A 1920s millionaire set off a race to have the most babies | Hacker News Reader

A 1920s millionaire set off a race to have the most babies

fivethirtyeight.com

108 pointsfisherjeff33 comments

Holding out the carrot of what sounds like a large payday to poor people in order to encourage them to do something that will financially destroy all participants except the winner(s) sounds a lot like what the gaming/lottery industry does today. He didn't profit from it, but it's just as cruel and damaging. He may have viewed it as a practical joke, but the impoverished children that resulted from this probably didn't find it as funny.

I'm sure they were quite happy with it. How can anyone regret their own birth?

>I'm sure they were quite happy with it.

A significant portion of the world's population lives in poverty and the resulting misery. Misery is far from "quite happy," and I suspect most of them wish their parents had some self-control.

People who live in poverty aren't miserable. Far from it. They experience exactly the same gamut of emotion as you or me, including copious amounts of happiness.

It is a very strong determination to make, that someone should wish they were never born, simply because their standard of living doesn't match what you think it should be.

>People who live in poverty aren't miserable. Far from it

You know this how exactly? I'm guessing you have never lived in poverty, but even if you have, you're making a demonstrably false generalization. Poverty permeates every aspect of the human experience. Studies have shown a clear correlation between it and suicide, likelihood of arrest and imprisonment, depression, and virtually every other negative thing a person can experience. Impoverished parents are inflicting their poverty on defenseless children that had no say in the matter.

People couldn't have been completely crazy. Anyone taking part would understand that not winning would be hugely burdensome, and winning would mean you have money but a huge number of mouths to feed.

If you won, it was $153 million dollars in today's money. That's more than enough money to feed all those mouths.

No, it was $10 million in today's dollars (it's in the article), although your point still stands. Still, being able to pay for, and being able to raise about 10 kids under 10 at the same time is not the same.

From the article:

"In addition to his work as a lawyer, Millar amassed a net worth of more than $10 million (in today’s Canadian dollars)..."

Each winner received $125,000, which is a little over $2 million in today's Canadian dollars.

Actually, the article says his net worth was more than "$10 million (in today’s Canadian dollars)". That's about 7.2 million in today's US dollars. The most any winner got was 2 million CAD (or 1.46 million USD) and the winners each had 9 kids. So that's like getting 162k to have a kid, which isn't that great of a deal.

$7.2 million in today's values is plenty for the Canadian fellow.

Historical inflation = 3% Historical stock market returns=11%

11-3=8

8 percent real return (inflation adjusted) on average per year.

Let's say he plays it a little safe, let's call it 5% real return.

That's $360K/year forever ... and ever.

Sounds pretty easy to me finance wise.

People get raised in big families on a lot less and do just fine.

Only if you never spend any of the capital. I expect having 10 kids there are a number of costs and debts that woukd need to be repaid so the actual interest received would be less.

Which presumably would also get hit with more taxes, lowering it by another 30-40%

Canada doesn't have any inheritance tax. As far as I know, this was the case at the time in question, too.

The article seems to suggest that a lot of the families planned on having big families anyways. It wasn't like the decision was between "no kids" and "maximum kids". More like "stop at 6 kids" and "maximum kids".

Indeed.

Germany, in the 1930s, also had a rewards program, where you would get additional rewards for every child you had, plus a special reward every 4 childs.

(Obviously, to create a larger army. One could argue, though, that such a program would be necessary today again, in the time of 2 million more jobs than people, and birth rates of 1.2)

There are more people then jobs in Germany.

The concept of "Fachkräftemangel", and how the Association of German Employers warns that until 2020 we’ll need almost 2 million more immigrants to fill all the jobs is known to you?

Educating current inhabitants could be an alternative.

Free schools, free university – if the current population doesn’t learn, it’s their own fault.

It’s seriously not hard.

It actually is not that easy. 'Free' for some extent but you also need food and a roof over your head.

It’s not like Grundsicherung is hard to get. And if you have a flat at some point, you can then apply for Hartz IV, too.

>One could argue, though, that such a program would be necessary today again, in the time of 2 million more jobs than people, and birth rates of 1.2

Or one could argue why the duck (sic), do we have "2 million more jobs than people", when we have all this automation opportunities plus unemployment.

And the answer would be because those jobs are usually highly skilled technical, and we don't give easy (money wise) access to the university to the large masses that could do them.

Indeed.

The German issue has been going from several million jobs to almost being solved in the past 10 years.

At the same time the amount of first-generation university students (people whose parents never graduated) went up, and the amount of female students in engineering rose to almost exactly 50%. Also, many universities which had required tuition went back to tuition-free teaching in 2011.

Obviously, this doesn’t solve all issues yet (and there are still many jobs that don’t require education, and can’t be automated, like nurses), and it doesn’t even solve all high-requirement jobs (as the birth rate is still too low), but it helps.

From the title and the time period, I was expecting this to be something about encouraging the rich to have more children -- a common concern among interwar eugenicists. As it is... well, this was certainly eccentric, among other things.

Hmmm. There was a TV movie I saw about this when I was growing up in Canada... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stork_Derby

Interesting comment from the judge:

  "A child born dead is not in truth a child," Middleton
  wrote. "It was that which might have been a child."

Following this, abortion isn't the termination of a child; only that which might have been a child.

I don't see how that follows, since a stillbirth can happen without external influence.

Or else the judge was wrong.

Note that this was specifically in the context of bequests and registrations under the provincial Vital Statistics Act. Stillbirths were registered differently from live children; and I don't think anyone would expect a stillborn child to be considered for purposes of dividing up an estate.

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