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Comment by ANewFormation

6 months ago

Every single woman needs to, on average, have a bit more than 2 children to have a stable population. Fewer than that and your population (once it shares the same fertility rate across generations) will begin changing at a scalar of fertility_rate/2 each ~20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 = 50% decline every 20 years. And it's exponential - that decline never stops or slows until you go extinct or start having children again.

But in this case one frustrating thing is people don't know what they don't know. My wife was quite lukewarm on having children but shortly after our first she wanted at least two more. They really change you in ways that are impossible to describe without cliche, and I think this is, by nature, even more true for the mother.

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ANewFormation

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bombcar  6 months ago

We could end up with a sustainable population where few women have children, but those that do have five or more.

Division of labor, as it were.

tokioyoyo  6 months ago

I agree with you, and you’re probably right! My parents said the same thing. Both my siblings have children as well.

But if the argument starts with “you’ll understand when you have kids!” to convince people to have kids… well, it’s like blindly trusting people. And again, it is coming from a person who will have children when the time comes. And relatively speaking, I’m doing ok financially, and it’s one of the problems I can take care of for the future of my children.

For every good parental story, there are quite a few unfortunate ones as well. The problem with the information access is, people tend to realize that chances of it happening is not 0. So you have all the opportunity loss, combined with the potential regrets and problems that add up for every new child… the math doesn’t add up for having multiple children. Also, doesn’t help that the average age of having the first child is already at 30s.

Anyways, I think I’m just generally angry that pseudo-intellectuals (including ourselves) are scared to propose other solutions. Because they will always be very unethical (lab babies, taking rights away and etc.) or very uneconomical.