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to live. Given these uncertainties, it is little wonder that fertility rates remain high on the continent as women hedge their reproductive bets.
    Further insights into how the life prospects of women shape reproductive outcomes is provided in another 2010 article in Human Nature, “Examining the Relationship Between Life Expectancy, Reproduction, and Educational Attainment.” That study, by University of Connecticut anthropologists Nicola Bulled and Richard Sosis, confirmed Low’s findings. They divvied up 193 countries into five groups by their average life expectancies. In countries where women could expect to live to between forty and fifty years, they bear an average of 5.5 children, and those with life expectancies between fifty-one and sixty-one average 4.8 children. The big drop in fertility occurs at that point. Bulled and Sosis found that when women’s life expectancy rises to between sixty-one and seventy-one years, total fertility drops to 2.5 children; between seventy-one and seventy-five years, it’s 2.2 children; and over seventy-five years, women average 1.7 children. The United Nations’ 2012 Revision notes that global average life expectancy at birth rose from forty-seven years in 1955 to seventy years in 2010. These findings suggest that it is more than just coincidence that the average global fertility rate has fallen over that time period from 5 to 2.45 children today.

    Kids Are Expensive
    Research by economists further illuminates the processes that yield falling fertility. Brown University economist Oded Galor and his colleagues have devised a unified growth theory that explains how and why people begin to focus on developing and deepening their human capital (chiefly by means of education), which then further accelerates the pace of technological progress. As a result, fertility and population growth fall, enabling humanity to escape from millennia of Malthusian stagnation into the modern world of sustained economic growth.
    Recall that Malthus asserted that people on average would produce as many children as they could feed, if not more. In modern econ-speak, children are a normal good: that is to say, as income increases, demand for kids would also increase.
    Instead, researchers observe that as incomes increase, the number of children per woman decreases. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the opportunity cost of raising children has risen over time. Opportunity cost is a benefit that must be given up to acquire or achieve something else; for example, a person may have to give up a Caribbean cruise in order to be able to buy a new car. In this case, a parent would be forgoing the extra income he or she would earn working and instead spend the time rearing a child. According to this analysis, the price of children measured in forgone income rises over time, lowering demand for them.
    However, Galor points out that during the initial stages of the Industrial Revolution, as incomes were increasing in Western Europe, average fertility was increasing, just as Malthus predicted. (In contrast, US fertility rates fell throughout the nineteenth century, from 7 children per white woman in 1800 to 3.5 in 1900.) Galor suggests that the opportunity cost argument for fertility decline is too simple. If income had been the key determinant, one would find that fertility should fall as any country reaches a specific level of average per capita income. Instead, Galor notes that at the end of the nineteenth century, fertility rates begin to plummet simultaneously for a number of Western European countries at very different per capita income levels.
    Galor argues that fertility began to fall as Western European economies developed increased demand for human capital during what he calls the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. In this analysis, initial increases to average incomes produced by technological progress resulted in parents’ increasing both the quantity and