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Comment by hgsgm | Hacker News Reader

This comment shows an extremely privileged perspective.

Most corporate jobs are paying just enough to afford a [deleted: decent] place to live, [deleted: a vacation, and then putting away a few thousand in savings].

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This is a complete fallacy too. We are working harder now than people did before the industrial revolution.

1) [citation needed]

2) even if this is true, at least we're not, I dunno, dying in our 30s and have things like running water?

Productivity has gone way up in the last few decades, and people can afford fewer and fewer children. It used to be common to afford 8 children on one income. Wake up dude

>Productivity has gone way up in the last few years, and people can afford fewer and fewer children.

That doesn't say much when that's been the long run trend since the industrial revolution.

Isn't it "only the poorest can afford children" situation?

Having fewer children should be celebrated not looked upon as a failure. The world doesn't need everyone having six kids anymore.

I'm not arguing for having that many children, just that its a basic way to benchmark how expensive being alive is. Clearly these people having so many children werent just randomly taking on impoverished hardship. Things were tight, but they had reasonable economic security with so many children. This points to a dramatic drop in wages in the last 50 years

Financially speaking, kids are an asset in non-industrialized societies, especially farming societies. But they are a liability in industrialized ones. I think that transition from asset to liability for nations undergoing industrialization might explain this phenomenon.

I really hope when people have kids they don't look at them as an asset or a liability, aside from when considering the financial impact. They're not a great fit for our lifestyle, but if my wife and I did end up having a kid I wouldn't think of them as a liability.

I think you're stuffing more meaning into my statement than I intended: I intentionally qualified the statement to the financial perspective only in which case it's appropriate to talk about assets and liabilities.

I say this as a happy father of 2 kids.

No one is saying we need 8, but many aren't having 1.

And the people who are crapping out kids may not be the ones you'd like to be carrying the torch forward into the next century.

Who are you building this future for if not for your children and those of your friends and family?

Tell me that the Quiverfull types who are having 10 kids are the ones who will appreciate your new app and I'll tell you you're full of crap.

Hey now. I was one of eight myself, am now a highly educated (Washington & Lee, Oxford University) and successful (team lead) software developer, and fully intend on having a large family myself. Don't make insulting generalizations like that.

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