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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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