Biologically, the most successfully fertile win, but politically and economically the factors and targets are different. Bengal, Java, and Egypt have done well in the population competition, but they’re enormous losers in every other respect. China and India have won the population competition, but they’re still playing catch up otherwise.

Give them points for community and avoiding the negativities of modern life, but with no emphasis on education mentioned and high welfare dependency, they look more like a freakish dead end, a viable third world enclave in the middle of the modern world.

“Third world” is too strong, they seem to be at the very bottom economic end of the developed world, probably like come Latin American country. And only because they’re subsidized.

If I’m not mistaken, such communities in Israel are widely resented.

I, too, am annoyed by religious people who subsidize their lifestyles through some form of welfare, as I don’t pay taxes to bring others closer to God. Still, I think most of these groups would survive even without public assistance. Several thousand Old Order Mennonites left Canada for Mexico in the early 20th century and stayed there, preferring to subject their children to *malnutrition* while they figured out how to survive on Mexican farmland and in the Mexican economy rather than expose those same children to the Canadian public school system. Very religious people are willing to put themselves and their families through quite a bit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish#Population_and_distribution

One particularly notable recent effort to quantify ideological conversion factors showed that under assumptions pretty close to reality, ideologies that people are more likely to convert away from than convert towards inevitably die out under a very robust range of other factors much more quickly than you would intuitively expect.

Tweaking the assumptions a little while still remaining within the range that empirical evidence dictates limits the basic conclusion only slightly – there can be a steady state with a tiny core of people who share an ideology that has net ideological conversion losses, but it doesn’t cascade out of control as simplier population genetic models would suspect. The experience of communities like the Amish suggest that this may be a fairly good model of reality.

I have to believe that children in a predominantly Yiddish speaking Hasdic Jews in a small impoverished community, no matter what other virtues it may have, are going to be more likely to convert out than outsiders are to convert in in 21st century in the New York City suburbs. The outside world which is impossible to hide is just going to be way to tempting for those kids to resist. They aren’t going to be Anglicans who join country clubs in the next generation, but a lot are going to at least marry native born non-Hasidic Jews rather than other members of the community.

I dont think they are the inheritors in the sense that they will take over the world some day. The world is a very big place. I think such communities and closed cultures are likely to remain exceptions, not the rule. And they lose adherents even as they breed new ones. I admire a lot of these communities but I dont think most people are going to be joining them…I think the attractions of “progress”, while decidedly mixed, do reflect something about human nature. Even in Iran, which is about as “Islamic” as a large country can be (and therefore has some of the same “richness of possibilities of the future”), the population growth rate has slowed dramatically as people have become more modern. Small communities will continue to buck the trend, but the vast majority of humankind is condemned to looking like the vast majority does right now: pretty mainstream (and not so attractive?). They may be reproducing less per capita, but they are huge in absolute numbers and likely to stay that way….They may ALL become poorer if some disaster hits at a global level or capitalism crashes and nothing more efficient replaces it, and then they will no doubt start breeding more too, but I dont see a future where the descendants of this village outnumber the descendants of the Chinese.