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Anecdata: I am 31 and have 3 young kids. They have 0 cousins and, on top of that, 0... second cousins? Cousins-once-removed? Whatever the one is for my cousin's kids. My kids are my grandma's only great-grandkids. And I have... 6 cousins.

On top of that, at my last job, on my team of 15, I was the only one with kids, and only 1 of those 15 engineers were under the age of 30. At my current job, my team is 8, and again we're all about 30, and nobody is even thinking about kids at all.

It baffles me. And it's also a bit inconvenient that nobody else at work has such pressing obligations, it makes me feel bad (though not too bad at this point) that I *have* to log off at quittin' time, sharp, to go relieve my wife of some childcare and make a family dinner.

All us over-30s with kids probaly random-walked into jobs that are family-friendly and are staying there. In my current team, almost half the people - and importantly, the previous and current manager - have kids, usually more than one. Can't speak for the corporation we merged into, but before the merger, the whole mid-sized company cleraly leaned for average age closer to 35-40, and a good chunk of employees at every level were parents.

Once you land in a job like that, and the pay is adequate, you really don't want to leave - jumping ship would be gambling with life of several people, and you're already above average with combined pay + work environment, and regression to the mean is a thing.

(And I say "random-walked" because how supportive the job is of parents is not something apparent on the outside - you'd have to know someone on the inside who's also a parent to get an accurate indication beforehand.)

This sounds accurate to me—I found my way into a company that offers 10 weeks paid leave for both mom and dad, unlimited PTO, flexible scheduling, work from home, among other things. A director just left for round two of her parental leave, I know at least two other people who are currently on it, and a lot of the developers are parents (quick mental straw poll suggests ~50%), many of whom explicitly have time off during the work day to take care of kids. I'm certainly not planning on going anywhere else any time soon.

I'd love to find a workplace like that

Yes - I made this mistake. Granted I left a place that was shifting towards less family-friendly, but ended up at a place that actively pushed people with families out. Literally any worker with kids who didn't quit due to the absurd asks of availability was pushed out via PIP or layoffs.

I'm in Denmark so pretty much every company is like this, supporting family is a big thing here. But that means people will leave because not so much a gamble.

Interesting!

In my first job, my boss was a psychopath fresh out of grad school, no kids. Had no problem getting himself promoted but held us back, saying top performers would have to work “nights and weekends” to rise above junior levels. (Which was supposed to be a routine promotion)

It’s remarkable how different my next employers were.

> into jobs that are family-friendly and are staying there. In my current team, almost half the people - and importantly, the previous and current manager - have kids, usually more than one

Interesting observation. At 3 kids I’m probably around median for the over 30 set at my work. My wife’s old firm had several people with 5+ kids. (Catholic+Jewish firm.) This is in DC where the median number of children for a college educated woman is around 1.

I have a similar job but there aren't that many parents,just a job treating us well. We do have an amazing cto and ceo from the human point of view, which is why I think the company works well with parents.

One joke that me and my wife say is that we cannot find other parents that like videogames and board games. Apparently we are a rare category and it's incredibly annoying

>it makes me feel bad (though not too bad at this point) that I have to log off at quittin' time, sharp, to go relieve my wife of some childcare and make a family dinner.

It shouldn't make you feel bad. I have no children and I have strict policy of logging off at the end of my work day (unless in truly exceptional circumstances). No one shuold feel shame (children or not) about finishing the work when they are no longer paid for it.

second cousins? Cousins-once-removed? Whatever the one is for my cousin's kids

Since it doesn't look like anyone else has answered: Your cousins' kids would be your kids' second cousins; and your first cousins once removed.

The rule is that if the closest common ancestor is N generations away from one person and M generations away from the other, with N >= M, they are (M-1)th cousins (N-M) times removed.

I've been doing this math frequently of late. I'm 35, have one child and of my high school class ... maybe 25% have children? there is certainly a bias from polling social media. But the anecdata would say that we're closing on the point where millenials have chosen to simply not have children.

Kids aren't expensive. They're a distraction from dopamine and career advancement.

My peers are all wealthy and they'd rather jet set than settle down. By all means they could raise families of two to four kids and still be incredibly comfortable. Vacation home comfortable.

Instagram is the anti-child. Instagram and the endless feed of social media, internet, and things to do.

Once you have children, the dopamine ends and the self-directed path takes a backseat. Nobody I know wants to give that up.

It's not just the wealthy. I know upper middle class people in their 40s who are partying on the weekends and taking trips all over the world. It's the life they want for themselves, and children put an end to that.

> Kids aren't expensive. They're a distraction from dopamine and career advancement.

They really are.

You can pay for some of it by letting your and their quality of life suffer, instead of with money (cram 3 kids into the 2-bedroom you already own; don’t worry that the schools are bad and dangerous and that’s why the place was cheap; that kind of thing) but not all of it, and most people don’t find making those compromises acceptable either, if they have the means not to.

The main costs are lost income OR childcare; housing; and healthcare. The rest isn’t exactly cheap (man they eat a lot as they get older) but those are the worst bits, and they’re very expensive.

I have four kids in one room and it's a blast. After family prayers we turn off the lights and tell stories and their imaginations go wild! The joy is palpable.

Bedrooms are for sleeping, there is other space to spread out :)

I can't imagine what puberty would've been like if I'd not had a room of my own. Even just experimenting with goth aesthetics would've been so different.

Hope it works out for them.

> cram 3 kids into the 2-bedroom you already own; don’t worry that the schools are bad and dangerous and that’s why the place was cheap; that kind of thing

Everyone used to do exactly that.

Yes. And if you do that today, it’ll reduce one of the major costs. You still have the rest.

> They really are.

I'm 50 this year. I've been an avid reader all my life, and back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I'd read the newspapers my grandfather would bring home. I would've still been in highschool (at the latest), so call this 1990 +/- 1 year. Even then I remember the classic newspaper article, claiming how much it'd cost to raise a child to age 18. I think back then they were calling that number $250,000. Now days, I think they set it at $1 million even.

For the longest time, they'd reprint that article every 2-4 years, just changing up one or another factoid. The logic was always specious. Every single thing anyone ever believed anyone needed for a baby/toddler/kid was always priced brand new and name brand. From dressers and chest of drawers, to baby strollers (this was even past the point where most people would ever use the damned thing).

They told the lie so often and from so many direction, ever since you were a child yourself, that you can't help but believe it. You're even telling it for whoever it is that wants that lie told.

I have three kids. I reckon the first cost more than $200,000 by age 5. No major medical problems (kids are also a reverse lottery ticket, in that regard—sometimes they just take all your money indefinitely because they’ve got a serious chronic illness). And we were far from extravagant in our spending. The bulk of it was in the three categories I listed.

[edit] I agree with you, actually, that there are a lot of dumb ways to spend extra money on kids. Dressers? Used. Clothes? Cheap, garage sales and thrift stores. Toys? Ditto. Half the “new parent” shit is useless. Changing table? ROFLMAO you have a floor, unless you’re infirm in some way that makes it hard to get down there, just throw a little blanket down and use that—they can’t roll off the floor!

> I have three kids. I reckon the first cost more than $200,000 by age 5. No major medical problems

That is certainly not typical.

Most of the people having kids where I grew up don't even see that amount of money. They're having kids just fine.

You can drop costs by having a parent stay home in the early years (math only works out if that parent earned very low wages and you have at least two kids in quick succession—then, yes, it saves money).

More efficient may be living near non-working family and having them take care of the kids, but that can mean compromising on school quality (unless you move again) and probably salary. Plus it requires a kind of capital that not everyone has.

You can drop costs by skipping medical check-ups and care. Not uncommon.

It can be done cheaper if the circumstances are right and you’re ok with some compromises that most people can’t stomach unless they absolutely cannot afford it.

> That is certainly not typical.

I was thinking the same, but then I re-read the original list: Lost income.

US$40 lost income per year for the first 5 years sounds extremely plausible.

That's $3,300 per month. How is that possible? The most expensive daycare? Is that the equivalent rental cost of a child-sized room in Manhattan?

One parent staying home for about two years, who had a low salary, factoring in lost retirement contributions, is about half of that, we could have cut that part to $30,000 or so if not for that, true. That’d drop my (conservative!) napkin math to more like $130,000.

About $15,000 for the pregnancy and birth (we split it over two deductible years—whoops, didn’t make that mistake again). Daycare costs for the rest of that time, tens of thousands more. Probably $3,000ish a year (maybe a bit more) in extra medical spending on average (copays on check-up visits, added insurance costs, medicine occasionally, a couple visits that involved stitches or an x-ray over that time span)

That’s before food, clothing, furniture (you do kinda need a bed at some point—we go pretty cheap on furniture and clothes, but it’s still probably $3-4k over that five years, mostly clothes). Diapers (or a lot of extra power use, though sure, cloth diapers would have been net-cheaper anyway). Adds up.

So yeah, it was certainly over $200k for us (conservative estimate). Could have gotten it down to merely over-$130k by putting a weeks-old to 2-year-old kid in daycare, but we didn’t, maybe we should have.

[edit] I should add that it does get better after the first one; there are efficiencies and shared costs (daycare may give you a discount, even!). Getting all three to age 5 wasn’t $600k, probably closer to $400k. You also can do it cheaper, yes, but our choices were ones that nearly anyone who can at-all afford it is gonna make, like having one parent stay home the first year or two, going to all the medical check-ups, moving to an area with good schools (if you don’t already live in one), et c.

So 130K in opportunity cost?

No that would have been raw spending. The difference was about $70k in imputed wages because of what we chose to do (which, again, I think almost anyone who can remotely afford not to send a kid to daycare in that first year or two, will have trouble not making that choice).

Because these costs are so front-loaded, so tend to hit earlier in one’s life, you really don’t want to start doing a more-expansive opportunity cost accounting, unless you want to get depressed (I have. Trust me, don’t—sigh, so long very-comfortable-retirement-at-55!).

130K in raw spending in 2 years...on what?

Five years. Health care, child care, and everything else. At least that much. Child care would be about half of that.

Average day care in bay area is already 2500, before feeding and clothing the kids, or any after school activities.

And that's the most expensive place in the country, no? Most people don't live in the Bay area and if you need daycare, it's presumably because you have a well paying job and it's a tax deduction.

We bought a used changing dresser for £10, my back is very thankful.

It's not even the schools that have that dynamic first. Lots of daycares are sketchy as hell and they also charge crazy high prices so you can't just pay for better. You have to take time out of your day and go suss them out and dig up inspection reports.

Availability is another big issue. You find a daycare that's great for your kid and safe. Then some staff turnover and you're not thrilled with it anymore.

In my area, the wait is around 18 months for a slot in a different daycare center. In-home daycare offers a lower price and some better availability, but are often unlicensed. You are best off signing up for a couple waitlists before you plan to have a kid and hope the one you choose works out well.

And of course, switching childcare providers is way harder than switching grocery stores. Your kid has feelings, grows attached to the caregivers, and make friends. There's a huge risk making a switch, and you most likely can't undo it if the new provider isn't a good fit.

> In-home daycare offers a lower price and some better availability, but are often unlicensed.

This is the problem. You're wanting a first class experience for your kid, and this probably causes you to overlook other viable options that are less expensive.

> In my area, the wait is around 18 months for a slot in a different daycare center.

Wait lists? There's likely service available, you're just setting a quality threshold.

> And of course, switching childcare providers is way harder than switching grocery stores. Your kid has feelings, grows attached to the caregivers, and make friends.

We have de-risked our species so much that we now care about children's daycare preferences.

Some other commenter mentioned spending $200,000 on their five year old kid. This is not typical.

As a species, we used to have multiple kids because we just accepted that some of them would die. We are so far on the other end of the spectrum now that children are being treated as princes and princesses.

Kids can be as expensive as you want them to be. People are buying their dogs and cats ridiculous things like treadmills these days, so of course it figures that some parents must be doing even crazier stuff for their human children.

This is learned consumer behavior.

Children are being over-invested in to a degree that some would-be interested people just aren't even bothering to get started (one of several reasons this is happening). I'm not saying don't love your kids, but it looks like having them has become a perfectionist goal that can't be reached.

Accept imperfection and less than perfect.

Yes. This. People are insane around their kids and the de-risking etc. We've gone with a childminer (in-home childcare, but is govt. registered here in the UK) and local school-attached daycare for two days a week each. Saving us hundreds of £'s over the coprorate daycare we were with otherwise and giving him more! The childminder is a husband and wife duo, they love all their kids so much. It's like dropping him with grandparents and cousins/friends for a couple of days a week. He reaches out to be picked up by them when I drop him in off in the morning (traitor, but I digress...)!

Follow and optimise for love.

In most other OECD states the actual and risk-factor costs of child and maternal healthcare are a ton lower than ours, too. Mine is a US perspective. Healthcare for kids eats a lot of money, here, and exposes you to a ton of risk of very-high medical spending.

I'm not even a parent and I have to deal with this shit. You can't be around adults with kids in daycare for more than an evening in a ventilated space and not immediately get sick. I kinda doubt it but I sincerely hope other places are better. It's easier to count the days my in-laws aren't sick.

It's probably just the reality of lots of really young germ factories in a confined space together but I count my blessings that my mom was out of work until I was in 3rd-4th grade because I got to avoid daycare.

You know what is also anti-child? Having parents that were completely unprepared to be parents. Stop with this dopamine epidemic nonsense excuse for everything that isn't working the way you want

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Recorded history you mean the history of domestic and emotional abuse, alcoholism, family disputes, lying and nromalised cheating? Then we are doing fine.

Congratulations on your millions. My dad beat and cheat on my mother, and his dad beat and probably cheat my grandmother.

> My adoptive father shared an apartment with a roommate when I was in elementary school. Here I am, just fine

My wife's mother beat and choked her from childhood. She was regularly told she was worthless and unwanted. Her father abandoned them, and her stepfather would whip her with clothes hangers for imagined infractions.

Many people are in similar situations. The abuse may not always be physical or as extreme as what she endured, but many parents are unfit for parenthood, and their children suffer from the trauma or neglect or religious extremism for the rest of their lives to a greater or lesser degree.

We don't always hear these stories because our social bubbles may comprise people who are more well adjusted, or at least present so. But abuse, infidelity, narcissism and so on are not new, and they aren't as rare as we might feel. And if those kinds of people didn't reproduce, that would be a good thing.

Are you saying it would have been a good thing for your wife's parents not to reproduce? Where would that leave her and you? (noted that childhood you described sounds awful, i agree)

While my wife and I love each other, yes, it would have been better had they not had children -- for her sake, and this is her own feeling. Her trauma from childhood and young adulthood continues to affect her deeply and daily even now, decades later, in manifold ways, from complicated health issues to self-efficacy beliefs to frequent nightmares and constant fear about the future. When your own parent refuses to give you food, faith that everything will work out in the end can be hard to cultivate.

Personally, selfishly, the thought of my life without her is depressing, absolutely. But I can love her and yet -- or more precisely, "and so," because it's out of empathy that I feel this way -- I can understand and support her desire never to have existed.

That's a philosophical question, but I would say probably better off. If that wouldn't have taken place, it means a lot of abuse around the world wouldn't either.

Are you aware that other people have provided everything you have in life, or have you really drunk the "self-made" Koolaid. Work the farm? Excellent, now one must purchase and run a farm in order to have children. How much do those cost? Oh, millions you say!? Wonderful.

> Here I am, just fine, a self-made millionaire today.

That says everything about how you view the world. "self-made". Nothing about how your adoptive father contributed, your peers or the entire society you grew up in.

Something else I'd love to get away from is that having money != being a well adjusted individual.

Ah yes, what I said was toxic because I would have to thank a lot of things for any success I had. Frankly, above a certain amount of income, no one has earned it. That's not toxic, it's just fact. You are welcome, my tax dollars have allowed you to become rich. I'm very glad you were as fortunate as you were, just remember to give back to the society which enabled your wealth!

> You are welcome, my tax dollars have allowed you to become rich.

This has to be one of the most entitled things I've ever read.

If you pick me out of this society and tax base and drop me into another, I will still be trying and working my ass off to accomplish my goals. That's my character.

You have nothing to do with my success. Jupiter clearing our orbit, the evolution of Eukaryotes, capitalism, post-WWII tailwinds, and my hard work have more to do with my success than your tax dollars.

Have you ever thanked your ancestors for eradicating Neanderthal, your mother for not sticking to her first dating prospects, or all those who died in wars so you can live in peace and comfort?

Sometimes when I notice a streetlamp come on in the afternoon, the complexity of it dawns on me. It's sturdy, well made. How would I ever roll that material up that way? How could I plant it into the ground so it stays standing? The material of it, where would I ever get the metal? The electricity, surely I would never have figured out how to make that, much less create whatever gargantuan distribution system that was required to turn the light on. And that it came on by itself at night: Is that a timer? A light sensor? Either way, were it up to me to make the thing from complete scratch, I doubt I would be able to crack it. The intellect of those that came before me gets almost overwhelming. How many lifetimes did it take to come up with all of this? How many to build it? And then I look down the street and see dozens more, so common that they are hardly noticed, and realize that I am in a world built on incomprehensible amounts of human ingenuity. I think about how if I were born even just a few decades sooner the world would be nearly unrecognizable to me. Once my mind hits this point, I find it impossible to feel anything but gratitude for the lifetimes laid before me to create the world I now inhabit.

  A horse and carrot

  Gallup up the gradient

  Atoms in the void

I'll start by saying this isn't really directed at you.

> Have you ever thanked your ancestors for eradicating Neanderthal, your mother for not sticking to her first dating prospects, or all those who died in wars so you can live in peace and comfort?

More people should make it a practice to be grateful for the things that allow us to be successful, they'd be more content.

I've never thanked Neanderthals but I do think about the choices and risks my ancestors took to ensure _they_ were successful.

Personally I try to semi-regularly reflect on how I got to where I am and the factors that went into that.

That includes thanking my mom and dad for their fuck ups as well as their good choices. It's been a humbling experience and long term day to day I'm happier and less isolated from the world.

> Maybe it'd thrill you to know I haven't heard or spoken to that person in over twenty years, and that he abused me?

You being a millionaire doesn't mean you aren't still dealing with that trauma. Some people internalize their abuse, forcing themselves to ever-higher levels of achievement to try to be worthy of the love they never received.

Your dismissals of parenting concerns are borderline emotionally abusive in themselves, gaslighting others' experiences by repeatedly claiming that things are "just fine" on the whole. For many people, things are not just fine, and not having children is a valid response to that, and an empathetic one.

This is rather judgemental.

I don't follow anyone on social media, and I don't post anything about my lifestyle there. It's not a driving force in my life.

I just don't want children. Even if I was bored out of my mind and incapable of travelling, I still wouldn't want them.

People's values have changed. Having babies isn't everyone's cup of tea.

> Once you have children, the dopamine ends and the self-directed path takes a backseat. Nobody I know wants to give that up.

Except for all those parents that neglect, or worse, abuse their kids.

Man this is so true, not sure why this is getting downvoted? Most people without kids just don’t want to change their (very fun) lifestyles and commit to something with a very long and uncertain but (hopefully) rewarding payout. It’s certainly scary.

That said the amount of dopamine/happiness I get playing with my child is more than any social media feed could ever provide. But in between those moments there’s a lot of work and sleepless nights for sure.

You got downvoted because you speak the truth.

The cost to raise a child from 0-18 is $310k per the Brookings Institute. This does not include daycare or college.

Honestly, no real productive thing to say here I just think you're a judgemental asshole and I hope your underwear itches forever.

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You probably grew up in a very wealthy and highly educated part of a major city. Not the case for 35 year olds in broad swathes of the country

Yep, people don't realize how much of a bubble they might be in. I grew up in a relatively wealthy/very high education suburb so all of my friends from high school are just barely settling down (getting married, no kids yet) after finishing PhDs/MDs etc. When I lived in the bay area, it was super common to be single or partnered but no kids (in my friend group, in our mid-late 20s). It really never occurred to me that there were other 'timelines'.

I moved out to Salt Lake City in the pandemic and now at 30 I'm very rare to be both single and have no kids. It's very common for people to have started having kids at age ~22 or so, even amongst the non-LDS crowd. I suspect San Francisco and Utah are polar opposite ends of the "having kids or not"-spectrum, so it does make sense in hindsight but it's still surprising to me

Presuming that wealth and education are increasing in the general population - wouldn't this pose a problem for the future?

Demographic collapse will bring poverty allowing for the continuation of humanity.

Nah, cultures that don’t have kids will just be replaced by ones that do. This process is already will underway in America, with WASPs (who have a strong anti-natal streak) being replaced by Hispanics.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/08/hispanic-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/fewer-latino-births-deat...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/us/us-birthrate-hispanics...

https://ifstudies.org/blog/5-8-million-fewer-babies-americas...

Interestingly, in the US, you find that the birth rate of all races converge. Why? Educated, empowered women have less children or no children, and in general delay childbearing. Immigrant fertility is higher, but settles back down after a generation or two.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#empowerment-of-wom...

> The level of education in a society – of women in particular – is one of the most important predictors for the number of children families have.

> Interestingly, in the US, you find that the birth rate of all races converge.

Because white (European) American individualist culture is inexorable in America. It’s in the water, you can’t avoid it. But the question is, as the white population collapses, will that continue to be true?

> Why? Educated, empowered women have less children or no children, and in general delay childbearing.

Why do you assume it has to do with education rather than other cultural traits? Muslim American women for example are more educated than white women, but have more kids.

At least in that culture, the difference isn’t education, it’s that having children is necessary for acceptance and respectability in Muslim society, and moreover children are socialized to care very much about those things. It’s not like with white Americans who are islands to themselves and don’t play by anyone’s rules.

> Why do you assume it has to do with education rather than other cultural traits? Muslim American women for example are more educated than white women, but have more kids.

Education and empowerment overrides cultural pressure.

> As in the rest of the world, fertility rates in countries with Muslim-majority populations are directly related to educational attainment. Women tend to delay childbearing when they attain higher levels of education.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2011/01/27/future-of-th...

(no assumptions here, just good 'ol data)

You’re mixing up becoming more culturally white/westernized with education. There’s often a correlation, both in immigrant groups and abroad, but the two things are distinct. Among the asian immigrants I know, for example, the kids aren’t any more educated than the parents (because skilled immigration already filters for people with graduate degrees, etc.) But they’re much less likely to conform to social structures.

In France Muslims trend towards having fewer kids after 1-2 generations.

It's not a "White trait", whatever that even means, it's a personal freedom trait.

You and rayiner are sort of in agreement, although I also disagree with the labeling of “white (European) American individualist culture is inexorable in America.”

Specifically,

> it’s that having children is necessary for acceptance and respectability in Muslim society, and moreover children are socialized to care very much about those things.

Replace Muslim with “more orthodox or cultish Muslims/Jews/Christians/Mormoms/etc”

In any case, the current and previous older generations that had fewer kids will not feel the consequences, due to the momentum of population growth, but all these social safety net and retirement benefits like pensions and healthcare don’t come from thin air.

While one way to incentivize having kids is belonging to a tribe like rayiner described, the other could be removing those old age benefits so that the cost of not having kids is (potentially) higher. Obviously, governments can promise all the benefits they want, but there is no delivering them if there are no hands to do the work (and I doubt innovation in automation will outpace declines in labor force).

Based on their subsequent reply, no, we're not at all in agreement. See the other subthread.

Yes, seems I was wrong about that.

“Personal freedom” is a white cultural concept. It’s not indigenous to any non-European culture.

Amartya Sen, "Human Rights and Asian Values," The New Republic, July 14-July 21, 1997

> In Buddhist tradition, great importance is attached to freedom, and the traditions of earlier Indian thinking to which Buddhist thoughts relate allow much room for volition and free choice. Nobility of conduct has to be achieved in freedom, and even the ideas of liberation (such as moksha) include this feature. The presence of these elements in Buddhist thought does not obliterate the importance of the discipline emphasized by Confucianism, but it would be a mistake to take Confucianism to be the only tradition in Asia-or in China. Since so much of the contemporary authoritarian interpretation of Asian values concentrates on Confucianism, this diversity is particularly worth emphasizing.

Indeed, the reading of Confucianism that is now standard among authoritarian champions of Asian values does less than justice to Confucius's own teachings, to which Simon Leys has recently drawn attention. Confucius did not recommend blind allegiance to the state. When Zilu asks him "how to serve a prince," Confucius replies: "Tell him the truth even if it offends him." The censors in Singapore or Beijing would take a very different view. Confucius is not averse to practical caution and tact, but he does not forgo the recommendation to oppose a bad government. "When the [good] way prevails in the state, speak boldly and act boldly. When the state has lost the way, act boldly and speak softly."

Indeed, Confucius clearly points to the fact that the two pillars of the imagined edifice of Asian values, loyalty to family and obedience to the state, can be severely in conflict with each other. The Governor of She told Confucius, "Among my people, there is a man of unbending integrity: when his father stole a sheep, he denounced him." To this, Confucius replied: "Among my people, men of integrity do things differently: a father covers up for his son, a son covers up for his father-and there is integrity in what they do."

> In many ways, the most interesting articulation of the need for tolerance on an egalitarian basis can be found in the writings of the emperor Ashoka in the third century B.C. Ashoka commanded a larger Indian empire than any other Indian king (including the Moghuls, and even the Raj, if we omit the native states that the British let be). He turned his attention to public ethics and enlightened politics after being horrified by the carnage that he witnessed in his own victorious battle against the king of Kalinga, in what is now Orissa.

The emperor converted to Buddhism. He helped to make it a world religion by sending emissaries abroad with the Buddhist message to East and West, and he covered the country with stone inscriptions describing forms of good life and the nature of good government. The inscriptions give a special importance to tolerance of diversity. The edict (now numbered XII) at Erragudi, for example, puts the issue thus: ... a man must not do reverence to his own sect or disparage that of another man without reason. Depreciation should be for specific reason only, because the sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another.

By thus acting, a man exalts his own sect, and at the same time does service to the sects of other people. By acting contrariwise, a man hurts his own sect, and does disservice to the sects of other people. For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own, with intent to enhance the splendour of his own sect, in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect.

The importance of tolerance is emphasized in these edicts from the third century B.C.-their importance as public policy by the government and as advice for the behavior of citizens toward each other.

About the domain and the jurisdiction of tolerance, Ashoka was a universalist. He demanded this for all, including those whom he described as "forest people," the tribal population living in pre-agricultural economic formations. Condemning his own conduct before his conversion, Ashoka notes that in the war in Kalinga "men and animals numbering one hundred and fifty thousands were carried away [captive] from that [defeated] kingdom." He goes on to state that the slaughter or the taking of prisoners "of even a hundredth or thousandth part of all those people who were slain or died or were carried away [captive] at that time in Kalinga is now considered very deplorable" by him. Indeed, he proceeds to assert that now he believes that "even if [a person] should wrong him, that [offense] would be forgiven if it is possible to forgive it." The object of his government is described as "non-injury, restraint, impartiality, and mild behavior" applied "to all creatures."

Ashoka's championing of egalitarianism and universal tolerance may appear un-Asian to some commentators, but his views are firmly rooted in lines of analysis already in vogue in intellectual Buddhist circles in India in the preceding centuries.

> As the year 1000 in the Muslim Hijra calendar was reached in 1591-92, there was excitement about it in Delhi and Agra (not unlike what is happening now, as the Christian year 2000 approaches). Akbar issued various enactments at this juncture of history, and these focused inter alia on religious tolerance, including the following:

No man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone [is] to be allowed to go over to a religion he pleased. If a Hindu, when a child or otherwise, had been made a Muslim against his will, he is to be allowed, if he pleased, to go back to the religion of his fathers.

https://histheory.tripod.com/Human_Rights_Amartya.html

Dag Herbjørnsrud, "The African Enlightenment", Aeon

> For two years, until the death of the king in September 1632, Yacob remained in the cave as a hermit, visiting only the nearby market to get food. In the cave, he developed his new, rationalist philosophy. He believed in the supremacy of reason, and that all humans – male and female – are created equal. He argued against slavery, critiqued all established religions and doctrines, and combined these views with a personal belief in a theistic Creator, reasoning that the world’s order makes that the most rational option.

In short: many of the highest ideals of the later European Enlightenment had been conceived and summarised by one man, working in an Ethiopian cave from 1630 to 1632. Yacob’s reason-based philosophy is presented in his main work, Hatäta (meaning ‘the enquiry’). The book was written down in 1667 on the insistence of his student, Walda Heywat, who himself wrote a more practically oriented Hatäta. Today, 350 years later, it’s hard to find a copy of Yacob’s book. The only translation into English was done in 1976, by the Canadian professor and priest Claude Sumner. He published it as part of a five-volume work on Ethiopian philosophy, with the far-from-commercial Commercial Printing Press in Addis Ababa. The book has been translated into German, and last year into Norwegian, but an English version is still basically unavailable.

> Yacob is also more enlightened than his Enlightenment peers when it comes to slavery. In chapter five, he argues against the idea that one can ‘go and buy a man as if he were an animal’. That is because all humans are created equal and with the capacity to reason. Hence, he also puts forward a universal argument against discrimination based on reason:

>> All men are equal in the presence of God; and all are intelligent, since they are his creatures; he did not assign one people for life, another for death, one for mercy, another for judgment. Our reason teaches us that this sort of discrimination cannot exist.

https://aeon.co/essays/yacob-and-amo-africas-precursors-to-l...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16199733

LOL.

"Personal freedom" was not indigenous to Europe, either.

It's an acquired trait.

How do you explain what happens outside of America?

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

Massive family planning campaigns, heavily funded by western countries, to change the culture around having children. (My dad does exactly that for a living.) In Asia you now have multiple generations of people who associate having big families with poverty and backwardness.

Sounds like culture doesn't mean much when even the lands where the culture originated from willingly discard the cultural elements that lead to more children and larger families, even while preserving other elements.

Consider the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNCBRTINIRN

https://www.dw.com/en/iran-birth-rate-decline/a-54371973

So much for white Americans and westerners.

Technically, it is lack of women's independence and rights that cause the higher fertility rates. This is often correlated with societal poverty, but not a necessary condition.

I doubt it will. Infact, I would be willing to bet good money that china is going to start factory farming the next generation within the next 20 years, using artificial wombs & in vitro fertilization.

> china is going to start factory farming the next generation within the next 20 years, using artificial wombs & in vitro fertilization

Enormously more expensive than producing children the natural way. Given the CCP’s history of using coercion to make people have less kids (forced sterilisation, forced abortion, some even allege infanticide), I would not be surprised if they start coercing people to have more. From an ethical perspective that’s terrible, but why expect a government which hasn’t cared about ethics in the past to start caring about it now or in the future? Coerced natural reproduction is massively cheaper than artificial wombs

They will be the first to ban abortion and clothing.

Me too! Among my cohort of friends that I grew up with, all of us in our early 30's, around 10 people, I'm the only one who is having kids. None of them are even trying to get married. The vast majority of people my age that I meet are not planning to have kids. I can't stop noticing it, and even my wife has started remarking about it now. It honestly does seem like an entire generation has chosen not to have kids..

> But the anecdata would say that we're closing on the point where millenials have chosen to simply not have children.

I'd bet that that isn't a "choice" so much as it is that millennials are prevented by their circumstances from having the children they'd want to otherwise. If more people could actually afford to have kids and were more optimistic about the future I imagine we'd have a lot more babies around

> I'd bet that that isn't a "choice" so much as it is that millennials are prevented by their circumstances from having the children they'd want to otherwise

Taking a look at median incomes and housing costs across the US, I'd bet that millennials have become forward-thinking enough to plan for kids, but have gotten themselves worked up into thinking they must spend millions on getting into the best daycares, have separate rooms for each of their children, a guaranteed spot at university, etc.

Genuinely seems to me the decently well-off "involuntarily-childless" folks are worried to be committing a human rights violation by bringing a child into this world where they go to the public school they're zoned for. Or it's just cope and they are worried about reducing their living standards even just a little.

This also may be a wise reaction to the observation that the middle class is vanishing. My father started his career as a decently paid factory worker, he moved into corporate as factories were going away. My parents emphasized college as the alternatives did not look like viable careers to their eyes.

Is it surprising that a generation who saw college graduates struggle emphasizes going to Harvard etc. for their own children? I’d be skeptical that the path I took will be open for my daughter in 20 years.

It's quite peculiar to observe members of the tech community citing their circumstances as a barrier during a period of abundance and prosperity.

Members of the tech community were never driving the decline in cousins or the population generally. Most of us here are wealthy and wealthy people tend of have fewer kids already. Even people here could reasonably have concerns about the future of the environment, our democracy, etc that might make having children seem unwise.

Most millennials, in fact most Americans, are not experiencing a period of abundance and prosperity. Their standard of living is in decline, their household debt is at record highs, and they still can't afford to buy the same groceries they normally would.

I think the better educated our species is thinking too much before having kids where as our parents and their ancestors kind of had kids and rolled with it. But even as a well earning tech guy, i can't help feel that being unemployed and being hit with one medical emergency can put my family on the street. In this time of abundance, i still feel like i'm being ground to dust by the man.

I think the lack of a social safety net has a lot to do with this feeling, which I share.

It’s absolutely a choice. That’s obvious because the millennials with the most money and education are the ones having the fewest kids. It’s downtown SF that’s childless. Working class parts of Dallas are bustling with kids.

It’s not that millennials can’t afford to have kids. It’s that they’re too self-centered and unwilling to endure the lifestyle hit for doing so.

I'm willing to accept that they feel like their situation is precarious when it actually isn't, because I've certainly been there. But I also overcame it when I realized I wasn't actually thinking everything through.

Might be due to some of us growing up really poor. I’m from a third world and I remember lack of water and electricity, five plus people crammed into a home the size of my current apartments living room. We used to use kerosene lamps and heat water and I grew up in the 90s. Even today my parents don’t own a home yet and they have rented their whole lives. They still work. It’s really up to me to resolve all our issues. And that’s my duty as their child, everyone has their circumstances.

My parents pushed me to get educated. Now I’m in my early 30s and honestly I’m not in a rush to have kids. Do I want kids? Definitely. But right now I’m trying to build family wealth so I can give my kids a great childhood. I’m on track to meet my goals in the next 5 years or so.

Most of the people my age who are situated with kids and family are well to do. They have well off parents who own at least one home. Somehow these people send their kids to private school or can afford to buy homes in great public school districts.

I’ve noticed the people in my situation more often than not are from a similar background. We grew up poor and we are trying to build our wealth. I work in tech so I can’t speak for people from other socioeconomic backgrounds. But this is what I experience.

Most of my friends are other Asians. I don’t know it seems like Americans are mostly well off.

I promise circumstances are not going to get better. Many individuals who eventually become parents wouldn't have taken the leap if they had waited indefinitely for what they deemed as "perfect circumstances." It's perfectly acceptable if you choose not to have children; after all, it's your decision. However, and Frankly speaking, it becomes tiresome to hear the implication that parents who took that leap have a more privileged situation than the tech community on platforms like Hacker News.

fwiw every 40yo I know who had kids at that age wish they did it earlier when they had more energy. Wealth building is easier in your 40s however for most

I didn't realize how physical raising a kid is. The chasing, the lifting, the playing ... they don't stop!

For those without kiddos:

Hold a 10lbs weight on your arm for three hours (simulates an infant trying to fall asleep in your arms). Do this for six months, three times a day.

Lift a 20lbs bag of rice off the floor to your hips once every 20 seconds for two hours (simulates a toddling-walking child wanting up). Do this for a three years, six times a day.

Get up off the floor in a hurry once every five minutes for two hours (simulates the toddler-child doing something they shouldn't). Do this, I dunno, forever.

Lift a 40lbs bag of dog food over your head every five minutes for 4 hours (simulates an older child wanting to play). Do this for 10 years, five times a day.

There is a lot of other 'cardio' like things mixed in too. But the above should give a sample of the physicality of child rearing. It's a lot of low weight, very high rep, long workout, long interval, isostatic exercise. You're mostly holding things near your center of mass for very long times, adjusting between arms. And you have to get up off the floor a lot in a big hurry.

For those who want kiddos sometime in the future, maybe about 2 years from now - this won't change, 2 years from now you'll still think 2 years from then is going to be the time. Just stop and have one. It'll turn out ok, probably - and the sooner you get one, the easier you'll handle the toil, 1% of which is described by the parent post ;)

there are also of course lots of medical problems associated with having kids later for both the parents and the kids so better to do it earlier.

I got a lower back injury from changing diapers. I just wasn't used to bending over while standing I guess.

I never understood why people don't just change diapers on the ground. Less risky, easy cleanup, no bending over.

> Most of the people my age who are situated with kids and family are well to do.

Same here, but looking back to my hometown and how it is now, it wasn't this way even just 20 years ago. Now even well-to-do doesn't guarantee kids, and lower and middle class folks have simply stopped.

Which bothers me a lot. I think many people are catastrophizing themselves into thinking they can't afford it, and in a few decades we'll all be worse off. I'm especially tired of couples making more than $200k/year talking about how it's effectively child abuse to send their kids to public school, or if they can't somehow guarantee an Ivy League golden path then it just isn't worth it.

The truth is we've been so 'scared straight' about the difficulty of parenthood that many of us want nothing to do with it. Life is easier without them.. not as fulfilling sure, yadda yadda

But saying we can't afford it sounds a lot better. In most places in the world, and through time, less money corresponds to more kids. So it's easy to see though this excuse.

> My parents pushed me to get educated. Now I’m in my early 30s and honestly I’m not in a rush to have kids. Do I want kids? Definitely. But right now I’m trying to build family wealth so I can give my kids a great childhood. I’m on track to meet my goals in the next 5 years or so.

There's a chance you won't make it, though. And at some point, it does become too late.

I have two siblings, but most likely will be the only one with kids, as we're in our mid to late 30s and I'm already a parent.

Me and my SO made it happen by moving to a much smaller (albeit still 500k+ inhabitants) city, where real estate isn't as stupidly expensive as where we grew up in.

My co-worker has six children and all the people I've met who have four or more follow the same pattern: living in the middle of nowhere on a single income working remotely.

It appears that real estate is the biggest concern, because I've also settled on having two instead of three, since my daughters will be sharing a room anyway.

Anecdata: I am 33 and have 0 kids. I make good money but, due to poor financial literacy at a young age, I am shackled with a hefty amount of student loan debt well into my 30s. My 20s were financially precarious and it would've been irresponsible to bring a child into the mix. Would've been nice, but it just wasn't going to happen.

I don't think that my specific situation applies to everyone, but I also don't expect I'm alone on this one.

>It baffles me.

My hypothesis, which I rarely hear anyone else mention, is that we no longer look to our children for entertainment. Life used to be really boring. Kids are excited by things adults find painfully dull. Having a weird little person around who is overjoyed playing with a stick is a pretty great thing in a world where there isn't much else to do.

Today people often seem to regard interacting with children to be a form of work. I don't think that our ancestors saw it that way. The kids certainly don't seem to see it that way; they're confused and disappointed when their parents don't want to play with them.

Many of the sociopolitical explanations of falling birth rates have been refuted by the present trends. Birth rates are now below replacement in most of Latin America and Asia, even where economic development is well below the level it was when they started falling in the rich world, and in spite of the persistence of traditional gender roles. Only Africa and the poorest parts of Asia are above replacement, and even then much less than before. Some of the highest birth rates today are in Afghanistan and Palestine. Not exactly paradise.

My hypothesis, which I rarely hear anyone else mention, is that we no longer look to our children for entertainment. Life used to be really boring.

while there is some truth to that with stories of a sudden baby boom 9 months after a significant power outage, i'd rather rephrase that as

"we no longer look to our children as the only thing we care about"

there are now so many other things (hobbies, causes) that we can put our energy into that they take away the focus from having kids. after all, once you have kids you will have to put aside some of your other activities for some years.

sociopolitical explanations of falling birth rates have been refuted by the present trends

i think birthrates don't so much correlate with wealth but with education. my guess is that education improves faster than wealth, so this could explain the development better.

> we no longer look to our children for entertainment

Anyone bringing kids into the world for entertainment value is doing them a disservice. These are humans, not pets.

Parenting is hard.

As a descendant of a long line of professional clowns I'm afraid I have to disagree with you here

I mean, you can try to be appealing to a higher ideal here, but all the people who make children (myself included) do it for themselves (the parents of the child). So yeah, entertainment might not be the exact word, but for a broad enough meaning of it, that's probably the reason for a good chunk of children.

The child didn't ask to be born.

> It baffles me.

Plenty of us would, if we could.

My own personal situation on why I don't have kids - to have kids, I'd have to find someone to have kids with. Dating is completed screwed, and that's not for lack of trying on my end. It's an absolute shshow out there. It's like no one could be bothered to get themselves out of bed to follow through on plans to meet up. I'm not sure if it's suburbanization, or if it's everyone is feeling overworked, or... what...

Nearly all of my male friends are noticing the same things. Locale, age, career... no change of circumstances seem to change the really poor outcomes. It's like the options on today's menu are: be solo and happy with it, or go do the passport bro thing.

We must live in different areas because I’m the only one without kids on my team of 8. I also kind of resent the implication that pops up in these threads that people without kids are living some kind of immoral, selfish life. Not everyone without kids is just out partying all the time. I would love to have kids, but fate it seems has different plans for me.

> I also kind of resent the implication that pops up in these threads that people without kids are living some kind of immoral, selfish life

I don’t see that implication in OP’s post at all, I’m sorry. This feels like projection.

You could be right. Although looking a few comments down the selfishness talk is ever present.

Everyone is living a selfish life; some people are also assholes.

with 3 kids at 31 you would most likely be the outlier in many countries. all the rest you said resonates - so many people do not want to have kids at all anymore, and it’s not difficult to understand why (socioeconomic uncertainty, environmental issues, a lot of places are not “child friendly”, and there’s more). having kids today seems to be an even more difficult undertaking than in the past; and in my opinion there is a lot less peer pressure pushing to procreate

it's only more difficult if you are paranoid.

No, it is tangibly more difficult. There’s a complete lack of other children in many cities. We live directly next to my oldest kid’s school, and we have no other kids within a mile. The nearest park has no regular group of kids who show up.

I live in one of the largest metro areas in the U.S.

Community is gone.

Was effectively my experience. This on top of moving countries and not having many (any) friends at school lead to a lot of boring days.

[dead]

> I live in one of the largest metro areas in the U.S.

> Community is gone.

Let me guess: you're in the urban core of one of the more expensive cities.

It isn't a more difficult undertaking. It was never easy, we've just been raised softly and do not value children the same way previous generations did.

An outlier in many places, but not most. Only in the Western first world is this now normal.

> Only in the Western first world is this now normal

It ain't just us, my friend. Births Per Woman:

    1.64 USA
    1.34 Japan
    1.28 China
    0.84 Korea

Now that women are part of the formal economy and everyone has options for entertainment other than unprotected sex, the mechanism by which the formal economy used to offload the entire cost of child rearing while reaping all of the benefits no longer functions.

We have two paths: dust off the shitty exploitative playbook of yesterday, or build a new playbook for tomorrow.

One could argue that women being part of the formal economy is also out of an exploitative playbook.

> One could argue that women being part of the formal economy is also out of an exploitative playbook.

That's the whole point. Now we have two solutions:

- make the playbook less exploitative, leaving to time and resources being shared more equally among people

- get back to a caste system where half of mankind is barred from non-family-related activities.

No. Women working AND rearing children (or taking on the majority of that work), is.

Yeah maybe I should have worded this better. "Forcing (potential) mothers to have a job" would probably have been more clear.

Who is forcing them? Women want financial independence, for obvious reasons.

For many women, it's not about financial independence, but about surviving as a family.

Seems like you are claiming women being part of the formal economy is exploitation, and preventing women from being part of the formal economy is exploitation?

> Who is forcing them?

The alternative being horrible.

What alternative? Are you suggesting society give women financial independence without them having to work?

The alternative to women having financial independence is them being dependent financially on men.

I'm a guy and I'd never want that if I were a woman.

It is - in the generation of my grandparents one income could feed an entire family AND lead to a house (no vacations though, and not much luxury)

Nowadays even if you have good jobs it really depends on a lot of circumstances if you can afford such a life (albeit mostly with more luxury and vacations) with two incomes.

Effectively the worth of income nearly halved.

Same here. To be sure, those women (i.e. my grandmothers) were definitely hard working. Raising lots of children, without "modern" appliances like dishwashers etc. in the household. But the money that came from one income was enough.

> Effectively the worth of income nearly halved.

At least the worth that reaches the worker after taxes etc.

In the case of my grandmother she was the only one working, so yeah... but still, one income could raise two children.

For sure - with both parents working and no societal support really where do you find the time

Maybe this is the great filter.

Not really - there are various self-correction mechanisms which simply aren't active (yet?) because the low birth rate isn't actually resulting in a shrinking population (due to immigration) so there is not problem to fix (yet).

Many people mention housing and real estate as a problem, well, if there was a population problem, we'd see loads of available empty homes and falling prices of real estate - we're not, so this is a clear signal from the society truthfully voting with their wallets (no matter what they misleadingly signal verbally) that we have more than enough people.

It's similar to some industries saying that there aren't enough workers - if there was an actual shortage, we'd see loads of unfilled vacancies together with noticably rising salary offers for these positions, and if we aren't, that's a clear signal from that industry truthfully voting with their wallets (no matter what they misleadingly signal verbally) that they actually do have more than enough potential workers.

In North America / Europe, you’re correct. In Japan, China, South Korea, they’re losing population, everyone knows they’re losing population, but self-correction mechanisms aren’t working or not working fast enough. Japan been trying to throw random stuff on the wall to see if anyone sticks, but the birth rate only keeps dropping. And well, young people really don’t want children.

It all depends on what do you mean by "fast enough" - the self-correction mechanisms would trigger after the population has shrunk, not when it starts shrinking; and it would apply to the generation after that. Also, we might consider the pressure from housing and jobs as a correction mechanism for overpopulation, so it would likely stabilize somewhere much lower than the peak.

While "everybody knows that they're losing population", South Korea and China haven't even started shrinking (they've stopped growing, and have been at approximately 0 population change for the last few years, it's technically negative but the change is insignificantly tiny) so obviously any self-correction mechanisms wouldn't apply at all yet.

Japan's population reached its peak in 2010 and as of 2016 the shrinking was quite low - so we're talking about just like 7 years of actual shrinking and that's not that much time to cause any socioeconomic changes triggered by population reduction, it would seem reasonable to look at the generation which grows up in a shrinking-population regime to see how it affects them, when they actually have real estate that gets significantly cheaper due to lack of population and scarcity of workers pushing up the bargaining position of labor; Japan's demographics is "leading the world" in this regard, but even they aren't there yet. And they have time to see how it works out - Japan's population is still far above its e.g. 1950 population, and continuing the current population trends it would be as long as 2075 to reach the 1950 level (which isn't bad!) again.

I agree with you about how we probably haven’t reached the point where the governments are supposed to worry, but I don’t think looking at a point in time in the past is right. Even though we have a long way to go for the decline to reach the population levels of 1950s, the demographic pyramid is pretty much inverted. Same applies to China and South Korea in some degree. Most of the women after the age of 40 aren’t going to have a kid, yet alone 2.1+ to revert the population decline.

But you’re right, more drastic measures will be taken in political and economical senses once absolute numbers start ramping up. It’s fairly obvious our current system isn’t the best for aging population with not as many children. Unfortunately, we just haven’t come up with anything better that gives some sort of stability and peace.

> Maybe this is the great filter.

For liberalism, perhaps. If the capitalists can't figure out how to grow new worker-slaves in vats or perfect AGI, future society will be very different. Might be mostly Amish and Orthodox Jews, etc. after the population crash.

I will admit that I was a bit off-the-cuff in terms of the Western aspect of my comment.

There are lots of factors, of course, and the trend isn't limited to only the west. Though it has certainly become a more normal trend in developed and developing countries than those with a higher level of poverty and poor.

I still contend however that it has never been easy. My grandparents had four children starting at age 20. My grandfather's first job was sweeping floors in a factory at age 13, making $0.30 an hour. When he asked for a raise, he was fired. He said he didn't have two nickels to rub between his fingers.

His father before him went into World War 1 at 15 years old. And his father (my great-great grandfather) falsely signed the documents affirming that he was 18 years old, to allow his own 15 year old son to go to war.

They struggled, but didn't complain. Some part of it is cultural expectation, and that has changed greatly over time. In spite of all odds my grandparents raised four fairly middle class children in these circumstances, but had a good few decades of strife. Whether or not they would create a family and procreate was taken for granted. It was assumed, at their own economic expense. But long-term family wise, today my grandfather has a tree of descendants who love him.

I think today we are more conscious of the economic equation. We ask whether or not we can afford to provide for children, rather than letting them exist and then asking how we can provide for them. There is an aspect of this that I appreciate, but I worry that it's mixed with some amount of narcissism. Though I am an atheist, there is some unreason to our existence in the first place, and there is hope in the continuance of ourselves that we should value beyond economics. There is a romance and some type of spiritual value in being able to put aside the cost-benefit analysis and simply bear new life that is part you, to have and to hold, to love, teach, and reciprocally learn from.

We have so much bounty today that the idea of "sacrificing" ourselves for something that only has potential value is an alien concept. As our material wealth has increased, and as our understanding of personal economy has evolved, I think we've lost a bit of our primal, but beautiful, nature that wants ourselves to persist at a biological, cosmic level.

You, here, right now reading this are the absolute last leaf, the most extended branch, the most outstretched and sun-bleached arm of a tree of life that has been proceeding for four billion years. You are the last link in a chain that has not been broken for four billion years. Can you believe that? Every time I consider that, I think of my parents. And I ask, who am I to be so conceited that all of that history, that fourth of a fraction of the universe, should end with me?

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, and, I will confess that I got a little tipsy for the super bowl. Don't judge me too harshly. But life is beautiful, and beauty is always difficult to sustain. We do it because beauty contains a truth and a promise for the future. And I think that's something we need to put effort into re-evaluating, and re-valuing, in our current world.

One line of inquiry might be why there is a correlation between bounty and the general wealth of an economy, and the fertility rate. Many parts of the world that are poorer are more fertile, and reproduce more unquestionably. Korea is rich and the rate is 0.84. In the Congo the rate is 6.21. It is not about economics. And if you counter that it is about poor education or care, I don't believe that's the reason either. It's culture, and values.

Paul Revere had 15 children. 5 of them died young, and he still had 10. He had a horse and a rifle and a small wooden house you can still tour in Boston. Today we have DINKs, and people who are in what is considered to be the low-income range with multiple rooms in big cities, an education, and combustion-engine vehicles who say it's too expensive to have children. Maybe your tastes are too expensive. Maybe you've been raised softly, and don't know how to set yourself aside to rear and participate in a family that is spiritually worth more than just yourself.

One of the other comments said I ranted so I thought I'd actually provide one. Sorry HN, I hope I made some sense here.

> And I ask, who am I to be so conceited that all of that history, that fourth of a fraction of the universe, should end with me?

Nobody will remember us in just 100 years. Nobody.

> Maybe you've been raised softly, and don't know how to set yourself aside to rear and participate in a family that is spiritually worth more than just yourself.

Is it really worth more, though? I always wondered if having kids is just so that somebody finally listens to you at an age where your peers really only listen if they're deep friends, or if you have something actually exceptional to say. And to relive childhood, and then again when you have grandchildren. You don't get these two things if you don't have children. But they're not that deep, you can e.g. teach to actually intelligent peers, research deep topics, and relive childhood curiosity in different ways. For the benefit of all of society, not just your little gang.

The human population is expected to peak at ten billion, and that's in the latter half of his century. We have no reason to fear declining birth rates in an existential sense.

I think this is probably true. Historically children would provide for their elders, but that role is fulfilled now more by technology, so in practical terms, they are less needed. It's an emergent trend of humans+technology that acts as a natural limit to our growth, so that as a species we don't just eat all the carrots and die like the rabbits would.

I do fear that Idiocracy might be a little accurate though. The people reproducing currently are the ones who do not consider their future or economics, while the smart ones who do, have less children.

> Historically children would provide for their elders, but that role is fulfilled now more by technology, so in practical terms, they are less needed.

You weren't watching the magician's hands closely enough.

The role is fulfilled by tax dollars that come from the youngest working generation. Might be tech involved, but the revenue still pays for the tech.

A common and understandable misconception.

It's the machines that actually pay for most things we enjoy today.

The keyboard you're typing your responses on, display you're reading this message from and virtually everything else in our silicon worlds* were not touched by human hands during production. Money is just an accounting method to allocate the production output.

Interestingly even the keyboards don't need that much of a human touch to type these days.

* other notable examples are almost 100% of the energy we use (electricity, hydrocarbons), majority of the global human caloric intake (grains, fats, sugars, potatoes, etc.), most raw materials (metals, fibers, hydrocarbons again, etc.), tools

And for the remainder, at this point it's just a matter of time before Humans Need Not Apply

The country you live in doesn't have the machines to make those goods.

The country that has the machines, wants cash. Where will you tax the revenue from? Are you hoping for some sort of technological charity? The Chinese will just ship us 10 million ass-wiping robots for the nursing homes for free, because they're a kind and benevolent people?

I understand things perfectly well.

That's a matter of organization, not production; No country is self-reliant in production of the high tech goods

"Organization" won't make them give you the machines for free. And your tax base eroded out from under you.

If the country isn't self-reliant, no big deal... as long as they can pony up the cash. And your country can't do that either. Do you have any arguments that aren't pure sophistry?

At what scale? There are definitely countries that will cease to exist on this path.

Immigration is zero sum and soon everyone will be competing for the same pool of people.

Which countries did you have in mind? The countries with the highest population decline are not the countries with the lowest birth rate. People emigrate from the former, and choose not to reproduce in the latter.

The places with above-replacement fertility are seeing theirs decline too.

We convert them to childlessness faster than they can replace the children we're not having. Less than 25 years away from universal below-replacement fertility.

> You, here, right now reading this are the absolute last leaf, the most extended branch, the most outstretched and sun-bleached arm of a tree of life that has been proceeding for four billion years. You are the last link in a chain that has not been broken for four billion years.

It's 3.7 billion, not four.

More importantly it's a vast tree of life, not a chain and not a hierarchy with humans at an upper lever with only royalty, priests, and God above.

If the sapiens go the stromatolites will still remain, with a lineage far older than apes.

Humans aren't about to go extinct but it's high time their population numbers stabilised, perhaps even reduced a bit.

The case can certainly be made by those that care that should the human branch be pruned the remaining mass of the tree of life on earth might very well thrive and surge in breadth and depth after a rather large number of other prunings at the hands of humankind.

4 was rounding from 3.7, so I think that seems like a bit of a petty correction.

Humans will not go extinct (I hope), but HN is full of some of the smartest people and these are their trends, and I hope that of the people who do reproduce, the techno nerds are among them. The future will need them.

I worry that the Great Filter is not about technology at all, but that in every planet with a species that has evolved into a higher intelligence, that at the cusp of being able to seed their galaxy, they willingly do not pursue it, because the level of analytical thinking required to achieve it also leads them to disinterest and abstinence.

In regards to your last sentence, that is true. But I would ask, who would be around to appreciate that fact?

> Humans aren't about to go extinct but it's high time their population numbers stabilised, perhaps even reduced a bit.

There's little evidence to support the theory that at some point in the future, little girls will all suddenly decide to buck the trend set by their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and all the adult women they see around them in the world, and have 2.1 children themselves.

But, if they do not all do this, if only some of them decide to buck the trend, they those girls would need to have 3 or 5 or 8 to make up for those who do not.

If neither of these things happen, population cannot stabilize. Mathematically, there has to be an average of 2.1.

Fertility rate declines are future extinction. They've run the experiments, and the results are always the same... despite having all the food and water and entertainment they might want, the mice either do not fuck or they just murder whatever offspring they do (rarely) have. And it happens more quickly than one might expect, because the rate of decline increases with each generation.

> the human branch be pruned the remaining mass of the tree of life on earth might very well thrive and surge in breadth and depth after a rather large number of other prunings at the hands of humankind.

And why should any human ever give a shit about whether these non-human organisms thrive, especially when hypothesizing a future where humans no longer exist? Sounds like some death cult nonsense. Will you be one of those lamenting how you think the most beautiful planets of all are those with no life whatsoever to "mar their beauty"?

> There's little evidence to support the theory that at some point in the future, little girls will all suddenly decide to buck the trend set by their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and all the adult women they see around them in the world, and have 2.1 children themselves.

There is some speculation - and some data which may or may not support it - that fertility may follow a "J" curve where it declines sharply with increased development and then slowly rises again above a certain level.

There is also some data to suggest that within a population, if a subset sees an increase in wealth, it can predict an increase in fertility within that subset.

Combined, a suggestion that does not seem unreasonable is that we develop certain expectations based on societal expectations, and as they increase it becomes harder and harder to justify additional children, but when people find themselves able to meet those expectations, the number of children goes up.

If that holds, then that would suggest the rate can be brought back up with sufficient societal assistance, which may or may not come as fertility rates becomes enough of a political issue. Whether that will actually work remains to be seen - we've already of course seen some pretty significant attempts, such as the escalating Hungarian family support scheme (total support for 3+ children amounts to over 300k Euro, of which about 1/3 is a non-refundable grant and the rest subsidized house loans), so we should start to get an idea of what a realistic cost to drive the rates back up will be, if it is viable, over the coming couple of decades as more countries experiment.

> There's little evidence to support the theory that at some point in the future, little girls will all suddenly decide to buck the trend set by their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and all the adult women they see around them in the world, ..

What nonsense.

The very evidence you seek is right here, right now, all about us - a world in which men and women have a reproduction rate lower than than their grandparents and great grandparents. They have clearly bucked the trend of those in times past. Q.E.D.

BTW, this focus you have on breeding "little girls" is distasteful to say the least.

> those girls would need to have 3 or 5 or 8 to make up for those who do not.

Only if the world is to return to the present 8+ billion after a fall below.

Should numbers slowly decline down to, say, 1950s world population levels and mean reproduction rates go to 2.1 then things will stabilise.

> If neither of these things happen, population cannot stabilize.

Faulty logic, as already explained.

> And why should any human ever give a shit about whether these non-human organisms thrive

My response was to a human who was waxing lyrical about 3.7 billion years of life, an infintesimal number and tonnage of which was actual humn life ... you should ask them why they care about other lifeforms.

You might perhaps ask yourself why you do not.

>The very evidence you seek is right here, right now, all about us - a world in which men and women have a reproduction rate lower than than their grandparents and great grandparents. They have clearly bucked the trend of those in times past. Q.E.D.

From the graph I saw the total fertility rate in the US has been falling since 1800 (start of the graph). It briefly improved after WW2 for a bit and then started falling again. There was another brief increase at the end of the 90s and it's been dropping to historical lows ever since. It's not just two generations - it's 200 years and possibly longer.

The graph: https://infogram.com/20221003_gygi_vanessa_calder_fertility-...

It would appear that we both agree that population changes rates can alter over time and that it's happened in the past and can happen in the future then.

Unlike the other commenter who has claimed that once a rate has been set it cannot change.

> he very evidence you seek is right here, right now, all about us - a world in which men and women have a reproduction rate lower than than their grandparents and great grandparents. They have clearly bucked the trend of those in times past. Q.E.D.

Are you daft? If fertility rates were high in the past, if they were 6 or 8 or 9.7... they could fall for a long time with no decline in population.

But once they dip below the magic number of 2.1, then population declines. That's how this works. That's the number of children a woman (every woman, on average) must have for population to remain the same from one generation to the next.

I don't know any other way to explain it. You probably think you're intelligent. You followed the teacher's instructions and got an A on math, but you never really understood it. If you follow the recipe, it just poops out correct answers... but here we have a novel problem, and you just can't get it.

> Only if the world is to return to the present 8+ billion after a fall below.

No. For the population to plateau out and stay the same, they'd need that many. It's how fucking averages work.

Either all of them have 2.1, or if only half have children, then they need to have 4.2.

And this isn't for the population to grow again. It's for it to plateau out and remain the same as it is.

> Should numbers slowly decline down to, say, 1950s world population levels and mean reproduction rates go to 2.1 then things will stabilise.

That's the fucking point. If population declines, it's already below 2.1

And if it's below 2.1, that becomes the norm and it never goes back above 2.1. No little girl grows up in a world of childless adults, of the rare "only child", and "only child" herself and says "I think I will do what ever woman I ever knew wouldn't do, and have 2.1".

It's a simple fucking idea.

> You might perhaps ask yourself why you do not.

Because I don't belong to a death cult that hates humanity. I mean, I shouldn't have to say it out loud, but there it is.

> Are you daft?

No. I still recall studying population dynamics, predator | prey cycles, etc as part of non linear dynamics in mathematics classes back in the 1980s.

> But once they dip below the magic number of 2.1, then population declines.

That magic number can change.

It's relatively easy for anyone to find observational examples of populations with adaptive reproductive rates.

> I don't know any other way to explain it.

Perhaps you might try studying mathematics.

> Because I don't belong to a death cult that hates humanity.

The question was about life on earth, not specifically humanity, the notion that you belong to a humanity hating death cult is frankly one that would not occur to most people .. but here you are going straight there.

> That magic number can change.

Which goes back to my original comment, where I talk about for it to change, the little girls of the youngest generation have to grow up and choose to have more children than their parents. They all have to choose this simultaneously, or the few that do choose it have to choose to have far, far more than 2.1 themselves.

Both of these scenarios are so outlandish, that you keep dancing around it, pretending that I'm describing it incorrectly. You don't want to think about it, or don't want others to think about it, or you just aren't capable... I can't tell which.

It'd be laughable, if I didn't think you were an enemy of humanity.

[dead]

Sub-Saharan Africa is the only part of the world where the fertility rate is still over replacement (~2.1 children per woman), and it's rapidly dropping there too. The first African country has dropped below replacement (Mauritius), with 10 more (of 55) having dropped below 3 already as of 2020.

China is seeing a population decline not caused by famine for the first time in modern history.

India's fertility rate is at or below replacement at this point, and India is a couple of decades from population contraction unless they increase immigration.

Having 3 children at a young age is an outlier in the vast majority of the world at this point.

Scroll down the World Bank's fertility numbers on this page [1] to get to data by region. You can add the entire Arab World, Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as having sustainable fertility rates. And places like Latin America are in decline, but still in the realm of realm of being saved at ~1.9. The only places currently in catastrophic collapse at the EU (1.5), North America (1.6), and East Asia (1.5).

For those who don't understand why 1.5 is so much worse than 1.9, it's because fertility is an exponential system. Every generation's (~20 years) size is (fertility_rate / 2) times as large as the one prior that gave birth to them. So after 5 generations (~1 century), a fertility rate of 1.9 would see the next generation's size go from 100 to 77 (100 * (1.9/2)^5). A fertility rate of 1.5 would go from 100 to 23. South Korea, at 0.78, would go from 100 to 0 - extinct, in a century.

And most people, across the world, do have children at what you'd call "young" ages. Female fertility rates start to decline rapidly as they age, obviously hitting zero at menopause which tends to happen in their 40s. Even when successful, an older parent results faces exponentially increased odds of seeing a variety of issues with the child, such as Down Syndrome.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...

> Scroll down the World Bank's fertility numbers on this page [1] to get to data by region. You can add the entire Arab World, Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as having sustainable fertility rates.

You can use metrics from different groups and slice and dice sections and find ways of getting above 2.1 (replacement), sure, but it's not affecting my main point at all, which was that it's not contained to the Western world, and that 3 kids is now an outlier in most of the world.

To your specifics:

South Asia is listed as 2.2. But India has hit 2.1 and is declining, and Bangladesh and Nepal are even further below replacement - the World Bank metric is I presume buoyed by Pakistan, which has hit 3.1 (3.47 in the 2021 numbers on Wiipedia), and is declining, and Afghanistan, which is in even steeper decline - the other countries in the region are mostly rounding errors in terms of population.

It's a difference of whether it's already hit replacement as a region already, or will within 2-3 years at most. I'm perfectly happy to accept the World Bank numbers for the sake of this argument, as it's not relevant to the argument.

With respect to MENA and the Arab World, you're double-counting. The bulk of the countries that are part of the Arab World vs Middle East /North Africa are the same.

The largest non-Arab MENA countries are Iran, which is well below replacement (1.7) and Turkey, at 1.9.

The Arab World also includes several countries considered sub-Sarahan by some or all of other groups (Somalia, Mauritania, Sudan) which pulls it up, and MENA curiously includes Sudan in some statistics, even though it's considered sub-Saharan and/or East Africa by other groupings.

Once you actually exclude the sub-Saharan countries from those groups, the rate lowers significantly. Taking Sudan alone out of MENA brings MENA close to replacement. If you choose to look at the Arab World alone, then, sure, even excluding the sub-Saharan countries they're still above replacement. I'm again, fine with choosing to slice the numbers that way - they do not affect the argument I was making in any meaningful way, because then the remaining MENA countries are below instead.

What we're left with no matter how we slice it, is that roughly half the worlds countries are below replacement, accounting for well above half the worlds current population (but that balance will shift rapidly), and leaving the world average at ~2.3 and declining even by World Bank numbers.

> And places like Latin America are in decline, but still in the realm of realm of being saved at ~1.9.

There's no "being saved" here. Short of economic collapse, we don't know of any reliable measure to drive these numbers back up again, and they've been consistently trending down since the 1960's. China appears to be poised to be the country likely go hardest in trying, now recommending 3 children per family, and given an extremely restrictive immigration policy. That's fine - they don't need to be "saved".

> The only places currently in catastrophic collapse at the EU (1.5), North America (1.6), and East Asia (1.5).

I was not, and is not, and will not be, arguing any "catastrophic collapse" - to me at least that notion is meaningless to most people other than "great replacement" type people.

The world as a whole is headed for a relatively gentle flattening of population growth, and a period of decline, but no "catastrophic collapse" in population. But we are headed for a fairly dramatic shift in politics and economic development as this happens and the countries facing the steepest drops become more dependent on actually courting immigration as a consequence. There will still be enough growth to do that for decades to come.

> "The world as a whole is headed for a relatively gentle flattening of population growth"

You know something that's really weird to think about? In 1950 Africa's population was 227m! [1] The US at the time had about 160m, nearly as many people as the entire African continent! Fertility rates are hard to intuit because they're not only exponential, but systems where the effect is delayed from the cause by several decades, but then once it starts - it starts rocketing off uncontrollably, be that in loss or gain of population.

The world's population may start to level off at some point, but sub-replacement rates will cause Western nations to start losing population at an exponential rate. It will be the equal but opposite of what happened to Africa over the past century. And this doesn't level out or even slow down, except when people start having children again. So for instance many people know Japan now has > 10% of its population over 80, but I think a lot of us have this sort of concept that 'Well sure, but as they start to die off - then things will probably start to look a bit more sane.'

In reality, it's the exact opposite. As this group dies off, they're going to be replaced by an even larger group of 80+ year olds, leaving Japan in an even worse state, as one can immediately see just glancing at Japan's population pyramid. [2] Right now Japan's losing about 1 in 200 people per year, and this will never stop until either they go extinct or they start having children again. And it will actually get substantially worse until they hit their 'fertility equilibrium point' where all living generations have/had comparable fertility rates (picture the sides of the population pyramid having a constant slope). And that's what's waiting for the entirety of the Western world, if we don't turn things around.

And this is also likely a vicious cycle because as age ratios and demographics get all screwed up, economies will start to collapse, which will make it even more uncomfortable to have children.

---

[1] - https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/africa-popula...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...

Fertility rates do indeed have that effect, but it's buffeted most places by immigration that will continue to soften the effect for decades to come, so I think it'll be hard to predict how that exactly will play out.

We can already see some differences quite starkly.

E.g. Italy's fertility rate hasn't been above replacement since ca. 1975, and started seeing population decline a few years ago and is already back at the population level it was at around 2007, because it struggles to attract (and want to attract) enough immigration.

Meanwhile, the UK dropped below replacement in 1972, and yet UN projections suggest the population is unlikely to decline until the 2050's at the earliest, and isn't projected to drop down to present-day levels at any point this century, largely buffeted by a far more aggressive immigration policy (including by politicians claiming to want the opposite - neither of the major party in the UK believes in reducing immigration, but some of their voters do, and that is likely to become a rising conflict).

So while I agree some nations probably will see rapid falls, it really comes down to in part to what extent they are able to open their doors and find means of becoming attractive to immigrants fast enough while finding ways of integrating them in a working way.

And this will reshape the political and cultural landscapes both within countries, and international influence.

(one minor example, since we've discussed the UK and Africa: The UK is likely to soon drop from the 2nd to 3rd largest native English-speaking population worldwide - both India and Nigeria already have far more people speaking English as their 2nd or 3rd language, but Nigeria seems to be more rapidly closing the gap to have more people who speak English as their 1st...)

> And this is also likely a vicious cycle because as age ratios and demographics get all screwed up, economies will start to collapse, which will make it even more uncomfortable to have children.

Well, we may unfortunately in that case get to test whether fertility is inexorably linked to poverty or whether once it's declined it won't rise again.

The other option is that as fertility becomes even more of an issue, we'll see a significant escalation in measures like the Hungarian (ramping up grants and subsidised house loans for families that get more children), but of course we don't yet know whether - or at what level - that will work... But I suspect many desperate attempts.

Also, expect reproductive rights to become an issue, with more countries seeming movements to push back on abortion rights etc. using fertility rates as a reason.

Earlier you expressed skepticism about the ability of nations to carry out actions to get their fertility numbers back up. And I agree with you. There's quite a lot of evidence, historical and present, that it's really not so easy. And especially for nations that only act once a problem becomes catastrophic, or politically convenient, we'll probably be well into a death spiral before we start acting. So the most probable outcomes aren't looking very hot.

But I'd say here that you're not carrying forward that same reasoned skepticism when offering immigration as a solution. Because the exact same holds true. There are countless examples of mass migration throughout history, and they generally don't come with a happy ending. Rome, over the centuries, became an empire of immigrants, in some ways akin to the United States. Yet it was also ultimately destroyed by immigration. The Goths, fleeing the Huns, were take in as refugees by the Roman Empire. Those same refugees would ultimately go on to destroy the Roman Empire.

In the present day, mass migration doesn't seem to be fairing much better. Prior to the migrant crisis throughout Europe, many expected that the migrants would integrate, become part of the normal mass of people, and it'd ultimately be a win-win situation for everybody. That belief was not well supported by history, and ultimately proved to be false. And in the US today, cities that express an extremely positive attitude towards immigration tend to rapidly express a different view once faced with large numbers of immigrants.

And immigration on the scale we're talking about would be absolutely massive, and never-ending. And I'm not even getting into the countless social/cultural/political problems this would all entail. I'm merely focusing on the most extreme - would this destroy the countries engaging in such? And it seems to me that the most probable answer is simply yes. Well actually in modern times I don't think it'd destroy them. The most likely outcome is what we're seeing happen in much of Europe - parties that oppose the immigration would rapidly come to power, and end up working to mitigate the damage, and end such a population strategy.

The destruction of the Roman Empire isn't something I lament, and yet if present nation-states survive as long as the Roman Empire they will have done exceptionally well. At the same time I don't buy the narrative. It's a bizarre thing to compare modern migration with fleeing armed groups seeking conquest to replace the places they were fleeing.

It's like comparing the average migrant or refugee with ISIS.

> Prior to the migrant crisis throughout Europe, many expected that the migrants would integrate, become part of the normal mass of people, and it'd ultimately be a win-win situation for everybody. That belief was not well supported by history, and ultimately proved to be false.

I've seen nothing to "prove it false", but there's also a very significant difference a rushed an chaotic acceptance of refugees vs. planned migration programs, and either takes time to shake out.

> And in the US today, cities that express an extremely positive attitude towards immigration tend to rapidly express a different view once faced with large numbers of immigrants.

And yet the US managed to successfully do it before. Several of my own ancestors families lived in Brooklyn at a time where it was so full of Scandinavian migrants that it had several Norwegian language newspapers, and my great grandmother lived there a decade without ever learning English because all her neighbours and shopkeepers etc. spoke Norwegian. I've spent a lot of time looking at US censuses because for the sake of genealogy, and the US censuses of that era are astounding for the way whole streets were nothing but immigrants.

Somehow the US is still there, as much as one might joke about the state it is in.

> The most likely outcome is what we're seeing happen in much of Europe - parties that oppose the immigration would rapidly come to power, and end up working to mitigate the damage, and end such a population strategy.

Then they will crater their economies, and soon enough get thrown out of office. People are quick to support anti-immigran rhetoric until it starts hitting their wallet when eg. employers struggle to hire. These anti-immigration parties fortunes tends to be tightly linked to unemployment levels.

Compare Italy to e.g. the UK, where despite the anti refugee rhetoric and historically high immigration, people fleeing the Tory party are not going to the anti-immigrant right-wing parties but to Labour - the UK, unlike Italy, has low unemployment and regular newspaper stories about employers struggling to find workers. Once Italy's population decline bites a bit more, this will change rapidly.

The Goths were not seeking conquest, and were mostly unarmed; the Romans invited them in happily, the political leaders thinking they'd be able to exploit the migrants to their benefit. And both sides actually got along quite well for a while. The problem is that the Romans took in more refugees than the State could sustain, and when Rome found itself unable to continue supplying the Goths, conflict began. Wiki has a summary, at least somewhat reasonable, here. [1]

But you know, I'm not sure this line of discussion is even meaningful. If I convince you the Goths were nothing even remotely like like ISIS, is that going to change your mind on anything? Obviously not. So why bother? What I am curious is what would change your mind.

So if you look at this from my perspective, you're talking about a scenario where a government of a country would be basically endeavoring to replace its own domestic population, with a foreign one, all while somehow presumably trying to maintain some of the value that makes people want to migrate to the country in the first place. I think we could both agree that there's no historic precedent for this, immigration on a far smaller scale has shown a tendency to result in problems, and so on. Yet you seem confident enough in assuming that it might work, to simply assume it. This, to me, is pretty weird!

What, if anything, could ever possibly convince you that such a scenario might not be particularly likely to succeed in anything like a desirable fashion? And, vice versa, how could you sell somebody like me, who is skeptical of such, on it? I'm more than open to the concept, but you'd need a pretty solid argument.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_War_(376%E2%80%93382)#B...

The very start of the background section there points out the inclusion of soldiers. They may not have set out for conquest from the start, but the article you link to go on to point out that the Romans would have been aware that they were taking a significant risk from the outset in allowing a group of that size to enter and stay concentrated, and go on to point out that a lot of them were allowed to or managed to keep their weapons despite not being meant to, and then put in a situation where they starved. To try to compare that to a modern government taking in a number of refugees it can trivially feed, and to then further draw a parallel between a rapid influx of refugees like that with immigration is fundamentally flawed.

> What I am curious is what would change your mind.

A line of argumentation that isn't based in tropes usually used by far-right extremist racists. I'm not saying that is your motivation, because I can not tell, but what I can tell is that those are the circles I see these arguments used by. When they are then further based in characterisations about failure I don't recognise from what I have seen myself, then you have provided nothing to give me any reason to trust any of what you've said.

When you now start talking about replacement, you're playing further into that.

I'm an immigrant myself, and I've seen enough variety between immigrant groups that the moment someone starts treating all immigration the same, and conflating handling of refugees and immigrants, that suggests to me someone who has preconceived notions and is coming at it with an agenda.

> I think we could both agree that there's no historic precedent for this

No, we most certainly would not. I pointed out the US to you as an obvious example. I find it funny that you flat out ignored that I've already pointed it out.

> Yet you seem confident enough in assuming that it might work, to simply assume it. This, to me, is pretty weird!

Define "work". I'm confident there will be all kinds of problems. I'm also confident it will happen, because, I'm even more confident that the alternative is a level of economic and societal collapse that will lead to violently overthrown governments, so I see it as entirely moot whether it will go smoothly or not. People will make it happen and manage the results because the alternative is turning into a third-world country.

So you're just not only going to double down the Goth's "setting out for conquest", but now also starting to add in a healthy sprinkling of ad hominem? Ok.

South Korea has entered the chat..

Seriously, it's wild visiting South Korea and having a tour guide jokingly beg people to immigrate and make babies.

#JokingNotJoking

Part of this is that South Korea was practically closed to immigration until around 2004 outside of the "usual" workarounds (marrying a local, or significant investment), and so it's become increasingly urgent.

They've liberalised a lot since, but it'll take a long time for them to develop a reputation as somewhere people will think of as a destination to migrate to.

Yes, nevermind the most expensive housing, education and healthcare ever, even in inflation adjusted terms. No it’s the children who are wrong.

you might look at the birth rates in china or almost any other Asian country, and see how your vague rant holds up.

I’m fairly certain this is just misaligned expectations. You can absolutely live in a 30sqm (or less) space with 5 children, raising them on plain rice, and send them to whatever public school you can get for free. And they’d very likely still have a better life than just 100 years ago. It’s just that nobody wants to do so because the standards are so much higher.

i agree with this. in a world where everyone (except a very few) has the same kind of life, it all just seems normal so you would not consider changing that. but as some people have less kids, more and more people learn from that, so the idea spreads (as does the education around how to avoid having kids).

Let’s be a little charitable here- having and raising children has been a much, much more dangerous proposition health wise even at your parents generation to say nothing of your grandparents generation.

There’s not a lot to be charitable about in the parent comment. Some poorly researched race replacement bs?

You personally are right, it has never been safer health wise to have children. It has never been more expensive either, win some, lose some.

Expensive relative to expectations. Not in terms of what most people could provide.

That's not bad. It's fine that people expect more and want to be able to provide more before having children (and I do agree the commenter who argued this is somehow confined to the Western world is way out there).

But we need to understand that across most of the developed world - there will be exceptions in pockets here and there - it is not the ability to afford children that has dropped, but that we're not willing to give up what we have to have children at a living standard that was considered good before.

E.g. when I grew up we always had food, but the food we had was dictated by cost in a way I never think about, and wouldn't want to deal with. We lived in less space, and I want more space, not less. Our living standard when I was a kid was fine; far above average for most of the world, about average for where I grew up. But if what it took to have more kids was to go back to that, I wouldn't.

The commenter above can call that soft all they want - I don't feel bad for wanting to enjoy life more than I want more children (I have one son; I might well have another child, but because I'm at a stage where my girlfriend and I can afford it without sacrificing our standard of living and that does place me in a privileged position)

more expensive than when? people had nothing 150 years ago and still had kids, mind you

Yes they, and especially women, had absolutely no choice due to lack of birth control and various repressions. A relevant and useful comparison.

First generation immigrants (in Europe) have higher birth rates than second generation immigrants despite being poorer. It's not just about costs - it's about cultural expectations.

In the past, if you could not afford to feed your family, you could literally starve to death. And people saved money by doing things like crafting clothes out of feed sacks. [1] It became common enough that companies would start selling their feed in sacks with floral designs, specifically with the intent of then being reused as clothing.

And that's just one among a vast array of lifestyle differences. Now a days the worst case scenario is that you end up on government assistance and have a less pleasant life. As for Asia, don't make the mistake of conflating Asia with just China/Hong Kong/Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. Asia's big, and those places are outliers in terms of fertility, with China's issues being entirely self inflicted. The average fertility rate across Asia is 2.3 [2], which is not great - but at least sustainable.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_sack_dress

[2] - https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/c416afed-en/index.html?i...

2019 data is fairly out of date. 2023 shows India is below replacement now (2.1 and dropping). china drastically so (1.2 and dropping). Those are the biggest populations by a large margin. Projections for the region show continued declines, not sustainable at all.

That would have aged like milk if you'd said it when the stats were fresh.

The point here being the rate is actively crashing pretty much globally. The outliers would be anywhere it's not.

True.

Where do you live? I'm a bit older but pretty much all of mine and my wife's friends have kids.

I'm actually really curious about the childless older people. Like I have a couple friends without kids but it's not like that because they are too busy doing fun awesome things. They are more of the ill adjusted habitually complaining types where they themselves can't form bonds because of a tumultuous childhood.

I feel like this is location dependent. My wife and I are in our mid 30s with two kids (13 and 9). Most of our friends are in roughly the same situation. I’m the oldest of 6 (by quite a few years) and only the youngest (age 21) of my siblings is childless. My kids have 9 first cousins so far. But we all live in rural parts of eastern Canada. I can honestly say, I don’t know many couples without kids. However, being a family with kids attracts families with kids. So it’s hard to say.

I couldn’t imagine bringing a child into this messed up world. I really feel we are at the beginning of a mass extinction and future generations, no matter how rich and well off physically, will be destined to a life of suffering.

> I really feel we are at the beginning of a mass extinction

Presumably that extinction would take place several generations from now? One great way to avoid or slow extinction would be to procreate.

> this messed up world

As bad as things might be, aren't they way way way way better than they were in previous generations? Before Russia invaded Ukraine we were on a really great streak of very little warfare on Earth (relative to decades and centuries before). Fewer people are facing malnutrition and disease from centuries before. Many countries are much more egalitarian and less corrupt than they were centuries before.

I think maybe you are taking too many things for granted that are really quite good in modern times.

> I think maybe you are taking too many things for granted that are really quite good in modern times.

The facts that (a) the world is better than it has ever been and (b) the world is currently awful and (c) we can make the world much better, are all true statements. This good article was recently discussed on HN: https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better

> Presumably that extinction would take place several generations from now? One great way to avoid or slow extinction would be to procreate.

... is that necessarily true? If our current population is well above the long-term carrying capacity, in terms of maximizing 'time there are humans on the planet', could the best course involve letting the population decrease for an extended period, and then aiming for a steady population only after we're near that carrying capacity.

A yeast cell in a wine bottle can reproduce while sugar is plentiful, but the increased population leads to more rapid sugar consumption and eventually fermentation stops.

> this messed up world

IMO the world might be messed up compared to the 80's or 90's, but take a broader look and we have never had it better than today. The average person living in the western world today has a standard of living high above what even nobility or kings would have in the middle ages and I would venture to say even a higher standard of living than the Vanderbilts or Rockerfellers did during the gilded age.

> I really feel we are at the beginning of a mass extinction

Yes, because of you. Go have kids. Ethiopians continued to have children during a decade-long famine and their population still increased. Stop making excuses for your own selfishness.

>it makes me feel bad (though not too bad at this point) that I have to log off at quittin' time, sharp, to go relieve my wife of some childcare and make a family dinner.

Nah, this part shouldn't be related to having kids or not. Even as a single person I have to log off to live my life, and overworking is not cool or hip.

Well, I have had jobs that have paid well, but not for long. If you're not working backwards from an accidental pregnancy, you just have to consider the volatility of your life, and the prospects for the future. My dad had me when he was 21, accidentally, in a time not so long ago where various alternatives weren't super available, and made it work (horribly) until they divorced, in one of the poorest and most isolated cities in Canada. He has however managed to work the same job for 30 years, and bought a house (with help from both sets of grandparents financially. Now, he does have the house, but he's had more kids in that time, and still works at the same company, but doesn't make enough to keep anything for later; it all goes to childcare and life.

In order to make something of what was an incredibly volatile childhood and an interest in computers, I eventually moved to a much more appealing and more expensive but larger pond that I could pay for at the time; my hometown just didn't really have a market. I'm also 31 now, nearly 32, and have only managed to bring in an income for a maximum of a year and a half since 18, have ended up without a stable housing situation for quite some time, and that's really difficult to pivot from if you consider that the bet you made on the thing you were capable of, just hasn't really panned out (frontend development apparently). What's next now that that the hypothetical prospects I'd have had in previous years have functionally evaporated? I'm not sure, but I'll pay for this basement apartment and drain my savings as I figure it out, going into my second year with no job of any kind.

Ironically, the people who got into trades that they had no prior knowledge of, and that didn't pursue the ambition to explore beyond the confines of their hometown, have the most stability. Me the idiot picked the computer thing and nobody taught me how to be sufficiently obedient or whatever.

So although I've been in positions where my salary was relatively higher than I could have ever imagined as a kid, I've always known it was going to disappear the next year in a layoff or a firing or a pandemic, and prospects for the future would always be just tenuous enough to barely be able to get by on my own or even with a partner. I don't take out debt, and all my money which stays liquid eventually goes to rent. I'm always in risk mitigation mode, because there's always been risk, and although I've never been compelled to have kids, some amount of that is predicated on the knowledge that it doesn't seem right to bring a kid up if I can't even figure out how to hold a job for 2 damn years.

If you go into a trade now, within 4 months into the apprenticeship you will be making money.

It's something to consider. Tricky thing is, I think a lot of people already did that, and kind of feel like whichever one I do will already be saturated.

Second cousins would be your cousin's cousins. It basically comes down to which level of grandparent you have in common. Grandparents = cousins, great-grandparents = second cousins, great-great-grandparents = third cousins.

The "removed" refers to differences in generational cohort. So if you are connected to the person by your grandparent but that same person is a great-grandparent to the relative, that relative is once removed from you. So your first cousins' children are first cousins once removed. Their grandchildren would be your first cousins twice-removed.

I think it's a mix of many things with the cost of living be number one and way down list or in the middle it could be...

- social media (want beautiful family to post n get likes)

- online dating want the most attractive I can get so I can get likes for who I'm with and kids i made

- thus everyone is pursuing a certain types/groups who they interact with and get burned by cause they have so much choice ..then get jaded about dating.

Again those reasons are by far not on the top of list reasons why but are on the list.

Maybe Hollywood needs to start reshaping our beauty standards for the sake of the human race ;-)

Ah this CNN columnist has the same opinion https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/13/opinions/dating-apps-relation...

Seen via Google News which could be creating a Truman Show type of life for me and others ... Google knows what i talk about online and shows me articles about possibly CNN gets this data and AI articles are created that are super targeted at me. YEAH (sarcasm) if true.

I feel obligated to share my counter example of anecdata.

Current team of 12, 9 are young parents, other 3 in committed relationships (international team based in North America + EU).

Previous team was around 50% parents, but people went on parental leave all the time, so the number kept increasing (company based in Germany, and basically the German half of the team had all the babies, the immigrant half almost none which is interesting).

And my brother and I got our first kids the same year, so the cousin bit is also covered.

> It baffles me.

You're just being silly or really unimaginative if someone making different choices than you on as life-altering a subject as children "baffles" you.

> it makes me feel bad (though not too bad at this point) that I have to log off at quittin' time, sharp, to go relieve my wife of some childcare and make a family dinner.

Don't feel bad! I don't have kids and I always appreciate the example set by my coworkers and manager who mostly all have kids. They're very good about having an "end" to their day which makes me feel like it's ok to also call it an end to my day.

I used to work on a team where we were all young & partner-less, including my manager, and everyone just worked "constantly"-ish (like breaks for sleep or errands so it wasn't super intense), but it just felt like a 24/7 slow marathon instead of M-F 9-5-type work. It was absolutely awful. They were all so intelligent too so I felt like I had to do that just to try to keep up and never wanted to be the first one to log off early. We were at a giant company and not scrapping to survive or anything, that was just the micro-culture within the ~10 of us.

Anecdata from Germany checking in: I have 2 kindergarden aged kids. They have 13 cousins. I don't even know how many second cousins.

Yesterday's divorce thread quickly disappeared off the front page but it's the taboo topic you must understand if you want to understand why family formation in the western aligned world has declined so rapidly. As long as we have certain truths that cannot be questioned and blackhole any attempts to discuss them, confusion will prevail.

> And it's also a bit inconvenient that nobody else at work has such pressing obligations, it makes me feel bad...

I hope your peers ambivalence (educated guess here) towards your other responsibilities make your priorities obvious. Having been in a similar situation, I "lost" the corporate battle (was laid off) but as soon as I had kids I knew my priorities needed to change. I literally worked 8:30 - 5. That was it. I wasn't going to lose missing even the most mundane of times with my kids for some after hours "retro" or some early morning "pointing" session. Thats me tho, thats my deal.

Being a good parent is a hard job and yet if you want to be one, you're expected to pay for it with both your money and your time.

No wonder the middle class people don't want to have kids. The poorest think differently - they treat kids as an investment because that's the only investment they can have at all. The richest also treat kids as investment, for different reasons. The middle class is childless - can't afford to have the best standard of raising children, so they think they shouldn't have any - and they don't.

Added anecdata: A lot of my direct colleagues are getting married and having kids at the moment, often a bit later in life (in their and their partners 30's) than the preceding generation, but still.

Me and my siblings, none of us seem to have any inclination; combination of just not wanting them, having neurodiverse conditions that seem more debilitating than my parents' generation, and finances like only becoming homeowners in our mid 30's (and my younger sibling cannot afford a home)

There is never a good time to have kids, and so any time is a good time to have kids.

Maybe I'm a lucky one, but we took the plunge right at the end of biological possibility since we're old, and I only wish I had done this 20 years ago. It's such a wonderful experience and believe me I never would have guessed that.

There's nothing I was doing back then that mattered at all. And now I'll be lucky to see my kids graduate college because I waited so long.

In hindsight, the high school years would have been the perfect time to have children. No responsibilities, doing nothing of value, biology in its optimal state, and the greatest support network you're going to have. But at the same time I feel for those who did because I know they felt the terrible social scorn.

You spend all those years being told that having children is the worst mistake of your life, until you're in your 30s, and then all of sudden the same people are "What's your problem? Why haven't you had children already?" It's bizarre.

Of my friends, 35+ something in Italy, only a handful has kids.

The others gave up or don't care or haven't met anyone (which they also kind of gave up a long time ago).

I have another anecdata for you. As a gay man living in a country that has very few children for adoption and bans surrogacy, I have given up on having kids.

First off, you shouldn't ever feel guilty about prioritizing your family over work. Please, never do that. I say that as a single 35 year old male. Secondly, I want you to understand that, though you may not realize it, you are in an extremely enviable position. To understand why people are not having children, you need to understand that in many places, it's not easy or convenient to have children.

I get the feeling these anecdotes are (unsurprisingly) biased towards young SF tech crowds.

My own experiences of being in my early 30s, born and raised on Long Island and now living in Boston, my circle of friends, relatives, and coworkers from both areas are having kids all over the place.

When my wife first became pregnant last year, it was actually a bit difficult finding openings with OBGYN offices in the general Boston area.

That's interesting. Virtually none of my friends in the Boston area (all 30+) have kids lol.

I am currently on a team of a dozen people, I am one of two who are married and who has children. It is challenging to say the least.

I had the same experience working for SF bay area tech companies, mid-size teams of high income 30 year olds and only a few people had kids.

Got a job with a company in the midwest, complete opposite. Almost everyone on my team has kids. That might suggest a lower cost of living is correlated with kids, but I think it is more of a cultural thing.

I think 30 would be _somewhat_ on the young side these days? Most people I know with kids had them mid to late 30s.

EDIT: Looks like the average age a woman in the US has a first child is at 27. That's actually lower than I'd have expected; here in Ireland it's 33.

mid to late 30s is about as late as you can have kids.

It's not that uncommon for women to have kids in their early 40s, though it certainly does start getting more difficult/sometimes impossible at that point.

> 0... second cousins? Cousins-once-removed? Whatever the one is for my cousin's kids.

Your cousins are theirs once-removed, i.e. 'cousin but one generation up'.

Second cousins are their children, i.e. same generation but up and across first.

"It baffles me."

It shouldn't. Life is pretty miserable for most people. Everyone is too busy to hang out and be relaxed. Having kids makes it even more so. Why do we want our kis to grow up like that too?

> Life is pretty miserable for most people.

this is objectively untrue with respect to almost every single piece of data we have on this subject. Just because youre a misanthrope doesnt mean everyone else is.

I wonder - do you think the drop in fertility represents a rise in overall life satisfaction or a fall? I hadn't thought about it much myself, but it seems like it could go either way.

The drop in fertility represents a rise in endocrine-disrupting chemicals like microplastics. Lower testosterone makes one less horny and more neurotic -- so we get cities of insane people worrying about completely nonsensical made-up risks. This is the face of every conceivable metric that we live in the best time to live -- ever. Never before in human history have we been richer, more peaceful, more equal than we do today.

A lot of 27 year old women 50 years ago had a kid and another on the way.

A lot of 27 year old women I know today are planning trips to Europe next year. Are they more unhappy than previous generations? I don't see it. There's a lot of interesting things competing today with being a parent.

ask them again when they are 40 and childless

definitely a fall i would say. 80% of women who do not have children, either actually wanted children but couldnt have them, or regret not having them. the fertility crisis is a complete disaster on an incredible amount of levels for people and society. The fact governments arent doing more to address this is mind boggling

check out this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i0uJ9IcQ-0

If so, then it's sort of strange to think that everything else in their lives is going so well then, isn't it? Perhaps your KPIs aren't telling you the full story or maybe happy people want fewer children?

> it's sort of strange to think that everything else in their lives is going so well then, isn't it

where are you getting this information from?

> where are you getting this information from?

Your previous comment.

>> Life is pretty miserable for most people.

>this is objectively untrue with respect to almost every single piece of data we have on this subject. Just because youre a misanthrope doesnt mean everyone else is.

Regret implies you wouldn't have regretted the other option, which is often not the case. It is entirely possible, and sometimes likely that you will regret your decision no matter which decision you make.

are hackernews commenters legally obligated to chime in with intense pedantry that is completely irrelevant to the larger point in order to feel like they are smarter than the person theyre responding to?

Really? Id like to see those numbers.

Look up the distribution of happiness in the US and other developed nations. Happiness is often lowest during childbearing years. Happiness in the US has been declining for about a decade.

https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/life-satisfaction...

people one average rate their list satisfaction from 5-7. thats a far cry from "most people are miserable."

It's worse if you're parents.

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/news/a33900/...

Sounds like you're the miserable one?

>Whatever the one is for my cousin's kids.

Cousins once removed. Second cousins are your parent's cousins. And your cousin situation sounds a lot like mine and my children - not a lot of cousins happening.

This is incorrect.

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

If two people have the same grandparents, then they are cousins. If they have the same great grandparents, then they are second cousins. atomicnumber3 was referring to what atomicnumber3's kids would call atomicnumber3's cousin's kids.

> It baffles me

It's almost as if when life is too expensive people don't feel optimistic or financially secure enough about the future enough to want to have kids.

Honestly, I appreciated "you" at my last job - I don't have kids, but work is not my life either, especially if I have to be in the office. I worked at a place where it was awkward to leave before 6:30pm, and the one person who always left around then was the guy with kids.

You're baffled people don't want kids? You couldn't pay me 3-10x to be 31 with 3 kids, lmao. And I'm almost 10 years older. I'm aging like fine wine with cool cars and vacations and obscene lofts downtown and you're going to be a turnip in 12 years with no savings because of college and child care fees.

I'm baffled people want kids, especially THREE. You have NO reason to have 3 kids.

And yeah, us child-free people absolutely know when you kid-poppers are constantly leaving work and can't be assed to take on priority projects because you've got to take Tommy and Madelyn to soccer and gymnastics at 3pm.

People value family differently. For some, their dream life is to have sick cars and a sweet loft, for others, it's to raise other humans to be good. You should probably understand that there are some that read your perspective on life as equally puzzling.

I agree that childcare and college is mad expensive. It's why people complain about these things as much as they do!

What I've always thought, as a parent: those without kids don't know what they're missing, and those with them know what they have.

I'm not saying this to try to brag about how I have some special thing in my life that you'll never understand. I'm saying it because it feels like a perfect system in a way - you simply don't miss what you don't have.

And lastly, those some sort of information bias at play. Non-parents hear all the time about how parents don't have time for this or that, or they hear them talk about how annoying their child is being. But most people have the self-awareness to not just sit and gush over how great their kid is to their non-parents friends, and even when they do, it's just obnoxious.

Oh I love parents and I don't have any problems with kids. Still consider them sometimes.

I was just bothered by the "I'm baffled by.." part of this specific post.

And you're 100% on the "don't know what we're missing," part. I haven't been married either, so no wedding, no births, no kids, it's an entire other lifestyle I basically won't have any interaction with if it doesn't happen, and it's a weird/scary thing because who knows which is better? Or what we're happier with in the end if we couldn't try both?

I'm straight but I kind of tell myself nowadays that all my gay friends are living that lifestyle and they're very happy from what I can tell so .. maybe it's not bad. But there are gay couples with kids, I don't know any. I haven't had the nerve to ask my good friend if he wanted/wants kids. Never know if thats a tough subject or not.

My only major parent pet peeve... is the word kiddos. And doggos. You can bring your screaming kids over to my pool to destroy my backyard and let all the bugs in cause they dont close doors while you get high and drunk but don't call them kiddos to me. I cannot deal with the mom forum abbreviations like DH (dear husband) and all that.. stuff. When it bleeds over to reddit etc, thankfully rarely, it hurts me to read.

I don't even care that parent coworkers leave to deal with parent stuff, at all. It actually makes ME feel less bad about leaving to do my personal stuff. I'm REALLY bad about being too anxious to leave. A lot better later in my career but early on I would never leave.

On my team of 15 only 3 don’t have kids, though there is a wide age range (24-55) the ones without kids are in their 30s but have indicated no interest. But only 2 have more than 2 kids (3). One has two of her own and now that they’re grown up she just adopted 2 high school age kids, which is very commendable, (and a huge undertaking) but I don’t really count it in terms of procreation.

I've worked with plenty of people who have no visible significant other, even. It's fucking weird. Thirty+ (40+) year old guys living alone in huge houses, never married. I'm guessing they are just hitting up sex workers. These are smart, well adjusted people who would have made good fathers.

Maybe they just never met the right lady. Calling it "fucking weird" seems a bit over the top, and contradictory to your statement about working with plenty of them.

I read it as describing the situation being weird. The people being normal is what makes the whole thing weird

I guess the older I get, the more unclear I am on what normal is supposed to be or what it ever was. What percentage of men historically even had children? My impression is that it has always been significantly less than the percentage of women who do.

Historically as in recent history or more distant?

In more distant history, yes most women had children and many men did not.

In recent history (in the west), I believe the ratio was much more equal due to culturally enforced monogamy. Obviously it was never 100% followed but I believe it made a very large impact on this metric.

0% as far as I am aware

That sounds wild. Got a reference?

Think about the language from a technical perspective. EDIT: On second thought, presumably you did and you are also adding humor!

https://youtu.be/5DlTexEXxLQ?si=pFtIMz5UKdA91aFb

if you don't meet the right lady by 40 then you haven't been looking hard enough. meaning, you were not really interested or focused on getting married. i am the only male among all my cousins that i know of to be married with children. and i am your proverbial geek who has a hard time meeting women. which my cousins or brothers are not. they had more opportunities to meet women than me (as far as i can tell), but for me, getting married and having children was one of my life goals. i achieved my goal. my brothers or cousins simply didn't even have that goal.

Maybe they're just not into it? Some people enjoy living alone without a committed relationship.

A lot of users in this thread assume that everyone's goal is to marry and have children. A lot of people are not interested in that, partly because they have other interests, and partly because the social pressure is not as strong as before.

Maybe they're just not into it?

that's exactly what i mean. they just were not into it. it's definitely not that they just were not lucky to meet the right lady to settle down with.

There's an entire culture of "incels" who seem to have trouble with this.

It is wrong that our society rewards drinking beers with tech bros and “skydiving” hobbies and what not fucking weird stuff.

And doesn’t reward that much investments of money and parental time into having healthy and educated kids.

Educated and well rounded kids, teenagers and adults don’t come free for society. It requires a lot of work, money, time and love. Ridiculous amounts.

To a degree this resource can be stolen from other countries, via immigration. But this only works to a degree and at a larger scale it is still a zero sum game.

From experience, I can tell you that women are far more attracted to the beer-swilling bros who jump out of airplanes than the quiet, introverted engineers who retire each night to their homes to relax while cooking dinner and watching TV. That doesn't make for a particularly interesting date. So it goes.

As a quiet introverted engineer who went out on many dates and got married I couldn’t disagree more. Maybe it depends on age. What you say is probably true at age 21, by 29 most of the women I met were very set on meeting a serious life partner, not a bro. I found that actually talking to them about their interests and engaging with that did wonders, even if my introverted instincts didn’t tell me to.

As a quiet introverted engineer who went out on many dates

as a quiet introverted engineer who almost never went out on dates i have to agree with GP ;-)

actually talking to them about their interests and engaging with that did wonders

completely aside from the topic, this is very important relationship advice.

love means to care about your partner and their interests and goals.

finding a compatible partner means to look for someone whose goals and interests do not conflict with yours. (the need or should not be the same, but it should be possible for each partner to continue to pursue their goals with the strong support of the other partner.)

As an introvert, I feel I had to work harder to compensate for the fact that I didn't naturally find myself in environments where I'd meet people and engage with them, but I've also found that the attraction I've gotten from women has steading increased over time. I've found it far easier to date in my 40's than in my 20's. Not just people who wanted a serious life partner. Some of it does seem to be women equating older men with more maturity, some of it hopefully reflects actual maturity...

I don't know if you had to learn how to do this, but for me I think a large part of it is also the same thing you mention - it took a lot of effort for me to figure out, but the same parts of my nature that was a disadvantage for me when younger drove me to experiment, even take notes, until I figured out what I got wrong and how to improve myself.

Ironically I've found one of my best assets when dating in my 40's was my past struggles. Particularly recognising them and being able to use them to give observations about how clueless men tend to be about dating based on the mistakes I used to make myself.

That's exactly the age I have the most experience with. Your mileage may vary I suppose.

Some of the women are quiet, introverted engineers.

> To a degree this resource can be stolen from other countries, via immigration. But this only works to a degree and at a larger scale it is still a zero sum game.

It's going to increasingly become a challenge. China's population is contracting. India has hit replacement and will start to see decline barring immigration over the next 20-30 years. Only sub-Saharan Africa is left with above replacement birth rates.

We're about to hit increasingly aggressive competition both to hold on to people, and to attract immigrants as more and more countries start getting bitten by demographic shifts.

At the same time it's going to have significant economic ramifications when more and more market categories stop getting "free growth" from growing population sizes.

> We're about to hit increasingly aggressive competition both to hold on to people, and to attract immigrants as more and more countries start getting bitten by demographic shifts.

This has an implied assumption that either more population is always better or that for all of the countries the current population is below the optimum level.

What if for some countries the best population size - the one that provides the best quality of life for its citizens - is close to the current one, not larger? What if for some countries the most favorable population size is below the one they currently have?

It has the implied assumption that a functioning economy is linked strongly to the number of people of working age relative to the number of people outside it, and part of the population decline comes with an inversion of the population pyramid where an increasing proportion of the population is retired.

As such, even if there is a "best" population size below the current population size, you will face massive upheaval if the decline toward that size isn't happening slowly enough that you can offset that either with technology, temporary workers, or just grit.

You also have no reason to assume the drop will stop at whatever level you want, and so you will see even countries where people do think some reduction is fine start to aggressively compete to hold on people or attract immigrants at whatever level they feel will give them a soft-enough landing and then stabilization.

E.g. you can look to Italy over the coming years. Italy is already in population decline, yet has a government many consider far-right and anti-immigrant - clearly, Italy is not ready to loosen up immigration to stem it yet, and is willing to accept even increasing the rate of its population decline while trying to address the underlying fertility rate.

Personally, I expect to see a major change in policy from Italy once this really starts to bite, but their current unemployment rate will still buffer them for a few more years (and once it drops, it might well create a slight rebound, but even if that happens, it's unlikely to do more than slow the decline slightly, and won't address the labour market for more than two decades).

If I'm right, you should start to see the tone change once the unemployment rate drops a bit further and pressure from businesses in need of labour starts affecting Italian politics more, followed first by increased attempts at appealing to European migrants first, with e.g. tax breaks and the like, before they eventually give in and start rolling back the restrictions on non-EU migration.

> We're about to hit increasingly aggressive competition both to hold on to people, and to attract immigrants as more and more countries start getting bitten by demographic shifts.

And yet we are seeing more and more walls (literally and figuratively) that rich countries put in the way. Even for "desirable" people immigrating and naturalizing in a western country the whole process is quite degrading, all the quotas and queues for H1B/Green cards, constant threat of deportation if person lost a job and couldn't find another one in very short time period, arbitrary delays and constrains on getting citizenship, etc.

Because it hasn't started to bite enough yet for the most desirable targets, coupled with politicians that have painted themselves into corners and are struggling to find ways out.

E.g. in the UK, the last several Conservative governments have on one hand presented themselves as tough on immigration, with deals to send asylum seekers to Rwanda (a few hours worth of applicants is all the deal can accommodate), putting them on barges (another few hours worth), turning back boat refugees, etc., while at the same time presiding over the largest increase in net migration in British history.

Predictably the conflict between that image and reality is starting to cause problems for them, and while immigration numbers are still high enough despite a process that is intentionally hostile, eventually the supply of people wanting to come will dip below the numbers that still allow the UK to be selective about whom to accept.

We've already gotten a slight taste of that with the sharp dip in EU/EEA migrants, who, as it turns out don't feel the UK is worth it enough to go through the immigration process vs. just showing up the way we could before (I'm in the UK with EU/EEA Settled status), and it's caused assorted groups complaining..

It will take until you have broader labour shortages before you see the real pressure though - especially countries buffered by unemployment will be able to put it off a bit longer, but when it hits, it will hit hard and just raising fertility rates won't be sufficient, because it has a lag of 2 decades of worsening conditions before it even starts reversing the drop in the labour supply.

It's going to increasingly become a challenge. China's population is contracting.

i think the economic differences and the population density still make immigration a viable strategy for some time to come, despite contracting population everywhere.

the future will be that the population in every larger city will consists of least a quarter chinese and indian (and eventually african as well).

It will be a viable strategy for decades, you're right, in as much as UN population projections don't show an actual global population decline until around 2100 or so.

The challenges that will bring, though, is policy, and which countries are attractive enough to "sit back" vs. being forced to offer increasingly attractive incentives, and where it will cause substantial political complications.

E.g. China is notorious for it being near impossible to permanently settle as an immigrant. I expect that aside from increasingly drastic measures to try to bring the fertility rate back up you'll see their first attempts be to entice the diaspora back to China, secondly an increase in rhetoric about One China towards Taiwan, and only well after those attempts to loosen up visa requirements for foreigners with no ancestral ties to China.

We'll see the return of diasporas increasingly becoming a problem for countries that has come to rely on certain immigrant flows.

A lot of countries will find political tension between forces wanting to more actively court immigrants vs. anti-immigrant groups becoming increasingly challenging and a major economic issue.

> To a degree this resource can be stolen from other countries, via immigration. But this only works to a degree and at a larger scale it is still a zero sum game

It can actually be a net negative for both the home country and host country of the immigrants. The home country may lose some of their more ambitious members. And there is a significant cost to a host country that is now accommodating a potentially large number of people from faraway places with vastly different cultures. (Some may ignore or deny these costs, but they're real and being felt in many ways e.g. in the US right now.)

> And there is a significant cost to a host country that is now accommodating a potentially large number of people from faraway places with vastly different cultures. (Some may ignore or deny these costs, but they're real and being felt in many ways e.g. in the US right now.)

You are being down-voted, but I'm curious what are the costs of having _legal, desirable_ immigrants in the US in your opinion? (because I would assume that OP meant specifically that group when writing "this resource can be stolen from other countries, via immigration").

I also worked with a 60+ woman who once said at the lunch table "if you're a 35 year old guy and single there's something seriously wrong with you". Maybe you would have hit it off with her.

Those are called "bachelors", plenty of historical precedent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor

I'm one of those. Very shy even into my late 20s. Then my Dad got sick so I was his support for nearly 20 years. Life went by and now it's too late to have kids. No woman of child bearing age wants to date a middle-aged man 10 years her senior. So really why bother even trying to have a relationship at this point?

Plenty of women wants to date a guy 10, 20 or even 30 years her senior. Especially if he's financially secure, wants a stable relationship, is reasonably healthy and treats her well.

If you have your life in order, all you have to do is to look in the right places. Those places exist in any country, but if you're a man like that and look on dating sites for Thailand or the Philippines, you will find 10 women that want to marry you within an hour or two.

However, if you're broke, don't have a decent job and have serious health problems, you may indeed by out of luck.

Not to give OP fuel for his fire, but just to be real because I am so sick of seeing these misleading comments all over the internet:

It's not just finding a woman who is willing. It's finding a woman who is a quality person that you have an attraction to that is willing.

When you are a woman who is sane, smart, have your life together, and is decent looking, you have many choices for a partner. Many of these woman can easily find high quality men who are their own age and have the same life situation.

So while yes, it does happen that the 50 yr old guy meets the amazing 33 yr old woman. Far more often than not, the amazing 33 yr old woman meets to amazing 33 yr old guy.

Unless you are down with divorced w/kids. Then it gets much easier. But you will be second to her kids.

> So while yes, it does happen that the 50 yr old guy meets the amazing 33 yr old woman. Far more often than not, the amazing 33 yr old woman meets to amazing 33 yr old guy.

This is absolutely true, well at least if you include those amazing people who met even earlier than 33. Amazing people tend to have options whether they are male, female or even other.

Those less amazing (the remaining 60-80%, depending on who's counting), often have to lower their standards or expectations in some way, unless they're lucky and find a special soulmate. Indeed, if someone is 35+ and still single, chances are their expectations are not aligned with what they themselves have to offer.

I've been there myself. Only when I decided that I did NOT want to remain single for the rest of my life and became serious about finding a partner did that change. And it changed virtually overnight.

Maybe just having a friend; as I've said elsewhere in the thread, I never really got the whole marriage/kids idea myself, but perhaps now that I'm also aging out of childbearing age, dating will be less complicated once any expectation of children are out of the picture.

Maybe They haven't found the one who they want and or wants them ..too maybe they aren't into women. With society being more accepting of same sex situations I'm pretty sure I read the number of those who identify something other then straight has increased.

[flagged]

> It baffles me.

Frankly, I never really got why people wanted children in the first place, so this turnabout is amusing. Perhaps you can ask some of these people that you are close with as to their reasoning.

It's the simplest answer. I find life to be worth living, I am grateful I have life and it's the most meaningful to me to be able to give life to someone else and try to make it as good and meaningful for them as possible.

And it can be so fun. I just taught my 3 year old to ride a bike and for the first time today we went for a bike ride along the boardwalk, each on our bikes. I had a pretty amazing single life but I would be hard-pressed to think of anything that matched how much fun this was for me.

I suppose we come at life from very different perspectives, shaped by our culture and our family. It is very hard for me imagine how someone must feel about their life and the world to say "nope, it ends with me." I know people do it but... I don't envy that starting point.

When it ends, it ends, and that's it regardless of how many others you created who will now go on to face their own ends. I get that somehow people are able to live in denial of the ultimate extinction of their being, but I never really seemed to be able to get the hang of that. To each their own.

This sounds familiar, perhaps you and I have discussed it before.

My life matters to me as a vehicle for what truly matters: if my descendants are thriving, and my values are upheld, whether I am physically here once I've contributed to it, is completely irrelevant to me.

I will fight to live as long and as well as I can, but only because that increases my opportunity to contribute what I want. Merely "existing" is not my highest value and therefore is not the thing I worry about solely.

Hard to explain if you don't get it.

It's certainly possible, but I've seen others here express the same sentiment. Another poster once posted a quite insightful comment about Nietzsche that really described a lot of the problems of nihilism that captured the feelings that I've had since realizing the unreality of religion at a young age, so I'm not exactly alone even if I am a bit of an outlier.

> Nietzsche

It goes back further than that. "To be or not to be" is indeed THE question, or rather THE choice, especially if you have the type of personality that tends to lead to an existential crisis at some point in your life.

In the end, as far as I can tell, there is no obvious "meaning" in life beyond what we decide to attach meaning to. And "to be" is a prerequisite for most objectives we may attach it to.

Having offspring can be seen as an extension to this. It is to decide that "beeing" will go on even after you as an individual dies.

> I get that somehow people are able to live in denial of the ultimate extinction of their being

Is that truly any more likely than the non-extinction of our being? It seems like a safe assumption as a default, but…

I mean, I'm not trying to be bleak, but do you have any evidence that any of the religions out there can deliver on their promises? Like I'd be somewhat inclined to listen, but extraordinary claims and all that...

I am not the one you're asking but I was born an atheist and discovered religion as an adult, through intellect. Here's my answer from that background.

Ready? The answer is "we don't know." There may be a Gd, there may not be. There may be meaning, there may not be. You can't really know either way.

The answer is that it doesn't matter. The question is what kind of life do you want to live. One that lives as if there's meaning or one that lives as if there isn't? I know my answer. If I get to the end and turns out the meaning was just something I made for myself, and that there's nothing special about my children and my values other than my deep affinity for them... that'd still be a pretty great life.

Exactly this. I hope to have kids because I'm so grateful for all that has been given to me, and I want to share it and pass it all on.

Biological organisms not procreating despite living in material and caloric abundance is cosmically weird.

Evolution has equipped us with a pretty generous frontal cortex so we have a sort of escape hatch to reflect and decide on whether to act on our biological imperatives. Reduction of human beings to 'biological organisms' as if we're humping rabbits is no less weird.

We haven't escaped any biological imperative. We still have sex. The desire to have sex is the biological imperative that produces offspring, and we haven't lost that. It's because we invented birth control that now the desire to have sex is not enough. We need a desire to have kids. Natural selection will make that desire stronger over time.

> Natural selection will make that desire stronger over time.

Natural selection doesn't work like that.

There is no guarantee that traits appear because they are needed ; only that traits that somehow appear may spread if they are useful or associated with something else that is useful.

But don't we have that trait already in some form? Some people want kids, others don't. The traits that make a person more likely to want kids will become more common.

If we don't have such a trait and the decision to have kids is based entirely on the environment, then this evolution will be cultural instead of biological. Cultures that have more kids will replace those that don't.

My point is more theoretic that an actual reflection on what will actually happen, because I'm not better than the next person at predictions. Simply put: just because a species needs to change in order to adapt, doesn't mean they do. Geologic strata are littered with species that no longer exists.

As for culture, it is not a static thing, or indissociable from individuals. My grandmothers had 6 and 8 kids, most of my cousins have 0-2 kids. So considering my grandmothers' behaviour and my cousins', Are they from the same culture? Will people that reproduce more today convince their children to do the same?

In either analysis, it's really hard to use natural selection as a predictive tool.

We, or at least some of us, most definitely have such traits.

Holding newborn babies tend to have a quite obvious and equally instant hormonal effect on a lot of people. For some people, even a few such encounters may be enough to induce baby fever.

And there are other factors at play, too, that are also inheritable. Factors like impulse control, introversion / shyness, ambitiousness drive and tendency to magical /religious thinking may all affect the number of offspring one way or the other.

So all that is needed is a few generation of strong selection pressure for such traits, and we're back to overpopulation again being a much bigger threat than population collapse.

> Natural selection will make that desire stronger over time.

A truer sentence haven't been said.

Even better, invent tools so we can still hump like rabbits but not be burdened with the results. Good stuff. Evolution gonna take a while to figure out a response.

Unless it already figured it out, and placed the solution in the gene pool. In that case, a few generations of natural selection is all that will be needed.

Does it not strike you as strange though that so many different nations / cultures are all seeing the same downward trend at the same time? There is something about it that feels like a biological imperative.

We have better things to do than hump like rabbits? We don’t need kids to work the farm, or to provide net positive muscle power input to the economy. We have machines for that.

> We have better things to do than hump like rabbits?

Correction: we still hump like rabbits, at much higher rates than before (welcome hookup culture) and broadcast it to the world for millions to watch.

We are simply not having children.

Actually hookup culture resulted in less sex, and married weekly church goers according to the existing data are having the most sex by far.

>higher rates than before (welcome hookup culture)

Got any source to back that up? All surveys I have seen point to younger generations having less sex, fewer relationships, and even just drinking less than their ancestors. Remember, the boomers were the "free love" hippies and then STDs became a serious concern, and we decided we should warn kids about consequences of sex.

We don’t need kids to work the farm

even if we did, kids are expected to go to school now. they changed from being a work asset to a cost center.

A fire has no cortex whatsoever, and yet if fire did not continue doing what fire does in order to stay fire - turn things that are "not fire" into itself- it would cease to exist altogether. That's all there is to it. There is no big picture.

edit: I expected apathy at best from a comment this deep in a thread. Now, granted, HN does not stand for Hard Nihilism, but four downvotes with zero explanations in under an hour suggests there is an incurious hostility toward the view that people (myself included) are, like fire, essentially just echoes of thermodynamics.

> That's all there is to it. There is no big picture.

Even if it is correct (which you haven’t tried to support, just claiming that you know best), how is it relevant? If there’s no bigger picture then what’s wrong with going extinct which should push us to procreate? The comparison to fire - the human population is the highest it’s ever been and still increasing so it doesn’t seem like we are “going out“, and if that was happening the collapse of civilisation would lead to the loss of the ability to mass manufacture birth control and loss of the medical systems supporting them at some point, and the population would go up again after that, wouldn’t it? Fire runs out of fuel, but human food grows on trees - less humans leads to more ecosystem regeneration which could support more humans.

> "an incurious hostility toward the view that people (myself included) are, like fire, essentially just echoes of thermodynamics."

I thought we were “just“ hydraulic systems? Just LLMs? Just clockwork? Humans are just {recent scientific discovery of the era} is an interesting view on its own but is it relevant to the thread? "We are just thermodynamic systems ... so we should reproduce"?

OP is saying that we have a complex brain which allows us to reflect on our biological impulses and choose whether or not to answer the instinct to reproduce. I'm arguing instead that we - as complex frontal-cortex-having organisms - have no more choice than fire does whether to make more of ourselves. And abstractly our existence follows the same flowchart as that of a fire but, as the kids say these days, "with extra steps." Our integrity and thus identity floats upon a process of degrading complex configurations of energy into simpler, uniform ones.

If fire were to gain sentience and therefore know what it was up to, this would not change its essential prerogative to keep doing it, in order to be able to keep doing it.

I'm older and also never wanted kids. There was a brief moment in my 20s where I would have been ok with it, but the relationship I was in didn't workout and that was that. Now I've been married a long time, and we had the no kid conversation on date one. Instead we rescue dogs and are in the process of moving and semi-retiring in a small coastal town in Italy.

My desire for not having kids is rooted in my own childhood. My parents had me at 19, we were poor and struggled for much of my early life. My mom used to say, "don't have kids until after college unless you want to work at McDonalds". And, for better or worse, my drive became for financial security above all else.

I dunno, I grew up in a family of 5 kids, and it just never really occurred to me to not have them. I think my greatest regret in life is going to be having only one :/

However, I have no issues with people that don’t want them. To each their own.

interesting .. I'm the oldest of 5 myself and have just one daughter, but I can't really imagine having or wanting more.

Honestly, it’s a relief when there’s other kids to play with him. I love having 3 kids in the house at the same time and to just guide them in their play, instead of having to _be_ the playmate. I’m pretty young, but I do not have the kind of imagination required to keep that up for a day :P

If he’s been outside running around the street with his friends all day it hasn’t cost me anything and the evenings are so much easier/relaxed.

I remember that being the same for me, except that I always had people to play with around, because they were living in the same house.

For me it's like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/hf0rf/for_reasons_une...

(third square)

Heh, maybe if people were having more kids the US political landscape wouldn’t be so fucked.

You think the fallout is bad now? Give it twenty years.

Watch idiocracy for what that could lead to.

For me, I consider bringing a new human life into existence to be one of the most net positive things a human being can do. It's also one of the most reliably net positive things.

Economists have very roughly estimated the value of a human life at around $10,000,000 these days, and there are reasons to suspect this is a vast underestimate for my kids in particular. The total cost to me as a parent to rear this golden goose? Somewhere around $100,000 total, spread over the course of 18 years. What a bargain!

There are of course things one can do which are worth even more, but it's exceedingly hard to reliably become a billionaire, or even to found a billion dollar company. But any old schmuck can nut inside a woman and force push eight figures worth of bliss into the source code of reality!

100k? In many places, just an additional room for child alone would be that much.

Why does it baffle you?

Kids are an expense. Money is tight.The future is bleak.

That's why I only have one kid (and it was unplanned). Every now and then my wife and I discuss having another one but the cons overcome the pros.

There is no non-selfish reason to bring a kid to this god-forsaken world.

People nowadays focus on career till 30 and after 30 (when you loose that naive optimistic outlook on life) realize that having kids is too much of a risky obligation - you don't have any guarantee that you will remain healthy enough to sustain family till they grow up and that your kids will be born healthy. Also, life has gotten quite expensive.

Just had my first kid at 33 /shrug

My father had 10 siblings and my mother had seven. I had seven siblings myself with over 30 cousins on both sides of my family. I have four children and my and most of my siblings each have six children or so. My mother has about 24 grandkids at the last count Maybe. Further, I live on the same street as two of my sisters and I have another sister that lives down the street, with my brother living 3 mi away. Only two siblings live out of town.

My children routinely play with and enjoy being with their cousins. My daughter has a hard time making friends but she says it's okay because at least she has her cousins.

I have had a very rich experience with many of my cousins and I think these cousins are growing up even closer together both physically and emotionally. Would highly recommend the lifestyle.

Large families are such a blessing when you get older. Kids are an awful lot of work for the first about 10 years but boy are they awesome every year after that. When my grandmother is interacting with her children and grandchildren at reunions it's like she's holding court, the queen of an empire.

You have to be religious, right?

This is the dream for us. We reverted to Catholicism after it became apparent that the secular world was incompatible with us, then eventually found our way to a high fertility parish. It’s incredible. Kids everywhere. Average family size is 5-6 kids. Really hoping our kids choose to remain in this lifestyle and we get to enjoy dozens of grandkids.

I initially read this comment to mean “we wanted larger family, the secular world doesn’t do that, we became religious and we’re happy”. Am I understanding that correctly? If so, this strikes me as a very novel argument in favor of religion, and is more convincing to me than most others.

I do wonder what I’d say if/when people question the fervor of my belief though, if I truly converted just for a community with larger families. I imagine “I believe in big families” wouldn’t cut it.

> I initially read this comment to mean “we wanted larger family, the secular world doesn’t do that, we became religious and we’re happy”. Am I understanding that correctly?

Kinda. We were open to believing in God. But the start of our journey was just realizing the secular world had nothing to offer us. Then we met a religious homeschooling family w/ 5 kids and they gave us a glimpse of what was possible. So we started swimming in that direction and it just kept getting better the farther out we swam.

> I do wonder what I’d say if/when people question the fervor of my belief though, if I truly converted just for a community with larger families. I imagine “I believe in big families” wouldn’t cut it.

Here’s the thing: if you’re not a militant atheist and you start spending a lot of time around sincerely religious people who you like, you’ll end up believing sincerely yourself. Since you’re secular, I’ll explain it like this: we’re evolved to cohere around a shared system of belief and the appropriate mental machinery will kick in as part of becoming embedded in a religious community. And that’s what I used to believe. But now I know those were just the breadcrumbs I needed to find my way.

Oof, my experience is the exact opposite. I was raised Catholic, and my family attended mass every week. I realized I didn't believe in god in my early teens. For many years after that I really wished I could believe, tried to believe. My parents had me enrolled in CCD (for those of you not Catholic, that's basically the Catholic version of what's colloquially known as "Sunday School") through 8th grade. I participated in some of my church's youth groups, and was friends with quite a few religious people.

But it just didn't work. I wasn't a militant atheist; I just questioned things, and was frustrated when my elders would shut me down and hand-wave my questions away.

I gave up in my early 20s. That was 20+ years ago. I'm still an atheist. I don't have a problem with religious people, unless they try to force their beliefs on others (especially when they try to use the political and legal process to do so). But most folks seem to just want to live and let live. But I no longer think there's something wrong with me, or long to be "normal" like my peers and believe in a god. I can't imagine ever believing, regardless of what communities I find myself a member of.

Welp - messed up the line breaks - hope that made sense.

> I just questioned things

Questioning things is how one truly reaches God. Your elders failed you.

Some people just hold beliefs because they were born with them, not because they necessarily believe in them. I know these types because I've lived my whole life around many of them. Thanks to them, I've come to despise the modern concept of organizated religions, though I still value religion itself.

This is why I tend to view modern religious leaders as parasites. They convince other people that they [the other people] can't understand religion on their own,that religion is mysterious and only those well versed may speak on the art.

By convincing people of such things, said people then outsource the job of thinking to those select few, and you're left with mindless brains who can't figure out the answers to a child's questions about God.

I ask myself questions, I always do, and I try to look for answers, for each question answered brings me one step closer to God, and by extension, brings me some measure of peace in life.

> you start spending a lot of time around sincerely religious people who you like, you’ll end up believing sincerely yourself

Interestingly, this is what turned me into an atheist at a rather young age. A friend invited me to a childrens' religious/social group wherein they explained that most science is actually incorrect; the earth is only 6000 years old, evolution is a lie created by the evil Darwin... that sort of thing. In my head, their version of Christianity fell apart and the rest quickly followed.

Yeah, you thought they were idiots and formed antibodies against their belief system. But there are sophisticated religious people. And IMO sophisticated religious people are much more likely to have pondered deeply the ineffability of existence and accepted that it is incomprehensible except by faith. Whereas atheists just want to point out that it can’t be turtles all the way down and then become suddenly disinterested in the question beyond that.

Oh, I got the academic, Jesuit-style teaching from my Catholic church and the decade or so of CCD I was compelled to attend as well. I actually spent years thinking rather deeply about it, but that doesn't mean it stuck - I suppose some of us just aren't capable of believing.

You do remind me of one of my favorite Douglas Adams quotes though:

> “Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

I'm imagining a dialog in which I ask, "So why does it all exist then?" And you reply, "Well, I'm not sure, no-one is. But it's not God." To which I respond, "My brother in faith!" and embrace you. After that we ponder the ineffable over a few pints.

“suppose some of us just aren't capable of believing.”

That’s such an obvious fallacy, you should do yourself a favor and introspect how such an absurd idea came into your head. Who put it there?

To see it’s absurd, consider, have you ever changed your mind about something? If yes, then it’s obviously possible and maybe even likely that you can and will one day change your views on divinity? If course it’s possible, and actually quite common. And yes, it comes as a surprise.

> Kinda. We were open to believing in God. But the start of our journey was just realizing the secular world had nothing to offer us.

I'm curious how you interprete "secular"? Cause it seems you're setting it up to mean anti-religion which is certainly not what the usual definition is.

> Here’s the thing: if you’re not a militant atheist and you start spending a lot of time around sincerely religious people who you like, you’ll end up believing sincerely yourself.

I won't question your own experience, but you're being way too broad here. I know many people who are not "militant atheists" but still don't believe in organized religion. I also have a lot of friends whose families are extremely religious - meaning they're around them all the time - none of them has been pushed or convinced to join. They just don't observe prayer etc compared to their friends.

> Since you’re secular, I’ll explain it like this: we’re evolved to cohere around a shared system of belief and the appropriate mental machinery will kick in as part of becoming embedded in a religious community. And that’s what I used to believe. But now I know those were just the breadcrumbs I needed to find my way.

This sounds more like a self-justification than something actually supported by science. Please note I'm not trying to "religion shame you". Just curious. :)

That’s awesome. I have good news and bad news — my family is extremely Christian, we were missionaries to Turkey for ten years, I’ve converted people, etc. It is a very close community, and I do think the community aspect will just keep getting better for you. At the same time, different people will feel differently about what truth is. I’m agnostic now, because I feel like I would be lying to my family if I said I still believe it all. The mismatch in belief does cause some stress sometimes, even though it’s still mostly a sweet community that I love to have in my life. Your kids might feel the same in 20 years. I’m sure they’ll still love you dearly anyways, just be sure that your pastor/church/community will still accept them as well, if they do walk away from the faith.

Thanks for your perspective. It's all a grand experiment. Maybe you'll see a thread on here in 30 years about how it all turned out.

If you visit /r/exchistian you can have a sneak peek right now

To be fair, there’s a spectrum of experiences, and I suspect that r/exchristian would have only the very worst experiences

> we’re evolved to cohere around a shared system of belief and the appropriate mental machinery will kick in as part of becoming embedded in a religious community

So brainwashing-lite? Man I'm glad whatever "appropriate mental machinery" that was in my head kicked in and got me the fuck away from communities like this.

My brother in brainwashing, you just got brainwashed in a different direction. Know this and you will be free.

Mind if I ask how you found a church like this?

I’ve been having similar thoughts. Sedevacantism seemed like a natural place to look but it isn’t well represented in my area.

I grew up catholic but it was mostly people going through the motions. Yours sounds like a more hippy esque flavor which appeals to me.

We prolly would have ended up at a similar parish or Orthodox, but finding our parish was a happy accident. I don’t have enough experience to tell you how to find something similar in another city, but if I had to guess, it’d be something like: join the Catholic homeschool community in your area and pay attention to which parishes people are commuting to. Other strong indicators are probably some amount of Latin in the masses, strong traditional music program, etc.

Are atheists only "militant" in your point of view? As an atheist I can say that the only way for me to believe in gods is to simply fake it. This believing "at will" is rather interesting concept, but I honestly can't comprehend it.

It’s like love. You fall in love, you fall in love with God. The rest is just garbled mumbling to yourself and others. And like love, it is your experience of it and your view of your beloved that matters, who cares what others think. This is how it is with actual belief. You experience something that shatters the illusion. Once that happens, you belong to God bothered people. And yes, those who have never experienced love also think love is “just chemical processes in the body”. But it’s not, otherwise they’d bottle that chemical process and make a zillion selling it. (They try with drugs but is just ain’t the same thing, you know?)

If falling in love with God conveys truth/reality, then how do you reconcile two people who are both "in love with God" but have incompatible beliefs about God?

I know a person who fell in love with a woman that didn't exist. Person A (my friend) was straight. Person B was gay and fell in love with Person A, and then created Person C (fictitious person) with the hopes that Person A would grow to love Person C, and eventually Person B would tell the truth but that Person A's love was pure enough that he didn't care about the deception and wanted to be with Person B.

Hell of a story, but the reason I mention it is because Person A falling in love with Person C didn't make Person C real. How does that work with God?

you do not have beliefs about the one you love. seeing truth/reality is when you stop cheating on the one you love. so love becomes real when your hearts sees clear. and since this is not “fiction” but rather the Reality of your Subjective Experience that is the only thing you ‘know’ for a ‘near at hand, within sight, felt by heart’. Love always tames Reason. whether imaginal love, temporal love, or divine love. The former are shattered when they are subjected to ‘external reality’.

The acid test of true love for God is that Reality confirms it.

This strikes close to home. Until you've experienced love, you cannot understand it. Doubly so for the purest forms of love, love above human love.

I wager we avoid that kind of love because it boils down to "sacrifice yourself for the good that's outside you". In human terms it's something like parents sacrificing themselves for their children, or friends sacrificing themselves for their friends[1]. Losing something painfully that cannot be replaced in the world. A world where we have all the time, money, internet to distract us from hardship & suffering that brings us closer to goodness.

I personally didn't believe in God until I received a tiny part of his love for myself.

[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2015%3A13&...

> a tiny part

don’t you believe that for a second. God does not deal with tiny graces. it’s just a process and then it becomes overwhelming and all resistance is gone. all of it.

> otherwise they’d bottle that chemical process and make a zillion selling it.

Oh they do- ask anyone in recovery from opioids.

that doesn’t provide the real thing - it is a ‘Fire’ destroys the person. God’s Love is a ‘Light’ builds you up and makes you strong and vital. You really have to experience it - and read Pascal’s wager in the light of his expressing a subjective personal understanding of spiritual experience not a logical formula for converting non-experienced. (Pascal got a hit of Love from God not a hit of opium.)

> that doesn’t provide the real thing

How would you know without experiencing it? The experience of joy someone else gets from anything- physical activity, their own religion, love, drugs (however fleeting) is as valid as yours.

it’s a matter of duration not external evaluation. i say the “real thing” since that comes to you rather than you affecting a state of mind-body. there is no street corner for someone to deal you that drug. this is the fundamental difference that is discernible from without. you can see the source of one type of bliss (and you can buy it) and the other one is subject to endless debate except by those who are blissed /out!

> I do wonder what I’d say if/when people question the fervor of my belief though, if I truly converted just for a community with larger families. I imagine “I believe in big families” wouldn’t cut it.

There's nothing wrong with that. Nobody should have a problem with you wanting to be a part of a church community, even if you aren't a "real" believer.

People just want to be part of a community. Most of the time the only available open communities are church communities, so that's better than nothing.

Yes, I totally agree. I'm simply saying that you don't have to be uber religious to be a part of a church community. A good church should make you feel accepted no matter who you are.

There are perhaps exceptions, e.g. if you are intentionally trying to harm the church or members of it, but otherwise the church should accept you as you are -- "true" believer or not.

In practice you will probably find a lot of "bad" churches, so you'll probably have to shop around a little bit.

> Nobody should have a problem with you wanting to be a part of a church community, even if you aren't a "real" believer.

I really appreciate this view, but certainly some people do have a problem with it. I think it would be especially awkward if you spend a significant amount of your life there, raise kids, etc, but never claim the religion is true. It almost sounds like a cringe-comedy movie

If your values and actions align with the religious community, and you're okay being around people who are religious/spiritual, I believe it can be mutually beneficial.

If your values and actions don't align with the religious community, then you should still be accepted, but if you don't have belief, then it's unlikely you'll stay for long.

^ note: by "should" I mean that, at least in my view, a "real" Christian should be accepting and not judge others. In practice nobody lives up to this, but it can at least inform how you should feel, e.g. if you feel judged it's saying more about others than it says about you.

^ double note: "real" Christian is incredibly hard to define. The Bible can be interpreted any way you want. Ultimately what guides me is trying to do what I think is right, using the Bible as one source of information.

Absolutely agree with everything you said. The biblical Jesus sets a high standard that is impossible to live up to. Even though I don’t believe now, I love people that try to live to that standard, and I aspire to as well

Except the whole dooming most of humanity to external lakes of fire. And maybe terrorizing kids with the threat that they'll commit the unforgivable sin, and be destined for said lake of fire

lol ya, those are part of the reason I’m no longer Christian. Shepherdjerred didn’t discuss those in his comment though

> cringe-comedy movie

Church Crashers

It's the strong believers that create schisms. Just hang around and nod -- those are your favorite believers.

Yes, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Err, yeah I'm a little skeptical of parents who want lots of children. I'm in my twenties now, but I was raised Catholic, I have twelve siblings, and I was homeschooled until my senior year. There were several issues:

- Me and my siblings all feel like our parents loved the "identity" of being parents and having lots of children, but when it came down to the brass tax of actually caring for our emotional needs, they were entirely absent. This was such a large rift that almost all of us intentionally don't have close relationships with our parents.

- On top of emotional neglect, there was inevitable physical neglect. One brother clearly had autism but our parents never had the time or finances to get him treated appropriately. Two siblings weren't able to get the braces they needed for their teeth as kids and had to get jaw surgery as adults. Two of my siblings were injured in severe accidents growing up that would've been avoided if a parent had been watching out.

- The parents of these families go around narcissistically glowing with all the social credit for being "superhero parents" when realistically the majority of the labor falls upon the oldest siblings. Me and my two sisters effectively raised all of our younger siblings with our mother being pregnant so often, and father working full-time. Our parents never recognized how much work we put in, and as we transitioned to adulthood it took a lot of work to establish healthy relationships with our younger siblings where we didn't feel taken advantage of (the younger siblings had parental expectations of us for years afterward).

- The lack of socialization from being homeschooled really came back to bite us in the ass. Some of my siblings got (cyber) bullied after transitioning to the real world. Some simply never were able to make the adjustment to talking to normal people, and some are still really struggling. I was able to get "socialized" and now appear like a normal SWE at a large tech company but I'm very lucky.

So....be very careful around these families and their values. A lot of times having lots of kids are a narcisstic vision from the parents, rather than a true desire to take care of a lot of people.

According to the sociological data, the same happens in smaller families, but the support structure is worse, so people are worse off. Life is challenging!

Citation?

Kids in smaller families don't have to raise their younger siblings.

Yeah, that's def not our plan (nor is it even possible at this point). But, for what it's worth, I don't see many families with > 6-7 kids, so I think your notion of what is meant by "want a lot of kids" is skewed by your experience.

I mean, is it? I'd say anything above 2 (the number of parents around usually) is "a lot of kids". Anything above 2 and you start running into the problems I listed. In this society, I think most people who want more than three or so are narcissists who want to be praised as super-parents and/or highly impractical (or just happen to be extremely wealthy). My whole point is that, there's a fun fantasy around having lots of children but it comes with huge cons for the kids themselves in today's society.

*brass tacks, but I like this take on it too

Not necessarily. My parents also both have quite a few siblings, and aren't particularly religious. They were born in the 1930s when it wasn't unusual.

I may have a couple of dozen first cousins, I don't really know, but they are geographically distant. I haven't met one since childhood, and I can't remember getting along with them very well.

this is a funny question. Avoiding tangents, for all intents and purposes, I'm secular. Though I've only had two children with no intention of having more, I was raised Southern Baptist, the oldest of six. I love our big family. My mother was one of seven, and all her siblings have many children as well. I look back fondly on our holiday gatherings and miss them dearly. my aunts were guardian angels through so many difficult times. But as much as I want those big family gatherings and the overall dynamic, I couldn't imagine going back to Southern Baptism as a means to see them perpetuated. It would be nice if there were a natalist "movement" (for lack of better word) that was more or less secular (without being self-aggrandizing and delusional ala effective altruism).

Yeah, wanting a secular natalist movement is where I was for a while. But then the truth of it hits you at some point: it will never exist. The secular way of life exalts the individual, but raising a large family is about subduing your own desires and devoting yourself to something more important than yourself. Well, guess who already does that: religious people.

> The secular way of life exalts the individual

Wow, that is not my experience at all. I think in some ways that's perhaps a very US-centric view, even though I'd still consider that a flawed way at looking at secularism in the US. Most of the developed world is fairly secular (even among those with religious beliefs), and extreme individualism is not as common as you seem to think.

I do wonder how common your attitude is among religious people, though. If it's common, that would explain a few things...

I was raised in a very religious household, but I left the fairly young. I spent the next couple decades around a large amount of both religious and secular people. It’s been my anecdotal experience that religious people are exponentially more likely to volunteer and donate to help others. I’ve seen yards cleaned, homes rebuilt, soup kitchens hosted, mobile laundry services and free shoes/clothes for the homeless, church closet giveaways (basically a free yard sale for the community), hundreds of doctors filling a convention center volunteering their time and money to treat people for free,… I don’t doubt non-religious people are doing these things, but I don’t think it’s at the same scale, and the secular nonprofits that are offering this kind of help often skim a lot off the top to pay beefy corporate salaries.

The secular way of life is an individual way of life, in the sense that it’s different for everyone. Some choose rugged individualism, some choose to devote themselves to their community.

I can find a small army of secular leftists who subdue their own desires and have devoted themselves to something more important than themselves - namely, overthrowing the capitalist system.

They don't make many babies though, because they've subdued their desires to reproduce and devoted themselves to the good of the planet ;)

Out of curiosity, what is the ballpark of your and your spouse's income and net worth?

I’m game but tell me your hypothesis first.

No hypothesis, just trying to gauge at what point could/would someone willingly consider that lifestyle.

I'm not sure money really matters that much. Most of our friends are well-educated but solidly middle class. If two income families were more common, then most of them would probably be upper middle class. Our family is upper middle class. I am self employed but don't have significant net worth other than my business.

I take it you attend a FSSP or ICKSP church?

Naw, just a reverent parish. Mix of English and Latin. Somewhat conservative, but not super conservative.

It’s awesome if you can afford it. I wouldn’t mind having 3 kids if each one of them could have their own space in the house, if I could help them develop life skills, and give them all the love and time they need. With large families it feels like many of the children are neglected. In a modern world either you don’t have the money or you don’t have the time.

Time doesn't scale. If you have eight kids and a full time job out of the home, it will be incredibly difficult to deeply get to know, support, etc them as individuals. A common observation is that in families with that many kids, the older kids raise the younger kids.

It probably functions much better if everyone works together in a family business.

OP is definitely Mormon. Many, many friends of mine come from Mormon families (for better or for worse)

OP commented, confirming that they were Mormon.

So basically you want your older kids to raise the younger ones, and have little choice in the matter?

I was lucky that my wife convinced me to move close to her family (it would have never occurred to me.) Now we live just a few doors down from her brother who's got 4 kids, and we have 2. Watching the cousins intermingle is an amazing and unique experience.

It's kinda sad but it's also obvious that people are majorly missing out. On having kids, on living close to family, on all of it.

Ironically, this is evolution in action. The folks that "remember" how to have a family and raise kids have an uncontested claim to the future. The "it's too hard to have kids" crew is selecting against themselves, evolutionary speaking. That won't last.

That would only make sense if the issue was biological and not socioeconomic. No one's getting selected out when the issue isn't a biological predisposition to avoiding procreation.

That's too narrow a view of evolution.

A better way to frame it is: which group is more likely to propagate their genes and have more ancestors 100/1,000/10,000 years in the future? Is it the group that can afford to have more children and successfully raise them, or the group that can't afford large families?

It doesn't matter if the cause is biological or socioeconomic. Just because humans have science, medicine, economics, etc. doesn't mean evolution has "stopped".

I'd add, propagate their /memes/, which originally meant the ideas (and values) that get transmitted through personal connections (not necessarily in gif format). The primal way you get your education, religion, values, etc. is through your parents.

It is biological. Before birth control the desire to have sex was enough to make sure enough kids were had. Socioeconomic circumstances didn't really matter. Unless you were on the brink of starvation, you wanted to have sex. Now that that's no longer enough to produce kids, we need a new biological reason to make kids. That could be resistance to birth control or a stronger natural desire to have kids, not just sex.

That's not a biological reason to make kids. That's just people who decide they want them. It's not at all clear that's a hereditary trait. If it's not, evolution has nothing to do with it.

The Romans had a contraceptive plant they used so much it became extinct.

Not to mention there is evidence of infanticide in early human societies. Indeed, it's been postulated that post-partum depression evolved to make getting rid of a potentially problematic baby (e.g. during times of famine) easier emotionally.

So 'birth control',in the sense of "ways to have sex but not make more humans" has more or less always existed - even in times of relatively high fertility. Don't agree that current low birth rates can be entirely explained by the pill.

Of course it's a combination of the two.

In the ancestral environment, kids "just happened". There were people who specifically tried to have more children, but they would only have a small advantage over the vast majority of accidentally made children.

Fast forward to modernity. Now, children are only being born to people who specifically choose to do so. A small change in socioeconomics accidentally privileges people with a biological quirk.

I genuinely haven’t met anyone who deeply wanted children and then didn’t because of “socioeconomics”.

I met plenty of ppl who talk about the climate or cost of housing as the reason for other ppl but I never knew of anyone making a decision this way. You know someone?

By socioeconomics, I'm referring to all those different factors.

The point is that "I don't want to have children because I'm worried about the impact of climate change" (social) or "I don't want to have children because I think it'll be too expensive" (economic) is not caused by biology and thus there is no selecting such concerns out of the gene pool.

Not even mentioning that evolution doesn't even meaningfully work at these short timescales. Modern humans are essentially identical to ~40,000 years ago, simply not enough time and pressure for evolution to do its thing.

I see. I didn’t mean literal genetic evolution. Cultural if you will.

Parents who fail to instill love and desire of family into their kids won’t get to be grandparents. A few decades ago maybe you could take it for granted “everyone ends up having kids” now it obviously is a dead end unless you really help your kids through it. It feels to me like the next generation will have parents who will be intentional about this value. Others won’t bother having kids to begin with.

I don't think so, their kids are not robots that can be programmed, they will still choose based on if/when they think they're able to provide for kids.

It'd take regression back to a society where women are considered to have no value outside of being child factories, for parents to be able to indoctrinate their kids into reproducing with no concern for how good of a life they can actually give those kids.

I'm seeing quite a few comments here that hint they'd like to see exactly that, a regression back to "the good old days".

I'm glad someone else sees it, the undercurrent of natalist nutjobs on this site weirds the hell out of me when these threads pop up.

On a less extreme note I do think parents can instill less individualistic/materialistic/extractive ideals in their children; I think these things - more the socio than the economic - are the main drivers of lower birth rates as evidenced by the fact that even rich people aren’t having kids.

It could also simply be lead poisoning

> The point is that "I don't want to have children because I'm worried about the impact of climate change" (social) or "I don't want to have children because I think it'll be too expensive" (economic) is not caused by biology

How do you know that? Are those really the reasons, or is the underlying reason "I don't really feel an urge to want kids, so I'm using this reason to justify it"?

Evolution works slowly, but that's because most traits have fairly minimal benefits. Marginally better eyesight might mean a 2% better chance of procreating. Assuming there's some genetic factor for "emotional desire to have children regardless of the circumstances", the chance of procreation rate for that is rapidly approaching 100%.

It's obviously far more complicated than that - it will be an interesting question for future biologists - if there are any!

[flagged]

The people who "deeply want children" are going to do it anyway. I think the majority of people to whom this discussion apples, have vague ideas that kids "would be nice", but simply don't prioritize it enough to overcome the said socioeconomic hurdles. So inasmuch as they are just deciding not to accept the necessary tradeoffs (e.g. move somewhere cheaper and less appealing) it is a bit of a disingenuous excuse or self delusional. However I still think it is fair to point out that the higher cost floor on kids simply makes it lower ROI.

I think we should also recognize the the generation in question might have difficulty with relationships. Having kids means finding a partner bought into the idea too and taking the leap. It seems people aren't figuring that out until much later.

While evolution might be a stretch here, this definitely is natural selection, just not as obvious as in other species.

The number of infants globally peaked around 2014-2017 and most of the future population growth will be due to larger generations replacing smaller ones.

The decline in population already started, but we're not seeing it thanks to how long we live.

That absolutely is not natural selection at all. Natural selection is the result of a random process. People deciding to have or not have kids is a conscious decision based on their life experiences.

Put another way, someone choosing to have kids isn't necessarily changing the balance between the child-bearing and child-free population in the world. If we could freeze the conditions that cause people to not want kids and keep them constant, we won't see the child-free "die out" and be replaced by people who only or predominantly want to have children. We'll just continue to see roughly the same proportion of people wanting and not wanting to have kids.

> People deciding to have or not have kids is a conscious decision based on their life experiences.

You're just looking at those who don't have children at all vs those who do, but that's not the whole story.

People don't decide these things in a vacuum - all over the western world statistics show that people have on average one child less than desired - mostly due to external pressures like availability of real estate and/or stable employment.

The environment simply doesn't support having more children, so those who do have them don't allow themselves to have more - much like animals which don't breed in captivity.

Countries like France largely staved off population decline because they decided to create an environment where people can have children as they naturally would.

"Natural selection is the result of a random process."

This is an outdated view...

its not socioeconomic, if it was then all my poor ancestors wouldn't have had so many kids. It is basically educated people who want the "best" future for their child overly thinking and not having kids.

> Ironically, this is evolution in action. The folks that "remember" how to have a family and raise kids have an uncontested claim to the future. The "it's too hard to have kids" crew is selecting against themselves, evolutionary speaking. That won't last.

You're only thinking about the "nature" part of "nature & nurture" though. Playing genetic pot-luck with your partner isn't the only way to have a legacy.

For example, think about all the spare time and energy that a non-child-rearing adult has to shape the cultural & technological future, and the impact that might have on the critical "nurture" element of your own child's life.

>The "it's too hard to have kids" crew is selecting against themselves, evolutionary speaking. That won't last.

That's not how it work. Evolution only selects for hereditary, biological factors, and even then, it's not a guarantee. "Stupid people" won't "die out" for the same reason.

Stupidity may actually be a factor that leads people to have more kids, so we may see more of it in the future :)

> Evolution only selects for hereditary, biological factors,

That's true. And we really don't know what the full list of such factors are hidden in our genes. Maybe many, maybe just a few. What's for sure, though, IF there are enough genes somewhere in the gene pool that lead people (women in particular) to want to have kids at an elevated rate, those are massively selected for right now.

Is the desire to have kids (as opposed to just sex) genetic? Given that pretty much everything about our personalities seems to be genetic to some extent, it seems pretty likely.

I think you can work this out backwards: if it was genetic, to a significant degree, then we wouldn't see it around. I believe that the largest predictor for the number of kids is socioeconomic circumstance, and culture.

Hereditary, biological factors only get selected via reproduction, so of course that’s how it works. “Stupid people” won’t “die out” as long as “they” keep having kids. Simple as that.

Yes, in retrospect suicidal people would have been a better, even if inappropriate, example.

Many people have suicide after having kids, making evolution indifferent to that flavor.

Do you really think that situation when one decides "it's too hard to have kids" never has hereditary, biological causes (including indirect)?

I think in vast majority of such situations hereditary factors are involved. It is really hard for me to imagine such situation that is completely independent from such factors.

It might have some influence, but not to the extent where, quoting OP, >>The "it's too hard to have kids" crew is selecting against themselves<<.

That's not how evolution works, and it's not at all clear that a desire or lack of desire to have children is genetic or hereditary.

Yes, people who don't have kids are ending their genetic line when they die. But that doesn't mean that people who have kids are necessarily increasing the pool of people who want kids, percentage-wise.

> But that doesn't mean that people who have kids are necessarily increasing the pool of people who want kids, percentage-wise.

Yeah I imagine that large families tend to result in adults who are themselves likely to have more kids than average, but things can certainly shift. Among my extended family, for example: my grandmother was one of 11 kids, my mom was one of 7, my aunts and uncles largely had 3-4, and my cousins mostly have 2-3. This is a tight-knit crowd, with a strongly pro-family culture (Catholicism), living in proximity with regular get-togethers, neighboring lake cottages etc, but clearly not immune to broader trends.

Here in Finland apparently 50% of 35yo males, and 35% of 35yo females have no children. Fertility rate in 2023 was 1.26. In comparison, 2015 saw fertility rate of 1.65, and it has been below replacement level since 1969. 61% of under 40yo people live in rental apartments, this share having risen about 10% from 2010. Also, apartments built today are about 9 square meters smaller on average compares to 10 years ago. I live in a two bedroom apartment of about 55 squares, and today this would be a typical three bedroom apartment size.

Housing has certainly become more expensive and lower quality in larger cities where most jobs are, and working life has become more unstable. Still, in my opinion cultural factors are a more significant reason for falling birth rates.

One of my grandmothers, raised 3 children in a 1 bedroom house, alone (my grandfather died right after the youngest one was born).

I see people now-a-days complaining that they don't have money, or space, or time and I just scoff at them. We aren't having children because society stopped seeing laziness as a negative trait. Everyone around us keeps telling us "you need to take time to focus on yourself": which usually translates to spending the day browsing through Netflix and ordering food because you can't even be bothered to cook.

This is making for very unhappy, empty lives.

The question is: did ahe want to raise her children like that and would she have chosen to do it that way if she had a choice. People raise children that exist any way they can. People don't choose more children in a bad situation. We can conjecture your grandmother didn't think it was ideal because she didn't have any more children during a time where having more than 3 wouldn't have been strange.

My country is (or was) profoundly catholic. It was not well looked upon to remarry after getting widowed.

My grandmother never remarried, so she never had any more children.

Threads about having kids are always filled with judgemental condescending comments like this. It's fascinating.

None of this discussion is productive. Nobody is going to change their mind about having kids because of a thread on HN.

I guess because having/not having kids is such a monumental decision, people feel the need to justify that their choice is the right one.

Communities like HN and Slashdot are why I'm not religious any more. And they've also made me more conscious of my choices and their impact on the environment and future generations.

I agree that there are a large number of people who overthink having kids and so don't but i don't think not having children makes ones life 'empty' or 'unhappy'. Like everything, it really depends on an individual, some people thrive as parents, others really regret it.

I moved to Finland a few years ago, and I by and large agree with this analysis.

I had the interesting experience of moving straight to rural Pohjois-Pohjanmaa first, before moving to one of the big cities for work. It's for that reason that I'm mostly convinced it's cultural as well - most of our friends up there have 2 to 6 kids, despite making quite a bit less than us city slickers.

I'm just always wondering why the ratio is not more close 50% / 50% between males and woman?

On birth male/female ratio is pretty much 50/50. So at any stage (except older >70 because woman usually lives longer) ratio should be similar. LGBT are just 10% of population and distribution between gays/lesbians seems also 50/50.

Based on that if there is a single male there is another single female somewhere. The only reason that comes to my mind that more female migrated from Finland somewhere else or there is a big immigration of males into Finland.

There could be various other reasons as well. For instance, males tend to be older in a family than females, so the 35-year cut-off may be too early to consider. Additionally, there is the desirability factor, where the most successful or desirable males may have multiple 'families,' or at least children from multiple women

Yes, here married men are about 3.5 years older on average than their wives, and average age of mothers has been rising. So, a significant percentage of those men will become fathers after 35, reducing the gap between genders. I think you're right about the second point as well. 87% of single parents in Finland are women, and it's probably easier for the men to remarry and have more children at that point.

Nevertheless, it's also notable that the majority of long-term unemployed are men by a significant margin. Average educational outcomes of women are better than for men these days. There's a much higher incidence of young men than young women dropping out of education and work. These men are statistically much less likely to have children than others.

For a woman (with a working utero) to have a baby, all that is needed is ONE man willing to have unprotected sex with her. Those are not hard to find, especially if she's willing to lie about whether she's on the pill.

A man will generally only become a father if he finds a woman that WANTS to have children with him. If he's unattractive, chances are she will select someone else. Many women will prefer even married men over an unattractive, low status one.

3 bedrooms plus a bath on 55 sq/m sounds pretty tightly packed huh, mind sharing a listing? I’m quite curious as to the layout.

I’m in Belgium where we’ve historically built larger than necessary apartments (and houses) so there’s a decent amount of housing stock to raise a family in, but the tides have turned and new apartments are also mostly smaller 1 and 2 bedrooms targeting singles. The latter sucks because if you’re a young family looking for an affordable but modern place (read: energy efficient) your options are slim.

Actually I meant a three room apartment (three rooms + bathroom), so I guess that's really a two bedroom apartment using US definition. Anyway, here's an example of a three room apartment packed into 41.5 square meters excluding balcony.

https://www.etuovi.com/kohde/38837797?haku=M2075336606

Another typical example with 4 rooms + bathroom packed into 65.5 squares:

https://www.etuovi.com/kohde/u24978?haku=M2075340353

Three bedroom or three room?

Even in the crowded Poland, I can't really believe in three bedroom + living room 55 square meter apartament.

My daughter is an only child but has eight cousins (that I know of, most are in her age range) but barely spends time with them. She's not missing out on anything because she has a large circle of friends her age, be it from the public playground when they only started walking, kindergarden or now the first three years in school. It takes some effort as a parent and tbh dumping-the-child-at-her-friends-and-vice-versa but she's got a much better social life than I had at her age and she'll continue that even though she'll move 4hrs away to the country-side this summer. Her best friend actually moved away two years ago, we still make sure they meet up and have sleep-overs and such.

Lots of people here write about the number of cousins, but those are often of a different age, it was the same with my two cousins. Also missing from the article: Kids being pushed into extra-curricula after school, be it soccer or music, those might not necessarily lead to friendships? Lastly, our environment has changed a lot. It's just not safe to let kids run wild outside with all those cars. The number of kids killed by cars didn't sink over the past 40 years because cars got safe, it sunk because kids get basically locked in. In my city (in Austria) we have quite a lot of older and newer building complexes where cars are kept outside, those are much better for kids.

>She's not missing out on anything

I disagree with this for 2 reasons:

1. Cousins are likely to be a mix of ages, probably your age +- 10 years. I think there's some benefit to that, especially having elder cousins that can teach you cool stuff / protect you at school / buy you beer etc.

2. You lose contact with the vast majority of friends you make at school, eventually. Cousins aren't the same, you're more likely to see them at holidays and events than your best friend when you were 5 years old.

There’s very specific safety features that have reduced the number of kids killed by cars. Backup cameras for example where mandated specificity due to demonstrated safety benefits.

People vastly overestimate how dangerous letting their kids out to play is and underestimate how beneficial it is. There’s real health benefits to running around outside which means limiting them to specific after school activities also has negative consequences.

SUV are get bigger with the blind zones in front of and around cars are getting longer and frontovers are becoming a problem as well https://www.kidsandcars.org/news/post/senator-wants-federal-...

That’s a real issue even if the increase in risk from front overs due to large SUV’s is significantly less than the safety benefits of backup cameras alone.

A common bias when many things change is to only consider the changes which support your views rather than all changes combined. I could counter by bringing up nearly 100% of new SUVs in 2024 include automatic breaking systems, but what matters here is relative safety not individual changes in isolation.

Pedestrian deaths were 2 percent lower in 2021 than in 1975, which seems like zero progress but the US had 211 million people in 1975 vs 337 million in 2021. Thus the individual risk has dropped by almost 40% even though people seem to think it increased. Not that overall pedestrian deaths is directly comparable to risk to kids from playing outside, but it is suggestive.

Edit: The reduction in children being killed is much larger, but that’s probably less to do with cars than wider social trends. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...

Besides the wider social trend for kids, did the pedestrian deaths decrease because cars get safer or people are just too scared to walk and take the car for everything? The increase of cars on the roads support this though: There might be a lot less pedestrians now than there were in 1975.

> people are just too scared to walk

For adults the number of pedestrian isn’t explanatory on its own. You need to look at several trends including smartphones and changing city streets to really understand the risk factors.

Cars are simpler because you can compare different models through time to build a clear picture of their relative safety.

Pedestrian fatality rates are at a 40-year high. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat...

No. That’s number of deaths not rates of death.

“estimates that more than 7,500 pedestrians were killed by drivers last year — the highest number since 1981.”

And yes they are intentionally trying to be misleading.

My older kids are 11 and 13. My experience differs. My wife and I moved away from family before having children. Our kids had plenty of friends they could play with. It felt transient though - perhaps because we lived in a transient area (SF Bay Area). Friends would come and go.

We moved back to be closer to family last summer. And, for us, the difference was stark. The relationships between family and friends are different. Both important.

But friends are replaceable…as terrible as that may sound. And one difference I think we (and others) didn’t realize is that family is much much much more permanent. You may not enjoy their company as much - but they will be there for many decades. And it turns out that’s very important for us.

That's indeed true. I don't have siblings, but many cousins of different ages. If they were "friends", they would have probably have dropped out of the radar pretty early on. But now in my 40s, I do see an immense benefit of getting to know the adult version of them, and having shared history, family, locations, memories etc. makes it massively easier.

I am not sure if friends replace (at least my experience of) cousins. With couisins, you spend days, nights, sleepovers sometimes a whole summer together. You share grandparents, your parents are siblings - you never leave each other's side. It's like sibling minus one. With friends, yes you get very good friends and they are your "chosen family" but you don't spend half as much time together even to the best of your efforts (unless living next door) at the same time, things force you to fall apart - moving, schools, preferences etc.

Unlike your friends, you can't choose your family and sleepovers with friends is what my daughter has more than once a month.

Sure, we are talking about averages, and on average, cousins of the past used to spend more time together than friends of today. And got along pretty well, especially in larger families where you can actually "choose your better family". Larger the family, more chances of having a "good cousin". What your daughter won't have is when those friends move away, she will be less likely to see them during summer / x-mas / thanksgiving, despite your best efforts. With cousins of the past, these were automatic.

As an elder millenial in my 30s, I also barely had any contact to my cousins. I think this isn't a recent development. My dad had a lot closer ties to his cousins and it showed in all the family meetings/reunions over the years. These people were somehow always present in my younger life. It was family. And though I've had plenty of friends over the years, I do think that ever-present network of familial ties is missing and that maybe we've lost something different that can't be replaced by friendships.

I don't know if I'm worse off in any quantifiable way and I don't know if it's worse this way. I just wonder if there's something I might be missing out on by not having that familial social network on top of my current social network, which is admittedly quite small and limited compared to when I was young. Maybe I'd feel less lonely and a bit less adrift if I had a larger family that I had close ties to and could fall back on.

A "family reunion" now is just me and my siblings. Down from 10-20 people to 3. That does make me sad to think about now.

I don't think cars are the biggest issue here though, most people I know seem to be worried about the lack of third spaces that are clean and wouldn't expose their children to crime or drug use for example.

The cars took the third space

I have 11 siblings and 75 first cousins. But, we lived thousands of miles away from any of those cousins, so I never got to know them very well and now have no contact with them. In the other hand, my daughter has a single cousin around her same age who lived about three hours away growing up, so they saw each other a few times a year, Now, as adults, even though they live in different countries, they still maintain their friendship and are frequently in contact. Bottom line, you can have a lot of cousins or few, but what matters more is how frequently you see each other.

How did your daughter only end up with 1 cousin from your 11 siblings? That's a catastrophically low TFR.

Few scenarios, could be that they are the oldest and the rest of their siblings aren’t ready to have a family.

Well, that cousin is from my wife’s side. She does have dozens of first cousins from my side, but we live far away from them, so she has only met some of them once or twice for short periods of time. Nothing long enough to form a connection. Plus, she is older than all of them by about 5 years, so there is that too.

I could be 1 in the same age range.

my dad was the youngest of 7. and he had kids late. so almost all my cousins on my dads side are at least a decade older than me, and we barely had any contact with them growing up. on the other hand, cousins on my mothers side are all my age, and i have the best relationship with at least one of them despite only seeing each other every few years.

Shit experience with large family would do it. My grandparents had 12 living children, less than half my aunts and uncles decided to have kids, and those who did had 1-3.

Is it not totally obvious that the low birth rate is directly caused by availability and social acceptance of contraceptives and related technologies?

People didn’t really “choose” to have that many kids in the past. It turns out that even if you don’t really want to have kids, not having sex is a very, very hard thing to do.

Nature’s solution to making humans have kids despite being able to reason themselves out of it is to make them incredibly horny compared to most other animals. Or, put another way, the less horny humans were filtered out along the way since they didn’t produce enough offspring and were outcompeted by the more horny.

I think this is a naive view.

I didn't have a sense that my grandmother's generation (and all children prior to that) were perceived by their parents as unwelcome consequences of their unrestrained hornyness.

Old literature starting with the bible is full of examples of people lamenting infertility, they clearly wanted kids.

Also, today the only people who have children are the religious, which are also people that have objectively got the greatest control and ability to restrain their sexuality, which kind of goes against what you're saying.

And finally, people forever back had ways to not get pregnant if they didn't want to.

> the religious, which are also people that have objectively got the greatest control and ability to restrain their sexuality

I cannot properly put into words how different the reality you live in must be different from the one I do.

You could give it a whirl I guess. The folks that I know who have many (5+) kids are religious jews, catholics, muslims and mormons. I don't know if all of these people have defered sex till marriage but they are certainly not the ones racking up tripple or even double digit bodycounts. Are you saying you have a line of reasoning that people who maintain religious adherence today are doing it so they can have unrestrained sex?

Catholicism has been in general against contraception. Of course it's still used, but probably at lower rates. Non protected sex leads to pregnancy at a much higher rate than protected one. I expect it to be similar for other similar religions. Bodycount is also irrelevant, the total numer of intercourses is what matters. I'm not sure if having a stable partner since a young age leads to more total intercourses than occasional partners, but I'd be lead to thing so.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_birth_control#:....

"bodycount"

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I am not so sure. France experienced its decline in fertility about a century earlier than its neighbors (see figure 1 in [0] for instance). Did they have better contraceptives?

Traditionnal methods such as marrying late (see: European Marriage Pattern), pulling out, timing are very effective at _reducing_ the number of children you will have (note: not effective at reducing it to zero - don't do this at home kids!).

[0] https://www.guillaumeblanc.com/files/theme/Blanc_secularizat...

Correction - do do it at home if you have no other option

The vibe in this thread is so hostile, and the most vociferous posts are from the pro-children side of the debate. I have no deeper comment to make here, I just find it a little shocking how aggressive half the posts are.

I didn't find any amount of "so hostile" comments.

I think what makes the vibe hostile it that this is the sound of social cohesion tearing apart and there is the implied worry that "it might get hostile" unless things are fixed.

But that is not the same thing as hostile. It is discussing a problem.

I regret not coming in my original post armed with evidence.

Accusation of being inhuman:

> The - natural - way - of - being - a - human!!! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39343369)

> Biological organisms not procreating despite living in material and caloric abundance is cosmically weird. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39341358) (less hostile, still a swipe)

Attack on one's validity as a member of society:

> Whenever I encounter this attitude I like to remind that person that they should have no voice, whatsoever, in what happens in government and politics anymore (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342079)

> but don’t expect the rest of us to give much credence to his opinions since he very well doesn’t care about our society. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342977)

Implication of social malignancy:

> that makes you a sort of parasite (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342021)

> It's fucking weird. [...] I'm guessing they are just hitting up sex workers. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39341263)

Implication that one's chosen lifestyle is inferior:

> People are just too selfish and think of kids as costing lattes and ruining their free time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342822)

> Kids aren't expensive. They're a distraction from dopamine and career advancement. [...] they'd rather jet set than settle down. [...] Instagram and the endless feed of social media, internet, and things to do. [...] Nobody I know wants to give that up. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39341734) (this one is not hostile, but it's still in put-down territory)

Whether one views these as hostile can perhaps be a matter of perspective, but these posts do not invite cordial, level-headed debate.

Ok ye that's some.

Given the amount of comments I would still not say the topic is particularly hostile? Or am I desensitised maybe?

I mean, if the question is React frameworks, there is way less risk for philosophical fistfights and outbreaks, rather than a discussion about how people live their lifes.

> I regret not coming in my original post armed with evidence.

This site is full of liars and sophists, among other scum. It frankly doesn’t matter whether you bring evidence or not.

There is a significant branch in here that advocates for taking voting rights away from the childless.

I don't see hostile comments and I'm not pro-children. I do, however, see strong opinions on this matter which is expected.

Why are people so obsessed about it I have children? I'm married and we've decided we don't want to have kids. It really bothers me when people say "oh you're missing out, that's such a shame". Please think about what you are saying.

It doesn't matter if I'm gay, infertile, poor, depressed, or just don't want them. Please keep your judgements to yourself or even just stop judging others.

> It really bothers me when people say "oh you're missing out, that's such a shame"

Do you have any friends or relatives who refuse to try ramen or pho, no matter how many times you tell them that it's the best food ever, and that you also thought it seemed weird to put steak in a broth with noodles until you finally gave it a try and then you couldn't believe how delicious it was and you wish you'd tried it years earlier... but they still think it sounds gross?

It's exactly like that. :-)

Except that kids change your life in major significant ways and there's basically no going back. So it's not exactly like that.

Kids don't always change ones life for the better. Some people deeply regret it regardless of how the kids turn out.

You're not responsible for a bowl of noodles for the rest of your life.

Actually: wouldn't it be great if most people thought we actually have a level of responsibility for other for the rest of our lives?

It's absolutely not like that at all.

Equating encouragement to try a new food and encouragement to bring another life into the world is... a bit silly.

Silly, but a good way to get across the point that you dont know what youre missing out on, or something

People will hold up a plate of dog shit and tell me I'm missing out, it's not a good point at all. If you don't believe me, I've got some cousin NFTs you wouldn't want to miss out on.

I'm not sure what conclusion I'm supposed to be drawing here, because I don't at all consider it normal to keep hounding someone to try any meal after they've refused it a couple of times.

Ramen and pho isn't that good though. I've had gross ramen. I don't understand your analogy.

Some kids are also not good, so at least that part of the analogy tracks.

I have kids and I actively tell people not to have kids if you don't really really really want them. It's not a pleasant experience most of the time. You do you. I'm not judging you at all.

I have a kid, it's great most of the time. My theory is some people struggle with life, and if that's the case, having a child can increase the struggle.

Conversely, if someone enjoys life and things are going well, a child can often enrich it even further.

Can we assume then that your child doesn't have special needs?

He has some issues with speech, but it's something he's working on with speech therapy. I don't mean to say that having a kid is easy. It's more akin to playing in interesting sport: hard work, rests are welcome, but it is fun.

I was listening to a professional rock climber talk about having kids. He described it as objectively bad, but the chemicals nature was pumping him full of were making him love his kids and be unable to picture life without them.

Please think about it before judging other people's judgement. People have opinions, its fine.

[edit] benefits of having kids: you stop taking yourself so seriously like being oversensitive about other people's opinions

My wife spent 35 years of her life never wanting kids, and suddenly was 51% for trying to see if we could have a kid, with much trepidation.

It worked out, and almost every day, certainly every week, she says she's so thankful she changed her mind just enough that she could be a mom. It is nothing like she envisioned it.

We also have friends who didn't want kids and then regretted it, and my wife sees her self in those people. If circumstances were different, she feels like she would have missed out on one of the best things that ever happened to her.

So I think that's why some people are so enthusiastic.

If it isn't too forward, would you mind if I ask if you and your wife had more than a single child?

Me and my partner are in a similar situation as you and your wife before your first kid, with some complications added on top.

Those complications will make it near a certainty that we will only ever have a single child. And I worry sometimes if deciding to have a single kid is just me being selfish and wanting a family, rather than thinking about what would be best for the child (for instance having siblings).

Our situation would also mean no cousins from her side, and my siblings all have children in the late teens by now.

We only have one now, but are hoping for another.

>And I worry sometimes if deciding to have a single kid is just me being selfish and wanting a family, rather than thinking about what would be best for the child (for instance having siblings).

I think this is an addressable issue. If you care about your child not being lonely, you could prioritize moving to an area that is family friendly, and/or prioritize making friends with some other families. We moved to an area with lots of parks in walking distance and there's almost always other kids playing there.

My son is 4 and an only child right now, but we regularly invite playmates and their parents over for dinner and a playdate for the kids. Almost every weekend my son and some another kid or two will be running around the house in the early evening while I cook some burgers and chat with the parents.

I mean, i also know tons of bad parent who judging by their actions don't seem like they enjoy being parents that much. You should only have children if you really want to have them and not because other people are doing it.

> but how do my personal decisions affect society?

You don’t live in a bubble. It does matter.

Whats the point of marriage then if being able you refuse kids? It's designed as a secure hub to build greater things like children bearing family. Why to subject yourself to lonely elderly life, tied to aging partner? Be like gay/bachelor people and enjoy hundreds of partners, why try to mimic family being afraid for full experience?

Wow... Where to start...

Assuming that you're not trolling: 1. Plenty of gay people have stable monogamous relationships/marriages. 2. Marriage isn't only for children. Marriage has legal and tax implications. 3. I like having a stable relationship, I don't like dating and switching partners. I like deeper connections with my partners.

Most gay marriages are non monogamous, so your point is ‘plenty’ misleading. Marriage is legally less beneficial for men in the us (divorce lawyer is paid by the men), and marriages don’t mean stable relationships. An emotional marriage is likely less stable than a cohabitation.

Because the first point is challenged: https://www.thegaytherapycenter.com/gay-men-in-open-relation...

> Several research studies show that about 50% of gay male couples are monogamous and about 50% allow for sex outside of the relationship. The research finds no difference in the level of happiness or stability among these groups.

> Most gay marriages are non monogamous, so your point is ‘plenty’ misleading

I think it's a bit rich to use an opinion plucked out of thin air to call someone else's words misleading.

You're right, there's no point to marriage.

I know this thread is mostly about a lack of cousins, rather than being distant from your cousins, but I feel like I have to ask:

How many people have cousins, or other relatives, that they want to interact with?

My extended family is a complete disaster. On my mother's side there's two brothers who are borderline abusive to their wives and children. On father's side I had a total of 10 cousins, the oldest of whom would be in their 40s, the youngest in their late 20s. Only 6 of them are still alive. One of them is in prison. These are all people that I want nothing to do with.

My siblings are not bad per say, but not people I consider myself close to. We're all too different in age from each other, and never had much more in common that living in the same house. Now we are scattered across North America. If I had had children, they likely would have never met any of their cousins more than a dozen times before adulthood.

I had a really rough time at school growing up, because I was a runt and got bullied pretty badly. My actual friends growing up were definitely my cousins, especially my brothers. The older ones always looked out for me, and I played outside all day with the ones close to my age. Seriously, if I did not have them in my life, I suspect I would be pretty fucked up as an adult. For me, blood has always been thicker than water.

I’d say half my friends have had trouble conceiving, many probably will not ever have kids, and a decent chunk of my cousins as well had trouble or weren’t able to. It’s not just that people don’t have cousins

> I’d say half my friends have had trouble conceiving

There's probably statistics out there but I've not looked into it - but anecdotally I also know a large contingent of people who've had issues conceiving. Many late 20s, too - people always seem to think it's more common in your 30s but so many of them were confused by the experience.

A lot of people wait way too long to have kids these days. Prime fertility is your 20s. After 30 more and more people will have trouble conceiving.

Why do you think that is? People waiting I mean

Increasingly people feel pressure or obligation to go to college and spend their 20s getting established in a career. By the time they feel ready to have kids it's more likely they'll have trouble.

I don’t think they are mistaken though? Housing and childcare are multiples more expensive than a generation ago, makes sense people need to feel established.

I get that but I think the other point is equally significant. After college it's fun to make money, travel, date around... generally continue exploring yourself and the world and having few responsibilities.

As someone in my early 20s, I can barely even take care of myself (and that's pushing it). At this stage of my life, I can't imagine being able to give a child everything a parent needs to give them.

Lot of blame gets placed on women too and sometimes it's misplaced. At-home sperm testing kits should really be covered by insurance considering how cheap and easy they are[0].

[0]https://yospermtest.com/

My father is 14 years younger than the next oldest sibling. My mother is 12 years younger than the next oldest sibling. Because of this my cousins were all much older than me and not people I interacted with. My little brother, my only sibling, is 14 years younger than me. My oldest is 11 and by the time my brother does have kids, if he has kids, my children will be probably be close to adults.

Fortunately my ex-wife has a lot of cousins she is close to and her sister has a daughter right in the middle of my 2 kids so they have 1 first cousin they are very close with but they have no interactions with second cousins outside of seeing them every few years at holidays.

Regardless, having no real interaction with my cousins growing up, I can't say if my life would have been better if I had.

My dad was one of 5 and my mom was one of 6.

I grew up with 20+ cousins ranging from 10 years older than me to almost 30 years younger than me. It was simultaneously like having lots of older brothers and sisters but also having multiple siblings only a couple months older or younger than me. It also meant I got a LOT of experience being around small children which carried over well to being a parent.

On the flip side, my father-in-law has 7 grandkids and they were all born in a 5 year window.

I also worked with woman from China and due to the "1 child" policy, the first baby she ever held was her own baby b/c she had no cousins, nieces/nephews etc.

It applies to all types of kin relations. Dramatically fewer people have a same- sex sibling. The number is probably down from say 0.9 to 0.4 or less.

Few people have friends with brothers and sisters to compare them to, to understand heritability.

We are becoming more and more tolerant of obviously unrelated people playing relatives on tv. I say that because when you see a real family resemblance in person, it's intense.

The only experience of having g a much older or younger sibling must be nearly nothing, now, too. It's sad that all these effects seem to make people even more likely to perpetuate the trend when their own time comes.

What

I'm an Old (53), and always felt a little weird because I had very little cousin interaction growing up. I mean, I'm from a small, mostly rural state; most people I knew had cousins out the wazoo -- but not me.

I think the real reason is that both my parents were from two-child families, and they were also very much older than their younger siblings; my mom is 7 years older than her brother, and my father was a full decade older than his sister.

Both my Aunt and my Uncle had families, but necessarily later. My aunt went first, and had a daughter about the age of my little sister -- 5 years after me -- and then another daughter a couple years later. However, they lived a couple towns over, and my father and his sister weren't especially close, so we didn't spend much time with them.

My uncle and his wife didn't start their family until I was 17, so obviously there was zero childhood overlap there. I see and talk to those cousins more often than the two from my father's side, mostly because we have more in common, but it's still not very often.

This is looking at trends starting from 1950, which is right in the middle of an event known as the “baby boom.” I guess there’s some usefulness to that analysis, but it seems a little shallow.

I wish the world weren't so bad that potential parents don't want to bring new lives into it... honestly, if I were a mother considering whether to have a child, I wouldn't want them to have to grow up in this terrible day and age. They'd end up more traumatized than I am. I wouldn't be able to live with myself.

> I wouldn't want them to have to grow up in this terrible day and age.

Today is very clearly the best time to be born, so much so that I'd argue if you could choose to have kids in an older time period or today, it's borderline abusive to choose the past.

Medicine/immunization, child mortality rates, human rights, ...

https://www.thendobetter.com/investing/2018/6/7/the-best-tim...

Both could be considered abusive depending on your perspective

Your comment seems to be coming from a genuine place, but you could really use some historical perspective.

I don't think that holds true here. At many points in history (including recent history) people were happy to have kids because they believed they could give their children a better life than they themselves have.

But it sounds like the GP is looking to the future, and is pessimistic about their ability to do that. History doesn't matter too much here, even if I agree with you that much of history was a cesspool of pain and misery compared to these days. If people don't see a viable, prosperous future for their kids, as good as or better than their own lives, that's what matters.

Now, I say this without passing judgment on whether or not this future pessimism is warranted. Even if it isn't, what matters is how people feel about it.

Even in the past they knew about the heat death of our sun.

Nobody has kids based on their relative circumstances to some arbitrary point in history, only those that have played out in their life and might in the future.

Gaining perspective by inspecting arbitrary points in history can be quite useful.

Perhaps emotionally or spiritually, which may be important, but I don't think enough to be practical. Those arbitrary points in history existed under their own constraints and opportunity or difficulty, and looking back further wouldn't necessarily have had much of an impact unless the future from that point looked quite promising.

I can only speak from personal experience, but I have found it to be immensely valuable in:

* Appreciating what I have today

* Not fearing the future in regards to global warming, war, and other instability

* Accepting that my life could turn completely upside down in an instant, e.g. due to economic instability, war, etc.

Yeah... I really don't understand why so many people revel in doom about today & the future.

What period of time would you rather live in, as an average person? What period of time did the average family have a better time?

The only real perspective I have is that a bunch of today's issues didn't exist in my own childhood, and a bunch of my childhood issues haven't been solved. That means there's been a net increase in issues.

For example the internet is much unfriendlier to children nowadays, social media is far more predatory than it used to be. The housing crisis is worse (the exact same place is nearly twice as expensive as it was when we first moved in about 10 years ago). Also, the AI dystopia and surveillance state bullshit seems to be worsening at an exponentially increasing rate.

Read some history! The last 500 years are humanity’s Golden Age of Golden Ages. 100 years ago half the people you love would‘ve died in childhood.

So what? If people think that their children's future will be worse than their own, it doesn't really matter what people experienced 500 years ago. A common sentiment among parents is giving their children more opportunities and a better life than they had. If some people don't feel like they can do that (regardless of whether it's true or not), I imagine that's a powerful demotivator around having kids.

Yeah, so if you are familiar with human history and the exponential curve of increasing human wellbeing that we're riding and you still feel strongly that the future will be worse, then the conclusion should be that you're probably in an irrationally negative emotional headspace for some reason, not that you're right!

(I say that without judgement, having been in that exact headspace myself not too long ago.)

If you're actually familiar with human history then you'll know that it's uneven with horrifying dark periods and isn't some consistent curve that goes up.

In the lead up to the 2008 financial disaster all the bulls were saying "the housing market only goes up" without any understanding of the underlying shifts that would come to bear. It's easy to predict the status quo, they didn't need any thought, they could be replaced with a rock with "housing goes up" written on it.

For the first time in decades, risk of global conflict is rapidly rising. Two revanchist empires in the east are eager to reclaim lost territories and see their chance as the American hegemony that presided over the long peace faces stagnation & decline. This is the stuff that makes world wars. Who wants their child to live through that?

But fine, anyone can write "human well-being only goes up" on a rock.

If you could choose any time period (and assuming median standard conditions, so cannot choose being king), which period would you think was best for raising children?

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What do you mean? Would I want my children to be at risk of school shootings? Would I want my children to have to deal with the fact that I can't afford to pay for health care in the only country where it's not free? Would I want my children to have to deal with the current state of the internet, with TikTok and other predatory social media running rampant? When they get older do I want them to have to deal with how hard it is to get a job and make a living? The housing crisis?

No I don't want to bring children into this world. These are not everyday struggles to be overcome. Today's world is extremely ugly, extremely unfair and I would not under any circumstances want to make a child suffer through it all...

Would I want to bring children into the world if it weren't this terrible? Maybe. I don't know. I'm not a potential mother, so I obviously don't get to make the decision of whether to give birth or not, but right now there are just too many obvious, overwhelming reasons not to.

Try to actually do the math on school shootings, and compare it to car crashes when you were conceived. If you were objective and considered risks equally, for school shootings to even come into your calculations (instead of immediately dismissing it as not worth your time) the world would have to be almost utopian. Try to calculate how many times more likely it is for you to have a miscarriage than any of your potential children to even be anywhere near a school shooting.

I don't think that's a good way of looking at it. The increase in school shootings is independent of car crash rates.

While it's still unlikely that any given person's kid will be killed in a school shooting, the idea of it is heartbreaking enough that I can understand why it's a part of someone's calculus.

> Would I want my children to be at risk of school shootings?

Everyone is at risk of everything. Since the beginning of time.

> Would I want my children to have to deal with the fact that I can’t afford to pay health care in the only country where it’s not free?

I agree the healthcare situation in the US (where I’m guessing you’re based) is not ideal but it’s far from the worst. Medicaid exists. CHIP exists. Obamacare exists. A competent enough parent would be capable of efficiently using their resources if their childs health was at stake.

> Would I want my children to have to deal with the current state of the internet…

The internet is a double edged sword where it can both be a blessing and a curse. It’s 100% possible to raise a kid to have a healthy relationship with the internet. Just don’t give them an iPad at 5.

> Housing crisis…

Yeah housing crisis is hard too. But markets fluctuate and who knows what it’s going to look like by the time a kid grows up to be of home-purchasing age.

I’m sad you have such a negatively skewed view of the world. I don’t think today’s world is “extremely ugly” and “extremely unfair.” Compared to life 100 years ago, I think we’ll be ok.

I'm pretty sure the world was at least as terrible at any given point in the past, we were just much less informed/aware of it thanks to the lack of Internet like mass-communication.

It was far worse. Imagine having kids when they could get polio. Or taken from you and sold as slaves. Or conscripted and sent to war.

These things are all becoming more likely again

I don’t disagree with you that life can seem bleak in the present, but people have brought children into the world under much harder conditions. There is something particular about post-industrialization that has caused this attitude shift.

> These are not everyday struggles to be overcome.

Neither were the slavery, tyrannical empires, war, plagues, etc of the past.

But fortunately humans continued to persevere and reproduce and make progress, as hopefully our children and future generations will.

Depression isn't always treatable, although it's worth a shot.

But it's a serious mistake to think it's a fact about the world. It isn't. It's a fact about you.

> the only country where it's not free

Hyperbole. And false.

All the other concerns are wildly overblown as well.

What a rude and deliberately-ignorant way to choose to reply.

[flagged]

What distemper? Also, your second sentence contradicts your first one, just FYI.

Classic online "I'm taking care to reply to make sure you know how much I don't care"

Related: The Great Cousin Decline --- https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/12/cousin-re...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38719249 (169 points | 52 days ago | 332 comments)

It's all pretty crazy. My wife has quite a few brothers and a bazillion cousins. I have a sister and several cousins. We're the only ones of her family and until very recently the only ones in my family to have a kid (and just one). I think the population is maybe going down harder in the US than we think. It also took us like 2 years to conceive.

Absolutely. It is not just that the number of cousins available has dropped drastically with more and more people choosing not have kids or have very few kids, the connections between the cousins is also much less strong in my family than it has ever been because the families now live so far away from each other in a different part of the world that the chances of face-to-face meetups is now reduced to perhaps once every couple of years or so and even then for very short periods of time.

I do feel very strongly that my kids are not going to have much of a relationship with their cousins - if at all.

I've got over 30 first cousins. Not joking. My mom was 1 of 12 children and my father was 1 of 8 children. They were born in India during the 1930's to 1950's when modern medicine was saving people's lives but modern birth control wasn't widespread.

Most of them had 2 children so that's over 30. We have 2 huge WhatsApp group chats and every week it is someone's birthday or anniversary.

It's cool having so many relatives and places to stay for free when you travel but it can be a little exhausting too!

Anecdata: I am 22 and I have a bunch of cousins but they are all from generations older than me, so while my half-siblings had a bunch of cousins to hang out with - I don't really have any. The closest I have that are my age are 3 2nd cousins (cousin's children), and we see each other once every 2-3 years. Every time we see each other we end up complaining about how few people are in our family in our generation.

On the other hand, all of my actual cousins are now having children, so it seems the next generation won't be having this problem (in my family).

Cousins are great if you stay close, but generally as you get older you drift apart and then you're left with no one again.

Anecdotally: as someone who was the youngest by 5+ years in a family of dozens of cousins, I feel like I got a little bit of both worlds. It was fantastic as a kid to be running around with the posse, but as I entered late-childhood that pretty much dissolved. Now, as an adult, I no longer see my cousins on a regular basis. We don't have much history beyond my 7th/8th year and they're not the type of people I would want to be friends with by choice. This estrangement was a big source of mental struggle for me throughout my early 20s, especially since I lost my actual sibling and didn't feel like I had anyone to relate to in my "supposed" family.

I almost think it's better to start off life with not much extended family, because it's not easy to make friends that you consider family when you're already a fully-fledged adult.

Another data point: My wife's grandparents have 10 children, 81 grandchildren (mostly adults), and around 300 and counting great-grandchildren. It's wonderful! When we go on trips around the U.S., we are almost always staying with a cousin. Our children really enjoy meeting and getting to know cousins their age. That said, I do notice that the younger generations typically are having smaller families (like 3-6 children instead of 8-12 children).

It's a lot of work to keep in touch and visit cousins, but my wife and I feel it's totally worth it. At times, we've decided where to live based on proximity to cousins, and we decided early on to regularly visit cousins who lived within a couple of hours. When we were married, we decided we'd try to go to reunions, funerals, and weddings, and we've largely done that for the last 19 years. There is a big family reunion for a few days every other year, with about half the family coming (so hundreds of people of all ages). We also have monthly dinners with typically 20-30 local cousins joining. We regularly tell family history stories, and we have a screensaver rotating through our pictures, including many from cousin visits and reunions, so cousins are regularly coming up in daily conversations.

One thing I've noticed is that the more often we go to reunions and visit other families, the more excited the children are to go to see cousins again (as opposed to another family branch, where reunions are every 5-10 years, the children just don't have the same connection with that much growing up in between reunions). Another thing I've noticed is that our children seem to feel very grounded in their experiences - they often are relating their experiences to a story from an ancestor and pulling lessons from that.

To address a comment elsewhere on this topic, yes, we are religious, the family is predominantly active members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a significant portion live in the intermountain west area of the U.S.

> we are religious, the family is predominantly active members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a significant portion live in the intermountain west area of the U.S.

Everybody in America would know to fill in all that information if you simply said "We are Mormon".

I'm glad you're enjoying your rich family!

"Mormon" was originally a derogatory term that was coined by those that legalized killing Mormons on sight until 1980. So some are understandably uncomfortable with its continued usage.

It may have been coined that way, but Mormons quickly adopted it as well as a favorite term and used it that way coming up on 200 years. The church used the word extensively in marketing campaigns for decades, between mormonads and I'm a Mormon, etc. Under Hinckley who was media savvy, it was used a lot.

Nelson (current head of the church) just doesn't like the word and wants to change it. Confusion, inconvenience, and Pragmatism be damned. It's his right as prophet to say that Jesus told him to use the full name of the church and drop Mormon, but let's not pretend it's suddenly offensive because it's been used by enemies of the church. They've also used the full name as well, so that should be offensive if we're staying consistent.

I find your insistence that they can't be offended by a word with an objectively offensive historical origin fascinating. Do you deny that sometimes opinions on words and language can change over time?

I have insisted nothing of the sort. Of course, opinions on words and languages can change over time. However, I find it unlikely that a population of tens of millions suddenly became offended, even if their prophet told them to.

More reasonably, I think they are not offended. Rather they are simply trying to use the full name of the church rather than any sort of shortenings. Sure, if somebody was being a jerk and using the word Mormon to be a jerk, then that could be offensive. However, that's a much different thing than being offended by the word itself used in a friendly context.

Unfortunately, I'm the only child in my family.

I do have 7 cousins, though. And 2 of them (the ones raised by my grandmother that lived next to my house and that I saw almost everyday during my childhood) are the family closer to siblings that I've got.

Nothing in the article aims at explaining or moving the attention to why. Just a collection of statements, without looking back at why this is. Women have to pick a career, this has an effect on family building.

The families of my father and mother each have nine siblings. Most of their siblings married and had children. Some of those sibling usually the oldest ones had six children. I grew up knowing at least 40 cousins.

I'm not married or in a relations ship and I don't have any children. My sister is married but no children. I see much of my generation (GenX) are in a similar state.

people are missing out. this is sad

I guess it depends, I had to draw a family tree when I was at school, many years ago, and I stopped once I hit around fifty cousins.

So on the one hand I have a huge family, but on the other hand, the practical hand, most of those cousins I never met. I've heard their names, I've sometimes seen pictures of them, and family gossip means I generally know what is going on with them but that's all.

I think there were 3-5 cousins who were similarly aged to myself, and who I saw every week or two, or daily during summer holidays. But the rest? I'm not sure what people would be missing out on there ..

There are studies that show quote plainly that people with kids are unholier than those without. The difference is much later on life when the happiness “winner” switches to the group with children.

One theory aside from the obvious is that the brain makes sense of whatever might happen to it, over time. Like how you miss out on some big opportunity, but years later you say, “ah, that’s ok because it led me to where I am today.”

No idea if that was coherent as I’m a bit tired, but wanted to share

Unholier?

Ah yes, studies about... holiness? I don't think we have a way to quantify what a hypothetical deity thinks about us.

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I have 2 siblings. We have over 30 cousins on one side of the family and 2 on the other side.

Only 1 of the 3 of us has kids, so my niblings don't have any cousins on my side of the family, and they only have a few on the other side. I haven't thought about how different that is compared to what I grew up with until seeing this post

I found daycare very expensive. It was close to $1200 per month. With two kids, it was forbiddingly expensive. My wife wanted a 3rd child but I did not because of high cost having babies. Then there is college fee when they grow up. I van empathize with people who are not able to have kids due to coat.

I grew up 2 states away from my parents siblings, I couldn't pick out most of my aunt's/uncles from a lineup let alone my cousins. My kids live close to the same distance away from their cousins, but we make a huge deal to make time to see them.

My kids and their cousins are all great friends and it's well worth the sacrifice

Maybe for some it is that easy: Why leading complicated lives with kids, pressure, responsibilities an uncertainties, when it is so much more comfortable and flexible without? Watching netflix and scrolling insta could be enough. The thing is, that life is that thing that starts beyond the comfort zone.

I think there are a lot of ways to get out of your comfort zone that don't involve kids. Failing to find them is either laziness or a lack of imagination.

The thing about having kids is that once you make the leap, you don't get to step back. A single decision to drop the birth control for a bit, and bam -- you're a parent with daily responsibilities for at least 18 years. That'll certainly get you out of your comfort zone, permanently.

But other things you can do are more or less entirely voluntary, and you can stop doing them at any time. So it takes more willpower to maintain, even if doing those things is strictly less work than raising a child.

Seconding the other comment, this is a pretty narrow view.

A person can do a lot with their life. There's an entire world to explore out there. Culture and history and math and science and art and philosophy. So many meaningful, fulfilling ways to spend a life that don't involve kids.

Not saying that kids cannot offer their own experience, they absolutely can. But it's not the only one that has value.

Interesting to hear this. My personal experience is the complete opposite. My sister has 2 kids, my wife’s sister and husband have 2 kids, my wife’s brother has 3 kids with one on the way, and we’re having our first in about 3 weeks.

That’s 12 cousins just in our little circle.

I think based on the data and projections in the article, your family is still pretty small, cousin-wise. So you're in some ways illustrating the point they're making.

Interesting article. It is something that saddens me a little for my own kids, who have 2 first cousins and maybe 15-20 second cousins. In comparison my 4 grandparents collectively had over 60 _siblings_ (no idea how many cousins!).

Previous discussion on a similar article from the Atlantic (2023) [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38719249

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2743184/

Not just cousins also, uncles and aunts. With a lot of single child families of today, a lot of children's eventual children will have no uncles and aunts. Alas, such is life.

I grew up with a fair few cousins but I can't really say that I think it would be missing out if I didn't. I'm ambivalent to the whole thing

Grew up in the 1970s. I had one sibling and no cousins (well we did, but they lived so far away we almost never saw them).

That's an interesting way to say "the West largely stopped breeding a while ago".

Not just 'the West'.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-21/chinas-population-is-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/26/japan-populati...

Zeihan (geopolitics celebrity dude) talks about this pretty often. It goes hand in hand with urbanization. When you're on the farm and especially when child mortality is high...you have lots of kids as they're needed for work. In the big city, kids are just a costly burden, so people have a lot less. All the countries that jumped into urbanization are in this boat. China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, and Japan are all in a really bad spot. It's not that they just ran out of kids...it's that they ran out 30 years ago. It's in this decade that they start running out of working age adults and shit starts getting really screwy. There isn't a known macroeconomic model for when the population pyramid is inverted and there is no money at the top to invest in new tech (it's all being used for them to live off of) and not enough people at the bottom to work or drive consumption.

> It goes hand in hand with urbanization

Haredi/Hasidic/ultra-Orthodox Jews are an interesting exception to that – a predominantly urban/suburban subculture sustaining a high TFR (over 6 in Israel).

A stringent religious doctrine which promotes large families may be the only thing which can overcome urbanization's encouragement of lower TFRs. In the long-long-long term, it is possible (not certain) that subcultures with that characteristic will end up numerically dominating the population.

> It's in this decade that they start running out of working age adults and shit starts getting really screwy

The obvious answer is a significant increase in immigration rates. Of course, for political/cultural reasons, some of the countries you mentioned don't want to do that. But, if the economic hardships of population decline grow big enough, they may become bigger than the political/cultural resistance to it.

In the long-long term, that strategy is going to fail, because the immigration source countries are on the same demographic trajectory, just further back on the curve. Still, the point at which it fails may well be long after we are all dead.

I can only speculate of course, but I think something that'd increase birthrates in urbanized society would "simply" be arranging things such that raising a family isn't so exclusionary.

In a developed society, people are more likely to have many things they want to pursue and achieve, and due to various factors (financial and otherwise), having kids usually entails giving up on most or all of that. That probably seems like a pretty raw deal to a lot of folks, considering we all only get one life to live.

If it weren't so necessary to put off all of these things until the kids have left the nest and youth has been spent away, I'd bet a lot more people would choose to become parents.

> I think something that'd increase birthrates in urbanized society would "simply" be arranging things such that raising a family isn't so exclusionary.

There's only so much you can do. You can introduce as much subsidised childcare, parental leave, flexible working conditions, free higher education, etc, policies as you like – those things can alleviate the disadvantage to other life goals of having kids, but are unlikely to ever be able to reduce it to a level at which it ceases to be significant.

Then, there is what some rich people do, outsourcing the rearing of their children to nannies, tutors and boarding schools, such that they rarely see them – but, that's not a recipe for raising well-adjusted kids, and economically is unlikely to be scalable beyond a very small rich minority

I think it is inevitable that cultures in which reproducing is just one option on the menu are always going to have significantly lower TFR than those in which reproducing is viewed as a religious duty, with those who reject it risking ostracism in this life, and the threat of punishment in the next

> There's only so much you can do. You can introduce as much subsidised childcare, parental leave, flexible working conditions, free higher education, etc, policies as you like – those things can alleviate the disadvantage to other life goals of having kids, but are unlikely to ever be able to reduce it to a level at which it ceases to be significant.

Reducing disadvantage to insignificance is indeed unlikely, but if things were structured such (for example) that working a part-time job paid a wage capable of supporting a family, that’d go a long way. It’d enable parents to work full-time for the extra cash for some period of time prior to starting a family to build substantial financial padding and then drop back to part-time once kids are in the picture, opening up time for parents to be both parents and be people.

We’ve seen incredible improvements in productivity in the past several decades, so there’s not really much reason why that shouldn’t be possible.

There are lots of reasons why people don't have kids which don't have anything to do with their expense.

I can think of several people I know, who (I think) would have made perfectly fine parents, but probably (or even definitely) never will. Waiting for "Mr/Ms Right", who they never manage to find - he or she always seems to be already taken or chasing somebody else or being chased by more appealing options. In other cultures/societies (and even previous versions of their own), at some point they would have settled for "Mr/Ms Good Enough"–but, they've absorbed a culture which discourages (even criticises) doing that. Plus, many children of divorced parents are hesitant to have kids with someone less than ideal, because they worry it will lead to their own kids going through what they did. I doubt changes to working conditions can do anything to address those kinds of issues.

Replacement TFR is 2.1 for low mortality countries; in 2021, the OECD average was 1.58. If we talk about that shortfall, 0.52, how much of that shortfall is due to expense/workplace/career/education-related reasons, and how much due to other reasons? (I don't know.) If it is mostly due to expense/workplace/career/education-related reasons, targeting those factors may make a big difference; if it is mostly due to other reasons, targeting those factors might not make much difference at all.

Well, my thinking here is that increasing available time by reducing the number of hours people have to work to live is going to be a net benefit to individuals like you’ve mentioned in your first paragraph too. People are more likely to go out and do things and find each other if the majority of their energy and waking lives aren’t tied up with work.

It might make some difference – however, if a person's dating expectations are fundamentally out of sync with what's realistically available to them, having more time to spend on meeting new people might not change the ultimate outcome. What we don't know, is what's the proportion of "probably would have found partner if they'd had more time to look for one" versus "unlikely to have found anybody that would satisfy them no matter how much time they had to look". If it is mostly the former, your proposals might make a big difference; if it is mostly the latter, your proposals are unlikely to change much

There is, it's feudalism.

The dynamic is that when markets are expanding, it makes sense to invest in the future, because you can capture a portion of the expansion and the reap indefinite profits off of it. When markets are contracting, your incentive becomes to grab as much of the pie now before it shrinks. This tends to make firms...well, militant. The incentive to cooperate only appears when people weight the future more than the present, giving value to future interactions; otherwise, the incentive is to kill off your rivals, take their stuff, and hide the bodies. Thus, during a contraction and in times of scarcity people tend to become raiders, scavengers, and conquerors.

To protect themselves against raiders, scavengers, and conquerors, people tend to band together into larger groups. Thus a hierarchy emerges - weaker groups pledge fealty to stronger ones, which in turn protect them from other strong groups that have not pledged fealty, and so on. Usually you get war in the meantime, but feudalism is the peace treaty that arises out of that.

Interestingly this dynamic tends to play out within the capitalist system. When an industry reaches maturity, usually there's a shakeout with a price war where many of the weaker companies go bankrupt, and then the savvier-but-weaker get bought up by the bigger ones, and so on until you have a few megacorps with hierarchical organization. The purpose of managerial capitalism is as much to defend firms against competition as it is to increase efficiency. In many cases, they are significantly less efficient than they were as startups, but at least they have hoovered up all the competition.

Japan has embraced everything West starting 1868.

China outright banned having more than 1 kid and people aborted girls en masse. This one I grant an exemption.

It’s not just China and Japan. India is under replacement rate as well.

The 14th word in TFA is 'worldwide'

Late stage capitalism driven extinction

How do you know it's late stage capitalism?

Or extinction?

There’s also late stage socialism. It’s called communism. It too relies on the right kind of growth just like capitalism. Socialism also tends to fail faster than capitalism because power is centralized from the start, so corruption spreads faster and is more malevolent.

Bullshit. USSR did the same thing about the same time.

People stop having kids when economic forces work against them. It doesn't matter how the forces were put there. At least it's not like it was in Adam Smith's time, when the downward pressure was a result of children failing to reach adulthood. Thanks to birth control and modern medicine, people can decline to have children when they know the conditions are not right.

The whole "children are so expensive" meme is overrated. College is expensive but attendance rates are high. Real estate is expensive but people keep buying homes. Some alternate reasons for declining fertility:

1. Decline in religious belief

2. Widespread, easy to use birth control

3. More options for entertainment are widely available. Having kids is less attractive when you could be traveling, binging endless series, or playing computer games

4. Strong anti-natalist sentiment that was pushed very hard post-war and persists

5. Higher rates of college attendance, which means people are studying and furthering their careers in their 20s rather than having kids

Children are not too expensive for anyone to afford, they're too expensive for most people to think it is worth having more than two. That might sound like a qualification, but it's what population decline means.

I unfortunately can't find the source right now, but I recently came across a study that found that, in the US, number of children was almost completely uncorrelated with regional cost of living but was quite correlated with beliefs about the amount of effort/time raising a child requires.

I think our culture of expecting/demanding that parents invest ever greater amounts of time and effort (with all the evidence suggesting that these increased investments do not improve long term outcomes) is a far bigger driver than costs.

And car seats! Three kids are dramatically more expensive than two because you need a bigger car, and many family activities are priced for a family of four.

Perhaps not as big a deal in the US, but in the EU where some form of car seat is required for the first 8-10 years of a child's life it's a big thing.

That only applies to 3 at the same time. And most Americans drive SUVs and other large cars regardless of how many children they have. Small sedans basically aren't even sold in America anymore due to lack of consumer preference.

I believe the average cost to raise a child in the US is comparable to a Lamborghini. I suppose it's up to the individual to decide what the more desirable purchase is.

Just imagine if the future of our economic system required a significant number of middle class Americans to buy three Lamborghinis, to offset the people who only bought one.

> College is expensive but attendance rates are high

A lot of "college is expensive" is a US-specific problem, not one universal to the Western world. In many European countries, public universities are tuition-free. Even in those Western countries with non-nominal tuition, it is almost always significantly less than the sky-high US levels.

The fact that many countries have cheaper higher education yet lower fertility than the US suggests that, even in the US case, this is unlikely to be a big factor. It likely makes a difference at the margins, but only at the margins.

It's not so much the expense but the timing. People are in college during the peak fertility years. By the time they graduate and get a job and spend a few years getting established, fertility is already declining.

Maybe a policy like this might work: for every child you have, you get a lifetime 10 percentage point reduction in income tax rates.

Suppose the top rate is 37%. Have one child, now for the rest of your life, your top rate is capped at 27%. Have a second child, now your lifetime top rate is capped at 17%. Third child, capped at 7%. Fourth child, never pay income tax ever again.

But, a lot of people will object to such a policy. Childless people will end up having to pay higher taxes as people with kids pay lower or no taxes–some may accept that as their personal sacrifice for the greater good, many likely won't. Others will object to the fact that the biggest benefit is going to be for the middle and upper classes – who are most likely to pay the higher tax rates – while having far less benefit for those on low incomes, who pay little or no tax already. There is the (difficult to quantify) risk that unsuitable parents may end up having kids just for the tax benefits, and then mistreat/abuse those kids. Given all these objections, I'd be surprised if it ever actually gets adopted. But, in terms of increasing TFR in wealthy countries, it might actually work.

I think you’re absolutely right, especially about #4.

We are wealthier than ever. It’s not the money.

> Real estate is expensive but people keep buying homes

This is such a mystery, why would people buy homes, I just can’t figure it out.

If it weren’t for housing costs, I would have 4 kids right now

All evidence suggests that people stop having kids when their society gets richer and better educated.

When there is consequently more to do, more to experience, more people to meet, more to discover, more novelty to novel at. In short, the modern era has more of what makes the childhood experience what it is, enough to spill over into what was previously considered adulthood.

I sometimes ponder what would happen if we did discover the secret to substantial life extension or even immortality; if this phenomenon of trying to stretch that delightful halcyon glow of childhood wonder - what I've heard the Finns call lapsuus - would extend into decades or centuries or perpetuity as a result. It would if nothing else provide a plausible explanation for the behavior of characters like Q from Star Trek.