Hacker News Reader

Comment by 988747 | Hacker News Reader

A theory I once read goes like this: in the past it was quite common for lawyers, directors, managers to marry their secretaries, which was the way for them to jump to higher social class. Now, a director making advances towards their secretary faces immediate sexual harassment lawsuit, so they choose to marry other managers/directors instead.

View on HN

Is that really a bad thing though?

For the 1/10 times at work where the person in power ends up having a meaningful relationship with an underling that you lose, you also have the 9/10 cases of sexual harassment that you lose too.

It's a bad thing from the secretary's point of view if a) she consents to the advances and b) successfully leverages that into a marriage with far greater benefits for her and her offspring.

Needless to say, those are pretty big ifs.

But then it's a good thing from the 9 other secretaries' point of view where they didn't consent to being harassed sexually, which is the point.

Yes, I've wondered the same thing. Anti-sexual harassment training, and more broadly the discouraging of socialization between men and women, has also reduced the opportunity for men and women to marry. The flip side of the male executive no longer being able to chase his secretary around a desk to try to pinch her on the butt is another executive not being able to politely court the secretary he is in love with (and vice versa).

I don't have a good answer for how to get the one without the other, but both are consequences of modern sensibilities.

More and more, I'm beginning to think that a society in which there is widespread use of birth control and in which the majority of women enter the labor force and work full time in an office is not going to be able to maintain replacement level fertility rates.

In which case, the future belongs to societies where women don't work and birth control is stigmatized.

It could be that there is a reason why the world was dominated by large patriarchal societies other than some sort of accident of history.

If that's true, then a society with lots of gig jobs or work at home jobs might help alleviate the problem. There could be other creative solutions, like reimagining higher education to give people time to marry and have kids before college. Other approaches are also possible. Whatever the reason, the secular societies will need to scramble if they don't want the world of the future to be dominated by orthodox religious populations.

Eh, Rome had widespread use of abortifacients, only falling after they had harvested those plants into extinction.

Do you have some data on how widespread and effective it was? Perhaps this also contributed to Rome's population problems - it needed to rely on the provinces to supply labor and manpower for a substantial portion of the Empire, and eventually the capital was moved away from Rome entirely. Constantinople was also basically empty by the time it was conquered, having a population of only 50,000 people when the Turks arrived, from a high of one million.

But I think in such ancient societies, the struggle is a little different. E.g. when you are being ravaged by wars and plagues, you need more than replacement level fertility. You need huge fertility that can recover massive population loss in a short period of time. After Hannibal decimated the population of Italy, Rome recovered remarkably quickly. They just made more Romans. Later on, that stopped working and they needed manpower from the provinces.

In modern societies, we've licked most of the other stuff and so can keep going much longer as fertility declines, to the point where we start noticing only when rates hit below replacement. Traditional societies would see population loss long before fertility rates fell below replacement.

>There could be other creative solutions, like reimagining higher education to give people time to marry and have kids before college.

This is essentially the advice of the "Princeton Mom": Find and marry your spouse in college. <https://www.today.com/popculture/marry-smart-princeton-mom-s...>

The obvious solution is artificial wombs, but that is probably very far in the future. But since you're talking about who the future belongs to, that's who. Until then, probably low population density already-developed countries that have fairly open immigration policies to accept the children of foreign breeders. That has seemed to mostly mean the US for the past few centuries, but places like Canada and Australia could easily employ similar strategies.

Even short of artificial wombs, there is a lot that can be done to help with this. The real issue isn't that women don't want to have kids at all, ever. It's that if they enter the labor force and work full time, usually it gets put off, often until it's not exactly too late, but at least too late to have as many children as you might have if you'd started earlier, bringing down the national birth rate because too many would-be mothers have aged out. There could easily be medical solutions to that focused on making pregnancy more viable in late middle-aged women. Better prenatal care, cheaper treatments for infertility. Even non-medically, it could just be more flexible working arrangements like you mentioned, work from home, better and cheaper daycare, more generous universal leave policies that don't single out parents, possibly something like sabbaticals that universities do but for commercial ventures, too. Mandatory paid gap years for people in their 30s even if they don't have children. A country that pulls that off could keep the economic advantage of having a larger workforce talent pool to draw from without sacrificing internal population growth.

Obviously, private employers can't bear that burden and it would need to be subsidized by the government, but if you really believe there would be significant national strategic advantages to doing this, then it should be subsidized by the government.

I always see people mentioning better employment benefits and more flexibility to increase fertility in working women. Unfortunately, I think this misses a fundamental problem with working and motherhood: opportunity cost. The more driven, promising, smart and successful a woman is, the higher her opportunity cost of having children. You also have to take into account that young people are not just working for current earnings but also investing in their skills for future earnings. It would then be reasonable for young women to simply take advantage of the more relaxed work environment for further career advancement. It’s likely what explains Europe’s low birthrates despite more generous welfare policies. Eventually as people get older their career progression stabilizes and the opportunity cost falls to the point where they can afford to have children. Notice that opportunity cost is not money per say. For example poorer working class people tend to have more children, I suspect, because their opportunity cost is lower. So, in a sense, the poorer you are the more affordable children become.

The solutions are quite simple. Provide free daycare. Provide 1 or ideally 2 year long parental leaves for both parents. Provide a somewhat generous child allowance for up to 3 kids.

The hard truth is that it's not as expensive or complicated to encourage people having child but for some reason we are trying to do anything except for the things that actually matter: allowing parents that want to spend all their time with their new child this opportunity and allowing parents that can't be bothered to handle all the early mechanical aspects to avoid them.

Cheaper starter housing and for the US cheaper higher education would also help but I'm convinced those are lower priority than targeting the early years.

Isn’t Singapore now offering over 10k as incentive?

If a society is required to pay so much for something that used to come naturally through cultural forces, then it’s probably not sustainable.

> If a society is required to pay so much

So much? Singapore's GDP per capita is $60k per year so $5k per month. If $2 month's worth of GDP for 1 baby so an entire lifetime of a new citizen is a lot, then I don't even know what to say.

> for something that used to come naturally through cultural forces, then it’s probably not sustainable

Having kids sucks (your mileage may vary, but before ~2-3 years the investment >>> benefits for all but the most dedicated people out there). Kids used to be cheap labor, which is now illegal for good reasons and they could be abused at will for various things, which is also illegal for good reasons. They were also frequently born because women didn't have a say in the matter, which is also becoming illegal for good reasons.

It is sustainable, it just needs to be done properly and respectfully.

Not by treating women like broodmares and kids as slaves to be worked to death and beaten up by adults who don't have any other way to relieve stress.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com