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Comment by dachworker | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm weird, but does anyone else have worries about what future their prospective children would inherit? In particular things that worry me: 1. the growing geopolitcal turmoil which is likely to eventually descend into a great war of sorts, the footage coming out of Ukraine is horrifying, 2. climate change isn't going to be dealt with and again, lots of violence will ensure because of that, almost certainly, 3. not sure what to think about AGI, but I'm not entirely dismissive and at best it seems like a dual use technology, 4. a GATTACA-type future where the super rich figure out a way to birth super humans with perfect genetics and top 0.001% IQs. All of those make the future look so unappealing.

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I think kids born now will inherit a much better world than in the past.

What sort of world did a child born in Europe in 1900 or 1930 inherit? What about a black child born in the US in 1950, or South Africa in 1960? What about a child born in China in 1950 or (what is now) Bangladesh in 1960 or Sri Lanka in 1970? Their children and grand children will have a much better life.

My grandparents were all born in Europe between the two world wars. Actually, despite humble origins they all had a fairly prosperous life. Even though I have much more education than they did, I don't think I can ever achieve the same level of prosperity as they had.

Like, I certainly cannot afford a family of 12 children. Nor can I afford to buy the amount of land that they acquired, and certainly not by working the same kind of jobs they did.

The poorest people have the most children, and they are not starving; they're usually obese. What has changed is that your definition of "afford children" has come to encompass a vast amount of requirements that your grandparents did not have.

And if you don’t provide those requirements, you risk jail time and/or having the kids removed from your care.

Not really. The only expense that could lead to that is child care, so I'll assume you mean leaving preteens home alone as a nosy neighbor calls CPS. First of all that doesn't really happen and it's national news when it does. Second of all at least a few states have passed laws enshrining children's freedom.

But usually the "requirements" that get parents to spend too much money are entirely optional things, of which a few are college tuition, a car for the child, camps, tutors, music lessons, vacations abroad, innumerable toys, iPads, etc etc

This is not what average people are talking about when they say it’s unaffordable. Top 10% of incomes, sure.

The median household income is under $80k, while median yearly housing cost is around $25k, food expenses for a family of 4 are $12k-$19k, median utility costs around $4k, health insurance $27k (about to go up), and median cost of vehicle ownership is $12k. Yearly figures. That’s sharing one car between both working parents and we’re using median numbers here, and the median person doesn’t live in a place with great public transit options. Already that leaves almost nothing to deal with emergencies, saving in case a parent loses their job, and miscellaneous expenses like school books/supplies and clothing. And perhaps contributing to elder care for 1-4 grandparents.

Also, this is just the median; people in the lower 50% are much worse off, except for those poor enough to receive substantial aid. And don’t forget that young people typically have lower incomes.

You really don’t want half of your society to decide that pets are cheaper, unless you want to end up with an inverted population pyramid and eventual collapse, or unlimited migration to replace lost workers (which creates its own problems).

But children don't add much marginal cost to those figures, except insurance. Housing stays the same (no you don't need a bigger house), food goes up slightly (12-19k for 4 people is absurdly luxurious), utilities barely increase, you don't buy them a car, clothing can be had at goodwill or handed down, etc etc. I think maybe you don't understand what little the median family had materially in 1940. They were not buying their six kids clothes from Gap or going out to eat even monthly. They were in very small homes with very cheap clothes and the wife cooked every meal from plain cheap ingredients. They didn't have phone plans or Internet bills or take 20 minute showers.

I was using USDA figures for median food costs, do you have a better source? And I did not say to buy them a car, I was giving the median cost of single vehicle ownership for the whole family (which factors in purchasing, licensing, insuring, maintaining, and fueling the vehicle). These are median numbers.

This is not the 1940s:

Cheap homes are unavailable. Even single family homes are becoming unaffordable except in isolated areas without jobs. Housing costs, even apartments, have gone up enormously as a percentage of income and building/health codes don’t allow you to live in shanties.

You need a phone now for most jobs. People aren’t hiring you if you can’t be contacted except for bottom of the barrel work. You likely need internet if your job requires remote work and kids probably need it for homework.

People in the mid 1900s had single earner households and households or neighborhoods with extended family. That means more time for cooking, sewing and repairing clothes, and other housework. Work often wasn’t as far away, especially in working class neighborhoods, so you might not even need a car.

Besides all this, literally nobody is going to have kids if it requires going back to a 1940s standard of living. That’s society’s problem, if as an aggregate entity it cares about perpetuating itself. If nobody cares, fine, let it fall apart.

> I was using USDA figures for median food costs

Median people in the USA eat extremely lavishly. Your series of comments, to me, boils down to a complaint that you can't maintain this extreme luxury while having children. Yeah, nobody ever could. The time frame in which people were "able" to have a lot of children was the time when they weren't living such extravagant lives of consumption. So yeah if the complaint is "Why can't I afford a lifestyle that would make my grandparents blush with shame at its luxury, and have as many kids as them, wtf?!" then I'm not very sympathetic to it.

> 4. a GATTACA-type future where the super rich figure out a way to birth super humans with perfect genetics and top 0.001% IQs. All of those make the future look so unappealing.

If everything goes alright for them. The thing is that we don't know about knock-on effects and monkey paw results - we can switch this gene on, your child has IQ 190, but later parents will figure out that it has social intelligence of a rock. Or we can switch this gene on, your child is now able to compete with marathon runners, whoops heart attack at 32 years.

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