>Why do peasants in Africa have more children than Lawyers in New York

Because below a certain agricultural productivity level having more kids is actually beneficial for your economic success. Once you get over a certain productivity level it makes sense to have fewer kids and invest in them moving up the economic ladder.

>Builders in Arkensas have more kids than tech workers in San Francisco?

Because the cost of every warm body in a household in SF is completely asinine so people have fewer kids than they would like to.

Poor people in San Francisco have more kids than rich people in San Francisco. The explanation just doesn't fit the data.

I was assuming you knew that your comparison of a builder in Arkansas or a programmer in SF was intended to be a comparison of two people not at the top of the income ladder but reasonably financially secure.

Poor people everywhere have more kids than richer people in the same places because various welfare programs make the net cost of each kid less. There's also a massive cost cliff once you get below the threshold at which parents have enough income to justify saving for their kids college.

That doesn't mean family sizes aren't smaller in high cost areas. This is a well known trend.

I posted anecdotes to contextualise the trend. I don't really think there's much point in getting hung up on them because my point is: poor people have more kids, on average, and this trend holds pretty much everywhere. The real question is: what is it about being rich that causes you to have less kids?

>what is it about being rich that causes you to have less kids?

Are we talking locally rich or globally rich?

People in industrialized (rich) nations don't have tons of kids because that's not how you get ahead in that kind of economy. Subsistence farmers have tons of kids because that's how they get ahead economically.

Within richer nations richer people have fewer kids because the way social safety nets and social expectations of how one should raise one's kids make kids more expensive the higher up you go.

Well, the relationship holds at every level. It's true within and across societies. It doesn't matter if we're talking locally rich or globally rich.

I'm skeptical of local explanations because the relationship is so universal.

I understand that the real reason is Women’s education. The more education a woman has the more life options she has. Uneducated women have lots of kids, educated women tend to have fewer.

I thought the relationship between wealth & offspring was actually stronger for men, but I might be wrong about that.

Rich people tend to think they're going to have high quality kids and K select as opposed to the R selection the poor use? /not entirely serious

"it's in the very poorest places that you're going to have a tripling in population ... it's amazingly as children survive, parents feel like they'll have enough kids to support them in their old age. And so they choose to have less children."

https://www.gatesnotes.com/about-bill-gates/a-conversation-w...

I actually don't agree with that diagnosis. I think the very poorest people genuinely can't access contraception. Once you get above a fairly low level and the pill becomes affordable, something else becomes the bigger factor.

I just don't buy that very poor people ration out sex under a precise calculation of how many kids they want. Doesn't fit my observations of how humans behave. Most people fuck because they're horny, or because their husband is horny and they need his support to survive, or frankly because they're so poor they have to sell themselves. HIV is a bigger risk than not having children in old age, most Africans know that, but that doesn't stop it either.

> Once you get above a fairly low level and the pill becomes affordable, something else becomes the bigger factor.

The life choices of women are an important factor. Having both a career and children is still difficult today and more women choose careers.

Poor people beget more poor people. That's the economic data point right there.

The reason peasants in Africa have more children is manifold: from religion and lack of knowledge preventing contraception to outright necessity, because in these regions child labour is a thing.

A for developed countries: again, multiple reasons with religion still being right up there.

You can't just draw a parallel between a poor agricultural worker and a New York Lawyer, because obviously there are a thousand confounding factors, anything from education to where is the nearestvdoctor, so general stavility of the country.