Comment by BugsJustFindMe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BugsJustFindMe | Hacker News Reader

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> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?

> The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.

Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.

You really need to interpret the comment you're replying to in the context of here and now, not 100 years ago before people had a choice about whether to get pregnant from sex. Doing otherwise is misleading.

Within the context of people having more choice about pregnancy, the critical remaining piece is that the world is economically and societally absolute shit for people to have children in. Women don't just have the option of entering the workforce, they increasingly need to because a dual income household is now the market expectation in relation to cost of living in developed cities and especially cost of living with children in developed cities. Not to mention the capitalist class war overtly amplifying economic disparity instead of reducing it. Not to mention the environment, climate, justice, and social wellness being gradually destroyed by plutocratic christofascists on a grand scale.

> Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.

TFR has been falling in the US since the 1800s, long before birth control.

TFR doesn't account for mortality which has also continuously fallen since then. If you're not adjusting for that, then you're looking at meaningless decontextualized numbers. Obviously if people want a certain number of children and the children keep dying then they're going to need to give birth more to get the right number of children. Birthing is not a useful measure on its own because pre-adulthood dead children lead to the same impact on population growth as no children in the first place.

I think your point is correct about the lack of optionality for women being in the workforce, but there are entire regions of the United States where it absolutely is optional. I live in one of them (Lynchburg, VA, which is filled with young evangelical Christian families that live in apartments and the mother stays at home) and my coworkers live in another (Salt Lake City, Utah which also has a ton of young moms staying at home).

I'm not foolish enough to think it's remotely possible in all places, but I do think an element of this is humans in the 21st century demanding a standard of living that far exceeds what they wanted in the 1970s, especially when it comes to vacations, automobiles, houses, etc.

My wife and I raised my first son (born when i was 23) in a 1 bedroom apartment, and my second child was born right after we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Most of my colleagues were shocked that I "didn't have a REAL HOUSE TO RAISE THE KIDS IN!!!! GASP!!!". And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.

> And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.

I agree with this. I also believe that modern people have become substantially...hmmm...dumber about expenses like food? People think it's impossible to make delicious nutritious meals quickly and cheaply, but in fact it's actually very easy and you just need to actually consider it as being possible, and you need to be willing to spend 5-10 minutes of effort. It's appalling to me the number of people who think that cooking anything beyond boiling water is mysterious or who will argue that it's impossible to eat well on a budget by pointing exclusively at niche products that only exist to satisfy a drive for extreme novelty and ignoring staples.

Awww man, I agree with you sooooo much on the food portion.

My son is now 19 years old, and doing very well financially (he chose to join the Army). I taught him from a young age how to shop and cook on a budget, in a healthy fashion. Started with hard boiled eggs, beans and rice, chicken and broccoli. Those kinds of things.

I also taught him (by observing his teenage friends) to always always always refer to DoorDash as a "Burrito Taxi" to help mentally reinforce the utterly absurd level of luxury you are indulging in when you have a human being drive a 3500 pound vehicle to your home to bring you a single meal prepared by somebody else.

The number of people I encounter who struggle financially (including one of my sisters) who indulge in these practices is insane. Our culture has forgotten that eating at restaurants (at least in the West, unlike say Singapore) is historically an expensive luxury, due to our relatively high cost of labor.

Agree, as a kid in the 1970s we ate almost every meal at home, cooked by my mother. Mostly staples rice, potatoes, vegetables, some kind of meat. Restaurants were a rare treat for something like a birthday or if we were traveling. Fast food, the same. Very infrequent, like maybe a few times a year would we be able to talk my mom into getting a Happy Meal. Pretty much the same experience for all the kids I grew up with as far as I remember.

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