Reply to the discussion of our paper ‘Explanations of the fertility crisis in modern societies: A search for commonalities’

Abstract

Billari Frejka and Macura broadly endorse our paper while adding valuable supplementary and complementary material. We concur with most of the regional and technical elaborations they propose. However we take issue with some of the points raised by van de Kaa and Hobcraft most of which refer to our penultimate paragraph. Before turning to these we will review some general observations that have underlain our thinking. We assume that no one regards the Western demographic transition over the last century or two as being independent of the Industrial Revolution as being something that would have happened if incomes had stayed at eighteenth-century levels. Similarly it is difficult for us to imagine that rising incomes in the second half of the twentieth century did not facilitate a culture of sexual liberalization easy divorce and family reconstitution. Yet Aries’ two brilliant contributions barely mention economic and material changes. The same is true to a substantial degree of much writing about the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) and is certainly the case in van de Kaa’s contribution to this discussion. Our critics also understate the importance of the 1960s breakthrough in contraceptive technology and ignore the importance of the change of attitudes to high fertility (or any fertility) which came with the identification of the global ‘population explosion’ and that was to be reinforced by the environmental movement. Van de Kaa is baffled by our statement that the world demographic transition involves a movement to the position where children are of no immediate value to their parents. In fact children have been of value for most of human history and still are in many populations but not in the modern West. (excerpt)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.