from Hacker News

Fertility Scenarios

by ianyanusko on 8/25/23, 1:57 PM with 23 comments

• by hn_throwaway_99 on 8/25/23, 3:23 PM

  It's hard for me to take these analyses seriously when the author links to other posts of his like this, https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/win-win-babies-as-infrastru.... This is what I call "technocrat dystopia". Yes, there are really valid economic reasons that we should consider alleviating. But even if you look at some countries, like Finland, that have tons of support for expectant mothers and post-birth childcare, fertility rates have also collapsed. So then the author gets into essentially "securitization" of childcare costs. Thanks, I'll pass.

• by banannaise on 8/25/23, 3:01 PM

  > Wealth: Some say that even though, in the last few centuries, fertility has been falling with increasing wealth, that switches to fertility increasing with more wealth at a sufficiently high wealth level.

  Here we go again, confusing national wealth with personal wealth. The core problem is that wealthy nations have a dramatically increasing number of people just scraping by - such that they cannot afford kids and/or do not have the leftover time and effort available to raise them. Tack on the loss of tight communities (with collective childcare support) and you have a recipe for a lot of people saying "this isn't realistic for me/us".

• by terran57 on 8/25/23, 2:41 PM

  A breakthrough in human life extension technologies could help alleviate the need to have more children to perpetuate the species. It is conceivable, as indicated in some research papers, that next century humans might be able to live past 100 with a high quality of life through advanced medical interventions.

  Now, of course, we face great unknowns in how things will turn out in the future. So, living past 100 might be a moot point if society has broken down.

• by Dig1t on 8/25/23, 2:54 PM

  Does evolution not still play a role? Nature can select for arbitrarily complex behaviors genetically, if it means the survival of the species. I don’t see why the same does not apply here to humans. Like if evolution can select for complex dance routines to ensure that birds mate, it probably will select for a propensity to want to have children. Choosing to not have kids is essentially the same as dying because one was unfit to survive in an environment, evolutionarily speaking. So if most of the people who did not have a strong innate desire to have kids “die”, then the ones who are left are being selected for because they had a stronger innate desire to have kids.

  It seems obvious to me that the desire to have kids has at least SOME genetic component, it’s not purely instilled by society, and the “death” (refusal to procreate) of the ones with a weaker drive will mean that the only people left will have a stronger desire to procreate.

  I’m not sure though, I would love to hear an argument against this idea from someone with a biology background.

• by amriksohata on 8/25/23, 4:47 PM

  Asian origin here with fairly conservative parents. Raised kids myself and understand how hard it is. It was for my parents but my mum didnt work nor did my grandma so they spent all the time with them and the dads just focused on their work and came home not having to think about anything else.

  I'm not saying only Dads should work. But what I'm saying is back in the day 1 person could work and still make ends meet and now 2 people work, we have more hectic lives and no time for kids, plus the cost and no real incentive for having kids. Back in the day societal pressures/religion would mean you would have kids.

  Now I can see a lot of people around me asking the question, why bother for all that stress? I feel this is self inflicted in richer countries.

• by mustafa_pasi on 8/25/23, 3:05 PM

  The problem is not really in having children but in raising them.

  I think it would be a good solution if couples were to have children in their early 20s, and have those children raised primarily by their grandparents who at this point would be in their mid-40s and very much settled in life.

• by fiftyfifty on 8/25/23, 2:51 PM

  It feels like Africa is setting itself up for a lot of suffering. It’s difficult to see the continent being able to support 3-4 billion people while also getting heavily hit by climate change over the next 70 years, with many regions already very susceptible to drought.

• by morninglight on 8/25/23, 3:43 PM

  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 45 percent of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned.

  Here's an idea!

  https://www.healthline.com/health/emergency-contraception/el...

  And don't forget julie:

  https://blackdoctor.org/fda-approved-morning-after-pill/

• by jp57 on 8/25/23, 2:54 PM

  One point he doesn't bring up is that this could be an evolutionary selection event. As wealth, education, birth control, and abortion make it possible for women to choose whether or not to have children many are choosing to have zero or one child. But some are not. I know a handful of well off, educated women with more than two kids.

  If those tendencies are based on heritable personality (or other) traits and not purely random or situational, they would be selected for in the current environment. Not sure how we'd determine if they are.

• by necovek on 8/25/23, 5:52 PM

  Another one of those fertility looks that doesn't even attempt to correct for the birth age move even though it brings it up at some point.

  Basically, none of studies attempt to calculate fertility rates while we are in the middle of birthing age moving up. If looked simplistically, if people suddenly decided to have kids at 40 after they used to have them at 25, you get 15 years of significantly reduced fertility. It's not as clear cut today, but the figures are probably somewhere in between.

• by epistasis on 8/25/23, 2:43 PM

  This post's headline does not match the article's headline of "16 Fertility Scenarios." In fact, the word "crisis" does not appear once in the article.

• by johnea on 8/25/23, 4:03 PM

  Less people = Good!

• by olalonde on 8/25/23, 2:50 PM

  830 years is a very long time. By then, we will most likely have solved ageing and might not even need biological bodies anymore.

• by btilly on 8/25/23, 2:49 PM

  I vote for the insular communities outcome. Mennonites, aka the Amish, are such an insular community. Currently something like a half million, and doubling every 20 years.

  https://anabaptistworld.org/amish-population-growing-and-mov...

• by h2odragon on 8/25/23, 2:13 PM

  Or we become multi-planetary; and the latency between planets is enough to let their cultures drift so that we can have the "some subcultures decide to have kids" without the "others repress them".

  Dunno if Mars is far enough away for that, tho.

  edit: Just imagine the first interplanetary war being fought to bring freedom to Musk's Martian baby factories, which use either artificial wombs or enslaved surrogates as you like.