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Comment by TOMDM | Hacker News Reader

People are wealthier and healthier today than almost any other point in history.

Better times than now are a blip in the grand scheme of things.

We have a huge number of social ills that contribute towards peoples reasons for not wanting children, but wealth and physical health are not among them.

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If you are looking at "all of history", for most of history it was usual for one person in a couple to spend most of their time at home, which is very hard to do now while covering rent.

Yes, circumstances change over generations. However we still are wealthier and healthier than ever. If your goal is to raise a family, it's fairly easy in most first world countries to move to a quiet area, have kids and get a non career job. If you wish to "have your cake and eat it too", life is going to be harder because you made that choice.

Actually, for most of history it was common for everyone to simply WORK AT HOME, as farmers. And that was a job for whole family, including children as young as 6 years old.

The truth is for me somewhere in the middle. Happiness and satisfaction are not absolute, they can exist only in relation to your surroundings. Thus younger people in the US might be objectively better off than people in say India, but that doesn't matter. Their surroundings are as the OP described and that dictates how they feel about the present and future day.

On physical health it's actually wrong for the US as people's physical health is deteriorating evident by the falling life expectancy.

But with all that said, the actual idea in Japan is for me pretty stupid, as I consider dating apps to be one of the reasons people are connecting less and less. The choice is too large, it's very superficial, most people want the "best" thus large number of people are out of luck.

In the old times, raising kids was cheaper and required much less care. From the moment a kid could walk, he would be helping around the farm. The clothes he would have would be one shirt which he'd inherit from his older sibling. The toys would be whatever is around the farm. Most kids would not go to school let alone attain some higher education. Nowadays, its completely different. As parents, you need to invest thousands upon thousands before your kid turns 18 and then hope that he will get somewhere in life and take care of you.

IMO, your generalizations are not fair. There is an inverse relationship between wealth and fertility, globally. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link... The article describes some possible reasons.

And how are we healthier? 42% of adults are obese, compared to 12% fifty years ago.

Not wealthier in every sense. House prices, and houses being really fundamental to our lives, going up due to modern factors are a real issue.

I like the analogy with the USAF and fighter jets. Every generation of fighter jet is more capable than the one before but also much more expensive per plane to purchase and operate, so they get fewer of them each time.

If anything, reality suggests the problem is in fact wealth. The poorest countries have the highest birth rates and throwing more money at this has produced quite literally zero success.

Wealthy countries pay women more to work and punish women financially if they have a baby due to the opportunity cost.

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