If you choose to have a child when your resources are that limited, your non-paternity leave is going to be among the least of the child's problems.

I'm not trying to pose a rhetorical question. I think this is literally a choice that societies have to make. On one extreme, society does not have to cater to anyone. We could collect no taxes and have no shared services. We could have no rules about how companies should interact with their employees or society at large. At the other extreme we could make everything a shared service and have society dictate how people get access to things.

Of course neither of these extremes is desirable for most people. We have to decide where to draw the line and what we think is good for our society. Your comment seems to imply that the choice in this case is obvious: if you can't afford children you shouldn't have them. However, I think you can imagine the suffering that could impose upon people who have little chance of being able to support a family by their own means.

Is a child a luxury like new shoes? Or is something that we want everyone (regardless of class or wealth) to be able to have (understanding that society will have to foot the bill)?

Even though I have couched the question in a slightly loaded way, you might be surprised that I am personally torn by this issue and can see huge drawbacks for both approaches.

It would be nice if we could actually make that choice. Better still, it would be nice if we had a whole lot of societies which made different choices and people were free to move between them, so we could individually make a choice.

Instead though we've got a lowest-common-denominator society.

The internet is a lot like that. Maybe someday this can be a model for the world at large.

They too might have kids right out of high school and skip going to college - because that's what their parents did. This is how you get generational poverty.

You are saying 1 out of 4 American workers shouldn't have kids[1].

If everybody followed your advice, a lot of pretty influential people wouldn't have been born: Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, Larry Ellison (OK maybe that works in your argument's favor). Jay Z. Abraham Lincoln. Barack Obama.

I wouldn't be here, either; my dad was a short-order fry cook when I was born. He worked a second job as a night janitor at PG&E when I was young.

So yeah, you'd better think long and hard about the financial aspects of having kids, but that actually applies whether you flip burgers at Mickey D's for minimum wage or flip bits at Facebook for a $150k annual salary.

Even if the financial aspects are hard, that actually isn't the hardest part of raising kids, even for poor people. And growing up poor isn't nearly as hard on kids as is growing up with bad parents.

If you want kids, the only reason you shouldn't have them is if you aren't up to the task of raising them -- for whatever reason.

That reason could certainly be financial; I'm not sure that I myself would have chosen to have kids if I was a short-order fry cook, instead of a highly-paid tech worker who is married to another one.

But I know plenty of low-income people who are awesome parents and whose examples I strive to live up to with my own kids.

[1]: http://www.raisetheminimumwage.com/pages/demographics

So finally it all depends on parenting and the values they instil on their kids which require no money. It just needs some thinking and common sense which is available to both the rich and the poor.

The odds of achieving greatness in sports is very low. If you come from a rich background, and want to maximize your chances of having a well-paying career, you do not go into sports. You go into law, or medicine, or banking, etc. Sure, the top players get paid well, but then look at what, say, minor league players get.

But if you come from a poor family, then sports is one of the ways to get out of poverty, because even if you can't go pro, there's still the chance of college athlete funding or becoming a coach for a school.

Engineering is similar, though less so.

This is true. In India for example engineering and medicine are the ways to get out of poverty. Hence there is an over representation.

>>If you want kids, the only reason you shouldn't have them is if you aren't up to the task of raising them -- for whatever reason.

As I read it, this submission is about paternity leave and associated Zuckerberg/Facebook, not whether people should have children.

1) You can't know what the world would like if person XYZ hadn't been born. It's pure science fiction. Somebody else would probably have invented the iPhone, or figured out relativity, etc. Or they wouldn't have. There's no reasonable argument to be made here. The world would be different in ways that cannot be predicted.

2) It implies that you are withholding from your fellow man by failing to reproduce more more more, because each could be the next potential Jobs, Rowling, etc.

I also think it's a little bit ugly to point at the conclusions of difficult lives and say "hey, what a good thing that was!" Maya Angelou wrote beautiful poetry, does that mean we should congratulate slavery and racism? I'd happily live in a world without Jay Z's music if it means kids don't have to grow up in housing projects with single mothers abandoned by their fathers and 12 year olds aren't shooting their brothers over stolen jewelry.

Nobody else here is talking about what you are talking about. It isn't logically connected to what I said.

I used the familiar names just because they are familiar, not for any reason of those people being more or less valuable to society. (Sorry if my joke about Larry Ellison made it seem otherwise.)

Most of us are familiar enough with those folks' stories that we can surmise that they were happy that their parents didn't follow Turing_Machine's theory, and therefore, that they were born.

We could also presume that for most of them at least, the parents were also likely to be glad they had them, too.

Thus, the two stakeholders referenced in Turing_Machine's post would probably disagree with him in those cases (and, I am trying to imply, countless thousands of other cases).

I certainly did not propose that we should judge whether or not people should breed based on their usefulness to society. That road leads straight to Adolf Hitler.

BOOM! I think we can cite Godwin now and close this branch of the thread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Parents

Barack Obama? You're citing Barack OBAMA? That would be the same Barack Obama who was raised by his banker grandparents, sent to a fancy private school (current tuition: $22,000/year), then through Columbia and Harvard?

Yep. McDonald's all the way, there, dude.

In any case, citing people who overcame poverty does not refute the overall point. In fact, the only reason we tell stories about these people is because they are rare exceptions. I mean, Stevie Wonder is a great musician who happens to be blind. That doesn't mean we should intentionally make more people blind in the hope of producing more Stevie Wonders. Neither should we encourage people living in poverty to have children that they cannot afford.

I'm just saying that if you work at McDonald's, you probably can't afford to have a child.

Yes, there will be accidents, people who fall on hard times, etc., and I actually have no problem with social programs aimed at helping those people out.

But that's not what the OP wants. He wants McDonald's to bear the burden of providing paternity leave for those people.

After all, they make a nice profit from those people.

Maybe it's better to value people well enough for them to be people, and part of that is forming a family.

Or, maybe McDees isn't on the hook. Fair enough. Then let's make sure those programs actually work and that people can make use of them without all the angst surrounding the use of said programs.

One or the other. I don't care much. But I do care a great deal about the idea of some people being denied the standing and basic dignity of being ordinary people when they are working and adding value to the society they live in.

Children should suffer as little as possible for their parents' mistakes.

I don't always see such intelligence and compassion on HN. Thanks for your comment.

318M people in the US, 188M above the age of 30. Around 38% of adults (30+) are working for minimum wage and any prospect of having a family would put them below the federal poverty line.

Do we really believe in an environment where 38% of adults shouldn't be afforded the ability to spend time with their child, something every other major-industrialized nation guarantees as a human right?

McDonalds should bear the burden -- I think the $5B in profits last year should allow for a little human decency.

http://www.budget.senate.gov/democratic/public/index.cfm/201...

How we value people has a very serious impact on our economics. We wonder about tepid demand? This is one cause of that tepid demand. When people are valued low enough for them to require help to exist and do basic things, they really can't participate in the same economy that desires strong growth year over year.

EDIT: I think I have a different opinion on this. I say if a human being in a wealthy nation like USA is only capable of a job that pays minimum wage, this is a problem with the system, and not with the individual. If we just discounted all people for where they have ended up, we will never be curious enough to explore how they got there and how to prevent it in the future.

The longer answer is that life doesn't always pan out the way you expect it to and, well, shit happens. Rather than worry about what you think someone should have done, let's focus on the fact that it already happened and how do we make the best of the situation.

That's a fair comment. However, it's countered by the fact that an awful lot of people are going to be doing basic labors. The basic labors need to get done, and someone is going to be doing them too.

Given that, it's it realistic for very large fractions of us simply not having kids?

Does not seem that way to me.

Anecdotally, the janitor at my school as a kid was not a smart man. Not dumb, just not intellectual. But, he was a pretty great dad and his family did well. They didn't have much, but they turned out just fine. Some of his kids ended up moving up and out on to better things too. I've often thought about that dynamic.

We never know how this stuff turns out. I, myself, grew up in relative poverty. Not just lacking luxuries, but sometimes basic needs. Honestly, didn't do me any real harm, and I'm sure glad I'm here as are my peers and family.

To me, the problem is one of how we value people rather than their decision to start families. People always start families. This is primal. Inherent feature. We need families. Most of us do anyway. Some of us don't. But that doesn't align with the job / value problem.

We need the janitor. Somebody is going to do that work, and what basis is that for denying them basic human dignity? Or, maybe we don't really need the janitor? Ok, that means we do a lot more ourselves. Wouldn't some people make the case they are wasting their time having to do that stuff?

Of course! As they should, and that is precisely why we need to value the janitor. The labor isn't sexy, but it serves an important purpose, even if that purpose is to free some research scientists to cure cancer faster.

If somebody is working full time, maybe that needs to somehow be enough to live a modest life, and to me, that life includes a family. Maybe both parents work. That's OK.

Should we actually put weight behind that idea of waiting to have kids in a time of relative financial security, quite frankly, way too many of us won't be having kids! Worse, that means way too many of us are deemed unworthy somehow, and is that really the right thing to do?

Given we need those basic labors done?

That said, if that's the only measure then only the rich can afford to have children so clearly there has to be more to this.

What if instead, a CEO is only allowed to take time off equal to or less than the average of every other employee.

Those are the kinds of traits (whether genetic or not) that we should be trying to expunge from the population.

I said nothing about disallowing anyone to reproduce. I just said if only rich people reproduced we could eliminate most human suffering. Learn to read.

First, I can't see how this is a strawman. Logically, in academia, perhaps you could argue this is a strawman because you technically didn't say the word "prevent", but in the "real world" I can't see how 50% of the entire world's population (or whatever percentage we're talking about here) would just agree with your hypothesis and say: "You know what, he's probably right. We, the poor people of the world are a burden on society and shouldn't be having children of our own. From this day forward we vow not to have children because we think this guy may be right, that it would truly end human suffering when it's all said and done". No. The only way this experiment would proceed is through a large-scale state-sponsored effort to prevent poor people from having children. Against their will. And not only this, but I'm almost positive that if this large-scale effort proceeded it would more than likely erupt into a civil (world?) war. Far from the original goal to "eliminate human suffering".

Second, I can't see how this is a personal attack. That is unless you do believe a person's self worth is measured by the size of their bank account. And if you do believe a person's self-worth is measured by the size of their bank account, it's no more a personal attack than the attack you've made on poor people by insinuating that they are the root cause of human suffering on this planet, simply because they have the audacity to have children of their own.

You seem to forget that capitalism only works when you have a captive group. In order for your life to be good, other people's lives have to be comparatively worse.

With that small of an educated population we could sit back, automate everything, and hardly have to compete for resources at all (especially not necessities like food and rent).

The working class quite literally feed you, clothe you, and keep you safe at night. Get out into the world, learn more about how things are created and whose shoulders you're standing on when you're seeing this golden future of yours.

Not to mention the per-capita increases in efficiency we would see if the population was small enough that we could get by farming only the most fertile ground, burning only the easiest-to-extract oil, etc.

> The working class quite literally feed you, clothe you, and keep you safe at night.

Yes, and I'm saying it's cruel of them (us? I'm rich by world standards but not American ones.) to continue to have children that are condemned to a life of the same sort of servitude (or worse, famine and disease).

Who's going to produce the goods and services you intend to purchase in your retirement?

First world birth rates are already low. Under your guidance we'd have a demographic crisis like you wouldn't believe.

Sure, there's immigration, but I don't see why your rule doesn't apply to poor people in other countries.

Also, it doesn't matter what economic system you're using, if your ratio of working people to non-working people decreases, your quality of life will also decrease.

Lastly, what I said doesn't require the population to grow, only to stay constant. If you want to reduce the population because it's somehow bad for the planet, you can do it gradually.

If I am to take this to its logical conclusion, I guess there are entire nations, indeed probably most of the human population, who you think should just not reproduce.

"If I am to take this to its logical conclusion, I guess there are entire nations, indeed probably most of the human population, who you think should just not reproduce."

Yeah, pretty much. Why are you advocating that children be born into a life of misery?

ps: I don't believe that all lower income people and their children live in misery. Seems like you would rather they just not live?

You've spent too much time in tech/online man, spend some time in the real world.

Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying (again, with the understanding that there are accidents, people who get laid off from better jobs, etc.)

And I am advocating for fewer people being born into poverty.

Why are you opposed to this?

Your method is that poor people should not have kids due to their inability to easily provide for those kids. In not having kids, they bring less people into an impoverished social standing that is hard to break out of. By this reasoning, should people with less desirable traits (history of heart disease, cancer, etc) not have kids to help eradicate those traits? There is a chance their child will not have those specific traits or htey will take, like there is a chance that a child will move out of poverty.

Of course not, that's absurd.

Other than the self regulation of impoverished people to not have kids to help eradicate poverty, which is what you are describing, I would rather see social means to help those people escape poverty.