People’s worries about demographic decline among the educated are really hard to square with my personal experience of everyone I know having three or more kids.
To be fair, the people I know are either academic economists or Finance Professionals and I realize this is not a representative sample of the intellectual elite, and in particular both groups are known for being kind of conservative/reactionary, at least compared to the rest of said elite.
(And for the record this totally doesn’t hold among the people I know who are not members of one of those groups.)
(Not sure how much this is economists vs. all academics–a French person once mentioned to me that “it’s the trend for all French intellectuals to have three children nowadays.”)
But it still makes me wonder if there’s some sort of countersignaling backlash to the demographic transition coming?
Like, there’s a level of education/achievement where the wife is working and wants to succeed in her career and thus doesn’t have time to have lots of kids. And then there’s a level where the wife works in a sufficiently creative/self-directed profession that she has plenty of job flexibility, plus they have enough money for the best full-time nannies and private schools anyway.