Fertility and Fitness Among Albuquerque Men: A Competitive Labour Market Theory

Abstract

The reduction in fertility accompanying modernisation poses a scientific puzzle that has yet to be solved. Despite the fact the problem has received a great deal of attention from economists, sociologists, demographers, anthropologists and biologists, no discipline in the social or biological sciences has offered a fully developed and coherent theory of fertility reduction that explains the timing and pattern of fertility reduction in the developed or developing world. The inability to offer an adequate theory raises fundamental questions about the theoretical foundations of those disciplines. For example, although economics has made great strides in explaining consumer behaviour, time allocation and labour force participation through the recognition that the household is a fundamental organisational unit of human action, there is no adequate explanation of why households are mostly composed of men and women who marry and have children. There is no economic theory of why reproductive partnerships form such a fundamental organisational principle in human societies nor of why people have and want children in the first place. The very modest progress of economists in explaining long-, medium- and short-term trends in fertility highlights this weakness.