“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas


Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Do economics dictate reproduction?


From FoxBusiness -- Author Nicole Knepper argues that the current economic situation has made many families rethink the decision to have children.

If only that were true. Why is it that the number of offspring trends inversely with the size of the family income? Is it a subconscious, evolutionary thing where the more tenuous and uncertain your circumstances are, the more offspring you tend to have to ensure the propagation of your genes? Or is it simply cultural that people in poor civilizations tend to have more kids because there's nothing else to do and because they don't receive personal validation from any other aspect of life?

People in known economic circumstances generally make calculated decisions about whether they can afford another kid, but less well off parents generally have way more than they can afford. In the animal kingdom, the lower you are in the food chain, the more offspring you have. Fish, mosquitoes, mice, etc, have hundreds or thousands of offspring in their lifetimes because they know that most will die or be eaten, while elephants, Lions, and humans which are at the top of the food chain, have a few or even one offspring over a lifetime and invest virtually all their resources to the rearing of that offspring to guarantee its survival.

Without casually diminishing the value of any human with respect to another, is it possible that generationally bad economic circumstances trigger an inherent, evolutionary tendency to over-reproduce?

11 comments:

Bill said...

I think the main determinate over time periods of decades is infant and child mortality. It takes people a while to figure out that children will survive.

Go to any old cemetery and check out the graves of children. You had 6 hoping 3, maybe 4 would live.

Anonymous said...

I think infant mortality in humans is the same way of saying a mosquito mother knows at a genetic level that most of her offspring will be eaten so she has thousands of offspring to ensure the propogation of the species.

Ed said...

That comment was mine, I pushed the wrong button.

Bill said...

Yeah, but the mosquito doesn't care - is not even alive anymore.

ryan said...

I could see one economic plus to someone who's poor having a bunch of kids. If the parents have no savings or not enough, they can (hopefully for them) rely on their children to support them in their old age. The more kids, seems to me the more spread out the financial load is. My Great Grandmother had 13 kids. 12 survived past 40 and are now all paying to make sure she has a comfortable life. At 87, she has a car (still drives) they bought her, an apartment in an "assisted living community", and the ability to bounce around from one of her kids houses to another at will.

Ed said...

Now that's some long-term thinking.

Bill said...

Before pensions and social security programs, this was the "retirement plan." Worked for millenia.

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