Hacker News Reader

Comment by xyzzy123 | Hacker News Reader

One somewhat divergent opinion I read once (wish I could find the article again) expressed the idea that in the modern world, governments are free-riding on parents.

The costs (time, money) of raising children are significantly privatised but the economic benefits once they reach adulthood tend to flow to government and society at large.

In the past, many parents expected to receive direct economic benefits from the labour of their children. Children were expected to e.g. contribute on the farm.

In countries without social safety nets, younger generations are expected to directly support older famility members.

Having kids used to be something with pretty direct economic benefits, it's now expected to be a somewhat more altruistic enterprise.

View on HN

I think this is an excellent point.

I've had a similar thought: we've made societies where nothing gets done without paying for it, and where it's financially incredibly hard to be a parent without both parents working near 100%. Yet having kids is basically an essential service to society. With most things in our economy, we don't expect things to happen without paying for it. So why do we expect parents to do free labor, taking from whatever extremely limited free time they have left to raise kids? Is it really that surprising that people aren't having kids?

When women was expected to stay at home and manage the house and raise kids, you essentially had a lot of dedicated labor to raise kids. They weren't paid, but the wages and the costs in society was such that the father could support the family on his wage alone. We need to realize that if you want someone to raise 5+ kids (which is a necessity if some people have 0 kids), that's really a full time job until all the kids are of school age, and it should be paid as such. Obviously, we shouldn't return to what we had before. We should pay the parent directly instead of it going through the husband, and in todays society it can be either mom or dad that stays home.

And you'd think with all the inane things they've finances in the name of trying to stimulate economic activity they'd be putting more into subsidizing childcare and other birthrate stimulators. Surely that would be more stimulative in the face of multi-decade deflation than building parks absolutely everywhere.

It is interesting how birth rate ties into their whole economic picture -- after multi-decade deflation, they're still sitting at well under 3% unemployment, and a poverty rate only slightly higher than the United States. Prices may be falling, but apparently, when your population is simultaneously shrinking at such a rapid pace, it's less painful than you'd expect on the average household economically speaking.

My observation here in the UK among my friends and family, we (mid 30s, with 4+8yo) are an outlier having two children. The norm is increasingly looking like single child families, and I believe it's mostly cost driven. They have no intention of expanding their family in future.

People I know who started family's around the same time but were in the later 30s or early 40s seem more likely to have grown a larger family.

I suspect in five years time when the statistics for this "cohort" (30s now) stabilises we will see a significant drop multi child families.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230110-only-child-or-...

> In countries without social safety nets, younger generations are expected to directly support older famility members.

And in countries with social safety nets, workers pay to support other, retiring workers. With increasing lifespans, sharply decreasing numbers of workers, and relatively early retirement ages… the wheels are going to fall right off the train, unless robots save us.

The wealth created by robots will go to a few.

I’m optimistic about robots increasing productivity, but I worry they won’t be used to uplift everyone equally. They seem well-poised to increase wealth disparity rather than reduce it. I would love to be wrong, though.

Funny how the assumption is that robots have to save us. Worker productivity is at a never before seen, all-time high. The benefits of that productivity are going straight into the pockets of the largest holders of capital.

We don't need robots, we need guillotines.

People need to start using the word guillotines more so that the sentiment analysis bots pick up on it.

Nothing is quite as progressive as ghoulish threats of political violence.

Simply raising tax credit on children would help a lot in the US. It also should not be progressively reduced like other tax credits do with income, as it is disincentivizing successful people from procreating.

Same for canada.

I use to chat with my friends and all their plans for life are literally "I'll do this when/if I have the money".

That's it.

My life (have two children and my wife was at home for 4 years) instead, the moment my first child was born has been: figure out life insurance so that your kids are safe if you die, figure out income for retirement to avoid weighting on your children, figure out savings necessary to pay for education, figure out housing because you will need 3 bedrooms and rent keeps going up.

I had to really take ownership of my finances. Amazing, I learned a lot, but government support is nowhere it should be for somebody that greatly contribute to society.

Having just had a baby this is absolutely true. We’re in the UK and yes, healthcare is taken care of, but daycare is going to be around £1800+ a month. This is our first kid and I’m 35 and wife is 36. We had to wait this long as we needed to make sure we could absorb such an insane cost. Somehow we’re still meant to save for pensions etc. We’ll be ok, but we have a ridiculously high household income compared to the total population. I truly don’t know how others do it. Yet pensions go up 10% a year - and I’m not against universal pensions, but c’mon.

> but daycare is going to be around £1800+ a month

Is that entirely private? Are there no public child care options?

Yeah, all the ones close are private and priced similarly. I think there might be some council centres, but it depends on which borough you live in, and I think it's means tested.

I think it's hard to appreciate just how hollowed out the UK public service has become, yet we still pay a decent amount of tax relative to other OECD countries.

I think daycare prices are mandated by law here in Finland so that parents are paying between 28 and 295 euro per month per child. Price depends on whether it's the first or second child, and what kind of household income you are earning.

The actual dream. I often gently tease my wife as I've advocated moving to Berlin on and off over the years - I think state support for families in DE is quite generous.

My wife lived in Germany before she met me, and was married then. She was getting a lot of input that she should pop out some kids and raise them with Kindergeld. It seemed like the kind of system that U.S. opponents of Welfare get nightmares from. But I don't know how it currently operates.

Pensions have gone up 10% this year because inflation has been 10% over the past year.

State pensions in the UK are very low to start with. If they don't at least keep up with inflation many elderly will end up destitute (and cost even more to the NHS...).

I'm well aware of inflation, but it says a lot that penioners vote tory and literally no one else seems to anymore. As I said, I support universal pensions, but why not do anything serious to help people raising children? I'm seriously wondering what the point of staying in London is. I still love the city, but the country has a death wish - not born here, almost a citizen, have been able to vote since we arrived due to commonwealth. After more than a decade of effective austerity as well, it's hard to see how anything can actually get better without a political will and consensus to invest that just doesn't seem to exist. It really does feel like the place is falling apart when you interact with govt services these days.

> but the economic benefits once they reach adulthood tend to flow to government and society at large.

Not at all. Almost everything is privatized today. When children reach adulthood, the economic benefits that they create also go to the private sector. 'Small government' in the West meant that the government being pushed out of every sector from education to healthcare and private profiteers taking their place. And as private players, their objective is to maximize their profit.

So even child raising became a thing that requires ever-increasing amount of effort and cost from parents as the profit margins rose. Japan got hit before other Western countries and got hit harder because it already had a 'work or die' culture that required 100% from the employees. To have children, you had to put 120%. And when the private sector's increasing fees made it require putting in 200%, the youth just stopped trying...

Since the government benefit from more children (i.e. form more tax revenue in the future), how about let the government breed and raise childern with donated eggs & sperm, surrogate pregnancy, and public school & daycares?

Like in Brave New World's Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre? Ha, be careful what you wish for!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com