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Comment by fargle | Hacker News Reader

"When he couldn’t put his double major in English and history to use"

"I’m sick of partying. I did that already."

whether or not you are right about the impact of policy choices, you still can't ignore personal responsibility as well. if you party your way through school to get a useless degree, then double down for a law degree you don't (or can't) use for unspecified reasons, i don't see how any policy is going to have a different outcome.

the idea that if all you did was get a college degree, didn't matter in what, and you were on "easy street" hasn't been true for at least 30 years before he graduated, probably never was.

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If about ~30% of people are experiencing the same problem, I'd say ignoring the "personal responsibility" part of the equation is valid. At some point of progress, we did something wrong, but not a single country can figure out what that wrong thing was, and how we can revert it.

Frankly, I think these opinion-lite pieces come from the problem how we have moved on from having unified culture and trend setters. Everyone has so many options, possible hobbies, interests and etc. to explore that conventionalism is frowned upon. Even if individualism has been promoted in North America for the past century, there was still things most people agreed on. We just don't have that over here anymore. And nowadays, almost nowhere. Committing to something or someone results in bigger opportunity losses than ever before, so ever chasing the dopamine rush from trying new things is more acceptable than ever.

I don't even know if it's right or wrong. I'm morally conflicted when I think about it. Same as having multiple kids, these topics will only come up more and more as literally every country is diving further into plummeting fertility rates.

We know what went wrong. It's housing.

When housing became a vehicle for investment instead of a place to live, it all fell apart. The only way forward is to discourage multiple property ownership through very draconian measures.

If you fix housing, you fix commitment, increase birth rates, and improve general happiness.

Housing hasn’t been the biggest problem in Japan since 2000s. Like it is, but not the biggest one. Yet the birth rates have never increased after the initial bump.

People, especially women, have other things they can spend time on instead of giving birth to 3+ kids.

Japan is an ethnostate with unique problems and situations that no other country shares.

I agree with you that other factors, such as cheap international travel and constant bombardment of people's highlights on social media, make it less attractive to invest in having a family.

Still, housing is a huge problem for Western Mediterranean Europe (Spain, Portugal, and Italy) and most of Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia).

Today's world is just too exciting and there is too much to do, so I agree that kids are pretty low on a list of priorities for a lot of people.

Also for the record, in the US the birth rate per woman was below 2.1 for about 50 years.

So this is not really a new problem, it's just that there were enough young people back in the day and people didn't have the same life expectancy.

Housing is definitely in a very tough spot and causes a lot of issues among mostly young people.

I do agree that it would fix a few problems, but I don't think the birth rates will meaningfully increase. It would have a bump, but overall that ship has sailed, people just don't want to have a lot of kids (if any) in today's world.

Really harsh calling it a useless degree (even though I don’t disagree) but expectations should be in order. Hell, even Harvard MBA is 200k+ in the hole, so without a plan afterwards it may not be the best choice.

If he wanted to work in academia I think it’s a very reasonable choice.

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