poor people have more children, on average. How long has this been true?

Question

Did medieval peasants have more children on average than royalty? Or is this a modern phenomenon?

In: 71

Answer 1

It’s not “rich vs poor” really, it’s “urban vs rural”. Urban people have less kids than rural people. As Peter Zeihan puts it, on the farm, kids are fee labor. In the city, ids are expensive pets, so people in cities have less of them.

People in urban centers also usually have more money than rural people, which is where the tie in to income vs number of kids comes in, but that is not the cause of the discrepancy.