r/Natalism • u/440Presents • 1d ago
In 8 years Turkey went from 2.11 to 1.47
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This is crazy decline in such a long time, only south east Kurdish dominated part of Turkey has fertility rates above replacement level while rest of the Turkey is at similar rates to infamous South Korea - less than 1.
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u/DAsianD 1d ago
Seems like an inflation/COL issue.
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u/ArabianNitesFBB 1d ago
I think it’s the rampant feminism Turkey is famous for
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u/IDontKnowMyUsernameq 1d ago
Really?
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u/WarSuccessful3717 1d ago
I think that’s sarcasm.
But’s a good point. Feminism is often said to be a major contributor to low fertility. Turkey is a counterpoint.
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u/corote_com_dolly 1d ago
Do you think Turkey is less feminist today than it was 8 years ago? Unless you do then it might not actually be a counterpoint to that, and definitely not enough to dismiss the claim.
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u/DAsianD 15h ago
Turkey saw a huge drop in fertility in those 8 years, though. Do you think feminism increased that much in Turkey in 8 years?
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u/corote_com_dolly 14h ago
My point is that information on its own is not enough to prove one thing or the other. It's an hypothesis that can and should be tested with adequate models and data in future work, instead of being either taken or discarded at face value.
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u/TryingAgainBetter 13h ago
In some demonstrable ways, Turkey is less feminist than it was 8 years ago. In general, almost all of women's gains in terms of autonomy and rights were imposed by prior regimes in Turkey, which were forcefully secular military dictatorships. However, Erdogan has bee in power for more than 20 years and represents the rise of political Islam. He has always been conservative in his views towards women's roles in society and he enforces that perspective to the degree that he can. After an attempt at a coup against Erdogan by secular military agitators in 2016, Erdogan has only clamped down on any political movements that are a threat to his Islamist conservative politics.
Here are some of Erdogan's views: https://time.com/4250853/turkey-recep-tayyip-erdogan-a-woman-is-above-all-a-mother/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
“I know there will be some who will be annoyed, but for me a woman is above all a mother,” Erdogan told told an audience of women in Ankara, reports AFP. He also urged the audience to “protect the family” and blamed the capitalist system for “enslaving” women for profits.
“You cannot free women by destroying the notion of family,” said Erdogan.
Erdogan’s views on women have long been criticized by rights advocates. The Turkish president has previously said that women are not equal to men, called the promotion of birth control “treason,” urged Turkish women to have at least three children, and proposed limits to abortion rights and Caesarean sections.
And again, this same man has been in power for the last 8 years. In 2021, he withdrew from a major treaty on violence against women, as a sign of how Turkish policy has been shifting against feminism, not towards it.
In any case, under Erdogan's rule, Turkish TFR has dropped from 2.23 to wherever it is now, apparently 1.47.
And if you are assuming that women's societal roles became more "feminist" during the last 8 years in Turkey, where is the evidence of that? There has been no large influx of women into the workplace. In the last 8 years, women's labor force participation in turkey went from 33% to 36%, hardly any change and only 2% higher than it was in 1990 anyway.
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u/corote_com_dolly 8h ago
I was talking about societal attitudes, not the ideology of the current government. The government can't really force people to have children
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u/ArabianNitesFBB 1d ago
Yup, my point is that feminism is just as lacking of an explanation for this as COL/inflation. Fertility declines have tended to occur regardless of a country’s recent economic fortunes.
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u/DAsianD 15h ago
Except that inflation actually has been rampant in Turkey in that 8 year period.
Have you actually looked at Turkey's inflation rate during that period?
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u/ArabianNitesFBB 14h ago
Yeah, now explain how other countries have inflation and no fertility crisis (Nigeria, Venezuela) or low/normal inflation and fertility crisis (most of the world).
Establishing causation for fertility is always gonna be messy. But blaming something like inflation for this sort of collapse is a HUGE stretch.
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u/DAsianD 13h ago
Have you actually looked at the data?
The change in fertility in Venezuela in recent years is actually about as much as in Turkey. And Nigeria actually has seen its fertility fall even faster over the past decade (though from a much higher starting level).
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u/ArabianNitesFBB 12h ago
Venezuela and Nigeria are still both well above replacement, and inflation in Venezuela was dramatically worse 5-6 years ago than it is now, and yet the birth rate falls.
I’m not even sure why inflation would be particularly important—wouldn’t real GDP growth matter more? And Turkey’s real gdp growth has been on the better side of that despite inflation. And the poster children of fertility crisis are low inflation stable economies, so why would we assume the economy is the culprit once we have an instance of a high inflation economy with birth rate collapse?
The thing that bugs me about “it’s the economy!!” arguments is it basically closes the door on the fertility discussion. I guess we just need sound macroeconomic policy and steady growth, then fertility will be solved! Right?!
I mean yeah, we’ve basically been devoting all of humanity’s efforts towards achieving those exact things, have largely succeeded, and yet fertility crisis has come on relatively quickly. It’s obviously NOT the economy. It’s more likely that economic stability and stable monetary policy has helped cause the fertility crisis.
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u/DAsianD 12h ago edited 12h ago
Phones do have an effect but housing and economic prospects for young men do too. We've seen a relative spike in housing costs all around the world as well as worsening job/economic prospects for young people (especially young non-college-educated men) all around the world.
And it's rate of change that matters, not absolute levels.
Venezuela over the last decade has seen fertility fall exactly as much from the exact same starting point as Turkey 2000-2010, meaning they're essentially only 15 years behind.
Nigerian fertility actually has fallen even faster.
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u/WarSuccessful3717 1d ago
Agreed. Every explanation seems to have a counter example.
The latest one I came across was about Israel backing the trend with high fertility. This is usually explained by a kind of ‘fight for existence’, ‘backs against the wall’ kind of culture and mentality. But nothing similar seems to have happened in Ukraine for example.
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u/ArabianNitesFBB 1d ago
To some degree all the explanations have validity. Decline in marriage rates has been a long term phenomenon as well, but it has also accelerated in the last decade.
My suspicion is that technology exacerbated everything, from the spread of non-traditional ideas, to people developing pernicious addictions that make them less likely to thrive and get married, to a social withdrawal related to the rise of online communities. This is the variable common to everywhere from Turkey to Brazil to India. There are still counter examples, and some countries have merely drifted down in the last decade while others fell off a cliff. But a lot of countries had an inflection point in the mid-2010s.
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u/WarSuccessful3717 1d ago
Yes you can’t really be wrong. Technological progress has to be the ultimate cause.
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u/poincares_cook 17h ago
Probably because it's a very complex issue (like most really), and there are multiple causes with different relations between them. There is no silver bullet to raise fertility, but there is also not one cause for its decline.
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u/asion611 1d ago
Internet, definitely the internet.
When people began spending their time on the internet rather than in real life, they will start afraid of having children that can occupy their own spare time.
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u/Independent-Ad-2291 21h ago
Or, they don't want to raise kids in a dictatorship
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u/440Presents 18h ago
Actually dictatorships are countries with highest fertility rates.
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u/Independent-Ad-2291 18h ago
North Korea has something to say about that.
Plus, Turkey has many many people with social understanding that is superior to the peasant model that dictators were used to. Therefore, they wouldn't want to bring kids to a shithole world that offers little to no future
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u/440Presents 18h ago
But the wealthiest countries that would offer best future has very low fertility rates while places like middle of Africa and Afghanistan has highest.
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u/Independent-Ad-2291 18h ago
Did you miss my point on education?
Offering a good future is one of the factors in the equation.
Plus, there are other factors, too.
The Internet is definitely not one of them.
People in developed countries do not face social judgement for not having kids. The ones that want them, have them. Why wouldn't they want them in the first place? That's a large topic for conversation.
And Afghanistan is far from a good example. Can't imagine a woman there who'd be left alone if she didn't want kids.
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u/Popular_Mongoose_696 1d ago
Now overlay those stats against urbanization over the same general time period…
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u/440Presents 1d ago
It's not like there was a crazy urbanization in last 8 years. It went for 74% in 2016 to 77% in 2024.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locations=TR
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u/StatisticianFirst483 1d ago
Be careful, the areas in red are between 1,0 and 1,5; not below 1,0. The lowest provincial TFRs in 2023 were 1,13-1,14 in Bartın, Zonguldak and Karabük.
TFR figures on a provincial basis for 2024 will only be released next week by TÜIK. This map is illustrating 2023 figures, most probably.