>The Jewish fertility rate surpassed the Arab rate for the first time in 2020, with Jews having three children on average compared to 2.99 in the Arab sector.
>At 6.64 children per woman, haredi women had the highest fertility rate among Israel’s Jewish population, compared to 1.96 among secular Jewish women.
Looks close enough to women not belonging to super religious groups in other developed countries.
I've never understood statements to the effect of, "if you take out the group causing the effect, then the effect is no longer present".
I remember discussing a buggy application once with another engineer (I could reliably crash the server with a mis-configuration on the client), and I was taking a fairly apologetic stance that after all the workarounds I had to make it work, it worked OK. His response was, "yeah, if you take out all the parts that suck, then it doesn't suck". And now I can never unhear that.
If you look at the underlying data behind that report you'll indeed also see that a woman living in a top 10 percentile social-economic location is expected to have 1.95 children vs. bottom 10 percentile expecting 5.36 (though good luck separating religion from social-economic status).
If you look the graph and focus only on purely secular women (split as Haredi > Religious > Traditional-Religious > Traditional-Not that religious > Not religious-Secular) you can see that since 1979 it has been hovering around 2, so it is hard to tell if anything real or recent is actually going on. Though if you also understand statistics you'll see that Israel is heading to its own kind of demographic disaster since the least productive population has been consistently increasing at a very high exponent... (That said, it might be better to have the problem of needing to increase the productivity of the least productive than the problem of having no one to work)
Source (in Hebrew) https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2022/062/01_22... (The graph I mention is on page 11, so with the above mentioned divisions + a line for all Jewish women that end right above 3 you should be able to parse it even without knowing Hebrew ;))
My experience suggests that there's a more or less fixed amount of religiosity in any person and it's on a normal distribution in any given population. That's the hardware/firmware so to speak, but what they apply that religiosity to can be quite varied. Just my observation from working in tech companies where C levels are treated like visionary leaders who provide the mission from on high - I could be mistaken, but the dynamics don't really feel terribly different from my religious education.
In the context of this discussion, I think astrange (and I) are using “religious” to mean a culture or tribe that encourages women to have many children and/or restricts women from being able to not have children. In my experience, these groups are typically associated with or offshoots of Christianity/Judaism/Islam, and usually described as “more religious” than the vast majority of people claiming to adhere to those belief systems.
more like kept it from sliding in the last few decades, but yes, still pretty high, and it's an achievement. They were also helped by having a very young population to begin with (just look at that perfect age pyramid), and the whole country currently has population of Nagoya metro area, Japan is much bigger and harder to change.
