Now what to do about all these excess people?

Saying that "people need to get paid higher wages to be able to afford having children" is obviously propaganda in an attempt to motivate rich people to pay poor people more money. I'm not saying that they shouldn't do that; in fact they should; but the fertility rate has nothing to do with it.

There are worldwide studies that families with less money typically have more children, but it's very important to note that this is only correlation, not causation. In other words, giving people more money does probably not (i believe) cause them to have fewer children. Rather, i think it's the other way around: Having more children leads to poverty as children are really expensive.

Also i want to point out that the story is really really more complicated than that. I.e. you see a lot of people wanting to have children, but not doing it because they're afraid that the cost of living will be significantly more expensive in the future. Yes, you read this correctly. It's not about the cost of living today, it's about the cost of living in the future. Consider this: Children (if treated properly) live around 80 years, and during that whole time they should be fed and housed. That costs money. If housing becomes significantly more expensive in 20 years, it will be very difficult to house them. You should think about this today, not in 20 years. The fear of future rising cost of living is a reason why lots of people are deciding against having children today.

Also there are many more things that i want to say about this, such as that there is a very directed campaign on social media today to disincentivise leftist people from flirting with other people today, which effectively leads leftist people to be less in romantic relationships, more lonely, less connected, less organized, also less pregnant. This obviously hinders them from organizing properly, which is a top-down attempt to smash rebellions before they happen. This is a scheme that is highly effective of corrupting society, especially leftist people as conservatives typically don't listen to social media and its messaging, especially when it comes to not flirting with other people (sexual harassment) and such.

also this is global, so I thought there was a strong correlation between agrarian societies, having low or depressed wages, and having lots of kids to help with the farm labor, or because there isn't much else to do for fun.

This could be a regressive imperialist view, idk, but its what I was always told about the correlation between wages and children, especially on a global scale - would be interested to see this same chart for singular countries, the USA for example.

Other commenter pointed out that typically higher incomes generally come with rights for child bearers... So that also could have something to do with it too.

Anecdotal, but partner and I have put off having children multiple times due to affordability, IE who can take that much time off work and still pay food/rent costs?

NOTES: Each point represents a country.

That graph doesn't rank rich people vs poor people; it ranks rich countries vs poor countries. Lots of other factors determine global fertility rate.

As a relevant example, there's a strong correlation between the educational level attained by women and their fertility rate.

Here's the same chart from that page, in case the linked site has issues:

But that's besides the point illustrated by this post, as the post article only pertains to one country - the United States. People in the US are experiencing changes that downgrade their quality of life over time. The economy was different when we were kids, and as a millennial, my generation has pretty much only seen things get worse.

Poor people in under-developed nations have it bad, but when that's all people have known, normal life goes on. Some may even have hope that perhaps some day they can see their country grow and prosper, that they can see their children in a better world.

By contrast, the US is experiencing an economic downslide. We don't see hope on the horizon. We were raised on promises (shout out to Tom Petty), but then matured into a country that did nothing but break them. Things seem to be getting worse all the time, right in the prime of our child-bearing/child-rearing years. We have no idea what anything is supposed to cost anymore, attaining affordable housing requires winning a literal lottery, and have you gone to the grocery store lately? Buying enough for one person is already absurd, I can't imagine having more mouths to feed.

Consider this the coincidence of women having high education + low income. More of us are aware of and have access to birth control (except for many in republican states, those poor women.) It seems that right now, the influence of education is stronger than the (supposed) pro-fertility influence of poverty you claim.

Though those certainly aren't the only two measures we could use to link wealth and fertility. Religion, secular cultural influences and practices, accessibility of contraception... it's a big picture, with lots of detail to look at.

Incomes for the bottom 99% have stagnated over the last 30 years, so how do you reconcile that with this reported drop in fertility? I don't think it's weird that people see a causal relationship where one obviously exists. I think that the inverse relationship that you're talking about is only one factor in influencing fertility rates, and you're conflating incomes with affordability.

It's not actually a clear inverse relationship on the individual level, even if the data shows a correlation at the national level.

There are a few things happening that complicate the analysis at the individual level, too:

• Wealth/income are correlated with age, and 40 year olds tend to have both higher incomes and lower fertility rates than 25 year olds.
• Wealth also correlates with race, for better or for worse, and there have always been persistent differences in birth rates by race.
• The sample sizes aren't big enough to show whether the very rich (95th+ percentile) actually reverse the trend, to where being richer is correlated with higher birth rates, where the curve ticks back upward at very high incomes.
• The correlation is actually the other direction when looking at the individual incomes in certain countries (Netherlands, Sweden, Norway), and the effect is stronger when looking at men and their incomes.

Other country level data also suggest that there are big cultural factors in birth rates as well.

All in all, the relationship between income and fertility is complicated, with lots of other factors at play.

Turns out, dredging through the cosmic horror shit-show that is a low income life, being smart enough to increase your odds of finding better paying work, then understanding just how lucky you got once you're on the other side, just makes you very jaded. Then you realize you can't guarantee your new, privileged life to your kid, so you make sure you never inflict that pain on another living being.

I propose that increased well-being of the general population will lead to a population increase over time, but it is a multi-generation kind of process. People not only need to feel safe, but they need some kind of gaurantee to feel like their kids will be safe too.

I wonder what the data looks like if we were to separate fertility by how long those people were above the poverty line? Does the first generation of people who are well-off have fewer kids than people who come from two or three generations of being well-off?