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Notes -
His South Korean example points at the opposite of what he’s trying to get at. If a SK family had the resources to devote to another child, by his own logic they would because the child’s rank reflects on the mother, and more so if there are more kids. The bottleneck is thus resources, not culture.
There’s a lot of variables that go into fertility rates, but they’re not really that complex. Age of marriage, rate of marriage, and economic factors are obviously the most significant ones in western societies outside of some edge cases (Amish etc.). It’s not rocket surgery. The graphs this guy shows are not evidence one way or another because they don’t actually reflect the modal family’s economic status, and this should be obvious with a little thought.
But status is relative. If you increase everyone’s pay you haven’t changed the percent of income they devote to status. Everyone will just spend more money on that one kid’s opportunities. If Koreans get more money they will spend even more on ensuring one high status kid. So what is important is to value number of kids as a mark of success for half the living humans (all the women), to balance out status concerns.
Empirically that’s incorrect, since Korean families with 2 or even 3 kids do exist - they’re usually more well off than others. There’s a limit to how much resources you can pour into a single kid, and also not all Koreans will actually torture their kids like that.
I agree that helicoptering money on all parents will simply raise prices for everything, and tutoring specifically. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. My point is that the bottleneck for a specific family is still economic, even when the example is taken at face value.
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