Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

The other day someone was complaining about too many people in the housing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35962521

The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, that has to be enduring economic security across their childhood. Now, how many people can comfortably afford to do so?

Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?

View on HN

Precisely this.

The incentives to have children are being removed one by one, it's becoming impossible to find affordable housing & education unless you are born rich, the social fiber is being eroded more and more with every passing year so the 0.1% can become even more filthy rich.

Add to that the younger generations being keenly aware of the deteriorating environment due to global warming (which older generations are happy to ignore), and is there really any wonder why birth rates are down across the board?

It's not necessary to pay for other peoples housing, all that is necessary is to repeal absurd zoning laws and ridiculous bureaucracy that makes building such things 100x more expensive (if it's even possible) than they need to be.

That's land owners "paying for it" in a decrease to the price of their assets. I'm all for that, but it involves one group of people benefiting from the loss to another group of people.

Those houses will just get snapped up by investors.

By all means build but you also need laws to prevent houses from being snapped up by those who don't intend to live them.

Housing is only a good investment because there's a chronic shortage. Those big evil investors are just a scapegoat, they might be exacerbating the issue but they aren't the real source. The real issue is the self-imposed shortage.

> Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it?

This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false. People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more. As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date.

USA actually has an advantage here as population growth decline is lower than most other developed nations (eg most EU states, Japan, Korea etc)

> This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false.

Me having a child would make me poorer. Which is true. Because I'd have to pay for the child's food and living expenses. That's what I meant. It's an individual decision.

Oh.. just that problem about our space ship not having infinite resources.. looking into the past won't help for seeing the rebound of the sigmoid curve..

>>Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it?

>This implies that more people make society poorer.

Not really. The implication is that children’s are a costly investment, and as I see it; there’s a big overlap of people decrying the decline of birth rate, and people supporting politician who support slashing the budget that might help people raising children e.g. school lunch programs.

It makes no difference if society reaps the rewards on the long term if individuals can’t afford to cost that investment because it was decried as an irresponsible decision.

> People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more.

Not at all, people don't create resources, we consume resources.

> As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down.

As long as we believe in infinite exponential growth. Instead we are starting to hit the wall and it time to stop dreaming.

> People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more

This is true only in some regards. There's a finite amount of natural resources that can be extracted from the planet, perhaps most tangible in terms of food. There's only so much more land that can be made into farmland, and it will only produce so much in terms of crop yields. We're already sort of pushing it in this regard. This food needs to be divided among the world population, somehow. Adding more workers won't miraculously double the amount of arable land.

There's only so much food that can be produced before we all need to lower our standard of living to feed everyone. Like yeah we can feed more people that way, but we'd all be eating insect gruel. I don't think that can be regarded as increasing the standard of living.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day

Fish, livestock, forests, land are all finite and we're already consuming them at such rate that by the end of the century our planet will become a desert. Adding a few more billions people won't help the matter. Solar ans other clean energy won't create more food and land. What would help is a drastic novel method of resources management.

> As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date.

Are we ignoring all the human history involving societies that collapsed or went through ecological and/or violent struggles?

Pre-plague Britain had terrible living conditions and over population. Living conditions for the survivors immediately rose after a huge chunk of the population was removed. Other civilizations that were overpopulated had huge amounts of population move to greener pastures, such as the Saxons.

Having children requires an element of hope, of faith in a bright the future. If you're convinced of nothing but dark days ahead, bringing children into the world would be a cruelty.

Media messaging, especially on social media, has gotten extremely dark and catastrophic. Looking at the screen you'd think the sky was falling several times every day. If global warming isn't doing us in, the nazis are literally back for real this time, or putin is hatching schemes, or there's the new Tau Ceti VI strain of Covid, or delayed side effect from the vaccines, or vikings on capitol hill, or race riots, or police brutality, or inflation, or deflation, or financial crisis, or public debt, or forever chemicals, or mass surveillance, or xi jinping, or killer bees, or vanishing bees, or microplastics, or actual space aliens. Et c.

Many people are living genuinely precarious lives. Some are well aware of it, others haven't quite realised it yet or are firmly in denial about it.

Humans don't breed when their own lives are precarious and it's rational and realistic to assume the lives of their kids will be even more so.

I see no mystery here.

> Humans don't breed when their own lives are precarious and it's rational and realistic to assume the lives of their kids will be even more so.

I do not think this is a generally true notion. There are so many people living in precarious circumstances in large parts of Africa, Asia and South America. But the highest population growth is right there.

Maybe there is some truth to the notion in developed countries.

>> Humans don't breed when their own lives are precarious and it's rational and realistic to assume the lives of their kids will be even more so.

> I do not think this is a generally true notion. There are so many people living in precarious circumstances in large parts of Africa, Asia and South America. But the highest population growth is right there.

Yes, but wealthy technological society enables it, because modern birth control technology is what makes reproduction so much of a choice.

In earlier times and in less developed places, if you really wanted to be "child free" you'd have to take much more extreme actions, like adopting celibacy or being OK with infanticide.

Birth control, yes, but also the existence of credible pension plans. If your survival in your old age solely depends on the family you probably tend to make sure there are several candidates for sustaining you.

I'd say it's the other way around. For most of human history we've had to live in a precarious state, stability or "things not changing", static life have never been true. Even for a farmer never leaving his village he always had to be precarious of the element.

It's only maybe last two-three generation or so we've tricked ourselves to the escalator life with dissipation of risk through social programs.

Historically, people have been far less aware of the circumstances outside of their immediate area. Life appeared extremely stable, because on a local level, it has been. Not that people didn't die or anything, they absolutely did, but what was certain was that life would more or less go on the way it had since time immemorial.

You can't have the sort of uncertainty about the future we have today without the progress we've had until today. The society-scale anxiety essentially boils down to this question: Just what is it we're progressing toward?

Housing and infrastructure? We even have bigger problems, and even if economists claim endless growth it is clear that our population, unless we grow into space, cannot grow forever.

To me it feels we have already passed the sustainable level at maybe 4 billion world population..

Another perspective, lower birthrates in western economies have strongly correlated with prosperity... and our prosperity is also endangered if we don't stop.

Biggest issue is (same with the whole ecological disaster) that this is a world and not a countries problem, and how do you approach that.. no clue. But to begin with, lower birth rates are a good thing imo, we just need to get into a sustainable balance and make sure swings one or the other way don't get too big..

> Another perspective, lower birthrates in western economies have strongly correlated with prosperity

As soon as you switch from the pyramid to the fat belly curve (of population vs age) you gain workforce with respect to burden and thus productivity as a country, as soon as it becomes top heavy you're screwed. Maybe it's something else but the baby boom after ww2 and impulses in the 50's 60's will become the baby burden quite soon (and has already started to be).

Agreed, but what about a balance between bottom heavy and top heavy, wouldn't that be best?

(And on economic arguments, I have been hearing the top-heavy-we-are-all-screwed slogans as long the climate crisis thing for what, 40 years (I think belly curve panic even longer)... however it seems only climate crisis turns out to be true (just observational :))

The climate crisis isn't true, these panics never are. Look at the data. If there was a crisis people would be dying but deaths from weather are massively down over the last 100 years. You can't actually perceive climate change with your senses because the changes are far too small and slow, so you have to rely on news media and academics who aren't exactly reliable.

> Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?

Why would they want more housing? That would only devalue their rental properties.

Children can live in their parents' homes, or parents can live in their childrens' homes.

Distinction arbitrary when it comes to availability of "shelter" in the Maslow sense but non-trivial when it comes to comes to components higher in the hierarchy pyramid.

It seems the thinking is shifting to making them have kids whether they want to or not.

Yeah, the Blue State solution: bans on abortion, moving towards banning contraception again. While simultaneously making it legally risky for obstetricians to work there, and banning certain medical interventions, so the maternal mortality rate goes up. (Someone find the American life expectancy thread on here from a few months ago?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com