Jason Collins reviews Eric Kaufmann’s Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century.
To give a sense of the power of this higher fertility, the Old Order Amish in the United States have increased from 5,000 people in 1900 to almost a quarter of a million members. In the United Kingdom, Orthodox Jews make up 17 per cent of the Jewish population but three-quarters of Jewish births.
…Kaufmann’s case worries me more than tales of government deficits due to demographic change. Even if you assign a low probability to Kaufmann’s projections, it provides another strand to the case that low fertility in the secular West is not without costs.
The numbers cited about Orthodox Jews in the UK struck me as fishy, based on what I know about the U.S. Suppose that there are 80 non-Orthodox Jewish women and they each have one child (a really low fertility rate), for a total of 80 non-Orthodox Jewish births. Then suppose you have 20 Orthodox Jewish women, and they have to account for 3/4 of all Jewish births, which means that they need to give birth to 240 children, or an average of 12 children each. There are in fact several sub-groups within Orthodox Judaism, and there are some sects in which families of that size are common, but there is no way that the average family size of all Orthodox Jews is 12 children.
There is a larger objection that I have, which is that the high growth of the fervently religious starts from a low base. Assume that non-fervent women have one child each, and fervent women have ten children each. If you start with 999 non-fervent women for every fervent woman, it is going to take quite a few generations for the fervent to “inherit the earth.” Meanwhile, much else will change.
[UPDATE: In a comment, Megan McArdle points out that the arithmetic in the above example leads to the fervent reaching parity in 3 generations, and then soaring to dominance thereafter. But as she points out, the discrepancy in fertility between the fervent and non-fervent is not as wide as in the examle. And if nothing else, I can fall back on “much else will change.” By the end of this century, we could very well see dramatic changes in medical science, including reversal of aging and cloning.
At those numbers, I get three generations for parity, four for total dominance. The real skews are not that large, of course. But it seems plausible to me that if secular birthrates stay where they are, secular humanity will be a very brief blip in a long religious history.
On your math about secular vs. religious jews in the UK, maybe there is an age component as well? If the demographic change isn’t new, but instead has been going on for a generation, the Orthodox population may have a lot lower average age. They may make up 17% of all Jews in the UK, but 40% of Jews under age 40.
Right.
One can’t just use total population and fertility rates without considering the age distribution and so forth.
Counting people past child-bearing age is particularly likely to lead one astray; you have to know who is going to soon join the choir invisible, who has already had their kids, and who has yet to procreate. I’ve observed big changes just in my lifetime so my intuition is that these shifts can occur very fast, even from a relatively low base.
Think about what data would be most valuable in running a simulation of demographic turnover. “Percent of new births” is as good a proxy as you’re going to get for ratios between groups of native-born young adults a generation from now.
Consider:
That’s 1.2 children per women – well below replacement – and even when adding in those big Hasidic families. If the ratio were really 80/20, then and average of 1.2 would be come from something like a split of 0.5 to 4 in Total Fertility Rate.
Once you have a split like that, it doesn’t take any heroic assumptions to derive scenarios in which the Orthodox kids are a majority of young adults in just a generation. Just that most of their women are younger and still having kids, while most of their secular coreligionists are older and/or done with childbearing.
Another way of reconciling 17% of Jews being Orthodox with 75% of new Jewish births being Orthodox is intermarriage – presumably non-Orthodox Jews marry non-Jews at a higher rate than Orthodox Jews do, and many of these mixed couples will decide not to raise their kids as Jewish.
There are a number of bizarre assumptions, but the first is that the non-violent death of belief systems which fail to reproduce is somehow a problem.
Second, biologists are used to source-sink dynamics, and it is likely that from large families, a distribution of fervors are produced; maybe the most religious go on to themselves reproduce and the less, don’t. That’s fine, but at each generation, they don’t all stay very religious. They recapitulate a distribution. See the Puritans for an example of this. It’s a kind of regression to the mean, but basically, it means that the fervent subpopulation is the source and everybody else is a sink, but you don’t get a mental ‘clonal replacement’ per se. Instead, you get a steady flow of genes into a moderately religious population.
Now, depending on what you mean ‘inherit’ this might qualify, but as a source of worry? Why? For whom? Maybe for the militant atheists, I suppose…
the Old Order Amish in the United States have increased from 5,000 people in 1900 to almost a quarter of a million members.
Wow with all that growth it appears The Old Order Amish are slightly less than .1% of the population. By the end of the century that might increase to .2% of the population and possibly impact a State Senate race! (Unless The Old Order Amish all get their own reality show.)
Leaving aside population growth, as long as the economy is not religious based (meaning their people income doesn’t depend upon attending church) the impact of religion will continue to diminish even with all these different fertility rates.
Actually, a quick back of the envelop calculation, using the same length of time and growth rates shows the Amish would be approaching 1% of the population from just under 0.007% in 1900.
Isn’t the US population almost 320M versus 250K Amish? That is approaching ~.1% of the population not 1%. Yes it is growing as a percentage but it is still a very small portion.
So is the author equating “religious fervor” with something negative? Given the democides of the 20th century at the hands of secular governments, I’d have trouble equating them.
While religion is declining somewhat in its influence in the West, it is growing in Africa and Asia. I know this chaps this hides of the anti-religious, but it’s not likely to change. Given the massive intellectual achievements of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, I’m certainly happy that the Global South is embracing them.
it is growing in Africa and Asia.
Is religion really true? I thought the traditional Asian religions in East Asian were diminishing especially in the stronger economies. (China went to a deep dive against religion with Mao.) It does appear Christianity is replacing some of the Asian religions and the enforced Maoist Atheism but we will see how Orthodox these relgions are. I do notice Russia is stronger Christian than in the past but I don’t see a huge change in behavior either.
The question is “How do we successfully reproduce in an environment that includes birth control?” Italians and Japanese are not very good at that. Mormons are much better. It seems fairly clear that religious people are more successful than the secular sorts. But I doubt that religiosity is the only contributor.
Either way, evolution is happening now, in real time. And quickly.
We didn’t end up with a secular society because secular people have more babies, we got here for 2 reasons.
1. People leave orthodox religions
2. There are many religions with different ordinal preferences
The first is obvious. If an orthodox woman has 10 kids but 2 of them leave the religion before they have their own large family then the effective birth rate for the orthodox falls by 20%, and the effective birth rate for the secular increases.
The second has some twists, but basically religion is divisive. A devout Muslim and a devout Mormon might agree on restricting alcohol, but they won’t agree on the details of the law so easily. The end result is usually complicated and ineffective (if irritating) laws like no liquor sales on sundays.
Orthodox religions require large, visible sacrifices from their congregations, secular societies provide a stark contrast for the sacrifices that they are demanding and encourage defection.
I would also bet that a larger presence in society would encourage defection as well. An orthodox Jew living in a state of 99% atheists and 1% orthodox Jews will either have to abandon their faith totally and have little or no contact with people with similar experiences, where as the same Jew living in a state with 80% atheists, 19% non orthodox Jews and 1% orthodox will have a much easier time leaving the orthodox behind. The assumption that a growing orthodox population will be able to maintain its membership or compromising to retain it is very dubious.
The rate of generational turnover may account for some of the difference.
If Ultra-Orthodox are more likely to marry and have children young, the growth of that population can be greater.
The discrepancy in figures for Orthodox Jews in the UK is driven by both fertility and age structure. The difference in TFR is 1.65 versus 6.9 (as given in that section of the book) – so only a fourfold fertility difference. The rest of the difference is due to the higher proportion of Orthodox Jews in their reproductive years.
I think if you add the number of Amish+Mennonites+Hasidic Jews together you get close to 1 million and that combined population net of those leaving has been doubling about every 20 years. Their birth rates have been slowly falling, but in about 120 years they could make up 50% of the USA population.