Jim Penman, a businessman studying global birth-rate decline, notes that religious groups like the Amish and Orthodox Jews have more children. Religion can help by discouraging teenage sex and appealing to people with certain brain chemistry, but he argues religiosity itself is declining because of deeper changes in human character, so faith alone won't fix the crisis.
Hi, I'm Jim Penman. I'm a businessman who's funded a research institute into, amongst other things, the birth rate crisis. Why are birth rates dropping? I've written previous books including Epigenetics and Character and Biohistory. About to release Birth Rate Crisis. What this graph shows is that on the whole, people who are more religious tend to have more children. There's 2 ways of looking at this. First of all, religion itself encourages forms of behavior that are good for children. Good for having children. For example, they get people to avoid sex outside of marriage, which is a really— and especially in teenage years, which is a really big bad thing for character. So religion encourages us to act in a way that is conducive to family. And also it reflects the fact that people who have ultra-sensitive dopamine systems tend to be more religious. So it goes both ways. So religion, faith, yes, it's a solution. It does help to increase the birth rate. And groups like the Amish and Latter-day Saints and Orthodox Jews who are strongly religious tend to have more children. But at the same time, the decline in religion is a result of the change of character. So religion itself can't solve the problem.
Rising mental illness and falling birth rates have the same cause, it is this.....
