I was browsing my RSS feed, as one does, and came across a New York Times article, "A Village With the Numbers, Not the Image, of the Poorest Place", about the Satmar Hasidic Jews of Kiryas Joel (NY).
Their interest lies in their extraordinarily high birthrate & population growth, and their poverty - which are connected. From the article:
"...officially, at least, none of the nation’s 3,700 villages, towns or cities with more than 10,000 people has a higher proportion of its population living in poverty than Kiryas Joel, N.Y., a community of mostly garden apartments and town houses 50 miles northwest of New York City in suburban Orange County.
About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income. About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.
Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically. Women marry young, remain in the village to raise their families and, according to religious strictures, do not use birth control. As a result, the median age (under 12) is the lowest in the country and the household size (nearly six) is the highest. Mothers rarely work outside the home while their children are young. Most residents, raised as Yiddish speakers, do not speak much English. And most men devote themselves to Torah and Talmud studies rather than academic training — only 39 percent of the residents are high school graduates, and less than 5 percent have a bachelor’s degree. Several hundred adults study full time at religious institutions.
...Because the community typically votes as a bloc, it wields disproportionate political influence, which enables it to meet those challenges creatively. A luxurious 60-bed postnatal maternal care center was built with $10 million in state and federal grants. Mothers can recuperate there for two weeks away from their large families. Rates, which begin at $120 a day, are not covered by Medicaid, although, Mr. Szegedin said, poorer women are typically subsidized by wealthier ones.
...The village does aggressively pursue economic opportunities. A kosher poultry slaughterhouse, which processes 40,000 chickens a day, is community owned and considered a nonprofit organization. A bakery that produces 800 pounds of matzo daily is owned by one of the village’s synagogues.
Most children attend religious schools, but transportation and textbooks are publicly financed. Several hundred handicapped students are educated by the village’s own public school district, which, because virtually all the students are poor and disabled, is eligible for sizable state and federal government grants.
... Still, poverty is largely invisible in the village. Parking lots are full, but strollers and tricycles seem to outnumber cars. A jeweler shares a storefront with a check-cashing office. To avoid stigmatizing poorer young couples or instilling guilt in parents, the chief rabbi recently decreed that diamond rings were not acceptable as engagement gifts and that one-man bands would suffice at weddings. Many residents who were approached by a reporter said they did not want to talk about their finances.
...Are as many as 7 in 10 Kiryas Joel residents really poor? “It is, in a sense, a statistical anomaly,” Professor Helmreich said. “They are clearly not wealthy, and they do have a lot of children. They spend whatever discretionary income they have on clothing, food and baby carriages. They don’t belong to country clubs or go to movies or go on trips to Aruba.
...David Jolly, the social services commissioner for Orange County, also said that while the number of people receiving benefits seemed disproportionately high, the number of caseloads — a family considered as a unit — was much less aberrant. A family of eight who reports as much as $48,156 in income is still eligible for food stamps, although the threshold for cash assistance ($37,010), which relatively few village residents receive, is lower....“You also have no drug-treatment programs, no juvenile delinquency program, we’re not clogging the court system with criminal cases, you’re not running programs for AIDS or teen pregnancy,” he [Mr. Szegedin, the village administrator] said. “I haven’t run the numbers, but I think it’s a wash.”
From Wikipedia:
The land for Kiryas Joel was purchased in 1977, and fourteen Satmar families settled there. By 2006, there were over 3,000...In 1990, there were 7,400 people in Kiryas Joel; in 2000, 13,100, nearly doubling the population. In 2005, the population had risen to 18,300, a rate of growth suggesting it will double again in the ten years between 2000 and 2010.
Robin Hanson has argued that uploaded/emulated minds will establish a new Malthusian/Darwinian equilibrium in "IF UPLOADS COME FIRST: The crack of a future dawn" - an equilibrium in comparison to which our own economy will look like a delusive dreamtime of impossibly unfit and libertine behavior. The demographic transition will not last forever. But despite our own distaste for countless lives living at near-subsistence rather than our own extreme per-capita wealth (see the Repugnant Conclusion), those many lives will be happy ones (even amidst disaster).
So. Are the inhabitants of Kiryas Joel unhappy?
My wording wasn't very clear here -- I didn't mean to compare middle-class Americans with ultra-Ortodox communities specifically, but to make a more general point about how people can consider themselves very free and really feel that way, even though things may look very different from an outside perspective.
Generally speaking, people feel unfree when they're suddenly constrained from doing something that they're used to and care about, or when constraints lower their status. In contrast, constraints that are ingrained in a culture are often not even noticed consciously by its people, or they are seen as self-evidently reasonable and necessary, since people are used to living under them, and are also at peace with the existing status hierarchy. However, this won't seem so to an outsider who is used to a different way of life and who perhaps derives status in his own community from some freedoms that are absent in their culture. Similarly, the level of discipline and regimentation (in both scope and intensity) is perceived subjectively depending on what one is used to.
So, ultimately, it depends on how you choose to measure freedom. In some extreme cases, it may be that one society is freer than another across the board, or very nearly so, for example if you compare modern-day U.S. with North Korea. [1] But usually, the impression greatly depends on what regime of constraints one is used to seeing as natural, and on one's subjective evaluation of the trade-offs involved. For example, many of those modern freedoms you mention are due to disappearance of strong informal communal norms that restrained people's behavior in the past, but as these social structures broke down, the necessary trade-off was the establishment and growth of impersonal bureaucracies that took over their necessary functions, and which now regulate, micromanage, and re-engineer practically all aspects of life and society. Whether you like this trade-off, and what you think of communities that preserved the older traditional modes of social organization, is of course your call.
[1] Though even this case might not be so clear-cut. Once I saw a documentary showing some illegal recordings of everyday life smuggled out of North Korea, and one of those showed a lady getting into a shouting match with a policeman, who eventually relented! In the U.S. this would be an invitation to get tazered, arrested, and likely charged. This of course doesn't mean that North Korea is not every bit as awful as people imagine -- if anything, it's probably even worse -- but this does suggest that some aspects of social regimentation may be more relaxed over there.