Hacker News Reader

Comment by more_corn | Hacker News Reader

Bringing a child into this world would be utter madness.

More crazy than the Cold War? The World Wars? The great flu pandemic? The Chinese Civil Wars? The European Wars of Religion? The Black Death? The Mongol Invasions?

I can't think of a single year in human history when the world wasn't crazy (maybe with the exception of a couple years in the late 1990s)

Every ancestor of yours since single cell organisms has reproduced. If they could all do it, you can to. Especially given that you live a more cushy life than 99.9999% of them.

To not be would be utter madness. For those who can and opt not to, they are perpetuating the tragedy of the commons.

We face the largest demographic crisis ever and we're passing the problem onto the young while draining them via taxation, whislt demanding ever increasing benefits in an all out land grab.

In 1950 the ratio of those paying into the system versus withdrawing was 15:1, were now at 2:1.

The problem is the draining by taxation, not the absolute number of productive people.

It is far from evident what size of real productive population is needed to sustain a society. With modern tools it does feel like it could be in the realm of sub 10% of the population. This will get even more wild if the techno-optimists are correct.

Depending on how close we are to biophysical bounds trying to increase the population to the historically required productive ratios is just going to make living conditions worse for the average person.

Alright, so why are so many adults not having children, and what do you think should be done to address it?

I have my own ideas, but I'd love to hear your opinion.

There seems to be a fairly strong correlation between wealth and childlessness, so the obvious guess is that the world is getting wealthier. Exactly why that stops people having kids is a bit unclear to me though. Maybe being a parent is one of those things that is a harder sacrifice to make the more alternative comforts have to be given up.

This is not true. In the west, the wealthiest do have higher fertility.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-...

It is true. That article doesn't really back up the idea that wealthy families have more children and in most of the graphs you can actually see fertility has dropped off with income. Eg, in Figure 1 it looks like the only demographic consistently meeting the replacement rate are low income women in certain cultural groups and a marginal number of wealthy migrants. It is obvious [0] that more wealth -> less children. The effect enormous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

The topmost graph on Wikipedia is about GDP, and when it comes to children-per-village, you’re absolutely right. But down some is the J graph, which looks like the American graph in the link I posted.

Economics has a simple answer: public pensions are a classic tragedy of the commons. If the pension system didn't exist, then people would be incentivised to have more children to support them in old age, instead of a free rider problem where everyone relies on everyone else having children.

The demographic crisis of refusing to allow young people and families into the country? You want people to have kids so that we can keep America white?

Why not? It's not like every country in the world can rely on immigration and brain drain. Don't you think it is alarming that the country can't produce enough people to maintain a stable-state population and instead has to rely on a parasitic strategy?

Not intrinsically alarming, no. If I thought the country should be self-sufficient in isolation then there are many weak points I’d prioritize before birth rate.

90% of those crossing the border illegally are men. Watch any video on YouTube documenting illegal crossings and you'll see

Does that have something to do with what I said?

How does letting in millions of only men cause a sustainable population growth?

How does the set of people who arrive illegally overlap with the set of people that would come if we let them in legally, given that we can define the set that is allowed in legally?

America has a more liberal immigration policy than practically anywhere else on the planet, as evidenced by the massive change in demographics over a mere half century. You would like it to go faster?

Please go advocate for the Chinese to take immigrants from everywhere on earth at the same time, which they currently do not at all. Or do you not care about that for some reason?

The topic was “Americans must have babies because we need more young people”. There are plenty of young people who would move here but aren’t allowed in - would you like to disagree with that? Or address it in any way whatsoever?

Do you think there is any chance that the characteristics of human territories are determined in significant part by the natural tendencies of their inhabitants?

Do you think there is any chance that there is a diverse set of natural tendencies among humans, clustered by what sort of environmental filters those humans passed through? For example, surviving “trying to kill you” winter every year for thousands of years in a row with survivor man tier technology, where planning and tool design/making are critical, vs not?

I’m literally asking if you think there’s no chance, and if so, how do you know that? Was it scientifically proven? I’ve looked long and hard for that, and gosh I just couldn’t find where that ever happened.

If there is a chance, though, then we are gambling at (further) becoming Brazil in order to save the comfort of one single generation of old people. Yeah I think I’ll pass on that, thanks.

As for alternate solutions. We could allocate available resources based on how many descendants the old person produced. Why should we tolerate free riders and make the young produced by others pay for them? Let them be in old people dorms. Let them have insufficient medical care. It isn’t worth risking the quality of the country over, obviously. And if we use the scheme I mentioned, then they aren’t anybody’s grandparents, anyway. Who will fight for them?

The values you hold, the ones you are defending right now, are western values. Your type seems so sure that the newcomers can be brainwashed to think like we do. Good luck with that! Egalitarianism is not the norm historically or globally. It certainly isn’t the human default.

> Let them be in old people dorms. Let them have insufficient medical care

Thats certainly not a set of values I’d say is worth keeping. Neither is the “but white people are evolved to be better” crap.

Ironically, your interpretation of what I said as “white people are… better” (which isn’t what I said, or what I meant) is itself deeply Eurocentric.

If we assume there are many, or even infinite, valid ways to structure a large human group, and the structuring of the large human group depends on the humans executing certain behaviors, then, unless we assume that all humans have completely identical natural instincts and behaviors, an assumption which has no basis in fact, then structures developed by a particular group may not be equally operable by another group, because the two groups may have differing instincts or behaviors. If particular behaviors are required to operate the large human group structure, then humans who have an easier or harder time performing these behaviors will tend to produce a version of the implemented structure with higher or lower fidelity with respect to its abstract design.

No structure of humans is “better” or “worse” than another structure. That is the Eurocentrism in your frame. The style of societal structure we live in is highly contingent. It was developed by Europeans. Can it be operated just as well by other groups? We don’t really know for sure, but the attempts we see around the world have had quite mixed results. That doesn’t mean those people are “bad people” or whatever, or “inferior”, it just means they may be better suited for a different sort of social structure than the one that was developed by our ancestors and people similar to them.

This issue is so highly moralized these days from childhood brainwashing (unintentional, I think) that people’s minds simply won’t go there in a calm and rational manner, absent substantial deprogramming (which is not a fun experience, let me tell you).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com