But really, I think it’s just largely due to the lowered infant mortality in developed countries where you don’t need to have a lot of children just to ensure several reach adulthood.
Yeah pretty much. e.g. when I was looking up stats on life expectancy on Palestine in 1900, it was pointed out that the life expectancy was ~20 years or something, but if you
survived to 5 years old, then your life expectancy
at that point would be 50 years, e.g. not to shabby. It wasn't like people were dropping dead for little reason, left and right.
e.g. traditionally poor nations have a very high infant mortality, but the ones that survive to 5 years old have a pretty good survival rate after that. So parents in those sorts of nations are getting pretty fast feedback: most of the non-survivors are going to drop dead pretty soon after they're born indicating that you need to make more.
Also, I'd argue that capitalism on the whole has made us
materially wealthy. e.g. even the poorest people have more food and more stuff than ever before. Except, maintaining the amount of stuff that we all think we need is
a lot of work. Sure, you can have a non-capitalist lifestyle, if you forgo manufactured modern products. Then you have plenty of free time to raise kids well. Except you don't get to
also have cable TV, broadband internet, central heating, iPhones and the latest video games, to go out to restaurants, clubs and concerts, and drive a nice new efficient car, all those things that actually require you to consume resources made by other people.
EDIT: Something as simple as deciding who gets to put gasoline in their car, and how much, suddenly becomes an unanswered question when you decide to remove markets from the story. do we have price fixing and/or ration cards, from government-run fueling stations, or what? And then, if the answer is "just go for electric cars" how do we fund the development of electric cars, should everyone pay for it via taxes, even if they don't want to drive a car? And even then, someone has to be paid for the effort of generating the electricity, because that involves labor, so you're still back at the idea of who gets to fuel up the energy needed for their car, out of the available energy. And this is just a
really basic question for the the "get rid of capitalism" idea.