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Comment by red-iron-pine | Hacker News Reader

#3 is because of #1. money buys the freedom. "broader social circles" are just a low-cost substitute; aka Grandma does the daycare.

You'd be surprised how easy it is to have a kid when you can afford daycare, lots of toys to keep Junior busy, and day-to-day life conveniences that make the rest easy to manage.

i.e. freedom isn't an issue because I can send kiddo to summer camp, after school programs, and dance classes. and it's easy to snag a pizza or tacos on the way home from grabbing them from said events. the wee one sleeps really well with white noise generators and temperature controls for the room, and has lots of books to play with (plus a yard + the dogs) when she's not sleeping.

it's the money.

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> it's the money.

Richest societies are having the fewest babies and poorest people are having the most. So this doesn't ring true.

Forbes says “ultra-rich have an average of 2.3 children, above the recent 1.93 average for average Americans”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenaebarnes/2022/07/10/elon-mus...

I am going by this data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...

Countries with the highest TFR are also generally the poor ones.

The relevant dynamics change between an average American woman versus a top 10% American woman compared to any American versus an average woman in a poorer country.

Specifically, women's rights, financial independence, and general safety if choosing to forego having many children or even entering into a relationship.

The women in the poorest countries are having more kids due to not being able to have fewer kids.

Average American women have fewer kids than top 10% Americans due to wanting more resources per child.

> The women in the poorest countries are having more kids due to not being able to have fewer kids.

Citation needed for that claim. While I don't necessarily disagree with you, I have also seen other plausible hypothesis that kids are seen as safety nets in the poorer society, or a possible escape hatch out of poverty even if one of them gets lucky in life. So having more kids might be a rational choice for poor people.

I do not have data either way about motivations for women in poor societies to have kids.

My claim is based on my personal experience of seeing what women have to go through and risk to bring a child into this world, and total fertility rate dropping to less than slightly above 2 at best in every single country where women achieve education and civil rights, indicating they obtain the ability to say no to sex in situations where they can get pregnant, and/or they obtain the ability to prevent or abort pregnancies.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

All the countries with high total fertility rates have environments where women would not expect quality healthcare or medical interventions should things go wrong. It stands to reason that women are not making a conscious decision to put their quality of life and life itself at risk over and over again to birth human resources.

Outside of outlier cult-ish groups, I see almost no women choosing to have more than 3 children. And the data seems to agree. Everyone I know that had a 3rd child, they had 2 boys or 2 girls first and only had a 3rd to try for the other gender.

So I am deducing that the painful experience of pregnancy/childbirth/breastfeeding/infant rearing is a significant limiting factor.

Sure, to an extent you can buy freedom with money, but I think you'd need a lot of money to really be free. Even in the scenario in your comment, you're presumably still the one driving them around between these activities. Unless you have money to pay someone else to do that for you, which would require quite a bit of money. I don't think that's what most people have in mind when they bring up money concerns -- they're likely much more concerned about affording housing, medical care, clothing, etc for a child.

I think the thing with 'freedom' is that they don't want to take on another big responsibility, at the expense of what they already have in their life.

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