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Comment by ip26 | Hacker News Reader

This feels like such a commonly missed point. Any “enlightened” movement with a notion of not having kids will by definition extinguish itself in one generation.

I don’t see this as meaning ultra-traditionalists are bound to inherit- I think it’s more likely the discourse would revert to the mean, aka the centrists.

But it also applies at the national level. If country A consistently makes having kids miserable, then in the long arc of time, the way of life in country B (which makes family life great) will win out.

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> But it also applies at the national level. If country A consistently makes having kids miserable, then in the long arc of time, the way of life in country B (which makes family life great) will win out.

Country C which simply reduces the ability for women to not have kids will win out over county B, since country B is extremely unlikely. Even the Scandinavian countries can’t come close to being country B with a sufficiently large total fertility rate that beats country C.

> Country C which simply reduces the ability for women to not have kids will win out over county B

Counterpoint: Country C is presumably a totalitarian nightmare, which historically tend not to prosper.

A century or so ago, most Western countries were "Country C" – certainly in comparison to what they are today. Did that make them totalitarian nightmares? A lot of people would describe 1920s/1930s Russia as a "totalitarian nightmare"; but would they use that language to describe the US or the UK in the same time period?

So in the UK and US, in general, yes, it was absolutely terrible by current standards, but they were, by and large, getting better, and slowly figuring out that maybe the state should stay out of peoples’ private lives. You know who was really backsliding on this topic around then? I’ll give you a hint; think stupid moustaches.

I still don’t think “totalitarian” is the right word. People called the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy “totalitarian” because they aimed at complete (“total”) state control of all organisations-you weren’t allowed to run a recreational club or a youth group without state approval. The state also put severe limits on your freedom to criticise it or disagree with its policies and claims.

By contrast, countries like the US and the UK at the same time, while no doubt there were injustices, unfairness, discrimination, even oppression (and they still haven’t completely put those things behind them)-the state never tried to exert total control over civil society or public criticism-which is why “totalitarian” isn’t the right word to describe them. And I don’t think whatever direction they might have been moving in makes a difference-if you aren’t “totalitarian”, you aren’t “totalitarian” regardless of whether you are moving “further away” from it or staying completely still.

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