Comment by eldritch_4ier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eldritch_4ier | Hacker News Reader

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You can look at fertility rates across rich countries, and what you'll notice is a rapid secular decline starts literally the exact same year that the birth control pill becomes legal.

Go ahead and google fertility rates for any developed country that comes to mind and compare it to when birth control became legal. For the US, UK, Australia, South Korea, etc its the EXACT year.

Wealth doesn't seem to explain it exactly: the main reason people who want kids don't have they in developed countries is a lack of mean (wealth). Wealth itself doesn't seem to be it (all else equal, having more means doesn't seem like the obvious cause).

I wonder what percent of children born for all of human history were simply unplanned. The data seems to suggest something like 50%+ of them. As family planning becomes more accessible, we're finding that people just keep postponing having them and a big part of the reason they had them before was simply "oops".

No surprise in hindsight. There's not a single animal on earth besides us very recently that do any kind of family planning. They just have sex and offspring happen. Why should Homo Sapiens be any different.

Evolution took the lazy shortcut of making us want sex, not children, and for millions of years that hack worked.

Now that birth control exists, there will be much stronger selection for actually wanting children. People who only want sex will be removed from the gene pool.

I wouldn't call it lazy but parsimonious. At least among mammals, newborns seem to have vastly different requirements from the parents depending on the species. Optimizing for sex rather than nurturing just covers more cases.

You have missed the causality. Birth control has a huge wealth benefit where starting a family can be delayed until careers are more established. The number of children can be limited as well. Kids are expensive!

Also, in rich countries, people have much higher standards for raising kids.

In 2023 I know a lot of bougie American parents who cannot fathom making siblings share a room. 40 years ago, bunk beds were normal. 100 years ago, all the kids would probably be in one room, possibly with their parents, grandparents, etc and that type of living is still endemic in poorer nations. But how many people can afford an American house with another additional room?

I know plenty of parents for whom private school is a must-have. Even if they themselves went to public school.

No surprise there. Public school experience varies from traumatic to just a gigantic waste of time during the best development years. Once you go through that you don't want your children to have the same experience.

It was as fine for me as it was for other successful people I know.

I do not see how our experience justifies tens of thousands of dollars per year. Other than a general commitment to providing "the best" to their kids.

A wealth benefit for who? Maybe in terms of aggregate societal wealth, but in terms of relative wealth things have gotten worse (you can't buy a home and raise a family on a single income anymore for instance).

Before: everyone had one wage earner per household. Prices for goods meets this reality.

After: everyone has 2 wage earners per households. Prices for goods meets this reality.

Nothing has changed except now you need 2 people earning to live just as well as before. More aggregate output means "more GDP", but who cares when your life is relatively worse in many ways.

I agree with your general point. However:

> Before: everyone had one wage earner per household. Prices for goods meets this reality.

This was only relatively well-to-do couples. Industrial economies were really good at expanding the middle class, but they never got rid of the lower classes in which both spouses had to work (and, of course, unmarried adults had to work regardless of sex). Labor force participation rate for women increased from a low of about 32% in 1948 (the earliest this chart goes) to a high of about 60% from about the mid-1990s to 2009. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002

According to table 2 (page 4) of this BLS document (https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2001/05/art3full.pdf ), a four-person family in 1947 could have a "modest but adequate" lifestyle on a budget of $2904. The median income for a family then was about $3000, while the median income for an individual not in a family was about $1000 (https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1949/demo/p60-00... ). The federal minimum wage of $0.40/hour in 1947 would gross about $800/year for 40 hours a week. So the income necessary for a modest but adequate lifestyle for a family was about 3.75x the minimum wage at our current labor standard hours. Today, with a minimum wage of $7.25/hour, that 3.75x would be $27/hour, or about $54,000/year.

I'd speculate that even today a person with a typical engineer's salary, like then, could support a family at at least "modest but adequate" standards on a single income. But a typical laborer's salary would be stretching it, whether back then or today. Heck, the Turpin parents managed to do it with 13 kids, though they abused the hell out of those kids.

> There's not a single animal on earth besides us very recently that do any kind of family planning.

The original family planning, infanticide, or abandonment of eggs for egg laying species, is practiced by a variety of animals.

It is difficult to afford raising more than two children on your own as a married couple. You have to enlist outside help. If you don't have a family to fall back on you have to purchase help. At some point one of the married couple needs to stop working instead of paying for childcare as the cost of childcare will exceed the income of one of the partners. Both partners want to maintain careers in the western world which applies further strain to the arrangement. I would have ten children if I had affordable childcare and additional help around the house. It is clear to me.

> I would have ten children if I had affordable childcare and additional help around the house. It is clear to me.

Why would you have ten children? what is the need, or the benefit, or the reason.

Not the same person you're responding to, but I'd have tons of children too if the economics weren't a factor at all. There's just something incredibly fulfilling about raising a child. It's similar to the feeling you get when helping somebody else out in need, except you also get to experience all the magical parts of the world all around you with them as they experience them for the first time. A lot of other things feel trivial by comparison once you've experienced that.

I do know families with many children. After some amount, you don't have time needed to fulfill all kids needs even if you are stay at home. At some point, educational and emotional needs of older kids go sideways since they are needed for work. And the stay at home partner seems super ultra tired all of the time.

Statistically, they have more behavioral problems including in educated not poor Christian families.

Mormons have entered the chat. Generally, lots of well behaved kids.

Utah with a 55% Mormon population has a TFR of 1.92. While it's higher than the US average of 1.66, I don't think the assumption that they generally have a lot of kids holds.

This exactly. There is something incredibly fulfilling with working with someone through the new world someone has never experienced. It has helped me let go of so many things I thought mattered. Once you see the life cycle for what it is the mental model of life is easier to digest.

Are you a woman? I expect the number of people wanting to birth 10 children is far less than the number of people wanting to have 10 children.

Giving birth is easy for some, extremely annoying for others, and downright lethal for others. You truly never know if you are a chosen one until you try. There is no obvious phenotype.

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