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Notes -
Birthrates: It's not (just) money, it's time
For over a decade now, sociologists have noted a curious quirk to birth rate data when sorted by income. While total fertility rates do decline with rising income (as has long been popular wisdom, depicted in eg. Idiocracy and so on), they do so only to a point. After a certain threshold, fertility rates shoot up again, as this chart shows. In the US (the above research is from 2022), this inflection point happens, depending on data, somewhere between $250,000 and $300,000 for white couples.
One interesting thing about fertility rates is that people always say they want more children than they have:
This is usually ignored because it is undone by revealed preferences in the richest societies on earth, or it is used as argumentative fodder for the left when they argue that fertility rates have declined because people can't afford as many children as they want (sometimes ridiculed given that people are vastly richer than in other nations or at other times when TFR has been much higher).
But maybe these two pieces of information do, together, tell us a little bit about why many PMC types in the West don't have more children, or children at all.
What happens at, say, $500,000 a year (in most of the US) that makes having three children so much easier? The answer seems obvious to me - affluent people can afford to spend time away from their children, and therefore feel more comfortable having (more of) them.
100 years ago, when up to a quarter of the working class in developed countries were employed as domestic servants, a middle-class mother who did not particularly want to spend all day, every day with her children did not have to do so. There were other women to handle that kind of thing. This was before most of these kind of women worked much, but even so, spending all day, every day with the children wasn't interesting. My grandmother, who grew up bourgeois in Berlin on the eve of the Second World War, remembered rarely ever seeing her mother as a young child until they had to flee to the US.
I grew up with rich people, and one of the interesting things one notices is that the people from the very wealthiest families, centimillionaires and billionaires, often marry very young and have children young. I know a number of (completely secular) rich white couples with three children aged 27-30, the time when many professional Americans are barely out of graduate degree programs or still stuck in a tough junior role or in residency. I'm still friends with a few of them, and the big thing that strikes me is how unchanged their lives are from many childless late-20s PMC people. They have nannies for the kids, so they can go back to work within a few months if they choose to. They have maternity nurses when the babies are first born, so they never need to wake up at night. They have people to look after the kids if they want to go to a summer wedding in Italy, or to a week skiing in Aspen. They can come and go from their homes as they please without worrying about who will look after the children, whose food, clothes, hygiene, trips to and from school and so on are handled by others. They see their children when they want to hang out with them, on their terms.
I understand, also, the British upper-middle and upper class urge to send kids to boarding school at a young age. Freed from daily parental obligation, relationships often grow stronger, not weaker. And parents are freed, again, to enjoy life on their own terms.
I think a substantial proportion of would-be parents, particularly in the PMC, don't particularly want to raise their own children, at least not all the time. They don't want to do the dirty work. Clearly the deal the super-rich have isn't economically viable to give to everyone else. But maybe some things are. State-funded boarding schools from a young age, state-funded daycare (open 24/7, not just during daytime on weekdays), state-funded maternity nursing so you can drop your baby off and visit it (or take it home occasionally) instead of not sleeping through the night for a year or two. I know this sounds insane, but I genuinely think this might lead more people to have (more) kids in the West.
Personally I believe that solution to low birth rates will be state funded industrial production of human capital via artificial wombs(if AI won't make it irrelevant by this time). Women often don't want to struggle through pregnancy, parents don't want to spend time on necessary work related to children and automation in the sphere of humanoid robotics is very far from achieving affordable replacements for servants.
Facilities created for raising these state children could be used by individual parents, so would be similar to your idea of 24/7 daycare. This can be a great time to reform our "modern" education system that was largely created in 19th century Prussia to something more applicable to current technological environment and honest of it's role as basically daycare for teenagers.
Huxley's dystopia has many more problems apart from artificial wombs. Caste system and pacification of population by drugs do not necessarily stem from destruction of traditional family structure. But generally to me, this theme of "terrible utopian technology destroying traditional way of life" and "loss of authenticity/connection to nature" repeated ad nauseum by dystopia authors such as Huxley or author of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is disgusting in its denial of how much better our lives are compared to our ancestors because of technologies and how their imagined societies are often better compared to us in the same way and for the same reasons.
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