Comment by nightspirit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nightspirit | Hacker News Reader

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> The fact that the EU’s replacement rate is 1.59 children per couple and the continent needs substantial levels of immigration to maintain a productive workforce

> The idea here is that all people are the same, and all you need to do is shoehorn enough to keep the economy going.

Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans.

Solving the underpopulation problem by constant import of uneducated masses from all over the world is going to cost more and more, both in terms of the peta-man-hours needed to teach them functioning in new reality (language barrier for a start) and in terms of things going wrong when the former fails.

I mean, what are these guys supposed to do here? Join the rat race, stop reproducing and replace themselves with who-knows-whom 100 years down the line? Despise this culcure and blow stuff up? Something else?

> Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans.

We know why, it's just an inconvenient truth. More women are choosing careers over having more children.

To maintain a stable population, each woman has to have an average of two children. But that's the average; many will be infertile or homosexual or never find a mate or choose to never have children or only have one. So a great many would have to have more than two children to balance the average; many of our parents had five, six, seven, eight siblings because their mother's entire life consisted of raising children.

It's not easy for a family to raise five or more children while both parents work full time, so hardly anybody does that and the average falls below the population replacement rate. That's the why.

How to fix that without going back to the Old Ways is not a trivial problem.

You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children.

Anecdotally, my other half would love to have children but I want to delay it right now because of finances. We live in the south-east of England so this is how things look:-

We have a nice 2 bedroom terrace that costs £500,000. I earn a good living but we're hardly living in luxury. The bank of mum and dad aren't rich, thus I struggle to pay that down. This could perhaps be attributed to woman joining the workforce, a lack of building, and a political lanscape that setup property as invesments.

She wants children to go to private school that may cost £9000-£30000 per year, with an oppertunity cost of upto £2,000,000 per child. This can probably be attributed to the nigh on impossibility to get your kids into a good performing state school and grammer schools being given the shaft after our parents had their turn.

She wants them to have a dad, but Men are afraid of commitment due to the litigious nature of break-ups which screw them over. I'm not saying Dads shouldn't pay for their kids, just they shouldn't be paying £4,000,000 for an ex-wife to keep the advantages of marriage whilst the man no longer gets anything in return

There's probably many more problems because the birthrate is fairly low right around Europe but these are some pretty big negatives for middle class men to commit to having children, at least not until they have their lot in life, which means there's less time to have more than 1-2.

> You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children.

The problem is that it's not just one problem. Almost everything is set up to economically discourage two-income families from having more children. After everything you've mentioned, the second income financially disqualifies you from many childcare and other benefits available to single-income families while progressive taxation, sold as targeting the wealthy, instead swallows the money a middle income family could have used to pay for those things out of pocket.

And after the government has laid claim to most of the second income, what's left becomes the baseline for the cost of living. More families now have two incomes so it takes two incomes to afford a home in a good school district.

It seems what is needed but not present is a strong lobby for middle class families. Everyone pays lip service because they're a large voting block, but where is the equivalent of the AARP or NRA for families with children?

> It seems what is needed but not present is a strong lobby for middle class families. Everyone pays lip service because they're a large voting block, but where is the equivalent of the AARP or NRA for families with children.

NRA is a narrow, single-issue lobby, not a general lobby for interests of a broad demographic (which even "middle-class families with children" is.)

And, really, everyone pays sort of vague lip service because its a large demographic, but no more than that because its not a large voting bloc. Particularly, its not a group that has a common set of policy preferences and consistently votes predominantly based on that shared set of preferences.

Its not like there aren't lobbying organizations that promote themselves as promoting the interests of "families with children"; but none of them really represents the majority of that demographic, because there is no clear voting bloc to represent.

There are many reasons why I do not personally want children.

Some are political or philsophical that would take too long to explain here but I suppose one big reason is that I just flat-out do not like being around children.

There are no economic or personal incentives that would change my mind on this matter and from what I understand, the number of people thinking this way (the not wanting kids in general part, not the not liking them part) has gradually increased over the years as living standards have improved and more people are able to fulfill other goals and personal ambitions.

> Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans.

Not "despite", but "because".

In an agricultural society, you need lots of children because you need a lot of hands working the farm. If you're dirt-poor in an industrial society, you need lots of children so they can all work in factories to earn money for the family. In any society with a high infant mortality rate, you need to have even more children because you can expect a lot of them to die young.

In the modern West, we're not subsistence farmers or dirt-poor factory workers, and almost all of our kids survive to adulthood. We don't have lots of children because we don't need to have lots of children.

There's also the fact that in many poor nations, there simply isn't enough of a social safety net to take care of you in your old age. The surest form of insurance is to have as many kids as you can and count on some or all of them to support you when you're no longer able to work.

With SS, Medicare (in the US), etc. even though you won't live in luxury, you at least have some kind of income coming in in your retirement years.

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