The benefit to society as a whole is that human society literally continues to exist. If no one has children then society ceases to exist because there isn't a next generation. It's hard to think of anything that benefits society more than having children to comprise the next generation of society.

And you know what's really bad for corporate profitability? Not having any workers in a few decades because conditions were such that no one now can afford to have the next generation of workers. The more people there are the better as far as companies are concerned. That's more potential workers and more potential consumers.

I'm not advocating some "Children of Men" fictional dystopia. There will always be kids, maybe just not the white collar tech worker too worried about career progression. For example, outside of my own kids, I'm agnostic on my coworker's kid or some stranger in Africa's.

Overpopulation is also a problem. As long as humans can migrate, I'm not convinced of some lasting labor shortage hypothesis.

People should have kids they can afford. No one is asking human beings to cease procreation.

The point is that we have made child rearing so easy and incentivized it to a point where one puny little pandemic comes around the corner and parents completely lose it and cannot cope.

If I wasn’t taken aback by the sheer number of parents who are legitimately feeling lost, I would be laughing. Are most of these people even equipped to be parents? I don’t think so. We have evolved to care for our young so they themselves can have their young and in the process we pass on our genes and memes.

That’s how we went from hunter gatherers to pastoralists to sailors to warriors to farmers to factory workers to ..here we are. What we have seemed to have lost is INSTINCT to care for our young.

Worse than outsourcing child rearing to hired help or the govt or public schools, current crop of parents seem to depend on employers to hold their hand while they raise their young.

This needs to be discouraged. This is absolutely unacceptable. Maybe there should be Parenting 101 MOOCs before people can decide if they are cut out for the challenge of parenting.

I shudder to imagine how these kids will turn out. While I think parents or anyone else who need help deserve it, every thing has a price. It’s not a favour to the world to be a parent.

On a relevant note, all of this only suggests to me that 4 day workweeks will become the norm. No one is going to go back to offices after covid evaporates. That’s how this problem is going to be resolved. It’s the only way.

What do you think of LGBTQ, then ? Fertility rates among them are near zero.

I’m not the person you asked, but: It takes a village to raise a child. The older I get, the more I believe that. My children have always benefitted from more external input, I’ve helped many around me by taking care of their children, and people who are LGBTQ have helped me in caring for me children. I didn’t think of it that way at the time, but in the context of your question I would point that out simply to say that children thrive with a community including individuals without their own children.

We don’t all need to have children to be relevant. But that doesn’t mean that the people primarily responsible for raising a new generation aren’t doing a difficult job deserving of support, either.

I hope as I age and my children become independent, I can help people with their own children even more. It makes a tremendous difference.

Can you expand on your question? I'm not really sure what you're asking/implying. Being LGBTQ is not a choice, and no, we shouldn't be forcing anyone to have children. But enough people need to be having children for society to continue, and the reproduction rate for LGBTQ individuals is actually not as close to zero as you seem to think it is. And adopting someone else's children to raise absolutely counts as "doing your parenting duty" as it were, since the raising from 0-18 is still the vast majority of the total work.

I would say that's a non factor since there are more straight people total that choose not to have children or can't for some reason.

For that matter, adoption is also an option so we can't look simply at fertility.

Large enough societies can carry people who don’t reproduce be it by choice or because of infertility or being LGBT. Same as we can accommodate a certain number of full time thinkers and artists who otherwise don’t produce tangible things. So it’s a function of what the demographics can handle. Smaller populations might require something like ancient Greeks did.

Every productive member of society is someone's kid, whether they're home grown or an immigrant.

You don't see some bad apples, declare your orchard blighted, and raze the whole thing. Not every apple is going to be perfect.

> "Benefit society as a whole" sounds good in theory but rarely works in practice because people are inherently self-interested

This is a very immature POV, IMO. Self interest can, and arguably _should_, be aligned with the benefit to society. That is, in fact, the only way to get _reliable_ benefit to society in the first place. Nobody gets anywhere by trying to piss up a rope. In any situation, you get the behavior you reward. So "self interest" is a good thing, when it's properly aligned to the broader whole.

And if we were to strictly worry about "benefit to society" then one could argue that childless people should earn less, since their amortized value to society in the long term is much lower than that of parents.

My original response was to highlight that perhaps we shouldn't be elevating child-raising as a completely altruistic, society-benefiting endeavor. We're talking about a few tech companies, which is not representative of the U.S. (nevermind human civilization).

"Amortized value to society" seems a very one-sided portrayal. Why should I earn less than someone who has kids, when skill/experience/contribution are equal?

Being a parent is a personal choice in today's day and age, especially for highly-paid tech employees. Let's not paint it as some altruistic gift to mankind.

Because your contribution later in life is likely to be negative. You will be putting strain on social security, medical insurance, etc. A strain that is uncompensated by the contribution of your kids in their prime earning years.