Having children is not standard. Historically, you had large families because that was your social security, the kids took care of their parents. This trend has been negated by Marxism. With the dawn of “socialism” in the 1930’s, the birth rate has declined in the West because government was there to take care of you so you didn’t need the family structure. Children were not responsible, that was the state’s job.
Then historically, the richer a nation becomes, the lower its birth rate. This trend is true even in Ancient times. In Rome, Augustus (27BC-14D) introduced Family Laws making it illegal for young men not to get married and start families. For you see, he too was faced with a era of “free love” like the 1960’s thanks to Ovid (43 BC–17/18 AD) who wrote Metamorphoses with the antics of Cupid. He banished Ovid to the Black Sea and his own daughter Julia to an island. It was more than just free love, it was the interesting phenomenon that as a nation gains in wealth and taxes rise, the birth rate declines. Rome underwent this trend and foreign immigrants pour in and take up the lower class jobs. The same trend hit Britain with its rise, Russia, Spain imported French labor to unload the ships from the new world, and the United States where the streets were said to be paved with gold. This is now proof that Singapore will be the richest nation in the world by 2016, its birth rate has also collapsed to the lowest in the world. This is yet another correlation that emerges from the computer when population and birth rates are run along side economics. Fascinating confirmations of trends.
