Jim Penman argues that money isn't why birth rates are falling. Wealthy urban areas have fewer children while poorer rural regions have more. Israel is rich but has a high birth rate, suggesting the real driver is how people choose to spend their resources, not how much they have.
More and more money and having less and less children. That's because people totally misunderstand why people have children, why they don't have children. Because if you ask a person why they don't have children, they'll typically say, "Can't afford it." That's the thing. Can't afford it. Too expensive to have kids. Costs too much money. I'd rather spend money on other things that I need to have. The problem with that is that how many children you have has no relation to how much money you have in practice. Because for example, you find that in the wealthiest cities, the people with the highest income have the fewest children. You go into the countryside where there's a lower income and you have more children. You have nations with lower income tend to have more children. The only exception really being Israel, which is a prosperous country which has a fairly high birth rate. Even though people say that it's lack of money in an absolute sense, it's actually not. What really makes the difference is not so much the absolute money, but your priorities. It's what you want to do with your money.
Rising mental illness and falling birth rates have the same cause, it is this.....
