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Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

It’s not just Japan, but also a lot of the western world. People are getting married less often and having fewer children and my guess is that it’s largely driven by women opting out as they are a lot more selective in who they date and marry compared to men. Historically women didn’t have much of a say in the matter since they needed to marry for a better life since they lacked the freedoms or resources to go it alone. Now that women have gained their freedom and the resources to to survive on their own (higher rates of education, economy that supports high paying jobs that employees lots of women, etc), they can totally stay unmarried and have fulfilling lives in their social circles and wait until they can select exactly what they want. Men largely take what they can get, they are the selected. Women select. And of course this is just a generalization.

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How do you ensure our society survives in such an environment? There’s a potential future where the birth rate in open and tolerant communities falls to near zero while the birth rate in closed, ultra orthodox (across numerous faiths and denominations) religious communities within which women are commanded to procreate remains high. If you watch a show like Handmaid’s Tale through this lens you can start to connect the hypothetical dots from here to there.

Liberalism needs to evolve to incorporate the family and procreation into its philosophies and worldview if it wants to continue having an influence.

Seems like you’re saying liberalism is anti-those-things but it’s not, it is anti-coercion though and if that has historically been the solution to what you describe then I could see one drawing that conclusion.

How about men could stop doing the things that make women not select them?

I think the solution is probably to make having children more attractive with government subsidies and labor laws. E.g. free daycare, affordable education (including college), health care, a minimum amount of paid time off per year, etc.

Nobody should be forced to get married or have children if they don’t want to. But if we can alleviate some of the risks/down sides to having children, I think we will see more people choosing to start families and also having more children per family.

> to make having children more attractive with government subsidies and labor laws

This is a bad idea. Russian government have already tried that, and the result was that less wealthy people (mostly alcoholic and drug addicts) started to literally make children to receive subsidies and spend them on themselves.

It's fun to me how Google search results differ for "to make a child for subsidies" and for this same phrase translated to Russian, where it has already became a phenomenon.

Subsidies can be tied up to mortgage: the entire cost of housing can be made deductible from taxes, all expenses related to kids can be reimbursed (by IRS in April: you show checks and they give you money back). On top of that your income can be backed by the government for an extended period of time in case something happens to you, while you still need to pay for everything. You may ask where do we get money for all this? Tax on wealth. Many countries tax investments at 1% a year, not income, but investments. This won't bankrupt the rich people because investments usually make 5-10% per year and the government can take a small fraction of that. And no, the rich won't move their money abroad because safety that the US gives is worth a lot.

Many European countries have all those things and the birthrate is still falling.

Isn't it likely that those ultra orthodox societies would repeat the cycle and we'd still end up back here anyways? It's not like the current situation sprung up out of nothing.

Artificial wombs.

Making babies isn't the hard part.

Or maybe, it's too expensive to start a family these days.

Or people grew up watching their parents regret starting one too soon and want to avoid that mistake.

People who talk about women being more selective makes me wonder if there's an ulterior motive to choosing that hypothesis. Sour grapes?

https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1111607604348805120

The implication of that chart is that women are increasingly having sex with the men who have sex with multiple women.

I agree with the GP, women are more selective these days. I've been in the dating pool a while and things are changing in weird ways.

Sexually speaking, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

> Or maybe, it's too expensive to start a family these days.

There's much more economic uncertainty for the average family as a result of two things.

1. Corporations innovating the labor market and successfully squeezing increasing amounts of wealth out of the workforce: successful union busting, ever more cleverly exploitative labor contracts, the gig economy, unpredictable scheduling, metrics and surveillance, etc.

2. Fewer funds proportionally available to labor thanks to increasing wealth capture by a tiny minority.

It's not only expensive, but it's statistically difficult to overcome the uncertainty and establish a homestead you can believe will prove stable over a kid-raising time frame.

It's easy to understand why people are hesitant to start families in such family-unfriendly economic conditions.

Simple solution: 1%/year tax on wealth and give these money to families with kids. The tricky part is wealth is often stored as shares and if you tax Bezos, he'd have to sell 1% of his shares, thus driving the price of those shares down; then if some hedge fund keeps buying the shares he sells, eventually he may lose control over his company, which is unfair. We might want to define wealth as savings above 5M dollars. This would be easy to work around: register a few companies with highly complex structure of ownership and spread money across them.

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