Almost everyone wants to have children if the conditions are right; the handful of misanthropes who don't are irrelevant. The reasons people choose not to are things that are eminently addressable by a government; risk that it will damage their career, fear they won't be able to support their children materially, or that they'll make damaging mistakes when raising them.

If people can't have children you can't fix that as easily as the factors causing people to not choose to have children.

A change to tax codes can immediately help alleviate the latter, for example.

This is obviously the nicer sounding position but I wonder if it's the true one.

I'm 100% on board with this. You can make a lot of mistakes in your life and still pull yourself up if you're unencumbered by marriage and kids. I know from personal experience. I was deep in debt and making poor life decisions in my twenties. It took until until my thirties to get my act together. It was hard, but would have probably been impossible if I had kids to worry about providing for. I'd even say that if you are financially able to support a family, I'd still wait until I get through my twenties before starting. With life expectancy up, there's no reason one can't wait.

> It needs to be the norm and not the exception to have zero children.

I get where you're coming from, and I don't look down on anyone who chooses to never have children, but I don't agree on this point. I know quite a few people who have chosen this lifestyle. I thought for a long time I'd never have kids as well. But now that I do, I couldn't imagine not having any. I think it's more important to wait until you're emotionally mature and financially secure enough to do it. If it's not for you, by all means, don't have kids. Being on the other side of it now, though, I can say that it's quite a transformative experience.

Let's not undersell how hard it is to have kids when just starting out in life, when you generally have less resources, which may mean less stable housing. Couch surfing or staying with good friends for a week or two because of financial hardship problems is doable when you're single or a couple, it's much harder to swing with children unless you have very good friends in a more stable place in life than you or family. Requiring there be family means mobility is limited, and limited mobility means limited career choices.

That's not to say it's not a good idea for some people given their circumstances, just that it's not obviously a better or easier path.

What I predict will happen: Government will reduce pension and social security payments to those that did not support the system by having 2 or more well-raised children.

Some people have to have children. I'm not opposed to other people having some children. What I am saying is there is not enough community support for everyone to have children. It is unhealthy for our society that some people have ten plus children and some have none. There should be an upper bound to how many biological children someone can have (my suggestion is two, maybe three but no more). There should be more support for all parents and children (no income/wealth cap or risk eligibility). You can still choose to not have children or have fewer than the upper bound.

The demographic shift of increasing the number of retirees per healthy adult will definitively cause suffering. There's a reason why Millennials are putting off having children - they can't afford to.

Agreed. My parents didn't have me until they raised enough money to take time off. Likewise, I don't plan on having a child (if any) until I have that cushion.

Quite frankly, I don't begrudge the government or corporations for not providing such benefits. I don't consider it their responsibility.

If your retirement plan is point blank shotgun than this is sustainable. Otherwise pray for automation, depending on how old you are, it might work out.

It's a natural response to the hardship. If the chance that the kid make it is 10%, then make 10 times more kids. That way you have around 100% chance that your lineage makes it through life.

Maybe, but I'm hesitant to say that's a solution, because it implies that we can or should offset the problem (as much as we can assume there is one) by asking some people to have no kids while others continue to have many. It's not a bad thing to do, but it's not really a solution.

> There is also significant government incentive for a population to grow both for the economy and for retirement programs like Social Security.

To some degree, this is a chicken and egg and/or catch-22 problem. Our economy is based on growth, because growth was seen as inevitable, and since our economy is based on growth, we incentivize growth. That works until growth becomes constrained, and then it doesn't. Whether from outside or inside forces, understanding and possible moving towards an economy that is less coupled to growth is an important thing for us to study for the future (even if it only helps us understand our current economy better in the end).

> I do think the best thing we can do is live by example. We can choose not to have kids.

That's not the correct example. If everyone followed the example, the human race would cease to exist. Leading by example should be leading by what we expect people to do. That means leading by some people not having kids, and some people having a sustainable amount. That's not exactly different than it looks like right now if you consider some people to be leading by example, and it doesn't seem to actually do much (but population growth greatly falls off with industrialization and coming out of poverty, so maybe it does?)

Many of the social benefits a working Western society wants depends upon a growing population, like social security.

Not getting dependent/child tax credits already does this.

It shouldn't be possible to get a full time job and not be able to support kids. If it was possible in the 60s it should be possible now. GDP has gone up 400% since then and the dependency ratio only went up 15%.

I'm in the US, where this kind of statement literally baffles my mind, because the opposite is true. In the US, having children is a financial liability and burden. Even for the poorest unemployed single mothers who do qualify for government benefits, it's a net financial loss to have a child. Our food assistance programs are pathetic and the shame of the developed world. Childcare is unaffordable even for entry-level tech workers these days. Students who have a child during high/secondary school graduate at 10% of the rate of those who don't.

> I guess could someone just give a good argument against teenage pregnancy? Ideally one argument that doesn't rely on your subjective values about what a fulfilling life involves?

Any question about the role of government (especially around family planning) ultimately is a question about what it means to have a society that supports living the good life. So for millennia, we have been arguing about what the good life is. A good answer to your question must recognize that in a society, we have to come to a consensus around subjective values about what a fulfilling live involves, in order to make rational decisions about how to further those agreed-upon ends.

If you try using an 'objective' metric to avoid making decisions based on subjective values, then you're just not noticing the subjective values that are correlated with using that metric over others. The school graduation stat I cited earlier has a value built in: it assumes that all other things equal, it is a bad thing for students to not complete secondary school, because it gives the foundation to be a good member of a good society.

Unfortunately I think the horse has already bolted there. Short of restricting contraceptives, the only thing we can do to increase fertility is give people a greater sense of stability.

>There's a mass delusion of inability to afford a family -- but there isn't much inability.

I honestly think you might be right there. A good friend of ours who had their first at the same time we did are on a single income, part-time wage and they are able to get by living frugally. He does miss out on certain experiences as a kid, though, and will have great difficulty trying to get ahead when he's a young adult as his parents won't own assets.

Having children should not be tied to having X amount of money - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177836

If you're a resident of a developed country in the year 2023, I guarantee you that the vast majority of your ancestors were poorer when they had their children than you will be if you have children now.