I'll bite. I have extensive first-hand culture experience (travel, friends, dating) with people from Indonesia, India, and China (PRC). I would broadly categorise all three as very socially conservative -- relative to other G7-level developed, liberal countries.

Economics:

China: Life in a mid- to mega-size city is already pretty good. Yes, it isn't 50K EUR per year, but 10K EUR per year is solid middle class.

India & Indonesia: Life in a mid- to mega-size city is meh-to-OK. In the next decade, urban incomes will very likely double. After, it will be close to China today.

Socially:

All three: Family structures are incredibly deep and supportive -- way deeper than most highly-advanced countries. Part of that comes from strong religious traditions from Taoism/Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, etc. The lack of social safety net is mostly handled by wider family.

I have much less personal experience with Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, but I guess their story is similar to the above three, but higher income.

> Family structures are incredibly deep and supportive -- way deeper than most highly-advanced countries.

As long as you bend the knee to all of your family's beliefs. God forbid you're gay, irreligious or different religion, date someone of another caste/religion, etc...

and unfortunately that does not matter for the things the post mentions, ie. population and geopolitical dominance. :/

I am not talking about fringe, weird, or internationally blockaded societies, but ones like the comparison of Provence and Brittany of the article.

Can you quickly specify what you mean by successful. And which "conservative" societies you were thinking of as successful

Well, by the metric of Conservative and high birth rate Afghanistan is currently the most successful country on Earth, as I believe it has the leading population growth rate...

Lol. I was hoping the OP had some definition of success that wasn't literally population growth.

I thought we were discussing the article, sorry, my bad.

You literally kicked off this thread with the statement

> It more and more seems like "traditional", conservative societies are more successful on aggregate.

Which is a much broader claim than just stating that traditional values increase fertility rate.

After being pressed to provide examples by multiple commenters, and failing to produce even one, you can't just sarcastically pretend that we were talking only about fertility rate all along.