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by JumpCrisscross
502 days ago
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> Do you have any evidence that wealthier men have more babies? Broadly, yes--wealthy people have more kids than poor people [1]. The confounding variable is market opportunity: when opportunity is high, the opportunity cost of kids goes up, which causes wealthier people to have fewer kids. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10427476/ |
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The study cites a dozen or so papers saying:
> Within contemporary Western populations, wealthier, higher status men tend to have lower fertility. In low and middle-income countries where populations are at different stages of this transition, women in wealthier households have fewer children on average. Over the course of the fertility transition, wealthier families also reduce their fertility earlier and more dramatically than the rest of the population.
They then essentially do a big regression analysis to say that if you take your material wealth and your education together, which they call your market opportunity, there is a strong negative relationship between that and fertility. Then if you take that same material wealth and your agricultural wealth together, there is a weaker positive relationship between that and fertility. So basically agricultural wealth (land and livestock) may be weakly correlated with having more kids, but other kinds of wealth aren't.
(And that's ignoring the fact that the chi-squared analysis said that their model was a poor fit anyway, but they hand-wave that away by saying that that's probably just because they had too much data.)
Finally, and importantly, the original statement by GP was that there was a sexual selection that favoring rich men. That is, that rich men would be selected by women and have more children. This study does not address that at all, as it measures household wealth, household education and number of children per woman, not per man.