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To be fair I personally believe this is not a case of “rich/educated people have fewer children”, more the case that the way society is structured in those rich
by seer 3y ago
To be fair I personally believe this is not a case of “rich/educated people have fewer children”, more the case that the way society is structured in those rich/educated places, having children is a bad deal.
It used to be if you had some kids, it was a huuge investment, but you got a lot out of the deal after about 13 years.
But right now, children are still a huge investment, but the parents hardly get any economic incentive for it, the country has “captured” that for its own end.
If governments took this into account and “repaid” this back to the parents, I’m sure people will have way more children.
If societies were structured in such a way that children made economic sense to their parents, I’m sure shrinking population would not be a thing.
Now if something like this has moral problems in and off itself is a different question. I just want to point out that “developed countries are have fewer children” shouldn’t be taken as an absolute truth. It just developed countries as currently structured do not incentivize parents enough. Just look at Israel for example.
- arcticbull 3y agoIt is indeed literally a case of rich/educated people have fewer children. It’s called the demographic-economic paradox. [1] There’s been a lot of research on this because the effect is so pronounced. > In decreasing order of strength, fertility (TFR) correlates negatively with education, [contraceptive prevalence], and GDP per capita, and positively with religiosity. [2] If you’re educated, rich, non-religious and can bone with impunity you have somewhere between 1 and 2 kids on average, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 It is absolutely a fantastic deal to have kids in Finland where you get months and months of mat and pat leave, etc, and their birth rate is 1.37 Israel is only high because they’re a religious ethnostate and religiosity as the studies show is positively correlated with fertility. Respectfully I do think the data shows we should take this for granted. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility [2] https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8331-7 https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
- zo1 3y agoJust a smaller comment to a part of yours. Getting maternity/paternity leave of months is peanuts compared to 2 decades of rearing, and I don't think we can use that as "proof". Parenting is hard and we absolutely should be incentivizing it way more, not with leave, but with more financial subsidies and rewards.
- arcticbull 3y agoYeah I mean having kids sucks period, that’s why people who can afford to, don’t. Haha, at least that’s my read.