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Comment by somehnacct3757 | Hacker News Reader

Kid-having emerges. This (western biased) article is blaming the victim.

An entire generation bled dry by student loans for useless degrees, unable to buy homes that their elders view as retirement funds. A thousand and one more entertaining things to do online which don't risk creating 18-year bundles of debt. And absolutely no idea how to break the cycle for your offspring.

Pick one thing to fix and spend your life addressing it and maybe you'll have it solved in time for when the population reaches 9 billion.

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Came here to say this - I live in London and see many a fellow parent struggling to even have space for the kids they already have (or soon will have). Trying hastily bolt on a loft extension - if they can afford that.

Meanwhile landlords are reaping in INSANE rents from anyone who didn’t manage to buy back when that was at least a realistic dream.

People are people. The urge to have kids is incredibly strong. But if you are living in a tiny flat earning no money then it’s going to at the least be strongly suppressed.

Parents are getting _older_ as well as fewer so that should give an indication of what’s going on here.

No-one is in a financial position to have a baby in their 20s anymore, and by the time you’re in your 30s it’s biologically already harder to have a baby.

Nail on the head.

For people who have certainty of access to future resources and plenty of living space I'm pretty sure the urge to reproduce isnt repressed.

London reminds me of this rat experiment: https://gizmodo.com/how-rats-turned-their-private-paradise-i...

Housing prices in London, SF, NYC, and most major cities are insane and unsustainable for all but the very rich. The average person should move and live anywhere else where they can afford it.

The US has wide open country areas for cheap.

I think too often people clamor to a lifestyle they can't afford and make believe it will magically workout.

USA is just 300 millions people. "West" depending on your definitions is about 1.5 billion people. Most of the west has cheap/free university education and good welfare. They still have problems with demography, because it's not economy that discourages people from having kids. Universally - the wealthier the society becomes - the less kids it has.

China is a great example too. After they lifted the one child policy there was no change at all. Having lots of kids was a net positive for the family’s finances in an agricultural society but in a modern service oriented society it’s a huge resource drain. Even in countries with free childcare and other policies, you’ll still have to somehow afford a 3-4 bedroom near a big city where your well paying job is and so on.

There are a lot of countries where you have cradle to grave social support - free education, free healthcare, excellent parental benefits etc. And yet they have low birth rates. In fact, there seems to be an inverse correlation between the quality of life in a country and its birthrate. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/birth-rat...

The trouble is, the numbers just don’t support your hypothesis. Birth rates are falling in almost every country on the planet, however poor they are, however rich they are, however large student loans are.

This just isn’t the root of the issue. It’s pretty common knowledge that mostly the richer a country is the less babies it has.

So, maybe research what the actual problem is, before projecting your own views of society on this issue

I think you missed the point of my comment. I don't believe the author's premise at all, that population will decline. The population is still growing as it always has. Why would it stop now? The author makes no argument that it will and the data shows it hasn't. To lerp the declining growth rate derivative out a few decades is as ridiculous as the people who lerp the population count directly. This is Henny Penny stuff.

So instead I critique the author's views on society. It's not women having careers, prevalence of safe sex, or tinder usage to blame. Has anyone tried blaming the avocado toast yet?

This is the crux of the issue. If society places value on more future taxpayers, it needs to create the environment where more people want to create future taxpayers. We would have "probably" been fine having a couple kids, but in the US you're often one job loss and major illness or accident away from permanent debt and/or bankruptcy. So we opted out.

> Pick one thing to fix and spend your life addressing it and maybe you'll have it solved in time for when the population reaches 9 billion.

That's only ~2037, 15 years or so from now. Less than half a career.

Being a victim of student loans would mean the borrower cannot properly consent to the debt. If that's the case we shouldnt offer student loans.

Otherwise theyre a victim of their own decision making. Of course they have a tough decision and probably received bad information like "education is priceless". So dont ever mislead kids with that crap. Ultimately We can distribute blame and repercussions across society l, which preserves the problem, or we could hold individuals responsible.

Ever talked with someone looking to hire? How often have you heard "I just need to hire someone with a degree and <some list of other minor requirements>".

My university degree is not in tech at all, but it sure has managed to open enough doors to make my self-learned skillset profitable.

Pretending that people were making bad decisions with going to college is victim-blaming - there isn't a job market out there which doesn't demand a degree, pretty much any degree if you want to be in the middle class.

Some just-so story of how people should've picked the obvious degree of some sort when they're 18, have no life experience and the entire job market can pivot around in 4 years is so much junk to defend an overpriced education system which can't deliver on it's promises and is protected by a debt-issuance structure no other financial instrument gets. Undischargeable loans! Give money away and just don't bother ever analyzing the risk. Imagine a student loan system where the issuers might lose their hat if they don't know what the job market would be like for their investments.

There are good cheap unis and community colleges whose quality is not bad and which cost a whole lot less. I’d like to see those utilized more

Agreed -- having a degree is important; having it from a prestigious/expensive university, for most people, is quite often much less so.

Obvious exceptions exist; we don't typically see presidential candidates who came from a community college. But most of the time, the degree is there more to show you could commit to a more self-directed educational experience than high school, and follow through with it while not usually under your parent's roof. Executive functioning, basically. Show some engagement in clubs, sports, or other activities for a bonus.

In many fields, if anything beyond this is expected, they want a graduate degree anyway, and this is where it can pay to splurge on the name, depending on your field.

My friends that stuck it out in community college near us were on the 5 year plan. 5 years until they had enough credits to transfer to a CSU. A lot of the courses were remedial to catch people up and the college track classes filled up instantly with people that had been in the school for years getting priority. If you came out of high school at a college level, you competed with all of the people that had taken 2-3 years of catch up courses and they got the spots.

I think if you had the opportunity to go to an inexpensive school or an expensive school and you chose to take loans and go to the expensive one, then you chose the loans.

That said, I think we are all victims of the horrible free-financial-aid policies that have pumped overwhelming amounts of seemingly-but-not-at-all-free money into the system and driven college tuitions to absolutely insane heights.

In India- or that subcontinent, people were majority in the very poor category. Only recently middle class grew, 20-40 years. What people did was buy homes and invest live savings to have a "permanant shelter over heads" for themselves and their families.

This is true for a lot of people so children when the start earning, "there is no rent to pay" which is a big savings considering.

On the other hand, you have "american dream" of kicking your kids out at 18 so the roof over heads analogy falls out the window.

I get it. Its fun, its freedom but at what cost? Apparently running your ass off to stay afloat.

Then there is this argument about "no opportunities in home town" but does this apply to 100% of 18 year olds in USA that they have to necessarily move out?

This is an over generalization of American culture. Yes, in my experience, when parents live in a high cost of living city with plentiful opportunities, the children tend to live at home longer. This seems quite common in California and New York. In areas with less opportunity, children are forced to move out or never have much of a career.

This was the case for me. I had no choice but to leave home at 18 or I would have been working in food service or lawn care for the rest of my life.

Everywhere? No. But it is commonly the case that the jobs are in one place, and the "good towns to raise a kid in" (schools, parks, low crime, or even just affordable housing suitable to raise a child in) are in others. Sure, perhaps when you've made your way up in your career field, you can go into a smaller/private practice of some sort (thinking law, finance, medicine here), but typically, for a lot of white collar fields, you start off in larger institutions, which typically means cities.

Could this change with the growing use of remote work? It could. Whether it does or not though remains to be seen.

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