Lower fertility is changing the world for the better
economist.com
economist.com
In all seriousness, I've always looked at birth control and education and affluence as a virus which drastically reduces fertility. But obviously some people, besides their sex drive, have another not so common drive. Despite money, education and condoms they really, really want, not sex, but kids. And over time this trait will become more widespread in the population. We better have colonized space by then.
Another trait is that of children-less lifestyles (sexual, medical or otherwise). If we're to keep up with the replacement-rate, that obviously means that someone needs to have more kids.
Some people will be child-less, others will have just one, maybe 2 kids. A few will strongly want to and will have 3,4 and more. It's basic natural selection in practice. Wealth and the pill are still very recent, fertility will stay low in the industrialized world for quite a while, a few generations at least, but things will turn around.
The article offers a theory that in rural societies, children are basically life-insurance, and the more the better (probably to a limit). But a tractor is much more reliable than a kid, and as a family grows wealthy, kids turn into "liabilities" that you have to provide food, shelter and education for, with little in return (not talking about love and family, talking about having someone to give you food and shelter when you're old and/or sick).
> Wealth and the pill are still very recent, fertility will stay low in the industrialized world for quite a while, a few generations at least, but things will turn around.
Why will things turn around? Of course there are wealthy families that have many children, but why will exactly that trait become dominant?
I wish I could make this point more clear, but words fail me. From some of your discussions with others in this thread, I see they are also having difficulty communicating the basics of evolution. Pardon me, I have to abandon this discussion now.
I do understand why a biological hereditary preference to have many kids will multiply quickly, but my question is: Why do you think that this is a biological trait? The statistics in the article seems to suggest that we adjust reproduction to environmental factors, in this case wealth and urbanisation, which also makes sense from a evolution perspective: if we reproduce too quickly, there won't be enough resources to go around.
I don't. It might be, it could be. Certainly religion, income, how you were raised, etc, all play a big role in how many children you want. But IF there is a genetic component to how many children you want, then I expect it to spread.
Evolution.
Right now, most people aren't that well adapted (in a Darwinian sense) to life in an affluent society. There's no reason to assume this will always be the case. The current speed of human evolution is over 100 times what it was in prehistoric times. Extreme environmental changes invariably lead to evolutionary changes.
What biological advantage does a large family have over a small family in an affluent society?
In past agrarian cultures, a large family wasn't just an advantage, it was required due to high mortality. My girlfriends mother is one of eight, all girls. None of her aunts, and none of their children have an above-average number of children, and between them I think they're below average.
On the other hand, my sister and I are out of a ridiculously small family, and she just had her third baby. Plans for more are uncertain, but not ruled out.
It's a sample of two, but if nothing else, it shows that if it's a biological trait, it's pretty weak.
(The fate of such a gene is quite different if food is scarce and there's a danger of starvation, which has been the case for most of human history.)
The engine of evolution is the ability of your decedents to continue to have children. If at any point all your decedents fail to have children then you fail. But, if your decedents have more children than the replacement rate over time, your DNA gets mixed with everyone else in that species. Once you become an ancestor 5,000 times removed from of 90+% of the population, most living people will have a random slice of the useful bits of your DNA and the harmful stuff should be less common.
Edit: DNA can also evolve odd stratagies. EX: Say each person has say a 23% chance of wanting a large number of children, which let's family's build resurces over time, and then have lot's of children and then repeat. With longer streaks of accumulators, and breaders possible even with the same DNA.
The definition of biological advantage is having a large number of offspring rather than a small one! (Simplifying a bit; said offspring should also reproduce, recursively, but it's a decent approximation to just consider offspring.) What kind of weird question is that?
Also, to bundle a reply to another of your concerns, of course you don't observe changes yet. If you have one population averaging 3 children per couple and another of equal size averaging 1, in the first generation it may not look like that big a deal, but by the fourth or fifth generation the 1-child-per-couple group has been effectively eliminated as a significant part of the population. Surprisingly small differences magnify surprisingly rapidly across generations; evolutionists have observed species going extinct because of far smaller differences than that. I just used large numbers to make the point more understandable, it applies equally to 2.1 children vs 2.15, it just takes a few more generations in that case... and not even all that many.
Like compound interest, it gets big surprisingly fast. Another example is that story of placing one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, and doubling it for each square, so 2 grains on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth and so on. You end up with 2 64 (2 to the power of 16), or about 16 million million million grains of rice.
In animals, yes. Humans, especially in affluent societies have more sophisticated goals. Obviously, reproduction is important, but we will also pursue irrational goals, such as self-realization, quality of life, love, ethics and so on. The idea that we consider it a virtue to raise a child with Asbergers syndrome or other genetic defects is evidence to that, and in an evolutionary context decidedly self-destructive. In fact, I feel queasy even writing this, so strong is our opposition to applying our intelligence to raising the quality of our gene pool = eugenics.
My point is, although ill-articulated in a biological context, how does having a large family further any of the goals that a affluent individual in a wealthy society has? I'm not talking material wealth, even though that applies as well, but also the "soft" goals of contributing great ideas, science, arts, all the jazz, to the greater good of humanity. My point is; is a family with 10 kids more likely to foster a Miles Davis, Ernest Hemingway, Obama, Reagan, whatever floats your boat, than a family with one or two?
You seem to be trying to prevent this from being true by sheer volume of analysis. Evolution doesn't care about your analysis, either. It doesn't matter why some people have more children than others in an affluent society. It doesn't even have to be an integer number of children like "3" vs. "2", it only has to be a trend.
If you want to have a separate debate about how children impact your quality of life, than say so and have at it. It is from my reading of your other messages that I get the sense that you are almost willfully denying what other people are saying. Perhaps that is not true. But step one is to agree that in the end, it simply doesn't matter what the reasons are, only the actions and their results.
What I was trying to argue, clouded by my lack of understanding of the exact biological meaning of the word trait (i.e. something hereditary rather than a preference a person might have), was that there seems to be little evidence, which is backed by the statistics in the article, that a preference towards many children is hereditary.
Unless the ten kids are near starvation or are very restricted in how they are allowed to spend their time, the answer is that the family with ten kids is more likely to foster a notable person. Each child in the ten-kid family may have a somewhat reduced chance of being notable, but that family gets ten rolls of the dice instead of only one or two.
It also depends on whether there are malthusian limits applicable specifically to the population that is growing. It's unclear if this is the case in the modern world, but it certainly was the case in the past (availability of food in one place didn't prevent famine in another).
In this case, a higher birthrate could technically continue for centuries (or even millennia) before a reckoning, so you might have to go well beyond a single iteration of offspring to know.
There's plenty of debate about whether science can save humanity from malthusian limits, so the scenario I described might never come to pass. There are also other ways (wars, territorial conquest, mass immigration) for a high growth population to find a release valve.
All in all, though, I'm hopeful that the economist has this right - a non-coercive reduction in birth rates brought on as a natural response to increasing levels of global wealth, peace, and prosperity. Man, that would be an awfully nice way to avoid malthusian catastrophe. And while there's plenty to debate and disagree about, it's encouraging that the data does at least to some extent support this hope.
Absent mechanized farming, medicine, hospitals, and everything else modern civilization affords most of us, this is approximately correct.
Citation?
Reclusive groups, such as the Amish, that avoid modern society and maintain high birthrates and cultural integrity, are increasing their numbers very quickly. There's no reason to suppose that this will suddenly stop, though due to the nature of exponential growth it may be a while before this begins to have much effect on average birth rates.
We do know of examples of high-income (and high-education) groups with high fertility, though. Mormons come to mind. There was a recent discussion about this I found interesting here: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/future-fertility.html
Given that plenty of heritable traits (like religiosity) are correlated with increased brood size, I'd say it's pretty likely.
Also, given that in first world countries even the offspring of poorer folks survive to adulthood, that removes any benefit of giving birth to fewer children.
But that's just speculation.
Fry: Well, so what if I love a robot? It's not hurting anybody.
Hermes: My God! He never took middle school hygiene. He never saw the propaganda film.
Farnsworth: It's just lucky I keep a copy in the VCR at all times.
[He presses a button and a film title, I Dated A Robot!, appears on the screen. In the movie a couple sit in a cafe and stare into each other's eyes. A narrator walks into the scene.]
Narrator: [in movie] Ordinary human dating. It's enjoyable and it serves an important purpose. [He turns the table over and a crying baby appears. He turns it back again.] But when a human dates an artificial mate, there is no purpose. Only enjoyment. And that leads to ... tragedy.
[The woman behind him turns into a blank robot and the man downloads a celebrity onto it.]
Billy: [in movie] Neat-o! A Marilyn Monroe-bot!
Monroe-bot: [in movie] Ooh! You're a real dreamboat, (mechanical voice) Billy Everyteen.
Narrator: [in movie] Harmless fun? Let's see what happens next.
[The scene cuts to Billy's bedroom where he kisses the Monroe-bot. His mother walks through the door.]
Billy's Mom: [in movie] Billy, do you want to walk your dog?
Billy: [in movie] No thanks, Mom. I'd rather make out with my Monroe-bot.
[Enter his dad.]
Billy's Dad: [in movie] Billy, do want to get a paper route and earn some extra cash?
Billy: [in movie] No thanks, Dad. I'd rather make out with my Monroe-bot.
[The girl from the cafe, Mavis, walks in.]
Mavis: [in movie] Billy, do you want to come over tonight? We can make out together.
Billy: [in movie] Gee, Mavis, your house is across the street. That's an awfully long way to go for making out.
Narrator: [in movie] Did you notice what went wrong in that scene? Ordinarily, Billy would work hard to make money from his paper route. Then he'd use the money to buy dinner for Mavis, thus earning the slim chance to perform the reproductive act. But in a world where teens can date robots, why should he bother? Why should anyone bother? Let's take a look at Billy's planet a year later. [The scene changes and a foam hand rolls across an empty football field.] Where are all the football stars? [The foam hand drifts across an empty laboratory.] And where are the biochemists? [The scene changes to a split screen of human and robot couples making out on beds.] They're trapped! Trapped in a soft, vice-like grip of robot lips. All civilisation was just an effort to impress the opposite sex ... and sometimes the same sex. Now, let's skip forward 80 years into the future. Where is Billy?
[The scene changes to a post-apocalyptic world. Billy is an aged man but still with his Monroe-bot and still making out with her.]
Billy: [in movie] Farewell!
[He dies.]
Narrator: [in movie] The next day, Billy's planet was destroyed by aliens. [A fleet of flying saucers destroy buildings with laser shots.] Have you guessed the name of Billy's planet? It was Earth. Don't date robots!
[A "Don't Date Robots!" caption appears on the screen and the movie ends. The Space Pope is displayed on the screen with "Crocodylus Pontiflex" written around him in English and alien.]
Announcer: [voice-over; in movie] Brought to you by the Space Pope.
(stolen from http://www.futurama-madhouse.com.ar/scripts/3acv15.shtml )
"And everywhere, it is changing traditional family life by enabling women to work and children to be educated."
How is it that women working outside the home is better than women working inside the home? There is an unstated assumption that working outside is better; an assertion unsupported by any data.
Concerning children's education, one need only point to US literacy rates from 1850 to the present to see that the two (women working, children educated) are not connected.
As a secondary point I will point out that demographics are not mentioned in this article, apparently the author has never viewed the movie "Idiocracy" ...
Depends on your definition of better. Ignoring difficult to measure benefits and focusing on easy to measure ones like economic output, it is easy to see how outside the home there's more opportunity to produce a lot more toasters, cars, etc, then inside the home. Unless you happen to live in a factory!
Concerning children's education, one need only point to US literacy rates from 1850 to the present to see that the two (women working, children educated) are not connected.
Really? And isn't comparing "work" before 1925 (arbitrarily picked) and after kind of like comparing apples and oranges?
Further this time period covers the change from nearly all women working inside the home (or working on the family farm), to many working outside the home.
Many posters seem to have missed my point; perhaps I could have stated it clearer.
To restate it, there is little causation between women working outside the home and whether or not children are educated; and if there is, the Economist article quotes no sources to establish that.
Comparing the influence of a cheesy movie to one of the stapleholds of science fiction is ridiculous. The fact that Idiocracy owes its existence to the concepts of The Time Machine suggests that it's a derivative work, meaning it's not as influential at all. I'm not saying The Time Machine was a good warning, either, not as much as 1984 and certainly not as much as Brave New World, which is arguably the best prediction we've seen from a book, so saying Idiocracy is as right as The Time Machine isn't saying much to begin with.
Perhaps you could ask some women.
You'll also find that there's not exactly a shortage of literature on this topic.
I'll offer just one feature: If you have a job outside the home, you are free to quit your job and take a better job when conditions change. Not so easy to "quit" the "job" of raising your kids, or of living in your home when you have no other home to live in and no work experience that you can use to find a job somewhere else.
US literacy rates from 1850 to the present
These have little to say about the question. Literacy rate in the USA is a poor proxy for "education" because it's just too basic (you can be considered literate in American English and still have only a fourth-grade education) and is covered by the universal primary education system that we've had for years. The US population has grown largely through immigration since 1850, which makes it misleading to attribute changes in literacy rate directly to trends in childhood education. And, even apart from that, the major factor in the US literacy rate from 1850 to the present is likely to be the difference in education available to different subsets of the population, and the relative sizes of these subsets:
http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp
In 1870 80% of the black population was illiterate, presumably because it was composed of former slaves who had generally been forbidden to learn to read. And this illiteracy rate among the black population declined fairly slowly and remains higher than among the white population, a fact which has a lot to do with the hundred-year period of Jim Crow segregation that started soon after the Civil War was over and continued through the civil rights movement, with legacy effects lasting to this day.
Quite a few women I know would rather be at home with their children than work. I hear that same complaining line from a family member often. It is not torture for someone to stay at home and raise kids.
I personally would like to be a house-dad when I eventually have kids (while my wife works). I think the importance of raising children is quite underrated. And the modern trend of outsourcing the raising of your kids (to day-care centers and after school programs, etc…) is wrong.
> I'll offer just one feature: If you have a job outside the home, you are free to quit your job and take a better job when conditions change. Not so easy to "quit" the "job" of raising your kids, or of living in your home when you have no other home to live in and no work experience that you can use to find a job somewhere else.
You can’t really quit raising kids – whether you like it or not. I would also offer a flipside: In my parents’ generation it was common for women to work half-day (half-day secretarial work, etc…). Yet today it isn’t so – the majority of jobs require you to work from 8 to 17h00.
In an industrialized, modern society, you can nearly double your workforce. Educated women increase the number of knowledge workers. This, in turn, increases productivity, etc. Some women may briefly opt to stay home with their children, but the majority of women in industrialized nations return to work at some point. This is considered good.
Can you think of an industrialized nation experiencing significant growth (either recently or currently) where women are discouraged from working?