The world is made for 4 person households. Taxis fit 4 people, and so do hotel rooms. The marginal cost of the third kid is always upgrading to an UberXL or getting an extra room every time you travel.
Or you can go camping like I did as a kid in the 90s with my two siblings and currently doing with my wife and three kids. Kids love it, all the freedom, nature and no screens.
This makes a lot of sense. If you're low income, there may be subsidies for childcare, one parent already out of the workforce (and lower opportunity costs for dropping out), or, because low-income people are less geographically mobile, more relatives nearby. At the high end, child care costs are not an issue. If you're in the middle, you get squeezed.
As a happily retired grandparent, I wish we would have raised more than two children. Wealth is easiest to measure in currency, but it isn’t the most important type.
Really fun read. The number that stuck with me is 49% of the top 1% having three or more kids, versus about 40% for the rest of the top 10%. Such a clear way to show how the third kid has become a rich-family thing.
An unprecedented historic crisis of epic proportion is sweeping the world, devastating the lives of billions of working people. It is the crisis of capitalism. These have profound implications not seen before in capitalism or human history.
Above all this is a catastrophe for the working class, where birth rates fall for working class women, while increasing for middle-class and elite women. The national total fertility rate is around 1.57 to 1.60 births per woman, while the wealthiest one percent ($17.1+ million in wealth) have 2.52 children.
This is not a crisis of "population" but the result of decades of attacks against the working class. This truth is disguised by national statistics, and obfuscated by bourgeois commentators and
demographers. Every statistic we see quoted both reveals and hides the true class content behind the social calamity. It is not "women" or "population" but class exploitation that drives the current social disaster, not of declining birth rates per se, but the horrors that drive birth rates down.
In more than two-thirds of the world’s 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the average replacement total fertility rate of 2.1 that keeps populations stable without immigration. In 66 countries, the average is now closer to one than to two.
However, those indicators are merely the symptoms. The cause is capitalism in historic decline, having long ago exhausted any historically progressive impulse, the capitalist ruling class is undercutting its own existence: us.
The present accelerating decline in worldwide birth rates is something never seen before in human history — never seen outside of the greatest natural or man-made calamities, not even world wars — reflecting increasingly inhumane living conditions under capitalism where the exploitation of the working class and farmers by the capitalist rulers is undeniably reaching the limits of human endurance.
At the center of these catastrophic economic conditions — revealed in unprecedented declining birth rates — is the brutal reality of class divided society, and in particular the brutal burdens of women's oppression.
Twenty-first century capitalist society is inherently antisocial and alienated. Capitalism negates solidarity, where we alone with our families face unsustainable worsening burdens of childrearing, debt, unemployment, illness, drug addiction, homelessness, and aging.
Despite the empty baubles and hype by their paid spin doctors, capitalism in the XXI century is a pessimistic society where it becomes harder to join with others and where the birth of children increasingly causes dread not joy, just as old age brings the fear of cruel poverty and isolation. Only the struggles of the working class generate solidarity for humanity, and we are seeing the effects of more than half a century primarily marked by retreats and defeats.
Despite the empty baubles and hype by the cheerleaders and paid spin doctors, capitalism in the XXI century is a pessimistic society where it becomes harder to join with others and where the birth of children increasingly causes dread not joy, just as old age brings the fear of cruel poverty and isolation.
As neither children nor the elderly generate profits, to the capitalists they are unproductive annoyances and a “burden.”
The class nature of this crisis is stark. Across a wide range of countries, the decline in births and coupling is much steeper among those with the least education and lowest incomes — the working class.
Again and again polls and interviews invariably report widespread apprehension and pessimism among young adults regarding the future under capitalism. For good reason.
It is particularly noteworthy that these accelerating declines and stagnation in social indicators are universal to capitalism today, irrespective of governments, religions, parties or policies, only differing by degree, from China to the United States and Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. In fact they are worse in the purportedly more “prosperous” nations.
NO CONFIDENCE VOTE AGAINST CAPITALISM
While these trends are receiving more and more attention and calamitous predictions, in fact we are living through something never seen before, with unknowable consequences — except the certainty that the capitalists will, as always, seek to make working people pay the price for their profits and their crisis.
What is undeniable is that works are suffering and unable, even unwilling, to have children, crushed by worsening economic and social conditions, but also out of a profound sense of pessimism and apprehension about the future.
These social indicators are undeniable proof of a deep malaise. They are a de facto vote of no confidence in capitalism and the nightmarish future it offers billions of working people.
Depends on the country’s welfare state with their different “social safety net” for new immigrants upon arrival with “paper(s)”….For example, Norway & / or Germany has a stable workforce population despite rising number of recent migrants being trained in crafts & light manufacturing (unions plus trade schools)…..Hence, nuclear family of 4+ will be dependent on disposable / consumer discretionary income rising in Northern Eurozone nations…. Socialism’s “finest” public policy to increase childbirths beyond zero-population growth by assisting working / middle-class/ lower income families via subsidies in any given “messy” parliamentary democracy!
In my own country, the Netherlands, there is a strong correlation between income and having children. Those in the highest income quartile are about two to three times more likely to have kids than those in the lowest. Interestingly, they didn't find this relationship for having three or more children, and there might even be a slight negative correlation. Note that this research did not isolate the top 1%, so trends there might differ.
This income divide makes sense when you consider how dramatically out-of-pocket childcare costs scale here. For one child in daycare three days a week in 2026:
- Low-Income (Under €56,412): Qualifies for a 96% subsidy, paying just €63 out of pocket per month.
- High-Income (Over €235,698): Subsidy drops to 36.5%, costing roughly €998 out of pocket per month for the exact same care.
Because the monthly price gap is so massive, the system is frequently manipulated at both extremes to maximize government subsidies:
- The Low Bracket Trick: Individuals may work unregistered ("off the books") to keep their official on-paper income as low as possible. This allows them to earn untaxed cash while still claiming the maximum 96% childcare allowance.
- The High Bracket Trick: Wealthy business owners and independent professionals can artificially lower their household income by retaining profits inside a corporate holding company (BV) instead of paying it out as a personal salary. By minimizing their official taxable income in "Box 1", they can claim significantly higher childcare subsidies than their actual wealth should allow.
You can have two careers as long as you stay at two kids or less. If you have 3+ either one person has to step back from their career or you start needing Nannie’s and au pairs and such, which means the wife’s career needs to be pretty high earning to cover the childcare costs post tax and still have enough left over to be worth it.
If you’re just two people in mediocre white collar careers, you can have an UMC lifestyle only if you restrict fertility to two or less.
The world is made for 4 person households. Taxis fit 4 people, and so do hotel rooms. The marginal cost of the third kid is always upgrading to an UberXL or getting an extra room every time you travel.
Or you can go camping like I did as a kid in the 90s with my two siblings and currently doing with my wife and three kids. Kids love it, all the freedom, nature and no screens.
This makes a lot of sense. If you're low income, there may be subsidies for childcare, one parent already out of the workforce (and lower opportunity costs for dropping out), or, because low-income people are less geographically mobile, more relatives nearby. At the high end, child care costs are not an issue. If you're in the middle, you get squeezed.
As a happily retired grandparent, I wish we would have raised more than two children. Wealth is easiest to measure in currency, but it isn’t the most important type.
Really fun read. The number that stuck with me is 49% of the top 1% having three or more kids, versus about 40% for the rest of the top 10%. Such a clear way to show how the third kid has become a rich-family thing.
The Social Catastrophe of the Working Class Family in XXI Century Capitalism —BIRTH, MARRIAGE, DIVORCE DECLINE
https://substack.com/@aaronruby/note/p-198323227?r=7jhui4
An unprecedented historic crisis of epic proportion is sweeping the world, devastating the lives of billions of working people. It is the crisis of capitalism. These have profound implications not seen before in capitalism or human history.
Above all this is a catastrophe for the working class, where birth rates fall for working class women, while increasing for middle-class and elite women. The national total fertility rate is around 1.57 to 1.60 births per woman, while the wealthiest one percent ($17.1+ million in wealth) have 2.52 children.
This is not a crisis of "population" but the result of decades of attacks against the working class. This truth is disguised by national statistics, and obfuscated by bourgeois commentators and
demographers. Every statistic we see quoted both reveals and hides the true class content behind the social calamity. It is not "women" or "population" but class exploitation that drives the current social disaster, not of declining birth rates per se, but the horrors that drive birth rates down.
In more than two-thirds of the world’s 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the average replacement total fertility rate of 2.1 that keeps populations stable without immigration. In 66 countries, the average is now closer to one than to two.
However, those indicators are merely the symptoms. The cause is capitalism in historic decline, having long ago exhausted any historically progressive impulse, the capitalist ruling class is undercutting its own existence: us.
The present accelerating decline in worldwide birth rates is something never seen before in human history — never seen outside of the greatest natural or man-made calamities, not even world wars — reflecting increasingly inhumane living conditions under capitalism where the exploitation of the working class and farmers by the capitalist rulers is undeniably reaching the limits of human endurance.
At the center of these catastrophic economic conditions — revealed in unprecedented declining birth rates — is the brutal reality of class divided society, and in particular the brutal burdens of women's oppression.
Twenty-first century capitalist society is inherently antisocial and alienated. Capitalism negates solidarity, where we alone with our families face unsustainable worsening burdens of childrearing, debt, unemployment, illness, drug addiction, homelessness, and aging.
Despite the empty baubles and hype by their paid spin doctors, capitalism in the XXI century is a pessimistic society where it becomes harder to join with others and where the birth of children increasingly causes dread not joy, just as old age brings the fear of cruel poverty and isolation. Only the struggles of the working class generate solidarity for humanity, and we are seeing the effects of more than half a century primarily marked by retreats and defeats.
Despite the empty baubles and hype by the cheerleaders and paid spin doctors, capitalism in the XXI century is a pessimistic society where it becomes harder to join with others and where the birth of children increasingly causes dread not joy, just as old age brings the fear of cruel poverty and isolation.
As neither children nor the elderly generate profits, to the capitalists they are unproductive annoyances and a “burden.”
The class nature of this crisis is stark. Across a wide range of countries, the decline in births and coupling is much steeper among those with the least education and lowest incomes — the working class.
Again and again polls and interviews invariably report widespread apprehension and pessimism among young adults regarding the future under capitalism. For good reason.
It is particularly noteworthy that these accelerating declines and stagnation in social indicators are universal to capitalism today, irrespective of governments, religions, parties or policies, only differing by degree, from China to the United States and Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. In fact they are worse in the purportedly more “prosperous” nations.
NO CONFIDENCE VOTE AGAINST CAPITALISM
While these trends are receiving more and more attention and calamitous predictions, in fact we are living through something never seen before, with unknowable consequences — except the certainty that the capitalists will, as always, seek to make working people pay the price for their profits and their crisis.
What is undeniable is that works are suffering and unable, even unwilling, to have children, crushed by worsening economic and social conditions, but also out of a profound sense of pessimism and apprehension about the future.
These social indicators are undeniable proof of a deep malaise. They are a de facto vote of no confidence in capitalism and the nightmarish future it offers billions of working people.
Depends on the country’s welfare state with their different “social safety net” for new immigrants upon arrival with “paper(s)”….For example, Norway & / or Germany has a stable workforce population despite rising number of recent migrants being trained in crafts & light manufacturing (unions plus trade schools)…..Hence, nuclear family of 4+ will be dependent on disposable / consumer discretionary income rising in Northern Eurozone nations…. Socialism’s “finest” public policy to increase childbirths beyond zero-population growth by assisting working / middle-class/ lower income families via subsidies in any given “messy” parliamentary democracy!
In my own country, the Netherlands, there is a strong correlation between income and having children. Those in the highest income quartile are about two to three times more likely to have kids than those in the lowest. Interestingly, they didn't find this relationship for having three or more children, and there might even be a slight negative correlation. Note that this research did not isolate the top 1%, so trends there might differ.
This income divide makes sense when you consider how dramatically out-of-pocket childcare costs scale here. For one child in daycare three days a week in 2026:
- Low-Income (Under €56,412): Qualifies for a 96% subsidy, paying just €63 out of pocket per month.
- High-Income (Over €235,698): Subsidy drops to 36.5%, costing roughly €998 out of pocket per month for the exact same care.
Because the monthly price gap is so massive, the system is frequently manipulated at both extremes to maximize government subsidies:
- The Low Bracket Trick: Individuals may work unregistered ("off the books") to keep their official on-paper income as low as possible. This allows them to earn untaxed cash while still claiming the maximum 96% childcare allowance.
- The High Bracket Trick: Wealthy business owners and independent professionals can artificially lower their household income by retaining profits inside a corporate holding company (BV) instead of paying it out as a personal salary. By minimizing their official taxable income in "Box 1", they can claim significantly higher childcare subsidies than their actual wealth should allow.
You can have two careers as long as you stay at two kids or less. If you have 3+ either one person has to step back from their career or you start needing Nannie’s and au pairs and such, which means the wife’s career needs to be pretty high earning to cover the childcare costs post tax and still have enough left over to be worth it.
If you’re just two people in mediocre white collar careers, you can have an UMC lifestyle only if you restrict fertility to two or less.