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Well that is a particularly click baitey article. My index is failing me here but I recall a paper that had looked into falling birth rates as standards of liv

Well that is a particularly click baitey article. My index is failing me here but I recall a paper that had looked into falling birth rates as standards of living increased and found that birth rate correlated strongly with the "cost" of children. The supposition (it really wasn't a theory or even a solid hypothesis) was that as parents became more educated and society's measure of success became more material, the parental effort to provide the "best" for their kids went up. It worked kind of like this, you have kids, you want them to have as good or better life than you have. If you've defined "better" here as wealth and social status, then you want them to have more opportunities. Getting them those opportunities (which you may have missed out on) costs money (wealth). Examples, good schools, good nutrition, good after school programs, Etc. Also, the developing society is putting more social status points on "successful" people (at least outwardly so by their display of wealth) which incentivizes couples to both continue their careers and "success trajectories." That path costs still more because now you have to add day care and possibly a nanny or two to the mix. Here in the U.S. there is actually an interesting empirical example that supports this, its called foster care fraud. When the state offers to pay money to someone as a foster parent, a small number of people will exploit this by becoming foster parents for many many children to accrue the state benefit for "caring" for them. As an example, it suggests to me that if the state provided support to people with larger families that offset their costs significantly, the result would be larger families. I would not argue that this "proves" the supposition that child care costs drive down the size of families, but to me it argues that it is likely a large factor in the decision.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> My index is failing me here but I recall a paper that had looked into falling birth rates as standards of living increased and found that birth rate correlated strongly with the "cost" of children. The supposition (it really wasn't a theory or even a solid hypothesis) was that as parents became more educated and society's measure of success became more material, the parental effort to provide the "best" for their kids went up. I think it is pretty clear that humans (like animals generally) are more likely to adopt K strategy (smaller numbers of offspring with higher investment in each) rather than r strategy (larger numbers of offspring with smaller investment in each) in a stable, secure environment, and that this is structurally favored by the environment. I wouldn't put much weight on the suggestion that either the number or investment piece drives the other, though.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  I don't disagree (someone does though :-)) The argument is that given an expected pool of available wealth K to a couple, and a predicted cost p per offspring. Is O = K / p variable? or constant? More simply, if you change one and not the other, does the value of O go up and down? The article was trying to look at that question by evaluating K and p and comparing O for different values.
tuatoru 6y ago
> if the state provided support to people with larger families that offset their costs significantly It's been tried, many times, without success.[1] You could argue that those countries didn't try hard enough, but that's a fallacy the name of which escapes me for the moment. [1] Demographers talk about a "low fertility trap": because young women grow up in a one-child environment, that is normal to them. They see their peers having one child, and they do too. There are other factors besides re-norming: assortative mating is given a lot of weight; there are the effects of TV, social media, video games, shopping, and other distractions (measured as these things have diffused through countries and regions of countries). Check out a recent demography textbook. (Fringe authors talk about the estrogen-like effects of obesity on sperm, and the 30% - 50% decline in micronutrients in food since the 1980s. They might be right, but they're fringe at present.)
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Cool, as it turns out there are a couple of fairly recent demography texts at the library (2007, 2010) so I'll pick those up this weekend. Thanks for the pointer!

dragonwriter 6y ago

> My index is failing me here but I recall a paper that had looked into falling birth rates as standards of living increased and found that birth rate correlated strongly with the "cost" of children. The supposition (it really wasn't a theory or even a solid hypothesis) was that as parents became more educated and society's measure of success became more material, the parental effort to provide the "best" for their kids went up. I think it is pretty clear that humans (like animals generally) are more likely to adopt K strategy (smaller numbers of offspring with higher investment in each) rather than r strategy (larger numbers of offspring with smaller investment in each) in a stable, secure environment, and that this is structurally favored by the environment. I wouldn't put much weight on the suggestion that either the number or investment piece drives the other, though.

ChuckMcM 6y ago
I don't disagree (someone does though :-)) The argument is that given an expected pool of available wealth K to a couple, and a predicted cost p per offspring. Is O = K / p variable? or constant? More simply, if you change one and not the other, does the value of O go up and down? The article was trying to look at that question by evaluating K and p and comparing O for different values.

tuatoru 6y ago

> if the state provided support to people with larger families that offset their costs significantly It's been tried, many times, without success.[1] You could argue that those countries didn't try hard enough, but that's a fallacy the name of which escapes me for the moment. [1] Demographers talk about a "low fertility trap": because young women grow up in a one-child environment, that is normal to them. They see their peers having one child, and they do too. There are other factors besides re-norming: assortative mating is given a lot of weight; there are the effects of TV, social media, video games, shopping, and other distractions (measured as these things have diffused through countries and regions of countries). Check out a recent demography textbook. (Fringe authors talk about the estrogen-like effects of obesity on sperm, and the 30% - 50% decline in micronutrients in food since the 1980s. They might be right, but they're fringe at present.)

ChuckMcM 6y ago
Cool, as it turns out there are a couple of fairly recent demography texts at the library (2007, 2010) so I'll pick those up this weekend. Thanks for the pointer!