Do poor people tend to have more children or fewer children than people with a higher income?
bump
In general, yes, for a number of reasons:
- The poor have less access to contraceptives,
- The poor are not as educated as the rich, especially about contraception,
- In poor agricultural communities, many children are required to work the fields in order to sustain crops,
- Poor nations have high rates of infant and child mortality, so people have more children than in other places,
- The financial burden of many children can make you poor if you weren’t already,
- Wealthy people marry much later in life, and often plan for their children, since they don’t need a cheap source of labor
In the Third World, amongst the really poor, children function as capital goods because the markets for risk and capital don’t exist or are too inefficient. One puts one’s surplus production into getting kids fattened up, so to speak, and then hopes they can ride out the rough times. In some cases the kids have paid themselves off by age 15, and then for the rest of their time in the household they are net producers. Of course, since retirement plans are non-existant, they serve that function as well.
Obviously there are lots of downsides. Nor does this all diminish a parent’s feelings for their children. It’s just a harsh fact of life. See An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution for more.
Sorry, I should have stated I wanted to focus on the United States.
Does anybody know of any statistics on the average number children for a family that makes say under $15,000 compared to a family that makes $15,001-$45,000 compared to a family that makes $45,001-$100,000 compared to a family that makes over $100,000?
Another factor in Third World poor having multiple children is that not all of them are expected to live 
and families have an articifically high target size to adjust for this for the economic reasons cited above, as well as in many cases for cultural factors which assign status in a community based partially in fertility.
Citing an example from the UN Population Fund:
“*n Nicaragua, a country where half the population of 4.6 million is officially unemployed, and 70 per cent struggle to survive on one dollar a day or less. The average family size is 4-5 children, but in the countryside, poor farm families often have 7 or 8. Infant mortality in some remote mountain communities often reaches 100 per 1,000 live births; 1 in every 10 babies does not live to see a first birthday.”
Some of the data you want is in the US Census Bureau site here.
You may be interested in this:
Sell, Ralph R.; Kunitz, Stephen J. “Trends in American family size diversity.” Population Research and Policy Review, Vol. 16, No. 5, Oct 1997. 415-34 pp. Dordrecht, Netherlands. In Eng.
“This paper examines completed family size diversity from 1940 to 2000 by race and across U.S. states. For all groups, regions and the USA as a whole, family size diversity decreased significantly, produced by a combination of fewer small and large families and a general decline in regionally-based differences. Both within and across states the diversity declined in two stages, but regional clusters of states followed different paths…A national and essentially homogeneous culture of childbearing, initiated during the baby boom years and now facilitated by birth control and abortion, has settled in at below-replacement levels. While the possibility always exists that childbearing pattern might change, there is no current evidence to suggest movement away from this low and homogeneous fertility.”
This one’s even older than I am: “The rich get richer, and the poor get children.”
You forgot to suggest that the poor are stupid too. :rolleyes:
Another reason: people often sacrifice family and children to have a higher income. Others choose to place family above their careers (or their vacations, SUV’s, etc.).
I don’t understand the snarky response. Which part of friedo’s answer do you take issue with?
WTF is that supposed to mean?
Probably the ‘poor are not as educated as the rich’ part. On a global scale its true, I don’t know about domestically.
http://www.doh.wa.gov/ehsphl/chs/chs-data/brfss/2001/DM_income_Children.htm
That site has some info but I don’t know if thats exactly what you want.
Actually that site is what you want, its just for washington. According to it the poor have fewer children in their household. Maybe its not so much that they don’t have kids its just that they live somewhere else too.
It is certainly true in the US that household income correlates pretty well with amount of education…people with some college education tend to make more money than people with no college, people with college degrees make more, and people with advanced degrees make even more.
Of course education is not synonomous with intelligence.