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Comment by asdasdsddd | Hacker News Reader

Can we stop framing fertility as a national/corporate policy issue when its almost entirely cultural. And I don't mean that policy is downstream of culture; I mean, people just want to travel, party, and drink instead of having kids.

If you're giving me stats, you'll have to explain why there's very little correlation between income and fertility within nations, and why previous (non-farming) generations had a higher fertility rate with fewer resources, and why a country's fertility generally declines as it becomes wealthier.

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It’s a job security issue [1] for fence sitters (people who might be swayed to have kids if the economics were more favorable). Certainly, it doesn’t apply to firmly childfree people who prioritize life experience versus childrearing [2].

Think of a bank underwriting a 20 year mortgage. Are they going to originate a mortgage if they aren’t confident in your future income earning potential? Same thing, but parents are doing the underwriting of originating the child liability.

[1] https://www.population.fyi/p/job-security-lasting-choices-bi...

[2] https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...

From anecdotal evidence I agree it’s the root of the problem - why have kinds when there are more fun things to do? Among my peer group probably half of the group chose not to have kids.

Lucky enough for humankind this is self-correcting problem on both local and global level: people with partying genes will become extinct.

> Lucky enough for humankind this is self-correcting problem on both local and global level: people with partying genes will become extinct.

Humans aren’t fruit flies. Very little of our behavior has simple genetic controls in general and our brains are famously flexible based on our experiences. It’s also complicated in this case because deciding whether to have children involves any of the same skills people need to be successful in life: it’s a multi-decade commitment and so the problem is hardly “self-correcting” if it means that most of the children are being had by people who don’t make major life decisions rationally. Fortunately, most of them would be the ones choosing to party instead.

That’s a theory, but you’d need some data to support it and there are some potential confounds. For example, if someone decides children are out of the question because they can’t afford significant costs and instead decides to travel at considerably lower cost, that doesn’t tell us what choice they have made in an alternate scenario where policies made the financial burden much lower.

Traveling, partying, and drinking is pretty great. Of course people want to do that.

If you think this is a problem and want to fix it, you either need to make traveling etc. less attractive, or make having kids more attractive. The people currently making a fuss about it seem to think they can just lecture people into changing, which is silly.

Who's making a fuss? I intend on taking advantage of the situation :)

people just want to travel, party, and drink instead of having kids

That’s something of a self-correcting problem, don’t you think?

Eventually yes, but it would be nice to avoid the Dark Ages this time. The crash will be brutal.

Is it? If it was, it would be fixed already. Parties didn't start in the 2000s.

I've heard this many times already, why don't you back that up with a serious study that proves the reason young adults don't want kids is to, quote "travel, party and drink"?

And if it's not an economical issue, what are we to do? Force people to have children? Artificial insemination?

Why don’t you back up your point with a study?

This is just silly argument to make in discussion. OP presented coherent viewpoint, and asking “for a study” is a simple way to derail any discussion.

No, OP presented a right wing talking point that I am tired of seeing repeated ad nauseam and that is never justified. I feel justified in calling out the obvious lack of evidence to their narrativisation of the issue.

No its the policy bros who have to justify this one because all the evidence shows that your ancestors had 2-4 times more babies despite having less time, energy, money, child care resources, or education which are all areas that "fertility policy" tries to address. The only counterpoint is that farmers need children to continue the farm. But thats a bad argument because urban fertility rates were also much higher compared to now.

You might want to learn about the "demographic transition". If it really is only about culture, what do you suggest we should do? Ban contraception? Require women to have at least two babies each? Endoctrinate the youth into wanting to have children? I can't think of a single thing that is not f'd up.

The models pretty much say its NOT about policy, but its about the conditions from which cultural values arise from. I don't even know what you are arguing about, did I make a single normative statement in my original post.

OP might be simplifying it, but changing values (shift towards individualism across the globe) and women's freedom of choice are one of the biggest reasons why people don't want to have kids across all researches that have been done. Cost of living, job security and etc. contribute as well, but it really just doesn't make any sense to have more than 2 kids, other than "for having a lot of kids" sake. And two children is less than replacement level.

Also, as childless/1 child families grow old and retire, they kind of show how it's ok to live a fulfilling life without going through arduous pregnancy and etc. I'm not even talking about sacrificing minimum of 6 years of your life (pregnancy + first year of the child) to raise 3 kids. Culturally it's not celebrated anymore, you lose out on career progression, and since others in your age groups aren't having kids, you feel left out.

These are very real problems that no government has been able to solve yet. The worse it gets, people will feel more guilty for prescribing their future child to a life that was worse than theirs. And the cycle continues.

The issue I take with OP's point is that I'm pretty sure I heard Jordan Peterson or JD Vance use the exact same words "travel, party, drink" and use it to justify some heinous stuff like stripping women of their reproductive rights. I'm tired of seeing it repeated thoughtlessly with no critical thinking whatsoever.

I believe if a government really thinks fertility rates are an issue, the only think it should do is make it materially easier for citizens that want kids but can't to have them. Any other policy I can think of feels incredibly authoritarian.

Well, yes, I agree. But every government will try random things, and when it gets tough, they’ll take on the draconian measures. It’ll be interesting to watch China, South Korea and Japan in the next decade. Most governments are trying to see how they get out of this hole, and copy their implementations. I have no idea how they can fix it without rolling back contraceptives or women’s rights. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.

And the whole “travel, party, drink” isn’t as morally insulting as it used to be before. I think a good chunk of people in their 20s would wear that as a badge of pride, rather than whatever they’re trying to imply.

People are having fewer children than they explicitly say they want to have.

Sounds like a pulp song. *

But seriously, can we stop trying to over-simplify everything into neat little black and white boxes because grey areas annoy us, and contradictions scare us half to death.

Can we just be at peace with the fundamental interconnectedness of things, and understand that causality can run in two (or many) directions at once.

Though you or I may act individually according to our instincts or beliefs or morals, a group including you or I may act according to systemic patterns and drivers. More than one thing can be true at once!

Once you understand that, perhaps the question can shift from who is responsible for this thing I don't like, to how can we influence change and should we even? and why? and how congruous is this want or need with the multiple levels of truth, cause, and effect acting on each other?

* op comment changed after I wrote this. it said people just want to have fun and drink and travel (and.. because there's nothing else to do).

Have you considered bringing attention to fertility, demographics and social cohesion as a collective issue (thus national/corporate/etc) and not just a self-centered cultural issue is precisely the point?

I am a bit of a fatalist, I think things need to get really bad before cultural values change.

Ahh we are in agreement there then.

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