I just read a very interesting article in Foreign Affairs, link courtesy of RealClearWorld. “The Luxury of Children” is about the world’s birth rate dropping below “replacement level,” normally said to be 2.1 children per adult woman.
The “news” in the article is that poor women’s fertility is dropping like that of more affluent women. In fact the only subgroups having more than 2.1 children per adult woman are affluent.
This is ascribed to children changing from being an economic asset in agrarian societies to being a luxury “good” in urban societies and most of humanity no longer being agrarian but not yet affluent enough to easily fit the costs of child raising into their budgets.
Unmentioned is the factor of effective birth control becoming affordable even to poor women, something that was not always true. Being able to separate sexual drive and reproduction is what has brought us to the present state of affairs, pun intended.
