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Posted by surprisetalk 1 day ago

Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria(www.nature.com)
Related: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00796-2 (https://archive.ph/otvAa)
385 points | 306 commentspage 2
lo_zamoyski 1 day ago|
Unsurprising. If you have nothing else to do with yourself, marriage is kind of the natural thing to look toward. (Besides, for poor families, it reduces the number of mouths you have to feed, though school doesn't make that cheaper, so it isn't the primary cause.) School occupies your time and produces a rationale for not marrying.

In the West, education and then career advancement (and perhaps a pointless desire to "play the field") are reasons for postponing marriage...which has only produced demographic decline. (We ought to recognize human biology and take that as an immutable given, and then structure social practices around it instead of willfully engaging in Procrustean hacks and customs. This would counter demographic decline, because the fix is in essence simple: start having children at a younger age. Everything else should be built around this.)

nottorp 1 day ago||
Pretty sure I ran into info that there is a general correlation between the average level of education for women and natality/population growth globally, and regardless of age.

Don't have any links though.

nottorp 1 day ago|
For the unbelievers, I do have links now:

https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/health/female-education-and-c...

pelasaco 1 day ago||
Always when I read it, I think in Germany https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit...

"Act to Prevent Child Marriages is incompatible with the Basic Law due to the failure to address the legal consequences of the invalidation of child marriages concluded abroad"

IAmAkshatAgain 1 day ago||
This shouldn't be a surprise, lots of evidence in other countries to support this
casey2 1 day ago||
This is the demographic equivalent of overuse of pesticides in the US. People have to stop advocating for shorttermism policies that have been shown to fail over and over again.

There needs to be a very high elementary school flunk rate, banned from school on failure, for girls that slowly decreases over time

shevy-java 1 day ago||
Well, there is a general trend: higher education, fewer kids. It's not a 1:1 correlation as many other factors contribute (in particular the higher cost of living; that's an even more important factor if you look at the oddities in South Korea or Japan, and even now in mainland China). Obviously the latter is not "child marriage", but I point at the number of offspring in general.
Zigurd 1 day ago|
Japan, China, and South Korea are all very densely populated. Not long ago this was seen as an overpopulation crisis that would cause them to be impoverished. Now the headlines are of a population crash. Neither of these trends is sustainable and you know what they say about unsustainable trends: they won't be sustained. If the population declines sufficiently, say back to the levels before Asian populations grew so quickly, wages will get bid up and houses will get affordable.

I'm not educated enough on the topic to know who is right, but there are plenty of people who say the planet is currently beyond sustainable carrying capacity. Nonstop population growth and urbanization is nonsensical. Who knows what the harmonious number of humans really is, but the only imperative is not to get it wrong in the overpopulation direction and cause billions of deaths from ecological collapse.

One reason I'm not against the attempt of Mars colony is that it would teach us, with a relatively small number of casualties, that humans need a complete ecology around them to thrive.

msarrel 1 day ago||
Maybe the United States can learn something from this
fleroviumna 1 day ago||
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colechristensen 1 day ago|
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