[brighteyes]

It would have been a more interesting article had it also went into the downsides of this approach.

One specific concern is that mandatory paternity leave may discourage men from becoming fathers, further decreasing the birth rate which is already quite low in many advanced economies.

Another is that if taking paternity leave impacts men's careers, then in many cases both parents will suffer such an impact, further disadvantaging couples from having children.

Overall, it's an interesting idea, and definitely worth discussing.

[tedunangst]

Make it mandatory leave. No kids? Oh, well, still have to stay home and play video games for six months.

[solatic]

An excellent way to destroy a country's productivity.

Listen, if you want the government to incentivize having children, then establish tax consequences. Same way as the government can force you to pay a tax penalty, the government could force people older than a certain age who are still childless to pay a "societal development" tax. The proceeds of the tax go towards paying for free childcare.

/not sure if I'm serious about the above or not

[smsm42]

With regular police visits to ensure you're not secretly using this time to work, or get education, or self-improve, because that would be unfair. In fact, it would be more efficient to just put such people in a low-security prison. With video games and well-stocked mini-bar of course, after all they are not criminals!

[gumby]

> One specific concern is that mandatory paternity leave may discourage men from becoming fathers...

> Another is that if taking paternity leave impacts men's careers, then in many cases both parents will suffer such an impact...

As the article states: how are these factors different for men than for women?

[RickS]

> how are these factors different for men than for women?

For the sake of this argument, they aren't. It's not about which gender they impact. It's about what percentage of relationship participants they impact.

Right now ~50% of relationship partners face credible career setbacks as a result of post-childbirth leave. Changing that percentage to 100% is probably going to have some ripples.

That's not to say it might not be worthwhile, just that it's unlikely to be as simple as "flip a switch, everybody acts the same".

[smallnamespace]

But it disproportionately affects those who choose to have children. This doesn't eliminate an imbalance, it would simply shift some of the burden around.

[karmajunkie]

And that's a bad thing because...?

The he whole point is to eliminate one of the primary causes of gender inequality in the workplace. Spreading the burden of parenting is exactly the right thing to do.

[brighteyes]

I don't think either of those arguments assumes they are different. In fact the second mentions it may be the same.

[was_boring]

Arguably, decreasing human kind's birthrate is a net positive. Even in the absence of that, being a dad, and knowing many dads, we've already made the choice to "disadvantage" ourselves -- and wish we could do it more. What stops us is the fact that we would lose our jobs which disadvantages our kids.

So I say bring on mandatory leave! The vast majority will be much happier.

[TangoTrotFox]

One important tangent. There's a very significant nuance to birthrates you're not considering when it comes to reducing birthrates. Most of everybody knows birth rates in the developed world are decreasing, compared to the developing world. But what many do not know is that this sort of pattern holds true even within developed nations themselves. For instance in the US people who earn < $10,000 per year have 50% more children than those who earn $200k per year. [1] The slope of the inverse relationship between income and fertility is surprisingly and disconcertingly smooth.

Think about what this means. The things that correlate strongly with fertility are: low income, low education, high religiosity. If you look at the pool of all children being born they're going to end up ever more disproportionately in low income, low education, highly religious households over higher income secular households in developed nations. I used to feel similarly to you, but in considering this the very people 'responsibly' choosing not to have children are the exact people that should be reproducing to no end if we want a better tomorrow for everybody. And this is without even considering genetic factors. Responsible fertility is, paradoxically, anything but responsible for those who would have the wherewithal to consider such things in the first place.

[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

[dmoy]

It's not really surprising at all (at least anymore). See for example Hans Rosling's research.

The richer you are, the higher chance of success of your offspring, so you don't need to roll the dice as much.

[TangoTrotFox]

This hypothesis made a lot of sense in the past. It was logical and mapped to the data reasonably well. But I'm not sure it does anymore. Part of the reason that I mentioned the developed world is that people earning < $10k are not pumping out children in some sort of attempt to create a family that can provide sustenance and a strong lineage. Far from it - in today's urban societies, children are often more of an indefinite burden than a future tool for wealth creation. Maybe even more clear is considering the sharp decline in the middle class fertility over the past decades. Again it's not like those born in e.g. the 70s were that much less likely to survive to coming of age driving their parents to have that many more children. And again, the urbanization problem was also present then as well in any case.

[malvosenior]

I don’t see how increasing the birth rate of people making over $200k per year leads to a better tomorrow (not that such an idealistic notion even exists). You’d be increasing the number of mega consumers, international flights, mc mansions...

What you really seem to be saying is you’d like people who aren’t like you to stop reproducing and people who are like you to reproduce more.

[SamReidHughes]

Watching the beginning of Idiocracy might make the problem clear.

https://youtu.be/YwZ0ZUy7P3E

[malvosenior]

That’s a fictional movie.

[fromthestart]

That doesn't mean it can't be a legitimate commentary on a non fictional problem.

[chris_mc]

Everyone is talking about needing to control population, but according to current figures, the population will level our around 11b people around 2100. Check out www.gapminder.org for more info, but a lot of what people think about the world is wrong.

[brighteyes]

True that many people are misled about this, but

1. 11 billion may be too much.

2. This isn't uniform across the globe. Japan's population is shrinking due to a very low birth rate, and that may be a bad thing (loss of cultural and genetic diversity, for example). And this is the more relevant aspect given the context.

[wdwhwq9484]

> 11b people around 2100

Color me skeptical. If previous prognostications are and indicator, humanity in general cannot predict the future more than 5-10 years out with reasonable accuracy.

Another way of saying this is that the confidence interval on global population estimates 80 years into the future is most likely large enough to render the estimate meaningless.

[zimablue]

And you think 11 billion is a good number? We couldn't support the 6 billion at western standards of living.

[albertgoeswoof]

Why? All evidence so far suggests we can, standard of living globally has only increased with population growth.

[jonathankoren]

This is paid leave.

Comparing Sweden, which has mandatory paternity leave, to other countries with parental leave, the the amount of money you get paid during leave is the major factor in whether someone takes it or not.

https://qz.com/587763/how-swedens-daddy-quota-parental-leave...

[Kiro]

Lowering the birth rates is the number one thing we can do to save the planet so I see that as a positive thing.

[rimliu]

Misanthropy should be looked down even more than misogyny because it’s hating twice as many people.

[08-15]

But misanthropy is unbiased, while misogyny is sexist.

[justtopost]

Fear of overpopulation is not misanthropy. Personal attacks are veboten here. Please stop.

[malvosenior]

The planet will be here long after humanity.

Cue George Carlin: https://amp.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/33jmhl/george_carli...

[SrslyJosh]

> It would have been a more interesting article had it also went into the downsides of this approach _for men_.

Fixed it for you.

[zimablue]

The downside is that it forces people who don't want children to pay for other people's children, at a time when we should be trying to reduce the population and not increase it. Having children is not a public service, it's closer to pollution and I object so much to subsidising it.

[adimitrov]

That's very short sighted. Population doesn't permeate the ether like a perfect gas, and we're not all indistinct like the molecules of such a gas.

Whether the current global population levels are unsustainable is up for debate. What is not up for debate, and is already apparent in Western nations as well as other booming economies such as China and Japan are the severe implications of demographic change and the disruptive effect of an aging population on a nation's economy.

This is why making babies in rich countries makes economic sense. If you want to fight overpopulation, then you need to fight for women's rights and education in countries where birth rates are too high. For every baby that you're not having, 20 others are born into poverty.

[zimablue]

It's only "economic sense" in a VERY narrow viewpoint where you assume that you're going to disallow immigration AND assume that your social security system is offset by a generation AND assume that economic measures like GDP/etc are important. I'd change those three before pushing the "increase population" button.

Japan had low growth and higher happiness for a couple of decades now.

Even taking all that, economically useful != right. It's economically useful to burn the forests and raise the oceans but it's not right.

[adimitrov]

Immigration is not disallowed. In many European economies, birth rates have been below replacement for decades, and immigration has been the only thing propping up populations. Recent events notwithstanding.

Japan is facing a demographic crisis[1]. Among developed nations, their problem is the most extreme because of very low rates of immigration, and a continuously dwindling replacement rate.

Nobody's talking about increasing population. We're well below replacement rate, and that's terrifying. The environment is not going to be helped by developed nations collapsing under their own demographic weight.

To reiterate my point: abstaining from having children in the West does a) nothing to reduce overpopulation b) severely impacts local economic capacity without benefit to the environment. Said economic capacity is currently at the forefront of developing sustainable energy models.

In order to reduce overpopulation, fighting for women's education and women's rights has proven far more valuable.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.de/japan-fertility-crisis-2017-4...

[rayiner]

I’m okay with not subsidizing having kids if kids in the future don’t have to pay social security, dividends, etc., for people who didn’t have kids.

[zimablue]

This is a choice we made in how we structure our governments though that doesn't make much sense on it's own.

We could easily have a system where each generation pays for its OWN social security, you just let the government screw you by spending the current account on wars.

Population is a much bigger question than a specific, stupid government fiscal policy.

[rayiner]

Unless you "save for retirement" by putting canned food in a basement, all you're doing is arranging for some sort of entitlement to a share of the production of a future generation of workers. That's true whether you're talking about social security paid with tax dollars, dividends paid on stock holdings, etc. Those are all abstractions over an arrangement in which a working generation gives up some of the surplus of its labor to the retired generation.

[zimablue]

That's a good point and fairly true I think but there are some caveats that limit it's application to this argument as in (do we want more american kids). 1. It's not only the production, we also work for tangibleassets, mostly housing like you said storable food, machinery etc. That's relevant because if population decreased all of these would become cheaper. To take to the extreme - 1000,000 humans in the near future could probably sustain an incredible standard of living assisted by robots. Pragmatically, if I owned a house my outgoings would be tiny. 2. You're paying for the work of ANY future generation, it absolutely doesn't have to be American. Most of the most expensive things (electronics, cars) are already produced abroad. Food, haircuts and social care are a fraction and only decreasing.

So social security doesn't have to be that shape and an equally large young American population isn't necessary to sustain the current older population. Deeper than this thread but I guess relevant, a lot of hours go into producing products for the 1%, or jobs which don't make sense which our system protects because it's built around having 100% employment so we force you into a min. wage job in order to pay the rest of your income in benefits from taxes on the top percent. If our system didn't optimize to 100% employment and had more extensive welfare you'd see much higher unemployment and the trains would still run.

[wpietri]

That's one way to look at it, as if children are some sort of luxury good like a BMW or a labradoodle. The other way to look at it is that all adults were once children, so anything we do to support all children is fair.

I think the flaw with your framing is it's essentially ahistorical. The only way we all got here is by having ancestors. We all consumed quite a lot of resources getting to adulthood. If you're all that concerned about improper subsidies, surely you're eager pay back, with interest, the large one that you've received?

[zimablue]

There are two big problems with your argument.

One: Your parents taking time off benefits them a lot more than you. It might benefit you a bit but it doesn't benefit you to see your dad from 0-3 months and not your mum, you're too young to know. People assume that it's a big benefit but actually I'd imagine having your parents somewhat around from the ages of 1-3 is far more important than constantly around from 0-1.

The other flaw is bigger really, basically it's a logical fallacy. Read my point to the other comment with this argument, it doesn't actually make sense. You can't expect people to be in favour of the conditions that lead to their existence, if you were the product of rape you should be pro rape? What if we were a species where all birth was via the rape and murder of the father, you'd still be telling people they're ethically obliged to be in favour of reproduction? Just because someone has benefited from something which had something else in the chain of causation doesn't mean that they have to be in favour of that thing. I benefitted massively from the colonial history of my country, for example.

[wpietri]

Oh, well if your best evidence is you imagining things, you can see how I'm not going to invest a lot in this reply.

I'll clear up one misunderstanding, though. The point isn't that one should be in favor of the particular conditions of one's birth. It's that one should be in favor of the continued existence of humanity, and do so such that the conditions for future humans are at least as good. Basically, Rawls' veil of ignorance.

By the way, I don't think your misunderstanding was an honest one. If you get to the point that you're suggesting your opponents must be pro-rape, maybe that's a sign you're too wound up to have a good discussion.

[gehsty]

Why should we be reducing the population? I’ve seen this mentioned a few times in this thread and I just don’t get it.

Also, so many things are subsidised by governments that if you were to pick and chose what you approve of by you paying for it and not using it then you’ll not use much.

On the softer side of things, having kids is a good thing, supporting people as much as possible when they have kids with flexible paid leave is a good thing, and I hope more companies and countries continue to improve levels of support for new parents.