You lost me at “poverty means people will have fewer children”.
How do you explain India? American ghettos? Central and South America?
“How do you explain India? American ghettos? Central and South America?”
We are talking about different kinds of civilizations. Rural, agricultural poor people don’t use money so much as barter and hand-to-mouth subsistence. They have more children because those children will work and ensure they survival of the family. Advanced, first world, cultures, use money obtained from activities they perform. They trade that money for goods and services. If they are just getting along, they have fewer children because they have a store of value, money. The more money they store, the better off they are. (Fewer kids, more stored money.)
The game, if you will, is to maximize the outcome for your family using the rules of the culture you are in. Subsistence in a first world culture is different than in a third world culture. The poor in America are fat, because we give them “benefits.” (And they make poor decisions with those benefits because they cost nothing.) Those are the people who have excessive kids because the taxpayer pays them to have those kids. But the “middle class” sees having fewer kids and investing more in them as the way to get ahead. If you want to send your kid to college, you can’t have three or four of them. You have one and invest heavily in that one.