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When Does More Money Not Mean Fewer Kids? (A Data Deep Dive)
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Decoding Fertility Rates: Income, Culture, and Ideological Influences In this episode, Simone and Malcolm dive deep into fertility statistics, examining the correlation between income levels and fertility rates across different demographics. They unpack several studies, including ones from Lyman Stone, and discuss the intricate relationship between wealth and the number of children people have. The discussion also covers cultural influences, historical trends, and specific cases in various parts of the world such as pre-industrial societies, modern Africa, and the United States. Key insights are shared on how educational attainment, societal norms, and economic factors impact fertility rates. Tune in to explore the nuances and complexities of demographic changes and fertility patterns.
[00:00:00] Simone! Today we are going to do an episode that focuses on Fertility stats, and it's gonna be a stat heavy episode. It's gonna be a study heavy episode, and it's gonna be on demographic collapse, which our audience love.
Ooh, the trifecta. The trifecta. So in today's episode, we are going to focus on the nuances of when fertility decline does not follow the model. The more wealth an individual has, the fewer kids they have. Where are the kinks in this particular incredibly robust statistical trends armor? Would you like to know more?
I, I like that we're looking at this because I think The exceptions to the general trend probably yield really useful insights So we're gonna be focused on a few articles here But one of the ones that I'm going to draw a lot from it's actually from Lyman Stone Who runs the Institute of Family Studies and it's [00:01:00] called more money more babies.
What's the relationship between income and fertility now? Something we should note here, and it's one of the reasons I'm looking at this, is I believe in always really digging deep. when somebody says something that sounds, you know, utterly preposterous or is obviously ideologically motivated because there's often elements of truth in what they're saying that I may not be seeing on the other side of the ideological fence.
Right. So those who are not familiar, haven't read a lot of limestone stuff. He really likes to manipulate statistics to try to argue his perspective. And his perspective is always. That we should be doing more cash handouts and that this can be solved with Christianity. Those are generally the two arguments that he's always going to use.
And so he'll often twist things to sort of this, you know, Christian socialist perspective. But this means that he has to argue and he has argued explicitly. There isn't that much of a correlation between [00:02:00] fertility and income, which is just a preposterous thing on its face. There was a piece that he wrote that was attacking us.
And this was one of the claims he made when we were pointing out that you don't seem to be able to solve this with cash handouts. However he has invested a lot of energy and a lot of his own personal credibility in debating this matter. And as such he has found a number of interesting points that I may not have caught myself which don't reverse either of the two larger truisms.
The first being that you do not appear to, with any reasonable amount of money, be able to pay people or with social services, increase fertility rates. And the second being that generally speaking, the more income a country has or the more income an individual has, the lower their fertility rate is going to be.
But there are modifications in this trend. Hmm. Okay. Over where we see those in turn. So the first is that if you look in pre industrial societies, [00:03:00] the more income an individual has, particularly a man, the higher their fertility rate is. in pre industrial societies. Yes. And this is only with male fertility, not female fertility.
No, it's also female fertil
Published on 1 year, 3 months ago