I was born in a Third World country where people sometimes didn't have money to buy food, and yet they reproduced like rabbits. And this is over from what people tell me.

It is cultural. Having kids is low status in the modern world. And it fucking makes a lot of sense. I only like kids because I have kids, my wife wanted to have kids, and I was kind of forced into it. Now, I love having kids, but because I already have them.

women have lower standards in the third world

Depends on what you call the third world. Eastern europe? Brasil? Argentina? Nigeria? it is not the same as Peru, Benin or Ethiopia.

Honestly, "third world" is a bad word. It comes from the cold war. A lot of countries we refer to as "third world" are really "second world" in this distinction.

I would say you have high birthrates despite low material growth in patriarchal countries, where men have more leverage over women. Whereas in countries struggling with birthrates, women have higher standards. For example, home ownership is a bottleneck. In the USA the supply of homes is artificially constrained by the older property-owning class to boost the value of their investment (but really it will result in a crash due to resulting population changes). In china, you have different shenanigans in the construction industry.

"Third world" immigrant groups have lower standards at first, but after they reach a certain material status in a "first world" country, they have the same birthrate trend as their native peers.

Don't know. By government numbers, china has incredible home ownership numbers. And China is kind of patriarchal, for example, man having affairs is seen as a status marker and more or less socially accepted.

You cited an article about people in 2025 talking about whether or not they might have kids in the future.

This census investigation is talking about people under the age of 18, meaning it includes people who were conceived almost two decades ago.

Several states on the list also have significantly above average housing affordability (home price to income ratios) like West Virginia or Pennsylvania.

The greatest generation may have been good at ridding the world of fascism, but not so good at raising responsible and civic-minded adults.

I don't understand why the Baby Boomers are the ones that get blamed for restrictive zoning. The oldest were in their early 30s and the youngest couldn't even vote during the peak of single family zoning activity in the 1970s

They voted to perpetuate it since then in the face of many proposals for more relaxed rules.

Being responsible for the peak of something and having the power to undo it but choosing to do nothing produce the same result.

By this logic, you'd also have to blame Gen X and Millenials, as they've all been voting for at least a decade (and together have outnumbered baby boomers for several) but single family zoning continues to persist

I, a Millenial with a very active voter record, increasingly do. What seems to be the problem? Perhaps I should point out that representatives still must bring issues to bear, and the age of the average representatives has only very recently dipped into even high Gen X territory. Regardless, if your goal is to spread a little bit of the recent blame around, by all means, don't let me stop you. We should do something about it.

So I guess it’s the desegregation advocates who are technically at fault? Like that’s when people started using sneaky tricks to maintain segregation. At least before that it was above board and didn’t distort all these other basically unrelated areas (like zoning, and school district “preferences”, etc).

Because they’re the ones who’ve been fighting to keep it. I don’t give a shit what happened in the 70s before I was born. I’ve been watching boomers fight for low density zoning since the 90s.

"If one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it."