"going to school and paying attention but being taught that abstinence is the only effective form of birth control and that condoms fail regularly so why bother" All so parents don't have to deal with the horror-movie scenario of their adolescent kids having a responsible, happy sex life.
I think there are a lot of good points being made, but you guys may be caught up in the math and are forgetting something fairly simple.
Sex is free, fun, and easy. The less education you have the less likely you are to understand effective birth control. The less wealthy you are the less you have to spend on contraception. Those things together with the easiest and cheapest form of entertainment would seem to cirrelate with a higher birthrate in lower income brackets.
I cant find any studies that support what Im saying right now, but the logic holds.
Sure we could come up with a bunch of reasons each way. They're probably all wrong. But why are we speculating? Just go ask some rich people why they want/don't want X number of children and they will tell you.
I have to wonder if there's a dip around the upper middle/lower upper who, because of price discrimination on college costs and such must still be conservative, that then reverses course for the mid to upper upper, who have wealth in excess of any reasonable pattern of consumption and certainly more than enough to raise many children.
I know that my plan is two max at the moment strictly because total cost per head is roughly $500k in today's dollars (including total private college costs, which account for half of that).
People who have a lot of money have a lot more fun entertaining themselves without leaning on the emotional network of a family. People with less money rely on their family and community for entertainment. So I'd expect wealthy "jet setters" to not have many children.
Legacy is terrifically important to many wealthy people. Many are in fact motivated towards wealth and success because of it.
Depending on how you define it, children are actually a much more reliable way to have a reasonably enduring legacy than businesses/foundations/accomplishments/fame/etc, though both approaches are ultimately ephemeral. You probably have to successfully make it at least three levels down an ancestor tree, rooted at yourself and with an average replacement rate around 2, in order for your own genetic legacy to have a high statistical likelihood of enduring through anything short of a species-level catastrophe.
Middle-class and upper-middle-class people generally do not have enough wealth to afford full-time live-in servants to take care of their kids for them. Having enough money for a somewhat fancy house isn't that rich, and kids don't just take money, they take a lot of time. Personally, I don't really want to sacrifice all my free time for the next 10 years or so.
> I know that my plan is two max at the moment strictly because total cost per head is roughly $500k in today's dollars (including total private college costs, which account for half of that).
So double the kids for same price assuming they go to a public university? Sounds like a good deal to me.
FYI, you can cut that down even further if you go to a community college for the first year or two and then transfer.
Rank of the college matters in my opinion. It's unfortunate but it does create opportunities. High-ranked public universities are often really great, but usually comparable in total cost to private ones (with savings for being in-state in some cases).
But yes if you only gain admission to the long tail of private colleges, then you would almost certainly be wiser to go to a low-cost public school.
I wouldn't want my kids to consider community college unless they had to. By definition, I'd like them to have the same academic opportunities I had, if possible.
I'm not sure if you're being serious here. The bulk of available tuition assistance comes from financial aid, which usually isn't offered to families at or above roughly upper middle.
I also assume you'd only go to a private college that ranks highly, which means low access to meaningful amounts of income/wealth-independent scholarship money. A low-ranked private college is usually no better than many public ones.
> The bulk of available tuition assistance comes from financial aid, which usually isn't offered to families at or above roughly upper middle.
Is that true, though? A few months ago, I was reading a few articles about more competitive (highly-ranked) universities directing significant portion of their own aid dollars to wealthier students in order to lure them in.
Now, much of these schools' motivation for doing so is that those aid dollars spread more thinly among more (wealthy) students means more revenue than focusing those dollars on "need based" (poor) students, especially if the poor students don't stay the whole 4 years because they can't afford even the subsidized tuition. That may not mean much for your ultimate calculation, since it could be as little as 10% discount, but it's still something.
There is likely also merit-based money out there, which may be what the parent comment was referring to, but I have no idea if that's anything but trivial in amount.