One of the most consistent findings in the social sciences is the negative association between education and fertility. This association appears when you compare more and less educated individuals within a country, and when you compare countries with different levels of education. The chart below shows the relationship between average years of schooling among women aged 15–64 and the total fertility rate. As you can see, it is strong and negative.
There are two main theories for why education is negatively associated with fertility. The economic theory says that education increases the opportunity cost of having children by raising women’s earnings potential. The cultural theory says that education changes women’s values, leading them to prioritise career over childbearing. Both theories may be true in part.
All this matters, of course, because the world — especially the Western world — is going through a fertility crisis. Not a single country in Europe has a birth rate above the replacement level—even the Nordic countries, which once bucked the trend toward low fertility, now have TFRs less than 1.6 children per woman. Why have birth rates cratered? One plausible explanation is rising education among women.
However, a new paper using a clever method finds that education may not have any effect on fertility after all. Neil Cummins managed to link birth and marriage records for a large sample of English women born during the 20th century. This enabled him to assemble a dataset with the women’s ages, their ages at marriage, and the number of children they had during the course of their lives.
His clever method to test whether education affects fertility was comparing women who were affected by compulsory schooling laws (which required them to stay in school for an extra year) to those who were born just before (and therefore weren’t required to stay in school for an extra year). The comparison serves as a ‘natural experiment’, where the ‘treatment’ is getting one more year of education.
Cummins’ results are shown below. The top panel corresponds to the 1947 reform, which extended compulsory schooling from age 14 to age 15. The bottom panel corresponds to the 1972 reform, which extended it further from age 15 to age 16. In each chart, the dots on the right-hand side of the zero line correspond to cohorts of women who were affected by the reform, while the dots on the left-hand side correspond to cohorts that were not affected.
In the lower-left chart, there is a hint of a positive impact on age at first marriage. But in the other four, there is no evidence of any effect whatsoever. Women who were required to stay in school for an extra year had just as many children as their counterparts who weren’t.
How can Cummins’ findings be reconciled with the strong negative association between education and fertility? One possibility is that education has zero causal effect on fertility and what’s really going on is that broader cultural changes (related to the demise of traditional gender roles) cause women to become more educated and to have fewer children.
This is only one study, and it will need to be replicated by other researchers. But it may turn out that what many social scientists thought was true is, in fact, not true at all.
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Not unrelated; some truth in that!
Here’s seven signs that show Western civilization could soon end
Excellent- nutjob conspiracy theories about the decline and fall of our civilisation are now in the Daily Mail.
A similar thing that happened to the Yeoman farmers happened to WW1 Landowners who died in battle:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmwsb9j4tWU&t=2s
How long in weeks was the life expectancy of a lieutenant on the Western Front?
From what I heard shorter than the regular soldier. How is that relevant to the Royals hovering up their land?
But, did they?
https://x.com/CilComLFC/status/1878137821443072396
And here is a perfect example of wokeism being put out by the Welsh government.
I think most here would consider this enticement. Doubtless for the ROPers this is aimed at it is surely just a permission notice for when the RNLI drops them off. So it really, really, really is NOT their fault.
Absolutely sickening.
And more fool us for not hanging the sons of birches
They’re taking the mickey.
Talking of wokeism, Arsenal are playing in all white today to show red a red card – or some shit like that. I don’t know what moron designed the shirts – Stevie Wonder perhaps – given that the shirt numbers are also white with the thinnest of black outlines. and the reason is to virtue signal about knife crime in London. Obviously missed the knighthood given to a man who has seen a huge growth in knife crime on his watch.
I think Casey is basically right. The parallels are undeniable.
It cn be bloody hard to see the way back from the destruction we have allowed to be wrought upon our magnificent civilization.
The rape gangs scandal may well come to be seen as a watershed moment – in one way or the other.
As a science student at the time, viewing Dr Jacob Bronowski’s landmark 1973 BBC series “The Ascent of Man” was a formative scientific experience.
The series began with primitive man’s first migration from Africa’s Rift Valley, and in a 13-episode tour de force went on to explain how science and technology had been so fundamental to Western civilisation.
In the final episode, Dr Bronowski concluded by stating that the ascendancy of Western civilisation could not be taken for granted. Prophetic words begin at around 36 minutes in:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0g1kpd9/the-ascent-of-man-13-the-long-childhood
The good Doctor’s last testimony to the future, he died the following year.
I’m amazed it has not been more widely denounced as racist. Probably helps that some of his family were apparently killed in Auschwitz.
I’m inclined to think you can’t judge the past by the mores of the present, verities tend to outlast the temporal and -isms can be in the eye of the beholder.
I’d always assumed the death of his family at Auschwitz to be as told in an earlier episode of the series.
I am certainly not judging him, just suggesting that it’s likely sooner or later that his probable neglect of the “achievements” of various races and focus on the achievements of White people will make him a Bad Person in the eyes of the madleft as one of our fellow posters calls them.
I have no idea whether the Auschwitz story is true or not, just saying it might have bought him some brownie points (I did find one commentator who posited that JB might be a racist but dismissed it because his family were victims of the holocaust – illogical bollocks but there you go).
Bollox is as bollox says and does.
Wokeism is dead as dead as the green agenda. It might not look that way yet but all it takes is a certain tightening of material well-being and all of this fancy thought disappears very rapidly. You quickly understand that the people that you need to value are the people who offer the best chance of survival.
I think the worm is turning but the war is not yet won.
We are at Alemein, not D Day.
“Before Alamein we never had a victory, after Alamein we never had a defeat.”
There was Operation Market Garden though.
It has gone. Spengler talked about this stage, home economicus. The bankers say inflate or die. That means lots of war because it is the greatest inflationary pressure. The West is now severely overstretched militarily. Sadly a school of thought has grown up in the last 25 years among the Anglo-Americans that a nuclear war is essentially winnable. They really believe it and they talk about it openly now. If this permanent bureaucracy isn’t somehow dislodged very quickly then only blind and mindless destruction can follow.
There was a British study in 1985 if I recall. which looked at the effect of a single nuclear weapon hitting the UK. It concluded that even if all the hospital beds were empty the health system would still be completely overwhelmed by such an event. And that was at a time when the NHS was healthier than it is now. I strongly disagree with this doctrine of escalation to nuclear as if it is just another step.
I do believe there were parts of East England that had radiation contamination from the Chernobyl accident.
There is a good documentary, I forget the name about a huge undergoround site in Finland where they try to bury all the nuclear waste products. You can put it in the ground or under the sea but you can’t undo the dark magic. Can any civilisation survive when it has developed tools that can blow itself to pieces. The idea the nukes will be left on the shelf forever. I would say no destruction is assured. Maybe then we rise up again, as Plato said of the post-Atlantean period, like children with no recollection of what went before.
We’re all doomed.
To underline what is happening, the corrupt legal system we have (refer to Paul Barret’s YouTube posts about Tommy Robinson for example) there are other examples, is another step towards the failure of our civilisation unless we can have legal proceedings accurately monitored and corrected when they go wrong.