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