You do have to factor in how many mothers (and how many other kids they have, too), when talking about replacement value.
Also, of course, their age and what was typical for their respective generations.
Very true. And, of course, how much does that impact whether the servants are apt to have kids (or how many) v. other jobs.
Surprisingly, most of those top 12 US billionaires I listed had all their children with one wife.
More famous people with lots of kids:
Alec Baldwin has seven kids with his second wife.
Tori Spelling has five kids with one of her husbands.
Jim Gaffigan has five kids with his wife.
Jerry Hall has four kids.
Stellan Skarsgård had six kids with one of his wives.
Steven Spielberg has four children with one of his wives.
Lauryn Hill has six kids.
Kris Jenner has six kids.
Mel Gibson has seven kids with one of his wives.
James Van Der Beek and his wife have six kids.
Gordon Ramsay and his wife have five kids
These are all cases where a woman has a lot of kids. None of the kids were adopted, I believe. This are cases where just one woman has those kids. I’m not including other kids the husband or boyfriend had with other women. So it’s not just men having kids with many wives.
Media personality Kris Jenner has six children. Two of her daughters have four children, two have two, and her son has one. A total of 13 grandchildren.
That’s an interesting point. Often, the servants who care for kids don’t have their own. But of course, sometimes they do.
The average number of kids among those 12 is actually 3.7, but it’s completely skewed by Musk and his 14. Ten of the twelve have either 2 or 3, and the median is 3. Certainly more than the the national average, but not outrageously so, and it’s difficult (and probably erroneous) to make sweeping statements based on that kind of sample size.
Yes, one can point to well-known examples of super-wealthy families with lots of kids, but even among the super-wealthy, they may well be exceptions to the norm. And, one could also point to lots of examples of middle-class and lower class families with a ton of kids, too.
Certainly, the extremely wealthy likely have staff and servants who take care of things like childcare and housekeeping, but unless they are adopting, a large family would mean that the super-wealthy wife is spending much of her life in her 20s and 30s pregnant, and that may not be an attractive choice for many of them.
If you want to look at the wealthy, rather than the super-wealthy:
For my college class, or those who responded to a survey (about a third of the class)
74% have kids
Those who had kids averaged 2.3
Across the whole sample, the average was 1.7
The median and mode is 2 kids
Median reported household income is >250k, but enough people decline to answer that question that it might be biased, probably biased high.
I’m not sure how to compare that to “annual birth rate per 1000 women”, but “number of kids in middle age” is a much more intuitive number than “births per year in this demographic”, although of course you can’t answer that question for young adults.
To be in the overall top 1% of income in the U.S., you must have an annual income of at least $787,712 according to the statistics in the article Here's how much money you need to earn to join the top 1% in every U.S. state - CBS News. Nobody is saying that the number of children is outrageously more than people below that level. It’s just that it’s more than 3.
@md-2000 certainly seems to be saying that “the ultra-rich have lots of kids.”
What he said in one post was that “not every rich person has a lot, but tend to be higher than average”, which I don’t think is like “have lots of kids”.
In addition to what else has been said: a lot of places in some areas have been bought up for use as short term rentals, making them unavailable for use by anyone wanting to actually live in them. A lot more money can be made by renting a place by the night or week than can be made by renting it by the month on a year-long renewable lease.
Decreasing household size (number of people) means more people are competing for houses/units. It’s how cities/neighborhoods can maintain full occupancy while population still declines. Also, increasing home size (square feet, number of bedrooms, etc.) makes a lot of housing unaffordable to the larger number of single-income buyers.
The other problem is housing availability where jobs are. We’ve gotten to a point where cities of any meaningful size are adding jobs faster than they’re adding housing. The neighborhoods where people want housing are often already “built out” due to zoning and other development restrictions. Builders/developers would be fools not to cater to the high-end market in that situation when the high-end market is unsatisfied. They’re just responding rationally to the distorted market.
I maintain a position that a lot of cities have reached “peak sprawl” where so much of the landscape is single-family detached homes and strip malls that it’s become too physically large and decoupled from the core city to viably grow much more due to talent/jobs/opportunities/networking/recreation getting too far apart and difficult to access. So the pressure on the real estate market is on closer-in neighborhoods that are already zoning-restricted, so with no chance to densify, prices just go up and up.
Another facet of this is that a lot of boomers decanted to low-tax environs for retirement where they often vote against school levies and other services that younger people want/need. They’re not beholden to any sort of job market either, so the glut of boomer homes coming down the pipeline are not in places younger working-age people want to live, or could reasonably make a living in.
I’m not the only one who thinks the US population could decline this year:
I don’t much of anything new in that article. Immigration does complicate the issue; but everybody already knows that driving immigrants out of the country and limiting new ones is self-destructive idiocy that will be correctable by a new administration.
Climate change will cause at least a billion people to move by the end of this century: that’s my forecast. Resistance to that mass emigration will be fierce, brutal, and also futile. Forecasts of future population without taking that into account are also futile. They shouldn’t be believed, nor even included in the first place.
Yeah, it was just confirming what I said in the OP.
Don’t be so sure it’ll be that easily correctable. After 4 years of Trump, potential immigrants will have gotten the idea that the US is not the welcoming place it used to be. They’ll probably have found some other country that’s more accommodating. It’ll take a few years to change our image back.
Plus it’s a coin flip if Republicans sweep back into power (assuming they relinquish it in the first place) for the next election cycle and try to kick everyone out again.
The real coin flip is whether, even if a Democrat is elected, they’ll act more like Obama or Biden:
Their electoral chances in a few years depends a great deal on the attitude they take.
I’ve watched what other countries are doing, especially in Europe. America in any other time has been more welcoming and will remain so in the future. Especially when all the farmers and factories and small businesses start screaming for more workers.
It’s already happening. The migrations across the Mediterranean plus the arrivals to the USA on the Mexican border are attributed to some extent to crop failures due to drought and other natural disasters, as much as political problems and economic migration. But it’s only going to get worse.
The difference is, the population in Latin America is levelling off, whereas the population growth in Africa is not showing any sign of reduction. Europe will be the main “beneficiary” more than the USA.
Also, the economy is important. An economy in recession is less likely to attract the sort of legal immigrants that fill the more skilled jobs; depending on how the economy in the rest of the world compares.
Short answer: who knows? Populations everywhere but Africa are generally levelling off and headed downward. Only immigration saves the countries that encourage it - USA, Canada, Australia, and to some extent NZ and UK. Countries like Japan and South Korea that don’t encourage immigration are heading into population decline already. So too most European countries, Russia, and China.
Fun site: check out the different countries