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Comment by ta76567656 | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget that 1) the first world birth rate is below replacement, and 2) your retirement savings will be made worthless by inflation if there is no labor pool to support the economy when you are retired. Parent poster is arguably subsidising your retirement by putting in the work to raise the generation that will produce the goods and services you will wish to consume in your retirement.

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I benefit just as much from parent's children (heh) as I would from yours, but less than I would from my own, because they'd entertain me.

Parent's enjoyment of those children is an appropriate benefit which both parent and parent's wife have purchased at the cost of parent's wife's career and their retirement savings.

Put another way, parent and I both receive an economic benefit, but parent receives an emotional benefit. You can argue that I should pay for the economic benefit I receive, but I do not think it appropriate that I should subsidize the price of his emotional benefit.

Empirically, seeing that couples in general find child rearing too burdensome to maintain replacement rate, it seems that the current split is not the correct one.

That's only relevant if you restrict immigration from areas where growth is rapid to areas where the locals reproduce below replacement.

That there are willing young immigrants available is a historical accident. As countries develop economically their birth rates consistently drop, eventually to below the replacement rate, as can be seen in almost all first world countries. Taking first world countries as a closed system my argument applies. Allowing for immigration means the system now depends on a pool of readily available people who live in economic misery to supplement the first world population, which is not a particularly ethical arrangement.

Immigration is the answer. That's what's keeping quite a few developed countries in population increases even now. Yes, there are a lot of arguments about "who".

I went for replacement myself: 2 kids.

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