‘De gustibus non est disputandum’, title of article by J. Stigler and G. Becker in the American Economic Review, March 1977.
‘Il paraît que je suis un phénomène socio-culturel’, caption of 1986 French advertisement showing a baby and advocating pro-natalism (sub-title: ‘la France a besoin de ses enfants’).
Abstract
It is argued in this article that family formation is conditioned not only by economic factors (more particularly, opportunity structures), but also by ideational changes: the economic factors produce period fluctuations that are superimposed on long-term (and often cohort-driven) ideational effects. Value orientations are explored and compared across countries and across age groups using the internationally-comparable data sets provided by the European Values Studies. The analysis indicates the existence of two latent dimensions with respect to familism: tolerance of non-conformism in family formation, and the meaning attached to parenthood. These two dimensions are not completely distinct from each other though, and both are related to religious and political variables (religiosity, ‘post-materialism’, nationalism, leftism, etc.). Theoretical links are made both with Easterlin's hypothesis which implies fluctuating fertility levels and with Simon's thesis concerning the importance of ‘civil religion’ in supporting fertility. The results are, however, largely in line with Ariès' thesis of two successive and quite distinct fertility transitions in the West, and suggest that fertility is very likely to remain at below-replacement levels.
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Acknowledgements: The authors wish to thank Professors De Moor and Harding for their permission to use the European Values Studies data. The tape was made available by the ESRC-Data Archive, University of Essex.
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Lesthaeghe, R., Meekers, D. Value changes and the dimensions of familism in the European community. Eur J Population 2, 225–268 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01796593
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01796593