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I think this is very confused. People these days are really rich compared to people in the past who had more kids, poorer people in countries like the US have m

I think this is very confused. People these days are really rich compared to people in the past who had more kids, poorer people in countries like the US have more kids on average than richer ones, and poorer countries on average have more kids than richer ones. (People don't seem to have fewer kids because they're poor; they seem to have fewer kids because they're rich!) Despite major housing issues, people live in bigger, fancier houses than ever, homeownership rates in the US are higher than most of the history of the US, and homelessness, though tragically common, still only directly affects a tiny minority of people, on the order of a fifth of a percent, which is not the sort of thing that seems very connected to the widespread change to having fewer children.

keiferski 3y ago
Yes this is my read too. It’s largely a cultural problem, not a resource one. The baseline expectations have gotten so high that not have a giant house and the latest electronics means you somehow can’t afford kids.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  If you're responsible for yourself in either the U.S or Canada, and have built some kind of a life as an adult in a place that isn't right next to where your parents still live, assuming they're still together, then children are an expensive liability rather than necessary and relatively cheap labor used for supplying the rich ones with chocolate. Likewise, access to free in or inexpensive birth control and sex education allows a person to make less risky decisions for longer, rather than popping out 5 kids and figuring it out. If you can figure out a way to afford the liability and it's important to you, great, otherwise it's sort of illogical.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    It’s a liability only if consumerism is your only value. Which for a lot of people, is absolutely the case. And it’s only logical if you only care about your own individual desires. It almost isn’t worth arguing about, though, because the reality is that society is ultimately made up of people that have kids. All the rationalizations in the world won’t change the basic facts of biology.
    - brailsafe 3y ago
      > It’s a liability only if consumerism is your only value. It's a liability if it's a liability. A consumerist liability is buying a brand new car with a loan if it seems like my income might disappear before the payments do. Not knowing how long you'll be able to keep paying rent in the place you've spent your entire adult life is just a logical consideration. Though people are obviously choosing to be consumers too, often it's just the basics that seem out of reach. However, if you've always wanted kids and it's always been your biggest priority, and there's never been any contravening forces that would make you question that, and you've lucked out and found someone who's completely on board with that, and your income has been stable, and your expenses are manageable, and your parents are nearby and still together, then sure you're choosing to consoom over having kids.
      - keiferski 3y ago
        Your last paragraph kind of highlights the point of my previous comment though, which is that the vast majority of people who have children today and who had children in the past had few or none of those things, and were absolutely fine with it. This is a modern hyper optimization of, “I can’t have kids unless they have the absolute perfect life situation.” At the end of the day, it is a cultural “problem” that potential parents are unwilling to have children. If anything, the material costs of entertainment, food, education, etc. are magnitudes lower today than a century ago, and yet a century ago it was normal to have 3-4 children.
        dale_glass 3y ago
        > At the end of the day, it is a cultural “problem” that potential parents are unwilling to have children. If anything, the material costs of entertainment, food, education, etc. are magnitudes lower today than a century ago, and yet a century ago it was normal to have 3-4 children. Curiously, the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child was from 1924. Yeah, it's easier to have kids if you care less about their wellbeing, and if one of the ways of dealing with the expense is sending them to work in a factory.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  If it wasn't a resource problem, giving birth in a US hospital would not cost $30k in shockingly common cases. I don't want to have kids because I lived through the "just suffer through poverty" experience and it's a great way to raise kids that have to support the psychiatry industry the rest of their lives. Poverty literally breaks a kid's brain, and you CANNOT hide money problems from your children. That life is one "hey we didn't do good this quarter so you're being let go" away from happening for most of us. So yeah, a lot of us don't want kids.
  - caturopath 3y ago
    I feel for your particular situation, but I don't think this explains the overall situation. Lower-income people within a country seem to have more kids in general: this is very much the case for the US. People with higher incomes and on average, then, more robust financial situations, are the ones more avoiding kids. The US is, like most places, far richer than it has been historically, and this is even more dramatic globally: a generation and a half ago, most people lived in extreme poverty (<$2.47/day), today less than 10% do. But we see that as countries get richer, they have fewer kids. I don't think it's a good explanation that risk of poverty is what is usually preventing parents from having kids, even if they subjectively feel it is.
ako 3y ago
That was also concluded by Hans Rosling: the higher the education of people, the fewer kids they have. Best way to address overpopulation is by increasing education worldwide. https://www.teesche.com/bookshelf/hans_rosling_factfulness https://www.teesche.com/bookshelf/hans_rosling_factfulness
- batushka3 3y ago
  And some muslim comunities deliberately prohibid female education as a support for this theory.
- Biologist123 3y ago
  I wonder if Rosling’s conclusions are confounded. The human and environmental systems in which we swim are complex, not simple. Education being the key driver of population numbers strikes me as overly simple.
  - defrost 3y ago
    It's more likely you're imagining an over simplified version of Rosling's "conclusions". He has presented hours of thoughts on data spanning multiple decades from countries across the globe and comments identified correlations. Education being highly correlated with reduced population growth is a data confirmed observation, and not a declaration of prime causation.
    - Biologist123 3y ago
      That would seem a fair insight. But then wonders what the drivers are.
afarviral 3y ago
Yeah, this seems obvious to me. However, out of ethical concerns, it is not obvious that the solution is to stop educating people. Perhaps just reminding would-be parents that if the educated and resilient stop reproducing, they are depriving the world of a thriving and resilient new generation. A clear directive that under-population is a growing concern and a few additional incentives for parents would go a long way too. Taking a philosophical angle, why is it the "right" choice to serve our genes, the economy, or to create a younger generation to care for the elderly? It is not unethical to unburden oneself of those obligations today, but you can imagine a future where it is.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Yeah, look at countries like Finland. Finland has, famously, some of the best government support for new mothers on the planet, comparatively high gender equality, consistently ranks at the top of world education rankings, has a strong, functioning social welfare system, and while housing is not exactly cheap, Finns on average spend 20% of their income on housing, which is not high. And Finland's fertility rate has completely collapsed, to 1.32 children per woman in 2022. As societies urbanize and become more educated, children become (economically speaking) a huge burden, not an asset, and that fundamental shift affects birthrates worldwide.

keiferski 3y ago

Yes this is my read too. It’s largely a cultural problem, not a resource one. The baseline expectations have gotten so high that not have a giant house and the latest electronics means you somehow can’t afford kids.

brailsafe 3y ago
If you're responsible for yourself in either the U.S or Canada, and have built some kind of a life as an adult in a place that isn't right next to where your parents still live, assuming they're still together, then children are an expensive liability rather than necessary and relatively cheap labor used for supplying the rich ones with chocolate. Likewise, access to free in or inexpensive birth control and sex education allows a person to make less risky decisions for longer, rather than popping out 5 kids and figuring it out. If you can figure out a way to afford the liability and it's important to you, great, otherwise it's sort of illogical.
- keiferski 3y ago
  It’s a liability only if consumerism is your only value. Which for a lot of people, is absolutely the case. And it’s only logical if you only care about your own individual desires. It almost isn’t worth arguing about, though, because the reality is that society is ultimately made up of people that have kids. All the rationalizations in the world won’t change the basic facts of biology.
  - brailsafe 3y ago
    > It’s a liability only if consumerism is your only value. It's a liability if it's a liability. A consumerist liability is buying a brand new car with a loan if it seems like my income might disappear before the payments do. Not knowing how long you'll be able to keep paying rent in the place you've spent your entire adult life is just a logical consideration. Though people are obviously choosing to be consumers too, often it's just the basics that seem out of reach. However, if you've always wanted kids and it's always been your biggest priority, and there's never been any contravening forces that would make you question that, and you've lucked out and found someone who's completely on board with that, and your income has been stable, and your expenses are manageable, and your parents are nearby and still together, then sure you're choosing to consoom over having kids.
    - keiferski 3y ago
      Your last paragraph kind of highlights the point of my previous comment though, which is that the vast majority of people who have children today and who had children in the past had few or none of those things, and were absolutely fine with it. This is a modern hyper optimization of, “I can’t have kids unless they have the absolute perfect life situation.” At the end of the day, it is a cultural “problem” that potential parents are unwilling to have children. If anything, the material costs of entertainment, food, education, etc. are magnitudes lower today than a century ago, and yet a century ago it was normal to have 3-4 children.
      - dale_glass 3y ago
        > At the end of the day, it is a cultural “problem” that potential parents are unwilling to have children. If anything, the material costs of entertainment, food, education, etc. are magnitudes lower today than a century ago, and yet a century ago it was normal to have 3-4 children. Curiously, the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child was from 1924. Yeah, it's easier to have kids if you care less about their wellbeing, and if one of the ways of dealing with the expense is sending them to work in a factory.
mrguyorama 3y ago
If it wasn't a resource problem, giving birth in a US hospital would not cost $30k in shockingly common cases. I don't want to have kids because I lived through the "just suffer through poverty" experience and it's a great way to raise kids that have to support the psychiatry industry the rest of their lives. Poverty literally breaks a kid's brain, and you CANNOT hide money problems from your children. That life is one "hey we didn't do good this quarter so you're being let go" away from happening for most of us. So yeah, a lot of us don't want kids.
- caturopath 3y ago
  I feel for your particular situation, but I don't think this explains the overall situation. Lower-income people within a country seem to have more kids in general: this is very much the case for the US. People with higher incomes and on average, then, more robust financial situations, are the ones more avoiding kids. The US is, like most places, far richer than it has been historically, and this is even more dramatic globally: a generation and a half ago, most people lived in extreme poverty (<$2.47/day), today less than 10% do. But we see that as countries get richer, they have fewer kids. I don't think it's a good explanation that risk of poverty is what is usually preventing parents from having kids, even if they subjectively feel it is.

ako 3y ago

That was also concluded by Hans Rosling: the higher the education of people, the fewer kids they have. Best way to address overpopulation is by increasing education worldwide. https://www.teesche.com/bookshelf/hans_rosling_factfulness https://www.teesche.com/bookshelf/hans_rosling_factfulness

batushka3 3y ago
And some muslim comunities deliberately prohibid female education as a support for this theory.
Biologist123 3y ago
I wonder if Rosling’s conclusions are confounded. The human and environmental systems in which we swim are complex, not simple. Education being the key driver of population numbers strikes me as overly simple.
- defrost 3y ago
  It's more likely you're imagining an over simplified version of Rosling's "conclusions". He has presented hours of thoughts on data spanning multiple decades from countries across the globe and comments identified correlations. Education being highly correlated with reduced population growth is a data confirmed observation, and not a declaration of prime causation.
  - Biologist123 3y ago
    That would seem a fair insight. But then wonders what the drivers are.

afarviral 3y ago

Yeah, this seems obvious to me. However, out of ethical concerns, it is not obvious that the solution is to stop educating people. Perhaps just reminding would-be parents that if the educated and resilient stop reproducing, they are depriving the world of a thriving and resilient new generation. A clear directive that under-population is a growing concern and a few additional incentives for parents would go a long way too. Taking a philosophical angle, why is it the "right" choice to serve our genes, the economy, or to create a younger generation to care for the elderly? It is not unethical to unburden oneself of those obligations today, but you can imagine a future where it is.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Yeah, look at countries like Finland. Finland has, famously, some of the best government support for new mothers on the planet, comparatively high gender equality, consistently ranks at the top of world education rankings, has a strong, functioning social welfare system, and while housing is not exactly cheap, Finns on average spend 20% of their income on housing, which is not high. And Finland's fertility rate has completely collapsed, to 1.32 children per woman in 2022. As societies urbanize and become more educated, children become (economically speaking) a huge burden, not an asset, and that fundamental shift affects birthrates worldwide.