France’s current fertility rate is 1.7 children per woman, but a close look at polling on people’s aspirations is revealing: the vast majority think the ideal family configuration is to have two children. And more people would prefer to have three than one. So we can tell that people would like to have more children than they currently have; there is no proof that they are not doing so because of their fertility levels.
Their fertility level is the number of children they have.
Sigh.
“Leave the baby making to us, Frenchies, You Just Keep Paying Taxes”, by Rokhaya Diallo
To be honest, I think the choice of words, “fertility rate” is a tad misleading as it seems to imply number of shags / pregnancy where I think the odds are about 8%, normally. Obviously, it’s actually counting children / mother, being a slightly different thing.
Modal family size hasn’t changed much. It’s the never had kids cohort that drag down the fertility rate.
@Ducky McDuckface
To be honest, I think the choice of words, “fertility rate” is a tad misleading as it seems to imply number of shags / pregnancy where I think the odds are about 8%, normally.
Am I misunderstanding you? Are you saying that for every hundred shags you can expect eight pregnancies? Or it’s one pregnancy per 12.5 shags? I assume this is per shag which is intended to produce pregnancy?? Even so it seems very… low.
Western countries would probably be OK if the fertility rate declined. We don’t need agri workers, or many factory workers, or many retail workers, and these numbers are only going to decline.
Not going to be great for the bubble of elderly as there are no young pople to care for them, but barring that unpleasant adjustment who doesn’t think France wouldn’t be better if it had 40 million people, instead of 70 million?
The problem is that what is keeping that reproduction rate at 1.7 is people called Mohammed, and Mohammed and Pierre are ultimately not going to be able to share the same space.
Not going to be great for the bubble of elderly as there are no young pople to care for them
I’m sure Somali or Albanian carers will treat elderly British people with dignity and respect tho.
@Steve
Yep, I was saying that *in the event that we had just allowed our population to decline naturally and gracefully it wouldn’t have been great fgor the olds*, whose ranks I shall join before too much longer, I suppose.
Obviously it is highly arguable it will be worse still under the current dispensation.
The problem is that what is keeping that reproduction rate at 1.7 is people called Mohammed
But it’s actually the French government, non? Mohammed didn’t decide to open France’s borders and put millions of Islamics on the French dole by himself.
Apropos of nothing, the first thing Algeria did on obtaining independence was to violently expel over a million French people and Jews.
The England and Wales numbers are interesting (to me)
Post NHS, TFR peaked at 2.93 in 1964
Dropped to 2.00 in 1973, and has been below 2 every year since.
The abortion act came into force in 1968.
It’s an interesting idea, attractive too. But not the real cause I fear. Births are 600k a year, abortions 200k a year (rought numbers both). So we’d increase the fvertility rate by 30% if abortion was banned and all other behaviour stayed the same (it wouldn’t). That would get the current 1.5 back up to 2, true. But it was 3.5 in 1900, 2.8 in 1965. So something else going on as well.
France would probably be quite a nice place, if it wasn’t full of the French. In fact, the only thing worse than a France full of the French would be a France full of mohammedans.
If we want people to have more children, the first thing should be to ask them to have more children.
Nobody’s asking, are they?
Used to be, middle aged women kept our society going by policing the sexuality of young ladies (don’t be a tart) and midering young couples into marriage and grandbabbies.
That worked, so why did it stop working?
Used to be, middle aged women kept our society going by policing the sexuality of young ladies (don’t be a tart) and midering young couples into marriage and grandbabbies.
That worked, so why did it stop working?
Because we as a society crossed the rubicon from ‘remember rationing and scarcity and religious belief and societal scorn and scrubbing your doorstep by hand and getting money by grafting’ to ‘I can get fed just sitting on my sofa watching telly and I’m going out on the pull on Friday drinking blue WKD with my daughter who’s my best mate’.
A sizeable percentage of today’s mothers are drunk tarts themselves. (Their baby fathers are scum, too, obviously.) They have zero idea how food gets on their table, and electricity arrives in their sockets, and water comes out of the tap, and they think this is just the way things are. Who gives a shit about grandchildren?
So when the ONS say:
“The leading cause of death in England and Wales in 2022 was dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, with 65,967 deaths” or some sites combine heart/ischaemic/circulatory at around 150,000 and call that the leading cause of death; they’re all sort of wrong. Cool/not cool.
Interested;
“Or it’s one pregnancy per 12.5 shags?
Yup. There are timing issues, ‘cos cycles etc. So, get at it once a month, assume that after 12 (more likely 18, to be sure) then there’s a bun in the oven. IVF treatment seems to make the 18/24 month assumption. Depends on the Trust area.
I assume this is per shag which is intended to produce pregnancy??
Um, obviously?
Even so it seems very… low.
Yeah, sort of. I think the number is basically an average over a range of (female) ages, so 14 to 38/40, maybe? So Prime might be 20 to 30? Then again, there are timing issues, female cycle and a male one, where the research can be assumed to be relatively zilch. There seem to many lots of other variables.
Bongo, Tim;
The ’68 Abortion Act might have little to do with it. More likely improved forms of contraception, particularly the pill. So;
https://daily.jstor.org/short-history-of-the-condom/. US focused, but there are legal issues over the period as well, so maybe the “tipping point” is late ’30s, WWII?
So something else going on as well.
The incentives have changed?
At one time becoming a parent put one in a mutually supporting family structure down the generations. That’s been eroded at the top & the bottom. The older generation is less willing to provide support to the younger. And similar in the other direction.
What’s the point in having kids?
BiS – What’s the point in having kids?
The father in The Road explained this:
My job is to take care of you.
I was appointed to do that by God.
I will kill anyone who touches you.
Do you understand?
who doesn’t think France wouldn’t be better if it had 40 million people, instead of 70 million?
France population density = 118/km²; that of Central England (where 80% of the English live on 50% of its land area) >700/km² (based on 2011 census figures which are known to be a significant understatement). And that’s forecast to increase to well over 800/km² in the next 10 years as we continue to import a city the size of Birmingham each year..
BTW The Spectator’s Freddy Gray has interviewed Eric Zemmour on his plan to win back the populist right of France, there’s an extract on SpectatorTV (YouTube) and an article in the mag. Zemmour is just the type of politician we need in the UK – anti-immigration, pro-free market. He named his party Reconquête, cf Reconquista.
– The incentives have changed?
Yes, and it’s the same the world over across races and cultures. If you have a subsistence or agricultural (poor) society then having many children makes sense; you compensate for the loss of some children and every surviving child is (almost) free labour for the family / group. In an industrial or post industrial (rich) society fewer children die young and every surviving child is an expensive mouth to feed.
We see everywhere during the move from agricultural to industrial that the population peaks (old cultural mores meet infant survival) and then after that there is demographic decline. Often assisted by wars where old cultural mores meet industrial murder.
Vastly oversimplified, of course, but thems the basics.
They did it with mice too. Once the mice had all that they needed (no effort needed), the population went into decline and ultimately died out. Ran it more than once, same outcome.
surprised there’s been no mention on the influence of feminism in this area.
The father in The Road explained this:
Quoting a highly improbable novel/movie with little internal consistency proves something Steve?
Why not just give us all a laugh & quote the Bible?
bloke in spain – Quoting a highly improbable novel/movie with little internal consistency proves something Steve?
I’m sorry you soiled your Tena for Men at the mention of God’s name, BiS.
I have nothing to prove to you. But I thought Cormac McCarthy, with terse elegance, put into words the essence of what fatherhood is.
Why not just give us all a laugh & quote the Bible?
I’m always happy to share the Word of God with you:
43 “Foreigners who live in your land will gain more and more power, while you gradually lose yours.
44 They will have money to lend you, but you will have none to lend them. In the end they will be your rulers.
45 “All these disasters will come on you, and they will be with you until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the Lord your God and keep all the laws that He gave you.
What’s the point in having kids?
That’s not a question, it’s an epitaph.
That’s not a question, it’s an epitaph.
There’s a presumption there that these offspring will do something to stop your country sinking further into the mire in which it’s already drowning. Do you see the least sign of it in the current younger generation? On the contrary, they seem to welcome sinking further with open arms. UK white society ceases to exist because it doesn’t deserve to exist. It won’t do what is required to continue. In which case, good riddance to it. Personally, I gave up on it years ago. You get the politicians & your ruling “elite” you deserve.
BiS – There’s a presumption there that these offspring will do something to stop your country sinking further into the mire in which it’s already drowning.
No, not at all.
They’re the seeds we’re saving from the fire.
Despair is a mortal sin, for we are not given a spirit of Fear.
@Steve – “43 “Foreigners who live in your land will gain more and more power, while you gradually lose yours.”
Why not just quote Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, while you’re at at?
But you quote from Deuteronomy chapter 28 (Good News Translation), and leave out a very relevant bit: “48 So then, you will serve the enemies that the Lord is going to send against you. You will be hungry, thirsty, and naked—in need of everything. The Lord will oppress you harshly until you are destroyed. ”
If the Lord has sent them, who are you to defy the Lord’s will?
Please point to the parts of ‘Rivers of Blood’ (a phrase invented by leftists, which never occurs in the speech) that have been shown incorrect by events in the five decades since it was made. While we may not have had ‘rivers’ of blood, we’ve had some quite significant ‘streams’.
Charles – If the Lord has sent them, who are you to defy the Lord’s will?
Because you did not obey the Lord your God and keep all the laws that He gave you
Christ is our survival.
@Chris Miller
While the exact phrase does not occur, it is fair label, given the speech contains: ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”.’ Maybe the singular would have been more appropriate, but did Enoch Powell himself object to the label?
As to its predictions, they can be divided into the those based on fact and those based on opinion. An assertion that there will be more immigrants if immigration is allowed is factual, but facile. The opinion that this will be a bad thing is mere opinion. If you’re a racist who hates immigrants, then it is inevitable that you will think that more immigration will be bad, but that is a mere opinion, and one which should be dismissed as based on foolish and inadequate grounds.
The ramblings of any swivel-eyed open borders fruitcake should be similarly dismissed.
Enoch, being the foremost classicist of his generation (double-starred Cambridge First and second youngest-ever full professor, pipped by a couple of months by some chap named Nietzsche), was quoting from Virgil. It very obviously was not meant to imply literal ‘rivers of blood’ (or even a single river) – apart from anything else, why should immigration problems in Britain cause the Tiber to become blood-flecked?
But there’s no denying that in the intervening 50+ years there have been (too) many deaths that have only occurred because of the ‘enrichment’ of our society by uncontrolled immigration.