Economic Growth and Evolution : Parental Preferences for Quality and Quantity of Offspring

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the model developed in Galor and Moav, Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth (2002), in which agents vary genetically in their preference for quality and quantity of children. The simulation produces a pattern of income and population growth that resembles the period of Malthusian stagnation before the Industrial Revolution and the take-off into a modern growth era. We also investigate the possibility that the economy will regress to Malthusian conditions after the modern growth era and show the susceptibility of the modern high-growth state to an increasing prevalence of a strongly quantity-preferring genotype