This is a tremendous overview. Some points or observations I want to add:
1. I've seen several charts for English TFR in the early 19th century showing a peak around 1820, as opposed to around 1840 in Blanc's chart that you're citing. Blanc is more recent, so I suppose more reliable, but I'll just point out this difference and I'm not sure what the cause is.
I also recall evidence that early-industrializing Britain was an early adopter of modern sanitation practices and consequently began to see improvements in childhood mortality in the Victorian Era, down into the 30-40% range; the ~50% number remained stubbornly persistent even in most of Europe throughout the 1800s. This gave further gas to the British population explosion. Though IIRC the drop to ~0% throughout the industrialized world mainly occurred in the period 1900-1950 or so.
2. If we gloss over the hiccup around 1930, we might call the period 1910-2010 "The Century of 2-3 Western TFR". I think the fertility story of that century remains very *culturally* impactful; it's when the image was established of what a family in an industrial, urban society looks like, and this is why many leftists and normies struggle to update and recognize the reality of a fertility crash. The 2-3 TFR century encompasses, for example, virtually the entire history of film and television. The popular imagination says that 2 kids are normal, 3 kids are normal-plus, and while some people have 0-1 kids, they are generally going to be canceled out by those with 3 and the occasional weirdos with 4+, such that population continues to increase.
This was a good enough approximation of reality during that century if you average out the decades, but we're now clearly outside that paradigm.
Great article. Maybe it's tangential to your main points, but was the relative delay in stage 2 in the UK relative to France a function of being able to dump surplus population in the Americas, Australia and South Africa? Otherwise, wouldn't England have had tens of millions of indigents, and gone communist? (The obvious response is that Germany was even later with almost no colonies, but Germany started massively underpopulated after the 30 years war, and in the 19th century it was able to dump a lot of surplus population in the United States).
If Emmanuel Todd is to be believed, England would never go communist.
Todd noticed in the 1970s that the geographical distribution of communism almost exactly matched that of a particular family type, the exogamous communitarian family. This family type is patrilocal (adult sons live with their father), exogamous (cousin marriage incidence is under 5 percent), and rigidly equal in inheritance shares between sons. This family type is found from Eastern Europe through to China. (Off topic, Islam pretty much overlaps the endogamous communitarian family type. Much cousin marriage; clans are insular.)
The reasoning is that a cultural belief in equality (between brothers) is necessary for communism to take root, and this is absent in cultures where inheritance is not strictly equal. Trust in males not related to yourself is also required - endogamous societies lack this; exogamous cultures learn it by trading women between families. Finally, an ingrained cultural habit of deference to authority is also required. In patrilocal cultures the authority of the father is very strong. (You're living in his house.)
The UK is exogamous, but neolocal for the most part (aristocrats: "stem" family type; only the eldest son remains with the parents), and either ad-hoc or primogenitive in inheritance practice (either inheritance shares are at the testator's whim, or all real property is inherited by the eldest son). The UK culturally expects inequality and is sceptical of authority, as each son must make his own way in the world and is therefore his own master. As such it is not fertile ground for the ideology of communism.
Todd's chef d'ouvre is in French only, but several others of his books are in English. I have "Lineages of Modernity".
I think settlers and immigrants are more a product of the population explosion back home than they're a cause of it. The French left such a small impact in the New World partly because they didn't have the same pressures to emigrate. The only reason Quebec exists is that it achieved an extraordinarily high rate of natural increase from what was truly a tiny initial settler population. Otherwise, like Louisiana, it would have been swamped by the Anglos.
The English migration, while it made all the difference to North America, wasn't THAT demographically relevant to England proper. The vast majority of the colonies' population came from local natural increase, and the vast majority of English living at any one time didn't leave England.
The main thing that happened is France's population went from ~4x that of Britain in 1800 to parity with Britain in the 20th century, which persists to the present. The tens of millions of excess Englishmen already happened, and the overwhelming majority stayed in England.
On "the future is malleable": As best I can tell, you haven't had any techno-fantasist comments yet, blithering about IVF and artificial wombs and such shiny glass and chrome retrofuturism obviating the needs for partnering and even sex.
Maybe you have, and you've deleted them. But in case you haven't, let this comment stand in for one of those. Take all the starry-eyed blah blah boosterism for read.
Twenty million artificial wombs at 67% utilisation to maintain the population of the West without troubling the fair sex with morning sickness and episiotomies and prolapses and caesarians and all the other horrors of childbearing: take them as given, and taxpayer-funded or at least heavily subsidised.
This is where we find out: do people *really* want the number of children they claim to desire, in surveys?
What you're assuming here is that the pains and inconveniences of pregnancy are the largest contributor of the differential between desired and realized fertility. This isn't true. The largest single contributor is clearly and demonstrably the decline in the marriage rate, along with later marriages.
That's not to say there's no effect from pregnancy itself. A while back, I came up with a rough estimate on the effect on TFR if reliable artificial wombs existed, were free, and had zero stigma, by drilling down into some of the data. I came up with up to 0.2, best-case. Some women will be swayed, on the margin.
But another thing going on is that, even within couples, men are often the constraint on fertility, and in those cases fear of pregnancy is the deciding factor approximately 0% of the time. Because it takes two to tango and both partners hold a veto on having more children (unless one of them is insane and sabotages birth control), realized fertility will ALWAYS be below desired fertility, even in a world where everyone got married at puberty and biological fertility problems didn't exist.
Until IIRC Gen Z, men were MORE likely to be the constraint exercising the veto. Gen Z flipped this because it's made fear of pregnancy and childbirth into a meme. Though, again, in practice this still means men will be the constraint in many individual cases.
Rather than rely on technology that doesn't exist, we'd have better luck just trying to reverse the damage of anti-natal memes with widespread pro-natal and pro-marriage cultural programming, including building deference to married people and children into many of our laws and institutions. Which might be hard, the left will resist it, but I imagine it would also resist paying for 20 million artificial wombs.
Yes, I was implicitly responding to a few essays I read recently that made the claim that the trauma of childbearing was the main, or a main reason for the decline in fertility. I didn't make that clear, and I also didn't bookmark those essays so I can find them again. My bad.
Feminism should be called masculinism. Feminism would be agitating for crèches in every indoor workplace, so that people can take care of their children during the working day.
Got it -- I misunderstood. I used to get in more of those arguments, which is when I went through the trouble of breaking down the numbers on desired vs. realized fertility. I don't have the details at the ready anymore because I haven't heard as many of these arguments lately.
Question. Since rising wages and status for young men played a role in earlier marriage and martial fidelity for the Baby Boom, why did the end of rising wages and falling status for young men not have the opposite effect. Welfare payments have always been a fraction of the income a gainfully employed husband could provide. But when gainfully employed young men became scarce after around 1970 marriage wasn't an option.
From wikipedia: "Resistance proceeded during the mid-1900s and in 1977, a nationwide Childhood Immunization Initiative was developed with the goal of increasing vaccination rates among children to 90% by 1979. During the 2-year period of observation, the initiative reviewed the immunization records of more than 28 million children and vaccinated children who hadn't received the recommended vaccines"
If what this implies were true, you'd expect unvaccinated people to have a measurably lower fertility. Reading through a few of the most popular articles analyzing this, there's no correlation between vaccinated status and fertility: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9464596/
Unfortunately it's almost impossible to find studies from pre-Covid, since there's been so many more heavily cited studies more recently, which opens the question of long-term effects, but the evidence I could find indicates there's no measurable link.
The cratering of Japanese fertility might be associated with the sudden introduction of pensions in 1942 and 1960. Pensions also reduce fertility by transforming people’s retirement plans from a family- to a government-oriented approach.
Fantastic summary. The Spanish graph blew my mind.
I have one question though, what about political persuasion and fertility? I am only seeing the conservative religious, nazis and big-noses having children.
Arctotherium has the clearest analysis of historical demographic and fertility trends and their causes of anyone I've read.
This is a tremendous overview. Some points or observations I want to add:
1. I've seen several charts for English TFR in the early 19th century showing a peak around 1820, as opposed to around 1840 in Blanc's chart that you're citing. Blanc is more recent, so I suppose more reliable, but I'll just point out this difference and I'm not sure what the cause is.
I also recall evidence that early-industrializing Britain was an early adopter of modern sanitation practices and consequently began to see improvements in childhood mortality in the Victorian Era, down into the 30-40% range; the ~50% number remained stubbornly persistent even in most of Europe throughout the 1800s. This gave further gas to the British population explosion. Though IIRC the drop to ~0% throughout the industrialized world mainly occurred in the period 1900-1950 or so.
2. If we gloss over the hiccup around 1930, we might call the period 1910-2010 "The Century of 2-3 Western TFR". I think the fertility story of that century remains very *culturally* impactful; it's when the image was established of what a family in an industrial, urban society looks like, and this is why many leftists and normies struggle to update and recognize the reality of a fertility crash. The 2-3 TFR century encompasses, for example, virtually the entire history of film and television. The popular imagination says that 2 kids are normal, 3 kids are normal-plus, and while some people have 0-1 kids, they are generally going to be canceled out by those with 3 and the occasional weirdos with 4+, such that population continues to increase.
This was a good enough approximation of reality during that century if you average out the decades, but we're now clearly outside that paradigm.
Great article. Maybe it's tangential to your main points, but was the relative delay in stage 2 in the UK relative to France a function of being able to dump surplus population in the Americas, Australia and South Africa? Otherwise, wouldn't England have had tens of millions of indigents, and gone communist? (The obvious response is that Germany was even later with almost no colonies, but Germany started massively underpopulated after the 30 years war, and in the 19th century it was able to dump a lot of surplus population in the United States).
If Emmanuel Todd is to be believed, England would never go communist.
Todd noticed in the 1970s that the geographical distribution of communism almost exactly matched that of a particular family type, the exogamous communitarian family. This family type is patrilocal (adult sons live with their father), exogamous (cousin marriage incidence is under 5 percent), and rigidly equal in inheritance shares between sons. This family type is found from Eastern Europe through to China. (Off topic, Islam pretty much overlaps the endogamous communitarian family type. Much cousin marriage; clans are insular.)
The reasoning is that a cultural belief in equality (between brothers) is necessary for communism to take root, and this is absent in cultures where inheritance is not strictly equal. Trust in males not related to yourself is also required - endogamous societies lack this; exogamous cultures learn it by trading women between families. Finally, an ingrained cultural habit of deference to authority is also required. In patrilocal cultures the authority of the father is very strong. (You're living in his house.)
The UK is exogamous, but neolocal for the most part (aristocrats: "stem" family type; only the eldest son remains with the parents), and either ad-hoc or primogenitive in inheritance practice (either inheritance shares are at the testator's whim, or all real property is inherited by the eldest son). The UK culturally expects inequality and is sceptical of authority, as each son must make his own way in the world and is therefore his own master. As such it is not fertile ground for the ideology of communism.
Todd's chef d'ouvre is in French only, but several others of his books are in English. I have "Lineages of Modernity".
OK, not communist, but undergoing some form of extreme political stability, as did basically every other European country in this period.
I think settlers and immigrants are more a product of the population explosion back home than they're a cause of it. The French left such a small impact in the New World partly because they didn't have the same pressures to emigrate. The only reason Quebec exists is that it achieved an extraordinarily high rate of natural increase from what was truly a tiny initial settler population. Otherwise, like Louisiana, it would have been swamped by the Anglos.
The English migration, while it made all the difference to North America, wasn't THAT demographically relevant to England proper. The vast majority of the colonies' population came from local natural increase, and the vast majority of English living at any one time didn't leave England.
The main thing that happened is France's population went from ~4x that of Britain in 1800 to parity with Britain in the 20th century, which persists to the present. The tens of millions of excess Englishmen already happened, and the overwhelming majority stayed in England.
When the Greeks were having their demographic explosion they colonized the whole world too. Same with the Roman’s.
Thank you for all this work.
On "the future is malleable": As best I can tell, you haven't had any techno-fantasist comments yet, blithering about IVF and artificial wombs and such shiny glass and chrome retrofuturism obviating the needs for partnering and even sex.
Maybe you have, and you've deleted them. But in case you haven't, let this comment stand in for one of those. Take all the starry-eyed blah blah boosterism for read.
Twenty million artificial wombs at 67% utilisation to maintain the population of the West without troubling the fair sex with morning sickness and episiotomies and prolapses and caesarians and all the other horrors of childbearing: take them as given, and taxpayer-funded or at least heavily subsidised.
This is where we find out: do people *really* want the number of children they claim to desire, in surveys?
My guess is no.
What you're assuming here is that the pains and inconveniences of pregnancy are the largest contributor of the differential between desired and realized fertility. This isn't true. The largest single contributor is clearly and demonstrably the decline in the marriage rate, along with later marriages.
That's not to say there's no effect from pregnancy itself. A while back, I came up with a rough estimate on the effect on TFR if reliable artificial wombs existed, were free, and had zero stigma, by drilling down into some of the data. I came up with up to 0.2, best-case. Some women will be swayed, on the margin.
But another thing going on is that, even within couples, men are often the constraint on fertility, and in those cases fear of pregnancy is the deciding factor approximately 0% of the time. Because it takes two to tango and both partners hold a veto on having more children (unless one of them is insane and sabotages birth control), realized fertility will ALWAYS be below desired fertility, even in a world where everyone got married at puberty and biological fertility problems didn't exist.
Until IIRC Gen Z, men were MORE likely to be the constraint exercising the veto. Gen Z flipped this because it's made fear of pregnancy and childbirth into a meme. Though, again, in practice this still means men will be the constraint in many individual cases.
Rather than rely on technology that doesn't exist, we'd have better luck just trying to reverse the damage of anti-natal memes with widespread pro-natal and pro-marriage cultural programming, including building deference to married people and children into many of our laws and institutions. Which might be hard, the left will resist it, but I imagine it would also resist paying for 20 million artificial wombs.
Yes, I was implicitly responding to a few essays I read recently that made the claim that the trauma of childbearing was the main, or a main reason for the decline in fertility. I didn't make that clear, and I also didn't bookmark those essays so I can find them again. My bad.
Feminism should be called masculinism. Feminism would be agitating for crèches in every indoor workplace, so that people can take care of their children during the working day.
Got it -- I misunderstood. I used to get in more of those arguments, which is when I went through the trouble of breaking down the numbers on desired vs. realized fertility. I don't have the details at the ready anymore because I haven't heard as many of these arguments lately.
The cost of child rearing vastly exceeds the costs of pregnancy.
Question. Since rising wages and status for young men played a role in earlier marriage and martial fidelity for the Baby Boom, why did the end of rising wages and falling status for young men not have the opposite effect. Welfare payments have always been a fraction of the income a gainfully employed husband could provide. But when gainfully employed young men became scarce after around 1970 marriage wasn't an option.
I Had no idea you had a substack
the 'unplanned' crusade and LARK/IUD boom pushed by OPA TitleX, UNPFA, ect seems a more direct explanation for post 2012 declines.
ex very Influential trial program in Colorado 2008-12 https://cdphe.colorado.gov/fpp/about-us/colorados-success-long-acting-reversible-contraception-larc
> The Colorado Family Planning Initiative helped cut
the fertility rate nearly in half for women aged
15-19 and by 20 percent for women aged 20-24.
> An estimated half to two-thirds of the decline in
the number of births to women aged 15-24 between
2009 and 2014 can be attributed to the Colorado
Family Planning Initiative,...
> They have provided a model for
comprehensive family planning services that can
improve the health and well-being of women across
the nation.
> with more public and private health insurance coverage under the
Affordable Care Act and new state funding...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bfk7CS8I5W92iCS0g8_COTBmi8a-JxZ4/view
https://stateline.org/2015/02/12/a-pregnancy-prevention-breakthrough/
Great overview. Very useful.
>ctrl+f: Vaccine
>0 results
From wikipedia: "Resistance proceeded during the mid-1900s and in 1977, a nationwide Childhood Immunization Initiative was developed with the goal of increasing vaccination rates among children to 90% by 1979. During the 2-year period of observation, the initiative reviewed the immunization records of more than 28 million children and vaccinated children who hadn't received the recommended vaccines"
Just sayin.
If what this implies were true, you'd expect unvaccinated people to have a measurably lower fertility. Reading through a few of the most popular articles analyzing this, there's no correlation between vaccinated status and fertility: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9464596/
Unfortunately it's almost impossible to find studies from pre-Covid, since there's been so many more heavily cited studies more recently, which opens the question of long-term effects, but the evidence I could find indicates there's no measurable link.
The cratering of Japanese fertility might be associated with the sudden introduction of pensions in 1942 and 1960. Pensions also reduce fertility by transforming people’s retirement plans from a family- to a government-oriented approach.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2493127
Fantastic summary. The Spanish graph blew my mind.
I have one question though, what about political persuasion and fertility? I am only seeing the conservative religious, nazis and big-noses having children.
Political and/or religious extremism correlate with higher fertility IIRC