Live Longer, Learn More: A Lesson from Nineteenth-Century Armenia

What makes economic development sustainable? One of the best ways to secure lasting growth is educating the population. When families invest more in their children's education, those children go on to have better chances of working, producing, innovating and passing those skills on in turn. In earlier societies, though, resources were limited, and families couldn't always invest as much as they might have wanted in each child. So, they faced a simple trade-off: more children, or fewer children with more resources for each. For a long time, quantity was chosen. But as economic development progressed, couples in many societies began having fewer children and investing more in each one. The question is straightforward: what leads a family to choose fewer, better-educated children? In a paper on nineteenth-century Armenia, Sinara Gharibyan, David Gomtsyan, and E. Roca Fernández explore one answer: mortality. The logic is intuitive: when children are more likely to survive, and adults can expect to live longer, education becomes a better investment, since the effort put in today has more time to pay off.