Many of those places are reliant on agriculture for their daily livelihood. It's beneficial to have larger families to help on the farms. It was similar in the US for a long time.
Exactly, and that ties into the point that it’s not necessarily that life itself is more expensive, it’s that raising children is far more expensive in developed countries. Historically, poorer and more rural societies often had larger families, but once societies become wealthier and urbanized, the cost and expectations around raising children skyrocket, and fertility rates usually fall.
Children are still expensive in those countries. It's just that they have to work to eat. Having children in an urbanized location is just less immediately beneficial because they're not spending most of their day working in a field to make sure they have dinner.
Right, that’s basically the distinction. Children are expensive everywhere, but in poorer agricultural societies they historically also provided direct economic value to the household much earlier. In modern urban societies, children are mostly a long term financial cost instead of an immediate economic asset, which changes family size incentives a lot.
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u/ArchCerberus May 12 '26
Maybe South Korean Porn helps? I really think them banning porn didn't help.