In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into a shocking demographic shift happening in wealthy countries: the complete inversion of the traditional fertility-wealth relationship.

For decades, poorer families had more children while richer ones had fewer. But starting around 2017, in nations with generous social services (free childcare, healthcare, education), higher-income and higher-educated people are now having MORE kids — while lower-income groups are having fewer.

We explore:

• Why universal free childcare and welfare might unintentionally reduce fertility among lower-income groups

• How modern “poor” lifestyles increasingly resemble historical elite living (outsourced child-rearing, conspicuous consumption, work outside the home)

• How modern “rich” lifestyles are starting to look like historical peasant life (homesteading, stealth wealth, focus on home/family, less external work)

• The implications for fertility collapse, dependency ratios, and whether generous in-kind social services could accidentally “solve” collapsing birth rates by boosting high-earner fertility

Backed by 2025 research from Western Europe, Nordic data, and real-world examples. Is giving people free services the unexpected key to higher birth rates among taxpayers? Or is something deeper happening with culture and household structure?

Episode Outline

What it means to be rich, and what it means to be poor, is fundamentally changing, and not like you’d think.

Rich people are starting to live like poor people used to live, and poor people are increasingly live like rich people used to live

And you can see this coming up in all sorts of places, but most notably in recent shifts in fertility

This is a big deal and I think we should explore it.

SETTING THE SCENE

• In September, New Mexico’s governor announced that New Mexico will be the first US state to offer universal free childcare, regardless of income

  • Average household savings are estimated at around $12,000 per child, per year (major understatement; when we had just three kids, we were spending around $4K/month—so around $50K/year for a daycare with a terrible reputation)

    • This comes at a time when polling indicates Americans want the US to focus on measures like this to combat declining fertility rates

• WHAT WE WOULD EXPECT FROM THINGS LIKE FREE CHILDCARE:

  • If the state covers major basic costs of having kids, rich people would have fewer kids as their standards for raising kids would be higher

    • Wynnell anecdote: $1M/kid/year

• THE COUNTERINTUITIVE TREND

  • Starting in 2017, we’ve seen a shift in wealthy countries—that largely cover things like childcare, education, and healthcare—in which wealthier and more educated families are having more children than poorer and less educated families.

• KEY QUESTION

  • Why does giving resources to poor people not increase their fertility proportionately to rich people?

• WHAT PEOPLE ARGUE:

  • When the state doesn’t offer generous social services, wealthy families aren’t willing to pay for having kids (but somehow poor families are)

  • Having to work—as poor people do—competes with family demands

• WHY I HESITATE

  • Wealthy people still work and have aggressive schedules

  • Wealthy people also generally choose to have kids in more expensive ways—i.e. Waiting until they are old and infertile and then having kids expensively—and they’re struggling with that cost

    • E.g. IVF is so expensive, people are traveling abroad to get it

      • E.g. One couple found a clinic in Bogota, Colombia “offering a dramatic price difference—a package of four IVF rounds in Colombia for $11,000 compared to around $60,000 for four rounds in the U.S. Medication costs were also less than half of those in the U.S.”

• MY HYPOTHESIS

  • The issue is more that governments and societies are turning poor people into wealthy people—or at least people who live like wealthy people historically lived—and turning wealthy people into poor people (or at least people who live like poor people used to live) and that’s why we’re seeing the inversion

    • I’ll explain why at the end, but let’s go into the details first.

First, a Caveat

We’re talking about wealthy countries here, and wealthy countries (with one notable exception) have abysmal birth rates.

@MoreBirths Thread

The Thread:

• Lower income had been associated with higher fertility but now that relationship has completely flipped in many developed countries. Higher incomes are now associated with higher fertility almost everywhere in Europe, for both men and women, a 2025 paper shows.

• But this is only within countries. Across countries the correlation between income and fertility remains very negative. Wealthy countries continue to have far lower birthrates than poor countries. Also, fertility tends to go down for countries as a whole as they get richer.

  • Cool animation that amusingly resembles sperm:

• • /photo/2

But obviously as wealthy countries’ fertility rates are low, they need to work out what policies help to increase them.

The Wealthy Country Shift We Must Investigate

Back to this unexpected shift

Historical and Current Trends

For most of the 20th century, there was a negative relationship between wealth and fertility in Europe: wealthier individuals typically had fewer children while poorer families had more.

However, starting around 2017, this pattern weakened and has even reversed in several prosperous European countries by 2021. In some places, the association is now neutral or even slightly positive.​

• Similar patterns hold when using education as a proxy for income: low-educated Nordic women and men now have the lowest fertility and highest childlessness (15-36% in recent cohorts), while higher-educated groups have stabilized near replacement levels (around 1.8-2.0 children per person).

Variation by Region and Gender

• In Nordic countries such as Sweden, studies show a clear positive connection between high lifetime earnings and having more children, especially among men.​

For women, the relationship shifted from women having more kids (up to women born around the 1940s) to positive or flat in the 1970s cohorts, with the poorest women now having the fewest children due to higher childlessness rates.

• In Southern Europe, parental wealth is still related to lower fertility, while in Nordic countries, greater wealth is associated with higher fertility rates.​

Regional Differences and Welfare Regimes

In European countries with limited social welfare support—such as lacking free childcare or universal healthcare—fertility rates among wealthier citizens generally show only a weak positive association or sometimes remain lower, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe.​

• In Southern Europe and some conservative welfare states (like Greece and Italy) with weak, higher parental wealth does not strongly compensate for limited public support.​

• In contrast, Nordic countries and regions with extensive social support show a clearer trend: high-income individuals, especially men, tend to have more children

What Spurred Discourse About This: An Academic Paper

A research note on the increasing income prerequisites of parenthood. Country-specific or universal in Western Europe? https://labdisia.disia.unifi.it/wp_disia/2025/wp_disia_2025_05.pdf

(Brini, Guetto, Vignoli, 2025)

TL:DR: They’re trying to argue that wealth is beginning to correlate with having kids more because “having kids is so expensive.” THEY ARE TRYING TO SAY WE NEED TO GIVE PEOPLE MORE MONEY FOR KIDS.

Summary of Findings [not to be covered in podcast, but for show notes]:

• Key Question: Has the role of income in enabling parenthood strengthened in Western Europe from 2006–2020, and are increasing fertility inequalities present between higher- and lower-income groups for both men and women?

• Main Findings:

  • Higher individual income strongly increases the likelihood of having a first child for both men and women across 16 Western European countries studied; the effect is stronger and more widespread for women, especially in countries with robust welfare systems.

  • The role of income as a prerequisite for parenthood has increased over time: Income-based fertility gaps have widened, primarily due to declining birth rates among low-income men and women, not just rising births among higher-income groups.

  • Country Variations:

    • In most countries (France, Italy, Luxembourg, Sweden, Austria, Norway, UK, Belgium, Cyprus), widening fertility gaps are driven by declining parenthood among low-income groups—supporting the “increasing income prerequisites” hypothesis.

    • A few countries (Finland, Ireland, Greece, Spain) show weaken