The cost of children

摘要

Now that my own children are teenagers and I work in a university in a large city, I can go for weeks without properly interacting with a child. This miserable and unnatural state of being is in part because the society I live in is WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic)1. But the dramatic and near-universal decline in birth rate and family size that has been one of the most pervasive social changes of the past two centuries, and that continues apace around the world, means that my situation is far from unusual. The question of why fewer babies are being born gets to the heart of what matters to us in life: do we value money, or prestige, or is it reproductive success? Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Shenk et al.2 attempt to disentangle the relative importance of three main classes of influence - risk and mortality, economic and investment, and cultural transmission - on fertility.