Anecdata: I am 31 and have 3 young kids. They have 0 cousins and, on top of that, 0... second cousins? Cousins-once-removed? Whatever the one is for my cousin's kids. My kids are my grandma's only great-grandkids. And I have... 6 cousins.
On top of that, at my last job, on my team of 15, I was the only one with kids, and only 1 of those 15 engineers were under the age of 30. At my current job, my team is 8, and again we're all about 30, and nobody is even thinking about kids at all.
It baffles me. And it's also a bit inconvenient that nobody else at work has such pressing obligations, it makes me feel bad (though not too bad at this point) that I *have* to log off at quittin' time, sharp, to go relieve my wife of some childcare and make a family dinner.
All us over-30s with kids probaly random-walked into jobs that are family-friendly and are staying there. In my current team, almost half the people - and importantly, the previous and current manager - have kids, usually more than one. Can't speak for the corporation we merged into, but before the merger, the whole mid-sized company cleraly leaned for average age closer to 35-40, and a good chunk of employees at every level were parents.
Once you land in a job like that, and the pay is adequate, you really don't want to leave - jumping ship would be gambling with life of several people, and you're already above average with combined pay + work environment, and regression to the mean is a thing.
(And I say "random-walked" because how supportive the job is of parents is not something apparent on the outside - you'd have to know someone on the inside who's also a parent to get an accurate indication beforehand.)
This sounds accurate to me—I found my way into a company that offers 10 weeks paid leave for both mom and dad, unlimited PTO, flexible scheduling, work from home, among other things. A director just left for round two of her parental leave, I know at least two other people who are currently on it, and a lot of the developers are parents (quick mental straw poll suggests ~50%), many of whom explicitly have time off during the work day to take care of kids. I'm certainly not planning on going anywhere else any time soon.
Yes - I made this mistake. Granted I left a place that was shifting towards less family-friendly, but ended up at a place that actively pushed people with families out. Literally any worker with kids who didn't quit due to the absurd asks of availability was pushed out via PIP or layoffs.
I'm in Denmark so pretty much every company is like this, supporting family is a big thing here. But that means people will leave because not so much a gamble.
In my first job, my boss was a psychopath fresh out of grad school, no kids. Had no problem getting himself promoted but held us back, saying top performers would have to work “nights and weekends” to rise above junior levels. (Which was supposed to be a routine promotion)
It’s remarkable how different my next employers were.
> into jobs that are family-friendly and are staying there. In my current team, almost half the people - and importantly, the previous and current manager - have kids, usually more than one
Interesting observation. At 3 kids I’m probably around median for the over 30 set at my work. My wife’s old firm had several people with 5+ kids. (Catholic+Jewish firm.) This is in DC where the median number of children for a college educated woman is around 1.
I have a similar job but there aren't that many parents,just a job treating us well. We do have an amazing cto and ceo from the human point of view, which is why I think the company works well with parents.
One joke that me and my wife say is that we cannot find other parents that like videogames and board games. Apparently we are a rare category and it's incredibly annoying
>it makes me feel bad (though not too bad at this point) that I have to log off at quittin' time, sharp, to go relieve my wife of some childcare and make a family dinner.
It shouldn't make you feel bad. I have no children and I have strict policy of logging off at the end of my work day (unless in truly exceptional circumstances). No one shuold feel shame (children or not) about finishing the work when they are no longer paid for it.
second cousins? Cousins-once-removed? Whatever the one is for my cousin's kids
Since it doesn't look like anyone else has answered: Your cousins' kids would be your kids' second cousins; and your first cousins once removed.
The rule is that if the closest common ancestor is N generations away from one person and M generations away from the other, with N >= M, they are (M-1)th cousins (N-M) times removed.
I've been doing this math frequently of late. I'm 35, have one child and of my high school class ... maybe 25% have children? there is certainly a bias from polling social media. But the anecdata would say that we're closing on the point where millenials have chosen to simply not have children.
Kids aren't expensive. They're a distraction from dopamine and career advancement.
My peers are all wealthy and they'd rather jet set than settle down. By all means they could raise families of two to four kids and still be incredibly comfortable. Vacation home comfortable.
Instagram is the anti-child. Instagram and the endless feed of social media, internet, and things to do.
Once you have children, the dopamine ends and the self-directed path takes a backseat. Nobody I know wants to give that up.
It's not just the wealthy. I know upper middle class people in their 40s who are partying on the weekends and taking trips all over the world. It's the life they want for themselves, and children put an end to that.
> Kids aren't expensive. They're a distraction from dopamine and career advancement.
They really are.
You can pay for some of it by letting your and their quality of life suffer, instead of with money (cram 3 kids into the 2-bedroom you already own; don’t worry that the schools are bad and dangerous and that’s why the place was cheap; that kind of thing) but not all of it, and most people don’t find making those compromises acceptable either, if they have the means not to.
The main costs are lost income OR childcare; housing; and healthcare. The rest isn’t exactly cheap (man they eat a lot as they get older) but those are the worst bits, and they’re very expensive.
I have four kids in one room and it's a blast. After family prayers we turn off the lights and tell stories and their imaginations go wild! The joy is palpable.
Bedrooms are for sleeping, there is other space to spread out :)
I can't imagine what puberty would've been like if I'd not had a room of my own. Even just experimenting with goth aesthetics would've been so different.
> cram 3 kids into the 2-bedroom you already own; don’t worry that the schools are bad and dangerous and that’s why the place was cheap; that kind of thing
I'm 50 this year. I've been an avid reader all my life, and back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I'd read the newspapers my grandfather would bring home. I would've still been in highschool (at the latest), so call this 1990 +/- 1 year. Even then I remember the classic newspaper article, claiming how much it'd cost to raise a child to age 18. I think back then they were calling that number $250,000. Now days, I think they set it at $1 million even.
For the longest time, they'd reprint that article every 2-4 years, just changing up one or another factoid. The logic was always specious. Every single thing anyone ever believed anyone needed for a baby/toddler/kid was always priced brand new and name brand. From dressers and chest of drawers, to baby strollers (this was even past the point where most people would ever use the damned thing).
They told the lie so often and from so many direction, ever since you were a child yourself, that you can't help but believe it. You're even telling it for whoever it is that wants that lie told.
I have three kids. I reckon the first cost more than $200,000 by age 5. No major medical problems (kids are also a reverse lottery ticket, in that regard—sometimes they just take all your money indefinitely because they’ve got a serious chronic illness). And we were far from extravagant in our spending. The bulk of it was in the three categories I listed.
[edit] I agree with you, actually, that there are a lot of dumb ways to spend extra money on kids. Dressers? Used. Clothes? Cheap, garage sales and thrift stores. Toys? Ditto. Half the “new parent” shit is useless. Changing table? ROFLMAO you have a floor, unless you’re infirm in some way that makes it hard to get down there, just throw a little blanket down and use that—they can’t roll off the floor!
You can drop costs by having a parent stay home in the early years (math only works out if that parent earned very low wages and you have at least two kids in quick succession—then, yes, it saves money).
More efficient may be living near non-working family and having them take care of the kids, but that can mean compromising on school quality (unless you move again) and probably salary. Plus it requires a kind of capital that not everyone has.
You can drop costs by skipping medical check-ups and care. Not uncommon.
It can be done cheaper if the circumstances are right and you’re ok with some compromises that most people can’t stomach unless they absolutely cannot afford it.
One parent staying home for about two years, who had a low salary, factoring in lost retirement contributions, is about half of that, we could have cut that part to $30,000 or so if not for that, true. That’d drop my (conservative!) napkin math to more like $130,000.
About $15,000 for the pregnancy and birth (we split it over two deductible years—whoops, didn’t make that mistake again). Daycare costs for the rest of that time, tens of thousands more. Probably $3,000ish a year (maybe a bit more) in extra medical spending on average (copays on check-up visits, added insurance costs, medicine occasionally, a couple visits that involved stitches or an x-ray over that time span)
That’s before food, clothing, furniture (you do kinda need a bed at some point—we go pretty cheap on furniture and clothes, but it’s still probably $3-4k over that five years, mostly clothes). Diapers (or a lot of extra power use, though sure, cloth diapers would have been net-cheaper anyway). Adds up.
So yeah, it was certainly over $200k for us (conservative estimate). Could have gotten it down to merely over-$130k by putting a weeks-old to 2-year-old kid in daycare, but we didn’t, maybe we should have.
[edit] I should add that it does get better after the first one; there are efficiencies and shared costs (daycare may give you a discount, even!). Getting all three to age 5 wasn’t $600k, probably closer to $400k. You also can do it cheaper, yes, but our choices were ones that nearly anyone who can at-all afford it is gonna make, like having one parent stay home the first year or two, going to all the medical check-ups, moving to an area with good schools (if you don’t already live in one), et c.
No that would have been raw spending. The difference was about $70k in imputed wages because of what we chose to do (which, again, I think almost anyone who can remotely afford not to send a kid to daycare in that first year or two, will have trouble not making that choice).
Because these costs are so front-loaded, so tend to hit earlier in one’s life, you really don’t want to start doing a more-expansive opportunity cost accounting, unless you want to get depressed (I have. Trust me, don’t—sigh, so long very-comfortable-retirement-at-55!).
And that's the most expensive place in the country, no? Most people don't live in the Bay area and if you need daycare, it's presumably because you have a well paying job and it's a tax deduction.
It's not even the schools that have that dynamic first. Lots of daycares are sketchy as
hell and they also charge crazy high prices so you can't just pay for better. You have to take time out of your day and go suss them out and dig up inspection reports.
Availability is another big issue. You find a daycare that's great for your kid and safe. Then some staff turnover and you're not thrilled with it anymore.
In my area, the wait is around 18 months for a slot in a different daycare center. In-home daycare offers a lower price and some better availability, but are often unlicensed. You are best off signing up for a couple waitlists before you plan to have a kid and hope the one you choose works out well.
And of course, switching childcare providers is way harder than switching grocery stores. Your kid has feelings, grows attached to the caregivers, and make friends. There's a huge risk making a switch, and you most likely can't undo it if the new provider isn't a good fit.
> In-home daycare offers a lower price and some better availability, but are often unlicensed.
This is the problem. You're wanting a first class experience for your kid, and this probably causes you to overlook other viable options that are less expensive.
> In my area, the wait is around 18 months for a slot in a different daycare center.
Wait lists? There's likely service available, you're just setting a quality threshold.
> And of course, switching childcare providers is way harder than switching grocery stores. Your kid has feelings, grows attached to the caregivers, and make friends.
We have de-risked our species so much that we now care about children's daycare preferences.
Some other commenter mentioned spending $200,000 on their five year old kid. This is not typical.
As a species, we used to have multiple kids because we just accepted that some of them would die. We are so far on the other end of the spectrum now that children are being treated as princes and princesses.
Kids can be as expensive as you want them to be. People are buying their dogs and cats ridiculous things like treadmills these days, so of course it figures that some parents must be doing even crazier stuff for their human children.
This is learned consumer behavior.
Children are being over-invested in to a degree that some would-be interested people just aren't even bothering to get started (one of several reasons this is happening). I'm not saying don't love your kids, but it looks like having them has become a perfectionist goal that can't be reached.
Yes. This. People are insane around their kids and the de-risking etc. We've gone with a childminer (in-home childcare, but is govt. registered here in the UK) and local school-attached daycare for two days a week each. Saving us hundreds of £'s over the coprorate daycare we were with otherwise and giving him more! The childminder is a husband and wife duo, they love all their kids so much. It's like dropping him with grandparents and cousins/friends for a couple of days a week. He reaches out to be picked up by them when I drop him in off in the morning (traitor, but I digress...)!
In most other OECD states the actual and risk-factor costs of child and maternal healthcare are a ton lower than ours, too. Mine is a US perspective. Healthcare for kids eats a lot of money, here, and exposes you to a ton of risk of very-high medical spending.
I'm not even a parent and I have to deal with this shit. You can't be around adults with kids in daycare for more than an evening in a ventilated space and not immediately get sick. I kinda doubt it but I sincerely hope other places are better. It's easier to count the days my in-laws aren't sick.
It's probably just the reality of lots of really young germ factories in a confined space together but I count my blessings that my mom was out of work until I was in 3rd-4th grade because I got to avoid daycare.
You know what is also anti-child? Having parents that were completely unprepared to be parents. Stop with this dopamine epidemic nonsense excuse for everything that isn't working the way you want
Recorded history you mean the history of domestic and emotional abuse, alcoholism, family disputes, lying and nromalised cheating? Then we are doing fine.
Congratulations on your millions. My dad beat and cheat on my mother, and his dad beat and probably cheat my grandmother.
> My adoptive father shared an apartment with a roommate when I was in elementary school. Here I am, just fine
My wife's mother beat and choked her from childhood. She was regularly told she was worthless and unwanted. Her father abandoned them, and her stepfather would whip her with clothes hangers for imagined infractions.
Many people are in similar situations. The abuse may not always be physical or as extreme as what she endured, but many parents are unfit for parenthood, and their children suffer from the trauma or neglect or religious extremism for the rest of their lives to a greater or lesser degree.
We don't always hear these stories because our social bubbles may comprise people who are more well adjusted, or at least present so. But abuse, infidelity, narcissism and so on are not new, and they aren't as rare as we might feel. And if those kinds of people didn't reproduce, that would be a good thing.
Are you saying it would have been a good thing for your wife's parents not to reproduce? Where would that leave her and you?
(noted that childhood you described sounds awful, i agree)
While my wife and I love each other, yes, it would have been better had they not had children -- for her sake, and this is her own feeling. Her trauma from childhood and young adulthood continues to affect her deeply and daily even now, decades later, in manifold ways, from complicated health issues to self-efficacy beliefs to frequent nightmares and constant fear about the future. When your own parent refuses to give you food, faith that everything will work out in the end can be hard to cultivate.
Personally, selfishly, the thought of my life without her is depressing, absolutely. But I can love her and yet -- or more precisely, "and so," because it's out of empathy that I feel this way -- I can understand and support her desire never to have existed.
That's a philosophical question, but I would say probably better off. If that wouldn't have taken place, it means a lot of abuse around the world wouldn't either.
Are you aware that other people have provided everything you have in life, or have you really drunk the "self-made" Koolaid. Work the farm? Excellent, now one must purchase and run a farm in order to have children. How much do those cost? Oh, millions you say!? Wonderful.
> Here I am, just fine, a self-made millionaire today.
That says everything about how you view the world. "self-made". Nothing about how your adoptive father contributed, your peers or the entire society you grew up in.
Something else I'd love to get away from is that having money != being a well adjusted individual.
Ah yes, what I said was toxic because I would have to thank a lot of things for any success I had. Frankly, above a certain amount of income, no one has earned it. That's not toxic, it's just fact. You are welcome, my tax dollars have allowed you to become rich. I'm very glad you were as fortunate as you were, just remember to give back to the society which enabled your wealth!
> You are welcome, my tax dollars have allowed you to become rich.
This has to be one of the most entitled things I've ever read.
If you pick me out of this society and tax base and drop me into another, I will still be trying and working my ass off to accomplish my goals. That's my character.
You have nothing to do with my success. Jupiter clearing our orbit, the evolution of Eukaryotes, capitalism, post-WWII tailwinds, and my hard work have more to do with my success than your tax dollars.
Have you ever thanked your ancestors for eradicating Neanderthal, your mother for not sticking to her first dating prospects, or all those who died in wars so you can live in peace and comfort?
Sometimes when I notice a streetlamp come on in the afternoon, the complexity of it dawns on me. It's sturdy, well made. How would I ever roll that material up that way? How could I plant it into the ground so it stays standing? The material of it, where would I ever get the metal? The electricity, surely I would never have figured out how to make that, much less create whatever gargantuan distribution system that was required to turn the light on. And that it came on by itself at night: Is that a timer? A light sensor? Either way, were it up to me to make the thing from complete scratch, I doubt I would be able to crack it. The intellect of those that came before me gets almost overwhelming. How many lifetimes did it take to come up with all of this? How many to build it? And then I look down the street and see dozens more, so common that they are hardly noticed, and realize that I am in a world built on incomprehensible amounts of human ingenuity. I think about how if I were born even just a few decades sooner the world would be nearly unrecognizable to me. Once my mind hits this point, I find it impossible to feel anything but gratitude for the lifetimes laid before me to create the world I now inhabit.
I'll start by saying this isn't really directed at you.
> Have you ever thanked your ancestors for eradicating Neanderthal, your mother for not sticking to her first dating prospects, or all those who died in wars so you can live in peace and comfort?
More people should make it a practice to be grateful for the things that allow us to be successful, they'd be more content.
I've never thanked Neanderthals but I do think about the choices and risks my ancestors took to ensure _they_ were successful.
Personally I try to semi-regularly reflect on how I got to where I am and the factors that went into that.
That includes thanking my mom and dad for their fuck ups as well as their good choices. It's been a humbling experience and long term day to day I'm happier and less isolated from the world.
> Maybe it'd thrill you to know I haven't heard or spoken to that person in over twenty years, and that he abused me?
You being a millionaire doesn't mean you aren't still dealing with that trauma. Some people internalize their abuse, forcing themselves to ever-higher levels of achievement to try to be worthy of the love they never received.
Your dismissals of parenting concerns are borderline emotionally abusive in themselves, gaslighting others' experiences by repeatedly claiming that things are "just fine" on the whole. For many people, things are not just fine, and not having children is a valid response to that, and an empathetic one.
Man this is so true, not sure why this is getting downvoted? Most people without kids just don’t want to change their (very fun) lifestyles and commit to something with a very long and uncertain but (hopefully) rewarding payout. It’s certainly scary.
That said the amount of dopamine/happiness I get playing with my child is more than any social media feed could ever provide. But in between those moments there’s a lot of work and sleepless nights for sure.
Yep, people don't realize how much of a bubble they might be in. I grew up in a relatively wealthy/very high education suburb so all of my friends from high school are just barely settling down (getting married, no kids yet) after finishing PhDs/MDs etc. When I lived in the bay area, it was super common to be single or partnered but no kids (in my friend group, in our mid-late 20s). It really never occurred to me that there were other 'timelines'.
I moved out to Salt Lake City in the pandemic and now at 30 I'm very rare to be both single and have no kids. It's very common for people to have started having kids at age ~22 or so, even amongst the non-LDS crowd. I suspect San Francisco and Utah are polar opposite ends of the "having kids or not"-spectrum, so it does make sense in hindsight but it's still surprising to me
Nah, cultures that don’t have kids will just be replaced by ones that do. This process is already will underway in America, with WASPs (who have a strong anti-natal streak) being replaced by Hispanics.
Interestingly, in the US, you find that the birth rate of all races converge. Why? Educated, empowered women have less children or no children, and in general delay childbearing. Immigrant fertility is higher, but settles back down after a generation or two.
> Interestingly, in the US, you find that the birth rate of all races converge.
Because white (European) American individualist culture is inexorable in America. It’s in the water, you can’t avoid it. But the question is, as the white population collapses, will that continue to be true?
> Why? Educated, empowered women have less children or no children, and in general delay childbearing.
Why do you assume it has to do with education rather than other cultural traits? Muslim American women for example are more educated than white women, but have more kids.
At least in that culture, the difference isn’t education, it’s that having children is necessary for acceptance and respectability in Muslim society, and moreover children are socialized to care very much about those things. It’s not like with white Americans who are islands to themselves and don’t play by anyone’s rules.
> Why do you assume it has to do with education rather than other cultural traits? Muslim American women for example are more educated than white women, but have more kids.
Education and empowerment overrides cultural pressure.
> As in the rest of the world, fertility rates in countries with Muslim-majority populations are directly related to educational attainment. Women tend to delay childbearing when they attain higher levels of education.
You’re mixing up becoming more culturally white/westernized with education. There’s often a correlation, both in immigrant groups and abroad, but the two things are distinct. Among the asian immigrants I know, for example, the kids aren’t any more educated than the parents (because skilled immigration already filters for people with graduate degrees, etc.) But they’re much less likely to conform to social structures.
You and rayiner are sort of in agreement, although I also disagree with the labeling of “white (European) American individualist culture is inexorable in America.”
Specifically,
> it’s that having children is necessary for acceptance and respectability in Muslim society, and moreover children are socialized to care very much about those things.
Replace Muslim with “more orthodox or cultish Muslims/Jews/Christians/Mormoms/etc”
In any case, the current and previous older generations that had fewer kids will not feel the consequences, due to the momentum of population growth, but all these social safety net and retirement benefits like pensions and healthcare don’t come from thin air.
While one way to incentivize having kids is belonging to a tribe like rayiner described, the other could be removing those old age benefits so that the cost of not having kids is (potentially) higher. Obviously, governments can promise all the benefits they want, but there is no delivering them if there are no hands to do the work (and I doubt innovation in automation will outpace declines in labor force).
Amartya Sen, "Human Rights and Asian Values," The New Republic, July 14-July 21, 1997
> In Buddhist tradition, great importance is attached to freedom, and the traditions of earlier Indian thinking to which Buddhist thoughts relate allow much room for volition and free choice. Nobility of conduct has to be achieved in freedom, and even the ideas of liberation (such as moksha) include this feature. The presence of these elements in Buddhist thought does not obliterate the importance of the discipline emphasized by Confucianism, but it would be a mistake to take Confucianism to be the only tradition in Asia-or in China. Since so much of the contemporary authoritarian interpretation of Asian values concentrates on Confucianism, this diversity is particularly worth emphasizing.
Indeed, the reading of Confucianism that is now standard among authoritarian champions of Asian values does less than justice to Confucius's own teachings, to which Simon Leys has recently drawn attention. Confucius did not recommend blind allegiance to the state. When Zilu asks him "how to serve a prince," Confucius replies: "Tell him the truth even if it offends him." The censors in Singapore or Beijing would take a very different view. Confucius is not averse to practical caution and tact, but he does not forgo the recommendation to oppose a bad government. "When the [good] way prevails in the state, speak boldly and act boldly. When the state has lost the way, act boldly and speak softly."
Indeed, Confucius clearly points to the fact that the two pillars of the imagined edifice of Asian values, loyalty to family and obedience to the state, can be severely in conflict with each other. The Governor of She told Confucius, "Among my people, there is a man of unbending integrity: when his father stole a sheep, he denounced him." To this, Confucius replied: "Among my people, men of integrity do things differently: a father covers up for his son, a son covers up for his father-and there is integrity in what they do."
> In many ways, the most interesting articulation of the need for tolerance on an egalitarian basis can be found in the writings of the emperor Ashoka in the third century B.C. Ashoka commanded a larger Indian empire than any other Indian king (including the Moghuls, and even the Raj, if we omit the native states that the British let be). He turned his attention to public ethics and enlightened politics after being horrified by the carnage that he witnessed in his own victorious battle against the king of Kalinga, in what is now Orissa.
The emperor converted to Buddhism. He helped to make it a world religion by sending emissaries abroad with the Buddhist message to East and West, and he covered the country with stone inscriptions describing forms of good life and the nature of good government. The inscriptions give a special importance to tolerance of diversity. The edict (now numbered XII) at Erragudi, for example, puts the issue thus: ... a man must not do reverence to his own sect or disparage that of another man without reason. Depreciation should be for specific reason only, because the sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another.
By thus acting, a man exalts his own sect, and at the same time does service to the sects of other people. By acting contrariwise, a man hurts his own sect, and does disservice to the sects of other people. For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own, with intent to enhance the splendour of his own sect, in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect.
The importance of tolerance is emphasized in these edicts from the third century B.C.-their importance as public policy by the government and as advice for the behavior of citizens toward each other.
About the domain and the jurisdiction of tolerance, Ashoka was a universalist. He demanded this for all, including those whom he described as "forest people," the tribal population living in pre-agricultural economic formations. Condemning his own conduct before his conversion, Ashoka notes that in the war in Kalinga "men and animals numbering one hundred and fifty thousands were carried away [captive] from that [defeated] kingdom." He goes on to state that the slaughter or the taking of prisoners "of even a hundredth or thousandth part of all those people who were slain or died or were carried away [captive] at that time in Kalinga is now considered very deplorable" by him. Indeed, he proceeds to assert that now he believes that "even if [a person] should wrong him, that [offense] would be forgiven if it is possible to forgive it." The object of his government is described as "non-injury, restraint, impartiality, and mild behavior" applied "to all creatures."
Ashoka's championing of egalitarianism and universal tolerance may appear un-Asian to some commentators, but his views are firmly rooted in lines of analysis already in vogue in intellectual Buddhist circles in India in the preceding centuries.
> As the year 1000 in the Muslim Hijra calendar was reached in 1591-92, there was excitement about it in Delhi and Agra (not unlike what is happening now, as the Christian year 2000 approaches). Akbar issued various enactments at this juncture of history, and these focused inter alia on religious tolerance, including the following:
No man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone [is] to be allowed to go over to a religion he pleased. If a Hindu, when a child or otherwise, had been made a Muslim against his will, he is to be allowed, if he pleased, to go back to the religion of his fathers.
Dag Herbjørnsrud, "The African Enlightenment", Aeon
> For two years, until the death of the king in September 1632, Yacob remained in the cave as a hermit, visiting only the nearby market to get food. In the cave, he developed his new, rationalist philosophy. He believed in the supremacy of reason, and that all humans – male and female – are created equal. He argued against slavery, critiqued all established religions and doctrines, and combined these views with a personal belief in a theistic Creator, reasoning that the world’s order makes that the most rational option.
In short: many of the highest ideals of the later European Enlightenment had been conceived and summarised by one man, working in an Ethiopian cave from 1630 to 1632. Yacob’s reason-based philosophy is presented in his main work, Hatäta (meaning ‘the enquiry’). The book was written down in 1667 on the insistence of his student, Walda Heywat, who himself wrote a more practically oriented Hatäta. Today, 350 years later, it’s hard to find a copy of Yacob’s book. The only translation into English was done in 1976, by the Canadian professor and priest Claude Sumner. He published it as part of a five-volume work on Ethiopian philosophy, with the far-from-commercial Commercial Printing Press in Addis Ababa. The book has been translated into German, and last year into Norwegian, but an English version is still basically unavailable.
> Yacob is also more enlightened than his Enlightenment peers when it comes to slavery. In chapter five, he argues against the idea that one can ‘go and buy a man as if he were an animal’. That is because all humans are created equal and with the capacity to reason. Hence, he also puts forward a universal argument against discrimination based on reason:
>> All men are equal in the presence of God; and all are intelligent, since they are his creatures; he did not assign one people for life, another for death, one for mercy, another for judgment. Our reason teaches us that this sort of discrimination cannot exist.
Massive family planning campaigns, heavily funded by western countries, to change the culture around having children. (My dad does exactly that for a living.) In Asia you now have multiple generations of people who associate having big families with poverty and backwardness.
Sounds like culture doesn't mean much when even the lands where the culture originated from willingly discard the cultural elements that lead to more children and larger families, even while preserving other elements.
Consider the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran:
Technically, it is lack of women's independence and rights that cause the higher fertility rates. This is often correlated with societal poverty, but not a necessary condition.
I doubt it will. Infact, I would be willing to bet good money that china is going to start factory farming the next generation within the next 20 years, using artificial wombs & in vitro fertilization.
> china is going to start factory farming the next generation within the next 20 years, using artificial wombs & in vitro fertilization
Enormously more expensive than producing children the natural way. Given the CCP’s history of using coercion to make people have less kids (forced sterilisation, forced abortion, some even allege infanticide), I would not be surprised if they start coercing people to have more. From an ethical perspective that’s terrible, but why expect a government which hasn’t cared about ethics in the past to start caring about it now or in the future? Coerced natural reproduction is massively cheaper than artificial wombs
Me too! Among my cohort of friends that I grew up with, all of us in our early 30's, around 10 people, I'm the only one who is having kids. None of them are even trying to get married. The vast majority of people my age that I meet are not planning to have kids. I can't stop noticing it, and even my wife has started remarking about it now. It honestly does seem like an entire generation has chosen not to have kids..
> But the anecdata would say that we're closing on the point where millenials have chosen to simply not have children.
I'd bet that that isn't a "choice" so much as it is that millennials are prevented by their circumstances from having the children they'd want to otherwise. If more people could actually afford to have kids and were more optimistic about the future I imagine we'd have a lot more babies around
> I'd bet that that isn't a "choice" so much as it is that millennials are prevented by their circumstances from having the children they'd want to otherwise
Taking a look at median incomes and housing costs across the US, I'd bet that millennials have become forward-thinking enough to plan for kids, but have gotten themselves worked up into thinking they must spend millions on getting into the best daycares, have separate rooms for each of their children, a guaranteed spot at university, etc.
Genuinely seems to me the decently well-off "involuntarily-childless" folks are worried to be committing a human rights violation by bringing a child into this world where they go to the public school they're zoned for. Or it's just cope and they are worried about reducing their living standards even just a little.
This also may be a wise reaction to the observation that the middle class is vanishing. My father started his career as a decently paid factory worker, he moved into corporate as factories were going away. My parents emphasized college as the alternatives did not look like viable careers to their eyes.
Is it surprising that a generation who saw college graduates struggle emphasizes going to Harvard etc. for their own children? I’d be skeptical that the path I took will be open for my daughter in 20 years.
Members of the tech community were never driving the decline in cousins or the population generally. Most of us here are wealthy and wealthy people tend of have fewer kids already. Even people here could reasonably have concerns about the future of the environment, our democracy, etc that might make having children seem unwise.
Most millennials, in fact most Americans, are not experiencing a period of abundance and prosperity. Their standard of living is in decline, their household debt is at record highs, and they still can't afford to buy the same groceries they normally would.
I think the better educated our species is thinking too much before having kids where as our parents and their ancestors kind of had kids and rolled with it. But even as a well earning tech guy, i can't help feel that being unemployed and being hit with one medical emergency can put my family on the street. In this time of abundance, i still feel like i'm being ground to dust by the man.
It’s absolutely a choice. That’s obvious because the millennials with the most money and education are the ones having the fewest kids. It’s downtown SF that’s childless. Working class parts of Dallas are bustling with kids.
It’s not that millennials can’t afford to have kids. It’s that they’re too self-centered and unwilling to endure the lifestyle hit for doing so.
I'm willing to accept that they feel like their situation is precarious when it actually isn't, because I've certainly been there. But I also overcame it when I realized I wasn't actually thinking everything through.
Might be due to some of us growing up really poor. I’m from a third world and I remember lack of water and electricity, five plus people crammed into a home the size of my current apartments living room. We used to use kerosene lamps and heat water and I grew up in the 90s. Even today my parents don’t own a home yet and they have rented their whole lives. They still work. It’s really up to me to resolve all our issues. And that’s my duty as their child, everyone has their circumstances.
My parents pushed me to get educated. Now I’m in my early 30s and honestly I’m not in a rush to have kids. Do I want kids? Definitely. But right now I’m trying to build family wealth so I can give my kids a great childhood. I’m on track to meet my goals in the next 5 years or so.
Most of the people my age who are situated with kids and family are well to do. They have well off parents who own at least one home. Somehow these people send their kids to private school or can afford to buy homes in great public school districts.
I’ve noticed the people in my situation more often than not are from a similar background. We grew up poor and we are trying to build our wealth. I work in tech so I can’t speak for people from other socioeconomic backgrounds. But this is what I experience.
Most of my friends are other Asians. I don’t know it seems like Americans are mostly well off.
I promise circumstances are not going to get better. Many individuals who eventually become parents wouldn't have taken the leap if they had waited indefinitely for what they deemed as "perfect circumstances." It's perfectly acceptable if you choose not to have children; after all, it's your decision. However, and Frankly speaking, it becomes tiresome to hear the implication that parents who took that leap have a more privileged situation than the tech community on platforms like Hacker News.
fwiw every 40yo I know who had kids at that age wish they did it earlier when they had more energy. Wealth building is easier in your 40s however for most
Hold a 10lbs weight on your arm for three hours (simulates an infant trying to fall asleep in your arms). Do this for six months, three times a day.
Lift a 20lbs bag of rice off the floor to your hips once every 20 seconds for two hours (simulates a toddling-walking child wanting up). Do this for a three years, six times a day.
Get up off the floor in a hurry once every five minutes for two hours (simulates the toddler-child doing something they shouldn't). Do this, I dunno, forever.
Lift a 40lbs bag of dog food over your head every five minutes for 4 hours (simulates an older child wanting to play). Do this for 10 years, five times a day.
There is a lot of other 'cardio' like things mixed in too. But the above should give a sample of the physicality of child rearing. It's a lot of low weight, very high rep, long workout, long interval, isostatic exercise. You're mostly holding things near your center of mass for very long times, adjusting between arms. And you have to get up off the floor a lot in a big hurry.
For those who want kiddos sometime in the future, maybe about 2 years from now - this won't change, 2 years from now you'll still think 2 years from then is going to be the time. Just stop and have one. It'll turn out ok, probably - and the sooner you get one, the easier you'll handle the toil, 1% of which is described by the parent post ;)
> Most of the people my age who are situated with kids and family are well to do.
Same here, but looking back to my hometown and how it is now, it wasn't this way even just 20 years ago. Now even well-to-do doesn't guarantee kids, and lower and middle class folks have simply stopped.
Which bothers me a lot. I think many people are catastrophizing themselves into thinking they can't afford it, and in a few decades we'll all be worse off. I'm especially tired of couples making more than $200k/year talking about how it's effectively child abuse to send their kids to public school, or if they can't somehow guarantee an Ivy League golden path then it just isn't worth it.
The truth is we've been so 'scared straight' about the difficulty of parenthood that many of us want nothing to do with it. Life is easier without them.. not as fulfilling sure, yadda yadda
But saying we can't afford it sounds a lot better. In most places in the world, and through time, less money corresponds to more kids. So it's easy to see though this excuse.
> My parents pushed me to get educated. Now I’m in my early 30s and honestly I’m not in a rush to have kids. Do I want kids? Definitely. But right now I’m trying to build family wealth so I can give my kids a great childhood. I’m on track to meet my goals in the next 5 years or so.
There's a chance you won't make it, though. And at some point, it does become too late.
I have two siblings, but most likely will be the only one with kids, as we're in our mid to late 30s and I'm already a parent.
Me and my SO made it happen by moving to a much smaller (albeit still 500k+ inhabitants) city, where real estate isn't as stupidly expensive as where we grew up in.
My co-worker has six children and all the people I've met who have four or more follow the same pattern: living in the middle of nowhere on a single income working remotely.
It appears that real estate is the biggest concern, because I've also settled on having two instead of three, since my daughters will be sharing a room anyway.
Anecdata: I am 33 and have 0 kids. I make good money but, due to poor financial literacy at a young age, I am shackled with a hefty amount of student loan debt well into my 30s. My 20s were financially precarious and it would've been irresponsible to bring a child into the mix. Would've been nice, but it just wasn't going to happen.
I don't think that my specific situation applies to everyone, but I also don't expect I'm alone on this one.
My hypothesis, which I rarely hear anyone else mention, is that we no longer look to our children for entertainment. Life used to be really boring. Kids are excited by things adults find painfully dull. Having a weird little person around who is overjoyed playing with a stick is a pretty great thing in a world where there isn't much else to do.
Today people often seem to regard interacting with children to be a form of work. I don't think that our ancestors saw it that way. The kids certainly don't seem to see it that way; they're confused and disappointed when their parents don't want to play with them.
Many of the sociopolitical explanations of falling birth rates have been refuted by the present trends. Birth rates are now below replacement in most of Latin America and Asia, even where economic development is well below the level it was when they started falling in the rich world, and in spite of the persistence of traditional gender roles. Only Africa and the poorest parts of Asia are above replacement, and even then much less than before. Some of the highest birth rates today are in Afghanistan and Palestine. Not exactly paradise.
My hypothesis, which I rarely hear anyone else mention, is that we no longer look to our children for entertainment. Life used to be really boring.
while there is some truth to that with stories of a sudden baby boom 9 months after a significant power outage, i'd rather rephrase that as
"we no longer look to our children as the only thing we care about"
there are now so many other things (hobbies, causes) that we can put our energy into that they take away the focus from having kids. after all, once you have kids you will have to put aside some of your other activities for some years.
sociopolitical explanations of falling birth rates have been refuted by the present trends
i think birthrates don't so much correlate with wealth but with education. my guess is that education improves faster than wealth, so this could explain the development better.
I mean, you can try to be appealing to a higher ideal here, but all the people who make children (myself included) do it for themselves (the parents of the child). So yeah, entertainment might not be the exact word, but for a broad enough meaning of it, that's probably the reason for a good chunk of children.
My own personal situation on why I don't have kids - to have kids, I'd have to find someone to have kids with. Dating is completed screwed, and that's not for lack of trying on my end. It's an absolute shshow out there. It's like no one could be bothered to get themselves out of bed to follow through on plans to meet up. I'm not sure if it's suburbanization, or if it's everyone is feeling overworked, or... what...
Nearly all of my male friends are noticing the same things. Locale, age, career... no change of circumstances seem to change the really poor outcomes. It's like the options on today's menu are: be solo and happy with it, or go do the passport bro thing.
We must live in different areas because I’m the only one without kids on my team of 8. I also kind of resent the implication that pops up in these threads that people without kids are living some kind of immoral, selfish life. Not everyone without kids is just out partying all the time. I would love to have kids, but fate it seems has different plans for me.
with 3 kids at 31 you would most likely be the outlier in many countries. all the rest you said resonates - so many people do not want to have kids at all anymore, and it’s not difficult to understand why (socioeconomic uncertainty, environmental issues, a lot of places are not “child friendly”, and there’s more). having kids today seems to be an even more difficult undertaking than in the past; and in my opinion there is a lot less peer pressure pushing to procreate
No, it is tangibly more difficult. There’s a complete lack of other children in many cities. We live directly next to my oldest kid’s school, and we have no other kids within a mile. The nearest park has no regular group of kids who show up.
I live in one of the largest metro areas in the U.S.
It isn't a more difficult undertaking. It was never easy, we've just been raised softly and do not value children the same way previous generations did.
An outlier in many places, but not most. Only in the Western first world is this now normal.
> Only in the Western first world is this now normal
It ain't just us, my friend. Births Per Woman:
1.64 USA
1.34 Japan
1.28 China
0.84 Korea
> we've just been raised softly and do not value children
Now that women are part of the formal economy and everyone has options for entertainment other than unprotected sex, the mechanism by which the formal economy used to offload the entire cost of child rearing while reaping all of the benefits no longer functions.
We have two paths: dust off the shitty exploitative playbook of yesterday, or build a new playbook for tomorrow.
Seems like you are claiming women being part of the formal economy is exploitation, and preventing women from being part of the formal economy is exploitation?
It is - in the generation of my grandparents one income could feed an entire family AND lead to a house (no vacations though, and not much luxury)
Nowadays even if you have good jobs it really depends on a lot of circumstances if you can afford such a life (albeit mostly with more luxury and vacations) with two incomes.
Same here. To be sure, those women (i.e. my grandmothers) were definitely hard working. Raising lots of children, without "modern" appliances like dishwashers etc. in the household. But the money that came from one income was enough.
> Effectively the worth of income nearly halved.
At least the worth that reaches the worker after taxes etc.
Not really - there are various self-correction mechanisms which simply aren't active (yet?) because the low birth rate isn't actually resulting in a shrinking population (due to immigration) so there is not problem to fix (yet).
Many people mention housing and real estate as a problem, well, if there was a population problem, we'd see loads of available empty homes and falling prices of real estate - we're not, so this is a clear signal from the society truthfully voting with their wallets (no matter what they misleadingly signal verbally) that we have more than enough people.
It's similar to some industries saying that there aren't enough workers - if there was an actual shortage, we'd see loads of unfilled vacancies together with noticably rising salary offers for these positions, and if we aren't, that's a clear signal from that industry truthfully voting with their wallets (no matter what they misleadingly signal verbally) that they actually do have more than enough potential workers.
In North America / Europe, you’re correct. In Japan, China, South Korea, they’re losing population, everyone knows they’re losing population, but self-correction mechanisms aren’t working or not working fast enough. Japan been trying to throw random stuff on the wall to see if anyone sticks, but the birth rate only keeps dropping. And well, young people really don’t want children.
It all depends on what do you mean by "fast enough" - the self-correction mechanisms would trigger after the population has shrunk, not when it starts shrinking; and it would apply to the generation after that. Also, we might consider the pressure from housing and jobs as a correction mechanism for overpopulation, so it would likely stabilize somewhere much lower than the peak.
While "everybody knows that they're losing population", South Korea and China haven't even started shrinking (they've stopped growing, and have been at approximately 0 population change for the last few years, it's technically negative but the change is insignificantly tiny) so obviously any self-correction mechanisms wouldn't apply at all yet.
Japan's population reached its peak in 2010 and as of 2016 the shrinking was quite low - so we're talking about just like 7 years of actual shrinking and that's not that much time to cause any socioeconomic changes triggered by population reduction, it would seem reasonable to look at the generation which grows up in a shrinking-population regime to see how it affects them, when they actually have real estate that gets significantly cheaper due to lack of population and scarcity of workers pushing up the bargaining position of labor; Japan's demographics is "leading the world" in this regard, but even they aren't there yet. And they have time to see how it works out - Japan's population is still far above its e.g. 1950 population, and continuing the current population trends it would be as long as 2075 to reach the 1950 level (which isn't bad!) again.
I agree with you about how we probably haven’t reached the point where the governments are supposed to worry, but I don’t think looking at a point in time in the past is right. Even though we have a long way to go for the decline to reach the population levels of 1950s, the demographic pyramid is pretty much inverted. Same applies to China and South Korea in some degree. Most of the women after the age of 40 aren’t going to have a kid, yet alone 2.1+ to revert the population decline.
But you’re right, more drastic measures will be taken in political and economical senses once absolute numbers start ramping up. It’s fairly obvious our current system isn’t the best for aging population with not as many children. Unfortunately, we just haven’t come up with anything better that gives some sort of stability and peace.
For liberalism, perhaps. If the capitalists can't figure out how to grow new worker-slaves in vats or perfect AGI, future society will be very different. Might be mostly Amish and Orthodox Jews, etc. after the population crash.
I will admit that I was a bit off-the-cuff in terms of the Western aspect of my comment.
There are lots of factors, of course, and the trend isn't limited to only the west. Though it has certainly become a more normal trend in developed and developing countries than those with a higher level of poverty and poor.
I still contend however that it has never been easy. My grandparents had four children starting at age 20. My grandfather's first job was sweeping floors in a factory at age 13, making $0.30 an hour. When he asked for a raise, he was fired. He said he didn't have two nickels to rub between his fingers.
His father before him went into World War 1 at 15 years old. And his father (my great-great grandfather) falsely signed the documents affirming that he was 18 years old, to allow his own 15 year old son to go to war.
They struggled, but didn't complain. Some part of it is cultural expectation, and that has changed greatly over time. In spite of all odds my grandparents raised four fairly middle class children in these circumstances, but had a good few decades of strife. Whether or not they would create a family and procreate was taken for granted. It was assumed, at their own economic expense. But long-term family wise, today my grandfather has a tree of descendants who love him.
I think today we are more conscious of the economic equation. We ask whether or not we can afford to provide for children, rather than letting them exist and then asking how we can provide for them. There is an aspect of this that I appreciate, but I worry that it's mixed with some amount of narcissism. Though I am an atheist, there is some unreason to our existence in the first place, and there is hope in the continuance of ourselves that we should value beyond economics. There is a romance and some type of spiritual value in being able to put aside the cost-benefit analysis and simply bear new life that is part you, to have and to hold, to love, teach, and reciprocally learn from.
We have so much bounty today that the idea of "sacrificing" ourselves for something that only has potential value is an alien concept. As our material wealth has increased, and as our understanding of personal economy has evolved, I think we've lost a bit of our primal, but beautiful, nature that wants ourselves to persist at a biological, cosmic level.
You, here, right now reading this are the absolute last leaf, the most extended branch, the most outstretched and sun-bleached arm of a tree of life that has been proceeding for four billion years. You are the last link in a chain that has not been broken for four billion years. Can you believe that? Every time I consider that, I think of my parents. And I ask, who am I to be so conceited that all of that history, that fourth of a fraction of the universe, should end with me?
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, and, I will confess that I got a little tipsy for the super bowl. Don't judge me too harshly. But life is beautiful, and beauty is always difficult to sustain. We do it because beauty contains a truth and a promise for the future. And I think that's something we need to put effort into re-evaluating, and re-valuing, in our current world.
One line of inquiry might be why there is a correlation between bounty and the general wealth of an economy, and the fertility rate. Many parts of the world that are poorer are more fertile, and reproduce more unquestionably. Korea is rich and the rate is 0.84. In the Congo the rate is 6.21. It is not about economics. And if you counter that it is about poor education or care, I don't believe that's the reason either. It's culture, and values.
Paul Revere had 15 children. 5 of them died young, and he still had 10. He had a horse and a rifle and a small wooden house you can still tour in Boston. Today we have DINKs, and people who are in what is considered to be the low-income range with multiple rooms in big cities, an education, and combustion-engine vehicles who say it's too expensive to have children. Maybe your tastes are too expensive. Maybe you've been raised softly, and don't know how to set yourself aside to rear and participate in a family that is spiritually worth more than just yourself.
One of the other comments said I ranted so I thought I'd actually provide one. Sorry HN, I hope I made some sense here.
> And I ask, who am I to be so conceited that all of that history, that fourth of a fraction of the universe, should end with me?
Nobody will remember us in just 100 years. Nobody.
> Maybe you've been raised softly, and don't know how to set yourself aside to rear and participate in a family that is spiritually worth more than just yourself.
Is it really worth more, though? I always wondered if having kids is just so that somebody finally listens to you at an age where your peers really only listen if they're deep friends, or if you have something actually exceptional to say. And to relive childhood, and then again when you have grandchildren. You don't get these two things if you don't have children. But they're not that deep, you can e.g. teach to actually intelligent peers, research deep topics, and relive childhood curiosity in different ways. For the benefit of all of society, not just your little gang.
The human population is expected to peak at ten billion, and that's in the latter half of his century. We have no reason to fear declining birth rates in an existential sense.
I think this is probably true. Historically children would provide for their elders, but that role is fulfilled now more by technology, so in practical terms, they are less needed. It's an emergent trend of humans+technology that acts as a natural limit to our growth, so that as a species we don't just eat all the carrots and die like the rabbits would.
I do fear that Idiocracy might be a little accurate though. The people reproducing currently are the ones who do not consider their future or economics, while the smart ones who do, have less children.
> Historically children would provide for their elders, but that role is fulfilled now more by technology, so in practical terms, they are less needed.
You weren't watching the magician's hands closely enough.
The role is fulfilled by tax dollars that come from the youngest working generation. Might be tech involved, but the revenue still pays for the tech.
It's the machines that actually pay for most things we enjoy today.
The keyboard you're typing your responses on, display you're reading this message from and virtually everything else in our silicon worlds* were not touched by human hands during production.
Money is just an accounting method to allocate the production output.
Interestingly even the keyboards don't need that much of a human touch to type these days.
* other notable examples are almost 100% of the energy we use (electricity, hydrocarbons), majority of the global human caloric intake (grains, fats, sugars, potatoes, etc.), most raw materials (metals, fibers, hydrocarbons again, etc.), tools
And for the remainder, at this point it's just a matter of time before Humans Need Not Apply
The country you live in doesn't have the machines to make those goods.
The country that has the machines, wants cash. Where will you tax the revenue from? Are you hoping for some sort of technological charity? The Chinese will just ship us 10 million ass-wiping robots for the nursing homes for free, because they're a kind and benevolent people?
"Organization" won't make them give you the machines for free. And your tax base eroded out from under you.
If the country isn't self-reliant, no big deal... as long as they can pony up the cash. And your country can't do that either. Do you have any arguments that aren't pure sophistry?
Which countries did you have in mind? The countries with the highest population decline are not the countries with the lowest birth rate. People emigrate from the former, and choose not to reproduce in the latter.
The places with above-replacement fertility are seeing theirs decline too.
We convert them to childlessness faster than they can replace the children we're not having. Less than 25 years away from universal below-replacement fertility.
> You, here, right now reading this are the absolute last leaf, the most extended branch, the most outstretched and sun-bleached arm of a tree of life that has been proceeding for four billion years. You are the last link in a chain that has not been broken for four billion years.
It's 3.7 billion, not four.
More importantly it's a vast tree of life, not a chain and not a hierarchy with humans at an upper lever with only royalty, priests, and God above.
If the sapiens go the stromatolites will still remain, with a lineage far older than apes.
Humans aren't about to go extinct but it's high time their population numbers stabilised, perhaps even reduced a bit.
The case can certainly be made by those that care that should the human branch be pruned the remaining mass of the tree of life on earth might very well thrive and surge in breadth and depth after a rather large number of other prunings at the hands of humankind.
4 was rounding from 3.7, so I think that seems like a bit of a petty correction.
Humans will not go extinct (I hope), but HN is full of some of the smartest people and these are their trends, and I hope that of the people who do reproduce, the techno nerds are among them. The future will need them.
I worry that the Great Filter is not about technology at all, but that in every planet with a species that has evolved into a higher intelligence, that at the cusp of being able to seed their galaxy, they willingly do not pursue it, because the level of analytical thinking required to achieve it also leads them to disinterest and abstinence.
In regards to your last sentence, that is true. But I would ask, who would be around to appreciate that fact?
> Humans aren't about to go extinct but it's high time their population numbers stabilised, perhaps even reduced a bit.
There's little evidence to support the theory that at some point in the future, little girls will all suddenly decide to buck the trend set by their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and all the adult women they see around them in the world, and have 2.1 children themselves.
But, if they do not all do this, if only some of them decide to buck the trend, they those girls would need to have 3 or 5 or 8 to make up for those who do not.
If neither of these things happen, population cannot stabilize. Mathematically, there has to be an average of 2.1.
Fertility rate declines are future extinction. They've run the experiments, and the results are always the same... despite having all the food and water and entertainment they might want, the mice either do not fuck or they just murder whatever offspring they do (rarely) have. And it happens more quickly than one might expect, because the rate of decline increases with each generation.
> the human branch be pruned the remaining mass of the tree of life on earth might very well thrive and surge in breadth and depth after a rather large number of other prunings at the hands of humankind.
And why should any human ever give a shit about whether these non-human organisms thrive, especially when hypothesizing a future where humans no longer exist? Sounds like some death cult nonsense. Will you be one of those lamenting how you think the most beautiful planets of all are those with no life whatsoever to "mar their beauty"?
> There's little evidence to support the theory that at some point in the future, little girls will all suddenly decide to buck the trend set by their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and all the adult women they see around them in the world, and have 2.1 children themselves.
There is some speculation - and some data which may or may not support it - that fertility may follow a "J" curve where it declines sharply with increased development and then slowly rises again above a certain level.
There is also some data to suggest that within a population, if a subset sees an increase in wealth, it can predict an increase in fertility within that subset.
Combined, a suggestion that does not seem unreasonable is that we develop certain expectations based on societal expectations, and as they increase it becomes harder and harder to justify additional children, but when people find themselves able to meet those expectations, the number of children goes up.
If that holds, then that would suggest the rate can be brought back up with sufficient societal assistance, which may or may not come as fertility rates becomes enough of a political issue. Whether that will actually work remains to be seen - we've already of course seen some pretty significant attempts, such as the escalating Hungarian family support scheme (total support for 3+ children amounts to over 300k Euro, of which about 1/3 is a non-refundable grant and the rest subsidized house loans), so we should start to get an idea of what a realistic cost to drive the rates back up will be, if it is viable, over the coming couple of decades as more countries experiment.
> There's little evidence to support the theory that at some point in the future, little girls will all suddenly decide to buck the trend set by their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and all the adult women they see around them in the world, ..
What nonsense.
The very evidence you seek is right here, right now, all about us - a world in which men and women have a reproduction rate lower than than their grandparents and great grandparents. They have clearly bucked the trend of those in times past. Q.E.D.
BTW, this focus you have on breeding "little girls" is distasteful to say the least.
> those girls would need to have 3 or 5 or 8 to make up for those who do not.
Only if the world is to return to the present 8+ billion after a fall below.
Should numbers slowly decline down to, say, 1950s world population levels and mean reproduction rates go to 2.1 then things will stabilise.
> If neither of these things happen, population cannot stabilize.
Faulty logic, as already explained.
> And why should any human ever give a shit about whether these non-human organisms thrive
My response was to a human who was waxing lyrical about 3.7 billion years of life, an infintesimal number and tonnage of which was actual humn life ... you should ask them why they care about other lifeforms.
>The very evidence you seek is right here, right now, all about us - a world in which men and women have a reproduction rate lower than than their grandparents and great grandparents. They have clearly bucked the trend of those in times past. Q.E.D.
From the graph I saw the total fertility rate in the US has been falling since 1800 (start of the graph). It briefly improved after WW2 for a bit and then started falling again. There was another brief increase at the end of the 90s and it's been dropping to historical lows ever since. It's not just two generations - it's 200 years and possibly longer.
It would appear that we both agree that population changes rates can alter over time and that it's happened in the past and can happen in the future then.
Unlike the other commenter who has claimed that once a rate has been set it cannot change.
> he very evidence you seek is right here, right now, all about us - a world in which men and women have a reproduction rate lower than than their grandparents and great grandparents. They have clearly bucked the trend of those in times past. Q.E.D.
Are you daft? If fertility rates were high in the past, if they were 6 or 8 or 9.7... they could fall for a long time with no decline in population.
But once they dip below the magic number of 2.1, then population declines. That's how this works. That's the number of children a woman (every woman, on average) must have for population to remain the same from one generation to the next.
I don't know any other way to explain it. You probably think you're intelligent. You followed the teacher's instructions and got an A on math, but you never really understood it. If you follow the recipe, it just poops out correct answers... but here we have a novel problem, and you just can't get it.
> Only if the world is to return to the present 8+ billion after a fall below.
No. For the population to plateau out and stay the same, they'd need that many. It's how fucking averages work.
Either all of them have 2.1, or if only half have children, then they need to have 4.2.
And this isn't for the population to grow again. It's for it to plateau out and remain the same as it is.
> Should numbers slowly decline down to, say, 1950s world population levels and mean reproduction rates go to 2.1 then things will stabilise.
That's the fucking point. If population declines, it's already below 2.1
And if it's below 2.1, that becomes the norm and it never goes back above 2.1. No little girl grows up in a world of childless adults, of the rare "only child", and "only child" herself and says "I think I will do what ever woman I ever knew wouldn't do, and have 2.1".
It's a simple fucking idea.
> You might perhaps ask yourself why you do not.
Because I don't belong to a death cult that hates humanity. I mean, I shouldn't have to say it out loud, but there it is.
No. I still recall studying population dynamics, predator | prey cycles, etc as part of non linear dynamics in mathematics classes back in the 1980s.
> But once they dip below the magic number of 2.1, then population declines.
That magic number can change.
It's relatively easy for anyone to find observational examples of populations with adaptive reproductive rates.
> I don't know any other way to explain it.
Perhaps you might try studying mathematics.
> Because I don't belong to a death cult that hates humanity.
The question was about life on earth, not specifically humanity, the notion that you belong to a humanity hating death cult is frankly one that would not occur to most people .. but here you are going straight there.
Which goes back to my original comment, where I talk about for it to change, the little girls of the youngest generation have to grow up and choose to have more children than their parents. They all have to choose this simultaneously, or the few that do choose it have to choose to have far, far more than 2.1 themselves.
Both of these scenarios are so outlandish, that you keep dancing around it, pretending that I'm describing it incorrectly. You don't want to think about it, or don't want others to think about it, or you just aren't capable... I can't tell which.
It'd be laughable, if I didn't think you were an enemy of humanity.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the only part of the world where the fertility rate is still over replacement (~2.1 children per woman), and it's rapidly dropping there too. The first African country has dropped below replacement (Mauritius), with 10 more (of 55) having dropped below 3 already as of 2020.
China is seeing a population decline not caused by famine for the first time in modern history.
India's fertility rate is at or below replacement at this point, and India is a couple of decades from population contraction unless they increase immigration.
Having 3 children at a young age is an outlier in the vast majority of the world at this point.
Scroll down the World Bank's fertility numbers on this page [1] to get to data by region. You can add the entire Arab World, Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as having sustainable fertility rates. And places like Latin America are in decline, but still in the realm of realm of being saved at ~1.9. The only places currently in catastrophic collapse at the EU (1.5), North America (1.6), and East Asia (1.5).
For those who don't understand why 1.5 is so much worse than 1.9, it's because fertility is an exponential system. Every generation's (~20 years) size is (fertility_rate / 2) times as large as the one prior that gave birth to them. So after 5 generations (~1 century), a fertility rate of 1.9 would see the next generation's size go from 100 to 77 (100 * (1.9/2)^5). A fertility rate of 1.5 would go from 100 to 23. South Korea, at 0.78, would go from 100 to 0 - extinct, in a century.
And most people, across the world, do have children at what you'd call "young" ages. Female fertility rates start to decline rapidly as they age, obviously hitting zero at menopause which tends to happen in their 40s. Even when successful, an older parent results faces exponentially increased odds of seeing a variety of issues with the child, such as Down Syndrome.
> Scroll down the World Bank's fertility numbers on this page [1] to get to data by region. You can add the entire Arab World, Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as having sustainable fertility rates.
You can use metrics from different groups and slice and dice sections and find ways of getting above 2.1 (replacement), sure, but it's not affecting my main point at all, which was that it's not contained to the Western world, and that 3 kids is now an outlier in most of the world.
To your specifics:
South Asia is listed as 2.2. But India has hit 2.1 and is declining, and Bangladesh and Nepal are even further below replacement - the World Bank metric is I presume buoyed by Pakistan, which has hit 3.1 (3.47 in the 2021 numbers on Wiipedia), and is declining, and Afghanistan, which is in even steeper decline - the other countries in the region are mostly rounding errors in terms of population.
It's a difference of whether it's already hit replacement as a region already, or will within 2-3 years at most. I'm perfectly happy to accept the World Bank numbers for the sake of this argument, as it's not relevant to the argument.
With respect to MENA and the Arab World, you're double-counting. The bulk of the countries that are part of the Arab World vs Middle East /North Africa are the same.
The largest non-Arab MENA countries are Iran, which is well below replacement (1.7) and Turkey, at 1.9.
The Arab World also includes several countries considered sub-Sarahan by some or all of other groups (Somalia, Mauritania, Sudan) which pulls it up, and MENA curiously includes Sudan in some statistics, even though it's considered sub-Saharan and/or East Africa by other groupings.
Once you actually exclude the sub-Saharan countries from those groups, the rate lowers significantly. Taking Sudan alone out of MENA brings MENA close to replacement. If you choose to look at the Arab World alone, then, sure, even excluding the sub-Saharan countries they're still above replacement. I'm again, fine with choosing to slice the numbers that way - they do not affect the argument I was making in any meaningful way, because then the remaining MENA countries are below instead.
What we're left with no matter how we slice it, is that roughly half the worlds countries are below replacement, accounting for well above half the worlds current population (but that balance will shift rapidly), and leaving the world average at ~2.3 and declining even by World Bank numbers.
> And places like Latin America are in decline, but still in the realm of realm of being saved at ~1.9.
There's no "being saved" here. Short of economic collapse, we don't know of any reliable measure to drive these numbers back up again, and they've been consistently trending down since the 1960's. China appears to be poised to be the country likely go hardest in trying, now recommending 3 children per family, and given an extremely restrictive immigration policy. That's fine - they don't need to be "saved".
> The only places currently in catastrophic collapse at the EU (1.5), North America (1.6), and East Asia (1.5).
I was not, and is not, and will not be, arguing any "catastrophic collapse" - to me at least that notion is meaningless to most people other than "great replacement" type people.
The world as a whole is headed for a relatively gentle flattening of population growth, and a period of decline, but no "catastrophic collapse" in population. But we are headed for a fairly dramatic shift in politics and economic development as this happens and the countries facing the steepest drops become more dependent on actually courting immigration as a consequence. There will still be enough growth to do that for decades to come.
> "The world as a whole is headed for a relatively gentle flattening of population growth"
You know something that's really weird to think about? In 1950 Africa's population was 227m! [1] The US at the time had about 160m, nearly as many people as the entire African continent! Fertility rates are hard to intuit because they're not only exponential, but systems where the effect is delayed from the cause by several decades, but then once it starts - it starts rocketing off uncontrollably, be that in loss or gain of population.
The world's population may start to level off at some point, but sub-replacement rates will cause Western nations to start losing population at an exponential rate. It will be the equal but opposite of what happened to Africa over the past century. And this doesn't level out or even slow down, except when people start having children again. So for instance many people know Japan now has > 10% of its population over 80, but I think a lot of us have this sort of concept that 'Well sure, but as they start to die off - then things will probably start to look a bit more sane.'
In reality, it's the exact opposite. As this group dies off, they're going to be replaced by an even larger group of 80+ year olds, leaving Japan in an even worse state, as one can immediately see just glancing at Japan's population pyramid. [2] Right now Japan's losing about 1 in 200 people per year, and this will never stop until either they go extinct or they start having children again. And it will actually get substantially worse until they hit their 'fertility equilibrium point' where all living generations have/had comparable fertility rates (picture the sides of the population pyramid having a constant slope). And that's what's waiting for the entirety of the Western world, if we don't turn things around.
And this is also likely a vicious cycle because as age ratios and demographics get all screwed up, economies will start to collapse, which will make it even more uncomfortable to have children.
Fertility rates do indeed have that effect, but it's buffeted most places by immigration that will continue to soften the effect for decades to come, so I think it'll be hard to predict how that exactly will play out.
We can already see some differences quite starkly.
E.g. Italy's fertility rate hasn't been above replacement since ca. 1975, and started seeing population decline a few years ago and is already back at the population level it was at around 2007, because it struggles to attract (and want to attract) enough immigration.
Meanwhile, the UK dropped below replacement in 1972, and yet UN projections suggest the population is unlikely to decline until the 2050's at the earliest, and isn't projected to drop down to present-day levels at any point this century, largely buffeted by a far more aggressive immigration policy (including by politicians claiming to want the opposite - neither of the major party in the UK believes in reducing immigration, but some of their voters do, and that is likely to become a rising conflict).
So while I agree some nations probably will see rapid falls, it really comes down to in part to what extent they are able to open their doors and find means of becoming attractive to immigrants fast enough while finding ways of integrating them in a working way.
And this will reshape the political and cultural landscapes both within countries, and international influence.
(one minor example, since we've discussed the UK and Africa: The UK is likely to soon drop from the 2nd to 3rd largest native English-speaking population worldwide - both India and Nigeria already have far more people speaking English as their 2nd or 3rd language, but Nigeria seems to be more rapidly closing the gap to have more people who speak English as their 1st...)
> And this is also likely a vicious cycle because as age ratios and demographics get all screwed up, economies will start to collapse, which will make it even more uncomfortable to have children.
Well, we may unfortunately in that case get to test whether fertility is inexorably linked to poverty or whether once it's declined it won't rise again.
The other option is that as fertility becomes even more of an issue, we'll see a significant escalation in measures like the Hungarian (ramping up grants and subsidised house loans for families that get more children), but of course we don't yet know whether - or at what level - that will work... But I suspect many desperate attempts.
Also, expect reproductive rights to become an issue, with more countries seeming movements to push back on abortion rights etc. using fertility rates as a reason.
Earlier you expressed skepticism about the ability of nations to carry out actions to get their fertility numbers back up. And I agree with you. There's quite a lot of evidence, historical and present, that it's really not so easy. And especially for nations that only act once a problem becomes catastrophic, or politically convenient, we'll probably be well into a death spiral before we start acting. So the most probable outcomes aren't looking very hot.
But I'd say here that you're not carrying forward that same reasoned skepticism when offering immigration as a solution. Because the exact same holds true. There are countless examples of mass migration throughout history, and they generally don't come with a happy ending. Rome, over the centuries, became an empire of immigrants, in some ways akin to the United States. Yet it was also ultimately destroyed by immigration. The Goths, fleeing the Huns, were take in as refugees by the Roman Empire. Those same refugees would ultimately go on to destroy the Roman Empire.
In the present day, mass migration doesn't seem to be fairing much better. Prior to the migrant crisis throughout Europe, many expected that the migrants would integrate, become part of the normal mass of people, and it'd ultimately be a win-win situation for everybody. That belief was not well supported by history, and ultimately proved to be false. And in the US today, cities that express an extremely positive attitude towards immigration tend to rapidly express a different view once faced with large numbers of immigrants.
And immigration on the scale we're talking about would be absolutely massive, and never-ending. And I'm not even getting into the countless social/cultural/political problems this would all entail. I'm merely focusing on the most extreme - would this destroy the countries engaging in such? And it seems to me that the most probable answer is simply yes. Well actually in modern times I don't think it'd destroy them. The most likely outcome is what we're seeing happen in much of Europe - parties that oppose the immigration would rapidly come to power, and end up working to mitigate the damage, and end such a population strategy.
The destruction of the Roman Empire isn't something I lament, and yet if present nation-states survive as long as the Roman Empire they will have done exceptionally well. At the same time I don't buy the narrative. It's a bizarre thing to compare modern migration with fleeing armed groups seeking conquest to replace the places they were fleeing.
It's like comparing the average migrant or refugee with ISIS.
> Prior to the migrant crisis throughout Europe, many expected that the migrants would integrate, become part of the normal mass of people, and it'd ultimately be a win-win situation for everybody. That belief was not well supported by history, and ultimately proved to be false.
I've seen nothing to "prove it false", but there's also a very significant difference a rushed an chaotic acceptance of refugees vs. planned migration programs, and either takes time to shake out.
> And in the US today, cities that express an extremely positive attitude towards immigration tend to rapidly express a different view once faced with large numbers of immigrants.
And yet the US managed to successfully do it before. Several of my own ancestors families lived in Brooklyn at a time where it was so full of Scandinavian migrants that it had several Norwegian language newspapers, and my great grandmother lived there a decade without ever learning English because all her neighbours and shopkeepers etc. spoke Norwegian. I've spent a lot of time looking at US censuses because for the sake of genealogy, and the US censuses of that era are astounding for the way whole streets were nothing but immigrants.
Somehow the US is still there, as much as one might joke about the state it is in.
> The most likely outcome is what we're seeing happen in much of Europe - parties that oppose the immigration would rapidly come to power, and end up working to mitigate the damage, and end such a population strategy.
Then they will crater their economies, and soon enough get thrown out of office. People are quick to support anti-immigran rhetoric until it starts hitting their wallet when eg. employers struggle to hire. These anti-immigration parties fortunes tends to be tightly linked to unemployment levels.
Compare Italy to e.g. the UK, where despite the anti refugee rhetoric and historically high immigration, people fleeing the Tory party are not going to the anti-immigrant right-wing parties but to Labour - the UK, unlike Italy, has low unemployment and regular newspaper stories about employers struggling to find workers. Once Italy's population decline bites a bit more, this will change rapidly.
The Goths were not seeking conquest, and were mostly unarmed; the Romans invited them in happily, the political leaders thinking they'd be able to exploit the migrants to their benefit. And both sides actually got along quite well for a while. The problem is that the Romans took in more refugees than the State could sustain, and when Rome found itself unable to continue supplying the Goths, conflict began. Wiki has a summary, at least somewhat reasonable, here. [1]
But you know, I'm not sure this line of discussion is even meaningful. If I convince you the Goths were nothing even remotely like like ISIS, is that going to change your mind on anything? Obviously not. So why bother? What I am curious is what would change your mind.
So if you look at this from my perspective, you're talking about a scenario where a government of a country would be basically endeavoring to replace its own domestic population, with a foreign one, all while somehow presumably trying to maintain some of the value that makes people want to migrate to the country in the first place. I think we could both agree that there's no historic precedent for this, immigration on a far smaller scale has shown a tendency to result in problems, and so on. Yet you seem confident enough in assuming that it might work, to simply assume it. This, to me, is pretty weird!
What, if anything, could ever possibly convince you that such a scenario might not be particularly likely to succeed in anything like a desirable fashion? And, vice versa, how could you sell somebody like me, who is skeptical of such, on it? I'm more than open to the concept, but you'd need a pretty solid argument.
The very start of the background section there points out the inclusion of soldiers. They may not have set out for conquest from the start, but the article you link to go on to point out that the Romans would have been aware that they were taking a significant risk from the outset in allowing a group of that size to enter and stay concentrated, and go on to point out that a lot of them were allowed to or managed to keep their weapons despite not being meant to, and then put in a situation where they starved. To try to compare that to a modern government taking in a number of refugees it can trivially feed, and to then further draw a parallel between a rapid influx of refugees like that with immigration is fundamentally flawed.
> What I am curious is what would change your mind.
A line of argumentation that isn't based in tropes usually used by far-right extremist racists. I'm not saying that is your motivation, because I can not tell, but what I can tell is that those are the circles I see these arguments used by. When they are then further based in characterisations about failure I don't recognise from what I have seen myself, then you have provided nothing to give me any reason to trust any of what you've said.
When you now start talking about replacement, you're playing further into that.
I'm an immigrant myself, and I've seen enough variety between immigrant groups that the moment someone starts treating all immigration the same, and conflating handling of refugees and immigrants, that suggests to me someone who has preconceived notions and is coming at it with an agenda.
> I think we could both agree that there's no historic precedent for this
No, we most certainly would not. I pointed out the US to you as an obvious example. I find it funny that you flat out ignored that I've already pointed it out.
> Yet you seem confident enough in assuming that it might work, to simply assume it. This, to me, is pretty weird!
Define "work". I'm confident there will be all kinds of problems. I'm also confident it will happen, because, I'm even more confident that the alternative is a level of economic and societal collapse that will lead to violently overthrown governments, so I see it as entirely moot whether it will go smoothly or not. People will make it happen and manage the results because the alternative is turning into a third-world country.
So you're just not only going to double down the Goth's "setting out for conquest", but now also starting to add in a healthy sprinkling of ad hominem? Ok.
Part of this is that South Korea was practically closed to immigration until around 2004 outside of the "usual" workarounds (marrying a local, or significant investment), and so it's become increasingly urgent.
They've liberalised a lot since, but it'll take a long time for them to develop a reputation as somewhere people will think of as a destination to migrate to.
I’m fairly certain this is just misaligned expectations. You can absolutely live in a 30sqm (or less) space with 5 children, raising them on plain rice, and send them to whatever public school you can get for free. And they’d very likely still have a better life than just 100 years ago. It’s just that nobody wants to do so because the standards are so much higher.
i agree with this. in a world where everyone (except a very few) has the same kind of life, it all just seems normal so you would not consider changing that. but as some people have less kids, more and more people learn from that, so the idea spreads (as does the education around how to avoid having kids).
Let’s be a little charitable here- having and raising children has been a much, much more dangerous proposition health wise even at your parents generation to say nothing of your grandparents generation.
Expensive relative to expectations. Not in terms of what most people could provide.
That's not bad. It's fine that people expect more and want to be able to provide more before having children (and I do agree the commenter who argued this is somehow confined to the Western world is way out there).
But we need to understand that across most of the developed world - there will be exceptions in pockets here and there - it is not the ability to afford children that has dropped, but that we're not willing to give up what we have to have children at a living standard that was considered good before.
E.g. when I grew up we always had food, but the food we had was dictated by cost in a way I never think about, and wouldn't want to deal with. We lived in less space, and I want more space, not less. Our living standard when I was a kid was fine; far above average for most of the world, about average for where I grew up. But if what it took to have more kids was to go back to that, I wouldn't.
The commenter above can call that soft all they want - I don't feel bad for wanting to enjoy life more than I want more children (I have one son; I might well have another child, but because I'm at a stage where my girlfriend and I can afford it without sacrificing our standard of living and that does place me in a privileged position)
First generation immigrants (in Europe) have higher birth rates than second generation immigrants despite being poorer. It's not just about costs - it's about cultural expectations.
In the past, if you could not afford to feed your family, you could literally starve to death. And people saved money by doing things like crafting clothes out of feed sacks. [1] It became common enough that companies would start selling their feed in sacks with floral designs, specifically with the intent of then being reused as clothing.
And that's just one among a vast array of lifestyle differences. Now a days the worst case scenario is that you end up on government assistance and have a less pleasant life. As for Asia, don't make the mistake of conflating Asia with just China/Hong Kong/Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. Asia's big, and those places are outliers in terms of fertility, with China's issues being entirely self inflicted. The average fertility rate across Asia is 2.3 [2], which is not great - but at least sustainable.
2019 data is fairly out of date. 2023 shows India is below replacement now (2.1 and dropping). china drastically so (1.2 and dropping). Those are the biggest populations by a large margin. Projections
for the region show continued declines, not sustainable at all.
Where do you live? I'm a bit older but pretty much all of mine and my wife's friends have kids.
I'm actually really curious about the childless older people. Like I have a couple friends without kids but it's not like that because they are too busy doing fun awesome things. They are more of the ill adjusted habitually complaining types where they themselves can't form bonds because of a tumultuous childhood.
I feel like this is location dependent. My wife and I are in our mid 30s with two kids (13 and 9). Most of our friends are in roughly the same situation. I’m the oldest of 6 (by quite a few years) and only the youngest (age 21) of my siblings is childless. My kids have 9 first cousins so far. But we all live in rural parts of eastern Canada. I can honestly say, I don’t know many couples without kids. However, being a family with kids attracts families with kids. So it’s hard to say.
I couldn’t imagine bringing a child into this messed up world. I really feel we are at the beginning of a mass extinction and future generations, no matter how rich and well off physically, will be destined to a life of suffering.
> I really feel we are at the beginning of a mass extinction
Presumably that extinction would take place several generations from now? One great way to avoid or slow extinction would be to procreate.
> this messed up world
As bad as things might be, aren't they way way way way better than they were in previous generations? Before Russia invaded Ukraine we were on a really great streak of very little warfare on Earth (relative to decades and centuries before). Fewer people are facing malnutrition and disease from centuries before. Many countries are much more egalitarian and less corrupt than they were centuries before.
I think maybe you are taking too many things for granted that are really quite good in modern times.
> I think maybe you are taking too many things for granted that are really quite good in modern times.
The facts that (a) the world is better than it has ever been and (b) the world is currently awful and (c) we can make the world much better, are all true statements. This good article was recently discussed on HN: https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better
> Presumably that extinction would take place several generations from now? One great way to avoid or slow extinction would be to procreate.
... is that necessarily true? If our current population is well above the long-term carrying capacity, in terms of maximizing 'time there are humans on the planet', could the best course involve letting the population decrease for an extended period, and then aiming for a steady population only after we're near that carrying capacity.
A yeast cell in a wine bottle can reproduce while sugar is plentiful, but the increased population leads to more rapid sugar consumption and eventually fermentation stops.
IMO the world might be messed up compared to the 80's or 90's, but take a broader look and we have never had it better than today. The average person living in the western world today has a standard of living high above what even nobility or kings would have in the middle ages and I would venture to say even a higher standard of living than the Vanderbilts or Rockerfellers did during the gilded age.
> I really feel we are at the beginning of a mass extinction
Yes, because of you. Go have kids. Ethiopians continued to have children during a decade-long famine and their population still increased. Stop making excuses for your own selfishness.
>it makes me feel bad (though not too bad at this point) that I have to log off at quittin' time, sharp, to go relieve my wife of some childcare and make a family dinner.
Nah, this part shouldn't be related to having kids or not. Even as a single person I have to log off to live my life, and overworking is not cool or hip.
Well, I have had jobs that have paid well, but not for long. If you're not working backwards from an accidental pregnancy, you just have to consider the volatility of your life, and the prospects for the future. My dad had me when he was 21, accidentally, in a time not so long ago where various alternatives weren't super available, and made it work (horribly) until they divorced, in one of the poorest and most isolated cities in Canada. He has however managed to work the same job for 30 years, and bought a house (with help from both sets of grandparents financially. Now, he does have the house, but he's had more kids in that time, and still works at the same company, but doesn't make enough to keep anything for later; it all goes to childcare and life.
In order to make something of what was an incredibly volatile childhood and an interest in computers, I eventually moved to a much more appealing and more expensive but larger pond that I could pay for at the time; my hometown just didn't really have a market. I'm also 31 now, nearly 32, and have only managed to bring in an income for a maximum of a year and a half since 18, have ended up without a stable housing situation for quite some time, and that's really difficult to pivot from if you consider that the bet you made on the thing you were capable of, just hasn't really panned out (frontend development apparently). What's next now that that the hypothetical prospects I'd have had in previous years have functionally evaporated? I'm not sure, but I'll pay for this basement apartment and drain my savings as I figure it out, going into my second year with no job of any kind.
Ironically, the people who got into trades that they had no prior knowledge of, and that didn't pursue the ambition to explore beyond the confines of their hometown, have the most stability. Me the idiot picked the computer thing and nobody taught me how to be sufficiently obedient or whatever.
So although I've been in positions where my salary was relatively higher than I could have ever imagined as a kid, I've always known it was going to disappear the next year in a layoff or a firing or a pandemic, and prospects for the future would always be just tenuous enough to barely be able to get by on my own or even with a partner. I don't take out debt, and all my money which stays liquid eventually goes to rent. I'm always in risk mitigation mode, because there's always been risk, and although I've never been compelled to have kids, some amount of that is predicated on the knowledge that it doesn't seem right to bring a kid up if I can't even figure out how to hold a job for 2 damn years.
It's something to consider. Tricky thing is, I think a lot of people already did that, and kind of feel like whichever one I do will already be saturated.
Second cousins would be your cousin's cousins. It basically comes down to which level of grandparent you have in common. Grandparents = cousins, great-grandparents = second cousins, great-great-grandparents = third cousins.
The "removed" refers to differences in generational cohort. So if you are connected to the person by your grandparent but that same person is a great-grandparent to the relative, that relative is once removed from you. So your first cousins' children are first cousins once removed. Their grandchildren would be your first cousins twice-removed.
I think it's a mix of many things with the cost of living be number one and way down list or in the middle it could be...
- social media (want beautiful family to post n get likes)
- online dating want the most attractive I can get so I can get likes for who I'm with and kids i made
- thus everyone is pursuing a certain types/groups who they interact with and get burned by cause they have so much choice ..then get jaded about dating.
Again those reasons are by far not on the top of list reasons why but are on the list.
Maybe Hollywood needs to start reshaping our beauty standards for the sake of the human race ;-)
Seen via Google News which could be creating a Truman Show type of life for me and others ... Google knows what i talk about online and shows me articles about possibly CNN gets this data and AI articles are created that are super targeted at me. YEAH (sarcasm) if true.
I feel obligated to share my counter example of anecdata.
Current team of 12, 9 are young parents, other 3 in committed relationships (international team based in North America + EU).
Previous team was around 50% parents, but people went on parental leave all the time, so the number kept increasing (company based in Germany, and basically the German half of the team had all the babies, the immigrant half almost none which is interesting).
And my brother and I got our first kids the same year, so the cousin bit is also covered.
> it makes me feel bad (though not too bad at this point) that I have to log off at quittin' time, sharp, to go relieve my wife of some childcare and make a family dinner.
Don't feel bad! I don't have kids and I always appreciate the example set by my coworkers and manager who mostly all have kids. They're very good about having an "end" to their day which makes me feel like it's ok to also call it an end to my day.
I used to work on a team where we were all young & partner-less, including my manager, and everyone just worked "constantly"-ish (like breaks for sleep or errands so it wasn't super intense), but it just felt like a 24/7 slow marathon instead of M-F 9-5-type work. It was absolutely awful. They were all so intelligent too so I felt like I had to do that just to try to keep up and never wanted to be the first one to log off early. We were at a giant company and not scrapping to survive or anything, that was just the micro-culture within the ~10 of us.
Yesterday's divorce thread quickly disappeared off the front page but it's the taboo topic you must understand if you want to understand why family formation in the western aligned world has declined so rapidly. As long as we have certain truths that cannot be questioned and blackhole any attempts to discuss them, confusion will prevail.
> And it's also a bit inconvenient that nobody else at work has such pressing obligations, it makes me feel bad...
I hope your peers ambivalence (educated guess here) towards your other responsibilities make your priorities obvious. Having been in a similar situation, I "lost" the corporate battle (was laid off) but as soon as I had kids I knew my priorities needed to change. I literally worked 8:30 - 5. That was it. I wasn't going to lose missing even the most mundane of times with my kids for some after hours "retro" or some early morning "pointing" session. Thats me tho, thats my deal.
Being a good parent is a hard job and yet if you want to be one, you're expected to pay for it with both your money and your time.
No wonder the middle class people don't want to have kids. The poorest think differently - they treat kids as an investment because that's the only investment they can have at all. The richest also treat kids as investment, for different reasons. The middle class is childless - can't afford to have the best standard of raising children, so they think they shouldn't have any - and they don't.
Added anecdata: A lot of my direct colleagues are getting married and having kids at the moment, often a bit later in life (in their and their partners 30's) than the preceding generation, but still.
Me and my siblings, none of us seem to have any inclination; combination of just not wanting them, having neurodiverse conditions that seem more debilitating than my parents' generation, and finances like only becoming homeowners in our mid 30's (and my younger sibling cannot afford a home)
There is never a good time to have kids, and so any time is a good time to have kids.
Maybe I'm a lucky one, but we took the plunge right at the end of biological possibility since we're old, and I only wish I had done this 20 years ago. It's such a wonderful experience and believe me I never would have guessed that.
There's nothing I was doing back then that mattered at all. And now I'll be lucky to see my kids graduate college because I waited so long.
In hindsight, the high school years would have been the perfect time to have children. No responsibilities, doing nothing of value, biology in its optimal state, and the greatest support network you're going to have. But at the same time I feel for those who did because I know they felt the terrible social scorn.
You spend all those years being told that having children is the worst mistake of your life, until you're in your 30s, and then all of sudden the same people are "What's your problem? Why haven't you had children already?" It's bizarre.
I have another anecdata for you. As a gay man living in a country that has very few children for adoption and bans surrogacy, I have given up on having kids.
First off, you shouldn't ever feel guilty about prioritizing your family over work. Please, never do that. I say that as a single 35 year old male. Secondly, I want you to understand that, though you may not realize it, you are in an extremely enviable position. To understand why people are not having children, you need to understand that in many places, it's not easy or convenient to have children.
I get the feeling these anecdotes are (unsurprisingly) biased towards young SF tech crowds.
My own experiences of being in my early 30s, born and raised on Long Island and now living in Boston, my circle of friends, relatives, and coworkers from both areas are having kids all over the place.
When my wife first became pregnant last year, it was actually a bit difficult finding openings with OBGYN offices in the general Boston area.
I had the same experience working for SF bay area tech companies, mid-size teams of high income 30 year olds and only a few people had kids.
Got a job with a company in the midwest, complete opposite. Almost everyone on my team has kids. That might suggest a lower cost of living is correlated with kids, but I think it is more of a cultural thing.
It's not that uncommon for women to have kids in their early 40s, though it certainly does start getting more difficult/sometimes impossible at that point.
It shouldn't. Life is pretty miserable for most people. Everyone is too busy to hang out and be relaxed. Having kids makes it even more so. Why do we want our kis to grow up like that too?
this is objectively untrue with respect to almost every single piece of data we have on this subject. Just because youre a misanthrope doesnt mean everyone else is.
I wonder - do you think the drop in fertility represents a rise in overall life satisfaction or a fall? I hadn't thought about it much myself, but it seems like it could go either way.
The drop in fertility represents a rise in endocrine-disrupting chemicals like microplastics. Lower testosterone makes one less horny and more neurotic -- so we get cities of insane people worrying about completely nonsensical made-up risks. This is the face of every conceivable metric that we live in the best time to live -- ever. Never before in human history have we been richer, more peaceful, more equal than we do today.
A lot of 27 year old women 50 years ago had a kid and another on the way.
A lot of 27 year old women I know today are planning trips to Europe next year. Are they more unhappy than previous generations? I don't see it. There's a lot of interesting things competing today with being a parent.
definitely a fall i would say. 80% of women who do not have children, either actually wanted children but couldnt have them, or regret not having them. the fertility crisis is a complete disaster on an incredible amount of levels for people and society. The fact governments arent doing more to address this is mind boggling
If so, then it's sort of strange to think that everything else in their lives is going so well then, isn't it? Perhaps your KPIs aren't telling you the full story or maybe happy people want fewer children?
>this is objectively untrue with respect to almost every single piece of data we have on this subject. Just because youre a misanthrope doesnt mean everyone else is.
Regret implies you wouldn't have regretted the other option, which is often not the case. It is entirely possible, and sometimes likely that you will regret your decision no matter which decision you make.
are hackernews commenters legally obligated to chime in with intense pedantry that is completely irrelevant to the larger point in order to feel like they are smarter than the person theyre responding to?
Look up the distribution of happiness in the US and other developed nations. Happiness is often lowest during childbearing years. Happiness in the US has been declining for about a decade.
Cousins once removed. Second cousins are your parent's cousins. And your cousin situation sounds a lot like mine and my children - not a lot of cousins happening.
If two people have the same grandparents, then they are cousins. If they have the same great grandparents, then they are second cousins. atomicnumber3 was referring to what atomicnumber3's kids would call atomicnumber3's cousin's kids.
Honestly, I appreciated "you" at my last job - I don't have kids, but work is not my life either, especially if I have to be in the office. I worked at a place where it was awkward to leave before 6:30pm, and the one person who always left around then was the guy with kids.
You're baffled people don't want kids? You couldn't pay me 3-10x to be 31 with 3 kids, lmao. And I'm almost 10 years older. I'm aging like fine wine with cool cars and vacations and obscene lofts downtown and you're going to be a turnip in 12 years with no savings because of college and child care fees.
I'm baffled people want kids, especially THREE. You have NO reason to have 3 kids.
And yeah, us child-free people absolutely know when you kid-poppers are constantly leaving work and can't be assed to take on priority projects because you've got to take Tommy and Madelyn to soccer and gymnastics at 3pm.
People value family differently. For some, their dream life is to have sick cars and a sweet loft, for others, it's to raise other humans to be good. You should probably understand that there are some that read your perspective on life as equally puzzling.
I agree that childcare and college is mad expensive. It's why people complain about these things as much as they do!
What I've always thought, as a parent: those without kids don't know what they're missing, and those with them know what they have.
I'm not saying this to try to brag about how I have some special thing in my life that you'll never understand. I'm saying it because it feels like a perfect system in a way - you simply don't miss what you don't have.
And lastly, those some sort of information bias at play. Non-parents hear all the time about how parents don't have time for this or that, or they hear them talk about how annoying their child is being. But most people have the self-awareness to not just sit and gush over how great their kid is to their non-parents friends, and even when they do, it's just obnoxious.
Oh I love parents and I don't have any problems with kids. Still consider them sometimes.
I was just bothered by the "I'm baffled by.." part of this specific post.
And you're 100% on the "don't know what we're missing," part. I haven't been married either, so no wedding, no births, no kids, it's an entire other lifestyle I basically won't have any interaction with if it doesn't happen, and it's a weird/scary thing because who knows which is better? Or what we're happier with in the end if we couldn't try both?
I'm straight but I kind of tell myself nowadays that all my gay friends are living that lifestyle and they're very happy from what I can tell so .. maybe it's not bad. But there are gay couples with kids, I don't know any. I haven't had the nerve to ask my good friend if he wanted/wants kids. Never know if thats a tough subject or not.
My only major parent pet peeve... is the word kiddos. And doggos. You can bring your screaming kids over to my pool to destroy my backyard and let all the bugs in cause they dont close doors while you get high and drunk but don't call them kiddos to me. I cannot deal with the mom forum abbreviations like DH (dear husband) and all that.. stuff. When it bleeds over to reddit etc, thankfully rarely, it hurts me to read.
I don't even care that parent coworkers leave to deal with parent stuff, at all. It actually makes ME feel less bad about leaving to do my personal stuff. I'm REALLY bad about being too anxious to leave. A lot better later in my career but early on I would never leave.
On my team of 15 only 3 don’t have kids, though there is a wide age range (24-55) the ones without kids are in their 30s but have indicated no interest. But only 2 have more than 2 kids (3). One has two of her own and now that they’re grown up she just adopted 2 high school age kids, which is very commendable, (and a huge undertaking) but I don’t really count it in terms of procreation.
I've worked with plenty of people who have no visible significant other, even. It's fucking weird. Thirty+ (40+) year old guys living alone in huge houses, never married. I'm guessing they are just hitting up sex workers. These are smart, well adjusted people who would have made good fathers.
Maybe they just never met the right lady. Calling it "fucking weird" seems a bit over the top, and contradictory to your statement about working with plenty of them.
I guess the older I get, the more unclear I am on what normal is supposed to be or what it ever was. What percentage of men historically even had children? My impression is that it has always been significantly less than the percentage of women who do.
Historically as in recent history or more distant?
In more distant history, yes most women had children and many men did not.
In recent history (in the west), I believe the ratio was much more equal due to culturally enforced monogamy. Obviously it was never 100% followed but I believe it made a very large impact on this metric.
if you don't meet the right lady by 40 then you haven't been looking hard enough. meaning, you were not really interested or focused on getting married. i am the only male among all my cousins that i know of to be married with children. and i am your proverbial geek who has a hard time meeting women. which my cousins or brothers are not. they had more opportunities to meet women than me (as far as i can tell), but for me, getting married and having children was one of my life goals. i achieved my goal. my brothers or cousins simply didn't even have that goal.
Maybe they're just not into it? Some people enjoy living alone without a committed relationship.
A lot of users in this thread assume that everyone's goal is to marry and have children. A lot of people are not interested in that, partly because they have other interests, and partly because the social pressure is not as strong as before.
It is wrong that our society rewards drinking beers with tech bros and “skydiving” hobbies and what not fucking weird stuff.
And doesn’t reward that much investments of money and parental time into having healthy and educated kids.
Educated and well rounded kids, teenagers and adults don’t come free for society. It requires a lot of work, money, time and love. Ridiculous amounts.
To a degree this resource can be stolen from other countries, via immigration. But this only works to a degree and at a larger scale it is still a zero sum game.
From experience, I can tell you that women are far more attracted to the beer-swilling bros who jump out of airplanes than the quiet, introverted engineers who retire each night to their homes to relax while cooking dinner and watching TV. That doesn't make for a particularly interesting date. So it goes.
As a quiet introverted engineer who went out on many dates and got married I couldn’t disagree more. Maybe it depends on age. What you say is probably true at age 21, by 29 most of the women I met were very set on meeting a serious life partner, not a bro. I found that actually talking to them about their interests and engaging with that did wonders, even if my introverted instincts didn’t tell me to.
As a quiet introverted engineer who went out on many dates
as a quiet introverted engineer who almost never went out on dates i have to agree with GP ;-)
actually talking to them about their interests and engaging with that did wonders
completely aside from the topic, this is very important relationship advice.
love means to care about your partner and their interests and goals.
finding a compatible partner means to look for someone whose goals and interests do not conflict with yours. (the need or should not be the same, but it should be possible for each partner to continue to pursue their goals with the strong support of the other partner.)
As an introvert, I feel I had to work harder to compensate for the fact that I didn't naturally find myself in environments where I'd meet people and engage with them, but I've also found that the attraction I've gotten from women has steading increased over time. I've found it far easier to date in my 40's than in my 20's. Not just people who wanted a serious life partner. Some of it does seem to be women equating older men with more maturity, some of it hopefully reflects actual maturity...
I don't know if you had to learn how to do this, but for me I think a large part of it is also the same thing you mention - it took a lot of effort for me to figure out, but the same parts of my nature that was a disadvantage for me when younger drove me to experiment, even take notes, until I figured out what I got wrong and how to improve myself.
Ironically I've found one of my best assets when dating in my 40's was my past struggles. Particularly recognising them and being able to use them to give observations about how clueless men tend to be about dating based on the mistakes I used to make myself.
> To a degree this resource can be stolen from other countries, via immigration. But this only works to a degree and at a larger scale it is still a zero sum game.
It's going to increasingly become a challenge. China's population is contracting. India has hit replacement and will start to see decline barring immigration over the next 20-30 years. Only sub-Saharan Africa is left with above replacement birth rates.
We're about to hit increasingly aggressive competition both to hold on to people, and to attract immigrants as more and more countries start getting bitten by demographic shifts.
At the same time it's going to have significant economic ramifications when more and more market categories stop getting "free growth" from growing population sizes.
> We're about to hit increasingly aggressive competition both to hold on to people, and to attract immigrants as more and more countries start getting bitten by demographic shifts.
This has an implied assumption that either more population is always better or that for all of the countries the current population is below the optimum level.
What if for some countries the best population size - the one that provides the best quality of life for its citizens - is close to the current one, not larger? What if for some countries the most favorable population size is below the one they currently have?
It has the implied assumption that a functioning economy is linked strongly to the number of people of working age relative to the number of people outside it, and part of the population decline comes with an inversion of the population pyramid where an increasing proportion of the population is retired.
As such, even if there is a "best" population size below the current population size, you will face massive upheaval if the decline toward that size isn't happening slowly enough that you can offset that either with technology, temporary workers, or just grit.
You also have no reason to assume the drop will stop at whatever level you want, and so you will see even countries where people do think some reduction is fine start to aggressively compete to hold on people or attract immigrants at whatever level they feel will give them a soft-enough landing and then stabilization.
E.g. you can look to Italy over the coming years. Italy is already in population decline, yet has a government many consider far-right and anti-immigrant - clearly, Italy is not ready to loosen up immigration to stem it yet, and is willing to accept even increasing the rate of its population decline while trying to address the underlying fertility rate.
Personally, I expect to see a major change in policy from Italy once this really starts to bite, but their current unemployment rate will still buffer them for a few more years (and once it drops, it might well create a slight rebound, but even if that happens, it's unlikely to do more than slow the decline slightly, and won't address the labour market for more than two decades).
If I'm right, you should start to see the tone change once the unemployment rate drops a bit further and pressure from businesses in need of labour starts affecting Italian politics more, followed first by increased attempts at appealing to European migrants first, with e.g. tax breaks and the like, before they eventually give in and start rolling back the restrictions on non-EU migration.
> We're about to hit increasingly aggressive competition both to hold on to people, and to attract immigrants as more and more countries start getting bitten by demographic shifts.
And yet we are seeing more and more walls (literally and figuratively) that rich countries put in the way. Even for "desirable" people immigrating and naturalizing in a western country the whole process is quite degrading, all the quotas and queues for H1B/Green cards, constant threat of deportation if person lost a job and couldn't find another one in very short time period, arbitrary delays and constrains on getting citizenship, etc.
Because it hasn't started to bite enough yet for the most desirable targets, coupled with politicians that have painted themselves into corners and are struggling to find ways out.
E.g. in the UK, the last several Conservative governments have on one hand presented themselves as tough on immigration, with deals to send asylum seekers to Rwanda (a few hours worth of applicants is all the deal can accommodate), putting them on barges (another few hours worth), turning back boat refugees, etc., while at the same time presiding over the largest increase in net migration in British history.
Predictably the conflict between that image and reality is starting to cause problems for them, and while immigration numbers are still high enough despite a process that is intentionally hostile, eventually the supply of people wanting to come will dip below the numbers that still allow the UK to be selective about whom to accept.
We've already gotten a slight taste of that with the sharp dip in EU/EEA migrants, who, as it turns out don't feel the UK is worth it enough to go through the immigration process vs. just showing up the way we could before (I'm in the UK with EU/EEA Settled status), and it's caused assorted groups complaining..
It will take until you have broader labour shortages before you see the real pressure though - especially countries buffered by unemployment will be able to put it off a bit longer, but when it hits, it will hit hard and just raising fertility rates won't be sufficient, because it has a lag of 2 decades of worsening conditions before it even starts reversing the drop in the labour supply.
It's going to increasingly become a challenge. China's population is contracting.
i think the economic differences and the population density still make immigration a viable strategy for some time to come, despite contracting population everywhere.
the future will be that the population in every larger city will consists of least a quarter chinese and indian (and eventually african as well).
It will be a viable strategy for decades, you're right, in as much as UN population projections don't show an actual global population decline until around 2100 or so.
The challenges that will bring, though, is policy, and which countries are attractive enough to "sit back" vs. being forced to offer increasingly attractive incentives, and where it will cause substantial political complications.
E.g. China is notorious for it being near impossible to permanently settle as an immigrant. I expect that aside from increasingly drastic measures to try to bring the fertility rate back up you'll see their first attempts be to entice the diaspora back to China, secondly an increase in rhetoric about One China towards Taiwan, and only well after those attempts to loosen up visa requirements for foreigners with no ancestral ties to China.
We'll see the return of diasporas increasingly becoming a problem for countries that has come to rely on certain immigrant flows.
A lot of countries will find political tension between forces wanting to more actively court immigrants vs. anti-immigrant groups becoming increasingly challenging and a major economic issue.
> To a degree this resource can be stolen from other countries, via immigration. But this only works to a degree and at a larger scale it is still a zero sum game
It can actually be a net negative for both the home country and host country of the immigrants. The home country may lose some of their more ambitious members. And there is a significant cost to a host country that is now accommodating a potentially large number of people from faraway places with vastly different cultures. (Some may ignore or deny these costs, but they're real and being felt in many ways e.g. in the US right now.)
> And there is a significant cost to a host country that is now accommodating a potentially large number of people from faraway places with vastly different cultures. (Some may ignore or deny these costs, but they're real and being felt in many ways e.g. in the US right now.)
You are being down-voted, but I'm curious what are the costs of having _legal, desirable_ immigrants in the US in your opinion? (because I would assume that OP meant specifically that group when writing "this resource can be stolen from other countries, via immigration").
I also worked with a 60+ woman who once said at the lunch table "if you're a 35 year old guy and single there's something seriously wrong with you". Maybe you would have hit it off with her.
I'm one of those. Very shy even into my late 20s. Then my Dad got sick so I was his support for nearly 20 years. Life went by and now it's too late to have kids. No woman of child bearing age wants to date a middle-aged man 10 years her senior. So really why bother even trying to have a relationship at this point?
Plenty of women wants to date a guy 10, 20 or even 30 years her senior. Especially if he's financially secure, wants a stable relationship, is reasonably healthy and treats her well.
If you have your life in order, all you have to do is to look in the right places. Those places exist in any country, but if you're a man like that and look on dating sites for Thailand or the Philippines, you will find 10 women that want to marry you within an hour or two.
However, if you're broke, don't have a decent job and have serious health problems, you may indeed by out of luck.
Not to give OP fuel for his fire, but just to be real because I am so sick of seeing these misleading comments all over the internet:
It's not just finding a woman who is willing. It's finding a woman who is a quality person that you have an attraction to that is willing.
When you are a woman who is sane, smart, have your life together, and is decent looking, you have many choices for a partner. Many of these woman can easily find high quality men who are their own age and have the same life situation.
So while yes, it does happen that the 50 yr old guy meets the amazing 33 yr old woman. Far more often than not, the amazing 33 yr old woman meets to amazing 33 yr old guy.
Unless you are down with divorced w/kids. Then it gets much easier. But you will be second to her kids.
> So while yes, it does happen that the 50 yr old guy meets the amazing 33 yr old woman. Far more often than not, the amazing 33 yr old woman meets to amazing 33 yr old guy.
This is absolutely true, well at least if you include those amazing people who met even earlier than 33. Amazing people tend to have options whether they are male, female or even other.
Those less amazing (the remaining 60-80%, depending on who's counting), often have to lower their standards or expectations in some way, unless they're lucky and find a special soulmate. Indeed, if someone is 35+ and still single, chances are their expectations are not aligned with what they themselves have to offer.
I've been there myself. Only when I decided that I did NOT want to remain single for the rest of my life and became serious about finding a partner did that change. And it changed virtually overnight.
Maybe just having a friend; as I've said elsewhere in the thread, I never really got the whole marriage/kids idea myself, but perhaps now that I'm also aging out of childbearing age, dating will be less complicated once any expectation of children are out of the picture.
Maybe They haven't found the one who they want and or wants them ..too maybe they aren't into women. With society being more accepting of same sex situations I'm pretty sure I read the number of those who identify something other then straight has increased.
Frankly, I never really got why people wanted children in the first place, so this turnabout is amusing. Perhaps you can ask some of these people that you are close with as to their reasoning.
It's the simplest answer. I find life to be worth living, I am grateful I have life and it's the most meaningful to me to be able to give life to someone else and try to make it as good and meaningful for them as possible.
And it can be so fun. I just taught my 3 year old to ride a bike and for the first time today we went for a bike ride along the boardwalk, each on our bikes. I had a pretty amazing single life but I would be hard-pressed to think of anything that matched how much fun this was for me.
I suppose we come at life from very different perspectives, shaped by our culture and our family. It is very hard for me imagine how someone must feel about their life and the world to say "nope, it ends with me." I know people do it but... I don't envy that starting point.
When it ends, it ends, and that's it regardless of how many others you created who will now go on to face their own ends. I get that somehow people are able to live in denial of the ultimate extinction of their being, but I never really seemed to be able to get the hang of that. To each their own.
This sounds familiar, perhaps you and I have discussed it before.
My life matters to me as a vehicle for what truly matters: if my descendants are thriving, and my values are upheld, whether I am physically here once I've contributed to it, is completely irrelevant to me.
I will fight to live as long and as well as I can, but only because that increases my opportunity to contribute what I want. Merely "existing" is not my highest value and therefore is not the thing I worry about solely.
It's certainly possible, but I've seen others here express the same sentiment. Another poster once posted a quite insightful comment about Nietzsche that really described a lot of the problems of nihilism that captured the feelings that I've had since realizing the unreality of religion at a young age, so I'm not exactly alone even if I am a bit of an outlier.
It goes back further than that. "To be or not to be" is indeed THE question, or rather THE choice, especially if you have the type of personality that tends to lead to an existential crisis at some point in your life.
In the end, as far as I can tell, there is no obvious "meaning" in life beyond what we decide to attach meaning to. And "to be" is a prerequisite for most objectives we may attach it to.
Having offspring can be seen as an extension to this. It is to decide that "beeing" will go on even after you as an individual dies.
I mean, I'm not trying to be bleak, but do you have any evidence that any of the religions out there can deliver on their promises? Like I'd be somewhat inclined to listen, but extraordinary claims and all that...
I am not the one you're asking but I was born an atheist and discovered religion as an adult, through intellect. Here's my answer from that background.
Ready? The answer is "we don't know." There may be a Gd, there may not be. There may be meaning, there may not be. You can't really know either way.
The answer is that it doesn't matter. The question is what kind of life do you want to live. One that lives as if there's meaning or one that lives as if there isn't? I know my answer. If I get to the end and turns out the meaning was just something I made for myself, and that there's nothing special about my children and my values other than my deep affinity for them... that'd still be a pretty great life.
Evolution has equipped us with a pretty generous frontal cortex so we have a sort of escape hatch to reflect and decide on whether to act on our biological imperatives. Reduction of human beings to 'biological organisms' as if we're humping rabbits is no less weird.
We haven't escaped any biological imperative. We still have sex. The desire to have sex is the biological imperative that produces offspring, and we haven't lost that. It's because we invented birth control that now the desire to have sex is not enough. We need a desire to have kids. Natural selection will make that desire stronger over time.
> Natural selection will make that desire stronger over time.
Natural selection doesn't work like that.
There is no guarantee that traits appear because they are needed ; only that traits that somehow appear may spread if they are useful or associated with something else that is useful.
But don't we have that trait already in some form? Some people want kids, others don't. The traits that make a person more likely to want kids will become more common.
If we don't have such a trait and the decision to have kids is based entirely on the environment, then this evolution will be cultural instead of biological. Cultures that have more kids will replace those that don't.
My point is more theoretic that an actual reflection on what will actually happen, because I'm not better than the next person at predictions. Simply put: just because a species needs to change in order to adapt, doesn't mean they do. Geologic strata are littered with species that no longer exists.
As for culture, it is not a static thing, or indissociable from individuals. My grandmothers had 6 and 8 kids, most of my cousins have 0-2 kids. So considering my grandmothers' behaviour and my cousins', Are they from the same culture? Will people that reproduce more today convince their children to do the same?
In either analysis, it's really hard to use natural selection as a predictive tool.
We, or at least some of us, most definitely have such traits.
Holding newborn babies tend to have a quite obvious and equally instant hormonal effect on a lot of people. For some people, even a few such encounters may be enough to induce baby fever.
And there are other factors at play, too, that are also inheritable. Factors like impulse control, introversion / shyness, ambitiousness drive and tendency to magical /religious thinking may all affect the number of offspring one way or the other.
So all that is needed is a few generation of strong selection pressure for such traits, and we're back to overpopulation again being a much bigger threat than population collapse.
Even better, invent tools so we can still hump like rabbits but not be burdened with the results. Good stuff. Evolution gonna take a while to figure out a response.
Unless it already figured it out, and placed the solution in the gene pool. In that case, a few generations of natural selection is all that will be needed.
Does it not strike you as strange though that so many different nations / cultures are all seeing the same downward trend at the same time? There is something about it that feels like a biological imperative.
We have better things to do than hump like rabbits? We don’t need kids to work the farm, or to provide net positive muscle power input to the economy. We have machines for that.
>higher rates than before (welcome hookup culture)
Got any source to back that up? All surveys I have seen point to younger generations having less sex, fewer relationships, and even just drinking less than their ancestors. Remember, the boomers were the "free love" hippies and then STDs became a serious concern, and we decided we should warn kids about consequences of sex.
A fire has no cortex whatsoever, and yet if fire did not continue doing what fire does in order to stay fire - turn things that are "not fire" into itself- it would cease to exist altogether. That's all there is to it. There is no big picture.
edit: I expected apathy at best from a comment this deep in a thread. Now, granted, HN does not stand for Hard Nihilism, but four downvotes with zero explanations in under an hour suggests there is an incurious hostility toward the view that people (myself included) are, like fire, essentially just echoes of thermodynamics.
> That's all there is to it. There is no big picture.
Even if it is correct (which you haven’t tried to support, just claiming that you know best), how is it relevant? If there’s no bigger picture then what’s wrong with going extinct which should push us to procreate? The comparison to fire - the human population is the highest it’s ever been and still increasing so it doesn’t seem like we are “going out“, and if that was happening the collapse of civilisation would lead to the loss of the ability to mass manufacture birth control and loss of the medical systems supporting them at some point, and the population would go up again after that, wouldn’t it? Fire runs out of fuel, but human food grows on trees - less humans leads to more ecosystem regeneration which could support more humans.
> "an incurious hostility toward the view that people (myself included) are, like fire, essentially just echoes of thermodynamics."
I thought we were “just“ hydraulic systems? Just LLMs? Just clockwork? Humans are just {recent scientific discovery of the era} is an interesting view on its own but is it relevant to the thread? "We are just thermodynamic systems ... so we should reproduce"?
OP is saying that we have a complex brain which allows us to reflect on our biological impulses and choose whether or not to answer the instinct to reproduce. I'm arguing instead that we - as complex frontal-cortex-having organisms - have no more choice than fire does whether to make more of ourselves. And abstractly our existence follows the same flowchart as that of a fire but, as the kids say these days, "with extra steps." Our integrity and thus identity floats upon a process of degrading complex configurations of energy into simpler, uniform ones.
If fire were to gain sentience and therefore know what it was up to, this would not change its essential prerogative to keep doing it, in order to be able to keep doing it.
I'm older and also never wanted kids. There was a brief moment in my 20s where I would have been ok with it, but the relationship I was in didn't workout and that was that. Now I've been married a long time, and we had the no kid conversation on date one. Instead we rescue dogs and are in the process of moving and semi-retiring in a small coastal town in Italy.
My desire for not having kids is rooted in my own childhood. My parents had me at 19, we were poor and struggled for much of my early life. My mom used to say, "don't have kids until after college unless you want to work at McDonalds". And, for better or worse, my drive became for financial security above all else.
I dunno, I grew up in a family of 5 kids, and it just never really occurred to me to not have them. I think my greatest regret in life is going to be having only one :/
However, I have no issues with people that don’t want them. To each their own.
Honestly, it’s a relief when there’s other kids to play with him. I love having 3 kids in the house at the same time and to just guide them in their play, instead of having to _be_ the playmate. I’m pretty young, but I do not have the kind of imagination required to keep that up for a day :P
If he’s been outside running around the street with his friends all day it hasn’t cost me anything and the evenings are so much easier/relaxed.
I remember that being the same for me, except that I always had people to play with around, because they were living in the same house.
For me, I consider bringing a new human life into existence to be one of the most net positive things a human being can do. It's also one of the most reliably net positive things.
Economists have very roughly estimated the value of a human life at around $10,000,000 these days, and there are reasons to suspect this is a vast underestimate for my kids in particular. The total cost to me as a parent to rear this golden goose? Somewhere around $100,000 total, spread over the course of 18 years. What a bargain!
There are of course things one can do which are worth even more, but it's exceedingly hard to reliably become a billionaire, or even to found a billion dollar company. But any old schmuck can nut inside a woman and force push eight figures worth of bliss into the source code of reality!
People nowadays focus on career till 30 and after 30 (when you loose that naive optimistic outlook on life) realize that having kids is too much of a risky obligation - you don't have any guarantee that you will remain healthy enough to sustain family till they grow up and that your kids will be born healthy. Also, life has gotten quite expensive.
My father had 10 siblings and my mother had seven. I had seven siblings myself with over 30 cousins on both sides of my family. I have four children and my and most of my siblings each have six children or so. My mother has about 24 grandkids at the last count Maybe. Further, I live on the same street as two of my sisters and I have another sister that lives down the street, with my brother living 3 mi away. Only two siblings live out of town.
My children routinely play with and enjoy being with their cousins. My daughter has a hard time making friends but she says it's okay because at least she has her cousins.
I have had a very rich experience with many of my cousins and I think these cousins are growing up even closer together both physically and emotionally. Would highly recommend the lifestyle.
Large families are such a blessing when you get older. Kids are an awful lot of work for the first about 10 years but boy are they awesome every year after that. When my grandmother is interacting with her children and grandchildren at reunions it's like she's holding court, the queen of an empire.
This is the dream for us. We reverted to Catholicism after it became apparent that the secular world was incompatible with us, then eventually found our way to a high fertility parish. It’s incredible. Kids everywhere. Average family size is 5-6 kids. Really hoping our kids choose to remain in this lifestyle and we get to enjoy dozens of grandkids.
I initially read this comment to mean “we wanted larger family, the secular world doesn’t do that, we became religious and we’re happy”. Am I understanding that correctly? If so, this strikes me as a very novel argument in favor of religion, and is more convincing to me than most others.
I do wonder what I’d say if/when people question the fervor of my belief though, if I truly converted just for a community with larger families. I imagine “I believe in big families” wouldn’t cut it.
> I initially read this comment to mean “we wanted larger family, the secular world doesn’t do that, we became religious and we’re happy”. Am I understanding that correctly?
Kinda. We were open to believing in God. But the start of our journey was just realizing the secular world had nothing to offer us. Then we met a religious homeschooling family w/ 5 kids and they gave us a glimpse of what was possible. So we started swimming in that direction and it just kept getting better the farther out we swam.
> I do wonder what I’d say if/when people question the fervor of my belief though, if I truly converted just for a community with larger families. I imagine “I believe in big families” wouldn’t cut it.
Here’s the thing: if you’re not a militant atheist and you start spending a lot of time around sincerely religious people who you like, you’ll end up believing sincerely yourself. Since you’re secular, I’ll explain it like this: we’re evolved to cohere around a shared system of belief and the appropriate mental machinery will kick in as part of becoming embedded in a religious community. And that’s what I used to believe. But now I know those were just the breadcrumbs I needed to find my way.
Oof, my experience is the exact opposite. I was raised Catholic, and my family attended mass every week. I realized I didn't believe in god in my early teens. For many years after that I really wished I could believe, tried to believe. My parents had me enrolled in CCD (for those of you not Catholic, that's basically the Catholic version of what's colloquially known as "Sunday School") through 8th grade. I participated in some of my church's youth groups, and was friends with quite a few religious people.
But it just didn't work. I wasn't a militant atheist; I just questioned things, and was frustrated when my elders would shut me down and hand-wave my questions away.
I gave up in my early 20s. That was 20+ years ago. I'm still an atheist. I don't have a problem with religious people, unless they try to force their beliefs on others (especially when they try to use the political and legal process to do so). But most folks seem to just want to live and let live. But I no longer think there's something wrong with me, or long to be "normal" like my peers and believe in a god. I can't imagine ever believing, regardless of what communities I find myself a member of.
Questioning things is how one truly reaches God. Your elders failed you.
Some people just hold beliefs because they were born with them, not because they necessarily believe in them. I know these types because I've lived my whole life around many of them. Thanks to them, I've come to despise the modern concept of organizated religions, though I still value religion itself.
This is why I tend to view modern religious leaders as parasites. They convince other people that they [the other people] can't understand religion on their own,that religion is mysterious and only those well versed may speak on the art.
By convincing people of such things, said people then outsource the job of thinking to those select few, and you're left with mindless brains who can't figure out the answers to a child's questions about God.
I ask myself questions, I always do, and I try to look for answers, for each question answered brings me one step closer to God, and by extension, brings me some measure of peace in life.
> you start spending a lot of time around sincerely religious people who you like, you’ll end up believing sincerely yourself
Interestingly, this is what turned me into an atheist at a rather young age. A friend invited me to a childrens' religious/social group wherein they explained that most science is actually incorrect; the earth is only 6000 years old, evolution is a lie created by the evil Darwin... that sort of thing. In my head, their version of Christianity fell apart and the rest quickly followed.
Yeah, you thought they were idiots and formed antibodies against their belief system. But there are sophisticated religious people. And IMO sophisticated religious people are much more likely to have pondered deeply the ineffability of existence and accepted that it is incomprehensible except by faith. Whereas atheists just want to point out that it can’t be turtles all the way down and then become suddenly disinterested in the question beyond that.
Oh, I got the academic, Jesuit-style teaching from my Catholic church and the decade or so of CCD I was compelled to attend as well. I actually spent years thinking rather deeply about it, but that doesn't mean it stuck - I suppose some of us just aren't capable of believing.
You do remind me of one of my favorite Douglas Adams quotes though:
> “Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
I'm imagining a dialog in which I ask, "So why does it all exist then?" And you reply, "Well, I'm not sure, no-one is. But it's not God." To which I respond, "My brother in faith!" and embrace you. After that we ponder the ineffable over a few pints.
“suppose some of us just aren't capable of believing.”
That’s such an obvious fallacy, you should do yourself a favor and introspect how such an absurd idea came into your head. Who put it there?
To see it’s absurd, consider, have you ever changed your mind about something? If yes, then it’s obviously possible and maybe even likely that you can and will one day change your views on divinity? If course it’s possible, and actually quite common. And yes, it comes as a surprise.
> Kinda. We were open to believing in God. But the start of our journey was just realizing the secular world had nothing to offer us.
I'm curious how you interprete "secular"? Cause it seems you're setting it up to mean anti-religion which is certainly not what the usual definition is.
> Here’s the thing: if you’re not a militant atheist and you start spending a lot of time around sincerely religious people who you like, you’ll end up believing sincerely yourself.
I won't question your own experience, but you're being way too broad here. I know many people who are not "militant atheists" but still don't believe in organized religion. I also have a lot of friends whose families are extremely religious - meaning they're around them all the time - none of them has been pushed or convinced to join. They just don't observe prayer etc compared to their friends.
> Since you’re secular, I’ll explain it like this: we’re evolved to cohere around a shared system of belief and the appropriate mental machinery will kick in as part of becoming embedded in a religious community. And that’s what I used to believe. But now I know those were just the breadcrumbs I needed to find my way.
This sounds more like a self-justification than something actually supported by science. Please note I'm not trying to "religion shame you". Just curious. :)
That’s awesome. I have good news and bad news — my family is extremely Christian, we were missionaries to Turkey for ten years, I’ve converted people, etc. It is a very close community, and I do think the community aspect will just keep getting better for you. At the same time, different people will feel differently about what truth is. I’m agnostic now, because I feel like I would be lying to my family if I said I still believe it all. The mismatch in belief does cause some stress sometimes, even though it’s still mostly a sweet community that I love to have in my life. Your kids might feel the same in 20 years. I’m sure they’ll still love you dearly anyways, just be sure that your pastor/church/community will still accept them as well, if they do walk away from the faith.
> we’re evolved to cohere around a shared system of belief and the appropriate mental machinery will kick in as part of becoming embedded in a religious community
So brainwashing-lite? Man I'm glad whatever "appropriate mental machinery" that was in my head kicked in and got me the fuck away from communities like this.
We prolly would have ended up at a similar parish or Orthodox, but finding our parish was a happy accident. I don’t have enough experience to tell you how to find something similar in another city, but if I had to guess, it’d be something like: join the Catholic homeschool community in your area and pay attention to which parishes people are commuting to. Other strong indicators are probably some amount of Latin in the masses, strong traditional music program, etc.
Are atheists only "militant" in your point of view? As an atheist I can say that the only way for me to believe in gods is to simply fake it. This believing "at will" is rather interesting concept, but I honestly can't comprehend it.
It’s like love. You fall in love, you fall in love with God. The rest is just garbled mumbling to yourself and others. And like love, it is your experience of it and your view of your beloved that matters, who cares what others think. This is how it is with actual belief. You experience something that shatters the illusion. Once that happens, you belong to God bothered people. And yes, those who have never experienced love also think love is “just chemical processes in the body”. But it’s not, otherwise they’d bottle that chemical process and make a zillion selling it. (They try with drugs but is just ain’t the same thing, you know?)
If falling in love with God conveys truth/reality, then how do you reconcile two people who are both "in love with God" but have incompatible beliefs about God?
I know a person who fell in love with a woman that didn't exist. Person A (my friend) was straight. Person B was gay and fell in love with Person A, and then created Person C (fictitious person) with the hopes that Person A would grow to love Person C, and eventually Person B would tell the truth but that Person A's love was pure enough that he didn't care about the deception and wanted to be with Person B.
Hell of a story, but the reason I mention it is because Person A falling in love with Person C didn't make Person C real. How does that work with God?
you do not have beliefs about the one you love. seeing truth/reality is when you stop cheating on the one you love. so love becomes real when your hearts sees clear. and since this is not “fiction” but rather the Reality of your Subjective Experience that is the only thing you ‘know’ for a ‘near at hand, within sight, felt by heart’. Love always tames Reason. whether imaginal love, temporal love, or divine love. The former are shattered when they are subjected to ‘external reality’.
The acid test of true love for God is that Reality confirms it.
This strikes close to home. Until you've experienced love, you cannot understand it. Doubly so for the purest forms of love, love above human love.
I wager we avoid that kind of love because it boils down to "sacrifice yourself for the good that's outside you". In human terms it's something like parents sacrificing themselves for their children, or friends sacrificing themselves for their friends[1]. Losing something painfully that cannot be replaced in the world. A world where we have all the time, money, internet to distract us from hardship & suffering that brings us closer to goodness.
I personally didn't believe in God until I received a tiny part of his love for myself.
don’t you believe that for a second. God does not deal with tiny graces. it’s just a process and then it becomes overwhelming and all resistance is gone. all of it.
that doesn’t provide the real thing - it is a ‘Fire’ destroys the person. God’s Love is a ‘Light’ builds you up and makes you strong and vital. You really have to experience it - and read Pascal’s wager in the light of his expressing a subjective personal understanding of spiritual experience not a logical formula for converting non-experienced. (Pascal got a hit of Love from God not a hit of opium.)
How would you know without experiencing it? The experience of joy someone else gets from anything- physical activity, their own religion, love, drugs (however fleeting) is as valid as yours.
it’s a matter of duration not external evaluation. i say the “real thing” since that comes to you rather than you affecting a state of mind-body. there is no street corner for someone to deal you that drug. this is the fundamental difference that is discernible from without. you can see the source of one type of bliss (and you can buy it) and the other one is subject to endless debate except by those who are blissed /out!
> I do wonder what I’d say if/when people question the fervor of my belief though, if I truly converted just for a community with larger families. I imagine “I believe in big families” wouldn’t cut it.
There's nothing wrong with that. Nobody should have a problem with you wanting to be a part of a church community, even if you aren't a "real" believer.
People just want to be part of a community. Most of the time the only available open communities are church communities, so that's better than nothing.
Yes, I totally agree. I'm simply saying that you don't have to be uber religious to be a part of a church community. A good church should make you feel accepted no matter who you are.
There are perhaps exceptions, e.g. if you are intentionally trying to harm the church or members of it, but otherwise the church should accept you as you are -- "true" believer or not.
In practice you will probably find a lot of "bad" churches, so you'll probably have to shop around a little bit.
> Nobody should have a problem with you wanting to be a part of a church community, even if you aren't a "real" believer.
I really appreciate this view, but certainly some people do have a problem with it. I think it would be especially awkward if you spend a significant amount of your life there, raise kids, etc, but never claim the religion is true. It almost sounds like a cringe-comedy movie
If your values and actions align with the religious community, and you're okay being around people who are religious/spiritual, I believe it can be mutually beneficial.
If your values and actions don't align with the religious community, then you should still be accepted, but if you don't have belief, then it's unlikely you'll stay for long.
^ note: by "should" I mean that, at least in my view, a "real" Christian should be accepting and not judge others. In practice nobody lives up to this, but it can at least inform how you should feel, e.g. if you feel judged it's saying more about others than it says about you.
^ double note: "real" Christian is incredibly hard to define. The Bible can be interpreted any way you want. Ultimately what guides me is trying to do what I think is right, using the Bible as one source of information.
Absolutely agree with everything you said. The biblical Jesus sets a high standard that is impossible to live up to. Even though I don’t believe now, I love people that try to live to that standard, and I aspire to as well
Except the whole dooming most of humanity to external lakes of fire. And maybe terrorizing kids with the threat that they'll commit the unforgivable sin, and be destined for said lake of fire
Err, yeah I'm a little skeptical of parents who want lots of children. I'm in my twenties now, but I was raised Catholic, I have twelve siblings, and I was homeschooled until my senior year. There were several issues:
- Me and my siblings all feel like our parents loved the "identity" of being parents and having lots of children, but when it came down to the brass tax of actually caring for our emotional needs, they were entirely absent. This was such a large rift that almost all of us intentionally don't have close relationships with our parents.
- On top of emotional neglect, there was inevitable physical neglect. One brother clearly had autism but our parents never had the time or finances to get him treated appropriately. Two siblings weren't able to get the braces they needed for their teeth as kids and had to get jaw surgery as adults. Two of my siblings were injured in severe accidents growing up that would've been avoided if a parent had been watching out.
- The parents of these families go around narcissistically glowing with all the social credit for being "superhero parents" when realistically the majority of the labor falls upon the oldest siblings. Me and my two sisters effectively raised all of our younger siblings with our mother being pregnant so often, and father working full-time. Our parents never recognized how much work we put in, and as we transitioned to adulthood it took a lot of work to establish healthy relationships with our younger siblings where we didn't feel taken advantage of (the younger siblings had parental expectations of us for years afterward).
- The lack of socialization from being homeschooled really came back to bite us in the ass. Some of my siblings got (cyber) bullied after transitioning to the real world. Some simply never were able to make the adjustment to talking to normal people, and some are still really struggling. I was able to get "socialized" and now appear like a normal SWE at a large tech company but I'm very lucky.
So....be very careful around these families and their values. A lot of times having lots of kids are a narcisstic vision from the parents, rather than a true desire to take care of a lot of people.
According to the sociological data, the same happens in smaller families, but the support structure is worse, so people are worse off. Life is challenging!
Yeah, that's def not our plan (nor is it even possible at this point). But, for what it's worth, I don't see many families with > 6-7 kids, so I think your notion of what is meant by "want a lot of kids" is skewed by your experience.
I mean, is it? I'd say anything above 2 (the number of parents around usually) is "a lot of kids". Anything above 2 and you start running into the problems I listed. In this society, I think most people who want more than three or so are narcissists who want to be praised as super-parents and/or highly impractical (or just happen to be extremely wealthy). My whole point is that, there's a fun fantasy around having lots of children but it comes with huge cons for the kids themselves in today's society.
Not necessarily. My parents also both have quite a few siblings, and aren't particularly religious. They were born in the 1930s when it wasn't unusual.
I may have a couple of dozen first cousins, I don't really know, but they are geographically distant. I haven't met one since childhood, and I can't remember getting along with them very well.
this is a funny question. Avoiding tangents, for all intents and purposes, I'm secular. Though I've only had two children with no intention of having more, I was raised Southern Baptist, the oldest of six. I love our big family. My mother was one of seven, and all her siblings have many children as well. I look back fondly on our holiday gatherings and miss them dearly. my aunts were guardian angels through so many difficult times. But as much as I want those big family gatherings and the overall dynamic, I couldn't imagine going back to Southern Baptism as a means to see them perpetuated. It would be nice if there were a natalist "movement" (for lack of better word) that was more or less secular (without being self-aggrandizing and delusional ala effective altruism).
Yeah, wanting a secular natalist movement is where I was for a while. But then the truth of it hits you at some point: it will never exist. The secular way of life exalts the individual, but raising a large family is about subduing your own desires and devoting yourself to something more important than yourself. Well, guess who already does that: religious people.
Wow, that is not my experience at all. I think in some ways that's perhaps a very US-centric view, even though I'd still consider that a flawed way at looking at secularism in the US. Most of the developed world is fairly secular (even among those with religious beliefs), and extreme individualism is not as common as you seem to think.
I do wonder how common your attitude is among religious people, though. If it's common, that would explain a few things...
I was raised in a very religious household, but I left the fairly young. I spent the next couple decades around a large amount of both religious and secular people. It’s been my anecdotal experience that religious people are exponentially more likely to volunteer and donate to help others. I’ve seen yards cleaned, homes rebuilt, soup kitchens hosted, mobile laundry services and free shoes/clothes for the homeless, church closet giveaways (basically a free yard sale for the community), hundreds of doctors filling a convention center volunteering their time and money to treat people for free,… I don’t doubt non-religious people are doing these things, but I don’t think it’s at the same scale, and the secular nonprofits that are offering this kind of help often skim a lot off the top to pay beefy corporate salaries.
The secular way of life is an individual way of life, in the sense that it’s different for everyone. Some choose rugged individualism, some choose to devote themselves to their community.
I can find a small army of secular leftists who subdue their own desires and have devoted themselves to something more important than themselves - namely, overthrowing the capitalist system.
They don't make many babies though, because they've subdued their desires to reproduce and devoted themselves to the good of the planet ;)
I'm not sure money really matters that much. Most of our friends are well-educated but solidly middle class. If two income families were more common, then most of them would probably be upper middle class. Our family is upper middle class. I am self employed but don't have significant net worth other than my business.
It’s awesome if you can afford it. I wouldn’t mind having 3 kids if each one of them could have their own space in the house, if I could help them develop life skills, and give them all the love and time they need. With large families it feels like many of the children are neglected. In a modern world either you don’t have the money or you don’t have the time.
Time doesn't scale. If you have eight kids and a full time job out of the home, it will be incredibly difficult to deeply get to know, support, etc them as individuals. A common observation is that in families with that many kids, the older kids raise the younger kids.
It probably functions much better if everyone works together in a family business.
I was lucky that my wife convinced me to move close to her family (it would have never occurred to me.) Now we live just a few doors down from her brother who's got 4 kids, and we have 2. Watching the cousins intermingle is an amazing and unique experience.
It's kinda sad but it's also obvious that people are majorly missing out. On having kids, on living close to family, on all of it.
Ironically, this is evolution in action. The folks that "remember" how to have a family and raise kids have an uncontested claim to the future. The "it's too hard to have kids" crew is selecting against themselves, evolutionary speaking. That won't last.
That would only make sense if the issue was biological and not socioeconomic. No one's getting selected out when the issue isn't a biological predisposition to avoiding procreation.
A better way to frame it is: which group is more likely to propagate their genes and have more ancestors 100/1,000/10,000 years in the future? Is it the group that can afford to have more children and successfully raise them, or the group that can't afford large families?
It doesn't matter if the cause is biological or socioeconomic. Just because humans have science, medicine, economics, etc. doesn't mean evolution has "stopped".
I'd add, propagate their /memes/, which originally meant the ideas (and values) that get transmitted through personal connections (not necessarily in gif format). The primal way you get your education, religion, values, etc. is through your parents.
It is biological. Before birth control the desire to have sex was enough to make sure enough kids were had. Socioeconomic circumstances didn't really matter. Unless you were on the brink of starvation, you wanted to have sex. Now that that's no longer enough to produce kids, we need a new biological reason to make kids. That could be resistance to birth control or a stronger natural desire to have kids, not just sex.
That's not a biological reason to make kids. That's just people who decide they want them. It's not at all clear that's a hereditary trait. If it's not, evolution has nothing to do with it.
The Romans had a contraceptive plant they used so much it became extinct.
Not to mention there is evidence of infanticide in early human societies. Indeed, it's been postulated that post-partum depression evolved to make getting rid of a potentially problematic baby (e.g. during times of famine) easier emotionally.
So 'birth control',in the sense of "ways to have sex but not make more humans" has more or less always existed - even in times of relatively high fertility. Don't agree that current low birth rates can be entirely explained by the pill.
In the ancestral environment, kids "just happened". There were people who specifically tried to have more children, but they would only have a small advantage over the vast majority of accidentally made children.
Fast forward to modernity. Now, children are only being born to people who specifically choose to do so. A small change in socioeconomics accidentally privileges people with a biological quirk.
I genuinely haven’t met anyone who deeply wanted children and then didn’t because of “socioeconomics”.
I met plenty of ppl who talk about the climate or cost of housing as the reason for other ppl but I never knew of anyone making a decision this way. You know someone?
By socioeconomics, I'm referring to all those different factors.
The point is that "I don't want to have children because I'm worried about the impact of climate change" (social) or "I don't want to have children because I think it'll be too expensive" (economic) is not caused by biology and thus there is no selecting such concerns out of the gene pool.
Not even mentioning that evolution doesn't even meaningfully work at these short timescales. Modern humans are essentially identical to ~40,000 years ago, simply not enough time and pressure for evolution to do its thing.
I see. I didn’t mean literal genetic evolution. Cultural if you will.
Parents who fail to instill love and desire of family into their kids won’t get to be grandparents. A few decades ago maybe you could take it for granted “everyone ends up having kids” now it obviously is a dead end unless you really help your kids through it. It feels to me like the next generation will have parents who will be intentional about this value. Others won’t bother having kids to begin with.
I don't think so, their kids are not robots that can be programmed, they will still choose based on if/when they think they're able to provide for kids.
It'd take regression back to a society where women are considered to have no value outside of being child factories, for parents to be able to indoctrinate their kids into reproducing with no concern for how good of a life they can actually give those kids.
On a less extreme note I do think parents can instill less individualistic/materialistic/extractive ideals in their children; I think these things - more the socio than the economic - are the main drivers of lower birth rates as evidenced by the fact that even rich people aren’t having kids.
> The point is that "I don't want to have children because I'm worried about the impact of climate change" (social) or "I don't want to have children because I think it'll be too expensive" (economic) is not caused by biology
How do you know that? Are those really the reasons, or is the underlying reason "I don't really feel an urge to want kids, so I'm using this reason to justify it"?
Evolution works slowly, but that's because most traits have fairly minimal benefits. Marginally better eyesight might mean a 2% better chance of procreating. Assuming there's some genetic factor for "emotional desire to have children regardless of the circumstances", the chance of procreation rate for that is rapidly approaching 100%.
It's obviously far more complicated than that - it will be an interesting question for future biologists - if there are any!
The people who "deeply want children" are going to do it anyway. I think the majority of people to whom this discussion apples, have vague ideas that kids "would be nice", but simply don't prioritize it enough to overcome the said socioeconomic hurdles.
So inasmuch as they are just deciding not to accept the necessary tradeoffs (e.g. move somewhere cheaper and less appealing) it is a bit of a disingenuous excuse or self delusional. However I still think it is fair to point out that the higher cost floor on kids simply makes it lower ROI.
I think we should also recognize the the generation in question might have difficulty with relationships. Having kids means finding a partner bought into the idea too and taking the leap. It seems people aren't figuring that out until much later.
While evolution might be a stretch here, this definitely is natural selection, just not as obvious as in other species.
The number of infants globally peaked around 2014-2017 and most of the future population growth will be due to larger generations replacing smaller ones.
The decline in population already started, but we're not seeing it thanks to how long we live.
That absolutely is not natural selection at all. Natural selection is the result of a random process. People deciding to have or not have kids is a conscious decision based on their life experiences.
Put another way, someone choosing to have kids isn't necessarily changing the balance between the child-bearing and child-free population in the world. If we could freeze the conditions that cause people to not want kids and keep them constant, we won't see the child-free "die out" and be replaced by people who only or predominantly want to have children. We'll just continue to see roughly the same proportion of people wanting and not wanting to have kids.
> People deciding to have or not have kids is a conscious decision based on their life experiences.
You're just looking at those who don't have children at all vs those who do, but that's not the whole story.
People don't decide these things in a vacuum - all over the western world statistics show that people have on average one child less than desired - mostly due to external pressures like availability of real estate and/or stable employment.
The environment simply doesn't support having more children, so those who do have them don't allow themselves to have more - much like animals which don't breed in captivity.
Countries like France largely staved off population decline because they decided to create an environment where people can have children as they naturally would.
its not socioeconomic, if it was then all my poor ancestors wouldn't have had so many kids. It is basically educated people who want the "best" future for their child overly thinking and not having kids.
> Ironically, this is evolution in action. The folks that "remember" how to have a family and raise kids have an uncontested claim to the future. The "it's too hard to have kids" crew is selecting against themselves, evolutionary speaking. That won't last.
You're only thinking about the "nature" part of "nature & nurture" though. Playing genetic pot-luck with your partner isn't the only way to have a legacy.
For example, think about all the spare time and energy that a non-child-rearing adult has to shape the cultural & technological future, and the impact that might have on the critical "nurture" element of your own child's life.
>The "it's too hard to have kids" crew is selecting against themselves, evolutionary speaking. That won't last.
That's not how it work. Evolution only selects for hereditary, biological factors, and even then, it's not a guarantee. "Stupid people" won't "die out" for the same reason.
Stupidity may actually be a factor that leads people to have more kids, so we may see more of it in the future :)
> Evolution only selects for hereditary, biological factors,
That's true. And we really don't know what the full list of such factors are hidden in our genes. Maybe many, maybe just a few. What's for sure, though, IF there are enough genes somewhere in the gene pool that lead people (women in particular) to want to have kids at an elevated rate, those are massively selected for right now.
Is the desire to have kids (as opposed to just sex) genetic? Given that pretty much everything about our personalities seems to be genetic to some extent, it seems pretty likely.
I think you can work this out backwards: if it was genetic, to a significant degree, then we wouldn't see it around. I believe that the largest predictor for the number of kids is socioeconomic circumstance, and culture.
Hereditary, biological factors only get selected via reproduction, so of course that’s how it works. “Stupid people” won’t “die out” as long as “they” keep having kids. Simple as that.
Do you really think that situation when one decides "it's too hard to have kids" never has hereditary, biological causes (including indirect)?
I think in vast majority of such situations hereditary factors are involved. It is really hard for me to imagine such situation that is completely independent from such factors.
That's not how evolution works, and it's not at all clear that a desire or lack of desire to have children is genetic or hereditary.
Yes, people who don't have kids are ending their genetic line when they die. But that doesn't mean that people who have kids are necessarily increasing the pool of people who want kids, percentage-wise.
> But that doesn't mean that people who have kids are necessarily increasing the pool of people who want kids, percentage-wise.
Yeah I imagine that large families tend to result in adults who are themselves likely to have more kids than average, but things can certainly shift. Among my extended family, for example: my grandmother was one of 11 kids, my mom was one of 7, my aunts and uncles largely had 3-4, and my cousins mostly have 2-3. This is a tight-knit crowd, with a strongly pro-family culture (Catholicism), living in proximity with regular get-togethers, neighboring lake cottages etc, but clearly not immune to broader trends.
Here in Finland apparently 50% of 35yo males, and 35% of 35yo females have no children. Fertility rate in 2023 was 1.26. In comparison, 2015 saw fertility rate of 1.65, and it has been below replacement level since 1969. 61% of under 40yo people live in rental apartments, this share having risen about 10% from 2010. Also, apartments built today are about 9 square meters smaller on average compares to 10 years ago. I live in a two bedroom apartment of about 55 squares, and today this would be a typical three bedroom apartment size.
Housing has certainly become more expensive and lower quality in larger cities where most jobs are, and working life has become more unstable. Still, in my opinion cultural factors are a more significant reason for falling birth rates.
One of my grandmothers, raised 3 children in a 1 bedroom house, alone (my grandfather died right after the youngest one was born).
I see people now-a-days complaining that they don't have money, or space, or time and I just scoff at them. We aren't having children because society stopped seeing laziness as a negative trait. Everyone around us keeps telling us "you need to take time to focus on yourself": which usually translates to spending the day browsing through Netflix and ordering food because you can't even be bothered to cook.
The question is: did ahe want to raise her children like that and would she have chosen to do it that way if she had a choice. People raise children that exist any way they can. People don't choose more children in a bad situation. We can conjecture your grandmother didn't think it was ideal because she didn't have any more children during a time where having more than 3 wouldn't have been strange.
Communities like HN and Slashdot are why I'm not religious any more. And they've also made me more conscious of my choices and their impact on the environment and future generations.
I agree that there are a large number of people who overthink having kids and so don't but i don't think not having children makes ones life 'empty' or 'unhappy'. Like everything, it really depends on an individual, some people thrive as parents, others really regret it.
I moved to Finland a few years ago, and I by and large agree with this analysis.
I had the interesting experience of moving straight to rural Pohjois-Pohjanmaa first, before moving to one of the big cities for work. It's for that reason that I'm mostly convinced it's cultural as well - most of our friends up there have 2 to 6 kids, despite making quite a bit less than us city slickers.
I'm just always wondering why the ratio is not more close 50% / 50% between males and woman?
On birth male/female ratio is pretty much 50/50. So at any stage (except older >70 because woman usually lives longer) ratio should be similar. LGBT are just 10% of population and distribution between gays/lesbians seems also 50/50.
Based on that if there is a single male there is another single female somewhere. The only reason that comes to my mind that more female migrated from Finland somewhere else or there is a big immigration of males into Finland.
There could be various other reasons as well. For instance, males tend to be older in a family than females, so the 35-year cut-off may be too early to consider. Additionally, there is the desirability factor, where the most successful or desirable males may have multiple 'families,' or at least children from multiple women
Yes, here married men are about 3.5 years older on average than their wives, and average age of mothers has been rising. So, a significant percentage of those men will become fathers after 35, reducing the gap between genders. I think you're right about the second point as well. 87% of single parents in Finland are women, and it's probably easier for the men to remarry and have more children at that point.
Nevertheless, it's also notable that the majority of long-term unemployed are men by a significant margin. Average educational outcomes of women are better than for men these days. There's a much higher incidence of young men than young women dropping out of education and work. These men are statistically much less likely to have children than others.
For a woman (with a working utero) to have a baby, all that is needed is ONE man willing to have unprotected sex with her. Those are not hard to find, especially if she's willing to lie about whether she's on the pill.
A man will generally only become a father if he finds a woman that WANTS to have children with him. If he's unattractive, chances are she will select someone else. Many women will prefer even married men over an unattractive, low status one.
3 bedrooms plus a bath on 55 sq/m sounds pretty tightly packed huh, mind sharing a listing? I’m quite curious as to the layout.
I’m in Belgium where we’ve historically built larger than necessary apartments (and houses) so there’s a decent amount of housing stock to raise a family in, but the tides have turned and new apartments are also mostly smaller 1 and 2 bedrooms targeting singles. The latter sucks because if you’re a young family looking for an affordable but modern place (read: energy efficient) your options are slim.
Actually I meant a three room apartment (three rooms + bathroom), so I guess that's really a two bedroom apartment using US definition. Anyway, here's an example of a three room apartment packed into 41.5 square meters excluding balcony.
My daughter is an only child but has eight cousins (that I know of, most are in her age range) but barely spends time with them. She's not missing out on anything because she has a large circle of friends her age, be it from the public playground when they only started walking, kindergarden or now the first three years in school. It takes some effort as a parent and tbh dumping-the-child-at-her-friends-and-vice-versa but she's got a much better social life than I had at her age and she'll continue that even though she'll move 4hrs away to the country-side this summer. Her best friend actually moved away two years ago, we still make sure they meet up and have sleep-overs and such.
Lots of people here write about the number of cousins, but those are often of a different age, it was the same with my two cousins. Also missing from the article: Kids being pushed into extra-curricula after school, be it soccer or music, those might not necessarily lead to friendships? Lastly, our environment has changed a lot. It's just not safe to let kids run wild outside with all those cars. The number of kids killed by cars didn't sink over the past 40 years because cars got safe, it sunk because kids get basically locked in. In my city (in Austria) we have quite a lot of older and newer building complexes where cars are kept outside, those are much better for kids.
1. Cousins are likely to be a mix of ages, probably your age +- 10 years. I think there's some benefit to that, especially having elder cousins that can teach you cool stuff / protect you at school / buy you beer etc.
2. You lose contact with the vast majority of friends you make at school, eventually. Cousins aren't the same, you're more likely to see them at holidays and events than your best friend when you were 5 years old.
There’s very specific safety features that have reduced the number of kids killed by cars. Backup cameras for example where mandated specificity due to demonstrated safety benefits.
People vastly overestimate how dangerous letting their kids out to play is and underestimate how beneficial it is. There’s real health benefits to running around outside which means limiting them to specific after school activities also has negative consequences.
That’s a real issue even if the increase in risk from front overs due to large SUV’s is significantly less than the safety benefits of backup cameras alone.
A common bias when many things change is to only consider the changes which support your views rather than all changes combined. I could counter by bringing up nearly 100% of new SUVs in 2024 include automatic breaking systems, but what matters here is relative safety not individual changes in isolation.
Pedestrian deaths were 2 percent lower in 2021 than in 1975, which seems like zero progress but the US had 211 million people in 1975 vs 337 million in 2021. Thus the individual risk has dropped by almost 40% even though people seem to think it increased. Not that overall pedestrian deaths is directly comparable to risk to kids from playing outside, but it is suggestive.
Besides the wider social trend for kids, did the pedestrian deaths decrease because cars get safer or people are just too scared to walk and take the car for everything? The increase of cars on the roads support this though: There might be a lot less pedestrians now than there were in 1975.
For adults the number of pedestrian isn’t explanatory on its own. You need to look at several trends including smartphones and changing city streets to really understand the risk factors.
Cars are simpler because you can compare different models through time to build a clear picture of their relative safety.
My older kids are 11 and 13. My experience differs. My wife and I moved away from family before having children. Our kids had plenty of friends they could play with. It felt transient though - perhaps because we lived in a transient area (SF Bay Area). Friends would come and go.
We moved back to be closer to family last summer. And, for us, the difference was stark. The relationships between family and friends are different. Both important.
But friends are replaceable…as terrible as that may sound. And one difference I think we (and others) didn’t realize is that family is much much much more permanent. You may not enjoy their company as much - but they will be there for many decades. And it turns out that’s very important for us.
That's indeed true. I don't have siblings, but many cousins of different ages. If they were "friends", they would have probably have dropped out of the radar pretty early on. But now in my 40s, I do see an immense benefit of getting to know the adult version of them, and having shared history, family, locations, memories etc. makes it massively easier.
I am not sure if friends replace (at least my experience of) cousins. With couisins, you spend days, nights, sleepovers sometimes a whole summer together. You share grandparents, your parents are siblings - you never leave each other's side. It's like sibling minus one. With friends, yes you get very good friends and they are your "chosen family" but you don't spend half as much time together even to the best of your efforts (unless living next door) at the same time, things force you to fall apart - moving, schools, preferences etc.
Sure, we are talking about averages, and on average, cousins of the past used to spend more time together than friends of today. And got along pretty well, especially in larger families where you can actually "choose your better family". Larger the family, more chances of having a "good cousin". What your daughter won't have is when those friends move away, she will be less likely to see them during summer / x-mas / thanksgiving, despite your best efforts. With cousins of the past, these were automatic.
As an elder millenial in my 30s, I also barely had any contact to my cousins. I think this isn't a recent development. My dad had a lot closer ties to his cousins and it showed in all the family meetings/reunions over the years. These people were somehow always present in my younger life. It was family. And though I've had plenty of friends over the years, I do think that ever-present network of familial ties is missing and that maybe we've lost something different that can't be replaced by friendships.
I don't know if I'm worse off in any quantifiable way and I don't know if it's worse this way. I just wonder if there's something I might be missing out on by not having that familial social network on top of my current social network, which is admittedly quite small and limited compared to when I was young. Maybe I'd feel less lonely and a bit less adrift if I had a larger family that I had close ties to and could fall back on.
A "family reunion" now is just me and my siblings. Down from 10-20 people to 3. That does make me sad to think about now.
I don't think cars are the biggest issue here though, most people I know seem to be worried about the lack of third spaces that are clean and wouldn't expose their children to crime or drug use for example.
I have 11 siblings and 75 first cousins. But, we lived thousands of miles away from any of those cousins, so I never got to know them very well and now have no contact with them. In the other hand, my daughter has a single cousin around her same age who lived about three hours away growing up, so they saw each other a few times a year, Now, as adults, even though they live in different countries, they still maintain their friendship and are frequently in contact. Bottom line, you can have a lot of cousins or few, but what matters more is how frequently you see each other.
Well, that cousin is from my wife’s side. She does have dozens of first cousins from my side, but we live far away from them, so she has only met some of them once or twice for short periods of time. Nothing long enough to form a connection. Plus, she is older than all of them by about 5 years, so there is that too.
my dad was the youngest of 7. and he had kids late. so almost all my cousins on my dads side are at least a decade older than me, and we barely had any contact with them growing up. on the other hand, cousins on my mothers side are all my age, and i have the best relationship with at least one of them despite only seeing each other every few years.
Shit experience with large family would do it. My grandparents had 12 living children, less than half my aunts and uncles decided to have kids, and those who did had 1-3.
Is it not totally obvious that the low birth rate is directly caused by availability and social acceptance of contraceptives and related technologies?
People didn’t really “choose” to have that many kids in the past. It turns out that even if you don’t really want to have kids, not having sex is a very, very hard thing to do.
Nature’s solution to making humans have kids despite being able to reason themselves out of it is to make them incredibly horny compared to most other animals. Or, put another way, the less horny humans were filtered out along the way since they didn’t produce enough offspring and were outcompeted by the more horny.
I didn't have a sense that my grandmother's generation (and all children prior to that) were perceived by their parents as unwelcome consequences of their unrestrained hornyness.
Old literature starting with the bible is full of examples of people lamenting infertility, they clearly wanted kids.
Also, today the only people who have children are the religious, which are also people that have objectively got the greatest control and ability to restrain their sexuality, which kind of goes against what you're saying.
And finally, people forever back had ways to not get pregnant if they didn't want to.
You could give it a whirl I guess. The folks that I know who have many (5+) kids are religious jews, catholics, muslims and mormons. I don't know if all of these people have defered sex till marriage but they are certainly not the ones racking up tripple or even double digit bodycounts. Are you saying you have a line of reasoning that people who maintain religious adherence today are doing it so they can have unrestrained sex?
Catholicism has been in general against contraception.
Of course it's still used, but probably at lower rates.
Non protected sex leads to pregnancy at a much higher rate than protected one.
I expect it to be similar for other similar religions.
Bodycount is also irrelevant, the total numer of intercourses is what matters. I'm not sure if having a stable partner since a young age leads to more total intercourses than occasional partners, but I'd be lead to thing so.
I am not so sure. France experienced its decline in fertility about a century earlier than its neighbors (see figure 1 in [0] for instance). Did they have better contraceptives?
Traditionnal methods such as marrying late (see: European Marriage Pattern), pulling out, timing are very effective at _reducing_ the number of children you will have (note: not effective at reducing it to zero - don't do this at home kids!).
The vibe in this thread is so hostile, and the most vociferous posts are from the pro-children side of the debate. I have no deeper comment to make here, I just find it a little shocking how aggressive half the posts are.
I didn't find any amount of "so hostile" comments.
I think what makes the vibe hostile it that this is the sound of social cohesion tearing apart and there is the implied worry that "it might get hostile" unless things are fixed.
But that is not the same thing as hostile. It is discussing a problem.
> Biological organisms not procreating despite living in material and caloric abundance is cosmically weird. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39341358) (less hostile, still a swipe)
Attack on one's validity as a member of society:
> Whenever I encounter this attitude I like to remind that person that they should have no voice, whatsoever, in what happens in government and politics anymore (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342079)
> Kids aren't expensive. They're a distraction from dopamine and career advancement. [...] they'd rather jet set than settle down. [...] Instagram and the endless feed of social media, internet, and things to do. [...] Nobody I know wants to give that up. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39341734) (this one is not hostile, but it's still in put-down territory)
Whether one views these as hostile can perhaps be a matter of perspective, but these posts do not invite cordial, level-headed debate.
Given the amount of comments I would still not say the topic is particularly hostile? Or am I desensitised maybe?
I mean, if the question is React frameworks, there is way less risk for philosophical fistfights and outbreaks, rather than a discussion about how people live their lifes.
Why are people so obsessed about it I have children? I'm married and we've decided we don't want to have kids. It really bothers me when people say "oh you're missing out, that's such a shame". Please think about what you are saying.
It doesn't matter if I'm gay, infertile, poor, depressed, or just don't want them. Please keep your judgements to yourself or even just stop judging others.
> It really bothers me when people say "oh you're missing out, that's such a shame"
Do you have any friends or relatives who refuse to try ramen or pho, no matter how many times you tell them that it's the best food ever, and that you also thought it seemed weird to put steak in a broth with noodles until you finally gave it a try and then you couldn't believe how delicious it was and you wish you'd tried it years earlier... but they still think it sounds gross?
People will hold up a plate of dog shit and tell me I'm missing out, it's not a good point at all. If you don't believe me, I've got some cousin NFTs you wouldn't want to miss out on.
I'm not sure what conclusion I'm supposed to be drawing here, because I don't at all consider it normal to keep hounding someone to try any meal after they've refused it a couple of times.
I have kids and I actively tell people not to have kids if you don't really really really want them. It's not a pleasant experience most of the time. You do you. I'm not judging you at all.
I have a kid, it's great most of the time. My theory is some people struggle with life, and if that's the case, having a child can increase the struggle.
Conversely, if someone enjoys life and things are going well, a child can often enrich it even further.
He has some issues with speech, but it's something he's working on with speech therapy. I don't mean to say that having a kid is easy. It's more akin to playing in interesting sport: hard work, rests are welcome, but it is fun.
I was listening to a professional rock climber talk about having kids. He described it as objectively bad, but the chemicals nature was pumping him full of were making him love his kids and be unable to picture life without them.
My wife spent 35 years of her life never wanting kids, and suddenly was 51% for trying to see if we could have a kid, with much trepidation.
It worked out, and almost every day, certainly every week, she says she's so thankful she changed her mind just enough that she could be a mom. It is nothing like she envisioned it.
We also have friends who didn't want kids and then regretted it, and my wife sees her self in those people. If circumstances were different, she feels like she would have missed out on one of the best things that ever happened to her.
So I think that's why some people are so enthusiastic.
If it isn't too forward, would you mind if I ask if you and your wife had more than a single child?
Me and my partner are in a similar situation as you and your wife before your first kid, with some complications added on top.
Those complications will make it near a certainty that we will only ever have a single child. And I worry sometimes if deciding to have a single kid is just me being selfish and wanting a family, rather than thinking about what would be best for the child (for instance having siblings).
Our situation would also mean no cousins from her side, and my siblings all have children in the late teens by now.
>And I worry sometimes if deciding to have a single kid is just me being selfish and wanting a family, rather than thinking about what would be best for the child (for instance having siblings).
I think this is an addressable issue. If you care about your child not being lonely, you could prioritize moving to an area that is family friendly, and/or prioritize making friends with some other families. We moved to an area with lots of parks in walking distance and there's almost always other kids playing there.
My son is 4 and an only child right now, but we regularly invite playmates and their parents over for dinner and a playdate for the kids. Almost every weekend my son and some another kid or two will be running around the house in the early evening while I cook some burgers and chat with the parents.
I mean, i also know tons of bad parent who judging by their actions don't seem like they enjoy being parents that much. You should only have children if you really want to have them and not because other people are doing it.
Whats the point of marriage then if being able you refuse kids? It's designed as a secure hub to build greater things like children bearing family. Why to subject yourself to lonely elderly life, tied to aging partner? Be like gay/bachelor people and enjoy hundreds of partners, why try to mimic family being afraid for full experience?
Assuming that you're not trolling:
1. Plenty of gay people have stable monogamous relationships/marriages.
2. Marriage isn't only for children. Marriage has legal and tax implications.
3. I like having a stable relationship, I don't like dating and switching partners. I like deeper connections with my partners.
Most gay marriages are non monogamous, so your point is ‘plenty’ misleading. Marriage is legally less beneficial for men in the us (divorce lawyer is paid by the men), and marriages don’t mean stable relationships. An emotional marriage is likely less stable than a cohabitation.
> Several research studies show that about 50% of gay male couples are monogamous and about 50% allow for sex outside of the relationship. The research finds no difference in the level of happiness or stability among these groups.
I know this thread is mostly about a lack of cousins, rather than being distant from your cousins, but I feel like I have to ask:
How many people have cousins, or other relatives, that they want to interact with?
My extended family is a complete disaster. On my mother's side there's two brothers who are borderline abusive to their wives and children. On father's side I had a total of 10 cousins, the oldest of whom would be in their 40s, the youngest in their late 20s. Only 6 of them are still alive. One of them is in prison. These are all people that I want nothing to do with.
My siblings are not bad per say, but not people I consider myself close to. We're all too different in age from each other, and never had much more in common that living in the same house. Now we are scattered across North America. If I had had children, they likely would have never met any of their cousins more than a dozen times before adulthood.
I had a really rough time at school growing up, because I was a runt and got bullied pretty badly. My actual friends growing up were definitely my cousins, especially my brothers. The older ones always looked out for me, and I played outside all day with the ones close to my age. Seriously, if I did not have them in my life, I suspect I would be pretty fucked up as an adult. For me, blood has always been thicker than water.
I’d say half my friends have had trouble conceiving, many probably will not ever have kids, and a decent chunk of my cousins as well had trouble or weren’t able to. It’s not just that people don’t have cousins
> I’d say half my friends have had trouble conceiving
There's probably statistics out there but I've not looked into it - but anecdotally I also know a large contingent of people who've had issues conceiving. Many late 20s, too - people always seem to think it's more common in your 30s but so many of them were confused by the experience.
Increasingly people feel pressure or obligation to go to college and spend their 20s getting established in a career. By the time they feel ready to have kids it's more likely they'll have trouble.
I don’t think they are mistaken though? Housing and childcare are multiples more expensive than a generation ago, makes sense people need to feel established.
I get that but I think the other point is equally significant. After college it's fun to make money, travel, date around... generally continue exploring yourself and the world and having few responsibilities.
As someone in my early 20s, I can barely even take care of myself (and that's pushing it). At this stage of my life, I can't imagine being able to give a child everything a parent needs to give them.
Lot of blame gets placed on women too and sometimes it's misplaced. At-home sperm testing kits should really be covered by insurance considering how cheap and easy they are[0].
My father is 14 years younger than the next oldest sibling. My mother is 12 years younger than the next oldest sibling. Because of this my cousins were all much older than me and not people I interacted with. My little brother, my only sibling, is 14 years younger than me. My oldest is 11 and by the time my brother does have kids, if he has kids, my children will be probably be close to adults.
Fortunately my ex-wife has a lot of cousins she is close to and her sister has a daughter right in the middle of my 2 kids so they have 1 first cousin they are very close with but they have no interactions with second cousins outside of seeing them every few years at holidays.
Regardless, having no real interaction with my cousins growing up, I can't say if my life would have been better if I had.
I grew up with 20+ cousins ranging from 10 years older than me to almost 30 years younger than me. It was simultaneously like having lots of older brothers and sisters but also having multiple siblings only a couple months older or younger than me. It also meant I got a LOT of experience being around small children which carried over well to being a parent.
On the flip side, my father-in-law has 7 grandkids and they were all born in a 5 year window.
I also worked with woman from China and due to the "1 child" policy, the first baby she ever held was her own baby b/c she had no cousins, nieces/nephews etc.
It applies to all types of kin relations. Dramatically fewer people have a same- sex sibling. The number is probably down from say 0.9 to 0.4 or less.
Few people have friends with brothers and sisters to compare them to, to understand heritability.
We are becoming more and more tolerant of obviously unrelated people playing relatives on tv. I say that because when you see a real family resemblance in person, it's intense.
The only experience of having g a much older or younger sibling must be nearly nothing, now, too. It's sad that all these effects seem to make people even more likely to perpetuate the trend when their own time comes.
I'm an Old (53), and always felt a little weird because I had very little cousin interaction growing up. I mean, I'm from a small, mostly rural state; most people I knew had cousins out the wazoo -- but not me.
I think the real reason is that both my parents were from two-child families, and they were also very much older than their younger siblings; my mom is 7 years older than her brother, and my father was a full decade older than his sister.
Both my Aunt and my Uncle had families, but necessarily later. My aunt went first, and had a daughter about the age of my little sister -- 5 years after me -- and then another daughter a couple years later. However, they lived a couple towns over, and my father and his sister weren't especially close, so we didn't spend much time with them.
My uncle and his wife didn't start their family until I was 17, so obviously there was zero childhood overlap there. I see and talk to those cousins more often than the two from my father's side, mostly because we have more in common, but it's still not very often.
This is looking at trends starting from 1950, which is right in the middle of an event known as the “baby boom.” I guess there’s some usefulness to that analysis, but it seems a little shallow.
I wish the world weren't so bad that potential parents don't want to bring new lives into it... honestly, if I were a mother considering whether to have a child, I wouldn't want them to have to grow up in this terrible day and age. They'd end up more traumatized than I am. I wouldn't be able to live with myself.
> I wouldn't want them to have to grow up in this terrible day and age.
Today is very clearly the best time to be born, so much so that I'd argue if you could choose to have kids in an older time period or today, it's borderline abusive to choose the past.
Medicine/immunization, child mortality rates, human rights, ...
I don't think that holds true here. At many points in history (including recent history) people were happy to have kids because they believed they could give their children a better life than they themselves have.
But it sounds like the GP is looking to the future, and is pessimistic about their ability to do that. History doesn't matter too much here, even if I agree with you that much of history was a cesspool of pain and misery compared to these days. If people don't see a viable, prosperous future for their kids, as good as or better than their own lives, that's what matters.
Now, I say this without passing judgment on whether or not this future pessimism is warranted. Even if it isn't, what matters is how people feel about it.
Nobody has kids based on their relative circumstances to some arbitrary point in history, only those that have played out in their life and might in the future.
Perhaps emotionally or spiritually, which may be important, but I don't think enough to be practical. Those arbitrary points in history existed under their own constraints and opportunity or difficulty, and looking back further wouldn't necessarily have had much of an impact unless the future from that point looked quite promising.
The only real perspective I have is that a bunch of today's issues didn't exist in my own childhood, and a bunch of my childhood issues haven't been solved. That means there's been a net increase in issues.
For example the internet is much unfriendlier to children nowadays, social media is far more predatory than it used to be. The housing crisis is worse (the exact same place is nearly twice as expensive as it was when we first moved in about 10 years ago). Also, the AI dystopia and surveillance state bullshit seems to be worsening at an exponentially increasing rate.
So what? If people think that their children's future will be worse than their own, it doesn't really matter what people experienced 500 years ago. A common sentiment among parents is giving their children more opportunities and a better life than they had. If some people don't feel like they can do that (regardless of whether it's true or not), I imagine that's a powerful demotivator around having kids.
Yeah, so if you are familiar with human history and the exponential curve of increasing human wellbeing that we're riding and you still feel strongly that the future will be worse, then the conclusion should be that you're probably in an irrationally negative emotional headspace for some reason, not that you're right!
(I say that without judgement, having been in that exact headspace myself not too long ago.)
If you're actually familiar with human history then you'll know that it's uneven with horrifying dark periods and isn't some consistent curve that goes up.
In the lead up to the 2008 financial disaster all the bulls were saying "the housing market only goes up" without any understanding of the underlying shifts that would come to bear. It's easy to predict the status quo, they didn't need any thought, they could be replaced with a rock with "housing goes up" written on it.
For the first time in decades, risk of global conflict is rapidly rising. Two revanchist empires in the east are eager to reclaim lost territories and see their chance as the American hegemony that presided over the long peace faces stagnation & decline. This is the stuff that makes world wars. Who wants their child to live through that?
But fine, anyone can write "human well-being only goes up" on a rock.
If you could choose any time period (and assuming median standard conditions, so cannot choose being king), which period would you think was best for raising children?
What do you mean? Would I want my children to be at risk of school shootings? Would I want my children to have to deal with the fact that I can't afford to pay for health care in the only country where it's not free? Would I want my children to have to deal with the current state of the internet, with TikTok and other predatory social media running rampant? When they get older do I want them to have to deal with how hard it is to get a job and make a living? The housing crisis?
No I don't want to bring children into this world. These are not everyday struggles to be overcome. Today's world is extremely ugly, extremely unfair and I would not under any circumstances want to make a child suffer through it all...
Would I want to bring children into the world if it weren't this terrible? Maybe. I don't know. I'm not a potential mother, so I obviously don't get to make the decision of whether to give birth or not, but right now there are just too many obvious, overwhelming reasons not to.
Try to actually do the math on school shootings, and compare it to car crashes when you were conceived. If you were objective and considered risks equally, for school shootings to even come into your calculations (instead of immediately dismissing it as not worth your time) the world would have to be almost utopian. Try to calculate how many times more likely it is for you to have a miscarriage than any of your potential children to even be anywhere near a school shooting.
I don't think that's a good way of looking at it. The increase in school shootings is independent of car crash rates.
While it's still unlikely that any given person's kid will be killed in a school shooting, the idea of it is heartbreaking enough that I can understand why it's a part of someone's calculus.
> Would I want my children to be at risk of school shootings?
Everyone is at risk of everything. Since the beginning of time.
> Would I want my children to have to deal with the fact that I can’t afford to pay health care in the only country where it’s not free?
I agree the healthcare situation in the US (where I’m guessing you’re based) is not ideal but it’s far from the worst. Medicaid exists. CHIP exists. Obamacare exists. A competent enough parent would be capable of efficiently using their resources if their childs health was at stake.
> Would I want my children to have to deal with the current state of the internet…
The internet is a double edged sword where it can both be a blessing and a curse. It’s 100% possible to raise a kid to have a healthy relationship with the internet. Just don’t give them an iPad at 5.
> Housing crisis…
Yeah housing crisis is hard too. But markets fluctuate and who knows what it’s going to look like by the time a kid grows up to be of home-purchasing age.
I’m sad you have such a negatively skewed view of the world. I don’t think today’s world is “extremely ugly” and “extremely unfair.” Compared to life 100 years ago, I think we’ll be ok.
I'm pretty sure the world was at least as terrible at any given point in the past, we were just much less informed/aware of it thanks to the lack of Internet like mass-communication.
I don’t disagree with you that life can seem bleak in the present, but people have brought children into the world under much harder conditions. There is something particular about post-industrialization that has caused this attitude shift.
It's all pretty crazy. My wife has quite a few brothers and a bazillion cousins. I have a sister and several cousins. We're the only ones of her family and until very recently the only ones in my family to have a kid (and just one). I think the population is maybe going down harder in the US than we think. It also took us like 2 years to conceive.
Absolutely. It is not just that the number of cousins available has dropped drastically with more and more people choosing not have kids or have very few kids, the connections between the cousins is also much less strong in my family than it has ever been because the families now live so far away from each other in a different part of the world that the chances of face-to-face meetups is now reduced to perhaps once every couple of years or so and even then for very short periods of time.
I do feel very strongly that my kids are not going to have much of a relationship with their cousins - if at all.
I've got over 30 first cousins. Not joking. My mom was 1 of 12 children and my father was 1 of 8 children. They were born in India during the 1930's to 1950's when modern medicine was saving people's lives but modern birth control wasn't widespread.
Most of them had 2 children so that's over 30. We have 2 huge WhatsApp group chats and every week it is someone's birthday or anniversary.
It's cool having so many relatives and places to stay for free when you travel but it can be a little exhausting too!
Anecdata: I am 22 and I have a bunch of cousins but they are all from generations older than me, so while my half-siblings had a bunch of cousins to hang out with - I don't really have any. The closest I have that are my age are 3 2nd cousins (cousin's children), and we see each other once every 2-3 years. Every time we see each other we end up complaining about how few people are in our family in our generation.
On the other hand, all of my actual cousins are now having children, so it seems the next generation won't be having this problem (in my family).
Cousins are great if you stay close, but generally as you get older you drift apart and then you're left with no one again.
Anecdotally: as someone who was the youngest by 5+ years in a family of dozens of cousins, I feel like I got a little bit of both worlds. It was fantastic as a kid to be running around with the posse, but as I entered late-childhood that pretty much dissolved. Now, as an adult, I no longer see my cousins on a regular basis. We don't have much history beyond my 7th/8th year and they're not the type of people I would want to be friends with by choice. This estrangement was a big source of mental struggle for me throughout my early 20s, especially since I lost my actual sibling and didn't feel like I had anyone to relate to in my "supposed" family.
I almost think it's better to start off life with not much extended family, because it's not easy to make friends that you consider family when you're already a fully-fledged adult.
Another data point: My wife's grandparents have 10 children, 81 grandchildren (mostly adults), and around 300 and counting great-grandchildren. It's wonderful! When we go on trips around the U.S., we are almost always staying with a cousin. Our children really enjoy meeting and getting to know cousins their age. That said, I do notice that the younger generations typically are having smaller families (like 3-6 children instead of 8-12 children).
It's a lot of work to keep in touch and visit cousins, but my wife and I feel it's totally worth it. At times, we've decided where to live based on proximity to cousins, and we decided early on to regularly visit cousins who lived within a couple of hours. When we were married, we decided we'd try to go to reunions, funerals, and weddings, and we've largely done that for the last 19 years. There is a big family reunion for a few days every other year, with about half the family coming (so hundreds of people of all ages). We also have monthly dinners with typically 20-30 local cousins joining. We regularly tell family history stories, and we have a screensaver rotating through our pictures, including many from cousin visits and reunions, so cousins are regularly coming up in daily conversations.
One thing I've noticed is that the more often we go to reunions and visit other families, the more excited the children are to go to see cousins again (as opposed to another family branch, where reunions are every 5-10 years, the children just don't have the same connection with that much growing up in between reunions). Another thing I've noticed is that our children seem to feel very grounded in their experiences - they often are relating their experiences to a story from an ancestor and pulling lessons from that.
To address a comment elsewhere on this topic, yes, we are religious, the family is predominantly active members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a significant portion live in the intermountain west area of the U.S.
> we are religious, the family is predominantly active members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a significant portion live in the intermountain west area of the U.S.
Everybody in America would know to fill in all that information if you simply said "We are Mormon".
"Mormon" was originally a derogatory term that was coined by those that legalized killing Mormons on sight until 1980. So some are understandably uncomfortable with its continued usage.
It may have been coined that way, but Mormons quickly adopted it as well as a favorite term and used it that way coming up on 200 years. The church used the word extensively in marketing campaigns for decades, between mormonads and I'm a Mormon, etc. Under Hinckley who was media savvy, it was used a lot.
Nelson (current head of the church) just doesn't like the word and wants to change it. Confusion, inconvenience, and Pragmatism be damned. It's his right as prophet to say that Jesus told him to use the full name of the church and drop Mormon, but let's not pretend it's suddenly offensive because it's been used by enemies of the church. They've also used the full name as well, so that should be offensive if we're staying consistent.
I find your insistence that they can't be offended by a word with an objectively offensive historical origin fascinating. Do you deny that sometimes opinions on words and language can change over time?
I have insisted nothing of the sort. Of course, opinions on words and languages can change over time. However, I find it unlikely that a population of tens of millions suddenly became offended, even if their prophet told them to.
More reasonably, I think they are not offended. Rather they are simply trying to use the full name of the church rather than any sort of shortenings. Sure, if somebody was being a jerk and using the word Mormon to be a jerk, then that could be offensive. However, that's a much different thing than being offended by the word itself used in a friendly context.
I do have 7 cousins, though. And 2 of them (the ones raised by my grandmother that lived next to my house and that I saw almost everyday during my childhood) are the family closer to siblings that I've got.
Nothing in the article aims at explaining or moving the attention to why. Just a collection of statements, without looking back at why this is. Women have to pick a career, this has an effect on family building.
The families of my father and mother each have nine siblings. Most of their siblings married and had children. Some of those sibling usually the oldest ones had six children. I grew up knowing at least 40 cousins.
I'm not married or in a relations ship and I don't have any children. My sister is married but no children. I see much of my generation (GenX) are in a similar state.
I guess it depends, I had to draw a family tree when I was at school, many years ago, and I stopped once I hit around fifty cousins.
So on the one hand I have a huge family, but on the other hand, the practical hand, most of those cousins I never met. I've heard their names, I've sometimes seen pictures of them, and family gossip means I generally know what is going on with them but that's all.
I think there were 3-5 cousins who were similarly aged to myself, and who I saw every week or two, or daily during summer holidays. But the rest? I'm not sure what people would be missing out on there ..
There are studies that show quote plainly that people with kids are unholier than those without. The difference is much later on life when the happiness “winner” switches to the group with children.
One theory aside from the obvious is that the brain makes sense of whatever might happen to it, over time. Like how you miss out on some big opportunity, but years later you say, “ah, that’s ok because it led me to where I am today.”
No idea if that was coherent as I’m a bit tired, but wanted to share
I have 2 siblings. We have over 30 cousins on one side of the family and 2 on the other side.
Only 1 of the 3 of us has kids, so my niblings don't have any cousins on my side of the family, and they only have a few on the other side. I haven't thought about how different that is compared to what I grew up with until seeing this post
I found daycare very expensive. It was close to $1200 per month. With two kids, it was forbiddingly expensive. My wife wanted a 3rd child but I did not because of high cost having babies. Then there is college fee when they grow up. I van empathize with people who are not able to have kids due to coat.
I grew up 2 states away from my parents siblings, I couldn't pick out most of my aunt's/uncles from a lineup let alone my cousins. My kids live close to the same distance away from their cousins, but we make a huge deal to make time to see them.
My kids and their cousins are all great friends and it's well worth the sacrifice
Maybe for some it is that easy: Why leading complicated lives with kids, pressure, responsibilities an uncertainties, when it is so much more comfortable and flexible without? Watching netflix and scrolling insta could be enough. The thing is, that life is that thing that starts beyond the comfort zone.
I think there are a lot of ways to get out of your comfort zone that don't involve kids. Failing to find them is either laziness or a lack of imagination.
The thing about having kids is that once you make the leap, you don't get to step back. A single decision to drop the birth control for a bit, and bam -- you're a parent with daily responsibilities for at least 18 years. That'll certainly get you out of your comfort zone, permanently.
But other things you can do are more or less entirely voluntary, and you can stop doing them at any time. So it takes more willpower to maintain, even if doing those things is strictly less work than raising a child.
Seconding the other comment, this is a pretty narrow view.
A person can do a lot with their life. There's an entire world to explore out there. Culture and history and math and science and art and philosophy. So many meaningful, fulfilling ways to spend a life that don't involve kids.
Not saying that kids cannot offer their own experience, they absolutely can. But it's not the only one that has value.
Interesting to hear this. My personal experience is the complete opposite. My sister has 2 kids, my wife’s sister and husband have 2 kids, my wife’s brother has 3 kids with one on the way, and we’re having our first in about 3 weeks.
I think based on the data and projections in the article, your family is still pretty small, cousin-wise. So you're in some ways illustrating the point they're making.
Interesting article. It is something that saddens me a little for my own kids, who have 2 first cousins and maybe 15-20 second cousins. In comparison my 4 grandparents collectively had over 60 _siblings_ (no idea how many cousins!).
Not just cousins also, uncles and aunts. With a lot of single child families of today, a lot of children's eventual children will have no uncles and aunts. Alas, such is life.
Zeihan (geopolitics celebrity dude) talks about this pretty often. It goes hand in hand with urbanization. When you're on the farm and especially when child mortality is high...you have lots of kids as they're needed for work. In the big city, kids are just a costly burden, so people have a lot less. All the countries that jumped into urbanization are in this boat. China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, and Japan are all in a really bad spot. It's not that they just ran out of kids...it's that they ran out 30 years ago. It's in this decade that they start running out of working age adults and shit starts getting really screwy. There isn't a known macroeconomic model for when the population pyramid is inverted and there is no money at the top to invest in new tech (it's all being used for them to live off of) and not enough people at the bottom to work or drive consumption.
Haredi/Hasidic/ultra-Orthodox Jews are an interesting exception to that – a predominantly urban/suburban subculture sustaining a high TFR (over 6 in Israel).
A stringent religious doctrine which promotes large families may be the only thing which can overcome urbanization's encouragement of lower TFRs. In the long-long-long term, it is possible (not certain) that subcultures with that characteristic will end up numerically dominating the population.
> It's in this decade that they start running out of working age adults and shit starts getting really screwy
The obvious answer is a significant increase in immigration rates. Of course, for political/cultural reasons, some of the countries you mentioned don't want to do that. But, if the economic hardships of population decline grow big enough, they may become bigger than the political/cultural resistance to it.
In the long-long term, that strategy is going to fail, because the immigration source countries are on the same demographic trajectory, just further back on the curve. Still, the point at which it fails may well be long after we are all dead.
I can only speculate of course, but I think something that'd increase birthrates in urbanized society would "simply" be arranging things such that raising a family isn't so exclusionary.
In a developed society, people are more likely to have many things they want to pursue and achieve, and due to various factors (financial and otherwise), having kids usually entails giving up on most or all of that. That probably seems like a pretty raw deal to a lot of folks, considering we all only get one life to live.
If it weren't so necessary to put off all of these things until the kids have left the nest and youth has been spent away, I'd bet a lot more people would choose to become parents.
> I think something that'd increase birthrates in urbanized society would "simply" be arranging things such that raising a family isn't so exclusionary.
There's only so much you can do. You can introduce as much subsidised childcare, parental leave, flexible working conditions, free higher education, etc, policies as you like – those things can alleviate the disadvantage to other life goals of having kids, but are unlikely to ever be able to reduce it to a level at which it ceases to be significant.
Then, there is what some rich people do, outsourcing the rearing of their children to nannies, tutors and boarding schools, such that they rarely see them – but, that's not a recipe for raising well-adjusted kids, and economically is unlikely to be scalable beyond a very small rich minority
I think it is inevitable that cultures in which reproducing is just one option on the menu are always going to have significantly lower TFR than those in which reproducing is viewed as a religious duty, with those who reject it risking ostracism in this life, and the threat of punishment in the next
> There's only so much you can do. You can introduce as much subsidised childcare, parental leave, flexible working conditions, free higher education, etc, policies as you like – those things can alleviate the disadvantage to other life goals of having kids, but are unlikely to ever be able to reduce it to a level at which it ceases to be significant.
Reducing disadvantage to insignificance is indeed unlikely, but if things were structured such (for example) that working a part-time job paid a wage capable of supporting a family, that’d go a long way. It’d enable parents to work full-time for the extra cash for some period of time prior to starting a family to build substantial financial padding and then drop back to part-time once kids are in the picture, opening up time for parents to be both parents and be people.
We’ve seen incredible improvements in productivity in the past several decades, so there’s not really much reason why that shouldn’t be possible.
There are lots of reasons why people don't have kids which don't have anything to do with their expense.
I can think of several people I know, who (I think) would have made perfectly fine parents, but probably (or even definitely) never will. Waiting for "Mr/Ms Right", who they never manage to find - he or she always seems to be already taken or chasing somebody else or being chased by more appealing options. In other cultures/societies (and even previous versions of their own), at some point they would have settled for "Mr/Ms Good Enough"–but, they've absorbed a culture which discourages (even criticises) doing that. Plus, many children of divorced parents are hesitant to have kids with someone less than ideal, because they worry it will lead to their own kids going through what they did. I doubt changes to working conditions can do anything to address those kinds of issues.
Replacement TFR is 2.1 for low mortality countries; in 2021, the OECD average was 1.58. If we talk about that shortfall, 0.52, how much of that shortfall is due to expense/workplace/career/education-related reasons, and how much due to other reasons? (I don't know.) If it is mostly due to expense/workplace/career/education-related reasons, targeting those factors may make a big difference; if it is mostly due to other reasons, targeting those factors might not make much difference at all.
Well, my thinking here is that increasing available time by reducing the number of hours people have to work to live is going to be a net benefit to individuals like you’ve mentioned in your first paragraph too. People are more likely to go out and do things and find each other if the majority of their energy and waking lives aren’t tied up with work.
It might make some difference – however, if a person's dating expectations are fundamentally out of sync with what's realistically available to them, having more time to spend on meeting new people might not change the ultimate outcome. What we don't know, is what's the proportion of "probably would have found partner if they'd had more time to look for one" versus "unlikely to have found anybody that would satisfy them no matter how much time they had to look". If it is mostly the former, your proposals might make a big difference; if it is mostly the latter, your proposals are unlikely to change much
The dynamic is that when markets are expanding, it makes sense to invest in the future, because you can capture a portion of the expansion and the reap indefinite profits off of it. When markets are contracting, your incentive becomes to grab as much of the pie now before it shrinks. This tends to make firms...well, militant. The incentive to cooperate only appears when people weight the future more than the present, giving value to future interactions; otherwise, the incentive is to kill off your rivals, take their stuff, and hide the bodies. Thus, during a contraction and in times of scarcity people tend to become raiders, scavengers, and conquerors.
To protect themselves against raiders, scavengers, and conquerors, people tend to band together into larger groups. Thus a hierarchy emerges - weaker groups pledge fealty to stronger ones, which in turn protect them from other strong groups that have not pledged fealty, and so on. Usually you get war in the meantime, but feudalism is the peace treaty that arises out of that.
Interestingly this dynamic tends to play out within the capitalist system. When an industry reaches maturity, usually there's a shakeout with a price war where many of the weaker companies go bankrupt, and then the savvier-but-weaker get bought up by the bigger ones, and so on until you have a few megacorps with hierarchical organization. The purpose of managerial capitalism is as much to defend firms against competition as it is to increase efficiency. In many cases, they are significantly less efficient than they were as startups, but at least they have hoovered up all the competition.
There’s also late stage socialism. It’s called communism. It too relies on the right kind of growth just like capitalism. Socialism also tends to fail faster than capitalism because power is centralized from the start, so corruption spreads faster and is more malevolent.
People stop having kids when economic forces work against them. It doesn't matter how the forces were put there. At least it's not like it was in Adam Smith's time, when the downward pressure was a result of children failing to reach adulthood. Thanks to birth control and modern medicine, people can decline to have children when they know the conditions are not right.
The whole "children are so expensive" meme is overrated. College is expensive but attendance rates are high. Real estate is expensive but people keep buying homes. Some alternate reasons for declining fertility:
1. Decline in religious belief
2. Widespread, easy to use birth control
3. More options for entertainment are widely available. Having kids is less attractive when you could be traveling, binging endless series, or playing computer games
4. Strong anti-natalist sentiment that was pushed very hard post-war and persists
5. Higher rates of college attendance, which means people are studying and furthering their careers in their 20s rather than having kids
Children are not too expensive for anyone to afford, they're too expensive for most people to think it is worth having more than two. That might sound like a qualification, but it's what population decline means.
I unfortunately can't find the source right now, but I recently came across a study that found that, in the US, number of children was almost completely uncorrelated with regional cost of living but was quite correlated with beliefs about the amount of effort/time raising a child requires.
I think our culture of expecting/demanding that parents invest ever greater amounts of time and effort (with all the evidence suggesting that these increased investments do not improve long term outcomes) is a far bigger driver than costs.
And car seats! Three kids are dramatically more expensive than two because you need a bigger car, and many family activities are priced for a family of four.
Perhaps not as big a deal in the US, but in the EU where some form of car seat is required for the first 8-10 years of a child's life it's a big thing.
That only applies to 3 at the same time. And most Americans drive SUVs and other large cars regardless of how many children they have. Small sedans basically aren't even sold in America anymore due to lack of consumer preference.
I believe the average cost to raise a child in the US is comparable to a Lamborghini. I suppose it's up to the individual to decide what the more desirable purchase is.
Just imagine if the future of our economic system required a significant number of middle class Americans to buy three Lamborghinis, to offset the people who only bought one.
> College is expensive but attendance rates are high
A lot of "college is expensive" is a US-specific problem, not one universal to the Western world. In many European countries, public universities are tuition-free. Even in those Western countries with non-nominal tuition, it is almost always significantly less than the sky-high US levels.
The fact that many countries have cheaper higher education yet lower fertility than the US suggests that, even in the US case, this is unlikely to be a big factor. It likely makes a difference at the margins, but only at the margins.
It's not so much the expense but the timing. People are in college during the peak fertility years. By the time they graduate and get a job and spend a few years getting established, fertility is already declining.
Maybe a policy like this might work: for every child you have, you get a lifetime 10 percentage point reduction in income tax rates.
Suppose the top rate is 37%. Have one child, now for the rest of your life, your top rate is capped at 27%. Have a second child, now your lifetime top rate is capped at 17%. Third child, capped at 7%. Fourth child, never pay income tax ever again.
But, a lot of people will object to such a policy. Childless people will end up having to pay higher taxes as people with kids pay lower or no taxes–some may accept that as their personal sacrifice for the greater good, many likely won't. Others will object to the fact that the biggest benefit is going to be for the middle and upper classes – who are most likely to pay the higher tax rates – while having far less benefit for those on low incomes, who pay little or no tax already. There is the (difficult to quantify) risk that unsuitable parents may end up having kids just for the tax benefits, and then mistreat/abuse those kids. Given all these objections, I'd be surprised if it ever actually gets adopted. But, in terms of increasing TFR in wealthy countries, it might actually work.
When there is consequently more to do, more to experience, more people to meet, more to discover, more novelty to novel at. In short, the modern era has more of what makes the childhood experience what it is, enough to spill over into what was previously considered adulthood.
I sometimes ponder what would happen if we did discover the secret to substantial life extension or even immortality; if this phenomenon of trying to stretch that delightful halcyon glow of childhood wonder - what I've heard the Finns call lapsuus - would extend into decades or centuries or perpetuity as a result. It would if nothing else provide a plausible explanation for the behavior of characters like Q from Star Trek.
Children are massively more expensive, and less useful, in richer societies. I don't think anybody in Japan would be allowed to provide for their children the standards of care provided in a country with a growing population. As for the second point, if you are a farmer in a country with little physical mobility, your children are your retirement savings. If you live in America, your children are future employees of a company ten states away.
I read a statistic somewhere that it costs $2M to raise a child. Considering that it's considered a horrible imposition to ask your kids for money, or even to ask them to take care of you, it's easy to explain why urbanization, industrial development, and education, work against population growth.
That's ok, it'll only take a couple of generations for the people who don't feel the drive to have kids to be out of the gene pool. Then the next baby boom begins.
some animals that live in groups where the leader gets to do all the mating, if a new leader emerges, he will kill all the offsprings of the old leader.
i'd say that this is a clear sign that animals do have strong biological drive to care about continuing their bloodline
We have very good relationship with our neighbor, who's French (this will become relevant later). We met at the playground both babysitting our kids. We know each other well enough to come visit, eat lunch together, go to various children-related activities etc.
About a month ago, when we came to visit our neighbor, she had a guest, whom she introduced as her cousin. Couple days ago, she had another guest, and what do you know: it's another cousin! I asked how many cousins does she have. Her and her cousin started to reminiscent and came up with an estimate of around fifty. My jaw dropped. Then they went down the memory lane, recalling their childhood and how they'd spend summers in the family house: legion of kids with few adults in sight.
My father had two brothers. One had (at least one that I know of) son. The other one had a son and a daughter. No two brothers live in the same country. I've only ever met one of my cousins, once. My mother was the only child.
But this was also the very common situation in my childhood years. Everyone I went to school with barely had any extended family. And once I started to think about what might have caused the difference: well, these things come to mind: my maternal grandmother had 11 siblings. One or two died in the war. A better half escaped the Communist regime. Those who didn't were sentenced to exile in Siberia. She and her sister were what's left of the family. That sister never married and had no children.
Similar, on my father's side, a bunch of relatives died in Holocaust. And even later on, through the Soviet times, the situation wasn't conducive to having many children. My parents, already, grew up in the world where cousins were rare.
It looks though like in some places in Europe, the war didn't affect the siblings situation so much, and even my generation had a chance to meet a bunch of cousins. The US seems to be similar in this respect, at least according to my wife's testimony, who would every now and then mention he cousin who is an architect / drug addict / screwed up by 'Nam / fashion model etc. There seems to be no shortage of cousins to draw on.
Our kid, in total, has three cousins. And there's unlikely to be more. Which is a new thing for the Western world, I guess, especially the parts not so much affected by the war. But this is how things have been for at least a generation in the East.
It changes the experience of being human, from what once was a solitude for orphans, and refugees, to a common experience. There's no extended family (and increasingly, no base family either, e.g. no siblings, or divorced or indifferent narcissistic parents) to take refuge to, strengh from, and so on: you're on your own.
Even your friends, if you get to have any, will be a more shallow, and mostly online presence (what with the "loneliness epidemic" and everything), and will increasingly be people who have not learned the art of being with others, unless it's fully on their own terms (think spoiled single children vs children growing up with siblings).
You get to cling and bow to careers, employers, state, trends, peer groups, and so on, as a survival mechanism.
[1] We can spin it as a good thing, by cherry-picking families which did terrible things to their kids as representative of family life at large.
Having kids is basically never going to cause someone to go from rich (excess wealth and luxury) to actually poor (struggling to survive).
However, it definitely can be enough to take someone who is just barely getting by, making their car payments, enough food on their plate, etc. to start to struggle. Kids are very expensive.
No-one is not having kids because they want a second yacht. But there are a lot of people who genuinely cannot afford to survive with a child.
Meh. I have ~17 cousins on one side of my family I spent 2 weeks with almost every summer of my childhood. Never got really close to them. Dont really see them or talk to them now.
I guess if said cousins lived in the same town as we did or really close by this would ring more true. Seems like this is more an issue with losing community than cousins.
This is one area where it's wrong. Instead of having 10 or more cousins...it's now common for kids to have 0 or close to it. My kid doesn't know what a cousin is. Kinda bonkers.
The headline didn’t say “reshaping the cousin experience”. It said “childhood”. Unless we’re ready to say any change is dramatic, this is the type of unprovable puffery in a headline that Betteridge’s Law was made for.
FWIW, it’s true of my kids too. But growing up, my cousins were in a different country and I wasn’t close. So my kids didn’t have an experience much different than mine.
It is still important to a lot of kids that live close by and even those that rarely saw each other (like mine due to similar isolation) still learned from the experience when we were together.
Yes, headlines are meant to grab your attention, but equating this one with the garbage that usually gets a quick Betteridge Law link is a bit drastic.
People pondering the societal implications of rapid population decline is very relevant. I'm not going to get too upset over the title.
Ok, fair, maybe I'm overreacting to it - i find headlines like that annoying.
If you have ever seen the early Seven Up movies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_(film_series) ) - the sheer mass of Baby Boom children all growing up together is incredible. No doubt peer influence was crucial for many of them.
But humans grow up in many situations, including remote farms, small villages full of old people, etc. Lack of cousins or same-age peers might be more common now, but it's been happening forever.
You're baffled people aren't having kids? What bubble do you live in? People straight up can't afford housing much less children. The avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now.
Edit: the replies - y'all are out of touch. Visit an average family in the Midwest with a household income of < $100k/yr that doesn't own a home yet.
I believe you, but we have to go by effects, not intent. If you post swipes like "What bubble do you live in?" (which is already against the site guidelines, btw) on a divisive topic like this, then the odds of a flamewar are high and you're responsible for starting it—the same way you would be responsible for a wildfire if you dropped lit matches in a dry forest, whether you intended a wildfire or not.
Dang, I don't know how this community would resist imploding without you. Your clarity of communication and considerate restraint are deeply appreciated.
I mean you could have a canned answer for such threads, but I liked and learned from how you handled this.
This is unnecessarily confrontational and inaccurate. According to census.gov, the current national homeownership rate is hovering at about 66%, which is about the same rate that it's been (+/- 3%) since they started tracking in 1964 [0][1]. This isn't restricted to old people either: 49% of 30 to 34 year olds and 58% of 35 to 39 year olds owned a home in Q4 2023 [2].
There are certainly regional differences in housing affordability, but the average American lives in a home that they own by the time they're 35.
[1] edit since there's some confusion—here's the direct link to the table I'm citing from, entitled "Quarterly Homeownership Rates for the U.S. and Regions: 1964 to Present"—https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/histtab17.xlsx
If you look into the "definitions" section it defines "Housing Unit. A housing unit is a house, an apartment, a group of rooms, or a single room
occupied or intended for occupancy as separate living quarters."
and "Householder. The householder refers to the person (or one of the persons) in whose name the housing unit is owned or rented [...]"
49% of people aged 30-34 aren't homeowners, 49% of us are homeowners or renters.
> The avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now.
You haven't disproven this statement in any way, you've just linked to some statistics that show we can still afford rent.
No, I'm not. I'm citing the numbers in the table entitled "Quarterly Homeownership Rates for the U.S. and Regions: 1964 to Present"* (emphasis added). That table is talking about homeownership rates, not householdership rates, and the definition they give is this:
> Homeownership Rates. The proportion of households that are owners is termed the homeownership rate. It is computed by dividing the number of households that are owners by the total number of occupied households (table 5 and 6)
Sorry, I just updated my links to include the citation for the age breakdown, which is in fact the link you linked to.
Note the title of the chart you linked to (tab7.xlsx): "Homeownership Rates by Age of Householder" (emphasis added). This is percentage of householders who own the home that they are the householder of.
EDIT: Also, while I'm at it, here's "Homeownership Rates by Age of Householder: 1994 to Present" (again, homeownership), which shows a 39% homeownership rate under 35 years old, which is about the same rate as it was throughout the 90s. It broke 40% in the 2000s for a while before coming back down, but was never higher than about 43%.
> This is percentage of householders who own the home that they are the householder of.
It is not. It's a ratio of homeowners in an age group to the number of renter households in that age group, which is kinda a useless statistic.
To explain why it's a bad metric take this real (but simplified) example. My roommate and I share a "household". Lets pretend that besides my roommate and I there is only one other person aged 30-34 in the US and they own a home.
The Homeownership Rates by Age of Householder chart would say 50%. 1 owner household / 2 total occupied households.
Now if you read that chart and take it to mean that there is only 1 homeowner and 1 renter, you would be misunderstanding what the statistics mean. There are more renters than homeowners in our example but the metric doesn't reflect that because it isn't meant to.
This is a fair argument and as late as it is I don't have a reply—you're right that there are limitations that I hadn't considered, and I'll have to look at the numbers more closely to figure out what they mean *.
However, I want to note that this represents a sudden change of pace from your original "49% of us are homeowners or renters" and "you've just linked to some statistics that show we can still afford rent".
When you misunderstood the situation, you insisted that I "own it" that I was wrong (when I wasn't). It would behoove you to do so yourself instead of pretending you understood the numbers all along.
* Edit: as an initial thought, I'd argue that the same argument often applies to the homeowner number—my wife and I jointly owning one house balances out you and your roommate.
I'm so terribly confused. How can you read this discussion and come to that conclusion? The whole point is that the number being quoted hides the truth.
Living arrangements have suddenly and dramatically shifted.
Man, those are wide age bands. Big difference from more 19 year olds living at home versus 34 year olds.
And flip that statistic, the percentage not living at home went from 80% to 68%.
Significant? Sure. Massive? Doesn’t seem like it.
And looking at home ownership rates for those under 35 years old, historically - its not that much lower, maybe a 10% relative drop.
So sure, fewer young people owning homes, but it’s <10% relative change. That doesn’t scream crisis to me. The vast majority of young people own homes similar to the past.
It's not comparing 18 year olds to 34 year olds, it's comparing the same age range in different time periods, so the size of the band is also irrelevant. Besides which, 18-34 is a standard range used all the time.
And it seems like you didn't even notice my last comment was your own words.
> 49% of people aged 30-34 aren't homeowners, 49% of us are homeowners or renters.
Wait, this is saying less than 50% of people aged 30-34 live in a home that is owned or rented by them (or their spouse)? I can't imagine a region where this is close to true, since probably near 100% where I live either own or rent. Is there a regional breakdown for this? And where do these people live? With their parents or in a shelter?
They're wrong, they got confused because the header column on the data is labeled "age of householder". This is because the data is the ratio of householders who own their homes to total householders, broken down by the age of the householder.
The title of the tables I'm looking at are "Homeownership rates by Age of Householder", which makes it pretty clear what they mean.
I notice that this isn't even close to the claim GP quotes you making. It's wild to me that you're out here telling the other guy to just own up to their "misunderstanding" while furiously backpedaling your own.
There is subtlety of the "renters are probably systematically undercounted due to the vagaries of householding" variety, but that is neither a straightforward effect (a homeowning married couple with 2 of their parents and 3 adult children under the same roof and 1 single renter in an apartment = 50%!) nor is it remotely what you were saying to begin with.
"Homeownership" rate is a bit of a misnomer, since it's the proportion of occupied housing units which are occupied by their owners.
Homeownership by age of householder restricts the reference set of housing units to those which are occupied by a householder in the specified age group.
This turned into a wild and (perhaps understandably) aggressive discussion.
After reading all of the back-and-forths here, I just wanted to thank you for continually being the clarifying force in this discussion, even amidst the downvotes and fallacies.
As a 41-year-old urban homeowner, I knew I was in a lucky category, but I didn't realize how difficult it actually is to know how lucky based on the available data.
HN has a blindness for the vast land area of America that isn't The Bay Area, NYC, Seattle, Boston, and a handful of other insanely expensive locations. Home ownership has probably plummeted in those markets (I don't have the data) but it leads to certain types of comments being passed around as fact.
The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless is really exhausting.
There are also people who pretend like problems highlighted in the Bay Area and other metropolitan cities are unique to them. Yet every time it looks like those are just the first wave of the changes that are heading to other regions first. Like the wave of homelessness. People made fun of SF, then it spread to the broader Bay Area, then LA, then other parts of the country. Turns out the effects of income inequality and how it impacts housing are rippling through the US.
While it may be too doomer, it’s worthwhile to listen and understand the struggles of people who aren’t you to understand what’s coming. Certainly home ownership is rarer even for millennials and Genz is likely going to have even lower rates (its a little too early to compare since they’re too young for it)
A lot of problems highlighted in the Bay Are and other [insanely expensive, dense urban areas in the US] are unique to them. Nobody is calmly walking through a Walgreens in western Minnesota shoving everything they can into bags and walking out the front door while 30 people record it. Nobody is putting glitter bombs in bags for news articles in rural Missouri.
Maybe shifts in housing dynamics happen first in cities then spreads to the suburbs, then the exurbs, then rural areas. Or maybe it's just due to how cities are governed, how many people live there, and how much new housing you get in any one year?
Bay Area is usually just 10-15 years ahead of the rest of the country, because it's a region that culturally tends to embrace the future (good and bad) and run toward it.
Bay Area in 2000 was complaining about illegal immigration, bilingual education, and the lights not staying on, all of which are contemporary issues facing the rest of America from 2015 onward. Bay Area in 2010 was in relative boom times from the tech industry, which again is spreading nationwide as tech jobs start getting more dispersed (though it may reverse thanks to RTO). Starting in 2012, housing prices became utterly unaffordable, which again started spreading nationwide around 2022.
Give it another 5-10 years and yes, people will probably be walking through a Walgreens in western Minnesota shoving everything they can into their bags.
To be fair the lights not staying on in California was a local problem and not a portend of things to come, but ironically caused by a Texas company that was committing insane levels of unrelated fraud and in this case was exploiting a loop hole in the energy grid to shut down their California plants in times of high demand to cause high purchase prices to import from their Texas plants.
It was allowed because it was politically convenient - they were tied into Bush’s inner circle and the energy problems were convenient in making Gray Davis unpopular and causing his recall to then install a Republican governor by the name of Arnold instead. Ironically Arnold created reforms within the political structure of California to solidify Democratic control of the state.
If you’re not familiar with that, look up how Enron fucked with the California power grid and the Bush administration prevented California from discovering it nor making changes to stabilize the grid (or something along those lines - I may have gotten some of the details wrong).
> People made fun of SF, then it spread to the broader Bay Area, then LA, then other parts of the country. Turns out the effects of income inequality and how it impacts housing are rippling through the US.
These aren't automatic, though. Who's to say they aren't produced by policy that's often done first in SF first?
The policy is usually in response to the problems, not vice versa. California is actually dysfunctionally democratic (with a small "d", not "Democratic"). The state constitution gives ballot initiatives powers that they don't have in many other states, and the state has a tradition of individual rights and political activism that means the citizenry isn't shy about using that.
A lot of people in the rest of the country tend to think "Oh, that's just dysfunctional California politics, we'll vote in different policies and things will go differently for us." Yes, you will vote in different policies. No, things will not go differently for you. California voted in different policies too - remember that it's the source of the Reagan Revolution, the hippie generation, the Chinese Exclusion Act, all sorts of policies that took hold nationally but are now the antithesis of what California stands for.
At the root of this is a misperception of the power of politics. Most ordinary people think that laws are laws and the people who make the laws have ultimate power. California (and U.S. history in general) proves that laws are reactions to specific social and demographic forces, and the laws reflect the shape of those forces. Economics drives politics and technology drives economics.
California is also dysfunctionally Democratic (big "D") in that all elected state level offices have gone to Democrats for the last several election cycles. Because the Republican Party has imploded and third parties have failed to gain traction we now live in a single party state. Politicians are selected by Democratic Party leaders and are no longer accountable to voters in any meaningful way.
This problem isn't particular to the Democratic Party. Other states now have single party Republican governments with similar levels of dysfunction and corruption.
The implosion is because the top two system in California ensures that Republican candidates never even get on the ballot because the GOP is so unpopular.
The top two system by the way was a popular ballot initiative championed by Schwarzenegger to remove the gridlock from the state and remove the power of individual parties.
Ironically Schwarzenegger came to power because of shenanigans the Bush administration and Enron were playing with California’s power grid to remove Gray Davis, a popular up and comer who could be a threat.
So in essence, your complaint that only democrats win in California and somehow that’s because of the Democratic Party is ironic because single party rule in California is due to direct efforts by Republicans to make it thus. It just turned out that the federal politics of the GOP shifted the state very solidly blue and turns out single party rule by Democrats seems to be quite popular given how the state flourished in the years following.
> So in essence, your complaint that only democrats win in California and somehow that’s because of the Democratic Party is ironic because single party rule in California is due to direct efforts by Republicans to make it thus
There was no complaint. I don't see the point in such a partisan way of thinking.
> single party rule by Democrats seems to be quite popular given how the state flourished in the years following
This doesn't seem to be the case now. Lots of people are leaving California, as far as I can tell[0].
> But this trend is now shifting, with a sharp increase in the number of higher-income adults moving to California (up 30% in 2022 versus 2021) and a slight decline in the number moving out. The net effect is a strong rebound from the pandemic years.
Basically the trend of pushing out lower income people is continuing because California still struggles to keep CoL under control.
Be careful trying to draw political conclusions from migration data, because it tells an economic story.
The migration data you cite says that the people leaving California are generally lower-income households without higher education. The people entering California tend to be highly educated and have very well-paying jobs [1]. California's housing stock is more or less fixed; actual housing construction is round-off error to the current population. What's happening is that high-earning immigrants are outbidding lower-income residents for the fixed supply of housing, and then faced with soaring housing costs, those lower-income residents are moving to states where their income places them higher on the social pecking order.
Yes, urban hellscape problems tends to spread to other urban hellscapes, but there exist places to live other than urban hellscapes.
There's a peculiar form of blindness that strikes the Urbanite, as if there are no other places to live.
The people who live in flyover country are barely even recognizable as human, so you might as well ask me to move to Mars! How the hell am I going to be seen in public drinking my $12 microbrews or pretending to appreciate the Moma so that other people know I'm the correct class of person? God, what would my parents think? I'd rather die than live there, so that place doesn't even exist for me.
So instead we should be looking at the massive failing small towns all across the area for examples? Humans population grows and it has to go somewhere. Humans are social animals so we congregate. Congregated humans also create opportunities for each other. Yes problems come with that but framing it as “this is the problem of urbanites” when more than half of the world’s population lives in cities is an othering framing that doesn’t actually help anything. There’s plenty of problems from small town communities spread all over the place too.
“It’s those damn young people”. “It’s those damn urbanites”. “It’s those damn techies”. Replace that kind of thinking with religious or racial terms and consider how you’re looking at a very large and diverse group of people.
I live in a mid-sized European city right now, which I'm sure explains a lot of the bias in my response but there do exist relatively affordable cities with a good quality of life, and I'd rather live in a place where I can walk to the supermarket and the pharmacy and the town center rather than have to drive everywhere.
High population density also (generally) means more social activities, which can be important for some people (like myself). Living in a rural area kinda scares me because I'm afraid I'd be quite lonely.
On top of that, for those of us who don't have the privilege to remote work, living in a city is often necessary to have a job.
How’s the situation in European cities? I’ve also wondered if many of the problems are culturally specific to American views on individualism and capitalism and distaste for socialism given how similar many European cities are to large American cities with a major difference being social and cultural norms.
Pretty much. I used to live in a mid-sized mid-West city in the US and still keep in touch. Most everyone I know bought a house, even with the modest wages they had. Why? Because there are plenty of homes in the $100-$200k range, even now.
Hell, you can buy beautiful, updated small mansions in the heart of many small midwestern towns for under $200k.
The trouble is:
1) no local jobs to speak of (unless you want to clerk at the farm & feed or assistant-manage the McDonald’s out by the highway)
2) nearest hospital that can do more than stabilize you before shipping you somewhere better, is over an hour away.
3) the schools are really, really bad
4) no local services or amenities. Hope the nearest state park (if any) is really good. But if it’s a midwestern one it’s probably not.
Remote work, being young and healthy and willing to take a little extra risk, having no kids and planning to have none, and being kinda a home-body (or being really into readily available rural midwestern outdoor activities like hunting and fishing), can make it a viable way to go, but that’s a lot of qualifiers.
In our medium-ish sized midwestern city there are smaller slightly-run-down houses in the low $200Ks, but universally in bottom-half school districts for the city. Solid choice if no kids, though. But also local tech jobs pay at most 50% of big-city equivalents.
They exist, but they’re needles in a haystack. Especially if you exclude rural districts that aren’t cheap because they’re basically captured by the same folks who attend the country club the community’s centered around (there are a few of these, particularly in the Northeast)
There are lots of schools in rural Pennsylvania that still have affordable real estate. Most of them have AP, college in HS courses, clubs, sports, etc. The metrics might not look as good as suburban schools because of the lack of home support or need to work for the larger percentage of disadvantaged students.
I think that's a part that gets ignored in most school comparisons - the largest differences are due to the level of home support, which is highly correlated with better incomes. So we have a cycle of implicit financial segregation. Many schools (in my area) have similar scores and outcomes if we exclude the disadvanged group from the metrics (because unless your child fits that category, that metric doesn't apply to them). So most people end up counting the wrong metrics for their kids.
Plenty of examples of far better options in mid-sized cities that have level 1 or 2 trauma centers, very good school options and lots of local services and amenities. And housing that is under $300k for a single family home.
> The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless is really exhausting.
The algorithm has turned (some) people into whiners and doomers. It really sucks to watch them take defeatist attitudes on everything in life.
I see lots of these young 20-somethings on Reddit thinking their lives are over. It's absurd. They have their entire lives ahead of them, and all it takes is one break into a career.
They even think climate change is going to "kill all of us" before they're elderly. That's not even what the science says.
On the topic of having children, though - people aren't having kids because they're choosing to focus on themselves.
There are ten times as many forms of entertainment today as there were in the 1980s, and people can endlessly consume content in their hands. You can go glamping at a music festival, post it on Instagram, and hook up with new friends and romantic partners you meet. All incredibly easily. Our culture has become built around experience and consumption.
I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children.
It's wild that, not too long ago, you could afford a house and a car on a single income as a mailman. That is unthinkable today. We understand there are ways to be successful, but it's like that saying: anyone can be successful, but everyone can't.
I know a lot of people who spend their money on experiences because they genuinely believe they won't get a retirement, so they might as well enjoy their life while they can. I'm part of this group. I don't think the world will literally be over by then, but the future looks bleak. We've also been drilled from birth that you should never have a child if you can't afford it, and people are taking that advice to heart. And because you can't afford your home on a single income anymore, more and more parents are having to rely on childcare, which is itself expensive.
The issues are just compounding. If you just want to believe that everyone is too enamored by their phones to procreate... that's your prerogative, but yikes.
> It's wild that, not too long ago, you could afford a house and a car on a single income as a mailman. That is unthinkable today.
to be fair it was unthinkable the day before yesterday too. in the history of human civilisation, that kind of setup has only been possible in a handful of countries, for a few skin colours, for a couple of decades. fueled by burning cheap fossil fuels taken from poorer countries
In the history of human civilization, before that kind of setup most people didn't worry about having a house, because they lived in villages, so they lived next to their extended family, and either stayed together under one roof or eventually moved couple hundred meters to the side and built their own.
Expectations for quality of life were lower, sure, but the problem of not being able to find a place to live anywhere near your family or job, that is relatively new and getting worse.
> in a handful of countries, for a few skin colours, for a couple of decades. fueled by burning cheap fossil fuels taken from poorer countries
Also: I know it's trendy to make everything about skin colours these days, but that's a distinct USA-ian bias. The rest of the world doesn't work that way.
I won't argue against exploitation of poorer countries as that, indeed, was a big theme in the last century or two. However, note that whatever many hard problems people in those poorer countries have, affordable housing isn't one of them.
> Also: I know it's trendy to make everything about skin colours these days, but that's a distinct USA-ian bias. The rest of the world doesn't work that way.
Europe's industrialized genocidal tribalism of 20th century, the modern islamic experience as an immigrant in Europe, 21st century genocide in Africa and the Middle East, Japan's war crimes in east asia during WW2. Where is this rest of the world you speak of?
You are proving my point here, by conflating together total war for world domination, anti-immigration sentiments (in case of Islamic immigrants, with a healthy dose of Islamopobia thanks to two decades of US anti-Islamic propaganda), civil wars, ethnic conflicts, regional conflicts, plain old war between nation states, and war crimes against POWs of the same racial group.
The rest of the world is where we can distinguish these different reasons, motivations and patterns, instead of lumping them together with racial discrimination and calling everything "racism".
I was perhaps broadening "skin colour" to include "ethnic" or "national" or "racial" distinctions, but I think that's a distinction without a difference.
If we want to say "The US has been bad", I'm on board and wholeheartedly agree. But using "The Rest of the World" as the counterexample, I'm not sure that will hold up.
I imagine we broadly agree and would love to have a cup of coffee with you some day!
In 1950 you could afford a car and house on one income - but that house as much smaller than the typical house today. You also had one car not two, your wife (this was sexist times - men worked, women stayed home) probably didn't even have a drivers license. If she did she couldn't drive anywhere when you were at work unless she drove you to work. (thus door to door salesmen: sell things those housewives need but cannot easily get because their husband is at work. Send both partners to work and suddenly houses get larger and you have two cars.
Note that despite the above, in 1950 women did often have jobs. It wasn't the "ideal" and it was less common (and even less common if you had kids), but plenty of women had jobs.
In the 1950s the world had gone through two (2) gigantic world wars, one recently, which completely collapsed multiple global empires, killed millions -- especially the young, fit men who are the backbone of the economy -- and devastated multiple countries, many of which were big developed economies.
the US, and certain parts of Europe, were mostly spared this, and as a result could make crazy money because they were the only source of advanced labor around.
it wasn't like that in the Guilded Age or Roaring 20s or Great Depression -- there was a reason all of those labor movements and riots happened then; wouldn't have happened if a one-income mailman could buy a house.
that was a one-off, a time when half the world blew up a few years before.
> In 1950 you could afford a car and house on one income - but that house as much smaller than the typical house today.
"Typical" is doing some really heavy lifting there given the kind of housing stock available in, say, East Coast urban areas. Most of those remotely-affordable houses are a hundred years old in the Boston area, for example.
I would love to see historical rates in urban vs rural/suburban areas for this, alongside migration/growth rates - does something like that exist?
My son (in college) probably won’t be able to afford much of a house in the Bay Area, austin, etc. but originally he was going to become an electrician in Watertown, NY. You can get a house for $120k there, which seems doable on a 50k income.
I've seen it but don't have it on hand. Urban prices certainly seem to have disconnected quite hard from suburban/rural ones, but even suburban/rural might not capture it. I grew up in a not-all-that-wealthy town in Maine about the same size as Watertown, NY--a little smaller actually; an empty half-acre lot there costs more than $120K. (I'd love to move back there, but a house the size of my Boston-area house costs the same as my Boston-area house...)
The formal dining room has now become the home office.
My grandparents raised 5 kids in a 900 sq foot home. They weren't poor. That was the typical home being built in the working class suburbs of Detroit in the early 1950s. Average new home being built today is twice that size for a smaller household.
"your wife (this was sexist times - men worked, women stayed home) probably didn't even have a drivers license"
According to a internet search it seems about half of women had driver's licenses. So this is not accurate. Anecdotal, but I just skimmed The Donna Reed show episode descriptions and a 1961 episode has her fighting a parking ticket, another 1961 episode has her daughter learning to drive.
There doesn't appear to be easily obtainable information on the internet showing how many married women had driver's licenses in 1950 [and just 1950] compared to married men (the federal government did not collect this information), however an article states "In the 1950s many suburban housewives obtained their licenses in order to fulfil their domestic responsibilities." it also states "Perhaps a quarter of women drove before the second world war and more learned to drive during the war."
> It's wild that, not too long ago, you could afford a house and a car on a single income as a mailman.
You can do that today in some parts of the US.
Was there a time when you could do that in NYC? Or San Francisco? Maybe. When the city was down in the dumps and housing prices dropped. Or if you were willing to buy in crappy neighborhoods or on the edge of the city.
It makes me think of my great grandparents. They have a beautiful house in a central location in a major Canadian city worth North of $2.0M. And they did it on the single income of a teacher! I weep for those times.
But oh yeah, when they actually bought the house, it was on the edge of the city where nobody wanted to live. Oh and my grandfather picked up extra jobs to make sure his family of 5 had everything they needed.
There was never a time when it came easy. When people say they can't afford a home what they mean is "I can't afford a house in this specific city that checks all my boxes".
Ddg reckons average mailman salary is about 50k. That’s 1/8th the average house price.
In 1990 it was about 25k with prices about 150k
House prices are about 100k too high, they should be 300k not 400k
One reason for this is more people rely on two incomes to pay for housing, so more money is available for housing, so money transfers from future debt of millenials to existing assets of boomers and gen x.
But on top of that it means two incomes means harder to have kids due to child care.
> But on top of that it means two incomes means harder to have kids due to child care.
Maybe we're also stuck in something of a vicious cycle.
More people not having kids leads to more double incomes. More double incomes means more money to pay higher prices. The market seems to be bearing the higher prices just fine, so they continue to climb...
As someone who is doing well financially I don't think you found the reason.
The gist of it is: There are worlds and circumstances into which people want to bring kids. We mostly failed to create that world and those circumstances. If tou want to know what a solution looks like look at western democracies with high birth rates. E.g. France, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark.
The rest is probably due to individualism. Kids cost time and energy and capitalism tells us we should live our best lives. And the best live does not involve herding 6 kids, even if they are your own.
We created this world willingly, and the low birth rate is a consequence — and so is the need for migration if we wanna stay wealthy. The thing is: now that the genie is out of the bottle we are not gonna be able to force people to have kids. We can just create circumstances in which they are willing to.
I am in my 30s and I am unsure if I will ever be able to retire. I am sure however that I will have to change my job and career multiple times throughout my life. Despite me being financially well off, I am not sure if I would be able to support kids in the future. This is not about being whiny. I just think if I had kids it is my responsibility to throw them into a world that can sustain them. This one can't.
> We mostly failed to create that world and those circumstances. If tou want to know what a solution looks like look at western democracies with high birth rates. E.g. France, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark.
Those countries all have a fertility rate [0] almost identical to the US - three of them are lower if you look at 2020 figures. All of them have been relying on immigration [1] to maintain their demographics, with various levels of backlash in recent years. The US is still ahead of all but Ireland on that immigration list.
In Ireland at least, the narrative around the "housing crisis" and people being priced out of starting families is far stronger than what I get from US media. So I think you need to look elsewhere.
Here's my related guess: many people want to wait until they feel in an appropriate position personally and financially before they have children. That might mean earning a certain amount or feeling like they have a foothold in home ownership or waiting for a future renovation. Only, the world in 2010+ constantly exposes you to bigger options on top of the issue of housing affordability: more adventures, more expensive furnishings, stories of others' salaries, etc. It would be quite easy to push back child-rearing for 5 or more years if you didn't feel like you were quite where you wanted to be, or wonder if you'll ever get there.
It's very interesting how this thread treats the decision to have children as a purely rational, logistical one. I would argue it is not entirely rational/logical.
It also seems pretty straightforward to me that when a person is constantly badgered to justify why they don't have kids, and nobody accepts the simple answer "I don't want kids", they'll probably come up with socioeconomic reasons like these just to get people off their back, but I see only talk like "they just want to keep their Netflix and travel lifestyles" and "housing market/economy"
Capitalism does not tell us we should live our best life. I think there are strong arguments that capitalism (particularly concentrated private investment in housing) causes low birth rates, but I don’t think capitalism itself causes some kind of consumption-fueled decadence causing us to prioritize fun over children.
Except that consumption is exactly what capitalism drives - particularly manufacturing, where a relatively fixed amount of capital (factories & machinery) can drive higher overall profits if more products are made for people to consume - even if those people don't actually need the products.
Apparently (I can't find the source for this, but it stuck in my mind), faced with a glut of production after WW2, the US could either consume more, or work less. The choice was made to consume more, not least because the industrialists could cream off a larger slice of the pie that way.
Having children still fuels consumption though. The difference is what is being consumed vs if that consumption spending were not spent on children. I think you are mixing up the colloquial definition of consumption of ie random plastic crap with the economic definition that is very broad and includes things like paying teachers.
Similarly regarding manufacturing and production glute, if the hard capital is fixed then so too typically is the hard production (not the case for many kinds of capital but it is for manufacturing) or at least capped. Just like with consumption, it’s a problem of what portion of capital is being expended on increasing production of things for children (housing, schools, kid stuff) or not. In both cases this is ultimately driven by the supply and demand stemming from parents themselves. But I don’t think there is a feedback loop because capitalism does not itself care whether capital goes to kids or not, only whether there is enough demand for capital expenditure to be profitable.
> Kids cost time and energy and capitalism tells us we should live our best lives.
Thought experiment for all the unrestrained free-market folk: how can the free hand of the market can solve for low birthrates? Bonus points if the solution doesn't involve government-issued visas.
Free market is a kind of natural selection. People with inner desire to procreate will spread themselves, people without it won't. Pro-natalist cultures (e. g. orthodox jews) will procreate as well.
This inner desire wasn't selected for strongly in the past because there were other mechanisms to nudge people to procreate (social norms, lack of birth control), but I expect it will play a much bigger role in the following generations.
Well technically those who seek to gain from people having children would want to generate som marketing/propaganda that encourages having kids. Families want big safe cars and would pay a premium for that, singles would be more enclined to drive in old used cars, so theres the car industry. Families usually wants big houses so there that, diaper industry etc.
> I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children.
That kind of thing, at least to me, seemed to get old pretty quickly. Probably more importantly though, is that we all get old at some point. When fewer and fewer people have children of their own, what happens when the bulk of people get past retirement age? I think it's a huge problem from both an economic standpoint (if there's no productive workers to keep things going, is the state really going to be able to support you in better than awful conditions as you age?) and from an individual and cultural standpoint.
Claiming a legitimate argument is from "the algorithm" is flimsy, unprovable, unfalsifiable, and does nothing except discredit the person rather than the idea. I could claim your argument is from living a life of privilege, but then I'd be addressing the person rather than the argument.
Our house prices, North of Dallas and deep in the suburbs - far from the bay areas and Seattles, have doubled. That includes my home. People in our profession usually have to live by big cities, like Dallas. But the homes are ridiculously priced and it's insane. My juniors have no hope of owning a home that is big enough to raise a family without years of saving. And they're college educated engineers, some of them married with dual incomes.
My wife and I are expecting. Daycare is expensive, but it's only an outrageous expense if you have two people making up to about 3x minimum wage. Below that, it makes sense (at least in our area) to have one person stay home. But the cheapest state-regulated, licensed daycares are around $1500/mo for full-day infant care.
$18k/yr is a lot to spend on anything when you're making $20/hr for sure, but if you've got two professional people making $75-100k/yr each it becomes a very manageable expense and nobody considers staying home to save that.
$75k is about $56k after taxes. And many people that have children tend to have at least two children, so you can double that $18k to $36k/year for those people.
Once you get to that point, it gets harder to justify having someone work just to take home an extra $20k a year. It starts making more sense for one person to stay home (or work a part-time gig that lets them still raise their children) and the other person to try to make a bit more money on their end instead.
My parents got around the daycare cost problem by my mother running a daycare out of the home, so she was making money while still able to raise us. But I imagine that's become so much more risky nowadays (like legal issues, parental trust, etc) that it probably wouldn't be worth doing that anymore.
And as soon as we both graduated high school she stopped doing it and went back into the workforce elsewhere.
Yeah after taxes and then daycare it gets blurry unless you're making well above US median.
even then, I'm not crazy with the idea of random strangers raising my kids. being "qualified" to run a daycare is mostly paperwork. plus I work remotely, and that means I can see my kid 3 times a day, even if I can't really stick around to do serious parenting in between meetings.
my wife's people are also around, retired teachers no less, so having them pop in on the regular helps a immensely. they had 3 kids, several grandkids, and have educational backgrounds in early childhood development, and I trust them to do everything they can to take care of my kid, even if it means occasionally giving them extra ice cream (but, usually, it's grandpa reading books or working on basic math with them, etc.).
"it gets harder to justify having someone work just to take home an extra $20k a year."
An extra $20k/yr is huge for most people. Median household income is around $80k. I've heard it's more like $100k for married couples with kids, but can't find that Stat. With either number(or even 75% of those after tax), that's a large bump (or subtraction).
This was already assuming the person quitting was making $75k though, per the parent, so presumably the other person is making more (or else they would probably be the one quitting for day care). Which means they're already making double the household median.
And once you get to that level, the person keeping the job getting a new job for a $10k-$20k bump starts becoming feasible (I got a >$60k bump when I last switched jobs), and that can make up the difference right there.
Then you have one person who can take care of the children and have time and energy to help with cooking and cleaning (keeping those costs down, especially if you were getting a lot of takeout before), and can save even more money.
There's plenty of families making this decision nowadays, it's not a hypothetical. It doesn't always make sense for every couple, but the marginal increase of income doesn't always make sense for all the added stress of trying to raise children while having two full-time jobs and the house not completely falling apart.
We don't even have children, and we aren't able to fully keep up with cooking and cleaning on two full-time jobs, we just don't have the leftover energy afterwards.
You're on Hacker News. I work in the Midwest, and I'm probably making half or less of the total compensation of people (with half my years of experience) working in Silicon Valley, which is the target demographic of this site. Yet I'm making significantly more than $80k. 'Lots of income' is the norm here.
And $10-20k isn't a huge bump between jobs. I've gotten that much of a bump, or more, at least six times throughout my career. And I wasn't always a software engineer, so it's not just because I'm in a lucrative career.
I haven't gotten it every time, but often enough that this shouldn't be impossible at least once in someone's career if they're extra motivated by switching to a single income household (unless it's a field known for low salaries, like maybe teachers can't expect that much of a bump, unfortunately).
I'd like to get less takeout. I'd be fine with just lunchmeat on bread or something microwaved for most of my meals, but my wife won't. She insists on a 'proper meal' every day, so on weeks we don't cook those (which almost always take me about 1.5-2 hours to cook) we tend to get a lot of takeout. I hate how much money we spend on it, but we can afford it.
House upkeep has been a challenge. Both of us have been pretty low energy after work, so during the week not much more tends to get done besides dishes, sometimes cooking, and laundry.
And then on the weekend we might be out pretty much all day both days (I work from home, so I feel more of a need to socialize on the weekends to make up for it, but even just extended family social obligations can suck up a weekend) or trying to relax from a long week, so not much tends to get done there either.
And so slowly things that need doing start accumulating, until it becomes this big thing that takes a lot of work (and some proper time off) to tackle.
I know it's not just me either. I know several friends and coworkers that hire maids to keep up with housework. People I know aren't making a ton of money comparatively so I wonder how they afford it. We can afford it but we kind of need to get the house up to a certain level before it's even worth hiring a maid (have to do enough decluttering, for example).
Also doesn't help that I keep saying "Well next week let's do better." and it keeps not happening for one reason or another.
I'm glad someone else spends this amount of time cooking. Look, I actually really enjoy cooking. It's almost zen to me to go from programming all day to just following steps, the most complicated of which is usually something like "now add some ingredient but don't stop stirring." It's mindless in a good way but still creative.
But can we talk about how every single unit of time seems to be distorted like it was written in some relativistic hellscape? Any 30 minute recipe takes just over an hour, any "from scratch" recipe takes me half the day.
I find it interesting how income tends to segregate with marriage, and how that exasperates some inequalities.
Having kids for those highly compensated dual income homes seems narcissistic when you get to the root of it. Like why have kids if we're outsourcing their raising to daycare and schools. The we only care about their accomplishments and leaving them with a large inheritance or paying for a fancy school. Then they go off to live mostly separate lives. Look at how well my kid is doing because I set them up in life, even though I barely raised them and rarely see them now. I don't know?
Telling the monthly rate in Texas is not a great metric in general... you must always add the property tax costs. What are those, 300k'ish houses? You're probably looking at at least another 500 a month in properly tax pushing it up to $2300, then if they are built like this add another $200 in for summer time cooling.
1800/month including tax. Real estate tax is high in TX, but not income tax. I prefer this taxation which has to come from somewhere. NYC has high income tax and real estate tax, and the grocery options could still be not close at all.
How far do you have to drive to go to a supermarket from that development? To a library? (Silly me, expecting people to go to a library in 2024, right?)
If Dallas or Houston or Austin had decent mass transit out to those areas that'd be one thing, but they wouldn't be very "mass", and therein lies one of the problems. Car culture increases isolation and generally shits up the world ever further; somewhere like a YOLO development in the suburbs to exurbs is deleterious to human flourishing and saying "well just buy something where you need a car for everything", as opposed to like the one-off Home Depot run or something, is just trading problems.
Yes, of course! And it's reasonable to think that living in both modest precarity and isolation is worse than living in somewhat more severe precarity; "affordable" places to live are inferior goods!
The problem, fundamentally, is that we, collectively and as a country, need to create more good places, rather than to exile people to the bad but affordable ones. We need a concerted effort to have strong towns and to put cars at the edge and not the center of those towns in order to have a healthy community future, and just sneering that you can buy a house in the hinterlands is both non-responsive and cruel to boot.
I agree with you. However, the discussion about housing is normally around how it's worse now than it was in the past, and these types of dynamics have existed for a long time.
Just looked it up because I was curious. Mortgage + Real Estate tax is right at 1800/month. 4 Bed / 2 Bath, new construction. Kroger is 3 miles away with a "cash and go" type place even closer, so about 8 min by car, 20 min by bike.
Point remains, that there is plenty of affordable housing in the US. It's just not where people want to live, thus supply/demand.
No amount of "fuckcars" ideology will matter here, some people actually prefer driving. I know I do, I don't want to be stuck in a subway or bus.
"How far do you have to drive to go to a supermarket from that development?"
That's the system - resource scarcity and preference. If you live in a densely populated area, prices tend to be higher because real estate is constrained. Zoning won't fix all of that because many people have a preference for SFH, larger sizes, etc. You end up with options and amenities, but it will cost more due to the consolidation. Or you end up with space, needing to drive to amenities, and cheaper prices largely due to less competition.
if you get out Dallas or Austin... where are the jobs?
the number of people working remotely, even now, is still comparatively small.
doesn't matter if the housing rates are 50% lower if your only options are minimum wage at some chain (dollar general, chik fil a, etc.), or scraping for one of the few non-wagie gigs.
that doesn't fix the problem, that just means you're getting paid less, while house prices may have roughly the same ratio of income-to-cost that you'd find in DFW or ATX.
and in exchange now you need a car, need to drive constantly, and have fewer amenities and choices (maybe save for access to churches or walmarts).
shit, even far flung burbs of Austin like Taylor and Hutto are getting pricy compared to when I was last out there. Hutto Hippo oughta make a reappearance and start eating the carpetbaggers who keep moving in around there.
Ad hominem means "against a specific person". He made a general argument. Might be good or bad, but in no way it was an ad hominem. Arguing how a group of people conflate or tend to misrepresent this or that, is not an ad hominem.
"Our profession" can work remotely from anywhere. Whether some companies choose to acknowledge that or not doesn't change the fact that we don't need to live by big cities. Most companies do understand that.
Home ownership rate is a poor statistic to make the point you are attempting to make, particularly because homes are "bought" with debt. Saying someone can "afford" a home because they are in one doesn't speak to being able to afford a home or not. Government programs to promote home ownership by taking riskier debt is an even more complicating factor. That was at the core of the 2008 financial crisis, IIRC.
Here is a statistic that is a better measurement of affordability: "Home Price to Median Household Income Ratio."' It shows homes are less affordable. If we could see the 25th percentile it would likely even paint a bleaker picture, at least if you believe those stats.
If you seriously think 40-49%, whatever ridiculous mis-read stat you're choosing to use this time, of 30-34 year olds are home owners I have a bridge to Hawaii to sell you. I'm 40, make around 300k and know a LOT of people my age and the vast, VAST majority don't own houses. I owned a house in 2016 and sold it, I don't want to own a house because I'm single and they're $800k minimum here, none of my friends want houses because for 99% of us it means moving 45 minutes away to some suburb. Would they take a house a block over here downtown? Absolutely, but that's $2mil+.
I can count how many times I walk into an ACTUAL house, like a free standing house not a condo, apartment, or townhouse - on one hand over ONE year. I think I have 2 friends with houses out of 20+ here in Denver, and I'm of course including condos/ths, anything purchasable. Almost everyone I know over 30 lives in a 1-2 bd apartment. And this is hackernews where I can pretty much assume someone like you is so far from the average American reality you have no idea what's going on.
There's already a post right above this from some compsci engineer talking about how, oh no, there really are a lot more americans making over $100k than you'd imagine!!
You don't have any real humans in your life to use THAT anecdata from? You sound like you're vastly out of that age range, your "you're too confrontational uwu" style of writing and you're obvious lack of knowledge related to the topic at hand.
I have anecdata on the contrary. I'm 25 and with my wife have a household income of ~150k. We own a house in a Midwestern major city, and so does 80% of our friend group. I realize it's an outlier, as should you, because most of the country doesn't have 800k minimum starter houses.
I could not care less about what the lives of 25yos in some midwestern city are like. The vast majority of millennials had to move to major cities for work around the 2008 recession.
What's your cities population? Is it even 100k? How much of your anecdata is actually related to this convo, in the sense of what percentage of your midwest people are even relevant to it? I've lived in at least 8 MAJOR (Houston, Denver, Dallas, Austin, Portland, San Josa) since 2008, those population centers absolutely dwarf whatever you can come up with in the mw to affect this stat.
This is like when someone on here chimes in with their amazing $120k house in Oklahoma. Owning a house at 25, whether you're in BFE Alabama or not is also not common.
Just about 2 million people in the metro area. Not the biggest, but not 100k.
Since I can't reply to your later comment yet, I might just do it here. I live in the city proper. It's Columbus OH just to make it easier for you. I'm sure you'll find a way to reason that's not a major city but it is (multiple Fortune 500 companies HQ'd, major league sport team etc). I live ~10 minutes from downtown and the house was 290k.
"Metro" is what suburbanites use to make it sound like they live somewhere more interesting, know anything about that city and its lifestyle, to people who don't know where, and not some suburb outside of it. So, no that doesn't matter. It's not your city.
People who live in BFE an hour or two north of Dallas, that isn't Dallas, love to say they live in Dallas, then you go further, "dallas metro." Nah. Then they find out you actually live downtown because you're asking for neighborhoods IN the city and call you a downtown pretty boy who probably has to fight off muggers daily. Christ, Fort WORTH is in the "Dallas metro" and it's literally it's own city that NOBODY in Dallas ever visits and has NOTHING in common with Dallas. "The Dallas metro has 10 billion people!" Yeah who never interact with one another and live an hour away.
So they love it till it's actually, you know, big scary city stuff. And that's a huge reason why WE don't claim them back. Hearing someone from Plano (rich af suburb) say they live in Dallas to someone from Texas themselves is so cringe. Because I absolutely know they actually hate Dallas, the city. It's different if the person has no idea where and you're just giving a general area.
It’s more useful for many purposes. You have oddball cities like St Louis where the city is really made up of a ton of small cities and towns—but treating them as separate would be misleading in many contexts.
In our midwestern city, we do live in the city limits proper. But if you drive straight from here to the city center, you’ll pass through at least two other towns before reaching it! There are probably seven or eight tiny to large towns in the same general direction as us, but which are closer to downtown than we are (some are just 5 minutes to downtown by car). And our school district is separate from the rest of the city (and shared by parts of some of those other towns)
Like 30% of the population of our metro area and probably 40% of the money is in another state! And many of them closer to downtown than us.
> That's a good point, I never saw the point of "metros" how they used them in Texas.
One role of that way of categorizing, even in less-atomized cities, is to capture the area that’s basically economically dependent on the city. Nobody (more or less) would live in those suburbs and exurbs if not for the presence of the city. It’s like looking at a lake’s drainage basin.
I live in the city proper. It's Columbus OH just to make it easier for you. I live ~10 minutes from downtown. I'm sure you'll find a way to reason that's not a major city but it is (multiple Fortune 500 companies HQ'd, major league sport team etc). It's also bigger than Portland and Denver (but not their metro areas, see why people use that term?). The metro itself is similar to Portland or Austin in size.
You're 25 in Columbus and most/all of your friends own homes? That's .. really impressive. I was one of the first people I know friend-wise, like out of everyone I know in ever city to buy a house, in Austin, and I was .. around 33 I think. $365k 1970s 3/2 in 2016.
Starting salaries post 2019 have skyrocketed though. It took me about 10 years experience to get over 120k, my ex, her second job at 25 was 150k. My first engineering job was $40k in 2006 or so. 2008 wrecked salaries for a decade. Hopping job to job to make an extra $10k because nobody was giving raises and everyone was treated like trash.
Cool good work man, maybe I'll check it out. My rent in Denver is $3100 for a 2br. Denver is SUPER dense for a mid sized city though, it feels way bigger than Austin/Dallas people+shop+bar+etc wise to me because of that. I never drive.
I mean yeah, I'm definitely an outlier. Neither me and my spouse have student debt which helps massively. And while we've done it without the help of parents, I'm pretty sure some of my friends got some kind of assistance that way.
Columbus is nice because it still feels kinda small and driving is still super comfortable because you can get anywhere in about 15 minutes. I still prefer to bike to work because it feels nice but I'm definitely in the minority here doing that.
You can't disagree with statistics. You are living a very unique lifestyle, that is highly paid in HCOL areas with high standards for housing. That is not the norm whatsoever.
All statistics have absolutely correct data and fundamentally sound designs, right? That's literally the entire argument going on in this conversation you've hopped on. How these statistics are being misconstrued or not.
I moved into programming from bartending after dropping out of school. I am absolutely not ignorant to the lifestyles of all of my friends who aren't engineers.
In fact it's the polar opposite. I am vastly aware of how ignorant my engineer friends are to real people. Like all of my $300k+ friends who have massive houses and 4 kids and 2 suburbans and wonder why a huge portion of their friends, like me, aren't giving them playdates or "cousins" to their kids so they have to go find dad-friends at the kids soccer games who their only real commonality is .. kids.
It's certainly possible that there are errors in the data, but if you suspect that to be the case, the proper argument would be to identify those errors so they can be mitigated, not to dismiss the data in favor of anecdotes, especially anecdotes that may represent outliers.
Whilst I don't disagree with you. That doesn't mean those with mortgages aren't struggling to pay.
Also if true, that is insane that the average american lives in a home that they own by the time they're 35. That is so far and wide not the case here in Australia.
Here in Australia, we don't have fixed rate mortgages for the life of the mortgage we have variable and fixed upto around 1-5 years. Our interest rates have gone from around 2-3% to over 5.8% and the value of homes since COVID have gone up enormously, some 30-40% across our cities and nationally combined 27%.
I know we're just talking about the US here I assume, but I earn a chunk above the average salary and I be considered "at risk" in affording the average cost of a home. I know plenty of people who bought their house 3 years ago right when COVID kicked off, of which they would not have been able to afford it today given the increase in just house prices.
Australia has made a bunch of home-ownership-unfriendly decisions which the US hasn't – e.g. in the US you get a mortgage interest deduction on your primary residence, in Australia you only get it on investment properties (joint filing for married couples, which the US has but Australia doesn't, also helps here); in the US owner-occupier mortgages are normally no-recourse, in Australia they are almost always full recourse; US government policy encourages long-term fixed interest mortgages, the Australian government has no comparable policy
Some of it is also geography – Australia is very centralised, with most people living on the coast. Each state has its population dominated by a single metro area which also serves as the state capital – quite unlike the US where majority of the time the state capital is outside the state's largest metro area.
Australia's comparative lack of rainfall inland is a factor, but political culture, and hence decisions by politicians, also plays a big part – suppose NSW moved its capital to (say) Dubbo or Bathurst? Many government jobs would leave Sydney, followed by many consulting/etc jobs which provide services to the government - right now, central and western NSW has plenty of affordable housing, but a big shortage of jobs providing incomes to pay for that housing. Never going to happen: it would require a degree of originality and thinking outside the box of which Australian politicians are constitutionally incapable.
Some of those things I agree with, however the issue was primarily sparked during COVID like in many countries. Houses prices were relatively affordable prior to COVID and increases in inflation.
Australia kept its record low interest rates in place during COVID, then we had runaway inflation to record high’s like many countries did and our reserve bank failed to increase interest rates even slightly to help with the increases to inflation. We increased overseas migration significantly to help drive growth in the economy which has created an enormous shortage of housing supply. As a result, interest rates have soar’d coupled with record high inflation our cost of living has skyrocketed including housing prices. As I said since 2019-2020 house prices have increased 30%+
Our country has always been centralised to the coast and isn’t necessarily the reason for these costs
People have been complaining about housing affordability in Australia for years. I remember endless discussions of it, media articles about it, and feeling its pain myself, 20 years ago. No denying it has gotten worse, but it was already rather bad.
That said - we bought our house (NSW Central Coast) in late 2015 for AU$550K. At the peak of the COVID price surge, those property value websites were saying it was over AU$1 million. Now they are saying it is only AU$850K. Still gone up a fair bit compared to when we bought it, but also fallen a fair bit off the peak. Of course, those websites are not completely accurate, but what they say is consistent with sale prices of comparable properties in our neighbourhood
> suppose NSW moved its capital to (say) Dubbo or Bathurst?
In a sense they already have, most NSW government departments moved their offices from the Sydney CBD to the Parramatta CBD, which is about 25km west. This helped a tiny bit.
Meanwhile, my multi-millionare ex-boss is struggling to buy a house, because he's being outbid by chinese "students" (lol) to the tune of +$500K over the expected price.
> which is about 25km west. This helped a tiny bit.
It would help a lot more if they added a zero to that number
> because he's being outbid by chinese "students" (lol) to the tune of +$500K over the expected price
I believe that’s a real problem but only in certain suburbs. If you are a well-off Chinese businessperson or government official, and you want to get your money out of China - in case Xi Jinping suddenly decides he doesn’t like you any more - splurging on a residence for your kid at uni in Australia is a good way to do so while complying with the laws of both countries. Still, while it is a real issue in some areas, at a national level I don’t think it makes a huge difference - there’s lots of housing in Australia which isn’t that close to a university campus
Landlords are running a business and get taxed on the rental income of their property. Deducting costs, including interest, same as any other business, is pretty standard and most wouldn't say it's "unfair".
Giving an interest deduction to owner-occupiers is a common policy to promote home ownership. But it's not a "level playing field" with landlords unless you also assess income tax on the imputed amount of rent they are saving by owning.
Reminder that Dubbo (population of only ~40,000) had to have water shipped in on trucks during the recent drought, so there are valid environmental reasons for the current layout too. A lot of those cheaper places are struggling, they cannot support large populations, and it's been said we've used up the good topsoil over the last 200 years so farming may be facing some issues in the coming years too.
I do think we should decentralise, but it will likely look more like Newcastle and Wollongong growing, which will probably feed commuters into Sydney more than they already do.
Also note, Canberra kind of fits your description - a regional "town", servicing the government. And it's also very expensive. As in, recently reported to be the second most expensive place in the country to buy a house, after Sydney. I think our issues are far more political as you point out, so other fixes are just bandaids, but anything that impacts home prices will be unpopular with the dominant voter bloc.
> Reminder that Dubbo (population of only ~40,000) had to have water shipped in on trucks during the recent drought
The Goldfields Water Supply Scheme pumps water over 560 km from Perth to Kalgoorlie; Dubbo is only 380 km from Newcastle. If you were serious about turning Dubbo into the state capital, you would have to give serious thought to building a pipeline to pump water from the Hunter, and then Dubbo would only run out of water if Newcastle was running out of water. (You could also build a pipeline from Sydney to Dubbo, which is only about 20km further, but much more mountainous terrain in the way.)
> I do think we should decentralise, but it will likely look more like Newcastle and Wollongong growing
Newcastle and Wollongong aren't really that much cheaper than Sydney. They are coastal, and everyone wants to live on the coast; also, Wollongong has physical growth limitations due to the Illawarra Escarpment. There's a lot more land on the other side of the Great Dividing Range, and water supply issues could be addressed with sufficient investment in water supply infrastructure.
> Also note, Canberra kind of fits your description - a regional "town", servicing the government. And it's also very expensive. As in, recently reported to be the second most expensive place in the country to buy a house, after Sydney.
Canberra is in some ways Australia's version of Washington DC. Although, DC has a very different social history – e.g. DC has historically (but as of last census no longer) had an African-American majority; and, DC is physically a lot smaller than the ACT is. But, what I am really talking about is an Australian analogue of Sacramento, Albany, Springfield (Illinois), Salem (Oregon), Carson City (Nevada), etc – which is something Australia doesn't have.
All that said, Queanbeyan's median house price is >$50K cheaper than Canberra's, by some measures beneath the average of Australian capital cities. And it is only 20 minutes drive from Canberra. In Sydney or Melbourne, that's what many would call an inner/middle suburb.
> that is insane that the average american lives in a home that they own by the time they're 35. That is so far and wide not the case here in Australia.
You also don't actually need to own a home in order to have kids. I spent the first 8 years of my life with 3 siblings in a tiny 2 bedroom apartment in a student housing development. We bought a home when I was 8, while my parents were in their 30s.
Plenty of other commenters had already pointed out that fallacy of OP's argument, so I decided to take on the idea that homeownership rates have significantly changed instead.
That's, as you say, recent. It bodes ill for the future if something doesn't change, but it can't possibly account for the long-term decline in birth rates being discussed here.
The parent commenter also doesn’t know what the word “housing” means. Being able to afford housing means being able to afford a place to live, it doesn’t mean owning your own house. Just like being able to afford food doesn’t mean owning your own farm, having access to drinking water doesn’t mean owning your own well or river, and having access to the internet doesn’t mean owning your own ISP.
To be clear I agree that affordable home ownership is a big problem, but not being able to afford home ownership is a very different thing from not being able to afford housing, and substituting one concept with the other is just an intentionally dishonest way of muddying the waters of any discussion on the topic.
Ah, I have a hard time remembering that the millennials have taken the boomers' place as the oppressive older generation.
Gen Z doesn't have a monopoly on spending their 20s in a scary financial situation. Let's see what the numbers look like in 10 years—if prior trends (the data I linked to above) are anything to go by, I expect them to be roughly the same as they always have been at about 66%+/-3%.
You better check what the average mortgage payment for new house buyer today and 5 years ago. Diff can be 2-3 times.
Also, actual homeownership is not a perfect proxy for wealth measurement, since it could be that today's gen z are buying 1br condos instead of single family houses like boomers.
You mentioned boomers. They faced higher interest rates, higher unemployment and higher inflation than people do now.
Sure, it may not be effortless coming of working age now, but it would take a staggering level of ignorance and/or entitlement to argue that it’s harder than it was in the 70s when boomers were coming up.
And much lower incomes. We can go back and forth like this all day.
The point you seem to be missing is that it has never been the norm in the US for a 25 year old to own their own home. The closest we ever got to that would be the Silent Generation returning home from WWII and the veterans benefits we were handing out.
My parents (Boomers) rented a dumpy townhouse in their 20s and early 30s while raising two kids. They finally bought their first home at ages 33 and 29 with a 19% interest rate. Money was really tight for the next 5 years or so until my dad's career progressed. This was with a college degree and a management position. Life has always been a challenge for the youngest generation just starting out. Today's 25 year olds look at their parents and forget that their parents have had decades of wealth accumulation and career progression. They didn't start out taking trips to Hawaii every year.
These numbers are all adults under 35, so your argument about generation gaps doesn't apply here. 20-something year olds are included in each decade's numbers, and the rate hasn't substantially changed in the measured decades.
> You better check what the average mortgage payment for new house buyer today and 5 years ago. Diff can be 2-3 times.
That's a separate question from whether people are priced out. If the average mortgage payment is much higher but 39% of people under 35 can still afford a mortgage, then no more people are priced out than were in previous generations.
> Also, actual homeownership is not a perfect proxy for wealth measurement, since it could be that today's gen z are buying 1br condos instead of single family houses like boomers.
True, but I'm not talking about wealth, I'm specifically addressing the question of whether the average American cannot afford to buy a home.
> If the average mortgage payment is much higher but 39% of people under 35 can still afford a mortgage
they afford rate they secured when it was much lower and in many cases houses were cheaper.
Today's 35 first house buyer salary man coming on housing market is also in very miserable situation.
You just stated that over 40% of people under 40 don't own a home. I don't think that proves the point you want it to. And that's before we even get into how much of that home they even "own".
I think this is very confused. People these days are really rich compared to people in the past who had more kids, poorer people in countries like the US have more kids on average than richer ones, and poorer countries on average have more kids than richer ones. (People don't seem to have fewer kids because they're poor; they seem to have fewer kids because they're rich!) Despite major housing issues, people live in bigger, fancier houses than ever, homeownership rates in the US are higher than most of the history of the US, and homelessness, though tragically common, still only directly affects a tiny minority of people, on the order of a fifth of a percent, which is not the sort of thing that seems very connected to the widespread change to having fewer children.
Yes this is my read too. It’s largely a cultural problem, not a resource one. The baseline expectations have gotten so high that not have a giant house and the latest electronics means you somehow can’t afford kids.
If you're responsible for yourself in either the U.S or Canada, and have built some kind of a life as an adult in a place that isn't right next to where your parents still live, assuming they're still together, then children are an expensive liability rather than necessary and relatively cheap labor used for supplying the rich ones with chocolate. Likewise, access to free in or inexpensive birth control and sex education allows a person to make less risky decisions for longer, rather than popping out 5 kids and figuring it out.
If you can figure out a way to afford the liability and it's important to you, great, otherwise it's sort of illogical.
It’s a liability only if consumerism is your only value. Which for a lot of people, is absolutely the case. And it’s only logical if you only care about your own individual desires.
It almost isn’t worth arguing about, though, because the reality is that society is ultimately made up of people that have kids. All the rationalizations in the world won’t change the basic facts of biology.
I completely agree with you. My wife and I made many lifestyle "sacrifices" in order to have kids. I put "sacrifices" in quotes, because driving in a cheaper car than your professional peers is only a sacrifice if you you are consumerist.
Is daycare "consumerism"? Other factors include stagnant wages, collage debts, amd even high medical costs - a vaginal birth with no pain medications and no complications can cost 5-figures (and may include a line-item for a parent holding the baby!).
Inflation has made baby products really expensive (did I mention stagnant wages?), and this is before daycare, which can be cost as much as rent in some locales, unless you're willing to subject your child to informal daycares. None of that is consumerism.
No one should be surprised that a country with a threadbare social safety-net and inflation outpacing childcare costs experiences a fall in birthrate - this can be explained in market-dymamics terms
Plenty of countries with good social nets have worse birth rates. Plenty of other countries with no social nets have high birth rates. I don’t think it’s particularly related, and as I said, I think it’s more of a cultural problem related to values and expectations.
I wish I hadn't included my last paragraph - all the replies are focusing on just that and not everything else I wrote!
I didn't argue a stronger social safety net would fix everything, just that having a weak one exacerbates the financial concerns, and is the major factor that would tip-over those who are not having children for mostly economic-reasons.
I know that feeling and I'm sorry to hear about your frustration.
That being said, I think the critique you're getting may be more fair to your post than you think. You bring up things like college debt and high medical costs, which are not US-like in most of the places with the lowest birth rate, and the day care situation, which often isn't either, in previous paragraphs.
I do think that even if we don't note that the post was likely US-centric, we'd struggle with the fact that it's the poorer people in the US are having more babies than the richer ones when trying to apply your explanation.
The same thing is happening in all western countries, and some other developed countries too.. Even those with free university level education, free health services, etc. Here in the UK we have the free healthcare (and maternity provision is still good), we do have university fees in most the UK, but the costs are far lower than in the US (fees are an order of magnitude lower than at some US universities, and there are cheap loans to cover fees and living costs). We have government subsidies for childcare.
We still have falling birth rates.
I actually think daycare is part of the problem - what is the point of having kids if you do not spend lots of time with them? The biggest advance would be more family friendly working hours.
i have earned a lot less to spend time with my kids, and i am so happy I did. The best thing that happened to me was to lose my job the day my oldest was born. Otherwise I would have been very well paid (I worked for an investment bank) but have hardly known my kids.
Any time I see "parents" require daycare for "their" children, I always think (or in particular cases say): Don't have children if you can't raise them yourself.
I write this with the utmost sincerity: You as the would be father/mother brought your child into this world, the absolute least you could do is be the dad/mom they need in their life.
Don't come at me with how you must sacrifice your career and future for your kids: Of fucking course you have to! The moment you decide to have kids and bring them forth, "your" life is completely at the behest of your kids. That is what having kids means.
If you do not want or cannot handle the duty of sacrificing your life for your kids, do not have kids. There is no existence more tragic than a child born to parents who can not or will not spend their childhood with them.
I got downvoted for a far milder version of what you said. Going to watch this with interest.
I do not think parents can be entirely blamed. We have made having children too difficult for multiple reasons. Yes, you are primarily responsible, but good communities, family friendly work, access to extended family and other things all help.
Children were pretty much never raised exclusively by their parents throughout the history of mankind, were they? So I would put quotes around the word "need" instead.
I'm sure not exclusively, and I don't know what a typical daycare schedule is like because my wife stays at home, but e.g. my 2 year old gets up around 7am, and usually takes an hour to eat her breakfast. Then I guess to drop her off somewhere and get to work by 9, we'd have to leave close to 8. Then we might get home around 6, and it's time to eat dinner (again this takes her an hour), take a bath, and bed time.
So 5/7 days, she'd only get her parents telling her to hurry up and eat followed by putting her to bed. That's almost exclusively being raised by a stranger.
I might not put it as aggressively as the other commenter, but I do wonder why it seems common for my peers to use daycare (if they have kids at all). I know they have the means not to. We'll see what happens when the time comes, but I quite like the idea of home schooling or hybrid schooling depending on what everyone wants. The time you get is so limited; to me at least I don't see what could take priority over spending time with them while we can (again, this applies more to people in my social class who have the means). And when people talk about "sacrificing their career"... my work is the means, not the end. To speak of "sacrificing" career for family is just... baffling. Unless you are a trauma surgeon saving lives every day or an amazing scientist inventing cancer cures, I can't believe anyone would say it. Something like principal engineer or director at a fortune 500? It's just a way to make money.
We lost my dad very suddenly when I was a teenager, so I've always had to consider that no matter how much money I make, I'll never be able to buy more time with him, but I can focus my resources on my family having more time together, and hopefully I can pass my kids that lesson without them having to learn it so directly (or at least so young. At some point we all need to learn that lesson directly). Having a stay-at-home-parent means we're buying 10,400 hours of her and her mom together before age 5. Good deal at almost any price, and it only becomes a better deal when you have more kids. Likewise with remote work, if I get an extra 1.5 hours per workday (commute + seeing them when I take a break), that's almost 400 extra hours together per year. Sometimes my daughter comes and sits on my lap while I'm working on the computer, and I'll put Curious George on for her on another monitor. How lucky I am!
When people in my social strata talk about daycare, I just want to shout at them. Not angry like the other commenter, but in a more pleading tone: don't you realize! Life is fleeting! Didn't anyone tell you! Oh well.
This is a different argument, and a bit weird one. Why do you want to shout at other people for having preferences that are different from yours (or rather your wife's)? For me personally supervising small kids 12/7/365 sounds like hell on earth, I'd prefer almost any other occupation.
Like I said it's more of a "stop! Don't you see what you're missing? You can't have it back!" kind of thing. If you're a neurosurgeon, sure, but are you really going to look back one day and wish you spent one more day in stand-ups or trying to increase conversion or debugging certificate issues or whatever? It's their lives and I'd never say anything (beyond abstract conversation online) but the degree to which it seems so normal is freaky to me. I do think being career-oriented is pushed very strongly by society (or the bubbles I'm in), especially on girls, which is something I worry about for my daughters. It makes me wonder sometimes whether introducing them to church would be a smart move even if I don't think I could ever really get into it.
I wouldn't want to supervise other people's kids all day, but my own? They do all sorts of cute stuff, and sometimes they just want to come sit on you and hug you. It's not even comparable to corporate office work. My biggest worry for them is that they won't get to have that too one day.
What if you have parents who are very willing to be the childcare you need? Is there really, seriously, "no existence more tragic" than a child who spends a few hours a day with a doting 50 year old grandmother? Or with their cousins and aunt and uncle? Or with a kindly neighbour and their kids?
> "Don't have children if you can't raise them yourself."
What do you think of "it takes a village to raise a child"?
I am not in favour of never letting them out of my sight because it is important they develop autonomy and be able to look after themselves. Seeing them growing and learning is one of the joys of being a parent.
The point is being involved, which is good for children and rewarding for parents.
There is some big logical fallacy going on here... there is a very, very vast space in between, as you are implying, staying 24/7 with your children and letting someone else raise your children for you (grandparents, nanny or whatever).
> Any time I see "parents" require daycare for "their" children, I always think (or in particular cases say): Don't have children if you can't raise them yourself.
Then it should be no surprise that fewer people are having children. Many potential parents are seeing a mismatch between their ideal conditions to having a child and their circumstances and/or the state of the world and choosing not to having children (or delaying)
Addendum: some parents think they can raise kids, but discover they cannot in the worst possible way. I don't judge anyone chooses to place a child in daycare, its much better for society than Shaken Baby Syndrome, for instance.
I agree with you entirely. It's hard not to imagine spending as much time with my son as I reasonably can. Even if he's a little challenging sometimes, it's really been one of the most amazing things I've ever been gifted in my life.
Fwiw my parents grew up poorer than me and had a lot of siblings. Listening to one of them, they had to refrain from flushing the toilet to save on water, shared beds, dropped out of high school to get a job etc. It was a totally different world but rightly or wrongly lots of child bearing. Among the older gen siblings (6) about half had kids.. no more than two each. In the subsequent generation again some had kids but only one or two. I have kids, wanted more but wife didn't. In this pace of things the birthrate clearly is going down. If two people have at most two kids then population is going to decline.
> It’s a liability only if consumerism is your only value.
It's a liability if it's a liability. A consumerist liability is buying a brand new car with a loan if it seems like my income might disappear before the payments do. Not knowing how long you'll be able to keep paying rent in the place you've spent your entire adult life is just a logical consideration. Though people are obviously choosing to be consumers too, often it's just the basics that seem out of reach.
However, if you've always wanted kids and it's always been your biggest priority, and there's never been any contravening forces that would make you question that, and you've lucked out and found someone who's completely on board with that, and your income has been stable, and your expenses are manageable, and your parents are nearby and still together, then sure you're choosing to consoom over having kids.
Your last paragraph kind of highlights the point of my previous comment though, which is that the vast majority of people who have children today and who had children in the past had few or none of those things, and were absolutely fine with it. This is a modern hyper optimization of, “I can’t have kids unless they have the absolute perfect life situation.”
At the end of the day, it is a cultural “problem” that potential parents are unwilling to have children. If anything, the material costs of entertainment, food, education, etc. are magnitudes lower today than a century ago, and yet a century ago it was normal to have 3-4 children.
I think you're on the right track. We collectively have an inflated sense of what qualifies as being in an appropriate financial/lifestyle position to have children (I know, because I do it too), but it's not necessarily the same as what qualified decades back. If you have an extra bedroom to fit bunks and can afford a bit more food, public schooling is fairly affordable and a lot of the rest is optional. We just got the bills for our kids' school year and it is nothing dramatic. The extra-curricular stuff (music, sport, etc) is what adds up. Holidays, especially overseas, are expensive. Interior design fit-outs for showy rooms are expensive.
Growing up, I didn't have a console until late teens. My children are 5-11yo and we would have 5+ consoles in the house. Last week, my mother (born in the 50s) was saying that she can't recall having an actual toy of her own while growing up. Now many of us plan to have a bedroom per child, study nooks, a second living room and/or parents' retreat, a dressing room, en suites, pool, and so on.
A century ago it was also normal to have two pairs of parents living near you to help with childcare.
I don't know how common it is today, but it's certainly much less common than it was a century ago.
I've decided not to have kids, but quite a few people I know have been having them, and there's a stark difference in costs between the friends who have family nearby and those who don't. Several new parents I know even decided to move to be near at least one set of parents, at least for the first few years of their kids' lives.
I don't really know anyone who has decided to not have kids primarily because of cost, though. But I don't know if the child-free people I know are typical.
It is still pretty common for parents to live nearby:
> Over all, the median distance Americans live from their mother is 18 miles, and only 20 percent live more than a couple of hours’ drive from their parents.
Although "a couple hours drive" is probably too far to help with daily childcare activities. And in the past the grandparents were likely in the same building or across the street.
I mean, 20% is the difference between the current US fertility rate (1.64) and a rate above 2.
Obviously the 20% of the population more than 2 hours from their parents isn't abstaining from children absolutely, but it's the right order of magnitude to be a significant factor.
> This is a modern hyper optimization of, “I can’t have kids unless they have the absolute perfect life situation.”
I think, in America at least, this is being amplified by a general gut perception that the middle class is shrinking (which does indeed seem to be happening). Even people who aren’t reading about or following the phenomenon can feel it to some degree: as middle incomes have become less common, there are a lot more high earners and more low earners.
Maintaining a high income is not a given, so the perceived risk of failure to remain in the upper-middle class now includes not just falling back to a comfortable middle class existence, but falling further down the ladder, to a place in a growing underclass with a starkly lower quality of life and future prospects.
This creates a feedback cycle: people have this gut feeling that if they don’t compete for high end jobs to live in expensive areas with good schools their kids won’t get into a good college, which is a requirement to maintain membership in this new, enlarged, hypercompetitive upper-middle class. Competition for these houses, colleges, and jobs goes through the roof. Life decisions become more stressful because the perceived stakes are higher. This in turn contributes to choices around kids: will you be able to navigate this such that your kids live a comparably comfortable life to the one you have had? How many kids can you do that for? What will life be like for a kid who for whatever reason can’t be a programmer/doctor/lawyer/etc?
No, I think you're mischaracterizing my argument. I didn't even mention schooling, I didn't mention entertainment, I didn't mention anything material, but I also didn't articulate the thought very well in retrospect.
There's nothing perfect, it's just a roof in the place you've established yourself, and eating, perhaps along with staying mentally and physically fit. It's just a basic question of whether someone's circumstances can be stretched further; in many cases they can, but in many more they can't, and if whatever reason they didn't spend the entire first part of their life aligning all the variables necessary to handle the basics, and getting lucky, then it seems more probable to be a disaster than not.
It's not about perfection, it's really high level stuff. First, get a long-term partner who fits certain criteria. Lets say attraction is last on that list because we've decided not to be perfect, we've decided to be like the previous generation who didn't care about their health or mental well-being at all and get the first person we have sex with pregnant, and take it to completion. Halfway through the pregnancy we realize we're totally incompatible, can't even equitably share space with the other person, and actually they're not even remotely invested in improving as a human. That's fine, it'll work out in the end, ignore your burgeoning depression.
Next step, get a place together. It's not looking good, but ignore that, it's for the sacrifice you've decided to make right now for some reason. You remember that your parents had you in a small 1 bedroom apartment that was probably crap, but they only paid $300 a month for. You currently live in a modest studio that's $1500 a month, and an upgrade to a 1 bedroom would go up to $2500. Maybe we get lucky and get a rustic basement for $1750. There are co-ops, but they have thousands of people ahead of you in line. Of course, there are always small towns in rural areas, so maybe we can move there, maybe get a job in the sawmill.
It's all just silly. If you're in a position to, and want to have kids, then you do, but otherwise there's no intrinsic reason to and getting there could be a tenuous personal decision to introduce a whole lot more strain in probably an already strained position.
If you're in the former camp, great. You still live close to parents probably, have had a stable job for a while that's not going away, there's not a ton of competition for rentals or whatever, and have a great supportive relationship that isn't volatile. You might be surprised, but that can be tough to come by. If you can pull it off you can pull it off.
> At the end of the day, it is a cultural “problem” that potential parents are unwilling to have children. If anything, the material costs of entertainment, food, education, etc. are magnitudes lower today than a century ago, and yet a century ago it was normal to have 3-4 children.
Curiously, the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child was from 1924.
Yeah, it's easier to have kids if you care less about their wellbeing, and if one of the ways of dealing with the expense is sending them to work in a factory.
I'm not sure how to respond to comments like this, because they obviously aren't made in good faith.
Potential parents today aren't choosing between "having kids and sending them to slave away in a factory" and "perfect childhood with every toy imaginable and no financial need."
The contemporary Western world is immensely wealthy on a material and informational basis, orders of magnitude beyond even a half century ago. I don't think people understand this at any level, mostly because they don't know much history.
People used to value the labor of their children. At the dystopian tail-end of it, they valued selling it on the market, which is what's being referenced.
But, generally, my impression from light reading is people throughout history thought of children as progressing pretty quickly into helpfulness. Now, though, people have jobs children can't help with, ever, which keep them too busy to project-manage children into helpfulness around the house. So people have them exclusively for their company (which, again my impression from light reading, has not been at all the historical norm).
If it wasn't a resource problem, giving birth in a US hospital would not cost $30k in shockingly common cases.
I don't want to have kids because I lived through the "just suffer through poverty" experience and it's a great way to raise kids that have to support the psychiatry industry the rest of their lives. Poverty literally breaks a kid's brain, and you CANNOT hide money problems from your children.
That life is one "hey we didn't do good this quarter so you're being let go" away from happening for most of us. So yeah, a lot of us don't want kids.
I feel for your particular situation, but I don't think this explains the overall situation.
Lower-income people within a country seem to have more kids in general: this is very much the case for the US. People with higher incomes and on average, then, more robust financial situations, are the ones more avoiding kids.
The US is, like most places, far richer than it has been historically, and this is even more dramatic globally: a generation and a half ago, most people lived in extreme poverty (<$2.47/day), today less than 10% do. But we see that as countries get richer, they have fewer kids. I don't think it's a good explanation that risk of poverty is what is usually preventing parents from having kids, even if they subjectively feel it is.
That was also concluded by Hans Rosling: the higher the education of people, the fewer kids they have. Best way to address overpopulation is by increasing education worldwide. https://www.teesche.com/bookshelf/hans_rosling_factfulness
I wonder if Rosling’s conclusions are confounded. The human and environmental systems in which we swim are complex, not simple. Education being the key driver of population numbers strikes me as overly simple.
Yeah, look at countries like Finland. Finland has, famously, some of the best government support for new mothers on the planet, comparatively high gender equality, consistently ranks at the top of world education rankings, has a strong, functioning social welfare system, and while housing is not exactly cheap, Finns on average spend 20% of their income on housing, which is not high.
And Finland's fertility rate has completely collapsed, to 1.32 children per woman in 2022.
As societies urbanize and become more educated, children become (economically speaking) a huge burden, not an asset, and that fundamental shift affects birthrates worldwide.
Yeah, this seems obvious to me. However, out of ethical concerns, it is not obvious that the solution is to stop educating people.
Perhaps just reminding would-be parents that if the educated and resilient stop reproducing, they are depriving the world of a thriving and resilient new generation. A clear directive that under-population is a growing concern and a few additional incentives for parents would go a long way too.
Taking a philosophical angle, why is it the "right" choice to serve our genes, the economy, or to create a younger generation to care for the elderly? It is not unethical to unburden oneself of those obligations today, but you can imagine a future where it is.
Housing isn't the sole factor in declining birthrates. Every industrialized nation is going through the same phenomenon and not all of them are having housing crises. It's a combination of various associated costs to raising children (housing, early childcare, food, schooling, extracurriculars, hobbies, etc.) that have risen faster than most people's wages. The nuclear family model also significantly diminished the role of parents and other senior relatives in early childcare which would've created significant savings in terms of both time and money.
Also, living without children or even a partner at all has become significantly more viable in the past 40+ years or so. It wasn't until 1974 when women in the United States could unconditionally open bank accounts out of their free will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Credit_Opportunity_Act. To not marry and have children would've practically been a form of ostracization. So many people, especially women, "settled" into marriage and family life simply because there was no other option. I think the decline in birth rates is a fair tradeoff to forcing fewer people into a lifestyle they did not want which would inevitably result in broken families and broken kids. What society needs to figure out is how to decouple productivity from raw human headcount, as well as how to avert potential humanitarian disasters that may occur when the decoupling happens.
A lot of them are, actually. I'm Irish, we're having a housing (and general cost of living) crisis. I know Portugal and Germany are too.
I don't know about other countries in the EU regarding housing specifically but there's a block wide cost of living crisis going on right now. Life is hard for people in all kinds of ways because of covid, war, climate change.
Note: I'm not trying to claim any of this is the cause of declining birth rates, that's beyond my sphere of knowledge. The purpose of my comment is to note that cost of living issues are not unique to the US right now.
The December Atlantic article on this topic (recently discussed) says the presence of this effect does not correlate with class [0]:
> Although the average number of lateral relatives varies across race and class groups in the U.S., the cousin decline is either imminent or already happening across all of them.
My suspicion is that once the standard of living reaches a certain baseline level (which e.g. even many "poor" people in the US hit) reproduction takes a back seat. This is clearly in part due to an increased availability of birth control and the ability for women to enter the workforce and make these choices for themselves, which wasn't even an option under more patriarchal societies.
I think there's something more subtle there, too. There's so much more to do now for young people in developed countries, even those of relatively modest economic means. This might manifest as furthering one's career, or in pursuit of hobbies, or in travel, or in consumption of entertainment products, or in higher education... or any number of ways. Child rearing takes many of these options off the table, or it curtails and constrains them severely.
It seems like having fewer children is a pretty reasonable response in a world that is more enjoyable and potentially personally rewarding than any has ever been before.
It's the same in Sweden. My friends and I are all a couple of years passed the age our parents were when they had us.
Out of 7 people who have SO's in my social circle, 0 have children. Why? Because they simply don't have the room. The housing market in Stockholm is insane, and even though most earn above average (most are in tech) they can only afford tiny 1BR apartments. Trying to raise a kid in such a place would be impossible.
Unless you want to move out into cheaper areas, that these days are plagued by high-crime and is no real environment for a kid anyway, you're SoL.
Sure, one could move away from Stockholm into smaller towns up north, but then your career will suffer. Also not something most are willing to consider just as they've gotten a foothold in their respective careers.
The next couple of decades are going to be real interesting, and I don't mean that in a good way...
What I don't understand is that native people who make a good income rationalize that they can't afford kids but yet in the same country there are many non-native people that earn considerably less that continue have children at extremely high birthrates. So why does the group that earns a lot of money claim they are incapable of supporting a family and the group that earns very little actually support a large family, in the same country?
Maybe the non-native people that earn less see their future brighter, whereas the native group with good income sees their future darker.
When you come from nothing its easier to give your kids a better future than you had.
Some animals don't breed in captivity. Some human populations also didn't breed because they were in captivity. Even though people have it better number wise, it's still possible to feel trapped.
I don't know exactly how is it on the US (also, AFAIK there's a huge variance of income and housing pricing all around the country), but here on Spain housing is getting worse and worse and worse.
2011 to 2020 ownership rate has fell from 82,6 to 73,9% in the general population, and from 69,3 to 36,1% in under 35yo. Also people is expending more than 40% of their salary to rent [0]
And those are numbers from 2020 (ownership) and 2022 (rental), but I guess that today, specially on big cities, that's way, way worse. I just checked my neighborhood prices (in Madrid) and, since late 2021 when I rented my current apartment, prices have raised +30%, and lots of posting are now for "temporary rentals" of less than one year. That's a model thought for touristic apartments that offer way less protection to the tenant (they can raise prices at will), less stability (they can kick you out no notice) and allows landlords to avoid housing rental laws (for repair, maintenance, etc.).
So it used to be "AirBnBs around me raise housing prices", and now it's "You can only rent AirBnBs".
The societal norms and structures that promoted natalism are gone in western countries for much of the population.
Raising kids is hard work. Ideally you have them young and live close to your family so that you have grandparents to help with childcare.
But our society tells people to wait as long as possible to have kids, and to prioritize career over other things - so once people do have kids, if they ever do so, then often grandparents are too old or far away to fill that traditional role. So lots of people are stuck paying thousands a month for daycare.
Just one of many ways that our system finds innovative ways to extract money out of people for things that used to be free or part of being in a community.
Every support system, from the "family home" where the grandparents have a bed, to the woman not working and taking care of the kids, has been systematically destroyed. Now everyone is expected to work and live alone/as a couple, and they have basically no physical support for raising a child.
I think this is the main issue right here. The others being increased housing cost (you need space for kids) and increasing costs (daycare, kindergarten, nappies etc.).
I would bet this plays a large part - people today respect the difficulty in a way past parents previously did not. Birth rates are certainly declining but I would bet the rates of accidental infant/toddler death are down as well.
That said, I personally know parents that are just taunting SIDS with the way they ignore infant sleeping best practices even though they’ve read the books to know better.
Societal expectation on the care for children grew immensely over the past few generations. When I was a child, parents largely just covered the physical needs and the kids were otherwise left alone to do their own thing. I remember being bored a lot, sitting in a room or roaming the streets.
Nowadays there's a widespread expectation that parents should organize activities, drive their kids' education, just be way more involved in their lives.
That's just the thing, isn't it. You can try to oblige to all best practices and have zero kids in the process, or you can just have the kids and figure it out as you go. No matter the kid mortality rate, the second approach still wins.
The inherent difficulty in raising kids plays a significant role in my decision. Additionally, I feel we are no longer glamorising parenthood as we once did. I remember when I was a kid, before the internet was a thing, it was pretty standard to see ads that claimed parenthood was an experience filled with joy and no challenges. For the past decade or so, though, I feel that parents are much more honest when discussing parenthood's challenges. We heard about post-labour depression, financial struggles, sleepless nights, end of careers and so on. It's a radical life change, and most of us do not want to commit.
singapore gives generous subsidies to working adults with children who hire live-in helpers/nannies. the government spent a lot of money on subsidizing tertiary education and the last thing they need are adults dropping out of the workforce after earning a diploma or a degree.
many families hire a live-in helper, who is typically a low-income migrant worker from a neighbouring country. due to space constraints only the most privileged can hire two or more. as it is with asian tradition, parents primarily involve themselves in the area of discipline and education, and everything else is left to the nannies. the low-income families who cannot afford a helper or the living space for a helper suffer from a lack of enforcing discipline or providing for a growing child and low-income children often grow up maladjusted to the modern working society.
singapore unfortunately, still suffers from a low replacement rate, so the foreign domestic worker (FDW, as it is known) policy while enough to move the dial away from the danger zone that is south korea, is still not enough to ensure singapore is growing comfortably. however, at this point i don't believe allowing
(the FDW policy is generous and broad-based enough to extend to working adults with elderly, which means that subsidies for domestic help pretty much extend to working adults through a significant part of their working life. families often qualify for significant subsidies taking care of multiple generations through several decades.)
However, some of the spaces created for the legal live-in helpers [I've seen in Hong Kong and Singapore] would be considered substandard in the US. I'm talking closet size rooms with no windows big enough for a single bed and a few shelves.
If the US would allow this domestic help and possibly the same rooms, child care would be much easier.
> and live close to your family so that you have grandparents to help with childcare.
Issue with this now is how concentrated certain industries are. Here in the UK, if I want to work in software, you need to move to a handful of expensive cities. London, Oxford, Cambridge, maybe Bristol or Manchester. Maybe some others if you're happy in a non-software job. Certainly not the rural farming town I grew up in, or anywhere within hours of driving.
So people move away. And now I'm faced with either delaying kids so I can get reasonably set-up in a city where a 500sqft flat costs £300,000 or moving away from all my friends and maybe even further from my family to afford a house.
It's really not that hard. You just have to change expectations and lifestyle. I never thought of it as "work" per-se but rather an obligation and responsibility to people brought into the world. It's amazing really. It's probably not for everyone and if someone sees it the same way as doing actual work then maybe it isn't for them.
A parent is wealthy beyond money. Besides, we get tax breaks and if you're not a decent earner you get free things for being a parent.
And I guess when I say it's not that hard - what I mean is that yeah there's effort involved, often time a lot. But it is made out to be this impossible thing. It's not. You figure it out and before you know it the really hard days are over.
So yeah it's work but that shouldn't dissuade anyone from having kids. Anything good takes effort.
It doesn't last that long. Been there, done that. But yeah it's work, of course it is. What I'm saying is it isn't as difficult as it is made out to be - that is it's made out to be this impossible thing. But yeah they break your back sometimes and emotionally it can be daunting. But those very difficult early days end pretty fast.
What we did is mom pumped and put milk in bottles. She's go to be at like 7PM after a feeding off the tap and I'd take over and stay up until 2 or 3 to feed baby and change diapers every 2 or so hours. Then she'd be back at it in the early morning hours.
I could absolutely afford to have children, but have chosen not to. The main reason is that I just don't feel "called" to be a parent. When I think about (and see, from others I know who have kids) the amount of work, and complete shift in lifestyle, it takes to raise a child, I get completely turned off by the idea.
If I had a kid, I'm sure I'd love them, and derive joy from them, but I don't believe the trade off is worth it. Maybe I'll end up being wrong about that, but I'd rather grow old and regret not having kids than regret having them. I think people shouldn't have kids unless they are really sure they want to be a parent. Anything less sounds like a big mistake.
Anyhow, have you actually talked to your childless peers about this? Hopefully there are at least some with whom you feel comfortable bringing up this kind of topic, with people who will give you a thoughtful, non-judgmental answer. I think you might find that they all have a variety of reasons for not having kids, and money may not be a big factor.
"The amount of work".... oh dear. As if caring for other people is only work. From what will you get distracted by having other people around you (kids)? From Instragram? Cycling? Reading books? What intensely important things do you have to do that deserve no distraction?
Having kids is not work. It is not only joy either. It is just the natural way of being a human.
The - natural - way - of - being - a - human!!!
Natural, like sleeping. Eating.
Sure, sometimes kids stress you. But then, nature has made sure that you'll mostly remember the good moments. You don't have to be overly perfect to have kids. Just don't be an overly bad person and talk to them often. Whatever environment they get born in: they will be ok with it. You don't need to be grandiose. Do what you naturally can, what you enjoy. And they'll enjoy it.
Humans are made to adapt to having kids. Kids are made to adapt to non-perfect parents. Just avoid the obviously bad stuff and all is good. Your life is good. You looking back on your life will be good.
Natural way of being a human is shitting under a tree and sleeping on this tree, and certainly isn't writing a comment on this site. I couldn't care less of arguments based on some kind of naturalistic fallacy.
Sleeping in a bed in a house is certainly the way humans prefer it. But thinking a society with not enough kids can survive and thrive, on the other hand, is wrong, because it is biologically impossible. It’s not a fallacy, it’s harsh truth.
There probably is a society where there are "not enough kids", but it certainly does not come remotely close to current one with over 8 billion humans scraping for resources.
The problem is just that we don't live in ONE society having 8 billion members, but in about two hundred different ones. And being in one of those that are in decline is not exactly a good feeling.
Until the global birth rate is sub-replacement for generations, there's no point in even having this conversation. If the issue is that the "right" kind of people ("native" people in advanced economies) aren't having children, but the "wrong" kind (aka the Global South, immigrants, etc.), then that's just racism. There's no baby shortage -- the ethnic makeup of humanity is simply changing and we will need to erase most of those artificial borders in order to survive. We ARE a single society, and pretending that we're not is a mutual suicide pact.
So when your company is going broke you don't care and are happy because in TV they said that the economy is growing? Are you a company-racist because you want your company to be healthy and non declining? Are you not trading with and appreciating other companies because you only love your own?
The same is with countries and their societies.
I will not be that defeatist to say "my country/my region/my continent can go down because there are others". And to say that is not racist.
Not really sure what you're getting at exactly, but I think you're comparing countries in the world to firms in a market, with the point that I must obviously care about my country's fortunes relative to other countries?
In the current order, I sort of do, but that whole Westphalian order of "countries" is artificial (and also relatively new in its specifics, though of course kingdoms and empires go back far longer): we're all related and share one biosphere, and more recently we share one globalized economy. The truth is that we will sink or swim together -- if we have abandoned houses in Peoria because American-born people aren't having their own children, that is an opportunity to house people who come from somewhere without enough housing or infrastructure. The only barrier to this happening is our suicidal apartheid regime of borders and passports that's even newer than the Westphalian system!
Borders are not erected to help you, an ordinary citizen. They are there to divide you against the ordinary citizens on the other side of them.
> "The amount of work".... oh dear. As if caring for other people is only work. From what will you get distracted by having other people around you (kids)? From Instragram? Cycling? Reading books?
What if they prefer Instagram, Cycling and Reading Books rather than raising children? Why are you so concerned about other people's lifestyles? Are you going to pay their rent or help them with their chores?
I decided to have a child, and it was a conscious decision I made with my partner, fully aware that our previous lifestyle would be no more. Deciding not to have a child would have been equally as valid.
I find it funny that this discussion elicits so much passion from people that decided to have children. Do you need validation from other people to justify your own decisions?
Whenever I am asked about it, I say that you should not have children unless you are absolutely certain that you want a child in your life, and that your life is stable enough to accommodate one. The world sucks even in the best of times. To condemn someone to existence when their lives will be made more difficult is selfish and cruel.
No children: no society. Or: a very old, geriatric, undynamic, fearful society with no innovation. Simple.
What happened that after a few hundred thousand years of having families we suddendly need to be "absolutely certain" to have kids? Human nature is the EXACT other way round. What we currently see is an outgrow of pure hedonism. It kills societies (literally, at least in the sense of "no new life").
Concerning "being fully aware that our previous lifestyle would be no more": this in itself partly shows the problem. So our casual life choices are in such a way that it is completely uncompatible with having a family? Sure - when you're 20, you might not be ready. But do we, as a society, promote lifestyles that even when you're 30 are impossible to combine with having kids? Then maybe our lifestyle as a society is wrong, what we tell ourselves to be "good life" is wrong.
And then again... maybe we take having kids too seriously? I really can't say having missed out on much since having kids (and no, we have no nanny). We simply did the stuff people "fear". We went out for dinner together two weeks after our first one was born (together with the baby). And we repeated, until today. We went on those 10 hour flights. We explored foreign countries. We visit museums with modern art. We spent months abroad. Is it always easy? Nope. But it was, overall, not too different from the life before. Kids get used to stuff, parents get used to stuff. Most of us can do it if we let go of the instagrammy thought of having to be perfect. And this is how society always was and always will be.
EDIT:
In the current medical climate where child mortality is very, very low, of course, as a society we CAN afford to have less kids overall. And as long there are a few people who LIKE to have 3 or more kids, we can afford to have some more people having no kids as all. I don't promote growing society ad infinitum. But having sub-replacement birth rates will NOT make our countries better for sure (and the economy is my very LAST concern). France 10-15 years ago can lead as an example with a healthy rate of births, wealth and personal freedom.
In my view, having children without being prepared for them is the most hedonistic thing one can do - creating people for your own reasons without a clear way of supporting them.
As someone without children, I find it strange that I'm perceived as living some hedonistic lifestyle. There are indeed material concerns when it comes to the idea of children, but they tend more towards maintaining housing and especially for me who has some medical needs, health insurance. I'm certainly not traveling all the time or living it up with a fancy brunch every weekend; I'm actually quite happy with a modest living arrangement and diet, but even that seems to get more expensive as time goes on, and my job tenures get shorter as the layoffs come quicker.
You don't feel like you've missed out on much since having children and I think that's a great attitude; I don't feel like I've missed out on much since not having children. We can both be correct in this because we are each our own people with our own wants.
Well, of course, I am not getting at you personally, as I don't know you. And of course I am not getting angry at people around me for not having kids (do I know their reasons well?). I speak more about society as a whole.
Much of what you write are modernity made problems. When we are really getting deep into what is going on, then YOU/ME/WE should not be living on our own alone anyway. YOU/ME/WE, in a healthy society, should be living in a multigenerational home where close to NOTHING changes if there is one more kid running around. OF COURSE having kids is a much more difficult choice when we all have to live on our own, only together with our partner (with which we also have to maintain a PERFECT relationship because there is no other person around or to go to to cool down a bit anyway), we all have to pay for our housing ALONE, plus taxes, plus (in many countries) health insurance, childcare etc. . A more humanly organized society would have much more of us simply live together, share more stuff. But most of us have to start at zero. Which some say is "fair". But in reality, it is making us poorer. Financially, emotionally.
In fact I'm a 30-something man who lives in a multi-generational household (with my parents). I'm under the impression that it's not considered an attractive quality.
You are right: it is not considered attractive. I myself do, as an example, not live in one (that said: all family lives in my region). Because we as a society somehow made "independence" the "cool" way to live.
I was thinking it was a behavioral evolution thing - demonstrating status and suitability as a mate; that sort of thing. But really it just seems like a waste of money if your needs are modest. I only need a room really. The funny thing is that I went through the trouble of buying a house before I realized that.
> What happened that after a few hundred thousand years of having families we suddendly need to be "absolutely certain" to have kids? Human nature is the EXACT other way round.
Human nature was to live out as a hunter-gatherer in some African savannah. Why would this hold any power over how people choose to live their lives in the Year of our Lord 2024?
> Concerning "being fully aware that our previous lifestyle would be no more": this in itself partly shows the problem.
You sound oddly interested in how I make life changing decisions that don't affect you in any way.
This is another example of a thought pattern often encountered. The thought of "being free to do what ever I feel like" and not caring.... is a meme.
> Human nature was to live out as a hunter-gatherer in some African savannah. Why would this hold any power over how people choose to live their lives in the Year of our Lord 2024?
You are taking a thing where Humans have proven to be quite flexible (the style of living) and bring it to a discussion that is, at its base, biological (no babies: no society). Sure, we can now say that it all doesn't matter if our more and more babyless societies go to die.... but is this really the way to go on?
I do not know you personally, but I reply to what you say because it is not only you who says it, but seems to exemplify what at least I see as a problem in society. I recognise thought patterns that I've heard before.
>And then again... maybe we take having kids too seriously? I really can't say having missed out on much since having kids (and no, we have no nanny). We simply did the stuff people "fear".
I'd commend you for that. Not helicopter parenting is the way to go.
The natural way of being a human for thousands of years was to hunt and gather, and then die before 40. But that didn't stop us from progressing past that point.
I was in a similar boat but did end up having a son recently with my wife. I am still pretty sure that I would be happy without kids but I am also happy with a kid. One thing I think people do tend to overestimate is how much work kids will be in the long term. Yes, short term is crazy, the first couple of years are very intense. But they become more and more independent each year and grow into an equal member of your family. Think about your own parents. I don't think mine were significantly constrained in their life after we turned 10. I mean if you think you'd want to go one month long solo travels each years that's a different story but otherwise kids can be pretty independent. I stayed home alone for a week because I didn't want to go on family holiday when I was 15.
If kids stay one year olds forever no one would have kids, you'd go insane. But that's not the case.
I just don't have any interest in kids. They're expensive and they require a ton of sacrifice. I'd rather travel, golf, do hobbies and generally enjoy my life. The only people that seem to want me to have babies are my parents so they can have grand kids... too which I've told them "Thank you for having me, but that's not a valid reason for me to sacrifice my life". I don't really care about the preservation of the human species. I'm going to be dead in the next 40 years or so, why should I care?
Whenever I encounter this attitude I like to remind that person that they should have no voice, whatsoever, in what happens in government and politics anymore. I don't want people who are self-selecting themselves out of the future having any say in what happens for my children. It's fine that you don't want kids, enjoy the golf course I guess. But in general I will discount your opinions to zero on anything else of consequence.
Some parents boast about how they'd impetuously shoot anyone who threatened their offspring. Here you are excluding those who leave behind only ideas and creative works from having a say in the future, in case that threatens your offspring. Reproduction makes people slightly crazy. First it's must have sex, then it's must protect the brood. I resent being manipulated by these mindless instincts, which serve only DNA. Your apparent vision of the purpose of life is a dichotomy between reproducing and golf.
They aren’t mindless. They’re what preserve the species and the arts and the culture and the science etc etc. I’m sorry you feel resentful about normal human instincts.
That's different, then, if it's a thoughtful project carried out in the cause of culture. But then why disenfranchise all the creative and science types, just because their only offspring are the ideas that they nurture? They're doing basically the same thing, they're still investing in the future, and less randomly as well (since you can't ethically control the ideas of your actual flesh and blood children by any means beyond suggestions).
Also, instincts are nothing to be proud of, they're just dumped on us by nature.
>Also, instincts are nothing to be proud of, they're just dumped on us by nature.
But instincts are something to be proud of. They're a product of extremely complex processes that occur over incredible timescales. At a minimum that's remarkable and interesting.
It makes perfect sense. Their preference set is limited to their own desires, for as long as they are terrestrially bound. They have no skin in the game for ensuring that things are functional after they die. Why should I listen to someone who only cares about their own gratification?
This strikes me as not dissimilar to religious people who are terrified of atheists because, without God, they must have no reason not to become mass murderers.
There are many people with kids who have revealed the value they place on the sustainability of the environment, democratic society, or the economy through the lifetime of their children, let alone their children's children, to be zero. Why would you assume that the childless are any more selfish, as a group? Why can one not care about the continuance and betterment of humanity without one's own direct descendents being involved?
Wow, that's a pretty extreme interpretation of all this.
Like a sibling poster, it reminds me of all the religious people who claim that atheists can't be moral because we don't have a god to guide us.
I do have skin in the game, even without kids. On a basic level, I care about the rest of my life, which hopefully will last another 50 years. I care about the planet and about future generations because that's the right thing to do, because short-termism and excessive consumption is a cancer.
And even if I won't have kids, I have nieces and nephews, and I have dear friends who have children. I want them to be able to grow up and live in a good, safe, comfortable world.
Frankly I find your point of view profoundly condescending and insulting. You don't need to have children to care about the future.
There's a bunch of old people that have kids that also very clearly don't give a damn about preserving the world for the next generation. Should they also not be allowed to vote?
Hell, I would bet that childfree people are more likely to support "future-preserving" plans than parents, on average. I'm thinking climate change, Fridays For Future.
Anecdotally, of the 4 sets of parents I know well enough to know their political opinions, none of them are really concerned about preserving the world for their children. I'm vegan, car-free, childfree and vote for the "green" options.
In your system of morality some guy who's condom broke or a rapist are more moral than someone who is infertile, and you are so sure of it you propose taxation to pile on top. Maybe you should reconsider if it makes perfect sense.
GP didn't write a moral judgement, but a practical one. People who don't have/care for kids don't have long-term skin in the game, therefore their influence on the shape of future society should be downweighed. There is a logic to that.
> some guy who's condom broke
Yes, this is how a lot of families are made. Unplanned != unwanted != unloved.
> or a rapist are more moral than someone who is infertile
Again, not about morality. GP's logic isn't about whether one's good or bad, but whether one has skin in the game of continued improvement of society and civilization.
But I guess a better way of scoping it is whether or not the person is a parent (EDIT: or in legal terms, caregiver?). Infertile people can become parents too (and that could be an indication of extra special caring about the future generation). And then people can be biological parents, but not actual parents, e.g. if they give their child away.
But the definition on "skin in the game" varies from person to person. Plenty of people with kids don't consider them as skin in the game. Plenty of people without kids have lots of skin in the game.
Sure you can. The parent was describing a heuristic they apply. If I don't know you, but need to quickly judge whether or not you're likely to care about future over immediate-term, you being a parent is... not the worst proxy I could use.
FWIW, I don't exactly agree with the poster on this. I feel that parents are biased towards near-term almost by definition: caring and nurturing children is an immediate job. Whether or not a typical non-parent is likely to be a "fuck you, got mine" kind of person, I find that parents tend to become more of a "fuck you, my kids got theirs" kind of people. Not out of ill intent - just more of "concrete needs of my kids today trump abstract speculative needs of their generation a few decades from now".
I think it's a bit more than that. The person upthread goes a bit farther than just whether or not someone cares about the future or not. It sounds like they've basically judged all childless people as hedonists who would gladly burn down the world as long as we get in one last round of golf.
Maybe that person doesn't really believe that, but if so, should probably be clearer about their position and not resort to veiled personal attacks.
Been stewing on this comment. You are right, I think, for roughly half of the parents in my peer group. They do indeed act with a "fuck you, my kids got theirs" attitude. But I think the heuristic still works, because the near term things that those parents care about tend to be highly correlated with what makes sense in the long term. Another comment, in this dumpster fire of a thread that I started, noted that becoming a parent makes you crazy. Alas, I think becoming a parent makes you normal. After all, everyone has a parent.
This might surprise you, but people can care about other people that aren't their blood relatives. Don't play morally superior just because you decided to procreate.
I think I would word it differently, but I more or less agree. Skin in the game is important.
Particularly with people who are old with no kids, I don't think they are totally cynical, but they do seem to have an incentive to vote society into schemes where they are taken care of by younger people, at no cost to themselves or their descendants. For instance they could decide the government needs to take out a massive 30 year loan to pay for care homes to be built.
But I also think that just because you have kids, that doesn't mean you're completely aligned with a longer term future. There's going to be a lot of desperate older people needing help from the few young people who are left, and that goes regardless of whether they made any of those young people. I mean sure, if you have kids you are less likely to be as short-termist as a childless old person.
I think it's a major issue that doesn't get talked about enough. People are happy to say "oh but plenty of old people care about society" which is true, but there's also plenty of foreigners who care about society, who can't vote. And it ignores the actual problem that we will be facing, which is that there will be fewer working people supporting older, non-working people. We need a system for equitable power sharing between generations.
> Their preference set is limited to their own desires, for as long as they are terrestrially bound.
This exact same sentence could be used to describe parents who bring children into a world rapidly becoming less hospitable due to climate change, the full extent of which they won't be alive to suffer.
> I will discount your opinions to zero on anything else of consequence
I’d settle for a much higher tax rate for the voluntarily childless to very inadequately offset the lack of contributing to the next generation. Probably the best way to implement this is that the child tax credit should be much bigger.
I'm impressed by the idea that it's even possible to stop people in general from having kids. In 1974 there were 4 billion people, and we were worried about overpopulation, with scare stories in the media on the theme of "standing room only". Now we are 8 billion, and worrying about low birth rates, even in China (see the "lying flat" trend). So, get back to me when we're down to 4 billion again and I'll consider supporting financial incentives to support future human life, but right now I don't see an existential threat from low birth rates. I do however think that it's really cool that people have the capacity to refrain from having kids when they know that it's a bad idea in their specific circumstances. I like this because it shows the malthusian overpopulation doom-mongers to be wrong, and they were getting annoying.
I already pay tax that ends up paying your child support money, builds kindergartens for you, funds schools, even though I have no kids. But no, let's punish me more because I don't fit your view of the world by raising my taxes more, even though I benefit from the existing ones a lot less than you do already.
You seem to have not read what I replied to. It is punishment if I pay MORE taxes than those with children, just because I don't have any, even though those with children benefit more from taxes, taxes that I already pay.
> You seem to have not read what I replied to. It is punishment if I pay MORE taxes than those with children, just because I don't have any, even though those with children benefit more from taxes, taxes that I already pay.
Think if it this way: in the childlessness-tax scenario, the parents would be paying society in-kind by raising kid(s), and you'd paying society with money instead. You're both paying, just in different ways.
Taxes also aren't some kind of payment-in-exchange for services thing. It's foolish to complain about programs because you don't personally benefit from them.
That kind of already happens in countries where government monetarily supports families with children since it's tax money. But the effective difference in taxes isn't probably that large.
It's just peanuts compared to having one less job for a while.
Maybe that is what to do, give tax credits on the order of an income. That way you are basically tax free while having young children, but you'll still want a job when they are a little bit older.
If we really want to go down this route we should do away with parenting. Children our are future therefore the government will be responsible for producing and raising children to meet our necessary societal workforce quotas. Parenting is a messy business that introduces too many quality control issues. Our glorious future means we must have only perfectly standard issue babies that conform to exact government measurements and standards. Men must donate sperm and women will be artificially impregnated until we can figure out how to grow test tube babies.
> If we really want to go down this route we should do away with parenting. Children our are future therefore the government will be responsible for producing and raising children to meet our necessary societal workforce quotas.
Come on, that's just idiotic sarcasm that doesn't even understand the GP's point, let alone actually skewer it. It's as stupid as trying to mock childfree people by sarcastically advocating a total ban on having children, like in ZPG (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069530/).
> Whenever I encounter this attitude I like to remind that person that they should have no voice, whatsoever, in what happens in government and politics anymore. I don't want people who are self-selecting themselves out of the future having any say in what happens for my children.
And you said we should deny political rights to people without children, a pretty mundane life choice all things considered. You're a straight up fascist plain and simple. Good job.
I weep for your offspring as they're probably poisoned by your brand of cruel morality.
It's actually people like you that have no regard for other people's wishes and desires, a downright hostile attitude towards people who live different lifestyles from you and who force their own lifestyle onto others as the "one true way of living", that should be removed from the ability to vote, imo.
Absolutely well said. I agree a 100%. If someone wants to be selfish, let him be, but don’t expect the rest of us to give much credence to his opinions since he very well doesn’t care about our society.
Because parents can't be selfish too? We all have our motivations for doing what we do. People's drive to have children can be selfish. Their drive to not have children can be selfish. There can be selflessness mixed in to either scenario.
Equating not wanting to have children with not caring about society is absurd. While we're throwing around ridiculous ideas: if anyone should have no say in politics of society, it's people who make these kinds of blanket judgments.
> That is bizarre. Someone disagrees with you so all their political rights should be removed? What?
You're misunderstanding him. I think it's more on the line of "freeloaders shouldn't have a say on what work gets done."
The GGP literally said "I don't really care about the preservation of the human species. I'm going to be dead in the next 40 years or so, why should I care?" If someone has that attitude, and explicitly rejects responsibility to go all-in on selfishness, they've pretty clearly given up the moral right to be part of decision-making for the future.
No, they haven't. Again, that's just you saying that because of their disagreement they should have their political rights removed. You are misunderstanding me, in thinking I'm misunderstanding him. I'm understanding him exactly, and I'm saying that saying you "don't really care about the preservation of the human species" is an opinion and that you and GP are bizarrely claiming that those with that opinion should have their political rights removed.
> No, they haven't. Again, that's just you saying that because of their disagreement they should have their political rights removed.
I think there's two aspects where you misunderstand:
1. The original comment is ambiguous about whether they think their "voice...in what happens in government and politics" should be formally removed, voluntarily given up, or just passively ignored.
2. I think simplistically framing this as mere "disagreement" fails to capture what's actually being discussed, and ignores important aspects of governance. It's sort of (but not exactly) like the question if insurrectionists should keep their places in the government they're subverting (e.g. should the Confederate States have kept their seats in Congress, ability to vote for the presidency, have it's members hold important positions in the US government, etc. while they were rebelling)?
> I don't really care about the preservation of the human species. I'm going to be dead in the next 40 years or so, why should I care?
If most Homo sapiens had the same attitude, the species would have gone extinct since forever lol.
You can have any personal goal you'd like, but from the evolution perspective, the purpose of any living organism is to survive and to reproduce, hence preserving its own species. That's why.
The funniest bits about this sort of argument is that I often see people become completely estranged from their parents because the attitude of 'I need my children to take care of me when I'm older' is like a package deal for a whole host of other shitty behaviors.
Oh I mean you have an obligation to be a parent that your kids would want to take care of.
I don't talk to my parents and have no interest in taking care of them, because, like you said, they are horrendous people. I think you're right that the entitlement to your kids time is something that comes with poor parenting.
That doesn't mean that on-net people's kids won't take care of them. Like everything with your kids, it's a two way street.
If they work for money and use it to pay the children to care for them, what difference does it make if they also have kids or not? Why would your kids have to be the ones to care for you for it to “even out”? In that argument, is daycare banned because the child is not cared for by the parents of the child? What if one of the parents dies? Is it ok to pay for help then?
You do realise this system is unsustainable, though ? We just cannot grow infinitely just because .end of life care costs money.
We are way too many, and the #1 source of global warming is human activity. At one point we'll have to stop growing, so the system of how we pay for elderly care has to change.
We don't have to grow infinitely. Population collapse comes with a huge host of problems though.
The problem of elder care isn't purely financial. It's not the model of paying that's the problem. At the end of the day, (kinda oversimplified) money represents a fractional value of the work output of a population. The output of the population depends on the number of people working in productive roles. The value of the currency is related to the consistent output of services and confidence in the existence of your country.
Shifting over an increasing fraction of your population to elder-care is non productive. It has a tension with both stability of currency and value of currency.
This is a false belief, that is increasingly common. Even if you're paying people to take care of you in old age, you are in fact contributing nothing while they are contributing everything. You will be only a burden, because the money is fake and in physical reality not worth anything. It is only in imagined reality that the money is worth anything, because it is something people agree to work for. Future workers will not be so dumb as to waste their life caring for somebody they are not related to, that are not a friend in any way, for no other benefit than fake "money". When the majority of elderly are childless, the cost of elder care and all other labour will increase faster than your bank account can ever keep up. It was different before atomisation of people, there was an exchange in the idea of "society" and "money". Now those concepts are only used to leech, abuse and destroy young working people, so why would they keep playing that foolish game?
Previous generations built the cities, farms, railroads and universities that we all use today. Just because somebody is no longer working does not mean that you are not still benefiting from work they did.
That's a false myth, used to guilt young workers to more easily leech from them. The food you eat today was not farmed by the people who are old now. Your consumer products were made in China, not by the elderly. The infrastructure you use has been repaved and remade several times during the decades that have passed since old people worked.
Except for a few relics, nothing remains today of what the elderly made. The exception being real estate, and that's why the elderly demand to each become a millionaire to let go of any of their real estate.
It's not like today's elderly worked to build something for future generations. They worked to benefit themselves at the moment.
In general when somebody comes to you selling guilt and murky reasons to why you are indebted to them, that's an enemy and a scammer, seeking to leech from honest people. Whether that's an employer, a generation of elderly, the government, a guild or whoever.
That's not giving away your money. That's just saying you will.
You need to either give it to someone all in cash, or transfer all the money in whatever bank accounts you have into someone else's account. Until then, you are a hypocrite.
That's how all money is created. Now it's up to you if you value that note I've issued, or if you value another note that the elderly issued before you were born. All money is created out of thin air in the form of debt notes. All money is debt notes. It can be used as a tool to grease the gears of a common economy, or it can be used as a tool by those in power to enslave others. Like a skilled worker with a good education having to work for 30 or 50 years at extremely high productivity to afford shelter, while an elderly person of today can become a millionaire without lifting a finger because of some real estate he inherited in the 80s – thanks to the monetary system pumping out newly inflated currency chiefly through real estate debt.
Yeah I know. Cash is just paper, that happens to have an agreed upon value by the majority of the population. And the money in a bank account is just a number in a database that happens to have an agreed upon value by the majority of the population.
Your hackernews comment just happens to be some text in a database that has a value which is NOT agreed upon by the majority of the population.
So my point was, since you don't seem to also agree that your money is valuable, please give all your cash to someone who does. And please transfer all the money in your bank accounts to someone else's bank account that does value those numbers.
> Cash is just paper, that happens to have an agreed upon value by the majority of the population.
There really is no such agreement, it is a belief system. And you know that "the majority of the population" has had no say in monetary policy, nor do they understand it. There is no democracy involved and has never been. Billions of dollars, euros and etc are conjured out of thin air and into the hands of the chosen ones as we speak.
Before cash started to rule everything around us, people would carry letters from kings, princes or other nobles, that would instruct subjects to provide the bearer with horses, lodging and hospitality. For example if they were travelling. Or if they were to lead a project. People had to work by decree, people received their benefits and etc by decree.
Just as the rulers today create an endless amount of money out of thin air, monarchs of the past would create noble titles out of thin air. With rights to estates and the servitude of the people who were born there and etc. People defending that oppressive and invented aristocracy system would say "it is the will and decree of God", just like you're now saying that today's oppressive and invented monetary system "is the will of the majority". Because most will always defend the status quo, no matter what.
If the money value is the will of the people, then when did the majority decide they wanted to have high inflation and even hyper inflation? I don't remember any such vote in any country, do you?
> There really is no such agreement, it is a belief system.
If everyone believes it, do they not agree on the same thing?
> And you know that "the majority of the population" has had no say in monetary policy, nor do they understand it.....
I never said they did. It doesn't change the fact that most people still value $1 the same amount.
> If the money value is the will of the people
I never said it was their will, I said they mutually agree to it's value.
> then when did the majority decide they wanted to have high inflation and even hyper inflation?
They didn't. The value of money (or anything) may go up and down over time, for any reason. But in a single moment most people will agree to the value of $1.
But anyway, back to my only point, since you think money is worthless, why don't you give all your money away? Why are you keeping it?
So until you give all your cash away, and transfer all the money in your bank accounts to someone else's bank account, you will remain a hypocrite.
If that's what you're stuck on, I'll gladly let you stay mentally stuck there.
> So until you give all your cash away, and transfer all the money in your bank accounts to someone else's bank account, you will remain a hypocrite.
Except for short-term liquidity you can be damn sure that I don't keep any fiat money in my possession, and neither should anybody else. That's why the stock market keeps going up, everybody wants to get rid off inflation currency as quick as they can.
I guess my incredible hypocrisy is much worse than the geriatric rulers completely destroying the wealth of their nations in less than a generation by enslaving young workers with their fake monetary system.
It’s a normal and perfectly healthy reason to have children if you also love and cherish them. I would bet the number of parents having children for the sole and totally disinterested benefit of the children is approximately zero. The OP not caring about humanity tells me they’re profoundly selfish and therefore probably not capable of the love and cherish part though.
No, it's an incredibly selfish reason to have children.
Certainly people have children for a variety of reasons, but if a big one is "who else will take care of me when I get old?", that's incredibly selfish, and not healthy at all. Loving and cherishing your children regardless doesn't change that.
I love how you've somehow twisted the person upthread's words into the idea that they don't care about humanity. This entire subthread is bizarre.
I respect my father more for telling me he actively doesn't place care expectations on me in his old age. "I made you, you are not responsible for me but I am responsible for you".
Does that mean I won't care for him? Of course not, but it's good to know I haven't come into existence just for that.
You can care about humanity without needing to want to have kids.
Why are we acting like everyone's lifestyle preferences are of paramount importance to everyone else's existence? OP is not taking from any other parents here, and there are still plenty more humans to make more humans.
Is there a hidden fear here that having an enjoyable childless life will somehow spread everywhere and we all die in a generation?
Well, someone will have to take care of him. If it's not his children then probably some nurse in a nursing home. And guess what? That nurse is also someone's child. No children today equals labor shortage tomorrow.
This is one of the most selfish arguments you can make for having kids. You just want someone to take care of you when you are old. If we'll ever have capable robots, you people can stop having children.
Assuming those people are being compensated for the elder care they provide, why is that selfish?
I remember my grandmother moving in with us for a while when I was a kid. It was miserable. Our house wasn't set up for another bedroom. My parents were both stressed out about it and it put a strain on their relationship. My grandmother certainly wasn't thrilled with the situation.
Certainly not all elder care situations are like that, but I bet grandma would have been way more comfortable in an assisted living situation, where people who are trained could have seen to her needs. And my immediate family would have been way more comfortable too.
> Assuming those people are being compensated for the elder care they provide, why is that selfish?
The thing is that an elderly person in care can never compensate those who take care of them, because they do not work and do not produce anything. They can only scam their caretakers by paying with fake fiat money that was allocated to the elderly before their care takers were even born.
I was mainly just challenging the assertion that having children, with at least part of the motivation being care in old age, is selfish.
I interpreted this as not "I will have children so my children can look after me", but rather "I will have children so there will be younger people around, who can (amongst other things) look after older people and do other important things".
Based on that way of looking at it, I think that not having children but still benefiting from younger people is more selfish than not having children and benefitting from younger people (if either of these is indeed selfish).
Basically, I was questioning why it is more selfish to use a resource while contributing to that resource, rather than not contributing but still using.
Put another way, who is more selfish - a farmer who buys some vegetables, or a software developer who buys some vegetables? Yes, they are both paying for them, so they are not directly exploiting anyone. But if no-one wanted to be a farmer, then there would be no vegetables.
Yes, I know this analogy is a stretch, but hopefully you get what I mean. Anyway, I don't think that either having or not having children is inherently "selfish", but there are almost certainly selfish motivations for each.
People's taxes do not cover their EoL care, full stop.
If we are paying the fair market cost of hiring someone to be a carer, the cost of having them not do something else has to be realized. This will mean that cost of carers will skyrocket, meaning that people's care becomes more expensive. If we start to pay the true cost -- and have it paid directly -- then when population collapse happens, a ton of the elderly will die on the street.
Technically that makes everyone who's over the age of 60 a sort of parasite. That doesn't mean we look down on them.
Is a childless teacher refusing to do their part to create the next generation? Arguably a good teacher can have more impact on society than any parent will. How about someone who invents a technology that has decades long repercussions.
George Washington didn't have children. Was he a parasite taking just the benefits from society?
I've got kids, but I'm not naive enough to think that people without kids are all parasites. I think a healthy society has a balance of people doing different things - raising children needs a huge amount of attention and emotional labour, and it's definitely not for everyone. But you can contribute to society in other ways.
> Technically that makes everyone who's over the age of 60 a sort of parasite. That doesn't mean we look down on them.
No, they just frontloaded their contribution. Nothing in the definition says that it has to perfectly meter out its contribution to the symbiosis so that there's never a second where it's not giving some little portion.
> Is a childless teacher refusing to do their part to create the next generation?
I've seen what teachers do, firsthand. It'd be better for everyone if they just sat it out and did nothing. So they're pretty far into the negative.
> but I'm not naive enough to think that people without kids are all parasites.
Nothing naive about it. It's just the definition of parasitism. Taking from the host, giving nothing in return. Sure, some may have some medical issues that prevent it... they have my sympathy. Maybe that's Georgie W's excuse, dunno. But for those that make it a choice, yes, 110% parasite.
> I think a healthy society has a balance of people doing different things
There's nothing healthy about a society that doesn't make the next generation.
> and it's definitely not for everyone.
The trouble is that it really is for everyone. If you think that someone else can have children for you, then you don't get to make society. Which might be a bit of a problem for you, considering that you live in it.
> Technically, that makes you a sort of parasite. You have no trouble taking your share of the benefits that come from living in our society, but refuse to do your part to create the next generation of people who would comprise that society.
The benefits of living in society are generally paid for by OP's tax money, not some imaginary bonds that theoretical children will repay some day afterwards. On the other hand the epithet you used could be easily applied to poor people having bunch of children while on welfare...
> The benefits OP will take in his old age will largely be paid by the children of his generation.
Bringing up the children of OP's generation is paid by OP's taxes. Moreover, parents probably pay less, not more taxes for having children in a lot of western countries.
> You have no trouble taking your share of the benefits that come from living in our society
They didn't ask to be born, did they? Why should that accident of existence saddle them with obligations to birth others? This is such a shallow "yet you participate in society" argument.
It's also a zero-sum argument. Participating in society is likely to amount to giving, not taking. It's like Marxists thinking there's only so much wealth to go round and thus anyone who has any should feel ashamed.
The argument could be made that those who have children are the parasites, selfishly diverting resources to the useless ineffectual new humans that they've made for the fun of it. This argument would be nonsense too, but it wouldn't be worse than the other one.
Yes, how selfish. Giving birth to and raising the children that will grow the food you will eat when you're too old and decrepit to do it yourself.
Do you all just plan on suicide whenever you feel you've hit your peak? Or will you go on, and just look at those who provide for you as suckers too unlucky to have skipped the grift?
I mean, I'm not judging here, but it's clearly parasite behavior.
I will set aside money during my productive years and pay for food when I'm old. Just because the food is not made by fruit of my loins doesn't mean I'm being a parasite.
He is working, creating value for society, capturing only a portion of the value he creates, and deploying that value through consumption of experiences and services.
The fact that you would prefer he spent his money on children, instead of on other experiences, is irrelevant. Your desire to control other peoples spending, and to vilify them, for it, shows only that you are an immoral, authoritarian, asshole, and that you do not respect other people.
It is somewhat sad, that an immoral, authoritarian, freedom, hating, asshole, such as yourself might have children. I only hope that women are able to recognize that you are a monster, and that you do not respect other people.
> It is somewhat sad, that an immoral, authoritarian, freedom, hating, asshole, such as yourself might have children. I
Already have two. My daughter tells me she wants to have six. That seems ambitious, I'd be happy if she has three.
I guess from your perspective this really is sad. That makes me happier than I already was. If you weren't so sad, maybe you could do something about it. My descendants will tell each other stories and legends of the sad childless people who couldn't be bothered to shape society and create the next generation of people, and how they'd just throw barbless insults at those who did.
This is where the difference between affordability and safety come in.
Obviously someone making that much could afford to have kids, but assuming tech hub (e.g. SF) cost of living, it’ll take a few years of salary like that to accrue enough financial padding to be certain that a chain of unfortunate events won’t put them out on the street once the cost of raising a family is added in.
This is why you see a lot of high earners waiting until the last second to have kids, if they do. Financial security like you have while making good money without kids is hard to let go of.
Birthrate by income levels is approaching a dumbbell distribution in industrialized nations. Lower income people have kids due to the lack of options, while ultra-high income people have kids due to the need for heirs (and they can afford to completely offload childcare to dedicated high-quality staff). Those in the middle are stuck because having children is a net negative to the continuation of career advancement, especially women due the unavoidable need for parental leave. The commitmments required to raising children, especially newborns, will disrupt travel plans which is a significant component of the typical middle class lifestyle. Childcare will also cost a significant sum of money, sometimes as much as mortgage payments in high CoL areas, without completely relieving the parents of their duties.
> without completely relieving the parents of their duties.
That's an underappreciated point. Kids in daycares and kindergartens get sick a lot. Those places are pathogen swapping grounds. Especially early on, you may have your kid 2 weeks in, 2 weeks out on average. And the "on average" is a killer, too - you can't schedule when your kid will get sick, so you're effectively on-call all the time anyway, and have to have a job compatible with you just taking off in the middle of the day and getting a day or two of leave, on the spot, at random.
My net worth is north of 5 or 6 million now, on a good day. My salary is mid 5 figures with TC. You just happened to hit a proverbial jackpot, in another sense. You don't think I haven't had my share of exes? You don't think I've ever tried to settle down? You had blind luck in your romantic endeavors. But please don't wear that as some sort of weird badge of honor, it cheapens the whole thing, in my honest opinion.
It could simply be that child rearing and career success are substitute goods, at least for a plurality of the population. I don't like admitting that, but it seems reasonable to suspect.
I'll speak as someone that waited until almost 40 to have kids and who feels, in hindsight, I was being completely selfish. I prioritized my career, my travel, my sleeping in, my social life, my leisure, etc. As soon as you become a parent, you realize you shorted yourself and your kid shared time on earth together. I also just don't have the energy or physical ability to play like I would have at a younger age. It's not something you can really grapple with or consider the magnitude of as a childless person purposely avoiding/delaying it. I don't think it's necessarily intentionally selfish in the moment, as you're living it, but later sometimes you get to reflect back and see your decisions as what they really where with the clarity of hindsight and you'll understand what you really did. It's a weird thing that happens and I think part of the whole "wisdom with age" thing. I think I was just being selfish. All the travel and me stuff I did in my 20s-30s is not really very important, my identity as a parent to the humans I created is my identity now, It's the only part of my identity I really care very much about. Sure I still have hobbies and travel and stuff but it's on an entirely different plane of importance.
What if someone is not waiting on anything and just doesn't want to have kids out of any number of reasons? It's alright if you have regrets, but I don't see it as selfish if you never intended to have kids in the first place.
Well, this is kind of the camp I was in. I never wanted kids, so I said and thought. I knew my wife was kind of on the fence; so I knew it was a possibility. But I was actually kind of expecting her to either A) just one day tell me she had been thinking and wanted a kid or, B) what I actually hoped at the time, her clock would stop ticking while we were busy doing us and the decision would be made due to that. We had long agreed that if we ever did do it, we'd try but if fertility was ever an issue we wouldn't pursue IVF or adoption; we'd just consider it a sign from the universe and live our lives happily childfree. But then, we (ok she) was diagnosed and overcame a huge medical issue and it had us re-evaluate our thoughts on family/life/everything in the process.
Also noteworthy is that I don't project an opinion of selfishness on others; it's what I feel of myself. I can say also, now having a lot of friends that also waited for whatever reason, it's not uncommon in this cohort. It's also very common that people wait then run into fertility issues and the feeling hits harder for them. We've known a ton of people that struggle hard with that, more-so if having kids was already on your must-do list and you just delayed it too long.
So to answer your question more directly, I don't think the person you described is selfish. They may however realize they were if they ever decided to actually have kids and perhaps have some regret do to that.
And you depend on doctors and sewerage workers and programmers and garbage men and police officers and soldiers and physicists and so on. Is it selfish not to become all of these things yourself?
As long as you participate actively in society by working, you are doing your part and are not being selfish.
And my taxes go towards (in most countries) supporting that. Also, the children are not obligated to take care of me. They can choose it as a profession and I will gladly pay them for it, just as I gladly pay any professional in my life for cutting my hair or helping my children if they have trouble at school (even though they themselves do not have to have children and are helping them instead of the other way around). Are the people providing services also selfish for providing them?
Why? Anyone paying taxes to the state has fully earned their right to exist, especially if the state has a welfare system.
Not having children isn't even a new concept. People have done it since time immemorial. What if they had multiple children and then lost them all to the statistically high child mortality rates? Were they being selfish by not furthering their lineage due to external circumstances?
Off the top of my head: not being able to biologically, thinking that they are not able to provide worthy living conditions for the children, abuse in childhood and being afraid of exhibiting the same behaviour, having sick parents/siblings who need a lot of care leaving no time for children, not wanting to increase the burden on the planet... or just plain having the freedom of choice.
It's not a blanket rule and it's more about how you'll feel about yourself, realizing you've been selfish, than it is projecting outwards that anyone without kids must be selfish; that's certainly not the case.
These seem like very clear exceptions and reasons. Take it as a general sentiment, I'm not trying to footnote everything I write online to consider every possible circumstance any human could conceivably encounter. I think you should have known these are clearly not selfish acts. Biologically infertile being selfish? Come on dude.
OK, it sounds like your experience was selfish simply because later ON you had children, and the time you spent alone was time you could've had with your eventual children.
But what of someone who will not have children at all? How is it, literally (in the definition of the word), "selfish" to not have children? From whom are you robbing experience? What is being "taken away" and from whom?
If you want kids, its selfish to bring the other party into existence. Life isn't all great, and you don't have a choice in whether or not you're born.
If you don't want kids, its selfish because you are not supporting the society (other party) that supports your existence. If we don't have kids above the replacement rate, society doesn't continue. If you are fine with that great, but its hypocritical if you plan to continue to benefit from society in your own life.
What of the people that have children but those children do not contribute in any meaningful way to society? Is the implication here that every child born must somehow be a net-positive to society?
I see what you're saying about the replacement rate, but I don't see how, on a smaller scale, someone choosing to not have children is a selfish act within the context of a society that is not yet below "replacement" level.
"I'm not giving anyone else a chance" -- there is no "anyone else". There is nothing being robbed, as there is no other party that literally exists in the universe.
What I hear from millennials is "life is suffering, our future is doomed (global warming, mass extinction, insane politics, increasing loneliness), why would I force some kid to have to grow up in this shit world just for my own fulfillment?"
Which is crazy. Because no one had a life harder than the previous generations.
The amount of technological progress in the past decade is staggering. So many infrastructure issues are now just automated, that we don’t have to think about.
It’s a great time to be alive. And a great time to give someone else that opportunity to experience it too.
Looking at long term trends, the only single thing I can be sure of is the future won't look like the present.
I am currently experiencing a strong drive to start a family. Lets say I get very lucky and cause a pregnancy tomorrow; kid comes out 9 months later, 21 years (± whatever for when school starts), they graduate university and… it's not predictable in the slightest. We might have single-atom transistors as standard, or the factories might be too expensive to mass produce them. We might have solved all genetic conditions, or research might have stalled with Moore's Law. AI might be good enough to make human labour uneconomical, which is a separate issue to if we will arrange our economies to make this a utopia or a dystopia, or it might not. Even without AI, internet connectivity and robotics is enough to make Amazon Mechanical Turk more like its namesake, with the same impact on cost-cutting and outsourcing to whoever has an internet connection. Genetics research, even if limited to no-growth-in-computing scenarios, may also make it affordable for small and dumb terrorist groups to attempt DIY genocides, and even if they fail at their goal that may still cause megadeaths… but we may well also have defences against it, either biological or surveillance. Similar issues for drones and high-powered lasers. We've already got government-affordable ways to put literally every human on the planet under 24/7 surveillance, and that's likely to get cheap enough for organised crime to automate blackmail, but we also already have people doing that with generative AI and the social responses (let alone the legislative) could be almost anything. 3D printed houses and boats are both realities now, will we finally witness large-scale seasteading, or is that fundamentally untenable?
And that's all assuming no world-ending, or even just economy-ending, catastrophes of any kind — no paperclip optimisers, no nuclear wars, no peak-${insert-resource-here}, no environmental issues causing 1e9-scale migration.
Media has them mind broke. The material conditions climate change / etc will inflict on them are nothing compared to the material conditions our ancestors endured before the creation of modern technology.
"Boo hoo, the weather is shitty and some people are moving around because of it" he says, as he doesn't have to worry about Bubonic Plague or Genghis Khan.
I wish people didn't mind people moving around, but (a) the UK gets worried about mere tens of thousands, and (b) "some people" in the case of climate-change induced changes to farming output would, with current economics, be "about three times the total population of Earth when the Black Death started".
Yes they can. People are just too selfish and think of kids as costing lattes and ruining their free time. Believe it or not, kids don't have to be expensive as reports have you believe. They can go to public school, wear hand me downs or walmart clothes, and eat what would have been leftovers.
Most coworkers with kids I've spoken with complain about costs of daycare, babysitting, and Montessori schools. We pay for none of those as they aren't necessary. If even one parent works from home, it's a solved problem. If both do not, evaluate the costs. Many times, you actually lose money by both parents working.
I have a child and we do fine on one salary. Would love more, but either my aging body or god one has determined that would be decidedly more expensive.
ETA: Anyone on the fence who wants a kid - go for it. Don't try to keep up with the Jones' or try to budget them out. Kids are awesome. They're little blank slates who don't need much more than love, attention, education, and sustainance. If you keep waiting for when it's right, it'll never happen.
Yet the message sent to potential parents is so far from that, I won't blame people foregoing having kids.
There's a strong movement pushing for smaller governments and less public and social expenses in general, that directly makes it worse (kids are sick all the time, they need schools, public transportation, libraries, public services in general). You're arguing for giving up on daycare when so many companies are pushing back to office rules.
To your point, if a couple is at the point they couldn't afford lattes if they had kids, I don't see them properly raising that kid without a ton of aid, and looking at the comments we usually have here, most will point the finger at them for not being responsible enough instead.
Free time I guess is a big one. If you value the 'hanging with the boys', clubbing, or really any solo activity it certainly would be a shock. By the time mine came along, I was done with most of that anyways I guess. But my own free time - watching TV, playing games, reading books, or just scrolling on my phone, was largely replaced with building legos, having nerf gun fights, playing board games, etc. One 'hidden' benefit is that you get to be a kid again without seeming weird, and kids toys todays are so much cooler.
I do think 'selfish' was too broad and strong of a claim. I was focusing solely on the thought of people who make way more than enough money claiming a child would ruin their lifestyle/break them. In reality, there are tons of other reasons a person may not want a child that aren't selfish at all.
I don't think i'd use the word selfish, but I do think it's interesting that many people who aren't wanting kids don't do it for the reasons I'd assume.
If you would have told me people choose not to have kids because they already feel they are contributing to bettering the world through some other mission, it would make sense. If you're a doctor or scientist or even a nurse or something where you feel your career is a calling, I can understand feeling stretched thin enough to not want to have kids.
But that's not what many of my anti-kid friends say. They basically say it would interfere with their netlfix watching, video game playing, luxury travel lifestyle.
It's not that kids would take away from other meaningful ways of connecting to humanity, its' that they'd get in the way of their consumption.
Who will buy your products and services 20-30 years from today?
If the question sounds ridiculous, trust me it isn't. You can look at demographics of China, or if you don't particularly care about that but care about finance, long duration government debt.
Life doesn’t need excuses. It happens on its own. Human ability to stop it from happening reliably is rather new.
The poor capitalist is only one sad person. The poor dictator or emperor or tsar is another. The childless by choice middle class city dwellers who suddenly realize there’s no one young enough to provide the products and services they require to continue their hedonistic lifestyles are another still.
There’s a conspiracy theory I don’t subscribe to which says Covid and vaccines are a depopulation program. But we don’t need one…
The reasoning is that you were raised by somebody but when it is your turn you are avoiding the responsibility. If everybody start to think this way the human race will stop existing.
You can't renege on a "responsibility" you didn't sign up for. Furthermore, if someone asked me to make a list of mammals least in danger of extinction, humanity would be at the very top. The idea that we need to keep exponentially growing or face extinction strikes me as remarkably similar to pyramid-scheme thinking.
> Most coworkers with kids I've spoken with complain about costs of daycare, babysitting, and Montessori schools. We pay for none of those as they aren't necessary. If even one parent works from home, it's a solved problem. If both do not, evaluate the costs. Many times, you actually lose money by both parents working
Many (most?) people definitely don't have the luxury of having a parent stay at home.
You are just as selfish as your friends. You just have a different idea about what life you want (and also probably higher income, I bet).
Would you have another kid if you knew it would make your current kid significantly worse off? It's the same argument as that, except that you count the spouse as part of the equation.
If you make conscious choices to keep having kids even though
1. You don't need them to help on your farm or to support you in your old age,
2. Each additional kid further immiserates your spouse and the older kids
If you're in the minority, maybe you're the one who's out of touch?
It's not that they can't afford having children—many of those who are less fortunate than them still have children. It's just that they think the cost of raising children, which likely affects their current lifestyle, is not worth it.
Do the math on a 100k income - everyone lives on inheritances. It's fine if you inherit a couple of mill and can live on all of the 100k. If you need to worry about savings - good luck.
That opinion itself is reflective of a bubble. The people not having kids are all well-off; the lower class is still having lots of kids, whether they own houses or not (and most do - the only places unaffordable are the centers of big cities). You drop below 2.0 kids somewhere around the 40th percentile of income, and pass 50% homeownership around the 20th.
My parents had three kids while living on a single salary that put us below into the poverty line for the first half of my childhood. I had a very happy childhood. Everything I had (even my underwear!) was a handmedown.
I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s possible. It’s a matter of priorities. I’m glad my parents made the hard choices they did.
This comment is spot on IMHO -- yes, of course it is possible. But it isnt desirable for many of us who went thru it.
I similarly grew up at the poverty line as my parents got crushed by double-digit inflation. Based on personal experience, I didnt want the same for my kids -- so we have 2 though we'd love to have 4.
This is the reason that we tell ourselves, but it isn't the reason why we stop having kids. If it were, the human race would have died out millenia ago.
Every single parent I'd wager that made those sacrifices and raised their family would tell you it was the best thing they ever did and that they'd do it again. If you've never been a parent you can't possibly understand it at all.
When you're poorer, especially in countries with less well enforced legal systems, you're not as negatively affected by having more children. Your priority is simply being able to stay fed and taking what work you can get, not buying a home in an area conducive to your highly specialized career. More kids are just another mouth to feed until they become capable of contributing to the family finances (typically at much younger ages than in the West).
This. In poorer parts of the world, you might have an extra mouth to feed for the first 15-20 years, but once your child finishes school and finds work they're contributing to your well-being and to helping feed the younger children. You also need not worry too much about your retirement, because you know your family will support you, and you'll play a role raising your grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Kids as a retirement investment - makes sense in countries that lack safe investments (safe from over-taxation, theft, inflation). Built in interest/growth rate due to breeding next generation.
Unfortunately I have shorted the children market by not breeding when younger. What's the appropriate way to invest in 2.5 children? I presume they are a very illiquid investment.
The other problem with cousins is that brothers and sisters move to distant locations so cousins are often inaccessible even if you have them.
Just buy enough shares in public companies, or apartment units, to get the capital-share-of-income of 2.5 of someone else’s children. Let the parents figure out how to get something out of the wage-share-of-income
This isn't enough of an explanation, because surviving is still harder in such places than it is in wealthy countries with low birth rates. Birth rates are inversely correlated with wealth regardless of housing affordability.
True, I was thinking of colleagues who had moved from Eastern Europe to Ireland and were telling me that it was much more common to have homes without a mortgage, they weren't as likely to be a vehicle for getting rich, NIMBYs weren't such a big thing, etc. Maybe it's a holdover from the Soviet Union.
Not owning a house is not a reason people don’t have kids. After WW II the birth rates in Poland were crazy high despite obviously huge problems with housing - often 2 families had to live in one small 2-room apartment (not a house). Now most people own or can afford to rent yet the birthrate plummeted.
The primary reason for low birth rate is availability of cheap and effective contraception (and cultural changes that led to most people being ok with using it). Change my mind.
Isn't this a bit like claiming that main reason of drowning is water?
The real questions here is why people given opportunity to not have children jumps at it.
My personal opinion is that children are not that great - too much responsibility, too little support from society, too many of them behaves like little psychopaths most of the time (this can be probably cured with strict discipline but stress free upbringing seems to be in vogue). And the things that children "give" in return are rather questionable (especially for people with low emotional needs like me)
Most people probably like the "idea" of children but the practical side of having them is mostly boring ungrateful work that takes greater part of you life away and there is inherent risk that it can never end (I do not understand how anyone would not take into considetation the consequnce of having special needs child)
> The real questions here is why people given opportunity to not have children jumps at it.
Point taken, but that opportunity was not there until about 60 years ago.
I don't think people unwillingness to have kids changed, they didn't have much real choice back then. Well, their willingness to have sex was stronger than willingness to not have kids ;)
I agree, evolution works over thousands of generations. We're still only a few generations from the invention of birth control. We still do a lot of things that used to lead to reproduction, but today lead nowhere. Another thing I've noticed is that women tend to prefer a guy of higher social economic status. But if she has done a lot of schooling, and has a good job, the pool of eligible bachelors is much smaller. Guys are much more willing to marry down.
The most consistent predictor of the decline of the birth rate in a society is increased levels of wealth, which indicates it's in no way that simple.
Personally, I think it is that expectations rise, both for your own life and for that of children once your purchasing power increases. It's harder to give it up than to not have it in the first place. Having children increasingly has to compete with a lot of other rewarding things that require far less commitment and far lower costs.
Having children has also become higher risk, both in absolute costs - as well as risks associated to the likely possibility of divorce and single-parenthood.
It had plenty of risks before too. Doing genealogy, e.g. of one of my great-great grandfather's children, several died young and left behind children, some ran away from responsibilities (one child - my grandmothers first cousin - ended up in care and was adopted because her mother was too poor to care for her and her dad ran off to the US with his brothers, and we didn't learn she existed until a few years after she'd died) or were forced to work abroad for years at a time. Of 12 or so of his children, I think only 4 were in their children's life until they reached adulthood, and at least one of them was a single parent because her husband died young.
The same great-great grandfathers second wife likewise "lost" a brother that was almost certainly taken into care while she and her older brother were left to fend for themselves as teenagers after being orphaned when their father died after having cared for them alone for a few years after their mother died.
My grandmother's mother - married to one of the children of the same great-great grandparents - lost contact with her siblings in her early teens when they were all taken into care when her dad proved unable to deal following her mother's death. While she found a couple of her sisters again later, her dads failure to cope means even now we've not been able to figure out what happened to the rest of her siblings.
While divorce is more common, abandonment, be it intentional due to the difficulty of obtaining a divorce, or unintentional (poverty, disease, death), or absence for noble reasons (e.g. going off to earn money to support the family) still left a lot of people raising children on their own in often awful conditions.
There's a marked increase in the number of situations like that for each generation further back in my family tree among the people I can track.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say something that I "feel" is plausibly true, but I don't have any data to back it up. While life has been objectively harder in the recent past (prior 80 years), life is subjectively difficult today in a way that it wasn't for the past 200 years.
Folks often start out heavily in debt, then they must work competitive jobs which grow more competitive over time to tread water. The combination of sleep debt, social isolation, and general anxiety of going bust is a subjective difficulty which belies the relative comfort of modern life.
This is born out at least partially in the data where "occupational burnout" affects some 65% of employees in the last year.
Maybe for some, but most people don't get college degrees, for example. Most people worked heavily competitive jobs from an earlier age before, and often far harsher work.
E.g. my grandmothers half brother worked in New York Harbour from he was 9. Most of her uncles and aunts worked from early teens, and often moved from home at that age because their parents couldn't afford to keep providing for them and needed them to get employment. Often in backbreaking work that ruined their bodies, and in some cases killed them young.
People might well have a subjective experience that they have it tough, but if so we're failing in teaching people history.
My sister, in the Midwest, has 3 kids. I assume the family makes < $100k/year, I’d be shocked if they made more than that. Money seems tight, but they get by. They have a home on a couple acres of land (in the middle of nowhere).
I haven’t helped to provide any cousins, so they don’t have any. Money is not the constraint for me. I’d probably have a better chance of having kids if I had less money, as it would imply I focused on building relationships instead of a career.
Lots of people without a lot of money have kids. They value having a family over other things and make it work.
Affordability has rarely been a concern for having kids.
I grew up poor and people never "thought" about affording kids, just had them and figured things out along the way.
It seems it's a self-filtering mechanism in the upper classes, that put all kinds stops before having kids (e.g not ready/mature enough yet, not financially stable, etc) and usually end up having one at most.
Ask your parents, did they enjoy raising you without any money? My mom certainly did not enjoy working 2 jobs to bring me up in this world, and while she loves me, I'm pretty sure she would not do it again if she could do it all over.
So while yes, affordability has rarely been a concern, perhaps people are more educated now and realize what having kids would mean for their life, and how much worse it would make their life? And instead of living life for the purpose of being some child making vessels, they want to actually ... I don't know, LIVE?
> My mom certainly did not enjoy working 2 jobs to bring me up in this world
Rich world problems, though. In poorer countries and our poorer past, you'd have been working alongside her as she wouldn't be able to do it all on her own. Poor people have little choice but to bring children into this world. They would not survive without them. Opting to not have children is a luxury.
> perhaps people are more educated now
Or less educated. We seem to have come to believe that children are porcelain dolls that will break if they have to lift the lightest of fingers before they turn 18, even though there is no basis to that. It's just a cultural display.
> Or less educated. We seem to have come to believe that children are porcelain dolls that will break if they have to lift the lightest of fingers before they turn 18, even though there is no basis to that. It's just a cultural display.
Very much so.
Sadly, hand-in-hand with some strange Peter Pan syndrome of many adults remaining eternal children or what's worse, outright demonizing having children, arguably one of the most beautiful things you could ever achieve in life.
Yes, of course. They'd do it all over again without hesitation. Also, we were technically homeless for a time and a church took us in and let us live in their attic.
I'm deeply grateful to have been given the chance to be alive and for all those experiences as a child.
> And instead of living life for the purpose of being some child making vessels
Also, the logical consequence of your position is all poor people should be banned from procreating, trickling off to enormous chunks of third world countries.
I know many couples in Portland Oregon having multiple kids (four or more) on incomes ranging from 60k-over 200k. Moms stay at home too.
You know what they have in common? They're all religious.
The lack of children is a cultural thing based on how much you value kids over things. That's basically it. Those who value children have them. Those who don't don't. I don't understand why this is controversial. Look at Israel.
>Edit: the replies - y'all are out of touch. Visit an average family in the Midwest with a household income of < $100k/yr that doesn't own a home yet.
Ok, but the poster is baffled not about why people aren't having kids, but about why his coworkers aren't having kids. Now since HN is out of touch they poster is probably just as out of touch and you would assume that they worked with people as financially out of touch as they are - therefore:
Among people making enough money presumably to afford having kids why no kids?
// The avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now
And yet somehow places I visit (which lately has been between NY, Ohio, and Florida) has young families living in houses. I am not saying there's no challenge but your comment would imply that these houses are standing empty because nobody can afford them when in reality each one coming to the market is immediately snapped up mainly by families looking to expland.
Young people paying a massive portion of their income (significantly larger than previous generations) just to have a roof, and gaining zero equity in the process. Hence "renting", as opposed to "owning".
>The avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now.
But this is always the case... ~20 years ago when I bought my first home, interest rates were close to 8%, it took a big chunk of my income, and we had to move way out to the sticks in order to afford anything. People are always having to make compromises if they want to buy a home, save for retirement, start a business, have kids, and all the other high-risk things that people want to do in order to seek a better life. Yes house prices are higher today than they were 20 years ago -- and incomes aren't necessarily better -- but if someone absolutely wants to buy a home, there will be options and tradeoffs.
You can buy a house in Shreveport, Louisiana for 10k or less.
There are many towns and cities in the US with extremely low housing costs. Most of West Virginia is a good example as well.
The reason Shreveport always comes to mind when I think of cheap housing is because I always remember that John Carmack and John Romero owned a little lakehouse there and that's where they lived while making Doom.
When Bobby Jindal was running for governor the first time against Kathleen Blanco in 2004, she put out an ad that featured the nappiest, hair sticking up picture of Jindal you could possibly imagine and coupled it with the tagline “Wake up Louisiana, before it’s too late” (implied subtext: and you elect a black man)
I do hear she regretted this on her deathbed stricken with cancer. But more to the point, a friend of mine was at a polling place in Shreveport during that election and witnessed a fistfight between two voters in the parking lot over whether Bobby Jindal was in fact, black or not.
That has nothing to do with the argument about cost of living. OP asked for examples of affordable housing in the US, implying that affordable housing does not exist anywhere. The point is that there are tons of places to live. Of course the social problems in Louisiana are different than in coastal cities (coastal cities have plenty of social problems too).
To your point, if more progressive people were willing to live outside of coastal cities, they could affect social change in places like Louisiana.
What it sounds like you are saying is that racism makes towns/cities outside of the coastal areas unlivable. That is simply not true.
I entirely agree (and I read that book too), I am just saying if you are going to throw a dart and pick Shreveport as an example you need to be aware of what you are getting into. Another good example is the New Yorker article “The Death Penalty in Louisiana” by Rachel Aviv which I submitted to HN years ago.
I can attest to this with N=1 datapoint here. My best friend postponed having kids till they could afford a SFH, but kept pushing it further as the supply dwindled and rates shot up (tier-1 city residents). I can imagine how the number of planned kids could be directly proportional to the number of bedrooms a couple can afford to have.
I am in a circle of people who absolutely could and my experience (including me personally) matches the GP comment. There are certainly people who cannot afford housing, but the kinds of people I know are people who own detached homes in reasonably large cities all by themselves and things are not that different.
I'm pretty sure engineers can still afford kids, it's just very time consuming and you'll have to settle for less in term of vacations/neighbourhood/purchasing power/carrier/&c.
But yes, most people can't afford having kids that's a given
Some of this is cultural. In the past, people would cram 12 kids (yes literally 12) into a 1,200 sq/ft rowhome. God knows where they all slept. I'm not suggesting this was good, people used to have kids and and have far less space.
You realize the wealthier a society, the fewer kids?
It’s 100% a cultural norm issue. I was raised in Canada but have lived in Israel for the past 20 years. The vast majority of my Canadian friends have no kids, and the ones that do have at most 2. In Israel, all of my friends (secular/non-religious) have kids, usually 3 or more. The idea of whether you can or can’t afford a kid does not cross people’s minds. You get married, and you have a kid. If you don’t get married, and you can, you still have a kid. It’s just what’s expected. I have numerous friends who are single and made the choice to have multiple kids via donors. When it is the norm in society, it’s just something you do. I am sure social pressure has an effect. You see your friends having kids, then you want to have kids too, and then your kids become friends with your friends’ kids, and it expands from there.
Financially, life in Canada is much easier as a parent when compared to here, but socially, life in Canada as a parent is much harder when I compare it to here.
I have 3 kids - for me personally it was the best choice I have ever made, but I accept that I no longer have my own life. I live for my kids and I wouldn’t change it for the world. It probably helps that most of my friends are in the same situation.
Anecdotal response; also, at 43, I may be older than others in this discussion, though many of my cohort have only recently started to have kids. If you're only 30 (or 31 like GP), you'll need to wait and see who will have kids.
My friend with the most kids (5) lives in the Midwest had a household income of well under $100k/yr when kid #5 was born (he's a cop, she worked irregular hours because 5 kids). Now that they are older, she might work more and he has been promoted, so it's possible they are above $100k/yr, but if so, it's not much above that.
Prior to kids, they bought a fixer-upper and made it livable over the course of several months of days-off. Granted he had several advantages here: he worked construction jobs to pay his way through college (in-state tuition was laughably low in the early aughts), and his father was a finish carpenter, so the know-how was available, and he graduated with less than $10k in debt.
Kids aren't that expensive. I have a friend in the midwest with 5 kids and his family income is about $60k. They have 3 cars, own their home and go on vacation a few times a year. But they never eat out, and have a strict budget.
People complaining about money and kids and meanwhile their Great Depression era ancestors are looking at them with unending shame.
Exactly. And also: childcare. Here in Canada, you may have to wait 4~5 years to get childcare, and it's very expensive (and you have to pay to enter the wailist). People even joke that your kid is going to be working by the time they get a spot
The US isn't in as good a position as it was e.g. twenty years ago. But it is still great compared to all of human history and even compared to most of the world today. And all throughout the ages, and all over the world, people are reproducing.
Good point, but that's never stopped people before. Even if this is the worst poverty ever inflicted, you'd have to chalk it up to the combination of that plus birth control and/or changed social norms.
Ah yes the good ol' trope of putting house ownership as basic human right, ideally just for me and right after the buy I expect the price to jump to 3x. If you don't have one, you are such a loser, a failure, how can you look at yourself in the mirror?
Completely idiotic approach of cargo-culting previous generations without a pinch of logic. There are highly developed countries (as in overall higher than US, say here in Switzerland) where this mindset is absent long term. Thus most population lives in rent for whole life, nobody is bothered by it, and generally Swiss are among the happiest nations in the world, consistently.
That isn't saying child births here are booming, in contrary, but that has absolutely nothing to do with home ownership and being priced out from owning homes. People simply grok how difficult raising even 2 children well is (as in by far the most difficult project you will ever do, spread over 20-25 years of consistent draining efforts with no guarantee of success even with best effort, while you also need to put some good effort into marriage too), society not really helping that much these days, and decide against it.
Don't blame them, as Bill Burr says there are simply too many people. Rather lets lift whole mankind from poverty and the topic of population explosion will vanish on its own.
This is absolutely correct. Let’s assume a hypothetical 30 year old who bought a house at the absolute peak of 30 year fixed interest rates, 16.64%. The median US home price was $70,400. Assume 20% down.
Let’s also assume a hypothetical 30 year old buying a house in 2023. 30 year fixed rate is 7.00%. The median US home price is $417,700. Assume 20% down.
Looking up inflation, a 1981 dollar is 3.37 2023 dollars.
The 1981 homebuyer pays 57% of the 2023 homebuyer’s down payment, and only pays 19% more each month. And that’s cherry-picking the absolute worst time to buy for that generation.
Your bubble is distorted too. I'm in the Central Valley of California but I work in the Bay area. The software people aren't having kids and complain a lot about housing and all that. And my central valley friends, installing garage doors, fixing machinery, making cabinets, digging pools, all have multiple kids and their own house.
I'm talking about people who don't currently own a home. Yeah, people who bought a house 5+ years ago are doing fucking amazing because it's doubled in value.
This is spot on. White collar dev folks whine how life is hard since they can't own their house close to their work, and rest of mankind just chugs along. HN is a massive echo chamber in many topics like Apple and I suspect this is another one.
Home ownership and prices have no effect on people having kids. Income does. You'll find loads of kids in low income areas but far fewer in middle income areas.
Everyone online complains about wealth being the reason they won't have kids, but it's not the case. Once people make one step up in their career, they want to make another and kids become an impediment. No matter the country, you'll find higher numbers of kids when people (and especially women) are deprived of education and work opportunities. Then you also have eccentric billionaires that have a dozen kids, but they're statistically irrelevant.
If you want families to have kids, cut wages, don't let women work, cram them into undesirable homes, and most importantly, ignore people who say they'd have kids if only they made a little more money. They won't stop once they get a taste of better living. They'll be very stressed out people, but they'll have kids.
I can afford children but swore to never have them nor marry, for the following reasons:
* Life is a hellhole. My children must witness my (and my hypothetical spouse's) deaths; witnessing death is a fucking hellish experience, I motherfucking do not desire to force that experience on anyone let alone my children.
* The world will continue. The Earth has spun and travelled around the Sun for time immemorial and will continue to do so regardless of any decisions I make. My existence and any existences I might create are utterly and absolutely pointless in the grand scale of the universe.
* The human world (in contrast with the world at large) is a fucking hellhole. I have absolutely no desire to bring new life into this human world and tell them, with a straight face: "Welcome! This is hell I brought you into. You will suffer many tragedies, you will be wronged so many times you won't bother keeping count. No, I can't help you. Have fun." What the hell am I, a sadist?
* I have many other activities, dreams, and goals I wish to accomplish that do not and perhaps even run completely counter to having children. Life is short: I only have so many hours left and none I can or will spare for offspring.
* I find the idea of compromising my life with a spouse to be a violation of fundamental human rights. Who am I to demand my spouse to bow to my wishes? Who is my spouse for them to demand I bow to their wishes? The answer is noone: I and any hypothetical spouse are noone. All men are born equal, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thusly, I swore to never marry and (also consequently) never have children. I am far too busy with my own life, kindly and sincerely please fuck off.
So yes, I can afford children. Many children. No, I won't have children. I can't wait until I am automagically ejected from the marriage market I never even wanted to be a part of.
This is, unironically, the most sane comment in this whole thread.
I don't even think you are in a bad place from a mental health standpoint. Hell, I bet you would be a fun person to have a couple of beers with.
I have a child by the way. Not a sadist, but in my hubris I imagine I am able to raise a child and protect him or her from a some of life's misery, and provide an interesting living experience.
In a sense, in my hubris, I am tempting fate, in hope fate doesn't turn its ugly head in my direction and decides to bite me in the ass.
Hi, your first comment ("Life is a hellhole") makes me think that you don't seem to be in a great place mentally right now. It's definitely your choice, and your decisions, but I would advice to review those views with someone else other than the internet. Whatever works for you - a friend, a therapist, a family member or a priest.
Consider this: despite life being "a hellhole full of tragedies", hopefully you don't resent your parents for giving birth to you?
My view is that life is both: full of tragedies and hardship, yes. But also full of wonders and joy. It's a full package, you seem to be only seeing one half of it. And to be clear: children are the same. A package, with joy and love and laugther but also hard work and tiredness and effort.
Hopefully this comment does not sound condescending to you, I am really trying to help. Have a very nice day.
Life is composed of both happiness and tragedies, but tragedies by far outnumber the happiness. If I were to specify an exact number, perhaps somewhere in the vicinity of 9:1 tragedies:happiness.
Some of the tragedies are also guaranteed and unavoidable from the moment you are born.
My conclusion is the result of a long internal deliberation fraught with weighing the countless factors which compose life. This conclusion is mine and mine alone and everyone else should draw forth their own rather than take mine as gospel or inspiration.
I simply do not value life highly enough to be worth forcing another life into experiencing it. I am perfectly happy to have my bloodline and heritage end with my death; it is not worth continuing whatever the arguments put forth.
> Life is composed of both happiness and tragedies, but tragedies by far outnumber the happiness. If I were to specify an exact number, perhaps somewhere in the vicinity of 9:1 tragedies:happiness.
> Some of the tragedies are also guaranteed and unavoidable from the moment you are born.
That's a grim perspective of life. For your personal life, do you think that the happiness you've experienced worth the tragedies that have happened to you? If so, don't you want another human (your child) to experience the same?
If it's not worth it, what makes you keep on living, then? (Assuming that you do.) Or do you wish that you had never been born in the first place?
>For your personal life, do you think that the happiness you've experienced worth the tragedies that have happened to you?
To be brutally honest: No.
I'm sorry if that answer makes anyone uncomfortable.
>If it's not worth it, what makes you keep on living, then? (Assuming that you do.)
I don't want to force the sadness of my death upon my parents and friends; I'll die sooner or later, but there's a difference between the Grim Reaper calling up my number and me just kicking down his door.
>If so, don't you want another human (your child) to experience the same?
I answered the prior question in the negative already, but I will answer this question anyway: No, I don't want to force any experience, good or bad, upon my hypothetical child. I think setting down rails as a parent and pushing my children down them is a gross violation of human rights, specifically the human right to liberty.
If anything, it's the child who gets to set down the rails and demand I, as their parent, help them travel it regardless of my own wishes. Not the other way around.
>Or do you wish that you had never been born in the first place?
If I had the opportunity to answer that question before coming into existence, with the life experience I have today? No, I would have wished to not be born and continued to enjoy solace in the vast void of nothingness.
If you truly believed what you said you believe, you'd wish you and all humans and all living things die asap, instantly, and painlessly from supernova or something. That way, all living things could leave together this horrible world you said. Death is better than life.
You might also wish that the Big Bang had produced matter and antimatter the exact same amount, so they would have perfectly canceled out, and there wouldn't be any matter at all in the universe. Nothing is better than something.
Why are you extrapolating my conclusion as gospel for the masses?:
>My conclusion is the result of a long internal deliberation fraught with weighing the countless factors which compose life. This conclusion is mine and mine alone and everyone else should draw forth their own rather than take mine as gospel or inspiration.
I couldn't care less what others do with their lives, so long as they don't harm or trouble others. It's none of my business.
> I couldn't care less what others do with their lives
From your previous comments, you care about your parents and friends and future children. So now change "all humans" in my previous reply to "people you care"—what's your response?
> This conclusion is mine and mine alone and everyone else should draw forth their own rather than take mine as gospel or inspiration.
If you honestly thought that, you wouldn't have shared your long opinion in this thread. People share comments on HN for others to discuss and debate. You can't just share something and defend it by saying it's your personal thought. Just keep it to yourself, then.
You fit the exact profile of someone who shouldn't bring children into this world. So, congratulations on making the right decision for you and your mental state right now. However, I would caution against extrapolating your one-dimensional opinions about the world into universal facts.
Who said anything about universal facts? I don't give a fuck what people do in their bedrooms because it's none of my business unless their acts convey negative consequences on others, and neither should others mine.
Also, what is it with accusations of my mental state? It takes a sound mind to derive a logical conclusion to the question of having children or not. If you're automatically assuming "people should have children" as a "universal fact", I would question your mental state because you are relinquishing your ability to think.
I've said elsewhere before that humans aren't special, but if there is anything that could set humans apart from other lifeforms it is our seemingly special ability to question and in some cases defy instincts and so-called "universal facts".
You're naive if you think that in the richest moment in the world history people are not making children in the richest regions for financial reasons.
That's nonsense. Poor people always had kids, still do. What changed is that people aren't able anymore to make sacrifices, huge in time and money for kids.
I would add to this is that the social pressures for having children have significantly diminished. I see a lot of people commenting on the side that having kids has become more difficult, which there may be some truth to but what people seem to ignore is that it has gotten a lot easier and more enjoyable to be a single person without kids. Society has adapted to this new cohort of childless adults and are catering to them in new ways.
White Americans just after the second world war controlled a huge fraction of the world's wealth. It's incredibly easy to raise your family in relative comfort when you're part of the only industrialized society on Earth that hasn't been reduced to rubble, the ones being rebuilt owe you billions upon billions of dollars, and you have a reliable underclass of other races to do the most unpleasant bits of labor for you.
Having children when you're rebuilding/are going to your potential death, is a very different circumstance. It's a lot easier to have kids when you have nothing left to lose.
You're a young male off to fight in either of the most brutal wars in history. This might just be the last time you see your wife, so you have nothing to lose in having a child at that point, as you have a much higher chance of never being able to do so later when things are better.
Alternatively you lived in a city reduced to ruins by the war, everything you knew or had is gone and you have no idea when or even if you'll be able to recover. Having a child doesn't involve as much of a concern over whether or not you can give them a better upbringing because things couldn't really get much worse in the first place.
Now, on the other hand, if you're talking about post-war, the world was recovering, there were opportunities everywhere, the future was looking more hopeful. You could just have kids and trust that they'd live a more comfortable life than yourself.
Nowadays, we're at this awkward point where there's just enough uncertainty and instability in the future, yet not bad enough that people have nothing to lose that people would rather wait or just not have any kids at all.
Yeah I mean it makes sense as a story. But it also makes sense not to have a kid if you think you’re going to die at war. Both stories are perfectly believable, I’d say. And likewise it also makes sense not to bring a child into a bombed out hellhole with severely limited food rations.
And in the 50s the future was looking good in some ways, but people also lived under a visceral fear of nuclear annihilation. These are all just feelings people may or may not have.
Ultimately, I think it’s much more complicated than saying that circumstances in the past made it easier for people to decide to have children.
Both sides have good points. Things could easily be improved to facilitate more child-rearing. Most metro areas should get a bump in salaries and hourly rates. I think 30 to 50 percent to cover inflation is doable.
With how poised American infrastructure is for a huge wave of massive investment and upgrades, the economic boom following that will more than justify the increase now to fix what's left of the covid supply chain crunch.
You’d be surprised how disconnected from reality people are. There’s talk in every western country about population aging and housing affordability yet people cant see either. Office workers are out of the child making equation and they are the least aware of the world outside. Being constantly gaslight and ordered around does that to you. But the issue is that the trend is to obliterate all types of income sources outside office cattle farming and fewer people will afford the luxury of a family and friends. The frog is warm but will boil surely.
Eh? If we’re in a “tech is a bubble” conversation then “the average American” conversation is out of the window. Tech workers earn way above the average. If you’re accepting that tech parents have the money to raise kids it stands to reason the OP would wonder why their peers aren’t also raising kids.
There is just one, single reason for the decline of births in so-called developed or developing countries - women emancipation. Anything else is simply a cope from people that are unable to acknowledge the fact that everything has a price.
You are presuming intentions that are absent from my comment. And it doesn't state any "argument".
I am not saying there that it is wrong to give women such freedom, nor that it is right. Maybe there is an alternative cultural setting where women emancipation doesn't bear such consequences. Maybe not. Maybe it is an unavoidable result of our societal progress. Or maybe a flourishing of the society cannot, and shouldn't, be measured in births-to-deaths ratio.
These things I consider unknown. But the cause of the current state of affairs is as stated.
This is likely the stupidest thing I'll read this week, thank you for that. In what way, exactly, are children not expensive? From some research and napkin math, it looks like $300k, not including opportunity cost (so in reality more like $500k), if everything goes right. Hope there's no medical issues, hope there's no car crashes. How many years of salary is that?
At minimum, children do come at an opportunity cost. Either you’re geographically constrained to be near family, one of the parents must not work, or you pay very real direct costs for child care.
False, folks just choose to live in places they cannot afford. Plenty of small towns in the US dying for new blood. You could buy a block's worth of houses for what one in SF, Austin, Seattle, NYC, LA, etc. goes for. Remote work + starlink makes this possible.
The bigger issue is still the age depopulation bomb, which is when retired non-working seniors begin to outnumber working adults. This is made worse by both liberals and conservatives being against immigration.
Yes, the cost of living affects this but even when the economy was great, Canada was already below the 2.1 birthrate in 1972. One explanation is declining male fertility (and yes, they accounted for socioeconomic factors.)
I have never understood how this is a "bomb," western cultures are so good at distancing the elderly, nobody will notice if conditions in care facilities become worse. How exactly will all of the unsupported old people overthrow society? By selling their IRAs? Will China's over-working-age-population get a second wind just long enough to take down the Party?
I think realpolitik has so permeated our way of thinking that an impending moral crisis or holocaust can only be brought into discourse as a nonexistent threat to stability. If there's any explanation for why people think an inverted population pyramid is an economic crisis, it is that their hearts are in the right place.
Because it’s taxed working adults who pay for entitlements like social security and socialized healthcare programs. When retirees outnumber them, these entitlement programs will collapse. As you’ve alluded to Asian culture, these entitlement programs are even more important in Western societies because multiple generations do not live in the same home. Also high trust societies tend to have much weaker family links.
> How exactly will all of the unsupported old people overthrow society?
They are reliable voters. You can already see this in play in places like Japan. As for places like China, they just won’t have enough workers and soldiers in the long run. Yes, their economy is terrible at the moment, but nearly everything is cyclical. Also the younger generation will just see how the elderly are treated and will lose more faith in their government.
if the majority of the public is much older they will likely vote for measures that favor them. Millennials look like they will be pretty left-leaning. The US could divert 10% of its military budget and ensure seniors live in relative comfort.
I’m not saying these things will come to pass, only that it isn’t obvious to me that there is a coming crash. The economy will morph to reflect the forces that exist within it.
There is a huge debt that the military budget might be diverted into instead. It's likely this military budget that ensures the debt can be never repaid.
US federal debt can't just be "repaid", it's basically all in non-callable bonds. It can be paid on one schedule, and diverting funds to it won't get it paid any faster.
On top of that, at my last job, on my team of 15, I was the only one with kids, and only 1 of those 15 engineers were under the age of 30. At my current job, my team is 8, and again we're all about 30, and nobody is even thinking about kids at all.
It baffles me. And it's also a bit inconvenient that nobody else at work has such pressing obligations, it makes me feel bad (though not too bad at this point) that I *have* to log off at quittin' time, sharp, to go relieve my wife of some childcare and make a family dinner.