[NoLinkToMe]

Agreed. By just about every measure, we're much better off than the past, yet have fewer kids. Statistics have supported this correlation (richer -> fewer kids) for a century, across the board around the worldwide, yet people often still get the causality exactly backwards: it's too expensive to have kids.

Real median incomes have risen, decade after decade.

And because of this, consumption in key categories has improved. For example:

Housing floor space per person, same trend.

Life expectancy, same trend.

Leisure has increased.

Tourism has increased.

Yet the common discussion is that it is unaffordable or impossible to have kids. It's backwards. My grandparents were dirt poor and each came from families with 8-10 people. I'm comparatively very rich and have no kids. The explanation that it's so unaffordable I think is mostly wrong. It's that not having kids for many people is a better deal than before.

The cost of kids isn't unaffordable per se, but rather opportunity cost is too high.

As an example I just came back from travelling the world for six months. I'm rich enough to do that. Which also means the opportunity cost is so great, that it's a lot to sacrifice to have kids. My grandparents had none of that opportunity cost precisely because they weren't rich.

[KellyCriterion]

> The cost of kids isn't unaffordable per se

Deopends on country and social support Id say?

In western EU countries, parental-costs are estimated to 180.000 - 200.000 EUR per head that parents will pay for the first 25 years.

[NoLinkToMe]

Will pay because these societies can afford it. If they had 10k they're not spending 200k, period.

That's the whole point in these affordability discussions.

Take homes, We often speak of homes being so expensive, $1m average in Silicon Valley or whatever. That's not because it's unaffordable, but precisely because for the people who bought these homes, they were able to afford $1m or whatever the number is. If people there could only afford $500k, they'd be 500k.

If it's 200k it's because that's what we can and believe should spend. And that's completely different from the past, when we could spend less, and decided we should spend less. My grandparents generation for example who had 5-10 kids certainly wasn't spending 1-2m on their children.

Fact is that median income has gone way up, while children per person went way down. We thus have more to spend per child, we can afford MORE, to spend more. And the fact that we do (evidenced by the 200k per child figure), is not evidence of unaffordability, to the contrary!