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Comment by CptFribble | Hacker News Reader

The less advanced a society, the less options for adults with gainful employment. Making babies is one option pretty much always available, so when you introduce more options it makes sense that making babies would get pushed back among all the other options, right?

So why are we continually surprised that non-agricultural societies have declining birthrates? I feel like we should have all gotten used to this by now.

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It’s not quite so simple. Both men and women state the ideal number of children they want to have as about 2.7: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility.... Our society doesn’t just introduce more alternatives to having kids, it introduces more factors that get in the way or having kids. We’ve structured our society around this extended adolescence, where young people aren’t even really done with school until well into their adulthood. By the time they get their feet under them and settled down, they’re rushing to have a couple of kids before the clock runs out.

That sounds like a problem for women. Men can happily have children in their 70s as the current president has shown.

You may be surprised to learn, men need women to have children. If women are waiting later to have children, it doesn't mater how old the man is. Further, even if it were a problem only for women, that doesn't make the problem moot.

It's a problem for women over 30. If men merely have to delay reproduction by 40 years to their 70s you can quite easily kick the can down the road for the next generation to deal with. Given how much worse each next generation is doing this may well seem like a great deal in 2060 to the women who are born in 10 years time.

Fun fact: millennial households earn more than their parents’ did at the same age: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/FT_18...

Pretty obfuscatory fact. Inflation-adjusted wages are flat to declining. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

It confuses the matter to talk about household earnings, which obscure the increase in two-income households. (Two-income households have more income and expenses for a given standard of living, since homemakers are contributing to household earnings and expenses in a shadowed form.)

Except most men marry women who are about the same age. The gap in average age at first marriage is just two years, and has steadily decreased over the past century.

Yes, then for their second and third marriage they choose younger women. The average marriage lasts o my 8 years currently.

Again this is a problem for women, not men.

Ok, this is just bad logic. Setting aside the actual figures. If "most women" are waiting until late in their life to have kids, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd wife you marry, regardless of your age, is waiting until later in life to have kids.

Most women today yes. Most women in 30 years? Depends on a lot of factors. Given how poor genz is at 20 to the next generation the stability of living in a one family house vs working a minimum wage clerical job could well be worth giving up the idea of a career.

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