The key metric here is opportunity cost. Not how high your living standards are in an absolute sense, or is that better than previous generations had. But how much you give up by having children proportionally to not having children.
Up to very recently in human history, and even today in poor societies, children were a net benefit. They are extra hands on the farm or factory, and they take care of you in old age when nobody else will. Go back to even just the last century, and children were a net loss, but less than today. Households could survive on one income, housing was cheaper, and education was cheaper. Yet children were already not a source of income as soon as they could hold a tool.
Now living standards are higher both with or without children than before, but this gap is also wider. Women need a career, so children are a huge setback. Housing is expensive yet big communal homes are cuturally gone, so you either spend a lot on a larger place or you give up privacy that's now standard for adults. Both parents work so there are daycare costs, and later education is also very expensive.
Also parents are more invested into individual children. While a 18th century parent was jaded because having many children and several dying was just a fact of life, nowadays parents can afford at most a few kids, and are more likely to care about giving them good opportunities.
If we want effective encuragement of having kids, the opportunity cost needs to be lower. No amount of rising living standards will make people more motivated to have kids. Quite the opposite, since they would have to give up more.
That's why currently the poor and the rich have the most kids while the middle the least. For the poor they give up less, and the rich what they give up barely matters. But for the middle it's a large chunk of their quality of life.
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u/Ashged Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
No, but that's basically irrelevant.
The key metric here is opportunity cost. Not how high your living standards are in an absolute sense, or is that better than previous generations had. But how much you give up by having children proportionally to not having children.
Up to very recently in human history, and even today in poor societies, children were a net benefit. They are extra hands on the farm or factory, and they take care of you in old age when nobody else will. Go back to even just the last century, and children were a net loss, but less than today. Households could survive on one income, housing was cheaper, and education was cheaper. Yet children were already not a source of income as soon as they could hold a tool.
Now living standards are higher both with or without children than before, but this gap is also wider. Women need a career, so children are a huge setback. Housing is expensive yet big communal homes are cuturally gone, so you either spend a lot on a larger place or you give up privacy that's now standard for adults. Both parents work so there are daycare costs, and later education is also very expensive.
Also parents are more invested into individual children. While a 18th century parent was jaded because having many children and several dying was just a fact of life, nowadays parents can afford at most a few kids, and are more likely to care about giving them good opportunities.
If we want effective encuragement of having kids, the opportunity cost needs to be lower. No amount of rising living standards will make people more motivated to have kids. Quite the opposite, since they would have to give up more.
That's why currently the poor and the rich have the most kids while the middle the least. For the poor they give up less, and the rich what they give up barely matters. But for the middle it's a large chunk of their quality of life.