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Comment by katzinsky | Hacker News Reader

I thought Kaiser Busch's most recent video on the subject was very good.

In short: People don't feel the world is worth bringing children into anymore, it's likely educating women doesn't help, and the relative economic precarity young people live in makes it seem extremely irresponsible. Then on top of all of that most developed countries have focused on individual consumption and hedonism rather than evolving older social traditions that tended to encourage family formation so younger people don't even have the psychosocial tools to dig themselves out.

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Re educating women:

It just now occurred to me that maybe uneducated women get married and have kids out of economic self-preservation. The more educated, the more able to make their own way, the less they have to marry and have kids if they don't want to.

But maybe we're also in an over-reaction. Women felt stifled in that environment. So they got jobs and bosses and all the workplace stuff that we find... stifling. It's not necessarily better; it's just a different flavor of bad. As more women have time to try it and find it to be empty, we may see a reaction away from that as the ideal of what female success looks like.

They also get their own money. Being stuck at home dependent on others is generally a worse deal.

Women have always been able to work, there are plenty of low-education jobs available and the poorer they are, the more of those they need to get shifts for. You may notice women working in many crap jobs when you look around. Higher education changes the jobs generally for the better. Also exposes them to "hey, there are more things going on in the world besides squeezing out babies". Though the educated who like making babies can and do go right ahead.

Well we've got maybe half a generation left for them to figure themselves out before we get run over by people who never tried that and will probably undo it once they have the power to.

Dig themselves out of what?

Living life in contradiction to their biological imperative

The biological imperative is to copulate. The more pregnancy, the less copulation, and the more time spent in child care. Contraceptives are the difference.

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