Fertility and wealth in Sri Lanka: are children normal goods?

The paper by Weerasinghe and Parr resurrects a longstanding debate over the causal role of wealth in fertility reductions of the past centuries (1). Malthus, who did not foresee any negative correlation between wealth and fertility, wrote, “That population does invariably increase where there are the means of subsistence, the history of every people that have ever existed will abundantly prove” (2). For Malthus, the desires of the rich are just like those of the poor. Why then would wealthier people, who can have more of anything they want, have fewer children? He basically believes that all human beings like to have sex and will take any opportunity to start engaging in sex and reproduction as early and as often as they can. Malthus’s unified account of human motivation is a very satisfying feature of his theory. His theory does appear to hold true in his own era. There had been fluctuations in the ‘means of subsistence’ prior to Malthus time, and the historical data on these populations indicate that they did indeed seem to behave the way that Malthus theorizes. Galloway describes over 100 years of population dynamics in Rouen, France, prior to 1787 and finds that abundant grain harvests significantly increased the numbers of marriages and births with opposite effects in bad times when grain prices rose (3).