It also relies, however, on a rich lead performance: the man can really act.
Galena became a boom town in the 1840's as fortune hunters arrived to mine the rich lead deposits that lay under the earth nearby.
To put it another way, the rich lead the decline in fertility, producing a short-term increase in income inequality as they capture the benefits of demographic change first.
Where the rich lead, the poor tend to follow partly because the poor get richer over time, and partly because health messages tend to reach the better-educated first and the worse-educated later.
To put it another way, the rich lead the decline in fertility, producing short-term income inequality since they are the first to capture the benefits of demographic change and they leave the poor behind.
In other words, the rich lead the process of demographic change, not the poor who have the most to gain and who, you might have thought, would find it easiest to reduce family size (because it seems a smaller step to have six, rather than seven children, than it is to have one, rather than two).
