I thought I read that fertility rate is also related to income/education status
One article I recall years ago mentioned that the poor tend to have more children than the middle class; but when you get to the ultra-rich, the trend is to have a lot of children too. (Think RFK Sr, Trump, Musk, etc.)
Yes, that’s true. The poorest people have slightly more than 2 children each (or now it may be slightly less than 2 each). The number of children drops very slowly as you go up in income until you reach the top 1.3$ of the population. Then the number of children jumps up to more than 3 each.
Why is this true? It’s because it’s about the amount of time people have outside their jobs and education. The people with the least amount of such time are those who grow up in working-class and middle-class families who’ve decided to get enough education and experience in their jobs that they can make it to at least upper-middle-class jobs. So they go to college and then graduate or professional school and then take starting positions in good companies or institutions. By the time they have been working in those companies or institutions long enough that they think it’s time to have children, it’s almost too late to have children. On the other hand, people who are born in rich families or who become rich fairly early in life have more time to have children. The poorest people will have no more than a high school degree and maybe not even that. They can say to themselves pretty soon that they have time to have children.
I’ve seen Elon Musk claim that he’s unusual in being rich and having a lot of children. This isn’t true. The richest people do have a lot of children, even though it’s not as much as him. This is typical of how much of what Musk says is wrong.
So how does a declining population line up with a supposed housing crisis in the US? The two seem to be at odds with eachother.
The baby boomers (mostly) haven’t died, yet, and are still tying up a lot of housing.
But it’s completely predictable that baby boomers will for without having more kids. So the projected future population is in decline, even though the actual population hasn’t shrunk yet (at least, not significantly. I haven’t looked up the latest figures, though.)
I think the lack of housing to downsize to is in play.
Also kids are returning home due to unfordable places to stay.
Multigenerational homes may be coming back.
We are selling our house in a short time frame and move into an extension of the kids house. Not thrilled but not my decision to make and I’ll get along.
We are a multigenerational house, from ages 9-87. It works bc my husband and I need the young folks to keep things up, we pay for the materials, they will do the work. However, I have my independence, both financially and spiritually (they moved into our house). Make certain you have your own space, maybe put in a little mini apartment someplace in the house. Make some “do not disturb” signs to put on doorways to your private area. Sometimes, it doesn’t work, though, and I get that. Some families like each other better the farther apart they live.
That’s why the separate granny flat of our design- our own space with a convoluted connection to the kids living area and no shared walls.
We don’t expect much interaction at all and since partner ( her dottor ) spends lots of time there anyways there won’t be a lot of “socializing” beyond what is there now.
No next generation either.
Kids both busy professionals so having my partner around is very useful to them.
I’m a bit of a loner anyways and when not out on the motorcycle ( I’m 77 ) I’m quite happy reading or consuming a variety of other media.
Living in the wet tropics Australia there is never the winter isolation…I’m sitting on the deck at 3.30 am with lovely mid 20Cs ( mid 70sF temps )
Certainly no getting underfoot on either side as the granny flat is 100% self sufficient/self contained.
Thanks for insight. 
It’s not shrunk yet. Maybe this year, but only by a small amount. Not enough to make a difference to the housing problem. I expect the population to go down more next year, but still probably not enough to make a significant dent in the housing problem.
I’ve seen and read many times that the issue isn’t a housing shortage, but specifically a shortage of affordable housing. Partly because developers make more money on “luxury” housing, partly because NIMBY types don’t want affordable housing built anywhere near them.
Much of the housing crisis is simply a lack of building enough housing to keep up with population growth, regardless of where those more people are coming from, or how slow or fast the population is growing.
And it doesn’t even have to be net growth, just growth of people who need their own place to live—kids getting older.
The pandemic set back housing construction by several years, so whatever path construction of new housing was on in 2019, it was off that path by 2022. Labor shortages and supply chain delays created cancelled contracts, or contracts were cancelled due to uncertainty.
So housing growth was already not keeping up with population growth, and then it got even worse.
And two things will make it worse going forward:
- tariffs, especially those on Canadian lumber
- layoffs in the US Forest Service.
Rich have more kids because the cost of a nanny is not significant. My wife watches a soap opera, and I alway wonder at characters that supposedly have children but rarely interact with them… because nannies. that’s what rich do. Plus, the other costs of children and the time demands - driving them evrywhere - again, nannies.
There’s a housing shortage for two reasons.
First - Because the baby boomer cohort was large, their offspring are still large, and the grandchildren cohort is larger than the 80’s and 90’s dying of right now. Give it 10 or 20 years, and the decline will set in… except, if we keep allowing immigrants, the population of Canada and the USA will keep going up. A lot of people immigrating come here, then have children.
Second - look at the old post-WWII suburbs. Many houses are tiny by today’s standards. New subdivisions do not generally have one-story 1100sf houses with unfinished basements and one-car or no garage. That adds to the cost that many cannot afford.
But Trump is doing his best to discourage further immigration, whether legal or illegal. And that’s definitely going to reduce it. After all, it did in Trump1.0 and this time it’s much more extreme.
Other than at the very high end, they do not. In fact for most of the income curve fertility rate decreases with income.
I will dispute this assertion. Can you back it up with a cite?
From Statista:
In 2021, the birth rate in the United States was highest in families that had under 10,000 U.S. dollars in income per year, at 62.75 births per 1,000 women. As the income scale increases, the birth rate decreases, with families making 200,000 U.S. dollars or more per year having the second-lowest birth rate, at 47.57 births per 1,000 women.
I realize this says ‘birth rate’, but there are significantly more households below the $100k level than above it.
Yes, I meant the ultra-rich. Certainly the well-off don’t tend to have a lot of children either. The ones who can afford a live-in nanny and a chauffeur and not worry about the costs, that live the lifestyles of the rich and famous, that category tend to have extra children.
Again, do you have a cite for that? Because I don’t recall ever reading about the Gates and Bezos of the world having extra-large families. Gates has 3 kids; Bezos 4. Certainly not anything out of the norm.
(Elon Musk excluded, of course.)
Not huge, but more than most people. It depends on what you mean by rich and ultra-rich. As I said, according to the statistics I read, the distinction comes at about the top 1.3% of the population. It’s not just a matter of having servants. It’s having one of the couple having a well-paid enough job that the other can quit their job for, say, five years instead of two months when the child is young.
And Trump has 5, RFK Sr. had 11… (an outlier, to be sure). True, not every rich person has a lot, but tend to be higher than average, and serial marriage to relatively young wives is possibly an aggravating factor.
- Musk is an outlier, having at least 14 children.
- Jeff Bezos has 3 children, including one adopted daughter.
- Zuckerberg has 3 children (latest 2023), and revealed his wife had had multiple miscarriages before that.
- Ellison has only 2 children despite being married 6 times.
- Warren Buffet has 3 children.
- Larry Page has only 2 children.
- Sergey Brin has 3 children with 2 wives.
- Steve Ballmer has 3 sons.
- Bill Gates has 3 children.
- Michael Bloomberg has 2 children.
- Jensen Huang has 2 children.
- Michael Dell has 4 children.
So the top 12 people listed in Forbes as American billionaires, the ones over $100B, have (excluding #1) have 30 children between them - an average of 2.5, well over the <2 for most of the USA.
Not excessive, but still indicative.
Not just the freedom to stay at home, but also the servants ensure the child-rearing does not become a drag on other social activities.