Dan M wrote: > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On >> Behalf Of Kevin B. O'Brien >> Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2008 9:00 PM >> To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion >> Subject: Re: What is wealth? >> >> >>> The countries with high fertility rates tend to be poorer. Thus, wealth >>> >> is >> >>> anti-correlated with the probability a person's gene marker will be seen >>> >> in >> >>> a given member of the Nth generation after one's own (which is a >>> >> standard >> >>> measure of sociobiological fitness). >>> >>> >> I tend to think that is a pretty simple manifestation of the Demographic >> Transition. Children are a net asset in poorer countries (they can be >> put to work, can support you in old age, etc.). In richer economies, >> children are a luxury good that cost you a lot and deliver no economic >> return, hence you will tend to have fewer of them. >> > > You know, if you took this and the first statement of yours I responded to > as axioms, you could probably put together a system in which both A and ~A > are both provable statements. (This was considered a big negative when I > took math and logic). :-) > > So, I think you have to pick one of the two statements you made and reject > the other. Or, say that both have some impact, but are not nearly as > universal as you've portrayed. > > Indeed, while I think the latter statement has some truth, the data don't > really fit it as a sole explanation. Russia's birth rate fell as its > economic conditions fell. There were far fewer births in the Great > Depression as there were in the post WWII prosperity. The US has a far > higher birth rate among college educated women than Japan does. > > My suggestion is that sociobiology is a viewpoint to be used, among others, > and that it is not a simple explanation. But, unlike others on the list, I > do think partial understandings can be helpful. > I don't think this is contradictory at all. When a wealthy country undergoes a temporary economic change, does it change the social expectations and norms? I don't think so. That would require prolonged long-term change. So during the Depression, you did not see people suddenly sending their kids out to work in the factories, etc. Now, if you were to make a "permanent" change in the American economy that reduced us to a standard of living typical of a peasant economy, that would probably result in eventual change in our social structure and expectations. But I would expect that to take a few generations at the very least. And as far as I know, there has not been an example of any country actually running the demographic transition in reverse.
The examples you cite are perfectly consistent with a society that views children as a luxury good. One ought to find that the consumption of luxury goods goes down during economic downturns. The fallacy here is that you are confusing long-term and short-term effects. The Demographic Transition is a model of a long-term shift in social norms about children under the influence of rising incomes as economies develop. When applied cross-sectionally to countries at different stages of development, it matches up pretty well with the data. You are trying to falsify it by applying the model to short-term fluctuations in economies with relatively fixed social norms, which the model was never intended to explain in the first place. Normal economic theory is quite sufficient there. (As a side note, short-term fluctuations are what standard economic theories handle best. Supply and demand really do work pretty well in the day to day stuff. It is when you get to questions of long-term growth and development that things get a little murkier.) The change process is gradual in the other direction as well. When a poorer economy begins to develop, the death rate falls due to better nutrition, better health care, etc. but the birth rate does not, immediately, fall at all. That is one of the reasons for exploding populations in other parts of the world. It usually takes several generations for people's behavior to adjust, and then the birth rate starts to fall. So you can have equilibrium, roughly, at either a low income level, with high birth rates and high death rates, or at high income level, with low birth rates and low death rates. During the transition between these equilibria, you get exploding populations. Now, I want to make clear that I am not primarily a demographer, so there may well be more recent research on this topic. But when I was in graduate school, the data seemed pretty consistent with this model, and it was generally accepted among economic demographers. I was exposed to it primarily by my interest in development economics. Regards, -- Kevin B. O'Brien TANSTAAFL [email protected] Linux User #333216 "Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished." -- Jeremy Bentham _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
