Tea at Trianon: The Actual Cause of Collapsing Fertility

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, September 2, 2024

The Actual Cause of Collapsing Fertility

From Becoming Noble:

Fertility is collapsing worldwide. We lack a coherent theory for why this is happening. As we shall see, the conventional explanations - changes in economics, housing, religiosity, contraception, and childcare - don’t fit the macro data and cannot be the fundamental drivers of the trend. Each of these factors may play an important role in certain circumstances, but none is the ultimate cause of the broader collapse. None has sufficient predictive power upon which to build effective policy. Once I have demonstrated this, I will propose an alternative theory, and use this theory to suggest policy which will significantly increase birthrates.
Economic interventions fail. Hungary spends an incredible 5% of its GDP on its fertility drive through the provision of financial incentives: significant loans, tax breaks, subsidized fertility treatments. Its dire situation has moderately improved, but overall fertility remains far below replacement levels, with a rate of 1.59 births per woman (fewer than the US at 1.66). A society needs a birthrate of 2.1 to sustain itself.
The Nordic nations offer further economic and lifestyle benefits to parents through exceptional state-backed parental leave and childcare policies, with the World Economic Forum describing them as “the best places to have children” in the world. In some, women can take more than a year’s parental leave, challenging the argument that the need to work is blocking women from having children. These countries also have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and they continue to fall.
Religiosity alone does not appear to have the answer. Even if you isolate the most religious population (weekly church attenders) within the most religious of the major Western countries (the USA), you find barely breakeven fertility rates, with churches unable to sustain themselves due to defections to secularism. The three most religious European countries (Romania, Moldova, Greece) all have negative population growth, with Greece’s fertility rate a catastrophically low 1.39 births per woman. Iran - which can reasonably be described as an actual theocracy - has an unsustainably low TFR (1.69). (Read more.)