Southerners are "American" while Northerners are "German"

I know I have seen this image and data before (in a book we got for free at a geography conference) but I ">just saw it again and now the connections to US politics sprung into my mind. Southerners tend to see themselves as either as unhyphenated Americans or Black. In the north, relatively few people see themselves as just American and instead remember their ethnic ancestry and are proud of it. The largest ancestry is German though the English were the "charter group" and hence the United States speaks English rather than German.

In a past academic life :) I taught cultural geography and researched ethnic distribution in cities....

It seems that the core "red states" area is also the area where people identify as American most. Well, this isn't quite true:



but I think interesting all the same.

Causes of the Demographic Transition

Oded Galor has made many contributions to growth theory and population economics and the connections between them. A new working paper examines various economic theories of the causes behind the demographic transition. In Galor's terminology the demographic transition refers specifically to the decline in fertility rates and population growth. This is the third phase in the conventional demographic transition model:



Galor gives the background of each theory, facts that they predict, and whether those facts match reality. It is a very useful survey. Hypotheses/theories that he rejects based on the evidence are that the fall in fertility was caused by:

1. Rising income in the early industrial revolution - a theory he associates with Gary Becker.

2. The decline in infant and child mortality.

3. Development of capital markets reduced the need to have children to support oneself in old age - The old age security hypothesis.

The ones for which he finds support are (not surprisingly given his previous work on these topics):

1. The rise in demand for human capital resulting in a trade-off between child quantity and child "quality".

2. The decline in the gender gap in human capital and wages.