Anecdatum, but:

My wife and I live in an expensive city. It's pretty fun.

Except, we just had a child. She's pretty fun too. In fact, we think we might like another.

She makes all the fun stuff in the city irrelevant (not heading to the bars these days), and the bad stuff in the city pretty horrible.

* She's inhaling poison every morning I walk her to creche.

* If I let her ride a bike on our street she will die.

So, thinking to ourselves "this is crap" we decided "let's have dad get a remote job and buy a cheap place in the country". She hates her job anyway.

Lo and behold, a few days after we said "all right, that's it, we're doing it" she gets two interviews for jobs she'd really like, in her sector (museums and heritage) - In the city (around the corner, in fact).

So, if she gets the job we're staying in the city and not having another kid. If she doesn't we're moving to the country and probably having another kid.

In all this, you'll notice I never said "we could find a place with more room within a reasonable distance from her potential new job" - because it's not really an option. They're quite expensive, and on top of that, banks here (not the US) make it quite challenging to get a mortgage. We've managed to save a reasonable deposit (if we could get a mortgage) but can't quite buy a place in the city for cash. We could get a place in the country for cash, though.

Fuck the job. Do your one kid a favor and have another kid. Siblings are just about the most useful things you can have in life.

I'm conflicted because the carbon footprint of another kid is substantial.

Then again, individual action is utterly meaningless. With ~8billion people it just doesn't matter what I do. Only large-scale action that brings about systemic changes matters. And hey, maybe one of my kids will be the one to help fix it!

Then again, if people viewed 2 as a nominal max then we'd still be on the right path (a bit below replacement rate would be OK generally speaking)

But I already brought one life in to the world when I worry about global collapse and am not sure I want to do that for another.

But siblings are pretty great!

But if I have an only child I can afford a better school for them..

Anyway, still thinking. So is the partner.

Also, "fuck the job" is easy to say except it's not my job, it's the opportunity for my partner to do the thing she's wanted to do her whole life and has worked her ass off for. It's crazy hard to actually build a career in museums and heritage (related... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16792942) and maybe she shouldn't have to give that up.

Then again, being in an industry where employment is that tenuous sounds like a crappy way to spend life.

FWIW, if you care about the environment, the right move is to have kids. All species expand to fill their ecological niche. If you abstain from having children, their spots will just be taken up by other people's children. We are powerless to influence the number of people, but we can influence the proportion of people who have an environmentalist bent.

I hear you about the career thing. I have sacrificed immensely to be able to afford a family. But now, when I am surrounded by my children, I think about all of the possibilities that lay ahead of them, all the grand adventures they will have and the adversities they will overcome, and I remark to myself, "I made all of this possible".

> FWIW, if you care about the environment, the right move is to have kids.

This couldn't be more wrong. Every new life is another body consuming resources.

> All species expand to fill their ecological niche.

This doesn't apply to humans. Unlike other animals, we've mastered agriculture and can produce our own food. But there are still non-renewable resources that we're constantly consuming and will eventually run out of, but we'll continue to reproduce.

> If you abstain from having children, their spots will just be taken up by other people's children.

This implies the inverse, that if I choose to have children, someone else will react by choosing not to. If I choose not to, that won't cause someone else to have more to "take up my spot". There will still be fewer children.

> We are powerless to influence the number of people

On an individual scale, yes. My choice to not have children has no significant impact on the population. But lots of people choosing to not have children does. Your argument is similar to the one made by people who don't vote because they think their one vote won't change the outcome of the election.

> but we can influence the proportion of people who have an environmentalist bent.

This part is at least true.

The thing is that, after you decide to not have kids, time keeps up it's inexorable march. The earth has a carrying capacity for humans. We haven't hit it yet. But we will. This is the one absolute of life: species expand in population until there's no more niche left to occupy.

So after you decide not to have children, other people will have children. Eventually, their descendents will take up the space in the earth's carrying capacity that your descendants would have taken up. There is nothing you can do to stop this. So the best strategy is to change the proportion of people who have an environmentalist bent. Children are an effective way to accomplish that.

Umm... at the risk of being dramatic..

In addition to worrying about the carbon footprint of another kid, I have a much bigger concern that

* We will do nothing regarding climate change (seems likely)

* The predictions for Business as Usual will have been too conservative (seems likely given that the Arctic is melting well ahead of schedule, and who knows how clathrates pan out)

* Temps rise by a good 8C or so in the next 8 decades

* My child, or their children, will die horribly in a new global Holodomor as our resource chains (webs, really) collapse and the world's civilizations implode.

Anyway, I already had one. But I have a deep, pervasive dread that I have doomed them to the above. However, I also might be wrong! Maybe it just gets a bit warmer and they can open a nice winery in Sweden and it's all fine.

Let your kids worry about that. I know I, personally, would rather be alive and facing catastrophe than not be alive. And history is filled with examples of people who persevered through all kinds of calamity. We're a resourceful bunch. And it'll be easier for your children to face the future together than for your child to face it alone.

Just checking in to say I sympathize. I don't have any kids yet, and was thinking about having none (not having a kid is as effective as being vegan and biking to work for the rest of your life...). But I'm worried about how my life would look with and without kids and how hard it would probably be to convince my future spouse to not have kids, etc. And in light of that I start feeling helpless and maybe it's worth just having a kid and enjoying my life because it's not my fault that so many people are fucking up the environment, driving trucks on hour long commutes, and having 5 kids. ¯\_(⊙︿⊙)_/¯

Population stability is probably the metric to optimize for if you care about sustainability. Rapidly growing or shrinking populations cause problems.

Given how much the West flirts with the replacement rate, I think you should do whatever you feel like doing.

I hope to have a large family for this reason.

I dont know if I'll have the time to give kids my full attention.

I found my brother was/is the reason I'm a nerd. Sure my dad was a database manager, but I spend hours daily with my brother gaming. I dont even think I wanted to spend a half hour with my 'boring' dad.

When thinking about having children and about the level of care and attention you’ll be able to give them, I think it’s useful to have the right comparison in mind. If you’re considering having another child, that child’s choices are not between your limited time and attention on the one hand and, on the other, parents who can shower them with time and attention. Instead, the alternative to your limited time and attention is never getting to be alive.

When you frame things that way, the answer for parents who are considering another child is pretty much always to give the child the gift of life. In the developed world, at least.

Life isn't automatically good!!! Bad parenting can, and does, create lives that are arguably better to have never existed.

I think it’s pretty patronizing to make this choice for other people. IMO, there’s only one person whose moral right it is to decide whether a life is worthwhile. And that’s the person whose life it is.

No there's not, because one lifeform's existed can effect others. Additionally when debating if life should come to be, the lifeform in question can't have an opinion until after the fact.

Think about the kind of life you think would have been better off not existing. Surely there are people alive whose life fits your criteria. Now imagine telling one of these people that it would have been better if they never existed.

Probably they'll tell you where you can stick your notions.

I'm not suggesting someone goes and tells them, that would just cause more pain. I'm suggesting we stop that life from existing in the first place.

If you have other reasons for not wanting a life to exist, that’s another matter. But if your only reason is that, in your estimation, that person would have a life not worth living, that seems awfully presumptuous. Life is optional. Let them decide if they want to be alive.

"is never getting to be alive."

I suppose we may differ on this but I don't really view that as a negative. I don't think there's a pool of "potential people" from which we draw when making a new person. An infinite number of beings don't exist, and won't. I actually would love to see more work on the nature of consciousness and the self, and what exactly gives a new foetus or baby its awareness of the fact that it exists.

And yet I'm not entirely consistent internally because even though "I want someone to hang out with when I'm old" is part of the reason kids sound fun, most of it is "bringing a new being capable of experience joy into the universe", so I guess I sort of agree, in a roundabout sense.

>the alternative to your limited time and attention is never getting to be alive.

Eh, if anyone should have kids, it should be the financially well off and educated people.

Remember that your logic isnt going to stop impoverished people from having 4 kids and welfare.

Yeah, you and I might not want impoverished people from having kids that they can't afford (since guilt will compel us to step in and assist). But I would bet that 99 out of 100 people who grew up in the worst kind of poverty would happily do so again rather than never have existed. So, from the child's point of view it's a good tradeoff.

I'm the older brother in my family and what the hell are you talking about!?

Someone once told me: "The best gift you can give to an only child is a sibling. Shows them they aren't the center of the world."

You can do that via good parenting too. The myth of the self absorbed only child is just that, a myth.

My cousin is an only child and he turned out great and had a great childhood. I kinda envy the amount of family time and adventures they were able to go on. Part of it might be family culture, but seems like with one kid you can "do" a lot more, where as with 3 kids, doing things were often frustrating endeavors and just "maintaining" was more the norm.

This is true. But I was thinking more about just getting through life. Governments and pension systems come and go. But as long as you have living siblings, you’ve got pretty damn good insurance against all the stuff that goes wrong in life.

As someone with 4 siblings I'm going to have to disagree with this. Siblings aren't inherently good things to have in life. I know plenty of only children who have never wanted a sibling and plenty of folk who are largely indifferent to their siblings. It depends massively on the personality of the people involved.

> I know plenty of only children who have never wanted a sibling and plenty of folk who are largely indifferent to their siblings.

Then there are siblings who are a literal burden on their families. Some people just use others and walk all over everyone. Someone in my extended family tried to burglarize the home of someone else in the family. That’s not someone I want in my family.

That too. I was more suggesting that some of us aren't particularly close with our family or people people. That and you can not particularly like someone without them being horrible, sometimes personalities just clash or are indifferent to each other.

If you think that life insurance, disability insurance, and a social safety net are good things, then you think that siblings are a good thing.

I don't expect my siblings to be any of those for me. It's incredibly unfair to put those expectations on family.

Yeah, nobody wants to burden other people with dependence. But shit happens. The history of our species is basically one conflagration after another. If I were to die with dependent children–which, up until about 80 years ago was a common occurrence—I know that my siblings would help care for my children. Or even if I just fell ill and needed assistance, my siblings would be there as a safety net.

And it goes both ways: I would do the same for them.

Family are the people who, when you need help, they have to try to give it.

Just had this with my brother. He's got a fairly expensive illness. I asked if he needed help. It never even occurred to him to ask - he's pretty independent. But if he has to have help, I'll try to help.

Considering the ratio of career gains that go to those working in a few expensive cities, even if this is largely selection effects, I'm not sure this paints a very rosy picture of the society we're creating.

I'm reminded of how few heads of EU states are parents

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/do-childless-leaders-mean-...

This stage of the demographic transition is a huge problem, IMO. The more I think about it, the more it seems like a ratchet (as in, it only moves in one direction):

Basically, two incomes are useful, so both people in a relationship pursue careers. Now they have more money to compete on the housing market. This seems like a good move, so others follow suit. At first this is largely a win for people who pursue this route. But, as more people do this, it becomes necessary in order to compete for real estate in good neighborhoods.

Now there is an advantage to be had by putting off having a family even longer, or having even less children. So people do this. But as more and more people follow suit, the advantage evaporates. And so on and so forth until you have demographic implosion.

For the life of me, I can’t see a way out of this in the short term. Maybe a wholesale transition to remote work?

Immigration will offset the demographic implosion, at least if current trends continue. But speaking as someone who studied climate science, a temporary population reduction can only be a good thing for long-term human survival. We're above the carrying capacity of Earth for humans, and though we've done a lot of tricks to expand capacity, we're currently putting a large swath of the biosphere in danger.

If there are less people, then pressure for good neighborhoods goes down, and we'll reach an equilibrium. I think it only seems like a ratchet because we're in the middle of a downturn after a 5000 year run of exponential growth.

Doesn't mean it doesn't suck to live in this time in terms of housing -- but in other terms, life is pretty outstanding. The two income thing is mostly new, but then compare the amount of time that medieval women spent on childcare and providing clothing. It's so much better now that they're not expected to spend every spare moment at the spinning wheel.

> We're above the carrying capacity of Earth for humans, and though we've done a lot of tricks to expand capacity, we're currently putting a large swath of the biosphere in danger.

Given the vast differences in climate impact between different populations and consumption habits, this doesn't seem to be the case.

Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be "We're above the carrying capacity of Earth for Rich Americans".

The issue is that the U.S. isn't overpopulated. India, China are tho.

Worth remembering that the average person in the US emits far more than the average person in India or China.

I don't think most people have a problem with having a smaller population in general, they have a problem with the shift in the age distribution. Having less people is fine, having few young people who have to care for a general aging population is not.

What is the carrying capacity of earth for Humans? I recall in the 70s there was hype about the “Population Bomb” but those fears were never borne out.

As well, what makes you think we will reach an equilibrium for good neighborhoods? Some housing will be abandoned, causing blight; blight causes good neighborhoods to become less desirable, and they spiral down from there.

Detroit is a great example of what happens when neighborhoods lose people.

It's really hard to say what the carrying capacity is, because unlike other species, humans keep modifying their environment. Without clothing, the answer is probably a few million. Without agriculture, the number is south of half a billion. With mechanized agriculture, large-scale land use changes, and artificial fertilizer, we can probably still double our current population. But at the cost of stressing the rest of the environment. I'd guess the "safe" level is somewhere in the low billions, i.e. 1-5 billion.

I was mainly talking about the SF case, where lower global population should make it more affordable rather than causing things to be abandoned. This is what is playing out in Tokyo, which is still growing while the countryside is abandoned. As for the small towns, it sucks, but dying small towns has been a thing for quite a while now as agriculture has become more mechanized. Detroit's kind of the odd man out being a depopulating metropolis, so I'd actually argue that it's a terrible example, at least for the next 100 years.

On a global scale, SF is tiny. Fewer than 1m people in a state of 44m, a country of 350m, and a world of 7,000m.

The impact of global population on SF is and will be negligible.

I'm not getting your point. The thing about global trends is that they are global, which means that they'll apply to all of the large cities. Some large cities might have other trends that might hide the signal, like falling into the ocean, but the point is the global mass migration.

Yes, we seem to have gone from women not having the choice to work to women not having the choice to not work.

This is false.

There are 500$/mo rents everywhere and food costs are the lowest in history.

If you dont care to keep up with the Joneses and have minimum wage people cook you food, you can easily live off 1 low-income salary.

...if you leave the big city? There are not $500/mo rents in many popular places. But sure, Des Moines, Pocatello, you can live like that. And why not - at that salary, you sure aren't going to the Bolshoi Ballet any time soon.

I can't find a $500/month 2-bedroom apartment for rent in Des Moines (https://www.padmapper.com/apartments/des-moines-ia/2-beds/pr...).

The cheapest I see is $625, which is 25% more than $500/month.

Yup. It widens the income gap significantly. The problem with anything that raises average income, is that people without average income are worse of.

If families have at most 1 earner, then the worse case scenario is to have 0 earners, being one down. If most families have 2 though, when you fall to 0, you're much, much worse off compared to the norm.

People with kids vs people without. People with college degrees in high demand profession vs people without. Basically, every time we push people in drove toward a more efficient "lifestyle", the worse off people who don't are.

There's a book somewhat related to this idea called The Two Income Trap. I haven't read it yet, but recently read a good book review of it[0] that discusses the extra competition created by two-income households and tries to vet the book's evidence. It also discusses the related problem that comes from treating "good school districts" as a positional good, causing a negative externality of over-competition and consumption beyond the intrinsic economic benefit of that good.

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-inc...

It’s a great book, written by (now Senator) Elizabeth Warren (from the great state of Massachusetts).

Solution: create a surplus of homes. That will detach price from income. Nothing else will work. (Note: we did this with food and it successfully kept prices low)

Not necessarily. The least affordable housing markets tend to be bigger cities. Growing the cities further will not necessarily make housing in those cities more affordable. There's a positive feedback loop between cities being bigger being more desirable.

Cheap public transit is all.

In case of food, it comes to your nearest super market. So its not just overproduction of food, its also supply chain optimization.

You're spot on about the basic underlying mechanic. A mechanic like that can be found directly causing or partially contributing to almost all the problems we face today.

Obligatory link going deep into this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.

Sane zoning laws would be much easier and do a lot more to ease the burden on people (I currently live in an “OMG no high rises! Won’t someone think of the neighborhood character!?” city and the rent is ridiculous). We just have to have the political will to change them, which unfortunately means angering very powerful monied interests, including Betty and Edgar who really love their now-valued-at-$500,000 house next to downtown.

This is bang on. Looking at the graph look where Harris County (Houston) and Dallas are.

If the graphs were plotted with increase in population against the change in fertility then those places would be outliers.

Texas zoning and tax on houses work.

The funny thing about housing prices is that a state in the US has handled house prices so well with an economy that is doing well but Texas is often ignored in these discussions.

Texas has pretty restrictive laws about parking minimums. It would be illegal to build a pleasant neighborhood (for my definition of pleasant) in Texas.

Also, negative externalities of Texas' built environment (lung disease, cancer, potentially more autism near motorways(still early stages of research) dead people on roads, inability to travel or perform basic tasks for those who can't or prefer not to drive, being impoverished by your automobile, and the potential collapse of global civilization due to climate change) are not priced in, so often the neighbors or the rest of the world are paying for those houses.

Thousands of acres with mcmansions in gated HOAs and no walkability sounds terrible.

> Texas zoning and tax on houses work.

Texas zoning also paved over all the marsh land that would've kept the city from flooding.

I'm living in California and I have this idea for a zoning law: if a residential plot of land sells for more than $X million per acre, it is automatically up zoned to higher density. That way if the market says a location is really valuable more people get to live there.

I've theory-crafted other potential policies like "require any increase in office build density to be matched by increased residential density". That seems more potentially game-able than simply increasing density of properties the market had determined are valuable.

There is a Brazilian show on Netflix, 3%, that explores (caution: spoiler for Season 1) a sterile elite ruling over a dystopia.

Anecdotal, but I put off dating altogether when my salary was low and home prices were skyrocketing in my home town (San Diego). I left San Diego altogether two years ago, but I'm still suffering (perhaps too drastic of a word) from the affects of not even being in a relationship for over half a decade. Meaning, being with women used to come naturally to me, now it's generally awkward after being single for so long.

Yeah when I see stuff like this I'm reminded of this relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/925/