Why Global Fertility Rates Have Fallen

The "demographic transition" has been observed for two centuries, but the reasons behind it are not clear. Simply put, as a society becomes wealthy due to industrialization and economic development, fertility rates fall. The trend was first noticed over two centuries ago. It has replicated in every country around the world since then. As countries become rich, they stop having children

The problem is, no one knows precisely why this happens. There are some clear correlations: a drop in infant mortality rates and a rise in female education certainly cause fertility to drop. If you can make sure pre-teen and teenage women attend school, fertility rates drop. If you can make sure children do not die in their first year of life, fertility rates also drop.

People who try to explain this don't understand how long this has been going on. They talk about the introduction of the Pill, the 1960s Sexual Revolution, or the laws on car seats. But none of those things explain the two-century drop in America's fertility rate.

This theory does. It has to do with vision. As my son pointed out, technology is just the material instantiation of ideas. As the number of ideas you interact with proliferates (via tech and education), the number of possible futures available to you proliferates.

In order to become parents, a man and a woman have to share a common vision for the future, a vision that includes common agreement on when to have children. But, the more ideas, the more possibilities, the more technology, available to both the man and the woman, the less likely the visions of both will be common. If they don't start with the common vision, they have to discuss, which takes time. They may never actually agree, so they never both choose that single vision: children.

If women aren't educated, they are exposed to ideas primarily through their parents and their husband, thus the vision the woman has for the future is much more likely to be in common with her husband's vision. Female education destroys fertility not just because every minute spent in the classroom is not a minute spent in the bedroom. Education is the beginning of a divorce from the common social vision.

In this sense, female education is a variation on homeschooling. Parents homeschool children to make sure the children share a vision that is common with their parents. Because of homeschooling, the family has a common vision.

If you hand your children, or your spouse, to other people to be educated, they won't have your vision. People who attend college together have common instructors, thus more likely to get married, more likely to have children. People who have common religion have common instructor and a common vision.

Notice the Baby Boom after World War II. World War I saw only 4.5% of the male population under arms, and the nation at war for only nineteen months.

In contrast, World War II saw 12.1% of the male population under arms, the entire nation intensively trained together in a common vision for over five years. The Baby Boom was the result of that common, national vision. But the 1956 Orphans Educational Assistance Act destroyed the common vision. This act expanded eligibility for college education to include education benefits for spouses and widows of veterans. Not coincidentally, the Baby Boom peaked in 1960, just four years later. It was essentially over by 1963. College education of women had shattered the common national vision, destroyed family formation and total fertility rates.

The presence or absence of a common vision explains everything.... the steadily falling fertility from 1800 through now, the Baby Boom, forged by WW II into a common vision for most Americans, which fell apart as female education and even more technology, even more ideas, were introduced, shattering the common vision into a thousand pieces.

Global fertility decline was kicked off almost entirely by normative and cultural processes, not strictly economic ones. The effect of income on fertility is not even remotely consistent across cultures or even across times. When whole societies become richer, they do not necessarily have fewer children.

Without a vision, the people perish (Proverbs 29:18). If nations wish to restore their total fertility rates, they have to find a way to rebuild a common national vision, a self-perception shared across a significant section of society. Given internet access and technological advances, that is nearly an impossible ask.