Striving for Status May Limit Fertility
Want to get pregnant? Don't shop so much. Really. Competition for social status may be an important driver of lower fertility in the modern world, suggests a new study, as reported by newswise.com. "The areas were we see the greatest declines in fertility are areas with modern labor markets that have intense competition for jobs and an overwhelming diversity of consumer goods available to signal well-being and social status," says senior author Paul Hooper, an anthropologist at Emory University. "The fact that many countries today have so much social inequality - which makes status competition more intense - may be an important part of the explanation." Across the globe, from the United States to the United Kingdom to India, fertility has gone down as inequality and the cost of achieving social status has gone up. "Our model shows that as competition becomes more focused on social climbing, as opposed to just putting food on the table, pe...