The Obvious-Once-You-Think-About-It Reason Why Education Cuts Fertility
As education goes up, fertility goes down. This rule works within countries: High-education individuals have fewer kids than low-education individuals. This rule works across countries: High-education nations have fewer kids than low-education nations.
Controlling for possible confounding variables does little to undermine the statistical strength of this negative relationship. In U.S. data, controlling for income makes the negative relationship between education and fertility stronger. Quasi-experimental estimates usually reinforce the common sense conclusion: Getting more education causes your fertility to fall.
What, though, is the mechanism? Economists routinely state with great confidence that education reduces fertility because it raises the opportunity cost of having kids. The more education you have, the higher your income; the higher your income, the more income to lose when you work less to care for another child. But even in terms of pure economic theory, this is a weak argument. Sure, education raises the cost of having kids; but education also gives you the income to more easily afford that cost. Yes, there’s an income effect as well as a substitution effect! Any economist convinced that education has to reduce fertility should also believe that education has to reduce the number of massages you get. After all, massages take time away from work, too.
Sociologists have a considerably better story: Education changes students’ values. Never mind rare heavy-handed propaganda about overpopulation. Education dethrones fertility via emphasis. Telling kids that academic and career success should be their top priority implicitly says, “And having kids should be a lower priority.” Not teaching religion and traditional values implicitly says, “Religion and traditional values aren’t very important.” And so on.
