The Economist:
ONE of the paradoxes of human biology is that the rich world has fewer children than the poor world. In most species, improved circumstances are expected to increase reproductive effort, not reduce it, yet as economic development gets going, country after country has experienced what is known as the demographic transition: fertility (defined as the number of children borne by a woman over her lifetime) drops from around eight to near one and a half. That number is so small that even with the reduced child mortality which usually accompanies development it cannot possibly sustain the population.
This reproductive collapse is particularly worrying because it comes in combination with an increase in life expectancy which suggests that, by the middle of the century, not only will populations in the most developed countries have shrunk (unless they are propped up by historically huge levels of immigration) but also that the number of retired individuals supported by each person of working age will increase significantly. If Mikko Myrskyla of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues are correct, though, things might not be quite as bad as that. A study they have just published in Nature suggests that as development continues, the demographic transition goes into reverse.
Dr Myrskyla looked at the world as it was in 1975 and as it is now (or, at least, as it was in 2005). He compared two things. One was the total fertility rate (the number of children that would be born to a woman in a particular country over the course of her life if she experienced the age-specific fertility rates observed in that country during the calendar year in question). The other was the human development index for that country. The HDI, a measure used by the United Nations, has three components: life expectancy; average income per person; and level of education. Its maximum possible value is one.
Back in the 1970s, no country got anywhere near one. Of the 107 places the researchers looked at, the best was Canada, with an HDI of 0.89. By 2005, however, things had improved markedly. Two dozen of what were now 240 countries had HDIs above nine—and something else remarkable had happened. Back in 1975, a graph plotting fertility rate against the HDI fell as the HDI rose. By 2005, though, the line had a kink in it. Above an HDI of 0.9 or so, it turned up, producing what is known in the jargon as a “J-shaped” curve (even though it is the mirror image of a letter J). As the chart shows, in many countries with really high levels of development (around 0.95) fertility rates are now approaching two children per woman. There are exceptions, notably Canada and Japan, but the trend is clear.
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14164483&fsrc=rss
MB: Shocking! The trend is clear, as countries or even households become more developed and financially stable they have lower fertility rates. Why is it than that our human psychology is working in an irregular way; households should want more kids as they can afford them not less. I am sure that there are a number of explanations for why this phenomena has occurred; however I feel a large factor has to do with the wealthy becoming consumed with work, which results in little time for family or more children. Can anyone else think of other possible social factors (such as a women’s role in the household in developed countries) that may contribute to the logical behavior?
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