Point 1 is relevant to the housing issue. Cheap housing in cities via densification probably reduces fertility. It becomes easier to have children in the city, but more people live there (where TFR is lower), making the net effect negative. Still a good thing for other reasons.
I'd also add that a few of these points are dubious or wrong. Scandinavia and France vs Japan is a bad comparison; Europeans generally have higher fertility then East Asians within any given society. This is a genetic effect. Not that either region has very impressive fertility.
And + men's housework doesn't increase fertility. Cross-sectional results on this are very weak evidence; longitudinal studies find no effect on fertility intentions and imply reverse causation: more kids => more men's housework.
Part of this is because men's fertility intentions matter too. Much of the literature on fertility tacitly assumes women's intentions are all that matter and men's are irrelevant. This not true.
Natural experiments on paternity leave (which is not the same thing, but closely related), find it *reduces* fertility, possibly because it reduces male wages [my interpretation, not the papter's]. iza.org/publications/d…
In general, I think the idea that we can get high fertility post-2nd Wave feminism by just doing feminism harder is based almost entirely on wishful thinking and overfitting on Scandinavia (before 2010) and France.
It's a specific case of the very common "weak men are making feminism fail" line of rhetoric. If we just turn the screws on men a little bit harder, all the negative externalities of the past 50 years of doing that will go away.
Employers hiring people and then training them in the specific skills they require has declined as a hiring model for decades, in favor of a hiring market where employers look for people who already have those skills.
In the training/internal labor markets model, a company struggling to find specific skills will train promising entry-level employees. In the hiring market model, they can raise wages or otherwise improve conditions. In both, they can also substitute technology for labor.
Neither a hiring market nor training model for matching jobs to seekers is compatible with "skill shortages" as a concept, which implicitly assumes skills are fixed and once people with those skills run out employers can do nothing (except through immigration or schooling).
"Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (TR Fehrenbach, 1973/1995) thread of threads. Mesoamerican civilization was horrifying and very backwards by Old World standards, but unique.
Excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1995). The PRI had massively expanded higher education. These universities were entirely 'free'/self-governing and became locuses of left-wing organizing.
In 1968, security forces fired upon a massive student demonstration/riot against the Olympic Games.
By 1970 Mexico had made enormous progress; the national income increased sixfold while the death rate dropped by half. But Mexico was still struggling with foreign-exchange; the govt pursued import-substitution to improve balance-of-payments.
Thread with excerpts from the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR) section of TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1995). Calles created the PNR in 1929 to institutionalize the govt and Revolution, creating a Mexican party-state.
The Calles/Obregon governments were corrupt, but never succumbed to paranoia; there was no equivalent to the Soviet or Chinese liquidations of class enemies, the press was free, and the average Mexican had nothing to fear from the govt (Red Terror against the Church aside).
Roughly 19M acres were redistributed through 1933; most land remained with latifundios. But the new latifundios were not like the old ones, they were commercial enterprises rather than social systems. The clerics, army, and latifundistas were all tamed by Calles/Obregon.
Thread with excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1995), on post-Revolutionary Mexico. To justify land reform, the revolutionaries revived the principle that expropriation was justifiable if the national interests demanded it.
The Constitutionalists defeated the Villistas in battle and assassinated the leader of the last revolutionary faction, Zapata, by treachery.
Carranza, the erstwhile leader of the victorious Constitutionalists, dug his own grave by trying to promote someone other than Obregon to the presidency after him; he was forced to flee the capital, run down, and murdered.
Excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973). The Porfiriato gave Mexico a generation of stability and development for the first time since independence. This left Mexico overdue for another civil war: the Mexican Revolution.
One problem was that the Porfirian school system had created a large, literate middle structure (not class). These educated mestizos became dissatisfied due to lack of opportunity; growth was rapid but not rapid enough to absorb them all.
The Revolution kicked off in 1910, when Diaz announced he'd won reelection with 99% of the vote. This kicked off an insurgency in Chihuahua, in the mestizo, frontier north.