Hacker News Reader

Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

Putting aside the considerable statistical skepticism, the natural next question we all have at noticing these trends is - is there any way for secular society to get some of the "special sauce" these ultra-religious groups have, before the aggregate supply of everything starts to fall?

Secular pronatalism doesn't seem like it has a lot of staying power with most people as an ideology. But I've been on board for a long time, and so have a lot of my friends. So maybe the best answer is the common sense one: Wait a few generations for all those not susceptible to the secular pronatalism mind virus to select out of the gene pool, and hope society doesn't crumble under its own technical debt in the meanwhile.

View on HN

I’m sceptical about how successful secular pronatalism can be. Large families, generation after generation, can come at a substantial personal cost, and it is a difficult sell for individuals if it is just a matter of principle, as opposed to something backed by promises and threats of post mortem reward and punishment. Furthermore, many religious pronatal groups reduce defections by socially ostracising and demonising defectors, making defection expensive. That kind of behaviour is much easier to justify given religious premises than secular ones. So I doubt secular pronatalism is ever going to be as successful as religious pronatalism. At its best, it might see some success under particularly favourable circumstances, but religious pronatalism will thrive in far less favourable conditions

To be successful, I think we need to bring back the "it takes a village to raise a child" mentality. We need to take some of the burden off of the parents.

This requires a cultural overhaul. Secular western culture is too individualistic and is incompatible with "village" behavior

Not going to happen to a large capacity under multicultural societies; no matter how hard you indoctrinate children, humans will retain their racial-tribal differences and will tend to segregate if not forced together by economics and state violence.

True, true. The evil vizier-economist's answer would be to notice that statisticians tend to estimate the value of a human life at around $10 million on average, and then notice that raising a child in the United States costs a paltry $250,000 or so over 18 years, and finally start to wonder how they can facilitate smoothing out that discrepancy across space and time to the parents' benefit. I"m not crazy enough to think far along those dimensions, but there is a big mismatch here that I think would be core to any secular solution to the problem.

I rarely run into a person that values their own life as high as 10 million dollars, unless they're quite wealthy.

Really? I would value my life much more than that.

I think how the question is phrased really matters.

How much do you value your life? Or how much would someone have to pay you to kill yourself?

Are these even different questions?

I was recently buying an older car and calculating out how much buying a newer car with more safety features was worse by assigning a value to my life/health and the risk of death and the risk of injury. I see used cars which generation over generation have major safety upgrades which, if you value your life at 10 million would probably save you 10 grand or so over the life of the car, having a gulf in price of a few thousand, and most of that value difference wasn't because of the safety features.

I guess it's possible people are just ignorant, but in general I see people especially men acting recklessly enough with their lives that they seem to not ascribe the highest values to them. They would rather have a shorter life where they have more money and other things.

On the other end of the spectrum, I probably give much more inherent value to my life than the average person (probably closer to 20m than 10m, if I were to spreadsheet it out) and it drives a lot of risk-averse action on my part.

Driving was one I decided on early: I didn't get a driver's license until 25, to get well out of the danger zone for auto accidents; and then less than a year after I got it, I moved to Finland (an uncommonly safe country in its own right) and I've been living off of public transit and bike paths that aren't thin painted lines next to motor traffic ever since.

Religion doesn't mean Ahura Mazda flapping about under the sun, getting all melty-winged.

Everybody who gets up in the morning and behaves in the ways they honestly believe are right has religion, including the non-spiritual.

In the context of this discussion and skissane’s comment, religion is the tapestry of traditions/“beliefs” that bind a tribal group together.

I write “beliefs” in quotes because there are beliefs (i.e. assumptions) that people might have philosophically on how they model the world, and there are “beliefs” that people espouse they have as a means to bond with other members of the tribe.

I don't see it as all that hard to imagine secular pronatalism. You just need the non-parents to subsidise the parents. We saw several examples of this under communism.

Secular pronatalism as an ideology is new to me, but obviously the main limiting factor in fertility rates globally is just a mismatch in the lifestyle of the modern luxury-expecting freedom-enjoying individual vs the self sacrifice needed to do child raising. I would say a significant part of that is financial and time-related, both things which have obvious political, not ideological, solutions. Fighting the ideology of individualism with an ideology of self sacrifice did not work for climate change and will not work for pronatalism.

I often joke to my peers: it doesn't matter what I invest in, my best financial decision was buying a house, my worst financial decision was having kids, the rest is just screwing around in the margin.

The special sauce seem to be forbidden contraceptives and limited opportunities.

Yes, there's also a kind of mandate in the bible to be fruitful and multiply, and the fact that if you grow up in a larger family you tend to have a larger family, but I would bet the other factors matter more.

Pronatalism doesn’t belong to religion especially. People didn’t used to have a lot of kids because God told them to, they had a lot of kids because they were free labor.

In that way, the pendulum is already starting to swing the other way in the US with the loosening of child labor laws.

Secularly, though, we’d have to do something to make it not hellishly expensive and inconvenient to have children. The US can’t even extend the child tax credit, much less fix healthcare, housing, education, food deserts, or childcare all at once.

Are you and your friends men? Unfortunately, the people who truly produce the next generation are largely absent from places like Hacker News, and history seems to show that, once they have any other options, spending 15-30 of their prime years doing the energetic equivalent of 40 consecutive Tour de Frances 9 months out of every 18, while being entirely dependent on a physically larger, stronger person who may or may not have legal and/or social sanction to beat you, is less appealing than living the way you and I live, as we please.

I'm guessing the only thing that will ever reverse this will be the invention of artificial wombs.

For what it's worth, I'm personally on board with having as many children as possible. Life is a cherished miracle. But I also can't bear children and take no risk in this endeavor.

I find it funny when men talk about having as many kids as possible when they take on 0% of the health risk, have no expectation of quitting their job, and statistically have a low chance of becoming a single parent.

Seeing it from the side of a Woman, it's no wonder birth rates are declining.

It definitely makes the policy predictions for how countries are going to deal with this much bleaker. Many countries have tried the carrot for years now. Get ready for them to start using the stick.

If we start forcing women to carry children against their will maybe our civilization doesn't deserve to survive.

>Unfortunately, the people who truly produce the next generation are largely absent from places like Hacker News, and history seems to show that, once they have any other options, spending 15-30 of their prime years doing the energetic equivalent of 40 consecutive Tour de Frances 9 months out of every 18, while being entirely dependent on a physically larger, stronger person who may or may not have legal and/or social sanction to beat you, is less appealing than living the way you and I live, as we please.

Whoa that reads almost as loaded as my reply:

I suspect collapse of nativity is why Feminism(tm) kills civilizations throughout antiquity.

> Wait a few generations ... and hope society doesn't crumble

We don't have a few generations until we are beyond the point where we can mathematically recover unless we develop economic mass adult-cloning technology and develop the psycho-social faculties to integrate that into a healthy (enough) society. The world won't end, but let's just say hyper-advanced visions of the future seem unlikely at this point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com