> In a message dated 7/14/03 9:52:40 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > >A few people seem to have skipped over the first sentence of my post. > > > >The article said that fertility rate is higher in dictatorships than in > >democracies at *all income levels*. Meaning if you take any income level > >and compare dictatorships and democracies in the same level, the > >dictatorships will tend to have a higher fertility rate. > > Yes, this is why I've suggested the higher fertility rate may arise from > attempts to escape the oppression through the joys of sex.
Right, and even if you assume access to birth control and the like, there may still be non-sexual "joys of child-rearing" that can accruse even under a dictatorship. More formally: In a dictatorship, the returns to non-child-rearing activities are reduced more than the returns to child-rearing, so child-rearing becomes relatively more attractive, so people do more of it. In other words, yes of course I'd rather raise my kids in a democracy than a dictatorship, just as I'd rather start a business (for example) in a democracy than a dictatorship. But in a dictatorship, while my child-rearing opportunities suffer, my business opportunities suffer even more. I can't think of any reason why this couldn't be true at every level. Still, I agree with Marko that we can't be sure that the underlying facts are true until we see how they treated the now-ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe/USSR. I was under the impression that fertility in the USSR and the Warsaw pact countries was very low, and I think it's still very low in Russia. I think the Russian population is decreasing. --Robert Book
