421–430 of 881 posts
My wife’s theory is that there will be a lot of babies born in about 6 months (9 months after the quarantine started), but only for first time parents. Being quarantined with a child is the absolute best birth control.
And it's astounding that they somehow put an overall negative spin on it. The problems of an ageing population seem miniscule compared to the problems of resource scarcity and climate change.
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You are failing to account for the gender imbalance. Consider an extreme gender ratio where for the 2.1 born for an average woman, there are 2 males and 0.1 females. This means that every generation will have 10X less women.
You can still grow, like India clearly shows, the woman just need to give birth more times.
For example If you start with a population of 100 (50 couples )and every next gen there are 9 boys to 1 girl and fertility ratio is 2 then your third gen will have only 20 kids as there will be only 20 women in the second gen . The fourth gen will have only 4 kids and there may not a 5 gen.
Either balance has to be fixed or replacement ratio of women has to be 1 not all kids , to sustain a 1:10 ratio of gender means 10 kids per female so there will be 1 girl kid
Serious thought/question: I think everyone can agree that reproduction is how you advance your gene pool to the next stage of the human species. Does this mean people who don't want kids are effectively weeding themselves out? And is this somehow a function of survival of the fittest (or natural selection) in action?
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You are thinking very short term and in a very narrow range of conditions around our current economic situation. We have never seen economic conditions remotely close to what we would see if the population were actually shrinking.
We have a good enough understanding of capitalism to know that the average person will not benefit from a shrinking labour pool. You have no clue just how devastating a shrinking population would be to an economy where the real average wage hasn't increased in 40 year.
The Hacker News comment section tends to be factual, rational, and logical. So - this may be out of place, but here goes. When making decisions about whether or not to have children, we operate in a state of partial information. (This is of course true of all decisions.) I would like to contribute a bit of information. I'm 66, and have three children and four grandchildren. My adult children are the most wonderful pe…
This is a bit like hearing a successful startup founder speak about the joys of success. It’s absolutely correct, but it’s also just one data point. Keep in mind, most of the lonely old people you see have children. And I’m not sure it’s a good, caring thing to tell childless people that they will be lonely in old age, because it need not be true.