and some japanes are taller than some dutch people. but that's not the way to bet. there are no significant groups or subgroups that are high fertility and atheist. if anythign all else equal, atheism is a huge indicator of lower fertility. so i applaud you, but ultimately for a society atheism must be considered catastrophic for natalism.
virtually every single subgroup that has high fertility is religious. if you're pragmatic and empirical, if evidence moves you, then instead of trying to reinvent the wheel you should accept that almost certainly some religion is necessary to drive societaly higher religion.
the only 1st world country with tfr above replacement is Israel. where, bingo, religion is a huge part of it.
so it's a necessary but NOT sufficient condition. trying to reinvent the wheel coming up wiht atheist high fertility strikes me as a quixotic and counterproductive task.
Caplan seems to accept radical consquences in other areas (open borders, etc.) but somehow has a cultural mental block still there for religion. oh well.
Can't speak for Bryan, but the whole reason I'm pronatal is because it's an extension vitalism, I admire fitness, intelligence, strength, beauty, and wealth. Making a fool out of yourself with talking snake stuff is inconsistent with that vision. Plus, religious people promote social maladies like abortion bans. No thanks to being saddled with the responsibility for that kind of nonsense.
But Magus’ point is that you don’t have to accept the total pack of religion as being good to recognize that being religious is an excellent - if not “necessary”, or even not theoretically necessarily best - in increasing TFR.
Atheist Tyler Cowen surely *does* get this point (in addition to seeing other moral value virtues in the religious in aggregate as well).
> It was Julian Simon and Judith Harris, not my upbringing or the Bible, that made me the natalist I am today. Which strongly inclines me to think that the best way to promote natalism is to bypass religion entirely. God is great? No, kids are great!
> But then again… the fact that Pakaluk couldn’t locate a single educated female atheist with more than four kids gives me pause.
I think we have broader sources of data on the relationship between fertility and religiosity. Although, my understanding is that a study on Irish given-names suggested that rather than religiosity, it's traditionalism (which is itself correlated with religiosity) which results in higher fertility.
Coming from a large family where I helped wash the nappies and change them and polished lots of shoes every day, I liked having lots of brothers and sisters to play with.
I married an only child. She discovered she liked giving birth and having babies.
My Mum was very well educated and corrected all our draft homework.
Kids are a lot of work at times but a lot more fun than anything else so know of.
I assume "be religious" = attending services and being observant, rather than having any particular religious beliefs. I think there's a lot of value in attending church services and being part of a church community, but as an ex-Catholic, I always stumble over the Nicene Creed, since I just don't believe it. I also feel conflicted, like I'm bearing false witness if I recite any doxology, but I'm being disrepectful if I stay silent.
Among orthodox Jews, if a parent or grandparent mentions the number of children or grandchildren they have, and its a large number, they'll immediately say kenahora, a contraction of kayn ayin hara, which means literally without the evil eye. The notion is that in telling someone else they have a large family, they don't mean to spark envy.
I have no hard data whatsoever, just a logical theory based on educated guesses.
Atheists highly correlate with progressive values (vs. conservative or libertarian or “no strong political values”).
Whatever they may used to have believed 50+ years ago, progressives (and even more so atheist progressives) believe that humans are destroying Mother Gaia - one of their overarching religions - and so having more than 2 or 3 children is doing harm. Indeed for many, having more than 1 or zero is doing harm.
The handful of women here (or mentioned here) on this Substack are the even more improbable (by statistics, not IQ or logic) highly educated atheists who are not progressives, he says being happy to Bet on It.
This, I submit, is the explanation / causal factor for P(religious | high fertility) = sky high
Namely, P(NOT progressive | high fertility) = EVEN sky higher
A long-time martial arts training partner of mine has 13 kids, about half of whom are now in my martial arts class. Back when my friend only had 7 kids, he took the family to Japan (a country that has a rapidly shrinking and aging population). When they visited the Tokyo fish market, one of the vendors bobbed his head up and down counting the kids, and then gave a thumbs up with a big smile.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that his family travels a long distance on Sundays to attend church of a traditionalist (though irregular) Catholic priestly fraternity, the Society of Saint Pius X. I'm told that families with this many kids is not unusual in his SSPX congregation. SSPX members were labeled by the FBI as "Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists (RMVE)" and accused of adhering to a white supremacist ideology. My friend and his wife and kids are all Filipino-Americans, illustrating how ridiculous the RMVE characterization is.
It might be interesting to rerun Pakuluk's study stratifying by partisan affiliation as well as by religiosity--Republicans have significantly higher fertility rates (and marriage rates) than Democrats do, and to the extent they are religious they tend to self-segregate into different religious sects with significantly different teachings.
I’m a female atheist with 5 kids!
and some japanes are taller than some dutch people. but that's not the way to bet. there are no significant groups or subgroups that are high fertility and atheist. if anythign all else equal, atheism is a huge indicator of lower fertility. so i applaud you, but ultimately for a society atheism must be considered catastrophic for natalism.
You rock!
Another female atheist with five kids here. We are out there, but apparently harder to find than the religious ones.
Seinfeld voice: whaaaaat is the deaaaaaal with these women?
We have 7, and my wife and I are apatheists.
virtually every single subgroup that has high fertility is religious. if you're pragmatic and empirical, if evidence moves you, then instead of trying to reinvent the wheel you should accept that almost certainly some religion is necessary to drive societaly higher religion.
the only 1st world country with tfr above replacement is Israel. where, bingo, religion is a huge part of it.
so it's a necessary but NOT sufficient condition. trying to reinvent the wheel coming up wiht atheist high fertility strikes me as a quixotic and counterproductive task.
Caplan seems to accept radical consquences in other areas (open borders, etc.) but somehow has a cultural mental block still there for religion. oh well.
Can't speak for Bryan, but the whole reason I'm pronatal is because it's an extension vitalism, I admire fitness, intelligence, strength, beauty, and wealth. Making a fool out of yourself with talking snake stuff is inconsistent with that vision. Plus, religious people promote social maladies like abortion bans. No thanks to being saddled with the responsibility for that kind of nonsense.
But Magus’ point is that you don’t have to accept the total pack of religion as being good to recognize that being religious is an excellent - if not “necessary”, or even not theoretically necessarily best - in increasing TFR.
Atheist Tyler Cowen surely *does* get this point (in addition to seeing other moral value virtues in the religious in aggregate as well).
> It was Julian Simon and Judith Harris, not my upbringing or the Bible, that made me the natalist I am today. Which strongly inclines me to think that the best way to promote natalism is to bypass religion entirely. God is great? No, kids are great!
> But then again… the fact that Pakaluk couldn’t locate a single educated female atheist with more than four kids gives me pause.
I think we have broader sources of data on the relationship between fertility and religiosity. Although, my understanding is that a study on Irish given-names suggested that rather than religiosity, it's traditionalism (which is itself correlated with religiosity) which results in higher fertility.
Coming from a large family where I helped wash the nappies and change them and polished lots of shoes every day, I liked having lots of brothers and sisters to play with.
I married an only child. She discovered she liked giving birth and having babies.
My Mum was very well educated and corrected all our draft homework.
Kids are a lot of work at times but a lot more fun than anything else so know of.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-154620106
1) Be Religious
2) Don't Sleep Around (before age 21)
White college educated women that follow this script have replacement level fertility of ~2.0 kids.
If you lack #1 or #2 then you have a TFR of 1.5.
If you lack #1 and #2 you will have 1.2 kids.
People who do both #1 and #2 have average marriage age of 24.
Those who lack #1 or #2 average marriage age of 27/28.
Those that lack both average marriage age 31/32.
Trads are right.
I assume "be religious" = attending services and being observant, rather than having any particular religious beliefs. I think there's a lot of value in attending church services and being part of a church community, but as an ex-Catholic, I always stumble over the Nicene Creed, since I just don't believe it. I also feel conflicted, like I'm bearing false witness if I recite any doxology, but I'm being disrepectful if I stay silent.
Among orthodox Jews, if a parent or grandparent mentions the number of children or grandchildren they have, and its a large number, they'll immediately say kenahora, a contraction of kayn ayin hara, which means literally without the evil eye. The notion is that in telling someone else they have a large family, they don't mean to spark envy.
RSVP
RSVP-ing
How late do you guess to be at the Clay Pit?
I may try to join you at Clay Pit, depends on some other schedule items
I have no hard data whatsoever, just a logical theory based on educated guesses.
Atheists highly correlate with progressive values (vs. conservative or libertarian or “no strong political values”).
Whatever they may used to have believed 50+ years ago, progressives (and even more so atheist progressives) believe that humans are destroying Mother Gaia - one of their overarching religions - and so having more than 2 or 3 children is doing harm. Indeed for many, having more than 1 or zero is doing harm.
The handful of women here (or mentioned here) on this Substack are the even more improbable (by statistics, not IQ or logic) highly educated atheists who are not progressives, he says being happy to Bet on It.
This, I submit, is the explanation / causal factor for P(religious | high fertility) = sky high
Namely, P(NOT progressive | high fertility) = EVEN sky higher
RSVPing for Friday!
A long-time martial arts training partner of mine has 13 kids, about half of whom are now in my martial arts class. Back when my friend only had 7 kids, he took the family to Japan (a country that has a rapidly shrinking and aging population). When they visited the Tokyo fish market, one of the vendors bobbed his head up and down counting the kids, and then gave a thumbs up with a big smile.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that his family travels a long distance on Sundays to attend church of a traditionalist (though irregular) Catholic priestly fraternity, the Society of Saint Pius X. I'm told that families with this many kids is not unusual in his SSPX congregation. SSPX members were labeled by the FBI as "Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists (RMVE)" and accused of adhering to a white supremacist ideology. My friend and his wife and kids are all Filipino-Americans, illustrating how ridiculous the RMVE characterization is.
It might be interesting to rerun Pakuluk's study stratifying by partisan affiliation as well as by religiosity--Republicans have significantly higher fertility rates (and marriage rates) than Democrats do, and to the extent they are religious they tend to self-segregate into different religious sects with significantly different teachings.