midway on Nostr: I would argue it generally still comes down to choices and priorities. Family life is ...

I would argue it generally still comes down to choices and priorities. Family life is priced out based on other life choices. To use an extreme example, the Amish aren’t exactly wealthy, yet they have a crazy high birth rate (around 7). I’m not saying every young person who wants a family need to become Amish, nor should we have a nationwide native birth rate of 7 but it’s an extreme example to demonstrate a point. I‘m saying that one’s financial state is generally the sum of a bunch of financial and lifestyle choices and those choices show one’s priorities. Those choices have consequences since financial resources as well as time are finite. How you spend them will determine what you can do and what you can’t do because you can’t do (or have) it all. To the Amish, family is clearly very important to the expense of other aspects of life. Others will have different priorities and, therefore, different outcomes. Career women rarely have more than 2 children. And this crosses over to societies like Scandinavia where government policies are extremely generous which complicates the argument that more government support will raise birth rates because they don’t…at least not enough to turn the tide. Raising rates from, say, 1.7 to 2 isn‘t a big enough needle move.