Please note this study is on men who got a wealth shock. But population wise high income households have less children for some reason.
For the countries and peoples moaning about low birthrates, the simplest solution is to go back to being destitute. The poorer a country or region the more children there are.
Not to say that's a realistic solution, of course. But the cause-and-effect seem fairly clear that more monies equate to less kids.
Go ahead and google fertility rates for any developed country that comes to mind and compare it to when birth control became legal. For the US, UK, Australia, South Korea, etc its the EXACT year.
Wealth doesn't seem to explain it exactly: the main reason people who want kids don't have they in developed countries is a lack of mean (wealth). Wealth itself doesn't seem to be it (all else equal, having more means doesn't seem like the obvious cause).
I wonder what percent of children born for all of human history were simply unplanned. The data seems to suggest something like 50%+ of them. As family planning becomes more accessible, we're finding that people just keep postponing having them and a big part of the reason they had them before was simply "oops".
No surprise in hindsight. There's not a single animal on earth besides us very recently that do any kind of family planning. They just have sex and offspring happen. Why should Homo Sapiens be any different.
Now that birth control exists, there will be much stronger selection for actually wanting children. People who only want sex will be removed from the gene pool.
Why would you have ten children? what is the need, or the benefit, or the reason.
Statistically, they have more behavioral problems including in educated not poor Christian families.
In 2023 I know a lot of bougie American parents who cannot fathom making siblings share a room. 40 years ago, bunk beds were normal. 100 years ago, all the kids would probably be in one room, possibly with their parents, grandparents, etc and that type of living is still endemic in poorer nations. But how many people can afford an American house with another additional room?
I do not see how our experience justifies tens of thousands of dollars per year. Other than a general commitment to providing "the best" to their kids.
Before: everyone had one wage earner per household. Prices for goods meets this reality.
After: everyone has 2 wage earners per households. Prices for goods meets this reality.
Nothing has changed except now you need 2 people earning to live just as well as before. More aggregate output means "more GDP", but who cares when your life is relatively worse in many ways.
> Before: everyone had one wage earner per household. Prices for goods meets this reality.
This was only relatively well-to-do couples. Industrial economies were really good at expanding the middle class, but they never got rid of the lower classes in which both spouses had to work (and, of course, unmarried adults had to work regardless of sex). Labor force participation rate for women increased from a low of about 32% in 1948 (the earliest this chart goes) to a high of about 60% from about the mid-1990s to 2009. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
According to table 2 (page 4) of this BLS document (https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2001/05/art3full.pdf ), a four-person family in 1947 could have a "modest but adequate" lifestyle on a budget of $2904. The median income for a family then was about $3000, while the median income for an individual not in a family was about $1000 (https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1949/demo/p60-00... ). The federal minimum wage of $0.40/hour in 1947 would gross about $800/year for 40 hours a week. So the income necessary for a modest but adequate lifestyle for a family was about 3.75x the minimum wage at our current labor standard hours. Today, with a minimum wage of $7.25/hour, that 3.75x would be $27/hour, or about $54,000/year.
I'd speculate that even today a person with a typical engineer's salary, like then, could support a family at at least "modest but adequate" standards on a single income. But a typical laborer's salary would be stretching it, whether back then or today. Heck, the Turpin parents managed to do it with 13 kids, though they abused the hell out of those kids.
The original family planning, infanticide, or abandonment of eggs for egg laying species, is practiced by a variety of animals.
Used to be true but now has changed. The richer have more children. See a recent survey on the new economics of the family by Mathias doepke of northwestern.
I don't think that this is true anymore. We have crossed the Rubicon, birth rates will only increase if people can maintain a good standard of living with less stress and more available time.
I disagree. I would guess the cause is women gaining agency to dictate how many children they birth, from a combination of being able to control when they have sex, birth control, and access to abortion.
It just so happens that women generally do not have these things in poorer societies.
It's not just that. There's a level of wealth where people just choose to delay having kids
Also, in poorer countries, one’s physical securities may be more strongly related to the size of one’s family.
> Estimates suggest that more than 160 million women and adolescents who wanted to avoid pregnancy were not using contraceptives in 2019, despite significant progress in the use of modern contraceptives globally over the previous 50 years.
> Major disparities in contraceptive use still exist between regions – with more than half the women with unmet need for contraception living in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Some women in some subcultures may choose to have more kids than others, but by and large, giving birth and raising a baby is not a walk in the park, so I cannot see many women jumping up and down to have more than 2 or 3 kids.
Because, in fact, life of existing children matter to poor too and new child often means that older gets less food or have to stop education.
Generally means that there are exceptions, with those Indian states being one of them. Good for India to have made significant progress on women’s rights.