IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v36y1976i01p45-75_09.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Population Change and Farm Settlement in the Northern United States

Author

Listed:
  • Easterlin, Richard A.

Abstract

As farm settlement spread westward, area after area exhibited remarkably similar economic and demographic changes, among them, the establishment of a virtually zero growth rate of farm population. At bottom this was due to a shift in farm family fertility from very high to replacement levels, a trend apparent in older areas as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century despite the abundance of good farm land to the west. The principal source of this wholly voluntary adjustment of fertility was the increasing difficulty encountered by farm parents in providing for their children the kind of start in life they would like them to have. Similar pressures may account for other rural fertility declines in the historical past or today's LDC's.

Suggested Citation

  • Easterlin, Richard A., 1976. "Population Change and Farm Settlement in the Northern United States," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 36(1), pages 45-75, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:36:y:1976:i:01:p:45-75_09
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S002205070009450X/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:36:y:1976:i:01:p:45-75_09. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jeh .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.