[fdgsdfogijq]

I'm not arguing for having that many children, just that its a basic way to benchmark how expensive being alive is. Clearly these people having so many children werent just randomly taking on impoverished hardship. Things were tight, but they had reasonable economic security with so many children. This points to a dramatic drop in wages in the last 50 years

[Erem]

Financially speaking, kids are an asset in non-industrialized societies, especially farming societies. But they are a liability in industrialized ones. I think that transition from asset to liability for nations undergoing industrialization might explain this phenomenon.

[throwaway5959]

I really hope when people have kids they don't look at them as an asset or a liability, aside from when considering the financial impact. They're not a great fit for our lifestyle, but if my wife and I did end up having a kid I wouldn't think of them as a liability.

[Erem]

I think you're stuffing more meaning into my statement than I intended: I intentionally qualified the statement to the financial perspective only in which case it's appropriate to talk about assets and liabilities.

I say this as a happy father of 2 kids.