I think the "cost of living" explanation for low birthrates is just wrong, and not even plausible (anecdote: my grandmother had 17 siblings, and they could not even afford proper sunday shoes for all of them, much less current living standards).
I think the biggest impact is from kids being obsolete/net negative as both workforce (when young) and retirement scheme (when the parents are old). But there is no reverting that development.
Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too, though.
Animals have "r/k selection": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory ; some have huge numbers of offspring (e.g. spiders, most fish), some carefully nurture a single egg per year. Humans are already at the smaller number of offspring compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, but what I think is happening is that social pressure has simply pushed the tradeoff hard into "quality".
That is, the message is "unless you can give your children a perfect life, you shouldn't bother".
Certainly the main victory against birthrate worldwide has been the long process of eradicating teen pregnancy.
> Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too
This is so basic as to be an axiom of the whole thing. The politics of going back to forced childrearing through suppression of healthcare are horrific, but some of the US is pushing for that.
> "unless you can give your children a perfect life, you shouldn't bother".
Except in real life, income is negatively correlated with fertility. Meaning, those most able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the least likely to have kids, while those least able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the most likely to have kids.
Yes - because they have high standards! Higher than achievable standards, and more income to give up if they start trading off time from work to actually raising their own children.
I'm not going to find sources right now, but from my understanding the research shows that the greatest impact on number of children is education of girls. Once women have more options, staying home their whole life popping out babies seems less desirable.
There will no doubt be a push by some of the most conservative idiots to stop educating girls.
I'd argue that the minimum education level rising in general is already strongly correlated itself, because it indicates that "uneducated" children are economically worthless (=> parents need to pay more to educate and children take longer until self-sustainable and economic "worth" of adolescents is relatively lower).
Flash news - todays people have higher standards and expectations of living than your grandma and grandpa. In particular - most people want college education for their kids. College education comes with tens of thousands in expenses and people are like "how am I gonna put 2 kids in college? I think I will have 1"
Another flash news for people who haven't had kids in daycare for a while - pricing for daycare means that for the first kid the mom could work and come ahead money wise. Second kid is about neutral (depending on location and salary, in some cases the mom comes ahead money wise, in other case she does not). Daycare pricing made us decide to have 1 kid - if we had 2 kids in daycare my wife would have been better off staying at home (which we could not afford and she did not want to do anyway).
Access to contraceptives make a significant difference as well.
The college explanation cannot be the full or even the main driver, because countries with free college (+ scholarships) have the same issue. Same for daycare pricing.
> if we had 2 kids in daycare my wife would have been better off staying at home (which we could not afford and she did not want to do anyway).
Why the sexist idea that only your wife you could stay home? There are a growing number of men who are staying home to raise their kids - still a minority, but a good trend to encourage.
Of course I have no idea what your personal situation is. You may have made the best choice for your situation - but you implied you didn't even consider one of your options and that is bad.
In my opinion, it mostly comes down to contraception and changing lifestyle choices. Most child-free people I know simply prefer not to have kids.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if, within a few decades, the dominant concern swings back toward "overpopulation" as major advances significantly slow or reverse aging.
>I think the "cost of living" explanation for low birthrates is just wrong
If you're demanding it be all-or-nothing, then sure it is "wrong". It obviously isn't the only reason. As countries get richer, people have fewer kids.
Is it a factor? Of course it is. Children are incredibly expensive if you subscribe to modern norms and expectations. There are many, many, many people who want kids but can't afford it, and if they do have a kid it's prohibitive having more than 1. Two is basically financial suicide for many. And to be clear, I have four children which is a luxury of being in a financially rewarding career at the right time, but even still it was unbelievably tough making it happen.
"anecdote: my grandmother had 17 siblings"
Standards change. You understand that, right? If you're middle class in 2026, the expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago. People generally aren't keen on having six kids sharing a room these days. Even bunkbeds are considered poor by many. Now since both parents will have to work, account for childcare, massive vehicles, education savings, and so on.
>? If you're middle class in 2026, the expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago.
I think this is it. Watching children bore me to death. I enjoy it for about an hour and that is it. The child doesn't appreciate having someone hover over them and the parent has better things to do than play children's games all day.
When I was a kid kids would walk home by themselves, spend all day either at school or playing outside, basically parents are there to provide general guidance, food, housing, a few luxuries, and protection. But none of this insanity where it is negligent if someone is not watching the child 24/7.
The biggest regret I have about parenthood is I envisioned it as it was when I was a child, and failed to take note that nothing that was allowed when I was a child is allowed anymore, someone will rat your ass out to CPS lickity split. This mean the child gets little of the independence and neither does the parent get a chance to give it to them. It's made me horribly, horribly sad on so many occasions to the point I've begged my spouse to let us move to another country where children can actually experience a childhood without the busybody enforced-by-law-helicoptering nonsense.
If I could parent children under the standards of the 1960s, or in most foreign countries with more liberal standard on the age appropriate independence of children, I would happily have a few more.
> anymore, someone will rat your ass out to CPS lickity split.
They will, but CPS will investigate and then close the case. It is still annoying, but they mostly understand some people think if you are not there 24x7 you are neglectful.
It doesn't always work out that way, but mostly it does.
I'd argue that those higher standards/costs for raising children are the effect and not the cause.
We (need to) invest more into their education because uneducated children/adults have little or even negative value as workers (especially to their parents), this was not the case two centuries ago.
Children appear to be a "luxury" nowadays because there is no longer any expectation that they "net contribute" to their family economically (might be a positive change ethics-wise, but this is a huge shift in incentives for parents).
> expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago
This is at the root of "it's too expensive" - what are in the "needs" column has vastly changed.
It is very likely that if you want a large family, one spouse (usually the mother) is going to have to stay at home, or at most work very part time - at least until all kids are into school. The costs otherwise simply don't work out unless you have "free childcare" from grandparents or other family members - which used to be quite common.
The easiest thing to do is unsubscribe from modern norms and expectations - but this is a personal decision and too hard for many.
Your post implies that costs for raising kids stop when the kids are in school. Your post did not include costs for college - which is becoming a norm for a lot of people. Un-subscribing from the idea of giving your kids college education is a bad decision.....
Another anecdote. Nobody in my extended family has more than 3 kids. My grandmothers from both sides had more. But the trend is pretty clear. Fewer kids for the modern generation. Regardless of the level of education and income. In fact, the lower education/income ones in my extended family have fewer kids.
I can't agree with you enough. I am so sick and tired of the cost of living argument. Back in the 1800s people were living in tiny cramped places and having 5-6 kids while barely able to afford necessities.
People then also largely worked on family farms and having kids was the economically sensible thing to do. Times change and people expect differently for both their own lives as well as the lives of their children.
FWIW I have one child and financial strain is a big reason I don’t have more.
I would absolutely start looking for an actual wife if I had any certainty I would not be renting at some point, and my parents sold the detached house they raised my brother and myself in to move into a condo closer downtown, so they didn't even profit. But with rent very nearly doubling from 800 to 1400 for a single bedroom apartment since covid, my savings is evaporating and not even going into something I can sell, so I intentionally got with an infertile girlfriend instead.
This is often a commonly blamed reason, but I think the data at this point pretty strongly suggests that the more affluent a country is the less kids they have.
You look at some of the most third world places in the world without strong economic security, yet somehow they manage to have babies at a higher rate than Western countries do.
Seems like when you give women the choice, many elect to have fewer kids than replacement level.
Hell, in many countries in Europe, they basically throw money at anyone having kids and their birthrate has plummeted which would indicate that economics is not only reason.
I don't think there's a country in Europe that funds childcare remotely to the level of cost. The most generous I'm aware of is certain states / cities in Germany that provide free 'Kita', essentially Kindergarten. In addition to maternity leave, national insurance etc. But this certainly doesn't cover the numerous costs (including time off work etc) associated with having kids.
Would be an interesting experiment to actually pay people to have kids - i.e.: financially reward them in accordance with the costs involved. I suspect, as with an actual liveable UBI, the results would differ radically.
We do pay people to have kids in the USA - once you're on welfare. Your WIC and EBT allowances go up per kid.
And even if you're not that poor, you get subsidized kids through things like the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. It's annoying that while some of those support 3+ kids, many "top out" at three and stop increasing.
I've often thought of searching for "sponsorships" for additional children (though we'd probably have them anyway) - not sure I want my son to be named Facebook X AI though ;)
You've missed my point... Those allowances and subsidies don't remotely cover the cost of having children. Especially in the US with the wild costs of hospital childbirth itself.
There needs to be a societal change where motherhood is not only respected but celebrated - why we are now in a society where it's looked down upon (not verbally but by actions) could be pondered.
Yes, the "cost of having kids" argument is 100% bunk. Africans in abject poverty are having 6-7 kids, while individuals living in the richest countries are having 1 or none even though they clearly can afford many more.
Even within Western countries income is negatively correlated with fertility - those most able to afford kids are having the least number of kids.
This comes up in every discussion about demographics. But counterintuitively, there are no examples of financial incentives actually fixing this problem.
For example, in 2022 Hungary was spending 6.2% of GDP on such incentives[1], but this only managed to bring total fertility rate up to about 1.6 [2].
It is the same everywhere else. The real reason fertility has declined since the sixties is because people have access to effective birth control. Nobody wants to be a baby factory.
Back of an envelope suggests that to really make this work you'd need most women in the 20-40 range to have the job title of "parent" and a lower middle class or more salary paid by the state, so .. 10-20% of GDP? Nobody wants to contemplate just how expensive this is going to be, including the fact that now you have a short-term labour shortage (because they're out of the regular workforce as well!)
If that were true then we would expect to see a positive correlation between income and family size, but households making 500k are basically the same size as households making 50k.
Your specific claim may indeed be true, but it's misleading. The relationship between income and children is U-shaped. From middle incomes to higher incomes, fertility rises. It is also important to point out that income is tied to other factors in America. You're going to disproportionately find your $500k earners in a handful of superstar coastal cities. Those things need to be controlled for if you want to isolate the effect of income on family size.
More that young(er) folks could afford to live on a single income for the pre-school years. Or, I guess, that there's extensive parental leave and support for the parent doing primary caregiver.
Mixed in with all this, and possibly preceeding all this, is declining marriage rates. It's significantly riskier, financially and relationally, to have kids without getting married.
There are many solutions to different aspects of the problem - if we define the problem something like "people get together older, and have kids older, and have fewer."
But even if everything was "easy and perfect" (arguably some other countries have this) - you still have something that is generally discouraging people from having kids.
The median Amish family income is about $65,000 and typically has six to eight children.
The Amish aren't on the consumer treadmill. They have amazing social support from their community. They tend to be "traditional families" so there's no question re: child rearing. So I guess that satisfies both of the original conditions... But I figure people would prefer a more commercial lifestyle. Particularly on places like HN.
By all estimates, they have also fairly high rates of domestic violence and abuse rates. Which to be fair, traditional families also frequently featured.
I disagree. I think there is a lot we can learn from Amish society. Main of the 'ills' of modern society don't exist in their community. I believe that we can learn and apply aspects of what they do well without losing our ability to support entrepreneurs and engineers.
You need a positive life affirming story in your life to set up kids and the current core does not have that. "You will be either a concentration camp guard or a prisoner, in a apocalyptic war" is not a life narrative, its a contraceptive.
Lots of people are doing the math and explaining why what the people who aren't having kids are saying is wrong. They have their math and the people still don't have kids.
Is housing really that expensive? When you price out a loan on a starter house it really ain't that bad. I'm a recent first time homebuyer and I don't understand why people think they aren't affordable. There were plenty of cheaper homes that I looked at and even with rates at their highest would be cheaper than my rent.
Do people expect a palace? Are there more unmarried people today who can't afford it alone?
With your example of a $350K home, someone making the median (presumably not 20-30 year olds but more like 40-45 year olds...) they could save up the $70k down payment in under 2 years.
P & I payment of ~$2k / month. Maybe $1k more for escrow of taxes and insurance.
So $72k total cost of living on $87k, assuming you've made it to median income.
Of course, if you're making less than $72k, buying a $350k house would simply be... untenable.
Also, based on rough guideline of "30% of income on housing", you'd definitely want to keep your mortgage under $2200 / month.
Census link indicates median home values are closer to $404K though, too.
When you say housing, are you excluding utilities or just not direct rent / mortgage / property taxes?
Either way, that's a good example of how different things are without kids and maybe why folks are choosing not to have them.
As someone without kids who lives in NY (not NYC), I couldn't even imagine spending 36k / year (minus rent). Even if I took a 3 week international vacation every quarter I wouldn't come close to that amount after factoring in my normal costs.
From the link I posted, a "family of 4" in R.I. has a cost-of-living of $3090 / month (without rent.) It then line items "rent & utilities" as $2644 / month.
In general the “housing is too expensive” people mean “I looked at every available house in both San Francisco and New York City, and didn’t find anything cheap!”
Many industries are concentrated in high cost of living cities or very high cost of living cities. Not everyone is a nurse who can work anywhere. Big cities generally have bigger salaries.
such annoying pedantry to point out that "akshually houses are cheap in southern missouri"
I mean, sure. but then there are 0 jobs and 0 community.
the housing shortage is a shortage of housing in the same places that there is industry and opportunity. the fact that there are ample plots of land upon which one could theoretically erect a tent is irrelevant
the cities mentioned account for nearly 10% of US GDP by themselves. That's not exactly what I would describe as a "jet set fart sniffing town." maybe you misread and thought the OP said Jackson or Sun Valley or something?
Housing for the boomers used to cost 3x the median salary. Now it's more like 6x the median salary. These are nationwide numbers. Wage growth isn't keeping up to pace with housing prices
Sure people can just move to a remote dying town and get a house for super cheap, but turns out people want to live within a reasonable distance to jobs.
God forbid paying the masses a living wage or allowing them access to things their forebears had. They will own nothing and they will be thankful for it.
They didn’t get here on their own. In 2016, Democrats ran an uncharismatic candidate in Hillary Clinton while pushing aggressively progressive ideas. Enough swing voters decided to take a chance on something different, and Trump won his first term. Without that win, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
Evolution is an aggressively progressive idea for some people in the US.
So which specific ideas made you think "I'll vote for the rapist gameshow host?"
12 weeks of paid family leave? More solar power? Only government run prisons? Buying into Medicare at 55? Free in state tuition for families earning less than 125k?
That's what Gemini lists as her most progressive positions.
I’m sorry Appalachia as a region has voted into power numerous figures who’ve overseen its precipitous decline into being one of the shittiest areas in the United States. Getting mad at other people who accurately observe your region to be a national parasite is wild.
> 12 weeks of paid family leave? More solar power? Only government run prisons? Buying into Medicare at 55? Free in state tuition for families earning less than 125k?
> That's what Gemini lists as her most progressive positions.
Actually what happened was Hilary Clinton was an unlikable and a champion of neoliberal technocracy, with maybe a bit of frosting on top and a side of entitlement.
It's worth remembering that, while much of the HN crowd loves neoliberal technocracy, it's not working for a lot of folks, often in ways that the statistics-obsessed nerds are blind to.
It's a damning indictment of Democrats that they've lost to Trump, twice. You'd think with all their scary warnings about fascism, they wouldn't have rested on their laurels and catered to their base as much as they have.
And what is fucking un-comprehensible to whole world is that you knew what kind of POS he is yet you still fully voted him in second time. This ain't a single person problem anymore, he dies / is died / just finishes the office and next guy will be as bad or worse, since clearly pushing boundaries in US is the right thing to do.
This is well beyond some basic excuse of 'bb-but look at the other choice', this is 'fuck them lets kick some shit out and fuck ya all' mentality when you run around in amok with chainsaw level of idiocy.
Keeping things as polite as possible of course, but not more.
With a two party system everything like this is inevitable. If one party sucks long enough it will get it's chance to show what suck really means to swing voters who want to see if the alternative is really as bad as people say.
Amazing to me how many of the issues that influenced swing voters in the past three presidential elections were nothing more than right-wing fever dreams.
The establishment Democrats are not exactly "aggressively progressive" by any reasonable standard. They shunned Bernie Sanders, who still isn't highly radical.
In my experience DevOps has little interest in doing actual DevOps - they just want to run ops. They want to advise (or tell us we’re holding it wrong) but not actually get their hands dirty. On the flip side, devs don’t want to spend a ton of time learning k8s or how to manage servers, cloud services, etc.
DevOps is a mess of our own making - embracing K8s created complexity for little gain for nearly all companies.
They both make stuff up and make very obvious mis-interpretations of evidence. If you take the output of an LLM, and ask another LLM to check it, this dramatically reduces this. Even if you do it with the same LLM but without the existing context. I was able to write a detailed analysis of a rule system by doing this with 3 steps, claude -> chatgpt -> gemini3. It caught all the mistakes, including overstatements and vague statements. It wasn't perfect, but even after one review the # of mistakes or stupid statements was almost 0.
I’d save a lot of time from not choosing to smugly telling the AI how wrong it was just for my own reassurances that at least for now I’m still more useful than it is.
What's crazy is that it only does the easy stuff (planting and watering). What we need is a robot to do the hard stuff (in my home-gamer opinion: pest control and weeding; maybe picking is most relevant for commercial agriculture).
Not sure if it comes out of the box, but it can also do simple pest control and weeding. Mechancical stomping plants at the wrong position or spraying with chemicals.
Harvesting would be fine for me to do by hand, because that is indeed he really hard part, especially with mixed crops.
A cursor style "tab" model, but trained on jetbrains IDEs with full access to their internals, refactoring tools and so on would be interesting to see.
Umm, it ain't ever gonna be over, it is a new era.
We need to adapt to new ways of thinking and ways of working with new tooling. It is a learning curve of sorts. What we want is to solve problems, the new tooling enables us to solve problems better by letting us free up our thinking by reducing blockers and toil tasks, giving us more time to think about higher level problems.
I remember this same sentiment towards AI when I was growing up, but towards cell phones...
I will empathize with you there. I totally want to understand everything too. I LOVE being elbow deep in code for hours on end, especially late nights, so, much, FUN!!!
It is just now, I don't have to do that to actually build something meaningful, my ability to build is increased by some factor, and it is only increasing.
And coding LLM's have become a great teacher for me, and I learn much faster, for when I do want to dig deeper into the code, I can ask very nuanced questions about what certain code is doing, or how it works and it does a fairly good job of explaining it. Similar to how a real person would if I were in meat space at an office. Which I don't get that opportunity anymore in this remote life.
If you were sincere in your attempt to "empathize with [them] there", your prose screams the opposite. I point this out, as anecdotally, it was quite distracting from the rest of your point and makes me think you are not doing much to meet the other perspective.
Now to directly push on your perspective, I'm not so sure why you make the conclusion that you don't have opportunity for feedback given you've moved to a remote office culture. I am giving you a form of feedback in this instance. Yes it is at my whim and not guaranteed if our interests don't align, however this is a cost of collaboration. It is a bit grim to see the ushering of "coding LLM" as proper replacement here, when you are doing no-more than bootstrapping introspection. This isn't to detract from the value you've found in the tool, I only question why you've written off the collaboration element of unique human experiences interlocking on common ground.
Umm, it ain't ever gonna be over, it is a new era.
We need to adapt to new ways of thinking and ways of working with new tooling. It is a learning curve of sorts. What we want is to solve problems, the new tooling enables us to solve problems better by letting us free up our thinking by reducing blockers and toil tasks, giving us more time to think about higher level problems.
Different people optimize for different things. I have a 450 mile trip (each way) next weekend. I can do it in 1 full tank of gas, but realistically I’ll stop once to fill up halfway. I don’t plan any other stops. If I had an EV, I’d probably have to stop twice, for 30+ minutes each, extending my already long trip by an hour each way.
Honestly, even my Lightning could do 450 with one stop, and it’s not the poster child for high range. My model 3 would do that no problem and the stop would be half as long.
My back and butt beg me to stop every couple hundred miles anyway, so on a long road trip I plan for a lunch stop. Longer than 450 and I stop for the night or fly. But I don’t love road tripping no matter how big the has tank.
