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Comment by ryanx435 | Hacker News Reader

It's not economic. People have been poor for hundreds and thousands and millions of years, and yet they still had children.

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It's not just economic; it's a combination of great expectations and poor results. Millennials have been lied to, nonstop, for their entire lives. They are a resource to be mined, not citizens to be valued as they were always told. Maybe some of them have realized it, but many seem to be just locking up. It's similar to what I saw in people my own age in Japan around 1999-2000. Sure they might be materially more wealthy than e.g. a subsistence farmer, but no one ever told the subsistence farmer that student loans were a sure path to a great career.

Children used to be a source of labor and providing generational wealth. Now children are a source of financial cost, not benefit, and thus it doesn't make sense for poor people to have them.

it doesn't make sense for poor people to have them

I would speculate that the disincentive is larger for wealthier people. A lot of child-related expenses are for positional goods (house in a good school district, saving for college) where the price is basically "all your spare income". So if you're rich having kids means giving up awesome vacations and the option of retiring before 50; if you're poor those things were never on the table.

Having a child is literally one more mouth to feed, I hardly think the disincentive is larger for wealthy people. That's just a bizarre piece of logic.

> Now children are a source of financial cost, not benefit, and thus it doesn't make sense for poor people to have them.

Yet it's low-income households who have the highest birth rates [0] afaik this isn't unique to the US, in Germany the situation looks similar.

It's extremely interesting how this relation between income&fertility doesn't just hold true on a country vs country scale, but also on a domestic level inside these countries, there must be something very fundamental at work here.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

But nowadays people can choose if they want to have children. In the past, that was not so easy, at least if you wanted to have sex.

Once people can choose to not children, factors like the economy affect population growth.

In the past it was not infrequent among cultures to choose not to keep children via various forms of infanticide. Some prophylactic and abortive options existed as well. Though, yes, not as assured or safe as present methods.

This. I'd blame the real cause on a mix of disinterest, economics, and toxic social media.

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