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Comment by Press2forEN | Hacker News Reader

For two months, lockdown protesters have been called selfish for the perception that they stand in opposition to what their detractors believe is a more important obligation to wider society over their personal concerns.

By the same token, having children is essential to maintain the social welfare state, and those that choose to travel or maintain a career instead are currently benefiting from that state while not contributing future workers back to it.

I don't know what the solution is, but short of dismantling the welfare state, there needs to be a concern on the part of today's young people for the perpetuation of the system from which they benefited so greatly.

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> there needs to be a concern on the part of today's young people for the perpetuation of the system from which they benefited so greatly

It also seems like the system that will throw me overboard and tell me to "pull myself up by the bootstraps" the moment I hit turbulent times.

Given current events, the argument could be made that it'll also throw you overboard the minute it hits turbulent times as well. Rough seas ahead, somebody is going in the water.

Right now I feel for the folks that physically have to be on the front-line of all of this to the point I'll say we did throw a lot of them overboard.

I'm afraid someone will go off on me for saying this, in regards to unemployment - I do not believe many of these jobs are ever coming back... and I think we've got a recession on our hands that's about to make 2008 look like a stroll through the tulips. We're just in the quiet before the storm =(

I don't think enough people here get how lucky most HNers are to be on the right side of the class divide, especially now.

Given that this recession was largely artificial - in the sense it's not the market pausing itself, I have no idea if this will prove to be a bad one or not - I don't think we've ever seen anything like this before. But I do share the same fear you have, that the jobs aren't coming back. I think for a lot of companies the skeleton crew will become the normal crew, and as always more will be done with less to the detriment of everyone who isn't still employed.

> It also seems like the system that will throw me overboard ... the moment I hit turbulent times.

Which is why having a set of people who are close to you is so priceless. Ultimately, your family and your best friends are more likely to be there for you than any government run program.

> having children is essential to maintain the social welfare state

That's not actually true though - immigration happily supports the required population growth. When the whole world stops reproducing we may need a plan B, but that's not a problem right now.

Immigration also requires someone having children, just in a different country. And the birth rate is already declining across the world [1]. So it is still kind of selfish, at a country level, to not have kids of your own but let the other countries go through the trouble of having and raising kids only to lure them once they are ready to contribute to the society.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN

To a large extent immigration (along with internal migration) and the pressure it puts on real estate costs have been responsible for the drop in birth rates. I know plenty of people that would have had kids if they'd had the financial stability and didn't require both parent working full time. But the current generation id far poorer than their parents where it counts.

> When the whole world stops reproducing we may need a plan B, but that's not a problem right now.

Regardless of reproduction rates this will happen sooner than you think. As India and China become more developed emigrating becomes less and less desirable as the gap between risk and reward shrinks. After that there is no pool of immigrants with a similar size, sub-saharan Africa will likely become one but the educational standard of that population will likely rise in a much more staggered fashion, it will never match the numbers we saw from India and China.

That's what robots are for.

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