Immigration is part of the mix, but the majority of immigrants are Mexicans who are conservative and traditionalist. In fact, most of the poor are latently conservative. When conservatives learn to court them instead of talking of building walls on the border and/or rounding up the illegals and shipping them back where they came from, the voting demographic can change radically.

You do it out of love, as a hobby; having children is not a rational choice in your case. That’s why one or two is more than enough for you.

If you were raising children in a rational way, like people do in societies without social protection, it would’ve been totally different, probably much less difficult than raising cattle.

I’ve got a pair of children that I’d like to lend you :-).

Raising children is the hardest job I’ve ever done, bar none! It’s at least 2-3 full-time equivalents when they’re young and it maybe falls to 1 when they’re older.

Maybe teenagers are less effort, but I doubt it. It simply switches from them demanding your attention to them needing your attention :-).

So, what happened there – did they suddenly get tremendous access to modern medicine? Did they see the light and become feminists?

No, what happened is that they got probably the most generous pension system in the world: you work for 25 years and you retire with 80% of your income; people were retiring at 43 with no worries at all. That’s the reason, I think.

this is what we’re haggling over: the demographic transition occurs in developed societies, and not in traditional societies. When women have choices, the birthrate plummets. And ‘having choices’ is a function of wealth, viewed either individually or societally.

And by ‘wealthy societies’ I’m contrasting societies that have acccess to modern medicine, or not – – and Cuba makes it into that club.

Places like Haiti (…and now South Dakota…) don’t.

For women. In a traditional patriarchal society it’s much less important than what happens to your cow.

Only wealthy societies can have a safety net.

Birth rates here

175 Luxembourg 12.06
176 Cuba 12.03

Yeah, I’ll bet that’s what the Indians (native Americans) though.

I’m not sure if we’re actually disagreeing here, but:

Making babies kills some fraction of mothers (a smaller number today than yesterday, but it is never risk-free). When women have other options, they tend to avoid staying pregnant continually, because making and raising children entails serious costs. One traditional formulation was “A tooth for each baby.” After a dozen pregnancies with inadequate nutrition, a mother may no longer be able to eat solid food. Making babies has high costs.

And “wealth” and “safety net” are private and public manifestations that amount to the same thing: if an individual amasses enough resources to support yourself, or whether the society you live in arranges things to support people when they need help, they’re both solutions only possible in a post-Malthusian economy. Only wealthy societies can have a safety net.

Exactly, confirming the results of my own model (I have defection rates in mine too, which additionally mutes the “fecund conservative” theme).

After playing with the model, the “baby gap” between conservatives and liberals would need to be at least ~20% and defections no more than ~20% (i.e. only 1 out of 5 kids has different politics than their parents)to produce 10% more conservatives than liberals in 2 generations (50-70 years).

http://stevereuland.blogspot.com/2006/03/one-baby-two-baby-red-baby-blue-baby.html

The problems are far more serious than simply assuming that kids reliably adopt the political beliefs of their parents. Longman doesn’t even establish a higher fertility rate for conservatives and he ignores the well-documented differences in fertility rate for ethinic groups, which are far more signficant than any liberal/conservative difference in breeding could possibly be. And he ignores immigration.

The only evidence he gives for a contemporary liberal/conservative variance in fertility is the fact that “red states” had an 11% higher fertility rate than “blue states”. Ignoring the fact that this probably has nothing to do with politics, I did a quick analysis and discovered that if the populations in these states were to start off with a 50/50 split, after a half century, the red state population will only have increased to 51.9% of the total. It takes about 270 years for it to increase to 60%. You’d better warn your great, great, great, great, great, great grandkids.

But even if children cost more in the upper classes, the upper classes have more money to spend in the first place. This argument doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

Opportunity cost, on the other hand, is useful to think about.