Kids are cheap when you are poor because you aren’t seeking status. A home in a highly desirable suburban school district won’t support 12 kids in the lifestyle that people demand in those places.

Whoever has custody of the kids is fine. The social services benefits scale. They won’t get rich, but they’ll eat. People will be OK. The only people who lose are stupid men who have multiple children with multiple women.

Once you have a little cash, the formula changes completely.

You also have the state which pays for most of the top line expenses of having kids. Once you start making money, those benefits don't fade, they instantly disappear entirely.

If you're at a certain income, additional kids is additional income as more and more gets taken care of.

And that certain income can be surprisingly high, as it's often a multiple of the poverty level which is calculated based on family size.

eg: https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/badgercareplus/fpl.htm

Yup. And it tends to cluster around rural and sectarian lines.

When people start having 6+, the formulas get weird and vary by state and sometimes county.

We've gotten smarter, to our detriment.

If you fail to pass on your genetics, are your really smarter?

Potentially. You're mixing "fitness" with "intelligence" -- there's no guarantee that "intelligence" will guarantee fitness.

That depends on whether or not you value passing on your genetics.

Are you implying homosexuals et al are somehow inherently dumber?

No, I'm responding to a comment.

And other people are judging your comment as dumb and somewhat misunderstanding of genetics/fitness.

And I'm judging them in turn for not understanding intelligence or genetics or fitness and for being passive/aggressive.

Right, and you seemed to imply that smartness can be measured in how many live copies of one's genes one manages to produce.

Sort of. The idea that we're somehow smarter today is nonsense on stilts.

Smartest was 10-15 years ago. Flynn effect reversed.

we are not smarter, but we have access to more knowledge

I wonder about that. How much of the knowledge we're exposed to is actually true?

“So you hate waffles?”

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/no-bitch-dats-a-whole-new-x-w...

If you fail to achieve goals, you're not smarter.

But passing on genes is a pretty arbitrary goal. It's the one encoded in our genes, but (looks around at random object) passing on teacup design is encoded in a teacup. The most teacups are the ones that make people look at them and say "I want a copy of that cup". It's just statistics, not the ultimate meaning of the universe. The humans who think it's the ultimate meaning of the universe may be more likely to replicate - but that's a genetically inherited delusion, not a fact. You can pass on your editor choice just as well as you can pass on your genes.

Is intelligence correlated with having kids?

What does the individual get out of passing on their genetics?

Natural selection does not care one bit about the individual, to the question is completely meaningless. Add to that, that we share 99.9% of our DNA, so you passing it on, means I'm passing it on for free, while you sit there with all the cost. Who's the fool now?! ;)

Were they Catholic? Contraception was a sin back then.