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Comment by scandox | Hacker News Reader

I enjoy being a parent but my advice to people who ask if they should have kids is that you really have to want to have kids because all the benefits are intangible and all the drawbacks are tangible.

People who say they don't want kids, usually mean it - whether they've identified their real reason or not.

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I'm not sure why there is a stigma to deciding to not have kids.

It's not as if your decision is going to have much impact on anybody except yourself or the potential grandparents who may feel that they are missing out, but that is very much their problem.

All this talk of "perpetuating the species" is so much crap... The species will get along quite well without everybody contributing their genetic material.

At least those who decide not to have kids are making a thoughtful decision, many unfortunately can't or dont.

There are tangible problems with a low birth rate though, which western economies are experiencing now.

There are also tangible benefits. Economic models needing to adjust to non-perpetual growth is not an impossible nor existential crisis.

The main problem isn't growth or the lack of it - it's generally decreased welfare of older people because there's no family member or caregiver to periodically check up on them and recognize early signs of deteriorating health - especially mental health.

Again, this is a very fixable problem, and society will be the better for it by learning to adapt better rather than just throwing more kids at the problem. Kids do not owe their parents anything, including geriatric care.

If it's fixable, then the fix was not implemented in societies which are aging the most.

People don't owe their parents anything, but they naturally do at least give a shit about them - provided they had a good relationship.

Less kids, less adults who would volunteer to do it.

Hasn’t it? There is considerably more infrastructure for the elderly today than a couple of generations ago. Communities where folks can maintain a bit of independence with caregivers and peers in the neighborhood seems like a nearly ideal way to age to me.

But of course not everyone lives like this and many have a horrible quality of life at the end so there is room to improve. One improvement is cultural I think: we shouldn’t be hanging on to every last strand of life possible, and should make it easy for those with little prognosis for quality of life to die gracefully in a way of their choosing.

In any case certainly more adaptation is needed, but I see signs of the development.

Adjusting economic models? We’re significantly below replacement level. That means population collapse and, eventually, actual extinction. We’re not headed toward a future where we just stop growing. We’re headed for a future where populations shrink by more than 50%. It takes decades to create this problem, and even more decades to fix it.

People aren’t paying attention because from a raw numbers perspective our population is growing. But it’s also aging, and eventually people will die and we won’t have created enough kids to reverse the shrinking.

I’m not even getting into the economic catastrophe of a shrinking population caring for an aging society. The US may be alright due to immigration but you can’t say the same of Korea, Japan, Italy, or most of Europe.

This is a crisis and we need to be taking action right now. By the time the populations start shrinking it will be too late. We can eventually reverse the trend but it will take an entire century, or more. We’re quite literally running out of time to avoid disaster.

Do you have some models you're looking at that cause you to believe with such certainty that this is what the future holds? I have not seen, nor can I even really fathom, a scenario in which declining birth rates leads in of itself to extinction (unless the birth rates drop to basically zero for some reason), but certainly this could be due to a failure of imagination. A declining population would certainly look different, but I don't see it causing the end of civilization, much less the species.

I dont agree population decline is a problem. Nevertheless, if it were, at any time of our choosing, we can open the gates and access a practically endless supply of people wanting to move and work in the countries with population decline.

I understand what you mean and I myself know that I want a kid, just not now. But I would never become a parent just because of an economies well-being or low birth rates. If I become a parent it's because I and my partner want to, that's it.

That's a problem for the western economic systems to solve, not the humans stuck climbing its pyramid.

That's just a transitionary problem. Even just 50 years ago there were half of us as now. 99% of humanity's history has had less than 1 billion people. 8 billion people is way more than needed and it's showing it's ill impacts on the enviroment as well.

> I'm not sure why there is a stigma to deciding to not have kids.

> It's not as if your decision is going to have much impact on anybody except yourself

That's pretty much every stigma, though, so it also makes sense why this one exists, too.

People say they want or don't want a lot of things, but it turns out they're often really bad at predicting net utilitarian impacts. A lot of people who say stuff like "I don't want to have kids because I'm happier buying funko pops and video games" are probably just wrong about their counterfactual happiness level.

> all the benefits are intangible and all the drawbacks are tangible.

That's quite well-said. I've heard it expressed many different ways but this one I think I'll appropriate :)

> People who say they don't want kids, usually mean it

Quite true, I'm almost 40 and still have a bunch of things that interest me way more than changing diapers and worrying myself to death.

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