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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

The poor traditionally have much larger families. But counting surviving children, perhaps the rich make out ahead in the end?

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No, this is not true. Or rather, it's true today (in the west) but this is historically very unusual.

We actually have surprisingly good records of such things, and digging them up demolished lots of commonly held beliefs. For instance Peter Laslett (The World We Have Lost) did exactly this for England.

When did the change happen? For instance, my sixth great grandparents were farmers in the mid west (Missouri). They had 12 children of their own. So, for my family, the poor having fewer children than the rich probably would have happened farther back than the late-1700s/early-1800s.

For England I want to say the crossover is about 150 years ago, could be 200, from memory. France & Germany a generation or two later, most other places later still.

The US frontier may well be different -- having almost infinite land meant it could sustain rapid expansion for a long time. I know that New England & Quebec had something like a doubling per generation in total a bit earlier, from say 1650-1800. Which was unprecedented, I don't think any other pre-industrial civilisation got close. (Mathus had the numbers and was suitably impressed.)

(Bear in mind that number of siblings looking backwards is a different measure to number of offspring looking forwards -- 2 kids/parent on average is perfectly compatible with everyone having 3 siblings, as long as they have some childless aunts.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio... is the primary cause of this change. Until food productivity started growing dramatically, populations were generally kept in check by the threat of famine. And famine was more a problem for peasants than nobles.

The change happened earlier in the Americas for the simple reason that due to recent settlement, population density did not yet match what the land could sustain.

Certainly these improvements led to overall population growth, which accelerated over a few centuries. But the pattern that richer people had more kids than poor is a different thing. I believe this persisted until Victorian times in England. The US frontier was a gigantic anomaly in other ways, and could be in this way too, I don't think I've seen data.

That's only modern times and it only applies to societies with contraception and women's right and most importantly, women's education.

For most of history, women weren't educated and there wasn't reliable contraception and hence they all had many babies.

Also, kings/nobility in the past had concubines and consorts who produced children as well.

> The poor traditionally have much larger families.

Also, wealth really doesn't factor into family sizes anywhere today. Poor educated women have less children than wealthy uneducated women.

For some reason, the more educated women are, the less likely they are to have many babies. This is a trend that holds in europe, the US, japan, south korea, etc across all wealth levels.

Major reason: to become an educated woman, you pretty much cannot have children before you finish that education, and once you have that education, you want to get the most out of it (and in the US, you have to, as you're probably in serious debt from it), and that usually means working in a full-time job with a rather child-unfriendly schedule and a lot of self-imposed pressure to "establish your career" before taking the risks of motherhood. If you have a career you like, you are more likely to limit the amount of time you're out on maternity leave (if you're in a country that provides decent maternity leave) or get your kids into daycare early in order to get back to the career you hope to preserve (my friends in the US).

There is no better form of birth control for teenage girls and young women than career aspirations.

Source: am an educated woman from the US South, with lots of educated woman friends, few of whom had children before 30, and none of whom work full-time and have more than two - as well as many childhood acquaintances with only high school diplomas and more kids.

Yes this seems to be the story today, both in the west and in some developing countries (e.g. India).

But this was not the historical pattern.

Firstly, it's my understanding that richer families started having fewer kids than poor ones in Victorian times -- about a century too early to be explained by women getting MBAs (or taking the pill).

Secondly, for poorer people before this, I think the main mechanism (in the west) was delayed marriage. (Not famine or disease etc.) Saving up enough money to decently start a household took time, and the community's definition of "decently" set the equilibrium population. See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_patt... (and Laslett book above).

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