Is Israeli Fertility Special?

Plainly

We did it guys.

Leaving aside Substack’s enduringly lamentable inability to cope with non-Latin alphabets, I’m chuffed. I owe it all really to one article, on Israeli fertility, and the power of shares by big-name accounts. So, I figure I’ll do what any decent man in this situation would do and try and wring out whatever juice is left in this thing. Luckily, Apple Pie wrote a blog about the topic, which in some ways is good, in that it corresponds to what I wrote, and in other ways is bad, because it does not correspond to what I wrote. So we’ll use that as a jumping off point.

Is the OECD a relevant comparison group? (yes)

Apple’s first point is that graphs like the one above are misleading because the OECD is basically a random selection of countries:

Wikipedia calls the OECD “a forum whose member countries describe themselves as committed to democracy and the market economy,” but the grouping is pretty loose; democratic Romania is still waiting for approval, while Mexico is all in, despite not being very democratic (the Economist Intelligence Unit now finds Mexico is better described as a hybrid regime than a democracy²).

OK, so would including Romania and excluding Mexico change anything about this picture? Well, Romania’s TFR is 1.81, and Mexico’s is 1.8 so, uhh, no it wouldn’t. Apple points out that Russia was rejected from OECD membership on political grounds, which, if evenly applied, should also have excluded Israel. OK, but Russia’s TFR is 1.42, so including them would make Israel look more special, not less. However, Apple’s real gripe is not that the OECD is a meaningless reference group per se, it’s that Israel shouldn’t be included in it:

So if we’re amazed about Israel’s fertility among OECD nations, the obvious rejoinder is to say that the OECD is just a loose collection of somewhat wealthy countries, in which Israel stands out for more reasons than just fertility: Israel also spends the largest percentage of its budget on defense,³ its economy experienced the biggest slowdown in 2024,⁴ and it scores as least peaceful on the Global Peace Index (GPI), a measure of societal safety, conflict, and militarization.⁵

Israel’s 2024 economic contraction in 2024 would appear to have nothing to do with anything, but the point here is that Israel is unlike the other OECD nations in being much more militaristic. This would be relevant if militarism and fertility correlate with each other. So, do they?

If we look at the Global Peace Index there certainly is correlation between fertility and warfare, but that’s because of the most basic fact about international demographics, namely that the crummier the country the more babies it has. Countries that are constantly at war with themselves or their neighbors are usually the worst countries, so they have the most babies. But if we make even a basic stab about controlling for poverty, the relationship disappears completely. Colombia is 146 on the list and has a TFR of 1.69, Turkey is 139 and has a TFR of 1.88 (and falling), North Korea is 142 and has a TFR of 1.79. Hell, the gun-violence plagued United States is all the way down at 132 and has a TFR of 1.66. This is all just blowing smoke really.

What people intend when they use the OECD category to demonstrate that Israel is unique is, fairly obviously, to use it as a proxy for economic development. I’ll be honest, I myself used to¹ think that OECD meant ‘Organization of Economically Developed Countries’, and, if you’ve noticed that that makes OEDC, then, yes, you’re right, maybe I’m retarded. But, to return to the point, it’s not a bad proxy, and if you want better ones, we have that too.

Here, you can find three rankings of counties by GDP per capita. The IMF puts Israel at 11, the World Bank at 20, and the UN at 11. Let’s take the World Bank ranking as the least generous to Israel. I worked my way down the list until I found a country with a TFR as high as Israel’s. I had to go all the way down no. 67, Kazakhstan, with GDP per capita one quarter the size of Israel’s before I got there. And Kazakhstan is itself an outlier within its GDP class!

So, in short, it is absolutely the case that there is something special about Israel as a country that is a massive, glaring exception to the inverse relationship between economic development and fertility and there are no good grounds to try and pilpul out of this.

Is the Middle East a better reference group? (no, but it makes no difference)

Apple’s next argument is:

In other words, what comparisons like this show is not that Israel is special, but rather that Israel is in strange company among the nations of the OECD. If you look at the same graph of women’s fertility vs. education for countries in the Middle East, a very different picture emerges:

First of all, it’s not really clear that the Middle East is such a good reference point. Even if you believe in geographical determinism, Israel is as close to Greece as it is to the UAE, and as close to Poland as it in Yemen. But, that’s moot anyway because, in fact, a different picture doesn’t emerge at all:

Now we can see the inverse relationship between fertility and education showing up in the data—and if Israel is unique here, it’s in terms of how well educated Israeli women are, with 12 years of schooling on average compared to 10 years in Iran, 8 years in Turkey, and around 5 years in Yemen. Israel is also the wealthiest in the region, which shouldn’t come as a surprise given the overall poverty of the area and Israel’s historical and cultural ties to wealthier nations

So, within the Middle East, there is a strong negative relationship between economic development or education and fertility, and Israel is the exception. Uhh, yeah, that’s the whole point.

To cut a long story short, the Middle East has two kinds of countries. Really poor countries like Egypt or Syria with high (but declining) TFR and richer countries with relatively low and declining TFR. Israel is absolutely unique in the region in having a multi-decade stable TFR of around 3, well above that of the relatively socio-economically similar (but poorer) countries in the region like Turkey (1.88) or Iran (1.68). So, again, Israel actually just is a special case, and it’s entirely correct for anyone who is pro-natalist, or just wants to avoid widespread population collapse, to investigate what is going on.

Is wombfare real? (probably not)

Apple argues that Israeli fertility is nothing unusual for a further reason:

Wombfare is the use of fertility as a political weapon to defeat rival ethnic and religious groups. The tactic is deployed by both religious and secular groups to support their long-term objectives of gaining political influence over competitors¹³

(For those of you who don’t spend your lives wandering through sociological journals, congratulations on your discovery that “wombfare” is a thing.)

Monica Toft’s article appears in A Research Agenda for Political Demography, which is a highly readable reference on population shifts and their importance for understanding the world we live in. Toft points out that groups like the Mormons in America, or Jews and Muslims in Israel and Palestine, have made conscious decisions to bear children because of their awareness of the demographic vulnerability of their own group.

You’ll notice straight away that one of these groups that illustrates this alleged phenomenon is precisely the topic of discussion, and the other doesn’t even have high fertility anymore. But I read the article just to make sure and, yeah, it’s poo:

Yet, despite the insight that these three cases provide, there is much research that needs to be done. We do not have widespread evidence of the conditions under which wombfare will emerge or when it will lead to instability and violence. Other cases might include a whole host of multinational states with differential growth including China, Fiji, Singapore and the United States. A cross-national and time series data set of one country such as India would be a tremendous asset here, as would an accounting of demographic changes of groups across all states. Such data are limited. The bottom line is that there are compelling logical arguments and some evidence, but the cases remain largely anecdotal. What is needed is a fair number of additional cases highlighting key dynamics and conditions isolating how wombfare leads to conflict and when it does not.

In other words, they haven’t even got round to the p-hacking-underpowered-studies stage yet of wombfare research. The author cites ‘four qualitative studies’, which means newspaper-level precis of Lebanon, Quiverfull, Mormons, and Israel/Palestine. To briefly review:

Lebanon was founded as a country for Christians and Druze, with some scraps thrown to the Sunni, and more or less nothing for Shi’ites. But Sunni and, even more so, Shi’ites had more babies because they were poor and uneducated. In response, the Christians did just about everything they could to maintain power, except one thing: wombfare. So what are you on about?

Quiverfull is a joke, who you’ve only ever heard of (if you have) because the NYT wants to make you scared of evos, and probably most of those who remain by now are Feds. What does this prove except that serious attempts at wombfare fizzle out laughably?

Mormons, by the author’s admission, ‘do not try to achieve clear political goals through their pronatalist policies’ so it’s not clear that there ever was wombfare, but, if there was, it’s over, because Mormons are below replacement.

And, if you think about it, it’s pretty easy to demonstrate that wombfare is fake. Serbian nationalism is pretty potent stuff. It kicked of WW1, inspired some of the most heroic resistance of WW2, and motivated some of the most grisly massacres in post-war European history. And yet, the whole time, Serbian fertility has been meh. Serbs have tried a lot of things to hold on to their sacred homelands in Bosnia and Kosovo, but one thing they haven’t done is outbred their ethnic rivals. If Israelis are practicing wombfare, then they are unusual in doing so, which brings us back to

What’s up with Israel? (same as before)

The annoying thing is that in between all the irrelevance, Apple actually basically has hit upon the right answer, namely ‘the presence in Israel of large numbers of religious groups like the Haredim and the Bedouin’, but this needs explanation. It’s very true that Bedouin have high fertility, but this is absolutely not influencing Muslim Arab Israelis more generally, who demonstrate the normal pattern of declining fertility in line with improved economic level:

Note that the figure for Muslims is inflated because Bedouins are included.

Ordinary Arab Israelis and Bedouin are culturally separate. Many Bedouins are Zionist, often super-Zionists, and those that aren’t have a tendency to go Al Qaeda or ISIS, which is vanishingly rare among Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. Bedouin speak a different dialect, don’t even physically resemble normal Arab Israelis, and are looked down on as uncouth darkies who live in shacks. Thus their high fertility doesn’t rub off.

And that’s the key point. It is absolutely not true that the presence of high-fertility groups reliably boost fertility of those around them. Amish in eastern Pennsylvania and western Ohio are about the same proportion of the population as Charedim are in Israel, but no-one has observed rural Ohioans being motivated to pop out babies at an increased rate. Similarly, Charedim are as populous in Brooklyn as in Israel, but have not inspired a natalist revival among Williamsburg’s hipsters.

To have that kind of influence, you need contact, but the thing about contact is that, by default, it works both ways, and if that’s the case then, over time, you’d expect the larger culture to influence the high TFR minority more than the other way round. And that is in fact exactly what happens to groups that don’t strictly segregate themselves. So what you need is a sort of social valve, a way of having high-fertility transmit mimetically outwards, without low fertility transmitting mimetically inwards. And that’s what has happened with Charedim in Israel. But I have explained this already. So what I thought I would do is share some personal experience about what it’s like to live in a high-fertility society, because while it’s easy to talk about mimesis, it’s another thing to really know what it means. However, unlike the whore of Ezekiel 16, if I’m going to spread my legs, it will be for money. It’s paywall time, freefags.

Please give me a baby

I have three sons. For someone born into more or less middle class circumstances in England of the late 1980s, that’s not bad, but for someone living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel, it’s trash.