Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria | Hacker News Reader

Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria

nature.com

388 pointssurprisetalk319 comments

I run a company that have done over 200 similar studies for various NGOs and international organisations.

In the general case, with some exceptions, we have found that two types of interventions stand above all others in terms of long term positive economic impact:

1. Infrastructure projects - like building roads

2. Gender projects - projects furthering women's rights in some way

These projects are long-term sticky and do not rely on continuous funding. A paved road will remain paved even after the funding is gone, and will have a positive impact on the community for many decades. Roads allow children to go to school in neighbouring villages, and people to sell their goods in a market, use a bike or other vehicle where they otherwise would not be able to.

Working with local governments to improving the attitudes towards girls and women often has a major impact on the economic output of a community both because more people can contribute, but also because the types of products and services become more diverse. This type of project is also sticky, once attitudes or structural barriers disappear they don't tend to come back.

Education or sanitation initiatives can be hit or miss, where, once funding dries up, all that is left is a non functioning latrine or empty school building.

i have friends who did NGO aid work in Africa and they said their work developing potable water sources was often undone. build a village a clean watersource, a small dam or a well, and the rival next village over would get jealous, and some night they'd come over and destroy it. this was a couple decades ago.

That combined with the fact that there is no culture of maintaining things at a community level. People from first world countries come in and build bridges/wells/etc and then they break down due to misuse or just age and there is no effort to maintain them, due to the ingrained culture that's taught from birth.

The USA has spent billions of dollars in the last century on trying to help African countries, but all it's realistically really led to is just more people in need in Africa. What happens to all those people that have become dependant on the aid when the US economy crumbles and there is no more money to send overseas?

The HDI of African countries generally has gone up since the 90's (although not all countries):

https://statbase.org/datasets/indexes-and-ratings/human-deve...

Western people suggesting Africa is an un-helpable backwater has been common for decades. Bill Gates likes to talk about all the progress made, in fact.

I don't know if you've seen the USA in the past few decades but there's no culture of maintaining things at a community level here either. We've got infrastructure crumbling all over the place.

“My pothole takes a month to get fixed” != “My community has no power or drinking water”

In the US it's not potholes at issue, it's major bridges on crucial transport corridors being well past their use by dates and not being funded to replace / upgrade / maintain etc.

Please don't trivialise: https://infrastructurereportcard.org/ https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering...

You're correct that this inability to upkeep infrastructure is in stark contrast to those many places about the globe that have never had electricity or water delivered to home dwellings.

Such places typically get by generation to generation and look after what they do have .. and are often removed as communities from what outsiders seeking local community resources see as necessary to support the take over of local community and imposition of third party extraction.

You're correct that China hires US PMC's to secure the take over of generational land rights and build roads to export "water" in the form of agricultural products, etc. You're correct that local communities see unsecured roads as a resource of good gravel, etc to be used.

that is so evil.

Dumb question but are there NGOs that also hand them AK-47 and show them how to defend themselves? You can't give people infrastructure in a place with no effective government and expect them to defend it with pleasant words. If you have nice things you have to also have a plan to defend nice things by the sword, if you do not you're actually inviting terrible things to happen. A lot of these NGO seem to focus on holistic approach, education, female empowerment but that's worth exactly 0 (actually, less than zero) if your community cannot defend itself and the next bumfuck warlord can just stroll into your now rather interesting town and rape everyone, off the men, and take all the shit.

Also I don't understand why, but your comment defaults to collapsed. That is a shame as it's highly relevant.

I did an analysis of reconstruction spending in Afghanistan sometime around 2010, just looking at what money was spent where and what the impacts were. Infrastructure spending was the only thing that had any measurable return. Building roads in a given region reduced violence.

I don't really get how "gender projects" are more "sticky" than education. Isn't it, after all, a specific type of education?

Investing in women is much more effective because they are usually more attached to their community and can’t up and leave nearly as easily (both because they are the primary ones taking care of their own families)

“Gender projects” change cultural norms, and don’t have ongoing variable costs. They just need to be funded long enough for the effects to be percolated throughout the community and become sticky.

Education projects require ongoing variable costs such as teachers, books, resources, etc. Even if the results are effective in the short term, once funding dries up for the variable costs the community can’t sustain the ongoing investment and as the parent says, all you have left are the fixed cost artifacts like schoolhouses but no funding to sustain the variable costs necessary to utilize it as a schoolhouse.

Bad idea. Unneeded infrastructure isn't cheap to maintain. It would have to be a bike trail and it's still of limited usefulness when the internet exists and there is no infrastructure to maintain vehicles.

What Africa needs is sustained investment. That will drive people to leave villages, but Western investors (and governments) are as short sighted as they can possibly be.

To invest, you literally have to come in with a security team / truckload of weapons or someone is paid (Wagner / Chinese government) to do it. The invested operation has to be vertically integrated with hand-picked assets, human resources, and supply chain. Very difficult situation to do in a way where the general populace benefits. In cases like Zimbabwe where farmers came in and did sustained investment, it did work having the tribal populace as helping hands but as soon as the reigns were handed over they immediately gutted everything and it went to shit followed by hyperinflation and mass starvation.

Very difficult problem that no one has really figured out. Kenya and Rwanda some of the more interesting leading edges in sub-saharan mainland africa as far as economics are looking.

The West has a pathological fear of being seen as neo colonial.

It's quite funny that in many African countries they still use infrastructure that was built in the days of colonialism.

Does #2 eventually tank birth rates though?

It seems to be the combination of both #1, #2 plus every tech bro billionaires attempts to "make the world a better place". An urban population full of disconnected people too mentally and financially worn out to procreate paradoxically appears to be our definition of success. What are we succeeding at? That, I haven't worked out.

That's the point. You will work to consume till you die or at least until they don't need you anymore

> Working with local governments to improving the attitudes towards girls and women

I'm genuinely curious about this. May I ask you how improving attitude is achieved?

Not OP, but I would personally say that it starts with improving behaviour through laws.

Once people stop becoming role models for poor behaviour then attitudes improve as the population sees them as equals.

See racial equality for similar examples. This is why the Conservative movements want to make sure they crack down on trans-rights early. If they let rules come in, then acceptance becomes mainstream.

A few years back there was an outcry in Germany about developmental aid funding bike paths in Peru.

Could this have been one of the most effective forms of aid?

Reading this, I can't help but feel like there is a weird correlation here going on.

It seems less specifically about the school and more about the support system and the safe place that this program gave to the girls.

It sounds like this was a program specifically built to target the reasons they were not staying in school in the first place. Which obviously is a good thing but just simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here.

That is an important distinction since the question to me remains if the numbers would continue without the program specifically in place.

Am I misunderstanding something here?

I think so. These girls still live with their family, it’s not like they’re in some cordoned off area where marriage if forbidden. It’s just a few hours of school every weekday.

Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.

I get that its not like they were sent to a boarding school or something.

But it does mention accelerated catch up programs just for them, assisting financially, and vocational training.

Which is clearly more than just "stayed in school". Meaning it is something that can't just be replicated by encouraging being in school but actively needing a program like this. Which is not a bad thing obviously, but it is important that the right lesson is taken out of this.

I think you may be reaching a bit for the "it's not this it's that" when it's obvious that a "get kids to stay in school" program is never "do exactly nothing besides make a kid be inside the school building reliably".

Every problem solved involves fixing dependencies.

Non-obvious for this guy me!

But if the issue fixed as "make it possible for girls to stay home until older" and paying the families would have had the same result as schooling, it's important to know that.

Education can be a good and still not be the fundamental cause (just like going to school where they provide breakfast and lunch may be good, but the reason you grow stronger isn't the classes, it's the food).

I'm ok with hearing "it's not this it's that" if there's an overcooked "it's not that it's this" narrative nearby, and there is: education was (and is!) aggressively pushed as a cure-all for job displacement and other ills by people doing labor arbitrage in the united states, it eventually turned out that wet sidewalks did not cause rain, and now there are a bunch of underemployed kids stuck with fake dreams and real loans and on the other side of the trade a bunch of rich boomers+billionaires whose brokerage accounts depend on continuing the hustle. Given that we have seen the exact education-cures-all narrative exploited to disastrous consequence in the United States, we should absolutely be asking the question "is education the active ingredient" to avoid exporting the same stupid mistake to others.

America has fairly low unemployment rates. Yes, schools are expensive and educational debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. But, you know, unemployment rates are the worst for people with low or no education.

I didn't say the problem in America was high unemployment, I said the problem was:

> underemployed kids stuck with fake dreams and real loans

Please respond to the correct argument I made, not the incorrect argument you wish I had made.

> Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.

The way this is phrased makes it seem like the children are making the choice to marry.

Many traditional cultures have a communitarian approach to decision-making. What an individual wants is often a small part of the equation, especially for girls and women.

That doesn’t sit well for a western individualist mindset but… it happens there too. Parental pressure in particular is the conduit for broader social norms.

I'm here to make somebody feel old: The Graduate (1967) came out almost 60 years ago. I wonder how long the norms portrayed in that film persisted or have evolved since then.

They nailed the plastics thing.

I had no idea where you got your interpretation from, then I realized it was lack of interpretation.

the social pressure is traditional society on families, and then elders in families exert significant pressure on younger dependents, not to mention the strong economic pressure of nonproductive mouths to feed in circumstances without significant surpluses. It's exactly how westerners lived a century ago so it should not appear mysterious.

Can offer one read:

> Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.

“Basically if you are a kid your friends/family will want you to get married if your friends/family notice you are unemployed/not in school/etc.”

(The desires of the kid were not referenced.)

Or, potentially, you have less time to marry (among other things) when you go to school?

No, it's not a scheduling conflict. A child getting married is entirely about if the parents choose to force that child to be married or not. They were less motivated to marry the child, if the child was going to school, because an education is an alternative path to gain moneys, which is the parents primary motive. It's interesting how disgusting greed like this is wrapped in words, like "culture" that try to make it ok. It's a repugnant behavior, which is why there was effort to correct it, and success in that is why we're reading about it here.

A parent's primary motive is not to gain money, much less to gain money by exploiting their child.

You call it greed but in a lot of these places it's necessity. Now that necessity might partially be the result of other people's greed but that's a whole other conversation about poverty.

Their motive is to provide financial and social security for their child so that their child won’t be out in the streets if something happens to them. That’s not greed. That’s normal basic universal care for offspring that all humans have.

By forced marriage and rape. Great deal! And no, it's not just for the sake of the child, in most cases. I implore you to look into this more.

Dramatics and stretching of definitions will only weaken your case.

Again, I strongly implore you to look into this more [1][2]. There are no dramatics or stretching of definitions here (unless you're one that thinks children can consent to sex). There's a reason this effort took place, and why its success is being celebrated.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11545136/

[2] https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/en/learning-resources/child-m...

Lol. Dramatics and accusation and you expect people to take you seriously… All this does is pour serious doubt over the veracity of the links you posted.

not familiar with nigera perse but in most places with child marriage, the marriage is the reason girls drop out of school.

other then that often its financial reasons. they will put boys to school because those are classically expected to take care of the family while girl will be married off to some guy. (ofc this is changing in a lot of places bits its the historical reasons afaik)

I actually knew someone who worked in rural development where this was an issue (and to his orgs credit reduced child marriage rates a lot).

Both happen at the same time, it's not one causes the other or smth like that. When families struggle with money, marrying girls off reduces their costs. Married boys remain with the family and actually bring someone new into the household, increasing costs or keeping stable if the boy works. Even in cultures where women pay dowries to marry, the ROI could be worth it if you reduce household costs every year going forward and your manual labor work has little chance of growing your income significantly.

Putting a kid through, even free school, costs money and at rural poverty levels in the Global South it's similar to a huge car payment one can't afford. Marrying the kids off is like ending that payment (if they go to live with another family which only girls do)

> Am I misunderstanding ...

NO. I've seen quite a few things, across many cultures, pointing out that girls being any combination of low-value, low-status, and unsupported leads to them ending up as "cheap bodies".

That includes several American women friends, whose life stories include getting married at age 17-ish - because, with the situations in their own families, that really looked like their least-bad option.

Cant you still marry a child in some american states? Isn't this a bit like the pot calling the kettle black?

not if you also condemn the American states that allow that...

Yes; it's currently legal in 34 US States. Here are the 16 that ban the practice: Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon, and Missouri.

In Nigeria, nearly 40% of all girls are wed by 18 between 2000 and 2019 (https://childmarriagedata.org/country-profiles/nigeria/#comp...), whereas there were a total of less than 300K American girls in child marriages between 2000 and 2018.

Pretty much "yes" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_Sta...

I'd guess your pot/kettle comment is something nationalist/political? My prior comment was trying to say it's universal, not some "country X is good/bad" dig.

See garciasn's sibling comment to yours.

Degree matters. A lot. Saying "it's universal" because there is some frequency everywhere is misleading. There are many country Xs that absolutely deserve to be called out as bad, because they are relatively so much worse than the best countries, or even the average ones.

My intent: "it's universal" means the correlation between girls being low-value and child marriages is universal.

Your seeming reading: "it's universal" means child marriage occurs in every country...but that is a huge tactical mistake to say, because it gets in the way of us condemning countries where the problem is much worse than in ours.

My concern is for the girls, not for scoring point for condemning countries. To actually help the girls, the article seems to provide a proven solution. So let's do more of what works.

Vs. what is the track record for major non-aligned nations (like Nigeria) implementing progressive social reforms at scale, in response to moral condemnation by foreigners? That I've heard of, not good.

I agree scolding generally isn't effective, especially when the scolding party has no power to enforce rules.

At the same time, I see no reason not to make the condemnation. It's not being made to effect change, but reaffirm our own norms which, in this specific case, I believe are better, and we shouldn't avoid saying so and call that enlightened. I think it's a form of cowardice.

And in this connected age, perhaps a Nigerian girl could take some hope, or energy, or solace knowing that much of the world does think the way she is treated is wrong, and not normal, and that her intuition to that effect has grounding, despite the powerful local norms she finds herself faced with.

It isn’t just about the letter of the law, it is also about judicial attitudes-two countries can have the same law on paper, but with radically different applications in practice, to the point that it isn’t really the same law.

Yes, in many US states, someone under 18 can legally marry with the permission of a judge. And if the applicant is a pregnant 17 year old who wishes to marry her 17 year old boyfriend so their child isn’t “born out of wedlock”, a lot of judges will say “yes”. But if the applicant is a father who says “I think my 12 year old daughter is old enough to get married, and I found her a husband I like”, no way in hell is any American judge approving that, even if the letter of the law says they could.

But in some other countries, there are judges who would be happy to give that marriage official permission.

I'm not from the US so excuse my ignorance, but if law says it's legal, how is it possible that the judge doesn't grant it? Wouldn't that make it illegal for the judge to do so?

Judges are way too busy to officiate most marriages in the US.

Basically any adult can officiate a marriage, then its just a matter of filing the right paperwork with the county clerk - that is what constitutes the legal/civil marriage in the US.

There was the famous case of the clerk in a county in Kentucky refusing to certify same-sex marriages a few years back.

There is also something called "common law" marriages where the state considers you married even if you didn't file the proper paperwork, but were co-habitating and especially if you had children. But this is a dying practice and only recognized by a few states / territories (ironically Washington D.C. is one of them ...)

The law usually says it can be done but needs permission from a judge. This is like saying that an after-school activity can be done for children but needs permission from the parent. That doesn't mean the parent must give permission.

The law isn't "child marriage is always legal" but "child marriage is allowed in specific cases with a judges consent" basically. They usually need to be given a reason to make an exception

> They usually need to be given a reason to make an exception

Devils advocate here, but what excuse could there possibly be to allow a 12 year old to get married?

it's mostly 16-17 year olds getting married to men (sometimes arranged by the family, sometimes a boyfriend who's only a little older). I think in the past a pregnancy would cause it?

the rare younger cases are mostly for the reason you might think, leaning on the parents wanting it. You'd hope the judge would say no but there's religious communities that still support it.

> the rare younger cases are mostly for the reason you might think, leaning on the parents wanting it

Parents want their 12 year old to marry an adult? We don't have this in Europe, religious or not.

> simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here

> Am I misunderstanding something here?

"Stayed in school" is a clear, binary condition that's easily measured and has obvious benefits to everyone because everyone is at least a little educated.

If I ask you "is your house temperature livable?" and you say "the thermometer says 20", answered. You didn't say "well, I purchased and installed a heat pump and duct distribution system capable of forcing warmed air to be distributed to the remainder of the house, which keeps the temperature in a habitable range, then ensured power supply remains connected and kept it on" and say I didn't really explain the important part.

Except that your example is a simple conversation vs explaining the outcome of a study/program. That immediately requires more information to actually convey what did and did not happen.

For example, I could read the actual details on this and possibly determine that they replace school with some other (cheaper) program that just keeps the girls busy.

Or I could determine that all we really need to do is launch an outreach marketing program encouraging that girls stay in school and ignore all of the other support that was given.

One of those is supported by the headline and one is supported by the lack of information about what actually helped.

If by your example there was a study on how we made a previously unlivable area, suitable for humans in their homes but all it said was "well the temperature is X" than you would have questions on how exactly that was achieved.

Same with living in space, if NASA told us that the way astronauts are living on the space station with "well there is oxygen" we wouldn't accept that because there is obviously more going on.

Wanting to actually know what the full picture is allows us to reproduce it.

> Wanting to actually know what the full picture is allows us to reproduce it.

That's why there's an article, with text beyond the headline.

> Am I misunderstanding something here?

No, you are right - especially in Northern Nigeria.

Northern Nigeria is in the midst of a protracted Islamist insurgency by Al Qaeda and ISIS where jihadis have often targeted government institutions like schools and kidnapped and subsequently assaulted and trafficked female students, such as in Chibok [0], Papiri [1], and Kebbi [2].

Marriage is viewed from an economic and safety lens in these kinds of communities - if education can provide both then a girl can continue to be educated. If not, marriage is the easiest solution.

This Pathways program had added security monitoring that reduced the risk of girls potentially being made a "war bride" (ie. sex slave) by a jihadist, and never to see their family again, which incentivized families to continue to support their daughters education instead of deciding to marry them off early.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibok_schoolgirls_kidnapping

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w7621xypyo

[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/world/africa/nigeria-scho...

Yes this is the classical correlation vs causation situation.

This is not a one-off study. There is a long record of similar studies showing that the number of years of education a girl receives delays marriage, and while longer schooling delays marriage longer, it is not just because girls are busy. Schools inherently provide female social support, and education provides increased self-reliance.

This is pretty easy to reason through: if a girl knows nothing about the world, a safe place for her to be is with someone who knows more. If a girl knows how to function in the world on par with a boy/man, or at least has visibility into a future where she can, there is no longer that fear/dependence cycle locked in.

eg How Much Education Is Needed to Delay Women's Age at Marriage and First Pregnancy? https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/...

The power of education to end child marriage - UNICEF DATA https://data.unicef.org/resources/child-marriage-and-educati...

Indeed, we know this, "educate girls to fix society", already for many years. The other "societal fix we know for year to work" is reducing economic inequality.

https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_ine...

I suspect there would be broad agreement across the political spectrum that more education means later marriage and later first pregnancy. The disagreement would mostly be over whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Smaller families, better education level of the next gen, ...

But yeah, if you are afraid of a war you want your group to be big, uneducated, easy to manipulate and expendable.

Complication from pregnancy is the leading cause of death in 15-19 year old girls, and second in 10-14, only because many of them are not yet able to conceive. We have excellent data on this.

Later marriage/first pregnancy is clearly a good thing.

https://www.who.int/health-topics/adolescent-health/pregnanc...

I completely agree, but there's a decent chunk of people out there who don't.

When I looked up causes of death in Nigeria, malaria blew away anything maternal related[]. Not that I would want to die of either.

Another big one was HIV/AIDS. I guess it depends on cultural factors whether early marriage might reduce the number of partners that could introduce HIV/aids. If non-married people are less monogamous it's conceivable the increased risk of HIV/AIDS could overpower the risks of whatever additional childbirth is associated with marriage.

Also note pollution was one of the bigger risks present in Nigeria. So as people get educated to go slave away in a dirty factory (or a city full of them where educated people work) it might actually be worse for their health than staying at home and marrying into some pastoral herding tribe or something.

[] https://ourworldindata.org/profile/health/nigeria

And more roads means more pollution. It is questionable if the answer is “make everyone dependent on cars”, although doing so obviously improves some outcomes.

Lets stop pretending there is an agreement that pain or harm to girls matters.

Sure, but this provides an argument for postponing marriage (and educating women) at least a little even if you want to coldly maximize birthrate with no regards to their feelings.

It's clear to you but that's still a value judgement. It's not as clear if you discount female autonomy.

I take your meaning but I don't agree it is only a value judgement. It is also an evolutionary and social force.

The mother and baby are more likely to die. I don't think wanting to prevent that is a value judgement.

No of course it isn't nobody suggested it was.

The value judgement is saying the changes you want are worth doing because they might reduce it. Social and personal choices are weighed all the time that include risks to lives, suggesting something that might reduce risk does not end the debate.

We would generally want to prevent people dying in horrible aviation disasters too, we could do that by ceasing non essential air travel.

> We would generally want to prevent people dying in horrible aviation disasters too, we could do that by ceasing non essential air travel.

Equating educating girls to an aviation disaster has to be a new low.

This inflammatory comparison does nothing to improve the level of civil dialog on HN.

Argument by absurdity is a well known and to some well regarded rhetorical technique.

It makes you at least agree that there is a line somewhere, and then you can go on to decide where to draw it.

> Equating educating girls to an aviation disaster

To be clear, that is an unfounded accusation that you just now fabricated.

> This inflammatory comparison does nothing to improve the level of civil dialog on HN.

Your disgusting lies and fake pearl clutching are the problem here.

Death being bad is a value judgement.

If the value that the “other side” is espousing is that “it’s okay for girls to die giving birth”, well, we can safely discount that as a valid position to hold in modern society.

Some things are just absolutely bad.

I believe nothing is *absolutely bad* in modern society.

For example, the best way to stop pregnancy-related deaths is to forcely termination any high-risk pregnancy regardless of the pregnant woman's own wishes. But seems no one would agree.

Karma 1 account posting very inflammatory content?

Even if true, your "leading cause of death" statement is meaningless as young women are not generally going to die from any other cause. If you "solve" teenage pregnancy, it might well become swallowing food without chewing.

I bet pregnancy is not the "leading cause of death" among 80yo women. That must be the best age to start having children.

Anyways, I couldn't find the reference to your statement by following the link but I found that risk of pre–eclampsia(only clearly stated risk to the mother) and lower birth weight is higher than in 20–24 —no mention of other age ranges.

The report mentions that adolescent childbirth is correlated with low socio–economic status and education. Did they control for that when doing the risk assessment? It is not clear.

No mention of genetic risk to the offspring. No mention of the lives of the offspring that were "terminated" in the making of the non–pregnancy statistics.

Just some vague "abuse" statements that do not include figures for abuse of non–female young people.

WHO, indeed.

I also was curious about this so I did some research.

It looks like age 20 to 34 has the lowest mortality rate. Older or younger than that has higher mortality.

And since 14 to 18 as a cohort are all minors, it’s completely reasonable that parents and society in general discourages this activity.

Taking risks at 35 and 14 are treated differently.

Understandably so.

But what about 18 and 33?

Beyond rare risk of death to the mother, I think the health of the child to be born and the potential for younger siblings is an important consideration since we are talking about reproduction.

In Europe, marriage and pregnancies below 18 were rare and people did use to average 21 before "female education" as well but other cultures differed and differ and I don't know to what extent it is appropriate to have "global" organizations mess with their reproductive lives from a Western perspective whether it has 1820s views or 2020s views.

I picked 14 and 35 for good reason. Both have a higher chance of mortality in pregnancy as a cohort.

Also 14 is relevant for the child marriage article, which is the current context.

18 year olds are not relevant to child marriage.

They are included in the statistics for "high risk" adolescent pregnancy in gp's reference which I take as a condemnation of both adult and minor teenage pregnancies and pregnancies in general.

The gender gap in compassion is always surprising. There is never “educate boys to fix society”. The argument is as follows: “But girls get raped, so we need to save them” “Who rapes girls?” “Boys” “What opportunities do they have?” “Drugs, army, and the street” “Wouldn’t they too deserve to be given care, notably the care that was too given to girls?” “No, [various reasons]” “But don’t you care that girls get raped by boys?” “Yes” “So what do you do?” “Take care of the girls”.

Males want to attract females and get married. They way they can do this is by achieving money/power. If education is profitable and possible, then executing it takes care of itself. If it's not possible, well it was a moot cause anyway unless some outsider will come in and help.

Females are valuable just for their ... personal assets ... so bootstrapping is a little harder because they have intrinsic value they can fall back on (someone is going to get angry at me for saying that, but it's just the way it is). If I can just marry a rich man I might be okay with that, or whoever makes the decisions for me might be okay with that. You have to get someone to come in and force enough of them to feel like they're a failure for not getting an education and then eventually they'll socially reinforce it themselves without further outside influence.

I believe this is why it's much higher yield for the enlightened outsider to come in and declare their moral and intellectual superiority and tell the females they are losers (or less happy, or less independent, whatever the politically correct terminology is used nowadays) for not getting an education, and get (read: bribe) their families to put them into it.

Wild comment.

> If I can just marry a rich man I might be okay with that, or whoever makes the decisions for me might be okay with that

Fyi, “just marry” incorporates a lot of things would disqualify the use of the term “just”. The least of which is pregnancy and the risks thereof, especially in these poorer societies without healthcare.

You say this as if you are providing new information. I suspect >99% of the Hacker News population, including the commenter above you, already knows this.

> Females are valuable just for their ... personal assets ...

Women can pretty much do anything men can do. How is a wealthy, financially successful woman less valuable than a man?

Where exactly was that stated or implied?

How do you interpret,

"Females are valuable just for their ... personal assets ..."

As in, women are valued just for having a womb. Men are not valued just for having a penis, or for having bigger muscles, or for being taller, unless they will use those assets on their person to go do something for someone else.

I do not interpret it, as you seem to, to mean, "the only valuable thing about women are their bodies." I do not see how you could come to such an interpretation, unless you are pattern matching the redpill memes you see in the other user's comment and extending that to, "(s)he must believe this, if there is anything remotely related to redpill in the comment".

I'll play this out...

Every human is equally valuable in the moral sense.

But value is subjective when we are talking about relationships and we can only generalize about this value.

High income women are more valuable to low income men.

High income men already have money. They value other attributes.

And this is the paradox successful women can face. Their success doesn’t attract the mates they desire, quite the opposite. And worse, they were never told that. They were told the opposite.

I've been told men are intimidated by successful women my whole life. Women aren't being tricked into having careers.

The whole framing of "women are only valuable for their personal assets" only makes sense from the perspective of a certain kind of man. My whole point is that this is entirely subjective. People talk about it like it's the natural state of things but it's a cultural belief.

Successful men are not intimidated by successful women, they just don't desire them (for their success)...in general.

The intimidation comes into play when men are put at an income disadvantage. Women also don't find men who make less than them desirable (in general). So it's a double wammy.

A single mutli-millionaire guy is not going to be impressed by a woman who works 50 hrs a week and makes $400k.

He would rather someone available to take care of his needs while he can take care of the financial needs.

This is the opposite of what successful females want.

> A single mutli-millionaire guy is not going to be impressed by a woman who works 50 hrs a week and makes $400k

Sure he's impressed.

People date/marry people from their caste/social circle. You want your partner to fit smoothly into your existing life which means having a similar upbringing and career trajectory.

The work vs take care of needs is a false dichotomy. The person that'll 'take care of your needs' is the person you are on the same page with - assuming you're looking for a long term partnership, rather than the equivalent of a prostitute.

Sounds nice, now imagine the dynamics are in rural Nigeria and 10-15% of kids shit themselves to death or die of malaria before they reach adulthood. Your parents are looking at some men and some are rich, others are thoughtful, others are both. Having a funny thoughtful man is nice but first and foremost you want good water and food so your kids aren't shitting themselves to death before they reach adulthood like what happened to 1/7th of your family. Probably going to want a man that can provide for you and buy nice clean food and one of the cleaner wells / bottled water sources more than you want someone in the same equally positioned caste that 'just gets you' or makes you laugh or whatever. Also nice if he's a bit powerful so that the next time the cattle raids happen, his 10 cousins show up with their muskets or machetes. If polygamy is allowed in this region, you might even prefer to be the second wife of that rich/powerful man over being the first wife of someone in your own caste.

The data in general shows women exhibit relative hypergamy. This makes sense as they have a higher reproductive cost and investment at the time of birth, and probably even thereafter.

> My whole point is that this is entirely subjective

No.

This 'entirely subjective' perspective only makes sense from a certain kind of human. I call them below 130 IQ human personally.

Right, no man has ever attracted a woman by displaying pro-social attributes.

> Females are valuable just for their ... personal assets.

2018 called and they want their red pill back.

——

When’s your book coming out? I’m dying to learn more about “the way it is”.

——

P.S. I say this with full sincerity: If you are open to advice, try reading “Models: Attract Women Through Honest”. It will expand your mind.

It was recommended to me by a friend who managed to un-redpill himself.

What? You think it is unfair that when boys go to school and girls don't, people target girls for help attending school? Twisted.

Yes - it's correlation from the factors you mentioned.

Reminds me of a uni project I did.

Using official Kenyan government statistics (back when Open Data was en vogue) for school attendance and access to sanitation, we tried to find out whether there's a correlation between school attendance of kids and their access to different types of sanitation (ranging from "flush toilet connected to main sewer" to "out in the bush"). We titled the project "Happy Butts, Happy Pupils". [0]

Learning 1: Districts with better sanitation have higher school attendance.

Learning 2: "VIP latrine" is a very funny and (unintentionally?) fitting name.

[0] TL;DR for anyone interested: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y5szIPCOnL4pyu67wu1MTRw8KSA...

My thoughts exactly. I think it’s less that more years of education causes child marriages to fall, and more that changing the environment that these kids are raised in leads to more education and to fewer child marriages.

You might think “why does it matter?”, but if you’ve drawn the wrong lesson, you’re setting up millions of dollars in failed investments in just building schools and sending teachers into them, which won’t have the affect you expect, and that will fail to improve the lives you thought you would improve.

Are people just riffing off the headline, the subheading and the first sentence of this page, is the full paper open access, or has anyone read the more substantial policy brief associated with the study [0]?

That's not to say that there's nothing of value being discussed here without the last two resources, but a URL swap may be helpful. The brief has a list of freely available references for further consideration.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00720-8

[0a] (PDF): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00720-8.pdf

Thanks - we'll put those links in the toptext as well.

Edit: actually, since the submitted link (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00796-2) is paywalled, I've put your link at the top and moved the other to the toptext.

This kind of data was shown by late Hans Rosling and his foundation Gapminder¹. He gave a Ted talk² about similar subjects as well, and I find him an excellent lecturer.

¹ https://www.gapminder.org/

² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

Unsurprising. If you have nothing else to do with yourself, marriage is kind of the natural thing to look toward. (Besides, for poor families, it reduces the number of mouths you have to feed, though school doesn't make that cheaper, so it isn't the primary cause.) School occupies your time and produces a rationale for not marrying.

In the West, education and then career advancement (and perhaps a pointless desire to "play the field") are reasons for postponing marriage...which has only produced demographic decline. (We ought to recognize human biology and take that as an immutable given, and then structure social practices around it instead of willfully engaging in Procrustean hacks and customs. This would counter demographic decline, because the fix is in essence simple: start having children at a younger age. Everything else should be built around this.)

I think that birth rates also drop when girls and women are educated. I would like to see such education AND lotsa child support programs and credits. I.e. I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world

Birth rates would also improve when boys and men are educated. Both genders need education and child support programs. Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child. They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.

Governments around the world would benefit their society by investing in family planning, family support (esp. child care) to enable parents to work and provide for their family.

An educated and healthy populace (from infant to old age) benefits everyone.

"Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child. They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body."

This will only reduce birth rates. I have two kids and it's hard. I would still have them if I knew just how hard it would be (especially during winter, when everyone is sick).

There are also many men that just don't care if they have a child, what it does to a woman's body. This won't change with more education.

So, the solution is to... not provide education? The logic doesn't make sense. You say this yourself: "I would still have them if I knew just how hard it would be"

If it reduces birth rates, that's not due to education alone. That's due to a lack of investment by governments to support those families.

You should know this with two kids. Any help is better than no help. Women want to work. Women want to go to school. That's what this topic is about.

"That's due to a lack of investment by governments to support those families."

Please show the evidence for this being true. Birthrates are low even in countries that provide a lot of support.

No country provides a lot of support. Some countries provide more but inevitably if you poll people they’ll mention that they mention significant financial deterrents, not to mention things like climate change, all of which are valid. People only need one of them to be true to decide to have fewer children, while society needs to help address all of them.

For example, if your government provides housing and childcare support—and say that’s the unicorn where those are consistently available, high quality, and cover the full cost—but still culturally tends to mommy-track careers into dead ends, despite doing those other things well you are going to have a lot of women decide not to risk multiple decades of lifetime earnings.

"No country provides a lot of support."

The evidence suggests this is not true. The rest of your comment points to non-financial issues.

https://www.newsweek.com/norway-birth-rate-fertility-rate-pa...

Yes, support does not have to be financial. If you read the entire article you posted note the experts quoted made the same point: opportunity cost is real. Career impact is real. The shift to getting educated and established in a career is real.

Societies have to address many different sources of no because the only reason rates used to be higher in the past was women not having a choice.

You'd be surprised how much people "want" to do something has to do with what they're told or pressured to do growing up. Ask kids why they're going to college and you'll see.

countries with high birth rates right now have government support for families?

> So, the solution is to... not provide education?

Where did the parent comment say that? This is about as bad faith of a take as it gets.

They said that providing more education is not going to help with increasing birth rates, and is likely to do the opposite. That doesn't mean that more education shouldn't be provided. Those two things are not contradictory.

Another example in the same category: increasing quality of life and wealth of the citizens is negatively correlated with birth rates. But it would be extremely silly to suggest that someone stating that actually means "we should not be increasing our quality of life and wealth."

> Where did the parent comment say that? This is about as bad faith of a take as it gets.

I'm asking a question. It's not a bad faith take. How else should I reply to it? Just accept it and move on? I don't agree and want to know more (from the OP, not from you, by the way)

Parent comment talked about having kids. Guess what, I have kids. My opinion matters too.

This is almost the opposite of what happens.

The more educated/developed a nation, the lesser their birth rate is going to be.

I understand the "shoulds" but that's not what the data suggests.

In essence, we can't have the pie and at the same time eat it.

The most useful thing education does for children is reduce child-mortality rate.[1]

Sources: https://raphael-godefroy.github.io/pdfs/mali_final.pdf

[1] https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED503923

This is misleading. Education is not the panacea. I am saying it's a "whole of family" approach. Governments need to also provide more support to families. This is clear to any parent.

Let us take your previous comment as the basis

> Birth rates would also improve when boys and men are educated.

There is no evidence of this being true. This is certainly a narrative peddled by many ideologues.

> Both genders need education and child support programs.

Poorest of poor and illiterate people happen to have more children than the rest.

> Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child.

If men are educated on responsibilities of alimony and child support, with almost no rights, they would neither marry nor have legitimate children.

> They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.

This maybe your personal dream and that's fine. But this has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

> Governments around the world would benefit their society by investing in family planning, family support (esp. child care) to enable parents to work and provide for their family.

Family-planning is euphemism for reducing children per woman. There's no benefit of having less children -> leading to less economic activity in the future. The family support you keep touting about is moot point. Government does not have their own money. People pay taxes which are used by government.

> An educated and healthy populace (from infant to old age) benefits everyone.

Agreed on this point. The definition of benefits are subjective but overall, it is agreed that it is a net positive.

> Poorest of poor and illiterate people happen to have more children than the rest.

Just curious, why do you think this is? Please elaborate.

> If men are educated on responsibilities of alimony and child support, with almost no rights, they would neither marry nor have legitimate children.

Here's the corollary. A woman's body is absolutely ravaged by pregnancy. Her career outlooks suffer. There's a historical reasons why men have to pay child support or alimony. Because many men just don't want children, I guess, but they seem perfectly OK with not using contraception. Those men helped create a situation where an entire legal system that was created to prevent such situations. Because all men have to worry about is financial issues. Imagine it being your physical health instead (like a woman) or your career (like a woman). Maybe, just maybe, men should work together to not be absent and show up for the family they help create. Peer pressure should be stronger by men and men's circles to have respect for women. If you are a good father, great. You have nothing to worry about.

Governments, society and individuals all need to understand the effects _on everyone_. I'm not saying men shouldn't have respect or dignity or whatever. But let's be real, women have not _historically_ had that luxury men have had and still have to fight for their rights too (to this day). The mere fact that you seem to totally miss ALL OF THIS indicates to me that the system of alimony/child support is still very much needed. Because men can't seemingly understand anything beyond financial pressure. Gee wiz.

Your comment is entirely "have children as much as possible" and just doesn't seem to have any consideration for the opportunity, physical or emotional costs of that decision. Like, at all.

> Government does not have their own money. People pay taxes which are used by government.

Yes, this is what society does. An educated and prosperous society builds safety nets for each other. You seem to only care about birth rates but not .. supporting people after they are born. Terrible. We need better policies for family planning. That's what I'm advocating for. You seem to not want any of that. Am I mistaken?

Looks like I mistook an ideologue zealot for a rational being.

Bbbye

> They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.

I thought they were built for that. For tens of thousands of years women had on average 7 children or more, it looks like the process is very reliable. These days birth-giving mortality is very close to zero, also post-birth care is quite good, so we are in a better place than ever and still concerned?

> These days birth-giving mortality is very close to zero, also post-birth care is quite good

Also reliable and affordable DNA testing makes much easier collecting pensions from fathers that before would just vanish, or outright deny paternity. An underrated breakthrough in women and children rights enforcement.

Historically, women started having children around 16-18 years old so that 7 was much easier.

Societally, almost everyone would argue we shouldn't encourage women to have kids that young.

That doesn't seem to be broadly true.

For example, in Tudor England, women generally got married in their early 20s and men on their late 20s. People absolutely knew pregnancy was dangerous for girls who weren't full grown.

It's varied throughout history obviously but if you look at average marriage age now, it's still in low 20s in many places.

Read this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/1t6akt4/id...

Just because women used to birth 7 kids with high morbidity and mortality rates does not mean they wanted to.

We are not "built for it" lol. Humans evolved to have huge brains for thinking and a narrow pelvis for running, and those two things historically kill a reasonable fraction of women. Not so much that the population can't grow, but something like a 1%/birth rate. Roll that dice 20-30 times and you get a lot of dead people.

Mortality aside, pregnancy is incredibly hard on the human body. Demineralized bones, anemia, vaginal scarring and fistulas, etc etc. Whole lot of stuff can wreck your body without killing you.

Well, again you are proving the point that education (knowledge of how pregnancy and delivery are actually traumatic) is discouraging reproduction. Many women won’t do this because they’re educated to the detriment of society, and it sucks because women deserve to be educated.

My dude, do you really think people didn't know about this in the past? I assure you they did lol.

I think they knew it sucked, but I don't think they had statistics on, say, maternal mortality. Also, they didn't really have a choice, but that's besides the point. The more you read, the less you want to have kids.

I'm not talking about mortality. You injected that and glossed over what I said.

More educated men have fewer children on average, but it's less of a difference than with women. It could even just be because they're marrying educated women.

If men/boys truly understand the current situation, they wouldn't want to marry nor have children at all. Legal system is essentially rigged against them. Paternal scams, alimony/divorce laws all are essentially designed to protect women at all times with no regard to the concerns of males.

Men do financially better off after divorce. They report higher loneliness, but then tend to find new partner sooner.

Women get poorer in divorce. They report higher hapiness after divorce and tend to stay single longer. And also, women file for divorce more often.

Yeah that’s just because there are more narcissist men than women. Maybe maternal instinct slightly offsets narcissism or something.

The narcissist partner never wants to leave, but the victim wants out as soon as they can afford to do it.

How do you tackle narcissism as a problem when virtually everything (internet, social media, celebrities, politics) prolifically promotes a narcissistic way of life as a successful one?

> How do you tackle narcissism as a problem when virtually everything (internet, social media, celebrities, politics) prolifically promotes a narcissistic way of life as a successful one?

This is what a government and/or society need to figure out. But no one really wants to ask or deal with those hard questions which is why the proverbial can keeps getting kicked down the road.

> Birth rates would also improve when boys and men are educated. Both genders need education and child support programs. Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child.

How are you defining "improve"? Is it "increase" or "decrease"?

I feel that informing males beforehand about the responsibilities of fatherhood would decrease the birth rate. Maybe you consider that an improvement? Many people in this thread consider increasing the birth rate an improvement.

I want to know, "I feel that informing males beforehand about the responsibilities of fatherhood would decrease the birth rate", why do you feel this way? Increased responsibilities should only fall on the mother? Please explain your rationale. If I misunderstand, please explain.

Not the person you’re writing to, but a lot of our birth rate was propped up by unplanned, unmarried pregnancies pre-2000. There is a large subsection of men that simply never want to have children, but will step up and father them due to societal pressure. It’s like the military draft: many people that don’t want to be soldiers end up being adequate soldiers when the rubber meets the road.

> I want to know, "I feel that informing males beforehand about the responsibilities of fatherhood would decrease the birth rate", why do you feel this way?

Because telling someone "$FOO comes with all these responsbilities which you did not know about" can only decrease their desire for $FOO, whether $FOO is "becoming a father" or "becoming a beekeeper".

> Increased responsibilities should only fall on the mother?

Which part of my post addressed allocation of responsibilities? My post deals with awareness of responsibilities, not with the actual allocation of responsibilities.

And it's not just with pregnancies, or with men; it's with everything and both sexes - giving people mandatory obligations for anything is going to reduce their desire for that thing.

Does this increase in birth rate happen before or after the various classes teach you to switch genders? I imagine maybe when you get into your phd level classes, it starts going up again, but definitely a big dip in highschool and undergrad college.

I’m very passionate about birth rates and I think they’re worth improving. Unfortunately, child support programs don’t move the needle, it’s thoroughly researched. Nordic countries have tried them in various ways, and the birth rate is still extremely low. Ultimately, the benefits of female education AND lowered child mortality AND access to contraception feel inextricably linked to lower birth rates.

I wish I had a solution. As an educated woman, why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career? Most research indicates that child support programs tend to just support people that already planned to have children. As someone about to be a first time parent, I would love more support in the US. But it’s hard to imagine a world where you take on a lifelong responsibility for, say, an extra $2k (or even $20k) being handed to you by the government.

> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career?

This contains the answer: we aren’t paying enough.

Kids used to confer private, excludable benefit through their labour. Without child labour, their economic value is no longer exclusive to their parents. This transforms children, economically, from a private good to a common resource. Our low birth rates are a tragedy of a commons. A known problem with a known solution.

If we want a higher birth rate, we should have a massive child tax credit. One that can rival the rising cost and opportunity cost of childrearing.

A better, cleaner solution is to remove old age benefits (Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid). A tax credit sufficient to incentivize attaining TFR would probably blow up the budget, and it would be hard to pin down the exact number, subject to tons of politics.

A better, cleaner, solution that literally no civilization on earth would ever vote for or want to deal with. "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."

Isn’t that the global problem with democracy? What sells well isn’t what is effective, and often times is just current generations selling out future generations.

People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years.

> People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years

Social Security and Medicare are equally about quality of life and survival. And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.

>And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.

It's better than burdening them with that and FICA taxes and the devaluation of the USD, which are also a financial obligation. The burden can be split amongst children, incentivizing raising more, or parents can opt out of burdening their children by going on a very, very long fishing trip.

The government mandated wealth transfer from young to old is obviously unsustainable, in all countries around the world. It is predicated on the assumption that people will "naturally" opt to raise a minimum of x number of kids (economically productive ones), yet the system is most beneficial to those who raise no kids.

Isn't it unburdening their children? The alternative is the same children paying for everyone's retirement, not just their parents, who presumably have several children to split the cost between.

It isn't so much a problem with democracy as it is with human beings. I think of democracy as averaging out things so the swings related to specific types of evil, shortsightedness, good, bad, aren't as big.

More authoritarian systems have higher variance, even if specific instances might be "better". I use scare quotes around "better" because I would argue giving people democratic power is valuable even if they do dumb shit with it, so you can't just compare democracy to authoritarianism. The latter simply lacks one key thing that democracy gives: some self determination.

This is not a defense of any particular contemporary realization of democracy.

> "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."

Part of the problem is that the decision to not have children isn't a decision for many people. Some never find a partner (and no, I'm not talking about "incel" nutcases here - I'm talking about countries and regions with a severe oversupply of males), some suffer from medical infertility (e.g. due to injuries, cancer, PCOS, endometriosis), some from genetic infertility (e.g. people with genetic disorders, being somewhere on the wide DSD spectrum or where the partners are not genetically compatible), and some have no other choice than not having children for ethical instead of medical reasons (e.g. both partners are carriers of genetically passed diseases or suffer from mental health issues that make them unable to take care of a child).

You can't just go and punish these people for not having had children in their life, that's just as unethical.

You also can't make general policy based on exceptional circumstances. What you do is put exceptions to the general policy for exceptional circumstances.

It's not better, because by the time people reach old age and understand the dangers of old age destitution and how dire is the lack of support from close family, they can't act on it anymore. Things need to be structured in a way people act while they still have opportunity.

One thing that makes me suspect the population crash will be much harder to fix than the previous population explosion, it's that there's no immediate fix. It takes ~20-30 years to raise a human being into a fully functional member of modern society, after the decision to conceive them was made. It's a long term investment. Back when people panicked on population explosion, some of the proposed "fixes" were brutal, like forced sterilization in India[1], or forced abortions in China[2], but they could be implemented and sometimes stopped quickly.

There's fundamental asymmetry. Time to terminate an unborn child is measured in hours to days (counting the recover time for the mother). Time to fully _raise_ a child is measured in decades. By the time people panic over it, it may be too late to avert the crisis.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/6/25/india-forcibly-...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-chil...

More to the point, human's reproductive lifetime is usually about 30 years. So by the time you realize that you've fucked up your society, the cohort that could do something about it has now aged out of childbearing years. You're left with a much smaller cohort to fix the problem, but because there are now so many fewer women of childbearing age, increases in fertility rate lead to many fewer births.

This is actually happening with Millennials. Strauss and Howe predicted a "Crisis of 2020" that would lead to civic renewal and presumably a higher birth rate, but it now appears that 2020 was the beginning of the crisis and it won't be resolved for some time, perhaps a generation, and by that time Millennials (globally, the last big generation) will have aged out of childbearing years. Any baby boom will be led by late Zoomers, at best, and that's a small generation that's already affected by the collapse in birth rates.

My takeaway: the globalized, technologically advanced society we have now is doomed to collapse, and we should be working hard to take that advanced technology and identify simplified versions of it that can be run and maintained by a much smaller, localized workforce.

There is no guarantee your kids will want to support you, or, to be morbid but realistic, even survive you.

Wouldn't that reward raising them in a way that increases the likelihood of them supporting you? And/or raising more of them so that the odds are at least 1 supports you?

The problem societies have is reconciling both individual vs societal interest and short term benefits vs long term benefits. I don't see that being solved with any kind of legislation, especially not by a legislature that has to depend on votes today.

As a side note, some places do try to legislate it with filial responsibility laws:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws

I would go further and say that the annual payment amount should be set by a feedback loop, so the incentive rises every year that the birth rate remains below whatever target (eg. replacement), and stabilizes as it reaches that target.

At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security.

This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas.

(In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").

That is the solution used for most labor shortages. Typically when people talk about "shortages," they actually mean something where the market price is higher than they arbitrarily think it should be.

It's the correct solution, but I'm not sure it is put into practice so universally. In some fields, yes, but in others the offered price is quite stubbornly anchored and the people with the authority to increase their offered wage seem to prefer to shrug, complain that nobody wants to work these days, and then go out of business, rather than continue increasing their bid until the market clears.

Just the other day there was a thread about how Zeiss is the production bottleneck for ASML and can't scale because they are running out of glassworkers, because nobody wants the job, because it doesn't pay enough to make up for the lack of job security.

I think the issue is that you pretty much can't pay enough.

I was reflecting, since becoming a parent, that there are basically two lenses with which to view the economics of parenting. You can children in terms of their cost and benefits in monetary terms, where money is the end and children are the means to that. Or you can view money as the means to support and provide for children, with raising them as the ultimate end goal. And people with the former worldview will most likely never have children, and if they do probably will not make good parents. Parenting is a 24/7 commitment for at least 18 years. It fundamentally changes the course of your life. And children also need to believe that they are the most important thing in their parents' lives, which is hard to do, by definition, when the most important thing is money.

I sit here trying to get some rest after having 5 days of rotating sick kids. When the baby was sick, he would wake up literally every hour; last night was the first in 5 days where I had any sleep stretch longer than an hour. (This also pales in comparison with the newborn phase, which is like this but lasts for about 4 months.) How much would you have to get paid to go without sleep for months on end? I was at a party a few months ago where someone asked "How many of you have caught vomit in your hands?" Every single parent raised their hand while every single non-parent looked on disgusted. How much would you have to get paid to catch vomit? I've been reliably sick about twice a week every winter for the last 7 years. How much would you pay to let a little germ-factory infect you all the time? (When governments have done medical experiments on this basis, it's been called abusive.)

When you have a realistic picture of what parenting actually entails, it starts to look a lot more like the economics of pricelessness [1]. There is usually no price at which people will be willing to compromise everything you give up by being a parent (usually things like liberty, experiences, security, peace) for parenthood if you don't want it. And conversely, there is usually no price at which people will give up the experience of parenthood for more money, if that's what they really want.

[1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-priceless...

Why not a child tax? 10% of children's income goes to their parents, or something similar. Also solves the problem of retirement.

Why not a childfree tax instead? It's not going to be popular, but for societies with low birth rates - contribute to the next generation either via human bodies or via cash. But I doubt society's ability to put this tax towards the next generation.

Sure, that works, but I think the incentives work out better for the children with a child tax than a childfree tax. With a child tax, there is an additional economic incentive to invest in the child (food, education, wellbeing, housing when they're starting their career), while the incentive ends at birth for a childfree tax.

I believe childfree tax is an really bad idea as there are so many examples shows how cruel parents can become when they have no intention of taking responsibility for their children. Enacting strict laws against abuse can prevent some extreme cases, but do we really want child to grow up in an hostile family?

I thought there was a broad consensus among social scientists that sub-replacement birthrates in the West are linked to the expense of new household formation, especially wrt. real estate prices. Child support programs can help quite a bit at the margin, but not enough to make a dent in that particular issue. It makes no sense to conflate this situation with Nigeria's, they're polar opposites in many ways.

Everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East have sub-replacement birthrates at this point. Including India and China. China has started seeing contraction, India will start seeing contradiction in ~20-30 years since the measures lag.

It is by no means an issue just in the West.

You're right the situation is different with respect to Nigeria, but the birth rates are also falling in all of the remaining countries. Nigeria's is still high but also falling.

That's not an good example. China has even higher real estate prices(due to land grant fees).

Well, real estate pricing doesn’t help but the reason there used to be high birth rates in India, China and SS Africa is because of child mortality. Even still, the replacement rate in poor countries is >3, not the 2.3 I quoted for the West.

I agree with everything you've written.

But since you mention the Nordic countries, it's worth driving home just how high the amounts are:

In Norway it's 100% of pay for up to 49 weeks or 61 weeks at 80% of pay, capped at ~$111k (based on a your salary, capped to "6G" - 6x the national insurance base rate)[1].

So not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them).

And this is in addition to e.g. legally mandated right to full-time nursery places with the fee cap dropped to a maximum of ~$130/month as of last year.

When people think money will be enough, they need to realise just how much money some countries have tried throwing at parents without getting back above replacement...

[1] in Norwegian: https://www.nav.no/foreldrepenger

People think money is enough because they look at their lives and think 'how could I afford kids? Clearly I need money to do that.' and they don't think 'if I had extra money, would I spend it on someone else or on myself?' and the majority of people choose spending it on themselves instead of that potential child someone else.

Those people often don't even consider the time cost either. Which makes sense, if reason A is sufficient to say 'no' then why continue dwelling on other reasons? But even if there was more money and they were willing to not spend it on themselves, they now need to accept giving up roughly 90% of their non sleep/work time to someone else as well. That's not giving away something new you didn't have, that's giving up something you've been using and are accustomed to having.

Most of the people in the pro-natalism space have moved over to the idea that you're not going to be able to convince folks to have a first kid. Instead, you might be able to convince folks to have a third kid. That seems to be where the space is moving towards.

So basically they probably don't lose their wage for the duration of their absence but it's likely still a net negative to them (financially aside from the physical and time burdens) and in line with societal expectations created over decades?

I say crank up the numbers then. Give them a bigger tax credit too. Hold it long enough for societal expectations to slowly adjust.

The issue is how many places can afford that. Norway can afford what it does now in large part because of an enormous sovereign wealth fund that owns more than a percent of all publicly listed companies by market cap worldwide, on top of other assets. Despite that, Norway also has some of the higher tax levels.

Elsewhere even reaching Norwegian benefits levels would involve an extremely sharp tax rise or very significant priority changes.

Unless we find other means of driving up the fertility rate, it's not clear most places will stomach the financial adjustments it will take.

> Elsewhere even reaching Norwegian benefits levels would involve a very sharp tax rise or very significant priority changes.

The answer is wealth redistribution. The rich simply hoard too much for society to keep working.

You can get that from the rich as the other person said but that kind of redistribution should be considered on it's own regardless of this matter.

What i'm advocating for is simply internal child related distribution. You don't take it from the states coffers. You for example simply carefully raise the taxes of the childless and lower the taxes of those with kids (probably not directly proportionally to the number of kids) in the process retaining your original government revenue.

You don't have to go overboard with it because realistically any effect drags drastically but you do slowly keep upping the difference in benefits untill you reach either replacement rate or something slightly below replacement in a way that doesn't constitute an outright crisis.

It only takes a few percent of women to decide they don't want kids for career reasons for the replacement rate to drop below parity.

When you add those who don't want kids or can't have them for other reasons - not straight, asexual, emotional trauma, physically unable, others - getting to parity is even harder.

It's not stress. For a lot of history life was far more challenging, uncertain, and dangerous than life today.

Humans kept reproducing, aggressively enough to compensate for infant mortality, wars, and pandemics.

The big change is that the primary role of women doesn't have to be motherhood, where for most of recent-ish history it was.

I'm not saying a return to that is desirable. But I am pointing out that the causes of low birth rates aren't mysterious.

Women who do choose motherhood are more likely to have kids younger.

But if given a choice, a significant proportion of women will either not choose motherhood at all, or will delay it significantly, which lowers fertility and raises infant mortality.

It doesn't need to be a majority of women. A fairly small percentage is enough to shift the numbers.

I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of people out there who want to be parents, but who put it off in favor of employment because they feel like they need money, and end up having fewer children than they wanted to have. I don't think they're all delaying motherhood because they prefer delayed motherhood.(Or fatherhood for that matter).

> not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them)

What is the lifetime private cost of raising a child in Norway? The $111k sounds like it's just offsetting the opportunity cost of birth, not the opportunity cost nor direct costs of raising a kid.

High in absolute terms, but lowered significantly by monthly child support payments and heavily subsidised nursery costs. As such, the total cost relative to the also relatively high incomes are better than in most developed countries.

Your right it doesn't offset opportunity cost. The point is that even providing assistance a high multiple of most other countries has been insufficient to get above replacement.

I'm sure there's probably a number that is high enough, but it clearly needs to be higher than Norway, and even scaling for cost of living differences very few countries are near Norwegian child benefit levels, so it seems likely it will be exceedingly expensive.

> sure there's probably a number that is high enough, but it clearly needs to be higher than Norway

There are three cost buckets: cost of birth, opportunity cost of birth, cost of child rearing and opportunity cost of parenting.

Norway is solving the first and probably the second while subsidizing the third. That leaves the opportunity costs untouched and direct costs, still, a net negative. Norway would need raise its annual payment to parents to completely cover the actual cost of raising a child, and then something for the career hit. I don’t know what those numbers are, but given it would directly increase the tax base, it’s almost precisely what one should borrow for.

Yes, but again, the point is to illustrate just how high a multiple of current benefits elsewhere you can reach without it being sufficient.

Two things I’d think about here:

1. Maybe this isn’t mainly a money problem?

2. And if it is a money problem, there might still be trade-offs. If you give people enough support, some may decide it makes more sense to stay home with their kids. That could mean fewer people working, less tax income, and then less money available to solve the problem long term.

(And yes, I know Norway has the wealth fund, around $400k per inhabitant or something like that. But I’m keeping that out of it here, because otherwise it becomes harder to compare Norway with other countries.)

There are also other things to think about.

For example: Do we want a system where one part of society has more kids and stays more at home, while another part has fewer kids and focuses more on careers?

I’m saying this because earlier in Norway, families had more freedom to choose between staying home with kids with financial support, or sending kids to kindergarten. Some political parties didn’t like that model because:

a) They saw it as bad for gender equality.

b) Immigrant women were more likely to stay home than Norwegian women, which could make integration harder.

So I think there’s probably more going on here than just money, even though money obviously matters too.

Wait, is that supposed to be a lot? Sounds just like a paid maternity leave, so mother can spend some time with her children without worrying about having a roof and food. 111k is the cap, but in practice this is just a long paid leave.

In my (much poorer than Norway) country we have that, and also women can't be fired for that duration and I think two years more and employer can't refuse then remote work if it's technically possible and parents get some money directly (~around 1/10 of average monthly salary per month is automatic, but also there are other programs for example for women who decide to return to work). And, as a young parent, this is still nowhere near the cost of takes to actually raise a child.

On the other hand, all those programs are still not enough to raise number of children significantly, so your main point stands.

Why does low birth rates need solution? Low birth rates are already the solution to countless issue like ressources depletion, climate changes and real estate high cost.

What's the point of sustainable resources, stable climate and affordable real estate in a society that fades away? What difference does it make whatsoever?

You're assuming fertility rates wont rebound once there is less population pressure.

It doesn't even take loosening population pressure. 1.6 birth rate in some country is only an average; some are still having 3+. If children start taking after their parents again, 1.6 birth rate now could mean 2.1 next generation and 2.9 after.

Also true, and whatever genetic component contributes to 'fecundity' will proliferate as those people have more children. Yet another mechanism that will cause populations to rebound. Fertility rates falling really seems like a short term problem, and we have plenty of those to worry about so it seems like it should be pretty low on the list of concerns.

I think think fertility rates will rebound once the current culture of self-destruction gets, well, self-destructed. But incidentally this means that people who value sustainable water sources over having kids won't be there anymore.

So it's kind of pointless in my opinion, to maintain a strategy that can't achieve its stated goals because all it can do long-term is to give way to other strategies with other goals.

What if the sustainable population is half of what we have now? A lower than replacement (global) birth rate would move things in that direction in a more palletable way than stochastic murder.

But, Logan's Run could solve population control and balance the Social Security budget. I always wanted to live in an underground city that was a Texas mall. The original mall is gone, but the Houston Galleria has an ice rink, so maybe we can setup there.

A constant stream of young workers is required for a sustainable economy.

In order to pay for pensions, the government borrows money from young, working adults. This is effectively what happens in pay-as-you-go public pension systems (which is most of them, to my knowledge, apart from the US, I'm not 100% sure how pensions work in the US). The money you put in actually goes to pay for another person, with the government guaranteeing that they will do the same for you.

If the percentage of retired people increases, the percentage of working adults naturally decreases. Eventually, you'll hit a turning point where the government can no longer borrow from working adults. The government is now in a debt crisis and has to loan money from banks or foreign investors at a significantly higher interest rate, which becomes even more unsustainable if the percentage of retired people increases even more.

This is what is happening in e.g. South Korea and Japan. There are too many old people, and too few working adults. This is caused ny low birth rates over a long period of time.

It's going to be painful, but at some point the bandaid has to be ripped off. This idea of sustaining our economic system infinitely through simply breeding more bodies is going to naturally fall apart in a world with non-infinite resources.

They don't need the population to increase, just stay the same or not decrease too fast.

Or like the US solves it, through immigration. In the US, the fertility rate is at roughly 1.6 children per woman (which is below the 2.1 children per woman required for a stable population), and yet the US population is steadily increasing thanks to immigration. One can talk all day about pros and cons of immigration, but it is ultimately the only solution we have to a falling fertility rate (other than trying to increase it, of course).

Fertility in the migrant source areas is decreasing fast as well. At some point the books won't balance anymore, to provide a reliable flow of workers.

Yea, my comment was looking at it from a global point of view. We simply can't base the global economy on an infinitely growing population--it's ultimately a ponzi scheme.

Many countries don't have a Social Security equivalent, and people rely on their families instead. So not having kids can mean not having anyone to take care of you in old age, but it's maybe still ok if your siblings had kids. It's not that the economy overall relies on that.

If you want to reach the ground floor in a tall building, it makes a lot of difference if reaching it by elevator, or jumping from the window. Speed matters! A _very_ slow transition probably could be managed without disruptive impacts on the individual level. But we slam the brakes in ~2 generations, such a way a large share of people alive today will be still be alive to become destitute and unsupported by lack of replacements, both on macroeconomic level, and in the micro level. If a single kid today go childless itself, he/she is very likely to become a lone senior with no close family, eventually.

I believe it's the natural result of PAYG pension system. Let's be honest, they choose PAYG just to get votes immediately. (Or stabilize the society immediately in non-democratic countries, like china)

> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career?

Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce. I don't see the logic in exempting humans from this reality. People with these luxury beliefs will get culled by nature in couple generations anyway, so at least nature will sort this out over time. People who prioritize continuity will inherit the future.

* Gene who prioritize continuity will inherit the future.

You as a man will only live for ~70 years(~75 if you are a woman) no matter how you eager for continuity.

Nature vs nurture though. I don’t think these fertile people choosing to not reproduce/failing to find a mate are genetically predisposed to not reproduce. I think it’s very much society-based. I argue this with the extreme: if they were put in a Handmaids Tale situation, I don’t think they’d have any problem producing enough children. I think in many ways society has failed them by making it appealing not to reproduce.

The reason why women stop having children in wealthy nations is that the pension system is based around forced collectivism of parental investment.

When you have a working age child in Germany the child's pension payments are added to a common pool that anyone, including the childless can draw from. You might argue that people have contributed their own payments to their pension, but this only works if most people have children of their own. The way the pension system is set up rewards free riders and discourages parental investment from both father and mother including step parents. One of the biggest reasons there is a single mother epidemic is that there is only a biological incentive to reproduce and no economic incentive to raise children. This means as a man you are better off sowing your oats since that maximizes the biological incentives and minimizes economic costs. Due to the defective pension system there is a strong incentive to avoid child support payments since they do not contribute to the pension of the father even though this should be a logical consequence. Hence you see extreme cases e.g. fathers prefer go to prison to avoid paying rather than work and have everything taken.

Women have to abandon their careers to take care of children which represent a pure economic loss to them, especiallyin the form of power pension contributios, when in reality the future pension contributions of their childre. are what makes their pension possible in the first place. The pension system considers their essential reproductive labor to be worthless despite it being an existential concern for the functioning of the pension system. No wonder you have women complain about gender pay gaps and the double burden of work and child care and female pensioners living in poverty.

Then there is the whole step fathers thing. Being a step father sucks, but men have a choice here, so they obviously decide to avoid single mothers in face of the irrationality of the pension system. If step fathers could gain a higher pension for raising step sons and step daughters, then the economic incentives would reduce single parenthood through more step fathers or through more parental involvement of the biological father who will obviously lose out on his pension due to absenteeism.

The ideal pension system allows parents to receive a portion of their children's pension contributions as their own contribution. This means there has to be a free for all pool and a parents only pool. If you are childless you will get a pension, albeit a lower one. If you have many children, your pension will be higher if they are economically successful.

> Most research indicates that child support programs tend to just support people that already planned to have children.

I mean that's the point. We don't want people who have no interest in being parents to become parents for a paycheck. What we want is for people to have the financial freedom to live as they wish to live. In the US 46% of parents of young children report they have fewer children than they'd like due to financial constraints, and 23% of gen-Z report financial concerns as a primary motivator for not having kids. We don't need to go from 0 to 2.3, we need to go from 1.6 to 2.1. That extra half child is gonna come from tipping the scale for someone who is already on the fence, not paying people to be incubators.

I think it’s a cultural thing - society seems to value careers above all else and I don’t understand why

Well, because we now need 2 people in a relationship to be working. I do not mean this to be sexist, but women entering the workforce has been a huge culprit to lowering birth rates.

Most people don’t see a problem with not reproducing because 1. “It’s not their responsibility to save society” and 2. The effects on the pension system are long-term. It’s like eating burgers and smoking every day, you don’t see the fatality of your decision right away.

Can you point to any examples of this:

>I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world

i.e countries with a very high education attainment rate or high ranking in the human development index coupled with a high fertility rate? There was HackerNews discussion a while back that alluded to the fact the more developed a country becomes the lower the fertility rate.

Because its suggested that solutions like affordable housing, more free time, child care may help in a few situations but largely don't bump the fertility rates.

Developed countries are currently getting by on their immigration rates but as the rest of the world becomes more developed this isn't a lasting solution.

This subthread has people using "improve" to mean "increase" and "improve" to mean "decrease". Maybe you guys should stop talking past each other and converge on replacement rate?

Up until very recently, and especially in Africa, huge amounts of effort went into reducing birth rate to avoid locally-Malthusian situations with high child death rates and occasional famines.

Birthrates at or below replacement rate are ultimately a good thing as we improve automation and AI. Infinite population growth is not a realistic model. We can't even prove the current population level is sustainable.

> We can't even prove the current population level is sustainable.

Everyday we prove it slightly more. To exhaust the nutrients in all the mud in the world would take a lot more farming, but we thought that ip4 addresses would never run out either, so maybe it will happen.

If anything every day we prove the current setup is NOT sustainable

Yeah but in poor/developing countries raising birth rates are not something they're looking for but the opposite, (the most important thing is reducing teenage pregnancy). I lived in Colombia and they had programs where they have free antibcoceptives, free antibcoceptives implants that last a few years, like a lot of effort is spent in preventing birth rates, since a lot of people without the resources have a lot of kids. I don't think the problem of birth rates is related to financial reasons when in poor countries you see people with multiple kids without being able to afford It. I know personally people that have 10kids.

What if you're wrong? What if, all else being as it is but with "lotsa child support programs and credits" and education, on average people who could give birth decide they're not keen and we do not hit replacement reproduction rates?

Because humans are so numerous even if we hit 1.0 rates (ie population halves each generation) we've got a long time before that's a pressing issue.

If the population halves each generation the biggest problem is total societal collapse. The children and the elder cannot be sustained by a small number of people of working age and the infrastructure cannot be maintained by a dramatically dropping population: even with AI and robots, roads don't fix themselves and train tracks don't get fixed by robots. We will not even have enough doctors and nurses to care for the seniors and no economy to make retirement possible (money will be worth their value in paper as there will be no people to provide services and goods for it).

If someone things the population on the planet is too big, then plan for a reduction that is manageable and change the pay-as-you-go pension system that exists in most of the world, that is based on working age people paying the pension for retirees. Even at replacement rate the pension systems will collapse, they were built in a time when the average number of children per woman was around 7 and the age of retirement was higher than average life expectation.

> The children and the elder cannot be sustained by a small number of people of working age

No, the children are fine in this scenario, there are even proportionally fewer than now and so there are any number of available carers.

The elderly are screwed. But, that seems OK?

> If someone things the population on the planet is too big,

This isn't a centrally planned thing, it's just an exaggeration of the observable reality. On the whole humans who could carry a baby to term but understand exactly what's involved are not keen and if they're willing to do it once or twice draw the line there. The assumption that we're just not compensating them financially enough to reproduce more is let's say, not well supported by available evidence.

I think we should choose to be entirely OK with that until there's risk of a real population bottleneck, e.g. 1000x fewer people -- in the expectation that conditions change and it might sort itself out without action.

> The elderly are screwed. But, that seems OK?

Remember, these elderly will be most of us. IIRC many 20 and 30-somethings today will be still alive by the time shit hits this specific fan. How old are you?

Oh I'm much older than that. I'm definitely screwed, but I don't see why that means this is a bad idea ?

They've tried this in several countries, and it's never resulted in birth rate near replacement. And it'd be even lower if they didn't have immigrants from more family-oriented countries.

Care to give some examples where women's "empowerment" led to stable birth rates? Pushing people too far away from their biological baseline is wreaking havoc in almost all developed countries. And nobody seems to be happy with their new found freedoms as indicated by mental health indicators.

> wreaking havoc in almost all developed countries.

This isn't a given. This is due to the continuous growth cycle without effort made towards long term stability. A pyramid scheme will fall apart if they can no longer scam new members to join.

A system where you need to increase those at the bottom for the top to succeed is a pyramid scheme.

Invest now in elderly care training. Reallocate resources from wasteful corn subsidies into healthcare, edible crops, and renewable energy. This will soften the blow from the inverted pyramid and society will be able to work through it over a period of 20 years.

Or, continue investing in war, divest from education, ensure wealth trickles up, and cry about the problem we all caused. It's not the woman's duty to keep this meat grinder going.

Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce. I don't see the logic in exempting humans from this reality. People with these luxury beliefs will get culled by nature in couple generations anyways, so at least nature will sort this out over time. People who prioritize continuity will inherit the future.

> Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce.

Yes, but not to infinitely grow. Any animal population with unchecked growth will eventually be culled by their own outgrown presence if their environment cannot support them. Humans have deemed current society cannot support their children in the ways they deem important.

Thus we've culled ourselves, not by over-grazing, but by using our own reasoning.

In this case, Humans are capable of supporting as large or small population as we'd like. The planet would support it. What the greater challenge is, is resource allocation. We've collectively decided society-by-combat is the most efficient way to allocate resources and because of that, some people have checked out and used what power they have to not continue that game.

The people deciding not to have children will be the same that suffer in their old age. That is their vote.

This is a fundamental issue with current economic system which borrows from future generations to keep going, often with dire consequences as we are seeing these days. Infinite growth is literally the core concept of modern economics. We need drastic changes to our economic models if we need to change any of these. But even then, you need above replacement rate to sustain a stable society which is unlikely to happen with current narratives around gender and social matters.

real world ecology contains both rising and falling populations over time, why should humans be an exception?

> Reallocate resources from wasteful corn subsidies into healthcare, edible crops, and renewable energy

Multiple problems with this:

- converting farms from one type of crop to another is often enough outright impossible (because climate and/or soil conditions don't allow other crops), very expensive (e.g. need to replace specialized machinery and buildings) or takes decades (if you shift to anything based on bushes and trees, that shit needs time to grow)

- rebalancing agricultural subsidies is a very, very fine line to walk. as a country, you want overproduction of at least core crops, even if it means excess going to biofuel, and you want to isolate farmers from wild speculation swings on global markets so that they don't call it quits and you suddenly end up with (far) less than you actually need. famines haven't been an issue for the Western world precisely of the artificial oversupply situation for many, many decades.

- healthcare doesn't need more budget. The US, Germany and many other Western healthcare systems have more than enough money - their issue is waste, corruption and perverse incentives.

- corn subsidies aren't automatically wasteful. the corn is needed to provide bio-ethanol as a synthetic fuel, and there are more than enough usecases that foreseeably cannot be converted to electric.

- letting farms just die out or go fallow and no one take over is also bad, especially in areas where soil erosion is already an issue. Once soil dries out and there is no plant material to tie it together, it either can get blown away by the wind or in the worst case it can compress all the way down to the nearest layer of bedrock, making it all but impossible to restore.

If I pull up a list of countries ranked by happiness and correlate by the women's rights measures the exact opposite is true.

I don't know why you're blaming women. Clearly men have failed society and the solution is go back to sending boys to war so only the high value ones survive.

Does education of women have to be reduced to keep the population from decreasing? That's the position of some fundamentalist Christians [1], some branches of Islam [2], and many haredi.[3] Used to be considered silly, when overpopulation was a concern, but it's being taken more seriously now.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/technology/replacement-th...

[2] https://tolonews.com/node/198993

[3] https://forward.com/life/326299/putting-academic-study-for-o...

There is also a lot of evidence that shows the availability of factory jobs in developing countries (not just Africa but also India and Pakistan) is very good for young women. A young woman who gets a job outside of her poor family is much less likely to be forced to marry young.

Africa is a continent

it also stops them from having children when they get older too

Yeah but more independence means it will eventually lead to the breakdown of family structures because if the US is anything to go by where 75% of divorces are women initiated you’re going to end up with broken families all over, dads in jail due to the inability to pay child support, parent less kids. In South Asia there is a tremendous amount of good that comes from having stable families even if everyone in it is not a 100% satisfied with their life.

That being said, I’m not against any of this progress but you can’t just introduce these sweeping societal changes to millenia old traditions and expect the social order in the country to survive.

What you are hiding in the "not 100% satisfied" are higher levels of domestic violence and abuse. Living in such situation massively sux and is impossible to escape.

There is also tremendous bad and horror in all that. Some peoples lives completely sux due to that.

It’s not hiding. Yes there may be domestic abuse but at the same time it’s not like the man is just cruising through life either. He is essentially having to work very hard for many many hours a week to provide for his family. So no one is really 100% happy but I would posit that the overall level of life satisfaction is much higher than whatever we have currently created in the United States (obviously this assumes that there is enough money for the basics and necessities of life and a middle class salary). You see these numbers bear out in India in happiness indexes if you specifically exclude people that are not in the upper or middle classes.

Tell mw more about how Afghanistan men are oppressed compared to women.

Or how child bride subject to lifelong violence and dependency has it as bad her husband, because he needs to work.

Afghanistan is an extreme case. For something less extreme I think the Middle East as a whole works well.

Major issues with this study:

Key Aspects of Education Costs in NigeriaPrimary & Junior Secondary:

Officially free in public schools, but hidden fees (development levies, PTA) are common.

Federal Technical Colleges: These are tuition-free, with the government covering costs for uniforms and books.

Senior Secondary & Tertiary: Not generally free. State-owned schools, while cheaper than private, still charge fees, and federal universities charge significant "acceptance" or facility fees.

Regional Differences: Free education initiatives can vary significantly by state.

In other words how long the girl stays in school is directly correlated to how much money the family has.

Always when I read it, I think in Germany https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit...

"Act to Prevent Child Marriages is incompatible with the Basic Law due to the failure to address the legal consequences of the invalidation of child marriages concluded abroad"

Globally and across modern times two factors reduce female fertility rate: more education and less religious commitment.

Maybe we should have the balls to admit that these two obviously good things are good and maybe, if you give free humans good things, and they decide to have fewer children, then that is good too.

> Interventions that address complex, entrenched social problems from various angles simultaneously might be considerably more effective than smaller-scale, cheaper alternatives are.

Is usually true. Bravo.

Well, there is a general trend: higher education, fewer kids. It's not a 1:1 correlation as many other factors contribute (in particular the higher cost of living; that's an even more important factor if you look at the oddities in South Korea or Japan, and even now in mainland China). Obviously the latter is not "child marriage", but I point at the number of offspring in general.

Japan, China, and South Korea are all very densely populated. Not long ago this was seen as an overpopulation crisis that would cause them to be impoverished. Now the headlines are of a population crash. Neither of these trends is sustainable and you know what they say about unsustainable trends: they won't be sustained. If the population declines sufficiently, say back to the levels before Asian populations grew so quickly, wages will get bid up and houses will get affordable.

I'm not educated enough on the topic to know who is right, but there are plenty of people who say the planet is currently beyond sustainable carrying capacity. Nonstop population growth and urbanization is nonsensical. Who knows what the harmonious number of humans really is, but the only imperative is not to get it wrong in the overpopulation direction and cause billions of deaths from ecological collapse.

One reason I'm not against the attempt of Mars colony is that it would teach us, with a relatively small number of casualties, that humans need a complete ecology around them to thrive.

This is the demographic equivalent of overuse of pesticides in the US. People have to stop advocating for shorttermism policies that have been shown to fail over and over again.

There needs to be a very high elementary school flunk rate, banned from school on failure, for girls that slowly decreases over time

Pretty sure I ran into info that there is a general correlation between the average level of education for women and natality/population growth globally, and regardless of age.

Don't have any links though.

For the unbelievers, I do have links now:

https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/health/female-education-and-c...

This shouldn't be a surprise, lots of evidence in other countries to support this

Maybe the United States can learn something from this

[flagged]

Please edit out swipes, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Your comment would be fine without that last bit.

We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamewar comments, using HN for ideological/nationalistic/religious battle, and breaking the site guidelines in plenty of other ways as well.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Banned that account for a legit comment but you conveniently ignore all the communists and anti-Trump, group-think, down-vote warriors. Maybe it's time to get paid for something other than being a moderator (level up your employment). It's why unions are not good; bad employees get to stay in their position regardless.

> Banned that account for a legit comment

Not for that comment, but for the pattern of breaking the guidelines. Note the words "repeatedly" and "plenty" in my comment above. If it had just been that one comment, we'd have either posted a warning or not done anything.

There's another factor too: when we have reason to believe that the person has done the same with previous accounts, we're more likely to ban instead of warn. It's all relative though.

> you conveniently ignore all the communists and anti-Trump, group-think, down-vote warriors

I know it feels like the other side always gets a pass, but actually, when accounts with those views (or any views) are breaking the site guidelines repeatedly, we ban them too.

If you see some that we missed, links are welcome. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.

Your comment is noted and appreciated about the reason for the ban but OPs point is well taken - pro-Trump or right leaning comments that are very reasonable but unpopular positions to leftists here are more likely to be flagged, even when the original post they respond to is just is inflaming.

Agree 100%. You are far more likely to be flagged if you have a reasonable but unpopular right leaning opinion with a similar edge to the left leaning opinion with just as much “sass” as the response.

I don’t feel like it was always like this.

It feels very 1980s for a magazine called "Nature" looking at African culture like this. Getting an ick feeling.

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