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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

The article cites the cost of living first and foremost, with the second item being that women disproportionately bear the cost of child-rearing. I wonder how many countries these would also be the two primary drivers. Or, to phrase the question more in line with what I suspect is the case, I wonder how many countries those two aren't the primary drivers in? I suspect not many.

I wonder how much longer those in power are going to stare this type of data in the face before realizing we need to make some fundamental systemic changes or this whole party is gonna come to a really nasty end. The first thing that goes in an animal population experiencing stress at scale is reproduction.

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Isnt women's share of child rearing at an all-time low in most of the western world? I cant help but wonder if the causality runs the other direction. That is to say, as motherhood becomes less central to the concept of womanhood, fewer women build self models that include it.

That said, I think a more influential cause than either factor is the increasing risk aversion and increasing expectations across the board, and especially when it comes to partnering, life choices, and having kids. Simply put, people arent taking as many risks, and marriage and children are increasingly viewed as risks.

Women's share of child rearing might be at an all time low, but homemaking used to be many women's only job. Maybe men are helping more now, but women are also keeping full time careers going and juggling child rearing at the same time. That it's somewhat less child rearing isn't exactly a big comfort in these new circumstances.

This is absolutely a story about risk, you're right on that. But I truly feel like you'd have to be willfully blinding yourself to not recognize that the risks are way worse than ever. The full grind of capitalism in a global economy has chewed up humanity & left us deeply powerless & exploited. The demands for housing health care, and help have shot to exceptional unaffordability. I don't think risk aversion has necessarily changed: it's just a fact that trying to raise a family is far riskier & much harder than it has been. Those willing to have a family have had to go against ever more abysmal ods.

>That it's somewhat less child rearing isn't exactly a big comfort in these new circumstances.

Absolutely agree. My my main goal was to highlight the proportion of rearing duties may not be causal, or at least a root cause. Im not sure that equal division of labor would even help with two working parents.

>The full grind of capitalism in a global economy has chewed up humanity & left us deeply powerless & exploited.

Im not sure that I lay this all on capitalism, but think that at a minimum, the two are tied. Parallel desires for risk mitigation and consumption feed directly into trained helplessness. Housing and healthcare are prime examples of this.

I dont think that raising a family is intrinsically any riskier or harder, it is just harder to do in parallel with fulfilling other desires. People want family + X, and the expectations and cost for X grow ever higher.

It is obviously easier to have a family with a 500sqft trailer in the country than a 2000sqft house in the city.

Women lose money by not working when pregnant and rearing. This opportunity cost is high and pushes people to not have kids.

I dont disagree, but Im also how you are tying this to my statement.

What is changing over time in the US or Singapore? Is the opportunity cost getting higher? That could be an interesting idea.

I suppose it is as salaries and material compensation increases, so does the opportunity cost. A homemaker has less opportunity cost than a female professional making 250k per year.

It could be the case that the opportunity cost people are willing to pay for children is not perfectly elastic, and does not scale with income.

One thing to note about the opportunity cost is it's not just your current position.

If you're gunning for a promotion it's not a great move to go on leave for 3+ months because of a kid. Say what you want, but uh people really do put off having kids until they're at a title they like.

If you look at China, it appears that young men there need to make exceptionally large and expensive sacrifices, like borrowing money and buying an expensive apartment, just to be allowed into the dating pool. Does that equalise the total investment into conceiving a baby? Is China better off with birth rates as the result?

"women disproportionately bear the cost of child-rearing" is very difficult to measure objectively.

> "women disproportionately bear the cost of child-rearing" is very difficult to measure objectively.

Not really, they've got the equipment for it (e.g. uteri and mammary glands). I think it would be impossible to "equalize" the cost without doing some extreme and bizarre things (e.g. have some kind of arbitrary Weregild-type thing to "equalize" the cost).

A significant part of the problem seems to be one of ideology colliding with reality.

Both of these comments are only reacting to the financial and physical costs of child rearing. Obviously humans with penises cannot bear children and it's unreasonable to suggest they should be made to. Similarly, the fact that those men in China are expected to attain so much debt simply to enter the dating pool is also a legitimate problem that needs addressing. However neither of those things reflect the costs of motherhood, which are a lot more expansive:

* Mothers are still by and large the "default" entity for all child care, with it being notable for men to take on that role. Men are regularly praised for "babysitting the kids for mom" even though if you think about that for like, 30 seconds, you realize how insane it is. Of course dad watches the kids too, in any kind of equitable household, that would be expected.

* Mothers are also by default responsible for almost all child-adjacent logistics. School, activities, medical appointments, friend visits, school trips, sports, immunization scheduling.... Like, think about all the annoying logistical bullshit in life that you have to get done just for you, and then imagine that you have to do it all twice, for yourself, and for a secondary third party who oftentimes doesn't appreciate it either.

>> A significant part of the problem seems to be one of ideology colliding with reality.

I think you should read that a little more expansively that the things I explicitly commented on.

Some examples of ideology: "children should be parented with high intensity", "men and women should be doing the exact same things in a family in exactly equal proportions with no specialization", "a family should consist of two capitalism-participting income-earners," etc.

I suspect fixing the issues you outlined with the fixes you're implying wouldn't actually do anything to increase birthrates.

I think they were making a more general point that the article may be taking a overly simplistic view of the "costs of child-rearing".

If a mother feeds and cares for children, that can be viewed as a cost of children to her. If a man works to feed and house those same children, surely that is a cost of children to me.

I suspect part of the problem is a generation of people raised with just enough economics knowledge to be dangerous, with life viewed through lenses of cost, profit and risk instead of joy, experience, and sentimentalism.

> I suspect part of the problem is a generation of people raised with just enough economics knowledge to be dangerous, with life viewed through lenses of cost, profit and risk instead of joy, experience, and sentimentalism.

IMHO, I think that's part of the problem, but I feel that it's more than "just enough economics knowledge to be dangerous." That knowledge definitely interferes with the ability to analyze the problem, but I don't think it's the main or only thing going on. You could probably add something like "individualism" to the left hand side and something like "duty" to the right to get closer.

Something that might be worth pondering is: When was that ever not the case? Are we seriously saying that in the 1800s those poor desperate people who had 12 kids and put most of them (the ones that even survived!) to work in mines and farms, were in a better situation?

The discussion around cost is a red herring. If it really was about cost, we'd be seeing the upper middle class having children by the ton. Most of us here on HN would have 10 children each, because cost definitely isn't an issue for any well-paid software engineer or startup founder.

I definitely think that you are right - this is definitely going to be a major crisis in the next few decades, and there needs to be a serious course correction, and -major- incentives for having kids.

But I don't think it comes down to cost, for the most part. I think there are a number of other factors, but cost just ends up being a nice easy scapegoat because it sounds completely reasonable. Nobody can argue with it, not even oneself.

> Are we seriously saying that in the 1800s those poor desperate people who had 12 kids and put most of them (the ones that even survived!)

This is the origin story of the contraceptive movement: either your population growth rate is contraception-limited, or it's death-limited. The latter is pretty horrific.

> If it really was about cost, we'd be seeing the upper middle class having children by the ton

The cost issue is even worse for everyone who isn't a rentier, because children need time, and the opportunity cost of that is higher the more you could be earning otherwise.

(hmm: "7 points by pjc50 18 minutes ago [flagged]" I see it's going to be one of those days)

In unindustrialized agriculture having a lot of children is a sound strategy. The first couple years they cost you food and time, but after that they are cheaper than employing workers, and they will even take care of you when you are too old to work the fields.

And without modern healthcare a lot of them will die. If you want to make sure one of them inherits the farm (and provides for you if you manage to become old) you need to have enough children to achieve this at an acceptable level of risk.

> Something that might be worth pondering is: When was that ever not the case? Are we seriously saying that in the 1800s those poor desperate people who had 12 kids and put most of them (the ones that even survived!) to work in mines and farms, were in a better situation?

I mean... the answer to that is, it's complicated. If you're talking the peasantry bound to the land owned by a Lord in ye olden days, I would say they were certainly stressed out and barely getting by, but they were different stressors. If they didn't grow enough food to pay their owed amount to the person who effectively owned them, they would obviously be in a really bad situation. But at the same time, that's something they could work on and reasonably plan ahead for: it's an actionable stressor, if you will. It's certainly a problem but it's a problem you can actually do something about.

In contrast, if you work in an industry that chronically underpays people, are saddled with various obligations, and are subject to extremely high costs of living, like, in theory you can try and get a better job maybe? But that's not nearly as actionable in general, and there's no guarantee that the better job is even out there, nor how many people you'd be competing with to get that better paying job. Sure, you have air conditioning, you have modern medical treatments, you have a whole host of things at your fingertips should you need them that those peasants wouldn't even dream of. But you also have a ton of stressors that are far more disconnected from your ability to solve them, that are down to systemic failures in our societies.

> The discussion around cost is a red herring. If it really was about cost, we'd be seeing the upper middle class having children by the ton.

That presumes that the upper middle class aren't also drowning in debt. I can't speak for everyone, but I assure you, I have the really nice house, relatively new vehicles, people would probably call me quite wealthy by the standards of the area I live in, and make no mistake, we're doing better than a lot of our neighbors, but I'm still like, three bad months from homelessness and that's definitely, along with the general trajectory of the world, one of the reasons why we're childfree.

I know tons of people my age who are doing much worse than me, who also have decided against children, even if temporarily because they are so damned expensive and there's basically no support here for parents save for a tax credit.

Not to be obnoxiously judgemental here (and this is partly meant to be advice to any younger reader and not just address you specifically), but if you are upper middle class and the expense of buying fancy things limits you from having children, why not not do that? I've got two kids, we might still have more, and we live in a median (for the US) house and drive a basic 2017 Subaru that we bought used. We're saving to buy that really nice house in an upper class area, and our existing mortgage is already fully covered by our assets (not paying it off because of the interest rate). If I lost my job, it means we'd stop making progress toward upgrading, but we are always secure in our current position. Pretty much the first thing we did while younger and still renting was to establish a year of runway, and we've only grown that over time.

We save like 2/3 of my income. Taxes are probably over half of our expenses. I realize it's annoying and preachy and privileged and all that, but if you're high income, the comfort and confidence you get from never overextending yourself is priceless, and you can still be quite comfortable.

Sorry, but the personal finance nerd in me can't help but point that this

> I have the really nice house, relatively new vehicles,

and this

> I'm still like, three bad months from homelessness

are related.

I tend to agree that costs aren't the only factor. Poor people have always had kids, usually more than wealthier more secure families. I think the bigger question is why security is increasingly becoming an pre-requisite.

I think it may have more to do with increasing cultural expectations we put on mothers and parents.

There was a times were it seemed like these expectations were much lower than today. To hear it from friends born in the 40's to 60's, the typical duties of parents basically ended at providing a roof and two meals a day.

It is cost, and it is more costly the wealthier you are because the opportunity costs are higher.

This ignores the lower marginal utility of money as wealth increases (and increased marginal tax burden), and probably greater marginal "utility" of having children at higher levels of wealth (as you have more ability to spend time with them/don't need to be preoccupied with economic worries. e.g. my wife is a stay-at-home mom and I can work from home, so we get to spend a lot of time with our kids).

Germany might be a counter-example. Cost of living has steadily risen 2008-2021 (and dropped a bit since then), but Germany's birth rate has increased over that period, while birth rates in France and the US have fallen. Germany's birth rate is generally slowly rising ever since a low in 1995.

If you zoom out a bit more Germany's birth rate cratered in the 1960s/70s, generally attributed to the wider availability of oral contraceptives. Similarly in its peers. Though that's only the enabling technology, the lower desire for babies is almost certainly driven by other factors (urbanization, better health care, etc)

> Though that's only the enabling technology, the lower desire for babies is almost certainly driven by other factors (urbanization, better health care, etc)

I'm not so sure about that. There's no law that says desire has to be aligned with needed action. For instance: up to the availability of oral contraceptives, it was very hard to avoid having kids even if you didn't want them. Kids would happen automatically if you desired a different thing: sex.

It's sort of like exercise: it used to not matter if someone desired to "exercise" or not, because they were forced to do lots of physical activity if they wanted to live (e.g. physical work on a farm, walk to the market, etc.). Now technology has enabled a previously impossible level of sedentary life for the common person, moving exercise from a necessity to a desire, we have huge and increasing levels of health problems in society because the desire for the needed thing itself isn't there.

I predict, after some period of time, "childfree" psychology will breed itself out of society, and the people who are left will have a lot more explicit desire for children.

Being able to trust that my employer would bring me back part-time in a comparable role (at the same hourly rate of pay) after a year of maternity leave and then decide if I wanted to continue working part-time up to my kid's 8th birthday sure made this whole thing less scary.

That's one of the big differences between having a kid in Germany and the US.

(the sub-500 EUR/mo daycare is another one - and that was for a 1.5 engineer income couple)

What are you talking about? Maybe I don't understand what you are getting at but Germany's Population Pyramid has them completely collapsing by 2100 whereas the US and France are actually the stars of population stability (in the west anyway)

[1]:https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2023/

[2]:https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

[3]:https://www.populationpyramid.net/france/2023/

I'm purely talking about the change in birth rate and how that relates to outside pressures. The German birth rate is rising, but it's also true that it's very low. It has been below that of the US since about the 1920s, and the two are only now approaching each other with the German birth rate sharply rising (probably attributable to immigration) and the US birth rate falling.

And of course population pyramids are affected by both births/deaths and migration. Migration is a pretty big factor that is very different between the three countries (and that changed significantly over time as well)

I mean the biggest target thing for Singapore to target would be housing costs

“No Flat, No Child” is becoming more and more common as even public flat prices skyrocket

https://www.population.fyi/p/singapore-no-flat-no-child

Housing in Singapore is surprisingly cheap when you compare it to European or US megacities.

In countries with the fastest growth rates women have an even greater child-rearing burden so that's not it.

That said, it's a tiny island, do they really need more people as a society? Or is this mainly looking at is a country wanting continuous neverending economic growth?

> Or is this mainly looking at is a country wanting continuous neverending economic growth?

I mean, yes almost assuredly. But that doesn't mean shrinking populations are without their own issues, outside economic ones, elder care being the most obvious. And, shrinking populations can quite easily contribute to large-scale cultural demise, which is always something worth considering. That said, fewer humans overall is undeniably better for our environmental outlook.

I guess the implication I'm making is can we at some point say, we've achieved a pretty good standard of living, let's enjoy our national patrimony and not perpetuate the rat race?

I mean if you're asking me? I'd say we're already there. If you're asking the MBA-brain-worms-having grindset number-go-up crazy people who run our society? Never.

It's nature. If you aren't growing, you are dying. At work, if you aren't moving up you are on the way out.

like trees that reach maturity in 25-40 years then live up to 300-600 basically with the same mature form?

I think they'd be ecstatic with a constant population level. They've got a birth rate < 1 per woman where a replacement rate is 2.1. So that means a halving of population size every generation.

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