Episode Details

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 The theory suggests that countries modernizing later retain elements of ancestral culture, particularly outdated misogyny and gender roles, which haven't adapted to contemporary contexts, leading to a dramatic decline in fertility rates.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 countri