Comment by anon9001 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon9001 | Hacker News Reader

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It's absolutely pushed from the top. Nobody outside of extreme religious communities sees increasing the population as a noble goal.

At least in the US, children are effectively a tax on the working class. How many people do you know that had to keep working to put their kids through college? Why do workplaces have tax-incentivized college savings accounts? Why does it cost employees to add children to employer-sponsored health insurance?

The system is very much set up to disincentive having kids. If you do have them, the trade is that you will always be financially drained. Somewhere between 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Very few will ever acquire equity in anything.

The American Dream is now working until you're 70, supporting 2 kids through college, building equity in your house, then reverse-mortgaging your property to hopefully cover your final years.

You could argue that it's an organic evolution of our profit-driven system, but that system only exists because it's what the owner-class is pushing.

Either we should accept that having children is a hobby for the rich and find other meaningful ways to live our lives, or we should have radical changes in society to increase family sizes.

This article is about global birth rates falling, which is true. But your comment is about conditions specific to the US. Yet birth rates are falling in countries which don't have the warped incentives you point out in the states, and where having children is supported (see Europe, much of Asia, etc.). So although you accurately point out that there are downsides, if not disincentives, to having kids in the US, that cannot be the driving cause of falling birth rates in the rest of the world. And therefore there's no indication of any kind of "top-down" force there either.

> having children is supported (see Europe...

I politely disagree, the childcare support and social services you have in Europe are not an incentive in anyway, for the large majority of countries here, they are a mitigation at best.

The majority of young europeans in fertile age, continue to struggle with housing costs (high rents high down payments) and salaries not in line with COL until far too late in their careers, if not indefinitely. Those two are the major drivers for 'post-poning' having children in IMHO.

"Europe" is a big and diverse place. But it's my fault for generalizing. Let me rather mention the Scandinavian countries, for example, where support is pretty ample. Certainly, having kids is still expensive and time consuming, but that's how it's been since the beginning of time. The difference is, now people can afford not to have them.

As for the rest of Europe, sure, housing is expensive and all that, but people have more discretionary income now than ever, after housing and daily necessities (at least as far as I can recall from economics classes). But I do think young people's expectations have shifted as well, which makes it feel like we've got less headroom for a bunch of kids. And we certainly don't have the safe, well-paying jobs our boomer parents often lucked into.

Here's a top down global conspiracy theory: micro plastics carried by the air and water are ingested and cause hormone disruption leading to less sex and therefore less children.

Why attribute to malice that which is equally well explained by incompetence? or in this case, greed?

This is just not true.

Birthrate declines as a society becomes more prosperous and women gain control over their reproductive rights.

In fact, the correlation is the opposite of what you said; wealthier people have fewer kids than poor people in almost every country. Your suggestion that people decide not to have kids because they can't afford them is not supported by the data; those who can most afford the kids have the fewest.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

I wish they'd show all the brackets above 200k in income. I would guess that after maybe 500k in income, it probably trends back up.

> Most billionaires have three or more children, the GoCompare analysis found. Among them, 5% had no children, 9% had one child, 23% had two children, 25% had three children, 17% had four children and 21% had five or more. Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has four children, and Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of the luxury goods empire LVMH, has five. [1]

So if you're a billionaire, you're having lots of kids, but if you're making 200k/yr you're having fewer kids. It makes sense to me.

[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/weird-things-top-billionaires...

Billionaires are such a tiny sample size, though. Not sure how much you can draw from that data.

Children inherently cost money. Someone has to pay it. You're trying to pretend like the system is designed to screw parents by burdening them with this cost source that is a child when simply put, children cost money.

> How many people do you know that had to keep working to put their kids through college?

College costs money. The incentives with government backed student debt has inflated that cost dramatically. This wasn't some scheme to tax parents. It was a moral hazard of a bad policy intended to make college accessible but in turn caused massive tuition inflation.

> Why does it cost employees to add children to employer-sponsored health insurance?

Again, because insuring more people costs more money. Whether you're adding a child or a spouse, more insurance coverage ought to equate to higher premiums. That the economics of how insurance works. Again if there are higher costs, someone has to pay them.

> The system is very much set up to disincentive having kids.

The system does disincentive having kids but that doesn't at all imply the system was intentionally designed to do so. (A) kids cost money and that is by definition a disincentive and (B) some policies like college loans were not setup to cause this disincentive. They instead just had adverse effects due to the moral hazard of incentivizing colleges to raise tuition since the government will back the loan and the student doesn't understand how to make an informed decision on cost tradeoffs at their age. But this isn't the system being designed to prevent people from having children.

I used to believe your line of reasoning, but I don't anymore.

> It was a moral hazard of a bad policy intended to make college accessible but in turn caused massive tuition inflation.

Do you really think that's unsolvable? That "bad policy" is corruption. That tuition inflation could be capped.

> Again if there are higher costs, someone has to pay them.

You would think we would all want to educate, insure, and support the next generation. Maybe some costs should be shared?

> They instead just had adverse effects due to the moral hazard of incentivizing colleges to raise tuition since the government will back the loan and the student doesn't understand how to make an informed decision on cost tradeoffs at their age. But this isn't the system being designed to prevent people from having children.

I know you're saying this unironically, but please consider that a system which allows an 18 year old to sign up to accrue tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of debt over 4+ years with no guarantee that they will be able to pay it back... well, maybe that's just not a system we should have built. You know who would love to build that system? Probably the recipients of the 18 year old's borrowed funds.

I have friends that are engineers in various fields, college educated, career people, and they're still struggling to save much of anything after childcare expenses and paying down their college debts.

It's no problem though, they just have to keep working and it's all fine. Unless they can't work for some reason, then they've got a big problem.

For your struggling friends, I found the problem:

"career people, and they're still struggling to save much of anything after childcare expenses"

That just isn't going to work. It can't. By law in most places, the ratio of childcare workers to children is limited. The work simply doesn't scale. Suppose the ratio is 1:4, and there is a 100% markup on the wages to pay for stuff like the building. Sending 4 kids will thus cost the pay of two workers. Dividing down, just 2 kids will cost as much as the typical parent might earn.

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