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Comment by jtzhou | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting how a country with a lot of seemingly positive aspects -- abundant natural resources and fresh water, temperate climate, stabile economy and low unemployment, and great infrastructure -- cannot convince its citizens to procreate, whereas a country like Yemen with little in development is exploding in population (doubling every 20 years).

When given the choice, it seems humans have children more out of necessity than desirability.

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Having children (and being married) is a tool for survival in harsh environments. Conversely, it can be seen as a trap/burden from a legal and financial perspective in a 'developed' country.

That is a very interesting observation.

Edit: In the land I come from (south Italy) it was fairly common up to 50s and 60s for a couple to raise many children, as many as 7 or eight.

The reason is dead simple: being the economy largely based on agriculture and being schools not very common, more children meant more helping hands.

That need has basically disappeared.

Interesting! It's almost as if we've evolved out the need to have children (no need for free hands working the fields, the ability to have sex for recreation instead of procreation, and children typically providing limited financial return compared to their historical role).

A little known facet of German society is that it is (or rather was) extremely hostile to mothers working. Even if a German couple wanted to have children (desirability), the sacrifices were sometimes too great. Especially as raising a family on one salary is becoming harder and harder, if not outright impossible.

Japan had -and still have- a very similar issue.

Developed countries offer alternative life goals. This, education and entertainment provide enough reasons not to have a family. Lower birth rate is a good thing in the long term, and getting non-developed countries into developed stage will accomplish that. See Gates' yearly letters.

> Lover birth rate is a good thing in the long term

It most definitely is NOT a good thing to have a birth rate below replacement in a developed country, especially one with European-style social programs. Eventually you run out of workers to support the people who aren't doing so.

If you assume a developed country, you have an attractive place to live for many people from other badly developed countries. So you can simply import them.

That brings with it its own problems, as many European countries are discovering.

Bring in wealthy people like the US experimented with by bringing in the Chinese.

typically their qualifications are low, though

They're certainly higher than German-born newborns. If you can afford to educate a child from birth, you can certainly afford to train adults.

not true

I think he means there's a difference between births arising from couples in love, as opposed to births arising either by accident or from couples bound by other arrangments forced out of motives of survival, hence the qualifier being a "lover's birth rate."

As for quantifying which births are "lover's" births, and which are not, well... good luck with that.

I'm thinking typo. "Lover" birth rate doesn't really make sense in the context of the discussion.

Ha ha! Right you are, oh well...

I don't know what are you quoting me, and then talking about something I never wrote. ( rhetorical q. )

Well, to be honest I thought you meant "lower" birth rate. I've never heard of the concept of "lover birth" rate before.

Lower is what I meant, it was a typo. And that is not what I'm referring to in my parent comment, which is still valid.

There's a good TED talk which illustrates the correlation between a country's wealth and birth rate:

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...

If your goal is to live in comfort after you're too old to work, then having lots of children is often the best way to accomplish that in a crappy country. Odds are good at least one of them will survive and do well enough to support you when you're old.

In a nicer place with better finance and social security systems, you can pull it off without having a lot of children.

I would still get in a world of trouble if I said human children are an inferior good.

I'm pretty sure that it's determined by optimism about the future. Germans think that the next generation will have it about the same or even slightly worse than them.

The Greatest Generation were absolutely positive that the future was going to be very bright once they returned home from the war, hence the baby boom and baby boomers.

Once you account for access to contraceptives, etc. (i.e. once childbearing becomes a choice), I think this is largely what determines the birthrate, which is why most efforts to 'engineer' a higher birthrate have been so futile.

Actually Germany still has rising population through (mostly inner-EU) migration.

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