When you're poorer, especially in countries with less well enforced legal systems, you're not as negatively affected by having more children. Your priority is simply being able to stay fed and taking what work you can get, not buying a home in an area conducive to your highly specialized career. More kids are just another mouth to feed until they become capable of contributing to the family finances (typically at much younger ages than in the West).

This. In poorer parts of the world, you might have an extra mouth to feed for the first 15-20 years, but once your child finishes school and finds work they're contributing to your well-being and to helping feed the younger children. You also need not worry too much about your retirement, because you know your family will support you, and you'll play a role raising your grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Kids as a retirement investment - makes sense in countries that lack safe investments (safe from over-taxation, theft, inflation). Built in interest/growth rate due to breeding next generation.

Unfortunately I have shorted the children market by not breeding when younger. What's the appropriate way to invest in 2.5 children? I presume they are a very illiquid investment.

The other problem with cousins is that brothers and sisters move to distant locations so cousins are often inaccessible even if you have them.

Just buy enough shares in public companies, or apartment units, to get the capital-share-of-income of 2.5 of someone else’s children. Let the parents figure out how to get something out of the wage-share-of-income

Go and foster some kids. Maybe start with one.

Foster parent relationships are somewhere between zero and one of your own kids. They can be close or distant, depends on the relationship.

> you might have an extra mouth to feed for the first 15-20 years

or just old enough to harvest whatever it is you're farming

Forget 15-20 years, in rural Guatemala I would see 7 year olds working for a couple bucks a day to bring to their (poor) parents

> you might have an extra mouth to feed for the first 15-20 years

more like 5-10 years

Poorer places haven't financialized housing usually.

Poorer is a relative term here. The income/birth rate discrepancy is probably happening within your local community.

This isn't enough of an explanation, because surviving is still harder in such places than it is in wealthy countries with low birth rates. Birth rates are inversely correlated with wealth regardless of housing affordability.

True, I was thinking of colleagues who had moved from Eastern Europe to Ireland and were telling me that it was much more common to have homes without a mortgage, they weren't as likely to be a vehicle for getting rich, NIMBYs weren't such a big thing, etc. Maybe it's a holdover from the Soviet Union.

I don't know, slumlords charging an exorbitant rent for a shack is a thing.

> Have you noticed that much, much poorer places often have a much higher birth rate?

In those places, the older kids help raise the younger ones, and can also help the parents with their labor/begging/crime/prostitution.

More like educated people are more likely to know how to not have babies, and to plan for them, and plan to have them on their schedule.

Certainly that does sometimes translate into not having babies at all.

So you would assume we have flat out selective removal of being smart trait. Just great.