Until you dragged in the dead horse that it's overpopulation. As Politesse said, wealthier people produce fewer, not more babies. You can find it counterintuitive until the cows come home, the data says so and it's easy to access for anyone with an internet connection.
When it costs 10 cents a day to raise your child, and all you have to do is teach them how to farm and sell at a market when they grow up, that lack of wealth actually goes much further than it does in somewhere like Canada or the United States, where you have to access child-care, modern amenities, and post-secondary education for your children to even have a sniff at well-paying work. So I was initially giving Politesse the opportunity to elaborate, but I assume I know what his response was going to be.
Wealth is relative. In Canada and the U.S. we make infinitely more money, but our cost of living is also prohibitively high. And the very reason that we're starting to see stagnation in our population growth is because people are realizing that they can't afford to bring kids up in a wealthy economy. In places where there isn't that restriction, having kids isn't a problem.
The reason people in wealthy economies can no longer afford kids is because there are too many people, and too little work to do. I don't know the history behind the term 'malthusian cycle', but we can at least agree that any living thing is naturally susceptible to fluctuations in it's population, and the effects of that fluctuation. A few decades ago low-skilled workers were in demand, now they're not because there are too many of them - hence there are more people making less money.
So in a theoretical world where the cost of raising children is no longer prohibitive, when the masses of low skilled workers have enough money to successfully raise children, it will be more likely for them to do so.
I'm not arguing that we
shouldn't try to raise the quality of life of everyone in a society, I'm arguing that this does, and should have limits.
