Conservative Governance Is Not Bad for Fertility

And regional political systems theories are fake and dumb, hiss, hiss, boooooo

In an otherwise nice article, Dave Deek said a silly thing:

And before people go conservative policy on me, Aria Schrecker pointed out, liberal countries have more children than conservative ones. So things are not as clear cut as people pretend.

The evidence mustered is about social values, especially social values around childcare.

But Dave Deek isn’t talking about social values! He says:

[Don’t conservatives have more kids?] At the individual level, yes. At the system level, the opposite is true.

Individual conservatives have more children than individual liberals. But countries with conservative policy regimes have lower fertility than liberal ones. The Nordics and France outperform Southern Europe. Catholic Italy and Spain have Europe’s lowest fertility despite cultural emphasis on family. So we have a situation where social conservatives thrive and live their best lives under generous welfare states.

I’m gonna rebut this in two parts. First, by extreme statements without evidence that are true and you must simply accept them in order to think clearly about the world. Second, by some actual evidence which will definitely convince you because Dave Deek’s point is just clearly and obviously wrong.

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lol @ Esping-Andersen Typologies

I will not explain this much, but you should accept it, as from God himself: Esping-Anderson typologies are fake and dumb. I have said it. My view is the view shared by almost everybody who has ever tried to work out an actual empirical, quantitatively-informed typology of regional government systems. Unfortunately Esping-Andersen classifications are so widespread that reviewers often force authors to use them; you can’t disregard a paper or penalize it for using Esping-Andersen because it might be the reviewers who are crazy people, not the authors. The Esping-Andersen system is so crazy it infects public discourse when people don’t even realize it. Like when Dave says that “Italy and Spain” have conservative policy regimes, what on earth do we mean by that? Italy spends 28% of GDP on social welfare! That’s more than ANY of the Nordics except Finland! Spain is a top-15 spender! What are we even doing here!?

Don’t do drugs. Don’t use Esping-Andersen classifications.

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Government Partisanship Is Unrelated To Fertility

We have good data for industrial countries on completed fertility and on government partisanship. We can just say “X country has been governed by right-wing parties 84% of the time, but Y country just 33% of the time.” It’s not rocket science! It’s just social science!