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 fertility, but it is more tied with male fertility. So this is from an article titled men's status and reproductive success in 33 non industrial societies affects a subsistence marriage system and reproductive strategy. And this showed a meta analysis of 288 results of 33 non industrial populations.

And it showed that. Status is significantly associated with men's reproductive success consistent with the evolved basis for status pursuit. Status hierarchies have changed dramatically though in recent eras. , if anybody doesn't immediately see the implication of this, it does show that dysgenic fertility selection, sorry, I should explain what dysgenic means. Dysgenic means certain environments can cause things to [00:04:00] be selected for in a population that do not actually make the population more fit but just increase the number of surviving offspring that population has.

A great example of this is rabbits in the UK. If you've ever seen rabbits in the UK, they're all deformed and weird looking and witness. Yes they, I don't remember the full story. But , the point being is that they don't have natural predators and because they don't have natural predators, it's literally just the ones that can have the most kids that survive. And so there is no real fitness preservation technique , or pressure for the population.

And so they end up being . cancerous witless balls , of tumors. They're really quite gross. If you ever see a rabbit in the UK, it's, it's, it's kind of scary. But where this is relevant to humans is we've been under similar pressures for a while, as we mentioned in our can society become an idiocracy episode which by the way, was ad restricted.

I don't [00:05:00] even think we went that spicy in that one. Just saw that today. Maybe we sound like it. And I'm like, come on, man. Yes. Humans have genes and they're correlated with intelligence and they're being selected against. This is like really clear in the data, but okay. I guess we'll pretend we live in your little fantasy world where everyone's born exactly the same.

But anyway, the point being here that dysgenic selection started in humans with the rise of the industrial revolution, it appears. Or with modern industrial society. And that before this, the more status someone was able to accrue, whether that was through, you know, wealth or charisma or attractiveness or et cetera, the more kids they were going to have now, generally the two things most correlated with a high fertility rate are low IQ and obesity which are, you know, witless rabbits, right?

I think it's low educational attainment. Not necessarily though. Okay. Low educational attainment. Yeah. But yeah, not, not ideal, not [00:06:00] ideal. Obviously this doesn't really help his larger point.

What fertility rates were like in pre industrial societies isn't exactly relevant in the modern world. But it is, you know, an interesting and novel point nonetheless. But to him saying something like, well, you can't just assume that less income means more kids because in pre industrial societies, that wasn't true, it's like, yeah, but that's not relevant to the current, to a post industrial society.

problem that we're facing that's like throwing sand in my eyes with statistics. This is what I mean when I say he, he likes doing the, the pocket sand thing. Statistics and hope you don't notice.

Pocket sand.

Okay. So for the next point. He says here, the author argues that historic fertility declines were overwhelmingly caused by novel cultural norms, which are often correlated, but distinct from income.

So here I was looking at the study that he was looking at. It's called a culture and the historic fertility transition.

This paper presents a novel argument for the historic fertility [00:07:00] transition, emphasizing the role of cultural forces alongside economic factors. The authors highlight a significant and abrupt decline in fertility rat