Birth Dearth

I have recommended the demographer Lyman Stone many times, and the interview Razib Khan did with him this fall may be the best yet. We note that developed countries have progressively fewer children and conclude that rising income depresses fertility.  But it is not so. That is only a mild correlation when isolated from other factors.  The big drivers are education, urbanisation, and the long-term projected cost of children.  He notes, for example, that South Korean culture expects that children will live with their parents until they can have a home of their own, and at the end of their twenties if they have not achieved that, the parents buy them a home. Knowing that this is the situation thirty years earlier raises the possible cost of each child, and reduces the desire to have too many. Even if they are married, they tend not to have children.  Stone notes wryly "there is no birth control as good as having your parents down the hall."

South Korea is now down to 0.6 children per woman, an insanely low and self-destructive norm. Since WWII they have become increasingly urbanised and educated, and the expectation for a person to "succeed" in some high-status job is now so enormous that people stay in school in fields they do not even like and give up all else in order to have this. 

He notes that Chinese elites have a long tradition of few children per woman, and they have long been educated, urbanised, and expected to pay for expensive education/houses/dowries. The phenomenon was disguised by serial polygamy, so that elite men had many children, while the women had few.

Fascinating discussion start to finish.

Uncomfortable update.  There is a full description of the forced attempts at heightened fertility in Romania under Ceausescu, and the horrible results of that. It includes some background I didn't know about how many of the children got put in orphanages.  I'm not sharing this information with my middle sons. They deserve to forget as much as possible.