[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by niky

The United States government is rich. US Businesses are rich. Not all Americans are rich. Not all American citizens are rich. You'll find higher growth amongst lower income brackets, especially in terms of unplanned growth and pregnancies.

Unless you institute absolute socialism, there will always be income differences. The poorer Americans are still far richer than most of the world's population, therefore they should, according to this theory, be having far fewer kids.

I suspect what you are seeing here not cause and effect, but two not strongly connected things happening in some of the same places. Giving educated & liberated women access to birth control, and societal attitudes that make it acceptable, does reduce birth rates. Most of the places where this happens are prosperous, but one can easily find counter-examples: Ireland & Utah, for instance, have higher birth rates than many equally prosperous places, while many of the former Soviet republics have low birth rates despite not being particularly prosperous.

It's the attitudes that matter. Indeed, I suspect that the causality here runs in the opposite direction: having educated & liberated women who choose to limit the number children they have helps make a country prosperous.

The recent US election is a good illustration of where all this population is at. Low income bracket and immigrant voters got Obama that big win.

Excuse the digression into politics, but this is a self-serving distortion pushed by the folks who like to play racial/identity politics games. What lost Romney the election - and it was far more a matter of Romney losing than Obama winning - was the Republicans' policy of driving away everybody who doesn't fit into their nuclear family model of society.And standard of living?

Given that even the poorest of welfare mothers in the US can get decent housing and medical care where nomadic tribespeople are basically dead if they get the wrong bacterial infection, I'd think the answer is pretty obvious.

I don't think it's that obvious, since I don't see most of the middle & even upper class population having decent housing, let alone welfare mothers. (An urban apartment is not decent housing, even if it happens to be a penthouse on Park Avenue.) And exactly what is preventing our nomadic tribespeople from getting basic medical care? Not to mention the vast range of modern lifestyle diseases that the tribespeople will never acquire.