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Comment by jdthedisciple | Hacker News Reader

> Our birth rates do not, and never will, provide for support of our population numbers

How about stop propagandizing against the family unit and children in the name of climate protection and freedom for starters?

(This is obv directed at the German Political Landscape (minus AfD), not you personally)

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It can't and won't help them. Unless you physically deprive women of rights and let them be married off against their will and others control their fertility, as it was in the "good old days" when the birth rate was sufficient.

It never worked in any country. Even in those with, to say the least, highly questionable human rights record and complete control of government over mass media: see China. Or with those with ample resources and willingness to spend them towards this goal: see Sweden.

Women are not having lots of children not because some evil forces are telling them not to, but simply because they can. They never wanted to procreate in "sufficient" numbers, they just didn't have a choice then. If we go as far as to deprive them of that choice, we will completely cancel everything we know as a civilised society - and also fail, because a huge emigration wave will ensue, and if we try to ban emigration, we will quickly fail into economic, technological and cultural irrelevance.

It's a choice between being Japan (controlled, predictable dieoff, slow but certain death), being Iran (nice population growth but...), and being America. To me it sounds like a no-brainer which one of the evils to choose.

The happiest women are married women.

The happiest among them are those with children.

Don't take my word for it, just look it up yourself, too tired to pull up the dozens of studies for you.

Clearly women want to have children. Nobody needs to force them to.

But rather, society is (indirectly) forcing them NOT to have them.

No need to deny human nature. Your caricature of a society that has children is complete and utter fantasy which has no bearing on real life. It is a product of aforementioned propaganda.

There is perhaps a survivorship bias in those studies, since divorce is so easy now, only people who are happy in marriage remain. i.e. reported happiness in marriage increases while everyone unhappy simply divorces and so the numbers would get swayed that way. Divorce rates have rocketed and women are very likely to leave marriages these days in many countries. So you end up with a tiny happy cohort that has no bearing on the wider population. So you should produce your sources to see how this is accounted for, ideally.

The problem with this is that women are of course happy when they have children, they love their children after all (father do too of course). But you don't love potential future unborn children do you?

Before having children they are a burden and a detriment to your lifestyle. After having them they are the best thing that could have happened to you.

And happiness is higher in countries with high divorce rates. Figures.

This could just as easily mean that people who are happy have more kids, not that having kids makes you happy.

This is like saying

"it could just be that people who are successful happen to be hard-working, not that working hard increases your chances of success"

The societal level of denial has reached new heights indeed.

Except you haven't actually given any evidence that kids cause happiness, just a correlation.

On the last point, i am not even sure there is correlation let alone causation. Successful people i know hardly work a lot (or they do but in short extreme stunts, like 3 weeks of 80-100 hours a week and then almost idle at 0-10 hours a week for the next 6 months). They mostly just tuned themselves into ability to get "into right place at the right time" at a rate way more frequent than regular folks, by having and consciously developing right personality traits.

> by having and consciously developing right personality traits.

Which takes a lot of effort and hard work.

> They mostly just tuned themselves into ability to get "into right place at the right time"

Which takes a lot of hard work

> then almost idle at 0-10 hours a week for the next 6 months

You have been tricked into thinking so, they just work so much more efficiently at some point and delegate a lot - at which point they are already successful due to their previous hard work

Fertility isn't dropping merely because women have "rights", but it's also because women are being forced into labor markets where they never would have needed to work before, women are being told, over and over again, how horrible it is to be mutually interdependent with a man, be married, or bear children or have families, and how much happier they'll be as successful, college-educated empowered go-getters.

It's both impractical and unpopular for women to raise children and stay at home while doing it. These are the rights they've won; foremost of them is the right for their bloodlines to die out within a few generations.

I am not sure of thats really going to work. Another commenter here said it quite well. If you have the "choice" to have kids whenever you like, then you don't have kids because they are always inconvenient. And the time window for women is a lot smaller than they themselves often like to admit. The highest birth rates in Europe you always find in the "bible belts", in places where contraception is religiously prohibited.

> because they are always inconvenient

This strange obsession with materialism is what lead to kids being considered "inconvenient".

Rather, materialism is and should be considered inconvenient when it comes to what really matters in life (children).

That's the root of the issue.

> Rather, materialism is and should be considered inconvenient when it comes to what really matters in life (children).

The problematic part is that most people only understand this after they have children.

About half of women never understand it having or not having children. They don't want to admit it because it's a shame to regret one's own children, but many of them do. Vast majority of men never understand it (mostly because they are married off before they want it, if they married at appropriate age i.e. 45-50, they'd be ok with it, but this is not what women want, they want to take men before they understand they don't want it).

Key is choice. People are not having kids for one stupid simple reason - because they can.

This is why the problem is just the same in every civilisation or culture, it is not at all confined to "Western", "Christian", "Liberal" or "Rich" world. It's everywhere without exception, maybe (hopefully) except Israel. Because Haredim don't give their women a choice.

Materialism has long been a driver of human behavior, and children are no exception.

The only thing that's changed is the migration of children from net capital assets for the family to net cost centers. The same thing has happened to animals. What used to be productive workers on the farm are now wholly decadent useless eaters, earning their keep only by being adorable.

Imagine how the calculus of couples saying "we can't afford children" would change if little Timmy could start defraying his own costs in only eight years by doing some basic bookkeeping, junior development tasks, running errands, cooking, personal assistant work, etc for the family. And then becoming a net capital asset from 12 to 20. That's how it was for most of human history, just with slightly less modern tasks.

Have you seen the price and dearth of family housing these days? Why would you would think that propaganda is the main cause when just the economics are prohibitive?

Who is propagandizing „against the family unit“ and „in the name of climate protection“? What are you talking about?

What he's saying is incentives in these countries are just not aligned to creation of families and rearing of children. And it's true, when you expect women to go to school til they're 25, a home requires two incomes and then some, everything is taxed to the breaking point, and birth control is ubiquitously available, you can expect a decline in fertility to the point that you eventually have a demographic crisis.

Our countries resolve this by importing people from countries with more people than they can handle, but if you look at the situation globally, as countries become richer this appears to happen universally. It's a matter of 100 years until we can't play this population shuffling game anymore and we will experience a global fertility and demographic crisis. And what's more, it appears that it is unavoidable and it's not clear if humanity will stabilize to a population level or if these fluctuations are inevitable. See https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-6-1.html

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