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| -Great Cultural Revolution |
| To boost birth rates, change culture, not policy - Just Have More Babies |
| 2026-03-15 |
| [National Review] In a Thursday afternoon, on a trip to a shared workspace in Jerusalem above its central bus station, I heard something I’ve never experienced before at any WeWork: children laughing. Alongside some Yiddish-speaking employees with twisted sidelocks talking about their Sabbath plans, hipster start-up founders, and a mélange of Israeli entrepreneurs conversing in French, I was surprised to find that I had rented an office with a kids’ movie theater and a playroom. I had never seen anything like it in any office in Washington, D.C., where I usually work. Parents wrapping up their week — the Israeli weekend runs from Friday to Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath — had brought their kids along to the office to play. I texted my wife that the adults were outnumbered by a good factor by rambunctious children. The prophet Zechariah once envisioned a Jerusalem that "shall be crowded with boys and girls playing in the squares." I doubt he imagined they would also show up to co-working spaces. Yet that scene was a handy illustration of an astonishing fact: Jerusalem’s total fertility rate in 2025 stood at 4.57 children per woman. That’s more than triple the rate of Washington, D.C.,and the cultural contrast is jarring. When a close friend of mine delivered at Sibley Memorial Hospital in December, which has one of the largest maternity wards in the D.C. area, a nurse flattered her by calling her a "teenage mom" — even though she was two weeks shy of her 30th birthday. The nurse explained that the median age of mothers in her ward was 36. It is now common knowledge that Israel is the only country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to have a natural fertility rate above the replacement rate — and nearly double that of the next-highest country. More children per capita are born in Israel’s capital city than in the capital cities of most sub-Saharan African countries, such as Nigeria and Zambia. What is less commonly understood is why. To keep itself going, any society needs a certain number of children to be born per year. And yet a specter is haunting the world — the specter of childlessness, of sparsely populated playgrounds and schools. In Japan and South Korea, companies that once produced baby diapers have retooled to make adult diapers. Chinese baby formula companies are pivoting to selling vitamins and supplements. Market forces have a way of revealing what politicians prefer not to say out loud, and the same will happen in the United States soon. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
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| Posted by: Grom the Affective 2026-03-15 18:04 |
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| Posted by: Procopius2k 2026-03-15 11:39 |
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| Posted by: Skidmark 2026-03-15 10:39 |
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| Posted by: Besoeker 2026-03-15 08:20 |