It was not just an increase in food that saved us from Malthus’s nightmares, but also lower fertility. As people became richer and better educated, they had fewer children, not more, as had been predicted. US fertility rates plummeted from seven children per woman in 1800 to 3.8 children in 1900, and to 1.9 children in 2012 – below the replacement rate. The trend is the same all over the Western world.22 It seems that, when child health improved, parents could assume that their offspring would survive to adulthood, and as human capital increased in value, economically it made more sense to
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