Do we need new fertility theories? I feel like the ones we have are much simpler and do a great job explaining things:
(1) Education strongly explains what's going on. Education increases income and decreases fertility. That is extremely well documented I think.
How education increases income needs no explanation I think. How it decreases fertility is straightforward:
(a) People almost totally avoid having children during education, and the more years in education, the more of the fertile years are spent almost totally avoiding children.
(b) Education gives people, and especially women, something else to do besides raising a family.
(c) At a basic level (literacy vs. illiteracy), those who are more educated can better control their fertility.
(2) Having more choices also strongly explains what is going on. As income increases, people simply have more choices of things to do besides having children.
(a) Opportunity costs are much higher when you have many alternative options for your time. The lost alternatives (both economic and not) are much greater when a woman has many more choices of what to do with her time, and a richer society affords her many more choices.
(b) We can easily see that when TV or Internet reaches a place, its fertility goes way down. Very simply, people can watch TV or browse the Internet rather than do **the thing.** ;-) It is well documented that fertility increases during blackouts.
These two very old and widely supported 'theories' -- education and having more choices -- nicely explain why increasing income and wealth are associated with lower fertility. We have great theories that are simply and almost certainly true.
Why do we need complicate theories that defy Occams razor? Is it because there is that slight U-shape? That (ever so slight) recovery at the very highest incomes?
I think that slight recovery at high incomes is easy to explain: At the high end of the income spectrum, folks are all about self actualization, and having children is going to part of that for most people. If you are an A-type trying to meet every definition of success, where you check all the boxes, of course you will want kids. For the strivers conquering Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, skipping kids would be a big oversight. Top politicians, the ultimate strivers in our society, almost always have children.
These are the simplest, Occams-Razor type explanations. Why do we need further theories beyond this when these theories are pretty robustly supported and very convincing?
We aren't very likely to do away with either education or fun alternatives entertainments beyond sex. So what is the solution? How do we get to higher fertility?
The easiest answer is just to value children really highly. You can just decide children are really important, and that should override everything else. That is what worked for Israel. They are extremely educated and full of entertainments. But they just decided, 'we've gotta have a lot of kids or our people are f$cked' and so they do.
Just deciding that children are super important probably seems like too simple of a solution, but it probably really is that simple. The elite strivers (of which politicians are my example) are busier than anyone, and more educated than most. But they have decent fertility just by deciding that is an important part of their complete life. Plus being good strivers, they are great at attaining marriage, which is key to fertility.
The fertility of the religious is due to the same thing. It isn't a mystery. They have a worldview where having children is a key part of a fulfilled life. But anyone can have that worldview. The problem right now is that culture doesn't value parenthood (and its usual precursor) that highly.
Summary: Now that fertility has crashed in high income places, for very mundane causes that we understand well, the solution is not to try to undo those causes, but overcome them by just valuing children more than ever before, the way Israel does.
I tend to agree with this perspective, and am curious to read Robin's response. The key behavioural mediator is capitalism: the return from applying yourself to education, work, or business is large and scales very, very high. The return from applying yourself to parenting is... constant? Predictable? Often less appealing, at any rate, than pursuing the financial opportunities that the developed world offers. It used to be the case that those financial returns were only available to a small subset of people in society, but we've put a whole lot of work into broadening the base and, well, here we are. Capitalism, equality, population growth: choose any two?
Sarah Perry has some hypotheses about why demographic transition started in some regions before other parts of the world that had similar levels of economic development and mean years of education per woman.
‘Around the sixteenth century, Europeans west of the Hajnal line began to switch to a pattern of late marriage, with a significant proportion of people never marrying, and uncontrolled fertility within the population who married. This norm was likely not adopted for the conscious purpose of limiting the population, but had the effect of keeping the population somewhat more comfortable below the Malthusian limit (Clark 2009). In preindustrial Japan and parts of China, however, farmers in long-settled areas kept early and universal marriage, but adopted fertility control by selective female infanticide and other means. In these populations, almost all women married and married young, but had around three children during their lives (Jones 1990 at p. 118). With industrialization and agricultural advances offering a pseudo-frontier relaxing Malthusian limits, the Japanese briefly adopted uncontrolled (or at least much less controlled) fertility, but after World War II they began to control their fertility once more. Most existing populations have been through multiple fertility transitions, and each transition has shaped the population.
Almost the entire world has recently undergone a single fertility transformation, one from uncontrolled fertility to controlled fertility. This transformation began in the late eighteenth century in a few small villages in France and New England, and subsequently spread to every continent and almost every population in the world. Europe at this time exhibited both early and late marriage patterns, but uncontrolled fertility was the norm, a crucial part of a memeplex maintained by the Catholic Church and other institutions at the center of every community.
What caused this worldwide fertility transition? Why did it start where and when it did, and what were the mechanisms of its spread? Why did so many humans adopt fertility norms at odds with their own genetic fitness? And what made some societies immune? What follows is a theory for the timing, location, spread, and limits of the modern fertility transition, taking into account the cultural, economic, and reproductive histories of dozens of populations.’
Do we need new fertility theories? I feel like the ones we have are much simpler and do a great job explaining things:
(1) Education strongly explains what's going on. Education increases income and decreases fertility. That is extremely well documented I think.
How education increases income needs no explanation I think. How it decreases fertility is straightforward:
(a) People almost totally avoid having children during education, and the more years in education, the more of the fertile years are spent almost totally avoiding children.
(b) Education gives people, and especially women, something else to do besides raising a family.
(c) At a basic level (literacy vs. illiteracy), those who are more educated can better control their fertility.
(2) Having more choices also strongly explains what is going on. As income increases, people simply have more choices of things to do besides having children.
(a) Opportunity costs are much higher when you have many alternative options for your time. The lost alternatives (both economic and not) are much greater when a woman has many more choices of what to do with her time, and a richer society affords her many more choices.
(b) We can easily see that when TV or Internet reaches a place, its fertility goes way down. Very simply, people can watch TV or browse the Internet rather than do **the thing.** ;-) It is well documented that fertility increases during blackouts.
These two very old and widely supported 'theories' -- education and having more choices -- nicely explain why increasing income and wealth are associated with lower fertility. We have great theories that are simply and almost certainly true.
Why do we need complicate theories that defy Occams razor? Is it because there is that slight U-shape? That (ever so slight) recovery at the very highest incomes?
I think that slight recovery at high incomes is easy to explain: At the high end of the income spectrum, folks are all about self actualization, and having children is going to part of that for most people. If you are an A-type trying to meet every definition of success, where you check all the boxes, of course you will want kids. For the strivers conquering Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, skipping kids would be a big oversight. Top politicians, the ultimate strivers in our society, almost always have children.
These are the simplest, Occams-Razor type explanations. Why do we need further theories beyond this when these theories are pretty robustly supported and very convincing?
We aren't very likely to do away with either education or fun alternatives entertainments beyond sex. So what is the solution? How do we get to higher fertility?
The easiest answer is just to value children really highly. You can just decide children are really important, and that should override everything else. That is what worked for Israel. They are extremely educated and full of entertainments. But they just decided, 'we've gotta have a lot of kids or our people are f$cked' and so they do.
Just deciding that children are super important probably seems like too simple of a solution, but it probably really is that simple. The elite strivers (of which politicians are my example) are busier than anyone, and more educated than most. But they have decent fertility just by deciding that is an important part of their complete life. Plus being good strivers, they are great at attaining marriage, which is key to fertility.
The fertility of the religious is due to the same thing. It isn't a mystery. They have a worldview where having children is a key part of a fulfilled life. But anyone can have that worldview. The problem right now is that culture doesn't value parenthood (and its usual precursor) that highly.
Summary: Now that fertility has crashed in high income places, for very mundane causes that we understand well, the solution is not to try to undo those causes, but overcome them by just valuing children more than ever before, the way Israel does.
I tend to agree with this perspective, and am curious to read Robin's response. The key behavioural mediator is capitalism: the return from applying yourself to education, work, or business is large and scales very, very high. The return from applying yourself to parenting is... constant? Predictable? Often less appealing, at any rate, than pursuing the financial opportunities that the developed world offers. It used to be the case that those financial returns were only available to a small subset of people in society, but we've put a whole lot of work into broadening the base and, well, here we are. Capitalism, equality, population growth: choose any two?
Sarah Perry has some hypotheses about why demographic transition started in some regions before other parts of the world that had similar levels of economic development and mean years of education per woman.
https://theviewfromhellyes.wordpress.com/2014/10/18/the-history-of-fertility-transitions-and-the-new-memeplex/
‘Around the sixteenth century, Europeans west of the Hajnal line began to switch to a pattern of late marriage, with a significant proportion of people never marrying, and uncontrolled fertility within the population who married. This norm was likely not adopted for the conscious purpose of limiting the population, but had the effect of keeping the population somewhat more comfortable below the Malthusian limit (Clark 2009). In preindustrial Japan and parts of China, however, farmers in long-settled areas kept early and universal marriage, but adopted fertility control by selective female infanticide and other means. In these populations, almost all women married and married young, but had around three children during their lives (Jones 1990 at p. 118). With industrialization and agricultural advances offering a pseudo-frontier relaxing Malthusian limits, the Japanese briefly adopted uncontrolled (or at least much less controlled) fertility, but after World War II they began to control their fertility once more. Most existing populations have been through multiple fertility transitions, and each transition has shaped the population.
Almost the entire world has recently undergone a single fertility transformation, one from uncontrolled fertility to controlled fertility. This transformation began in the late eighteenth century in a few small villages in France and New England, and subsequently spread to every continent and almost every population in the world. Europe at this time exhibited both early and late marriage patterns, but uncontrolled fertility was the norm, a crucial part of a memeplex maintained by the Catholic Church and other institutions at the center of every community.
What caused this worldwide fertility transition? Why did it start where and when it did, and what were the mechanisms of its spread? Why did so many humans adopt fertility norms at odds with their own genetic fitness? And what made some societies immune? What follows is a theory for the timing, location, spread, and limits of the modern fertility transition, taking into account the cultural, economic, and reproductive histories of dozens of populations.’
That link is quite good; thanks for the pointer.