Gary Shteyngart

But when you're also working 80 hours a week, and if you have kids, you have to put them through these schools to get into a university that will take up half your paycheck already.

So having one kid is already a gigantic undertaking.

Having two is basically an impossibility for most Koreans.

And I think that's where we're going to.

I think there's a really interesting way this actually connects to rankings.

One just fascinating thing about fertility rates around the world is that people tend to have a lot of kids sometimes when they're very, very rich, but also when they're quite poor.

And then in the middle here, it's too expensive to have kids.

And it's not that that's wrong, but it has to do with the positional competition of having kids when you are in richer countries in particular.

And I mean, obviously there's other things going on here, birth control and women's liberation and a million different things.

But there is a reality that, you know, you go to much poorer places and they have a lot more children.

And then you go to Brooklyn and everybody's like, it's too expensive to have kids.

Yeah.

And it's not that that's fake.

It's true.

But it has to do with, you know, we have made having kids very, very expensive.

We've made having kids very, very expensive.

We've also made it too competitive.

I was just in Palo Alto and I flew back to downtown Manhattan where I live.

And in both of these precincts, there's this feeling that you're not just having a child, you're having a kind of...

I don't know, you're having a corporation, a mini corporation that has to do really, really well.