Differences in fertility by class internationally

Update: See below….

The World Values Survey has a lot of data broken down by subjective social class. One of these asks how many children an individual has. So I thought it might be of interested to inspect WVS 5, generally taken around 2005, and compare differences by class in term of children. Of course there might be differences in the age breakdowns of the different classes, so that controlling for age there might be greater differences than evident. But as a coarse I thought it would be of interest. Because the data is in proportions I added up the percentage with 3 or more children in class (above replacement). For a few selected nations I calculated the mean for each class (I used WVS 3 and 4 to supplement).*

I didn’t go into this with any particular hypothesis or expectation, but I’m going to explore particular questions in future posts….

Date below.

Readers with insights about a specific nation (because you actually know something, not rank speculation) are welcome to clarify. I was struck by the differences between Scandinavia and southern Europe. Interestingly, both Chile and Argentina exhibit the southern European pattern.

Update: Mean fertility by subjective class isn’t too hard to calculate. But the formatting is kind of crappy, so I put the table here. All from WVS 5. Remember that the N’s for “Upper Class” are almost always very small, so I’d ignore those. I’m pretty sure that the survey sample for many Third World countries are of higher SES than the population median, so don’t get too trusting of the specific numbers, but rather how the rank orders relate to each other up and down the social ladder.

Note: CSV file.

* I should have calculated the mean for each nation, but it’s rather tedious.