Abstract
This paper reconsiders the fertility of historical social groups by accounting for singleness and childlessness. We find that the middle class had the highest reproductive success during England’s early industrial development. In light of the greater propensity of the middle class to invest in human capital, the rise in the prevalence of these traits in the population could have been instrumental to England’s economic success. Unlike earlier results about the survival of the richest, the paper shows that the reproductive success of the rich (and also the poor) were lower than that of the middle class, once accounting for singleness and childlessness. Hence, the prosperity of England over this period can be attributed to the increase in the prevalence of middle-class traits rather than those of the upper (or lower) class.
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Data from Table F.1
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As is clear in our demographic measures below, farmers are often an outlier group. We suspect that farmers organised themselves differently with regards to family planning than other segments of society for two reasons. They were much more closely affected by inheritance rules and the division of farm land between offspring, and as food suppliers they responded in the opposite manner to variations in food prices than all other groups who were food demanders.
We also ran other models with a greater number of time periods, one for each decade, but this did not influence our results.
The Cox proportional hazard model assumes, as its name indicates, that the hazard rate is shifted proportionately by the control variables. It implies that the survival functions for different social classes change proportionately and do not, for instance, cross each other. One test of the proportionality assumption (by Grambsch and Therneau (1994)) is obtained by computing, for each control variable, the scaled Schoenfeld residual, and by correlating it with a transformation of time (Hosmer and Lemeshow 1999, pp. 197–205; Schoenfeld 1982); proportionality is rejected if the correlation is statistically significant. In the case of our regression, the correlations are respectively 0.01 (Husbandmen), 0.01 (Craftsmen), 0.00 (Traders), -0.02 (Farmers), -0.00 (Upper class), and none of them is statistically different from zero.
We tested for regional variation in the marriage rates by grouping our parishes into three regions: North, Midlands and South. The upper classes had lower risks of marriage in all regions and statistically signicant differences in the Midlands and South. However, the gradient appears to hold across all regions (not reported).
Note that childbirth outside of wedlock was banned by the Church of England, and that illegitimate births, therefore, were rare ranging from 1.2 to 6.0% of births across our period (Wrigley et al. 1997, p. 224).
Leridon (2008) measures natural sterility in the Henry database for rural eighteenth century France when fertility control was ineffective. Restricting the sample to couples where the husband and the wife were still living together at age 50, 3.7% of women who married at age 20–24 remained childless.
We also test for proportionality here. The correlation between the scaled Schoenfeld residual and transformation of time are respectively 0.01 (Husbandmen), 0.00 (Craftsmen), 0.01 (Traders), 0.00 (Farmers), 0.03 (Upper class), and none of them is statistically different from zero, but for the Upper class. In addition to the proportionality assumption, it is also possible to test the assumption of the Cox model that censoring is independent from survival time. We have reasons to believe that it might be violated in the case of childlessness, as sterility and death have common unobserved determinants. We consider this issue in Appendix I, using the method proposed by Jackson et al. (2014) and find that it is not important for our results.
Again, we tested for regional variation in the childlessness rates by grouping our parishes into three regions: North, Midlands and South. The upper classes had lower risks of first birth in all regions but the differences were only statistically significant in the South. However, the gradient appears to hold across all regions (not reported).
The proportionality of the hazard rates is less clearly supported for the birth estimations than for the two extensive margins. Among the 63 coefficients in Table 4, proportionality is rejected in 26 cases (at the 5% level). However, this non-proportionality is not overly concerning because we are estimating the parity progression ratios over a short period of time (the cumulated hazard over 10 years rather than 30 years for marriage rates), and non-proportionality is less likely to be an issue over short time intervals (Bellera et al. 2010).
Moreover, the proportionality of hazards is never rejected.
We break the margins down further in Appendix D. This gradient also matches what one would find from a simple count of the number of children surviving to women sorted by the woman’s father’s occupation (see Appendix E.
We use the imputation method described in the next section (Sect. 4.6) to aggregate the uncertainty around the estimates for the four margins estimated above.
One might also wonder what would happen if those with unknown occupations were able to be assigned to their correct occupational categories. The unknown category has lower net reproduction than the other groups. Part of this is driven by the sources of occupations, which leads us to underestimate births and overestimate childlessness for that group, and is discussed at length in Sect. 5.3 and Appendix L. If we assume that the vast majority of the unknown were lower classes and reallocate all of the unknown into the lower class category, the net reproduction of the lower classes becomes statistically lower than both the middle and upper classes. However, the middle classes would still have far higher fertility than the upper classes, which is what is important for our story. The hump-shaped gradient would only become more accentuated.
Note that we do not lose any parishes in this robustness check because the parishes with data after 1780 all have starting dates before 1680. Thus, there are 26 parishes in all of the analysis.
We are not surprised that women have a slightly higher emigration rate than men in this case. We are mostly measuring migration over very small distances, given that a migrant is simply someone who leaves their parish of birth. We would not be surprised, then, if relatively few women migrated long distances and most women migrants simply moved into their husband’s parish nearby. As such, our findings do not challenge the common understanding that men have a higher propensity to emigrate.
See Appendix D and Figure D.1 for more detail.
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Acknowledgements
David de la Croix acknowledges the financial support of the project ARC 15/19-063 of the Belgian French speaking Community. We thank Gregory Clark, Neil Cummins, Oded Galor, James Kung, Carol Shiue, Joachim Voth, Patrick Wallis and participants at the workshops on “The importance of Elites and their demography for Knowledge and Development” (UCLouvain, 2016), “Deep-Rooted Factors in Comparative Development” (Brown, 2017) and the seminar Economics and History (Marseilles, 2017) for comments on an earlier draft. An earlier version of this paper circulated as “Decessit sine prole”—Childlessness, Celibacy, and Survival of the Richest in Pre-Industrial England.
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de la Croix, D., Schneider, E.B. & Weisdorf, J. Childlessness, celibacy and net fertility in pre-industrial England: the middle-class evolutionary advantage. J Econ Growth 24, 223–256 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10887-019-09170-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10887-019-09170-6
Keywords
- Fertility
- Marriage
- Childlessness
- European marriage pattern
- Industrial revolution
- Evolutionary advantage
- Social class