• Traister101@lemmy.today
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    7 hours ago

    There is also that sure but biologically people want to have kids, the extreme cost of living experienced by many prevents them from having kids

    • blarghly@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      If that were true, we would expect richer countries to have higher birth rates. Instead, we see roughly the opposite trend. The richer a country gets, typically, the lower the birth rate. You can’t tell me that a teacher and a data entry clerk in Virginia are less economically capable of raising children than subsistence farmers in Malawi, no matter how high the rent in Virginia is.

      If you want to see high income places with high birth rates, then you end up in very traditional/religious cultures, like Mormons and the Arab petro-states, where women face extremely high cultural pressure (if not force/violence) to be child-bearers.

      • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        Richer countries tend to have really shitty work life balances though, You need both money to raise a kid and time to do it as well, if both parents are working full time and barely making rent then of course they aren’t going to have kids. Japan and South Korea are perfect examples of this.

        • blarghly@lemmy.world
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          30 minutes ago

          And in rich countries, who are the people still having many children? The poor, uneducated, rural, religious/conservative segments of the population, who believe in some way or another that raising a child struggling in poverty is preferable to not having children at all.