Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

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Ha ha! You probably should have been voted down, but OK, let's take a look at your idea.

You are saying 1 out of 4 American workers shouldn't have kids[1].

If everybody followed your advice, a lot of pretty influential people wouldn't have been born: Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, Larry Ellison (OK maybe that works in your argument's favor). Jay Z. Abraham Lincoln. Barack Obama.

I wouldn't be here, either; my dad was a short-order fry cook when I was born. He worked a second job as a night janitor at PG&E when I was young.

So yeah, you'd better think long and hard about the financial aspects of having kids, but that actually applies whether you flip burgers at Mickey D's for minimum wage or flip bits at Facebook for a $150k annual salary.

Even if the financial aspects are hard, that actually isn't the hardest part of raising kids, even for poor people. And growing up poor isn't nearly as hard on kids as is growing up with bad parents.

If you want kids, the only reason you shouldn't have them is if you aren't up to the task of raising them -- for whatever reason.

That reason could certainly be financial; I'm not sure that I myself would have chosen to have kids if I was a short-order fry cook, instead of a highly-paid tech worker who is married to another one.

But I know plenty of low-income people who are awesome parents and whose examples I strive to live up to with my own kids.

[1]: http://www.raisetheminimumwage.com/pages/demographics

I have seen that most of kids who have struggled in their childhood because of say low income from their parents or bad family have a kind of a fighting spirit. Most of the people who you see achieve greatness either say in sports or in engineering come from really poor and troubled backgrounds. Now compare that to the upper middle class and the rich whose kids have been given all the resources and you don't see much of them at the top. Even if you see them it would be because their parents would have set up artificial constraints on their resources which they would have to fight to get it.

So finally it all depends on parenting and the values they instil on their kids which require no money. It just needs some thinking and common sense which is available to both the rich and the poor.

You have a massive survivor bias in your example of greatness in sports.

The odds of achieving greatness in sports is very low. If you come from a rich background, and want to maximize your chances of having a well-paying career, you do not go into sports. You go into law, or medicine, or banking, etc. Sure, the top players get paid well, but then look at what, say, minor league players get.

But if you come from a poor family, then sports is one of the ways to get out of poverty, because even if you can't go pro, there's still the chance of college athlete funding or becoming a coach for a school.

Engineering is similar, though less so.

>But if you come from a poor family, then sports is one of the ways to get out of poverty, because even if you can't go pro, there's still the chance of college athlete funding or becoming a coach for a school.

This is true. In India for example engineering and medicine are the ways to get out of poverty. Hence there is an over representation.

Do you have some statistical evidence to support the claim that people from low income and bad families are overrepresented in the higher echelons of sports of engineering? I strongly suspect quite the opposite is true. It is not sufficient to view a few examples - after all, a huge portion of the population comes from 'really poor and troubled backgrounds'.

No I don't. It is just an observation. Now in for e.g. India there are a lot of people going into engineering or medicine as a way out of poverty. So you are right but now it is the profession through which to get out of poverty and there will be a lot of people from poor and troubled families in it.

The logical extension of this argument is that everyone on earth should be forced to have as many children as possible all the time, because - gasp - think of all the wonderful human beings that we're missing out on. In fact, all those women of childbearing age you see walking around without a baby in their womb are guilty of a certain kind of murder. Strap them down and get to work!

The parent's comment said something explicitly different. There's a very clear line:

>>If you want kids, the only reason you shouldn't have them is if you aren't up to the task of raising them -- for whatever reason.

As I read it, this submission is about paternity leave and associated Zuckerberg/Facebook, not whether people should have children.

The parent claims that we need the bottom quartile of earners to have children otherwise we would lose out on socially valuable humans (list of examples provided). This is a variation on the argument raised by anti-abortionists that goes along the lines of "how do you know you're not killing the next Mozart?" or "what if your parents aborted you?" It's drek for two reasons:

1) You can't know what the world would like if person XYZ hadn't been born. It's pure science fiction. Somebody else would probably have invented the iPhone, or figured out relativity, etc. Or they wouldn't have. There's no reasonable argument to be made here. The world would be different in ways that cannot be predicted.

2) It implies that you are withholding from your fellow man by failing to reproduce more more more, because each could be the next potential Jobs, Rowling, etc.

I also think it's a little bit ugly to point at the conclusions of difficult lives and say "hey, what a good thing that was!" Maya Angelou wrote beautiful poetry, does that mean we should congratulate slavery and racism? I'd happily live in a world without Jay Z's music if it means kids don't have to grow up in housing projects with single mothers abandoned by their fathers and 12 year olds aren't shooting their brothers over stolen jewelry.

You are way out in left field all by yourself.

Nobody else here is talking about what you are talking about. It isn't logically connected to what I said.

I used the familiar names just because they are familiar, not for any reason of those people being more or less valuable to society. (Sorry if my joke about Larry Ellison made it seem otherwise.)

Most of us are familiar enough with those folks' stories that we can surmise that they were happy that their parents didn't follow Turing_Machine's theory, and therefore, that they were born.

We could also presume that for most of them at least, the parents were also likely to be glad they had them, too.

Thus, the two stakeholders referenced in Turing_Machine's post would probably disagree with him in those cases (and, I am trying to imply, countless thousands of other cases).

I certainly did not propose that we should judge whether or not people should breed based on their usefulness to society. That road leads straight to Adolf Hitler.

BOOM! I think we can cite Godwin now and close this branch of the thread.

1 out of 4 isn't that extreme, historically ~20% of individuals in Western Europe didn't have children.

Steve Jobs, the child of two Ivy League students? That would in no way qualify under "you shouldn't be having kids if the only job you can get is McDonalds or Yum! Brands".

Jobs's birth parents were 23-year-old grad students at the University of Wisconsin, not a population known for being rolling in dough. They decided they were too young to marry and have kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Parents

From the page you just linked, Jobs's birth father was "the son of a self-made millionaire".

Who nonetheless didn't feel like his life was secure enough to marry and raise a family right then.

Job's biological father came from a wealthy background. He and Job's mother met at University of Wisconsin (not from the US, but pretty sure that isn't Ivy League). The mother was working as a TA, so she wasn't wealthy.

OK, I misremembered. University of Wisconsin is not Ivy League. But I stand by the point; working as a TA doesn't make you wealthy, but it does mean you can get a better job than working at McDonald's.

TAs can't possibly be wealthy? That's news.

"Then there would be fewer people" is not the strongest argument, as overpopulation and unsustainable resource use are the largest problems currently faced by humanity.

Steve Jobs was raised by parents wealthy enough to send him to Reed College. His biological parents were grad students who (I believe) later became professors (or at least his father did). None of those people were working McDonald's jobs with no prospects for anything better.

Barack Obama? You're citing Barack OBAMA? That would be the same Barack Obama who was raised by his banker grandparents, sent to a fancy private school (current tuition: $22,000/year), then through Columbia and Harvard?

Yep. McDonald's all the way, there, dude.

In any case, citing people who overcame poverty does not refute the overall point. In fact, the only reason we tell stories about these people is because they are rare exceptions. I mean, Stevie Wonder is a great musician who happens to be blind. That doesn't mean we should intentionally make more people blind in the hope of producing more Stevie Wonders. Neither should we encourage people living in poverty to have children that they cannot afford.

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