In 2023, the U.S. birthrate sank to 1.62 babies per woman, the lowest on record, after fifteen years of steady decline. Timothy Carney is skeptical of efforts at the national level to increase fertility rates; instead he turns to the evidence from such exceptionally fertile communities as Orthodox Jews and Mormons, and the influence they have on their neighbors:

The economist Natalie Gochnour from the University of Utah . . . says the Catholics in Utah have a higher birthrate than the Catholics in any other state. “It’s in the air,” Gochnour says. If you look closely, you can see the vectors of this communicable condition.

Kemp Mill is a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., anchored by two Modern Orthodox synagogues. Kemp Mill looks very different from other neighborhoods in Montgomery County, not only because the residents eschew driving on Saturday but also because families of six, seven, or more are a common sight.

If you pass through Kemp Mill on a weekend or a summer afternoon, you will see little gangs of children roaming the neighborhood and this hints at the feedback effects. The more children roaming the streets, the easier it is for any individual parent to let his or her children roam the streets, which makes parenting easier and makes having a little platoon of your own more imaginable.

Also, the more neighbors and friends you have who have a toddler and a newborn, the easier it is to have a semblance of a social life while you have a toddler and a newborn. Coffees planned around naptime replace lengthy boozy brunches, and playground picnics replace dinners at fancy restaurants. On a larger scale, places with more children are more likely to accommodate children and their parents, culturally and physically.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].