Why is Fertility Collapse Happening Faster in Some Places Than Others? (& Are Women at Fault?)

In this episode, we delve into a new theory by EW, who explores why fertility rates fall faster in some countries than others. The theory suggests that countries modernizing later retain elements of ancestral culture, particularly outdated misogyny and gender roles, which haven't adapted to contemporary contexts, leading to a dramatic decline in fertility rates. We compare two groups of countries with differing fertility trajectories and investigate the roles of economic development, respect for elders, individualism, and gender dynamics. We also discuss the implications of these cultural factors on both family dynamics and societal trends, touching on real-world examples and personal anecdotes. Join us as we analyze these critical issues and invite you to share your thoughts on the factors influencing global fertility trends.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be talking about a theory about fertility rates that come out from EW for end of the show.

Don't know if you've ever been on, we should ask him. Nice guy. But anyway, he has done a new theory where he tries to understand why fertility rates fall. Faster in some countries than other countries. Mm-hmm. IE what is protective of fertility rates and the, the gist of the argument is that these countries modernized later and that caused them to maintain more of their ancestral culture, specifically the misogyny and gender roles.

Simone Collins: Oh.

Malcolm Collins: Which is not properly updated for the new context. And leads to a crash in fertility raise. And I thought that the theory was really interesting. So let's go over it piece by piece, because I think he might be onto something here. But any thoughts before I start? Let's

Simone Collins: dive in. Let's

Malcolm Collins: do it. All right.

Let's get a graph on screen here. Gotta you gotta [00:01:00] ex enhance, enhanced,

Simone Collins: yeah. Give us, give us the visual and the, the premise that crem sets is what differentiates the countries in orange from the countries in blue? Why do the orange countries plunge into ultralow fertility while the blue ones have maintained themselves better?

So let's

Malcolm Collins: talk about the two country groups. Orange includes Korea, Spain, and Italy. While blue includes the United States, France, and the United Kingdom.

Simone Collins: And REU groups them into two sets. He says the countries in the first set are group one nations. In the second set, they're group two nations. Notice anything about their growth rates.

One thing is that they've all grown to similar enough levels. Another is the acceleration of the pace of growth. So in the second tweet, he shares two additional graphs showing different. Trajectories of growth and different fertility rates

okay.

In Group one, nations [00:02:00] started off a bit richer and they grew at a more stable pace. In Group two, the nations started off poorer, but they caught up to group one by growing faster. In the latter half of the 20th century, their fertility re rate trajectories followed suit.

Malcolm Collins: And so what you see here is a really interesting thing in Group one countries where we've talked about it in other videos, but around the 1930s there was a huge fertility crash that a lot of these group one countries recovered from.

This was mostly due to medical technology, although how seeing in the war played a role as well. Hmm. And you can look at our video on, you know, the, the ba the baby Boom. To get more information on this, but the gist being is that if you take the baby boom as an anomaly and you sort of try to draw a through line through these, it looks fairly stable.

Whereas these other countries start to crash really dramatically and pretty quickly. And what's interesting is most of the crash in these other countries. Fertility rates [00:03:00] happens between 1920 and I'd say 1980. So before our, our, our modern time. And that's where they're dropping for much higher initial fertility rates.

So if you look at it like sort of the mean fertility rate at the beginning of this period in 1920 for the group two, all of these countries where they started with a much higher mean fertility, let's say around. Four or maybe even 4.5, whereas the other group started with a mean fertility of three to 3.5.

Mm-hmm. So it's almost as if the higher fertility you start with, the lower your fertility goes over time.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And REU has a theory around this.

Premiere rights. All societies used to be pretty sexist. They used to repress women in various ways, and that was just that for all of human history. But as societies have developed, one of the major changes has been that women's status has quickly moved up to the levels

that have only once been seen by men with slow continuous growth. These norms changed and women's acceptance was [00:04:00] taken up gradually without much need for pushing. But with rapid growth, the picture is far different. The norms have changed more slowly than the markets, and I. That may have been disastrous.

You can see plenty of signs of this everywhere. For example, in the Group one Nations that experience slow and steady growth, men and women tend to have more similar household labor distributions. He then shares a graph of time use and fertility among the 12 group one and two group two nations. And there is somewhat of a negative correlation between total fertility rate and female minus male daily hours of unpaid household labor.

He continues. Similarly, in the case of distributions in the home is incidentally related to fertility among this group of developed countries, he shows another graph with negative correlation between time and fertility among 20 nations. He writes, I'm aware there are issues with treating this as if it's causal, but the point here is less about the particular example of household time use and more about how norms change over time with slow [00:05:00] versus rapid growth.

Take South Korea as an example in South Korea, men's attitudes towards women are still pretty unrefined, a potential result. Enormous sex differences in getting along in politics, these gulfs. Are opening up the world over, but South Korea is the most extreme example Here. He shares a financial times graph showing the ideology gap opening up between young and men and women in countries across the world.

With South Korea being the first country shown, I. And just over time, especially from 2015 to 2020, the gap is just like, like they're just becoming different species. Whereas in the US the gap is violent, but not that insane. In Germany, it's a little bit less bad. In the UK it's, it's also, I mean, they're, they're all getting worse.

And I, this resonates with me. I mean, I, I could see a lot of the tension there making sense.

Malcolm Collins: I actually think Rock came up with a better answer, but I do like this answer. It's definitely something that is contributing to the fertility collapse that we're seeing in Italy and Spain. [00:06:00] Is the idea that not, sorry, not Italy and Spain, South Korea, but I don't know why.

Said that but likely the same thing is that men are staying much more misogynistic in their attitudes and expectations of their wives

Simone Collins: than

Malcolm Collins: men are in the United States. And if you get female liberation in terms of the workforce with all the misogynistic attitudes, now marriage becomes an incredibly raw deal for.

For women? No, just in terms of hedonism, I'm not saying in terms of like g