Live Longer, Learn More: A Lesson from Nineteenth-Century Armenia

What makes economic development sustainable? One of the best ways to secure lasting growth is educating the population. When families invest more in their children’s education, those children go on to have better chances of working, producing, innovating and passing those skills on in turn.

In earlier societies, though, resources were limited, and families couldn’t always invest as much as they might have wanted in each child. So, they faced a simple trade-off: more children, or fewer children with more resources for each. For a long time, quantity was chosen. But as economic development progressed, couples in many societies began having fewer children and investing more in each one. The question is straightforward: what leads a family to choose fewer, better-educated children?

In a paper on nineteenth-century Armenia, Sinara Gharibyan, David Gomtsyan, and E. Roca Fernández explore one answer: mortality. The logic is intuitive: when children are more likely to survive, and adults can expect to live longer, education becomes a better investment, since the effort put in today has more time to pay off.

Why nineteenth-century Armenia?

Armenia at the time makes an especially useful case study. Society was still largely pre-industrial, without modern medicine, healthcare system to speak of, and no sweeping technological change that could, by itself, explain a rapid shift in family behaviour.

The authors draw on two sources: the 1897 Russian Empire census and digitized parish records, which together let them track mortality, fertility, and education at the local level.

Their starting point is geography. Living conditions in Armenia varied sharply with altitude. Mountain areas were less densely populated, and the climate held back the spread of certain infectious diseases, especially respiratory illnesses. As a result, people living at higher altitudes faced lower mortality than those in the lowlands.

A Longer Life, A Better Education

The idea the authors test is simple. When mortality falls, families can be more confident that their children will grow up and live longer lives. That changes the calculus: investing on skills (reading, arithmetic, running a business) becomes worthwhile, because there’s more time to make use of them.

The data bear this out. In high-altitude regions, where mortality was lower, people were better educated. Detailed school records rarely survive from this period, so the authors rely on a classic proxy from economic history: whether people could report their exact age. Someone who rounds their age to 30 or 40 is typically less numerate than someone who gives a precise figure like 37 or 42, making this a useful stand-in for numeracy across the population.

The same high-altitude regions also had lower fertility. That combination matters: it’s not just that mountain communities were more educated but rather they also had fewer children. Both patterns point the same way: when survival is less uncertain, families can shift resources from having more children to educating the ones they have.

Ruling Out Other Explanations

The real challenge is showing that mortality, rather than something else about mountain life, actually drives these patterns. The authors approach this by working through the alternatives one by one.

One possibility: mountain communities were simply wealthier, letting them have fewer children and educate them better. The data don’t support this: high-altitude regions show no general economic edge over the lowlands.

Another possibility: the way labour was organized in the mountains gave women more autonomy. In pastoral societies, common at higher altitudes, women often played a larger economic role, which could shape family decisions and lower fertility on its own. However, the authors find that this explanation doesn’t hold up on its own, according to the data.

When Health Drives Development

The paper points to a core mechanism in economic development: better survival odds reshape the choices families make. When life is longer and less precarious, education pays off more, and parents can choose to have fewer children while investing more in each.

That said, the findings should be read with care. The authors aren’t claiming mortality is the only factor (or even the main one) behind falling fertility and rising education. Economic organization, social norms, and cultural change all play a part as well. What the study does show is that an often-overlooked factor, how much disease exposure varied by environment, could shape family behaviour long before modern medicine or the welfare state existed.

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