Hackman Joseph, Hruschka Daniel
University of Utah, Department of Anthropology, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
Arizona State University, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona, USA.
Evol Hum Sci. 2020 Nov 23;2:e58. doi: 10.1017/ehs.2020.62. eCollection 2020.
Studies have shown mixed associations between wealth and fertility, a finding that has posed ongoing puzzles for evolutionary theories of human reproduction. However, measures of wealth do not simply capture economic capacity, which is expected to increase fertility. They can also serve as a proxy for market opportunities available to a household, which may reduce fertility. The multifaceted meaning of many wealth measures obscures our ability to draw inferences about the relationship between wealth and fertility. Here, we disentangle economic capacity and market opportunities using wealth measures that do not carry the same market-oriented biases as commonly used asset-based measures. Using measures of agricultural and market-based wealth for 562,324 women across 111,724 sampling clusters from 151 DHS surveys in 64 countries, we employ a latent variable structural equation model to estimate (a) latent variables capturing economic capacity and market opportunity and (b) their effects on completed fertility. Market opportunities had a consistent negative effect on fertility, while economic capacity had a weaker but generally positive effect on fertility. The results show that the confusion between operational measures of wealth and the concepts of economic capacity can impede our understanding of how material resources and market contexts shape reproduction.
研究表明，财富与生育之间的关联喜忧参半，这一发现一直困扰着人类生殖的进化理论。然而，财富衡量指标不仅仅反映经济能力，而经济能力预计会提高生育水平。这些指标还可以作为家庭可获得的市场机会的代理指标，而市场机会可能会降低生育水平。许多财富衡量指标的多面性含义模糊了我们推断财富与生育之间关系的能力。在此，我们使用一些财富衡量指标来区分经济能力和市场机会，这些指标不存在与常用的基于资产的衡量指标相同的市场导向偏差。利用来自64个国家151项人口与健康调查的111,724个抽样群组中562,324名女性的农业财富和基于市场的财富衡量指标，我们采用潜变量结构方程模型来估计：（a）反映经济能力和市场机会的潜变量；（b）它们对生育结局的影响。市场机会对生育有持续的负面影响，而经济能力对生育的影响较弱，但总体上呈正面影响。结果表明，财富的操作衡量指标与经济能力概念之间的混淆会妨碍我们理解物质资源和市场环境如何影响生育。
