Hacker News Reader

Comment by glenra | Hacker News Reader

> wealthier people have fewer children on average

I don't believe that's the case. At least not if we're using income as a proxy for wealth. Arranged by income, wealthier households in general tend to be larger households.

It's well established that the "top 20%" by income contains more than 20% of the earners - lots of dual-income couples - and also contains more than 20% of the people; the "bottom 20%" contains less than 20% of the earners and people. Seems to be true for 1% as well. If you want to check, there's a nice table of household size by income here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...

View on HN

I stand corrected. My cursory google search didn't turn up anything concrete, so I fell back on some things I've heard but can't quite place the origin. My understanding was that wealthier families had, on average, ~2 children, but lower income families tended to have more than that. That, of course, does not necessarily mean that the average household size will be larger (there may be more or less unwed or divorced households at lower income levels).

Of course, my point still stands: just because it's 1% of households does not necessarily mean that it's >1% of people (it may very well be, though).

I suspect that on a global scale (and excluding China due to its "one child policy") this is true, but it may not hold up as well in the USA or "first-world" countries in general. Within the US I suspect there's a high standard deviation for the number of children in wealthy families, but it may be higher than for those where resources are highly restricted during reproductive years.

Globally, I've seen references for years about high birth rates in poor countries, with (anecdotal?) indications that having multiple children was a requirement if you were going to have someone to take care of you in your old age. I suspect that also ties in heavily with youth mortality rates - you may have multiple children in hopes that some of them will actually make it through.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com