tradition that preaches opposition to birth control and still has normal hormonal urges is different from an upper class Mormon woman who is sent to a university specifically to find a spouse which is different from a young couple who is being priced out of their city and can only afford to rent with roommates even though, in a previous generation, their jobs would have allowed them to buy a starter home.
Idealogues know all this and have very specific visions of who should and should not be allowed to have children and they know they can smuggle their ideologies into accepted discourse as long as it seems like the impact on natalism is an unintended side effect and not their primary goal. Abortion laws are structured so they disproportionately impact certain groups over others “accidentally”. Zoning decisions are made so certain people are allowed access to the housing market and not others. Education is pushed to promote “family values” and “religious cohesion” that just happen to also allow or ban certain teachings around sex education.
But anyone who is able to trivially see past these deceptions and then promotes active efforts to counter these ideological distortions are pegged as “activists” who have committed the sin of actively trying to engineer a system which must be reflexively opposed which is exactly what the ideologues were counting on.
All of those issues are decided according to more pressing, immediate matters than the birthrate. That’s partly why it’s better not to use the birthrate as a driver of policy.
Whether society ought to be encouraging more or fewer children is fundamentally an economic question, and the answer depends on a lot of variables, including the current birthrate.
I agree with @Johanna that it is morally wrong to use coercive measures to attempt to change the birthrate. But that’s not because society has no interest in the birthrate, it’s because those coercive measures are wrong in and of themselves. So if we have an impending demographic crisis (and some nations may, right now) we should be looking for morally acceptable ways to address that. Japan is investing in robots. Sweden is investing in generous social support for parents. Both look somewhat successful to me, although maybe neither is going to be quite enough. But those are both morally acceptable paths, IMHO.
The US is backing away from what has been stabilizing our population (immigration of working-age adults).
I’m dumbfounded by the complex proposed solutions that nations come up with in the attempt to increase birth rate without once stopping to consider a more liberal immigration policy.
I am not convinced birthrate drives policy in any but authoritarian regimes that can pull it off. Rather, birthrate is an important indicator of other things that need to be monitored closely because they matter.
If your national yearly average wage is $5,000 that isn’t good, but it’s not like making poverty illegal is going to work. Instead you enact policies to change this number and you’ll know it’s working if the number goes where you want. Number of new citizens per year is the same.
Why? All societies should seek to be sustainable in the future where we will all live some day. I have no idea why sustainability has become a liberal concept since it matches so closely with the conservative mantra of, ‘don’t buy what you can’t afford’.
One reason is that the country may want to preserve their own culture. Immigrants often want to maintain their own culture rather than take on the culture of the host country. The differences diminish after a few generations, but the end result is often a blended culture.
As an analogy, consider a farm town that is losing population. The residents can see that the town will eventually go bankrupt and be deserted. To counter that, they might create tourist areas and have festivals to bring people and more economic development. If it’s successful, the town will boom and people will return. However, the town’s character won’t be the same. It will be gentrified. The existing businesses will close as people go to the new corporate stores like Starbucks and Lululemon rather than the old diners and old stores. Property prices will skyrocket. The sleepy, farm town will become a tourist destination. The end result is that the town will survive, but the original residents may not recognize it. What the original residents wanted is to have the town they know survive, not that a completely different town replaced it.
I’m an American, and I was taught our culture is defined by immigrants. Culture isn’t some precious thing that needs to be locked away and unchanged through all time. Put it is a museum if you want to preserve it, but don’t enforce it or try to direct it in a destructive (and usually racist) attempt to maintain a pure national identity.
I think immigration is a much more comfortable solution to stabilize the population in America than it is in Japan. The Japanese are very into being Japanese. I’m sad we are cutting back on that, as i see “American culture” as flexible enough to accommodate quite a lot of immigration.
Also, while worldwide population is still increasing, that increase is slowing almost everywhere, and we might need other strategies eventually to maintain the services an aging population requires. I think both supporting parents and investing in robotics are likely to be useful strategies for much of the world.
Because immigrant labor may not be the best at keeping society functioning. If you import immigrants who do not share western values on women’s rights, gay rights, jewish rights, democracy, secularism, childrearing, etc that can cause a host of problems. There is a limited supply of hard working, tax paying, educated, healthy immigrants who share western values that the western nations can all bring there.
Also the entire world is facing a demographic crunch. The only parts of the world that are seeing a high birth rate are nations so mired in poverty, disease and dysfunction that they can barely function. Even if the west imports labor from other nations, those other nations are facing their own demographic issues.
Also humans are innately tribal due to the way we evolved. When a large number of immigrants who have a different skin color, language, beliefs, etc move in, it makes the majority demographic become more authoritarian and xenophobic, like it or not. Mass immigration in Europe is leading to a rightward, pro-fascist shift in European politics. Mass immigration in the early 20th century led to a resurgence of the KKK.
In the long run, it won’t matter because one would hope robotics and AI would fill the labor shortage. One would hope.
