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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

So to you it can be summed up to "it's all women's fault" ?

Not really.

One can also frame it as society’s fault for not providing both women and men with sufficient incentive to procreate. Note that the word “fault” typically has a negative connotation, but I am not intending to use it with positive or negative connotation, but simply as a causative factor.

The comment I replied to stated something changed, to which I wanted to clarify what I think the biggest variable that changed. Of course, men also may not want to have as many kids as in previous years, but I would still bet this is a much smaller factor than women saying no.

It does sound like we were relying on alcohol, a lack of contraceptives, a lack of choice for women and good old forcing people into marriage to subsidize the lack of incentive to have children.

There's a trend happening in many countries where economical stagnation or downturn push young people and couples to wait for better days to engage in romantic relationships or build families.

You could shelve that as "society not providing enough incentives", but to me it looks like a more complex issue than what's covered by carrot/stick mechanisms.

Not all issues leading to forgoing procreating are that complex, but putting any of them as "women chose to xxxx" is I think only useful at a micro level, and kinda misses the reasons why they chose to do so, which are usually not in any individual's hand.

Capitalism has a minimum profitability requirements, simply being wealthy and having abundance does not mesh well with capitalism, instead the go to solution has been to send people to war and destroy all the wealth we built up so the rebuilding phase is profitable again. The fact that this profit is utterly pointless and does not increase human well-being doesn't matter.

I read it more as "men have traditionally undervalued the societal contributions of women".

Basically, that's my theory. Back in the "old days", women didn't get to choose their jobs, or when (or if) they had children. Basically, women were little better than slaves.

Now that women have freedom, society is imploding in a way, at least in terms of population.

So to get back to replacement levels of fertility, we either need to 1) turn women into slaves again, or 2) look at some other way of running the society. #1 doesn't sound very good if you value human rights.

1) is basically arguing that women are monopolizing procreation and are taking it hostage and charge unreasonable fees, how about we don't listen to them? It sounds ridiculous because women are usually stuck with the children and end up in classic single mother poverty.

What are men morally supposed to do when women simply do not want kids?

It’s not an issue of financial struggle since the trend is most pronounced in wealthy countries, especially in those with small wealth divisions.

Create embryos from their own stem cells and bring them to term in human-compatible pig surrogates?

Respect them. Their body, their choice. Even if it means the end of humanity.

It won't mean end of humanity. It will just mean humans that don't respect women choice get to multiply.

Hence the point. If women don’t want kids, then that’s that.

more like the rules of society reward the wrong behaviour (not reproducing).

I think our societies are in bad shapes in many ways, and a decent range of people could be not reproducing as a direct reaction to that...

Would you see a reward system counteract a psychological perception of their current situation ?

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