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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

People don't want to have children because:

1) they can't afford it, or

2) they don't have a reasonable apartment/home (same thing as 1. really)

3) they don't want to give up their lifestyle

4) they're genuinely afraid the future is dystopian and dark (which is rather interesting since I can't imagine a future more dystopian than one without children)

So if you want to fix the society to want to have children again you have to make it

1) affordable,

2) less inconvenient,

3) (not really sure what to do about being afraid of the future)

if that sounds like socialism... too bad. Capitalism evidently makes people prefer capital (both money and time) over children.

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I just want to add that some people simply don’t want to have children.

This is important to note because “should I have children” is kind of a novel question, especially for women, in the context of human history.

If you go back a century or three, women (especially from a middle class or upper class family) were expected to wed. And wives were expected to bear and care for children.

Choice was not particularly involved, and most career paths were unavailable for self-sufficiency in the first place.

A question like “would I be happier advancing my career as a scientist or choosing to raise children” is a foreign question a century ago. Now it is a question that the modern woman must grapple with.

This is similar to what you are saying, but it’s the social side of the coin rather than the economic one: an upper middle class family may easily be able to afford raising children, yet the wife still does not want to sacrifice her career which embodies her ambitions, her passions, and her sense of worth.

Good point though I anecdotally can say that some these women decide that they'd like a child later in life when it's biologically very late (euphemism here).

Also back then a lot (heard numbers like 25%) of women didn't have children. Not sure what this changes about the equation given that it probably wasn't their choice either, but it sounds like a lot.

Having children is definitely going to be another "tragedy of commons". At an individual level, one has to sacrifice a lot in terms of time, money and effort to raise children. Some people love that (myself included), some people would love to do that but do not have resources for whatever reasons (student loans, crazy work culture, expensive housing etc). But a lot of people simply don't want to have children and all the costs associated with raising them.

And that "selfish" attitude worked over the past 2-3 generations - why go through the hassle of raising kids when the government will anyway provide you pension and assistance when you get old? The costs of kids are privately born but the benefits are socialized in terms of taxes and welfare programs. And now you are looking at South Korea with a 0.7 TFR, with other nations not far behind.

It will be interesting to see how South Korea and Japan deal with it. A range of outcomes are possible - a "Ship of Theseus" scenario with these cultures getting slowly replaced by immigrants, awesome future based on awesome robots, dystopian future based on overhyped AI tech, complete collapse of social programs as the young refuse to care for the previous generations who either preferred partying or were worked to bone by their corporate culture, or a soft landing where the society actually get its act together.

So if you want to fix the society to want to have children again you have to make it
1) affordable,

2) less inconvenient,

Sweden has done about as much as any country reasonably can do address those two, and it hasn't had much effect on improving the birth rate.

How do you know what the birth-rate would be without those policies?

By looking at other similar countries that havent gone that far.

> 4) they're genuinely afraid the future is dystopian and dark (which is rather interesting since I can't imagine a future more dystopian than one without children)

I can. A future where children are all poisoned and enslaved to grind a little bit more value out of a dying-anyway civilization is, to me, nastier than one that voluntarily calls it quits before things get that bad.

But also: Very few childless people think nobody should have children. More than we need to pool our resources into supporting those who are going to be born anyway.

I think the truly new thing is that people can "want" children, opposed to this being a must (due to religion, lack of rights, it being a personal pension system, lack of contraception).

When people are free to WANT children and decide on how many, it's going to be 0, 1 or 2. Which might average out to 1.5 - 1.8 in most countries, far below replacement level.

There's nothing you can do financially to truly move the needle. Even people with no immediate financial challenges tend to not have more than 2 children.

Why not? Because a 3rd, 4th, .... adds no value whilst it does add immense logistical nightmares.

When you love children, 2 will keep you plenty busy. When you have 4 you'll have an issue with your car and home. You'll be spending most of your time driving them around to their schools, sports, hobbies, whatever.

It's not an economic issue, as tempting as it is to think that. When given the choice to want children, most still want them, just not many.

Prefer capital? Raising children used to double as an investment in the family farm. With a little luck they made self-sufficiency easier rather than harder.

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