« Saudi Arabia fact of the day | Main | With oil at $140 a barrel, can you still love Julian Simon? »
What determines fertility?
Here are some thoughts:
So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”
By this logic, the worst sort of system is one that partly buys into the modern world — expanding educational and employment opportunities for women — but keeps its traditional mind-set. This would seem to define the demographic crisis that Italy, Spain and Greece find themselves in — and, perhaps, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other parts of the world. Indeed, demographers have been surprised to find rapid fertility changes in the third world, as more and more women work and modern birth-control methods become standard options. “The earlier distinct fertility regimes, ‘developed’ and ‘developing,’ are increasingly disappearing in global comparisons of fertility levels,” according to Edward Jow-Ching Tu...the birthrate in 25 developing countries — including Cuba, Costa Rica, Iran, Sri Lanka and China — now stands at or below the replacement level.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 29, 2008 at 04:17 PM in Science | Permalink
Comments
Fascinating.
Don't people frequently overestimate the extent of socialism in Scandinavian nations relative to the US?
Posted by: Mercutio.Mont at Jun 29, 2008 5:25:43 PM
This seems to be pretty much saying, "The more you expect women to give up the rest of their lives to have babies, the less likely they'll be to have babies."
Now, maybe this just seems obvious to me because I'm a woman, but, uh...I can't figure out why the article is so long, honestly.
Posted by: Andromeda at Jun 29, 2008 5:32:53 PM
china will peak out soon but india still cranks and is on pace to pass china. virility speaks well of a man but vasectomies must be promoted vigorously: ultrasounds are sold @ convenience stores everywhere you turn. pay em to keep kids in school; incentivisation helps out. on the flip side pay em to have kids (tax credit)where they need em, adopt em where they don't.
Posted by: wagonrunner at Jun 29, 2008 5:44:51 PM
Perhaps it's the Italian custom of children living with their parents well into their thirties that has a lot to do with the lack of starting their own households.
Iran notwithstanding, religious patriarchal societies almost always have more children than sexually egalitarian societies, which likely explains why such societies have been far more prevalent throughout history. Similar to Indo-European-speaking farmers sweeping across the continent to push aside "proto-Basque" hunter-gatherers, patriarchal societies historically have simply outpopulated and displaced egalitarian societies.
Posted by: at Jun 29, 2008 5:48:12 PM
Don't people frequently overestimate the extent of socialism in Scandinavian nations relative to the US?
Answer: Yes. Especially US media people.
Posted by: Jacob Christensen at Jun 29, 2008 6:03:53 PM
What maintains the high cost of housing in Italy, etc. if the population is declining?
Posted by: at Jun 29, 2008 6:22:10 PM
Hong Kong has the world's lowest birthrate (lower than 1), followed by Macau, Singapore and Taiwan. In fact, they have lower birth rates than China, in spite of not having one-child policies.
My hypothesis is that it's related to the incompatibility between economic development levels and informal institutions in non-mainland Chinese soceties. They are economically devloped, but the mindset is surprisingly traditional. Here in Taiwan, most women - especially outside Taipei City - are still expected to live with their parents until they marry, and then quit working when they get children. Also, if their husbands are first-born sons, they are expected to live with their in-laws. Add to that a competitive education system, where average performance causes parents to lose face (relative position is what counts), and parents face social pressure to spend lots of money on cram schools in order to raise the likelihood of getting into a respectable college. Is it then any wonder that lots of young women (on average better-educated than young men) tend to be quite skeptical of marriage+ children. Interestingly, lots of men with a low education (something like 20% of all new marriages) are between Taiwanese men and primarily rural women from mainland China or Vietnam. This latter group actually makes the birthrate higher than it would otherwise be. In a local interview survey, most men who married non-Taiwanese spouses gave "desire to have children" and "greater willingness to do household chores" as their main reasons for arranging marriages with non-Taiwanese women. Another study found that Taiwanese women spend an average of 4 hours per day on household chores, while the corresponding average for Vietnamese spouses was 8 hours.
Posted by: David at Jun 29, 2008 8:18:00 PM
I don't understand how people find it surprising that it is individual incentives that drive the fertility rate, whatever those incentives may be. I do believe it is up to researches to figure out which incentives are the more salient ones. I am not an expert on fertility, but I know that it is a well-studied topic, and chatting about it here (or reading about it in the New York Times) won't provide much of the picture.
Posted by: Kyle at Jun 29, 2008 9:34:08 PM
Italian women spend a lot more effort on their looks than Swedish women, too.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jun 29, 2008 10:38:06 PM
New from NBER:
Will the Stork Return to Europe and Japan? Understanding Fertility Within Developed Nations
Abstract:
Only a few rich nations are currently at replacement levels of fertility and many are considerably below. We believe that changes in the status of women are driving fertility change. At low levels of female status, women specialize in household production and fertility is high. In an intermediate phase, women have increasing opportunities to earn a living outside the home yet still shoulder the bulk of household production. Fertility is at a minimum in this regime due to the increased opportunity cost in women's foregone wages with no decrease in time allocated to childcare. We see the lowest fertility nations (Japan, Spain, Italy) as being in this regime. At even higher levels of women's status, men begin to share in the burden of child care at home and fertility is higher than in the middle regime. This progression has been observed in the US, Sweden and other countries. Using ISSP and World Values Survey data we show that countries in which men perform relatively more of the childcare and household production (and where female labor force participation was highest 30 years ago) have the highest fertility within the rich country sample. Fertility and women's labor force participation have become positively correlated across high income countries. The trend in men's household work suggests that the low fertility countries may see increases in fertility as women's household status catches up to their workforce opportunities.
Posted by: Jason Malloy at Jun 29, 2008 10:39:40 PM
75 kids in a classroom in rural india; neither parent speaks english nor has the resources to get a tutor; who succeeds? what are job opportunities for uneducated unskilled in an industrial or information economy? bodyguards needed, learn to kill
Posted by: wagonrunner at Jun 29, 2008 11:05:30 PM
Don't people frequently overestimate the extent of socialism in Scandinavian nations relative to the US?
Answer: Yes. Especially US media people.
Alternate answer: No they don't... especially Scandinavians who underestimate the value of their own
welfare state but who would really not want to swap neosocialism for the type of lassiez faire system
found in anglo countries like the US, UK and Australia...
Posted by: at Jun 30, 2008 12:13:58 AM
The work of demographer Eric Kaufmann, for example:
http://www.sneps.net/RD/uploads/06prospect-Kaufmann.pdf
suggests that religiousness is a major determinant of fertility.
Since the religious (including both religious natives, and immigrants) are substantially-out reproducing agnostics and atheists; and since religiousness is transmitted between generations (both by cultural and genetic mechanisms) - this implies that there will be a demographically-driven religious revival/ takeover in developed societies.
Incidentally, Kaufmann finds that religious belief is associated with increased fertility even without church membership, and even after applying controls for educational level.
Posted by: BGC at Jun 30, 2008 12:37:33 AM
"So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility"
WRONG.
Third model: keep everyone RURAL and POOR (cf. Malawi). Lots of births.
Total fertility rate: 5.67 (see https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mi.html )
"The economy is predominately agricultural with about 85% of the population living in rural areas."
Posted by: Dave Barnes at Jun 30, 2008 12:44:45 AM
"Italian women spend a lot more effort on their looks than Swedish women, too."
So do Taiwanese women, althogh they prefer artifically pale to artificially brown (generally, Chinese men here [in rural southern Taiwan] are light brown while women are as far from light brown as money can buy).
So I guess we can conclude that East Asian and southern Europeans still favor traditional family values, while Americans and northern Europeans are more into gender-equality family values.
Religion? Actually, according to the WVS, Amerins are more religious than Italians/Spanish/Taiwanese and - especially - the Japanese. Also, religious southern Europeans (Catholics) and east Asians (mixture of Buddhism and Taoism) do not have (or comply with, in some cases) the extreme behavioral prohibitions of US fundamentalist protestants (which make up about 27% of the US population).
Posted by: David at Jun 30, 2008 12:59:57 AM
In 2004, George W. Bush carried 25 of the 26 states with the highest total fertility rate among white women:
http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_02_11/article.html
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jun 30, 2008 1:58:28 AM
Alternate answer: No they don't... especially Scandinavians who underestimate the value of their own welfare state but who would really not want to swap neosocialism for the type of lassiez faire system found in anglo countries like the US, UK and Australia...
No-one who knows anything about the U.S., the U.K., or Australia could possibly mistake those countries for anything resembling Lassiez Faire. Nor is the Scandinavian welfare state that much larger than the U.S..
Here is some information gleaned from nationmaster:
Finland Social Spending as % of GDP: 25.6
Norway Social Spending as % of GDP: 25.1
Denmark Social Spending as % of GDP: 27.5
U.S. Social Spending as % of GDP: 23.4
Generally the Scandinavian welfare state works better than the U.S. welfare state due to historical reasons i.e. Europe got rich through imperialism and slavery, but externalized post-imperial social devastation (descendants of U.S. slaves and colonized territories are in U.S., descendants of European slaves and colonized territories are in 3rd world)... Scandinavian countries have smaller and more homogeneous populations... there are large supplies of exportable natural resources relative to small populations... etc., etc.
Scandinavians feel safer with their welfare state, in the same way Americans feel safer with their giant military. Geography and historical circumstance helped Scandinavian avoid certain social problems, the same way geography and historical circumstance helped keep the U.S. free from invaders. A Finnish welfare program probably doesn't improve the quality of life of Finns any more than a stealth bomber program improves the safety from foreign invasion of the U.S... However, in either place, such programs have so much cultural and ideological significance attached to them that any mainstream questioning of those programs are impossible.
Posted by: Rex Rhino at Jun 30, 2008 2:53:16 AM
By coincidence, this new posting by the Audacious Epigone is about - oh... 100 times more intelligent, insightful and factual than the similarly-themed NYT piece.:
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2008/06/more-religious-demographics-from-pew.html
Posted by: BGC at Jun 30, 2008 3:15:00 AM
It is very clear that most Spaniards no longer embrace a "traditional mind-set". A look at survey data, or even more telling, spending some time in Spain, will quickly reveal so.
Posted by: aa at Jun 30, 2008 3:36:10 AM
"Scandinavians feel safer with their welfare state, in the same way Americans feel safer with their giant military."
Good point. I wonder if the same could be said about the medicine (including vaccinations).
So, perhaps "The Great Filter" is we get prosperous, have a social safety net, whether it's private resource ownership or collective resource provision, don't need kids to take care of us, don't make that investment, and we die out.
Posted by: Andrew at Jun 30, 2008 7:06:45 AM
Low fertility is caused by two factors:
(1) Money supply growth that drives prices of real estate faster than incomes of young families. Think Spain, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, Estonia, Czech Republic and East Europe generally.
(2) Pay-as-you-go pension systems that undermine the traditional role of family in old age support. Poor and mostly rural countries without government-sponsored pensions have high birth rates. Think Africa, India and rural China.
Posted by: Pavel Kohout at Jun 30, 2008 7:18:18 AM
Oh, yes, and did you try to factor in the high birth rate of African and Middle-Eastern immigrants in Sweden? The whole picture would look much different as soon as this is considered.
Posted by: Pavel Kohout at Jun 30, 2008 7:22:21 AM
@ Pavel Kohout:
Pay-as-you-go pension systems that undermine the traditional role of family in old age support
Sorry, but: No. Denmark and Sweden has a substantial element of payg in their pensions systems.
Oh, yes, and did you try to factor in the high birth rate of African and Middle-Eastern immigrants in Sweden?
Have you considered the immigrants in Germany? It seems to me that the German Turks must produce fewer children than their Swedish and Danish counterparts.
No, it is the other way round: Conservative systems which place a high cost on women (work or children) and have high entry levels to the labour market for the young are counter-productive - they neither sustain family building nor employment. At the same time we have a dual equilibrium with the North American and North European system(s) being stable.
Posted by: Jacob Christensen at Jun 30, 2008 9:02:21 AM
Jacob Christensen -
(a) OK, Sweden and Denmark have important PAYG pillars, but that doesn't disprove the main proposition that PAYG destroys fertility. Virtually all countries with negligible or non-existing pension fund pillar have very low fertility rate. On the other way, Iceland, whose PAYG pillar is smaller than its fund pillar, has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe.
(b) German Turks have lived in Germany since 1960's, thus their level of assimilation is way different, though not perfect. Also, the share of foreign-born Swedes is higher than percentage of foreign-born Americans in the good old days of unregulated immigration in the early 1900's. (No I don't suffer from an anti-immigrant bias.)
(c) You say that "Conservative systems which place a high cost on women (work or children) and have high entry levels to the labour market for the young..." - what does ot mean? Why should a "conservative system" (what is that, anyway?) put hugh entry levels to the labour market for the young? This doesn't seem to make sense at all.
If something really makes high entry levels for young workers, it's high income and payroll taxes, which can hardly be considered "conservative system".
Posted by: Pavel Kohout at Jun 30, 2008 9:45:20 AM
Sorry, but: No. Denmark and Sweden has a substantial element of payg in their pensions systems.
Well, we could just argue back and forth that way. Or, we could look at the research. There's a substantial body of evidence showing at the very least a strong correlation between pay as you go systems and lower fertility. Denmark and Sweden are included in these studies, so they're hardly a counterexample. Of course, there could be other explanations, but it certainly requires addressing more than your comment, Jacob Christensen.
Conservative systems which place a high cost on women (work or children) and have high entry levels to the labour market for the young are counter-productive
For the young? Only if you consider a "conservative system" to be one with a high minimum wage or lots of union rules or what have you. In the US the "conservative system" is often described (positively or negatively) as one that has low barriers to labor for the young.
Posted by: John Thacker at Jun 30, 2008 9:59:54 AM
