Not half. But 10% overall, in some cities at least 30%, and giving birth a large risk of death.
Enough to be a dramatic effect.
From the citation.
At the beginning of the 20th century, for every 1000 live births, six to nine women in the United States died of pregnancy-related complications, and approximately 100 infants died before age 1 year (1,2). From 1915 through 1997, the infant mortality rate declined greater than 90% to 7.2 per 1000 live births, and from 1900 through 1997, the maternal mortality rate declined almost 99% to less than 0.1 reported death per 1000 live births (7.7 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1997) …
… In 1900 in some U.S. cities, up to 30% of infants died before reaching their first birthday
Well, yes. That certainly comports with my thinking / belief / negligible spirituality. But it’s one of those odd thoughts about the sheer improbability of the me who is me happening to exist at all. So many way’s I could have been a different me, or no me at all. And likewise for everyone.
I’ve told this story before. …
I’m the eldest of three sibs. All through growing up our parents said they’d planned all along for three kids. It was the right number, not too many, not to few, etc. Three was a very deliberate plan. (I’d cue a Monty Python cite, but it’s not so funny in this context.)
Anyhow, we’re all in our late 30s or early 40s when Dad dies. In the course of the typical family reunion otherwise known as a funeral, one of his sibs, our aunt, let slip that there had been a first child previous to me who’d died a few days after birth; pneumonia or something.
This had been a secret my parents never shared. I wasn’t #1; I was #2. Which revelation sat oddly with me, but wasn’t very significant. Until I looked at my third brother standing there; the one who was really #4 and was just realizing that had real #1 not died, they’d never even have tried for the pregnancy that became him. That rocked his world more than I expected.
Lotta ways that whole “what’re the odds of me?” line of thinking gets … unproductive … if ruminated on too much.
Really, all it would take is a different sperm entering the egg for a very different person to result. That by itself means that the chance of us, specifically being born is tiny.
For every one of us who exists: there’s a multitude of people who don’t exist. And if I hadn’t existed, that would be no different than their nonexistence.
I have no memories of the 14 billion years that passed before I was born.
Supposedly there is enough genetic diversity among humans that there are something like 10^100 different genetic combinations a human being can have. However only about 10^11 humans have ever existed on earth.
Urbanization, everywhere in the world and not just in western culture, tends to lower birthrates. 1920 is indeed the date at which 50% of Americans were deemed to live in urban rather than rural areas. The cutoff point was much lower than you might suspect: 2500 people. That’s all it takes to go from a mostly subsistence farming viewpoint passed down through generations to an urban income with urban opportunities and lessened need for home-grown workers.
A chart of U.S. urbanization is available on this page. Underneath it says:
If the United States has urbanized during the last two centuries, so has much of the rest of the world. Only 3 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas in 1800. By a century later in 1900, 14 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas, and twelve cities had populations over 1 million. Just a half-century later in 1950, the world’s urban population had doubled to 30 percent, and the number of cities over 1 million grew six times to eighty-three cities.
Today, more than half the world’s population lives in urban areas, and the number of cities over 1 million stands at more than four hundred. By 2030, almost two-thirds of the world’s population is projected to live in urban areas. The number of megacities—cities with populations over 10 million—rose from three in 1975 to sixteen in 2000, and is expected to reach twenty-seven by 2025 (Population Reference Bureau, 2012).
That number is a minimum of 33 today, possibly 40, the uncertainly due to the multitude of ways countries define their urban areas. Birthrates correlate with urbanization. They can be forcibly minimized, as in China, but China’s incredibly quick urbanization and creation of a middle class that has more people in it than the population of the U.S. swamps any attempt to bring the birthrate back up.
Obviously, a multitude of factors combine to create birthrates, and they are felt more as smaller communities are studied. This simple factor does explain more in more places than any other.
Interesting sociology/ psychology question, of just where being a hamlet or village ends and “urban” kicks in. Somewhere between Dunbar’s Number and 1000-2500 inhabitants? Some few hundreds? Preindustrial towns were culturally urban even though quite modest in size by modern standards.
A related question might be even in tiny rural farm towns, did/do farm families in the surrounding county have larger families than those who lived and worked in the town/village? Did the people who ran the general store or the minister and his wife tend to have fewer children than the farmers?
Yes they did. I knew the answer so I just asked AI for a quick quote.
In 1900, birth rates in the United States were significantly higher on farms than in rural towns (rural nonfarm areas), continuing a long-term trend where farm families were the most fertile segment of the population. While overall fertility was declining, farm families maintained high birth rates and continued to add children later in life compared to those in villages or urban areas.
Comparison of Birth Rates (Circa 1900):
Farms (Farm Population): Farm households had the highest fertility levels. Farm wives were notably more fertile than rural nonfarm (village) wives. In many parts of the country, rural areas were 20 to 67 percent more fertile than urban areas, with farm families driving the high end of this range.
Rural Towns (Rural Nonfarm/Village): While still generally more fertile than large cities, rural towns saw lower birth rates than farms. As towns industrialized or modernized (e.g., added banks, schools, or factories), fertility rates dropped faster than on isolated farms.
Overall Trend: The 1900 Census indicated that while the national birth rate was in decline (the total fertility rate was about 3.56 in 1900), the gap between farm and non-farm fertility was large and, in some cases, widening, meaning farm couples lagged behind non-farm couples in the overall transition to smaller families.
Note the progression in declining birthrates from farms to small towns to large cities.
My mother originally wanted seven (she was from a family of seven kids) and ended up with four. Her doctor had her tubes tied after she nearly bled out after my brother (the fourth) was born. My younger sister was the “oops” baby. My mother was pregnant with her while we were moving into a new house while she had a 2.5 year old and a 1 year old.
I was too soon. But once they had a child, they decided to go ahead and have some more – and my mom had two miscarriages. After that, her doctor suggested she “give her system a break”, and she promptly got pregnant with my brother. Her doctor still wanted her to give her system a rest after he was born, and my second bother was born 15 months later. Then she had 3 children under age 4, and decided that was enough. She went on the pill, and actually avoided pregnancy for a couple of years. But she had unpleasant side effects. She went off it, and got pregnant with my sister before she had a single period. After that she had her tubes tied.
I got AI to help get to a real cite if anyone wants to nerd out!
In particular yes mostly urbanization but also less nearby extended family (including relatives asking when ya gonna have kids? The article’s explanation: “To put it casually, kin priming is what happens when your parents ask you when you are going to have another baby.” ) and increases in secular beliefs, proxied by fewer Biblical names.
We construct comprehensive models of couples’ fertility incorporating a wide variety of economic, social, cultural and familial factors, including measures of parental religiosity and kin availability outside of the household. The results indicate that while shifts in the occupational structure and increasing urbanization of the population provide the most consistent and substantive contribution to fertility decline over the period, cultural and religious attitudes – as proxied by parents’ nativities and child naming practices – played a major role in couples’ childbearing decisions.
My older brother and I were born more than a decade apart. Which was good in many ways because he was a great mentor to me, but also resulted in only-child loneliness when he eventually moved away from home.
But if my parents had decided not to have another child? I wouldn’t exist, but it doesn’t bother me. We come from nowhere, and sooner or later, end up in the same nowhere. The Earth alone is around 4.5 billion years old, the universe much older still. Our individual existence is not even a blink of an eye in that timeframe.
I think it’s a pretty profound concept that where we go in death is precisely the same place we came from. Remember where you were before you were born? Yeah, that’s the place.
I’m 4 of 6, with one miscarriage. My dad (Catholic convert, not particularly pious but put in the time) was fond of saying “rhythm is spelled p-r-e-g-n-a-n-t”.
Quite. The tiny child born this year will be 74 in the year 2100; unless there is complete climate collapse, the people of 2100 could benefit from a wide range of advantages, including competent and capable automation.
And if life expectancy increases dramatically, associated with a longer period of well-being in older age, then the population could begin to explode once more.
This YouTube video suggests that demographic decline is already affecting the economies of nations where the workforce has peaked, and that economies built on the presumption of indefinite growth may be in deep trouble:
) and increases in secular beliefs, proxied by fewer Biblical names.
