<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>This is why India is ultimately destined to overtake the western world. Either directly or from within.&lt;p&gt;Having had occasion to debate about this on /r/childfree, I feel like a lot of their arguments are based on one of the following fallacies:&lt;p&gt;1) That there are &quot;too many people.&quot; That may be true in parts of Africa, but in the developed world, the positive economic contribution of each additional person still vastly outweights the cost of their incremental strain on natural resources.&lt;p&gt;2) That depopulation in the future doesn&apos;t affect people in the present. If you&apos;re thinking of investing in a startup, what does it do to your calculus if you know that your customer base won&apos;t be any bigger in 20 years than it is today, and will be older?&lt;p&gt;3) There is no positive externality to having kids. Your average person is going to contribute millions of dollars in labor and social value (how much would you pay to save the life of a loved one?) over his or her lifetime.&lt;p&gt;4) Failure to look at the value of alternatives in incremental terms. The question isn&apos;t: what is the value of having kids versus doing a startup, it&apos;s: how much does having kids reduce my probability of doing a startup, and what is the weighted value of that relative to having kids.&lt;p&gt;5) Failure to account for the correlation between parent-child incomes. I&apos;d say 90% of the kids from my high-income suburban middle school are now making median or above incomes. Maybe 7-10% are in the top 1% of income for their age bracket. High income people create a larger positive externality when they have kids.&lt;p&gt;6) Failure to weight the value of alternatives by probabilities. Your average person has very few alternative courses of action that is going to generate as much economic value as raising kids. Your high income person has has a greater probability of doing these things, but writing a best-selling book or founding a successful startup is far from guaranteed. So the relevant question is not: what has higher external social value, doing a startup or having a kid, but rather which of those has higher social value weighted by the probabilities that your startup will have any real success (low), or by the probability that your kid will achieve at least median economic success (quite high).&lt;p&gt;This is of course not to argue with anyone who chooses not to have kids. Nobody needs to justify personal decisions like that. But to the extent that they do try to justify it (and that&apos;s largely what /r/childfree is--people who feel the need to justify their decision), it&apos;s useful not to rely on fallacious reasoning to do so.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Pkeod</author><text>YMMV. Not everyone wants kids, plenty of people are already having kids, many people who do have kids regret it entirely, and many people correctly recognize that you can&apos;t live your dreams and raise your kids right. It&apos;s not just a financial lens for many people it&apos;s a time lens too.&lt;p&gt;Having kids whose lives you very probably won&apos;t even be allowed to be a part of is a reality for many guys too. Even if you have kids in marriage the reality is you will probably get a divorce, the kids will go to the mother, and you will pay.&lt;p&gt;Why risk it if you know you can avoid it? Having kids it&apos;s a guarantee of joy or satisfaction. Writing books, creating epic things can give just as much joy and satisfaction.&lt;p&gt;10 year at a time male birth control is coming so vasectomies will no longer be necessary. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-home&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-home&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://reddit.com/r/childfree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://reddit.com/r/childfree&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>Delmania</author><text>I suspect I&apos;ll get downvoted for this, but for some reason, I find this quote chilling,
“Children are a financial drain,” Merrill wrote. “The time investment of raising a child is immense. The responsibility is epic. The impact on future projects would be drastic. In light of these factors, it makes sense to reduce the chances to nearly zero and have a vasectomy performed.”&lt;p&gt;It seems to completely remove the joy and satisfaction that comes from raising children. Only a few things should be viewed from a financial lens. Wealth is not money, wealth is discretionary time.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share</title><url>http://www.wired.com/business/2013/03/ipo-man/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>loganfrederick</author><text>&quot;Plenty of people are already having kids&quot;&lt;p&gt;Arguably not true. Population growth rates have been decreasing in a variety of countries[1] and economists have found connections between economic growth and population growth[2].&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Generational-Storm-Americas/dp/0262612089&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Generational-Storm-Americas...&lt;/a&gt;
[2]: &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.harvard.edu/kremer/publications&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://scholar.harvard.edu/kremer/publications&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>Pkeod</author><text>YMMV. Not everyone wants kids, plenty of people are already having kids, many people who do have kids regret it entirely, and many people correctly recognize that you can&apos;t live your dreams and raise your kids right. It&apos;s not just a financial lens for many people it&apos;s a time lens too.&lt;p&gt;Having kids whose lives you very probably won&apos;t even be allowed to be a part of is a reality for many guys too. Even if you have kids in marriage the reality is you will probably get a divorce, the kids will go to the mother, and you will pay.&lt;p&gt;Why risk it if you know you can avoid it? Having kids it&apos;s a guarantee of joy or satisfaction. Writing books, creating epic things can give just as much joy and satisfaction.&lt;p&gt;10 year at a time male birth control is coming so vasectomies will no longer be necessary. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-home&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-home&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://reddit.com/r/childfree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://reddit.com/r/childfree&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>Delmania</author><text>I suspect I&apos;ll get downvoted for this, but for some reason, I find this quote chilling,
“Children are a financial drain,” Merrill wrote. “The time investment of raising a child is immense. The responsibility is epic. The impact on future projects would be drastic. In light of these factors, it makes sense to reduce the chances to nearly zero and have a vasectomy performed.”&lt;p&gt;It seems to completely remove the joy and satisfaction that comes from raising children. Only a few things should be viewed from a financial lens. Wealth is not money, wealth is discretionary time.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share</title><url>http://www.wired.com/business/2013/03/ipo-man/</url></story>