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I recently saw promoted businessinsider.com/din… "The dark side of DINKs: People who want kids but can't afford them". Which reminded me of a newspaper story about a woman who had married a doctor (doctors are well-paid in the US) but because the doctor had an ex-wife to whom he was paying heavy alimony, "she couldn't afford to have kids…
I recently saw promoted https://www.businessinsider.com/dinks-childfree-parents-choice-kids-childless-2024-3 "The dark side of DINKs: People who want kids but can't afford them". Which reminded me of a newspaper story about a woman who had married a doctor (doctors are well-paid in the US) but because the doctor had an ex-wife to whom he was paying heavy alimony, "she couldn't afford to have kids".
But in any advanced country the social welfare system makes it possible to raise children reasonably successfully on zero earned income. What these people are saying is that they see a minimum level of expenditure required for children and they can't provide it. Despite that many people in their society can't provide that level of expenditure and have children anyway. This suggests that some sort of social fallacy is causing problems.
In re "children tend to turn out the way they are", there's a long-running complaint that the main US college admissions test, the SAT, is strongly correlated with parents' income. I ran into an analysis that looked at the families of the students who ranked in the top 5% of the SAT. While a disproportion of them had families with incomes in the top 25%, fully 15% had families with incomes in the *bottom* 25%. So income isn't an immense driver of SAT scores. OTOH, fully 50% of those students had one or more parent with a post-bachelor's degree. So social-and-genetic inheritance of educational status is considerably stronger than the effect of income.