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Comment by misja111 | Hacker News Reader

Eventually evolution will catch up. Surely there must be some gene that motivates us to have a lot of kids. If such a gene exists it will quickly wipe out any genetic competition. It could also work indirectly, for instance a genetic disposition that pushes humans into fundamentalist religions that are opposed to birth control.

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Genes still play a role, but memes (the pre-internet kind- similar to an idea) will likely play a big role. We have seen it in the past: “God wants you to grow and multiply” of the Old Testament or “One Child Per Family” in China, in the past.

In a way memes are the “genes” of a society.

Yet China today is saying "Have three kids" and the Chinese people are by and large saying "Meh".

In that case, the Meme defining society is "Meh". It's not always a top-down thing.

On the contrary, we are genetically predisposed to having small numbers of kids, only a bit above replacement rate at most. Humans are K-specialists with extremely resource intensive offspring. Population growth is purely the result of improved living conditions causing lower mortality, and thus having the minimum number of kids you needed before results in a surplus.

There was an optimistic forward looking documentary style movie about this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA

It's not exactly opposition to birth control, it's more like indoctrination of women (some would even say brainwashing) into having kids like crazy.

Our societies can't even keep up producing child care, schools and jobs for the small amount of children we have. Can't imagine them succeeding in indoctrination.

Having children is awesome but it is also a hard work and quite costly. It would be quite hard to compel modern people have 3+ children.

People in Africa and India keep having many kids in atrocious conditions. "Inadequate childcare" and "costly" are not even on the cards when they marry and get on with making kids.

The West used to be like that too, but then something changed and living on in your kids took the back seat to premium consumption.

India has declining birth rate as well and probably below reproduction rate already. People are not stupid. It just takes them some time to adjust.

African societies may still be forced to use children as free field labor. The more centralized their agriculture becomes, the fewer children they would need.

The most important resource to spend on children is time. Even if you decide to cut on spendings, it does not add any extra time. With both parents employed full time, there's very small wedge to stick children into.

India is below replacement rate (1.9) as of 2019

You don't need child care when women aren't in the work force.

You also don't need baby formula and get (other things equal) physically and mentally healthier kids.

A long maternity leave will do.

What if women genuinely want to have identity based on what they do? Full time employment is probably the thing which has to go in favor of reproduction, it's akin peonage in that regard.

What if I want to have identity based on something I don’t do? We all want things but society can’t always sustain itself that way.

Let's imagine you want to have an identity of a person working for a hot start-up.

How would you explain that a 25 years old male can be a first developer employee in a start-up, but a 25 years old female can't be a talent acquisition manager there?

And then fail to crop up a period of inactivity in their career to have a child?

You have to sacrifice some things to achieve other things. If you want to sacrifice procreation for a career, you won't be the first to be taken care of by evolution.

So you want some other people to sacrifice their life goals in order to achieve yours?

I'm just not sure how it works in practice.

And yeah, they would be taken care of by evolution.

There is not much free will, people's goals are informed by what they see about high-status individuals. It's very regrettable that being a mother (or a father) is no longer seen as an achievement at all.

It's hard making a moderate-income 3+ chidren family the role model. It's obvious how you would like to exploit their fertility but they still have to foot the financial, logistic and labor costs of raising a lot of children.

Especially hard if you expect mother to not have her life while having all these kids, who are then going to depart their home and make her life even more eventless.

A family with 2-3 children was the definition of "poster family" in the US up to at least the 60s. Then something started to shift.

Again, the majority of people in the West are better off than the majority of people anywhere else, affording children is a matter of life priorities.

As I've already said, you can't buy time, and that's the coin people in the West may have in even shorter supply than their peers elsewhere.

Israel kind of shows that having the life priorities that you desire is possible. But I'm not sure how to do that in practice, or even if it is feasible until the current population Ponzi scheme wears off and then a few generations pass.

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