[niky]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

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.

Poor people in America have better support structures, but wherever they live, they would still be considered poor.

Originally Posted by jamesqf

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.

Education is indeed a strong correlation, but poverty and a lack of it merely propagate the status quo or worsen it. Part of it is how hard you have to paddle to stay afloat. If the children can paddle for you, you'll have more children. I already touched upon this in my previous post. If the cost-of-living
and education is high enough, most people won't have many kids. If raising kids is not expensive, and provides you with labor bonuses... bonanza.

Originally Posted by jamesqf

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?

I'm not a conservative. More of a "centrist" (or what America calls "liberal" or left-of-center). Obama won the singles vote, he won the minority vote, he won the immigrant vote, he won the women's vote, he won the lower income bracket vote. I won't argue that the Republicans managed to piss all of them off, though, or that it was the Republicans who lost the election rather than the Dems winning it. I was just pointing out the changing shape of the voting demographic.

Then again, I am biased in favor of changing demographics. My work is in education, and labor export to the United States (in the form of migrant skilled workers) helped buy my house and our cars.

Originally Posted by jamesqf

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 medic/al care? Not to mention the vast range of modern lifestyle diseases that the tribespeople will never acquire.

Uh... if there's no one to import the medicine, and no money to pay for it, where will it come from? Nomadic tribes lack the one thing necessary to buy medicines. Money. That's why a lot of them migrate to cities to become urban poor. Even living on scraps a day, they get access to better shelter and eats than they do out in the wild. And thanks to the social structures and missions built up in most countries, they can get at least rudimentary healthcare in cities.

Lifestyle diseases matter to us because we live long enough to get them. Unless your tribe happens to live in an exceptionally dry, hot place where pathogens fear to tread, most tribespeople don't.

No matter how bad conditions are, middle class people will strive to stay middle class in the cities rather than migrating outwards to become relatively unstressed farmers. That's because the standard of living (aside from the stress) is inherently higher, and they don't want to lose that, and they don't want their children to lose that.