Research Fellow at Open Philanthropy.
Previously at the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research.
isabel
Karma: 215
Thanks for the feedback! “Prioritization of religious law” and “opinion on halakha” fall under the set of things that that I was trying to point at with the phrase “role of religion in public life”.
The relationship between those questions and religiosity is clear and monotonic, while on other issues the relationship is more complicated. The Haredi have views that are approximately the same as the Masorti in terms of Arab expulsion and political identification, and are less right-wing than the Dati. Though there’s still some division by religiosity in terms of identification with the left / center / right, it’s much less intense than, for example, the difference in views on transportation on Shabbat.
I rephrased the sentence to “While there is an extremely strong relationship between religiosity and views on the role of religion in public life, opinions on other political issues are less starkly divided by religiosity, though there are still some divisions.” and added in this graph of political identification to make that clearer.
I think your comment does a really good job of illustrating the difficulty in determining which groups and circumstances are selecting on what traits, as the two examples of unusually strong selection on fertility that you bring up are the Amish and the French, which have been on opposite ends of fertility behavior. It’s not impossible that both of these groups are selecting more strongly on fertility than everyone else, but it is somewhat counterintuitive.
I agree that the Amish are selecting on something, but that something isn’t necessarily a preference to have more children. The paper you linked also lists “affinity for work, perseverance, low status competition, respect for authority, conscientiousness, and community orientation” as other characteristics that may be being selected for among the Amish. If the Amish are being selected for ~conformity and community orientation rather than desire to have more kids irrespective of circumstances, then if the circumstances change at the community level (for example, if it becomes more difficult to purchase farmland, as is already happening to the community in Lancaster County, or if the Amish stop being exempt from the requirement that children need to stay in school until they are 16, which some people are pushing for) then the Amish fertility rate could decline further than it already has.
The French case seems somewhat more compelling: because of contraception and norms around family sizes, the people who had larger families in France would be people who intrinsically valued larger families, and so selection would in the direction of higher fertility preferences more directly, rather than high fertility being a result of conforming to local norms. That being said, two centuries of selection in the direction of people who want kids more than average hasn’t been enough to bring French fertility above replacement, merely to above average for Europe.
Do you know which year the map from Breeder’s Revenge that you linked is for? I don’t see a year on it, but it shows more départements at above replacement than the paper that I’ve found on Recent Demographic Developments in France, which has a map for 2015. Note that the country-wide TFR of 1.96 shown below has declined a bit since then, reaching 1.86 by 2019, and 1.83 in 2020 and that non-immigrant TFR is even further below replacement. While I think it’s plausible that TFR in France will start going up again in the near future, it’s also quite plausible that it won’t.