Here:
Nation Total Fertility Rate
------------------------------------
Iceland 2.14
* Ireland 2.10
* New Zealand 2.10
USA 2.01
Norway 1.98
* Australia 1.97
France 1.97
UK 1.96
Turkey 1.92
* Finland 1.85
Denmark 1.74
Luxembourg 1.70
Sweden 1.67
* Netherlands 1.66
Belgium 1.65
Estonia 1.63
* Canada 1.58
Greece 1.50
* Czech Republic 1.49
Portugal 1.49
Spain 1.47
* Switzerland 1.46
Germany 1.42
* Austria 1.41
Italy 1.41
Hungary 1.33
Where is the correlation?
Let's not get fooled by reputations. We may think of Spain, Portugal, and Italy as being very religious countries, but the Catholic Church more or less gave up trying to do its job starting with Vatican II. Turkey has had a secular (and secularizing) government since Ataturk. Hungary, Estonia, and other Eastern European nations were under Marxist indoctrination for more than forty years. In the Balkans (e.g., Greece), religion is more a marker for ethnicity than a guide for living life.
Much of the positive side of the ledger for population in Western nations is due to immigration of people who are induced to have children either as an act of piety (Muslims in Europe) or as a matter of custom (Mexicans in the United States). The above chart does not contradict this.
* better education * higher income
Nation Total Fertility Rate
------------------------------------
Australia 1.97
Austria 1.41
Canada 1.58
Czech Republic 1.49
Finland 1.85
Ireland 2.1
Netherlands 1.66
New Zealand 2.1
Switzerland 1.46
Social policies such as benefits for families with two or more kids and low-cost, widely available day-care centers for children under 3 that allow women to work and have kids sound far more important to me than any "residual Catholic natalism".
Muslim immigration into France accounts for the high fertility.
he birthrates of Muslim women in Europe have been falling significantly for some time. In the Netherlands, for example, the TFR among Dutch-born women rose between 1990 and 2005 from 1.6 to 1.7. In the same period for Moroccan-born women in Holland it fell from 4.9 to 2.9, and for Turkish-born women in Holland from 3.2 to 1.9. In Austria, the TFR of Muslim women fell from 3.1 to 2.3 from 1981 to 2001. In 1970 Turkish-born women in Germany had on average two children more than German-born women. By 1996 the difference had fallen to one child and has now dropped to 0.5. These sharp falls reflect important cultural shifts, which include the impact of universal female education, rising living standards, the effect of local cultural norms and availability of contraception.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walke...
http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/408410.html http://historyandfutility.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/why-eurab...
To this decades-old immigration that is still growing strong, we must add recent immigrants, who are much more religious and have much higher fertility rates.
The second development to note is that INED, France's National Institute of Demographic Studies, has done some detailed research and concluded that France's immigrant population is responsible for only 5 percent of the rise in the birthrate and that France's population would be rising anyway even without the immigrant population.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walke...
http://www.ined.fr/en/resources_documentation/publications/d...
It might be one of the "Recent Demographic Developments in France"
I just read the linked article at UPI. It is unclear on the matter.
What about new-age spirituality, alternative spirituality, etc.? Those typically don't show up in these kinds of studies, but they do qualify as religious beliefs.
Approximately three minutes after your reply came another reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354753
that cites sources that may allow analysis of what's going on here.
USA: 2.1
UK: 1.9
Spain: 1.5
Portugal: 1.4
Denmark: 1.9
A better explanation is "Western nations have low fertility rates".
In my observation, intelligent people breed less. Intelligent people are also less associated with religion.
Could we also be looking at a list of countries with highest intelligence per capita?
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010...
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsPAIDrejoinder.pdf
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsRavenAfr2010rej.pdf
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/APA02.pdf
This is a hard issue to analyze when most countries don't gather data on IQ that are comparable at all from country to country, and when there is considerable disagreement about what we mean by "religion."
It is becoming a firmly established research finding that rationality is weakly correlated with IQ,
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/Engli...
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Psychology/Cog...
with many high-IQ individuals exhibiting extremely poor rationality, so even if we knew differing IQ distributions for countries around the world reliably, which we do not, we would have no idea from those statistics which countries have a populace that tends to act rationally.
I think you're missing that population control within available resource constraints is also part of the fitness equation. Also it's very likely that population expansion or contraction is more cyclical over the long term than a two year period of data would show.
Additionally, although the figures I quoted were over a two-year figure, they exemplify a larger trend. For example, the Wikipedia article on Australia's demographics show that Australia hasn't had replacement level fertility since 1975.
But in general better education leads to more wealth, more time spend in schools and those who have college degrees are less likely to be religious and they are less likely to have children (the price of kids is low if they can help out on the farm, very high if you have to raise them in a modern society).
I don't know a good solution to this, but I suppose the problem with fix it self on way or another.
Instead, the government simply put lots of programs into place to support family raising -- high-quality free daycare, long school hours (so both parents can get back to work and mothers don't have to sacrifice careers), hefty tax breaks per child, medical care (for birth & pre/post natal, but also pediatric care).
And (a bit more oddly) the medical care a mother gets after giving birth has a heavy focus on getting her back into shape for restarting her sex life -- it's standard to be prescribed a course of physical therapy to retrain the perineums of new mothers for exactly that reason.
All of these programs designed to help mothers keep working, etc. are not because at heart the French are feminists; they are not. Sexism is rampant. BUT they want mothers to have babies, so they figured out how to make that happen.
The system isn't perfect by a long shot, and it's not always ideal to have the state raise your kids as much as tends to happen here, but it's certainly quite successful: the birth rate is about 2 births per woman and slowly rising.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walke...
Those programs don't actually make raising kids cheaper. They just time-shift the payments, much like a loan would do.
Remember, govt programs are paid for by taxes. Those parents are being taxed.
Oh, and if we're going to argue for using govt money to buy kids, shouldn't we put the process out for bid? I'm sure that we could get high-quality kids for less from other suppliers.
Not exactly true, see my comment above:
Your argument would imply that the 10 "fittest" countries in the world are: Niger, Guinea-Bissau, Afghanistan, Burundi, Liberia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Mali, Sierra Leone, and Uganda.
(Also, e.g. country-level wealth is extremely non-adaptive according to your criterion. You may want to reconsider it.)
This is incorrect. Winestock:
> Bottom line: Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive.
A third possibility, one of many, is "Lack of religion and a fertility rate less than 2.0 occur co-incidentally in seven countries". Given that we have only examined nine countries of a possible 195 (or so), I think that this third option is at least possible.
> Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive.
There is at least one other possibility, which is that there is no link between religion and fertility, even transitively.
If we find a correlation, then that's a sign that we should look deeper. So far, the evidence says that lack of religion is tightly connected with a drop in fertility. If something other than lack of religion is causing the drop then the best place to look for it is by checking those factors that are most common to the irreligious and least common among the religious.
If someone has done this research then I am unaware of it.
I might add that for social causation issues like this, longitudinal data (studies of changes over time) are often much more informative than cross-sectional data (comparisons of different subgroups at the same time). You and the original submitter posted longitudinal data, studied by researchers who have a data model that they are further investigating. That's at least worth talking about here.
After edit: as several replies have helpfully noted, one way to test the proposed model is to look at data from other countries, and another way to test it would be to look at data from different (earlier) historical periods in the same or different countries. Much work needs to be done to accept the causal mechanism proposed in the submitted link, but meanwhile we can check the narrower issue of whether participation in organized religion has the same time trend (reduction over time) as fertility rates in various countries of interest.
The same model would probably fit quite well to countries where there's a marked trend increase in a specific religious affiliation, like Indonesia where dominant and growing Islam may hypothetically be decades away from making other affiliations extinct. Does Indonesia have a correspondingly much higher fertility rate? Actually no (~2.28), especially not if you control for other variables like poverty and infant mortality that are known to be correlated with high fertility rates. And it's dropping.
Correlation != causation is laziness at it finest.
--Randall Munroe
Go to Wikipedia and search for "Demographics of X" where X is a nation from the list given in the above-linked article: Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Switzerland.
(Nation/ Total Fertility Rate) (Australia/ 1.97) (Austria/ 1.41) (Canada/ 1.58) (Czech Republic/ 1.49) (Finland/ 1.85) (Ireland/ 2.1) (Netherlands/ 1.66) (New Zealand/ 2.1) (Switzerland/ 1.46)
Those numbers are for the years 2007 to 2009, depending on the nation. Note that only Ireland and New Zealand are at replacement levels. Residual Catholic natalism may explain Ireland's current fertility (given their loss of religion, don't expect that to last). Reading between the lines in the Wikipedia article for New Zealand, it seems that the Maori and Pacific Islanders are doing more than their fair share of baby-making. My guess is that they are more religious than the contracepting whites.
Bottom line: Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive.
UPDATE: I can't get the formatting right on that table of fertility rates.