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Comment by a-nikolaev | Hacker News Reader

If you tried to take care of a baby or a toddler, you would see that it's like a second job in terms of how much time and effort it requires from you every day. Now imagine yourself doing all that x2 amount of work, would you ask for help or extra accommodations?

It's not a model, a mental experiment, or a charitable action. It's the x2 amount of work you need to do, day and night, 365 days a year.

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I am well aware of that. This is precisely why I chose not have children.

Why should society bear the cost of you wanting to work less than everyone else?

Bear what cost exactly?

Extinction is the implication. I agree but its a bit of a boring argument. How about: Society is no social contract, you cannot really choose to leave society. Instead I'd argue, you are required to contribute to society, whether you like it or not. Helping raise children -- whether you have them or not -- is a part of that requirement. I can promise you, whatever subsidies go to parents, $$, time, and effort are still very very far in the favor of the childless.

The human race is not an endangered species. We are not in danger of going extinct due to lack of people.

And yet we need people to have children

People can have children without congratulating themselves for a sacrifice well delivered. Newsflash: there is NO village that will raise the kids. Families raise kids. Not society. The trade off for the hassle of procreating is making sure that ones genetic pool continues. That’s how we evolved. Kinship for species only extends so far and not much at all when there is parental entitlement.

"there is NO village that will raise the kids. Families raise kids. Not society."

What do you think nannies, daycare centers, and schools are doing? It is exceedingly rare for a child to be raised from birth to adulthood by just their close family.

"That’s how we evolved"

BS. We evolved to live in groups of 100-200 people (i.e. villages). Primates generally live in such groups (size varies by species) and will generally help with raising the young within the group, often with some form of social structure determining which group member is helping or being helped (e.g. lower-ranking females will act as "nannies" for higher-ranking females prior to mating and having their own offspring). Moreover, humans evolved a many-to-many mating pattern, so the "village" was the smallest unit of genetic closeness until extremely recently (and even so, people often break the social rules and have adulterous sex, and often change partners multiple times in their lifetime, resulting in a large number of half-siblings).

I agree. We did evolve by water sources/valleys and in small villages supported by kin. But when a state of 40 million(my state of California in USA) is the ‘village’ where every child is raised, we are scraping the bottom of the barrel because there is so much diversity in the needs of different groups that we can’t optimize. Too much specialization.

It would be interesting to model around insect populations rather than ape societies as we have increased in population and there are way too many unique sets of specializations.

I like modeling villages around 125-250. It’s closer to the Dunbar number and we can have diff age groups. And cluster several ‘villages’ together for services that scale.

Like I said, the "village" that raises children in a modern society includes schools, daycare, nannies, and so forth. It is not that 40 million people are the "village," but rather than each child will have a unique group of adults that constitute the village for that child. Society as a whole provides care in the sense that parents need some way to know that a daycare center / nanny / school is trustworthy and will properly care for their children; thus we set up systems of certification (historically this was often tied to a religious institution), audits, and punishments for inadequate care. We also do care for children we do not know, and in fact are instinctively driven to do so* (hence the "thing of the children" argument you will often hear from people with an agenda), and thus we set up programs to help parents (SNAP, public schools, etc.) and remove children from homes when it is deemed that they are not being adequately care for or are being actively harmed. We have also set up systems to take over care for unwanted children, for example a baby can be left at a fire or police station anonymously and the state will take over and try to find a new home for the child to be raised in. None of this is scraping the bottom of the barrel in my opinion, it is something we have done as part of the growth of organized civilizations.

(*) For example, if you saw a lost child wandering around crying, your first thought would probably be to try to help the child find his parents, even if it was inconvenient to do so, despite not knowing who the child or his parents actually are. Most people would at least stay with the child to wait for the police (or whoever) to arrive and take over, and many would willingly give the child food, an umbrella or coat, or whatever else the child needs.

> People can have children without congratulating themselves for a sacrifice well delivered ... Kinship for species only extends so far and not much at all when there is parental entitlement.

This, 1000%.

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