I don’t think so. The poorest nations have a high birth rate 🐶🐾🫡

Have kids anyways, life will be hard. Hardship is good.

For the record, I do think there is some truth to this. I think a lot of people are likely opting out of having a family because it's expensive and it is getting hard to make ends meet. I was trying to say that it should not stop people. I think part of the problem is that younger people are basically scared of living, and don't take risks. I know this is an oversimplification. But I know a handful of younger kids who all have some form of social anxiety.

The birth rate in poor nations is also crashing.

Ricardo wrote about this way back in the 1700s. Men and women, but especially women, don't settle down and have children until they have the same financial security their parents had. (I would broaden this slightly to include other forms of social status). When living standards are rising, people have always married earlier and with more certainty. And when living standards are falling, they don't get married, and do more war and crime instead. Fits contemporary data neatly, but is very unfashionable viewpoint today. If you want grant money you need to claim a priori that its women's empowerment and mens' unwillingness to do her dishes that have led to declining birth rates. Nothing to do with the State and its handmaids vampiring up more productivity every year for the last fifty. Unthinkable.