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Comment by erasemus | Hacker News Reader

Wow that's well below replacement fertility. Also dysgenic since intelligent and responsible people are more likely to follow the moral fad. For me it demonstrates the importance of obeying my conscience and not caring what neighbours and other people might say. It's easier for me to do that nowadays since I'm not dependent on a local network of reciprocal favours in order to survive. But still I wonder how many neighbouring families both secretly wanted another child but were each afraid what the other might think.

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I have a problem with the term "dysgenic" -- mainly because the term is applying a value judgement to things (phenotypic traits) whose value is entirely contextual.

The main idea I'm getting at is that the world is dynamic and unpredictable. Today's advantage might be tomorrow's disadvantage and vice versa.

Problem acknowledged, though revealed preferences show that humans do value phenotypic traits, and those preferences may be controlled by objective ideas. Actually my main reservation about the word 'dysgenic' would be that 'responsibility' refers to something highly emergent which could be entirely passed down by parenting traditions and not at all by DNA. So, 'dyscivic', then? Yet regardless this inheritance would also be disproportionately selected against. Another objection to my phrasing is that people who take their morality entirely from the social environment can't be wholly responsible people. 'Otherwise responsible' would have been better.

It's not a moral fad at all. Women, including highly educated women, typically prefer having more children than they have [1]. 60% of women in the EU say they have less than the ideal number children. Women all over the world want more children than the replacement rate (makes sense) and in the developed world they have fewer children than this.

The reason women have fewer children nowadays is because of women's liberation - specifically in terms of education and professions. Working and studying requires time and dedication, and that conflicts with having and raising a child.

I don't really know how to solve this problem other than force women to choose between careers and children as they currently do. The best thing I can think of is subsidizing child care, trying to get more jobs that can support a family (so one parent can work and one can child raise), better maternity and paternity leave, and maybe making it more common to take a year or two off around 18 to 20.

1 - http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/11/birth-rates-...

The 'moral fad' I was referring to was what took place in protestant Slovakia beginning in the 1800s, not about human fertility/fecundity today.

From the article:

>In XIX. century the trend of having a single child took hold among protestants of the historical regions of Novohrad, Hont, Malohont and Gemer.

>it seems that if you had multiple kids back then you've got criticized and laughed at by your friends and neighbors.

>The best thing I can think of is subsidizing child care...

Since most childcare providers are women and programs with high adult to child ratios are preferred doesn’t this lead to the strange situation where a large parts of the workforce are taking care of other people’s young children?

This story reminds me of two similar stories. One was a fad in England where middle class wet nurses were employed by the wealthy. The middle class then passed their children down to the lower class and the lower class to the lowest class. The result was the lowest class mothers wet nursing a half dozen children.

The second story was that in communist Russia the early leadership was obsessed with economic efficiency. The thought of mother’s raising their children was considered a waste of resources and so the idea was that the state would take over raising and caring for children. Professionals would be better equipped and trained and, more importantly, more efficient! The result was a nearly feral generation of children that almost collapsed the country.

Raising young children is just very labor and resource intensive. Forgoing having children frees up a tremendous amount of economic resources and can temporarily boost consumption. In economics this is known as the one time “generational dividend” that if squandered leaves society poorer and not richer.

Yeah, I agree that's a problem too. The problem seems to come from when women entered the work force, society neglected to take a roughly equal amount of men from the work force. This resulted in a surplus of labor and therefore diminished costs of labor, and therefore families needed to have two people working, and now they don't have the time and resources for children.

I'm a believer in the idea that we should be using productivity to ease the obligations of labor. Ideally we could get back to one person per household working, or even better, both parents doing part time work (though I believe this plan requires socialized medicine). This would give plenty of time for child raising and wage earning, and distribute the burdens evenly among parents.

In recent years women have faced a declining happiness according to self reported results. We also have dwindling populations in the developed world and exploding populations in the under developed world where ideally that would be reversed and we could send the developing world doctors, engineers, teachers, etc. I see these problems as connected by the fact that women are structurally limited by society from pursuing their biological drive towards children whereas men, who don't face declining happiness, live in a society that encourages their biological drive (sex).

One person per household working did not really worked for lower class. That is origin of kindergaden - four years old alone whole day because both parents work 12 hours a day (in Germany). Meanwhile rich had kids with nannies whole day, because women needed to "represent familly" (read look good and spend time at parties) else husbands career could suffer for social reasons.

Women are not really struturaly limited to have more children. Most families could afford one more child if they wanted to. Not being at home is preferable then to be at home for women. There is a reason fight for female right to have career happened when large part of population was able to have one person at home - that situation largely sux for too many personality types and on top of it, you are fully aware of your lesser status.

It would be the same with man at home. He would become restless and unhappy too.

And sex has nothing to do with anything. Contraception made it so.

The research I'm familiar with shows that both men and women want to spend more time with their children, that only about a third of women want to work full time, and that women's desire to work full time declines as they get more money.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/03/14/modern-parenthood-...

This evidence seems to directly contradict your view that women spend less time at home because they are bored and made unhappy by it. Furthermore, the evidence I've given above, that women in developed countries all have fewer children than they say they want suggests there is a systemic oppression of women here.

Your point of view discounts taking care of children. You assume people would be unhappy doing it, or people who do it are inferior. This is a sexist opinion that devalues child raising and domestic labor.

Yeah, because being at home all the time is totally comparable to coming home from work an hour sooner. It is not nearly the same. Stay at home moms are risk group for depression and alcoholism. That is not because it is such a great happy situation. There are some happy women in such situation, but majority is not. Women expected to be like that whole their lives rebelled in sixties - not out of hapiness.

Especially when there are children in the mix, then shorter shift makes organizing things easier - for husband too. One of you two has to go to care for children and when women cant leave sooner, husband has to. If you have no career, just a dead end job you dont like all that much, going sooner is attractive. It just so happen to be completely different situation then having nothing productive to do whole day.

> Furthermore, the evidence I've given above, that women in developed countries all have fewer children than they say they want suggests there is a systemic oppression of women here.

Having one more child would in practice means complete stop of any meaningful work and career or whatever it is that they wish to do with their time. Not just having to come sooner then full time shift, but end of the game. These people are choosing to have less children. I both have less cars and less dogs then I consider optimal, but in both cases there is practical reason why I made that trade off. It is same thing with children.

> Your point of view discounts taking care of children. You assume people would be unhappy doing it, or people who do it are inferior.

And yes, they are considered inferior by large groups of society. Be it religious people or people who value money a lot. You may talk about how awesome domestic labor is, but that is just words. Women, who actually did it in the past, were actually considered lesser. And the very fact that they did childrasing was (and still is in fundamentalist subcultures) used as argument for why they should be ruled over by somebody else.

The hell, being "naturally caring" is still talked about as opposite of both intelligent and able to learn tech - every single time topic of women comes out.

> Most families could afford one more child if they wanted to.

The counter argument was made in Elizabeth Warrens book The Two Income Trap where her research showed that the single income family of the 1970’s had more disposable income than the two income family of the 90’s after adjusting for housing, healthcare, transportation and childcare and showed that the majority of those expenses were primarily driven by children.

A household with children has less ability to make trade offs in the big four than a household without children. For example affordable schools and childcare may dictate more expensive or more distant housing.

The result is that children have a disproportionate impact to discretionary income beyond immediate needs for food, shelter and clothing. If you consider children as just another discretionary way of spending income people in many cases will make the rational choice to spend less on children if the cost is vastly increased.

In other words if the choice is between a minivan and instant coffee and a Mercedes and Starbucks many women may rationally choose the later.

If children were like any other discretionary purchase this wouldn’t be a problem but children are also a societal asset (or liability). Current public policy in many countries has shifted to privatizes more of the costs while socializing the benefits.

For example Social Security benefits is a pay—as-you-go program but there are no adjustments to benefits based on the economic value of the children that a household contributed to the current generation that is paying it. If the costs of raising those children were fully socialized it wouldn’t be an issue but otherwise it is a transfer of income from those who raised children to those who did not.

That does not explain stats for European countries with good free public schools.

I did not meant money so much through. More like, overall lifestyle and your ability to do things that are not children related. With one child, mom can have work she takes seriously and is important for her. She can be competitive there, if you will. With four, nope. Whether you value yourself as entrepreneur, passionate programmer, artist, reader of books, gamer, whatever, you are more or less ok with one-two childs. With four/three, you have to forget about that other identity of yours. Forever.

Have you ever derived confidence or was praised for being good at something or achieving something? One more child may mean good bye to all that.

Moreover, 1970 had poor people too. There was less gap between poor and rich, but it existed. Poor people still exist. Taking about past families as of 1960-1970 usa affluent upper middle class were historical norm is weird. I have noticed tendency to take richest parts of society as the norm, ignoring majority of population for most historical periods.

Imo, a lot of effort and money into childrasing is consequence of widening gap between classes of people. If the difference between bad school and good school did not meant so much for future life, the good school districts would not be so expensive. That is zero sum competition and it does not matter how many incomes you have. You simply need more then competitors.

>That does not explain stats for European countries with good free public schools.

It may still hold if public policy transfers income from families with children. This could range from mercantilistic suppression of exchange rates that favors exporters to the detriment of households to public spending for the retired. France has worked to develop policy that is targeted at raising the fertility rate with some success.

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/france-boosts-birth-rate-w...

Your analysis is suffering from the "lump of labor" fallacy.

Unless I'm mistaken, the relationship between supply and demand is still a well regarded concept in economics - if the supply of labor doubles, the cost of labor will...

A) Be unaffected

B) Increase

C) Decrease

I'm not saying there is a fixed amount of work, I'm making a supply and demand argument to argue that the cost of labor will fall when the supply increases. Thus, I think my analysis isn't committing this fallacy, but if be happy to consider your reasoning if you care to explain.

You'd get a low grade in economics class with such an argument -- the issue is that in the long run, the market responds to the availability of new inputs (in this case, lots more labor), and in the long run you have no idea how the relationship between supply and demand will change.

> nearly feral generation of children that almost collapsed the country

Care to provide a source? We have kindergartens that accept children as young as 1.5 y.o, older kids (3+) typically stay at kindergarten for 8 hours a day.

Early communist attitudes underestimated the economic value of functioning nuclear families in regards to areas such as childcare and domestic services. Writings of idealists in the 1920's (https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-fam...) reflect a gross devaluation of the economic value of labor in the home versus labor outside the home.

Nuclear families were already under pressure in by the 1920's due to the impacts of World War One which resulted in a surplus of women and internal displacement that broke up many nuclear families. This was compounded by the family code of 1918 which liberalized divorce and resulted in many men abandoning their families. A 1926 Atlantic archive summarizes illustrates the impact:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1926/07/the-rus...

With the breakup of the nuclear family as an economic unit many women and children entered a workforce that was ill-equipped to receive them depressing factory wages. The shift of labor from child rearing to the production of consumer goods resulted in an increase in the besprizorniki, or the "unattended".

The most complete works on the subject are by Wendy Z. Goldman including The "Withering Away" and the Resurrection of the Soviet Family, 1917-1936 and Women, the State and Revolution Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936. Copies of the second can be found online and a quote on page 76 summarizes the cycle.

The decrease in children's homes and daycare centers inadvertently increased the numbers of besprizorniki as the needs of women and the needs of children formed the tight, alternating links of a vicious circle. Without daycare, many single mothers were unable to search for work, and without work, they were unable to support their children, who in turn ran away from impoverished homes to join the besprizorniki on the streets. The large numbers of besprizorniki then forced the state to divert scarce resources from daycare centers to children's homes, increasing the hardships of both employed and unemployed mothers, and ultimately increasing the numbers of besprizorniki.

In the context of the parent comment it very much was a moral fad.

>>> Working and studying requires time and dedication, and that conflicts with having and raising a child.

In a hypothetical world, this decision should not be a woman's decision only. Why don't we have this problem with men?

>>> I don't really know how to solve this problem other than force women to choose between careers and children as they currently do.

Force men to make the same decision?! Why only women have to choose?

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