On average most woman want two children. But when a lot of them die they will get more (average of 6 around 1800).
The combination of enough food, education and good health care are why less babies are born.
So if you live in a country with good education but lack of food most women will still have more babies than two.
I don't believe that's true across cultures. Even in North America you've got social groups and organizations that are continuing to make babies like crazy.
The number 2 comes from the current world wide trend. In developed countries the fertility rate tumbles down but stops at around 2. So it is believed this is the average bottom.
Maybe you like this talk from Hans Rosling: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies
See Hans Rosling's talk on this [1] or see it yourself in data [2]. As soon as education, medicine, economic situation improves, you get a drop to ~2 children per woman across all cultures.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies
[2] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
Most likely answer, religion. Successful religions grow one of two ways, and generally have encodings for both. That is they tend to have means to convert the non-religious, and secondly, and importantly in this case, have 'strong' rules on having kids. For example, in the old testament Onan was killed for 'spilling his seed' and not impregnating his dead brothers wife.
That said, even in ancient times it appeared that birthrates did go down, as in Greces case, their city state succeeded. This left them open from attack and cultural take over by outside nations and ideals with higher birthrates.
In the modern world we are coming to the point where human labor is not as necessary and has been supplanted by machine labor. Also machine protection, in our weapons of war. This could allow a nation/culture to shrink dramatically while still being able to defend against outside threats. If such a shrinking culture were one that 'grew' by spreading its message to other cultures it may succede to grow and shrink the entire worlds population at the same time. These ideas of disappearing utopia cultures are often touched by science fiction.
"Many more". Israel: 3.11 (down from 4 in 1960s), Faroe Islands: 2.6 (down from 3.2 in 1970s).
Compare to Niger: 7.24.
And especially compare to muslim countries which just love having kids, don't they? Oh, look dropping from 8 kids per woman to around 2 for most of them (some are understandably lagging behind, like Yemen, Iraq, Gaza)
> That seems to indicate that 2 is not in fact a magic number at all.
I said ~2 kids, i.e. about two kids, not exactly 2 kids. There's nothing magic about this number, it's sub-replacement fertility [1]. 2.1 for developed countries, 3.4 for some developing countries. Yes, some nations will dip below 2, can't see how that disproves my words. Neither culture nor religion have anything to do with it. Give people quality of life, education, access to modern medicine, and they stop having 8 kids per woman, and quickly dip to about replacement fertility rates.
> On average most woman want two children. But when a lot of them die they will get more (average of 6 around 1800).
and that doesn't seem to be the case.
And you said that culture had nothing to do with it, but clearly the variation in the birth rates (50% to 150% of the ~2) in countries with roughly the same standard of living is due to something.
Once again. Slowly.
As people gain access to medicine and education, and as quality of life increased, traditions and religion fly out of the window. Even deeply religious countries like the Gulf states go from 7-8 kids per woman to roughly 2 kids per woman.
These factors trump any other factor in determining how many kids a woman will have.
Once the countries get on more or less the same level in terms of these factors, only then will you see variations due to other things like culture, religion, what not.
Israel is 1.5 times more than other developed countries (and the difference is slowly but surely dropping)? So? Niger is almost 4 times more than other countries.
Medicine, education, quality of life. These three universally affect rates regardless of tradition, religion or what not.
A robust pension or welfare scheme makes it less mandatory. Some might want to go with six kids, others are content with zero or or one or two just to carry on a family line in at least a token way.
Citation needed, especially since we are talking about much different cultures.
Use slider at the bottom to vary time.
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2018;&mar...
Had the price (not just monetary) of having child be different, the decisions quite easily can be different.
It's likely because it's not actually about education, but about social hierarchy of women. And education may or may not move them up the ladder in each particular hierarchy. Having children usually does though. But it's still a hierarchy and it can be influenced.
China's current investment into Africa at this time may eventually bring the economic stability to many of these area. That said I'm not sure I'd want China enforcing my long term cultural stability.
* DPR Congo. By most accounts a failed state, although some would rather call it a violent kleptocracy[1] on account of the very successful exploitation of resources by the ruling elite.
* Gabon. Very underpopulated and underdeveloped given its size. It's not necessarily a poor country in terms of natural resources, but their massive debt and so-so management of resources and spending basically keep the population poor but healthy and well fed. In the case of Gabon, infant mortality rate is not that high (compared to neighbouring countries which almost double theirs) so I wouldn't take /u/pasta's suggestion that infant mortality or access to food has anything to do with the high fertility rate per mother. I would say that in Gabon it's simply the opposite: infant mortality rates have really dropped whilst traditional roles are still in place. There's also no pressure to have fewer babies as women (and men) don't and can't have much higher aspirations, economically and socially.
* Niger. Okay, literally one of the worlds most impoverished countries.
* The Gambia, perhaps the one I can't quite narrow down a reason for. I've been to Gambia on a few occasions, and I'd say that whilst it's still a very poor country (relying mostly on tourism, which isn't much, and agriculture -- not much land for it), it always felt quite safe. I would say the main reason for Gambia's high birth rate would be education and poverty. Most people still live in poverty and education is still not at desirable levels. In fact, the main reason I've visited the country was to volunteer with some non-profits involved in education.
I've also noticed that a few countries are not in that graph, for instance Ghana and Nigeria, two west-african powerhouses. I'd be curious to see what the line would look like for Ghana as this is one of the success stories of west africa. Extreme poverty has dropped to under 30% (from almost 60%) in two decades and it's one of my favourite destinations in west africa. Unfortunately, I couldn't find figures for female average mean schooling years to compare with their birth rate and infant mortality rate.
I do agree that there has to be a bigger picture here. I believe that the more choice an individual has, the fewer children. Economically successful countries will tend to have fewer children, depending on how their social structure supports them in raising the children. If it's something that may put a halt on your career aspirations, you'll probably delay having children or not have at all.
1. http://time.com/4545223/why-you-cant-call-congo-a-failed-sta...
This graphs shows it
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attain...
For some countries like India or China, the effect is very strong. Just a few years of education drastically reduce the number of children, but for other countries like Uganda or Zambia the effect is much smaller. The original source where I first heard this (which I sadly can't find again) claimed this was due women wanting almost as many children as men in these countries.