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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

> Only because of the subsidies. It's hardly "natural" for all humans to reproduce.

This is an incredibly bold statement. Most people like having sex, and in a natural state (sans birth control, online dating, internet porn, etc) there are going to be a lot of pregnancies. The idea that tax credits, welfare or parental leave is what is driving this situation is ridiculous. This feels more like a dog whistle about the welfare state, but even if you take away those "subsidies", people ain't gonna stop having kids, that's just not how the majority of young people of child-bearing age think.

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No but some men would have more than two children, and some men would have zero.

We balanced this out up until recently by sending men to war and other dangerous jobs that made them die before they had a chance to reproduce.

There is an enormous asymmetry between the sexes in our biology and that's the feature that drives natural selection and evolution.

The only reason why all people are able to reproduce are subsidies, otherwise natural selection would reject a lot.

That's just a silly assertion. Many developing countries have little to no subsidies in regards to children and yet their birth rates are higher.

Better medical treatments and lack of wars are not child subsidies.

> Better medical treatments and lack of wars are not child subsidies.

Lower education and religion is probably the biggest cause for these higher birth rates. In the victorian era, people would simply not get married if they didn't have the means to raise children, and they would be childless, and there was nothing strange about that. To give subsidies for everyone to have children comes from the post ww2 politics.

I think the biggest cause is actually high rates of child mortality. Humans have more children when there is a higher chance those children might not survive.

If women in developing countries had financial freedom and access to easy and convenient birth control, then they would not have high birth rates.

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