At 10:43 PM 7/24/97 -0400, you wrote:
>Beth Middleton <bmiddleton@PLANT.SIU.EDU> writes:
>>Colinvaux's take on this is that humans fill different economic
>>niches, much like plant and animal populations. The wealthy niche is
>rather small,
>>but consumptive. Necessarily, wealthier people have fewer children,
>>because there is a smaller economic niche for them to fill.
>
>What does that mean, "smaller economic niche"? Wealthier people have
>more economic resources. I'm confused.
>
> -- Anne
"Smaller economic niche" refers to how much of a certain type of resource
(in this case money) is available to a particular group of people. Each
individual in this "wealthy" niche has more money than people outside of it,
but the niche itself is small in terms of how many people can occupy it.
What Colinvaux was saying was that only a few people can occupy this wealthy
economic niche. Wealthy people have to spend much more money on their
children in order to keep their children in the wealthy economic niche, so
therefore they have fewer of them. Also, there isn't space for a lot of
people in this niche.
If the rich had too many children, their offspring would overpopulate this
niche. He also suggests, that since power can be traced to the wealthy,
that wars often start when this wealthy niche is becoming overpopulated (too
many rich people, too few "wealthy" resources for them).
These ideas make some sense, yet many ecologists think that "niche theory"
can't be applied to people. Niches are usually subdivided between species,
not subpopulations.
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