The problem with this viewpoint is that, at scale, having kids isn't just an individual "life choice." It's a basic requirement for a sustainable human society. People have to have 2.1 kids on average in order for society to keep existing. We're well below that in almost the entire developed world. That means the most liberal societies in the world, where women can choose to pursue careers and business, are also not sustainable and can't continue to exist without importing people from societies with traditional gender roles. In other words, they currently exist only due to a sort of arbitrage and aren't viable in the steady state the way they're structured now.
If you think liberal societies are a good thing, then we really need to figure out a way to allow women to have careers and also children. It's not "having it all." It's about pursuing two pillars of life that for most people are both necessary: work, and family. We should be thinking about it in the same way as we design buildings to have sufficient bathrooms for everyone--as a biological fact of life that we must accommodate.
I disagree, I think in the countries and social spheres where this is an _actual_ choice for women, it is very much a "life choice" (because the rest of the world makes more than enough children to resolve the issues of "sustainable human society"). When we'll get to a point where world wide population growth drops below 2.1 factor, maybe then we can start reconsidering this policy.
And that said, longer term, what is not sustainable is a continuing growth of population, not reducing it. Yes I realize reducing population invalidates many things currently supporting our civilization but having to deal with the pain of those changes seems much better than dealing with the issues of an overpopulated planet.
That's not really a rebuttal to my point--just an assertion that we should take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity while we can. It tells us nothing about what a sustainable liberal society looks like.
And the fact is that the arbitrage opportunity won't last long. If you're 30-something, the world population is currently projected to start declining within your lifetime.
I think we are going to have to adapt to a post-growth world. Or maybe things will grow in other ways. I am not worried about declining birth rates. It's not like we are heading for a "Children of Men" scenario. The population will stabilize before it goes to zero. Or maybe we will just grow people in vats.
I'm not talking about endless growth. I'm talking about simply maintaining existing societies. The fertility rate in South Korea is now below 1. That's a society that's basically gone within three generations.
> The population will stabilize before it goes to zero.
Right--so what does society and culture look like then?
> Or maybe we will just grow people in vats.
We can't even fix male pattern baldness for god's sake.
Culture and societies change. No one can predict the future. If the population of South Korea goes down to 49 million (from 50 million today), why does that automatically mean that they will lose their culture?
>We can't even fix male pattern baldness for god's sake.
I'm sure we will fix that before the population gets to zero!
Elon Musk used to be bald. Now he’s not.
Who will raise the people who were made in vats? Which is the real problem here, not who reproduces.
I would say it depends. My wife would not want to miss it. Especially her first birth was indeed a wonderful experience. The second was too fast but still a wonderful experience.
Why children per woman? In such a world where humans grow in vats, it would be children per person...
Especially when there are other women (or people actually) looking for the same professionnal success while minimizing the impact of bearing (the only exclusively female element in this matter, note) and raising children on their careers as much as possible.
All I meant is of course you will be penalized for taking years off when some people (even of the same sex and with the same supposed disadvantages) don't.
And how do you ever fix that? There will always be people willing to not have kids to further their career. Or work 16 hr days. Or never see their family. These are often the people at the top. Do you force them not to do it?
Reminds me of this scientist I worked with. He’d work all day, go home get dinner, come back and work until 9 or 10. He was an internationally known scientist. No way he could do that and have a healthy family relationship.
Now try having a family and competing with this guy?
The problem is that there is overshoot - when you watched half your siblings die young, you don't simply take the doctor's word for it that your kids are all going to grow up strong and healthy. It takes a few generations to adapt. During this period of time, you have excessive population growth, and then even if these people have children only at replacement rate, the population will still increase as the more populous younger cohorts replace the smaller previous cohorts.
Eventually people start having sub replacement rate children as there are just too many people. In theory this is good, but soo too here will there be overshoot. If you were an only child and your parents were only children, it's hard to start having large families. Even if you wanted to, you need to support a lot of older generations, which puts a severe strain on your ability to also have lots of kids. Eventually yes, things will turn around and the population won't go to zero, but decades of population shrinking and the associated economic issues will do a number on the population. India will have to deal with this problem in a century, much of the developed world will have to deal with it a lot sooner.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...
The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely
Probably true, but eugenics motivations aside (and if you insist on going there we have egg donation technology), we probably don’t need to figure out a way to make motherhood and a small fraction of the most demanding jobs compatible.
There’s nothing fundamentally unworkable about a world where you can be a unicorn tech founder, big law partner, or Harvard professor or you can have children in your 20s but not both.
I don't think it's really that small of a fraction. It's not just tech founders who are faced with career tracks that have a pressure to perform in the key 25-35 age range.
> There’s nothing fundamentally unworkable about a world where you can be a unicorn tech founder, big law partner, or Harvard professor or you can have children in your 20s but not both.
Insofar as these are the people who become CEOs and politicians, that actually is a problem.
It's quite normal to have a population that increases exponentially, hits resource limits, and then decreases rapidly. (This was like literally 1/3 of my calculus class - it's a pretty classic example for coupled partial differential equations.) Eventually the population declines enough that the resource limits no longer apply, and people start having babies again. Population isn't a monolithic concept: there will always be some women who have children regardless of their incentives.
I'll just be happy if we can get there without war, famine, pestilence, and death, which are the normal results when a society hits resource limits.
Your best case scenario is population collapse, but to do it without disease or conflict? Just everyone peacefully getting old and dying without having children?
Oftentimes, what's good for the empire isn't good for the citizens of the empire. So yeah, I'm happy to leave behind the wreckages of a dead empire if it means more for the people in that empire.
Unfortunately, I'm guessing that we'll get the war, or the pandemic, or both. That's how things have historically ended.
We have some additional complexities in that a lot of those growth limits are because of the interplay between economics and population. There's plenty more room for humans on earth; there's not more room within major metropolises without triggering our "It's too crowded; better not breed" instincts. But economic forces needed to sustain those high populations promote concentration and crowding.
I think what you're missing is the fact raising a child is something that all human beings are biologically engineered to find overwhelmingly fulfilling, yet office environments are not designed with employee fulfillment (or even basic wellbeing) in mind.
Once you become a parent, over time your viewpoint shifts from seeing the baby as an obstacle that gets in the way of other things, to everything else getting in the way of your time with bubs.
I suspect the reason that many of your friends aren't going back to the office is that raising a child is simply more satisfying.
This is very much not a fact, and I really wish society as a whole would stop pretending that absolutely everybody wants to be an actual parent. Then maybe the people who do find parenting fulfilling can do that while those of us that don't can make up for them instead of being pressured into a role that we can't and/or don't want.
I guess that word choice was mainly a reaction to the parent's langauge, where she seemed to be suggesting that career success is the be all and end all. It's an idea that was shoved down the throats of my generation (late milennials) by corporate/university propaganda and had to be unlearned painfully.
> When I mention it to someone that I want to take time off for a couple years to have children in silicon valley, they look at me as if I'm an alien.
Is this really that common? As an anecdote, a few years ago, my kid's preschool teacher announced she was quitting half way through the school year due to health reasons. When I privately asked if everything was ok, it turned out to be that she wanted to have kids of her own. I was relieved and totally supportive of her decision: everyone ought to have the chance of choosing the life and family they want to have.
I can see how a certain "why would you want kids" attitude might come out from some young folks, but I think it's not so much that they're judging you personally, but more that they are expressing their own preference for not wanting kids at that stage in their life.
As for gap years, I know someone who got into software development relatively "late" in life (coming from the culinary industry and doing occasional freelance web stuff). My mom took some very long gaps and still had no problems working afterwards. The idea that one has to toil without gap years or else be banned from the industry forever is a myth. As you said, I think the mantra "if there's a will, there's a way" is very true.
I also see the shift in priorities over the years being very common, and I don't think there's anything inherently bad about changing one's mind about whether kids are more important or even the reverse (deciding that career work is more fulfilling than being a housewife/husband after all).
You can't do everything at once. It's a simple fact of life. Be a stay at home mom, sure. Be a mom with some daycare. Later on, allow your child to go to school. Make some choices! That's what growing older is about: pruning the tree of possibility so some branches can grow strong.
I am far, far more career-oriented now that I have a kid than before I did. Now I have someone who depends on me financially, who I want to provide for, who I want to be a good role model for. Having a kid flipped a switch in me that is leading me to much more ambitious work. Before the kid, I figured the world was just going to broil slowly and that it didn't particularly matter what I did. Now I have a drive to make a difference for her future life and ensure she'd be taken care of were something to happen to me. And for everyone who's gonna assail me for letting my child spend 23.8% of her waking hours not in my direct presence... well, you do you.
> With kids you just have to focus on a few priorities with the time you have left This focus has been beneficial for me.
If you’re really that into high pressure job and grinding the ladder why would you be so attracted to raising a family as a sahm ? You can’t do everything at once. No one is stopping you from raising children but yourself. Many don’t go for the business route and that’s a respectable choice but of course you can’t have it all. If in the end your fertility is more important than your career then have kids without making a fuss about it. Especially if you know that for some ecologically unreasonable reason you want numerous kids then start early.
Also I’ve seen so many female acquaintances wanting to keep up their old life ambitions and eventually just never go back there because child rearing became more important than anything (and sometimes their sole motivation left in life). How can you be so sure you won’t fall for this ? Especially if you aspire at staying at home for a few years, it seems a higher predisposition to stay in that state forever than when you long for your office job.
Because some manage to do it both and it seems right that they be rewarded for it.
With kids you just have to focus on a few priorities with the time you have left and if it really is software then one will find the motivation to cultivate it and to make it work. Heck we have the perfect job for it you can remote you can freelance you can contribute ... But talking about aspirations not pursued without a kid to be developed while child rearing when you will have even less time sounds like a fantasy to me.