Eric Kaufmann: evaluation

Transcript context

…You’ve lived in Japan for, what, eight years? Why is Japanese fertility so low? Well, the way it works with fertility is that, if you’re very patriarchal, you have high fertility. If you are not patriarchal at all, you have moderate fertility. And if you’re in the middle, you tend to have really low fertility. The thing in Japan is that women — they know that once they stop working, they will essentially just be folding shirts for their husband. I think that part of this is that, because the society is still relatively patriarchal, it has that very low fertility. Something similar in southern Europe that we see also, again, very low fertility. So one of the ways this is explained is that, if you give women the opportunity to enter and exit the workforce relatively easily and you don’t impose a very sort of patriarchal gender role, then you will get somewhat higher fertility. Japan fits that pattern of southern Europe. How secular is Japan really? If I watch a Miyazaki movie, there’s spirits all over the place. Is that just for kids and for fun? Is that a substitute religion? Are they simply as secular as they appear to be?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.