Dead men tell no tales: how the Homo sapiens became Homo economicus

Roman Zakharenko

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The paper explains long-term changes in birth, death rates and attitude to personal consumption by changing patterns of cultural transmission. When communities are culturally isolated, they are focused on population growth, resulting in large fertility and welfare transfers to children, limited adult consumption and lack of old-age support. With increasing cultural contact across communities, successful cultural traits induce their hosts to attempt becoming celebrities by limiting fertility and increasing longevity via higher consumption and old-age arrangements. Empirical analysis confirms that celebrities have fewer children and live longer; their presence precedes reduced aggregate birth and death rates.

Keywords: cultural transmission; celebrity; demographic transition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J11 J13 J14 Z19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-12-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-evo and nep-gro
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/90643/1/MPRA_paper_90643.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:pra:mprapa:90643

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().