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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

To quote a smart person I know: “Yeah, sure, you could give up, but then who’s gonna feed the kids?”

When your life is hand to mouth, there’s not a lot of room left for suicidal stuff. Too busy surviving. Especially if there’s people depending on you.

Even if you’re suicidal, you don’t have the luxury to go through with it. And even if you’re depressed, you don’t have the luxury to give into it. Because if you do, then you don’t eat and neither do yiur kids. No choice but to keep going.

Life’s fun like that.

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Or, such places handle social interaction better. Birth rates decline in developed areas. My pet hypothesis is that “developed” countries/areas are only developed through extracting so much from workers that only a selected subset may reproduce.

Or, y'know, developed countries have more access to birth control...

I think this js the main reason. Most people here get children unplanned and the minority of them are rich.

You’re pointing out the mechanism. I’m talking about why people choose to not have children. This is not a disagreement.

The point of your parent comment is that the people in the developing world might also choose not to have children if they had realistic access to birth control - thus making the “why” incorrect. It could just be that having kids isn’t actually worth it.

It's not only one cause - declining TFR has to do with a ton of different things, access to birth control being one of them but far from the only one.

Birth rates decline because of female education. This is such an established fact that your pet theory sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory "the moon landings were faked".

Right, I forgot about that. But there’s still room to ask why women don’t want children.

Really? Is it such an established fact? I seem to remember it still being a point of extreme contention, academically, only a few years ago. I haven't been in an academic setting discussing population growth and human movement for a while, but it's crazy that it would go from being one theory among many in an incredibly complex system to an established, unassailable fact in a decade.

Does Argentina have a much worse education system for women than Brazil?

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