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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

> If you consider starting a family with no hope of ever getting out of renting, as landlords constantly raise monthlies, you might reconsider children.

Generally the less money you make the more kids you have. It's really a question of prioritization. People say they're holding off on kids for X or Y reason but I think this is more of an expressed vs revealed preferences situation. They would rather chase material wealth for themselves than have kids, and to be clear I'm not judging just observing. Through most of human history mud huts weren't a blocker to having kids.

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

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That’s because people pulling a nice paycheck have gotten a taste of stability and don’t want to risk losing it, and this is intensified when the economy is turbulent. People making less never had stability in the first place and don’t have as much to lose.

Aside from that, it's merely observations/anecdotes, but from what I’ve seen people who have managed to achieve a massive uplift in economic status (say from minimum wage in their mid-20s → net worth north of $500k-$1m in their mid-30s) are more likely to have children than people who’ve always been wealthy. I would theorize that such individuals feel a greater degree of economic freedom, having lived at the bottom and being able to make more effective use of what they have.

Mud huts didn't have you evicted 4 years after you built it.

A different scenario. It's one thing to function in a world where you have nothing but can always make ends meet because while you aren't earning anything more, at least your expenses aren't increasing. Currently we have a different system.

> Generally the less money you make the more kids you have.

Previously, but this no longer holds.

https://www.governance.fyi/p/45-why-rising-family-size-tempo...

It holds. It holds practically everywhere on Earth. Income is one of the strongest inverse correlations to fertility.

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility#Contrary_...

https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-...

https://www.demographic-research.org/articles/volume/51/26

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf

(your paper is five years old, and is lagging broad, rapid global fertility decline trends; it's not income-fertility, its "educated, empowered women with access to birth control have less kids, no kids, and/or delay childbirth" regardless of income, with the caveat being some higher income cohorts and ultra orthodox religions/cultures [Israel] having higher than baseline fertility)

The contrary findings section on Wikipedia starts quoting a 2002 article. Could you point to which part exactly you find more compelling?

Education and contraceptives as the article I linked are separately correlated and powerful, as is religious adherence. They're all factors. Note that each of these factors is differently important in different countries or regions, so just because you found a study that shows a positive correlation in the Netherlands that it is in isolation important or that it would work the same way in the US.

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