I'm not even talking about those places. Besides, it really depends on how you define a "peasant" existence.
Ok. Let’s first agree on terms.
A peasant life is existence almost entirely through one’s own subsistence household:
- you grow your own food,
- you build and repair your own house,
- you provide for your family with almost no cash and almost no dependence on global markets, corporations, or the state.
Large families (children = labor), early marriage, minimal purchased goods, a rhythm dictated by the sun and the seasons, not by office hours.
Until the 20th century, an ordinary peasant could build a house, a barn, a cellar; sew clothes and forge tools; he understood animal husbandry, horticulture, beekeeping; he could hunt and fish. A single peasant family was, in practice, nearly self-sufficient.
In many parts of Africa people still live exactly like that today: subsistence farming + hunting/fishing.
The hierarchy of values is completely different.
Success is not measured by salary, bank balance, the car you drive, or the resorts you visit.
Success is measured by the size of your plot, the number of goats, sheep, cows, chickens… and, above all, the number of children.
Children and subsistence farming are directly linked. In a peasant economy children are not a burden; they are the workforce.
A four-year-old is already helping, already learning every skill he will ever need.
In an industrial urban society, by contrast, a child is a pure dependent until at least 18.
The average 18-year-old high-school graduate in the West possesses an enormous volume of theoretical information… but almost zero practical survival skills.
An 18-year-old in a rural African village may never have heard of E = mc², yet he already knows how to build a house, plant a field, raise livestock, and feed a family. By 18 he is fully ready to marry and produce the next set of helpers. There is no trade-off between “career” and children, because the concept of career simply does not exist.
You mentioned earlier that high-fertility regions in Africa tend to have low formal education. Fair point, but let’s ask a deeper question:
Who is actually more educated?
- The person who can ace every school exam yet cannot grow food, build shelter, or survive a single week without a functioning supply chain, or
- The person who cannot pass those exams yet possesses every practical skill required to thrive in the environment he was born into?
Which of these two is truly equipped for life?
Which society is actually sustainable when the trucks stop rolling and the grid goes dark?
That is the real difference between the two models, and that is why one produces eight children per woman while the other struggles to reach 1.3.
Why does this have to be an either/or situation? [...]
And yet, my income is considered lower middle class. Some people might even see me as 'poor'. And again, I don't feel 'poor'.
And because I don't dine on filet mignon, lobster and champagne every night...don't own designer clothes and jewelry...don't own a car...does that make me a 'peasant'?
No. What you just described does not make you a peasant at all.
It makes you a typical resident of an industrial urban society.
“Why does it have to be either/or? Why can’t we have electricity and high birth rates at the same time?”
Because electricity does not grow on trees.
It requires power plants, grids, appliances, and, ultimately, a light bulb.
To build power plants, run cables, and manufacture that bulb you need factories.
To have factories you need full-scale industrialization.
To industrialize you must industrialize the entire society—its time structure, its family model, its cost of child-rearing, everything.
The demographic crisis is a systemic property of industrial society, not a personal failing of individuals.
You cannot fix a systemic problem with individual lifestyle tweaks.
When you point to African countries with high fertility and say “look, they are poor and still have lots of children,” you are quietly smuggling in a completely different social model: a peasant, pre-industrial, subsistence-based society.
You are comparing apples and oranges and pretending they are the same fruit.
If you seriously propose the African peasant model as the solution, then be honest: it requires de-industrialization.
No factories → no power grid → no light bulb.
That is the actual price tag.
And as I have said repeatedly, that solution is spectacularly unpopular in the industrialized world for obvious reasons.
Therefore, you cannot legitimately use the fertility rates of a peasant society to lecture an industrial one.
The two systems measure wealth by completely different metrics.
In an industrial society “poor” means “doesn’t have enough money.”
In a peasant society a man can have zero cash in his pocket and still be rich—because his wealth is counted in land under cultivation, heads of livestock, and, above all, children.
In a peasant society the truly poor man is not the one without money;
it is the one without children, without animals, and without a field to feed them.
That is why the comparison collapses the moment you try to transplant one model into the other.
They are different civilizations with different mathematics of life.
