There's also the whole "not being aware contraception exists because you couldn't go to school" thing.

Sex is free, fun, and easy. The less education you have the less likely you are to understand effective birth control. The less wealthy you are the less you have to spend on contraception. Those things together with the easiest and cheapest form of entertainment would seem to cirrelate with a higher birthrate in lower income brackets.

I cant find any studies that support what Im saying right now, but the logic holds.

I know that my plan is two max at the moment strictly because total cost per head is roughly $500k in today's dollars (including total private college costs, which account for half of that).

Depending on how you define it, children are actually a much more reliable way to have a reasonably enduring legacy than businesses/foundations/accomplishments/fame/etc, though both approaches are ultimately ephemeral. You probably have to successfully make it at least three levels down an ancestor tree, rooted at yourself and with an average replacement rate around 2, in order for your own genetic legacy to have a high statistical likelihood of enduring through anything short of a species-level catastrophe.

So double the kids for same price assuming they go to a public university? Sounds like a good deal to me.

FYI, you can cut that down even further if you go to a community college for the first year or two and then transfer.

But yes if you only gain admission to the long tail of private colleges, then you would almost certainly be wiser to go to a low-cost public school.

I wouldn't want my kids to consider community college unless they had to. By definition, I'd like them to have the same academic opportunities I had, if possible.

If your kids are too stupid to get tuition assistance, private college isn't going to do any more good for them than a regular local uni.

I also assume you'd only go to a private college that ranks highly, which means low access to meaningful amounts of income/wealth-independent scholarship money. A low-ranked private college is usually no better than many public ones.

Is that true, though? A few months ago, I was reading a few articles about more competitive (highly-ranked) universities directing significant portion of their own aid dollars to wealthier students in order to lure them in.

Now, much of these schools' motivation for doing so is that those aid dollars spread more thinly among more (wealthy) students means more revenue than focusing those dollars on "need based" (poor) students, especially if the poor students don't stay the whole 4 years because they can't afford even the subsidized tuition. That may not mean much for your ultimate calculation, since it could be as little as 10% discount, but it's still something.

There is likely also merit-based money out there, which may be what the parent comment was referring to, but I have no idea if that's anything but trivial in amount.

Well, people in the US made way more children when they made very few money, and lived 10 together in tiny houses and apartments.

And they still do in the developing world.

So it can't be just costs.

Our expected spending on children has also grown dramatically. For example back then there was an expectation that someone would always stay home an look after the kids, now we expect them to go to day care. Back then 4 kids sharing a room their entire childhood was normal, now each kid is expected to get their own room. Back then kids where expected to entertain themselves, now we expect them to attend all sorts of after school activities. Back then they where expected to either go straight to work after high school or pay their own way through college either by working or scholarships, now the parents are expected to help pay for college, and so on.

Basically it's not that having kids per se is more expensive, it's that providing kids with the quality of life we've come to be expected to provide them with is expensive.

In the past, kids could work on the farm or in a factory and generate money, now you have to send them to daycare and buy them toys and they cost money.

Previously, more people would jump straight out of high school into blue collar jobs and raising families. Now, men and women are delaying kids to focus on college and building a career.

And mothers would more often stay home to raise kids. Now both parents are working more, and there's less time to spend raising children.

Boarding houses have become illegal, and their modern equivalent of micro apartments are in danger of becoming illegal [0].

To add a personal story, when I was college we had about 20-30 people living in a medium sized single family home. We were mostly students, but there were a couple of kids, and a grandmother too. Our neighbors hated us, and constantly tried to report us for overcrowding. However in our locality there was no cap on the number of residents, so long as conditions are sanitary and safe. But we'd have the zoning person come through frequently to ensure we didn't have things like too many ovens or broken bathrooms.

0: http://www.sightline.org/2016/09/06/how-seattle-killed-micro...

How many bed rooms and how did the actual sleeping work?

A "standard" 3-bedroom house would have 7-8 people in it per room (assuming you use the family room as a bedroom too) which means either bunk beds or wall to wall sleeping bags? Also 30 people sharing two bathrooms doesn't sound fun.

First world problems...

Most people don't live with grandma anymore, and the government will happily take your children away if you don't keep every second of their lives supervised by an adult, prior to the age of 13.

Today's mom, on the other hand, moved to San Francisco to get her data scientist/devops/whatever job (there were not any in her area of northern Minnesota and she kind of liked CA after going to Stanford) and Grandma doesn't want to move to CA because it's going to fall into the ocean, you know.

Back then: Have kid when 18-24, Grandma is 36-42.

Now: Have kid when 35, Grandma is 70.

Those things actually contribute to the problem. They drive up taxes, causing more families to feel that they need two incomes and overtime and a bit more waiting.

Ah yes, back when one (1) unexceptional salary could actually support a few humans, shelter, etc.

> They drive up taxes, causing more families to feel they need two incomes...

I’m pretty sure the stagnation of wages while costs of living kept increasing played a way bigger part of this than a few percentage points of tax changes.

Hypothetically, though, if previous generations (a) did not need as many farm hands, (b) did not need as many factory workers, (c) had access to cheap birth control and (d) enjoyed low child mortality rates, do you think their high birth rates would've stayed as high?

I also don't want to leave my wife and I without a child but all I envision are bars of my own making.

[...] the shrinking arable land beset by frequent drought, is supporting a rapidly expanding population. [...] expected to grow from some 16 million today to 55 million in 2050, reaching 140 million by the end of the century

A 10x increase in population, decreasing farmland, and then add the effects of climate change on top...

Sure, but they're far cheaper in both Sweden and Finland than in the US, yet people are still having fewer children there, so it can't simply be a cost issue.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/sep/22/books.famil...

Also interesting: China's fertility rate is apparently lower than the US's.

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

Of course, who knows if the chinese data is even accurate.

If it's what your priorities are you can have a home, cars, max out your 401k and be paying back student loans on a single entry level tech salary.

This requires that you put up with a long commute, beater cars, an old house and DIYing a good chunk of skilled trade work that you could hire someone for. You'll be bringing your own lunch to work, drinking beer from a can and not building much cash savings at that stage. Nevertheless it's sustainable on a single entry level tech income in a major urban area and living a couple hours away.

I think that increased spending on luxury things has by implication de-prioritized the "life milestone" things.

Generations ago people bought a house and started a family first. Now people accumulate wealth first and settle down later (which is probably a reflection on the fact that the lifestyle needed to accumulate wealth is not very compatible with settling down).

The reason for this may be that, in the absence of public social safety net, family (and particularly close family) serve as a safety net, and particularly children, once they are able to be productive, can be a kind of safety net against infirmity for their parents.

- lack of birth control and related education - desire for “free” manual labor to work stuff such as farm fields - desire to ensure continuity of one’s family tree (i.e. high mortality rates for infants and children due dangerous conditions and/or lack of healthcare)

Their birth rates are also declining and doing it with increasing speed.

I dunno, fungi usually don't produce mushrooms until right before their host is about to die or their substrate is about to be depleted. Reproducing takes a lot of energy, so individuals usually wait until they have no other choice.

Humans seem to be the same way. E.g. low-income kids go through puberty sooner, presumably due to having poorer health. And usually if someone starts drinking a lot or otherwise abusing drugs, they get really hot for a year or two before they start looking sickly and terrible.

At the population level species keep reproducing until they use up all the available resources, and then the populations collapse, but on the level of individuals the dynamics seem to work in almost the opposite way.

if we had a more fair economic system, more families would feel economically secure enough to have children.

the minimum level of economical security required rises proportionally with wealth and income disparity, because our economic outcomes are inextricably tied to each other through inflation and the like.