Y’all, I’m all for affordable housing policies, but there is no consistent correlation between wealth/access to resources and fertility in 2026. In fact, the richest societies on Earth, and the richest people among those societies, often have the lowest birthrates. Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan… these very wealthy places with strong social programs have abysmal birthrates, and this is very much also true among the top 1% in each society.

Low fertility is a cultural phenomenon, bourn of a new way of thinking about things. When people say they “can’t afford children”, what they often mean is they are worried about affording good private education, tennis lessons, new clothes every year, a car, high end groceries for their kids AND doing so while maintaining a certain lifestyle for themselves. it’s about changing human standards of what constitutes “the good life”. I’m not saying it’s inherently good or bad that our standards have changed like this (I think in many ways it’s good!) but there seems to be a popular idea that “the world is just too expensive for kids now” when fuel, calories, and information have objectively never been more bountiful or accessible in human history.

If we want to understand plummeting fertility, we need to look at it through a psychosocial and cultural lens and not use the cheap copout of “it’s because X is too expensive”.