3 ms·

This is the opposite of what Hans Rosling says in his book Factfulness. According to Hans Rosling's findings family size is linked to child mortality which is

by maire 7y ago

This is the opposite of what Hans Rosling says in his book Factfulness. According to Hans Rosling's findings family size is linked to child mortality which is linked to poverty. When mothers see their children die then they want to have more children. When they see their children grow to adulthood then they have fewer children. You can also play with the data yourself on his site https://www.gapminder.org/ https://www.gapminder.org/. He also looked at family size relation to culture and religion and found even in religions that promote large families, family size is still declining. Family size has dropped world wide everywhere except for Africa. There is an unfortunate link between poverty and family size in Africa. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is tracking this exact issue. I am not a data scientist, but the heritability of large families seems a difficult thing to pull out of the data when environment plays such a large role. In my personal family history child mortality and religion did play a large role in family size. We all now have small families.

theotherview 7y ago
This is a 20+ year recollection...but while working on a Masters in Public Health, we learned that the only causal factor that could be linked to both number of children birthed and age at which a woman gives birth to her first child is the education level of the mother. That is, as women in a society have greater access to education, they postpones when they have their first child and in the end have fewer children in their lifetime.
- maire 7y ago
  Yes - Hans also said the same thing although indirectly. His life work was reducing child mortality (under the age of 5.) He discovered that the biggest factor in reducing child mortality was the education level of the mother. It turns out that most child deaths are preventable if the mother understands how to prevent the death. For instance, dehydration due to diarrhea and vomiting can be prevented by sanitation. Also access to vaccines is linked to the education of the mother. It goes without saying that access to birth control also plays a big factor. Melinda Gates tells a story about how she was talking to a group of African women about vaccines and what they really wanted was birth control so they could plan their family. They couldn't use condoms because culturally it implied they had AIDs. This also seems linked to education.
LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
When evolution looks at reason, it is invisible. All the process sees are numbers, and the numbers pointing to reason beeing a procreation inhibiting disease. So reason is circumvented. Drug addicted? Mental illness? Traumatized by war? Escapezombie? Just plain reckless? You are imune to the disease. You are the future.

by maire 7y ago

theotherview 7y ago

This is a 20+ year recollection...but while working on a Masters in Public Health, we learned that the only causal factor that could be linked to both number of children birthed and age at which a woman gives birth to her first child is the education level of the mother. That is, as women in a society have greater access to education, they postpones when they have their first child and in the end have fewer children in their lifetime.

maire 7y ago
Yes - Hans also said the same thing although indirectly. His life work was reducing child mortality (under the age of 5.) He discovered that the biggest factor in reducing child mortality was the education level of the mother. It turns out that most child deaths are preventable if the mother understands how to prevent the death. For instance, dehydration due to diarrhea and vomiting can be prevented by sanitation. Also access to vaccines is linked to the education of the mother. It goes without saying that access to birth control also plays a big factor. Melinda Gates tells a story about how she was talking to a group of African women about vaccines and what they really wanted was birth control so they could plan their family. They couldn't use condoms because culturally it implied they had AIDs. This also seems linked to education.

LifeLiverTransp 7y ago

When evolution looks at reason, it is invisible. All the process sees are numbers, and the numbers pointing to reason beeing a procreation inhibiting disease. So reason is circumvented. Drug addicted? Mental illness? Traumatized by war? Escapezombie? Just plain reckless? You are imune to the disease. You are the future.