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Why "Socially Conservative" Nations Are Having Fewer Kids (Yes Really) With Aria Babu
In this insightful discussion with rising conservative thinker Aria Babu, we analyze counterintuitive social trends around fertility rates. We explain why more “socially conservative” countries often have lower fertility than socially liberal ones.
Aria contends intensive mothering expectations in traditional cultures create barriers. Malcolm notes conservative minority groups within secular societies have higher birth rates. We argue familial living stands crucial, not public policy concessions. Still, promoting extensive stay-at-home motherhood proves misguided, despite intuitions. Overall an incisive look at the data on real drivers of birth rates.
Aria Babu: [00:00:00] My theory for it is that British elites have three beliefs that are very difficult to square with each other, which is one of them, which is that biodeterminism is completely false. That a child's outcomes are based wholly on on their environment.
Second, the inequality is bad. So the fact that children from different. Households have different outcomes is genuinely negative. It's like a genuine, like really bad thing to happen. And three, the education can basically fix all of all of these ends. So then when you see that children who go to the same schools end up having different outcomes based on their parents backgrounds, the best theory that then comes to mind is, oh, it's about what's going on slightly before school, which I think is why so much energy is poured into the early years foundation stage.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: Hello! It is so exciting to be with you guys today. I am really excited to bring... Someone who I feel we, we have scouted in, in, in talent scouting, but it seems that all of the other rising conservative intellectuals also know her Aria [00:01:00] Babu who is sort of a underground key figure in the, the conservative intellectual movement in the UK.
And she recently started a sub stack. She's only one episode in, but I already love it. I was actually planning to do an episode just on. chain of subtext that she's releasing. So do you want to start by going into the subtext that you're working on the, the, the first episode, and then we can expand from
Aria Babu: there.
Yeah, of course. So my first piece was about how socially conservative countries. don't seem to have higher birth rates in socially liberal countries. So the first, like, look at the data, if you just look at the European value survey, and you compare that to just TFRs across these countries, shows that actually the more like socially conservative countries, so we're looking at thinking like Italy and Spain, for example, have lower birth rates than the more socially liberal ones.
We're thinking Scandinavian countries, France, Britain. My second post which I've already done the research for, but I haven't published yet, then goes into [00:02:00] asking why that might be the case. So my first theory is that maybe more socially liberal countries have better provision of childcare. They have more public services that support motherhood.
So I looked at cost of childcare, number of parents who use it, and Yeah, both of those things, basically, and also attitudes towards using child care. And it seems that those also have like literally no correlation with birth rates in different countries. And I remember seeing that in Austria the cost of a nursery place for two kids costs 3 percent of the average woman's income, whereas in Switzerland, it costs 64 percent and those countries have the exact same birth rate.
Fascinating. So that doesn't seem to make a difference. And I was like, okay, what is another reason why a more socially liberal country might have A higher birth rate. Well, maybe it's because a more socially liberal country. Well, I was going to say maybe it's just because it's a nicer place to live, but that's actually like supe
Published on 2 years ago