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Comment by gblargg | Hacker News Reader

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One reason our ancestors had plenty of children is that children were a large net-benefit to them.

Many modern societies are structured in a way that makes children an economic negative to their parents. From an individuals' POV, the "smart" play is not having children and hope others do.

Individuals believe that they do not need children because they have saved up for retirement, not accounting for the fact that if everyone did this and there was nobody left to do any work once they reach retirement age, that money will be worthless and they'll be unable to retire. The alternative is mass-scale immigration, and that's becoming unpopular. For an example of what happens if a society has neither enough children, nor immigration, see South Korea. Poverty among the elderly is rampant and they are increasingly being forced back into the labor market.

Many western societies needed to start applying a large multiplier to parental benefits decades ago.

>People aren't born not wanting to have kids, since all their ancestors did.

What evidence do you have that all their ancestors wanted to have kids? I can think of a lot of reasons why people may have had kids without necessarily wanting them. They wanted to have sex in an era before birth control. They were pressured into it by the social norms of their local community. They were raped. Etc.

I have a lot of criticism of the childfree movement but I think it’s pretty disrespectful to assume they’re not being honest when they say they don’t want to have kids and that they’ve always felt that way.

Birth control is older than the Bible[1], it just wasn't as effective. Humanity as a whole was very aware how babies come to be.

Ways to have fun without coitus aren't a recent invention either.

Human reproduction and raising children is an unusually taxing, time-, and resource-intensive process, which is why we've applied our considerable intellect to plan for that since forever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_birth_control

I've read that wikipedia article, and I got the impression that to say that birth control just wasn't as effective is an understatement. One more my finding: the idea of planning your family is relatively modern: Malthusians promoted it widely. It doesn't mean people were not thinking along these lines before, but our widespread understanding of how important it is is mostly a modern phenomena. Like the idea to postpone a marriage and reproduction was not very popular before modernity. We've applied our considerable intellect to invent these things and to make not so smart people to be aware of our findings, but these are very recent ideas. In agrarian world you need a lot of people to feed your armies, so any attempts at birth control would be deemed illegal, amoral or whatever. Kings and popes would do anything to stop people from slowing down their reproduction. Which they did, witch hunt clearly stated that witches are guilty of killing yet unborn babies, ie abortions.

> Malthusianism

Weren't these more about "human population planning"?

> the idea of planning your family is relatively modern

The term "family planning" is. The general concept is not, which is why we have two thousand year old papyrus talking about birth control.

Note that at no point I used the word "family" - because just our modern understanding of a family will muddy any attempt to compare to historical fact.

Involuntary reproduction has been a tiny tiny minority of births for the past few millenia at least. It happens and is awful but it should not be construed to constitute a large part of any person's ancestry.

They may be honest when they express themselves initially, but their revealed preference later ends up being very tragic. I know several women, and others who are friends of my wife, that did the "I don't want kids" routine only to realize that this was a huge mistake and enter the dating market at 37 to find nothing but a wasteland. People can pretend that their own reason can override their biological reality, but only to a point. "I don't want to have kids" means you die alone. Eventually people realize this.

So true. "No eggs" https://youtu.be/9he_ZRnZDlk

Having kids just so you won't die alone sounds tragic too.

I'm almost 40 and never wanted kids. As a kid, everyone would say things in the context of "when you have kids of your own..." and I always knew that I didn't want them.

If I lived in a world without reliable birth control, I may have ended up with kids I didn't want, but I'm lucky that I have other options.

Kids shouldn't be raised by people who don't want them, and not everyone is born with the biological drive to reproduce.

Your view that [most] people are born wanting kids may be biased from societal pressure and a historical lack of options.

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