Hacker News Reader

Comment by psadri | Hacker News Reader

Material resources are the most obvious way to demonstrate you have "power".

As for poor people with many babies -- it could be due to lack of access to birth control, or sometimes an insurance against high infant mortality rates. When your livelihood depends on how many hands are helping you in the farm, you want to make sure you have at least X babies.

View on HN

You both missed the most obvious answer as to why poor people generally have more children; poor people typically have more time on their hands and encounter boredom more frequently, thus they fill this time with intercourse. Couple this with a lack of birth control and viola, more children. Of course in the context of farming having more hands around is essential to survival, in most other cases though more children will further impoverish the couple.

Poor people do not have more children because of "boredom." They have more children because they are less educated and because of higher infant mortality rates.

Or you know: lack of access to birth control, particularly the pill. A high infant mortality rate doesn't actually explain anything, particularly in developed nations where that's not true.

You're correct that it was a bit of a pontification, but does it not seem like to much of a stretch to say that the more wealth you have the more options you have for entertainment? If you spend a majority of your time stuck at your house around the opposite sex and can't afford to do much else that in turn you will end up having more intercourse?

Or because poor people are generally not using up 5-10 additional years of peak reproductive age in education and career building before starting a family. It's complicated, but starting to produce children at 18 vs 30 tends to mean that you have more chances and those chances are somewhat higher quality, due to fewer complications, lower chance of congenital defects, and lower rate of cesarean section, among other factors.

Very excellent point, obtaining an education is quite the time investment and humans are definitely more fertile in their early 20s than any other time. I actually had not taken this into consideration...

Isn't there at least one "nordic" country that pays for living expenses for young people to go to school while raising a family?

It's almost like they want healthy children and an educated work force. How odd...

>>You both missed the most obvious answer as to why poor people generally have more children; poor people typically have more time on their hands and encounter boredom more frequently

Wow... you basically equated "poor" with "lazy." Nice.

The reality, on the other hand, is that most poor people have to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet, and have a lot less leisure time than rich people do.

You can't deny that social welfare programs feed a self enforcing cycle of apathy in some segments of the population that contribute to the ability to remain lazy while still surviving. You are 100% correct that I should have phrased it better to not generalize all poor people, only a specific subgroup. I understand that some people bust their asses to scrap by and it wasn't my intention to demonize them or throw them under the bus.

Does anyone have metrics on what portion of the welfare receiving population falls into the "apathetic" segment vs the "bust their asses" segment? Seems to me that what side of this issue people end up on comes down to which segment they believe is the majority, and that belief seems to almost never involve critical thinking.

The US has a really high number of working poor that continue to have children at higher rates. Lack of determination and motivation to stay away from lifestyles that increase your chance of early pregnancies certainly factors at the individual level. Low achievement environments tend to socially entrench the values or conditions that keep people from achieving economic success (demonizing education, emphasis upon group responsibility over individual achievement, sports or religion celebrated as a center of social functions instead of something like academic or economic symbols, familial responsibility guilt trips, ad infinitum). This happens both in rural and urban areas in the US as well. I'm not sure how relevant this would be in the rest of the world, but children leaving home for economic opportunity via education is something most of Asia has shown some cultural validity in my experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com