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Comment by jseban | Hacker News Reader

> Huh? It has to work out that or the human race dies out. I guess you could have a few couples who have a lot of kids instead, but developed societies are really adverse to that.

Obviously the human race somehow made it until we created developed societies. I think you are confusing survival of the human race with survival of our current pension system.

Who knows if it's really better or worse to suddenly allow everyone to reproduce?

For sure it's not "natural", and as far as I can see it would actually reverse evolution to regression instead.

And it seems like we can't really stop it anyway with how many men today are becoming outsiders in society because they get rejected to reproduce.

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It’s natural only in the sense of a selection bias: we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t so. Men aren’t the limiting resource here, but if women start having less than 2.1 kids on average, we eventually just disappear. This is just math, not related to economics, morality, or ideology.

> Men aren’t the limiting resource here

Yeah that's the point, so there really is no need for every man to have children, should it be the norm I'm wondering. Can we get rid of this natural selection, and should we? I don't know. Why is it so self-evident that every person should have children? Clearly it's not natural. It's just another artificial "equality" of a social welfare state.

If monogamy is valuable, and I think it is, then most men should be parents as well. I can’t imagine a world with a few guys fathering most of the kids, that seems like it would cause lots of problems.

You can still be monogamous if some women have more children, not every woman needs to have 2 children to achieve that average. A woman can easily have 4 children and suddenly half of the women can also be childless and still achieve a 2 children average.

The whole idea that child bearing should be perfectly and equally distributed across the whole population is a construct of the social welfare state, enabled by subsidies, and is just an artificial form of equality like any other. As such I think it should be examined and debated like everything else, and not taken for granted as self-evident or "natural".

> A woman can easily have 4 children and suddenly half of the women can also be childless and still achieve a 2 children average.

The median is close to the average in kids per women in the developed world. Having four kids is harsh on many women’s bodies; eg my grandma had 8 kids, but she died in her late 50s. While no doubt some couples will want to go for four kids or more, I don’t think it’s ethical to encourage it over a more standard 2 something for most couples.

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