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Comment by FBISurveillance | Hacker News Reader

Apologies for ranting but this topic resonates too much.

Housing prices are 9x salary vs 4.5x salary in the 70s and it takes a while to save up. Personal data point: it took me winning an IPO lottery to start thinking about having kids for real. Having kids while earning minimal wage? Terrifying, especially in the US where getting yourself or your kid sick could bankrupt you in the blink of an eye - and if you want multiple kids you increase the risk.

So we think we have to have it all before we start trying having kids and have no sense of community whatsoever. Societal focus on hedonism and career leaves little to no time to raise kids. And at the end of the day you end up having no support from the society that slowly but surely ages.

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I agree with you on the latter point, but I want to also point something out on the former. Many people who are of no "proper" means to do so continue to have children. And they make it work, even if it may be uncomfortable and require sacrifice. So the issue is not one of finances, but priorities. Winning an IPO lottery being the baseline where you feel comfortable for having children doesn't mean that such is the inherent baseline, but that you simply prioritize comfort and wealth over raising a family. And that is okay.

This nuance is important; it emphasizes the real issue is not economics, but culture! We've created a society that values the pursuit of wealth and comfort more than family, and it's likely this system is not sustainable. Not everybody can be wealthy, because wealth is relative and mediated by what exists. If 30% of people want something and there's only enough for 3%, then it doesn't matter what the relative wealth is among these people: 90% of people won't be able to "afford" it, and that will never change. A post-scarcity society will never exist alongside consumerism; we'll simply take what we can have for granted and lust over the new scarcities.

>Many people who are of no "proper" means to do so continue to have children. And they make it work, even if it may be uncomfortable and require sacrifice.

Unfortunately many people who are not properly equipped to raise children (financially, temperamentally or otherwise) have lots of children and don't make it work. The result is a permanent underclass and a serious crime problem in many of our major cities.

I think we can find some middle ground between "I won't have kids until I can afford to send them to Harvard" and "I'll have 7 kids while being addicted to drugs and having no family to support me".

Agreed. And unfortunately it's the dwindling middle class

I think a lot of that underclass is artificially propped up too, sort of along the lines of thinking you hear with open immigration vs generous welfare state pick one.

We shouldn’t ignore the trauma that those children often experience, though. My parents had me at 17 and 19 years old, and I had a rough, complicated upbringing that caused me lasting damage. Because of that, I personally don’t see myself as having children ever, and I’m lucky enough to have a partner that feels the same.

But the people having kids are the ones with less money. The parents in my neighborhood are middle class (I mean like cops and admin assistants) and there’s three families with three kids just within 8 houses. Meanwhile among my law school friends, 0 kids is far more common than 2, and while I’m sure someone else besides me in my class (200 people, late 30s) has 3, I don’t know them.

One thing I think gets really overlooked is that college and job searches tear apart extended families, which in more traditional societies are a huge part of the child care strategy.

Yes this is what I've noticed too. My friend who installs HVAC systems for a living just had his third kid before 30 and they're doing fine. Other friends who are DINK attorneys are watching the biological clock run out and they feel they "can't afford" a kid.

I think your HVAC friend may actually be earning more than your attorneys. Unless you're in a prestigious law firm, they don't make all that much. And HVAC is so high in demand these days that they can raise prices to the moon and still be booked for months in advance.

Also unstated: does the HVAC guy's wife work?

no, stay at home mom.

I have not yet found a single planned 3rd child among my colleagues and associates in situations where both husband and wife work full time (without live in help, or at least someone who comes to the house full time to watch the kids before and even a little after the parents come home). Not saying it won't happen that I will eventually find one, but I find it to be the single biggest predictor of having more than 2 kids.

Don’t forget grandparents. That’s how my wife and I had three while both working as corporate lawyers. This is quite common among people I know.

I’ve been curious how Amy Coney Barret and her husband pulled it off. She definitely has it all, staggering.

She lives in a Catholic faith community in South Bend. There’s lots of kids of all ages and so always people around to babysit, etc. It’s like my dad described his village in Bangladesh. Nobody takes care of their kid all the time like in America. (The women have to go into the rice fields during the day too.) The kids get passed around.

That's fascinating. I'm starting to awaken to the fact that America has a bunch of expensive solutions to problems and create these impressions that there is no other practical way. People figure out stuff all the time but somehow those means never become communicated to become mainstream or even purported as an alternative. It's interesting to put ideas to the "but does it scale" test. I think that idea of individual parents fully monitoring their kids maybe doesn't scale when the kids begin to outnumber the parents. Interesting stuff to ponder.

> Housing prices are 9x salary

Monthly mortgage payments are the same though. (Lower interest rates, etc.)

Also building costs gone up. (The plague of single family homes, stricter building codes, higher quality requirements from buyers, while buildings are still produced using the old labor intensive methods.) And due to fucked up zoning building low-cost housing is just not happening :/

So folks are basically forced to buy expensive houses.

This is because you think too much. Most people just have kids and figure it out, same as it has been since the beginning of time.

Surely this is an option, but the risk is higher than ever. If you win the genetic lottery - good for you but cry havoc if you don't and not well-employed/have savings... chances are that you and your loved ones will have a miserable life.

I'm not saying people shouldn't take the risk, but it does seem that more people are either not willing to, or the risk profile changed since 70s, or both.

>This is because you think too much. Most people just have kids and figure it out, same as it has been since the beginning of time.

The data for the past few decades (near universal fall in birthrates and increasing mother's age at birth) clearly indicates otherwise.

If we look back at say mortality rates and poverty and health, the people in the past had it much worse off.

They didn't wait to have babies.

Tradition and ideological homogeneity was much stronger back then.

The world was simply much simpler.

The number of practically available paths forward were less. So why wait? Nowadays people are in an analysis paralysis, so they just wait. (Or try to find better mates, better jobs, better social groups/communities, move around more.)

And due to less homogeneity it's seems harder to find someone. (And probably is harder.)

Also the acceptable mortality was higher. Wars were more common, losing people due to illness was also more common, etc.

And nowadays we have endless alternatives to getting married. Single life is very enjoyable. (see Netflix et al :))

If look back at the society of the past from where I come from, this is the same society that gave us Jim Crow. Before that, chattel slavery.

Not really sure what I'm going to be learning from them about raising children in the 21st century.

Then why the

1. Inverse relationship between household income and fertility rate?

2. Enhanced child tax credit (US), child benefit (UK), Medicaid (kid gets sick?)

3. Insanely progressive taxes on income?

I think to some degree, what the parent says is true, but I think it has more to do with how much richer parents feel they need to pour into getting 'the best' for their child. Decent preschool and daycare is expensive. Private education is expensive, or test prep to get into good selective private schools. Tertiary education is extremely expensive, more so if you're trying to pad your kid's application with a bunch of expensive extracurriculars to get them into the Ivies and Stanfords and MITs and whatnot.

If anything the Korean system is even more intense; at least with American SATs or ACTs it's only three hours, you can retake them as many times as you want, multiple times a year, and getting into a mid-tier university for undergrad is still okay. South Korea has a university test that is eight hours long, only held once a year (so you wait a whole year to retake results) and the chaebols (the South Korean conglomerates that control the economy, like Samsung or LG) only really hire from top tier universities. South Korea has a university graduate unemployment rate of 25%, compared to the US at 4%.

Yes the system doesn't want children, if the children have an easy time we just add more roadblocks. I can't wait until everyone has a PhD before they can start their career as a barista.

Reminds me of that skit from Idiocracy.

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