France's baby bust
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It seems far-fetched to use global population as a relative indicator of France's "decline", where the global population exploded after the industrial revolution.
Of course, empires with more dense populations have more ability to dominate others, at least thanks to the variety of skills and the sheer mass of the population. There’s a reason why politicians work to increase population: It increases levied taxes. The system wouldn’t be balanced with stable population.
But even if we equate population with domination, is dominating the world what we want?
As for the “but they’ll pay your retirements!” argument, well, retirement-by-next-generation-paying is a pyramid scheme and the elderly should have thought of it before they set it up.
Half the reason we got out of the Malthusian trap is that we finally got enough people that specialisation and economies of scale start to pay off.
Wanting to reduce the global population is like saying you want to eliminate economies of scale, which would make life harder for those who remain, not easier.
The food production grew because of the invention of synthetic fertilizer, not because the more people we have, the cheaper the food can be.
Because population is key for the level of influence a country can have. A high population doesn't guarantee it, but a low population will likely sideline the country when important topics come up.
There are diminishing returns on industrialising.
But in the short term, it is a lot of sacrifice, especially for the woman who has to give birth and raise all those babies. And of course, it is a lot of work to instill values such that the family stays close, and luck such as being located in a location that is experiencing an economic boom.
True, but that’s not a benefit to the people making the decision to have more children. It’s a beneficial second order effect that won’t negate the cost to the parent.
The fertility rate in Britain was still higher in the 1880s than it was in France back in 1800. Economically Britain was 20-50 years ahead of France but demographically France was almost a hundred years ahead.
e.g. see https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033137/fertility-rate-f... and https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033074/fertility-rate-u...
The population explosion that's discussed in the article (the population dividend of the demographic transition) just never happened in France - which is the whole point of why its relative standing dropped so much over the past two centuries compared to other hitherto much smaller countries such as England and Germany.
One could even say that the power shifts due to the industrial revolution were detrimental for the influence of France by favoring other nations and populations to a greater degree.
The Industrial Revolution made European conquest possible.
Potatoes unlocked lots of land in the northern part. And the other unsung botany, too.
And the ability to send surplus men (and women) to an empty (because of disease) continent instead of having them warring against each other like pre-Columbian Europe and East Asia (looking at Sengoku) is also decisive...
[0] Remember one reason why Britain was able to fight Napoleon even when the entire continent was conquered was because of industries.
"In terms of soldiers the French numerical advantage was offset by British subsidies that paid for a large proportion of the Austrian and Russian soldiers, peaking at about 450,000 in 1813."
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_in_the_Napole...
And control of the global trade networks. The same reason why the seemingly insignificant Netherlands (population and area wise) were able to maintain its position as a global superpower throughout most of the 17th century before being replaced by Britain. Of course it's a bit baffling that that happened after England and Holland ceased being rivals because a Dutch army invaded Britain, overthrew it's government and put their Stadholder on the English Throne..
In fact, looking at the timing, one could almost make the argument that the Industrial Revolution was the effect of colonization and exploitation of the rest of the world and not the cause.
The major corporate movement didn't even start until the 17th century.
Spain and Portugal did it first, long before Industrial revolution (which Spain had much much later and only halfway, and Portugal never had at all). They did it because they could: finishing reconquest of their territories from Arabs in the late XV century, they only saw foreign expansion as continuation of the same trend: Christendom acquires more land from the infidels, with divine assistance, they saw it as their natural life role and mission and same thing they kept doing for 700 years before, just on land.
Then, Netherlands, UK and later France acquired some territories - Netherlands for the purpose of trade (was before Industrial revolution and industry wasn't involved), UK because of religious issues - to push out people of "wrong" religions, like Puritans, as far away as possible, and France, well, because they saw it was going fashionable and they sort of felt compelled to do the same not properly realising why (resulting in the most ridiculous and useless empire imaginable).
Finally, Germany did it when they got so belatedly reunified after 1870 - they simply happened to grab some colonies from France because they won the Franco-Prussian war. Also never figured what to do with those.
In every case, only with the latter part of British colonialism, industry played some role (when colonies were used as source for industrial raw materials e.g. cotton from U.S. South), or market to sell them (India). Military capabilities brought forward by industrialisation, never had a role properly.
Jamestown, for example, was not founded by the government of England but instead by an investment company in search of riches. The Puritans as well; the government didn't put them on a boat, they bought a charter from the Virginia Company.
British colonies were somehow able to attract massive amounts of settlers and eventually became self sustainable. The Dutch, French and others could never achieve that and mainly relied on the fur trade with the Native populations.
For example, Virginia, the most populous colony at the time, had about 58k people in 1700 but over 530,000 by 1780.
The colonies as a whole grew by about 245,000 people in the 17th century and 2,550,000 in the subsequent 80 years, before the American Revolution. I should mention, however, that these numbers include the number of enslaved persons, about 575,000 people in 1780. That's a growth from around 6% of the total population in 1700 to over 1/5 of the total population of the colonies and around 40% of the population of Virginia in 1780.
It's not that much of a mystery how the British colonies became financially successful; most of it was due to location and slavery. It's the same reason that, while the French and Dutch were not as much of an economic success in their North American colonial holdings, they (and the Brits) were a huge financial success in the Caribbean. By importing people enslaved in Africa to work sugar plantations and not worrying about the death rates, the investors and colonial powers were able to make a substantial profit.
edit - obviously there are a lot more layers to that.
If they settled in some country rules of which they'd find obliged to obey - either because it was Christian, or because it was too strong to ignore with their forces - they couldn't claim land and instead, will become immigrants, then of course it's not colonisation.
That's arguable. I mean they didn't have the steam engine, but besides that the Dutch economically was relatively industrialized according by most other metrics (high urbanization, high amount of energy usage (wind, peat, water), relatively very high labor productivity etc.)
Trade allowed the Netherlands to acquire huge amounts of capital but unlike some other countries (e.g. Spain) they didn't waste it and instead invested into dramatically increasing the productivity of their economy .
Compare to the British colonies and dominions: brought British culture and legal system (even to territories where local population always dominated), developed them economically, and yes, robbed them too, making good profit.
French system, for comparison, was an utter failure. Only benefit it provided was a good network of anchorages and coal bunkers for the French Navy.
For example Ming China was the first gunpowder empire and was militarily competitive with if not superior to the European countries of the time. Qing China was caught resting on its laurels after it had accomplished the millennia-long Chinese goal of subduing all neighboring regions. In the case of China's defeat by European powers it was a combination of European ascendency and Chinese military stagnation at the time.
It was capitalism and accompanying political restructuring (from feudalism) that released and focused that demographic, intellectual, and technical 'potential'. Would a tiny "aristocratic" minority be able to scale up empire without making emerging (secular, technical including finance) social classes partners in the fruits of empire?
(Convince yourself: Consider demographic and socio-economic trends in China 1990 to 2010. Was it population growth or the socio-political change that catapulted its economic power?)
However Europe still lagged both economically and population wise behind Asia at the time and industrialization hadn't really started.
An example involving France, and which had long lasting consequences: in 1830 France invaded and conquered Algeria. Looking at those with modern eyes one might think it should have been a massive war with an untenable outcome because France has a population of 68 million and Algeria has a population of 46 million... but in 1830 France had a population of about 33 million and had industrialised while Algeria had a population of only 3 million and still had an agrarian economy so the dynamic was completely different (although it still wasn't a walk in the park for the French).
But it's important to state that it wasn't Europeans, but western Europeans who colonized. Here in Romania we never colonized anyone but were colonized by western Europeans and Asians: Austrians, Russians, Turks, &c.
"By feeding rapidly growing populations, [it] permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950."
"Because potatoes were so productive, the effective result, in terms of calories, was to double Europe’s food supply."
"Routine famine almost disappeared in potato country, a 2,000-mile band that stretched from Ireland in the west to Russia’s Ural Mountains in the east."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-change...
> It is unclear why the Catholic Church’s influence waned so quickly and why France was the first country to secularize.
But then, if he doesn’t know enough about what’s happening in France during that period, how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ? What if it was a completely different reason that he couldn’t find in his very limited set of documents ?
> The decline of Catholicism, and fertility, in eighteenth-century France turned it from a demographic powerhouse – the China of Europe – to merely a first-rank European power among several
Why wouldn’t it the other way round, with the core causes of the French decline also triggering less religiousness ?
This article has a lot of data, but the base logical argument feels off, like starting from a conclusion and sticking correlated statistics to it without ever coming up with definitive causality.
It’s still true today: https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secula...
So religion can be a factor, but there are so many other factors than can weight in the balance.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_by_country
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
One can philosophically not care at all about the beliefs of Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc, but for the purposes of interacting with members of their tribe, and signaling to other members of their tribe that they are in that tribe, they might still describe themselves as being “Catholic” (or whatever).
France fertility rate are boosted by its Muslim population https://mythdetector.ge/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/inline-im....
Looking deeper into your source numbers, it’s interesting that they’re not consistent across countries for populations that are all “muslim”.
From 1.5 in Greece to 3.1 in Finland, it still shows to me that religion is not the main factor in this.
He gives several data points for secularization, such as the language people chose to use in their wills. Since there is a strong general correlation between low fertility and low religion, it seems likely that these are causally linked in 18th century France, rather than coincidentally happening at the same time.
It's a harder question why France in particular secularized at this time. The argument he very tentatively proposes is that freedom from religious coercion leads people to tend to become more religious (as can be seen by comparing the US to Europe over the last few centuries) and that France, due to its strong counter-reformation, had an unusually high level of religious coercion.
> Why wouldn’t it the other way round, with the core causes of the French decline also triggering less religiousness ?
What do you mean by "French decline"? Its loss of status as a superpower starting in 1815? That postdates the decline in religiousness.
The article isn’t proving that point, and I’d argue other conditions, in particular mortality rates or living conditions in general have more of a widely accepted impact on fertility than religion.
I’d be open to see religion playing a role in this narrative, but IMHO it needs be more than an opinion or a hunch.
> “French decline"
I meant by that the decline in population
Why would we want 300 millions inhabitants in France ? That's what we would have with the density of the Netherlands.
Why couldn't France be on top of leisure, urban transports, ecology, natural ecosystems, technology, political innovation, and even military defense, with 70 million inhabitants ?
Worlwide politics are biased, always considering GDP first, instead of a myriad of more relevant indicators.
As Musk likes to point out, Japan already has adult diapers outselling baby diapers. I don't think running out of resources is a risk.
Because capitalists want more. More workers, more consumers, more sales, more demand for housing, more demand for goods, more profit.
That would obviously benefit its reach.
If France wanted to export its culture abroad then it should invest in making some kick-ass games and movies, not breed more.
US successfully exported its culture here because it made the best entertainment in the world and we couldn't get enough of it, not because it was a numerous population.
Larger domestic market, more money, more eyeballs, more creators.
Why make a $100 million video game like GTA 5 for 200 million French speakers when you can address the market of 2 billion global English speakers?
(Of course, they do localize it to French after developing it in English. But not everything gets localized and usually it’s targeted primarily at the English market.)
Meh, yo a degree yes, but not always. Korean entertainment had some international smash hits recently that went viral like Parasite, Squid Game, and All Of Us Are Dead, and they were all in Korean not in English. Quality mattes more than language.
and to a degree France has this too with their Institut Francais (French institute) ... but of course with a negligible efficacy.
that said, as far as I know, Paris is still the top top top number 1 travel destination.
I'd be interested what happens when general birthrate declines and a religious group, that massively encourages tons of children, take larger voting percentages.
As a country we were over 50% secular 30 years ago, the last census tells over 90% declared to be religious (census is wrong, but how wrong?).
https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/politics/chur...
Edit: capitalization
If not, I’d be interested if you look at birthrate by religion in France (and please add stats of bullying at school if you find them) and see whether it fits your expected model.
The interesting thing about these groups is that they exhibit “carrying limits”: they get to particular community sizes and begin to experience attrition through secularization.
Haredim “get away” with minimizing participation in many ways, which makes their attrition rates lower than comparable religious groups. But that doesn’t last forever; compare the secularization of Jews in Austro-Hungary in the late 19th century.
But that was implied by discussing a carrying _limit_ right?
I feel like this is true for religious groups in christian-majority countries (or at least traditionally christian countries). I believe that secularization is a christian phenomenon (yes I know it sounds counter-productive), and as such it can only exist in countries with a strong christian tradition.
I'm counting back though prime ministers and i can't recall one who made religion a major part of their platform in my lifetime.
But a major policy decision directly targeting religion? The closest I can think of in the US is Trump banning immigration from majority-Muslim countries under the pretext of links to terror.
As for the rest of the Western world, you might think of Angela Merkel and Ursula von der Leyen, who explicitly represent the Christian Democratic Union.
That said I'd argue the culture war is quasi-religious, and it's being fought equally across the Anglosphere and beyond.
It seems to me like the reason Germany doesn’t have a religiously charged debate on abortion is that no major party is pushing for abortion to 24 weeks or even later like in America.
It doesn't seem unreasonable that other people would have a lower comfort limit, again even without religion.
If you want to see what atheists do when they’re not bound by the cultural hangover of an abrahamic religion, look at population control efforts in Asia. The Chinese correctly observed that, from a purely utilitarian standpoint, there’s no compelling reason to draw the line at birth.
Except there is. You want the same protections applied to you, even if you're unconscious or otherwise unable to protest. Pretty much the only broadly supportable position is that killing a viable person is murder and no more or less supportable than them killing you.
Personally I find his view to be utterly morally abhorrent, but I have to credit him with the courage and consistency of taking utilitarianism to its logical conclusion.
Me. That's why I want to find a simple set of rules that we can both agree to, where you care about me in trade for similar concern and protection.
> If a stroke reduces you to the same level of mental functioning as a newborn
Right, I don't consider that viable without some sort of prognosis of recovery but if we go too far down the line of 'burden to society' it starts to include people who drive too slowly in the passing lane and gets more subjective.
That would be considered OOT for a priest over here.
Only in the Churches where the religion part is seen with faint embarrassment. Established Churches are the best way to drive religiosity down yet discovered besides banning.
The Trump travel ban is weird in its various iterations. On one hand Trump was on the record during his campaign as wanting to ban Muslims from entering the country entirely, but on the other hand the ban completely omitted the largest predominantly-Muslim countries (Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh). For a sense of scale, those three countries make up about a third of the world's Muslim population. (Add on India and Nigeria and you're looking at half of the global Muslim population.) There was also criticism for omitting places like Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Lebanon (and Egypt, in earlier iterations) which actually had demonstrable ties to 9/11.
But, the original list was mostly consistent with restrictions on the visa waiver program, which is to say the administration probably wanted to start small with the most legally defensible subset before expanding it more broadly. In practice, said restrictions were uniformly blocked by the judicial system.
Ostensibly the first amendment's establishment cause prevents Congress from passing laws that are overly religious, although that doesn't entirely stop them from, say, passing the Defense of Marriage Act or attempting to explicitly opt out churches from COVID restrictions.
These days it's mostly about putting ideologically-aligned judges on the courts and letting them choose which laws to block or precedent to overturn.
No, it does not. The first amendment establishes freedom of religion, and prohibits state-sponsored religion. (The phrase "separation of church and state" is found nowhere in the Constitution.) As the Constitution was originally interpreted, it only applied to the federal government; individual US states had state-sponsored churches into the 19th century.
>or attempting to explicitly opt out churches from COVID restrictions.
This is based on the first amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion. This is why churches, for example, don't pay taxes.
In any case, this is immaterial to the Trump immigration bans. The US president has enormous latitude over who is admitted into the country. <https://np.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/4vv1rc/utmwnn_explai...>
Hasn’t the growth of Islam in Europe been a large and growing political issue for the past decade?
France in particular has had lot of debates about religious clothing at schools, what kind of criticism of religious ideas is and isn’t acceptable, etc.
From my POV, it looks like religion is a bigger deal in European than American politics. In America, politics are the religion for many and marrying across political lines now carries more opposition than across religious ones, for the majority of people. Things have changed quite a bit since the 80s.
Probably more like two decades by now :-) The political parties in Europe that pride themselves on anti-Islamism are themselves not religious all. And no one (of any significance) in Western Europe is arguing for a return to Christianity. Some parties advocate “Judeo-Christian values” but the various incarnations of this concept are nebulous at best and mostly completely unrecognizable to Jews and Christians.
At the same time, many Western European countries are now majority atheist or at least majority unaffiliated with organized religion, so, no, religion is not at all a bigger deal in European politics at all.
This is apparent if you come from a different religious background. I know people who are nominally atheist but you can tell their family is German Protestant a mile away.
Most people would call that a culture.
One were most people do not go to church on Sunday and politicians, even if they’re from a religious background, like Angela Merkel, don’t ever talk about God.
And one that is very different from the one across the Atlantic where “in God we trust” is the national motto and politicians make sure to fluff up their religious credentials.
Sure. But in Europe that culture co-evolved with more than a 1,000 years of Christianity being central to society. The cultural inheritance of Christianity survives whether people go to church or not. The same is true for those Muslim immigrants. They are culturally Muslim. It’s those differences in culture, rooted in religion, that are the source of the conflict, not theology in the abstract.
> One were most people do not go to church on Sunday and politicians, even if they’re from a religious background, like Angela Merkel, don’t ever talk about God.
The German system of offering education in Christianity in public schools would be illegal in America. In Germany abortion is still technically illegal, and is restricted after 12 weeks, whereas in most of America it’s available up to 24 weeks. In Bavaria the government can require Christian crosses to be displayed in all public buildings. In America that would be illegal.
So why doesn’t Merkel talk about Christianity? Is it because Christianity has less influence on government and society in Germany? Or is it because Germany secularism carved out a sphere for Christianity in society, and, unlike in America, nobody is trying to eliminate that sphere?
If you look, you can definitely religious people but it's not most people or even close. The one large exception to this is the large number of immigrants who were much more likely to be religious and church-going.
What is your point about this? The motto has a long tradition almost as old as the country and it's really not uncommon for European countries to reference God in their national or even unofficial national motto.
> politicians make sure to fluff up their religious credentials.
Like who and how? Most politicians don't do this. Politicians in the US are generally not very religious in my opinion. Ironically, the ones I can think of that are most outspoken about their religion are two Catholics who are at odds with their church leadership over abortion and gay marriage, and Muslims who I somewhat doubt practice Islam. I am struggling to even think of more overtly religious politicians. I just think media reports skew how irreligious politics in the US actually is. I am sure you can find some story about a speech somewhere reference religion or a cross being put up on a state courthouse or something somewhere but I don't think exceptions make the rule and this forgets that even just taking the federal government alone, there are hundreds of politicians who never bring up religion and things are actually much more mundane.
France has had a strong separation between the state and religion for a century. It’s one of the less religious country in the world and a significant part of the population is still strongly against any kind of religion especially the Catholic Church.
As I wrote: "a significant part of the population is still strongly against any kind of religion".
All religious signs are banned in schools not only the hijab. France views religion as strictly a private matter which has no place at all in the public sphere. That’s not a religious conflict just widely incompatible with the American view on the subjects.
But even then, as a French, I would applaud anything going against religions. The faster we get ride of obscurantism the better the world.
Where can I learn more about this? I find it difficult to believe this is true for "the majority of people".
- https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/02/interfaith-...
- https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/06/22/3-partisan-e...
This trend started with William Branham (progenitor of Latter Rain cult, The Message cult, prosperity gospel, healing-campaign revivalism ... leading to the current New Apostolic Reformation) and his mentor Roy E. Davis (Klan leader) in the 1930s. They started a political white supremacist cult with a religious bent. These two spawned a plethora of "heretical" movements still going strong today, a fusion of supremacist, new age ideas from the late 1800s, anti-communist, and evangelical/pentecostal ideas.
(Refer to the "Leaving The Message" YouTube channel. These guys, Branham and Davis, spawned the hydra.)
Edit: clarity, additional points
Much of the get-out-the-vote effort on the right consists of reminding their voters why they hate the other side. This naturally pisses off the left. This leads to much angry rhetoric on the left. This rhetoric is nut-picked and put on blast by the media on the right. Etc. The situation isn't symmetric because the left has a lot of issues they're happy to run on: climate change, electoral reforms, education, health care. The right is mostly focused on their hatred of the left -- anti-wokeism, anti-CRT, anti-gender-whatever. The net effect is a lot of hatred.
In France, Muslim immigration has made religion a major campaign issue. The French frame it as a matter of secularism versus Islam, but French secularism is better described as a form of Enlightenment-flavored post-Catholicism: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/10/02/the-catholic-nes...
Doesn't seem to be more religious though.
And this belief/concern presupposes that in democratic societies the political power is held by voters, which I feel is highly reductive even for the most effective democracies
Actually no, human life only started to be dominated by this after the shift from hunter gatherer to agrarian societies.
Always easier to have a good life with extra help from the government :)
Suggests they don't really have it all figured out though. Being able to defend yourself from invaders is an important thing to figure out, too.
of course we work a lot more because we want some of that economic surplus to reinvest it back into things that we think will improve our life. a relatively constant life wouldn't require that. also our decision-making and surplus distribution system is very very inefficient compared to a few hundred strong community's.
economically we can afford to build millions individual cars and houses and offices, fully furnish them, and do this again-and-again when old buildings get demolished, old stuff gets dumped into landfills.
we can afford to build tanks and bombs and then do that again and again, and to maintain standing armies.
unfortunately efficiency and longevity is just not a global concern :(
Starvation and disease of course were primary concerns of prehistoric peoples and can be experienced by nearly all larger life forms.
Poverty really only came into existence once things like 'wealth' were invented. Those things only really came into being once people started to live in larger communities, though not exclusively food based ones. Places like the Chaco Canyon Culture show signs of 'wealth' (and therefore poverty), but only in it's early period, and then only kinda.
War is a bit of a funny one too, as it kinda depends on what we mean by war. Where is the demarcation between family feuds and true warfare?
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a good read into the recent developments into the 198,000 years of human history BC.
https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/...
> Using this genealogical data, I estimate that the decline in fertility took hold in France in the 1760s
1760s don’t look far from the French Revolution to me. Ending a regime that lasted more than a dozen centuries doesn’t happen from a one night cultural shift, and I’d argue a shift starting in the 1960s seems pretty reasonable.
Of course the cultural itself is coming from other factors, but I’m not convinced it can be dismissed so lightly.
When there is surplus, the population can grow. If production does not increase in step with population growth, there will be shortage. When there is shortage, there is hunger and/or starvation.
Geopolitically France is an interesting place with one foot in Mediterranean civilization and one foot in Northern Europe, good natural barriers, and a fairly unified culture.
After the religious wars of the Reformation, there was a period of pretty good kings and increasingly strong state, prosperity importing tech from Muslim world via Italy, and liberalization. During this period, Italy, Germany, UK, low countries had their own problems and France was pretty dominant.
Before the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, France had 4x the population of Great Britain. After Napoleon's defeat, was never that dominant again. Mediocre kings and Napoleon III, played second fiddle to UK in industrial revolution, political unrest, and Germany unified under Prussia and Rhine industrialists and defeated France in 1870.
And it's ok to leave work on time to take care of your children _your coworkers understand that they are more important to you, and they make you happy.
You get a lot of assistance and encouragement from both the local governments and the social fabric. Like there are a lot of clubs to have children to do sports. They're managed by all the parents, by cities, schools,... So finding a hobby for your children isn't so hard.
middle class and low income families can get a lot of subsidies to help them pay for a lot of stuff for their children (including the (in)famous allocations familiales, and 'allocation de rentrée scolaire', that are just spent of flat screens according to right wing ppl)
And you can leave your children at some kindergarten or at they grandparents when you need.
So you can have children without being crazy rich like in the USA, or without being a Rabenmutter like in Germany, and you have time to take care of them.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
https://outside.vermont.gov/dept/DCF/Shared%20Documents/Bene...
If you calculate opportunity cost, the cost of a child increases dramatically as you go up the income ladder. From tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds (in income missed) or even millions (if you take time off + pay for your kid's schooling in private academies)
So this guy makes a prediction, and his entire argument is proven false, but he apparently had an amazing PR firm so to this day his name is used in serious conversation.
Rather "annual calories from agriculture per capita" would reveal much more of the reasons behind this and other upheavals in Europe during the period.
There were climate/weather changes (not well understood or appropriate to research in light of current climate changes) in Europe during 1500-1850, which caused starvation, upheavals, migrations, wars, and so on. They did not affect all areas simultaneously in the same way.
But if the amount of available calories drops below the necessary amount, then famine occurs. How bad this is depends on how much overshoot, and how prepared the population is to find alternatives.
In Irish history, there is the "Great Famine". During the 1800s, maybe 20% of the population of Ireland and the Scandinavian countries emigrated to north america.
The current trend of global warming and increasing harvests started in the later 1800s. Then came mechanised farming, artificial fertilizers, and science.
> ...the Catholic Church, threatened by the spread of the Protestant Reformation, took ‘be fruitful and multiply’ seriously and the purpose of marriage became explicitly multiplicative
> The decline of Catholicism, and fertility, in eighteenth-century France turned it from a demographic powerhouse – the China of Europe – to merely a first-rank European power among several
The second quote still doesn’t show that the birth rate was high because of Catholicism. It doesn’t even say what the effect of that position was.
Could catholicism have been the cause of the high birth rate in France before it dropped? Sure. But the article never makes that claim. And it implies otherwise, because it mentions high birth rates around Europe including places that weren’t catholic.
However, it does seem that there is a lag between this change and how society is organized. There are some facts that are hard to ignore:
1. Raising young children without help is a lot of work.
2. Somebody needs to cook. Ordering 3 meals a day from a restaurant is unaffordable for most. There is also a trust/perception issue that "outside food" is not as good as homemade food.
3. If you work a full-time job you can give very little time for anything else.
Some major societal change needs to occur that invalidates one of these three points.
Yea, it looks like another poltical topic that vary with party. Alarmism about overpopulation is also quite popular.
> during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when France was defeated after a solitary battle against a single opponent.
I was always curious about that war, since "Sedan" is the only battle you ever read about (plus maybe The Commune), so I read a book on it. There were quite a few battles leading up to it. The Germans had better artillery, and their field commanders had more latitude for improvisation.
> In my research, I argue that the diminished sway of the Catholic Church, nearly 30 years before the French Revolution, was the key driver of the fertility decline
You're not getting an 50 million European country out of 80 million contry: instead, you will be getting a 80 million African country occupying the same place.
Lot of Glaucons at Hackernews, I guess.
So, the demographic transition took place exceptionally early in France, but why? In my research, I argue that the diminished sway of the Catholic Church, nearly 30 years before the French Revolution, was the key driver of the fertility decline.
Are we cursed to an eternal dance between perceived personal liberty and societal success ?
Everything from Iran, Iraq to European Hungaries to US bible belt states, you can pretty much directly map failure to fringe conservatism.
> It more and more seems like "traditional", conservative societies are more successful on aggregate.
Which is a much broader claim than just stating that traditional values increase fertility rate.
After being pressed to provide examples by multiple commenters, and failing to produce even one, you can't just sarcastically pretend that we were talking only about fertility rate all along.
Economics:
China: Life in a mid- to mega-size city is already pretty good. Yes, it isn't 50K EUR per year, but 10K EUR per year is solid middle class.
India & Indonesia: Life in a mid- to mega-size city is meh-to-OK. In the next decade, urban incomes will very likely double. After, it will be close to China today.
Socially:
All three: Family structures are incredibly deep and supportive -- way deeper than most highly-advanced countries. Part of that comes from strong religious traditions from Taoism/Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, etc. The lack of social safety net is mostly handled by wider family.
I have much less personal experience with Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, but I guess their story is similar to the above three, but higher income.
As long as you bend the knee to all of your family's beliefs. God forbid you're gay, irreligious or different religion, date someone of another caste/religion, etc...
We’re presumably in agreement that imposing excess infant mortality is not a good idea.
When that balance strongly tilts one way, tension occurs and requires rebalancing for that society to continue to prosper. On society lifetime scale, this usually takes decades which is annoying to a single generation, but a speck in the scheme of things.
Weren't pretty much all societies on the planet in the 1700s and 1800s "traditional and conservative"?
Yet most of them weren't particularly successful against the British, who, on aggregate, weren't that much traditional (superficially, yes, but behind the visible old-school clergy and nobility, ruthless modernization continued apace).
Of course both fell in WW1 but the period just before it was quite interesting to ponder about.
The heart of German economic development was in industrial Prussia, resulting in enormous growth of left-wing politics. Bismarck's anti-socialist laws were repealed in 1890 and the SPD since then got the plurality of votes cast in every election to the Reichstag.
Rural Bavaria was much more conservative, yes, but back then it was an economic backwater. Bavaria only started industrializing after 1950.
When I think of an archetypal "conservative, traditional" society, the first countries that spring to mind are Afghanistan and Iran, which I wouldn't call particularly successful countries.
Some like Saudi-Arabia do better by virtue of sitting on an infinite source of money, but even these oil nations have something dysfunctional to them. They tend to be so corrupt and anti-meritocratic that they need foreign companies to perform any non-trivial task, as they can't get anything done themselves and do nothing to foster homegrown talent. They don't produce value beyond what they (or rather, a mix of hired and pseudo-enslaved foreigners) dig up from the ground.
To begin with, the terms "objective" and "relative" are not antonyms. A definition can be both, neither, or either one of the two.
And the terms "progressive" and "conservative" in particular describe attitudes towards the status quo and traditional institutions, which means that whatever exact position a progressive or conservative person takes on an issue will depend on context. By their very definition, the meaning of these words is bound to a particular point in time.
As an example: anyone not on the extreme fringes of the political spectrum will agree with at least the broad strokes of the universal declaration of human rights today, but the adoption of a similar document [1] in revolutionary France was a highly contentious act that directly attacked millennia of institutional power (that is, the divine right of kings).
Conservatives at the time fought this tooth and nail and sought to restore the old institutional power. But most conservatives today would for the most part support this text. In the short term, the Revolution didn't succeed, but on the long term they "won", their ideology largely got adopted and supplanted the old feudal ideology: the Revolutionary ideals are now the status quo in many countries, which many conservatives will defend (support for absolute monarchy is thinly spread even among conservatives today). Nevertheless, it would be deeply absurd to call the French revolutionaries conservatives. In fact, the usage of the terms "left" (supporters of the revolution) and "right" (loyalists to the monarchy) to denote political positions originates from this time.
So yes, at the time, the positions of the French Revolution were progressive, even though the Revolutionaries weren't progressive by today's standards (in particular with regards to women). These terms are fundamentally relative, to try to give them an absolute meaning is simply to not understand them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_M...
> I think we need an objective rather than a relative definition if we're going to do anything other than move goalposts.
I claimed that this is a nonsensical statement for two reasons:
1. You imply that relativity and objectivity are at odds (they aren't -- "I'm taller than my mom" is both a relative and an objective statement).
2. You claim that in order to have a meaningful conversation about conservatism and progressivism, these terms must be defined in an absolute sense. But they are by definition relative. Most of my comment illustrates this point.
From my European point of view you have a two parties system allowing you to chose between conservative and more conservative.
Legitimacy laws were still prevalent across the western world until the 1970's. Furthermore, abortion was basically illegal in Britain until 1967.
In the year that Legitimacy ceased to have legal meaning in Britain, the fertility rate dropped below 2, where it remains today.
> It more and more seems like "traditional", conservative societies are more successful on aggregate.
Which is a much more general statement.
I see no evidence for that claim. Evidence that traditional values affect fertility rate does not provide evidence for this claim; for that you need at least some examples of traditional conservative societies outcompeting their more liberal contemporaries in some meaningful way.
(Despite what the fascists want to think, there's substantial evidence that open societies being more adaptable and innovative is an overwhelming advantage)