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Part of this was custom, but part of it was rational economic thinking. A fa
ther owned land or had the right to farm it. His child needed to have access
to the land to live, so the father could dictate policy.
As children brought families prosperity and retirement income, the ma
jor responsibility of women was to produce as many children as possible. If
women had children, and if they both survived childbirth, the family as a
whole was better off. This was a matter of luck, but it was a chance worth
taking from the standpoint of both families and the men who dominated
them. Between lust and greed, there was little reason not to bring more chil
dren into the world.
Habits are hard to change. When families began moving into cities en
masse, children were still valuable assets. Parents could send them to work
in primitive factories at the age of six and collect their pay. In early indus
trial society factory workers didn’t need many more skills than farm laborers
did. But as factories became more complex, they had less use for six-year
olds. Soon they needed somewhat educated workers. Later they needed
managers with MBAs.
As the sophistication of industry advanced, the economic value of chil
dren declined. In order to continue being economically useful, children had
to go to school to learn. Rather than adding to family income, they con
sumed family income. Children had to be clothed, fed, and sheltered, and
over time the amount of education they needed increased dramatically, un
til today many “children” go to school until their mid- twenties and still have
not earned a dime. According to the United Nations, the average number of
years of schooling in the leading twenty- five countries in the world ranges
from fifteen to seventeen.
The tendency to have as many babies as possible continued into the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of our grandparents or
great- grandparents come from families that had ten children. A couple of
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t h e n e x t 1 0 0 y e a r s
generations before, you’d be lucky if three out of ten children survived. Now
they were almost all surviving. However, in the economy of 1900, they
could all head out and find work by the time they reached puberty. And
that’s what most of them did.
Ten children in eighteenth- century France might have been a godsend.
Ten children in late-nineteenth-century France might have been a burden. Ten
children in late-twentieth-century France would be a catastrophe. It took a
while for reality to sink in, but eventually it became clear that most children
wouldn’t die and that children were extremely expensive to raise. Therefore,
people started having a lot fewer children, and had those children more for
the pleasure of having them than for economic benefits. Medical advances
such as birth control helped achieve this, but the sheer cost of having and
raising children drove the decline in birthrates. Children went from being
producers of wealth to the most conspicuous form of consumption. Parents
began satisfying their need for nurturing with one child, rather than ten.
Now let’s consider life expectancy. After all, the longer people live, the
more people there will be at any given time. Life expectancy surged at the
same time that infant mortality declined. In 1800, estimated life expectancy
in Europe and the United States was about forty years. In 2000 it was close
to eighty years. Life expectancy has, in effect, doubled over the last two hun
dred years.
Continued growth in life expectancy is probable, but very few people
anticipate another doubling. In the advanced industrial world, the UN
projects a growth from seventy- six years in 2000 to eighty- two years in
2050. In the poorest countries it will increase from fifty- one to sixty- six.
While this is growth, it is not geometric growth and it, too, is tapering off.
This will also help reduce population growth.
The reduction process that took place decades ago in the advanced in
dustrial world is now under way in the least developed countries. Having
ten children in São Paolo is the surest path to economic suicide. It may take
several generations to break the habit, but it will be broken. And it won’t re
turn while the process of educating a child for the modern workforce con
tinues to become longer and costlier. Between declining birthrates and
slowing increases in life expectancy, population growth has to end.
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p o p u l a t i o n , c o m p u t e r s , a n d c u lt u r e wa r s
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