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People have lived much denser in apartments in cities for hundreds of years. Whole families used to live in a room on Paris a couple hundred years back. Was the

People have lived much denser in apartments in cities for hundreds of years. Whole families used to live in a room on Paris a couple hundred years back. Was the fertility as low in those cities back then too? (This is a serious question I just don’t know.)

pi-e-sigma 3y ago
Increasing the standard of living actually lowers the fertility. Everywhere! Not only in the capitalistic societies. Even in the Soviet Union the fertility started to drop as the standard of living increased.
- CogitoCogito 3y ago
  Could just be another confounding variable like education, general cultural change, etc. I mean if “increased standard of living” meant “everything stays the same but taking care of kids is now easier” I would expect an increase in fertility. Obviously we shouldn’t simplify too much, but I don’t think increased standard of living alone makes much sense as explanation. I think something else is probably driving it.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    It depends not just on absolute level of ease but relative. Suppose having and raising a child takes some normalized 100 units of work and some basket of luxuries takes the same 100 units. Even if having a child drops to 50 units of work, if that same basket of luxuries drops to 25 units, you'll still see a decrease in fertility.
klooney 3y ago
France was one of the nations on the frontier of fertility panic in the 1800s.
trealira 3y ago
It was like this in American cities, too, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries [1]. Yet immigrants still had high fertility rates, although they were declining by then [2]. That second link is a paper that focuses on the Irish immigrant fertility rate. [1]: https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/tenements https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/tenements [2]: http://www.econ.yale.edu//growth_pdf/cdp848.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu//growth_pdf/cdp848.pdf

pi-e-sigma 3y ago

Increasing the standard of living actually lowers the fertility. Everywhere! Not only in the capitalistic societies. Even in the Soviet Union the fertility started to drop as the standard of living increased.

CogitoCogito 3y ago
Could just be another confounding variable like education, general cultural change, etc. I mean if “increased standard of living” meant “everything stays the same but taking care of kids is now easier” I would expect an increase in fertility. Obviously we shouldn’t simplify too much, but I don’t think increased standard of living alone makes much sense as explanation. I think something else is probably driving it.
- scarmig 3y ago
  It depends not just on absolute level of ease but relative. Suppose having and raising a child takes some normalized 100 units of work and some basket of luxuries takes the same 100 units. Even if having a child drops to 50 units of work, if that same basket of luxuries drops to 25 units, you'll still see a decrease in fertility.

klooney 3y ago

France was one of the nations on the frontier of fertility panic in the 1800s.

trealira 3y ago

It was like this in American cities, too, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries [1]. Yet immigrants still had high fertility rates, although they were declining by then [2]. That second link is a paper that focuses on the Irish immigrant fertility rate. [1]: https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/tenements https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/tenements [2]: http://www.econ.yale.edu//growth_pdf/cdp848.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu//growth_pdf/cdp848.pdf