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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

> modern, affluent states are commiting voluntarily suicide because their citizens are not too willing in giving birth

Phrase things with the blame assigned accordingly. Your phrasing blames people for not becoming parents. A more accurate phrasing is '....because their wealthy elites are so greedy they make having children unaffordable'

"Demographic collapse" is because people can't afford rent, can't afford food, can't afford healthcare - childbirth is ABSURDLY expensive in the US, can't afford childcare, and so many other things.

Why is that? Because of greed. More and more of everything is swallowed up by private equity and corporate management who have no empathy, no flexibility, only a demand for eternal growth. The human piece is irrelevant and actively undesirable. Far simpler to just pay for some GPUs and write articles blaming ordinary people for having no more options.

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Scandinavian countries are commonly listed as a counter-example to what you say. Those countries have strong social safety nets for everyone, and their citizens' basic needs are covered. Child care costs are not an issue for them. Yet, their fertility rates are also too low.

Thus, to the extent that costs and money play a role, it does not seem to be a decisive one. There is something else going on.

Does that include housing? I went and read the Swedish Wikipedia birth rate article (Födelsetal), but couldn't find any clues. Social norms, that's about all.

Presumably the worrying thing here is a possible boom-and-bust cycle. In the long view it should be self-limiting, if a small population with lots of space tends to fill it with a larger future population that then reproduces less. It's just unpleasant to be caught at the declining stage of that cycle, with abundant old people.

US real household income is probably 3x higher than during the baby boom. How could they have afford to have had kids back then? Moreover, people have always been greedy. Yet birth rates have only started dropping more recently.

I would surmise it’s the opposite cause, people are wealthier now and so kids are less desirable because the opportunity cost is higher.

>How could they have afford to have had kids back then?

Most families had only one person working, and one available for childcare. Housing was dramatically cheaper. So was a university education. So was food.

And no - unregulated capitalistic greed has dramatically accelerated in the last few decades. It hasn't always been this way. Corporations are buying up everything so they can extract rent and using algorithms and regulatory control to extract every possible dime. Where before you might rent a small home from a landlord who would understand if you were laid off and had to skip a month or two (and who might not raise rents every year) now you have an apartment owned by equity using software to talk to all the other landlords and fix prices as high as possible who will file eviction if you're a minute late.

Only in the middle classes does opportunity cost come in. Today, the wealthiest and the poorest have beyond-replacement fertility. Race becomes a factor in America, but the only group of women with higher fertility in the middle class are foreign-born.

Then why more affluent younger people have no plan to have kids? The under 35 who have a partner at my work are just planning their next trip. They don't want to hear anything about kids and their constraints.

They will give you reasons like over population, environnemental collapse etc... I think they are very self centered and don't want to make sacrifices

Costs are out of control. I know families where both parents were big tech SWEs and one quit their job because losing that huge salary was about the same cost as childcare.

Exactly. How do we expect parents with multiple lower income jobs to manage this at all. We don’t have universal childcare and Reaganites fucked us with the nuclear family bullshit.

> think they are very self centered and don't want to make sacrifices

How dare they not want to spend decades doing something they don't want at enormous personal and financial cost just to keep your favorite economic pyramid scheme running. So selfish.

Here's an idea: if you want kids so much, pay for them. Provide universal healthcare, childcare, education. Provide food stamps for everyone under 18. Put your money where your mouth is.

If those people expect to continue to live on after they retire, then all the products and services they rely on in that stage of life will be performed by the children of their peers, the ones who had them at enormous personal and financial cost. They are externalizing the costs of there being people to make the economy work in their old age to others so they can take more trips. In fairness, if you don't have kids you should have to pay higher taxes (enormously higher in fact to get close to making up the difference). Those taxes get re-directed to childcare for those that need it. Fair?

> if you don't have kids you should have to pay higher taxes

We do actually have this today in the US through policies like the earned income tax credit, child/dependent care tax credit, and child tax credit, which primarily reduce taxes for people with children (and therefore put a relatively higher tax burden on childless people).

There’s also a large tax credit for adoption costs. I wonder if GP comment would result in more births, or something like H1B arrangements for personal tax reasons.

As a US citizen, why on earth would I bring a new innocent child into this modern capitalist christian nationalist hellscape? We just had to have a judge force the government to fund food stamps for another month for fucks sake. I would be more likely to adopt because the child already exists and needs love and care.

We adopted. So many things today are in opposition to Christ’s teachings. The politicization of helping the poor. The individual reaction to problems by wanting so much wealth that those problems don’t apply to me.

Adoption is costly but for now there’s a tax credit. And I suspect every company would like to have the kind of employee who adopts. Some will pay large proportions of the cost, but not the median employer.

That's part of the problem, but the trend is universal, so it's not only that. I think that reduction of human population is good, but we need to rethink our economic models entirely, which nobody is doing, at least not seriously enough

Then countries with even more greedy elites would have even lower rates, which is not the case.

A few examples of fertility rates (higher is better, 2023 data):

  Sweden: 1.45
  US: 1.62
  Kenya: 3.21

You’re not making the point you think you’re making

> Phrase things with the blame assigned accordingly. Your phrasing blames people for not becoming parents. A more accurate phrasing is '....because their wealthy elites are so greedy they make having children unaffordable'

OP has identified the problem more accurately than you have, though.

AI is a symptom, not a cause. We have to fill the labor gap with immigrants and AI because people are having fewer children.

Do you think modern institutions are less efficient at suppressing human greed than medieval ones? Obviously they are more efficient.

The problem you mention is not the wealthy elite, but rather the unproductive parasites, rich and poor. And this is a somewhat separate problem from the birth rate collapse. Indeed, it doesn't help the birth rate, but it's also not the main reason people aren't having children. The main reason is people wanting to have sex without having children, and we've given everyone the ability to do so with the birth control pill.

Technology has enabled greed and exploitation to increase exponentially. The ability to regulate it has been slashed at every opportunity - such as cutting funding to the IRS.

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