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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

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> It’s parents responsibility to feed a child’ - cried the generation that drank free baby formula provided by the state.

Brutal and accurate. So many accusations are just confessions. So many lazy people complain about 'lazy youth', so many people living on social welfare complain about 'greedy pensioners' or 'welfare queens'.

I truly do not understand it.

That doesn't really gel with the global nature of the trend. Something extremely foundational is happening, probably related to advances in contraception in the 60s. You're going to cultural factors. If it was that then there'd be advanced countries somewhere with high birth rates.

U.S. fertility rate was dropping long before the 60s (and even before the great depression) [1] though it does sound like contraception may have had an impact. [2]

[1] https://www.prb.org/resources/the-decline-in-u-s-fertility

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4847a1.htm

The most direct conclusion is that people didn't really /want/ to have kids, they didn't have a choice or they felt they needed to have large families for other social reasons (like risks of those kids dying, the need for people to take care of you later in life, cultural assumptions).

If you change contraception and push culture a bit, people's revealed preferences are saving money or spending it on themselves over having kids, is all. This seems to basically track across every region.

> spending it on themselves over having kids

Not at all, it’s that having kids used to be financially beneficial for parents, and now it’s horrendously expensive. The situation changed 180

And in addition, threat of climate change means you aren’t sure into what kind of world you are bringing children

Contraception is a means to an end. It only gives people a chance another way to choose. It doesn't change the calculus of why they choose one thing or another.

Well - there's like another thousands factors that compound this.. Meager examples: - For the last X number of decades it's been beat into the 1st worlds brain that humanity is a scourge on the Earth (climate change - pollution, deforestation, forever chemicals etc). - Common theme among young people that children as just a burden and would get in the way of you "experiencing the world" or "doing the things you really want to do". - Cost of everything seemingly pushed as far as society can take it.

Conditionally speaking, I feel like it's rather hard to be positively disposed to the idea of having children in America.

This is a big part that is overlooked. Our cities in the US are hostile towards anyone who doesn't have a car, honestly. Kids suffer quite a bit, and although I think they _would_ deal with it in earlier years, they don't now when they have the internet. I renember when I was a kid that if I wanted to talk to my friend, I usually had to go locate them because even if the phone line was free on my end, it probably wasn't on their end.

On free baby formula in the UK see https://novaramedia.com/2023/06/21/parents-are-having-to-ste...

This right here.

Also, you can just import immigrants enmass to make up for the pension problem and expect it to work long term. It just leads to spiraling costs of living in the short term which has the secondary effect of suppressing birth rates even more for the above poster's reasons.

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