Hacker News Reader

Comment by SamoyedFurFluff | Hacker News Reader

The weirdest part is that I’m pretty sure women generally want a replacement rate (or more!) number of children when surveyed, but feel like they’re unable to support that number. Why can’t we address those?

Edited to ask: some replies seemed skeptical so I went to find what I based this idea off of. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility...

https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-many-kids-do-women-want

View on HN

I am not sure it always just boils down to resources. I know cases where she decided to have no more kids after her first, because she realized raising kids is psychologically stressful. Being able to take the easy way out is definitely a factor, the question is how much it weights.

Surveys in general like this are kind of useless, you have to see what people actually do.

Almost everyone when surveyed says they want to reduce pollution and help the environment, but do they actually do things (especially things that inconvenience them)?

Some of it is a real concern, such as cost associated.

Some of it is pressures we put on ourselves: a lot of people think you basically need to be perfect to be a parent. No one is perfect, and I see a lot of shit from people without kids expecting parents to be so.

I'm sure the American allergy to welfare/social safety has something to do with it.

The American allergy to welfare and social safety has caused _global_ fertility to collapse?

its not global so much as prosperity-trap nations, there's enough of those these days (c.f. China) that it lets you say that generally globally, its true

There were predictions 10+ years ago that illustrated this _global_ trend. One stuck with me in particular, I might of found it through /. or Ars, not sure can't find the exact paper. But it predicted all but a handful of nations would be at or below replacement rates by 2050. It was spattering of African countries and Yemen. I think there was one another non African country but it escapes me. It stuck with me because I scoffed at the idea, yet every year and now seemingly every week we see more and more data that shows we are quickly lining up with that prediction. I don't think we'll be able to navigate this decline with any semblance of grace. Not with the state of our culture and politics. We'll see tremendous instability leading to further erosion of rights, we'll see wealth inequality skyrocket... I mean we are barely even talking about the birth rate issue let alone at a point where we could perhaps have strategies to confront this rapidly approaching future.

maybe, but American fertility rates are equal or higher than countries like Sweden, Norway, and Finland which have great welfare and social safety nets.

Perhaps SV needs to disrupt the existing moribund market. Think bootcamp contracts, but targeted to infants. Pay to... exist. If you believe IQ is all genetics, there should be at least ~250K players in the SV market.

https://modest.io/proposal

ah the widely cited "I'm pretty sure" statistic

lol citation needed.

So I googled this and I don’t seem to be wrong. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility...

Being pregnant, birthing kids, breastfeeding them, and raising them to age ~3 sucks for a woman.

It could just be that evolution did not bestow humans with a sufficiently easy and risk free process to reproduce, hence the price women demand is too high (in an environment where women can actually price their sacrifice in birthing and raising children due to achieving in financial independence).

So, is emancipation to blame?

Why "blame"? Having more children is not somehow a noble good. Unless you're one of those "every sperm is sacred" types.

Elon is on it. Saving the world again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com