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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

> Not sure what the answer is but off hand it seems that conservatives and those that are religious have higher birth rates than those who are secular and liberal thus part of this problem is clearly values/cultural.

Mainly an issue with feminism being widespread but living/working conditions not having caught up with it. Society is set up assuming that the wife will stay home to care for the kids. As a result having children pretty much requires either enough disposable income to outsource caring for the kids (nanny, extracurricular activities, etc), or one of the parents staying at home.

For conservatives it's less of a problem because it's more accepted to have the wife stay home.

If we want birthrates to raise again we're going to have to figure out how to make having kids not be a stopper for your career.

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What about part-time jobs for mothers of young children? It's a compromise between working full-time and staying home.

Why mothers?

It could be fathers as well. If a father wanted to stay at home taking care kids, I wouldn't mind at all. But I'm replying the argument above which stated "the wife will stay home to care for the kids".

> Mainly an issue with feminism being widespread but living/working conditions not having caught up with it.

Are you sure that women entering the workforce wasn't _because_ of economic reasons? It seems to me that "feminism", as you put it, may have only been allowed to win, because it was desirable economically.

In other words, could feminism be a result of living/working conditions and not the cause?

Following this, people are having less kids because there is huge economic incentive not too.

> Are you sure that women entering the workforce wasn't _because_ of economic reasons? It seems to me that "feminism", as you put it, may have only been allowed to win, because it was desirable economically.

I'm not sure where the disagreement is there. Yes, one of the reasons women entered the workforce was the increase in income for two-earner households.

The point is that both having two earners per household and having good birth rates are beneficial to society as a whole, but we don't yet have a system where both are compatible; we just exchanged one for the other, as the negative effects of low birth rates aren't immediate.

The economic incentive to not have kids is where the problem lies, and it's what needs to be tackled. Flexible schedules, paid paternal/maternal leave, free education/healthcare, access to affordable housing for young couples... There is no silver bullet, it's a sea of deal breakers that need to be addressed individually.

The reason humans have babies is sex is pleasurable and no birth control was available.

Nobody cared 50% of children died before turning 5, nor that they got shit education, nor that women were oppressed.

Our expectations and sensibilities grew much faster than everything else, not the least or biological natures.

Actually, some people theorize the opposite causation for one thing you mentioned: kids survival rate increasing means one could have less kids. In a world where half the kids don’t make it to 5, and people depend on their kids for their elder life, people are likely to have more of them.

It was desirable economically to the upper classes. It was, obviously, bad for workers (two-income trap). The only way it would be a net economic positive for them would be through their share of gains to the overall economy... but we know that the median person's proportional share of the economy has shrunk, so that's a bust.

> It was desirable economically to the upper classes. It was, obviously, bad for workers (two-income trap).

Long term yes. But did women enter the workforce because of the economic benefit originally? Then as women continued entering wages fell (supply and demand) and the working class ended up trapped, as you say.

Another huge factor is globalization. Women maybe had to enter to earn enough when work started being outsourced.

I'm guessing you're a guy? Women entering the workforce was good for them because like any teenager knows (boy or girl), true independence happens when you earn your own money.

Good for individual women who genuinely want to work, bad for women as a class when everybody does it because now even those young-ish married women who would have been happier raising the kids have to work because of the incrementally lowered cost of labour.

Some people making a choice causes a cascade, taking the choice away from everyone else, kind of like car ownership in the mid 20th century.

(And bad for all the men, too.)

So the great news is as we become richer and richer, the economic incentive not to have children will be so great that we die out as a species?

"Feminism" is many things to many people.

To me it is like the abolition of slavery, makes perfect sense in a modern context.

"Feminism" as it stands today in the west, just like other "-ISMS" to me, are abominations, both the cause and effect, the narcissistic, entitlement and victim culture combined with hating (average)men -- it is the dragon eating its own tail that destroys the modern society.

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