Hacker News Reader

> If you’re really that into high pressure job and grinding the ladder why would you be so attracted to raising a family as a sahm ? You can’t do everything at once. No one is stopping you from raising children but yourself. Many don’t go for the business route and that’s a respectable choice but of course you can’t have it all. If in the end your fertility is more important than your career then have kids without making a fuss about it. Especially if you know that for some ecologically unreasonable reason you want numerous kids then start early.

The problem with this viewpoint is that, at scale, having kids isn't just an individual "life choice." It's a basic requirement for a sustainable human society. People have to have 2.1 kids on average in order for society to keep existing. We're well below that in almost the entire developed world. That means the most liberal societies in the world, where women can choose to pursue careers and business, are also not sustainable and can't continue to exist without importing people from societies with traditional gender roles. In other words, they currently exist only due to a sort of arbitrage and aren't viable in the steady state the way they're structured now.

If you think liberal societies are a good thing, then we really need to figure out a way to allow women to have careers and also children. It's not "having it all." It's about pursuing two pillars of life that for most people are both necessary: work, and family. We should be thinking about it in the same way as we design buildings to have sufficient bathrooms for everyone--as a biological fact of life that we must accommodate.

> This viewpoint is common, but doesn't scale. Having kids isn't a "life choice." It's a basic requirement for a sustainable human society.

I disagree, I think in the countries and social spheres where this is an _actual_ choice for women, it is very much a "life choice" (because the rest of the world makes more than enough children to resolve the issues of "sustainable human society"). When we'll get to a point where world wide population growth drops below 2.1 factor, maybe then we can start reconsidering this policy.

And that said, longer term, what is not sustainable is a continuing growth of population, not reducing it. Yes I realize reducing population invalidates many things currently supporting our civilization but having to deal with the pain of those changes seems much better than dealing with the issues of an overpopulated planet.

> I disagree, I think in the countries and social spheres where this is an _actual_ choice for women, it is very much a "life choice" (because the rest of the world makes more than enough children to resolve the issues of "sustainable human society"). When we'll get to a point where world wide population growth drops below 2.1 factor, maybe then we can start reconsidering this policy.

That's not really a rebuttal to my point--just an assertion that we should take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity while we can. It tells us nothing about what a sustainable liberal society looks like.

And the fact is that the arbitrage opportunity won't last long. If you're 30-something, the world population is currently projected to start declining within your lifetime.

There has been various research about Earth's carrying capacity. The numbers are controversial but it shouldn't be controversial that there is _some_ limit.

I think we are going to have to adapt to a post-growth world. Or maybe things will grow in other ways. I am not worried about declining birth rates. It's not like we are heading for a "Children of Men" scenario. The population will stabilize before it goes to zero. Or maybe we will just grow people in vats.

> I think we are going to have to adapt to a post-growth world. Or maybe things will grow in other ways. I am not worried about declining birth rates. It's not like we are heading for a "Children of Men" scenario.

I'm not talking about endless growth. I'm talking about simply maintaining existing societies. The fertility rate in South Korea is now below 1. That's a society that's basically gone within three generations.

> The population will stabilize before it goes to zero.

Right--so what does society and culture look like then?

> Or maybe we will just grow people in vats.

We can't even fix male pattern baldness for god's sake.

>Right--so what does society and culture look like then?

Culture and societies change. No one can predict the future. If the population of South Korea goes down to 49 million (from 50 million today), why does that automatically mean that they will lose their culture?

>We can't even fix male pattern baldness for god's sake.

I'm sure we will fix that before the population gets to zero!

> We can't even fix male pattern baldness for god's sake.

Elon Musk used to be bald. Now he’s not.

> Or maybe we will just grow people in vats.

Who will raise the people who were made in vats? Which is the real problem here, not who reproduces.

Pregnancy and childbirth are not wonderful experiences and there would definitely be an uptick in children per woman if you could get a baby without carrying it inside you for nine months and then pushing it out. How large the uptick would be I don’t know.

> Pregnancy and childbirth are not wonderful experiences

I would say it depends. My wife would not want to miss it. Especially her first birth was indeed a wonderful experience. The second was too fast but still a wonderful experience.

Why children per woman? In such a world where humans grow in vats, it would be children per person...

It's not about population, it's about culture.

The rest of the world's birth rate is pretty low too by now. Only Africa has a high birth rate.

But you can work and have kids. The problem is the expectation of being on track for (or offered back after years of hiatus) a top career while taking years off to raise childen is unrealistic.

Especially when there are other women (or people actually) looking for the same professionnal success while minimizing the impact of bearing (the only exclusively female element in this matter, note) and raising children on their careers as much as possible.

All I meant is of course you will be penalized for taking years off when some people (even of the same sex and with the same supposed disadvantages) don't.

I don't disagree with your larger point, rayiner, about "figur[ing] out a way to allow women to have careers and also children". But I agree with the GP poster (hycaria) that the top poster (astan?) creates a false dichotomy, that one must either have a high pressure grinding 100-hr-week job or be a SAHM, which are certainly mutually exclusive. Many of us do just work 40-50 hours per week. Further improvements in work-life balance and support for families of all kinds would definitely be good for the US.

I agree 100%. We shouldn't create a dichotomy, we should figure out ways to enable people to do both.

But people can have a career and kids, just not a high-power start up founder career.

And how do you ever fix that? There will always be people willing to not have kids to further their career. Or work 16 hr days. Or never see their family. These are often the people at the top. Do you force them not to do it?

Reminds me of this scientist I worked with. He’d work all day, go home get dinner, come back and work until 9 or 10. He was an internationally known scientist. No way he could do that and have a healthy family relationship.

Now try having a family and competing with this guy?

I agree. Any culture that promotes less children, deliberate or otherwise, would eventually be replaced by a culture that does promote more children.

Except that cultures change over time. And, typically, when cultures evolve they tend to promote less children. For example, population growth in India is declining as the economic situation is improving (source: https://datacommons.org/place/country/IND?topic=Demographics)

All cultures tend towards replacement rate. But replacement rate for pre-industrial societies with significantly higher infant mortality are much higher.

The problem is that there is overshoot - when you watched half your siblings die young, you don't simply take the doctor's word for it that your kids are all going to grow up strong and healthy. It takes a few generations to adapt. During this period of time, you have excessive population growth, and then even if these people have children only at replacement rate, the population will still increase as the more populous younger cohorts replace the smaller previous cohorts.

Eventually people start having sub replacement rate children as there are just too many people. In theory this is good, but soo too here will there be overshoot. If you were an only child and your parents were only children, it's hard to start having large families. Even if you wanted to, you need to support a lot of older generations, which puts a severe strain on your ability to also have lots of kids. Eventually yes, things will turn around and the population won't go to zero, but decades of population shrinking and the associated economic issues will do a number on the population. India will have to deal with this problem in a century, much of the developed world will have to deal with it a lot sooner.

> All cultures tend towards replacement rate.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...

The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely

> If you think liberal societies are a good thing, then we really need to figure out a way to allow women to have careers and also children.

Probably true, but eugenics motivations aside (and if you insist on going there we have egg donation technology), we probably don’t need to figure out a way to make motherhood and a small fraction of the most demanding jobs compatible.

There’s nothing fundamentally unworkable about a world where you can be a unicorn tech founder, big law partner, or Harvard professor or you can have children in your 20s but not both.

> we probably don’t need to figure out a way to make motherhood and a small fraction of the most demanding jobs compatible.

I don't think it's really that small of a fraction. It's not just tech founders who are faced with career tracks that have a pressure to perform in the key 25-35 age range.

> There’s nothing fundamentally unworkable about a world where you can be a unicorn tech founder, big law partner, or Harvard professor or you can have children in your 20s but not both.

Insofar as these are the people who become CEOs and politicians, that actually is a problem.

Steady states are the exception in nature, not the rule.

It's quite normal to have a population that increases exponentially, hits resource limits, and then decreases rapidly. (This was like literally 1/3 of my calculus class - it's a pretty classic example for coupled partial differential equations.) Eventually the population declines enough that the resource limits no longer apply, and people start having babies again. Population isn't a monolithic concept: there will always be some women who have children regardless of their incentives.

I'll just be happy if we can get there without war, famine, pestilence, and death, which are the normal results when a society hits resource limits.

So your... plan... is to wait for Western civilization to fall, and have the survivors return to traditional society amongst the abandoned buildings of the dead empire?

Your best case scenario is population collapse, but to do it without disease or conflict? Just everyone peacefully getting old and dying without having children?

If we really can get it without war or disease, why not? People will be able to afford houses again. Wages will go up. Inequality will probably decrease, at the cost of making the rich people much less rich. Maybe we'll even get some semblance of community again. Aren't these all the things that people on both sides of the political spectrum are asking for?

Oftentimes, what's good for the empire isn't good for the citizens of the empire. So yeah, I'm happy to leave behind the wreckages of a dead empire if it means more for the people in that empire.

Unfortunately, I'm guessing that we'll get the war, or the pandemic, or both. That's how things have historically ended.

I think the general demographic thesis on human population peaking relatively soon is that it comes from people voluntarily having fewer kids as conditions improve a la the demographic transition model. There’s no expectation that we hit earths carrying capacity

A steady indoor temperature of 68-72F is also not part of nature, but people get pretty grumpy if it is not the case.

Human populations (and pretty much all populations of complex life where predation is not a significant cause of death) follow logistic growth trends. Sudden population collapses are not normal in nature.

In the grand scheme of things we don't have a sudden population collapse. Fertility rates are at about 1.7-1.8 in the developed world, and we've got population momentum up till about 9B people. If current fertility rates continue we'll have about a 10% decline every generation once population momentum exhausts itself, which is pretty typical of a bubble that overshot its logistic growth limit and then is returning to equilibrium. (See eg. the stock market over the last week.)

We have some additional complexities in that a lot of those growth limits are because of the interplay between economics and population. There's plenty more room for humans on earth; there's not more room within major metropolises without triggering our "It's too crowded; better not breed" instincts. But economic forces needed to sustain those high populations promote concentration and crowding.

I am not a female, but I'm a dad who quit the industry a year ago so when my wife was pregnant with our first child.

I think what you're missing is the fact raising a child is something that all human beings are biologically engineered to find overwhelmingly fulfilling, yet office environments are not designed with employee fulfillment (or even basic wellbeing) in mind.

Once you become a parent, over time your viewpoint shifts from seeing the baby as an obstacle that gets in the way of other things, to everything else getting in the way of your time with bubs.

I suspect the reason that many of your friends aren't going back to the office is that raising a child is simply more satisfying.

> the fact raising a child is something that all human beings are biologically engineered to find overwhelmingly fulfilling

This is very much not a fact, and I really wish society as a whole would stop pretending that absolutely everybody wants to be an actual parent. Then maybe the people who do find parenting fulfilling can do that while those of us that don't can make up for them instead of being pressured into a role that we can't and/or don't want.

Fair call. "All" was not the right word to use - although it most people are wired this way.

I guess that word choice was mainly a reaction to the parent's langauge, where she seemed to be suggesting that career success is the be all and end all. It's an idea that was shoved down the throats of my generation (late milennials) by corporate/university propaganda and had to be unlearned painfully.

many don't realize thats what they want until they actually go through with having the kid though

Some people (even women) are impatient to go back to work because being with a toddler all day everyday isn't fun to everyone. Some people simply enjoy their job a lot. Or because reality takes a toll and you prefer to have a nice house and everything money permits even if that means a few less hours per day with your kid. Or the balance of all of this.

Sometimes I wonder how much of this idea of "maternity = bad" is self-imposed and/or a false impression.

> When I mention it to someone that I want to take time off for a couple years to have children in silicon valley, they look at me as if I'm an alien.

Is this really that common? As an anecdote, a few years ago, my kid's preschool teacher announced she was quitting half way through the school year due to health reasons. When I privately asked if everything was ok, it turned out to be that she wanted to have kids of her own. I was relieved and totally supportive of her decision: everyone ought to have the chance of choosing the life and family they want to have.

I can see how a certain "why would you want kids" attitude might come out from some young folks, but I think it's not so much that they're judging you personally, but more that they are expressing their own preference for not wanting kids at that stage in their life.

As for gap years, I know someone who got into software development relatively "late" in life (coming from the culinary industry and doing occasional freelance web stuff). My mom took some very long gaps and still had no problems working afterwards. The idea that one has to toil without gap years or else be banned from the industry forever is a myth. As you said, I think the mantra "if there's a will, there's a way" is very true.

I also see the shift in priorities over the years being very common, and I don't think there's anything inherently bad about changing one's mind about whether kids are more important or even the reverse (deciding that career work is more fulfilling than being a housewife/husband after all).

Agree, as another woman. People have had children in many adverse circumstances throughout life: I have friends who grew up in refugee camps, under politically repressive regimes, in real poverty. People make it work as best they can.

You can't do everything at once. It's a simple fact of life. Be a stay at home mom, sure. Be a mom with some daycare. Later on, allow your child to go to school. Make some choices! That's what growing older is about: pruning the tree of possibility so some branches can grow strong.

I am far, far more career-oriented now that I have a kid than before I did. Now I have someone who depends on me financially, who I want to provide for, who I want to be a good role model for. Having a kid flipped a switch in me that is leading me to much more ambitious work. Before the kid, I figured the world was just going to broil slowly and that it didn't particularly matter what I did. Now I have a drive to make a difference for her future life and ensure she'd be taken care of were something to happen to me. And for everyone who's gonna assail me for letting my child spend 23.8% of her waking hours not in my direct presence... well, you do you.

> With kids you just have to focus on a few priorities with the time you have left This focus has been beneficial for me.

The problem is that while all you say is true, and we can’t have it all, the media’s message is always that you can have it all. By the time we realize it was all a lie, corporations won even if a person wouldn’t have selected that path.

You don't understand why people can have multiple, potentially incompatible ambitions, and talk about the major obstacles that exist to achieving them and how to get around them instead of just giving up? That seems like a fundamental limitation in your own understanding of people.