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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Urbanization is what pulls fertility rates from 8 to 2.

There's no contest here, it's just urbanization. Looking at anything else is penny-pinching over decimals, while the elephant in the room is right there.

Urbanization is huge, but it can’t be the whole picture, as even farm families typically don’t have eight kids anymore. Fertility in rural areas has been falling just as surely as in urban areas; it just hasn’t fallen as far (but then, it also started off higher).

As an illustration, my uncle is a semi-retired farmer. He had three kids. My grandparents had four (plus one stillbirth and one miscarriage); my great-grandparents, seven; and my great-great-grandparents, ten. Not counting the Amish, I think all the farmers I know have between two and five kids. Heck, even among the Amish it’s relatively rare to have 8–10 kids today.

But what is it about urbanization, according to you? Surely urbanization itself cannot be the immediate cause, there must be some X or set of X such that urbanization causes X... and then X... causes low fertility rates.

IIRC the leading explanation is that kids generally are productive enough on low-tech farms to be at least net-neutral on the farm's balance sheet. Even in the days of kids sweeping chimneys in Victorian England, that just doesn't work in cities. Probably not on high-tech farms, either.

I suspect any study of even highly mechanized agriculture would show that farmers have a lot of kids, to say nothing of the migrant workers picking peaches(for whom kids are net earners from the time they’re out of diapers- and yes, child labor is a major part of the fruit and vegetable supply chain even in countries with generally strict child labor laws).