You need slack in the system for this to happen. If everyone needs to work then the village is empty.

We're also seeing baby boomers, who were raised partially by their grandparents, neglecting the role of grandparent. They live vicariously, through Facebook and video calls, and when the parents ask for them to get more involved, they're met with "I raised you, so I've done my part"

Both my wife and my parents maybe see our kids twice a year, thrice if they have some other reason to come to town. And it's not an issue of health. They all travel regularly, for extended periods.

I think the level of obsessive care people feel obliged to deliver to their single child prior to age of 8 is a part of the same story. You can see how radically it changes even with the second child (not to mention the third) but half of the parents never get there nowadays and think it's the norm.

It also may be the wrong causality. Perhaps when children are rarer, they are more precious and we naturally want to protect them more.

It's bizarre to me that the piece doesn't mention the contraceptive pill, which debuted in 1960, the exact same year as peak fertility.

> it doesn't come into play until all of your children are at least like 8.

Not all, but probably at least one. When it was usual to have larger families, it was common older children being tasked with some care/monitoring of their younger siblings. My mother was fistborn, and she took care of walking her younger brothers/sisters to school.

I was roaming the country and forest with the neighbor kids when we were 4. This was mid 80s.

It’s strange to see that anecdote so highly upvoted when it’s so trivial to look at birth rates by parental age.

Reduced teen pregnancies are not the driving factor in recent fertility rate declines at all.

It is interesting how an appeal to emotion with a difficult story can lead so many to overlook the obvious shortcomings in that explanation. Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.

> And it is insane to me that I'm now seeing this "oh actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad" thing pop up all over the place.

The other side of this is insane to me... the "oh actually looming human extinction won't be so bad" thing. Sub-replacement fertility rates are slow-motion extinction. Animal models where they "bounce back" is irrelevant, those animals have their extremely high above-replacement fertility all through their famines, plagues, and predator massacres such that when those pressures relent their population recovers. There's no known precedent for raising fertility rates that fall let alone so low.

While I agree, his experience is also salient.

Ease of access to birth control and ease and safety of abortion will be having a very detectable impact on the birthrate.

Not saying they need to be restricted, just that they're very relevant data points.

> actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad

I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?

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>There's actual data, you know.

Did you bother to check it out?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_U...

More than half a million in the US alone, per year. That's material.

The issue is not so much the access to the methods, but the negative feedback loop that they cause. For every woman freed from unwanted childbearing, how many are socially pressured into not having a child?

Anecdotally, this is something that my wife and I experienced as relatively young parents (~24 at first child): people expect abortion to be the default. I can't tell you how many people asked us when we were going to “just get rid of the thing” because they expected that to be the default option. We have no idea how damaging this effect is to overall fertility.

The saddest part is that many women will get to an age where they do want to have one or more children, but because they are closer to the end of their fertile window, they cannot. I’ve seen this happen to my extended friends and family far more than the “unwanted pregnancy” scenario, which I’ve only seen happen once.

Fundamentally, there's perhaps a broader philosophical divide. Do you believe that children are burdensome, or the most valuable thing you can produce in life? If you think the former, it's nearly impossible to feel any motivation to tolerate the difficulty of pregnancy and childbearing.

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Why? Can you defend this for me? I'm genuinely asking. Why is it irresponsible to have a child when you're young and financially not established? Why is it any more irresponsible to do that than to have children at a geriatric age?

Children are resilient, and so are parents.

In my opinion, this idea that you have to have everything perfectly set up in life before you can contemplate having a child is ridiculous.

Maybe we as a society should decide that having children is fine when you don't have a stable career yet and finance it as such. The contradiction that our most fertile years are also the most unstable is something society could and should balance.

EDIT: typo

Or alternatively, it’s a great idea because your parents can then help raise them and you can then start a career without worrying about having babies. Imagine being 25, already having your kids, and you never need to go on leave.

are you saying that everyone in poor countries barely making it by are being "just irresponsible" when they decide they want to have kids?

this seems very elitist, possibly racist, and certainly could indicate that your view might be wrong, given the literal billions chosing to do this.

There are also huge probability multipliers in congenital and cognitive problems with late pregnancies.

Don't the difficulties in pregnancy related to age tend to come up around 40 or older?

I don't think the choices need to be "have children at 19 years old" or "have children at 40" - surely having kids at 30-35 is still physically fine and gives you some time to become more financially secure?

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Your 56 year old great grandfather married a 14 year old girl and was married for 50 years?

It's actually interesting what underlying prejudices readers project upon the anecdotes of others.

In actual fact, I was merely offering a data point. I have no agenda, I am not in the slightest anti-abortion, I am not against 100% female bodily autonomy, I do not consider past generations to be "the good old days" - the events I described were traumatic for everybody involved - and I do not profess to be qualified to draw any conclusions, or to claim that what happened to me is why the world has changed.

I can only see certain cause and effect chains relating to my own generational situation, and suggested that such changing norms may be one factor in the mix. May.

Extraordinary how poverty makes a family impossible but only in certain ZIP codes.

I mean, at least you're not propagating that woods-rapist line?

The local peak around 1990 was a very small bump from the flat run through the 1980s, and was probably a brief rebound effect of the extreme negative social pressure related to unprotected casual sex stemming from the AIDS crisis fading a bit as that became perceived as less acute of a threat, and there numbers dropped rapidly after that peak, quickly going through the floor they had settled in during the long flat period preceding the brief rise and peak.

So it is not at all inconsistent with a strong social force against teenage births existing and being acted on in the late 1990s, in fact, had that not existed the rise up to the 1990 peak would probably not have been so brief and followed by a rapid drop that went straight through the preceding floor.

Teenage births peaked in the late 1950s, by a significant margin. See https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-th...

It's difficult to find teenage pregnancy rates before 1972, let alone multiple sources, but if you look at Guttmacher's numbers both teenage pregnancy and abortion rates ramped up significantly between the late 1970s and early 1990s. See https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/UST... Teenage abortions rates are even more difficult to find before 1972, but abortion certainly existed in the 1950s, and given the birth rate it's possible teenage pregnancy rates were also higher in the 1950s and 60s.

Also, notwithstanding that the data does coincide with the given narrative, one must also consider socio-economic and cultural factors--pregnancy, birth, and abortion rates aren't homogenous across groups. For example, the OP (or their girlfriend) could have been from a segment of society at the trailing edge of a trend.

> The short way to get a baby boom is to make it OK to be a less than perfect parent.

There are still lots and lots of shitty parents out there.

No, parents just hate not being in absolute control over their kids, and an unmarried teen pregnancy is an extreme case of such non-control.

In the past, how many people had kids not because they wanted to but because of social expectations, norms, etc?

What loss? It was not her but her "girlfriend" which I don't even know how to correctly interpret these days. Is she saying it was her love interest or just a friend who is female? Heaven knows!

Kids aren't even dating anymore hardly. My son (15) is having a horrible time navigating social interactions. The girls at his school are all horrible people, it seems (not true, I'm sure, but I constantly have to hear about how he is treated like crap by the girls all the time).

Partly her parents, for refusing to allow her to go on birth control as a preventative in advance. She did ask. Back then, in my country, parental approval was required by law for people under a certain age. That has since changed.

Unfortunately it took a lot more than asking (i.e. it took "a pregnancy") before they took her seriously.

But primarily, yes, my fault and her fault.

I am not sure how you think a 17 year old kid with ZERO legal or social rights or family support or money was somehow meant to overpower the iron will of the girl's furious parents (who in turn intractably convinced the girl herself), whose roof she still lived under - being in the final years of high school - and the medical fraternity, and the laws of my country, and the will of society. What was I supposed to do? Lock her in a tower?

But congratulations on shallowly judging people as murderers on a whim. Perhaps you might consider how that is a less than ideal characteristic, if caring about the lives of human beings is your actual goal here.

What terrible reasoning. Does that mean that if he were the child of rape he’d be pro-rape? Anything that would have prevented his existence is bad?

The US sees about 20K teen pregnancy abortions.

That's probably not why the number of births is way down.

Number of births in the US are ~3.6M right now. We also have 1M abortions per year. That's - if abortions were the sole problem - 4.6M births / 330M people.

Except... It was 4.3M births / 177M people in 1960. Double the current rate. It dropped off sharply right after the 1960s. Not coincidentally right when the pill was introduced.

It never was about "better end the pregnancy". It was always about women having a say, instead of being default-delegated to brood mare.

We landed in a ~stable equilibrium with that, with a TFR of 2.1 in 1990. And then live births dropped again, like a stone. And, oddly, so did abortions. Which implies that the likely problem is a drop in pregnancies in the 1990s.

Teen abortions are a tiny irrelevant side show compared to this. So maybe let's not speculate on "baseline beliefs of society" based on what's noise in the statistics.

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Thank you! I have taken any off-tone responses in stride, on the understanding that child-bearing is a very contentious and emotional issue for many.

I think the point of the post is that society has changed its stance on having kids. People who aren't purposefully branching out on their own and are just "going with the flow" of their external influences are more likely to not have kids. Everyone still has the choice, but the default has changed for most of us.

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This is a shocking take. I can personally attest (in my 40s) to the pressure felt from professionals during the foetal abnormality scan, pregnancy especially a first time pregnancy is an incredibly vulnerable and difficult experience where those you're surrounded with in every context have massively outsized influence on your otherwise clueless state.

Our baby had no abnormalities, but the language and presentation of the doctor almost had me ready for violence. It's easy to understand from his perspective - he must dehumanize the thing in many cases he is going to encourage you to abort, and if that is what he recommends, it's a recommendation that would have carried tremendous authority for both parents, who would then have immediately acted upon each other.

I feel this isn’t so generous a response. This person is describing their lived in experience, coloured by the time and experiences they’ve had since. They certainly recognise that it would have been a moment that had things transpired differently would have dramatically altered the course of their life.

I read their remarks as a somewhat mournful expression of a desire to follow “the road not travelled”.

I honestly don’t know how you can say this. When my son was born, we were asked enough times about circumcision that it seemed like a battle to get to “no”. (USA)

The system has a system and a narrative. If you’re working against the narrative you have to be very prepared.

I read a lot of stupid, vapid, ridiculous things frequently posted on Hacker News, and this is not one of them. It's just a human experience.

It was a fluke because the US was unscathed by a war that destroyed much of the industrial and productive capacity in the rest of the world, at the same time vast strides in technology were being made. The US worker had a worldwide monopoly on labor and innovation for 30 years.

This is dead wrong. For all of human history through say 1800 gains in productivity flowed back to the general population in the form of more kids (but no per capita growth), this was the Malthusian equilibrium. Since 1800 not only has the typical person’s standard of living exploded but the typical person works in both paid and nonpaid labor far fewer hours. Roughly the typical person worked 4000 hours a year in paid and domestic labor in 1800 compared to less than 2000 hours a year today.

I had a similar financial situation. Difference is we already had two kids. My wife gladly gave up her career to be a stay at home mom. She’s still independent, though. The “contract” is that I make the money, she takes care of home stuff and kids, and she gets to do whatever else she wants.

If our situations were reversed and she was the one making crazy tech money, I’d happily be a stay at home dad.

Is that how you proposed it?

Good for her, I wouldn't want to be beholden to someone else either.

Hard work had little to do with it. A unique set of factors generated a historic economic boom that was briefly able to sustain a uniquely prosperous lifestyle for some Westerners. It came unwound because it was never sustainable.

Nope! Check out the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future's 1970 Congressional Report: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 (copy and paste URL to avoid HTTP Referer check)

John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ sez: "We have all heard[citation needed] about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]"

Since you're posting on Hacker News you're probably in a pretty high income bracket, and your married male friends probably are as well. High income brackets have seen pretty steady marriage rates, and as someone also in this bubble, they tend also to have men with more egalitarian views on marriage. But the flipside is that high-earners tend to delay childbirth-- they have to, because you need a lengthy period of education and work experience to get to that high bracket.

It's lower income brackets where marriage rates are really collapsing. A lot of this is economic-- the earnings potential for lower-class men has eroded-- but it's also the men in these income brackets tend not to have adopted upper-class views on egalitarian partnerships, and their potential partners aren't having it.

So among high earners you have stable marriages but where they can't start having children until their careers are secure, while among low-earners the men are both economically and temperamentally unacceptable to their partners. So fertility collapses in both groups.

If this view of marriage sounds unfamiliar, you might want to see e.g. [0], in particular the point about how "top-half marriage and bottom-half marriage are so unalike they might as well be completely different institutions."

[0]: https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/marriage-is-down-beca...

Some men are stepping up. but others aren't.

Many women don't want to have kids because they can't find a qualified partner they feel will be a good dad and good husband.

Many men advocate for an equitable household.

But the stats are clear. Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population.

100%, if my gf made half as much money as I do, I'd be happy to do all the housework, literally all of it.

Data shows very clearly that men are way behind on helping around the house.

I agree and add myself to the list and also every father I know about, including older peers. Both share responsabilities at home.

This myth needs to die, it's not true and it discriminates against men.

So does my teenager, that doesn't make them an equal partner.

They are married though. A bunch a guys stand no chance of being or staying married because they just don’t offer what it takes

Greetings from the trenches. My wife and I both work (because we both want to but, realistically, we also don’t have much choice). We split it all 50-50, and I pay more because I earn more, but There isn’t enough time for the house work, childcare, and work. Let alone time for ourselves or for eachother. It leads to tension and stress for both.

So I’ve had enough of “mothers have it so tough and dads have it so easy”

Any way thank you for making me feel seen.

Cubicles? I would love one, today it's nearly always open offices.

I consider this medical malpractice. Freezing eggs in your late 30s is way too late. You're taking an almost infertile woman and subjecting her to unnecessary complications while taking her money even though the staff should be fully aware that this is going to end in failure.

In vitro fertilization simply does not worth reliably beyond 35. You need eggs from your early 20s.

After 35 your last option is natural conception, because multiple passes of IVF are incredibly expensive. It's like a lottery at that point. Natural conception is worse, but you have 12 free tickets every year for five years. That will get you two children if you are lucky.

I'm sorry you're going through that. I don't mean to discount the man's issues with modern dating. We are trying to do our best, but its still really hard.

Good news is if your income is still low by the time they head to college, depending on the state, in-state tuition to a state college will be reasonable or free.

If your income is higher by then, it'll probably be ok.

Same boat. I know a number of women who couldn't find partners who both wanted kids and could pay half the bills so those women are now freezing their eggs or pursuing single motherhood by choice. Of the woman I know who are married, all of them had to talk their husbands into the first child and second child.

I think it depends on age.

Men in their 20ies don't want kids because they still want to enjoy life without responsibility, but by the time they are in their 30ies they are ready to settle down and the idea of having a family becomes more and more appealing.

Even if that is true, I still observe that gender norms are strongly adhered to.

Anecdotally, I see many women who want to settle down but never take the initiative to ask a guy out.

> In fact I would say this is basically everyone I know, the men are the ones being anti-natal while women want kids way earlier.

This does not make sense. It's not men taking birth-control pills, plan-b and having abortions.

in the 1950s, your choice for life partner is the 50 kids in your high school class. Women got married below the age of 25 and didn't have careers.

Today, Tinder and Instagram gives you access to literally the entire planet of single people and the illusion that you have the chance to be with one.

The big difference is that mom is working now.

The problem is not who does the most household work, the problem is that the one who does (usually the mom) can't compensate by not working. A single income is rarely sufficient for a family.

In many HCOL cities, for many couples, SAHM isn't a financially feasible option.

Also, as a full-time mom, you’ve given up autonomy to your husband (since he controls the finances). While women can leave the relationship whenever they want, their careers often suffer, and they can’t just pick up where they left off.

Some Women who are full time mothers report feeling isolated. Many chose to keep their job even if all the money goes to day care.

The newborn phase is still pretty uniquely brutal compared to most jobs.

If you read forums of new parents (e.g. parenting subreddits), the common consensus is that being a stay at home parent is far harder than a job.

Being full time mom sux. Genuinely.

All modern problems are capitalism problems

No, but if the load is uneven and you’re giving up career possibilities it becomes harder not to think about what you were giving up because instead of some hard to quantify 1950s-style bargain you’ll be thinking of lost promotions relative to your peers when you're doing laundry at 11pm.

Yeah, drives me crazy when governments are trying to lower the cost of childcare with tax incentives or creating dating apps to encourage connectivity.

Yeah, this might convince some people, but money is not preventing educated women from having kids.

My 31-year-old ex-girlfriend told me she needs a high degree of career stability, especially after recently losing her job. Even if she landed a new role quickly, it often takes 1–2 years to feel secure and fully ramped up in a new position. As someone at a level 4/5, she'd likely be aiming for a promotion once that stability sets in. Realistically, that puts her promotion around age 33 to 35, which is right around the time when starting a family becomes more biologically challenging.

“ factor. People had babies when they didn't have fresh food, running water, or even homes. Certainly far worse lives than we have today.”

And cheap, reliable, birth control.

> Media says that it's the economy, but I've never once believed that to be the leading factor. People had babies when they didn't have fresh food, running water, or even homes. Certainly far worse lives than we have today.

One thing to consider is choice. Historically women didn’t have the ability to avoid having children short of abstinence, and even that wasn’t a given in a culture where marriage isn’t voluntary, marital rape is legal, education limited, and you’ve had religious indoctrination saying it’s a sin your entire life. Men didn’t have the risk of dying in childbirth, but had the rest to varying degrees (e.g. stories about wives pleading for children with men who in the modern world would be recognized as queer).

Now that people have choice, the technology to implement their decision, and a huge financial swing (children are expenses rather than cheap labor and your retirement plan) that historical baseline is increasingly irrelevant.

> I think that if I were a woman that I would personally choose career or personal life first before having children, all other things in my life held equal. I have a lot invested in those things, they're here and tangible, and they bring me joy

And then you're 35/40 and pregnancy, let alone more than one is way more complicated.

"Media says that it's the economy, but I've never once believed that to be the leading factor. People had babies when they didn't have fresh food, running water, or even homes. Certainly far worse lives than we have today."

Historically, women didn't have bodily autonomy, had lower education and when those two points have not applied (recent history) there has been hope of an improvement around the corner.

Women now have bodily autonomy, have higher education, and many people today only see a downward trajectory economically speaking.

Yes, and no.

Even if dad can give the baby mom‘s pumped breastmilk, Mom still needs to pump more to keep the supply up and avoid pain. So mom has to wake up anyway.

> it should pay a basic income to stay-at-home parents

However, birth rates are through the floor even in countries with 2 years paid parental leave.

its a reasonable take and expresses my opinion as a male

i have a long term spouse and let her make the call because i know it sucks too, i doubt i would sign up for it

theres always adoption. yes, i know the adoption process is rigorous and expensive

how so? Most of the ideas I shared I got from the female author Logan Ury in her book, "how to not die alone"

> From everything I hear, being a mom is pretty awesome and rewarding.

Then you don’t even read magazines, let alone mom forums, or attend playgroup, or basically hear anything.

> When I see a family of 5 my first thought is "holy frak they must be loaded."

I had 5 kids in the 1990s-2000s economy.

I couldn't start out as a couple in this economy.

Over the last 30 years, rent went from ~$400/mo to ~$2k/mo. Most critical expenses increased similarly.

I now live with my adult kids because together we can afford to live.

> When I see a family of 5 my first thought is "holy fuck they must be loaded.

This is an interesting divide between social media reality of children and the real world.

Any parent will recognize that having 5 kids does not mean paying 5X the cost of infant daycare, which is obvious when you think about it. Infant daycare is expensive but it's also temporary.

It's also fascinating that so many people assume daycare is the only option. With 5 kids, having a parent stay home or work part time is fine. You can also hire a nanny. Many of my friends do a nanny share where two families split the cost of a nanny to watch both of their kids together. I have friends who took jobs working offset schedules for a while. Many people move closer to parents who are able to help (not an option for everyone, obviously).

It's also not the end of the world to take a couple years off work. It's a hurdle, but not the end of the road. Many people do it.

I think many childless people who don't spend a lot of time with parents or families become fixated on the infant phase. They see high infant care costs, sleepless nights, changing diapers, and imagine that's what parenting is like. In reality, it's a very short phase of your life.

> Costs $2500-4000/mo for infant care where I am.

That's what grandparents are for. Growing up my immediate family lived in the same neighborhood. My mother's parents lived two blocks away and walked over. My fathers parents lived ~15 minutes away. Everyone worked locally. Baby sitters were always named grandma :-)

Now you have to move across the country for a lucrative tech job, leaving behind your support network. You either plan for these things or deal with the consequences. Though I have a feeling many young tech oriented people starting their careers dont have family on their minds...

And lastly, it depends on where you live. An ex military friend moved to a shitty town in PA to be near his mother and sister and bought a hose using the GI bill. He has a federal job, five kids and a stay at home wife. Pretty wild to have a family of seven these days but he is happy and doing good. Family support helps big time.

Another option: In our case we both WFH which allows us to live near my wife's parents. Which means we have the luxury of an involved, local grandparent as an option over infant/childcare. We literally put the $ we'd budgeted for childcare into a 529.

Certainly don't want to speak for everyone but at least for us it's an enormous cost savings and is a "win-win" for everyone involved.

Another (seemingly less often discussed) advantage to WFH.

If child care is that expensive, it's cheaper for one person to stay home, unless both parents have high paying jobs.

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The funny thing is that childcare is ... actually free.

> BUT! He had a lot of help from family which is key.

Yep. When typical wages equal 100% of rent, how is a new couple supposed to sustain themselves?

Agreeing with you, and connecting it to the link, my parents talk about their childhood as basically being feral. You had multiple kids in the house who entertained/babysat each other (possibly by beating each other up, but whatever) and you also had streets filled with kids doing whatever (baseball in a dirt field, playing in traffic). The rule was to be home by the time the streetlights came on. Organizing and transporting to playdates etc. was not a thing.

That's because they've been raised to believe it's hard.

And seeing the various lists of what is required of parents .... I guess I agree. But here's the kicker... You don't need any of that.

For example, we have three (soon to be four kids). My neighbors have one. I can't imagine how hard their life is parenting their one kid compared to ours simply because of how all consuming their parenting is. Every behavior of little Jimmy has to be scrutinized. Copious books are consulted for the best way to do every little thing. Jimmy must be reasoned with instead of just instructed. Old ways are rejected outright instead of adopted as methods that successfully formed our generation.

Take for example potty training. They started at the 'right' age of three years old. Their kid has taken months to potty train. Little Jimmy has to be reasoned with and convinced to use the potty. Every mistake results in an elaborate ritual they read about in a book.

Meanwhile, we have three kids all of whom potty trained around the 1.5 year mark. We never read books. We just did what our parents did. We stuck out a potty and let them run around naked and every time they made a mistake we stuck them on the potty.

I can't even imagine how difficult it would be to change diapers for 3 years.

There's numerous examples of this. For example, little Jimmy has a whole menu and there's a ritual to introduce new food to him that they read about in a parenting book

They were shocked to see us feed our 8 month old whatever we had on the table that was safe for them to eat.

They have various 'rules' for other babysitters, including grandparents, for little Jimmy. Meanwhile we just trust our parents.

The entire thing results in them spending a helluva lot more time on little Jimmy than we do on our kids. And because of this, little Jimmy is not only overparented but also the family does less. We camp, ski, kayak, vacation internationally, etc with our kids (same age as little Jimmy). For them, they cannot without breaking their various protocols.

Anyway, listen to the wisdom of the ages. Children are very easy. Your entire body and psyche was made to make and raise them.

I’ve got one fantastic child, the relief of starting to get my time and freedom back is still enough to remind me I don’t what to loose that again, even temporarily.

The parents might be fine but the kids aren’t. I got my great programmer job entirely because of anger that my family was and continues to be in relatively bottom feeder jobs. The trauma associated with living in even relative poverty compared to your peers is hard to overstate.

Being a parent is a selfish decision - full stop. Antinatalism becoming socially acceptable is entirely due to an authentic ethic of compassion that the older generation and parents have abjectly failed to embody.

Well said. This all tracks strongly with my experience.

"We gave 1000 lucky participants $3.50 and a used bubblegum wrapper to share between them, but it didn't measurably increase their marginal propensity to have kids at all! Clearly the root problem couldn't possibly have anything to due with economics!"

It's wild how quick and eager economists are to discard money as a driving factor when the solution could possibly involve more social spending. If this were about taking credit for success, they would be tripping over themselves to explain how economics drives the cultural factors, lol.

> Money is not the issue according to this from 4 days ago

The article does not say that. In fact, it notes that money (and correlated housing) are significant, generous incentives have a positive impact, but most importantly they need better data because there are complex trade offs around opportunity cost which are inadequately captured by the available data.

> According to that the issue is culture.

This is a much stronger claim than the article makes, especially given their careful recognition of limits in the data, the global nature of the trend, and especially the interrelated nature of economic constraints and preferences. The speculation in your last paragraph aren’t discussed - they’re talking about things like how much people derive satisfaction from careers or the way people’s choices are influenced by their peers, which again are highly related to economic constraints (e.g. if housing costs are a major barrier, odds are that your friends are also affected and so you’re all having fewer kids later). They mention things like travel in the opportunity cost category, but that needs better data to tease out whether people are not having kids because they want to travel or whether people who have decided to delay/not have kids are making the much smaller financial commitment to have a vacation. There’s a lot of thoughtful discussion in that piece about teasing out the interrelated factors and it really highlights that there isn’t a single magic fix.

Which is partially an issue due to fire codes that were established when we built vastly more flammable cities.

It's weird how much happens for random, completely unrelated reasons.

"Working" is a pretty generous description of a policy that, at a cost of 3-4% of GDP, has raised the fertility rate from its low of 1.23 in 2011 to about 1.55 today. That 1.5ish TFR is pretty stable, too: there's been almost no improvement since 2016.

No country has figured this out, and if getting to (just!) replacement rate requires healthcare-like expenditures as a % of GDP, it is genuinely unclear to me how we do that on a global scale.

The problem is millennials having fewer children, not wealthy people having fewer children.

Millennials are historically notable for having both fewer children and less wealth than prior generations at the same age.

That time period is so markedly different from ours, the comparison is useless.

People have always been and will always have casual sex. People didn't used to be perfect Christian monogamous couples until the 60s. We just punish people less for it than we used to which is a good thing.

This is completely a-historical. Humans have been having sex outside of marriage since that concept was invented and you’re projecting an idealized Western European view on an entire world with a complex history of different cultures. What you’re describing isn’t even true of European history (e.g. read up on hand fasting or the high rates of marriage after pregnancy) and it’s even less so globally. Marriage is in part a financial relationship, and that drive a lot of premarital sex: if men were expected to make a significant monetary contribution (dowry, house/land, etc.) even in the most religious societies many would not be celibate for a decade, they just weren’t having sex in formal legally-binding relationships.

One other key thing you’re leaving out: historically, many women did not have the freedom to choose whether they had children, or often who or when they married. Unless you’re proposing a new take on Ceaușescu-era Romania, that is not relevant to the discussion of fertility rates.

They were also marrying at 19

Also, pro wrestling is real.

> Child care is accessible and affordable if you look in the right places and are willing to be creative.

That is really not the case.

> And children do not meaningfully detract from any other positive sides of life.

Honestly, they actually quite often do. You are not allowed to talk about it, but reality of it is that you loose a lot.

Somebody else echoed my opinion exactly. Don't load your expectations onto other people as a given.

I don't use social media. I read (and less often, post on) Hacker News at work sometimes, and that is quite literally all the user submitting content I produce. I've never used social networks (truly, personal choice), nor browsed them anonymously.

I also don't read the news on a daily basis. I use one day per week to catch up on news from a relatively neutral, brief and unbiased source (The Economist Weekly summaries).

You don't need to use social media or read the news frequently to see that the world is in a bad state. You see it every day around you, and you can see it getting worse. Personally, I try my best to block out the things I can't change. I stay offline as much as I can outside of work time, exercise and read a lot. I spend about as little time as you can engaging with world affairs and politics, yet I still notice it. I'm not unhappy in general in life, but I acknowledge that things aren't as good as they were a few years ago, can work out the direction things are headed, and can project that 20, 30, 40 years down the line, things aren't going to be better or probably even stay at this level.

We're all well aware people have had it worse historically. That doesn't detract from the fact that when we have more education than the typical person born before the 1900s, and when women have the means to control their reproductive cycle, many people aren't going to go ahead and have kids when they foresee the future being worse for their kids.

We have lived through a golden age the last 50+ years. Things are going to get worse. The perfect storm which led to our (in the West) prosperity isnt't going to whip up again as it did before, even if we did have a WW3 and "won" it. The spoils simply wouldn't be the same.

The dodo went extinct in 1662, it also was an unbroken evolutionary thread of more than 4.5 billion years. The opening line is a meaningless tidbit.

Your response to the other poster comes across a tad condescending. Just because somebody doesn't see things positively doesn't make them have a "doomerism" mindset (sounds like the exact sort of forced trend word vomit that comes from social media).

> This kind of doomerism is only accessible because you have social media and global news networks that expose you to the negativity bias of humanity.

I have zero social media, don't read the news, and have a happy stable lifestyle. I can afford to raise kids and ten years ago, yeah go for it. I wanted to have children.

Now? no way. My generation stops with me and many others my age (36) echo the same statement. I don't want to push kids through the next up-generations of the shite that's starting to pile up now.

"it's you because of X" is a strawman argurement. The world is bleak it's not a happy place but your welcome to keep that illusion.

We have wars, we have povetry, we have divide. Will it get better? Maybe, the future will decide but with my history of life doesn't feel like it will be anytime soon, I've seen in the past twenty years; how long do I wait for?

I like to think the good will always outweigh the evil however until something does come along and dethrones the current evil, issue consquences for their actions we are stuck here in a swurling-black-hole of dispair. That's realism and will that be you? Because I like to think it will be me. I can walk outside my apartment and see how shite it all is.

We have achieved so much, people are more educated than past generations, vaccines, advance technologies and the rest which is great. And now have a text box where you can ask a silly question of your choice and some robot will spit out the answer. Amazing stuff, the caveat being those running these systems are those who are producing the dysoptian mist.

> you can raise a family on a smaller budget than you'd imagine. Children are way less expensive than adults.

This is fallacy, i'm no father but there is much more expense then just feeding kids. What if your child get's ill? Need's special tutoring? Has a disability? Wants to learn to horse ride? Fair assumption if all kids were born equal but life isn't like that.

What if the "budget" ends up being cancelled, say losing your job because of some political reform and cuts? How do you raise children when themselves have no money; poverty is only increasing. Please tell because I'm sure their are plenty of homeless who would love to have that life hack.

The past didn't have rapid game changing technology like we have now.

Just because we are always evolving doesn't mean we can afford to in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if the next stage of evolution are desiginer-babies. Artfically created in a lab and ready to be posted to you to cradle. Some exec's wet dream and it's already in the making.

This isn't doomerism, this is real life, reality. Try looking outside the walled gardens and maybe you'll see the past, the present and the curtian of the future holding futuristic lies and corruption of the real world that shroud the real harmony of humanity.

We are at the best time in humanity but that can only be said by those who can afford it. Being pesstistmic is a downer, but being optistmic is bloody hard at the moment and to think some angel will come down from the sky and save us all, I won't stop you from dreaming.

> Yet they are doing fine.

Are they? What's the current status of their retirement accounts? What are their plans for funding their kids' educations? Do they own their own homes?

There's a difference between being able to survive and living a good life. The reason the more financially literate and educated people put off having kids is because they care about their own futures and the futures of their kids. They know they can't work forever and they know that the current political environment is one of removing and undoing every single social safety net out there. Meaning, a mistake today very well could mean homelessness/eating cat food/etc or ultimately starving to death.

My father-in-law is 72 and still needs to work to pay the bills. He can't retire. That's the future for the less financially and intellectually equipped parents and their kids in the current political climate.

> All the people my age who have children are the less financially and intellectually equipped to be parents

Well, yes. Because they've not quite got the heavily broadcast message that having children is a bad financial decision. The West is a society that respects wealth and has a vague distaste for children and parents.

The UK has an ongoing debate about the two-child limit on child benefit payments. Whenever this is discussed, furious people appear out of the woodwork to condemn those who dare to have three children as financially irresponsible.

An additional child at £17.25 a week is an intolerable cost to the taxpayer, apparently. And you wonder why people don't have more children.

No it does not, not for countries like the US that are primarily composed of immigrants. I think we often forget that a lot of the white people here are immigrants, too, usually only a couple generations removed.

You don't need a stable population to have a stable society. I'm not sure why you're connecting the two.

There's over 8 billion people, the population is exceptionally stable my friend.

The population isn't even shrinking, let alone shrinking rapidly.

The population is rapidly shrinking because our “elites” only sow the seeds of despair. They only act in their own best interests. The commons are gone and all we have left is the memory of it. Stability is not on the horizon.

Isn't that the main promise of AI and automation and whatnot?

You can't make this statement in a vacuum.

You need to know what the current population is, what the carrying capacity is, etc etc.

Generic statements sound and feel good, but are completely useless.

We can’t have billionaires with their own private space programs and 5 families with more wealth than 50% of America, and have a stable society.

This is just the natural and obvious outcome of what we’re already dealing with. The fertility crisis is just our refusal to deal appropriately with the ultra rich and the collapse of our institutions.

Then we haven't had a stable population in several centuries, because it was rapidly growing.

Yet we have made (hopefully this is not contentious) great strides in technology, human rights, and general quality of life.

Certainly there were some stable societies in that timeframe?

Really? Because one obvious thing it'll require is about a doubling of the birth rate ... it's not about growth, it's about stability. At least at first.

Stable in terms of population, not all of the stuff you're talking about.

You’re answering the wrong question. That’s the answer to “how do we maintain the status quo?” We can absolutely exist in a world where growth does not exist from ever increasing population, but profits will evaporate as inflation increases and labor supply contracts. As a sibling comment mentions, automation will be a component.

Those in power should be building for a changing world where labor has more power, the cost of labor goes up, and it becomes increasingly scarce. They’re not ready to make peace with this though (or unwilling to between now and death). One of the few things we do well as a species is kick the can into the future, or steal from it, depending on perspective.

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf

> There is no form of civilization that works with an imploding population and inverted demographic pyramid.

No form of civilization has ever had the access to automation we have today.

And in another 20 years, I suspect that'll be even more clear.

We currently have about 800 times the population as we did during the time of hunter gatherers, so we can lose quite a large portion of our population while still greatly exceeding the previous levels. It could be that we are seeing the end game of logistic growth. A decline in population would mean that resources would become cheaper, which in turn could stimulate population growth again.

It's not the cost itself. 40 PERCENT of GDP went toward war production in the 1940s. Almost half of everything we produced was to win the war. The other 60 percent largely went to feeding and clothing and housing the people working on the war effort, and keeping the lights on, etc. since they were no longer producing those things.

Everyone in the whole society was literally working on the same thing toward the same goal at the same time. There's simply no comparison with that to anything we've experienced since then. That kind of thing can't be measured in dollars.

My understanding is the cost of housing is increasing far faster than inflation in the entire anglosphere.

I mean, kids start school at around 6 in the US. So one every 2 years. That's not uncommon for people who want families? Most of the folk my age with 3 kids had them within 3 or 4 years?

This is almost 100% the answer, despite it pissing literally everyone off. I really feel like the only long term solution is getting artificial wombs figured out. Last I checked, we're closer than I thought, but people are still hung up on all the ethical questions that will probably evaporate when we realize it's the only way people are largely going to have kids at all.

Not the OP, but the statement above is a proposed answer to the question in the article title "What Would It Take to Have Another?"

As such it can be true or false, but I don't really see how it can be sexist.

If you think it's not true, it would be curious to hear why.

It’s kind of naïve to think it’s a sexist attitude.

Some young women are waking up to the fact that even though their corporate overlords call them family a month before mass layoffs, it can be a lot more rewarding to work for your actual family instead of the family assembled by billionaires looking for a good return on investment and pension funds.

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I think the issue is that the very different world is different because it's about the self and the individual. I am the most important thing. Human rights are about the person. My body. I can still be selfish and unselfish in my consumer choices. I can be unselfish and share my cake with you but I still get to eat my cake. What choices I make define who I am. The identities I freely adopt make me whom I am. The rewards of life impact me first.

It used to be about sacrifice and responsibilities. It's about giving up on choice. It's about not having cake. Our grandparents were defined by their responsibilities not their choices. Their identity was assigned to them as parent, it wasn't something they made themselves. It's horrific to think about for many (including me). How could I advocate for less of me?

A fear of the future of the world is about my future identity. Indeed we fear giving up our identity. We even want to die on our own terms. Many comments here talk about having babies as a kind of economic consumer choice and I imagine some parents do have children as a luxury good. "If only it was cheaper." It's still a choice of the self.

Our world is different in that it's hard to think about and talk of a world where the self is less important than the other and yet being a parent is usually about putting the child before themselves. Ironically therefore, babies are the best way to talk about not living in a selfish world!

some of the younger people i work with also mention climate change and global instability, amongst other things. they don’t want to bring kids into this world as it exists today.

It's Malthusian scarcity, expressed through market-clearing prices. It's like some alpha baboon hordes all the food so nobody else is going to reproduce.

I'm certainly not denying them their right to express their thoughts; I'm not sure where you've got that notion from.

Are you suggesting I should not have the right to express my thoughts about their thoughts?

Were those children born to brave parents who made a choice to selflessly sacrifice to do their societal duty, or could it be that having sex is fun and only relatively recently have we managed to figure out how to do it without risking pregnancy? Given individual choice, would we have such a large population to begin with?

That’s an argument for antinatalism, not an argument for how good it is today.

Why is this ridiculous? If the topic is about the baby boom, surely "optimism" at the end of WWII plays a big role. (Unsurprisingly, birth rates during the Great Depression had plummeted)

> People have been having babies in all sorts of adversity for all of history.

Anatomically modern humans exist for ~100,000-200,000 years. Reliable contraception widely available is something that didn't exist until ~60 years ago. So we can't just use past performance to predict the future.

Because things are supposedly “normal”, or happened “for all of history” it doesn’t make it right or moral in any way.

I expect better, more thoughtful replies on HN than this.

> People have been having babies in all sorts of adversity for all of history

But they didn't know how screwed they were.

I have a feeling that far right populism was worse in 1930s

not nothing. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46...

"people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours."

will things still get somewhat bad, certainly yeah. but there's a very real chance we're on track to a mostly carbon free future in a ~ decade. Im pessimistic about a lot of things but there is a lot to be optimistic about here.

Doesn't seem to stop "some* religious people to pop 5-6 kids

Because as of 2025 we know that in modern times such young pregnancies are closely related to financial difficulties, lack of maturity and stability, and in the end those lead to unhappy families and more importantly children.

Is this true for very wealthy people, or only for above average earners?

There are many examples of very wealthy people having lots of children. Children are still a significant investment for high earners, but at a certain wealth level it becomes inconsequential.

Quick google shows some support for this idea:

"There is a new emerging trend where better-off men and women are more likely to have children than less well-off men and women."

https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-rela...

ergo, there is probably a level of financial support/wealth at which people start having more children. Or more simply, the point at which the personal benefits outweigh the personal costs.

Because income rises with age, and fertility declines with age. Not that hard to figure out.

Worldview blown.

Snark aside, I actually believe that could happen, especially if they're putting kids through college.

I think this would be worth a post and a bunch of discussion all by itself. I think there are a bunch of factors influencing this.

If you’re willing to share, did they ever discuss with you the reasons they weren’t interested, and do you think they told you the complete and honest list of all the reasons?

For example, did they have concerns about unplanned accidental pregnancy? Or were there certain expectations related to it that detracted from the experience?

many people have very active libidos, there is a burgeoning "consent culture" about being more upfront about talking about it so you find what you're looking for faster. removes the guess work and hoping the vibes turn out to be what you want.

A single child raised to adulthood in the United States is worth over $10 million to the economy. Consider that in the calculation of what a fair share of investment bringing that into the economy is.

> has 5 children

You forgot a couple of 0s

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77v4x8g7pro

It's not just a money issue. You need medical and other care staff. You need appropriate places to house people. Things like that. None of this is really a "we can just pay for it" thing.

But yes, obviously something will have to be done about taxation on wealth. But simply "tax wealth" doesn't really solve anything here on its own.

In the US at least, the end of the Vietnam war didn't have the same social attitude as the end of WWII.

For one thing, there wasn't really the same largely positive attitude of we're glad it's over but it was super important that we were there. There wasn't much of a hero's welcome for returning soldiers from Vietnam.

Not to be overly morose, but the casualty rates for US soldiers was much lower in Vietnam, so there was less of an urge to make a big family to make of for the loss of others.

Afghanistan/Iraq were even less so.

WWII was an amazing boost to the whole US economy, and there was a big post war boom, from reconstruction, and other things. That didn't really happen for Vietnam or Afghanistan/Iraq.

Now, if we have another total war, and come out on top, I would expect another baby boom. Even if we didn't come out on top, if post-war reconstruction enabled a good economy, we could still have a boom.

Well, in the US at least, it was after the war was over, not during it.

Is the war in Ukraine over yet? The baby boom happened after World War II, not during.

Ukraine has conscription for over 25s so that they can have children before going to the war.

it would happen after the war is over.

Baby Boomers are the folks born from 1946 to 1964.

The war is the cause, but it has to end to do it.

trauma

Literally.

Also, the day Paris was liberated in WW2, there wasn't a soldier in the city who could not get laid.