A few days ago, I saw also this ‘dads’ vs ‘duds’ hypothesis:
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I remember having a discussion with somebody on the question: “If you knew the world was going to end in 8 years time, would you still have kids?”
At the time, I thought “of course not! why would you go through all the pain of the early years just to die together 6 years later?” That was before I had kids. But having now had 2 kids, I’ve changed my mind completely.
Yes, the early years are painful, but even in the years 2-6, there’s so much that the kids experience and you experience I think it is easily worth it even if the world ends.
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Bad and worse?
The Atlantic, citing research from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), reported that self-identified conservatives have an average of 1.4 children, compared to 1.09 for liberals. It’s a gap IFS researchers said remained even after controlling for other variables, such as sex, religion, race, income, age, marital status and education.
The curious thing is that the total fertility rate for the USA is around 1.6. Since Cons and Dems are below this, it seems having a strong political identity is bad for future children.
Maybe simply being “politically aware”, regardless of your stripes, is enough to make you think twice?
+1 dependent. 
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I can bet that SVP voters have higher fertility rate than the voters of any other main party. EVP has probably even higher rate.
People in their teens and (early) twenties have very few children on average.
Including people younger than thirty in a study on the number of children per adult makes exactly zero sense.
If the progressive parties have nothing more to offer than “do whatever you want, as long as you don’t bother anyone”, conservatives outbreeding them is just the logical consequence.
Humans are imho closer to an ant colony or bees than they are to lone wolves… If you want to survive as a country and culture, you need really strong ideological ties. Look at Israel, they survived genocide after genocide and now still are like 20M people worldwide.
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Stand-up comedian Leonarda Jonie blames feminism/casual sex for the falling birthrate:
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@Phil_MCR, I find your question too extreme an illustration. I wonder what the reaction would be if the question were, “If there is a good chance that the world will go extremely badly pear-shaped for you and your (hypothetical) kids in the next 6 years, would you have children?”
The extreme construction is what is thought provoking as it forces you to consider how you will spend your last years.
(Btw, would be good to reply to the specific post to make it clear which you are replying too.)
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Well, this way you are never going to reach the 10 Million inhabitants, so how are you going to get elected?
That’s true, but isn’t my question more difficult to answer? Because you are not promised certainty, so it forces you to consider how they’ll spend all their years, which are much longer than yours.
Well, the point of the question is to address whether there is sufficient value/purpose in only a few years if they have no future beyond that.
I would say if you knew with certainty that the world was ending as we know it and the chances of survival were extremely low within, say, the 6 years as has been mentioned, then you would be having children for your own benefit rather than theirs.
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I believe you were born in the fifties, perhaps the sixties.
Did/do you condemn your parents for giving you life even though race segregation was still a thing back then and you had to go through the cold war?
That’s a valid question if you are guaranteed world destruction. I think that some of the people deciding not to have children are more concerned with what they believe is a dystopian future–a sort of Mad Max with Elon in charge–than that people like Putin will blow up the world entirely.
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I am not sure the dystopian future idea has very much effect on the natalist argument. There are plenty of natalists who think that the “end” is coming: JD Vance says he’s doing ‘God’s work – and if that leads to the end times, OK’ | JD Vance | The Guardian. For me, a lower birth rate for a couple of centuries can only do us humans good. It will not in itself solve all the problems but it should be a move in the right direction
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Well the only worry I had during the cold war was “duck-and-cover” exercises in school. I lived in the civilized country of California and never experienced racial segregation (and I had a Japanese brother).
Exactly. The original question/scenario was a known world destruction event.
The world destruction events are more likely in a world where the human population keeps on increasing. Maybe it is a conspiracy by those who believe a judgement is coming.
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