Comment by brutus1213 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brutus1213 | Hacker News Reader

I fear SK is a harbinger of what's to come in other developed western countries. Companies seem to follow each other in getting more out of workers. When jobs and career become the most important thing (for survival, professional satisfaction or lifestyle), then family life suffers. Even with superb (albeit costly) child care that I avail, my wife has to throttle down her career to put taking care of the kids first, while I prioritize income generation. I have to put considerable thought into how I spend quality time with my kids (including taking a risk that a delayed email response will have professional costs for me). But I feel far more fortunate than my wife (who has to pay a heavy toll forgoing her professional aspirations). Society needs to evolve to do better to support working parents and caregivers.

I think small scale entrepreneurship might be a solution to the current corp craziness. Also, need to ensure lifestyle creep doesn't occur. Easier said then done.

It's even worse when you look at the studies of child outcomes based on if their mother stayed with them during their childhood vs working/daycare.

It is without doubt beneficial for children to have their mother with them in early childhood. This work over all else society is harming the next generation and ripping new mothers away from their babies a few weeks/months after birth.

The problem will solve itself; political leanings are heritable and in the past couple decades conservative birthrates are significantly higher than liberal birthrates, so eventually the genes that incline people towards prioritising work over family will be bred out.

I have a similar theory, that desire to procreate is heritable, in a way that was previously inextricable from desire to have sex. With easy birth control, those desires can now be fulfilled separately. We're still working through the mass die-off of the genes that mostly just wanted the sex half of the equation.

In a few generations, most everyone alive will be the progeny of people who really wanted children. This is probably heritable and will probably stabilize birth rates.

Maybe. I think the difficulty is that in a place like Korea, the dependency ratio will become extremely high, and so taxes will have to go up sharply. Most voters will be retired and so will vote for the few young people to pay them. This will lead the young people to emigrate unless they’re prevented from doing so.

I think many if not most people do that because they don't feel they have any other realistic choice.

I 100% believe that developed nations need to address this with social policy. It would be popular with nearly everyone.

> I think small scale entrepreneurship might be a solution to the current corp craziness.

That would mean breaking up big tech and prohibiting firms above a certain size from buying competitors.

Otherwise, there're huge swaths of the economy that used to be accessible to entrepreneurs that now aren't economically viable (without an attached unrelated business pumping in cash).

in at least some european companies, contacting employees during off hours is already illegal.

what we need is better protection for employees, and especially for parents.

in my vision childcare times are counted towards pension times. stay at home times are required to be taken by both parents equally, so that their careers are affected equally and there is no question on who has to throttle their career because it's both.

that still leaves a career difference between those who have children and those who don't. not sure what to do about that other than serious tax benefits for every child. in germany you get 250euro per month per child in cash until the child is grown up. unconditionally. that's a start, but may not be enough. somehow the income difference needs to be made up. not having children should simply not have benefits in terms of income and career.

just throwing out ideas here: how about preferential hiring for parents? but that's difficult to enforce. same goes for promotion.

actually, with automation taking over jobs maybe the simplest solution to equalize career chances is to reduce everyones working hours. if working time is limited to 20 or at the most 30 hours per week, then childless people get more free time, but parents get more time for their children without having to throttle their careers.

Could you share, if only for reference and comparison, where you live? I'm assuming, because of the missing work/life balance, that you live in the US?

It always seemed crazy to me that there still are societies and countries out there not offering more support to new parents, and even existing parents. It's literally what makes the country survive long-term, and without new children, you'll obviously end up in stagnation. So why not make it really easy and worry-free?

The way the US supports parents is by having an economy that produces high-paying jobs for most young adults willing to work hard.

Since the fertility rate in the US is significantly higher than the rate in the Western Europe, I conclude that this works pretty well.

Seems to be working so well all those demographic numbers are going up and to the right! That correlation between wealth and number of children is staggering it's almost causal if only I could prove it. Let's double down on it!

> having an economy that produces high-paying jobs for most young adults willing to work hard

I was gonna check how it looks like right now in the US, but seems the government been unable to publish official reports about employment for some reason, so hard to know exactly, but suddenly avoiding to release official reports usually isn't a signal that things are going great.

3rd parties seems to indicate the progress of "producing high-paying jobs" isn't going all so well:

> Wednesday’s decision was justified primarily by weakening conditions in the job market. Hiring has slowed markedly since the summer, while unemployment has ticked up and businesses across industries have begun signaling greater caution

> Private-sector signals have flashed more urgency. ADP’s November report showed employers shedding a net 32,000 jobs, the sharpest decline in more than two years

> hiring remained stuck at 3.2%, consistent with what economists and Powell himself have called a “low hire, low fire” labor market. Companies aren’t slashing staff outright—but they aren’t expanding either. That’s enough to worry economists.

https://fortune.com/2025/12/10/fed-cuts-rate-december-hawkis...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Natalism/comments/1bwxsuj/total_us_...

It seems like $300k+ is where households feel comfortable having kids.

Also note that poor people have more kids than the middle, which makes sense. Every study has shown the same thing.

i think you guys might be overestimating how much income generation is needed. govt employees live fine.

TFR of my town of million people with $3k percapita income is 1.5

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