Do high-status people really have fewer children?

Abstract

Evolutionary discussions regarding the relationship between social status and fertil-ity in the contemporary U.S. typically claim that the relationship is either negative or absent entirely. The published data on recent generations of Americans upon which such statements rest, however, are solid with respect to women but sparse and equivo-cal for men. In the current study, we investigate education and income in relation to age at first child, childlessness, and number of children for men and women in two samples---one of the general American population and one of graduates of an elite American university. We find that increased education is strongly associated with delayed childbearing in both sexes and is also moderately associated with decreased completed or near-completed fertility. Women in the general population with higher adult income have fewer children, but this relationship does not hold within all edu-cational groups, including our sample with elite educations. Higher-income men, however, do not have fewer children in the general population and in fact have lower childlessness rates. Further, higher income in men is positively associated with fer-tility among our sample with elite educations as well as within the general popula-tion among those with college educations. Such findings undermine simple statements on the relationship between status and fertility. D iscussions of fertility often note that status is positively correlated with fertil-ity in societies other than modem, developed societies (Borgerhoff Mulder