How did the European Marriage Pattern Persist? Social versus Familial Inheritance: England and Quebec, 1650-1850

Gregory Clark, Neil Cummins and Matthew Curtis

No 17475, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Eric Turkheimer famously stated as a Law, "All human behavioral traits are heritable." But this poses a puzzle for pre-industrial demographic systems, such as the European Marriage Pattern, where individuals made behavioral choices that limited fertility. Why were these behaviors not replaced over time with those that generated higher fertility? Some have argued the solution to this puzzle is that limited fertility in the first generation was actually maximal fertility in subsequent generations. But we show that there was no fertility penalty to future generations from higher fertility in the initial generation in both England and Quebec. Here we argue instead that the European Marriage Pattern survived for more than 500 years because, for pre-industrial fertility behavior, Turkheimer's Law does not hold. Even though at the social level fertility limiting behaviors transmitted strongly, there was scant familial inheritance of fertility choices. So fertility enhancing deviations did not get transmitted within families across generations, and the European Marriage Pattern could persist indefinitely. In the paper we show evidence consistent with horizontal as opposed to vertical transmission of fertility behaviors.

Keywords: European marriage pattern; Pre-industrial fertility limitation; Horizontal cultural transmission (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17475 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How did the European Marriage Pattern persist? Social versus familial inheritance: England and Quebec, 1650–1850 (2024)
Working Paper: How did the European marriage pattern persist? Social versus familial inheritance: England and Quebec, 1650–1850 (2024)
Working Paper: How did the European Marriage Pattern persist? Social versus Familial Inheritance: England and Quebec, 1650-1850 (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17475

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17475

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().