ABSTRACT
How can we understand the role of attitudes in determining fertility, and can this understanding help us to predict future population growth in low-fertility societies such as the United States? This is a difficult issue for an economist to address since economics has produced, to my knowledge, no conceptual role for attitudes in determining behavior, and variables purporting to measure attitudes make only rare appearances in economic studies of demographic (or other) phenomena. Economic models of fertility focus on the constraints and opportunities that face households with desires for goods and leisure as well as children, and analyze changes in fertility in terms of changes in these constraints-incomes, prices, and contraceptive technology.1 Preferences, in the form of a utility function whose arguments include the number and ‘quality’ of children, are assumed to be stable. Attitudes, as defined in the Barber/Axinn study, are either not addressed or are dismissed as rationalizations of intended behavior. As an economist, I perceive two tasks ahead of me: (1) to reinterpret this interesting discussion of attitudes and the attitude/fertility link in terms that I (and perhaps my students) can understand, and (2) to suggest some ways in which this reinterpretation might contribute modestly to the analysis of fertility.
