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The title may make this sound boring, and it might be for some of you, but I think my mom will like this.

Today in Econ we were talking about various policies adopted to instigate growth, one of them being population growth controls. If there are too many people, there's not enough capital (machines, dollars, etc) to go around, so income per worker is low. So we were discussing why women in less-developed countries would have more children in the first place, for several sad reasons: infant mortality rates are high (so you have to have more kids to make sure someone will take care of you when you are old), there's not much else for women to do but be mothers (not too many women lawyers running around in Tunisia, probably), and because of child labor (the more children you have, the more income is generated for the family).

In further discussion about child labor, Prof Beckham Gramm commented that it wasn't so long ago that we had legal child labor in factories, and she mentioned "Iowa farm families", where they have like 8 kids and all the kids do chores.. Okay, so that's like my Grammy, only they had 9 siblings total on their Iowa farm, I believe. :)