[morepedantic]

You mean those people with running water, indoor plumbing, central heating, electric lights, and a passenger vehicle capable of reaching speeds faster than the fastest land animal who entertain themselves with a magical rock that performs trillions of calculations a second to render 8-bit animals on an island to display on a sheet of quantum dots? Not to mention vaccines, antibiotics, cell phones, free education, supermarkets, and all the other modern wonders?

My point IS that you don't consider this to be a high level of consumption. To you it's normal. You've acclimated, and would again if the quality of life were 10x higher.

If people decide to build careers before having children, and DINKs acclimate to their income levels, then any child would feel like an unacceptable quality of life. You'll always feel like you're a rung below where you need to be, and this property would be independent of any particular scale.

Call it pedant's hypothesis. I've proposed it as an explanation. I can neither prove nor disprove it.