Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

jeffbee

That's just bias and ignorance. Fertility is positively correlated with wealth and income, not negatively.

"We found that the relationship between wealth and fertility was much more likely to be positive than negative."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4822433/

View on HN

Fertility isn't the only factor in a family's size.

It does seem that lower income families have more children. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p... (The data is in an excel spreadsheet.)

Fertility is literally just a measure of how many people children people are having. Your data is largely capturing the fact the age at which your income tends to peak and the age at which people tend to have children are very far apart.

How about this?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

It shows a clear downward trend in number of births as income rises.

People generally earn more after being in the workforce many years. It is no surprise, to me, that older people are having fewer children than young people.

Sure but that doesn't control for anything. Control, for example, by race or education, place of residence, etc.

Controlling for cost of living would make sense, but why would you control for race or education?

Because I think you are trying to answer the question of whether giving a specific person more money would cause them to have more or fewer children. You want the marginal fertility associated with a given marginal change in wealth. If you don't control for other factors then you are just taking cultural influences (e.g. that possibly some national origins or races prefer larger families) and multiplying them by the association between that race and wealth (e.g. that some race within a given country is systematically impoverished). So, that would be an invalid analysis without the control.

Why link a study of studies when you could just link data?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com