The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been characterized by a massive decline in fertility, beginning in rich western countries and spreading all over the world. It is a transformation¹ that is still underway in poor countries today. 

 

Technological² advances have, over the same period, radically³ decreased child mortality and increased life span. Modern parents need not have many children to ensure that one or two survive; almost all children survive to reproductive age. But Darwinian genetic⁴ interests cannot explain the modern decline in fertility (if Darwinian interests dominated, fertility should increase with increased survival, as observed in many historical elites). Rather, the fertility decline to present levels is mostly an economic response to the changing value of children, and to the changing economic relationship of parents and children. The economic transformation is not spontaneous（自发的）, but the product of cultural transformation through education. 

 

The economic value of children has decreased, but this is not the most important cause of the fertility decline. The transformation of countries from predominantly（主要地） agricultural to predominantly urban reduced the value of children, especially where the industrial employment of children was restricted. Each child's labor⁵ contributed positive value to a family farm or cottage industry, but in an urban setting, children began to have negative economic value. Indeed, the fertility decline correlates somewhat - though not perfectly⁶ - with the transformation from agrarian⁷（土地的） to city life. 

 

But the fertility decline is not merely the product of a price effect of people having fewer children because children are more costly⁸. Children are not normal goods (or even inferior goods, as might be surmised⁹ from low fertility among the highest income groups): they become not goods at all, but rather bundles of claims on their parents. This transformation is a culturally-controlled change in direction of the flow of resources. Before the fertility decline, resources flowed from children to parents (and even up to grandparents and kin); after the transformation, resources flowed from parents to children. In Mass education as a determinant of the timing¹⁰ of the fertility decline, John Caldwell argues that the vector of this cultural transformation has been mass education. He characterizes it as the replacement¹¹ of "family morality," in which children are expected to "work hard, demand little, and respect the authority of the old," with "community morality," in which children are dependent on their parents to become future productive citizens (perhaps even upwardly mobile) for the good of the country. 

 

Caldwell identifies five mechanisms¹² by which education reduces fertility by reshaping the economic relationship of parents and children. First, education reduces the ability of a child to work inside and outside the home – not just because school and studying take up time, but also because the child's student status makes others reluctant to enforce traditional duties. Second, education increases the expense of raising a child, again not just because school is expensive, but because education increases a child's demands on his parents for non-school expenses in a manner Caldwell describes as unprecedented¹³. Third, education increases the dependency of children, reframing a formerly¹⁴ hard-working, productive child as primarily a future producer and citizen. Fourth, schooling¹⁵ speeds up cultural change and creates new cultures. Finally, fifth, in the developing world education specifically transmits the values of the Western middle class, which is contemptuous of traditional "family morality" as described above.

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