Once you have a comfortable stable population of people who no longer worry about their future ⊠then they will be more likely to have a family.
Somehow India is an exception to this. People worry about the future and still have kids. Nearly every married couple I know has at least one child or planning for one.
I donât get it.
Because all forms of poverty are not the same. Itâs only confusing if you insist on measuring things in dollars instead of stability. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India has a much more secure and stable life than a precarious retail worker in the US. Yes, the precarious retail worker might have more trinkets and consumer goods than the Indian farmer, but the Indian farmer owns their own livelihood.
Having a child is ultimately an act of selflessness and generosity. People have children when they are fairly confident that they will be able to ensure those children will enjoy a quality of life that they find acceptable. And âacceptableâ is context dependent. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India can have a couple kids and guarantee that their children will have a secure future. If nothing else, they can pass the farm onto their children. At the worst, the farmerâs children will have the same standard of living as the farmer. Most such farmers would hope their children would get an education and do even better than they did. But if nothing else they can always just take over the farm. The same isnât true for a wage slave working for Walmart. The Walmart worker knows their existence is incredibly precarious. If rents spike again and wages donât keep up, they will be living on the street. Their existence is precarious, and few people want to bring children into such a precarious life.
Stability is the key to birth rates. It has nothing to do with dollars earned. A US retail worker makes far more dollars in wages than the market value of the Indian subsistence farmerâs crops. But the US retail worker has to live in a much, much more expensive country. And the Indian subsistence farmer owns their own land, a plot thatâs been in the family for generations. They donât have to pay rent. They donât have to worry about getting fired. The only thing they have to worry about is crop failures. But farmers have had to worry about those since the dawn of time.
Hence my comment about poorly aware people and outmoded ideas. Itâs shocking how we allowed our educational system to become so gutted, basic inferential logic has suffered so much, and how poor and stressed weâve allowed ourselves to become that neutral and ambiguous comments are triggering visceral emotions rather than curiosity and exploration. I was busy and am decreasing screen time in general, so I didnât take time to type all that out. Instead I returned to my work, had a nap, went for a walk, had lunch, finished my work for the day and am relaxing. And have decided to spend screentime learning something exciting and interesting - re-creating. Thank you for taking the time to type it up. Enjoy your day/afternoon/evening.
Itâs because itâs not quite true. Reproductive rates are inversely correlated with wealth and education. If youâre poor, you need more kids to help the family (and, morbidly, even more kids in case some die due to lack of healthcare), especially once you yourself become elderly. When youâre secure, you end up not doing that.
But if youâre secure, but the world sucks, you say âwhy would I want to bring a child into this?â
If you want to maintain a population, you need to create the conditions for people to want to have kids, and give them the opportunity. Separately, you should also want to give your citizens a high standard of living.
But if youâre secure, but the world sucks, you say âwhy would I want to bring a child into this?â
Then the people around me must be oblivious af cause theyâre pretty secure, lifestyle wise. Iâm not talking about farmers or daily wage workers. The people Iâm referring to have stable jobs and monthly income.
Having kids is a lot more expensive when youâre wealthy/middle class than when youâre poor (most of the costs like food, education, etc directly vary with your already existent quality of life), so to poor people itâs a lot easier to make the decision to have another kid. Also I donât know about India but for example in my (third world) country daycare isnât a necessity in the same way it is in the West so thatâs part of the equation too.
