Why does higher literacy rates correspond to lower birth rates?

Question

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

Answer 1

It’s not that *literate* people are less likely to have kids.

It’s that populations with a higher rate of literacy… also tend to have a higher level of development – better medical care, better education, more industries and jobs concentrated on advanced technologies.

If you look at how a country developed in time you can see why this is a trend.

A country starting out a few hundred years ago that was based on agriculture (farming and harvesting) had a lower quality of health care, which meant people were more likely to die. Also, having more children was an asset, a positive thing, because they could help contribute to the work on the farm. But you were also more likely to have even *more* kids than that because you kind of anticipated that at least a few or more would die from disease.

Then medicine started getting better, and technology started getting better. People started moving to the city and the mortality rate for children started to drop. But this was a transitional period so people were still poppin’ kids out.

Then finally a *lot* of people settled in the city, and having kids became a *liability*, a burden, because… well, your 14 year old kid isn’t going to be helping you compile and file financial reports for your job at Goldman-Sachs. And you could feel comfortable having just one or two kids because with modern medicine you have a really strong guarantee that they are gonna be healthy and survive through adulthood.

Now, there are still a lot of countries that are developing around the world and unfortunately do not have access to the same level of medicine that other countries have, and they still rely on very manual farming and fishing jobs for survival. So they’re in that early stage still.