Hacker News Reader

Comment by starttoaster | Hacker News Reader

> That’s, obviously, if we fail to reverse the trend of falling birth rates.

Make it cheaper to have babies and people will have babies. Of course, that hits everyone's bottom lines by a little or a lot, including the healthcare industry, daycare industry, baby food and supply industries. Make housing more affordable, nobody wants to live in a 1 bedroom apartment that doesn't even accept pets and raise a newborn. The list goes on and on. We won't address all that in time, and it's going to hit us where it hurts later.

View on HN

From what I've read so far, the data doesn't really support that argument. Even in my circles, the richer the couple, the less likely they have kids and so on. I don't think it's just "if you have money you'll have babies" scenario anymore. All the countries that have tried to be super-pro-baby, so far, have failed to reverse the trend as well.

"The data" doesn't really mean much to me, especially without context. By all metrics, I'm pretty well off now. 3 bedroom house, stable job with better income than anyone in my family ever dreamt of. But I spent the last 10-12 years digging myself out of poverty from homelessness. My wife and I don't have kids because we see them as a potential anchor back into poverty and the scare of going back literally haunts us. So I'm curious about your data, but I'm an anecdotal example of someone with money that is not having kids due to the cost.

Besides that, haven't you ever heard before that the richer you get, the more parsimonious you become?

Fair enough. My point was, in developed world, if you’re poor you might not have kids because of its costs. If you’re rich, why would you have a kid if they might experience extreme problems in the near future? And it’s also hard for me to imagine to have ~3 kids, even though that’s needed to sustain the population.

But yeah, might be a big problem in the future, appreciate your input.

Because there are no countries super pro-baby. Some countries have better policies, but still babies are really expensive to rise. Of course if you want them to grow in decent environment, with separate room for each child, good school, hobbies etc.

Year or two of maternity leave helps, but parents will struggle untill school starts.

Few hundred euro per month will help, but not too much, will not cover the difference in rent of bigger apartment.

Career? Forget about promotions for few years.

France has had some success and while they're still below replacement, it's going to be a glide to population decline, not a hard crash like it's going to be with some other European countries.

I mean, they had protests against increasing the age of retirement to 62 from 60, while in countries like the Netherlands the same figure will be 67 starting next year.

Here in the UK my retirement age (can claim state pension) is currently 68. Work and personal pension age still seems to be 55.

UK folks can find theirs here https://www.gov.uk/state-pension-age

As for the on-topic I doubt I'll be able to afford a family in this lifetime haha, given up on that one as a goal a while back along with getting on the property ladder. Maybe if a relative or two leave an inheritence I can reconsider.

From what I've read, it's a vaguely U shaped curve. The poor and the very rich have more babies than the middle class. That jives with my experience. Surgeon friends of my wife are both more likely to have 4+ kids and to have 0 kids than middle and upper-middle class friends who almost invariably stop at 2 unless the second baby turns out to be twins.

The uptick in the rich is very small and insignificant but it is interesting. It's not enough to have any real impact on the birth rate, but it does provide evidence that people will have more kids if financial circumstances are favorable.

This is 2018 but it states that women on average want to have 2.7 children.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility...

As far as I know, the biggest correlation to fertility is religion, which makes some sense to me as a non-religious person; I'm not willing to put children through this existence.

Polls have shown that people want more children than they're having. People can't afford the children they wish they could have.

Median housing was smaller 50 years ago and people had more kids then.

Poor people have smaller houses than rich people yet have more kids.

Very few people are dying to have a baby but they just need a little more money or a state stipend before they can afford it. The problem isn't money although it makes for a convenient excuse. The fact is that for young people today, there are too many competing interests. All of the 26 year olds I know want to go to Italy next summer not change a diaper. The average age of average and first time motherhood is higher than it's been in the history of the human race. It really is uncharted territories.

> Median housing was smaller 50 years ago and people had more kids then.

Adjusting for inflation and the average household income, do you think things, in general, were way cheaper 50 years ago, or way _way_ cheaper? By trying to argue against my 1 bedroom apartment portion of my comment, I almost feel like you've bolstered the rest of it.

> Poor people have smaller houses than rich people yet have more kids.

Are we accounting for other factors like are poor people typically using (or even have belief systems that allow for the use of) contraception? Do poor people, speaking potentially overly broadly, tend to plan their financial arrangements as cautiously as people that are more well off? I've been well off, and I've been homeless, and I can personally tell you that I never thought more about planning for retirement as I did once I started having a disposable income.

IIRC, poor people have a lot of kids, but rich people have the most kids.

I'm well above median salaries in my state, but actually somewhat below median salary when you consider that I'm the sole earner for a household of four people. And I'm here to tell you that life isn't so hard here slightly below the middle.

The problem isn't primarily the cost of babies, it's primarily creeping credentialism.

Women are fertile from 18 to 40 (legally and safely). If the years to 28 are taken up with getting credentials (degrees and post-grad quals) and then from 28 to 34 or so establishing a career and forming a household, the're isn't much time left to have babies. And the thirties are much lower fertility than the teens and twenties biologically speaking.

Credentialism and housing costs. Not direct childcare costs.

Housing is a zero-sum Red Queen race. Increase someone's income, they'll want to live in a "better" neighborhood so the time taken to form a household is the same or longer.

TLDR: the problem is not lack of money but lack of time.

> Housing is a zero-sum Red Queen race

Only because we don’t build more. Remember, even the desirable areas like Atherton or San Francisco had near zero populations a few hundred years ago. New places can be built if we allow it.

Would the new places be handy to good schools (primary, secondary, teertiary)? And good enrichment activities for the kids?

The housing problem is not just houses. Although that'd be a great place to start.

There were no great schools in Atherton or SF 300 years ago.

It doesn't work, people don't want kids because of the culture. They're trained to become "sexually liberated" wage slaves and the few kids get sent to kindergarden at 6m.

Before trying I was also scared to death to have kids and thought it would ruin my life - spoiler it didn't.

I agree, choosing to have a family over a career or ambition is social suicide to many young people. High wage earning women are especially vulnerable to this. "you're just giving up to have a basic life in a basic city..", my wife heard this from many of her supposed friends when she decided to leave the workforce to raise our two boys. Ironic, my wife has grown her career leaps and bounds since returning to the workforce yet her former friends, so sure they were destined for greatness, are doing the exact same thing they were doing 15 years ago. It's really them who hit the "stop" button on life.

If women want to be sexually liberated wage slaves, we have to respect that as well. I guess, I am sexually liberated guy who is a wage slave, there’s no difference.

We should definitely make it more possible for women to have an easy life even when they have children though. Dunkin on others’ choices isn’t cool. That being said, the choice is less attractive nowadays for myriad of reasons.

It's less about affordability itself and more about the time young people need to figure out and take control of their lives. The longer that takes, the fewer children people will have on the average.

If experienced professionals make more money than fresh graduates, things that are affordable to the average person may be unaffordable to the average young person.

If people accumulate wealth over their careers, young people are at a disadvantage when they try to buy a home.

If young people can't find stable jobs with good career prospects near their friends and family, they need more financial stability before they feel comfortable having children away from their support networks.

Some of these issues can be alleviated by redistributing wealth from middle-aged people to young people. For others, it may be necessary to tune down the competitive meritocracy and expectations economic efficiency.

> It's less about affordability itself and more about the time young people need to figure out and take control of their lives.

> If young people can't find stable jobs with good career prospects near their friends and family, they need more financial stability before they feel comfortable having children away from their support networks.

And it's such a big financial decision that requires having a perception of complete financial stability because...

I posit that it's because it's such a huge financial burden. Lessen that burden, and you lessen young adults' apprehension to accept that burden.

I made this point in another comment but you have to also fix the current trend that having kids is some how "less than" grinding at a job. I'm a man and so not totally qualified to make this statement but I know from experiences my wife has had that women are especially vicious to other women choosing a family over career and status.

I think there's another dynamic at play which makes you both right in some ways. My mom and both of my sisters began having kids in their teens. Despite my family always struggling with money I don't ever recall it being seen through an economic lens. My girlfriends family on the other hand is very comfortably middle class, and when her brother had a baby a year or two shy of 30 there were a lot of economic concerns from her parents, they were almost upset at first. It seemed odd to me since him and his wife both had decent jobs and were doing way better than any of my siblings with children, but I realized it's because they weren't going to be able to raise their kids the same way they were raised. It seems like a big problem is that if you're from a middle-class background and want to have a family you'll likely have to come to terms with being worse off than your parents.

I think it's much more a problem for middle class families because unlike poorer families they seem more cognizant of what they have to lose, or at least the perception of what they have to lose, and maybe there's also an aspect where it's more ingrained that they should do better than their parents. I don't know maybe that's obvious to everyone but it was something that got me thinking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com