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Notes -
The 7 Habits of Highly Fertile People
I Background
Look into the comment section of any mainstream video or article on below-replacement fertility, and you will find a familiar refrain: it is simply too expensive to have children.
However, despite this common meme, the data do not bear it out. Plotting Total Fertility Rate (TFR) vs Household Income actually produces a U shape with peaks at household incomes <$20k and >$1m, and trough around $200k per year. 2012-2016, 2018-2022.
What is happening here?
My wife and I are members of the PMC, as are most of our friends. We are in our mid-thirties. We have noticed that our friends are branching into one of two forks:
Recently, I have had the opportunity to get to know well two families quite outside our social circle. The first is the family of a carpenter who makes $30/hour, lives in a rural area 45 minutes outside of a tier-2 city, stay-at-home mom, five kids. The other is an urban family, headed by single-mom who works as a receptionist at a low-end hotel (making, I would guess $20-30k/year), also with five kids.
While these families are superficially quite different, when it comes to childrearing, they actually have a lot of beliefs and habits in common. And, these beliefs and habits stand in stark contrast to those of my peer group - folks who are making quite a bit more money and yet cannot imagine affording five children!
I document them below, mostly for myself:
TL;DR: High-fertility families structure their lives in such a way as to make children extremely cheap and dramatically less time-intensive.
II Habits of Highly Fertile People
1) High-fertility families do not believe that every child needs their own room.
2) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for education.
3) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for kids' stuff.
4) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for enriching activities.
5) High-fertility families start early. They have known no other adult life, besides being parents. Their tastes are quite modest.
6) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for childcare:
7) High-fertility families pay very little for (and think very little about) healthcare
I am not trying to say that having five children is the only worthy goal in life. And, it is entirely possible that the progeny of the PMC will somehow be “better” than the progeny of the Carpenter or Receptionist - healthier, higher-IQ, more worldly.
III Policy Ideas for Increasing Fertility
It also occurs to me that, even if you cannot change the beliefs and habits of the PMC, you could still make policy decisions that increase their fertility:
1) Decrease the cost of housing.
2) Improve the public schools
3) Decrease the cost stuff
4) Enriching activities:
5) Starting early:
6) Childcare:
7) Healthcare:
There are no highly fertile people, only highly fertile women. Women alone make the decision, not couples. “Her body, her choice.” That is the way we have structured modern society. At the time, we didn’t know women would bail on their duty to reproduce. Instead of using the power they received wisely and dutifully, they abuse it to extort ever more resources, while failing to maintain even replacement-level fertility.
As you note, rationally speaking, they already have more than enough (public schools, free entertainment, essentially free healthcare, etc). Giving them even more would just encourage them to limit the supply of babies even more, like a cartel.
I know more women who want children than men. Where is this huge number of 20-30 year old men who want kids? There are many who want a girlfriend, or perhaps even a wife, meaning a hot woman who wants to have sex with them. But if you gave them the choice between a hot girlfriend on one side and a wife and two kids, the travails of pregnancy, waking up five times a night, looking after young children, buying clothes and food, doctor’s visits and cleaning up bodily fluids on the other, I think they would mostly pick the former.
A particular large category in my friend groups is single-parent women with one kid. A huge amount of men will consider them out of the question simply due to seeing them as used goods looking for an idiot to pay up for someone else's kid (as indicated by thousands upon thousands of memes on this topic on the Internet), and many of the rest will be of the kind that any sane mother would keep away from their kid's vicinity.
When dating, I also considered single mothers out of the question. Their allegiances will (rightly) be with their children rather than their new partner. And the biological father will always be in the mix, too. Mostly I wanted my own kids, not to parent someone else's. Why is that wrong?
There’s a big difference between dating a single mom who’s single because her husband died, and dating a single mom who’s single because she had a kid out of wedlock or went through a divorce.
The former is historically common and is a great situation for all around, this is a person who took til death do us part seriously and probably retains, despite her loss, the character and personality to maintain a healthy relationship.
In the latter two cases, there’s tremendous baggage, and a strong suggestion of poor relationship characteristics. If she couldn’t work things out with the father of her children, who’s to say she’ll be able to work things out with you when things get tough?
Spousal abuse and infidelity mix things up, and it really depends on how exactly that went down. But I suspect most cases of single motherhood in adults young enough to continue to have children have to do with poor relationship behaviors and poor character, things that should give someone pause even if children weren’t in the mix.
Granted, but the number of dating age single mother widows is to within an epsilon of zero compared to the number of dating age single mother high-time-preference-poor-planning-out-of-wedlock-dumpster-fires.
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