Comparative Fertility Rates with KaiserBauch

In this episode, we are joined by the insightful KaiserBauch to explore a detailed discussion on global fertility rates. We compare statistical trends across various countries, discuss contributing factors like socio-economic conditions, digitalization, and cultural perspectives, and analyze the influence of religion on fertility rates. We also touch upon historical fertility patterns and enigmatic examples like Israel and Kazakhstan. Lastly, we ponder hypothetical scenarios and strategies for creating high-fertility societies.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello! We are excited to be here with Kaiser Bach. No! Kaiser Bauch. Okay, so if you guys haven't seen his channel It is a fantastic channel. If you're interested, if you guys ever watch our channel and your responses, I hate how political they've gotten.

I wish they just focused on fertility rates and the really deep dive on individual countries looking at the entire history of their fertility rate. His is the channel to go to. That is, that is the channel that you are thinking of that ours is not because I don't have the time to do that research. And someone else is already doing it.

So what I wanted to focus on with this episode is having done all of these incredible deep dives on geographies around the world and the fertility rates that they're seeing, both the rises and drops over time. I want to get a synthesis of your ideas or patterns you've recognized that could be useful to either [00:01:00] resolving this issue, predicting when it's going to happen, etc.

So go ahead, get us started here.

Kaiser Bauch: Well, first of all, thank you very much for this kind introduction. I'm very glad to be here. Thank you for having me. And I mean, this is kind of a complicated question, to be honest, because one of the things that I really try to focus on in my videos is the differences between different countries or, let's say, civilizations or regions and trying to figure out why two different countries in modern period have, like, vastly different level of fertility rates.

Because people, people often talk about low fertility rates as if they were like a singular phenomenon. But there is a very wide range of low fertility rates. Like, completely, one thing is like South Korea or East Asia. Where you have really like fertility rates under one child per woman. And completely other thing is like the Anglosphere.

[00:02:00] Where, even though the fertility rates are below replacement,

they

generally tend to

be

more close to like two children per woman or at least in the in the 1. 5 to 2 children per woman range and this makes the situation let's say much more stable and easily handleable in the long run. So what really interests me is to like dig deep and try to find out why are there these differences.

Because it seems to me there are these like big broad macro factors that influence basically the whole world and that depress the fertility rates everywhere which is like all the well known stuff like the decrease in infant mortality rates, then you know urbanization, female education, lack of religiosity, urbanization, all of this.

But then there are these like very country or let's say region specific details which make, for example you know, South Korea have fertility rates that is [00:03:00] almost one child lower than that, for example, in the United States. So it's, it's, it's very hard to find some like, unifying, unifying traits that would be applicable to all of the countries.

I think

Malcolm Collins: a good

Kaiser Bauch: place to start

Malcolm Collins: is unifying traits that people don't think about. So here's an example. Why is it Latin America's fertility rate in your estimation crashing so quickly? Well,

Kaiser Bauch: I mean, what is happening in Latin America, but what is happening more broadly all over the world in this past, like, let's say five or six years, or maybe since the COVID pandemic, really, I would say is that like, we are now seeing fertility rates really crash to Very low levels in many countries all over the world.

A lot of them are in South America, like Chile, for example. It is possible that Chile will have a fertility rate lower than one child per woman this year, maybe. Or this year, 2024, so last [00:04:00] year actually. But there are also other countries around the globe that are seeing this like massive fertility crash that is very fast.

It is happening in remarkably short period of time. Like what other

Malcolm Collins: countries?

Kaiser Bauch: Well, I think Thailand is now having very low fragility rate, but, but also there, we can observe that a lot of the countries I previously talked about, for example, like, UK or Canada, or even the United States that had like, Fertility rates that were decent, that were relatively close to two children per women, are now going even deeper.

Also a lot of countries in Eastern Europe are seeing their fertility rates crash very close to like one child per woman. For example, countries in the Baltic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, they had fertility rates that were relatively reasonable. Five or six, seven years ago. And now they all crashed down close to one child per woman.

I think that probably the most [00:05:00] logical explanation to me is that new generation of young people is growing up and they are they are. Comprising a larger and larger proportion of childbearing cohorts in these countries. And I think these younger generations are, like, really negatively influenced by the digitalization of their lives.

You know

Malcolm Collins: I was going to say, I think one thing that people are underestimating, especially for this post COVID generation, when they're like, how is this happening all over the world at once is how unified the culture that the internet generation consumes is while there might be regional colors. The movies that a young person in Estonia is watching these days is going to be the same movies that a young person in the U S is watching.

Was maybe a 20 percent difference. Same with rural Guatemala. Same was pretty much anywhere in the world. And I think that we have [00:06:00] overestimated how much cultural uniqueness there is.

Kaiser Bauch: I completely

agree with you on this and tell me more. Maybe, maybe more so than the movies even, it's things like Tinder or like the way young people are now getting or not getting into relationships to be more precise.

It's pretty spread all over the world and I think like just the general The lack of social relations or the digitalization of social relations is, in my opinion, probably the most influential part of the equation when we are talking about this specific period of the last, like, maybe decade or six, five, six, seven years in which we seen this really like big fertility declines, I would say digitalization is probably the biggest part of, of this.

What

Malcolm Collins: do you think? think about this theory around cell phones. We covered it recently. I was really surprised. It sort of came out of nowhere for me. And the theory goes like this that cell phones are basically everywhere now and cell phones are more fun [00:07:00] than having sex or kids or socializing with people.

And the way the theory was presented that I heard it is, you know, when I was a kid, you had like snake on your cell phone, like very simple games. And so like, if a friend says like, come over to my place. You know, there was nothing better to do, really. You could watch what was on TV, like pre scheduled programming, or play Snake on your cell phone, right?

But now, you can watch and engage in lite