Eric Kaufmann: belief

Transcript context

…No; when they move to cities, the fertility rate doesn’t fall much. It doesn’t. I mean, it does in some cases. Addis Ababa in Ethiopia has got a two total-fertility rate, so it does seem to be happening in some places and not in others. I don’t have a good sense of necessarily why that’s happening. Some societies where there’s strong ethnic and religious competition, local politicians want to keep numbers up and their constituencies strong and growing. That could be one factor. Patriarchal attitude’s another. But it is the case that in some sub-Saharan African countries — clearly South Africa, where South African blacks have about a two, also a replacement-level fertility. So there are some countries where this has occurred. I know some people say the data might not be very accurate in some countries on fertility, but I think, in general, the consensus is that you’re right, that these fertility rates have not dropped. I would put it down more to a cultural reason rather than anything economic in that case. I have some friends who obsess over the long term, and they’re fond of making the argument that Darwinian forces, over some time horizon, will bring almost the entire world to greater religiousness if religious families keep on having more children, and that maybe 400 years from now, we’ll have a world where most people are just flat-out religious. Do you attach any credence to this at all?…

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