> FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.
I don't think this assertion holds true at all: https://i.redd.it/5wy659956rsc1.png
I don't think this assertion holds true at all: https://i.redd.it/5wy659956rsc1.png
In the graph, fertility rates decline with income until around $275k. Those aren't families who can't afford housing. Those are well-off families with low birth rates. The birth rates start to climb in that chart only for the ~4% wealthiest families.
Also, you might reasonably conclude from that chart that rich women (in the $400k+ brackets) have more children, but that's not what the chart is actually showing. It's a synthetic total fertility rate, and not the actual TFR. They look at how many children women in that income bracket had this year, and estimate how many children they would have had if kept that reproductive rate for their whole reproductive period. That's going to misestimate the true rate due to selection effects. So, for example, a women who only wants one child is more likely to choose to have that child at 30, when her family income is higher, than at 18. But that doesn't imply she would have had more children if she had more money.
To put it another way, even if giving people more money had no effect whatsoever on their total fertility rate, you'd still expect the graph to curve up like that due to how people time their pregnancies.
The men are playing Fortnite. The women are on TikTok and Instagram.
Babies went off trend so we could collectively do dopamine maxxing as a species.
Evolution didn't anticipate this.
So what we have now is the vast majority of humans being self-selected out of the gene pool by smartphones.
It would be ironic if this was the great filter.
We're going to be so jealous of the robots. They'll have everything and never die.