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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Which is in fact panic that teens are not having enough children, because that's where we have seen big drops...

This whole "panic" seemed weird from the start, but once it becomes clear that it's from the lack of teen pregnancies it takes on an even creepier Epstein-like oddness.

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It is entirely possible to believe multiple things at once:

1. The drop is fertility is bad for society

2. The drop in teen pregnancy is good, despite it's contributions to 1

3. We should try to fix 1. without undoing 2.

Fundamentalists, and others who abhor birth control, demonstrate pretty regularly that they have no issue with Teen Pregnancy, but rather unmarried teen pregnancy.

They want married teen pregnancy. By their own admission.

I agree, but I don't think #3 is possible. For a variety of reasons, both biological and societal, the older people get the less likely they are to have kids, and fewer of them.

Kiryas Joel, New York, has astronomically high fertility, but also extremely low rates of under-18 pregnancy - which proves the combination is possible.

That is an exceptional outlier. It's almost entirely (>90%) made up of one religious group that has strict cultural rules about early marriage and having many children.

That's not something typical outside of that one particular group, nor can you copy-paste that anywhere else.

I think in fact it's the opposite. Because of how universal below-replacement rates are in EVERY developed nation, it shows just how independent it is from factors of culture, economics, environment, etc. It takes a seriously unusual situation like the one in Kiryas Joel for below-replacement to not be the norm.

I disagree - very high fertility combined with very low rates of extramarital pregnancy are totally normal for traditionalist religious groups-not just ultra-Orthodox Jews, but also the Amish, Salafists, Deobandis, vilayet-e faqih-e faqih Twelvers, the SSPX, inter alia - what Eric Kaufmann (see his book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?) calls “endogenous growth sects”. There is nothing unique to Kiryas Joel about it; Kiryas Joel is simply the most easy-to-point-to example of a wider phenomenon

No, it's from the cost of living being so high that people are delaying having kids.

Worldwide the main thing that correlates to having less kids is being more educated. High cost of living correlates with more kids, not less.

Worldwide being more educated means higher cost of living. Nowhere in the world is there a country with high cost of living and high birthrates

High cost of living can happen for two reasons, either everything is expensive, or you make no money. And guess what, people with no money have way more kids than people with a lot of money in middle class lives in developed countries, who then say lack of money is why they don't have kids.

The one thing you can do to stop teenage pregnancies is for example to educate young girls, give them menstruation support and allow them to go to school. This effect dominates vs "oh I can't put my kid in private school" that we say is the reason for no kids.

I suppose it depends by what you mean by “high birth rates” but Israel has a high cost of living, Tel Aviv is comparable to most American superstar cities when you account for resident’s lower incomes, but the country has a birth rate well above replacement, at roughly 3 births per woman.

Of course, Israel also has a nearly identical rate of secondary and tertiary educational attainment to other OECD countries so I’m not sure that makes the argument against education.

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