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Comment by ubertoop | Hacker News Reader

> it recently announced that state clinics would no longer hand out contraceptives or offer vasectomies

What a backwards and ill informed way of handling a declining birth rate. We should not be promoting accidental births, but instead doing everything we can to ensure couples live in a world where they WANT to bring another life into it.

- Good pay

- Safe neighborhoods

- Balance work/life

- Assurances of healthcare for themselves and their family

- Hope that the future will be even better than the already wonderful, today.

Very few of these things are true for the average worker these days. Often in the US, if you want to have kids, you are writing off your ability to ever retire.

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> instead doing everything we can to ensure couples live in a world where they WANT to bring another life into it.

Neither of those suggestions actually increased birth rates, individually or in aggregate. Pretty sure many Scandinavian countries tried all of those, and it had little to no impact on their birth rate.

Do you have any source to show improvements to birth rate?

So I don't think any of the above directly increases birth rate, but the one thing that people seem to be in agreement on is cheap/free daycare.

Evidence from Quebec suggests that compared to Ontario, the birth rate has increased because of subsidized day care. https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/daycare-difference-quebec-fert...

The correlation here at least makes sense, because child-caring is time intensive. So you need one parent to stay at home, or go part-time, or pay out the nose for a nanny/unsubsidized spot, at least in the US.

All those things are themselves good, and unplanned families are not good.

Falling population is good, working shortages will increase the demand for automation and result in worker dignity. We simply need a fuck-ton of immigration to amortize things a bit, until we get to post-scarcity post-growth steady state in 2100.

> Falling population is good

Depends. If population is falling everywhere, you can't have things like free healthcare or pensions, barring some medical miracle like eternal youth.

Even if you allow immigration, you're only draining something else of its population, and that's not sustainable.

> working shortages will increase the demand for automation and result in worker dignity.

That depends on power distribution. If Amazon automated its processing center, do you think that workers would benefit or just Amazon? Plus what jobs would the newly laid off be given?

But giving workers power isn't a solution either. Give them option to choose, and their jobs would never be automated. It's not in their interest to be made expendable. Not to mention the their ego would be bruised if they knew they could be made expendable.

None of those things have prevented people from having kids before. In fact they are mostly inversely correlated.

You would think that wealth/security is what matters but the stats show otherwise. People in poorer countries have more kids than in rich countries. And within developed countries, the poor have more than the middle class which in turn have more than millionaires.

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