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Comment by centimeter | Hacker News Reader

> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids

Because she already collects a massive amount of utility associated with raising her own children. The economics of paying people to raise their own children doesn't make sense; the externality allocations are completely wrong. I'm sure you can imagine some of the perverse incentives that come into play.

A woman benefits from raising her own kids (with an associated opportunity cost in employment availability), and the father also benefits from her raising the kids (without the same opportunity cost), so the rational economic strategy is for the father to defray some of the opportunity costs to the mother. This arrangement has existed for at least thousands of years and is called "marriage".

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> This arrangement has existed for at least thousands of years and is called "marriage".

Well said.

The modern inclination to tear down tradition institution and then replace them with increasingly more damaging and convoluted schemes is an endless source of confusion to me. It's almost if we've become so arrogant that we assume if something has been done for generations that it must be wrong, which seems like the exact wrong assumption to make.

There's also a inclination (not specifically modern) to mythologize traditional institutions. For example, the notion of a medieval knight in full plate.

The modern notion of traditional parenting is about 60 years old. Before that, things were much less straightforward, unless you were rich, because the absense of modern machinery and whatnot meant that that often both parents had to work.

> There's also a inclination (not specifically modern) to mythologize traditional institutions. For example, the notion of a medieval knight in full plate.

Indeed, the proverbial rose colored glasses. I think this is where a lot of conservatives get tripped up.

Being willing to make improvements is necessary to avoid stagnation, but it's equally important to remember change is not necessarily improvement (and often isn't).

Hell raising kids in the 60s & 70s is a lot less work. You could send the kids off into the neighborhood to play with all the other kids and only interact with them when they had issues. Otherwise they would rather be out exploring the local woods or streets with all the other kids, and family being around to help out.

Now with the legal necessity of 24/7 adult supervision before they are 12, that is gone and as a result you have helicopter parenting making it a shit ton more work to do.

The preponderance of research suggests that modern humans in high-IQ societies are substantially K-overselected. That is, we are investing an irrational amount of resources into a small number of average children when by basically any rational analysis, we should be having more children and putting in much less effort. As you say, part of this is distortion from the legal system.

That’s a pretty narrow interpretation of “marriage” and doesn’t track my experience at all.

Obviously it's an oversimplification, but the point is that marriage nicely handles (among other things) the allocation of child-rearing externalities.

Can you explain to me the utility I get from raising my kid? I'm not really a kid person, you should know up front.

The utility is your kids being raised. For example, it doesn't make sense to pay you to clean your own room. People get pay because they provide value to another person, not because they provide value to themselves.

> Can you explain to me the utility I get from raising my kid

This is deeply instinctive - if you don't feel this, most likely you have been deeply mindfucked by modern society. Evolution, obviously, ensures that you get rewarded with lots of utils for doing the single most important thing you can do from an evolutionary perspective.

I'm not saying you've done anything wrong; this isn't your fault. But just try to imagine someone from a healthy society (in the sense of "the society is not at risk of collapse") asking a question like "what, exactly, do I get out of having children?"

Even in unhealthy societies like ours, if you can convince people to raise children, they almost uniformly report higher life satisfaction (both vs people who don't have children and vs themselves before having children).

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