[HN Gopher] We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in ...
___________________________________________________________________
We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US
Author : pseudolus
Score : 197 points
Date : 2021-03-04 11:55 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Two in-laws and ourselves are expecting pandemic babies in the
| next 6 months.
|
| In our part of the country it seems like a baby boom (midwest),
| so I'm curious to see how this plays out demographically.
| xnx wrote:
| At some point we will have to confront the fact that younger
| generations supporting older ones is the ultimate ponzi scheme.
| yortpyperty wrote:
| At some point we will have to understand what debt is.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| We've always understood it, the challenge is empowering those
| who would otherwise be encumbered with it against their will.
| gumby wrote:
| While the demographics are interesting, the forecasts of doom are
| overwrought. These authors should be celebrating a future of
| increased prosperity with lower resource contention.
|
| Population, especially in a country like the US, can easily be
| augmented through immigration, as it has been in the past. If
| that even matters.
|
| But does it? A top heavy aging population does need an improved
| "GDP production" base (the article calls it "tax base" as most
| policy people think of it, but retirees are supported by a
| combination of tax funds, retirement funds, family support, and
| other sources). But working against this requirement is a long
| term secular decline in commodity and goods prices due to
| increased automation, increased productivity, increased resource
| efficiency (e.g. see the decreasing energy intensity in GDP),
| shift of energy production from op ex to cap ex, et al.
|
| And there's clear economic ignorance in the article's claim that
| "a smaller work force... portends lower economic productivity".
| The very definition of productivity is the same or greater
| economic output per unit labor.
|
| The next wave of automation boom is like the computing boom of
| the 80s and 90s, which was famously "visible everywhere but the
| statistics."
| andrew_ wrote:
| Anecdotally, my experience within my immediate geography in a
| southern state are opposite from the hypothesis in the article.
| My wife and I had a child in late 2020, and with my social circle
| I can name a dozen more newborns last year that were conceived
| after we became aware of the pandemic. Just last week two friends
| announced they were expecting.
|
| This could be regional, as the economy where I live hasn't taken
| as big a hit. I wonder if the state's lax policies amidst the
| pandemic, which have and are sure to continue to draw strong
| emotional responses, are responsible for a different outlook
| amidst the turmoil.
| bluedino wrote:
| Also had a child last year, the staff at the hospital said they
| are busier than usual.
| antattack wrote:
| Deviation, up or down, from the mean will cause inefficiencies
| and extra costs to our society. Still, 300k less births, however,
| is less than 10% of total number, and is not significant enough
| to be of big concern. 10% is going from 1:16 teacher to student
| ratio to 1:14.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| I wonder if there's a good way to model the cost of children over
| the last 100 years? My guess is fewer people are having children
| due to the financial costs rising considerably.
| dahart wrote:
| There are certainly tallies of the expenses. I don't know about
| over time, but Googling immediately got me the number $233k in
| 2015 from the USDA.
| https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-chil...
| I've seen _many_ other such lists over several decades, so
| charting the average costs over time should be possible.
|
| It might be worth checking out the countries that have
| implemented child bonuses to check the hypothesis that costs
| are the reason. https://money.com/government-pays-have-a-baby-
| low-birth-rate... (Not to mention what others nearby have
| called out: look at birthrates tallied by socioeconomic status.
| If birthrates go down with increasing income, maybe costs
| aren't a major factor in birthrate declines, perhaps increasing
| income is the reason?)
|
| What this kind of thing doesn't tell us is anything about the
| alternative choice that is much more difficult to model: what
| is the cost of not having children. There are cities in the US
| and countries in the world whose economies are collapsing due
| to population loss. And I've watched people in my life go
| through breakdowns due to angst over not having kids. I've lost
| at least one very close friend in part because I chose to have
| kids and he chose not to.
|
| The costs also don't really help evaluate the goals or the
| choice to have kids or not. The reason to have them usually
| isn't primarily financial, and for most people the reason not
| to have them also isn't primarily financial, even if there's a
| secondary influence like costs.
| ph4 wrote:
| My first kid was just born last week. The hospital billed my
| insurance company $45k. This is for an uncomplicated, straight-
| forward vaginal birth.
| ed_balls wrote:
| is it really $45k in US? Or just the company told you they
| are billed 45k but they "negotiate" it down to 10k. In my
| country a birth in private hospital cost $3k...
| ph4 wrote:
| I'm sure there are all sorts of negotiations and esoteric
| adjustments going on behind the scenes - $45k was the total
| of the itemized invoice sent to my insurance company. I'm
| unsure exactly of how much it will cost me out-of-pocket,
| but I'm expecting $3-4k.
| ploika wrote:
| Much more of the decrease in the past century is due to
| increased access to education and full time employment for
| women, increased availability of contraception, and decreasing
| child mortality.
| curiousgal wrote:
| I wonder when will the hostile immigration policies kick in
| and accentuate that.
| mywittyname wrote:
| What part of the world are you from? Hostile immigration
| policies seem to be alive and well in most of North America
| and Europe and have been for a while now.
| ldbooth wrote:
| That is tied to the changing of jobs as well. Jeremy Diamond
| has a lot to say bout this in Guns,Germs,and Steel. My
| grandfather was raised on a farm, where at the age of 16-18
| he was fully employed without a college education or debt.
| Today, parents plan their families with a view toward paying
| for college. Corporations own the housing stock and get
| between people and equity, pushing up the cost of housing.
| It's so many things, I sure hope to hit that stability and
| start a family. No one makes plans to struggle economically.
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| It's Jared, not Jeremy.
| ldbooth wrote:
| Ah thanks, touche!
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Yes, I agree with you. People are overall better off because of
| technological improvement, but making a living is harder (wages
| didn't grow with prices, modern life has more costs attached to
| it).
|
| Also families are much more unstable nowadays, with divorces
| being common. Children growing up in stable families do better
| in several parameters, therefore instability has a ripple
| effect on society.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Divorces aren't rare, but they also hit a 50-year low last
| year. This wasn't a COVID outlier, it's the continuation of a
| trend. Lots of reasons for this that don't necessarily
| undercut your argument though (e.g., fewer people getting
| married in the first place).
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I would argue that it's also due to kids having "more" rights
| via the culture perpetuating entitled rights. So a mild
| spanking could be consider by many as straight up child abuse.
| People scoff if you let your kid just poke the world around
| without asking who, what, where, why. Kids needs to grow into
| their own and the current culture doesn't allow that.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Sorry you can't beat your children as you'd like
| nindalf wrote:
| I love this comment because it can be interpreted in two
| ways - "sorry, you can't beat your children", telling them
| what they can't do. Or sarcastically empathising like
| "sorry you can't use violence to coerce your child".
| afavour wrote:
| I don't know that isolating the cost of raising kids is
| necessary when you can see the drop in overall wealth by
| generation. Millenials (who are the prime "kid having"
| generation right now) own far less wealth than any generation
| that came before them. Is it really in any way surprising that
| fewer are having kids?
| jseliger wrote:
| The rent really is too damn high:
| https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-
| fut...
| missedthecue wrote:
| Don't poorer people have more kids on average?
| gryn wrote:
| because historicaly wealth was correlated with levels of
| education, but in this case people are more educated so
| they nope out of it.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| The clearest impact is has is on accounting for our social
| safety nets. For example the Social Security program is solvent
| to 2035, and that will probably come down quite a bit in the
| short term even with increased immigration.
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html
| swiley wrote:
| Housing and Education are probably the biggest costs. Maybe
| healthcare too.
| LargeWu wrote:
| Childcare can easily run over $1000/mo per child. More for
| infants. When my 2nd child was born, it cost us over
| $500/week.
| stevekemp wrote:
| This really does depend where you live; we paid
| EUR250/month for daycare for our child from the age of 1
| upwards.
|
| Even having a baby is very expensive in the USA, in terms
| of costs for the delivery, and the very very short
| maternity leave available to the majority of women. By
| contrast we had almost a year of paid leave, and paid
| something like EUR250 for a birth - which was mostly based
| around the cost of the room we had for a week after the
| delivery.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| How does the total fertility rate in your country compare
| to the US (1.78 in 2020), considering your country's pro-
| natalism policies?
| andrew_ wrote:
| We're at $1800/month for an infant and toddler in daycare.
| Wife and I both work. Thankfully the company I work for has
| an HSA for childcare.
| rayhendricks wrote:
| $1000/mo per child plus needing to spend at least half a
| million in the desirable parts of the USA for a house are
| the real reasons.
|
| Got shipped because IMO this is just a bit too much money
| to spend.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Expanding low cost or free daycare is probably the best way
| that the state can incentivize people having children. I've
| also read that it serves as an effective anti-poverty
| measure as well.
| hinkley wrote:
| The reason people have sex at the end of the adventure movie is
| because the heroes just went through a harrowing experience
| together, possibly almost dying.
|
| Sex falls under "life affirming activities". It's not a movie
| trope, it's a human trope.
|
| This last year has been a shit show. You get people vaccinated
| and employed and people will hear their biological clocks again.
| There will be a rebound effect, and there will come a time when
| 5th grade teachers are temporarily working as 4th or 3rd grade
| teachers because there are few 5th graders this year but a bumper
| crop coming up behind them.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| How much of that loss in birth rate will be taken up by
| immigration or is that even a consideration?
| buttholesurfer wrote:
| It's okay the biden admin will just import that many more
| foreigners and grant citizenship to those 11 million illegals.
| Problem solved. /s
| theNJR wrote:
| Important to note the 300k is a hypothesis
|
| > Official birth data from the U.S. National Center for Health
| Statistics will not be available for many more months, but some
| states have already released provisional birth data. In January
| 2021, which would be the first month in which all full-term
| babies born were conceived after the lockdown began, births fell
| by 7.2 percent in Florida and 10.5 percent in California, after
| adjusting for secular trends, seasonal variation and the use of
| provisional birth data.
| ouid wrote:
| great
| andred14 wrote:
| Of course because the experimental biological agents that people
| somehow still want will likely sterilize if not outright kill
| millions.
| ianai wrote:
| This is probably mostly covid related. But I personally don't
| even consider kids. Kids are a life long commitment. I'd only
| make that commitment if I felt long term stability or at least
| optimism. Austerity and cynicism dominate the US right now
| though. It's a recipe for strife, struggle, and things that rip
| families and countries apart. It doesn't have to be this way in
| the US.
| refurb wrote:
| Makes sense. Time are certainly filled with more strife and
| struggle than the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, polio epidemics
| and two World Wars.
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| Seriously, people need some fucking perspective. Yeah, things
| aren't too hot right now, but that's because all you do is
| consume the 24/7 newscycle and worry about what some nobody
| on Twitter is agonizing over about Disney's latest TV show.
| The world is the safest it's ever been. Aside from Covid,
| many massive killers of the past are no longer a problem. Our
| ancestors would be shaking their heads if they saw the
| prosperous times we live in now, but don't choose to have
| children.
| carapace wrote:
| I was reflecting just this morning how glad I am that I
| don't have children. (And I don't follow the 24/7 newscycle
| or use Twitter.) You want perspective?
|
| The Doomsday Clock is still set to 100 seconds before
| midnight.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
|
| > Aside from Covid ...
|
| Covid isn't the last virus. And the tools we use to fight
| it are also the tools we could use to make worse ones.
| (Every tool is also a weapon. As long as people are willing
| to hurt each other technology is fraught with danger.)
|
| Here's a brand new failure mode to worry about: "A puzzling
| lack of thiamine is disrupting some marine ecosystems."
| https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-oceans-
| mysterious...
|
| We don't yet know how bad it is nor what's causing it.
|
| And where the hell are all the bugs!? It's warming up now
| and there's nobody out there. That should scare the fuck
| out of you. It does me.
|
| How many habitable planets are there? One. There is one
| habitable planet.
| Helloworldboy wrote:
| Imagine not having children because of the fucking
| Doomsday clock lmfaaaaaaaaao
| gruez wrote:
| >The Doomsday Clock is still set to 100 seconds before
| midnight.
|
| >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
|
| The same article points out it's not exactly objective,
| and I'm inclined to agree. It's more of a political (ie.
| subjective) statement that the world is fucked rather
| than an objective measure.
|
| >Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker harshly criticized
| the Doomsday Clock as a political stunt, pointing to the
| words of its founder that its purpose was "to preserve
| civilization by scaring men into rationality." He stated
| that it is inconsistent and not based on any objective
| indicators of security, using as an example its being
| farther from midnight in 1962 during the Cuban Missile
| Crisis than in the "far calmer 2007". He argued it was
| another example of humanity's tendency toward historical
| pessimism, and compared it to other predictions of self-
| destruction that went unfulfilled.[24]
| carapace wrote:
| It's not like I can link to an _objective_ measure, eh?
| There 's no actual Doom-o-meter?
|
| The point is that serious thinkers (not just talking
| heads or twitterers) see cause for concern, so it's not
| all hysteria and click bait.
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| Doomsday Clock is a politically-driven relic from the
| Cold War era. We don't trust politicians to be experts on
| the climate, so why do we trust a bunch of scientists to
| be foreign policy experts?
|
| I contend there's a lot of potentially existential
| threats out there, but to use it as a crutch for not
| having children is weak, especially when people still
| procreated through much worse times.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| Where will those children sleep? Every bedroom you add
| drastically increases the cost of already exorbitant
| housing. That's just one of many basic necessities out of
| reach to most people, but it's probably the biggest.
| Clubber wrote:
| >Time are certainly filled with more strife and struggle than
| the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, polio epidemics and two
| World Wars.
|
| I really don't see how you could possibly come to that
| conclusion. I think your outlook may be affected by Mean
| World Syndrome:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| I did not want to have kids. Then one day I realized that for
| the past 3 billion years my ancestors had been passing the
| torch. I was not going to be the one to let down the team. I
| felt a duty to give my genes a chance to fight it out in
| darwin's cage match. I can not guarantee my genes will win, but
| if I fail to reproduce I guarantee they will lose.
|
| Looking back, I am not sure this justification makes any sense,
| but it was how I thought at the time.
|
| In any case it's moot now because it turns out kids are great
| fun to have around and generally make life better. Except the
| car seats, car seats are a pain in the ass.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Perhaps it would be better for your other genes (shared by
| living relatives) for you to not have kids and thus not
| potentially spread the genes that are causing hesitancy
| around having kids. :)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >I can not guarantee my genes will win, but if I fail to
| reproduce I guarantee they will lose.
|
| It's probably not so wise to make decisions based on
| anthropomorphizing genes. They don't want anything other than
| to replicate, given that they're replicators and if they
| didn't they wouldn't continue to exist, that's all there is
| to it, it's a pretty meaningless affair.
|
| I feel paying more attention to one's cultural legacy
| probably makes more sense than passing one's hair colour on.
|
| That's not to say that having kids can't be fulfilling
| because many people get a lot of joy out of raising kids, but
| having attachment to a bunch of nucleotides seems kinda
| degrading to be honest
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| I'm always suspicious of anecdotes that go "I never wanted to
| do [thing], and then I had a thought that changed my
| perspective on [thing] though it's not really logical up
| front, and then [thing] happened and now I love [thing]." I
| always suspect it's the psycological immune system [1]
| kicking in to alter your own perceptions of [thing] so you
| don't go crazy, because [thing] was originally something you
| Did Not Want and being stuck with the consequences otherwise
| would just drive you nuts.
|
| Specifically with the biological imperative argument... I've
| always felt the opposite effect: being aware that my biology
| so wants me to have children makes me doubt whatever impulses
| I may have towards having children as being motivated by what
| I want, and instead being motivated by an evolutionary
| adaptation that doesn't take my psychology into account.
|
| [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_the_surprising_scie
| nce...
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| It also reminds me of the choice-supportive bias.[1]
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias
| dennis_jeeves wrote:
| Lol, not many parent will come forward and openly say
| that they regret having kids.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I've never had kids, but I have many sisters and cousins who
| have, so my genes have already been passed on.
|
| I'm personally mostly indifferent and sometimes want my own,
| but it's my wife's choice more than mine and she has medical
| issues that would make pregnancy extremely unpleasant and
| dangerous.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Your ancestors were just fucking without contraception. They
| weren't trying to "pass on the torch" or anything silly like
| that.
| [deleted]
| nitrogen wrote:
| Historical creation myths seem to say otherwise. E.g. those
| referring to seed, or fruit of the loins, or commandments
| to multiply.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Even if we are to believe that humans need to be
| commanded to reproduce, you're talking about the last few
| thousand years, not 3 billion.
| calebm wrote:
| Maybe not consciously, but what about subconsciously?
| rimiform wrote:
| Kids might make _your_ life better, but they probably would
| have been better off had you stuck to your plan of not having
| them.
| conductr wrote:
| Not existing is better than existing? Suicide rates should
| be 99% then right, because if you're not a 1%er it's not
| worth living.
|
| That said, I do fear my kid will live to see something
| we've made apocalyptic movies about. Hell, we all might.
| tshaddox wrote:
| There's a big difference between never existing, and
| existing but then dying.
| nescioquid wrote:
| It is antinatalism
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism), and an idea
| to which I'm not unsympathetic.
|
| Basically, life is suffering, and from the view of
| reducing the amount of suffering in the world, it is a
| good to abstain from bringing more beings into this world
| to suffer.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| I think you're making a leap in OP's reasoning: they
| didn't say that for _currently existing_ people it's
| better to not be existing. I suspect the point is more
| that it will be better for future generations to limit
| the _size of_ future generations, lest we increase the
| amount of strain on the climate/energy production/water
| scarcity/etc.
|
| I also think OPs reasoning has more to do with the
| considerations of inflicting the potentially post-
| apocalyptic future on those future generations: there is
| an arguable moral duty to ensure that whatever offspring
| you have will have a (generally) good life, and that if
| you aren't reasonably sure of that it's A Bad Thing to
| have said offspring.
| conductr wrote:
| > they didn't say that for _currently existing_ people
| it's better to not be existing
|
| He said the guys kids would be better off if he didn't
| have them. And basically said he had them for selfish
| reasons (kids make _your_ life better)
|
| Seems like you're the one making leaps, I read what was
| written
| 2lwxxtj wrote:
| I get the impression that you are not very happy in life.
| samr71 wrote:
| Such doom and gloom! You really believe the future is gonna
| be so bad that children would be better off not existing at
| all?
|
| The world has huge issues, sure, but it's still far better
| to be alive now than any time in human history. The only
| way the future could be worse is if this idea becomes
| mainstream and the prophecy self-fulfilling.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >The world has huge issues, sure, but it's still far
| better to be alive now than any time in human history.
| The only way the future could be worse is if this idea
| becomes mainstream and the prophecy self-fulfilling.
|
| What if automation and outsourcing to cheaper countries
| leads to a widening income/wealth gap such that you're
| always scraping by and any hiccup along the way will
| cause you to have to start depending on very unreliable
| social safety nets?
|
| I think people earning $20 an hour commuting 2 hours each
| day to work are capable of doing the calculations of
| figuring out they will probably never build wealth such
| that they don't have to worry about sacrificing a
| vacation if their kid breaks their arm or losing their
| job because their kid became sick and having no family
| around to help shoulder the burden.
|
| People's wages didn't stagnate because the idea of a
| worse future became mainstream, wages stagnated because
| the supply and demand equation for labor shifted
| negatively for wage earners. People then started thinking
| about a worse future once they saw friends and family de
| railed by unexpected medical expenses, or laid off and
| never rehired at a comparable wage, etc.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| I think this is a rather short-sighted view; The future
| is not guaranteed to be better, especially not when we
| have lots of evidence of impending (1) massive climate
| disruption (2) water shortage (3) political polarization
| (4) economic imbalance, the list goes on.
|
| Saying "the only way" the world gets worse is if we don't
| have children is to ignore the potential for all of those
| effects to grow worse. It's certainly possible that we
| may overcome them and human life will continue on its
| merry way, but it's very unreasonable to ignore all these
| difficulties and the psychological effects they can have
| on new parents.... And on new children.
|
| What would your response be to a 9 year old having an
| existential crisis about the polar bears starving to
| death because of climate change, and the implications for
| human civilization, and civilization's apparent apathy
| towards that? "Don't worry kid, just make sure you have
| children of your own and everything will work out"?
| samr71 wrote:
| All of the things you listed are solvable problems, with
| hundreds of thousands of people working tirelessly to
| solve them. Fear porn about the impending collapse of
| everything helps no one, and is the reason why that the 9
| year old is having an existential crisis about polar
| bears at all.
|
| Should we worry about these things? Absolutely! But the
| incessant hysteria is counter productive. Us ceasing
| having children in a form of civilizational suicide is
| not a solution.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| > All of the things you listed are solvable problems
| [...] But the incessant hysteria is counter productive.
| Us ceasing having children in a form of civilizational
| suicide is not a solution.
|
| I absolutely agree! I'm not an anti-natalist, nor do I
| think not having children is necessarily the correct
| choice, either morally or for these hypothetical
| childrens' well-being: my point was merely that the issue
| is more complex than "just have kids and sort the
| problems out" or "don't have any kids because these
| problems are impossible to sort out." I apologize if I
| failed in this, but I was just seeking to highlight the
| empathy needed to understand the reluctance many (myself
| included) have around the idea of having kids.
|
| Too often I think those who have reservations about
| having children are told "Oh just get over it," or
| "You're being dramatic," which does nothing to address
| the underlying concerns these would-be parents have, and
| in fact can just make those concerns worse because they
| feel like nobody is truly paying attention to those
| concerns. Which just exacerbates them.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > What would your response be to a 9 year old having an
| existential crisis about the polar bears starving to
| death because of climate change, and the implications for
| human civilization, and civilization's apparent apathy
| towards that? "Don't worry kid, just make sure you have
| children of your own and everything will work out"?
|
| Speaking as a new parent who did in fact have an
| existential crisis about this as a child, very very
| disappointed in both myself and the rest of us.
| keiferski wrote:
| Pretty much every single generation other than your parents
| (assuming you're 25-40) had a tougher time and lived in a world
| with a more uncertain future. _Every_ generation, going back
| millions of years.
| carapace wrote:
| That's not even remotely true.
|
| The vast majority of humans had very very stable futures.
| Like tens of thousands of years stable.
|
| Civilization as we know it is very very recent and unstable.
| cat199 wrote:
| > That's not even remotely true.
|
| I beg to differ - when's the last time you heard of a
| famine or major war in the 1st world? (same cannot be said
| of elsewhere, it is true)
| carapace wrote:
| > when's the last time you heard of a famine or major war
| in the 1st world?
|
| Does what we're doing (I'm Team USA) in the Middle East
| count?
|
| In re: expectations of a stable future and the pros and
| cons of modern civilization, in the USA more people have
| died in car accidents than in all the wars we've fought.
| keiferski wrote:
| The Cold War seems to have evaporated entirely from the
| collective imagination. For nearly half a century, people
| had a not unreasonable expectation that a nuke might end
| the world at any moment.
|
| Prior to that, you had WW2, the Depression, WW1, slums and
| brutal industrial factory jobs and before that mostly
| subsistence farming. The idea that life today is so
| precarious and difficult is absurd. We just aren't used to
| difficulty.
| carapace wrote:
| The Cold War is still going on.
|
| We are still at risk of nuclear destruction. Not only are
| the old weapons still around but we are making new ones
| for some crazy reason. (Check the Doomsday Clock, I'm not
| the only person who has noticed that atomic war is still
| threatening this planet.)
|
| You have to take the long view: For approximately a
| million years we lived in very stable societies (as
| judged by the artifacts and art left behind.) In fact the
| people of Sentinel Island and some other places _still_
| live this way.
|
| Very recently, since roughly 10k to 15k ago, we started
| doing agriculture and cities. Since then things have been
| rough: wars, famines, societies collapsing, etc.
|
| Despite that, in the last 400-500 years, we have
| developed _science_ and _technology_ , which has
| increased and accelerated civilization _but not
| stabilized it._
|
| Now of course _some_ people have had it pretty good for,
| say, the last century or so (I date it from the ready
| availability of hot and cold running water in the tub. If
| you can take a hot bath you 're ahead of the game, IMO.)
|
| And that's great! And more and more people are getting in
| on that, which is also great!
|
| But if you want to say, as you did, that "Pretty much
| every single generation other than your parents (assuming
| you're 25-40) had a tougher time and lived in a world
| with a more uncertain future. Every generation, going
| back millions of years." that's wrong. It's only going
| back a few thousands of years, at most, and then only for
| a small fraction of the people on Earth.
|
| That's before the problem that luxury the few are
| enjoying is bought at the cost of the life or our whole
| planet! Is it really so great after all if some people
| get to live well for a generation or two but then
| everybody (that survives) has to live in post-apocalyptic
| hell?
|
| Sentinel Island will be destroyed by the rising ocean in
| a few decades or so. The folks that have lived there for
| some 40,000 years will die or be forced to migrate.
| That's on us, not them.
| gruez wrote:
| >(Check the Doomsday Clock, I'm not the only person who
| has noticed that atomic war is still threatening this
| planet.)
|
| AFAIK in recent years it's only moving forward because of
| other man-made calamities (eg. climate change), not
| because of atomic war.
| keiferski wrote:
| You are dramatically underestimating the difficulty of
| hunter gatherer life.
| carapace wrote:
| Maybe. I'm no anthropologist. Most of what I know about
| the lives of hunter-gatherers comes from watching "The
| Gods Must Be Crazy". The !Kung family seemed pretty happy
| (before the bottle fell into their lives... but I don't
| want to spoil it. It's a great movie.)
|
| I think it's clear though that the ordering of QoL goes
| roughly:
|
| Wealthy City/Farm > Hunter-Gatherer > Poor City/Farm
|
| So for about a million years most people had it pretty
| good, then for about ten thousand years most people had
| it pretty bad, and then the last hundred years or so many
| people have gone from bad to good conditions, but many
| still endure pretty bad conditions.
|
| If we could somehow compare the subjective quality of
| life of the people of Sentinel Island and the people of
| Manhattan Island I suspect that the least happy
| Sentinelese folks would be happier than the least happy
| New Yorkers.
| thesagan wrote:
| Don't many hunter gatherers have easier lives?
|
| See: "According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated
| that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed
| more leisure than typical members of industrial society,
| and they still ate well."
|
| Citation: "Notes on the Original Affluent Society", Man
| the Hunter. R.B. Lee and I. DeVore (New York: Aldine
| Publishing Company) pp. 85-89. Published in 1966.
| hntrader wrote:
| Definitely not.
|
| The average life expectancy in Africa today, the poorest
| continent, is over 60.
|
| The average life expectancy of hunter gatherers was about
| 30, give or take 5 years.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Average life expectancies are very very deceptive. If
| lots of babies die (which was the norm for much of
| history), then it's gonna skew the mean massively
| downwards in a way that doesn't reflect the observed
| distribution, conditional on not dying as a baby.
|
| For instance, my understanding is that life expectancy at
| age 5 in both Africa and the UK are approximately equal.
| hntrader wrote:
| "approximately equal"
|
| Right, because of basic modern medical care, which hunter
| gatherers don't have, often dying of problems with their
| teeth in their 20s, untreated infections, etc.
|
| And that's only one of a deluge of reasons as to why
| hunter gatherer life was much more difficult than modern
| life, even modern life in relatively poor countries.
|
| We can have a debate about whether life is easier in
| current South Sudan versus prehistory hunter gatherer
| tribes. Beyond that there's no debate to be had.
| conductr wrote:
| > We just aren't used to difficulty
|
| This is it absolutely. We can't even fully understand how
| easy our lives are. I'm an adult with mouths to feed, yet
| both my wife and I barely know how to cook. And that's
| only our biggest problem assuming we have access to food.
| We certainly have no clue how to procure food outside of
| retail.
|
| This is part of what worries me for my kids. It's been so
| easy, the equilibrium is more difficult. As we know from
| covid, weather events, etc our whole way of life is a
| fragile house of cards.
| jankyxenon wrote:
| Stable may be correct. But part of that stability was high
| infant / child death rates and very low life expectancy.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| A good fraction of the pre-civilization humans were killed
| by a blow to the head...
| hntrader wrote:
| In historical Europe, the probability of dying due to
| skull fracture varied between 2 percent (some places in
| England), 7 percent (London) and 20 percent (Croatia).
|
| Not to mention early death from famine and disease and
| other forms of homicide.
|
| The notion that we've got it harder now is wrong on all
| counts.
|
| There's a case to be made that we've got new existential
| risks due to technological progress (climate change,
| nukes, AI), and that's accurate, but tech/civilization
| will also help us to offset other existential risks
| (asteroid impact, pathogen). So that's up for debate.
| gadders wrote:
| That's a valid perspective, but times have been a lot worse in
| the past. It's a good job our ancestors didn't think like this.
| minikites wrote:
| History is not a monotonically increasing function of
| progress. Things can and often do get worse in the short term
| and there's no reason the past can't be better than the
| present.
| gadders wrote:
| You could say now is a local minimum, but in what time
| period? Out of the last twenty years? Maybe. The last
| hundred? Probably not.
| Teever wrote:
| It's not that they didn't think like this but that they
| couldn't.
|
| Thanks to readily available and affordable birth control
| individuals have much more freedom to make reproductive
| choices that benefit themselves.
|
| What those individual freedoms do to society as a whole is
| another issue but it is entirely within the ability of
| western governments to increase birthrates through policy.
| The fact that they don't is most interesting.
| beaner wrote:
| Ehh... I wouldn't assume that's the whole reason. It's been
| known for a pretty long time how to not have a baby if you
| don't want one, physically.
|
| Two other factors are religion, and the fact that children
| are now expenses into their mid-twenties rather than
| income-generating/household-contributing in their teens.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Yeah this is huge, just 100 years back kids got married
| and worked at like 13 years old.
| conductr wrote:
| > Two other factors are religion, and the fact that
| children are now expenses into their mid-twenties rather
| than income-generating/household-contributing in their
| teens.
|
| I'd boil it down to selfishness.
|
| In the past, kids were productive assets as you
| mentioned. They were also your elder care and retirement
| plan. So having kids was a selfish act.
|
| Now, kids are liabilities and things like elder care and
| retirement is a financial consideration and people don't
| want their kids burdened by it (US culture). Also, you
| can freely live your life without kids (travel, career,
| etc). So, in that sense, not having kids is a selfish
| act.
|
| I personally feel like many of the people who say they're
| not having kids because overpopulation/fearsome of
| future/etc are just looking for a pat on the back while
| really their motivation is selfish.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| There's plenty of counterpoints to this around the world
| and including in the USA today. Our ancestors just thought
| differently about family, progeny, and themselves than we
| do, and that's fine.
| gadders wrote:
| True, birth control does make that choice easier.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| This isn't true. There were ancient, relatively effective
| methods of birth control. And if you really couldn't care
| for kids they became orphans.
|
| Also with larger extended families and closer knit
| societies many people would "gift" their kids to others who
| were barren.
|
| 5 out of my mother's 15 cousins were adopted (without their
| parents dying).
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Hey, you're dead, though I'm seeing a lot of perfectly
| fine comments from you that contribute valuable things to
| discussions. You might want to do something about that.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Thanks for letting me know. I may create a new account :)
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Following this logic, Niger must be filled with stability and
| optimism, and Norway is similar to the US in instability and
| pessimistic outlook for the future.
| rimiform wrote:
| That's a very sensible perspective. Unfortunately, you will
| probably, as most people do, change your mind about this and
| decide to have children anyway.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Austerity and cynicism dominate the US right now though.
|
| This is greatly exaggerated by news media and social media,
| especially with everyone stuck at home. The contrast between
| what I read online and what I see in the real world has never
| felt larger.
|
| Austerity refers to reduced government spending, which is the
| opposite of what we're experiencing right now. We're spending
| so much that my CPA friends are working overtime to help
| businesses figure out what to do with their stimulus money.
| Prices for goods like lumber are through the roof because
| construction demand is off the charts. My local construction
| companies don't have any availability until Q4, if they're
| taking bids at all.
|
| Obviously we have problems that need to be addressed, but the
| combination of 24/7 news media and politicians competing for
| our attention has exaggerated these issues to the point that
| we're losing our ability to put things in perspective or judge
| the absolute scale of social issues.
| ok_coo wrote:
| This is not meant to be a cynical take, but where do you see
| investment in America right now that's not being done in a
| corporation?
|
| All I see is "we can't afford to do this" while the military
| wastes trillions of dollars on pet projects.
|
| When I look at how other countries treat their citizens, I
| can't help but think of the guy who calls us, "human capital
| stock."
|
| That, IMHO, is how the U.S. views its citizens.
| r00fus wrote:
| > We're spending so much that my CPA friends are working
| overtime to help businesses figure out what to do with their
| stimulus money.
|
| So really what you and @lanai are talking about seem to
| identify you both are in completely different strata.
|
| As the US experiences more and more social/economic
| stratification, these separate realities become more
| divergent (canonical YMMV).
|
| It's peak ignorance to pretend everyone has the same
| conditions as you. Stats show many people are suffering.
| EVdotIO wrote:
| This is pretty much the crux of why we see unrest and
| increased polarization. There are the afore mentioned CPAs
| with just too much stimulus money to spend, people buying
| houses faster than they can be built, or the high net
| wealth individuals that might as well be aliens on mars
| (and coincidentally can't wait to do). Meanwhile people are
| falling deeper behind on rent payments with delinquency
| figures at 25% in NYC, unemployment figures hovering around
| 10%, small businesses forced into insolvency, and a
| radically different landscape when this is all said and
| done.
|
| Those at the very top made out like a bandit, and there are
| a cohort of the PMC that will to be fine. For this group to
| be so out of touch with reality to downplay or outright
| ignore these issues is a direct path to a very angry
| segment on society.
| mywittyname wrote:
| What I experience in real life is pretty bad. My extended
| family went from being really close and compassionate to
| hateful and unable to be in the room with others.
|
| Your world might be nice, but not everyone else's is.
| seneca wrote:
| > My extended family went from being really close and
| compassionate to hateful and unable to be in the room with
| others.
|
| I can't speak to your personal situation, but from what
| I've seen this is usually driven by the exact trends the
| person you're responding to is pointing out. Exaggerated
| media and politics.
| oflannabhra wrote:
| (I'm sorry about your family. I'm not trying to discount
| your experiences, just bring the GP comment proper
| context). I don't think you understood the parent comment.
| They weren't saying that everything is rosy, they were
| saying that the economic doom and gloom portrayed in the
| media (especially surrounding COVID) does not make the
| current economic reality. The context was not social
| polarization.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| Ultimately people are the cause and our media is a
| symptom. Folks want to hear doom, outrage, oversimplified
| & radical takes, and the reinforcement of their beliefs.
| That sells. Supply and demand. So your outlet can play
| ball or get steamrolled by someone who will. I think
| mywittyname is right to focus on the people, not the
| media symptom.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| I'd argue doom and gloom isn't what people _want_ to
| hear.
|
| It's a weakness in our psychology, we're entertained by
| drama and it sells well.
| jseliger wrote:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html
| foolinaround wrote:
| Oh well... I was expecting there would be a baby boom,
| considering all the folks that are 'working' from home, and was
| thinking that they would get 'busy'...
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| This is going to have a huge impact on colleges and universities
| in ~18 years. Imagine an 8% decrease in high school graduates in
| one year, on top of the already projected drop in high school
| graduates over the next 10 years. The decline in high school
| graduates over the next 10 years is largely due to the drop in
| birthrate during the 2008/9 economic crash and recession.
| lkj45ygw wrote:
| New York Times needs to be banned on HN.
|
| It is pure nazi propaganda and has nothing to do with startups or
| code.
|
| Why is New York Times allowed on HN?
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| This site is about anything that's intellectually stimulating,
| and isn't limited to startups or code(though such topics are
| always welcome).
| lkj45ygw wrote:
| This article brought to you by the Branch Covidian's Ministry of
| Propaganda and public enlightenment.
| theNJR wrote:
| This study seems relevant
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023121996854
|
| > Fewer young adults are engaging in casual sexual intercourse
| now than in the past, but the reasons for this decline are
| unknown.
|
| And this recently discussed article
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/opinion/sunday/endocrine-...
|
| > Scientists are concerned by falling sperm counts and declining
| egg quality. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals may be the problem.
| rednerrus wrote:
| Didn't a study just come out showing that casual sex is
| declining because kids have other things (mostly video games)
| to do?
| Frost1x wrote:
| While endocrine disruption or inhibitors are very likely a
| factor to blame, I think we also have cultural and
| socioeconomic factors compounding the problem. There are so
| many who just don't want to deal with the current dating and
| casual sex culture. The rewards for time investment and effort
| just aren't that high compared to alternatives available to
| many, compounded by other factors of daily life competing for
| that time.
|
| In heterosexual groups, it's challenging for many men (from my
| experience) who are interested in casual sex but the effort is
| simply too high for them to pursue so they largely just check-
| out (I know quite a few heterosexual males who just feel like
| it isn't worth their time anymore). In other groups like the
| LGBTQ+ arena, specifically gay men, it's not nearly as
| difficult to find the sexual reward many seek and as a result,
| you'll find casual sex seems quite high. I have quite a few
| friends here as well and they continue to seek and find causal
| sexual encounters, dates, etc. or at least they say.
|
| I'd be very interested to see if any empirical data exists that
| shows casual sex rates over time, normalized, and broken into
| heterosexual and non-heterosexual groups. If there's a similar
| decline in both groups then I suspect endocrine disruption may
| be the real problem. If there's less correlation, I'd tend to
| think much is culturally driven.
| com2kid wrote:
| Our entire society has been flooded with low effort high
| (short term) reward entertainment activities.
|
| Psychology has been weaponized to optimize addictive behavior
| loops. Instead of going outside and talking to people being
| the norm, now people have to make a concerted effort to pull
| themselves away from their psychologically addictive pocket
| sized happy fun device, convince others to do the same, and
| then arrange a time to go out.
|
| Socializing is messy, painful, and difficult. But for the
| majority of human civilization, there weren't very many
| alternatives for entertainment!
| captainredbeard wrote:
| > who are interested in casual sex but the effort is simply
| too high for them to pursue
|
| They are outcompeted due to a lack of initiative and
| willpower; that's evolution doing its job.
| mdorazio wrote:
| This comment is needlessly flippant. The move to online
| dating (and social media profiles in general) has radically
| shifted how dating works. A quick look at any research from
| OK Cupid or others who investigate perceptions, ratings,
| etc. very clearly shows that it's become a meat market
| where a small number of men get a disproportionate amount
| of the available dates. Before online dating, expectations
| were generally more in line with reality and dating was far
| less of a chore.
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| Evolution is not prescriptive. Just because a certain
| outcome is favored by evolution doesn't mean that outcome
| is _good_.
| xeromal wrote:
| I don't think the poster said it was good, just that it
| was working as expected. The people with less willpower
| get filtered out
| tomjen3 wrote:
| >Poverty no doubt discourages marriage, but doesn't always
| prevent it. And it seems to be positively favourable to
| generation. A half-starved Highland woman may bear more than 20
| children, while many a pampered fine lady is incapable of
| bearing any and is generally exhausted by two or three.
| Barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare
| among those of lower station.
|
| >Luxury may inflame in the fair sex the passion for enjoyment,
| but it seems always to weaken--and often to destroy--the powers
| of generation
|
| Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
|
| Given that he wrote that when North America was a rebellious
| colony where no chemicals were in common use and that we
| essentially all much, much, much richer than the rich people he
| talks about here it seems more likely to be something
| fundamentally human.
| fullshark wrote:
| Table 2 has several hypothetical factors that seem more likely
| culprits
| keiferski wrote:
| Birth rates have a much larger effect on society than I think
| people realize. I recently read _Shall the Religious Inherit the
| Earth?_ by Eric Kaufmann. It makes a pretty strong argument that
| contrary to the widespread assumption that everyone will just
| become an atheist, the world will actually become more religious,
| almost entirely because of birth rates.
|
| _In this 2010 book, Kaufmann argued that the answer to the
| question raised in the title is in the affirmative because
| demographic realities pose real challenges to the assumption of
| the inevitability of secular and liberal progress. He observed
| that devout factions tend to have a significant fertility
| advantage over their more moderate counterparts and the non-
| religious. For instance, white Catholic women in France have on
| average half a child more than their white secular counterparts
| while the Amish in the United States have three to four times
| more children than their fellow Christians on average. Highly
| religious groups tend to isolate themselves from the secularizing
| effects of modern mainstream Western society, making it more
| likely that the children will retain their parents ' faiths. At
| the same time, secular people generally have rather low fertility
| rates by comparison for a variety of reasons, such as
| materialism, individualism, the preference for the here and now,
| feminism, environmentalism, or general pessimism. Kaufmann
| projected that secularism will have a mixed future in Europe. It
| will remain strong in most Catholic countries, notably Ireland
| and Spain, but has essentially ground to a halt in Protestant
| Europe and in France, and will falter in Northwestern Europe by
| mid-century. He told Mercator Net that the only way to buckle the
| trend involves "a creed that touches the emotional registers",
| which "can lure away the children of fundamentalists" and "a
| repudiation of multiculturalism." He suggested that "secular
| nationalism" and moderate religion associated with the nation-
| state could be part of the mix, but these traditions have been
| losing support at a considerable rate._
|
| _He observed that moderate faith of the Abrahamic variety is
| under pressure from both secularists and fundamentalists as they
| find themselves living in the secularizing societies of the
| West.[13] If it were only true that the religious were having
| more children than secular people, Kaufmann argues that the
| effects of the incoming demographic transformation would only be
| national, but because those who are having the most children tend
| to be intensely religious, he predicted that there would also be
| ramifications for international relations. However, Kaufmann
| rejected the increasingly popular notion that Islam will become
| the dominant religion in Europe by the end of the twenty-first
| century. Rather, Muslims would stabilize at around a fifth of the
| European population by 2100._
| yannick wrote:
| the force that keeps humans bound to earth won't be gravity, but
| demographics.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Birthrates are a powerful, but lagging/post-hoc indicator of
| public policy effects. It's worth noting that we tend to
| associate high birthrates with poverty and negative social
| outcomes. Except, when rates are low we (western countries) use
| immigration from high-birthrate societies to shore up the
| population replacement rate, as the article notes. When you look
| at who is having kids in the US and Canada, the families, (or
| specifically, women) who have 2 or more children are either
| exceptionally wealthy (90th+ pc) or exceptionally poor.
|
| I'd speculate this is because if you are either rich or poor you
| have stability in that your life circumstances aren't going to
| change that radically, and hypothesize it's mainly educated
| middle class people who are having kids below the population
| replacement rate, if at all, because their lives do not find a
| relatively stable equilibrium. The mix of the promise of upward
| mobility that is always _just_ out of reach, and the risk of
| "losing it all," creates a condition of constant low-level stress
| similar to other species that do not breed in captivity.
|
| If you have the Malthusian or environmentalist worldview that
| fewer people is better, this is a positive (if cynical)
| development. But even that's not going to work because public
| debt and entitlements mean shoring up a replacement rate
| population with immigration from high-birthrate societies. The
| other thing is the people who are having kids create even more
| polarized opportunity, where the life outcomes of a 3-kid wealthy
| home vs. the outcomes of a 3-kid working class or public-
| dependent home are going to be alien to each other. An
| (increasingly rare) person from a single-kid middle class home is
| not only a social minority, but has to create more of their own
| opportunities because they are an outsider to both societies.
|
| IMO, the covid baby bust is only a symptom of a much larger and
| longer term macro-decline, and just the beginning of the real and
| inevitable consequences of the post-war baby-boom generation.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > An (increasingly rare) person from a single-kid middle class
| home is not only a social minority, but has to create more of
| their own opportunities because they are an outsider to both
| societies.
|
| I don't follow: is a single kid from a middle class family an
| outsider to kids from other middle class families where they
| have 2 or 3 kids? I mean, I understand that middle class is
| neither rich nor poor, but what's the difference for a unique
| child compared to middle class families with serveral kids?
|
| Do the siblings typically provide opportunities for their
| brothers/sisters? (I'm personally launching atm a new endeavor
| with my brother but I don't see that as particularly common).
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| I'm also not sure what they're getting at but here's my
| anecdote FWIW.
|
| I never fit in well with the other welfare kids that came
| from families with many kids. Nor did I fit in with the
| middle class and up kids always flexing their Nikes,
| vacations, cars, and other vapid things I could never dream
| of getting.
|
| My circumstance did allow me to mingle with the various
| classes and see how they live and succeed. The poor families
| rapidly introduce the kids to low pay manual labor jobs in
| grocery stores, farms and the like. The better off families
| got their kids fun summer jobs near their summer homes
| working banana stands or giving guided tours.
|
| The differences become even more stark in college, for those
| who went that is. The relationships gained from introductions
| made by the well offs family and friends pay massive
| dividends immediately if you speak the right language. By
| which I mean one doesn't speak like a poor person. Between
| private job offers, highly paid internships, and favor
| trading the poor kids don't just have the deck stacked
| against them, they're playing with the cards and chips
| that've fallen off the table, but only against the other
| poors.
|
| The one constant between classes is drug use. There's _a lot_
| of drug use in all these groups, even the DARE /ROTC/AP kids.
| The difference is that the poor kids self medicating away
| their shit hand, while the rich kids are rebelling against
| their parents, self medicating their home problems like abuse
| and emotional neglect, or trying to get an edge in
| classes/work. Rarely do well off kids fall into hardcore
| addiction. I've seen a lot of kids taken to very expensive
| rehab clinics multiple times. Poor kids don't get these
| vacations and access to world class shrinks.
|
| Siblings tend to follow the familial mean. Sure sometimes a
| rich family has a complete failure of a child, but most of
| the time they're mediocre middle management coasting through
| life on their laurels continuing the time honored tradition
| of trading favors with and smoothing over the rough patches
| for their kids and siblings. Siblings in poor families do the
| same things, but with limited means comes limited success.
| motohagiography wrote:
| To clarify, if you are a 3+ kid poor person, you will come
| from a family that is likely very poor. If you are a 3+ kid
| rich person, your parents are probably 95th percentile.
|
| If you aren't from the neighbourhood for the first group,
| you're not trusted, and if you don't just _know_ certain
| things, you aren 't trusted by the second, because each group
| quietly assumes you're really part of the other. It's what we
| used to call class, and that's what I meant by being alien to
| each other.
|
| There are exceptions. The most interesting ones are religious
| communities. Few people who belong to a church would accept
| being called poor no matter what their income was, and
| religious people with middle class jobs have lots of kids as
| well.
|
| The other anomaly is the new institutional who have the iron
| stability of things like academic tenure, teachers unions,
| municipal and state employees, who only receive that
| stability at an age just as their fertility starts to wane,
| and usually after sacrificing it to get there.
|
| It would be hard to argue that public policy has been
| anything but anti-natal for the last 50 years.
| logshipper wrote:
| I could not agree more.
|
| Whereas historically having kids used to be a "social" decision
| in various respects, it has now become a socio-economic
| decision for the reasons you point out.
|
| If anything, I would argue that the economic shock of the
| pandemic (aside from the horror stories you hear from WFH
| parents who have kids) and the inequality it has exposed in our
| financial systems has cemented the idea for a lot of middle
| class millenials to have no kids/fewer kids.
| treis wrote:
| It was always a socio-economic decision. Kids were your
| retirement plan before we came up with things like 401ks.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| This is a very interesting perspective to me, because I
| know it's relatively common in non-Western (or maybe just
| non-American?) cultures that parents move back in with
| their kids when they get old, or more generally that
| extended familial units are far more cohesive than they are
| in the States.
|
| ....Which then means your extended family (and own
| children) are indeed a 'retirement plan', because the
| expectation is that they'll be around to support you when
| you're unable to support yourself.
|
| But the intensely individualistic American lifestyle
| doesn't lend itself to that thinking very well, so there's
| less incentive for folks to have kids for their own
| interest.
|
| (Indeed, as a mid-20s couple, we're more often told the
| ways in which children _limit_ the lives of the parents,
| rather than augment them.)
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| I have neither the "Malthusian or environmentalist worldview"
| nor the opposite, which seems to be dangerously close to a
| "nationalist or eugenics worldview". In other words: any
| grievances about birth rate on a population-wide level run the
| risk of spurning legislation or other changes with the purpose
| of forcing (with varying level of vehemence) individuals to
| make reproductive choices they otherwise wouldn't.
|
| Specifically, it's hard to interpret the universal drop in
| birth rates among societies as they advance on anything but
| women exercising their newfound freedom not to have children.
| Many attempts to reverse the trend will thus look to reverse
| these changes.
|
| To be sure, there are other policy ideas one could advance, and
| some examples of them working well, such as universal
| childcare, mandatory parental leave for both genders, and some
| others that share the distinction of having zero chance to
| become law in the US.
|
| I'm taking the liberty to advocate for ignoring any population-
| wide concerns about birth rates because even in the most
| extreme cases such as Germany or Japan, and even moreso in the
| US where it's relatively mild, the effect just isn't strong
| enough to lead to any insurmountable problems. Given a bit more
| automation and medical advances that keep people not just alive
| but fit, the problems of an ageing population seem to be
| solvable, especially as long as there is still significant will
| to immigrate, which does not seem likely to abate.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Perhaps this is a marker of the divide in worldviews.
|
| If we can't develop a country and a society people willingly
| want to have kids in, what is it for?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| People do want to have kids, but the physical process of
| going through pregnancy and birth is brutal and dangerous.
| The people who have to do it quite rationally don't want to
| do it four times in the same decade once they have any
| other choice, even if it would be socially optimal. The
| best thing we can do at this point is develop the
| technology to create babies outside of human wombs.
| laurent92 wrote:
| > when birthrates are low we use immigration
|
| This is why I don't believe in ecology. Every 5% we save on
| water, is being used by our leaders to stuff more population on
| the same land.
|
| It defeats the purpose of saving: Public policies cancel
| individual efforts, such as my friends who chose to have no
| kids for ecology.
|
| Capitalism is a way of forwarding global constraints to
| individuals, and exponential house prices communicates that the
| territory cannot survive with more people. Yet, not only do we
| increase population (so all those "no kids" friends are up for
| disappointment), but we bring those newcomers to the levels of
| consumption of middle classes, using lowered prices so they can
| afford 70% of mid-class consumption levels.
|
| Since our leaders break the relationship between environmental
| constraints and costs, by offering free housing, food and
| subsidized public services, people believe it is ok to be 120
| people per square kilometer, and we can afford to love and
| welcome more people. No! Each additional individual emits
| greenhouse gases! We're already emitting ~3x the affordable
| rate! We should have taken the naturally decreasing population
| to smoothly become more sustainable, but our government decided
| to add 0,5-1% population per year, artificially! Our land
| _can't afford more_ people!
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| The only solution is having fewer babies worldwide. National
| borders don't stop people from moving where opportunity is.
| jtbayly wrote:
| > public debt and entitlements mean shoring up a replacement
| rate population with immigration from high-birthrate societies
|
| There are very few of these left, and the ones that still exist
| are also in declining fertility, even if still above
| replacement.
| [deleted]
| boh wrote:
| Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US anyway)
| is highly dependent on population growth. Many existing
| entitlements were created during periods of uncommon birth-
| rates with the expectation that the babies being born will grow
| and reproduce at the same rate as their parents. This growth
| hasn't materialized, and much of the existing growth can be
| attributed to immigrant inflows. Regardless of the
| environmental arguments against overpopulation, we are living
| in a competitive world, and historically, declining birth-rates
| have often not been favorable for sustaining sociopolitical
| influence and relevance or economic growth and stability. We
| are however, living in a unique time were robots and AI can
| potentially pick up the slack for whatever losses of
| productivity a lower population may cause. We will however
| still have to operate in a period of growing stagnation and
| inequality. Wealth will be less available through incomes (as
| it already is), and inequality, without the proper counter
| measures, can inflate to the levels more familiar in Jane
| Austen's time. You have more economic growth if you give 1
| million people $100 dollars (since they are more likely to
| spend it on goods/services) vs giving $100 million to one
| person (who will likely spend the bulk of their money on
| financial instruments). An economy needs many people to spend
| money to grow, we're now expected to have less people with less
| money to spend.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >You have more economic growth if you give 1 million people
| $100 dollars (since they are more likely to spend it on
| goods/services) vs giving $100 million to one person (who
| will likely spend the bulk of their money on financial
| instruments).
|
| The US spends the majority of it's Federal Budget on giving
| small amounts of money to the non-rich, to the order of
| trillions of dollars per year.
|
| Also, when someone puts money into a financial instrument,
| that money usually flows immediately into productive use.
| Capital flows are attributed with about 30% of the economic
| growth over the last century, which is a huge increase in
| quality of life, especially for the most poor.
| imtringued wrote:
| >Also, when someone puts money into a financial instrument,
| that money usually flows immediately into productive use.
|
| Yes but only under the assumption that aggregate demand
| always exceeds supply, which isn't true nowadays and that's
| why the economy is broken.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US
| anyway) is highly dependent on population growth
|
| It's not the financial system, it's the underlying economy.
| Back in the day, people had to have kids so there was someone
| to take care of them in their old age. The financial system
| abstract, but does not eliminate, that structural feature of
| the underlying economy. You still need young bodies producing
| goods and performing services for the elderly non-working
| population.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| > We are however, living in a unique time were robots and AI
| can potentially pick up the slack for whatever losses of
| productivity a lower population may cause.
|
| Productivity growth is currently the lowest it's been since
| before the industrial revolution. AI and robotics may be
| revolutionizing a few specific domains. But there's no
| evidence that they're replacing the need for human labor any
| time soon.
|
| That probably will happen at some point. But probably not in
| our lifetimes or even our children's lifetime. We still need
| able-bodied workers to run the economy.
| rsync wrote:
| "Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US
| anyway) is highly dependent on population growth."
|
| I came to this discussion ctrl-f'ing for "deflation" and
| while I got zero hits, your comment is close enough ...
|
| I will abstract one level deeper and rephrase what you said
| as:
|
| "Much of the financial system is highly dependent on economic
| growth."
|
| There continues to be fervent discussion of the results of QE
| over the last 10 years and the results of various covid
| stimulus packages and how these things could be inflationary,
| etc., etc.
|
| Some of this may come to pass - we may, indeed, find
| ourselves in geographic or temporal pockets of inflation -
| possibly very high inflation.
|
| Make no mistake, however: the world we are living in is
| _massively deflationary_ and even dramatic and innovative
| attempts to maintain (low) inflation are barely keeping us
| above water ...
| imtringued wrote:
| If we were truly suffering from an aging society then where
| is all the inflation? Where are all the rich old people
| spending their money but not finding enough workers to do
| everything they saved their money up for?
|
| It's probably because retirement has to be financed by the
| individuals themselves. Nowadays retirement means cutting
| spending today so that you can spend tomorrow. There are
| rich old people who aren't cutting down on spending but
| simply keep saving their wealth and there are poor old
| people who are cutting down on spending to build up
| savings, even though they are officially above the
| retirement age. This leads to a savings glut which is
| something you cannot fix by adding even more money into
| asset markets.
| agent008t wrote:
| What do you mean? Inflation can be easily created - just
| create more dollars and credit them to people's bank
| accounts; you will soon see all kinds of prices going up.
| brandmeyer wrote:
| If this was true, then the monetary policies of the 2008
| financial crash and the 2020 pandemic would both have
| created consumer price inflation. They haven't. We've
| seen some asset price inflation instead. In effect we did
| create a bunch of dollars and credited them to people's
| home equity and mutual funds... where it just sat there
| doing a whole bunch of nothing to consumer prices and
| wages.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| 2008 policies wasn't that effective at putting money in
| people's pockets though. 2020 was more effective, but
| probably to early to tell if it is inflationary until
| lockdowns go away and people have more options to spend?
| agent008t wrote:
| Take it to the extreme. What do you suppose would happen
| if every American household is credited with a billion
| dollars tomorrow?
| toss1 wrote:
| Good thought experiment
|
| Not nearly as much inflation as you might think
|
| Most of everyone's newfound Billion would sit idle
|
| The inflation would come from the $200K/year everyone was
| spending, as in if you just gave everyone
| $200K*expectedRemainingLifeExpectancy, you'd get the same
| consumer inflation
|
| The extra billions would go into inflating assets.
|
| The key concept here is velocity of money - really
| interesting concept that surprisingly (at least at first
| for me) falls out of the formulas in Econ1 classes. It
| does relatively equate to the actual turnover of a piece
| of currency, as in how many times does that George
| Washington bill change hands in the year after you spend
| it?
|
| The key policy hack is to give help to people who will
| SPEND the money, not to banks and corps who will just
| park it in investments.
|
| That gets the multiplier effect you need out of crashes.
| 0xfaded wrote:
| Unless everyone moves to protect their new found billion
| by buying assets, in which case asset prices shoot the
| roof. This is not a problem, since most assets these days
| are unproductive, and like you say, no one would notice a
| difference in their day to day lives. The one place
| people would notice is housing.
|
| The fix is to see somehow make houses a toxic asset that
| cost exactly the value the provide in the form of a roof,
| and no more.
| toss1 wrote:
| >> somehow make houses a toxic asset that cost exactly
| the value the provide in the form of a roof, and no more.
|
| Wow, that seems like a plan just bulging with answers to
| the question: "What Could Go Wrong?". Yikes
|
| Pretty clearly, rent control doesn't work either, it just
| creates two distorted markets. Homeless shelters don't
| work except for a few cold nights. Housing projects don't
| usually create good conditions either.
|
| With housing, the problem is like cars - there is no
| answer to "what is best?" because everyone needs/wants
| something different. It is not just 'transportation' or
| just 'a roof and walls'. I want a sportscar and a 3-bay
| garage to work on it; you want a pickup truck to haul
| bursh and supplies for the small cabin you want, and That
| Guy wants just a lot of Lyft credits and airline miles
| and a bedroom in a shared apartment because he's rarely
| there...
|
| It might be better to approach the demand side, just
| ensure that the regional minimum wages are enough that a
| full time job is over the poverty level, so people can
| afford to get housed.
|
| Edit: Moreover, and maybe more on point:
|
| Housing costs are MANY more things than a mere dry bed,
| hot shower, and place to cook. Housing is different for
| everyone, from individuals to families. And the cost
| includes everything -- the rawaccommodations, the
| quality, the environment & neighborhood, the convenience,
| the school district, the expectation that more housing
| and/or amenities and/or jobs will or won't be built or
| destroyed in the future, and more.
|
| And so the solution is to either ignore all of that, or
| destroy it?
|
| Moreover, how would you even do it?
| mikem170 wrote:
| Fiddling with the demand side causes problems.
|
| Better would be to lift the restrictions on supply,
| loosen the zoning laws.
|
| /Soapbox (not aimed at you): I've been reading zoning
| regulations in several localities. "Land of the free" my
| ass! More like control and conformity. It doesn't make
| sense to me why accessory dwelling units are not allowed
| in areas with high demand, or more duplexes, triplexes,
| and walkups. There's no safety issues involved. It's
| simply greedy property owners imposing on others because
| they are selfish and can get away with it.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| You can call it selfish. But a city becomes a crowded
| warren without any rules. What is the middle ground?
| imtringued wrote:
| It's the obvious solution. There is a problem with a lack
| of jobs in rural communities. These people need a
| temporary solution that lets them get back to their feet.
| Doing demand side stimulus does help them but in a
| completely different way and this has absolutely nothing
| to do with the housing market which is the biggest
| concern right now.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| The economy isn't a linear response system. Thought
| experiments about extremes tell us little or nothing
| about non-extreme areas of the domain.
| tomp wrote:
| > If this was true, then the monetary policies of the
| 2008 financial crash and the 2020 pandemic would both
| have created consumer price inflation.
|
| Not really, as this post explains:
| https://www.lynalden.com/money-printing/
|
| TL;DR: QE is mostly meant for banks, it was used to
| increase bank reserves (as banks were forced to do by the
| regulators), and didn't substantially increase the amount
| of money available in the economy. But this time (COVID-
| stimulus) might be different.
| dantheman wrote:
| Have you seen the stock market, housing, and education --
| there is a huge amount of inflation. Technology is
| keeping it in check for a lot of consumer goods but the
| dollar has lost a huge amount of its value.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| You're forgetting the war backed petrodollar
| willcipriano wrote:
| Thought experiment: You print a trillion dollar bill and
| throw it in a underground vault. You look around. "Hey no
| inflation" so you print some more. You keep this up for a
| while. Years pass and someone finds the vault and begins
| to spend the money inside, what happens?
|
| Right now much of that printed money is sitting in stocks
| and bonds, what happens when that is no longer a great
| place to be? What if those dollars decide they want to be
| used to buy say houses, instead of bonds?
| 015a wrote:
| Exactly this; the Fed has been printing like crazy, but
| the new money has relatively low velocity. Velocity is
| required for inflation, not just the money itself.
|
| Look at stock market prices of the past ten years; its
| the largest bull market in US history. The US Dollar
| isn't getting inflated by the printing; the stock market
| is.
| imtringued wrote:
| You know, the idea that we have run out of profitable
| investments is absurd when you consider the massive
| housing shortage in major cities. Is the truth that we
| simply banned all those investments and companies like
| Uber are trying to work around that backwards
| legislation?
| nradov wrote:
| Those dollars have been used to buy houses. Residential
| real estate prices are up in most areas.
| frongpik wrote:
| There's too few building permits being issued these days.
| dv_dt wrote:
| In 2008 and really also in 2020, the bulk of the created
| dollars wasn't given to people where it might create
| consumer price inflation, by a vast degree it was
| allocated at the top. There it is creating asset price
| inflation local to the place of major injection.
|
| It's a poor stimulus effect if one is trying to use it to
| move the economy.
| vp8989 wrote:
| "where it just sat there doing a whole bunch of nothing
| to consumer prices and wages."
|
| Your primary residence should be thought of as a
| consumption item, whether you rent or own. If homes cost
| more to buy or rent since the QE (and they do) then we
| absolutely have had consumer price inflation.
| imtringued wrote:
| Yes, but you have to give the dollars to the right
| people.
| boh wrote:
| Having things cost more isn't an issue if the economy
| grows at relatively the same rate as the nation's money
| supply. For the economy to be considered inflationary,
| the money supply has to outgrow economic growth. The OP
| is making the argument (at least how I interpret it) that
| economic growth has been stagnant, and that the money
| supply hasn't been effectively put to work in the real
| economy. The US inflation rates are more a reflection of
| central bank activity vs the actual economy (which is
| deflationary).
| shortandsweet wrote:
| Why do you feel we're living in deflationary times?
| deelowe wrote:
| Because we are. Without taking action to curb it, the US
| will start to see deflation take hold. This is due to an
| overall aging demographic who are beginning to leave the
| workforce, an overall increase in savings/investment
| across the population, lowered rates of consumption, the
| younger demographic having less children, higher rates of
| education and on and on.
|
| This has already begun to in both Germany and Japan. In
| the former, they've been able to curb things through
| government intervention. Japan on the other hand has
| really struggled.
| pojzon wrote:
| On the contrary the price of up-keeping a household has
| increased dramatically.
|
| 30-40y ago it was not uncommon for a single pension to
| cover all expenses of:
|
| - food
|
| - car or two
|
| - paying a mortage
|
| - having 4 kids going to school
|
| - other household expenses
|
| - saving up money
|
| /
|
| Currently it is not possible. How in such a case do you
| still think we live in deflation times?
|
| I would rather say that "some things" became cheaper due
| to technology advancements, but common things inflated so
| drastically, its literally impossible for young people to
| start families with sustainable life.
| deelowe wrote:
| A fairly simplistic empirical examination of the monetary
| policy since 2009 proves this:
|
| - Historically low mortgage rates
|
| - Decreasing bond yields
|
| - Increasing withdrawals from 401k and other retirement
| funds
|
| - Increased savings rates for the younger demographic
|
| - Reduction in consumer spending
|
| - Over a decade of QE
| lurquer wrote:
| Don't mean to butt in, but personally, the fact that I'm
| typing this on a piece of $300 hardware (phone) that
| would have cost millions in the 80's, hundreds of
| thousands in the 90's, and definitely over a thousand in
| the 00's is a good indicator.
| u801e wrote:
| I think computer hardware is one of the few things that
| decreased in price over time. The price of most other
| good and services has definitely increased since the
| '80s.
| Supermancho wrote:
| And despite the same technological improvements, gasoline
| is decisively more expensive. Technology is purely
| deflationary, so the situation with phone cost isn't very
| telling. What is more impactful is the cost of phone
| service vs median income across those decades, despite
| technology's deflationary forces.
| nradov wrote:
| Gasoline pump prices are highly impacted by taxes and
| regulations so those don't tell us much about core
| inflation or deflation. Look at the spot price of crude
| oil on international markets. The price today is still
| well below previous peaks.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Been to the grocery store, ordered takeout or tried to
| buy a house lately? The prices of electronics
| (calculators, watches) fell consistently throughout the
| 70s which was a period of very high inflation. You can't
| cherry pick one sector.
| lurquer wrote:
| Of course.
|
| It is very difficult to get a good number across all
| sectors. Despite my post, I'm not all that convinced we
| are in a deflationary period. The bell-weather asset for
| me would be Gold, and its price since I've been alive
| wouldn't make me lean towards deflation.
|
| If anything would, I suppose it would be the number of
| hours worked. That is, how much labor does it take to
| support a reasonable lifestyle. In my experience -- and
| I'm an old geezer, so take this with a grain of salt --
| it seems like a lazy bastard can get by in this world a
| lot easier than 100 years ago. The degree of manual back-
| breaking labor that went into earning a dollar has
| decreased significantly. I don't know how that would get
| figured in.
| nradov wrote:
| Gold prices aren't highly correlated with inflation so
| that would be a poor indicator. If you look at the actual
| historical data, gold isn't a very effective inflation
| hedge.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> It is very difficult to get a good number across all
| sectors.
|
| That's what cost of living indexes are for.
|
| >> The bell-weather asset for me would be Gold
|
| You probably mean to say gold futures or gold-based
| derivatives. There are more people who think they own
| "gold" than there is physical gold on this planet. Unless
| you have a bar in your hand, you own a contract tied to
| the price of gold, ie paper.
| ryder9 wrote:
| that's economies of scale and manufacturing momentum,
| nothing to do with deflation
| newsclues wrote:
| Exactly. Just because tech is cheaper doesn't mean food
| or my cost of living has decreased.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I also would like to hear rsync's answer. But I'll make a
| guess:
|
| The (world) population is no longer growing (much). But
| productivity growth hasn't stopped. The result is that
| stuff gets cheaper, that is, the same number of dollars
| buys more. That's deflation.
|
| Worse, we've gotten to the point where many people have
| what they need - not necessarily everything they want,
| but most of what they need. (I'm not going to buy twice
| as much food if my salary doubles. I'm not going to drive
| twice as many cars. I'm not going to buy a house that's
| twice as big. I'd use almost all the money to pay off
| debt and to invest.) That makes it hard to create
| inflation in the basic stuff, because you can't make
| demand exceed supply.
| treis wrote:
| >The result is that stuff gets cheaper, that is, the same
| number of dollars buys more. That's deflation.
|
| It's more about the number of dollars out there.
| Fractional reserve means that a dollar saved leads to
| dollars being created. Boomers saving up for retirement
| meant lots of dollars being created. Boomers withdrawing
| and buying stuff means lots of dollars will be destroyed.
| Fewer dollars means dollars become more valuable i.e.
| deflation.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _however: the world we are living in is massively
| deflationary and even dramatic and innovative attempts to
| maintain (low) inflation are barely keeping us above water_
|
| That reflection isn't looking down at the surface of the
| water, but rather up at the air that we need to head
| towards to stop drowning. Monetary inflation is a large
| part of what's killing the middle class. All that
| offshoring was supposed to cause lower prices to compensate
| for decreased need for domestic labor. Instead a whole
| bunch of monetary inflation was induced to force everyone
| to keep working the same amount, at jobs that no longer
| exist. As long as the Fed continues with its maladaptive
| policy that is directly opposed to technological progress,
| productivity gains will continue to accrue to mainly the
| upper class.
| yortpyperty wrote:
| As a new father, I share this perspective. To get an anecdotal
| sense of our financial struggle, we have 2-4x the net worth
| that my parents when they were our age, but cannot afford the
| same house that I grew up in and doubt we ever will.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| The exact house or equivalent in a similarly populated area
| as the one your parents bought in? If the former, I imagine
| it's because the area has developed significantly since.
| yortpyperty wrote:
| Exact house.
| IkmoIkmo wrote:
| Some contend that this isn't a sign of poverty but rather a
| sign of wealth.
|
| i.e., suppose every consumption good becomes 10x as cheap
| overnight. Cars, food, phones, clothes, travel by air,
| electricity, movies, music.
|
| What would happen to home prices? Well, it's likely they'd
| skyrocket. All the additional disposable income has to flow
| somewhere, to some asset, and that's often real estate.
|
| There's some indication that that's been happening. Of course
| there's many other stories in real estate which clearly
| indicates we're less well off than before, particularly
| certain groups.
|
| But there's also many indications we're better off, but
| simply spending more of our money on RE, because in part, we
| can, because in part, we want to.
|
| For example, compare the average home size (square footage)
| in 1950 to 2020 and anywhere inbetween, it's a pretty
| straight line that ends up a 2.5x increase.
|
| Then compare the average persons per home, it decreased from
| about 3.4 to 2.5, in large part to the large number of
| single-person household, a luxury not affordable in the
| 1950s, especially not to women in a much more patriarchal
| society than today.
|
| This means we've seen a tremendous increase in the square
| foot per person. That's a measure of wealth. The fact home
| prices skyrocketed due to the demand for these luxuries, and
| the (by definition) ability for Americans to afford to push
| prices to these levels, should not necessarily be seen as an
| affordability crisis, but rather as an indication of wealth.
|
| Yes, if prices of bread skyrocketed and we were all consuming
| less because of it, that's poverty. But if the average bread
| consumption per household grew by 2.5x, and the average
| number of people eating that bread in the household dropped
| by 25%, then you can't quite say that on average we're less
| well-off, bread-wise.
|
| And homes aren't the same as in the 1950s either. Today's
| homes are well-equipped with many luxuries and comforts.
| Finally, high prices are a bit misleading without taking
| interest rates into account. In the 1980s for example
| interest rates were 15%, you'd pay your home in full every 6
| years in interest alone. Just look at the historical trend of
| interest rates, they're at record lows. For example, a 30
| year mortgage of 100k at the 1980's 15% interest rate, costs
| as much in total payments, as a 30 year mortgage of 300k at
| today's 3% interest rate. A 3x price increase alone has
| absolutely no effect on affordability in the past 40 years
| due to the massive drop in interest rates. If you take into
| account the fact that nominal income grew by 5x since the
| 1980s as well, plus the larger square footage and the fewer
| people per home, it's easy to see why the cost of a square
| foot has actually become way more affordable. And given many
| things got so much cheaper, it's easy to see why so much
| wealth has flowed to RE.
|
| Definitely don't want to pretend like there's no housing
| affordability issues anywhere, but I do want to nuance the
| view a bit that we're generally worse off than previous
| generations, in which housing is an oft mentioned example.
| But on balance, it's not really the clearest example for this
| generational loss of quality of life that people tend to
| think it is.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I've been thinking about this lately. Similar to you, the
| house I grew up in is much more less affordable now than it
| was when my parents bought it.
|
| However, in my case it's not really the same house any more.
| At the time, the location was thought to be on the outskirts
| of town, away from the desirable areas. As the city grew,
| this location became the desirable area. If I look to what is
| now considered the outskirts, I still see new construction in
| the $300K range (pre-COVID anyway), which is similar to the
| inflation-adjusted price of the house I grew up in.
|
| At some point we can't escape supply and demand with more
| buyers fighting over the same limited housing supply.
|
| Many of my friends have been moving to less popular cities
| and up and coming towns as they start raising families, and
| it pays off. Obviously not an option for everyone's
| situation, but thankfully the increase in remote work is
| relieving some of the pressure in overcrowded cities.
| shortandsweet wrote:
| That's what I don't understand, if population growth is
| stagnant or declining, how is it these housing prices are
| reaching such heights?
| usefulcat wrote:
| You can find cheap housing, the problem is it's all in
| places where most people don't want to live. For example,
| Detroit, or any of thousands of small towns all over the
| US.
|
| Not picking on Detroit, it's just an obvious example of a
| large city that used to have a much larger population.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| That does make sense at least. The places with the least
| opportunity and/or desirability are going to be the
| cheapest.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| There is a lot of cheap housing in places that people are
| willing to live, but people need a push to change.
| Allowing work from home, schools, and lockdowns have been
| helping provide the push. Most cities have reasonable
| housing prices, it is just distorted by a few areas which
| have become extremely unaffordable.
|
| Detroit is an interesting example. People did want to
| live there, but as the jobs declined, so did the city. If
| jobs can come back, the city can come back.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Ah that reminds me, we should not discount racism as a
| factor. Many would rather become debt slaves for life or
| forgo children than live cheaply around black people.
| Lammy wrote:
| Very sad to see this downvoted. I don't know how people
| can see things like "WTF Happened in 1971?" without
| realizing the date correlations to the 1968 Fair Housing
| Act and especially especially to the 1974 Equal Credit
| Opportunity Act:
|
| https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968#Ti
| tle...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Credit_Opportunity_Ac
| t
| frongpik wrote:
| Using the word racism so liberally devalues its meaning.
| Frost1x wrote:
| That's a sort of two way street though. In areas
| affordable housing exists, there often aren't many
| opportunities financially speaking, especially in the
| labor market.
|
| It's one thing to live in a city, work for awhile to bank
| up capital, and then move somewhere with a low COL area
| to live comfortably with some supplemental income from
| the region with knowledge of that nest egg if investments
| you currently have.
|
| It's an entirely different story to live in such an and
| accumulate enough capital to purchase a home. Often, jobs
| are few and far between that are competitive, even after
| adjusting for COL. Employers in these areas often have
| less competition for positions and therefor have more
| leverage. Acquiring debt in these areas when you start
| your career could make it difficult to climb out of. Its
| not true with all positions. A lot of healthcare
| positions can pay better in these areas due to what are
| essentially government subsidies through
| medicare/medicaid. You'll occasionally have some
| industrial organization doing specialized work people
| with advanced degrees can prosper in but they need to
| strategically target these areas.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Because nobody wants to hold currency for extended
| periods of time.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Bingo
| 0xfaded wrote:
| Or more precisely, once a house attains some value beyond
| providing a roof over heads, the price of a house is no
| longer representative of a house, but a government backed
| asset that can never depreciate lest the pension funds
| fold.
| blockyhead wrote:
| Not when the government is printing it by the trillions.
| nradov wrote:
| To some extent homes in affluent are expensive because
| they are expensive. Most rich people don't want to live
| near poor people and so they'll pay extra for that even
| if it seems economically irrational.
| rayiner wrote:
| In the U.S.
|
| 1) Population continues to grow due to immigration and
| higher birth rates among immigrants.
|
| 2) Population is growing in some areas and declining in
| others, which is matched by housing prices increasing in
| some places but falling in others.
| Clubber wrote:
| We make up for it with immigration. I believe legal
| immigration is well over a million a year.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-
| finding...
| blockyhead wrote:
| Because people want to live in the city. I bet you can
| find really cheap houses in the countryside.
|
| Iirc A couple of days ago there was even a post up on HN
| that listed places where the government would give you
| land for free, and I think also some starting capital.
| com2kid wrote:
| > That's what I don't understand, if population growth is
| stagnant or declining, how is it these housing prices are
| reaching such heights?
|
| Housing prices around me are directly correlated to
| school quality. The same house near a good school is
| literally 1.5x-2x the price.
|
| The supply of good public schools is very limited. A good
| private school is ~20-30k a year. Figure that is worth
| 300k, not even counting that that over the years tuition
| prices will go up.
|
| So people pay to live near one of the handful of good
| schools.
|
| Seattle stopped busing kids awhile back, instead aiming
| to keep kids at "local" schools (IMHO to save money), so
| now unlike the opportunity I had as a kid (test well, get
| into a good school in the "right" part of town) the city
| is perpetuating generational poverty.
|
| This has the effect of making pockets of the city have
| well rated and poorly rated schools. Previously schools
| were kinda mixed in quality, good programs and teachers
| at many different schools. Sure some had a reputation,
| but now the ratings are incredibly bi-modal, and housing
| prices follow that distribution.
|
| Oh also in the last decade, the population has increased
| by 21 million. The growth rate is slowing, but it isn't
| zero. The way American cities are managed, it isn't
| possible to add sufficient housing. E.g. in 2019 around
| 40k people moved to the Seattle metro. 14k building
| permits were granted[1].
|
| To put that in perspective, the most construction
| friendly city in America, Houston, approved 38k permits.
| (Not sure if these are for housing units, are permits
| overall inclusive of multi family dwellings).
|
| FWIW Dallas got ~131k new people (US Census Bureau)
|
| No surprise there is a problem. American cities are not
| capable of building fast enough.
|
| [1] https://www.wfaa.com/article/money/economy/dallas-
| fort-worth...
| treis wrote:
| >Housing prices around me are directly correlated to
| school quality.
|
| Because "school quality" is basically indistinguishable
| from "socio-economic status". It has little to do with
| the quality of buildings or teachers or other resources.
| It's mostly about the ability and willingness of parents
| to be involved in their kid's life and the standards they
| hold.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| The US is still growing its population, via immigration
| rather than births.
| mgolawala wrote:
| Home prices keep reaching new heights in some areas due
| to:
|
| 1) Migration. Immigration from outside the country, but
| also internal immigration within the country from less
| economically vibrant parts to more economically vibrant
| regions.
|
| 2) Falling interest rates keeping the monthly mortgage
| payment the same or lower despite higher principals
|
| 3) Expectations that the price trend for homes will
| continue to look like the past. This expectation can lead
| to people buying more housing than they would normally
| consume.
|
| 4) Shrinking household sizes. You have gone from an
| average household size of 3.33 in the 1960s to an average
| household size of 2.53 today. That may not seem like much
| but you would need ~25% more housing today to accommodate
| the same population.
|
| 5) Larger house sizes. From a median of about 1000 sq ft
| in 1950 to 2300 sq ft today.
|
| The above can combine to keep pushing up house prices in
| some areas (as we see in the US) even as the population
| growth of a country stagnates.
| jjav wrote:
| > Larger house sizes. From a median of about 1000 sq ft
| in 1950 to 2300 sq ft today.
|
| Maybe it's a California thing, but not so sure about
| that.
|
| House I grew up in was over 3000sqft and can't think of
| any friends that had houses smaller than (estimating
| here) about 2500sqft (in the 70s to 80s). Myself and
| friends were all lower middle class families. Land and
| housing was just so cheap then that it was normal.
|
| And yet today, not a single house in this (much more
| recently built) neighborhood is over 2000sqft. Most of
| the models are 1300-1500sqft. And of course these houses
| cost ~40x what my parents paid for the house.
| wishysgb wrote:
| In my opinion the thing that is leading most to inflation
| in addition to your points above, is that there are way
| too many land lords anyone who makes a little money goes
| and buys a house, increasing demand.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Also add; limited housing development.
|
| Most new housing development after the war was gotten by
| turning farmlands and nature into single family houses. A
| lot of places have reached the limits of how far one can
| expand and run into some combination of geographical
| barriers, legal barriers (e.g. protected park or
| farmlands), or the barrier posed by time (most people
| have an upper limit of how long they are willing to
| commute.)
|
| The next logical step in density, subdivision of existing
| lots and/or intensifying into homes that accommodate two,
| three, four families in a place where a single family
| house stood, is pretty much illegal on most residential
| parcels in the US. Pre-zoning, neighborhoods were free to
| densify as they desired, so even in older single family
| neighborhoods there are sprinklings of slightly more
| intense development. But in 2021 zoning reform is hotly
| contested because people feel like they should have
| control over what their neighbors do with their land, and
| the overall result is that there isn't too much
| developable land left.
| frongpik wrote:
| Ban building new office space in overcrowded areas. Big
| corps will be forced to build their offices elsewhere, in
| remote areas with plenty of land, workers will follow and
| so do small businesses.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 1. Who would pass and enforce such a ban? Local
| governments are self interested and want more jobs,
| because it makes politicians look good and jobs require
| minimal additional services while providing lots of tax
| money. (See: Bay Area) State has same issues. Feds don't
| have the rights to do so, and good luck passing that kind
| of legislation anyways.
|
| 2. With the decline of the inner city during the
| midcentury we already saw what this looked like. It
| mostly resulted in jobs moving to the suburbs of
| established big cities, not decentralization of jobs into
| totally different regions.
| imtringued wrote:
| Considering how many people insist on their neighborhood
| staying the same, why haven't they thought long and hard
| about what it means to let more and more corporations
| settle in their city without building enough housing to
| match the new jobs?
| pojzon wrote:
| Rich elites buy-out all properties/flats in cities
| because its a better overall investment taking to account
| inflation.
|
| People who slave in that situation consider themselves
| unhappy and thus consider moving to a houses outside of
| the city. Due to limited infrastructure outside of the
| cities -> only a part of outskirts are really habbitable
| for those families. The demand in this case is higher
| than supply.
|
| Demand is so low only because city politicians are too
| inefficient in providing new places with infrastructure.
| r3drock wrote:
| One explanation is rising amounts of space per person,
| the apartments are just getting bigger.
| whatshisface wrote:
| When you watch the price of the same unit grow over time,
| it's not usually because the owners are building more. :)
| scatters wrote:
| And decreasing household size.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Same, but the "outskirts" has gone from a 30 minute drive
| to work to a 2 hour drive to work. At some point something
| has to give.
| jjav wrote:
| Indeed. We make some 25x what my parents did, but with them I
| grew up in a property with a wonderfully large house and many
| acres of land. Yet here I am stuck in tiny house with no yard
| to speak of and couldn't possibly afford anything more given
| current cost of housing and land.
| rimiform wrote:
| Makes you wonder whether you ever thought not having a baby
| might be a sensible option.
| sn41 wrote:
| Yup. This is the same phenomenon in India as well - the
| salary is "high", so you can splurge on furniture, buy
| reasonably priced cars etc. much easier than earlier
| generations. But we cannot afford to buy the same house my
| parents lived in at our income level.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| This always feels like a weird argument.
|
| In the part of Maryland (USA) that I live in, quite a few
| areas are named after families who lived here in colonial
| times, and they were granted huge swaths of land. But a
| descendant from one of those families today can't
| reasonably expect an estate of hundreds of acres. There's
| just not enough land to go around with the size of today's
| population.
|
| Obviously, that's taking it to the extreme, but the
| population of India has probably doubled since 1980 or so.
| I don't know your age or your parents' ages, but there are
| certainly far more people in India now than when your
| parents were your age, so it wouldn't make sense for an
| equivalent amount of wealth to buy an equivalent piece of
| real estate compared to previous generations.
| wcarss wrote:
| This mostly makes sense if real estate is already fully
| utilised, but it isn't.
|
| I can't speak to India, but there's a feeling broadly in
| North America of having "new development" and "expansion"
| over time. Cities are much, much larger now than they
| were 40 years ago, and people imagine that the new farm
| land subsumed and developed should be available for a
| similar price relative to income to what it was 'back
| then'.
|
| The XXX-acre rural farmland wasn't as valuable as the
| same space in town when purchased as a lot, but now it
| holds as many homes as that downtown space used to. Is it
| worth the same today, relatively, as that space was then?
| No, they're both worth comparatively way, way more than
| they were.
|
| I don't mean to suggest that scarcity isn't a part of the
| equation here, more that there are a lot complex factors
| involved, e.g. wage levels relative to inflation over
| time.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| You're right of course, that it's more complex than just
| land scarcity. But I feel like people sometimes have this
| strange default sense that something is wrong if things
| don't stay the same. "My dad fixed diesel engines and
| provided for a family of 5, so I ought to be able to do
| the same thing". Well, your dad lived in a different
| time. You can't be a Holy Roman warrior anymore, and
| there's also a chance you might not be able to make a
| good career at being a diesel mechanic at this point.
|
| Sort of like when you have kids and see them everyday,
| you only vaguely notice them growing up because the
| change from day-to-day is so subtle? But when the
| extended family visits once a year, they notice a huge
| change? The world is constantly changing like that...you
| might not notice that today is different from yesterday,
| but today is drastically different from when your parents
| were your age.
| [deleted]
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Real estate is only expensive in the highly utilized
| areas.
| rayiner wrote:
| > The XXX-acre rural farmland wasn't as valuable as the
| same space in town when purchased as a lot, but now it
| holds as many homes as that downtown space used to. Is it
| worth the same today, relatively, as that space was then?
|
| Yes, they are. It's hard to make a direct comparison,
| because falling interest rates have caused housing prices
| to go up, and as people have gained income they have
| chosen to buy much bigger houses. But the per square foot
| price of a median-sized new home has been stagnant at the
| $100-120 range (based on CPI) since 1973:
| https://donsnotes.com/financial/real-estate.html. And
| falling interest rates have meant that the monthly
| mortgage payment per square foot has actually gone down
| over that time.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Have you accounted for development induced appreciation?
| Perhaps a similar home further from the city center would
| be a more suiting comparison?
|
| Anecdotally, in central New York housing prices have gained
| only modestly. The 2008 financial crisis didn't have a
| large effect on prices here either. But... development in
| central New York is near zero.
| agent008t wrote:
| Given that good jobs remained in the city center, and
| commutes are not faster than they used to be, the point
| is not very relevant.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| I think that the internet has eliminated the commute for
| a lot of service sector jobs. I think that a lot of jobs
| remain in the city center only because that's the way the
| older generation has always done it.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The Amish are fleeing high land prices in Pennsylvania.
| There is development of a sort.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| refurb wrote:
| But why would you expect to be able to afford the same house
| even with higher net worth?
|
| I mean, my folks bought a house I can afford either but when
| they bought it, it was on the edge of the city, not a
| desirable area in a 2nd tier city. That's why it was cheap.
| Now it's in a historic neighborhood, highly desirable in a
| city where everyone wants live.
|
| I _could_ afford a house similar to the one they bought in
| terms of those qualities. In fact it would likely be cheaper
| compared to salary.
| threwawasy1228 wrote:
| Show me an affordable house in on the edge of NYC in the
| "undesirable" neighborhoods. Even if you pick neighborhoods
| past where subway lines end (a very undesirable quality for
| city property to have) that also happen to be high crime
| areas it is still too expensive for anyone to purchase.
| Like two examples look at New Lots/East New York and South
| Ozone Park/Jamaica. Both fit my description above, they are
| at the very edge of subway access, and are high crime
| areas, and both are too expensive for normal middle class
| people to buy property in.
|
| Contrast this with great people I've met who are ~60 now,
| who just stumbled into the east village/alphabet city in
| the 1980s in their mid-20s and bought up cheap houses while
| bumming around paycheck to paycheck. What area of NYC or
| the valley can I do that in now? If the answer is none, and
| you can't point me to a city in the midwest or south where
| buying up cheap affordable property IS going to turn me
| into a multimillionaire when I'm ~50 what does that mean
| for our growth/stagnation culturally and as a country? This
| is the difference, there is no place that even has the
| faintest whiff of a city that is about to take off where
| such gains would even be possible.
|
| In other countries that have similar issues in Europe,
| where a lot of cities are unbelievably expensive there are
| two solutions that you see a lot. One is that it is
| culturally common to live with your entire extended family
| and not be able to afford a house, and the second is
| welfare or new home ownership incentives that make it more
| viable. "Rugged Individualism" in American mindsets and
| cultures makes both options seem untenable but clearly we
| have to adapt.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| 1980s NYC did not have "the faintest whiff of a city
| about to take off". That couple bought property in a
| crime ridden part of a crime ridden city. Tompkins Square
| Park was an open air drug market.
|
| The equivalent today is a bad area of Detroit. I'm
| certain you can find something affordable there today. I
| doubt it will turn you into a multimillionaire, but if we
| were having this conversation in 1984 everyone would
| doubt buying in the East Village would get you anything
| other than mugged or shot.
| rayiner wrote:
| Having grown up in the 1990s in the D.C. suburbs, and
| visiting family in Queens (recent immigrants) I still
| reflexively do a double take when new associates at my
| law firm say they're living in Brooklyn, or in D.C., in
| Capitol Hill. Like--I know you can afford to live
| somewhere decent!
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Is is it you that are the outlier or your dad? What kind of
| housing did your grandfathers and great-grandfathers have?
| yortpyperty wrote:
| I have the same job as my father. Grandparents immigrated
| at a young age and grew up in the same area of the city.
| wcarss wrote:
| The point is precisely that neither of them is an outlier
| within their respective time -- they are normal people who
| want "normal" housing: i.e. just enough to raise a family
| in.
|
| The parents born in the 30s-50s could largely afford to
| purchase homes large enough to raise a family in, but far
| fewer people born in the 70s-90s will be able to do the
| same.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| My point is that, at least in the US, the post World War
| II economy was unusual and the factors that lead to it
| are unlikely to ever be repeated.
|
| We are reverting to the status quo ante about what middle
| class means.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| I agree with the first part of your comment but there
| wasn't really a middle class prior to the 20th century.
|
| The petite bourgeoisie would probably be considered
| upper-middle class today. Even the industrial revolution
| was only a small period of humanity.
| rayiner wrote:
| This isn't really true. First, what's considered "big
| enough to raise a family in" has doubled since the
| 1950s-1970s. I grew up in an 1,100 square foot house
| built in the 1950s. The starter homes around us are
| double that size.
|
| Also, as the U.S. grows, the "frontiers" obviously shift.
| Since 1970, the U.S. has grown from 205 million to 330
| million, and the number of people per house has gone down
| significantly. Back when it was built in the 1950s, the
| house I grew up in was in a new development in a boring
| suburb of D.C--itself a boring city with mainly GS-scale
| government jobs. Now, with all the tech jobs in the D.C.
| area, it's become a more desirable, upscale place.
|
| What used to be the boring, middle-class suburb is now
| somewhere around Kansas City, MO or Greensboro, NC.
| Houses in those places are just as affordable as the
| houses you grew up in. In fact, when you account for
| growing house size and falling interest rates, they are
| more affordable: https://donsnotes.com/financial/real-
| estate.html
| ivanche wrote:
| This is highly dependent on society/nation standards. I
| grew up in a 750 sqft apartment (family of 5). My wife
| grew up in a 440 sqft (family of 4). Now I consider 250
| sqft/person to be a palace, but in the US it's probably
| considered unlivable.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Exactly. It's not some fundamental biological fact that
| you can't raise a family in fewer than 1500 sq. ft. of
| house and 1/4 an acre of property. That was just a
| cultural norm set in a particular time and place.
| wcarss wrote:
| I don't understand what the value to you is here in
| arguing that we all ought to just settle for less. More
| space is preferable, better conditions are preferable,
| and we do have the capabilities to work toward these
| things for all humans.
|
| The specific factors of post-WWII America may be unlikely
| ever to be repeated, but I can't agree that we should all
| settle for life as it was in the 1910s or earlier on the
| basis that that's simply 'how life is' -- the status quo
| is not an argument for itself.
|
| The average (human, at least) life has improved
| substantially in the last few hundred years in some key
| ways (admitting that there are some ways it is likely
| worse). Even if the potential improvements to life track
| a sigmoid curve, there's no reason at all yet to think
| we've maxed it out, let alone gone beyond what's
| possible.
|
| We can absolutely continue to improve, so it seems
| totally fair to identify and analyze causes, means, and
| paths to do so, i.e., recognizing "I cannot afford the
| same standard of life as my parents did" as something
| that ideally would be different, and discussing patterns
| of wage growth, economic trends, and policy decisions
| that might counteract that perceivable regression of
| quality.
| rayiner wrote:
| A sentence with "ought" in it is a signal that what
| follows is a pointless thought. You can't will things
| into existence by saying it "ought" to be that way.
|
| As to your other point, some aspects of living conditions
| are scalable, and others are not--something that's
| obvious if you're thinking about what "is" rather than
| what "ought to be." Technology doesn't magic more land
| into existence. As the population of the country grows
| (it has grown from 200 million in 1970 to 330 million
| today) space becomes more expensive. There is no reason
| to assume that the trend should be toward more space per
| person. In fact, physics and math tells you the trend
| should be in the opposite direction.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| People shouldn't be made to feel like they would be or
| are bad parents if they put two kids in a room. Because I
| think the upshot to that is not going to be some workers'
| movement that produces less inequality but instead fewer
| people that want kids having them due to fear of social
| stigma.
| wcarss wrote:
| That's a really good point! I agree that we should be
| supportive of parents in the face of circumstances they
| can't directly control, rather than stigmatize them or
| hold them to an unfair standard. Thanks for explaining it
| that way.
|
| I also think we can both do that _and_ work to continue
| to improve circumstances, which to me includes
| recognizing that the circumstances can be improved.
| IkmoIkmo wrote:
| > The parents born in the 30s-50s could largely afford to
| purchase homes large enough to raise a family in, but far
| fewer people born in the 70s-90s will be able to do the
| same.
|
| Does not explain why home sizes grew 2.5x since the
| 1950s, while the average household size dropped from 3.4
| to 2.5. (which is in large part due to the many single-
| person households).
|
| There's many indications that we're enjoying much more
| real estate per person than ever before, real estate
| which is also much more luxurious and located in much
| more interesting locations, with better schools, more
| safety, more amenities etc.
|
| Second, we tend to easily forget that the past wasn't
| divided equally. Being a woman and running your own
| household independent from a husband was a pipe dream for
| many women back then. Buying a home was a pipe dream for
| many black families, too. There's lots of such examples.
| This past we speak of where 'we all' had it better is
| often actually a bit of a narrow view of certain groups
| of people having it better, ignoring others who
| definitely didn't. Whereas now the average person is
| better off, in small part at the expense of a smaller
| group who used to dominate before.
| bookmarkable wrote:
| Interesting analysis, but I think you are discounting the
| number of people in each of these groups. Percentage basis,
| yes, the rich and poor will have more children. But both groups
| are not the 80% of the middle (using your 10% cutoffs on either
| end).
|
| So I don't think children from the non-rich and non-poor
| society are going to be aliens in the world anytime soon. Sadly
| though, fewer will know life with siblings. To meet groups of
| siblings, you'll find more rich and poor - but only at their
| birth. Any number of those will change positions in society in
| any direction.
| abootstrapper wrote:
| > When you look at who is having kids in the US and Canada, the
| families, (or specifically, women) who have 2 or more children
| are either exceptionally wealthy (90th+ pc) or exceptionally
| poor
|
| Source?
| shortandsweet wrote:
| I don't understand your view that population growth is required
| to manage debt. Isn't it inflation that reduces the future
| value of such debts?
| motohagiography wrote:
| Population growth ostensibly creates economic growth, which
| generates tax receipts to pay down public debt. We're about
| to hit a wave of massive inflation, which rewards asset
| owners and punishes workers and savers.
|
| Further, I used to think that millennials were poorer than
| they think they are, but then it clicked they absolutely
| understand, and that's why they behave exactly like the poor
| people they subconsciously recognize they in fact are.
|
| If you took the traditional criticisms of how the poor manage
| their lives you'd get things like, a lack of long term
| planning, blowing money on gaudy status signalling to attract
| other poor partners or mates, a temporary and transactional
| attitude to work, lots of unsecured high interest debt,
| hyperbolic reactions to perceived slights, superstitious
| beliefs, extreme promiscuity, isolating and sabotaging people
| who make their own way as not being authentic, a lot of
| people would unironically say those are racist and classist
| stereotypes, without seeing that they accurately describe the
| lives of ostensibly middle class white millennials.
|
| They know they're poor and they're acting like it, and they
| have less hope than policymakers imagine. Inflation wouldn't
| make a difference because they don't have any savings, and
| they don't have assets, it's just another force they're
| subject to.
|
| "So we drink and dance and screw, because there's nothing
| else to do..."
| nathancahill wrote:
| A different environmentalist worldview that I was raised with
| (as one of four kids of environmentalist parents):
|
| Kids raised with an environmental mindset will have a larger
| positive impact than having fewer or no children. Their impact
| will outweigh their environmental footprint.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| I'm curious how the logic works for that. I've always assumed
| that there's effectively no way for an individual human to
| net-negative their own emissions/energy consumption/whatnot,
| just because of the sheer amount of material they
| need/use/consume (at least, in a Western society). A few
| outliers (Greta Thornberg?) may be able to effect sufficient
| policy to counteract their own environmental impact, but in
| the general case I don't see how raising a kid with a
| strongly environmental-conscious mindset is at all better
| than just... not having a kid.
| nathancahill wrote:
| I've given a lot of thought to this. Here's a few points I
| think about:
|
| 0. Your own environmental impact is significantly reduced,
| so the baseline to "counteract" is lower than "Western
| society".
|
| 1. Change happens incrementally. Moving the needle in small
| ways slowly changes the big picture. Greta is moving the
| needle in big ways within her lifetime, but like you say,
| that's not the norm.
|
| 2. Raising awareness and leading by example can have an
| outsized impact in your community.
|
| 3. Voting and other political involvement (won't turn this
| political, but every vote matters, especially for local
| issues that might be decided by 50-100 votes).
|
| 4. Supporting companies that align with your values.
| Consider the total dollar spend of an individual over the
| course of their life.
|
| 5. Charitable giving. Tons of great work is being done
| around the world by non-profits. Even if you don't pursue a
| career in non-profit work, donating is tax deductible and
| goes a long way.
|
| 6. Raising your own children with a similar mindset.
| nitrogen wrote:
| 7. Inventing and supporting new sources of energy,
| materials, and efficiency.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I agree with you. The only way out of this is via automation.
| If we have high enough automation, costs will drop despite lack
| of growth. In the end the world will be a stark 0.001% who own
| the automation and the flat 99.999% who subsist on leisure and
| boredom.
| knz wrote:
| > In the end the world will be a stark 0.001% who own the
| automation and the flat 99.999% who subsist on leisure and
| boredom.
|
| Leisure? Or poverty?
|
| This strikes me as a return to the default state for much of
| human existence and the current reality for much of the
| world's population.
| Balgair wrote:
| > I'd speculate this is because if you are either rich or poor
| you have stability in that your life circumstances aren't going
| to change that radically,
|
| In the U.S. this may be due not to 'stability', but Medicaid.
|
| To be clear, Medicaid benefits are a _hot_ mess of bureaucracy.
| To paraphrase Voltaire: 'The point of Medicaid is to ensure
| that no two people are covered under the same set of rules'.
|
| That said, Medicaid covers ~22% of the U.S. population. The
| Medicaid yearly income cut-off for a 2-person household is
| ~$57k/year. Most of the costs of a pregnancy are covered under
| Medicaid [0].
|
| What are such costs? Well, again, it's _very_ complicated, no
| birth is 'standard'. And googling this is going to lead to a
| wide range of answers. But in my local area for a first birth,
| one baby, no c-section, no epidural, no emergency measures,
| you're looking at ~$20k out of pocket. And that's with a 'good'
| HCP. C-sections go to ~$80k, and those are ~20% of first births
| in my area. Again, the costs will vary wildly depending on
| _many_ factors.
|
| Then you add in check-ups, vaccinations[1], standard illnesses,
| ear infections, etc. Medicaid will mostly cover these things,
| while anyone making more than the cut-off must pay them out of
| pocket with their HCP discounts, if applicable (again, caution,
| it's super complex bureaucracy).
|
| The interesting thing is to look at other countries with mostly
| functional universal healthcare systems. What has happened to
| their birthrates based on income when you look at how much a
| mother can be expected to pay for a birth? From what I can
| recall, there seems to be no real difference as compared to the
| US, correct?
|
| [0] https://www.growingfamilybenefits.com/medicaid-coverage-
| duri...
|
| [1] They may be free, but it depends on your HCP. Sometimes the
| nurse to inject will bill pretty high. I've gotten ~$300 bills
| for vaccinations before.
| [deleted]
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I've never heard of anyone paying $80k for a c-section out of
| pocket, and I know a lot of people that got them. Hell, my
| wife had to have 2 and the total bills were around $25k, and
| we paid around $2k out of pocket after insurance.
| Balgair wrote:
| Again, I'm just going off of what google returned to me
| about the area where I live. The costs are going to vary
| wildly from state to state.
| Scandiravian wrote:
| I'm surprised by this, as I had expected the opposite. Couples
| are spending a lot of time together being confined to their home
| without much entertainment, so I'd expected that to result in
| more baby making
|
| I guess the stress from the uncertainty of the future and lack of
| personal space more than countered that
|
| Time for me to adjust my assumptions about the world... And
| probably check my privilege, since I'm massively underestimating
| the impact the pandemic has had on a large part of the population
| francisofascii wrote:
| It is a reasonable expectation. There have been studies linking
| high birth rates to blizzards. "blizzard babies" But of course,
| this was not a blizzard. Increased anxiety and depression can
| be a libido crusher.
| sjg007 wrote:
| I never thought that. The uncertainty was too great. The
| economy isn't doing well either.
| everdrive wrote:
| > there home without much entertainment
|
| They were pumped to the brim with entertainment. Passive,
| internet-based entertainment.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| But it's the worst possible time to have a baby. Healthcare is
| all round degraded, hospitals are risky places to be, new
| parent services are degraded, socialising with other parents is
| limited. Why would you risk doing it now rather than waiting if
| you had a choice? Most people have a choice, so are choosing to
| wait.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Sadly, that all really depends on where you live.
| jtbayly wrote:
| > since I'm massively underestimating the impact the
| s/pandemic/lockdown has had on a large part of the population
|
| Not having money or a stable income causes people to not have
| kids.
| a_brawling_boo wrote:
| My wife and I had decided to start trying for a second child
| around the beginning of 2020, after the outbreak we put those
| plans hold because we didn't want to have to make repeated
| trips to the doctor/pediatrician/hospital where all the covid
| was. What was our employment/financial situation going to look
| like? In the spring of last year a million people were loosing
| their jobs a day at one point. Also, friend of ours, a PA in an
| emergency room, told us witnessed more than one miscarriage due
| to covid, so no, we are waiting for now.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| My wife and I started talking about having a kid and..
| oooops!
|
| The maternity visits are fine. The major consequence is that
| only mom can go. I didn't get to see the ultrasounds this
| time around.
|
| For the maternity ward, just make sure to have an N95 or KN95
| mask. Keep it on AT ALL TIMES that you are outside of the
| room. The hospital we went to had negative pressure machines
| in case a mother was covid positive.
|
| Have your kid. You'll be fine, and when you're old, you won't
| regret it.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Around here the fathers (or any visitors) weren't even
| allowed in the delivery room, not to mention being forced
| to labor with a mask on. An awful experience for the mom.
| Nevertheless some of us are crazy enough to build our
| families even during these times because, like you said,
| it's about the long plan.
| bluedino wrote:
| Dads were allowed the whole process here. But nobody else.
| It was nice to be free from in-laws, friends, overbearing
| family members...
| Scandiravian wrote:
| I'm sad to hear that you've been impacted by the pandemic in
| this way. I hope the vaccine rollout and improvements in
| control of the spread will reestablish the security you need
| to provide for a second child
| [deleted]
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Having a kid in western society is massively more
| difficult/taxing on parents compared to the past, when folks
| managed to have 10-15 kids and they somehow survived and
| developed themselves with their siblings (and some died but
| that's another story). We all know that. Kids are more
| difficult to manage in age of ubiquitous screens and
| distractions.
|
| Now you have to put your kids to hobbies, take care of their
| development, folks often live very far from helping family like
| parents, you need to have massive income surplus if you want
| your kid to go to higher education (which is true everywhere,
| in US particularly dialed to 12).
|
| Many folks are depressed, even without realizing it. Dating
| trimmed to bare minimum. Places where people would meet are
| mostly closed, which means almost 0 chance for random
| encounters.
|
| I could go on for a long time what is worse/properly bad. If I
| didn't have family on my own, being single during past year
| would be pretty miserable place to be, probably combated with
| consumption of copious amounts of weed (not a solution, but I
| know it would help, even though its just a temporary funny
| escape).
| leesalminen wrote:
| > If I didn't have family on my own, being single during past
| year would be pretty miserable place to be
|
| I feel super lucky to have had my first son born right before
| the covid outbreak in the US. The restrictions have basically
| forced me to spend every waking second with him (and my
| wife), and it's been (mostly) great. I have thoroughly
| enjoyed getting to know my son, and am happy to have been
| able to support my wife as much as I have. Like you, I
| couldn't imagine doing this last year as a single guy- it
| would've been very difficult for me. My brother, for example,
| who is in his 20s and single, has had a fairly rough time
| this past year. Most of the mechanisms he used to combat
| depression are gone.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Lots of people stopped dating, bars are closed, etc. I suspect
| the decrease in drunken sex is probably a large reason for the
| decrease.
| tzs wrote:
| That reminds me of something I've occasionally wondered
| about.
|
| Just in terms of total population and ignoring all else such
| as quality of life and economic impacts, is alcohol's net
| effect to lower population growth (drunk driving deaths and
| such) or to raise population growth (drunk sex or other
| related poor decisions)?
| coldpie wrote:
| It doesn't answer the question you posed, but I read a
| study[1] just yesterday that estimated that the largest
| factor of young people having less casual sex now than they
| did ten years ago is a reduction in drinking rates. It was
| still a minor factor (explains about 25% of the drop, by
| their estimation), but it seems less alcohol use does
| correlate with less casual sex.
|
| [1]
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023121996854
| andi999 wrote:
| Actually 300k birth due to drunken sex paints a very dark
| picture of society.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Not all death on the street are because of alcohol.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| It's a social lubricant, even in healthy relationships
| wanting more children I'd bet many are conceived drunk.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Couples are spending a lot of time together [...], so I'd
| expected that to result in more baby making_
|
| But a counteracting force is that some couples _think 9 months
| ahead_ and are afraid of _delivering_ their baby in a COVID-
| overloaded hospital.
|
| COVID makes the opportunities for _conception_ easier but adds
| to the stress and uncertainties of delivery and postnatal care.
| (So maybe more sex activity but also more _contra_ ception to
| prevent pregnancies.)
|
| It's like that anecdote I heard of the forced shelter-at-home
| lets people do home-improvement projects but some are afraid of
| getting on high ladders because if they fall and seriously
| injure themselves, they are afraid the busy hospital won't be
| able to see them quickly. COVID changes the risk profile even
| for people who don't get COVID.
| teeray wrote:
| > adds to the stress and uncertainties of delivery and
| postnatal care
|
| Another lurking factor is the availability of grandparents to
| assume some of the early child care. Movement restrictions
| can remove this assistance entirely from new parents.
| xwdv wrote:
| I'd do the opposite. The pandemic is the perfect time to have
| a kid if you were thinking ahead. Sure, in the short term it
| might suck, but in the long term, your kid will be amongst a
| smaller generation. That means more resources can be diverted
| to them in schools and other activities. Daycares pressed for
| money because of a sudden drop in the supply chain may start
| lowering fees a bit for a while. Colleges receive less
| applicants, mortgage lending, etc... And since a lot of the
| families that can afford to have kids in a pandemic are
| probably more affluent, that means a better selection of
| romantic partners close to the same birth year with better
| than average socioeconomic status.
|
| It's a great time. You don't want to have your kid during a
| massive boom. They'll just be a mini boomer.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I guess, although I do believe I've heard the argument that
| the baby boomers had every step of their lives tended to
| politically because of what a massive voting block they
| represented - nobody wanted to screw over that block. Small
| generation? Ok let's sacrifice them to the benefit of other
| interests!
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > But a counteracting force is that some couples think 9
| months ahead and are afraid of delivering their baby in a
| COVID-overloaded hospital.
|
| My wife works in a maternity ward.
|
| Babies are a high priority. They're fully prepared to deliver
| babies from covid-positive mothers. (And, yes, there's been
| plenty of covid-positive mothers.)
|
| And, because visitors are strictly limited, it's actually
| quite easy in the maternity ward.
|
| I went in because we got pregnant thanks to being stuck at
| home. It's much more peaceful without a parade of visitors,
| but super-scary because some of the delivery rooms have
| negative pressure machines in case there's a covid-positive
| mother.
| sokoloff wrote:
| We have two kids (meticulously over-planned :) ), but when
| I look back to the incredible level of uncertainty that was
| in the world in March-May of last year, we'd have taken
| significant precautions to not get pregnant during that
| timeframe.
|
| No one knew what hospitals were going to look like in July
| 2020, let alone Feb 2021. I'm glad that we are in a stable
| situation where providing in-hospital labor&delivery care
| is reasonably safe, but you couldn't have really banked on
| that to be the case at the critical start of the process.
| [deleted]
| beowulfey wrote:
| It's not the fact that hospitals cannot handle it.
|
| It's when you consider the cost-benefit of the increased
| risk associated with being in the hospital during a
| pandemic and possibly experiencing stronger
| symptoms/complications because of the pregnancy if getting
| sick, the scale tips away from trying for kids.
| milesdyson_phd wrote:
| During the height of severe covid cases in my area a lot of
| hospitals were not even allowing spouses in during
| delivery, so yes it was still relatively safe but
| definitely not the same.
| ldbooth wrote:
| Outside the couples though, there's a lot less mingling going
| on. Dating during Covid... Awkward.
| mbg721 wrote:
| The uncertainty isn't just the COVID overload, but also no
| doulas/support people, and not knowing if the father is even
| going to be allowed in the building in case something unusual
| happens.
| PebblesRox wrote:
| Caring for a baby once it's born is also harder without the
| support available from family to bring food, babysit older
| kids, etc.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| I'm in San Francisco, where we've consistently had some of
| the most restrictive policies.
|
| My wife is pregnant and they've told me the whole time that
| I'd be allowed in for the birth, but while rates were
| climbing I've been unable to attend any appointments or
| ultrasounds. It's been kind of surreal knowing that, yes,
| we're having a baby, but not having been able to _really_
| see it.
|
| Now that rates have dropped, I'm finally going to be able
| to attend my first ultrasound today and I'm totally stoked!
| 1-more wrote:
| Congrats!! Hope it's smooth sailing for you and your
| spouse and your child.
| leesalminen wrote:
| My wife and I had our first son at the end of 2019, right
| before the outbreak. We've heard from friends that women
| are delivering wearing a mask now.
|
| My wife thinks that she wouldn't be able to do that and
| that she would pass out. The level of breathing required to
| deliver a baby is intense.
|
| She has basically threatened the livelihood of my genitalia
| if I impregnate her during the pandemic. She's kidding,
| right? ;)
| avesi wrote:
| I delivered wearing a mask last year, it's honestly
| security theater. A little floppy surgical mask does
| nothing to contain the breathing of a laboring woman. I
| was more upset I couldn't kiss my baby when he was first
| put in my arms.
| andrew_ wrote:
| It's a tough juggle between a hospital that won't allow
| you to give birth maskless, and the level of care you
| want. We went through a similar tough choice with our
| daughter born in August last year - we ultimately went
| with a Catholic-based hospital that we vetted for great
| care that allowed my wife to give birth without a mask
| on.
| dhosek wrote:
| The level of breathing needed to deliver a baby is
| intense, sure, but the impeding of breathing from wearing
| a mask is minimal. Early on when I was wearing homemade
| masks made with shop towels, rubber bands and staples,
| mask wearing was uncomfortable, but with masks that
| aren't made out of random elements are fine. My first-
| grade kids have no problem running, jumping and climbing
| with their masks on.
| ars wrote:
| > but the impeding of breathing from wearing a mask is
| minimal.
|
| If I inhale hard on a surgical mask, it collapses and
| seals against my mouth. I have to either use a brand new,
| very stiff, mask. Or adjust the mask not to seal well
| against the sides to add some more space between my mouth
| and the mask.
|
| It doesn't happen during normal breathing, but I could
| easily see it happening during labor - the sweat would
| soften the mask, and the level of breathing needed would
| easily do it.
| andi999 wrote:
| Actually how does one actually do that 'check your privilege'?
| Is it like a checklist for takeoff:'privilege on? check!'
| neogodless wrote:
| Become aware of it and acknowledge it.
|
| Consider ways to improve your perspective around those
| without the same privilege, and adjust your communication so
| that it isn't incorporating arcane assumptions.
| draw_down wrote:
| It's just something people say. It doesn't mean anything
| real.
| salawat wrote:
| I don't know, but whenever someone tells me to check mine I
| cordially remind them it is an overt act of supremacy, if you
| will, to assign more importance to one person's adversity
| than another's.
|
| We all have a metaphorical bowl of sh#t to work through in
| life. Everybody's is different, but we all have to get
| through it somehow. I'm not getting or letting anyone else
| get held over a barrel because one person doesn't like the
| specifics of their own or another's tribulations.
|
| Remember folks, kindly leave your sh#tbowl yardsticks at
| home, and just enjoy the company of other people.
| tremon wrote:
| After entering the premises, you make your way to the
| checkroom, hand over the items you're not supposed to wear
| inside, and proceed to the venue proper.
| shigawire wrote:
| You think about things from different socioeconomic
| perspectives. It should be pretty obvious that the pandemic
| is not a year long stay at home tea party for many people.
|
| If you only consider you experience as a wealthy tech worker
| you might not understand this.
| mehphp wrote:
| I completely understand that I happen to have it good
| because I'm in the tech industry and have been unaffected
| financially due to the pandemic. However, I'd hardly call
| myself "wealthy" and it's hardly the year long tea party
| from my perspective either...
| pjc50 wrote:
| A couple of easy wins:
|
| - are you describing what you'd do in a situation without
| considering that other people are in different situations
| with different constraints, both external and of human
| fallibility?
|
| - have you said "why don't they just" or a similar form of
| words, without at least coming up with your own potential
| reasons why that might not be easy?
|
| (This is like writing "works on my machine" on a bug report.
| You know not to do that, so don't write "works on my
| lifestyle and background" on other people's bug reports about
| life)
| josephorjoe wrote:
| So, maybe off topic, maybe not.
|
| i have a cat. She's a good cat, mostly. We get along pretty
| well, mostly.
|
| Before the pandemic, there were large parts of the day when we
| didn't see each other.
|
| Because we knew we would be separated much of the day, we found
| time to play around when we were together. I'd throw a toy and
| she would squawk and chase after it then look at me excitedly
| until I walked down the hall, picked it up, and threw it back
| the other way. Then when she was tired it would be time for
| treats and petting. Good times.
|
| Play time was a valued time for both of us, as we knew that
| soon we would be separated for many hours, possibly days. Time
| together was special.
|
| Now, we have nearly unlimited time together, and when I want to
| play, kitty is tired or hungry or wants to stare out the window
| at the pretty birds and squirrels and swats at me and tries to
| bite me if I persist in trying to initiate play time.
|
| Meanwhile, when kitty wants to play, I'm often at my desk
| trying to focus on my work and probably trying to understand
| why this awful corporate group has cut another ticket about
| outdated software to our team when I'm on call. So when kitty
| jumps on the back of my chair, climbs onto my shoulder, and
| then flops down on my keyboard with a 'come pet me' look, I
| pick her up and toss kitty on the floor and tell her to leave
| me alone.
|
| There is no play time anymore.
| siltpotato wrote:
| My cat died recently and I didn't get that experience before
| then. He always knew when I was ready, somehow.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| We are no longer purely instinctual animals unable to control
| our drive towards reproduction. Oppertunity for sex is no
| longer the controlling factor. Economic realities now dictates
| when and where we choose to reproduce.
|
| But after seeing footage of a highschool prom where, because
| covid, the kids were only allowed to dance back-to-back, and
| the health advice about having sex through walls, maybe we are
| soon going to have more basic issues too.
| Scandiravian wrote:
| I think that's a good point. I probably should have
| elaborated a bit, that I wasn't talking purely instictual
| increase in sexual activity, but also an increase in
| opportunity to discuss and plan having a baby
| auganov wrote:
| No idea what it really is but it would make sense for the
| instinct to be quite the opposite to prevent inbreeding.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > And probably check my privilege
|
| That's a weird way of putting it. Not having a good model of
| others' experience is a universal experience, and something
| that should be treated as a reason to not make assumptions
| about others, not a sign that you're privileged.
| Scandiravian wrote:
| > should be treated as a reason to not make assumptions about
| others
|
| That's what checking ones privilege is. I'm in a position
| where my financial security, mental well-being, and future
| prospects would make it a good time for me to start a family
| if that was what I wanted. Same goes for many of my friends
| and colleagues, who have in many cases done exactly that
|
| I think this article shows that this security does not extend
| beyond my social circle and that it's a privilege to have
| such a level of security
| beaconstudios wrote:
| But my point is that such a misunderstanding of other
| people is not a symptom of privilege, its a symptom of
| being human. You probably don't know how billionaires as a
| class (and generalising people by a demographic is
| overgeneralising too) are experiencing covid either, but
| that isn't a question of privilege.
|
| I guess I just don't like the idea of taking a universal
| human experience and casting it in terms of privilege.
| You're not blinded by privilege, you're blinded by the lack
| of generalisability of the human experience (or the lack of
| omniscience).
| pjc50 wrote:
| "Privilege" is a terrible word to have become entrenched
| for such a useful concept, because many people
| instinctively get their backs up about being told they're
| privileged when they don't have to face a challenge that
| someone else faces.
|
| And it's not just a question of generalization, but a
| question of whose stories get told through the media.
| Whose lifestyles make it into the "lifestyle" section.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > Privilege" is a terrible word to have become entrenched
| for such a useful concept, because many people
| instinctively get their backs up about being told they're
| privileged when they don't have to face a challenge that
| someone else faces.
|
| I think people get their backs up because privilege
| checks as a concept are based largely on
| stereotypes/generalisations and confrontational
| behaviour, not empathic individual relating.
|
| > And it's not just a question of generalization, but a
| question of whose stories get told through the media.
| Whose lifestyles make it into the "lifestyle" section
|
| That's because the mainstream media is, by definition,
| normative - so it caters to what are considered cultural
| norms. The great thing about the Internet (and one of the
| good things about the postmodern breakdown of the
| metanarrative) is that while there are still dominant
| cultural norms, they're not standards to live up to
| anymore in the sense they might have been in the modern
| era. We're fragmenting into subcultures of subcultures
| where everybody can find a place where others share their
| tastes or beliefs. I find the idea that competing
| narratives have to share space in the mainstream media to
| be a strangely modernist-apologetic approach for a
| (progressive) movement that could do much better by
| embracing the breakdown of the normative standard by
| creating competing spaces.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > creating competing spaces.
|
| Creating a competing space in which everyone agrees your
| norms are true is completely inadequate if that's not the
| space that policy gets made in. And within each country,
| there is effectively only one of those.
|
| It doesn't matter if you create a "competing space" in
| which black lives have equal worth to white ones if the
| police are operating in a very different one defined by
| "killology". Nothing says "normative" like the barrel of
| a gun.
|
| Besides, when people _do_ create competing spaces they
| get denounced as "safe spaces" or "filter bubbles", even
| if everyone in the space knows full well what goes on
| outside the bubble.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Man, progressivism is _so close_ to an ideology I could
| get behind, but it 's like half a cup of postmodernism
| and a teaspoon of systems theory. I'm a glass deep on
| both.
|
| As an ideology you have correctly identified an inequity
| in treatment by law enforcement based on race, but the
| lack of systems theory and postmodern understanding leads
| you (as an ideology) to ascribe this to human
| perpetrators who actually want this to happen. I'm sure
| there are racist police out there, but systemic racism is
| not caused by racist individuals; its caused by the
| behaviour of systems (the justice system, systems around
| poverty, long term effects of previous explicitly racist
| policy). Until progressivism fully discards modernism and
| embraces postmodernism and systems theory, I don't
| believe it will be able to solve any of the problems it
| has identified.
|
| > Besides, when people do create competing spaces they
| get denounced as "safe spaces" or "filter bubbles", even
| if everyone in the space knows full well what goes on
| outside the bubble.
|
| For what it's worth, people criticise safe spaces for the
| use of the term "safe" implying that opinions are
| violence (which is just a bad formulation of the fact
| that bad opinions can _lead_ to violence), and filter
| bubbles lead to a lack of dialogue, where in my ideal
| people can live freely in their bubble but agree to join
| a dialogue with someone from another bubble with mutual
| consent so we don 't all spiral into self referentiality
| (ie hyper reality) through bias reinforcement.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| > As an ideology you have correctly identified an
| inequity in treatment by law enforcement based on race,
| but the lack of systems theory and postmodern
| understanding leads you (as an ideology) to ascribe this
| to human perpetrators who actually want this to happen.
| I'm sure there are racist police out there, but systemic
| racism is not caused by racist individuals; its caused by
| the behaviour of systems (the justice system, systems
| around poverty, long term effects of previous explicitly
| racist policy). Until progressivism fully discards
| modernism and embraces postmodernism and systems theory,
| I don't believe it will be able to solve any of the
| problems it has identified.
|
| Weren't all of those systems designed, implemented and
| enforced by individuals? Racist policy makers, racist
| voters... from a systems perspective, systemic racism is
| the function of individual racism aggregated over time.
|
| If anything, it seems modern and not post-modern to
| extract racist individuals from systemic racism as they
| are part of and the origination of the systems
| themselves. It's treating humans as something outside of
| the system, which is a view I'd align more with
| modernism.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > Weren't all of those systems designed, implemented and
| enforced by individuals? Racist policy makers, racist
| voters... from a systems perspective, systemic racism is
| the function of individual racism aggregated over time.
|
| No, that's not always the case. Take for instance, the
| racially biased outcome that webcams more easily
| recognise white than black faces. That probably happened
| because the webcam was built and tested primarily by
| white people. Is it an encoding of racist intent? No, but
| the outcome was racially biased. The intervention,
| instead of firing all the developers for being racist,
| would be to simply include more people of different
| ethnic backgrounds in testing.
|
| The same can be true of more complex systems. A classic
| not-related-to-inequality case of backfiring being the
| Cobra effect
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect).
|
| Obviously some factors in modern day racial inequality
| are caused by racist individuals, but that does not make
| a system of racial inequality - it makes bad people
| causing hostile interactions on an individual scale.
|
| There are clearly instances where policy is wilfully
| racist - slavery, redlining, and so on. But even once the
| system is gone, the repercussions continue until
| corrective systems are put in place.
|
| > If anything, it seems modern and not post-modern to
| extract racist individuals from systemic racism as they
| are part of and the origination of the systems
| themselves. It's treating humans as something outside of
| the system, which is a view I'd align more with
| modernism.
|
| A large piece of the modernist narrative is that we are
| masters over reality - if I'm a governor and I want to
| stop burglary, I implement a "no burglary, burglary will
| be punished" rule and sit back, satisfied that I've done
| all that I can. Modernism ignores complex causality,
| which is the field of study of systems theory.
|
| A systems-aware governor would be asking "why does the
| burglary occur in the first place?" and seek the root
| cause of the problem in order to redress the outcome. Of
| course this tends to cross jurisdictions, but the idea
| that we can draw jurisdictional distinctions and have the
| justice person fix crime while the economy person makes
| jobs is also a failure to act systemically and no real
| systems change will occur in that setup.
|
| > It's treating humans as something outside of the
| system, which is a view I'd align more with modernism.
|
| To this specifically I will point out that humans exist
| inside overlapping systems, not apart from them. You are
| a citizen, a family member, a human being, your job, a
| member of your communities. We serve many functions
| inside many systems, but changing systems happens from
| within them, ie grassroots politics.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| > There are clearly instances where policy is wilfully
| racist - slavery, redlining, and so on. But even once the
| system is gone, the repercussions continue until
| corrective systems are put in place.
|
| I'd argue this has far more impact than poorly trained
| AI.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| obviously. The point being, the effects last even when
| the racist policy makers aren't there any more and the
| policies have been removed.
|
| You can't just oust all the racists and expect things to
| start getting better. It's a good start, but you're not
| going to solve systemic racism that way. You have to look
| at the system itself, not the people who exist within it.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| The systems only exists because people continue to prop
| them up though, which often does require explicit racist
| intent. This is why I say that your point is more modern
| than post-modern. It's placing humans external to the
| systems they create and maintain.
|
| I agree that systems can have a racist effect without the
| participants realizing it. Progressivism is in large part
| creating awareness of these systems so people can
| actively realize their own role in perpetuating them. I
| don't think we're actually disagreeing on much other than
| degree of implicit vs explicit participation in systems.
| yesenadam wrote:
| "the mainstream media is, by definition, normative"
|
| ELI5 please? or, you know, 10ish.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| sure thing - so the idea is that the mainstream media
| exists to prop up the status quo. Not in the sense that
| it was invented for that reason, but the incentives at
| play force the media to essentially play to the
| confirmation bias of their audience in order to be
| competitive. Given that the media also pretends to
| present an objective truth (the idea of objective truth
| is also a very modernist ideal, but I don't want to go
| too deep into the postmodern rabbit hole here), the
| outcome is that the status quo is presented as the
| objective ideal. Thus if you believe that narrative,
| anything that isn't the status quo is treated comparably
| as inferior.
| nineplay wrote:
| > prop up the status quo.
|
| > play to the confirmation bias of their audience
|
| I wonder how much overlap their is between the two. It
| seems to me that lately, if anything, the media pushes
| the narrative that the status quo is hopelessly corrupt
| in order to confirm to their audiences conformation bias.
|
| People on all sides of the political spectrum are eating
| up stories about who's to blame, whether it's the
| government or the billionaires or probably, more
| typically, both with the assumption that whatever both
| are doing is at the expense of the common man.
|
| I'm not trying to imply that those stories are accurate
| or inaccurate, just that they are the stories you see
| rising to the top of reddit or FB or other social
| platforms as proof of what the poster believes.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| It gets interesting when the status quo becomes
| "everything is corrupt, including the status quo". See
| also: selling of expensive anticapitalist clothing,
| revolution as a brand, etc. Self referentiality and the
| emptying of meaning from symbols is an important symptom
| of postmodernism.
|
| > People on all sides of the political spectrum are
| eating up stories about who's to blame, whether it's the
| government or the billionaires or probably, more
| typically, both with the assumption that whatever both
| are doing is at the expense of the common man.
|
| I'm hoping that the dam breaks and systems theory and
| postmodernism drive a new cultural revolution, but I'm
| not holding my breath.
|
| The truth is usually that bad things happen because of
| unintended consequences of systems behaviour, not because
| of conspiracy, but to look for an agency behind these
| things is what people tend to do.
| nineplay wrote:
| I sometimes go through the thought exercise of making
| myself responsible of decisions with wide-ranging
| consequences.
|
| I'm sitting here architecting a little project here and I
| had plenty of bad ideas and assumptions. In my space,
| that's fine, it's part of the design process.
|
| If I was head of the CDC and trying to figure out how to
| handle this unprecedented global pandemic I'd also make
| plenty of mistakes and missteps. In this case, however,
| mistakes and missteps mean criticism from all sides and
| probably people dying.
|
| It's a horrible responsibility and it's sure that rather
| than people are going to call it encroaching socialism or
| government incompetence or corruption.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| yes being a decisionmaker in charger of a large
| organisation must be hard because you are given
| responsibility for its failings, and you aren't directly
| in control - you are in that you can make rules and
| whatnot, but rules are really just guidelines and fall
| apart when they make contact with reality.
|
| But we all know this is true, but we still act the same
| way and then get mad when the leader fails to perform
| magic. It's 21st century scapegoating.
|
| Sadly we do actually have tools for fixing big problems
| but we seem to prefer scapegoating to actually doing
| anything.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Thank you. :-) Although ..you seem to have used as many
| jargony or cliche phrases in this paragraph as the
| previous one, it doesn't seem at a significantly lower
| level. "exists to prop up the status quo" .. "the
| incentives at play" .. "play to the confirmation bias of
| their audience" .. "the status quo is presented as the
| objective ideal"
|
| All these seem a bit murky, rather hand-wavy. Maybe it's
| not possible, or would be too lengthy, to ELI10. I kind
| of know what you mean, but I feel there are unexamined
| assumptions buried in those murky phrases. Who can tell
| if they're right or not? It's impossible to say exactly
| what they mean. e.g. How would you go about finding out
| if something actually "exists to prop up the status quo"
| or not? (Sorry if this comment is a waste of time.)
| beaconstudios wrote:
| It's jargon-y because I'm using terminology you don't
| regularly use. I talk like this all the time, not to try
| to sound smart or academic (I really value clear
| communication, some ideas are just hard to communicate
| clearly) but because these are the terms I think in. I am
| trying to translate from my terms into what I assume are
| yours though (leaning on some cultural assumptions here),
| so please bear with me.
|
| > (Sorry if this comment is a waste of time.)
|
| I find these exercises inherently valuable because I need
| to learn to make these ideas understandable if I am to
| try to help popularise them, which I would like to.
|
| > How would you go about finding out if something
| actually "exists to prop up the status quo" or not?
|
| So I'm using a concept called teleology here. It's a way
| of thinking about the purpose of a system in terms of its
| outcome. The media "props up the status quo" in the same
| way that Darwinian evolution "adapts species to their
| environment". There's no conscious agency there; no one
| is at the helm of evolution, making it do so (with
| apologies to biblical literalists).
|
| So how do you find out if the media props up the status
| quo? The same way you find out if Darwinian evolution
| adapts species to their environment: you observe it and
| see if your hypothesis holds up over time. If the media's
| reporting lines up with assumptions you would make from
| your deepest beliefs, then either both the media and you
| are perfect truth-uncoverers (which would be impressive
| given epistemology, ie the study of how we can know
| things, is still a hotly-debated topic 2000 years after
| its creation), or the media is blowing smoke up your ass.
| michaelt wrote:
| When I have to explain something to people who don't know
| all the specialist terms, I like to state things in terms
| of concrete real-world examples.
|
| After all, I can think of several concrete
| interpretations of "propping up the status quo" that are
| pretty different.
|
| For example, perhaps you think the media's gossip
| coverage props up the status quo by making already-famous
| people more famous.
|
| On the other hand, maybe you're arguing that media brands
| are all owned by Jeff Bezos types, and they prop up the
| status quo by denying airtime to eating the rich and
| overthrowing capitalism.
|
| Or you could argue that Fox News tells its viewers what
| they want to hear and every other media outlet does the
| same; and what all readers want is the status quo
| reinforced.
|
| Or perhaps you see propping up the status quo in the
| media's attempts to be 'unbiased' in political reporting,
| like when one party says X should be higher and they find
| someone from the other party to say X should be lower.
|
| Perhaps you're thinking of newspapers' comment sections,
| where newspapers hire pundits with political opinions
| that their readers will find right on.
|
| Maybe you see the latest twitter storm is the current
| status quo, and reporters who follow such things as
| helpless to do anything but chase the latest trends to
| get clicks.
|
| Perhaps you see 'propping up the status quo' in the area
| of broad, unquestioned ideas like love of country, the
| flag, mom and apple pie.
|
| Maybe you feel reporters are too credulous when listening
| to politicians, and they're propping up the status quo
| every time they take someone in government at their word,
| or fail to point out when someone contradicts themselves.
|
| Perhaps you see the media as a smokescreen, distracting
| people with low-impact high-emotion issues like who can
| use which toilet to distract people from The Real Issues.
|
| It's hard for people to know if they agree with you, as
| some of those interpretations are a lot more radical than
| others.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > When I have to explain something to people who don't
| know all the specialist terms, I like to state things in
| terms of concrete real-world examples.
|
| Yeah I do tend to do that too, but I'm also wary that
| concrete examples in this case tend to make people switch
| off their minds and think with their ideologies. It's a
| hard balance to strike - I usually try to concretise the
| example with an analogy if the topic is messy. But the
| failure to communicate successfully here is mine, so I'll
| try to clarify.
|
| What I mean is that the media props up the narrative of
| its audience. A concrete example is the idea of cultural
| norms. So to concretise the parent I was originally
| replying to:
|
| > And it's not just a question of generalization, but a
| question of whose stories get told through the media.
| Whose lifestyles make it into the "lifestyle" section.
|
| becomes:
|
| > the media promotes WASPy values, lifestyle sections
| promote very "white" lifestyles
|
| So my point was that yes, they do, because it sells,
| because most of their audience is white and share those
| cultural values - and that is because that is the biggest
| audience segment available. Hence large WASP-cultural
| population => media wants large audience => media targets
| WASP-cultural audience => everywhere you look, WASP
| cultural standards are promoted. The norm is reflected
| and promoted by the media. Role models are mostly white
| and represent WASP values.
|
| But where in a modernist setting, these values are
| treated as ideals to live up to (and thus that if you
| have different norms, you'd better shape up), in a
| postmodern context the idea of "objectively best"
| cultural norms breaks down because people simply disperse
| into their own groups with their own media that reflect
| their own norms. Every groups creates an echo chamber
| where there is no competing narrative because they shut
| it out.
|
| My criticism of progressivism is that it hasn't abandoned
| the idea of a central narrative, and instead of creating
| parallel media is mostly concerned with reforming the old
| media to represent every cultural bloc, ie tokenism. Also
| for confusing race with culture.
| lcc wrote:
| David Graeber made a really good argument for why
| misunderstanding others _is_ exactly a symptom of
| privilege. The whole article is worth reading (as is the
| whole book I originally read it in, "The Utopia of
| Rules"), but here's the argument in a nutshell:
|
| "Those born to working-class families invariably score
| far better at tests of gauging others' feelings than
| scions of the rich, or professional classes. In a way
| it's hardly surprising. After all, this is what being
| "powerful" is largely about: not having to pay a lot of
| attention to what those around one are thinking and
| feeling. The powerful employ others to do that for them."
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/26/car
| ing...
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The short version of which is "the privileged are just
| selfish", which is a class based stereotype, ie
| dehumanising.
|
| If someone starts off poor but becomes wealthy, do they
| lose the ability to empathise? Or do those those lack
| empathy seek the power to pursue selfish ends? I would
| argue the latter makes more sense.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Could this be explained by class/cultural differences in
| the manner of expressing feelings? Maybe poor people
| would be just as bad at reading the feelings of rich
| people, but each group can read well within the group.
| Scandiravian wrote:
| I agree that this type of misunderstanding is something
| every human experiences. Those assumptions will however
| impact my decisions - who I vote for, what charity I
| donate to, how I approach other people in life, etc
|
| My current situation is very safe and secure, so if I'm
| not aware that this is a privilege that is only enjoyed
| by a small subset of the population, my assumptions could
| lead me to making decisions that negatively impact a
| disproportionately large part of the population who do
| not share that privilege
|
| I want to leave things better than I found them and to me
| this a helpful tool for doing that. Other people have
| different goals and different tools, and that's great as
| well
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Maybe rather than expanding your assumptions one checked
| privilege at a time, just drop your assumptions
| altogether? You simply can't know the experiences of
| others; even direct communication only transfers a very
| loose approximation of experience, and that's if both
| sides are both communicating earnestly and are skilled
| communicators. So if you can't know the experience of
| just one person then you certainly can't group people by
| their experience.
|
| Generalisations are a poor substitute for empathy and
| curiosity.
|
| But that's all very abstract so to concretise my point:
|
| > Those assumptions will however impact my decisions -
| who I vote for, what charity I donate to, how I approach
| other people in life, etc
|
| I try to support people who don't play zero sum games,
| who create lasting systemic changes. Some fraction of
| most political movements are based on this, while other
| parts are about tribalism - so try to back leaders who
| want what's best for all.
|
| To cast people in terms of privilege is to make moral
| judgements on people based on pure circumstance.
|
| And approach people as if you know nothing about them -
| because you don't. To think you know something about
| someone you don't know is literally the textbook
| definition of prejudice.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| The entire point is that people are inherently unaware of
| many of assumptions or personal "theories of the world"
| they are applying to their evaluations of people, places,
| and things. Asking people to "drop their assumptions
| altogether" is like asking people "just don't behavior
| with any cognitive biases." You may as well punch the
| ocean for all the good it will do. People, like the OP,
| just will not be self-aware enough across contexts and
| moments, especially when thinking and reacting in real-
| time.
|
| And I do not degree, nor do I really understand (which is
| likely the issue) the idea that trying to become aware of
| your own privileges that you take for granted others
| don't have is somehow tied to a _moral_ judgment of
| others.
|
| EDIT: But I do think in support of your point that all of
| us could do with more intentional mindfulness in how we
| see and react to the world. I don't want my comment to be
| a signal that efforts to have fewer pre-baked assumptions
| or biases are futile. But saying "drop your assumptions"
| is like telling someone upset to "just calm down."
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I totally agree that fully breaking down your own
| assumptions is very, very hard, and basically an
| impossible ideal. But the great thing about impossible
| ideals is that they give you a goal to strive towards
| where the closer you get, the better you get.
|
| The end goal is replaced with the process of gradually
| increasing mindful self-awareness of your biases and
| generalisations.
|
| > And I do not degree, nor do I really understand (which
| is likely the issue) the idea that trying to become aware
| of your own privileges that you take for granted others
| don't have is somehow tied to a moral judgment of others.
|
| My apologies, I'm still trying to formulate my thinking
| in this area. I think it's because considering people
| from the dichotomy of privilege/underprivilege leads to
| empathy with the less privileged but not the more
| privileged, which implies that people who are more
| privileged are less deserving of empathy. Saying that one
| person is more deserving of empathy than another is what
| I mean by a moral judgement. And while people who are
| less fortunate are in need of more support (inherently),
| failure to empathise with the privileged (key here being
| empathise, NOT sympathise) can lead to the bad things
| associated with dehumanisation - scapegoating, us vs them
| narratives, that sort of thing. I think this is a major
| failing of the progressive movement that is so very close
| to being a powerhouse for positive change. It's inches
| away from being both postmodern and system-oriented, so
| I'm liable to focus on its failings as a critic who wants
| it to improve.
| Scandiravian wrote:
| I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop
| assumptions all together. Without assumptions this thread
| wouldn't have happened
|
| Taking the word "privilege" as an example, you have an
| assumption about what I mean when I use it and that it
| entails "moral judgement". These are not things I've
| expressed in any of my posts
|
| > try to back leaders who want what's best for all.
|
| I'm confused how you can know what's best for all without
| making assumptions. Could you elaborate?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop
| assumptions all together.
|
| Dropping assumptions altogether isn't what I meant and is
| trivially shown to be nonsense. We couldn't live our
| lives if we didn't assume the sun would come up tomorrow.
|
| What I mean is making unfounded assumptions about other
| human beings and their experiences.
|
| > Taking the word "privilege" as an example, you have an
| assumption about what I mean when I use it and that it
| entails "moral judgement". These are not things I've
| expressed in any of my posts
|
| Then I've made a mistake, by making an assumption that
| was unfounded. I'm not claiming to be perfect at avoiding
| unfounded assumptions about people or what they say, just
| that it's a better ideal than growing out your set of
| assumptions. After all, if you take people and keep
| dividing them into groups based on shared
| characteristics, take that to its terminal limit and
| you're simply treating people as unique individuals.
|
| [edit] having reflected further, I think there might be a
| legitimate meaning behind my thinking of it as a moral
| judgement, but I'm interested to see if you agree. It's
| on my other comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343064
|
| > I'm confused how you can know what's best for all
| without making assumptions. Could you elaborate?
|
| I don't know what's best for all, nor do I believe that
| anyone else does - and I'm suspicious of anyone who
| claims they know what is best for any other person. What
| I try to do is look for people who navigate through
| empathy. The way I see it, politics is predominantly
| driven by finding the "bad people" to blame your voters'
| problems on and make them stop doing the bad thing. In
| reality people's behaviours are driven by structural
| incentives, so I am more inclined to trust people who,
| instead of pointing fingers at other humans and their
| moral deficiencies, focus on changing the incentives. I
| think a lot of green initiatives contain this kind of
| systems approach, as an obvious candidate; but so do some
| people of many different political movements. It's
| basically an individual rather than an ideological thing,
| hence why I say backing individual leaders.
| Scandiravian wrote:
| > just that it's a better ideal than growing out your set
| of assumptions. After all, if you take people and keep
| dividing them into groups based on shared
| characteristics, take that to its terminal limit and
| you're simply treating people as unique individuals.
|
| I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my
| privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful,
| assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of
| assumptions
|
| Removing assumptions about others is exactly the goal of
| checking ones privilege. The reason for privilege being a
| focus point is that assumptions arising from social class
| differences causes more harm in the world than any other
| cognitive bias
|
| When you write "dropping unfounded assumptions about
| other humans and their experiences", you're describing
| half of what "checking ones privilege" is about
|
| The second part is to find out how and why those
| privileges are not extended to everyone by contributing
| to causes that promote and work towards a more fair and
| equal access to those privileges regardless of social
| class, race, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation,
| etc
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my
| privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful,
| assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of
| assumptions
|
| To be clear, I don't think privilege-checking causes more
| harm than not-privilege-checking. But I think it causes
| less good than the version of privilege-checking that is
| applied to everyone regardless of demographic privilege,
| which is to say, empathy.
|
| By being choosy about who deserves empathy, rather than
| your ideal being focused on general human equality you
| propagate class divides but simply change which ones you
| value. I think it's a mixup between empathy and sympathy.
| You end up valuing the humanity of the disenfranchised
| more than the privileged, which is dangerous. You can
| think that people who are marginalised deserve better
| without either thinking those who are privileged deserve
| worse, or that they are active perpetrators of said
| marginalisation. I'm not saying you necessarily make this
| mistake yourself - I don't know your feelings on the
| matter - but I see people go down this line of reasoning
| all the time after acknowledging the concept of class
| privilege and I just think we can do better than that.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| There are so many pregnant couples between our friends. We mostly
| expect baby boom in our country. In news they say that we have
| biggest mortality in world due to covid. Well... People are
| probably not scared that much as agenda says.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Your observations of your own peer cohort are not informative.
| People get older, their friends get older, they all have babies
| at the same time. It appears to you like a baby boom but
| demographically it isn't data.
|
| We already have enough vital statistics data to know that 2020
| has clobbered the birth rate in the US.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| I'm not from US. I just share my personal view.
| NDizzle wrote:
| Sorry for letting you down, everyone. Three is our limit!
| mehphp wrote:
| Three!? I got the.. ahem... boys taken care of immediately
| after the second. haha
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Most middle class homes in our suburbs only have 3 bedrooms so
| that sort of caps kids to 2 or less.
|
| While we have a public schooling system if you want you kid
| into the "better" schools you need to pay extra for additional
| teachers to reduce the classroom ratio and facilities.
| frockington1 wrote:
| When you factor in taxes, the math can change. Sometimes 12
| years of private school is cheaper than municipal income and
| property taxes
| sadfev wrote:
| What a wonderful "problem" to have. That means less UBI, more
| advances in automation and more impulse to productivity.
|
| No one wants to live in an overpopulated hellhole (aka India).
|
| This should be lauded!
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| This is a good thing. The carrying capacity of the planet is
| finite, and our large global population is largely responsible
| for the destruction of the environment and climate change.
| Further, the high standard of living of Americans places a
| significant burden on the resources used to sustain this
| lifestyle. 300k fewer Americans will have a much greater impact
| on the environment than 300k fewer people of any other country.
|
| There's also the fact that the global population has to decrease
| at some point, a la Japan.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Many places have less than replacement now. Spain is very much
| less. Nearly every country on earth is headed asymptotically
| toward that. We've just taken a jump ahead by several years on
| that path.
| chriskanan wrote:
| I highly recommend David Attenborough's 2020 Netflix
| documentary "A Life on Our Planet."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough:_A_Life_on_...
|
| https://www.netflix.com/title/80216393
|
| It is his "witness statement" on how he has personally observed
| enormous environmental damage over his ~70 year career
| documenting wildlife throughout the world.
|
| He argues that the solution is to reduce our population growth
| worldwide.
| kmlx wrote:
| on the other hand our planet has seen 5 mass extinction
| events.
|
| at the same time, 56 millions years ago the planet was
| extremely hot: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-
| qa/whats-hotte...
|
| and, to top it off, all we're doing is prolonging the
| inevitable warming of the planet.
|
| things aren't so clear as that documentary makes it
| unfortunately.
| nindalf wrote:
| What has this got to do with anything?
|
| The planet used to be hotter, agreed. But the species alive
| then were completely different, adapted to living in those
| conditions. The species alive now (including us!) can
| thrive in current climatic conditions. A drastic change in
| a short span of time will lead to a mass extinction.
|
| Unless you think a mass extinction event is ok because it
| happened millions of years before humans existed? It
| happened to the dinosaurs so it's no big deal if it happens
| to most living creatures alive today?
| leesalminen wrote:
| > things aren't so clear as that documentary makes it
| unfortunately.
|
| I've been wondering lately what happened to the documentary
| genre. When was the turning point where they started
| becoming political in nature, driving an ideology based off
| FUD and pseudo-science? Or have they always been this way
| and I'm just realizing it now?
| adrianN wrote:
| I suppose the turning point was when we stopped living in
| a shared reality where scientific consensus was worth
| something.
| adrianN wrote:
| There were no humans 56 millions years ago. I'd like the
| planet to remain in a state that is good for humans for at
| least a few more millennia.
| kmlx wrote:
| "a few more millennia" is basically nothing in terms of
| the planet's history.
| adrianN wrote:
| The entirety of human civilization is basically nothing
| in terms of the planet's history. That doesn't make it
| less important to me though.
| kmlx wrote:
| to me it's an important aspect. try as we might, we'll
| still be subject to planetary forces outside of our
| control.
|
| the planet is warming. we can delay it for a bit, but the
| planet will continue to warm no matter what we do.
|
| of course we should manage our impact on the planet. but
| this will represent just a small delay in the grand
| scheme of things. a few generations, maybe even a few
| thousand years as you've put it.
|
| but a multi generational effort to tackle either moving
| to a different planet or something like living
| underground will be needed.
|
| unfortunately our extremely limited existence will make
| these efforts extremely hard to tackle.
| neogodless wrote:
| It's really odd to me. 200 years ago, the population was
| about one billion. Now it approaches eight billion. If the
| trend really is lower over the next 100 years and it drops...
| don't we think it would eventually reverse again? Why do we
| want the population to be stable or always growing? Why would
| it be bad for it to be going down for a while?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It would not reverse if woman have universal access to
| contraceptives and are empowered and educated. It's a one
| way ratchet.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-
| the-...
| neogodless wrote:
| That's an assumption though, based on the current
| conditions and population. You can't extrapolate that
| same assumption to a future modernized world that has
| returned to one or two billion humans. Perhaps in that
| world, women happily choose to have more children than
| they are having now, for a variety of unforeseen reasons.
| Perhaps the world is just so _great_ for everyone that
| women choose to bring additional children into the world,
| knowing just how much joy that children will experience.
| Perhaps children become a new popular hobby or some
| entertainment scheme we would find abhorrent in today 's
| world.
|
| I don't believe there's anyway to know today that it's a
| one way ratchet forever.
| adrianN wrote:
| Many parts of our economy assume perpetual growth. The
| easiest way to ensure growth is to increase the number of
| humans. Look at countries with shrinking birth rates for a
| glimpse of the problems an aging population can cause.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Perpetual growth based on an ever-increasing population
| is a recipe for eventual disaster.
|
| The earth's resources are not infinite. We may not be
| able to say precisely what its carrying capacity for
| humans is (and the answer would depend to some extent on
| the conditions in which the humans are prepared to live),
| but I am entirely confident that there _is_ a limit.
| rocgf wrote:
| It definitely is, and believing anything else is
| delusional.
|
| With that said, would you like to be the politician to
| stop the madness, if that's even possible? Things will
| not change until we have a crisis.
| rocgf wrote:
| Because our economy is somewhat of a Ponzi scheme, in which
| everything needs to keep growing forever. We are
| perpetually borrowing from the future, with the assumption
| that everything will be growing forever.
|
| As people get older, they start getting more expensive. If
| you don't have a larger generation coming from behind to
| provide for that ever-increasing older generation, then the
| costs have to be spread among fewer people.
| rocgf wrote:
| It is very hard to understand why your comment was downvoted
| this badly.
|
| I thought everyone understands that the planet is overpopulated
| as it is and that bringing as many children into the world as
| possible is not a net positive.
| kmlx wrote:
| it's not overpopulated.
|
| this is a myth that has been going on since the 1970s:
|
| https://www.vox.com/the-big-
| idea/2017/12/12/16766872/overpop...
| tremon wrote:
| The earth is not overpopulated in the same sense that Covid
| is just a flu: people argue their position with anecdata
| instead of statistical trends.
| Tepix wrote:
| The author Lyman Stone writes mainly for IFS Institute for
| Family Studies, which is moderately to strong biased to the
| right according to
| https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/institute-for-family-
| studies/
|
| He also writes for The Federalist, another biased
| publication: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-federalist/
|
| If you look at the destruction of natural resources world-
| wide, you don't have to be an expert to see that the
| current resource usage is unsustainable. At the same time
| the rich countries are unwilling to give up their status.
| The trend is going in the wrong direction.
| tryonenow wrote:
| >which is moderately to strong biased to the right
| according to
|
| And? Are we really at point where even technical forums
| like HN are going to discredit people simply for leaning
| right? Please, keep that partisan ignorance on reddit.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 700 million people in the world face food scarcity at any
| one time. The world is overpopulated and its resources
| strained by the existing 7.4 billion humans (CO2 budget,
| natural resources reserves, etc).
| rimiform wrote:
| More people than that are overweight. The total amount of
| food might be enough, but simply ill-distributed.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| How many people are fat from having a calorie-rich but
| nutrient-poor diet?
|
| We may produce enough calories in sugar, but stuffing the
| world with cheap junk food is not a solution. Total
| amount isn't a good metrics; total quality and
| availability would probably be better.
| leesalminen wrote:
| It seems like that's artificially constrained food supply
| though. There's plenty of land to grow crops on the
| planet. It's not like there's not enough seeds or dirt to
| grow food.
| kmlx wrote:
| those are two unrelated ideas.
|
| again, overpopulation is a myth. a convenient and lazy
| one. but still a myth.
|
| there are too many resources on the web explaining this.
| [deleted]
| jnwatson wrote:
| Practically speaking, we make enough food for all the
| humans on this planet, and we'll likely be able to until
| at least 10 billion people exist.
|
| The reason that folks face food scarcity is a
| distribution problem, not a production problem. We don't
| do a good job at making sure people don't go hungry, even
| in the US.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.nationalgeographic.org/photo/biodiv-clearcut/
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/06/phosp
| hat...
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/sea-
| runni...
|
| https://www.siwi.org/latest/the-worlds-natural-aquifers-
| at-r...
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/ground
| wat...
|
| https://www.idtechex.com/en/research-article/the-meat-
| indust...
|
| https://www.pnas.org/content/117/36/21994
| RankingMember wrote:
| This is a super-anthropocentric perspective. If we could
| talk to the non-human inhabitants of the planet, they'd
| have much to say about the encroachment of humanity into
| every corner of their world and its unremittingly negative
| impact upon them.
| rocgf wrote:
| > it's not overpopulated.
|
| I'm sorry, but this is just a ridiculous statement to make,
| except maybe if our opinions on what overpopulation means
| are vastly different.
| JeremyBanks wrote:
| My impression is that most people who talk about
| overpopulation are basing it on old trends before population
| growth rates dropped off so much.
| adrianN wrote:
| It is a fact that we're currently using a large number of
| resources much faster than they replenish. That seems like
| a good criterion for calling the planet overpopulated.
|
| One can of course argue that _sufficient technology_ can
| curb our resource consumption without reducing the number
| of humans, but I find it a bit odd to use hypothetical
| technology deployment as an argument against the planet
| being beyond its sustainable carrying capacity today.
| RankingMember wrote:
| I think a lot of the disagreement in the comments here
| comes down to different ideas wrt the definition of
| overpopulation. When I talk about overpopulation, I talk
| about a human population that reaches the point where
| it's detrimental to quality of life for all beings on
| earth. Sure, we can sustain population growth for a long
| time by continuing to destroy more and more of our
| natural resources and wantonly disregarding the existence
| of all other life on this planet (and ultimately, our
| own), but can anyone who cares about the whole of the
| planet really look at that and consider it a net
| positive? In my mind, an anthropocentric perspective is
| as misguided as a purely misanthropic one, and is
| certainly more evidently virulent.
| Peepootoler wrote:
| It's a good thing, but I expect politicians to just use this as
| another excuse for more mass immigration. They've been using
| this narrative for decades now after all.
| tsjq wrote:
| https://archive.is/jVKmU
| jackschultz wrote:
| There was an article I read in the Econonmist[0] (paywall, sorry)
| a couple months ago, that talks about a paper [1] (read the
| abstract) how raising the age that children are required to stay
| in car seats, 8 yo in the US, causes birth rates to decline. The
| reasoning is that cars have room for two, but not three, children
| in car seats. Thus the cost of the third child includes upgrading
| to a larger sized car or van. Very interesting unintended
| consequence of a safety measure. Also this doesn't deal with the
| pandemic results, but when I read about it I thought it was
| interesting and that if this is a thread about birth rates,
| others might want to read about it too.
|
| [0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-
| technology/2020/11/26/...
|
| [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-04 23:02 UTC)