Today’s mini-history
lesson:
It was a whole lot
harder to cut the pie after dinner 150 years ago.
In the mid-1800s,
the average American family had seven children. I guess the youngest never got
any new clothes until he or she decided to marry.
About 100 years ago,
at the start of the 20th century, the average number of kids per
family had dropped to a bit over three—by that time, folks had been moving off
the farms and shifting to urban life for quite a few years.(1)
Right now the
average family has less than two children. In fact, the fertility rate of
American women overall has dropped below the biological “replacement rate” of
about 2.1 kids.
Immigration is responsible for net population growth in the
United States.
(1) Atul Gawande,
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (New York: Metropolitan
Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2014), 21.
Copyright © Richard
Carl Subber 2015
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