Some people like to read, some people like to listen, some people prefer to write, while some speak. I am a bit of a mix, and if you are too, it’s possible that you’d prefer to listen to some of the writing on Alpha Sources rather reading it on a screen. Up until recently, that wasn’t really possible unless I either painstakingly, and poorly, recorded myself reading the text, or I paid an artist to do it for me, the latter which is a touch overkill given that I am not charging for access to my blog. Fortunately, AI voiceover technology is getting good, and fast, so good in fact that I am not able to introduce something new entirely; the Alpha Sources audio essay. These essays are powered by ElevenLabs, where I have recently become a subscriber. It’s fascinating what this tool can do, and I have only scratched the service, I am sure. I am kicking off with an audio version of my recent long-form essay, The Fertility Wars. All references and links used in this essay can be found by following the links above. The written essay contains two footnotes, which have been omitted in the audio version.
Read MoreThe Economist’s Free Exchange column drops in on the question of an economic motherhood penalty from childbirth. It is nice to see that the Economist correctly distinguishes between two distinct economic motherhood penalties, both of which can be traced to the interplay between evolutionary forces and modernity, where the latter in this case is defined as an environment with rapidly increasing returns to investment in human capital and education. The first, between fathers and mothers, emerge because the cost of child-rearing especially in the early part of a child’s life overwhelmingly falls on the mother, a conclusion which follows from Trivers (1972). This is true in terms of the cost during pregnancy and immediately after too. It is also true before we consider the possibility that the resource allocation trade-off for many women shifts in the wake of motherhood. The second motherhood penalty occurs between women. Put simply, in an economic structure where childless women have the ability to devote all their resources to somatic investment and take advantage of the above-mentioned increasing returns to human capital investment, the wage and wealth divergence between women who have many children and those who have none will widen significantly, at least in theory. For more on this, I cover the theory in more detail in my essay on fertility and sexual selection; see here.
Read MoreI am currently writing the third chapter on fertility for my book on demographics—see here— which focuses on on the onset of sub-replacement fertility in one country after the other since the 1970s, what's driving this shift, and whether the decline—to a large extent driven by birth postponement or so-called tempo effects—is reversing or accelerating. It is a treatise on the notion of a second demographic transition, including empirical case studies, and a discussion about whether sub-replacement fertility is something to worry about, cherish, or perhaps to approach with indifference. This is an enquiry that is defined just as much by what it excludes as what it includes. Once we dip into the multidisciplinary academic work on demographics which has emerged in the last two-to-three decades, we go from a large literature to an almost unmanageable one. I will hopefully be able to present a first draft on the chapter soon. In the mean time, however, one thing that as struck me during my recent work is that global fertility will soon fall below the replacement level, defined as just over two children per women, despite what the latest UN projections would have you believe.
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