Hacker News Reader

Comment by tclancy | Hacker News Reader

I started to read this waiting for the punchline to a Dad joke. Kids can still mow lawns for sure.

>This stuff is being pushed from the top.

Is this some kind of Sparta thing? Like you all go up to the top of the mountain and someone pushes Dad off? Because if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works.

>It used to be a mark of shame not to have a large family

When and where was this? As someone who grew up Catholic it feels like that cut both ways.

To be vaguely serious for longer than I want, my wife and I just had a long, unfun conversation about how hard it is to deal with her mom's dementia and I don't know that we could do anywhere near as well with dealing with it if we didn't have a kid of our own. It's a shitty Ponzi schema, but the alternative is being Shakers.

View on HN

Old calculus: "I need to have lots of children so they support me in my old age. No matter the cost."

New calculus: "Between retirement accounts and welfare, society will support me in my old age. Children are really, really expensive."

It's economics, plain and simple. Of course there's a "top" and the "top" does dictate the structure. If you doubt that, ask: what percent of your income do you pay in taxes, and what percent of his income does your CEO pay in taxes (assuming you work at a typical bigcorp)?

I'm not saying that "yolo all the way to carrying capacity -- and beyond!" would be a better policy, but it clearly used to be the policy and isn't anymore. Personally, I think we dodged a big bullet and took a little one. The "little" bullet is still going to hurt quite a bit, though.

This, but also people used to see having a family as being the meaning of their lives. In the modern world, the alternative meaning of life invention is the Career™. This alone, that people have been influenced to believe a career is a replacement for having a family, is highly suspect of "top-down" influence. We don't even have the perspective of how ridiculous career driven culture is.

Yeah, the two are connected, for sure.

I think there's definitely something to this, and I'd agree that career driven culture is very toxic.

But I'd also hesitate to call it "top-down" influence. That would drastically downplay the autonomy we have in first-world countries. Nobody is forced to prioritize their career over everything else. In most countries, I'd say it's the complete opposite - tax incentives and benefits are usually structured to encourage child-rearing.

It's too easy for everyone to blame "the man" or "society" for a mindset that is entirely self-inflicted - with the exception of the US system tying healthcare to employment. That is definitely a top-down influence.

> It's too easy for everyone to blame "the man" or "society" for a mindset that is entirely self-inflicted - with the exception of the US system tying healthcare to employment. That is definitely a top-down influence.

The truth is that most "toxic culture" issues are systemic, so dumping blame on individuals for following systemic incentives doesn't make any sense.

Nobody is forced to prioritize their career, but a lot of people don't exactly have a choice to pursue leisure either. Lot's of people working paycheck to paycheck with no savings. How can you start a family in this country under those conditions?

> The truth is that most "toxic culture" issues are systemic, so dumping blame on individuals for following systemic incentives doesn't make any sense.

Aside from tying healthcare to employment in the USA, what systemic issues are there?

> Nobody is forced to prioritize their career, but a lot of people don't exactly have a choice to pursue leisure either. Lot's of people working paycheck to paycheck with no savings. How can you start a family in this country under those conditions?

Yet birthrates decrease with income - lower income households have higher birthrates [0]. This suggests that a lower fertility rate is indeed a choice, rather than economic necessity.

[0] - US statistics, but this is broadly the same across the world https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

systemic != top down for me.

top down to me equal some secret cabal of people that push an agenda

systemic to me means the way the system is but how the system got that way would be the random inputs of thousands or even millions of individual and uncoordinated actions.

People living paycheck to paycheck seems like it's always been a thing even when they had larger families. In fact the largest families in the modern world come from the people with the least amount of money (not judging, just stating what I've read). So having a paycheck looks like it has the opposite effect of encouraging family. No I'm not arguing that we should therefore get less pay. Just arguing against that idea that if everyone had a paycheck large enough to support a bigger family that they'd start having bigger families.

I would agree that not all systemic problems are top down, but many are, and there are "secret cabals" dedicated to creating and propagating such systems. It doesn't make sense to me to define systemic problems as strictly random, since humans attempt to create top-down, complex systems constantly (especially post-WW2 in more modern society).

> People living paycheck to paycheck seems like it's always been a thing even when they had larger families.

Different eras, different issues. In agrarian times a large family was an investment in future labor, and as a retirement/continuity strategy. In modern society, adding children is a significant expense, and with the easy availability of birth control, it's far more of a choice. In both cases, people were following the rational incentives that society has created for them.

We can argue about whether the current economic circumstances are random or top-down, but in either case, if you change the incentives for having kids (universal healthcare, affordable childcare, food/housing security, etc.) then you will get more kids.

This also causes people to move farther away from their families for both school and then work, often meaning that the grandparent support system is not available when you want to have kids.

That, in my opinion, is taken for granted more than anything else.

It also causes people to wait longer and longer to have children. My twins, my first children, came when I was 38 years old. My wife was 35. Most of our friends and family were also well into their 30s before having their first kid. This is not a winning strategy...

Society can only support you in old age if there are enough younger people around. Unfortunately, even though kids are needed for society to function and keep going, not much of the cost of raising kids is socialized, at least in the states. Day care for one kid where I live is $1700/month and rising, you have to be rich to afford it.

"Society can only support you in old age if there are enough younger people around."

I do not agree with that. In my opinion, technology advancements (say, driverless cars) will make reduce the amount of young people needed to support for older people.

I have yet to see any technology that will change a bedpan in the next 30 years. Much less provide the most important component to an older person’s mental (and hence in some ways physical) health - which is the company of other humans, family and friends, and typically grand children and other decendants.

I have been thinking of some powered exoskeleton that provides mobility as one solution.

What is more concerning is loneliness, but maybe VR NPCs or something.

I don't think loneliness will be massive issue. Considering the population of young adults and adults already suffering from it. Nothing will be different for us. And the communications are likely to improve so this is one thing that technology can solve.

In that case, if these technologies become so successful to eliminate the need for young people, they will basically become our successor species and all this is moot anyways.

Obviously that won’t happen overnight, but it could definitely happen gradually.

It's important to note that in Germany, at least, day care is provided by the state at no cost, starting from the age of 3mo or so. You also get 300 euros a month per child. German society has made a concerted effort to encourage that people have children in Germany. It's an idea worth copying, IMHO.

That does sound easier, is there a higher birth rate in that area?

It has, but mostly from immigrants or poor families. Middle class families are still barely having one child or none at all.

> New calculus: "Between retirement accounts and welfare, society will support me in my old age. Children are really, really expensive."

My calculus is not at all that society will support me. In fact, it’s the opposite. I anticipate no support from society, but I also don’t want to burden my family or society so I hope to be able to go out on my own terms once I am no longer self sufficient.

If declining birth rate is a matter of what people can afford, we should look for some sort of correlation between wealth and birth rate.

To the best of my knowledge, the correlation is somewhat negative--that is, rich people have lower average birth rates than poor people.

How can it be economics "plain and simple" if even people who can easily afford to raise large families choose not to? Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan could afford more kids than the Duggars. But they have two.

For the same reason that the CEO of the fortune-500 I work at ran around with a broken phone screen for the better part of a year: things cost time and energy, not just money. Children even moreso. Being cash-rich doesn't make you rich in time and energy.

> Old calculus: "I need to have lots of children so they support me in my old age. No matter the cost."

You forget that old calculus also included "Eh it's barely worth learning their names until they're 5 years old".

In 1900 child mortality under 5 was 35%! In 1800 it was almost 40%. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_mortality#/media/File:Gl...

You needed 3 babies just to make 2 toddlers. Let alone adults.

Some people have extraordinary wealth and they have the ability to set economic incentives, policies, and cultural influences for certain types of behavior to emerge. There's a hierarchy to our societies, there are people with great power and people with little to no power. I guess the greatest magic trick of the modern world is to make people believe such things do not exist.

IMO a greater magic trick is convincing folks like you that these rich people are actually powerful enough to control fundamental behaviors like sex and reproduction.

It's a profoundly dis-empowering and anti-democratic message, which is of course why a lot of those rich people are happy for you to believe it.

The reality is this: in every instance we know of, making education and birth control available to women (not forcing, just giving them the option) has resulted in declining birth rates and increasing standards of living.

It's really quite inconvenient to be pregnant, to parent a newborn, and to be responsible for a child for 2+ decades. It's very rewarding, but it's also really hard. You don't need a global conspiracy to explain why many women limit or opt against it if given the chance.

Are you saying there are no mechanisms that allow wealthy people to influence human behavior on a large scale? Please read "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays.

The problem with your thesis is that it overlooks the centuries-long advancement of feminism in favour of a conspiracy theory.

It's funny how people dismiss things so readily by labeling them "conspiracy theory." I just can't imagine looking at a world with such great wealth inequality and coming to the conclusion that this is an equal playing field where everyone exerts the same influence on the evolution of humanity.

Mary Wollstonecraft was not rich, and (ironically given this discussion) died due to the complications of giving birth to Mary Shelley.

The claim that the wealthy are controlling everyone's fertility is as short-sighted as it is parochial.

Given that elsewhere in this thread you explain how this is all the work of a shadow government, the label hardly seems unwarranted.

They're controlling the economy in ways that influence reproductive choices.

Social progress influences choice, which in turn influences economies, which influence people.

There is no cabal of They. The "shadow government" thesis is straight-up conspiracy batshit.

Unless you mean the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China who certainly authorized the two-child law just a few years back, but they're not really a shadow government. They're a regular one, just not very transparent.

Ultimately both Chinese communism (via Hegel) and Western feminism (via Wollstonecraft) trace their origins back to the French Revolution, so maybe you are being controlled by Robespierre.

Either you have sufficient evidence or you don’t. This is what separates us from the schizos.

There should be a godwins law for people who attempt to use this method of ending a discussion.

"go read this book which explains my point because I can't explain it well enough to others." is not a convincing argument in the least.

What good are books if we can't direct people at them? That book makes my case. The fact that Bernays was a major advisor for the media complex of America makes the book an even more significant piece of evidence for my position.

The idea is not that books are not useful, but that you should make effort to summarize the main point of the book while still recommending the book.

Ok...the main point is that there is a shadow government that shapes our culture and people's perceptions through mass media and by corrupting influential people for the purpose of endorsing certain ideas/products. In that work, Bernays details these types of "shadow governments."

You should see their blog. It quotes Nietszche and the Bene Gesserit on the way to thousands of words restating Wittgenstein's axioms.

France has tried. They even give subsidies. But the fertility rate is only 1.85.

The groups that are still growing are those that oppress women. Islamic countries [1] and ultra-orthodox Jews, especially. Evangelical Christians used to be higher but have now dropped down to the below-replacement US rate.

Teen pregnancies are way down in the US. So are abortions; that's not it.

Nobody really understands why. There's lots of speculation. The decline of religion? Better birth control? Video games? Declining testosterone levels? Fewer people in agriculture?

[1] Fertility rate 2.9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth

[2] Fertility rate 6.2. https://geopoliticalfutures.com/israeli-population-increase-...

[3] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2018/06/faith-fer...

Parenting is hard and expensive, especially these days in the developed world where people have children late and most people don’t live near extended family. My parents moving near me totally changed my wife and my outlook on having a third (from “no way, too sleepy” to “hey remember when the little one was just a baby?”)

Money is just one form of wealth. Having a network of trusted, productive people, such as healthy grandparents who can assist with raising children is another.

I can see in my extended family and friends the monetary and general success of those with supportive families (especially those families with multiple brothers) that worked together versus those families that were split apart and did not have someone to rely on. They are in completely different socioeconomic classes now.

Wouldn't rich people or powerful organizations be able to influence family planning decisions in exactly the way you just described?

Funding cheap ubiquitous birth control on a global scale.

If you want some chocolate ice cream, and I sell some to you, does that make me a powerful person who influenced your ice-cream-eating decisions?

>Because if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works.

First, a top dictating human sexuality is hilarious to read out of context. Also somewhat accurate.

Anyway, I don't think they mean there is a concrete system designed to keep people from reproducing. It's more of a feedback loop where the richest people in the world get concerned about things like global warming, overpopulation, and whatever else risks their way of life and so they use their social capital to dictate ideas and ideals that protect them. They can do this with things like think tanks or social media influencers or whatever. It's not some highly organized psyop but it's effective because they have so much economic influence.

I think you're trying to very generously interpret a conspiracy theory that doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny. Access to contraception, and a rise in women's education and employment, are not a message imposed on society by the wealthy, inadvertently or otherwise, nor have they occurred on the timeline of concerns such as climate change and resource exhaustion. They are social consequences of the Enlightenment.

Consider how attitudes towards contraception have changed over time. There was a time, not that long ago, where the separation of procreation from the procreative act was considered harmful to both society and the individual.

There is a cultural elite, who’s effect has been so profound, they have led you to believe that such a cultural norm as we enjoy today was inevitable and have convinced the world that taking a perfectly healthy reproductive system and making it dysfunctional is “healthcare”.

Contraception is not dysfunction.

There is no cultural elite brainwashing me into believe otherwise. I can arrive at this position all on my lonesome, simply by rejecting the appalling prejudices of the Catholic church (and many other religions), misogynists in general, and bigoted authoritarians (but I repeat myself); both on the basis of the crushing harm they have inflicted over the centuries, and the colossal waste of talent due to the systematic oppression of women.

As for this:

> the separation of procreation from the procreative act was considered harmful to both society and the individual

That depends who you read. If your selectively chosen history of the last 6,000 years consists entirely of texts written by and/or documenting the fun police, I can see how you might arrive at this conclusion. On the other hand, there have always been voices otherwise. Until the Enlightenment they tended to be pilloried and/or executed, but that doesn't exactly highlight the hypocrisy in charge as something to be desired, rather something to be abandoned.

Again, unless you are amongst them.

How’s the water?

I don't mention water.

edit: poking around, this seems to be some reference to an American college commencement speech. I'm not an American, so I didn't get the cultural allusion, sorry.

Point of fact, I don't swim in your water at all. Any assumptions you may choose to make about the cultural perspective, skin colour, second language, religious tradition(s), countr(ies) of birth/residence/affiliation/upbringing, nationality of parents and/or in-laws, immigration status, education, newspaper subscriptions, food and musical preferences, or political leanings influencing my worldview are likely flat wrong.

Contraception is not dysfunction, and this is neither a parochial, nor (what-americans-call-"liberal") liberal assertion.

That was people disliking the change and being loud. And they failed to pose their will on those who found contraception useful for their own lives.

And they failed also because non stigmatized contraception lowers teenage pregnancies and make aids spread less. Meaning it actually solves societal problems.

Inability to control pregnancy means less heath, particularly for women and small children.

> if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works.

Access to birth control and abortion, social services and welfare, trends in divorce and family court ... All of these things are top-down forces that create a tapestry heavily influencing human sexuality and the choices men and women make. One only has to look at how different things were 50 or so (or less) years ago before these things were as widespread.

Yes... other comment, see this one please.

> One only has to look at how different things were 50 or so (or less) years ago before these things were as widespread.

Was the average person happier under these circumstances? That's what should be optimized not keeping things the same for the sake of it

I wasn't making a normative statement. You can form your own opinion on what you prefer

What suggests these are targeted "top down" forces and not just a natural progression of society and technology?

Why can't it be both?

While I don't really believe in a 'conspiracy' - I can easily see "targeted 'top down' forces" in the reverse direction...Limiting women's access birth control, abortion, etc. Hell - just getting your tubes tied can be 10x harder then getting a vasectomy.

If societal forces can be so effective in limiting women's choices/options, is hard to believe they could have had a hand in expanding them as well?

Premodern society where women were effectively property, where religion dictated their role, where marriage and a woman staying at home were the social norm. You're trying to pretend like social policy is a new thing when the Catholic Church has been controlling the rights of individuals for a very long time. To such an extent that Kings were generally subservient to the Pope. And then those Kings and Queens did actions like the Inquisition where they forced individuals to either convert to Catholicism, be exiled, or be murdered.

History goes through many stages of social belief intertwined with social control. In ancient Rome there was a plant that caused abortions and was so popular it went extinct [1]. However also in ancient Rome, Augustus patronized writers like Virgil to help instil "traditional family values" in the Roman population.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium

Perhaps the "premodern societies" that are emphasized in educational settings had those qualities. Maybe that says more about our educational values than about premodern societies. Many ancient people didn't emphasize property in the first place. Many others were more matriarchal than patriarchal. Sure, Catholicism was fairly irredeemable...

“Premodern?” The US fertility rate fell from 3.65 in 1960 to below replacement in 1972. In that time, the labor force participation rate of married women went from 32% to 42%. Then it’s been pretty stable since then between 1.8-2.1, even as the labor force participation rate for married women went from 42% to 67%. We are talking about much more recent social trends at issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com