Population growth doesn't imply economic prosperity. Children are an economic issue. And I'll give you a lesson in math, specifically exponential growth.
Here's an example of why the "surrounding States" grew.
My mom's second husband, in Indiana, was a truck driver.
His daughter had five children and put the whole family on welfare. She got married to several men in a row but the "nicest" one was a guy who got out of prison and had extremist prison gang tattoos on his face.
He was driving his car down Etna Avenue, in Huntington, in 2009, and lit a cigarette,
and it caught the meth precursors on fire and his car blew up, and he crashed into a phone pole down the street from my house, knocking out my Internet. The police sent him back to prison.
It's generally the people who have no access to reproductive healthcare generally, don't have the presence of mind to use some if it is available, and don't have much money, that tend to have more. Because there's really no other way it makes sense.
So I've seen this play out a lot because I lived in Indiana until I was 35, and so there's one reason the State's population grows. They're not paying for it and they have no access to proper reproductive healthcare. Even if they had no access to welfare programs and did have a proper medical system in Indiana, I feel that many of them wouldn't change their behavior at all because they simply do not operate on that level. It takes more presence of mind to connect cause and effect over a 9 month timeline.
Another issue, where people in cities don't have many kids, is that they are better educated in general and have more access to a functioning healthcare system. Cities are the engine of a modern economy. They are what makes the rest of the country "work". The rest of the country is good mainly for farmland, manufacturing, and power plants. Which are essential to a modern post-industrial economy, but not the primary source of the Gross Domestic Product. You could not have much of a Welfare State with the GDP of an agrarian, petroleum, and manufacturing-based economy. (See; Russia, North Korea, etc.) (Even Saudi Arabia, which has a lot of oil, had to make deep and unpopular cutbacks in the recent years.)
It used to be that on the farm, more children were an asset, because it meant they'd workers on the farm. But then people moved to cities, where they're an expensive hobby. So you live in a city, you have less of them because they aren't working and
each one will
cost you $310,605 on average according to the Brookings Institute. Even in rural areas, children are not as necessary as they once were due to heavy machinery, and increasingly the software and services that run it. (Think drone tractors and stuff.)
That $310,605 figure assumes one child up to age 17. Many people end up helping them with college. Not all.
So then what you get a lot of the time these days is they can't find work, or suitable work, or anything that involves what they studied, and they end up living with you a lot longer.
By the time mom's second husband died, 9 years after they got divorced, it was because he spent years and years polluting his body drinking refrigerators of beer and smoking three packs a day, and salting the salted peanuts (and all his food because all he could taste was salt). Budweiser and whoever owns Kool cigarettes probably had a flash crash on the New York Stock Exchange that day.
He had a heart attack at 59, and thus endeth the caveman*, but by that point he'd had 4 children, 16 grandchildren, and 8 great-grandchildren. *(She described taking him to a fine restaurant once, and he banged the silverware and growled 'I ont some meat!'.)
I forgot to mention this family starts having them when they're really way too young. But while teenage pregnancy is an economic problem, and a negative social indicator, it's a whole different topic.
So there's exponential growth.
And then for this economic investment, pretty much all of them are doing life on the installment plan in Indiana prisons, which are probably the best place you'll find a job at in Indiana. And you'll already be related to some of the inmates probably.
The ones that aren't in jail also make sure they file their taxes every year, because they'll get back several thousand dollars from the earned income tax credit along with everything they paid. So they file taxes and they get their refund and what could have been refunds for several productive citizens.
The problem happens where so many do when it involves people. Some associate
quantity with
quality.
And some will ask "How can you assign a dollar value to a human life?"
Well, I'm not trying to be a Philosophy major here, and so we'll leave that aspect to them.
Economists put value on human life every day, when they set fines for OSHA, or when they write up Accidental Death and Dismemberment insurance policies. Or when there's a wrongful death lawsuit.
If you ask me, there is no "value" I can place on a single life. I refuse to make that assessment. One person is important to me. However, when we discuss taxes or the cost of raising a child, I can give you some idea, because economists have done the work.
My cousin just had a child at 43 even though the doctors said it would never happen. Economically, she was teetering on a fourth bankruptcy filing already, so economically this is a disaster, but oddly she's happy and I'm happy for her. It's nice when we can be happy in this world.
To me, there's sort of a cold logic in the way that I approach my thinking, so if it were possible for me to be in that position, I would be unhappy because logically this is a major problem. There are five people in that house and she's the only one who has a job. She married a layabout, and he moved the mother in law in and now there's a baby, and they had already adopted a "difficult" child.
My feeling is that there's too many people around advocating for having more children without feeding or clothing or finding a loving home for the ones that are here. It's like some sort of weird puppy mill thing for humans.
I look at things like this from the economic angle I guess, because I never got love from my parents. My dad was always just saying how much money I was costing him.
I'd hate to fail a child like he did. Never encouraging, never saying "You did good." after an achievement. Just off to make another one. I do not understand this and I'm honestly glad I don't.
That's one reason I focus on enrichment of my own life, and the work, because the work is around long after anyone remembers who did it.
