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Comment by mildchalupa | Hacker News Reader

There is a short window of human fertility. Let's assume you are "smart" and wait until you are out of college. You might start at 22 and have a little over 13 years until it's its considered a geriatric pregnancy.

If the economic or social constraints are such that individuals are unwilling to bear children then that is it, you do not get to try again.

Today we straddle those in the fertile window with student debt, high rent or an impossible housing market, thus less chose to have children.

This is not to say that it's a cataclysm, but it's certainly unsustainable from a societal standpoint.

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But those aren’t intractable issues and society will adapt. I think that’s key critique - extrapolation is a problem when you have feedback systems to adjust to changing environmental conditions. Like even if no one has kids for 10 years, we still have new ones being born. If it’s super critical to society you’ll see all sorts of programs and support spring up to encourage people to have larger than today normal families (eg offering free childcare etc). Also, you seem to have dismissed geriatric pregnancies out of hand (not to mention limiting counting pregnancies to specific subgroups for some reason because you view other types of kids as undesirable?) but I don’t see why that’s the case - children born during this time are still children. Fertility levels may be reduced but they still happen.

The point is that the claim that we’ll have a species-wide population collapse seems unreal when we have more people on earth than ever and we have lots of children at every age group giving us lots of shots to adjusts to problems. Not to mention tech that extends the fertility age well beyond the limited window you’ve said.

There’s a lot of baked in stereotyping it seems like on your end of what “acceptable” children look like that may be worth unpacking more than there being any serious concern about a population collapse.

Economic and social constraints? By world metrics we cant even see the horizon of economic limits at the commodity level, production is seemingly hyperbolic. The economic constraints that you feel have next to nothing to do with what it actually costs to furnish a modern first world life for you. Maybe you are actually feeling your currency being steadily debased for decades, maybe you are actually feeling a top marginal tax rate ~37%, maybe you feel the loss of gainful employment due to trade agreements, but thats all political.

It's not a cataclysm, but it means that for the next few generations, the fertility window of women must increase and the attractiveness of men has to increase. That is going to be a very slow process. There is no way this mechanism is fast enough to prevent any declines predicted until the year 2100.

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