Raw LLM Responses

It is an economic thing but not in the way most people think. The places with high birth rates have high birth rates not because they are wealthy or poor, but because their economy is structured in such a way that having more kids is a wise economic choice, so people are economically incentivized to have as many kids as they can stand. It just so happens that that kind of economy is basically always a rural agrarian economy built on large amounts of low skilled labor, so more kids = more cheap labor, and also more social capital in the small community you most likely live in, and also more old age security which your community/government almost certainly does not provide otherwise. Which is the total opposite of modern urban economies, which are built on highly educated labor utilizing labor-multiplier technology, where kids have no economic value to their parents and on the contrary cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise and educate, then move out and try to take care of themselves, and often can't even do that and still rely on parental aid in their adult lives. In our world we are very strongly economically disincentivized to have kids, and almost all adults would be economically far better off without kids. In that case, having kids is making a huge financial sacrifice, so you only do it if you really want to be a parent, and then you most likely stop at 1 or 2 kids rather than cranking out 5-10 like you might if you were a subsistence farmer in a rural agrarian economy. TL;DR How rich or poor the average person is in your economy is pretty irrelevant. You'll have high birth rates in places where it makes economic sense to have kids; where more kids will make you better off financially, and you'll have low birthrates in places where having kids is a financial burden and a poor economic choice. And by the by, if we think that financial incentives can increase birth rates, we need to go wayyy further than we ever have. The average cost of raising a ch