Abstract
Fertility patterns are rooted in a society's culture and social structure, and in the economics of childbearing that is thereby set up. Technological change affects the demand for children, and hence for fertility regulation, both by directly altering the expected benefits and costs of children to parents and by influencing the cultural and social structural underpinnings of that economic calculus. Routes of that influence include the demand for education generated by competition for modern sector employment, the consumerist values and lifestyles conveyed by communications media, and the erosion of community and kin pressures on individual behavior in a more mobile and more commercialized society. Such forces for behavioral change, it is argued, are more powerful factors in fertility decline than either the “social technology” of contraceptive service delivery (family planning programs) or improvements in the technology of contraception itself.
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