Hacker News Reader

Comment by eric4smith | Hacker News Reader

My first kid just reached 18. Now I'm seriously thinking of having another one.

Remember when we were younger and the world's population hit 7 billion, everyone was really, really concerned about overpopulation??? I even did not want to have any kids because of this.

Now, Korea is seriously going to be worse than even Japan. And faster too.

Back in Jamaica one of my grandma had 7 children, the other one had 8 (with 2 stillborn). Now most women there have 1 child.

Here in Thailand today, we see much of the same thing. Talking to people they report their grandparents having 4-8 kids. Now most Thai women are lucky to have even one child. Same in Vietnam and Indonesia, which I frequent regularly too.

An outlier is when I was in Qatar recently, it was very common to see large (3-7 kids) families everywhere from all over the Middle East.

It is what it is.

View on HN

The answer is easy. Middle easterners want kids for cultural and religious reasons. I know any talk of religion and/or culture is verboten in modern American discourse but it's a significant factor in most the world. Yet it makes most Americans uncomfortable

It also helps that Qatar (along with the UAE and Kuwait) provide hefty benefits to married couples for marriage and childbirth.

Emirati and Qatari women have almost 50% more children than Saudi women despite cultural similarities because their government offers crazy good benefits.

Saudi Arabia has less money per citizen so families bear more of the cost and opt for smaller families.

Culture plays a huge role but so do government incentives.

> It also helps that Qatar (along with the UAE and Kuwait) provide hefty benefits to married couples for marriage and childbirth.

This is a reflection of their culture and religion. Governance and law proceed from culture and religion, not vice versa.

>Middle easterners want kids for cultural and religious reasons.

Would middle eastern women want just as many kids if they had the same freedom and opportunities as women in developed countries?

Qatar is a pretty developed country, and has a higher than average female workforce participation. This is not to say it has perfect freedom for anyone. I honestly can't answer your question. These things remain to be seen.

Note that child death rates were considerably higher even 50 years ago in all of those countries.

Yes. Duh. That's why I even mentioned my grandma.

People keep saying high child death rates mean people have more children. But i have yet to find any proofs or research paper for this. What I really find is that as people's expectations of better living go up (not living expenses per se), then people have less children.

At first I disagreed, but after reconsidering I think absence of other evidence the increased child death rate and child birth rate are coincidental. I haven't seen data actually supporting the evidence that more children were born because more children died. I think it's plausible that the increased rights and health of people within our society both lead to decreases in child births and child deaths, but I've seen nothing to suggest that the death rate is causal to the birth rate.

Interestingly enough in Korea the mortality rate in 1955 was the same as in 2005. It increased in the 60s, peaked in the 80s, and has been declining again since the 90s

(It's now even lower than in both 2005/1955)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com