I understand that the more educated people are more aware of the responsibilities and risks of having children and they use protection more etc. but why is it ALWAYS that more literate and rich populations have lower birth rates? At one point, shouldn’t the literate and able people have children to contribute to the future of their countries?
In: Other
Basically:
Higher literacy -> better development -> better healthcare system -> less need to have more children as they are all highly likely to get into adulthood -> lower birth rates
they have it backwards. people who have the mindset, drive, effort, and responsibility to become ‘rich and literate’ are the same people who realize raising a kid is a huge investment of time and money and try to wait until they can actually afford it before doing it carelessly. Sure there are a lot of spoiled rich kids who don’t think it matters..but eventually the trust fund runs out.
James Nicoll may have explained it best:
> “Until recently baby production was largely dependent on slave labour; as soon as women are allowed to answer the question “Would you like to squeeze as many objects the size of a watermelon out of your body as it takes to kill you?” they generally answer “No, thank you.” This leads to falling birthrates everywhere women are not kept enslaved and ignorant of the alternatives.”
–Dave, literacy for everyone USUALLY leads to literacy and lack of ignorance for many women
Having a high literacy basically means that area of society cares about making sure that it’s population is educated.
This has a lot of other implications/correlations. Usually areas that care enough about their population’s literacy will care about taking care of the population in general compared to places that don’t care about literacy, leading to a higher quality of life.
People who are educated are more likely to make informed decisions.
Aka having a kid becomes more than just someone telling you “it’s fun, I did it, you should do it” or a side effect of sex.
People who are educated know how babies are made and can actively choose to not do the thing that makes babies.
People who are educated usually come from higher income areas so they can afford birth control and abortions more often than lower income areas can.
People who are educated are more likely to know that having kids takes time and money and choose to wait it have less kids to ensure each child gets a certain amount of time/money. They also know that if they don’t want to have kids, they don’t have to have kids.
People who are educated most likely can take care of themselves and chances are they will not have to rely on their children on the future, another side of that is cultures where farming or labor is necessary, too much time is spent doing the labor so there is no point in going to school because you don’t have time. Some of those people will have more kids to have more workers.
Going back to the topic of an area caring about it’s population’s well being and quality of life, if you take good care of your kid and have good medical care and such your kid is pretty much guaranteed to make it to adulthood. In other, less fortunate places, infant/child mortality rate is insanely high, mostly due to diseases and lack of adequate medical care. People in these areas will have more kids just hoping a decent amount of them will actually make it to adulthood.
Tl;dr, people who are literate are most likely educated, which has a lot of implications, like access to birth control and family planning/education and low infant mortality rates means it’s more guaranteed your child will make it to adulthood so there is not really a need to have a bunch of kids to hope some make it. The higher rate of literacy, the higher level of medical care (usually).
I learnt this in AP Human Geography. As Literacy rates become higher, woman and men both are generally gearing towards studying more and getting better jobs. Since Women want to finish their education, they push back getting married and having children, to where they might marry, but not have kids. It is related to the stages of demographic growth.
1. Nerds read books.
2. Nerds don’t get girls.
3. ???
4. Profit.
One thing that you’ve got to remember when discussing ‘the future of the country’ in terms of having kids is that in an advanced capitalist country, there are only a few successful people, so the need to provide lots of kids isn’t there. Especially because of globalisation, the labour is outsourced to other countries, and so lots of people aren’t really needed any more to keep the country running (they rely instead on other countries having lots of people)
nah you assume wrong
simply nerds get laid less and thats the end
also nerds tend to be usually ugly so thats it too , they go for carieer cuz they failed with love early on
Me having one kid over having no kids will contribute statistically nothing to the future population.
This is a [highly studied](https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-education-and-its-impact-on-fertility.pdf) issue, and there is a lot of literature on it. As with many social science questions, there are [multiple factors](https://blogs.worldbank.org/health/female-education-and-childbearing-closer-look-data) in play. However, the main ones seem to be that as girls and women gain more social and economic opportunities through education, they tend to seek to have fewer children. But there are also other factors, such as better information about reproductive health and birth control, and better negotiation strength with their husbands.
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