That’s, an interesting website. The name was a red flag for me, the article format is excellent though and I wish more websites would adopt this style of presenting information. I’ve gone through about 10 articles from what seems to be the main active author (David Demos), very neutral and non-descriptive language being used throughout. The premise of the site is using fertility and population reproductive stats coupled with policies to distinguish social-economical standings and impactful progressive legislature. It’s definitely a niche view and I believe leaves out nuances that are important for determining “quality” of a society, but I agree that better child/elder care services, paid leave, eliminating gender pay gap, reproductive assistance, etc can be good indicators of economical advancements.

I just keep wondering though if there is a dog whistle I’m missing out on. They’re very careful with not defining “family unit” (from what I’ve seen), as some conservatives and religious organizations don’t recognize all the various types. If I’m not mistaken, a lot of the policies they’re advocating as positive includes all family types including non-child ones (such as prolonging lifespan, elder care like mentioned before, etc). It would be fascinating to see an exit poll style survey from different demographics and what they personally interpret from the articles though. I guess “bravo”? would be in order for the site, these types of subject matter can boil down to polarization in a heart beat but they’re walking the tight rope well.

As for the article itself, it’s refreshing to see Michigan using policies from a fellow state that has proven and verified net positives they can correctly point towards when bad actors try to claim “whataboutism”. If you haven’t checked out the article I would highly suggest it as it’s basically already a TL;DR and anything else I can say about it is probably more condensed in the actual writing than what I could spell out here.