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Notes -
Successful economies often have large populations of homeless drug users in their major cities. In fact, the wealth of these countries probably why so many people can afford to be homeless drug users. If we were poorer, there wouldn't be enough charity or social welfare to support them.
There is a very strong negative correlation between wealth and fertility on a societal level. In developed countries, the fertility rate has steadily fallen as we've gotten richer over the last 150 years. In Africa, people clearly living in extreme poverty have several times the number of children as we do. The problem is not that people cannot afford to have children.
Often? I was unaware that the presence of giant groups of homeless indigents was a positive sign for an economy. I'm not going to try and argue on this point, but I'd like to see some more evidence that this is a good thing as opposed to a social problem, because I imagine that in an actually functioning economy these people would have jobs/homes/better things to do. If the economy generating large numbers of crazy hobos with knives who randomly assault passers-by in major cities is a sign that it is functioning well I think there are some problems with how we define "functioning well".
African economies and countries are so incredibly different to the west that I don't think this is a good comparison. In extremely terrible economies having large numbers of children is heavily incentivised for a variety of other reasons - that's your replacement for medical technology, retirement savings, childcare, extra labour etc. In the modern west, most of the childless members of my cohort explicitly tell me that there are financial reasons behind their childlessness, and a lot of them tell me that they would prefer to have more children if they weren't limited by the costs of doing so. That seems to be borne out by the statistics I look at as well.
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