A tragic mixture of having perspective, intelligence, and (relative) poverty.
[1] I say "male", because even in this day and age, female unemployment is much more socially acceptable than its male counterpart.
Now that the individual's economic future is so uncertain, and it's that way for everyone, people who don't think about the future are breeding at a much faster rate than people who do, and it's terrifying.
For the life of me, I can't figure out why healthcare (which has long-term effects on peoples' intelligence levels, since a lot of that's not genetic) isn't a no-brainer, but also education. Free higher education is the absolute best eugenic program ever devised-- if your kids are smart, society will invest limitless resources in making them succeed-- because it hurts absolutely no one; it's pure carrot. Instead of getting soaked on tuition, parents whose kids get into top schools should get paid.
The only countries whose education systems I'm familiar with are the US, Japan, and England. In Japan, public universities are of higher quality than their private counterparts, and their tuition is much cheaper. You do get the effect of smart kids studying their butts off to get into a public (national) university like Tokyo U. or Kyoto U. because they can't afford a private college tuition (though annual rates are in the range of $10-15k, much more reasonable than the US). Iirc England is somewhat similar, with reasonable rates for the best universities (Oxbridge, for instance)
Empathy and social justice are crucial for any society that wants to be respected. You are proposing barbary. Social Darwinism.
The question is how we want to shape our societies and reality. Is it acceptable to have few lucky ones with huge incomes that are far beyond the necassary amount for living a fullfilled live and have the rest die on the streets?
Or would it be more beneficial for the society at large if all have the possibility to live free from existential dangers such as homelessness, disease and hunger.
Robots, computers and automatisation are great tools. At the moment the profit that these tools generate is not shared among all people. It's time to socialise the profits that are gained through automatisation in order to be able to live in peaceful societies.
If you discard huge parts of the population as worthless you'll have to invest even more in your security. You will have slums, riots, terrorism and violence and walled gardens.
That is not the reality I want to live in.
OP is offering a possible partial solution to exactly the problem you present here. With fewer children born into poverty, some degree of abatement is likely. I'm not sure why you dismiss the notion out of hand, refuse to engage the actual idea, and then immediately mischaracterize the original position to be some absurd straw-man in which the OP is adjudicating the "worthless[ness]" of various people.
It's almost as if people on the internet don't know how to properly argue the actual ideas presented, and instead prefer to just make shit up.
The problem with such thinking is that it's often not up to us to decide if we are needed in this world or not. And it is also more often than not up to us if we have the energy and power to earn a wage that allows us sustaining our existence.
My impression is that there is a general consensus that every human beeing has some basic rights (U.N. Declaration of Human Rights) and that we as a society should work to provide these rights for everyone even if we have to sacrify some personal profit for it. Because it can also happen to us.
Op's post came across as If he does not share this views. I'd say if you deny basic human rights I can call you barbaric.
There is a difference between saying it's not a good idea to get children if you are in a bad economic situation or saying that it's correct that these children suffer homelessness because their parents made a bad decision or are somehow not fit enough to procreate. If you start to talk about fitness (here indirectly measured as ability to earn money) as an indication who should procreate you have a form of social darwinism. And there are a lot of problems with such a thinking.
Ironic on HN, because http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
You are judging them all as bad. It seems funny.