Data By the Bay

Having revisited the known phenomenon of negative correlation between girls' education and fertility analyzed by Jeffrey Sachs in "The End of Poverty", we proceed to take into account such quantitative ratings of democracy and freedom as the Democracy Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit and Freedom in the World scores published annually by Freedom House. Are all democracies doomed to act as behavioral sinks, in John B. Calhoun's terminology? We will approach the problem by looking at the structure of fundamental and derived human rights. The structure will incorporate the right to have children and the right not to have children, neither of which the founding fathers needed to address directly, given a very different historical situation. The former right is explicitly restricted in China nowadays, while the latter is under attacks elsewhere. Preliminary conclusions will be drawn and future research directions proposed.