![]() ![]() For example, if you believe in God and you believe God is all-seeing, the decisions you make will be informed by that. Nevertheless, the author argued that we make different decisions when we are being monitored. ![]() You don’t look at the cover every time you open it to remind you, so you forget what it is you are reading or listening to). (This always happens to me with kindle and audiobooks. I once to listened to an audiobook about willpower and decision-making. Idyllic Spanish Colonial architecture on South America How I would love to have been one of HE Bates’ Darling Buds of May (I imagine we all would, though tral life is never as idyllic as fiction). It’s a life I’ve never known, without wishing to sound sad, one I’ve always wanted and wished for. So I never grew up with lots of brothers and sisters or a big family. My mother worked and I went to boarding school. He wrote about his divorce at great length and to considerable acclaim. I hardly saw my father at all when I was young due to various court rulings, and that led him to set up an organisation called Families Need Fathers. My parents divorced when I was just a few months old. But, whatever the cause, families have got much, much smaller. There’s probably something to all of these explanations. Without religion egging us on, many of us will take the sex, but we might forego the added burden of having to bring up the ensuing children. One primary purpose of religion is to get you to reproduce, he suggests. On that note, my friend Simon Evans argues, and I’m paraphrasing, that we have smaller families because religion has died. It tends to be only the very rich, who can afford it, the very poor, who get state aid and thus can also afford it (especially if housing is covered), or the very religious. If you look at who has big families today, it is most unusual to see an ordinary middle-class family with five or more kids. Most kids now stay at home well into their 20s. Add in school fees and you can double that number. The average cost of raising a child to 18 is now over two hundred grand. ![]() I’ve written endlessly about house prices being a function of cheap, debt-based, fiat money, and it’s quite easy to, therefore, attribute declining family size to fiat. We can no longer afford to buy the large homes our Victorian ancestors built to house their families, so just putting a roof over their head is problem enough. The biggest expense of bringing up a child - government aside (the state takes half of everything you will ever earn) - is somewhere to live. Be grateful you are alive in Britain today - you get to live twice as long.īut when parents themselves are asked why they don’t have more children, the most commonly given reason is cost. Stat of the day: in 1850, life expectancy in Britain was 40 for men and 42 for women. With the longer safer lives we now have in the west, you can have two or three kids and know that the likelihood is that they will make it safely to adulthood. In poorer countries, you might have lots of children, knowing that a significant number will not make it through pregnancy, childbirth and early childhood, let alone the teenage years. Matt Ridley argues that families get smaller as people grow wealthier and live longer. All sorts of reasons have been proffered for that. Having nine or 10 brothers and sisters was not unusual. I’ve recently been looking at my family tree on one of those ancestry websites, and I was amazed to see just how big some of the families were in 19th and early 20th Century England.
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