As civilizations become prosperous they have progressively fewer children. It happened to Rome. In the West with the child labor laws and the determination to let kids be kids children have become a net financial liability whereas historically the more children the more prosperous one’s family. In an agricultural society you raise your labor force at home. In an early industrial society the more kids you have the more incomes from the factory support the family. In a late industrial society the suggestion that one’s children could help support the family draws gasps of horror even from people who consider themselves traditionalists and conservatives. The more expensive children become the fewer there will be. In more traditional less developed societies children are expected to pull their own economic weight by the time they are ten and usually do. In America we just made new laws that forbid farm children from doing “chores.” We raise children to be older children so that we have far fewer emotional adults than biological.
>As civilizations become prosperous they have progressively fewer children. It happened to Rome.
It’s not money. Poor, rich, it all doesn’t matter. The only thing that corresponds to birth rates is how liberated women are. More liberated, the lower the birth rate. The less liberated the higher the birth rate. This trend has been observed as far back as Ancient Sparta and Babylon.
This is why Muslims out breed everyone. They tend to keep their women pretty unliberated.
Look the groups in the America that have tons of kids: The Amish and the Hasidic jews both have tons of kids keep their women pretty unliberated and both are very wealthy groups.