The title isn't all that exciting. But the topic is.

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One of the most, and possibly the very most important changes to society which made the modern world possible was the rapid and severe reduction in fertility first in the US and Western Europe but now in most of the world. It is highly unlikely that we would have advanced the standard of living from the squalid slums of Victorian times if the population was still reproducing at the same rate.

It is a longish article which makes a number of interesting points but I'll only copy short passages here:


http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/s ... -memeplex/

Should-Read: Sarah Perry: The History of Fertility Transitions and the New Memeplex
by Brad DeLong February 28, 2017
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Should-Read: Sarah Perry: The History of Fertility Transitions and the New Memeplex: “European cultures have historically prevented people from restricting family size within marriage…

…The European marriage pattern allowed for the control of fertility only through delaying and restricting nuptiality. A new pattern, allowing for controlled fertility within marriage, simultaneously originated in New England and France in the late eighteenth century. The new pattern traveled with a new set of values, including suffrage, democracy, equality, women’s rights, and social mobility. Its main mechanism of spread was education, the availability of which also incentivized the new fertility pattern’s adoption by providing a clear way for parents to compete for the future status of their children by having fewer children. The new pattern spread across Europe, North America, and Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, encountering temporary, partial resistance from some groups. Even Catholics and Mormons worldwide adopted controlled fertility by the early twentieth century or earlier.

As the new pattern grew to dominate the western world in the twentieth century, Asia and Latin America transitioned to the new pattern. Sub-Saharan Africa entered a fertility transition beginning in the 1980s that is ongoing. In each of these transitions, when controlled fertility was adopted, the pre-transition positive (eugenic) relationship between fertility and wealth became a negative (dysgenic) relationship. Only tiny pockets of culture that maintain extreme separation from the new pattern – especially through refusing outside education and preventing women from contact with the outside world – have fertility patterns plausibly consistent with uncontrolled fertility. These may include the Amish and Hassidim in the United States.

Once the fertility transition to controlled fertility occurs in a population, its fertility generally continues to decline until it is below replacement. The benefits of the new pattern are increased material wealth per person, a reduction in disease, starvation, and genocide, and upward social mobility. The main drawback is the onset of a dysgenic phase that may end civilization as we know it.

"...The Changing Nature of High Fertility: Catholics and Mormons

Catholics and Mormons in the United States maintained higher fertility than other religious groups, and the Irish, Spanish, and Dutch maintained high fertility for a long time after the fertility transition in Europe. However, all these groups have subsequently adopted the modern controlled fertility pattern, and their adoption of controlled fertility within marriage appears quite early. Instead of maintaining the old, uncontrolled fertility pattern, Catholics and Mormons appear to have shifted to controlled fertility, but at a higher target parity (or lower target spacing) than the surrounding population. In both cases, the nature of church control changed: it was not able to mandate true uncontrolled fertility, but was able to convince parents not to stray too far from the community mean on the highly observable metrics of birth spacing and parity. During the latter half of the twentieth century, the fertility of Mormons and Catholics descended well below any possible natural fertility population, converging at or just above the non-Mormon, non-Catholic mean. These institutions have been fighting losing battles against the new controlled fertility pattern, defending ever-shrinking concessions to higher fertility.

The role of theology in maintaining high fertility is secondary to the role of community control (Goldsheider 2006). The religious community can exercise indirect control by preventing contact with extra-religious status seeking, such as through providing religious rather than public education and emphasis on traditional gender roles; and it can exercise direct control through surveillance of birth spacing and parity by religious officials and by the community. By maintaining control of primary education, by being the center of social life among its communicants, and by surveilling the birth spacing of its members, the Church slowed but did not ultimately prevent the adoption of controlled fertility. Instead, the Church maintained a high target parity (or low target birth spacing) among its members even as they controlled their fertility. This target parity decreased over time; this is consistent with Catholics and Mormons controlling fertility and targeting the current mean parity or birth interval (so as to avoid detection by being average), as the mean would decrease over time by this process alone.

The Mormon fertility transition occurred over the latter half of the nineteenth century, just after the frontier peak in fertility (Heaton 1998). Mormon women born in 1840-1845 had on average around nine children, and the maximum parity observed was a staggering 22 (Bean 1990 at pp. 186-202). Mormon women born in 1895-1899, however, had an average of around five children, with the maximum observed birth order being just ten. Age at marriage declined only one year during that time, and the period of lactational infecundability remained constant. Beginning with the 1860-1865 cohort, women were clearly utilizing fertility control by birth spacing, and their fertility control started earlier and became more effective over time. By 1900, the Utah LDS were no longer a natural fertility population, but a controlled fertility population with a high target parity (ibid). ..."

When I talked with friends about this none were aware that Mormon birth rates had collapsed as far as it has although most had noticed that Catholic fertility has gone down a lot.

"... Throughout the twentieth century, samples of Mormon college students and families have reported high rates of usage of fertility control, as well as high rates of usage (Bush 1976). The LDS fertility rate is presently probably about three children per woman, much higher than the average white American fertility rate, which is below two. Again, while the LDS Church was not able to maintain a genuinely uncontrolled fertility pattern, despite narratively compelling pronatalist theology and strong community involvement, it has maintained a target parity somewhat above the background level.

This is not the case for modern Catholic populations. In the United States, Catholic and Protestant fertility converged in the 1970s, and both are currently below replacement (Frejka et al. 2006). Catholic fertility in Southern Europe has also fallen to below replacement since the 1970s (Berman et al. 2007). But throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Catholic communities maintained high fertility for long periods of time even as the fertility transition accelerated in surrounding populations. ... "

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The question is one of the most important in human history because it answers the question of "what about Malthus".

Malthus said that human populations will increase by a predictable rate until the capacity of the land to feed them was exhausted. He said explicitly that there are, in principle, only three things which limit human fertility:

1. "self control" which he said would never happen.

2. "Vice" by which he meant birth control or sexual practices which do not lead to reproduction. Which, as a clergyman, he said were morally unthinkable.

3. "misery" the population increases until starvation and disease limit it.

Because #1 won't ever happen and #2 is unthinkable he insisted that it was fruitless to try to help the lives of the poor because you could never achieve more than a delay of the time when misery would take over.

And he was very successful in persuading people who were otherwise the modern equivalent of liberal do-gooders that there was no point to even trying. he was the "Reagan Reactionary" of his age.

But he was wrong only on one point. Limiting fertility occurred on its own with no external force driving it and it used what the thought of as "immoral vice'. The social and economic change which has done the most to make all of us better off was started endogenously and spread through society even though some of the greatest social forces in history were set against it.

A remarkable thing, and encouraging.

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[Guinevere]

In the sage words of Sandra DOC and the Notorious RGB:

Women's participation in the economic and social lives of [any] country is directly related to their ability to control their reproduction.

[rubato]

In the sage words of Sandra DOC and the Notorious RGB:

Women's participation in the economic and social lives of [any] country is directly related to their ability to control their reproduction.

But the fact that the process began > 150 years before Roe v. Wade, Griswold v. Connecticut, is of interest in itself. And the connections to the modern idea that... " The new pattern traveled with a new set of values, including suffrage, democracy, equality, women’s rights, and social mobility. Its main mechanism of spread was education, the availability of which also incentivized the new fertility pattern’s adoption by providing a clear way for parents to compete for the future status of their children by having fewer children. "

And it is still true that the best way to get women to have fewer children in poor countries is to educate them.

Why are we so unaware of the history of perhaps the most important change in social history?

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