Re:The War ISIS Wants
by ElysianEagle on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @12:50PM
(#10582751)
There's also the fact that in many poor nations, there simply isn't enough of a social safety net to take care of you in your old age. The surest form of insurance is to have as many kids as you can and count on some or all of them to support you when you're no longer able to work.
With SS, Medicare (in the US), etc. even though you won't live in luxury, you at least have some kind of income coming in in your retirement years.
Not "despite", but "because".
In an agricultural society, you need lots of children because you need a lot of hands working the farm. If you're dirt-poor in an industrial society, you need lots of children so they can all work in factories to earn money for the family. In any society with a high infant mortality rate, you need to have even more children because you can expect a lot of them to die young.
In the modern West, we're not subsistence farmers or dirt-poor factory workers, and almost all of our kids survive to adulthood. We don't have lots of children because we don't need to have lots of children.