> You privately spend 1 million dollars each to raise them

Average kid costs $227k, not a million. Just wanted to clarify since that number was very off. The cost of raising a child is growing extremely quickly though, much faster than inflation.

https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/21/pf/cost_raising_child/index...

Edit: That was 10 years ago, probably higher today, but pretty sure it still isn't close to a million.

That $250k or so number has been bandied about since the 90s. It’s an average and isn’t entirely useful (as education costs can be a huge portion of it depending on how you calculate it).

Kids are expensive but they can be as expensive as you want them to be, as evidenced by poor people having them.

$300,000 now, not including college or any major emergencies. Having a child with a birth defect or major disorder; it’s easy to see how the costs could easily reach the millions.

The average cost per kid also goes down with the number of kids you have. Economies of scale, hand-me-downs, kids sharing rooms, older kids providing free childcare etc…

Most people don't do things for ROI. My kids were definitely not "done" with ROI considered. They are costly and time-consuming, but I love them.

Western countries with their lack of intergenerational support and lack of affordable child care while we have stagnating wages are probably the major reason.

> They are costly and time-consuming, but I love them.

That's your ROI; you spend time and energy raising them, caring for them, cleaning for them, providing for them. In return, they give you affection, love, you enjoy playing with them, or having conversation with them.

If you are someone who does not enjoy spending time with children, or do not think you will enjoy seeing them grow, you usually... avoid having children since you do not see the return.

At some point, you made the decision to have children because you think you would be happier with some.

Seriously, this whole ROI thing does not work with kids, at least not in my case. In most cases they return vomit, poo, curses, anger, anxiety. Yet I would miss them dearly if they were gone. Can this really be rationally explained?

The first one was actually an accident. As is so often the case. Life cannot always be explained using an Homo oeconomicus.

My point is that of course once they are here you care for them, would miss them if they are gone, etc. etc. They are living beings, so of course ROI calculations no longer apply - you just want to do what's in your power for them to be happy, reduce their suffering etc.

However, before you are in that situation, ROI calculations absolutely do apply. To give you an example - most people on HN that have children probably have 1-3 of them - and that's about as many as they wanted to have. But if you somehow happened to already have 10 children, would you then be selling 7-9 of them (or indeed any) to the circus? Of course not. You would love them, care for them and do the best you can, and you would miss each of them dearly if they were gone.

And yet, given any degree of control over the situation, you would probably try not to have so many. Why not? Because of some calculation - let's call it the ROI calculation. It is precisely the same calculation that keeps you from having 10 children that keeps others from having any children at all.

Why were they "done"? How did you decide to have them?

Did you enjoy spending time with other toddlers so much, that you thought you would enjoy it more than all your other hobbies (which you may have to give up), that you wanted to be doing it during the majority of your downtime, have sleepless nights etc.?

I think you need to grow up.

I’m imagining sitting down with the kids and explaining how Bobby’s performance is adequate but Suzy needs to really up her income because the ROI is just not there, and if she doesn’t we’ll be forced to acquire a new kid.

People will not like this, but the reason populations are shrinking is because women don't want to have many kids. Ask any modern woman, the majority view child rearing as a huge burden, and most would think three kids is way too much.

For perspective, my grand grand mother had 16 kids. All her grand grand children who are my generation that I know of have either two or three, with no apparent plans to have any more.

Many women would like to have more children, but they don't because child rearing is a huge burden.

And if you ask any mother with >4 children she will tell you that 3 children is the maximal burden in terms of work. Once you have more than 4 children the job gets easier, not harder. Experience, older children pitching in, being forced to drop what's not important, et cetera. One father described it as "zone defense" rather than "man-on-man defense".

But the dollar cost does not go down. Time off work + $250K per child mean that only the rich can have more than 2 children.

The dollar cost does go down because the fixed costs are fixed. Very few families with 4+ kids will have a room for each kid, for example, but even so five bedroom+ houses level off in price. A fifteen passenger van is less than double the price of a minivan, but holds twice as many people, so that levels off, too.

Even things like private schooling levels off (many have a “all kids after three or four are free). The biggest one that doesn’t level off would be college.

Many health insurance plans charge for up to two or three kids and then stop increasing.

I know families with 8+ kids and none have made more than $150k a year and some are way below that.

I ask many women already since I'm looking and that's a question to ask. I did not make your impression at all. Many say they want 2 or 3, but some say they want a big family. But maybe I am pre-filtering anyone who would say they want none.

What I would say, though, is that many women want to have kids later in life, and then this probably has an effect on the number of kids they get to have.

Later in life greatly affects it, especially since if you start having kids in your 30s you are more easily tired out chasing after them.

Many people have a "I'll have kids after X" where X keeps changing until suddenly they realize they're running out of time.

I do like that in this piece they call that out specifically and highlight the magnitude of what it would take to really move the needle on that (spending a double-digit percentage of GDP to actually compensate these women for their opportunity costs).

Well this is obviously true. You can argue that its OK, or even good, but there is no questioning that women (and men even) are less inclined to want kids than before.

Sounds like you're also implying that populations are shrinking because modern men aren't prepared to make that extra burden bearable.

What are lesbian couples meant to do?

No need to reproduce. Let natural selection take its course.

Did your great grandmother want to have 16 kids, or is that just what happened?

Does she sound to you like a modern woman?

Consider the possibility that women a hundred years ago didn’t necessarily want that many kids either.

How many would have opted for birth control were it more readily available and effective?

I consider your question/objection offensive.

Consider that your projections don't apply to people from a 100 years ago.

[note: OP changed their comment while this was typed up.] Again, not the question.

If you went back in a time machine, and said “here’s some medicine, take it if you wanna stop at three kids” and changed nothing else societally, would everyone who had 16 kids still opt to have 16?

I think it’s unlikely every single woman would make the same choice given an alternative. Modern or otherwise.

You don't understand that extent to which you are projecting your prejudices.

“It's not the man's job to help with child rearing” suggests you might have a few of your own.

The question was, "What did she want?"

Did she commit suicide after the 4th kid because it was too much on her?

That should answer the silly question.

She's not a character from a novel written by a modern day feminist about how hard and traumatic life is in a Middle Eastern country because she has to carry the burden of raising children.

“Didn’t commit suicide” is a pretty low bar for minimum level of happiness.

She was happier than all modern women.

16 is a bit of an outlier but you can find women today who have that many kids, so someone somewhere chose to do so.

The number of people who choose to have 16 is non-zero.

The number of people who had 16 and didn’t want 16 is also non-zero.

Availability of birth control coinciding with a fall in number of children per family suggests what the balance between the two might look like.

Complete nonsense. People naturally do want to have kids. It is just very expensive to have them both in terms of time and energy. I do not know a single person my age (30) who thinks of kids as retirement insurance.

Frankly speaking, if I never get to have kids, I couldn't care less what happens to me when I'm an old fart, ideally I would never reach that age at all.

But if they are deciding not to have kids because they are expensive, doesnt that ultimately mean they dont want to have kids?

Let's take the semantics out of it. People are deciding to have kids less frequently. Obviously there are reasons for it.

Having kids you cannot afford is immoral.

Is going into a career that doesn’t pay enough to survive without public assistance immoral? What about not moving to a lower cost of living area?

One can make such arguments, but that having kids that one cannot afford is immoral is much more immediately evident. I mean it here, primarily in the sense that it will harm the kids themselves, and not in the sense that it will burden the wider society.

In most developed countries, there wouldn’t be any direct harm. The state would step in and make up the difference for necessities.

> I do not know a single person my age (30) who thinks of kids as retirement insurance.

Well of course, because they don't need it due to the fact that it's already there in the form of socialized retirement.

Remove socialized retirement , pension funds etc. and people will start having more kids as they'd start seeing them as a retirement insurance yet again. As they were seen for the whole history of mankind (and still are in high fertility countries).

It's time we face the fact that people don't make kids out of love but out of need. If you remove the need and you'd remove the kids, which is what is happening.

There is still need for kids for socialized retirement. They are required to fund it. But now it's a social need instead of an individual need. Not having kids is the entire society's problem. Let's see what people have to say about you not having kids. Are they OK with it? Do they think you should be having kids? How many?

> Not having kids is the entire society's problem

So is tax evasion, CO2 emissions etc. What are the odds of being audited by the IRS ? What are the odds of being punished for illegally burning weeds? What are the odds of being punished for modifying your semi diesel engine so that you can do the "rolling coal" thing?

When you move from the level of the individual up to the level of society at large, solving problems (or in this case situations that certain people deem as problems) becomes harder not easier.

Good luck trying to force people to have kids and police people's penises and vaginas. Besides it's not even necessary...Nigeria and sub-saharan Africa will take care of that "problem" much like China takes care of the iPhone production problem now.

That's why categories exist. The first world can't do the job of the third world and vice versa, each should do their own job.

You are talking complete nonsense. If you care so much about your retirement (I don't and don't know anyone my age who does, beyond putting some $ in savings), you would still need kids, because there is nothing more sad and lonesome than a poor old fart stuck in an old people's home who never gets visitors. I wouldn't wish that fate on my worst enemies.

> If countries want to raise their birthrates they should immediately liquidate all their pension funds and insurance funds (both public and private) and transfer the stock/bonds owned by such entities to the holders of such rights.

“Sweet, I’m putting all of it in Terra $LUNA!”

Welcome to a golden age of scams.

We're in the golden age of the wise elites in government protecting people from themselves, so pick your poison, I guess.

We’ve tried both poisons. I’ll take safe medications over snake oil, and seatbelt laws over road deaths.

The charts at https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4818a1.htm are pretty striking.

> Who is we?

The developed world.

> It simply means that you get to keep your own money and get to decide each on your own if you want to test your pills before popping them or if you want install safety systems in your car before hitting the road.

Again, we tried that. We have concrete evidence of how that works.

"Test your own pills" is silly enough I don't think I need to address it.

Car manufacturers got pushed, kicking and screaming, into seatbelts, airbags, and a variety of other safety measures. Market pressure didn't do it, but thousands of people a year stay alive because of that regulation.

> I think it's very peculiar that the US became so socialized given that every kid in the country dreams of hitting the walk-off Home run in the 9th inning of Game 7 of the World Series

These are two very odd things to attempt to tie together.

> People do things for ROI and specifically quality of life ROI.

Right. The famous, old, debunked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus. Of course.

The money is an abstraction. If you look at the actual production and consumption, it's clear that the issue persists regardless of whether the retirement system is government-provided or funded through private savings.

You can't actually save up the things that retirees need. They will mostly require services. No matter how much cash has been set aside up to pay for it, the supply of services is largely dependent on the labour force available. The production and consumption of services needs to balance instantaneously.

"It would be better if people saved up for their own retirement over time and did not depend on the government forcing the working force to give up their income."

The US had that exact system up until about 1935 - when Social Security was founded. It turns out that if we let people save for their own retirement, the vast majority will choose not to.