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Comment by clark_dent | Hacker News Reader

Millenials talk about not wanting children because they don't want to subject a new generation to this absolute shitshow of a planet, or because they can't afford the time and resources to adequately raise them.

I've not heard anyone talk about an overpopulation problem in 30 years.

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I'm a millennial and I really really like this planet. It's my favorite one. My kids are going to like it here too someday, I hope.

My peers who are skipping kids are mostly doing so because their other ambitions don't align with raising a family, which I totally get. It's a huge trade off, I hope it'll be worth it.

"They had such enormous fun that they called for another elephant to come."

gen x here, and my observation is that millenials tend to let there back brain say whatever the 'expected' response is,as having had it barked at them from birth makes it effortless, and then going back to bieng cagey,mildly subversive, and somewhat ferral in there actual lives. point of order : there is NO trade off in getting what you want.

>doing so because their other ambitions don't align with raising a family,

Are your peers more ambitious than mine or are their ambitions to travel for cheap and watch as much netflix as possible?

(This is obviously not true of my coworkers/friends from work who can all afford kids and most choose to)

As a general rule they won't talk about overpopulation being a problem because they know that the population will likely peak within their children's lifetimes.

They do talk about whether the earth can sustain that population as a reason not to have children. They are correct to. Their children might be the generation who have to explain to their children what fish tasted like.

yes, this is the thing I'm not quite getting from the "malthus was proven wrong" argument. Yes, technology increased food production, but that doesn't mean there isn't a carrying capacity to the earth. We have overfished. Fisheries are in decline all over. I guess you could say "no problem, we'll have lab created or grown fish and it will be fine" ok, maybe. But it's not going to be the same and the oceans won't be the same.

What I don't get from all of the demographic collapse hand-wringing: Somehow in the 1970s we got by with 1/2 as many people as we have now - why would a long, slow decline back down to that number be catastrophic? Why would stabilizing at a lower population be problematic? Sure, during that decline there's going to be issues, but once you hit a new stable population those would go away.

> > Somehow in the 1970s we got by with 1/2 as many people as we have now - why would a long, slow decline back down to that number be catastrophic?

Because we've built an economic system based on the idea that you must, at all costs, grow. Stable success is insufficient and will be seen as failure.

And then we spent many decades programming people to believe this is the only thing that can possible work.

Nothing natural about this at all, it is just the result of the cult of capitalism.

Have we, though? Governments rely on economic growth to fund their plans. That means economic activity has to grow, which means ... something ultimately rather unclear about what people around at the time consider wealth to be. It doesn't mean "everybody into the spawning pools and get busy".

The issues might go away sooner than that, because I imagine - naively? - that a society full of old people would put lots of effort into reducing the problems of being old.

Having declined, the population might increase again, and decline again, but with fewer issues the more practice we have. Stability sounds unlikely.

> Sure, during that decline there's going to be issues, but once you hit a new stable population those would go away.

I think you're compressing a lot of hardship into "issues"... It's not about total number of people, it's about demographic distribution. If half of your population is at retirement age, who is going to take care of them? Who will be working to generate tax revenue to provide the social services that you expect?

Also populations don't just stabilize, they feed back off of themselves. If half of your population isn't procreating, you get fewer and fewer babies which is a vicious cycle. There aren't many policy levers to pull during demographic free fall.

Easy, raise the retirement age.

The problems you are expecting from demographic free fall aren't going to happen for generations, and at any point during that time people could decide to start having more babies.

> Easy, raise the retirement age.

I'm not sure it's that easy. There are a lot of people who aren't able to work as they get older for medical reasons. And there's a lot of ageism that keeps older people out of the job market. Maybe that ageism lessens as the population ages, but we're not there yet.

That usually doesn't go super well [1]. Are you good with delaying your retirement 24 months for the greater good? If so, do you think that your fellow citizens would be?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_French_pension_reform_str...

Conversely, I think a lot of people would like to delay retirement and continue working, but they can't because they got let go after they were deemed to be "too old". It's a pretty common occurrence for people in their 60s. And then since your options aren't great you may as well be retired.

One commonly perceived problem is the increase not just in the fraction of the population that is retired, but how long they will remain retired if provided with adequate care, or (more bluntly) how long it takes them to die compared to previous generations. Here in Germany the social system was established when most people died within two-three years of retirement age. Today they can expect to live for more than fifteen years, thanks in part to more expensive health care (cardiac arrest used to be effectively lethal, if not immediately then through subsequent arrests, now it's generally survivable with expensive care). The current retirees are entitled to this, having paid into the system, but current workers can look upon their own increasing contributions and the overall maths and feel uneasy that though paying more they may receive less.

The retirement age is now slowly being raised, and given time the system may level, but in the meantime "issues" will indeed present.

Raising the retirement age is one thing, but finding work for those retirees is another. Ageism is rampant (and especially in tech). Maybe that becomes less of an issue when more of the population is older, but I don't think we're there yet.

> Why would stabilizing at a lower population be problematic?

1. There are no incentives to stabilize at a lower population. It is not like population are decreasing because of overpopulation.

2. It is workers / welfare recipients ratio that will be the catastrophic problem.

> catastrophic problem

with an easy answer.

Boomers will probably die off before that, but able workers aren't going to skip a meal for someone no one cares about.

It's more of a GenXer thing from 30 years ago, I believe.

> Millenials talk about not wanting children because they don't want to subject a new generation to this absolute shitshow of a planet

They often list overpopulation as a reason. But yes, it's not the only reason they give.

As an antidote to this kind of mindless negativity, just consider whether any individual human is happy to have been born. It seems very clear to me that most people enjoy being alive and so having children is moral on utilitarian grounds.

Bad argument. You could have had even more children, is the fact you didn't immoral? What kind of monster are you?

Most people are doing something morally wrong by not having children, or only having 1 child. That seems like a reasonable conclusion to me.

However, I wouldn't push the point. My view is that "life is good so having children is good" but not "you must have as many children as possible." There are various ways I might justify this philosophically, but I would just say that parents have a special obligation to their children and, if you have too many children, it's impossible to fulfill that obligation. So you should have as many children as you can effectively parent.

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