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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.
I've talked about this before, but me and my wife have had two kids at a comparatively late age, ie. the younger one is 11 months and the older one is 3 years and we are around 40. If we could magically become ten years younger we might have another child, now there's no dice - not just because the age makes it unlikely, but because we just wouldn't have the stamina for three little ones.
While we don't have that much money (especially when compared to my assumptions about the general earnings of this forum), the time and energy issues are absolutely more crucial as to why we feel burdened, not only because we are getting older but also because the most natural "extra nurses" apart from day care - the grandparents - are old too, around 80 (and my father dead), and also live on the other side of the country.
Once one's a parent, one quickly realises that your friend circle just isn't that much help - the childless ones just don't seem reliable enough, and the ones with children tend to have their hands full with, well, their children, who are often equally as young as yours.
One less-discussed fertility thing might be the culture where it's almost a rite of passage, at least in educated circles, to not only move away from home but frequently to a whole different city from your parents. It's fun when you can go out drunk and party without fearing you'll run into your older relatives and they disapprove, but once you're a parent, the far-away grandparents thing starts getting acutely more real.
I feel your comment. My wife and I are mid 30s with a 3 year old and a 1 year old. Luckily I think we have enough time to have one more. But looking back at my own childhood, I’m struck by how much more assistance my parents got from their parents than we get from mine (wife’s parents aren’t in the picture). I spent a whole lot of time with both sets of grandparents up to age five or so, every weekday really.
Same. It makes it a lot harder. It’s also crazy how unwilling my MIL is to help.
For now, it's a combination of "my wife sees asking my parents for help as a failure and imposition on her part" and "my parents just retired and are traveling literally all the time."
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