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Comment by redavni | Hacker News Reader

To the young people here. Ignore the last line in the article.

You should never ever allow statistics at this level impact your decision to start a family. If you are intelligent enough to be reading an article about statistics on the Internet, please reproduce.

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This. We're already facing large reductions in population world-wide due to low fertility. Sure, the overall turning point is a few decades away, but it's certain, and in many countries it's in the past.

Aren't you just citing different statistics?

when we say the overall turning point is a few decades away, under most assumptions that don't involve massive war or pestilence or ecological collapse, even with a substantial drop in fertility, my child(ren), by the time they are old, will still be living in a world with higher total population than the current one.

we are basically in no risk of running down the population within any of our lifetime...

... on the proviso that everything doesn't go pear- shaped.

And with a recognition that those risks of things that might go pear-shaped are probably highly correlated with the carrying capacity of the planet with regards to human population numbers.

Planetary "carrying capacity" is not at all well defined. It depends on too many things like natural developments (think year 536), how the economy is organized, and powered, where and how many nukes have exploded, the quality of life, unforeseeable technological and scientific developments, dynamical ecosystems, ... So I'm curious what you mean by it? And how can you declare there's "basically no risk" when we still have superpowers with atom bombs going to war?

> You should never ever allow statistics at this level impact your decision to start a family. If you are intelligent enough to be reading an article about statistics on the Internet, please reproduce.

I think that reading articles on advanced topics on the internet at best demonstrates one's self-assessed, not actual, intelligence. There are more than enough people in the world who are sure that they're the smart ones.

Dunning-Kruger is the relevant theory here: Maybe we have too many self-assessed smart people, and too few self-doubting ones.

I don't have any good answers here, but it would seem that a negative consequence of welfare for lower income classes would have them disproportionately incentivized to have children (as their welfare would represent a much higher % of their total income). With this being the case I have to imagine that's a large contributing factor to associating large families with lower income and thus it loses the former advantage of large families being a high status indicator and thus higher income (and presumably higher intelligence/ better adjusted) families were responsible for a larger percentage of the population.

I have no idea what a humane incentive would look like, but I do wonder if we could find one if giving higher income families more incentive to reproduce relative to lower income families (or more directly I'd want to incentivize higher intelligence and better adjusted families, I just don't know how to measure that so I use income class to differentiate).

Presuming in all of this, that it isn't controversial to want intelligent and adjusted people to be responsible for the lions share of genetic makeup of future generations.

Well, I guess eugenics is back... It was a nice 100 years.

Scary "Idiocracy" figures aside, this discussion is incomplete without the incel statistics. The data is relatively conclusive that anyone below a certain threshold has no chance of getting a date. I think you will find that all the eugenics you could possibly want is already happening, the "program" is being administered by everybody, and the social norms that permit it are unimpeachable.

It has little to nothing to do with genes. You want a productive working class that produces more than it consumes to support the people who - for whatever reason - do not.

You could provide incentives to those who would rather not produce to straighten up and fly rite.

I'm sure you mean to sound scary with the word "eugenics" but this word is also the root cause of outlawing incest. Do you think we should legalize incest? I'd assume not, and that's quite literally a eugenics law, so no it was not 100 years ago that society agreed that eugenics in some forms was a good idea. It's very much alive today and the vast majority of people would argue that's a good thing.

Of course, since I feel you've already tried to demonize my position I guess I'll go ahead and restate again that I don't know of a humane way to implement eugenics such that we end up with more children from wealthy families. So if you want to take a stab at understanding me in a more charitable light, you can take that to me all the scary ways you can think of incentivizing such behavior are things I would be against.

Or, you know, reduce welfare and help people get off welfare.

Ideally there would be a solution to bridge the huge class gap and better distribute resources such that middle class would move to the upper class and leave a vacuum pulling poor people up, but I do find it considerably disturbing to see how many people downvote ideas on social media. We're not yet a society that's mature enough to entertain ideas we disagree with, it seems.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12321292/

>A 100% increase in the per child welfare benefit resulted in a 2% increase in the number of children. The policy implication is that a considerable increase in welfare benefits will have only trivial behavioral impacts for the poor on family size decisions.

At face value this, to me, only suggests that welfare is already so high that anything further is suffering from diminishing returns. To me, that wouldn't imply there are no policies (social or legal) that would encourage wealthy families to have more children.

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