I think there is something in this. I grew up in a very wealthy NYC suburb, and having children in one’s 20s was just not done. When I moved to a southern city in my 20s, I was shocked at how many women my age had children and I couldn’t shake the feeling that what they were doing was somehow quite trashy - even though they were all middle class married women. It wasn’t until I was visiting my hometown and realized you seldom saw a woman under 35 with a small child that I realized I had absorbed the norm that “having a child in your 20s is for low class people”. Similarly, having more than two children (unless triplets) was also seen as rather déclassé...when I was pregnant with my 3rd, rather than congratulations I got some ribbing about “so, when will you be moving to a trailer park?”
I’m not sure if the 2-child or less thing is due to the enormous amounts of parental investment involved in raising an upper-middle-class child; or if it is a side effect of delaying motherhood to 35 or older with the associated fertility issues and need for expensive fertility treatments.
Your last paragraph -- the former. Re: your observations from your wealthy NYC suburb. Agree. Today, any 22 year old with an infant is obviously the babysitter, wherease in prior eras, 22 was the onset of peak fertility.
How do you tease all this out from some more obvious facts, namely: the widespread availability of cheap and reliable contraception, thus decoupling the pleasure of sex from childbearing, and the extension of education and full human rights to women resulting in their full entrance into the commercial work force? For most of human history, and still for all of the rest mammalian history, producing offspring was the natural consequence of pursuing sexual desire. Now it is a conscious choice.
The idea is that lower fertility rates for the rich are historical, not just recent. In previous posts, Robin outlined evidence from the distant past about fertility decline amongst nobility in different societies. Even this entry's anecdote comes from 1862 -- well before modern contraception and women's entrance into the workforce.
Can you be specific about this evidence? It seems counterintuitive that e.g. Victorian upper-class families would have fewer surviving children than Victorian lower-class families.
If you're admitting this entry's (fictional) anecdote as evidence, then here's a couple more: Lewis Carroll was from an upper class family and had 10 siblings. William Gladstone had eight children. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_of_the_Victorian_era and click on some of the famous, important people: where number of siblings are listed, most of them had many. https://www.victorians.co.uk/rich-victorians says upper and middle class Victorians would have 4-6 children typically. In addition to that, Victorian upper-class men might be more likely to have children out of wedlock, e.g. with servants.
High status men having bastards is fairly irrelevant (unless they tend to invest heavily in bastards or even bequeath them a portion of the inherentance
Bastards are pretty relevant to the reproductive success of the upper-class men, regardless of how much support was given to them.
If rich men have many bastards, that means that risky and costly behaviors to become rich are more selected for, genetically. It also means behaviors that result in bastards are more selected for - libido, sociopathy.
Yes, but genes are affected by it. You have a population full of descendants of rich men who slept around and abused their power over their servants. Those traits are to some degree heritable.
Also, I guess I don't understand why any explanation is needed. I mean let's just take the simple model where people have kids when benefits (including emotional and getting to fuck in absence of birth control) exceed costs. Now postulate that the emotional satisfaction of raising additional children falls off pretty quickly (it's not that much more satisfying to raise the 4th as it is to go from 1 to 2).
That predicts that in a world with effective birth control, high child survival rates and with both parents pursue careers (meaning that having more kids imposes costs in terms of career) there would be a strong pull towards few kids. Amplified if people tend to mimic peers.
But why wouldn't such desires have undergone strong negative selection effects? Well on this model anything short of generic change to directly desire more kids is fighting against the current and such a genetic change takes time under selection and until this most recent generation there has essentially always been one of those factors above to screen us from the effect x
Just an anecdotal note. I live in Finland and have been following The Ukrainan war a bit. Before the war a russian thintank called The izbrosky club,which is close to Kremlin, suggested that Russia should abandon western style of Capitalism because it would lead to destruction of country via collapsing population.
Why do we need this theory, though? Higher income people have a higher opportunity cost in having kids and hence tend to have fewer. What more is needed for the general trend?
Below replacement fertility can't persist in the long run and thus can't be an inherited trait. Any "opportunity cost" should be rewritten in terms of expected impact on fitness.
Far too general and quite unscientific -- our wealth has hardly been stratified, relative to current standards, for the blink of an eye, && certainly less time than other demonstrable selection effects (e.g., 10k yr explosion etc.)
Look at the pyramids of ancient Egypt and tell me that's not stratified wealth. The pyramids are older than the modern European "white" phenotype. Even among people who weren't farmers or pastoralists, the peoples of the Pacific northwest had potlatches based on having excess wealth to burn, and owning other people as slaves certainly counts as stratification.
Yeah, the absence of forced sex seems a much larger issue then the stratification of wealth. The Pharoah had a large number of women available on whom to sire children, and most of them had a little to no say in when or whether that happened.
Even into the modern era, getting married, staying married, and intercourse with her husband were not optional for most women – social and economic exclusion (along with some light violence) enforced the first two, and the absence of marital rape (and the assumption of conjugal rights) enforced the last.
A lot of the issues of the modern world come because we are trying to convince people to do things that we used to just force them to do. Overall, that's a good change, but it does come with complications.
Agreed. There is some evidence that the richest individuals have more children, not less. Birthrates over 3 according to the link below. This goes against Robin’s theory (I think) but is consistent with the opportunity cost idea. Above some level of wealth the opportunity cost for having children becomes relatively insignificant. No need for unfalsifiable evolutionary narratives.
IQs rose in NW Europe because middle/UMC yeomen farmers had more surviving offspring. The nobility may have had less on average to concentrate inheritance.
If you can't get your slightly above average people to have more kids your fertility will be dysgenic regardless or a few outlier fecund stars.
Did the rich of yesteryear really have less kids than their underlings or did they just have more unacknowledged bastards, more postnatal abortions, etc as bastardry was mostly a class thing as the poor couldn't afford the lifestyle needed to support it. And even today, look at Musk or various other celebrity males; they def making babies left and right, Tyson had what, 7 kids? De Niro, 7? Jefferson with his slaves? Hell I'm middle class and I've had six with four women and those are only the ones I know about.
While I have no proof I think it's reasonable to assume access to sex, especially multiple fertile partners throughout decades, increases offspring generally pre effective birth control era and I've seen nothing to suggest the rich of yesteryear were less promiscuous than the poor, quite the opposite actually.
I think the problem you have now is more what happens when women can individually choose the nest size to maximize their portion of the maritial resources with no downside. In my life I've met maybe a half dozen men that didn't want to have MORE kids. Met plenty that wanted no kids but it seems to be "none or a lot". whereas most women I've met seem to be in the one to two category and often begrudgingly so after two as one and a spare is enough to lockdown lifetime income whereas three+ does nothing but reduce their handbag count.
Men don't bear children, I literally have no idea how many kids I have fathered. I know of six, two of which were aborted contrary to my wishes and one which midterm (month 6) miscarried leaving me with three living children I'm aware of. Statistically I probably have another dozen or so that I'm unaware of some of whom are living and breathing today along with a couple more abortions and miscarriages. I expect to have a few more in the future as well, ideally living ones that I know about but that's not really something I have any control over given paternal rights are effectively non-existent in the USA in practice. I thought I had another earlier this year but alas, DNA said elsewise.
Selection neglect seems irrelevant to looking at ancestors vs parents of successful people
We don't usually see someone who had many children and a few grandkids got rich in the same light as someone who had 3/4 kids get rich
Part of this is probably that we care more about kids than grandkids, grandkids more than great-grandkids, and at about 7 generations we don't much care anymore
Why does there have to be a selection explanation? Why can’t it just be a random set of traits that weren’t selected against in the past, that are maladaptive in the modern context? Most humans are bad at reasoning about exponentials and probabilities, I don’t think we need to assume that “reasoning badly about exponentials and probabilities” was some kind of selected for trait in the past, just that it wasn’t particularly important during the vast majority of the human brain’s evolution. Similarly, I just don’t think “make sure to be motivated to have kids when there is a world of plenty, fun and meaningful things to do without kids, kids don’t provide much immediate return, and very effective birth control exists” was a problem human had to solve, so it didn’t.
Reasoning badly about probability probably is a selected trait. Our ancestors definitely needed to deal with uncertainty, and our cognitive biases about it (e.g. gambling addiction) were probably more adaptive in the ancestral environment.
What does “probably” even mean here? Like we can come up with a convincing story for anything or the opposite of anything. Like we could say that male pattern baldness exists because the shine scared saber toothed tigers or something. How would we evaluate if that was “probably” correct or just random chance? I don’t subscribe to the belief that every trait has some specific evolutionary purpose, some stuff is just random, and didn’t hurt anything enough to be selected against.
Some traits are just random and exist because they didn't hurt anything enough to be selected against.
But our instinctive biases for reasoning about uncertainty would have been *integral* to the daily survival of our ancestors. Where is the best place to hunt or gather? Reason about uncertainty. Who is the best mate? Reason about uncertainty. Which faction should I align myself with? Reason about uncertainty. Our ancestors who were *bad* about reasoning about uncertainty (in the ancestral environment) would have been at a substantial reproductive disadvantage.
It's not a trait that could drift randomly. It's too important to survival.
So we must conclude that our ancestors had *good* heuristics for reasoning about uncertainty, in their particular environment. And the fact that modern people are often bad about reasoning about uncertainty is a result of the difference between the ancestral environment and the modern one, applying evolved heuristics to situations where they are now maladaptive.
This story seems to be structured very unlike the previous selection neglect examples for academics and businessmen. In both of those the imitators look at the very successful representatives of the class, and neglect that they aren't similar to an average successful representative.
In the fertility case, they are looking at the very successful "parent of rich/successful child"... but then they "should" be looking at parents of reasonably successful children, not at the entirely different "most great grandkids or later descendants" metric, no?
I think part of it is the historically high social mobility that we have compared to previous eras. Unlike before, where there were smaller slices of people who had a chance at the big leagues and had fewer kids in order to go for it (say, merchants, bankers, lower nobility, etc.), we now have a large slab of people who can be convinced they have a chance to hit it big (nearly anybody with a degree or who works really hard). Therefore, they have to act like it - by delaying childbirth in order to get a lot of degrees, and work their butts off, and maximizing their lifetime net worth by investing everything now.
None of which you'd do if you thought "eh, I've got enough to live the way I do, and I could never make it in the big leagues".
Maybe one way to test these status based evo-psych theories would be to compare people whose ancestors lived in small societies to people whose ancestors lived in large ones. Smaller societies, like hunter gather bands, would have had shallower status hierarchies, so probably a lower correlation between status and fitness.
East Asians have lived in large, settled , state pacified for probably longer than any other group and their fertility is also exceptionally low.
I can't find much on hg fertility but google says the Inuit fertility rate is 2.8, which doesn't seem that high.
"So if people look at the more successful individuals around them, and ask what their relatively rich parents did to help make them successful, they will tend to see stories of parents who had fewer kids. "
But isn't giving your children more siblings not also an advantage? If you have a bunch of brothers and sisters, you may have to share parental capital investment, but you are surrounded by more people that (if things don't go too wrong) like you, trust you, help raise and socialize you and would be willing to cooperate economically with you.
So shouldn't we see large successful families that have high social status, which in turn would influence a couple's decision making on how to optimize the status of their offspring + themselves, as well?
Robin, perhaps you don’t know Susan Blackmore theory on fertility reduction: her view was that in the past cultural transmission was communal and familiar, and consequently, familiaristic memes had massive advantage; in the current cultural environment, were ideas come to people by more heterogeneous sources, the cultural transmisión losses her familiaristic bias, and you get less children. As a general rule, the literature says that the most important variable determining fertility is female literacy.
hi, strangely enough I also have a theory for the decline fertility involving prestige status, but it is more general: "56. Think of culture as a collective of evolving individual structures - in terms of Daimonion's (Daimonion, unpublished work) membionts - using people's brains as a substrate (if you not ready to go that far, just replace "membionts" with "self-replicating structures with differential stability in culture" in the rest of the article, and treat the brain not as a substrate in which membionts live, but simply as a node - a medium of storage and processing power for self-replicating and selected structure in culture).
57. The higher the total number of human brains and the more frequently they communicate, the higher the rate of reproduction, mutation, and specialization of the membionts. The more brains interact, the more complex the collective of membionts becomes.
58. Prestige status facilitates learning specifically through “info copying” (Henrich, Gil-White, 2001). Info copying is an anthropocentric view of self-replicating cultural structures - membionts . When learning by copying, “behavioral traits, the ideas, values, and opinions of prestigious individuals are also likely to be copied” (Henrich, Gil-White, 2001) because of the high costs associated with recognizing the key features. Prestige status thus dramatically helps membionts to reproduce faster in the symbiotic process between culture and humans.
59. Preferential attention to and learning from high-status individuals helped select for adaptive membionts in Homo sapiens' symbiosis with culture (Barkow, 2014) and kept the population of neutral or maladaptive membionts in culture at bay.
60. The greatest obstacle to the spread of culture is aggression and unwillingness to cooperate, for example, with out-group non-kin. Dominance status is rooted in aggression. This is why cultural evolution selects more and more for prestige status.
61. With the evolution of complex culture, the importance of prestige status grew. Prestige facilitates the spread of culture membionts. To replicate in the brains of the entire group of followers, the membionts need only access the brain of a prestigious person at the top of the local status hierarchy.
62. Today, prestige is a more important status acquisition strategy than dominance in Western human societies. US undergraduate women prefer prestigious men over dominant men as romantic partners, particularly in the context of long-term relationships (Snyder, Kirkpatrick, , & Barrett, 2008).
63. Open dominance is a low status signal in family or work environments in Western societies.
64. People are motivated by status to work for the culture, to replicate it, and to make it more complex.
65. But not all culture is adaptive to humans (Barkow, 1989).
66. Because of prestige status, many people in affluent societies invest much more resources in culture replication than in the past. They even go so far as to forgo their own reproduction in order to reproduce the symbiotic membionts. This explains the shocking decline in the reproduction of humans in affluent societies." (from a paper I write on the topic of money and prestige status)
What if cultural evolution has accidentally selected for a family size and not an offspring number. Then as life expectancy shot up (and thus witnessing the early development of your great grandkids is now a thing) we have fewer kids. Or to say the same thing from the other side, if I’m in my early thirties thinking about having my second or third kid, but my grandparents are still around, my immediate family still seems big--even with one and two child households at each generation node.
Why would we select for family size? Perhaps there would be an optimal band size in hunter gatherer situation either for ease of movement or basic division of labor
Would readers care to comment on Jose Yong's theory: When social status gets in the way of reproduction in modern settings: An evolutionary mismatch perspective
Ruth Mace (evolutionary anthropologist) was onto the idea that pursuit of status inhibited childrearing back in her 2008 Science article. Reproducing in Cities.
I think there is something in this. I grew up in a very wealthy NYC suburb, and having children in one’s 20s was just not done. When I moved to a southern city in my 20s, I was shocked at how many women my age had children and I couldn’t shake the feeling that what they were doing was somehow quite trashy - even though they were all middle class married women. It wasn’t until I was visiting my hometown and realized you seldom saw a woman under 35 with a small child that I realized I had absorbed the norm that “having a child in your 20s is for low class people”. Similarly, having more than two children (unless triplets) was also seen as rather déclassé...when I was pregnant with my 3rd, rather than congratulations I got some ribbing about “so, when will you be moving to a trailer park?”
I’m not sure if the 2-child or less thing is due to the enormous amounts of parental investment involved in raising an upper-middle-class child; or if it is a side effect of delaying motherhood to 35 or older with the associated fertility issues and need for expensive fertility treatments.
Your last paragraph -- the former. Re: your observations from your wealthy NYC suburb. Agree. Today, any 22 year old with an infant is obviously the babysitter, wherease in prior eras, 22 was the onset of peak fertility.
How do you tease all this out from some more obvious facts, namely: the widespread availability of cheap and reliable contraception, thus decoupling the pleasure of sex from childbearing, and the extension of education and full human rights to women resulting in their full entrance into the commercial work force? For most of human history, and still for all of the rest mammalian history, producing offspring was the natural consequence of pursuing sexual desire. Now it is a conscious choice.
The idea is that lower fertility rates for the rich are historical, not just recent. In previous posts, Robin outlined evidence from the distant past about fertility decline amongst nobility in different societies. Even this entry's anecdote comes from 1862 -- well before modern contraception and women's entrance into the workforce.
Can you be specific about this evidence? It seems counterintuitive that e.g. Victorian upper-class families would have fewer surviving children than Victorian lower-class families.
If you're admitting this entry's (fictional) anecdote as evidence, then here's a couple more: Lewis Carroll was from an upper class family and had 10 siblings. William Gladstone had eight children. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_of_the_Victorian_era and click on some of the famous, important people: where number of siblings are listed, most of them had many. https://www.victorians.co.uk/rich-victorians says upper and middle class Victorians would have 4-6 children typically. In addition to that, Victorian upper-class men might be more likely to have children out of wedlock, e.g. with servants.
Children per woman is the interesting bit
High status men having bastards is fairly irrelevant (unless they tend to invest heavily in bastards or even bequeath them a portion of the inherentance
Bastards are pretty relevant to the reproductive success of the upper-class men, regardless of how much support was given to them.
If rich men have many bastards, that means that risky and costly behaviors to become rich are more selected for, genetically. It also means behaviors that result in bastards are more selected for - libido, sociopathy.
Men's siring bastards doesn't affect legitimate family size, so monkey see monkey do isn't affected by it
(Poor men often have a harder time reproducing rich men's womanizing)
Yes, but genes are affected by it. You have a population full of descendants of rich men who slept around and abused their power over their servants. Those traits are to some degree heritable.
Also, I guess I don't understand why any explanation is needed. I mean let's just take the simple model where people have kids when benefits (including emotional and getting to fuck in absence of birth control) exceed costs. Now postulate that the emotional satisfaction of raising additional children falls off pretty quickly (it's not that much more satisfying to raise the 4th as it is to go from 1 to 2).
That predicts that in a world with effective birth control, high child survival rates and with both parents pursue careers (meaning that having more kids imposes costs in terms of career) there would be a strong pull towards few kids. Amplified if people tend to mimic peers.
But why wouldn't such desires have undergone strong negative selection effects? Well on this model anything short of generic change to directly desire more kids is fighting against the current and such a genetic change takes time under selection and until this most recent generation there has essentially always been one of those factors above to screen us from the effect x
Just an anecdotal note. I live in Finland and have been following The Ukrainan war a bit. Before the war a russian thintank called The izbrosky club,which is close to Kremlin, suggested that Russia should abandon western style of Capitalism because it would lead to destruction of country via collapsing population.
Why do we need this theory, though? Higher income people have a higher opportunity cost in having kids and hence tend to have fewer. What more is needed for the general trend?
Below replacement fertility can't persist in the long run and thus can't be an inherited trait. Any "opportunity cost" should be rewritten in terms of expected impact on fitness.
How long is the long run and for which population? There are already indications of groups selecting out of the dynamics we're discussing.
The amount of time humanity has had stratified wealth is plenty enough time.
Far too general and quite unscientific -- our wealth has hardly been stratified, relative to current standards, for the blink of an eye, && certainly less time than other demonstrable selection effects (e.g., 10k yr explosion etc.)
Look at the pyramids of ancient Egypt and tell me that's not stratified wealth. The pyramids are older than the modern European "white" phenotype. Even among people who weren't farmers or pastoralists, the peoples of the Pacific northwest had potlatches based on having excess wealth to burn, and owning other people as slaves certainly counts as stratification.
Yeah, the absence of forced sex seems a much larger issue then the stratification of wealth. The Pharoah had a large number of women available on whom to sire children, and most of them had a little to no say in when or whether that happened.
Even into the modern era, getting married, staying married, and intercourse with her husband were not optional for most women – social and economic exclusion (along with some light violence) enforced the first two, and the absence of marital rape (and the assumption of conjugal rights) enforced the last.
A lot of the issues of the modern world come because we are trying to convince people to do things that we used to just force them to do. Overall, that's a good change, but it does come with complications.
Agreed. There is some evidence that the richest individuals have more children, not less. Birthrates over 3 according to the link below. This goes against Robin’s theory (I think) but is consistent with the opportunity cost idea. Above some level of wealth the opportunity cost for having children becomes relatively insignificant. No need for unfalsifiable evolutionary narratives.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenaebarnes/2022/07/10/elon-musk-isnt-the-only-billionaire-with-9-plus-kids-meet-the-us-richest-people-with-the-most-children/?sh=4fbc35fe13b9
Bilionaires are too tiny of a fraction to make much difference to overall trends.
IQs rose in NW Europe because middle/UMC yeomen farmers had more surviving offspring. The nobility may have had less on average to concentrate inheritance.
If you can't get your slightly above average people to have more kids your fertility will be dysgenic regardless or a few outlier fecund stars.
Did the rich of yesteryear really have less kids than their underlings or did they just have more unacknowledged bastards, more postnatal abortions, etc as bastardry was mostly a class thing as the poor couldn't afford the lifestyle needed to support it. And even today, look at Musk or various other celebrity males; they def making babies left and right, Tyson had what, 7 kids? De Niro, 7? Jefferson with his slaves? Hell I'm middle class and I've had six with four women and those are only the ones I know about.
While I have no proof I think it's reasonable to assume access to sex, especially multiple fertile partners throughout decades, increases offspring generally pre effective birth control era and I've seen nothing to suggest the rich of yesteryear were less promiscuous than the poor, quite the opposite actually.
I think the problem you have now is more what happens when women can individually choose the nest size to maximize their portion of the maritial resources with no downside. In my life I've met maybe a half dozen men that didn't want to have MORE kids. Met plenty that wanted no kids but it seems to be "none or a lot". whereas most women I've met seem to be in the one to two category and often begrudgingly so after two as one and a spare is enough to lockdown lifetime income whereas three+ does nothing but reduce their handbag count.
Seems you'd prefer my prior theory I described above.
You have six children with four women, and those are only the ones you know about? Please clarify.
Men don't bear children, I literally have no idea how many kids I have fathered. I know of six, two of which were aborted contrary to my wishes and one which midterm (month 6) miscarried leaving me with three living children I'm aware of. Statistically I probably have another dozen or so that I'm unaware of some of whom are living and breathing today along with a couple more abortions and miscarriages. I expect to have a few more in the future as well, ideally living ones that I know about but that's not really something I have any control over given paternal rights are effectively non-existent in the USA in practice. I thought I had another earlier this year but alas, DNA said elsewise.
Selection neglect seems irrelevant to looking at ancestors vs parents of successful people
We don't usually see someone who had many children and a few grandkids got rich in the same light as someone who had 3/4 kids get rich
Part of this is probably that we care more about kids than grandkids, grandkids more than great-grandkids, and at about 7 generations we don't much care anymore
Why does there have to be a selection explanation? Why can’t it just be a random set of traits that weren’t selected against in the past, that are maladaptive in the modern context? Most humans are bad at reasoning about exponentials and probabilities, I don’t think we need to assume that “reasoning badly about exponentials and probabilities” was some kind of selected for trait in the past, just that it wasn’t particularly important during the vast majority of the human brain’s evolution. Similarly, I just don’t think “make sure to be motivated to have kids when there is a world of plenty, fun and meaningful things to do without kids, kids don’t provide much immediate return, and very effective birth control exists” was a problem human had to solve, so it didn’t.
Reasoning badly about probability probably is a selected trait. Our ancestors definitely needed to deal with uncertainty, and our cognitive biases about it (e.g. gambling addiction) were probably more adaptive in the ancestral environment.
What does “probably” even mean here? Like we can come up with a convincing story for anything or the opposite of anything. Like we could say that male pattern baldness exists because the shine scared saber toothed tigers or something. How would we evaluate if that was “probably” correct or just random chance? I don’t subscribe to the belief that every trait has some specific evolutionary purpose, some stuff is just random, and didn’t hurt anything enough to be selected against.
Some traits are just random and exist because they didn't hurt anything enough to be selected against.
But our instinctive biases for reasoning about uncertainty would have been *integral* to the daily survival of our ancestors. Where is the best place to hunt or gather? Reason about uncertainty. Who is the best mate? Reason about uncertainty. Which faction should I align myself with? Reason about uncertainty. Our ancestors who were *bad* about reasoning about uncertainty (in the ancestral environment) would have been at a substantial reproductive disadvantage.
It's not a trait that could drift randomly. It's too important to survival.
So we must conclude that our ancestors had *good* heuristics for reasoning about uncertainty, in their particular environment. And the fact that modern people are often bad about reasoning about uncertainty is a result of the difference between the ancestral environment and the modern one, applying evolved heuristics to situations where they are now maladaptive.
This story seems to be structured very unlike the previous selection neglect examples for academics and businessmen. In both of those the imitators look at the very successful representatives of the class, and neglect that they aren't similar to an average successful representative.
In the fertility case, they are looking at the very successful "parent of rich/successful child"... but then they "should" be looking at parents of reasonably successful children, not at the entirely different "most great grandkids or later descendants" metric, no?
I think part of it is the historically high social mobility that we have compared to previous eras. Unlike before, where there were smaller slices of people who had a chance at the big leagues and had fewer kids in order to go for it (say, merchants, bankers, lower nobility, etc.), we now have a large slab of people who can be convinced they have a chance to hit it big (nearly anybody with a degree or who works really hard). Therefore, they have to act like it - by delaying childbirth in order to get a lot of degrees, and work their butts off, and maximizing their lifetime net worth by investing everything now.
None of which you'd do if you thought "eh, I've got enough to live the way I do, and I could never make it in the big leagues".
Maybe one way to test these status based evo-psych theories would be to compare people whose ancestors lived in small societies to people whose ancestors lived in large ones. Smaller societies, like hunter gather bands, would have had shallower status hierarchies, so probably a lower correlation between status and fitness.
East Asians have lived in large, settled , state pacified for probably longer than any other group and their fertility is also exceptionally low.
I can't find much on hg fertility but google says the Inuit fertility rate is 2.8, which doesn't seem that high.
"So if people look at the more successful individuals around them, and ask what their relatively rich parents did to help make them successful, they will tend to see stories of parents who had fewer kids. "
But isn't giving your children more siblings not also an advantage? If you have a bunch of brothers and sisters, you may have to share parental capital investment, but you are surrounded by more people that (if things don't go too wrong) like you, trust you, help raise and socialize you and would be willing to cooperate economically with you.
So shouldn't we see large successful families that have high social status, which in turn would influence a couple's decision making on how to optimize the status of their offspring + themselves, as well?
Why do we tend not to see those stories instead?
Robin, perhaps you don’t know Susan Blackmore theory on fertility reduction: her view was that in the past cultural transmission was communal and familiar, and consequently, familiaristic memes had massive advantage; in the current cultural environment, were ideas come to people by more heterogeneous sources, the cultural transmisión losses her familiaristic bias, and you get less children. As a general rule, the literature says that the most important variable determining fertility is female literacy.
hi, strangely enough I also have a theory for the decline fertility involving prestige status, but it is more general: "56. Think of culture as a collective of evolving individual structures - in terms of Daimonion's (Daimonion, unpublished work) membionts - using people's brains as a substrate (if you not ready to go that far, just replace "membionts" with "self-replicating structures with differential stability in culture" in the rest of the article, and treat the brain not as a substrate in which membionts live, but simply as a node - a medium of storage and processing power for self-replicating and selected structure in culture).
57. The higher the total number of human brains and the more frequently they communicate, the higher the rate of reproduction, mutation, and specialization of the membionts. The more brains interact, the more complex the collective of membionts becomes.
58. Prestige status facilitates learning specifically through “info copying” (Henrich, Gil-White, 2001). Info copying is an anthropocentric view of self-replicating cultural structures - membionts . When learning by copying, “behavioral traits, the ideas, values, and opinions of prestigious individuals are also likely to be copied” (Henrich, Gil-White, 2001) because of the high costs associated with recognizing the key features. Prestige status thus dramatically helps membionts to reproduce faster in the symbiotic process between culture and humans.
59. Preferential attention to and learning from high-status individuals helped select for adaptive membionts in Homo sapiens' symbiosis with culture (Barkow, 2014) and kept the population of neutral or maladaptive membionts in culture at bay.
60. The greatest obstacle to the spread of culture is aggression and unwillingness to cooperate, for example, with out-group non-kin. Dominance status is rooted in aggression. This is why cultural evolution selects more and more for prestige status.
61. With the evolution of complex culture, the importance of prestige status grew. Prestige facilitates the spread of culture membionts. To replicate in the brains of the entire group of followers, the membionts need only access the brain of a prestigious person at the top of the local status hierarchy.
62. Today, prestige is a more important status acquisition strategy than dominance in Western human societies. US undergraduate women prefer prestigious men over dominant men as romantic partners, particularly in the context of long-term relationships (Snyder, Kirkpatrick, , & Barrett, 2008).
63. Open dominance is a low status signal in family or work environments in Western societies.
64. People are motivated by status to work for the culture, to replicate it, and to make it more complex.
65. But not all culture is adaptive to humans (Barkow, 1989).
66. Because of prestige status, many people in affluent societies invest much more resources in culture replication than in the past. They even go so far as to forgo their own reproduction in order to reproduce the symbiotic membionts. This explains the shocking decline in the reproduction of humans in affluent societies." (from a paper I write on the topic of money and prestige status)
What if cultural evolution has accidentally selected for a family size and not an offspring number. Then as life expectancy shot up (and thus witnessing the early development of your great grandkids is now a thing) we have fewer kids. Or to say the same thing from the other side, if I’m in my early thirties thinking about having my second or third kid, but my grandparents are still around, my immediate family still seems big--even with one and two child households at each generation node.
Why would we select for family size? Perhaps there would be an optimal band size in hunter gatherer situation either for ease of movement or basic division of labor
Would readers care to comment on Jose Yong's theory: When social status gets in the way of reproduction in modern settings: An evolutionary mismatch perspective
https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2055/aop/article-10.1556-2055.2022.00028/article-10.1556-2055.2022.00028.xml
Ruth Mace (evolutionary anthropologist) was onto the idea that pursuit of status inhibited childrearing back in her 2008 Science article. Reproducing in Cities.
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1153960
I had seen ther Mace paper, which doesn't say much, but not the Yong one, though that's pretty bad alas.