Hacker News Reader

Comment by salmonfamine | Hacker News Reader

A lot of liberal (in the classical, broad sense) young folks simply shrug their shoulders at this fact -- not everyone wants kids, so what?

I think it's worth considering, if you're one of these people, that without children being born to liberal parents, the "extremists" of the world -- fundamentalist muslims, christians, and so on -- will inherit the earth. Of course some of their children will grow up to be liberals, but that number will inevitably decrease as the total number of liberals does as well.

If you believe that equality, feminism, human rights, and so on would suffer in that world, then I think you should consider if not having kids is really a big deal after all.

View on HN

...so then they inherit the earth?

I wonder if this sort of thing is cyclical. The next dark age, caused by the earth being overrun by the fecund and illiberal peoples of the world until they can only eat themselves. Maybe a plague wipes them all out and they are too poor/illiterate/unlucky to survive it. 600 years later, someone re-invents the internet, for people to use to post that they don't want kids.

I don't think "let's make some babies to keep those extremists at bay" is the sexiest of pillow talk. But then again, I have dated individuals with severe enough views on the world where I could see that actually working. :)

My lifespan is too short to worry overmuch about any of it.

Haha, yeah it does fall apart on the individual level. I don't think I would convince my girlfriend to have kids by talking dirty with population statistics ;)

And for the record I'm just another childless, un-married late-twenties tech guy that wants to travel and hang out with my friends on the weekend. So I'm definitely part of the "problem" not the solution.

I just mean to say -- we've inherited a really rich intellectual tradition that has borrowed from thinkers around the world, and really we are torchbearers for that way of life. It's not a guarantee that progress will march forever onward. So we need to think about how to keep our societies going in a way that still produces families.

Maybe that means the government steps in and says that every workplace has to have a day care center. It seemed to work for Patagonia. Maybe it means we start some crazy scheme where companies hire married couples as a package deal. Maybe it means we have to rebuild our cities to have denser neighborhoods with lots of families clustered together. Maybe we all have to start living in hippie communes. I have no idea.

I don't want society to go backwards, but I don't want our values to die out either. So it's clear that we need radical change.

>Of course some of their children will grow up to be liberals, but that number will inevitably decrease as the total number of liberals does as well.

This is particularly true because political views are to some degree heritable. And it's not just a hypothetical thing: many conservatives believe they can "win" if they just manage to have children and hold out for a few decades as the liberals slowly breed themselves out of existence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com