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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37381 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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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:

  • High-PMC who have a household income of $400k+ and are having 2-3 children.
  • Low-PMC who have a household income of $150k - $200k and are childless, or have one child and are baffled as to how they could afford more.

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.

  • Carpenter: Three bedroom house 45 minutes outside of a tier-2 city costs around $200k. Husband and wife in the master, their three daughters share one bedroom and two sons share another.
  • Receptionist: Urban, subsidized apartment. Mother and baby share one bedroom, two girls in another room, two boys sleep in the living room on pull-out beds.
  • PMC: Cannot imagine having the millions it would take to afford a six-bedroom house in a tier-1 city.

2) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for education.

  • Carpenter: Stay-at-home mom is part of a homeschool pod with other families.
  • Receptionist: Sends her kids to the local public school in urban tier-2 city. The school is not good.
  • PMC: Would slit their throats rather than send their kids to the same public school as the receptionist. Intend to pay $25k-$40k/year/child for private school.

3) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for kids' stuff.

  • Carpenter and Receptionist: Almost all of the clothes, toys, cribs, and other accessories that a child needs, their parents acquire for free. Hand-me-downs, Buy Nothing Facebook groups, friends/neighbors/family, etc.
  • PMC: Every kid needs brand-new everything. Sure, you might be able to get multiple uses out of your $800 crib or $300 car seat, but you are not shopping at Goodwill for little Charlotte.

4) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for enriching activities.

  • Carpenter: When the children are free they are either playing outside, playing inside (on screens), or doing chores. The older kids have part-time jobs. The kids do play sports through some homeschool rec-league I don’t understand. The parents spend very little, but the mom does have to drive the kids around for games.
  • Receptionist: Play outside of the apartment. Sometimes that's in the public library (video games on the library computers), sometimes that's the Boys and Girls Club, sometimes that's just out in the neighborhood. The mom spends $0 dollars and essentially no time on this.
  • PMC: $3,000 for Introduction to Data Science camp at Stanford, thousands of dollars between new gear and hotel rooms for travel sports (not to mention the hours spent driving), thousands for tutors in piano, math and foreign-languages.

5) High-fertility families start early. They have known no other adult life, besides being parents. Their tastes are quite modest.

  • Carpenter: Had their first kid at 20. Mostly cook in, occasionally go to casual-dining restaurants like Applebees, spend their vacations driving to state or national parks. Have never been to Disneyland and don’t think they’re missing out.
  • Receptionist: First kid at 17. Basically the same as the above, except doesn’t really vacation.
  • PMC: Spent their twenties eating at Michelin-starred restaurants and traveling overseas. Now, starting to have children in their early-to-mid-thirties, they simply do not have enough fertile years left to get to five children. And, furthermore, they cannot fathom bringing five kids to French Laundry nor buying that many tickets to Morocco.

6) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for childcare:

  • Carpenter and Receptionist: Grandparents, friends, neighbors cost $0. The older children are expected to care for the younger.
  • PMC: $40k+/year for a nanny or $10k/year + an extra bedroom for an au-pair

7) High-fertility families pay very little for (and think very little about) healthcare

  • Carpenter: To be honest, I don’t know
  • Receptionist: Medicaid, cheapest possible pediatrician + the school nurse
  • PMC: Not only do they have excellent insurance through their employers, they also pay out-of-pocket for all kinds of treatments. Moreover, they spend a lot of time meticulously researching pediatricians, specialists, orthodontists, etc.

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.

  • There are, of course, a myriad of known-good solutions: from slashing regulations in order to increase housing supply, to improving transportation to make it viable to live in the ‘burbs and commute into the city.
  • Even if you cannot convince the PMC that each kid does not, in fact, need their own bedroom, by reducing the cost of that one marginal bedroom, you increase their fertility.

2) Improve the public schools

  • Imagine if an excellent education, in a safe environment! was commonly available in American public schools. Not only would more families choose to send their children to public schools over paying tens of thousands for private schools, you would also dramatically lower the cost of housing in those few school districts that actually do a decent job.

3) Decrease the cost stuff

4) Enriching activities:

  • No ideas. Competition here is zero-sum.

5) Starting early:

  • Wild first idea: perhaps make sex-ed a required course in college with a strong emphasis on fertility windows.

6) Childcare:

  • Ensure Middle America thrives so that young PMC don’t feel like they have to leave the heartland for the coasts where they don’t have grandparents + the same social network for childcare. Ha. Ha. Easy to say.

7) Healthcare:

  • Destroy the AMA’s supply-limiting bullshit, dramatically increase the number of doctors, dramatically decrease cost of healthcare.

I think a lot of it stems from the desire to have PMC children. They can live a much more relaxed lifestyle, like the one @2rafa outlined in another comment:

Our couple who make $250k a year (by regular American standards a great household income) could move to the burbs, or perhaps to an MCOL state, buy a spacious McMansion, send their kids to a nice, safe, middle class public high school with good teachers. They could go skiing on the East Coast instead of to Aspen. They could go to a nice middle class resort in the US for a week in Summer instead of to Santorini or Positano for the IG slideshow. They could even spend two weeks in Europe if they were willing to fly economy and stay in a hotel that wasn’t five star. The likelihood is they would be no less happy.

If the children of this couple are smart and ambitious, they will ascend to the PMC themselves. If they regress to the mean, they will live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. But that's not enough for the parents! They imagine this as their own personal failure and they will do everything to ensure their children remain PMC. This means sending them to the right school, maintaining the level of consumption that lets them socialize with PMC and UC children, padding their college application with the right experiences, etc.

Voila, their children are now a single child, because that's all they can afford. And I don't think it's a bad thing. Low PMC fertility ensures that elite overproduction is not a threat: the class is continuously being refreshed by middle-class outliers.

Those couples DO exist; New Jersey and Killington, VT are full of them.

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