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Comment by steadicat | Hacker News Reader

Care to show some numbers to support your argument?

Here:

    Nation          Total Fertility Rate 
  ------------------------------------
    Iceland         2.14
  * Ireland         2.10
  * New Zealand     2.10
    USA             2.01
    Norway          1.98
  * Australia       1.97
    France          1.97
    UK              1.96
    Turkey          1.92
  * Finland         1.85
    Denmark         1.74
    Luxembourg      1.70
    Sweden          1.67
  * Netherlands     1.66
    Belgium         1.65
    Estonia         1.63 
  * Canada          1.58
    Greece          1.50
  * Czech Republic  1.49 
    Portugal        1.49
    Spain           1.47
  * Switzerland     1.46
    Germany         1.42
  * Austria         1.41
    Italy           1.41
    Hungary         1.33

The list is sorted. Those marked "*" are in the original list.

Where is the correlation?

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The number for Iceland is the only one that surprises me. The rest exemplify the general trend in the West in modern times: religion has been on the wane and irreligious people are not as interested in baby-making as religious believers.

Let's not get fooled by reputations. We may think of Spain, Portugal, and Italy as being very religious countries, but the Catholic Church more or less gave up trying to do its job starting with Vatican II. Turkey has had a secular (and secularizing) government since Ataturk. Hungary, Estonia, and other Eastern European nations were under Marxist indoctrination for more than forty years. In the Balkans (e.g., Greece), religion is more a marker for ethnicity than a guide for living life.

Much of the positive side of the ledger for population in Western nations is due to immigration of people who are induced to have children either as an act of piety (Muslims in Europe) or as a matter of custom (Mexicans in the United States). The above chart does not contradict this.

Don't confuse correlation with causation - less interest in baby-making could be due to:

* better education * higher income

In the countries with declining reproduction, I'd be interested to see how rate of procreation relates to income-level. Is it the well off who are not reproducing, or the relatively poor?

And easy access to birth control by living in an industrial society with the capacity to make it.

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