But this is something the society (i.e. the government) should take care of, not individual companies (that might, but likely won't, benefit from future offspring). For example, by sponsoring companies that hire workers that have kids (or otherwise levelling the playing field between non-parents and (less-productive) parents in economic terms).

I agree that society and the government should take care of it, but I disagree on the methods.

I'm all for laws giving parents leeway to have extra time off to take care of kids, job protections for maternity/paternity leave, even the government chipping in for the extra days. Of course, I think everyone should be entitled to sick days - jsut parents have more.

You know, because they have more responsibility than I do - which actually makes parents more productive overall than someone like me it. It just doesn't all show at work.

That's how I see. As a society we need to decide if encouraging people to have children by setting up parent friendly policies is important. I feel it is given the same reasons you gave and thus am in a proponent of those policies. Claiming they are unjust to people without kids ignores in my opinion the societal need to keep a good replenishment rate of our population to support older generations and keep the working population large to support everything from infrastructure to social services funded.

Another option is immigration which has its own pro cons.

This might have been true in the past, but it's not really true anymore. We have a shortage of many things on this planet, but people aren't one of those things. Having children, at this point, is exacerbating environmental issues without providing much tangible benefit to society. It's been well documented that society gets more benefit from immigrants anyways...first-world countries can easily get away with negative replacement birthrates because the third world is growing so quickly and many want to move here.

There are arguments that our society should support parents, but they're moral arguments, not practical ones. Society doesn't need to encourage people to breed. It's ingrained in our nature and enough will do it anyways that we'll be fine.

Calm down Malthus. Overpop has always been a slippery slope, and we've always been "on the tipping point!" You also pretend that culture and cultural attitudes are not important and potentially conducive to the success that a region has.

Notice I did say that there's a moral argument to be made for society supporting parents. Otherwise, procreation could end up the province of the wealthy and people should be able to exercise their biological imperatives if they choose. But the comment that I was replying to was arguing that society needs people to procreate, which is just laughably false. There's a big difference between limiting procreation (i.e. China's "One Child" policy) and not incentivizing procreation. You act like I was advocating the former when I was only talking about scaling back the latter.

> You also pretend that culture and cultural attitudes are not important and potentially conducive to the success that a region has.

I'm not pretending that...I'm acknowledging that more diverse areas consistently outperform areas with monocultures. Adding people with new perspectives almost always improves a situation. Why do you think there's such an emphasis on getting more women and minorities into tech? Hint: it's not just bad PR. Those new perspectives will make the workplace environments and the products and services they produce better.