Japan is a prosperous high HDI nation. They have clearly decided that making bankers happy is not worth sacrificing their national identity by inviting mass immigration. They may not appear to be "winning" to those who measure civilizational success by the quarter but I bet their way wins out in the long run.
> They may not appear to be "winning" to those who measure civilizational success by the quarter but I bet their way wins out in the long run.
I'll bet the opposite. The long run is really long and if your population is in decline then you either up the numbers or sooner or later it will be game over for your branch of the tree.
Populations can grow geometrically at any time. What matters to a particular "branch" is that it remains a cohesive and clearly demarcated appendage while it weathers hostile conditions. Grafting on another branch is what ensures its demise as a distinct entity.
Hehe, there is no society on earth right now that never incorporated substantial numbers of outsiders. The relatively placid world that we live in today is in no way the historical norm. Hostile conditions are the norm. Ask the Palestinians, the Iraqi, the Iranians, the Panamanians, the Native Americans and Native Canadians and lots of people living elsewhere in Europe and the world (or anybody else for that matter, but for first or second generation immigrants it is obvious) to see how far back their roots go. In most cases you won't have to go much further than three or four generations (assuming you can trace them back at all) before you land abroad and in many cases in wildly different cultures due to wars, colonialism, trade, famine or natural disasters. Japan is due to its state as an island an exception, not the rule and even Japan is subject to the maxim that you use it or you lose it.
It is interesting that you listed a number of peoples who have at various times been subjected to genocide because of their initial accommodation of outside populations in your rebuttal of my affirmation that Japan refusing to compromise its stance on immigration is vital to its survival as a cohesive and distinct nation.
>you use it or you lose it
Please explain in direct language the point your deployment of this aphorism was intended to convey as I find it wholly inapplicable.
> It is interesting that you listed a number of peoples who have at various times been subjected to genocide because of their initial accommodation of outside populations in your rebuttal of my affirmation that Japan refusing to compromise its stance on immigration is vital to its survival as a cohesive and distinct nation.
Exactly for that reason. Note how the Japanese have had their various wars of conquest in the past. At that time they had no problem with their 'stance on immigration'.
You're not answering the question at all. Being an imperialist power and oppressing other people is good for you as a society if you win (just ask the British; they're still enjoying the fruits of their imperial policy after all this time), even if other people find it morally reprehensible. This doesn't equate in any way to believing that accepting immigration is helpful to the society.
Just look at modern-day China: the Han Chinese ethnic group dominates, and oppresses all the minority groups. China is not a country with a lot of immigration either (nor do they have a shortage of people). So far, it seems to be working out for them, though admittedly it sucks for the minorities.
Actually I agree with you, if a society at some point believes it has progressed enough and feel happy enough, there is no internal reason to pursue growth at any expense.
Japan may decide that being self sufficient and self reliant offers them the best return on their lifestyle.
There will be a lot more older folks, who expected to retire and collect social security, still in the workforce as a result of diminishing payments by youngsters into that program. Demand for medical care will continue grow as the majority of the population gets older.
I believe Japan is experiencing this right now at a large scale.
Japan is transitioning from traditional family-based care (which fails when children are absent or nonexistent) to government-funded social-safety-net care. USA has already made that transition (with Medicaid for nursing home care).
Not just social security: it's public pensions and health care too - every program that expects a pyramid population shape with many young workers supporting a few older ones is going to implode in the next few decades. It's gonna get ugly.
For the time being, immigration is still causing the millennial generation to increase and is the reason why US population continues to grow. So for at least the US the result is that we may not face the same problems as other developed countries or the problem of an aging population may be reduced.
It will cause the US to continue to be a nation of immigrants and the resentment that may cause.
I am not sure how you are implying those two things can be seperate. All immigrants have a source. Throughout US history there has been waves of immigration. Where that source is has changed along with the resentment of that source. It is not from any particular source that resentment occurs, but that there is immigration from a source at all.
That view is ahistorical. Anti-immigrant sentiment has always been directed at the source of the immigration. When Chinese began immigrating in the mid-late 19th century, immigration was suddenly a problem and so we had the national origins formula which ruled until 1965.
There are also military ramifications. If we get into a big skirmish with China, they will overwhelm us with soldiers and high-volume weapon manufacturing capability.
China is perhaps not the best example. Given their one child policy that was in place for a long time, and the fact the fertility rate there is still well below that of the US, the relative size of the pool for soldiers will shrink faster than in the US.
Not to get too deep into the weeds but troops require logistics. Food, gear, etc. Aircraft Carriers are the great equalizer, as they provide mobile shears for cutting those lines. The USA still has the most and that's why we keep it that way.
They should be mild, really, so long as immigration makes up for it, and the US is historically good at attracting and assimilating immigrants. Trump aside (which is indeed a big aside), it seems like that will probably continue.
Politically, it probably means increased racial tensions as the majority white population finds itself on a more and more equal footing with other ethnic groups.
In a debt-based growth-dependent (to repay ever the increasing debts) economy, it crashes everything. Turns out assuming infinite growth does not produce a stable civilization. This is why there are concomitantly erstwhile calls for people to both reduce their "footprint" by not reproducing and also that immigration is crucial to every (western) society's survival.
Why does criticizing an impossible assumption put the onus on me to identify economies that do not make that assumption or to envision what such a state of things might look like? Is it not sufficient to refrain from obvious error?
Sample of one (well, two) here but my wife and I decided it was now or never as we hit our mid thirties and decided to have a kid. She still has mountains of student debt precluding homeownership though which means it's unlikely we'll have two.
We also waited until the kid could be something other than American though, so we're outliers.
Student loans, housing costs, job prospects, healthcare, childcare. People are making a rational decision to avoid children they can’t afford. We as a society need to re-examine the causes of rising costs of essentials so reproduction is no longer financially infeasible.
Exactly. If you think about it, most species reproduce when resources are abundant, and stop reproducing when resources become scarce. That's basically what is happening to young people here.
It's the opposite with humans. 3rd world/developing countries have extremely high birth rates. The best mechanism for "population control" in people is to improve a population's standard of living.
I don't think that it's a matter of worldwide standard of living. I wonder if developing nations have an easier time with a young person reaching a comparable standard of living with their parents, and the developed ones have a much larger discrepancy. In a developing nation success might be somewhere to live, and a job. Before someone from north america is "doing well" you need a partner, a 5 bedroom house, two cars, two jobs, and a university education. We can't meet our "needs" until much later in our life.
>Before someone from north america is "doing well" you need a partner, a 5 bedroom house, two cars, two jobs, and a university education. We can't meet our "needs" until much later in our life.
If it's what your priorities are you can have a home, cars, max out your 401k and be paying back student loans on a single entry level tech salary.
This requires that you put up with a long commute, beater cars, an old house and DIYing a good chunk of skilled trade work that you could hire someone for. You'll be bringing your own lunch to work, drinking beer from a can and not building much cash savings at that stage. Nevertheless it's sustainable on a single entry level tech income in a major urban area and living a couple hours away.
I think that increased spending on luxury things has by implication de-prioritized the "life milestone" things.
Generations ago people bought a house and started a family first. Now people accumulate wealth first and settle down later (which is probably a reflection on the fact that the lifestyle needed to accumulate wealth is not very compatible with settling down).
That's exactly what I'm saying - the goalpost for what "doing well" is has moved, we now expect more of ourselves because of the visible relative affluence of our immediately previous generations. We don't see how the baby boomers started, but we see how they are ending, and that's set the goal for our own success.
- lack of birth control and related education
- desire for “free” manual labor to work stuff such as farm fields
- desire to ensure continuity of one’s family tree (i.e. high mortality rates for infants and children due dangerous conditions and/or lack of healthcare)
More precisely, it seems to be to improve the strength of social safety nets (that correlates with standard of living, but also explains places in the developed world where the average standard of living is high by developed world standards but the birthrate is also high for the developed world.)
The reason for this may be that, in the absence of public social safety net, family (and particularly close family) serve as a safety net, and particularly children, once they are able to be productive, can be a kind of safety net against infirmity for their parents.
> most species reproduce when resources are abundant
I dunno, fungi usually don't produce mushrooms until right before their host is about to die or their substrate is about to be depleted. Reproducing takes a lot of energy, so individuals usually wait until they have no other choice.
Humans seem to be the same way. E.g. low-income kids go through puberty sooner, presumably due to having poorer health. And usually if someone starts drinking a lot or otherwise abusing drugs, they get really hot for a year or two before they start looking sickly and terrible.
At the population level species keep reproducing until they use up all the available resources, and then the populations collapse, but on the level of individuals the dynamics seem to work in almost the opposite way.
but the scarcity here is artificial, induced by unfairness in economic opportunity in spite of more than abundant resources economy-wide.
if we had a more fair economic system, more families would feel economically secure enough to have children.
the minimum level of economical security required rises proportionally with wealth and income disparity, because our economic outcomes are inextricably tied to each other through inflation and the like.
Historically, children generated profit. These days, in developed countries, children are expensive. They cost money and time (e.g., years that you would otherwise spend going to school, building a career).
These days, in developed countries, children are expensive.
Sure, but they're far cheaper in both Sweden and Finland than in the US, yet people are still having fewer children there, so it can't simply be a cost issue.
The monetary cost of a Swedish child might be lower (though to some extent, the cost is just distributed across the population in the form of taxes), but the opportunity cost is not. Scandinavian countries have high rates of post-secondary education, which delays parenthood, and even with progressive workforce policies, having children can slow career advancement [1].
At least in Germany, birth rates have been growing significantly in recent 3 years. And no, it is not just immigrants, it's about everyone. I think this is an effect of the many children/parent friendly laws that have been introduced by the government over the last 10 years. Laws seldom change a society over night, but their effects take some time to be visible.
Right in that bucket and don't think I'll ever afford being able to rear a child from a financial position of "comfort". Savings to the hilt but it's a cash flow problem.
I also don't want to leave my wife and I without a child but all I envision are bars of my own making.
"going to school and paying attention but being taught that abstinence is the only effective form of birth control and that condoms fail regularly so why bother" All so parents don't have to deal with the horror-movie scenario of their adolescent kids having a responsible, happy sex life.
Sure we could come up with a bunch of reasons each way. They're probably all wrong. But why are we speculating? Just go ask some rich people why they want/don't want X number of children and they will tell you.
I think there are a lot of good points being made, but you guys may be caught up in the math and are forgetting something fairly simple.
Sex is free, fun, and easy. The less education you have the less likely you are to understand effective birth control. The less wealthy you are the less you have to spend on contraception. Those things together with the easiest and cheapest form of entertainment would seem to cirrelate with a higher birthrate in lower income brackets.
I cant find any studies that support what Im saying right now, but the logic holds.
I have to wonder if there's a dip around the upper middle/lower upper who, because of price discrimination on college costs and such must still be conservative, that then reverses course for the mid to upper upper, who have wealth in excess of any reasonable pattern of consumption and certainly more than enough to raise many children.
I know that my plan is two max at the moment strictly because total cost per head is roughly $500k in today's dollars (including total private college costs, which account for half of that).
> I know that my plan is two max at the moment strictly because total cost per head is roughly $500k in today's dollars (including total private college costs, which account for half of that).
So double the kids for same price assuming they go to a public university? Sounds like a good deal to me.
FYI, you can cut that down even further if you go to a community college for the first year or two and then transfer.
Rank of the college matters in my opinion. It's unfortunate but it does create opportunities. High-ranked public universities are often really great, but usually comparable in total cost to private ones (with savings for being in-state in some cases).
But yes if you only gain admission to the long tail of private colleges, then you would almost certainly be wiser to go to a low-cost public school.
I wouldn't want my kids to consider community college unless they had to. By definition, I'd like them to have the same academic opportunities I had, if possible.
People who have a lot of money have a lot more fun entertaining themselves without leaning on the emotional network of a family. People with less money rely on their family and community for entertainment. So I'd expect wealthy "jet setters" to not have many children.
Legacy is terrifically important to many wealthy people. Many are in fact motivated towards wealth and success because of it.
Depending on how you define it, children are actually a much more reliable way to have a reasonably enduring legacy than businesses/foundations/accomplishments/fame/etc, though both approaches are ultimately ephemeral. You probably have to successfully make it at least three levels down an ancestor tree, rooted at yourself and with an average replacement rate around 2, in order for your own genetic legacy to have a high statistical likelihood of enduring through anything short of a species-level catastrophe.
Middle-class and upper-middle-class people generally do not have enough wealth to afford full-time live-in servants to take care of their kids for them. Having enough money for a somewhat fancy house isn't that rich, and kids don't just take money, they take a lot of time. Personally, I don't really want to sacrifice all my free time for the next 10 years or so.
I'm not sure if you're being serious here. The bulk of available tuition assistance comes from financial aid, which usually isn't offered to families at or above roughly upper middle.
I also assume you'd only go to a private college that ranks highly, which means low access to meaningful amounts of income/wealth-independent scholarship money. A low-ranked private college is usually no better than many public ones.
> The bulk of available tuition assistance comes from financial aid, which usually isn't offered to families at or above roughly upper middle.
Is that true, though? A few months ago, I was reading a few articles about more competitive (highly-ranked) universities directing significant portion of their own aid dollars to wealthier students in order to lure them in.
Now, much of these schools' motivation for doing so is that those aid dollars spread more thinly among more (wealthy) students means more revenue than focusing those dollars on "need based" (poor) students, especially if the poor students don't stay the whole 4 years because they can't afford even the subsidized tuition. That may not mean much for your ultimate calculation, since it could be as little as 10% discount, but it's still something.
There is likely also merit-based money out there, which may be what the parent comment was referring to, but I have no idea if that's anything but trivial in amount.
They also did so in an environment where childcare was free (Because grandma was doing it for you.)
Most people don't live with grandma anymore, and the government will happily take your children away if you don't keep every second of their lives supervised by an adult, prior to the age of 13.
Because Grandma had her mom watch her kids so didn't spend $14,400/year on infant care, and her mom had time because she got fired from her school teacher job the day she got married!
Today's mom, on the other hand, moved to San Francisco to get her data scientist/devops/whatever job (there were not any in her area of northern Minnesota and she kind of liked CA after going to Stanford) and Grandma doesn't want to move to CA because it's going to fall into the ocean, you know.
Caring for an infant is hard, high-skilled work and something you want to get right. "Shaken baby" is a real thing and can lead to development disorders. A hands-on attentive caretaker has a very good ROI -- healthier, more communicative toddler and child. "You get what you pay for [or do yourself]" is a real thing for the first few years of a child's life, and having family nearby, which we fortunately did, was invaluable.
Unfortunately many areas have outlawed living 10 together in tiny houses and apartments.
Boarding houses have become illegal, and their modern equivalent of micro apartments are in danger of becoming illegal [0].
To add a personal story, when I was college we had about 20-30 people living in a medium sized single family home. We were mostly students, but there were a couple of kids, and a grandmother too. Our neighbors hated us, and constantly tried to report us for overcrowding. However in our locality there was no cap on the number of residents, so long as conditions are sanitary and safe. But we'd have the zoning person come through frequently to ensure we didn't have things like too many ovens or broken bathrooms.
> To add a personal story, when I was college we had about 20-30 people living in a medium sized single family home.
How many bed rooms and how did the actual sleeping work?
A "standard" 3-bedroom house would have 7-8 people in it per room (assuming you use the family room as a bedroom too) which means either bunk beds or wall to wall sleeping bags? Also 30 people sharing two bathrooms doesn't sound fun.
The house was sectioned off in to 3 areas. Mine had 6-7 people sharing 6 bedrooms and 1 bathroom. I'm not sure of the layouts in the other sections of the house. But the landlord had definitely divided the home in to as many small rooms as possible.
In the past, kids could work on the farm or in a factory and generate money, now you have to send them to daycare and buy them toys and they cost money.
Previously, more people would jump straight out of high school into blue collar jobs and raising families. Now, men and women are delaying kids to focus on college and building a career.
And mothers would more often stay home to raise kids. Now both parents are working more, and there's less time to spend raising children.
Our expected spending on children has also grown dramatically. For example back then there was an expectation that someone would always stay home an look after the kids, now we expect them to go to day care. Back then 4 kids sharing a room their entire childhood was normal, now each kid is expected to get their own room. Back then kids where expected to entertain themselves, now we expect them to attend all sorts of after school activities. Back then they where expected to either go straight to work after high school or pay their own way through college either by working or scholarships, now the parents are expected to help pay for college, and so on.
Basically it's not that having kids per se is more expensive, it's that providing kids with the quality of life we've come to be expected to provide them with is expensive.
The other thing everyone is forgetting is how much TIME kids require; it's not just about the money. As someone else in this thread said, poor people get their entertainment from their families and communities, whereas richer people have other ways to entertain themselves (travel, etc.). Raising kids is a huge time-sink; you never get any time to yourself, you never get to do anything that isn't kid-friendly, etc. It's a huge lifestyle change if you're used to being able to take weekend trips, go to fancy restaurants, go on international travel, etc.
This is interpreting previous decades as "normal" and current status quo as "abnormal".
Hypothetically, though, if previous generations (a) did not need as many farm hands, (b) did not need as many factory workers, (c) had access to cheap birth control and (d) enjoyed low child mortality rates, do you think their high birth rates would've stayed as high?
It's not just a US issue. Fertility drops below replacement rate all across the world in urban settings with modern economies, from Germany to Japan to China, even trending in sub saharan Africa https://www.ageing.ox.ac.uk/blog/Is-fertility-stalling-in-su...
That article is not particularly reassuring. Although the rate is declining in sub-saharan africa, it is very slow and seems to be stalling out. The example of Niger is particularly concerning:
[...] the shrinking arable land beset by frequent drought, is supporting a rapidly expanding population. [...] expected to grow from some 16 million today to 55 million in 2050, reaching 140 million by the end of the century
A 10x increase in population, decreasing farmland, and then add the effects of climate change on top...
It will mean a big problem for Europe as the level of outflow is likely set to accelerate over the coming decades. Who knows what the political consequences will be..
The reason is that the US doesn't provide support for families. Childcare, maternity leave, health care support, these are things that could make it possible for working parents to have more kids. The US is doing just the opposite.
The US didn't have that stuff a century ago either, and the birth rate was higher. You may wish for those things, but they aren't required. Some EU countries have those things, and their birth rates are even lower than the US birth rate.
Those things actually contribute to the problem. They drive up taxes, causing more families to feel that they need two incomes and overtime and a bit more waiting.
> The US didn't have that stuff a century ago either, and the birth rate was higher.
Ah yes, back when one (1) unexceptional salary could actually support a few humans, shelter, etc.
> They drive up taxes, causing more families to feel they need two incomes...
I’m pretty sure the stagnation of wages while costs of living kept increasing played a way bigger part of this than a few percentage points of tax changes.
That's what I thought originally, but if you look at the data it doesn't actually line up, chinese fertility rates were already well off their peak by 1979.
Of course, who knows if the chinese data is even accurate.
For decades, the US birth rate has been held up by immigration. American values have been to regard the country as a nation of immigrants, who not only act as a source of youthful workers, but also have more kids than Americans who have been here longer. So the US has avoided workforce aging, as has happened in parts of Europe and especially Japan, through immigration.
With the recent reduction in immigration, accelerated by the party in power now, the US is going to face the same low birth rate problems as other advanced economies.
And the people leading immigration suppression in the US know this.
Paul Ryan in December:
This is going to be the new economic challenge for America: people. Baby boomers are retiring—I did my part, but we need to have higher birth rates in this country,” Ryan told reporters on Thursday. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican and current Speaker of the House, “did [his] part” by having three children.http://www.newsweek.com/paul-ryan-wants-you-have-more-kids-7...
It's also worth adding: the political environment in the US for decades means that one party wants to make it hard for two-parent working families to have more kids (because those two-parent families tend to vote for the other party, and one-earner families have kids that vote for their party). That's a big part of the reason the US has poor child care and maternity leave support -- because those policies are a political football in the US.
These working people who can't find jobs are addicted to opiates or refuse to educate themselves. Dirt cheap illegal laborers slave over jobs a white American would never, ever do.
Yeah I don't know anybody personally who feels like a winner because they have clean drinking water. It's universal where I live. In places where it's not, you might feel like a winner when the neighboring village doesn't have it, and sucks to be them.
Every time agriculture-heavy states crack down on illegal immigration, crops rot on the vine because nobody else wants those jobs, even in periods of high unemployment. Here's the story from Georgia, there are identical ones from the Southwest as well:
Your choice is not between illegal immigrants and working-class citizens getting that work, it's been illegal immigrants getting the work and nobody doing it.
Seriously. Stories abound about millennials (or anybody) not willing to do manual labor, waiting for higher-end jobs.
And it makes sense. We pay for everyone to go to 12 years of public school, learning calculus, history, chemistry, literature, etc.., only to work picking strawberries for the rest of their lives?
Fuck that.
The American labor force isn't designed for these kinds of jobs. I can't imagine any smartphone addicted millennial to do manual labor. In fact, we'd be more honest about our economy if we actually banned these jobs for Americans, and only allowed unskilled immigrants to do them, and deal with it from there.
Bullshit. If the pay is right, you will find plenty of people to pick produce. But in a world where people expect $15/hour for work that is leisurely in comparison (fast food), paying that much for hard labor ain’t gonna cut it.
> I provided sources showing that this is, empirically, what happens, no matter what you would like to believe.
I can’t read the second one, but I’ve seen the arguments in the first one a million times — a whole lot of whining about how it’s absolutely impossible to find workers. No, you can’t find them at the price you want. Show me the farmer offering $30/hour plus benefits. You can’t. Even in the first article they peg “skilled” labor at $15-20/hour with the unskilled earning less. Guess what, I can get that a McDonald’s so try harder Mr. Farmer.
> Obviously! But once you do that, the produce costs so much that no one wants to buy it.
So I take it you were against the recent ~doubling of fast food wages in some localities to $15/hour then? Nah, probably not, I’m guessing you used the same argument so many others did: “what’s your problem, it’ll add like three cents to the cost of your Big Mac.” Well, I’d argue that doubling or tripling farm labor costs would only add a dime to the price of a basket of strawberries. Who cares? Pay real wages for real work and stop making excuses for what amounts to modern day slave labor.
We are drifting away from my original claim here, into new claims where I actually mostly agree with you. The original claim was "Illegal immigration hurts low-skilled American workers", and I responded saying "No it doesn't, because those immigrants are taking jobs that wouldn't otherwise be filled, at least in the produce market that presently exists".
Whether people should be willing to may more for their produce, and whether the treatment of these workers is ethically defensible - those are separate questions. I would be totally fine with paying real wages for produce-picking and then subsequently tightening immigration, but there's the paying market we'd like to have and the one we've actually got.
> Obviously! But once you do that, the produce costs so much that no one wants to buy it. That is the fundamental issue here.
the market will correct itself.
why would anyone want to pick raspberry for $10 an hour when I can get paid more working at in & out. Basically we should support shitty working conditions and black market labor because people dont wanna pay more for their produce?
...and the market of voters will "correct" the elected politicians. Which is why no politician is foolish enough to do this, and they have a monopoly on making laws.
Sometimes "nobody doing it" is the correct answer. It might not be economically viable for the USA to grow strawberries. We can import strawberries or find something else to eat.
In the long-term, automation may help.
We can also pay a tiny bit more for our strawberries. At retail level, the cost of farm labor is is tiny portion of the total cost.
Crops don't rot on the vine if farmers know the labor situation in advance. Some will decide not to grow that crop. Others will find labor, paying more if required.
Whenever the supply of illegal aliens is reduced, wages rise. The "living wage" can not happen in the presence of illegal aliens. Once wages rise, Americans take the jobs. You can even see this today in the record-low unemployment rates.
> Sometimes "nobody doing it" is the correct answer. It might not be economically viable for the USA to grow strawberries. We can import strawberries or find something else to eat.
I actually agree with this, but society has decided that "food security" is an important component of national security and that the country would like to maintain domestic food production even if it is uneconomical. And that's fine, if that's what the public wants, but once you do that you have to live with the consequences, like being forced to choose between illegal labor and rotting crops.
> In the long-term, automation may help.
Maybe, but a lot of the produce-picking that can be automated already has been. What's left is crops that, for whatever reason, are much harder to automate.
> At retail level, the cost of farm labor is is tiny portion of the total cost.
I'd like to see a source for this.
> Crops don't rot on the vine if farmers know the labor situation in advance
Please actually read my two links. The first is from 2012, and the second is about how the situation persisted through 2016. You're saying four years of Georgia's law wasn't enough advance notice?
It wasn't four years of a consistent labor situation without any expectation of change. It was four years of ups and downs with changing politics. It would be reasonable for a farmer to expect that there will be a massive amnesty, and then that doesn't happen. Some farmers simply have four years worth of emergency funds and a whole lot of stubbornness.
Also, I should have said "crops MOSTLY don't rot on the vine" because:
Even if the labor supply is stable, some crops will still be left to rot. The production of the land and the demands of the consumers are both subject to change. This affects the price. Given the current price, some farms may decide to not bother harvesting.
Farms aren't always 100% serious. Lots of them are almost a hobby, or for tax reasons. (if you can claim your home is a farm, you may pay lower property taxes, and there are even income tax advantages)
>We can import strawberries or find something else to eat.
> Whenever the supply of illegal aliens is reduced, wages rise. The "living wage" can not happen in the presence of illegal aliens. Once wages rise, Americans take the jobs. You can even see this today in the record-low unemployment rates.
So we import our strawberries and wages will rise? How can both of these things be true? And the alternative is we won't eat strawberries anymore?
What you're proposing is setting our country up to be a worse place on the individual level "hey, why can't I find strawberries in my grocery store?" and on the national level, because we'll be beholden to whoever we're importing from.
There's a reason why a country should grow its own food. It's critical for our national security that we not be dependent on outsiders for something so basic.
Whoever told you they're doing this to "Make America Great Again" was lying to you. Not being able to buy strawberries would make America worse.
If you live in a place where said labor is plentiful (California, Florida, etc), this is a problem in so much as that job which went to someone who will work for less. For certain parts of the country, that is a viable occupation.
But that doesn't mean these jobs are in any way desirable.
In another instance, I see people who complain about Amazon's cashierless stores taking away jobs that people could do, but they don't seem to have an answer about how this situation could free those people up to do some other, potentially less menial job.
In many states the employment market is so tight that jobs are going unfilled. This is especially true in blue-collar jobs that require interfacing with computers and advanced machinery. In many areas with higher unemployment rate, employers still complain they can't find anyone who can pass a drug test.
We do have a mismatch -- lots of employers simply aren't yet paying enough to get employees. And agricultural employers can't get any Americans, white or not white, to work for them, in part because the seasonality of the jobs and lack of health insurance makes the pay immaterial. If you work for 6 weeks you could lose eligibility for some benefits, and what are you going to do for the other 46 weeks in the year? Providing benefits not tied to employment would mitigate this problem. But it still wouldn't solve the problem of all the Americans not even looking for work because they're out on disability. These people, again, are not competing with immigrant labor, because by and large they really can't do any sort of physical labor.
There is really no competition for ag jobs. Americans really, really don't want to do them, for some rational economic reasons and some reasons of expectations/feelings about what they deserve.
Americans do actually want to do ag jobs, they just expect decent working conditions. Many employeers prefer illegal immigrants because they are more easily exploitable in regards to not only wages, but also safety.
> In many states the employment market is so tight that jobs are going unfilled.
That has been the case for a mere 12-18 months out of the last decade.
You know why liberals used to be against allowing vast inflows of unskilled labor? They fully understood the obvious consequences to the workers their party represented, as it pertained to wages & employment prospects. Make that labor more scarce and wages rise. It's the reason Bernie Sanders used to openly advocate against allowing large amounts of unskilled labor immigration.
No other developed nation uses the immigration approach that the US uses. Everyone else favors a merit based system and favors immigrants that can pay for their social benefits. This is why Canada is so annoyed with the US right now on immigrants crossing the border into Canada. [1] A few thousand illegal immigrants cross over each month and Canada is begging the US to make it stop. Out of the entire planet, only the US is held to a different standard, everyone else is allowed to restrict unskilled labor immigration. The US is uniquely backwards in its approach to heavily limiting skilled labor and simultaneously allowing unlimited amounts of unskilled labor.
Where's the international condemnation for Canada's approach to restricting hispanic immigration into their nation? Why are they not called racist for it? They're a mere 1.5% hispanic, specifically because they won't allow unskilled labor from Latin America into the country.
That's an extremely ugly, hypocritical double standard. If the US behaves exactly as Canada does, it's called racist, xenophobic, etc.
I'll note that the sole reason the Republicans are supporting / allowing the low skill immigration approach (and why they've blocked Trump's attempt to shift to a merit system), is that it benefits business margins: they want as much cheap labor as they can get to suppress wages. It's why the Koch brothers are such big proponents of it.
The vast, endless supply of unskilled labor that has flooded the US for decades is partially responsible for low wage growth among lower skilled workers in the US over that time. If there's always more low-skilled labor, wages will not rise for low-skilled laborers. It's basic supply and demand. As automation increasingly hammers low-skill laborers, that effect will get dramatically worse.
The other critical reason why the US is going to be forced to end its immigration policies: you can't support an increasingly generous welfare state matched against vast inflows of unskilled labor that can't pay for its own benefits programs. This is why other developed nations follow a pay-your-way merit system. If you can't support yourself, Canada generally isn't letting you in. A couple million low-skill immigrants coming into their nation would bankrupt their welfare system and collapse their healthcare system. The US welfare state is now more generous than Canada's, so how is the US expected to continue to afford it? You want universal healthcare? You can never have that unless you change the immigration system to restrict inflows of unskilled labor.
The US should flip its policies: continue to allow in some reasonable amount of low-skill labor, and allow in a lot more high-skill labor (which helps pay for the benefits cost of the low-skill labor). As the US moves gradually toward universal healthcare, and continues to increase the generosity of its welfare state, this will become a fiscal necessity, just as it is in all other developed nations and for the exact same reason.
No, that's why it's a fact and not an opinion poll that was cited. If people were thinking that, maybe they wouldn't be talking about shooting illegal immigrants [0].
That is in large part a selection problem. Educated or skilled workers generally have an easier time immigrating legally so it is only natural for those here illegally to be less educated or skilled.
I'm what you would call a (potential) high-skilled immigrant (STEM Phd soon completed at top tier college). Clearly, the current policies don't make me want to stay. The path to permanent residency (i.e. proper immigration) is getting harder and harder.
No longer that two days ago we got an email about "public charges" (i.e. -legal- public help that would make Dhs/State consider us a burden to the US) and how we should be careful not to use those while in the US, otherwise we can get denied entry/visa. Yikes.
Hardly any are undocumented. Of course, for many the documents are forged. Maybe they have your social security number; hope you don't mind! BTW, identity theft is illegal.
Oh, also, in all states and countries an unregistered firearm is not illegal. It is undocumented. If I enter your home without permission, I'm an undocumented resident.
If we decide that we are no longer able to exploit desperate immigrants to pick our crops, than the price those crops are sold at will rise until such time as the next Eli Whitney, who is probably an HN reader, invents a machine to harvest them cheaper.
All you're doing by continuing the exploitation is keeping such automation from being developed, as you rob it of it's market.
It is so predictable that the whole "but what about the farmers" is touted as a reason to flaunt immigration laws. The farmers are not owed such a subsidy by the American people. They will adapt if they are forced to. They would be stupid to do so before they are forced to.
>the price those crops are sold at will rise until such time as the next Eli Whitney, who is probably an HN reader, invents a machine to harvest them cheaper.
Sure, and who cares about the people who can't afford food in the meantime while we wait for the new Eli Whitney? You are proposing fixing one problem by creating numerous more problems.
I would be interested in your estimates of how much you believe produce prices would actually rise if farm workers were paid non-exploitative wages. I would also remind you that many of these poor people would be the ones receiving that higher wage.
Prices would only go up marginally a few percentage points, but that can be enough to break certain budgets especially when fresh food like this is already more expensive than processed and unhealthy alternatives.
You also shouldn't treat poor people as a single group. Yes, some poor people will be receiving these higher wages but no all. There are still people lost in the transition just like there would be people lost in the transition waiting for innovation from Eli Whitney.
"Who will actually spend the money to develop a strawberry picking machine when there are piles of people that are willing to do it for below minimum wage and no health care?"
Having some group you use at near slave labor status can hold back technological innovation.
> Who will pick strawberries? Who will clean your hotel room? Etc.
There is a seasonal / migrant worker visa for this reason. For instance, near me, Kiawah Island's resorts are partly staffed with Jamaican guest workers because the seasonal nature of the job. In high school I worked as a bagger at a grocery store on another island that was incredibly seasonal, so we had Russian guest workers during the summers.
Some jobs probably just wouldn't get done without either A) a wage increase or B) guest workers, e.g. particularly brutal agricultural tasks. We can allow the necessary workforce in for these tasks if need be.
> It's the classic who will do "X" dirty job argument.
The poor.
Having grown up in an area with a large Hispanic influx, they did. I currently live in an area with little to no Hispanics, but we do have a lot of poor African-Americans. They do the jobs I grew up seeing Central and South Americans work.
The problem with the illegal influx from southern nations, is they can also crowd out native blue collar markets by working for less, and are willing to live an impoverished standard of living. We should not be forsaking our own countrymen so we can get cheap lawn care from a wage-slave underclass living in third-world conditions on American soil.
The seasonal worker visa is talked about for Brexit. The people who need the workers, the fruit farmers, say it's far too much effort and isn't workable.
The poor here just aren't willing to do that work at that price. The supermarkets aren't willing to pay more for the produce. Something has to give and in both countries I'm sure it's going to be the rules on visas.
> Who will pick strawberries? Who will clean your hotel room? Etc.
1859: But who will pick cotton? Perform household chores?
We will either develop a technological solution or gasp the wages and benefits for picking strawberries will rise to such a point that it makes sense to pick that up as a career choice.
The biggest reason for that IMO is because Mexico has been doing relatively well over the past couple of decades. You don't attempt a very risky illegal crossing if you can get a job and support your family where you are.
The repeal of NAFTA will restart the immigration wave as the Mexican economy tanks.
Some parts of NAFTA might eventually be renegotiated but it won't be repealed any time soon. In the USA it was implemented as a federal law (not a treaty or executive agreement) and there is very little Congressional support for a repeal.
I would posit that the people coming here illegally to work are actually the most entrepreneurial, hard working, can-do people that we should welcome into our society. Judging based on what current socio-economic status they're at is short sighted. You'll see the same thing expressed in HN regarding employees at declining companies, the most desirable employees leave earlier...
Though I would add that doing it via a more realistic temporary work visa program would be preferable to encouraging an illegal crossing industry to flourish.
> I would posit that the people coming here illegally to work are actually the most entrepreneurial, hard working, can-do people
You're not at all wrong, I grew up with a lot of illegal friends. Good number of them have since gone on to become American citizens through hard work and determination and have built good lives for themselves.
Maternally, I'm a second generation American. My grandparents came to America post-WWII with nothing but an offer of employment, and ended up retired with the classic condo beach life. The classic story of rags to middle class American riches. There's a reason that's been the American tale, coming to a faraway land in search of prosperity takes drive. We filter for hard workers.
The problem is the black-market / underbelly aspects of this pool, and that very desperation and drive that drove them here has them put up with conditions we should be ashamed of be it in California, Iowa, or Appalachia. Businesses exploiting that cheap source of labor drive down the ability for those trying to live a basic American life.
Europe did the same in importing large numbers of Muslim laborers after WW2. The hope was that they'd either make their money and go back home, or culturally integrate. Many observers will say that neither happened and there's now a difficult social problem in many countries like France.
America integrated large immigrant waves in it's past, and I doubt anyone would say the Italians, or Irish, or other minorities were not integrated today. Time bridges cultures, and we're the better for it.
I don't think you're thinking of the historical details to say that in such a blase manner. The path to integration went through periods much more violent and contentious than anything we see today.
I'm aware of how immigrants were treated back then and I'm not condoning it. That still doesn't change the fact that they came from cultures that IMO were quite compatible with the USAs considering their common origin and values. I think the current situation in Europe, and other instances of mass migration in history, demonstrate that not all cultures are compatible with each other
Like Cubans after the revolution, or Iranians after their revolution, or maybe the mass of Vietnamese after the war? What actual cultures are you saying are incompatible? America has worked with them all and despite hand-wringing over "compatibility". There is a much stronger case to be made human beings are humans in the end and that it just takes time.
That’s not true. When German immigrants were new, no one believed they would integrate since they refused to give up speaking German. Catholics like the Irish were viewed with suspicion because they revered a pope.
America’s secret superpower is the ability to assimilate pretty much any people within four generations give or take
So, only white people can assimilate then? The now many generations of people of Hispanic origin that are part of the American story would seem to indicate you are wrong. As is the case with the now multiple generations of Koreans and particularly Japanese, who remain part of the US story even after being put into concentration camps because of precisely the same sort of prejudice, that they were somehow inherently un-American due to their "cultural incompatibility", i.e. non-whiteness, unlike the millions of German-Americans in the US at the time.
The Muslims will (continue to) integrate as well. It takes a couple of generations.
> I think the current situation in Europe, and other instances of mass migration in history, demonstrate that not all cultures are compatible with each other.
Japanese Americans?
Chinese Americans?
Indian Americans?
Plus, the very concept of some sort of empirical “cultural incompatibility” seems highly questionable. I mean, it’s not like cultures change over time or anything like that.
Which historical details? The fact that the US was extremely racist but the immigrants managed to integrate by focusing on work and adapting instead of spiting and complaining about the host country?
That's not what anti-immigration crusaders said at the time. It was a common belief that Italian and Irish immigrants (who were mostly Catholic) could never fit in to Protestant American society. Your statement is pure revisionism.
The Chinese immigrated to the US at a similar time as the Irish and Italians. The more than 3 million Chinese living in the US today seem plenty well integrated and I don’t think China and America are particular close in terms of culture.
As recently as 1998 I had a preacher tell my Irish Catholic friend that she still had a chance to accept Jesus and be saved. There is still a feeling that Catholics are not really Christian in some circles, and that was an important factor in justifying the discrimination you mention!
> In fairness many Catholics don't accept Protestants as Christians either.
If any Catholic actually thinks this, they must be deeply ignorant of Catholic theology. According to the Catholic Church, anyone baptised using water and with a Trinitarian formula is Christian. Most Protestant denominations baptise people in this way, so most baptised Protestants are Christians according to traditional Catholic theology.
(And this is not something new introduced with Vatican II either, it historically dates back to the Donatist schism in 4th century North Africa.)
That's interesting but I thought the Donatist decision only applied to people who wanted to be part of the Roman Catholic church but their baptising priest had at some point lapsed. Generally Protestants don't recognize the authority of the church at all (i.e. Sola scriptura).
Donatists claimed that sacraments were only valid if the priest who performed them was a faithful Christian. So if the priest was a heretic or grave sinner, the sacraments he performed were invalid. The Catholic Church declared that to be a heresy – a heretic or a sinner can still perform valid sacraments, provided the heresy doesn't involve a radically different understanding of the nature of the sacrament.
So, from the viewpoint of traditional Catholic theology, Protestants are heretics, but their beliefs about baptism are close enough to the Catholic belief that their heresy doesn't invalidate their baptisms. (Different story for ordination and the eucharist, since Protestant theology on those topics is further away from Catholic theology.) Whereas, non-Trinitarian Christians, the Catholic Church views their beliefs to directly touch on what the sacrament of baptism is about, so their non-Trinitarianism invalidates their baptisms from the Catholic viewpoint.
> So, from the viewpoint of traditional Catholic theology, Protestants are heretics, but their beliefs about baptism are close enough to the Catholic belief that their heresy doesn't invalidate their baptisms. (Different story for ordination and the eucharist, since Protestant theology on those topics is further away from Catholic theology.)
This is largely an issue of apostolic succession; regardless of the theology of the communities about ordination and the eucharist (which do differ critically), the sacraments cannot be valid because they are valid, in Catholic doctrine, only when performed by a validly ordained bishop (ordination) or consecrated by a validly ordained priest (Eucharist); the absence of episcopal apostolic succession (or, in much of protestantism, even the episcopal office) means that there are no validly ordained bishops and priests around. Now that is intimately tied to the doctrine around ordination, but even if the doctrine around the substance of the sacrament of the eucharist were identical, the absence of a valid minister of the sacrament would be critical.
> Whereas, non-Trinitarian Christians, the Catholic Church views their beliefs to directly touch on what the sacrament of baptism is about, so their non-Trinitarianism invalidates their baptisms from the Catholic viewpoint.
Well, there's two issues there. Sure, it's debatable whether a non-Trinitarian would have the requisite intent to validly (if, necessarily, illicitly) perform a baptism in the eyes of the Catholic Church, but what is more certainly fatal of most baptism by non-Trinitarians would be the failure to baptise using a Trinitarian formula, which is required for the sacrament to be valid, whether or not it is licit.
> This is largely an issue of apostolic succession
There are two different cases here. Protestants differ in their ecclesiology; some retain belief in episcopal apostolic succession, others reject it. Of course, those Protestants who reject episcopal apostolic succession, there are (from the Catholic viewpoint) no valid bishops, and hence no valid priests, and hence no valid Eucharist. On the other hand, the Anglicans, and some (but not all) of the Lutheran churches, claim to have bishops with valid apostolic succession. In the case of the Anglicans, the Catholic Church has decided that their eucharistic theology is so different that their episcopal consecrations and ordinations are invalid as a result (Apostolicae curae, 1896). Presumably, the same judgement would apply to other Protestant denominations claiming episcopal apostolic succession also.
I see, but in addition to a valid baptism aren't there required beliefs as well? Such as the immaculate conception and Papal infallibility, which Protestants would deny?
According to Catholic teaching, any validly baptised person is a Christian, regardless of their beliefs. Baptism is an indelible mark on the soul, like a spiritual membership card that you cannot destroy. Once you join, you can never really leave. Even if you convert to Islam, or become an atheist, you remain (in some spiritual sense) a Christian as long as you live. This is very different from the Protestant understanding of what it means "to be a Christian", which is based on a person's belief and (more importantly) the inner attitude of their heart.
The Roman Catholic Church does not recognize, in a doctrinal sense (obviously, it does in a secular material sense) the existence of any other Christian Churches [0]; it takes the “Catholic” in its name quite seriously.
From the doctrinal point of view, there are no non-Catholic Christians, just Catholics of various degrees of imperfection, is and everyone who intends to join Christianity, or to join someone else to it, intends joining to the Catholic Church as the two are identical and coextensive.
[0] it does recognize particular churches, but they are part of rather than separate from the universal Church; in addition to those in full communion with Rome, these include Christian communities who are out of Communion with Rome but who retain valid episcopal apostolic succession, including the various Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches, among others.
> Generally Protestants don't recognize the authority of the church at all (i.e. Sola scriptura).
Sola scriptura is a doctrine of a subset of protestantism; there are Protestants who don't adhere to it but instead to prima scriptura, or to doctrines that aren't clearly either. It is certainly not the case that Protestants as a whole reject ecclesiastical authority.
> it takes the “Catholic” in its name quite seriously.
I'm pretty sure you know about this, but for laymen who may not be familiar with the terminology.
The word "catholic" (little c) literally means "universal". And it is a strong doctrine of the "Catholic church" (big C) that the group of worshipers is singular and universal.
It's not clear to me whether Rome accepts Christians who completely reject its authority. The central point of Lutheran Protestantism is that it's open source: anybody with a Bible can decide for themselves how to implement it without asking for permission. Of course there's value in a community of believers but the requirement is just to gather "two or more".
I guess Protestants have a harder time deciding who's a Christian; probably acceptance of the Nicean Creed is a popular standard, though I prefer "anyone who seeks to imitate Christ".
> It's not clear to me whether Rome accepts Christians who completely reject its authority
Rome absolutely accepts them as Christians.
It views them as wrong, but it does that for plenty of Christians that don't completely reject it's authority, too.
> The central point of Lutheran Protestantism is that it's open source: anybody with a Bible can decide for themselves how to implement it without asking for permission.
It would seem to me that the central point of Lutheran Protestantism is that there is a right way to implement Christianity, that right way is clear in Scripture, and having intermediaries between the believer and the Scripture is a barrier to the believer finding the truth in Scripture.
Lutheranism also seems generally pretty strongly defined by a particular opinion on what the right answers are, or at least a wide range of them, though somewhat internally divided by the degree of certainty ascribed to those answers.
Thank you, just to be clear: there is no obstacle to a Protestant sponsoring a child's baptism in the Catholic Church as parent or godparent?
Also I think you are right that many Protestants believe their opinions are clearly implicated by scripture, but it should be obvious on reflection that Scripture is not self-interpreting.
> Thank you, just to be clear: there is no obstacle to a Protestant sponsoring a child's baptism in the Catholic Church as parent or godparent?
Strictly speaking, there is a distinction between "sponsor" and "witness". The sponsor must be a Catholic, the witnesses can be non-Catholic Christians. However, in my personal experience (having had one child baptised Catholic, and the other will be baptised soon), everyone just collectively treats the "sponsor" and "witnesses" as "godparents". The parish just tells people "one godparent must be a Catholic". The sponsor is just the first godparent listed on the baptism certificate.
As far as parents go, technically there is no requirement that either parent be Catholic, or even Christian. A Buddhist couple could ask for their child to be baptised as Catholic. Now, in practice, priests will be extremely hesitant about fulfilling such a request, but strictly speaking it is allowed.
My understanding is there needs to be a reasonable expectation the child would be raised to be Catholic. A typical heuristic is at least one Catholic parent. I guess "be Catholic" in this context means "will go through confirmation" or something to that effect.
Yes. A priest is not supposed to baptise without such a "reasonable expectation". (Although if he does it anyway, he has broken the rules, and could be disciplined for it, but the baptism is nonetheless valid.)
One Catholic parent is the usual heuristic but it isn't actually the rule so isn't absolutely binding. For example, if a non-Catholic is known to regularly attend Catholic services, but for whatever reason is hesitating in formally converting, a priest may very well agree to such a parent's request to baptise their child.
"Being white"'s an interesting phrase to use, because I don't think Irish (or Italians at a different point) were considered white at the time they were being discriminated against here. It shows how much whiteness is socially constructed.
The racists of the day were apparently quite progressive. They couldn't even see the color of the person's skin. It's almost like race is more of a social construct than a biological one.
The Chinese immigrants were not (and still are not) particularly religious, and certainly didn't have a religion that promoted extremism and placed them at odds with the existing inhabitants. Other Asian immigrants in the US were also either not religious, or (like with Koreans and Filipinos) adopted the same religion as the dominant culture.
The fundamental problem, as I see it, is religion.
> and certainly didn't have a religion that promoted extremism
Lets cut through the code words then and have a direct counterexample to what you're trying to say.
Nigerians are primarily Muslims. They are also highly educated and among the most entrepreneurial immigrants to the USA. And while there's a "Nigerian prince" joke every now and then, they really are doing relatively well in the USA. Like, "better than Asians" with regards to college education statistics.
Nigerians are basically the perfect counterexample to the "Religion" (aka: Islam) problem that is so often brought up. High rates of college completion, high rates of business / entrepreneurs, high-rates of integration. Overall, clearly net-positive to the USA.
> Other Asian immigrants in the US were also either not religious, or (like with Koreans and Filipinos) adopted the same religion as the dominant culture.
What about Indians? Who are usually either Hindu or Muslim? Indians are also highly educated and start a large number of businesses.
I'm personally Catholic. I'd obviously prefer it if immigrants would come with the same Religion as me, but the statistics are in. Nigerians, Indians, and a whole host of other immigrants kind of do perfectly fine in America. There's no need for them to be Christian or otherwise "mainstream".
Indeed, bringing in immigrants on the basis of religion is severely anti-American IMO. America is certainly big enough to sustain Hindu, Muslims, and other religious groups. Especially if those people are coming in highly-skilled, highly educated, and overall are a benefit to our society.
Ok, then what is the problem then? It's not racism; Nigerians are a lot darker than Arabs. Maybe it's a cultural problem, combined with religion: you never hear of Nigerian Muslims committing terrorist acts in the West. Islam is a big, big religion, and Muslims from some cultures simply don't have any kind of bad reputation (I'm thinking Malaysia here), while others certainly do.
So maybe it is religion, just not the whole religion, but rather particular sects. All Christians are not like the Pentecostals or the Mormons, and similarly all Muslims are not the same.
Its certainly a problem that's specific to particular sects.
The sect of Osama Bin Laden was "Wahhabism", which is relatively rare outside of Saudi Arabia. And even then, the Saudi Princes who work with the USA are often pro-Wahabbism, so the USA can't even deride that sect (even if its the primary sect of Al-Qaeda). Because there's still "good guys" who follow that particular sect.
Note that the "Bin Laden" family was a very rich and entrepreneurial group of people. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Laden_family) Some of them were huge investors in the US before their "black sheep" messed up their family name forever.
The Middle East is complicated. Like, super super complicated. Honestly, the bin Ladens in general (aside from the infamous one) should be welcome to the USA. A bit unfortunate about their "black sheep" sibling.
-----------
Besides, if "Religion" was the problem, why did the USA DESTROY the only secular, maybe even atheist, group in the Middle East? (aka: Iraq Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athists).
Reason: the world is complicated. And thinking about it in terms of Religion only is a mistake. ISIS for example is a combination of yes, Wahhabism, but ALSO has the support of former Ba'athists.
And the Ba'athists believe in Secularism and secular law. They seemed to have joined in the ISIS fun not because of religious reasons, but because they wished to take over Iraq and saw aligning themselves with the fundamentalist Wahhabists as the best path forward and creating a unified Arab State.
So yes, we are fighting secular (arguably an atheist) groups in the Middle East. The world is a very complicated place. Yes, we have enemies some places, but Muslims exist across the entire world. You can't paint the issues of one region as a blight on all Muslims.
Even then: I'd imagine that we should welcome the many Iraqis who have helped the USA and are now getting targetted by ISIS in their country. We have friends in the region and we are turning them away with our immigration policies. We've turned our back on our closest supporters of that region, and I wouldn't be surprised if a large number of them have died because of their pro-US support or actions.
Oh right, Pakistan is where the Muslims come from. Apologies, its sometimes hard to remember everything about the world.
But yeah, neither of those are Christian. Both are IIRC Polythistic religions, about as different from Christianity as possible. Muslims for example believe in Abraham and the existence of Jesus. Their story is... very different but Allah is clearly the God of Abraham / Yahweh.
So if anything, Muslims are "closer" to the mainstream religion of the USA than Hindu's or Sikhs
I think that MAYBE a case can be made against the Wahhabi philosophy / sect (and similar sects). Maybe, but that's the furthest I'd go towards deriding a religious group in its entirety. Things are especially complicated because a large number of pro-Wahhabi Saudi princes are working very closely with the USA on this issue.
I don't think that Muslimphobia is an appropriate response to Antisemitism.
Look: the Nazis were primarily Christian. We recognized the political movement of the Nazis as independent of their religion.
People today still don't realize that the Ba'athists of Iraq (who eventually joined with ISIS) were SECULAR. Hint: Religion is at best, a minor component to the violent middle-eastern philosophy. The Middle East is far more complicated than a group of religions.
There is a concept, and this concept goes BEYOND religious grounds (as it is taking hold in the Ba'athist reminants of Northern Iraq). Middle Easterners long for the re-establishment of their lost Empires from the middle ages. They dream of a reunified Arab State. (Or at least, that's the shared dream of the violent ISIS members in general)
And yes. Ba'athists believe it should be secular and pan-religious. They're also authoritarian and incredibly violent. But its important to keep these political groups in mind. But yes, even the secular groups dream of re-establishing their former empire. And yes, Wahhabists believe it should be a religious theocracy. But there's a lot of subgroups to this political movement.
Don't mistake the political situation with the religious undertones. Besides, a Muslim from Nigeria typically doesn't give a rats ass about this "pan-Arabic" stuff. So the religious stuff is purely a distraction.
I see your point, I don't see why it is relevant, I know about Ba'ath, etc.
I know that Jews have been suffering more attacks in Europe recently including one in Berlin that wasn't a jew but wore a kippah to "prove it was not dangerous" and got attacked. So ignoring the issue or just sidelining issue is not ideal.
Its certainly an issue. But antisemitism / Holocaust deniers are kind of a universal group. Not only are there certain Arab groups who are Holocaust deniers, but there are also Right-Wing KKK Members who were making their anti-Semitism quite clear just a few months ago.
Antisemitism is on the rise. But blaming it squarely on Muslims is just plain wrong. The above Swastika was found at the infamous Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally.
I don't necessarily have answers. But I'm also not entirely sure why Muslims get all the blame here. There are plenty of Muslims who are literally thousands of miles away from these incidents (ie: Nigerian Muslims) who really shouldn't be lumped together with the rest of the crap going on.
> But yeah, neither of those are Christian. Both are IIRC Polythistic religions, about as different from Christianity as possible.
Many Hindus believe that the numerous deities are different forms or aspects of one ultimate deity. As such, they are much closer to monotheism than you think. It can be described as "inclusive monotheism", as opposed to the "exclusive monotheism" of the Abrahamic religions.
Sikhism is not polytheistic at all, it is very monotheistic.
Christianity itself has been accused of polytheism. Many Jews, Muslims, and non-Trinitarian Christians argue that there is no real difference between Trinity and tritheism. Many Protestants accuse the Catholic and Orthodox cult of Mary and the Saints of bordering on polytheism. Mormonism (admittedly on the fringe of Christianity) sees the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three separate "beings", although it redefines the word "God" to refer to those three beings collectively. Mormon theology also implies that God the Father has a wife (the Heavenly Mother), and of other gods ruling over other universes (or parts of the universe.)
In my observation, religions that are extremely far apart generally get along better than religions that are much closer. Also, polytheistic religions just don't seem to have compatibility problems with other religions. The religions that get along the worst are the Abrahamic ones: Muslims and Jews hate each other, Christians hate Jews (more so in the past), Sunni and Shia Muslims hate each other, and Catholic and Protestant Christians have had many conflicts even in recent history (Ireland).
Of course, part of this could just be physical proximity: these warring groups tend to be neighbors or even in the same places, causing friction. But, for now at least, we have lots of Indians (Sikhs and Hindus) here in the US and don't have the problems with them that we do with others.
> In my observation, religions that are extremely far apart generally get along better than religions that are much closer
This seems to be more true of mutually exclusive religions that are historically geographically close together for an extended period of time than ones which happen merely to be doctrinally similar, and to be more (but certainly not exclusively) true of political conflicts between religious communities rather than theological conflicts.
> But, for now at least, we have lots of Indians (Sikhs and Hindus) here in the US and don't have the problems with them that we do with others
Part of that is because the people who would have problems are still mistaking South Asians with Middle Easterners and also (whether or not they do that) assuming they are Muslim. Give it some time, they’ll get their own targeted hate. (Hinduism already gets some through the Christian anti-yoga movement.)
You may not have read a lot about the contentious history of Catholicism in the US. Until the 1960s, many Protestant Americans still considered Catholic Americans "not really American" because of their alleged allegiance to an extra-governmental power, the Church (and in particular the Pope). As recently as the 1950s Protestant-Catholic intermarriage was truly frowned upon in many parts of the country and Catholics were prohibited from joining various civic institutions.
Not really true, especially for southern Sicilians Italians
They shared neither language nor religion (US was overwhelmingly protestant). At the time, they were considered a distinct race from your typical white American due to their Sicilian heritage. Their diet was also significantly different, to the point where some states actually sent out social workers teaching Italian families to cook "American" foods -- the fear being their pasta-heavy diets would prevent them from integrating. Politically, they were far more pro-labor and were viewed as agitators, socialists and anarchists -- far removed from the political mainstream during the roaring 20s. They were hated and feared enough that there was a mass lynching of 11 Italian-Americans in Louisiana.
This movie, Gangs of New York, by Martin Scorsese about New York City during a period of Irish immigration might suggest otherwise. I recall attempting to watch it when it came out on DVD but it was too violent for a Friday night:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_of_New_York#Historical_a...
> There was a widespread suspicion that Catholicism was incompatible with democracy.
And that was the secularized, polite face of the common religious belief that both the Papacy as an office and the particular occupants of that office were the literal referent of the biblical Antichrist, and that “Papists” were, therefore, followers of the Antichrist.
I agree. I should clarify my point is just that it's very hard to undo a decision to increase immigration after the fact; I do think there should be some amount of cross-cultural immigration.
That was back when there was a broad social concensus in favor of integration. Both sides of the political spectrum have destroyed that (the right through nativism and the left through cultural relativism).
And do you agree with the observers? If so, do you have sources to back up the claim? I ask you not to accuse you of anything but because I watched a Kurzgesagt video a while back saying most of the immigrants have integrated well over the next few generations.
Based on my personal experiences with people of Turkish and Egyptian descent living in Europe, I believe that many are happy being integrated into their adopted nationality, and many are not. Again my point is not that immigration can't work, just that a hasty decision can be nearly impossible to reverse.
Exactly. Over the next few generations. Everyone was immediate integration, which doesn't happen in most places AFAIK. Even in America, first generation immigrants and refugees stand apart in some places. But their kids fit in well, and are fairly American, though they still possibly speak the heritage language and such. By grandkids though you couldn't tell them apart from normal 'integrated' Americans apart from the accent of their grandparents.
It just takes time to integrate, and I'd say those who argue that Europe isn't integrated are looking st more recent immigrants, or older generations, and not the ones who would most likely be integrated already.
What some people don't realize is that the person emptying your trash bin in the evenings might very well be college educated. Not that they stand a chance of using that education in the US without the appropriate level of English.
Yes. For instance, my father-in-law has a PhD but worked as a janitor for a while when he first came to the US, until he could teach himself enough English to land a better job.
Employing immigrants in unskilled labor is a good thing if we're on the cusp of an automation revolution. Immigrants are not citizens - these are employable people who invested in traveling to America because we pay more for their skills. They go home when the market becomes unfavorable.
California has never been "straddled" with unemployable farm workers over winter...
Try getting reasonably priced manual or domestic work in NYC. Workers here are lazy, incompetent and entitled. Compared to large cities in Asia it is difficult to get good workers here.
> I don't see the value in large numbers of unskilled workers entering the US every year.
With a potentially large wave of automation coming, the US shouldn't straddled itself with lots of unemployable drivers, farm workers, etc.
Your argument is that the jobs these people do might be automated away so they shouldn't come here. Is that correct?
I would counter that many of these jobs can't easily be automated and that these workers are much more adaptable than you give them credit for. You just aren't going to see robots picking strawberries or hanging sheetrock on a large scale anytime soon for economic and technical reasons. Delivery drivers and dishwashers have very low cpaex vs robots that could do the same. These immigrants also start small companies at higher rates than native born Americans.
I guess I just don't get the rationale for keeping out low skill workers. The pay for goods an services, provide labor, start businesses, and generally do quite well.
You are not in agriculture and manufacturing then. We want to bring back coal mine jobs but why don't those coal miners start picking strawberries then? Neither requires a higher education or barely any education at all.
Another nativist who displays his/her prejudice under the guise of Illegal vs legal immigrant.Go spend a year outside of United States and come tell us how your experience looks like.
Why is it that birth rates have gone down though? Many factors, mostly economic, which should be addressed instead of importing millions of people who will soon be replaced by automation anyways.
People used to have many more kids regardless of whether they were facing good or bad times. I'd say the change is less economic and more due to culture - both men and women want less kids.
There is economics in the cultural change - as people get wealthier and government welfare becomes more reliable the forces behind maintaining and growing the family decreases. Wealthy people in the past still had many more kids than they do now though, so there's probably a bigger explanation.
The idea that a population must expand in perpetuity is an idea that is obviously flawed to apply to any finite nation.
Given the oncoming tide of automation, it seems doubly flawed.
It should be acceptable for any population to ebb and flow, as changes in internal and external forces occur. Deciding to import warm bodies because your economic ponzi appears to require it seems like short term thinking. It would be better if the ponzi itself was addressed and the population allowed to ebb for awhile.
People are easy to attract to your country when you really need them ... unless you've managed to make that country undesirable.
I'd say it's because of two things: 1) the invention of reliable birth control (namely The Pill), and 2) the rise of women to equal citizenship status with men, instead of basically being slaves used for breeding.
Women are the ones who have to sacrifice the most for children, so now that they have a choice, they don't do it nearly as much: some have none, others only have 1 or 2 and they've had enough. For replacement rate, every woman needs to have 2.1 kids on average, and not nearly enough women want to have 3+ kids to make up for all the women having fewer (which also includes infertile women don't forget).
And also with men and women being much more equal, men are expected to invest much more effort in child-rearing now, instead of just banging their wives and then letting them deal with the consequences while they do other stuff with their time. Well they don't want to deal with 6 kids either, and many don't want to deal with any.
Well, try talking to your grandparents or beyond. It was a different time.
Try to imagine. There is no google search to find out how to make children. The closest library is far away and it's not that common to go to school and learn to read. That leaves you with the opinions of the family, the neighbors and the priest, who don't know much either and offer contradictory explanations.
>Try to imagine. There is no google search to find out how to make children. The closest library is far away and it's not that common to go to school and learn to read. That leaves you with the opinions of the family, the neighbors and the priest, who may not know much either and offer different tales.
I have to assume you're trolling, but to be charitable, here[0] is the Wikipedia article on the history of birth control. It starts in 1800 BC with ancient Egyptian writings describing the use of acacia and honey as a spermicide.
People knew where babies came from way before the internet.
> People knew where babies came from way before the internet.
I think you missed the GP's primary point. Just because someone in the entire world had the requisite knowledge might mean nothing at all to another someone a mere few hours of travel away, let alone on the other side of the world.
That's why written language was such a huge invention[1]. Then the printing press. Then the telegraph, radio, and telephone. Finally, the Internet. I'm sure I missed a few, but you get the idea.
[1] A moment of silence for the Libary at Alexandria, please
Right, just because some proto-scientist in a primitive ivory tower had observed two goats fucking, doesn't mean the common person had access to that kind of knowledge.
Sex and procreation can be found throughout recorded human history, regardless of locale. In mythology (from Zeus boning anything that moved to "be fruitful and multiply" to the Immaculate Conception and numerous creation myths besides), religious teachings regarding sex being for procreation and not mere pleasure, laws governing property rights, inheritance and royal succession, in literature, in plays and songs, in fairy tales and old wives' tales, etc.
For example, here's an article on Samuel Pepys and a sexual manual from 1680 which quite clearly demonstrates that the nature of carnal knowledge was generally known at the time[0]. Along with death and mortal fear, sex and birth comprises one of the archetypal constants of the human experience. It's everywhere. It also happens to be knowledge that's necessary to continue the species, which humans have proven quite good at.
I guarantee that our parents knew how babby was formed, as did their parents, as did their parents, etc. Even our hominid ancestors before the formation of language understood it, because even animals understand it at an instinctive level.
I'm pretty sure neither I, nor the comment to which I was replying was referring to the knowledge (or ignorance) of the link between sex and pregnancy. At least in general.
The problem for something like contraception, which is the context here, is in understanding the details. Those details are sorely lacking in plays, songs, fairy tales, and old wives' tales.
> It also happens to be knowledge that's necessary to continue the species
No knowledge is actually necessary, as mere ignorant performance of the act is sufficient.
Kids used to be cheap farm labor who eventually became your retirement plan. Now that nobody has land, child labor is forbidden, and "free-range parenting" is all but negligence, parenthood is a nearly unaffordable hobby.
Based on the people I know, it's because they have student debt, they can't afford a house, they can't afford for one parent to quit their job and do full-time child care, and the price of day Care is prohibitive.
The only people who can afford kids are either extremely rich or extremely poor.
> And the people leading immigration suppression in the US know this.
Yeah, but most don't focus on it. Paul Ryan is parroting his father and is not particularly brave or interesting. He's just a guy looking for a new cause to champion, because then he can just be the first, rather than compete. It has little to do with the "issue", which is a non-issue.
> US is going to face the same low birth rate problems as other advanced economies
Weaseling in "advanced economies" (which means countries without vast natural resources to exploit or what?) is not compelling as part of a narrative, as much as it's a nonsequitor.
>because those two-parent families tend to vote for the other party, and one-earner families have kids that vote for their party
This confuses cause and effect. Two-earner families tend to be two-earner families because you need two incomes in expensive cities (which vote D regardless of familial status). Single-earner families get much on much less in smaller cities and rural areas that tend to be more conservative.
yes, it's time we all ackowledge and internalize the fact that our priorities as a nation have changed away from economic prosperity for all.
we're full-on protectionists now. immigrants threaten what we got (a high-status nation dominated by wealthy white people), so they got to go, despite being the primary driver of our properity.
as a bonus, wealth disparity will only accelerate as the economic pie stops growing, because the existing capital holders have great advantage in capturing the remaining income streams, further driving down birth rates.
meanwhile, countries like china and india have tons of economic headroom because their populations are 4-5 times that of the US, but at lower economic levels. those countries will eventually eclipse the US if we stay on this path.
Some good, fairly recent data from Pew [1] and in this [2] NY Times article. From what I gather from this, border crossings are going down, but illegal visa overstays are going up.
I think it's difficult to argue that we need more people when we are already straining ecologically. Fewer people is better, especially when we can automate away jobs that are unfilled.
However, this does expose a gaping hole in capitalism, that it can only deliver improvements to the masses under conditions of growth. With falling birthrates and immigration, we will need to find a more sustainable political economy.
Nonetheless, immigration is falling for dystopic reasons, not good ones (i.e. other countries are more attractive in a positive sense). It's falling because of authoritarianism, xenophobia, and a program of ethnic cleansing targeted at the most vulnerable people that is being performed by ICE.
EDIT: The last paragraph is justified because there are 325M people in the US and 11M undocumented people. There may be a marginal effect on jobs, but the bulk of the economy is made up of everyone else. We're talking about 3% of the population.
There has been a noticeable difference in the quality in top universities in the US. No really top student from anywhere really wants to navigate the nonsense that US immigration is.
The only people who are coming in are reasonably well off, but desperate to move.
Replacement level fertility is by definition non-exponential (or if you prefer, has an exponent of 1.) A reasonable number of macroeconomists would be ok with replacement-level fertility. The economics get really bad when the birth rate falls below replacement though - you get fewer workers supporting more retirees, which has the bad consequences you can see now in Japan.
> you get fewer workers supporting more retirees, which has the bad consequences you can see now in Japan.
With the productivity gains of the last few decades this shouldn't be a problem. That is, if those productivity gains actually went into something useful, instead of appreciating my 401K.
Didn't flat growth in Japan happen much earlier than this problem? My memory might not serve me well, but my own understanding is their flat growth is a hangover related to their debt bubble popping in the late 1980s - with the bad debt still getting purged out of the system nowadays.
Do you know of any studies that look for opportunities in declining populations? There seems to be a tendency for people to label declining populations as 'bad' and proceed from there as opposed to asking 'what are the benefits as well as the harms of this trend?'
I would love for governments all over the world to finally reach a scarcity mindset. Unfortunately, the earliest governments to try that were pwned by imperialists.
But these days power dynamics aren't so linear anymore due to WMDs.
There is no good reason to be happy about having less people.
Most of the earth is empty now due to desert belts, and we almost have the technology for terraforming them but do not have enough people to need that.
Losing people instead is really scary because that will mean we won't have large enough economy to afford large geoengineering projects, and will be caught in runaway effects of permafrost melting without possibility to do anything.
There are two things that give me hope that number of people on earth will keep increasing: first is technologies for increasing lifespan, and reproductive age, second is that subcultures that encourage not having children, will die off naturally.
Wife and I decided ages ago to not have children. I had a vascetomy when I was ~25. I think our reasons differ, and mine are confused, but it's very clear to both of us that we never want children. Oddly, she liked being an aunt though, so there is that.
When you are an aunt or an uncle caring for nephews and nieces is super cheap, and once you no longer get the same joy of spending time with them as they grow older you can back off without guilt. Similar to grandparents.
At the end of the day, the kids go home with their own parents.
> How many people here would say that they have actively decided not to have children?
Plenty of people do. For many different reasons.
Some people do not like kids, some people like their life as it is, some people are in a relationship that they are happy in but that they are sure of that it won't survive having children, some people carry genes that they do not wish to pass on and so on. The list is endless, probably at least as long as the list of reasons why people do want children, possibly even longer.
38, and unless I find a seriously convincing argument from the next woman in my life. Not happening. I don't have a desire to have a kid, but it's fun to interact with them in short bursts(friends). This of course can change tomorrow, that's life.
I'm not having children. There are a lot of reasons.
1) I'm a woman married to another woman. Yes, one of us could get a donor, but it's one more hurdle, and it means we won't ever have one accidentally.
2) Debt. We've got some debt that needs to be paid off, and babies are expensive.
3) We'd need a bigger home. Right now the house we're in is paid off in full, and we'd have to go through the whole home-selling/buying process if we wanted enough space for kids.
4) Health concerns. I'm depressed, diabetic, and have fibromyalgia. My doctor says I also likely have PCOS and due to that I might not even be fertile. So I'm not a good candidate to try to get pregnant. My wife has her own health concerns, which are genetic, and she doesn't want to pass them down to a kid. I don't want to pass on the fibro or diabetes either. They both suck.
5) We're happy as is. We've got cats instead of kids (insert lesbians-with-cats joke here?). A lot of our friends have kids, so we're both pretty content to just be "aunties" to all our friends' kids.
32 male here. I actually love kids but my partner and I decided it’s not a good time and if we do want kids we should adopt. There’s still plenty of kids still without parents...
have 2 and would consider having 3 if it wasnt for the horribly short maternity leave and cost of daycare. I just can't do the pump at work, wash bottles all night again. I also anticipate I wont make any savings for the next 1-2 years with the cost of child care. It sucks, it really really does.
Decided actively I don't want children at around age 30. Married, and currently seek a vasectomy so my wife doesn't have to be on birth control and I never have to worry about having a child ever again.
As half of a thirty somethings couple that wants children but can’t afford the financial implications in the Bay Area, it seems pretty clear to me why fertility is down.
The Bay is not the be-all and end-all for jobs. Full stop. In fact, it's likely going to be on the downturn if they can't get the housing situation and the growing income gap under control.
If a couple wants kids, and they can't pull it off in the Bay Area and it's a high priority item, you can bet they are on the way out.
You could move to a much less expensive area with a reasonable job market. It's not all black-and-white, people stare themselves blind on what their take home pay is but quality of life is at least as important. I would not move to the valley for any kind of money given that it would stop me from having the life that I would like to live.
It's not as if SV is the only place in the world with a job market. Though if you're early 20's and have nothing to lose in the world then it might be a good spot to start simply because what you make there in a couple of years can buy you a home cash somewhere else if you play it smart and keep your costs way down.
This is what I did (as far as a job goes). While southern California is still really expensive by national standards, the cost of living is half that of the bay area while the pay isn't that much less.
You honestly don't even have to keep your costs way down. If you just live with roommates and don't actively try and spend a ton of money you'll be able to save enough in seven to ten years to probably buy a house somewhere else (or at least cover 60% of it).
The trick is that reestablishing an entire friend network and getting comfortable in an area takes time. The first year or two in a place is usually more difficult and I suspect this gets even harder as you get older and people are paired off.
If you live in the bay area in your 20s with roommates and then pick up and move to Austin or Boulder at 30 it's probably hard to make friends (though I'd guess dating is probably a lot easier).
A version of your comment is posted in response to every suggestion that somebody leave expensive coastal areas. One wonders what the heck you think is going on in the rest of the country.
There are jobs in other cities. The idea that there is "little or no job market" outside of NYC and San Francisco is -- I'm sorry, there's no other way to say it -- absurd. The fact that you forward this claim with such smugness -- "rrrright" -- makes it all the more baffling.
Where are you getting these ideas? Click-bait articles about the Rust Belt?
A few figures on median income. These cities were chosen at random:
- Cincinnati-Middletown Ohio metro area was $60,260
- Indianapolis-Carmel Indiana metro area was $56,750
- Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro-Franklin Tennessee metro area was $60,030
Compare to:
- Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Washington metro area was $78,612
- San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA Metro Area was $96,677
- New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA Metro Area was $71,897
So, look, San Francisco is an outlier, even by the standards of big, growing cities with lots of jobs. But look at those others. The median income in Cincinnati is about $10k less than in New York City.
Do you think the cost of living in New York City is only about $10k more per year than in Cincinnati? Of course not.
The cost of living differences between the cities in that first group and the cities in the second group far, far, far outpace those earnings differences. So, you're wrong on both counts. The cheaper cities aren't "slightly less expensive;" they are vastly less expensive.
There's "jobs" in all those places, but not necessarily jobs the OP can do. I lived in the NYC area for a short time, and the job market there for my specialty and experience was terrible. Here in the DC area, it's excellent. Places like Indianapolis, Nashville, etc., would also likely be terrible for me. Certain industries and specialties are concentrated mainly in certain areas, so if you're specialized, you have to stick to those places.
Yes, of course. If you're a deep sea fisherman, it's trivially provable that you can't do that job in Nebraska :)
But that's never what these guys mean.
It's always casually advanced as a blanket statement about the hopelessness of living somewhere that you can't smell the ocean. I don't know why it became popular to demonstrate such obvious ignorance about the job markets of inland cities, but here we are.
I, for example, know precisely nothing about the job market in, say, Salt Lake City, but that's why I don't make statements on the internet about the job market in Salt Lake City.
There are tech jobs everywhere. From Toronto to Paraguay and from SF to NYC and everywhere in between.
Technology is everywhere, it is almost impossible to find a place where there are no tech jobs. But the bigger cities tend to have more of them and for better pay and Silicon Valley, New York, DC, Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and so on will have the best paid jobs but also the highest cost of living.
Silicon Valley is an outlier in many respects, you should not calibrate your worldview by it. If you mean by tech job: a place where I can sit in a chair and make 7 figures easily then indeed, there are no tech jobs outside of SV and Seattle.
Look, yes, obviously there are more jobs in the biggest cities. Why people insist on translating this into “there are no jobs anywhere else” is anybody’s guess. But it extends beyond preference or opinion and into objectively, verifiably, factually wrong territory with remarkable consistency.
It makes the people who claim it look ridiculous, but they seem to think it makes them look — I don’t know what — something not ridiculous. They don’t merely say it; they say it with aplomb and even contempt. (Maybe because they get universal agreement every time they bring this up with people in their real life?)
The person we’re responding to in this thread is an almost archetypical example. Is this some sort of “winner take all” bias? It’s very weird.
Programmers in the most expensive cities are doing fine. But this cultural wisdom is doing very real harm to people who would be much better off in cheaper cities. They think, “well, sheesh, it’s hard here, but I probably couldn’t even find a job in Pittsburgh.”
Echo chambers are dangerously wrong in many ways but today anybody that can use a browser should be able to verify the information for themselves with a little bit of work if it really mattered to them.
Heh, the psychology underlying that opinion is fascinating.
Part of this could be a need to feel that one's own choice was rational or ideal. People make decisions based on emotion, and then invent reasons to justify the decisions.
A related factor could be the fact that a person could be compelled to move if they knew of a better place, but moving is a pain.
Another possibility is being unreasonably picky. Maybe somebody feels they need to be near all of the big internet giants, not that they can simultaneously work at them all.
A failure to consider cost-of-living may lead one to an unreasonable cut-off point. If a person does normal software development and sets a minimum salary of $300,000 then yes, there are "no jobs" in nearly every location.
If you accept that the South and the Midwest are legitimate places to live, then you're forced to really consider it, which is difficult -- moving long distances is hard! It's much easier to conclude that those places aren't real options.
The South is a legitimate place to live, just like Saudi Arabia is.
If you want to talk about quality of life, that's another issue.
If you're not a gun-loving church-going conservative, you're not going to be very happy relocating to the South. It's already horribly hard to make friends over the age of 30 (this comes up here on HN often), and moving someplace where the locals are diametrically opposed to your worldview is not going to help with that.
This response is absurd. It says everything about this conversation and your place in it that you’re not wildly embarrassed to compare the South to Saudi Arabia.
This response isn’t like a little wrong, or a bit of hyperbole — it’s egregiously and embarrassingly wrong. It’s not just, like, your opinion, man. It’s a factually absurd, untravelled, ignorant comparison.
For my specialty, there's lots of places where I could go to get a job. But it might be the only job there. I had some silly company try to recruit me to La Crosse, Wisconsin not long ago. The work sounded really interesting and was a good fit for me, but it's most likely the only company in that town that would have such a job for me. That town isn't near anything. So if I were to relocate there, and the job didn't work out, I'd be screwed: I'd be forced to relocate again (at my own expense most likely) to someplace else. I've seen quite a few jobs like this: these jobs try hard to recruit people like me, thinking that because I'm older and experienced that surely I have a family (nope) and want to "settle down" in some nice small town (nope) and will be happy to take a low salary because the cost of living is supposedly so low (it really isn't, only housing prices are low in places like that, and they're not that much lower).
My examples were big, dynamic cities like Cincinnati, Nashville, and Indianapolis — metros with millions of people, not isolated college towns with an urban population of about 50k — which renders this response a non sequitur.
I’m from St. Louis and even there six-figure programming jobs are pretty easy to get. There’s no nice way to say this: you don’t know what you’re talking about.
> Going from expensive area with good job market to slightly less expensive area with little to no job market.
You forgot many options, such as slightly less expensive area with good job market. Or much less expensive area with reasonable job market. I'm not even sure I know of a place that's only slightly less expensive but has little to no job market.
Each day on my walk to work, I pass by a couple houses for sale. They are on .25 acre lots, less than a mile from the beach, and likely to sell for about $250,000 each.
That is, uh, about 10% of the San Francisco cost or 20% of the general Bay Area cost. Salaries are more like 50%, and of course that also means a lower income tax bracket. Other stuff is cheaper too, like food and gasoline. Last I checked, the price of gasoline was about 50% of what you have to pay.
The finances work out fine. I have 11 kids.
At age 35, probably 2/3 of the childbearing years are gone. (could be all gone, could have another dozen years) You'd better hurry.
There are a couple smaller places, a tad cheaper, on neighboring streets.
One can work for Raytheon, Northrop Grummen, Harris, Lockheed Martin, Thales, GE (trains), and several cybersecurity startups. All of those are doing well. Doing less well I think, there is also: Intersil (a wireless chip company), DRS (a military optics company), NASA contractors, etc.
I don't believe this place is particularly special. All across America, there are smallish cities in which the finances work out for tech professionals.
This is something that seems to happen in most countries when they reach a certain stage of development (see Japan, Korea).
I think it related to the general availability of contraception and that the work involved in caring for children has increased, while the number of carers has decreased.
The trend toward migration means grandparents are often not nearby to help care for kids. This coupled with the fact that in most cases both parents need to work increases the difficulty in raising kids dramatically.
I’ve also noticed that, while grandparents are not around to help, fathers often still don’t involve themselves in childcare.
All this coupled with how expensive kids are means that if you can satisfy yourself with one child, people often do. Enough that it depresses the birth rate significantly in any case.
> fathers often still don’t involve themselves in childcare.
Are people really living in marriages where the husband does nothing? This is a genuine question. My family is Indian, and I grew up in America, but from what I remember, my mom and dad spent most of their time taking care of my brother and I, whether that be by cooking, paying bills, cleaning the house, taking care of the car, driving us around, etc. Our grandparents lived in India, and only immigrated permanently in our teenage years, and both my parents worked (my mother even went to college). Indian culture is not known for an equal sharing of responsibilities, but that was my experience in my family. What are these husbands doing, if not taking care of their families? Watching TV? What? How is doing nothing productive for your family considered societally acceptable for men? As a man, I've always felt it was a societal imperative that everything I do directly benefit my wife and children.
The stereotypical American setup is: Man helps by going to job, paying bills, doing "male-coded" household work(handyman, auto maintenance, etc.). Woman does "female-coded" equivalents(cooking, cleaning, shopping).
In my own family the actual way it worked out was that both of them indulged their fixations and muddled through the rest without much discipline or mutual encouragement. This was imperfect but mostly worked for me up until my teen years, at that point I was neither something to indulge in or make plans with, unless one of them had concocted a story involving me - and then I was obliged to go along with it. That was not great for my psyche.
And I presume in more dysfunctional families they end up getting into an argument about everything, or one is an abuser and gets away with doing less.
Isn't male coded housework quite difficult? My dad did a lot of projects on our house that were quite necessary to prevent things like mold growth or to make it easier to live there. He made my brother and I help a lot, and based on my memories, it was not easy work. We had this shower that needed sealing quite often, and from my memories, it was back breaking work. Often times, I would hope my mom would ask me to help her peel carrots, fold clothes, or something easier, much to my dad's chagrin.
In my experience when I was married and lived this way (without kids), the "male" tasks were comparatively quite difficult and frequently involved specialized knowledge, but didn't take all that much time compared to all the cooking and cleaning my ex-wife did, though sometimes it required some late hours if a project needed to be done at a certain time.
In our case, I worked a full-time tech job while my ex either wasn't working at all, or for a while was in a technical school (which wasn't taking all that much of her time), plus for a while we had several rental houses that we had to do repairs and upgrades on. So I did auto repair, tile installation, plumbing repair, etc., while she did most of the cooking and cleaning, and some things we shared like painting.
Many people (regardless of gender) no longer know how to do any of these things. I've learned a lot about moisture management, mold growth, roof functioning, etc over some years of homeownership, a lot of it from my husband who learned it from his grandfather. Many of my peers have no idea about any of it.
The tasks you mention are amazingly important. However, many people today feel "male-coded" tasks encompass the following alone: take out trash, mow lawn, take car for oil change or car wash, set up TV. That set of tasks is not complex.
Yes. A friend of mine is very much an uninvolved father. His wife handles all the child-rearing and housekeeping, while he plays videogames, often while drinking. I've mentioned to him that he should probably be more involved, but it's not my place or responsibility to tell him he's failing as a husband and father. In his defence, he's still a better father than his own father ever was, but that's not exactly a high bar, and he knows it.
Frankly, I don't know why his wife puts up with him.
I’m not sure... I get your point and understand how you feel. But having seen it a few times, and the effect it has on the wife and child, I can’t be friends with people who act like this anymore.
I just feel like I’m normalizing their actions by acting like it’s no big deal. I think one of the reasons that this kind of attitude amongst fathers continues, is because it’s seen as somewhat normal and socially acceptable.
I totally agree. A man who sits at home all day (or even after work), drinks, and plays video games, is not someone who is going to make me a better person, in any respect. I'd cut my losses. The last thing anyone needs is to be associated with a loser.
We know a couple like this, and if I were the wife, I'd leave him. He's a nice guy and all, but he's utterly useless, and I've told him that a few times. I'm just a friend though, and his wife puts up with him. I just don't get it -- she's a smart, educated woman, and he's quite educated as well, but I don't see how a grown adult can act like he does. Their marriage feels abnormal though, and I can see it breaking apart in the future. Perhaps this is a reason why divorce rates are up too, if this behavior is considered normal.
I’ve seen it happen a lot. Father works (particularly in a tech context often earns much more than mother). Uses this fact to exercise financial control and states that their “equal contribution” is financial support.
Meanwhile, at least in early years, mother spends 16 hours a day looking after kids. Essentially the father gets some downtime, but mother has to look after kids constantly (maybe gets a little help but that’s it). And if you /never/ get any downtime it tends to drive you into depression... causes other issues.
> Father works (particularly in a tech context often earns much more than mother). Uses this fact to exercise financial control and states that their “equal contribution” is financial support.
Now that you mention it, I've seen this in some friends and colleagues, working in the tech sector. I always chocked it up to tech workers often being socially atypcial. Didn't realize it was considered normal. Just doesn't match my experience with my parents, or the adults I grew up with (who granted, were mostly vietnamese and phillipino due to where we lived), and I don't see it in my wife's family (irish). My dad always earned more than my mom, but when he came home, he would always be the one to do things with my brother and I and leave my mom to rest. Moreover, my mom was always so thankful that she no longer had to work.
In their zeal to make us all live in the 1950s socially, the GOP have created a nightmare situation, whereby the large businesses lobby them to make changes in their favor thus creating pollutions, that in turn destroys the sperm count of young males, so theres less children to teach about creationism.
Huh, I did a blog post about this just last night. Basically, people's personality has an impact on whether they have kids, personality is heritable, fertility won't be low forever given current conditions but who knows how conditions will change.
> Basically, people's personality has an impact on whether they have kids,
Maybe you address in your post, but as stated this doesn't make a lot of sense. Fertility is falling across all demographics and in all developed countries and has been for decades – are you saying everybody everywhere has experienced a personality shift over that time?
And while fertility probably does have some genetic component, I think that's a small piece of it compared to prevailing economic conditions (having kids is friggin expensive and this generation is deeply in debt) and social mores (whether there's powerful religions pressure to have kids). Genetics neither explains this nor provides a way out of it.
Well presumably until you get to a certain level of development, the only personality trait that matters is whether you want to have sex or not, but after that point (relatively recently in generational terms) other factors matter. Kind of like how height is mostly determined by food availability, until you get to a point when sufficient food is available for everyone, and then genetic factors matter more.
No, I'm saying that both personality and material conditions have an effect on who has children. Or it might be that the personality traits that cause people to have children in 21st century America are different than those that caused people to have children in 19th century America. But in any event the traits that seem to cause people to have more children in current US conditions are substantially heritable. How many generations will it take? Quite possibly a lot but it'll happen eventually baring further external shocks.
And there are lots of other factors involved as well. I think the differences in fertility between Germany and France are particularly illustrative.
> Basically, people's personality has an impact on whether they have kids
Sounds like a tautology to me.
If this were true wouldn't that mean that the genes for the heritable part of the "want to have kids" personality type would be overrepresented in the population, because they came from parents who had kids?
Because to the extent that there is a "wanting to have kids" trait directly it was less necessary in the ancestral environment because there was also a "wanting to have sex" trait that could do the work. But getting into the stuff we actually measure, stuff like Agreeableness[1] that makes people want to have more kids in the modern world also has significant drawbacks if there's the danger of, e.g., starving to death if you don't look out for number one.
Not true at all. Turns out that the poor people who actually cant afford to have kids are having more kids. Hispanic and Black growth is much higher than whites and asians.
Asians with the highest income level have lowest birth rate.
Given that it is mostly whites who have been leading in STEM there is a high chance that US will lose its competitive advantage in these fields.
> Not true at all. Turns out that the poor people who actually cant afford to have kids are having more kids. Hispanic and Black growth is much higher than whites and asians.
You're technically correct, but minorities are only slightly higher (birth rate wise) than whites.
"It’s official: Minority babies are the majority among the nation’s infants, but only just"
I would argue, based on historical data, that if wealth inequality was reduced in conjunction with higher education levels of minority women, their birth rates would dip again (higher income levels and higher education obtained by women are prime drivers of lower birth rates). This discounts cultural drivers, but my hunch is those decline with each passing generation (ie catholicism and its disdain for contraception/family planning).
That article doesn't show birth rate, it shows total number of births. Considering the total population difference, that suggests minority birth rate is much higher as the parent said.
Birth rates work like compound interest. Even they are marginally higher it can mean they will grow at much rapid rate in next 20 years. Also what matters truly for a nation is working age population. New hires for Google in 20 years will represent far less whites. (If blacks and hispanics do not take to STEM in large numbers the total pool of candidates will be so less)
Programs that apparently target wealth inequality such as subsidising fathering bastard children have actually hurt minority women as they tend to have more and more fatherless children who eventually end up in the world of abuse, drugs and crime.
The skills that get a person through college -- good long-term planning, ability to defer pleasure, prudent analysis -- also tend to cause people to successfully put off having children.
That's really the crux of the problem. Then add to that the fact that people who do have children young are put in a comparative disadvantage to their peers.
I wonder if the poor are having more children because they feel like they have less to lose?
I desperately want to have kids and my girlfriend is on board, but she makes next to nothing and I make quite a lot of money. I tried an online calculator and if things go awry between us, I'll be paying her roughly a quarter of my post-tax income for the next two decades here in California.
That's just too big a gamble for me. So even though I desperately want children and I can afford them and everything would probably work out fine -- here I am, aging and childless while my girlfriend nears infertility because I can't justify the math to myself.
Sounds more like you have a relationship problem than a financial problem.... if you are worried about things going south between you and your partner you have bigger issues to work out than having kids.
Also, you'd be insane not to get married before having kids. It's a legal contract between you and your partner that kinda comes in handy if you get disabled, die, etc...
Huh? Not worrying about something that could go wrong is just blissful ignorance. It's a very valid concern that should be accounted for in your big life decisions, you can't just hope for everything to go well because it almost never does so you should consider the consequences when it doesn't and make an informed decision if the costs/risk for that to happen are worth the hassle.
I've been together with my wife for almost 20 years now and I still make decisions where I consider "what would happen if my partner would die/leave me/etc". And one good thing of being in a long relationship with someone is that these things can be discussed transparently among ourselves, otherwise you wouldn't be able to discuss simple issues like life insurance.
And yes, getting married gives implicit legal protections and a lot of those legal protections are all about "what would happen if" scenarios...
You only have one life. Not having children means not living it fully (though it's mighty convenient). All the money in the world won't change that and it won't matter when you're gone anyway.
Yes, not having kids means missing out on certain (important) human life experiences. But so is if you DO have kids, it automatically means you will miss out on things that can't be done now because you don't have the money/time/etc that goes into having those kids. And in terms of "when you're gone away" I'm not seeing how having kids changes that, you still die and stop existing afterward, it's your kids that keep on living. You may feel good/proud about having them live after you die, just as an artist may feel good about their work living for many years in the minds of people. Personally I've decided to focus on one thing "make sure I don't regret too many things when I'm n my death bed". That means planning and doing things that I think I would regret not having done otherwise but of course, there will always be some regrets, simply because we always tend to regret/miss the things we haven't done if by no other reason.
We may prefer having kids over other things or vice versa but I disagree with a general state of the form "not having kids is a clear loss", there are pros and cons.
feels to me like you do not want children bad enough... there are infertile couples out there who have to pay quite a lot of money to get to the position where you are now (I assume you both guys are fertile) [0]
Apart from the examples in the article, I am also judging from my own experience and I personally reached the point where the money simply does not matter compared to the possibility of being a parent.
If things don't go awry, you'll be paying her half of your post-tax income, and vice versa. So what's the concern about paying a quarter?
Since you say you can afford it anyway, as you make "quite a lot of money", and millions of people with much less raise children, it seems as trough you don't want desperately want to have kids, but perhaps you like the idea but don't want to spend money on other people in your family.
> I have no intention of getting married, so: No I won't.
No offense, but that is a silly attitude. Marriage isn't about love, it's a legal contract two parties agree to. It entitles you to rights like power of attorney, ability to make health decisions for each-other, inheritance, etc. In addition, it also has non-trivial tax benefits, especially if one of you isn't working.
Honestly, having kids without getting married is pretty irresponsible in my opinion, simply because of the very important legal benefits that come from marriage.
Right now, children is sort of theoretical for you. That's fine, as it's like that for everybody.
Once you have them and have fallen in love with them, you'll find that their happiness is worth working things out with their mother, rather than breaking up. If you can't man up enough to put up with her shit (assuming there is any) and you do break up, the money will be going to your kids, who you'll love, and giving that money won't be as objectionable as you imagine.
For me, I used to break up with women over silly arguments that embarrass me now to think about. Now, when such emotions surface, it always leads to me thinking about my kids and what a break-up would do to them. When you have kids, you're in a relationship with their mother and with them also.
When you're mad at her, you're still having fun with them, and that lets you work through your issues with her, as their happiness includes her presence. The same applies to her, if you're being an asshole for awhile. So breaking up after kids is not as likely as you fear.
No, that money certainly won't be going to my kids. It's utterly ridiculous to pay that amount of money for child support for one child.
This is essentially incentivizing my partner to break up with me: "Hey <GF>, if you dump him, you get a $60k check for the rest of your life for sitting on your ass." Incidentally, this is far more than she has ever made.
You are correct that it does not take $60K a year to raise a kid (or two or three).
There has been a meme for a couple decades now, that kids are so expensive and will cost millions of dollars to raise, etc. This meme is doubtless responsible for much of the reduced birthrate.
You can spend as much or as little as you desire on kids. I grew up shopping at Goodwill, but now I buy $40 shoes that my kids will wear for 6 months before outgrowing. That's my choice, as there are cheaper new shoes and much cheaper used shoes. Somebody else might buy their kids $120 shoes and complain to their friends how expensive their kids are. It's a shame that people like to promote this myth of the expense of kids.
If you can get over your trust issue with your GF, her not needing to give up a high paying job and being able to be home with the kids is a win. She won't feel like she's missing out on something and your kids get a much better childhood.
Being practical hardly constitutes a "trust issue". It's as if none of the people criticizing me have a concept of relationships grounded in reality. It wasn't the topic and I shouldn't have to defend my relationship here.
Nope, you shouldn't have to. I really wasn't attacking you, but on the contrary, was trying to be helpful, since you had expressed desire to have kids, and then were deciding not to.
It seemed necessary for me to qualify my encouragement for you to not abandon the idea of kids, on the condition that you could make yourself feel safe in the relationship, since it seemed like you did not.
It just makes me sad to see successful people deciding not to have kids, given the subject of this thread and given the very few number of my friends, my wife's friends, my family, and my wife's family that had kids.
> This is essentially incentivizing my partner to break up with me: "Hey <GF>, if you dump him, you get a $60k check for the rest of your life for sitting on your ass." Incidentally, this is far more than she has ever made.
If this is the attitude you have toward your partner then I stand by my other comment. You've got bigger problems with your relationship than just having kids.
> Incidentally, this is far more than she has ever made.
What the fuck does it matter what your partner makes? Your money is her money and her money is yours. You share everything--good and bad. That is what good partnerships are about. You are a team...
But again, I digress. This isn't /r/relationships, but yes, you've got a bad attitude w.r.t. relationships. Best of luck in all your future endeavors...
I'm not sure that low income Hispanic and Black birth rates says anything about their ability to afford those children. In other words, just because they're having more children doesn't mean it's a financially wise decision, or even one they can technically afford.
Many middle class white and asian families are putting off children because of the cost of living. Just to make a decent 2-earner income, you need both to have at least a college degree. After graduating college and landing a job you're still making historically low wages relative to the cost of living.
Take those historically low wages and try and buy a house. Home ownership (a staple milestone for young families) is still wildly unaffordable in most healthy economic zones. When home ownership is pushed later, and later in life, couples don't feel "settled" and ready to build a family.
How can you say whether having children is "financially wise"? Accumulating money is not an end in itself. How much is a child worth? If you don't have children, the long-term ROI of your family. Wealthy people spend exorbitant sums on their lives, while poorer people raise more children with less money. Which financially wiser?
This is driven by a very simple thing - pension funds and insurance.
Back in the day (and in poor countries with no pension funds) people knew that they had to have children because otherwise nobody would support them when they were old and they'd die. Right now people are confident that they will get a pension when they are old, so there is no reason for them to have kids.
They consider children as an inconvenience, miss out on the marvel of parenthood, and basically make the nation die off gradually.
Plus of course - lowering wages and women having to work, thus making having a child a huge problem.
What workers are you thinking of that have a pension besides certain federal/state/municipal employees.
The average or median worker in the United States cannot depend on a pension, it is impractical for the vast majority of Americans to consider what we commonly think of as retirement and stopping work.
http://time.com/money/4258451/retirement-savings-survey/
People blame capitalism, Trump...It might be mysterious forces are working here...World doesn't need more humans, and Nature seems to be adjusting to that.
Anybody have the statistics on infertility rates to compare? I'm specifically interested in biological infertility, excluding people who choose not to have children.
My personal, anecdotal observation. This is the continuing legacy of the baby boomers. A counter-point, opposite of their parents, the so-named greatest generation.
Come to the height of their careers in the 70's through the 90's. The decades of self. With Michael Douglas's character's "Greed is good!" as a centerpoint.
They're where the wealth has gone. Leaving following generations without the security to settle down and raise families.
Everyone wanted something for nothing. Well, you turned something into nothing. Sold your own kids and grandkids out.
A lot of it appears to be going to chronic, late, and end-stage medical care.
And it's not the aides providing 24/7 coverage, who are getting rich. (Having been dealing increasingly with this, recently with some friends. Most of the aides are immigrants who are making relatively low hourly wages. The bills, however, can (well) exceed the full household expenses for a staunchly middle-class family of four. And many eventual estates have to pay those until they're more or less broke, when the government picks up.)
I need to reduce my commenting. This here is anecdote. And I'm pretty steamed about what I've been watching happen in the U.S., for the past 3+ decades.
In Europe with the free healthcare, the elderly can be kept on care for a very long time, all covered by the taxes of the younger workers. This is gonna become a huge hole in the budget.
Can’t say I don’t see this as a good thing. Given how some people won’t be able to survive in the post-automation future 50-100 years from now, the best thing for them is probably to never be born.
If we were serious about finding the next Einstein we would be attempting to maximize the pairing of individuals who could produce such a person. This may someday be feasible, as genetic testing and online dating begin to intersect, but the time is not yet.
AFAIK, Einstein was not the product of a pair of super-geniuses. It doesn't work that way.
Of course, you're not likely to get an Einstein if a bunch of uneducated idiots breed either, but most really remarkable people like that come from pretty "normal" parents, though admittedly usually from family backgrounds that are at least middle-class, and not impoverished, and where they had good opportunities and education.
If you want to increase your chances of making more Einsteins, there's two things you have to do as a society: 1) minimize poverty, illiteracy, poor education, etc., and 2) increase the birthrate (while making sure as many of those kids as possible grow up in economically and emotionally stable homes). You're not going to get Einsteins from a bunch of dirt-poor subsistence farmers, nor from a tiny cabal of wealthy people.
There's also a lag associated with fertility rate decreases.
Even if the children-per-woman rate has decreased sharply, the population can still be increasing for decades afterwards, because there are still a sharply higher absolute number of women in the relatively-lower-rate birthing generation, thanks to the rate having been higher in the past when they were born.
Not caring about lower fertility rates because you don't realize that there's a temporary lag keeping the population increase high seems very careless.
I see this as a good thing. Hopefully by helping other countries implement plans that engender educational and employment opportunities for women we can finally hit “peak child” and begin to slowly shrink our global population over time.
Almost like a rabidly anti-sex society resulting in people having significantly less sex than at any point historically known might have some sort of negative consequences, huh? I'm sure the rampant depression, anxiety, and other things known to be a consequence of reduced sexual activity are all caused by something else though. The fact you could start up the Youth Anti-Sex League from Orwell's 1984 and no one would even bat an eye is probably just a fluke. Carry on.
For what it's worth, I've got two kids and live in a 2bd. apartment in SF. I'll never be able to afford a house in the city, but I like my job and I'm not willing to commute from the outermost burbs I could afford. And it's totally worth it.
Yes, having kids brings some limitations with it, but it's also one of the very best experiences that one can have.
I hear a lot of young professionals express fear that they can't afford "a big enough house" or that "the city isn't good for kids." Here's the thing, the kids do not care. They don't think they they live in a small apartment. They just think their home is next door to the bakery that sells their favorite oatmeal cookies. That they can walk to beautiful parks and libraries and schools. It's just normal to them, they're happy, and they aren't comparing themselves to the 50's era stereotypes of what "lifestyle" is "healthy" for kids.
SF is a great place for kids. All the parks and rec programs are so much fun and so cheap, the kids here have access to the abundant cultural and educational resources that aren't available at any price in most of the world.
I say this not because anyone should be convinced to have a kid. But, if you want to have children and the thing that is holding you back is a materialistic fear that you won't be able to "provide a good enough life" for them, or that the city "won't be a good place for them," just know that isn't necessarily true.
The best way I know how to express this for young urban professionals is to compare it to world travel. You probably know people from your home town who have never left, and how their world view is kind of small. It's not that they need to move away from home, but you know from experience how much traveling has opened your mind and enriched your life, and you wish they would choose to have that experience too. If they say to you "oh, but travel is so expensive," you know that isn't necessarily true, you can have an amazing travel experience on a dime if you want to.
Parenting is a lot like that. What kids care about is having parents that love them and care about them. If you can do that part, they won't care too much about the rest.
I think city living in SF is super great for people who can afford the extra cost. Right now you have 2 kids in a 2 bedroom, and at some point that is going to be pretty cramped for everyone. Also the number of families that put a strain on the system is pretty stressful. For example, getting a slot into the school lottery for Lowell High is crazy competitive.
Yet, I agree, nothing beats walking them to day care and then to work and having a dog to play with in a park a few blocks away. Having access to some of the best food in the world and lots of evening family friendly events is quite a perk and a dream.
Another thing though that I hear a lot, people who choose to live in the subburbs here also find the "unique" culture of SF a bit much for a kid to get exposed to so early. A bit too gritty and real lol, but I applaud you for being so open.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadI'll bet the opposite. The long run is really long and if your population is in decline then you either up the numbers or sooner or later it will be game over for your branch of the tree.
>you use it or you lose it
Please explain in direct language the point your deployment of this aphorism was intended to convey as I find it wholly inapplicable.
Exactly for that reason. Note how the Japanese have had their various wars of conquest in the past. At that time they had no problem with their 'stance on immigration'.
Just look at modern-day China: the Han Chinese ethnic group dominates, and oppresses all the minority groups. China is not a country with a lot of immigration either (nor do they have a shortage of people). So far, it seems to be working out for them, though admittedly it sucks for the minorities.
Japan may decide that being self sufficient and self reliant offers them the best return on their lifestyle.
I believe Japan is experiencing this right now at a large scale.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/2018/01/24/feat...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/17/generation-soc...
A generation full of sociopaths will be getting their just desserts when they're wasting away in poorly-run nursing homes with no one visiting them.
It will cause the US to continue to be a nation of immigrants and the resentment that may cause.
Politically, it probably means increased racial tensions as the majority white population finds itself on a more and more equal footing with other ethnic groups.
We also waited until the kid could be something other than American though, so we're outliers.
If it's what your priorities are you can have a home, cars, max out your 401k and be paying back student loans on a single entry level tech salary.
This requires that you put up with a long commute, beater cars, an old house and DIYing a good chunk of skilled trade work that you could hire someone for. You'll be bringing your own lunch to work, drinking beer from a can and not building much cash savings at that stage. Nevertheless it's sustainable on a single entry level tech income in a major urban area and living a couple hours away.
I think that increased spending on luxury things has by implication de-prioritized the "life milestone" things.
Generations ago people bought a house and started a family first. Now people accumulate wealth first and settle down later (which is probably a reflection on the fact that the lifestyle needed to accumulate wealth is not very compatible with settling down).
Their birth rates are also declining and doing it with increasing speed.
- lack of birth control and related education - desire for “free” manual labor to work stuff such as farm fields - desire to ensure continuity of one’s family tree (i.e. high mortality rates for infants and children due dangerous conditions and/or lack of healthcare)
The reason for this may be that, in the absence of public social safety net, family (and particularly close family) serve as a safety net, and particularly children, once they are able to be productive, can be a kind of safety net against infirmity for their parents.
I dunno, fungi usually don't produce mushrooms until right before their host is about to die or their substrate is about to be depleted. Reproducing takes a lot of energy, so individuals usually wait until they have no other choice.
Humans seem to be the same way. E.g. low-income kids go through puberty sooner, presumably due to having poorer health. And usually if someone starts drinking a lot or otherwise abusing drugs, they get really hot for a year or two before they start looking sickly and terrible.
At the population level species keep reproducing until they use up all the available resources, and then the populations collapse, but on the level of individuals the dynamics seem to work in almost the opposite way.
if we had a more fair economic system, more families would feel economically secure enough to have children.
the minimum level of economical security required rises proportionally with wealth and income disparity, because our economic outcomes are inextricably tied to each other through inflation and the like.
Sure, but they're far cheaper in both Sweden and Finland than in the US, yet people are still having fewer children there, so it can't simply be a cost issue.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/sep/22/books.famil...
I also don't want to leave my wife and I without a child but all I envision are bars of my own making.
There's also the whole "not being aware contraception exists because you couldn't go to school" thing.
Sex is free, fun, and easy. The less education you have the less likely you are to understand effective birth control. The less wealthy you are the less you have to spend on contraception. Those things together with the easiest and cheapest form of entertainment would seem to cirrelate with a higher birthrate in lower income brackets.
I cant find any studies that support what Im saying right now, but the logic holds.
I know that my plan is two max at the moment strictly because total cost per head is roughly $500k in today's dollars (including total private college costs, which account for half of that).
So double the kids for same price assuming they go to a public university? Sounds like a good deal to me.
FYI, you can cut that down even further if you go to a community college for the first year or two and then transfer.
But yes if you only gain admission to the long tail of private colleges, then you would almost certainly be wiser to go to a low-cost public school.
I wouldn't want my kids to consider community college unless they had to. By definition, I'd like them to have the same academic opportunities I had, if possible.
Depending on how you define it, children are actually a much more reliable way to have a reasonably enduring legacy than businesses/foundations/accomplishments/fame/etc, though both approaches are ultimately ephemeral. You probably have to successfully make it at least three levels down an ancestor tree, rooted at yourself and with an average replacement rate around 2, in order for your own genetic legacy to have a high statistical likelihood of enduring through anything short of a species-level catastrophe.
If your kids are too stupid to get tuition assistance, private college isn't going to do any more good for them than a regular local uni.
I also assume you'd only go to a private college that ranks highly, which means low access to meaningful amounts of income/wealth-independent scholarship money. A low-ranked private college is usually no better than many public ones.
Is that true, though? A few months ago, I was reading a few articles about more competitive (highly-ranked) universities directing significant portion of their own aid dollars to wealthier students in order to lure them in.
Now, much of these schools' motivation for doing so is that those aid dollars spread more thinly among more (wealthy) students means more revenue than focusing those dollars on "need based" (poor) students, especially if the poor students don't stay the whole 4 years because they can't afford even the subsidized tuition. That may not mean much for your ultimate calculation, since it could be as little as 10% discount, but it's still something.
There is likely also merit-based money out there, which may be what the parent comment was referring to, but I have no idea if that's anything but trivial in amount.
Well, people in the US made way more children when they made very few money, and lived 10 together in tiny houses and apartments.
And they still do in the developing world.
So it can't be just costs.
Most people don't live with grandma anymore, and the government will happily take your children away if you don't keep every second of their lives supervised by an adult, prior to the age of 13.
Today's mom, on the other hand, moved to San Francisco to get her data scientist/devops/whatever job (there were not any in her area of northern Minnesota and she kind of liked CA after going to Stanford) and Grandma doesn't want to move to CA because it's going to fall into the ocean, you know.
Back then: Have kid when 18-24, Grandma is 36-42.
Now: Have kid when 35, Grandma is 70.
Boarding houses have become illegal, and their modern equivalent of micro apartments are in danger of becoming illegal [0].
To add a personal story, when I was college we had about 20-30 people living in a medium sized single family home. We were mostly students, but there were a couple of kids, and a grandmother too. Our neighbors hated us, and constantly tried to report us for overcrowding. However in our locality there was no cap on the number of residents, so long as conditions are sanitary and safe. But we'd have the zoning person come through frequently to ensure we didn't have things like too many ovens or broken bathrooms.
0: http://www.sightline.org/2016/09/06/how-seattle-killed-micro...
How many bed rooms and how did the actual sleeping work?
A "standard" 3-bedroom house would have 7-8 people in it per room (assuming you use the family room as a bedroom too) which means either bunk beds or wall to wall sleeping bags? Also 30 people sharing two bathrooms doesn't sound fun.
First world problems...
In the past, kids could work on the farm or in a factory and generate money, now you have to send them to daycare and buy them toys and they cost money.
Previously, more people would jump straight out of high school into blue collar jobs and raising families. Now, men and women are delaying kids to focus on college and building a career.
And mothers would more often stay home to raise kids. Now both parents are working more, and there's less time to spend raising children.
Our expected spending on children has also grown dramatically. For example back then there was an expectation that someone would always stay home an look after the kids, now we expect them to go to day care. Back then 4 kids sharing a room their entire childhood was normal, now each kid is expected to get their own room. Back then kids where expected to entertain themselves, now we expect them to attend all sorts of after school activities. Back then they where expected to either go straight to work after high school or pay their own way through college either by working or scholarships, now the parents are expected to help pay for college, and so on.
Basically it's not that having kids per se is more expensive, it's that providing kids with the quality of life we've come to be expected to provide them with is expensive.
Hypothetically, though, if previous generations (a) did not need as many farm hands, (b) did not need as many factory workers, (c) had access to cheap birth control and (d) enjoyed low child mortality rates, do you think their high birth rates would've stayed as high?
[...] the shrinking arable land beset by frequent drought, is supporting a rapidly expanding population. [...] expected to grow from some 16 million today to 55 million in 2050, reaching 140 million by the end of the century
A 10x increase in population, decreasing farmland, and then add the effects of climate change on top...
The people not having kids and not receiving support are the ones paying the taxes which support a system that does not benefit them.
Those things actually contribute to the problem. They drive up taxes, causing more families to feel that they need two incomes and overtime and a bit more waiting.
Ah yes, back when one (1) unexceptional salary could actually support a few humans, shelter, etc.
> They drive up taxes, causing more families to feel they need two incomes...
I’m pretty sure the stagnation of wages while costs of living kept increasing played a way bigger part of this than a few percentage points of tax changes.
Also interesting: China's fertility rate is apparently lower than the US's.
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
Of course, who knows if the chinese data is even accurate.
With the recent reduction in immigration, accelerated by the party in power now, the US is going to face the same low birth rate problems as other advanced economies.
And the people leading immigration suppression in the US know this.
Paul Ryan in December: This is going to be the new economic challenge for America: people. Baby boomers are retiring—I did my part, but we need to have higher birth rates in this country,” Ryan told reporters on Thursday. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican and current Speaker of the House, “did [his] part” by having three children. http://www.newsweek.com/paul-ryan-wants-you-have-more-kids-7...
It's also worth adding: the political environment in the US for decades means that one party wants to make it hard for two-parent working families to have more kids (because those two-parent families tend to vote for the other party, and one-earner families have kids that vote for their party). That's a big part of the reason the US has poor child care and maternity leave support -- because those policies are a political football in the US.
With a potentially large wave of automation coming, the US shouldn't straddled itself with lots of unemployable drivers, farm workers, etc.
I hope we can move to a much more sensible immigration system, similar to Canada's, for example.
Not a sleight, just facts.
13% of unauthorized immigrants have completed college, as compared to 31% of US-born and 30% of authorized immigrants.
[1] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-an-immigrat...
If you don’t believe me, go clean a slaughterhouse one night, or pick strawberries in the hot sun for a day.
Edit: Automate these jobs.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-06/crops-rot....
Your choice is not between illegal immigrants and working-class citizens getting that work, it's been illegal immigrants getting the work and nobody doing it.
And it makes sense. We pay for everyone to go to 12 years of public school, learning calculus, history, chemistry, literature, etc.., only to work picking strawberries for the rest of their lives?
Fuck that.
The American labor force isn't designed for these kinds of jobs. I can't imagine any smartphone addicted millennial to do manual labor. In fact, we'd be more honest about our economy if we actually banned these jobs for Americans, and only allowed unskilled immigrants to do them, and deal with it from there.
I provided sources showing that this is, empirically, what happens, no matter what you would like to believe.
> If the pay is right, you will find plenty of people to pick produce.
Obviously! But once you do that, the produce costs so much that no one wants to buy it. That is the fundamental issue here.
I can’t read the second one, but I’ve seen the arguments in the first one a million times — a whole lot of whining about how it’s absolutely impossible to find workers. No, you can’t find them at the price you want. Show me the farmer offering $30/hour plus benefits. You can’t. Even in the first article they peg “skilled” labor at $15-20/hour with the unskilled earning less. Guess what, I can get that a McDonald’s so try harder Mr. Farmer.
> Obviously! But once you do that, the produce costs so much that no one wants to buy it.
So I take it you were against the recent ~doubling of fast food wages in some localities to $15/hour then? Nah, probably not, I’m guessing you used the same argument so many others did: “what’s your problem, it’ll add like three cents to the cost of your Big Mac.” Well, I’d argue that doubling or tripling farm labor costs would only add a dime to the price of a basket of strawberries. Who cares? Pay real wages for real work and stop making excuses for what amounts to modern day slave labor.
Whether people should be willing to may more for their produce, and whether the treatment of these workers is ethically defensible - those are separate questions. I would be totally fine with paying real wages for produce-picking and then subsequently tightening immigration, but there's the paying market we'd like to have and the one we've actually got.
the market will correct itself.
why would anyone want to pick raspberry for $10 an hour when I can get paid more working at in & out. Basically we should support shitty working conditions and black market labor because people dont wanna pay more for their produce?
...and the market of voters will "correct" the elected politicians. Which is why no politician is foolish enough to do this, and they have a monopoly on making laws.
In the long-term, automation may help.
We can also pay a tiny bit more for our strawberries. At retail level, the cost of farm labor is is tiny portion of the total cost.
Crops don't rot on the vine if farmers know the labor situation in advance. Some will decide not to grow that crop. Others will find labor, paying more if required.
Whenever the supply of illegal aliens is reduced, wages rise. The "living wage" can not happen in the presence of illegal aliens. Once wages rise, Americans take the jobs. You can even see this today in the record-low unemployment rates.
I actually agree with this, but society has decided that "food security" is an important component of national security and that the country would like to maintain domestic food production even if it is uneconomical. And that's fine, if that's what the public wants, but once you do that you have to live with the consequences, like being forced to choose between illegal labor and rotting crops.
> In the long-term, automation may help.
Maybe, but a lot of the produce-picking that can be automated already has been. What's left is crops that, for whatever reason, are much harder to automate.
> At retail level, the cost of farm labor is is tiny portion of the total cost.
I'd like to see a source for this.
> Crops don't rot on the vine if farmers know the labor situation in advance
Please actually read my two links. The first is from 2012, and the second is about how the situation persisted through 2016. You're saying four years of Georgia's law wasn't enough advance notice?
Also, I should have said "crops MOSTLY don't rot on the vine" because:
Even if the labor supply is stable, some crops will still be left to rot. The production of the land and the demands of the consumers are both subject to change. This affects the price. Given the current price, some farms may decide to not bother harvesting.
Farms aren't always 100% serious. Lots of them are almost a hobby, or for tax reasons. (if you can claim your home is a farm, you may pay lower property taxes, and there are even income tax advantages)
> Whenever the supply of illegal aliens is reduced, wages rise. The "living wage" can not happen in the presence of illegal aliens. Once wages rise, Americans take the jobs. You can even see this today in the record-low unemployment rates.
So we import our strawberries and wages will rise? How can both of these things be true? And the alternative is we won't eat strawberries anymore?
What you're proposing is setting our country up to be a worse place on the individual level "hey, why can't I find strawberries in my grocery store?" and on the national level, because we'll be beholden to whoever we're importing from.
There's a reason why a country should grow its own food. It's critical for our national security that we not be dependent on outsiders for something so basic.
Whoever told you they're doing this to "Make America Great Again" was lying to you. Not being able to buy strawberries would make America worse.
But that doesn't mean these jobs are in any way desirable.
In another instance, I see people who complain about Amazon's cashierless stores taking away jobs that people could do, but they don't seem to have an answer about how this situation could free those people up to do some other, potentially less menial job.
We do have a mismatch -- lots of employers simply aren't yet paying enough to get employees. And agricultural employers can't get any Americans, white or not white, to work for them, in part because the seasonality of the jobs and lack of health insurance makes the pay immaterial. If you work for 6 weeks you could lose eligibility for some benefits, and what are you going to do for the other 46 weeks in the year? Providing benefits not tied to employment would mitigate this problem. But it still wouldn't solve the problem of all the Americans not even looking for work because they're out on disability. These people, again, are not competing with immigrant labor, because by and large they really can't do any sort of physical labor.
There is really no competition for ag jobs. Americans really, really don't want to do them, for some rational economic reasons and some reasons of expectations/feelings about what they deserve.
That has been the case for a mere 12-18 months out of the last decade.
You know why liberals used to be against allowing vast inflows of unskilled labor? They fully understood the obvious consequences to the workers their party represented, as it pertained to wages & employment prospects. Make that labor more scarce and wages rise. It's the reason Bernie Sanders used to openly advocate against allowing large amounts of unskilled labor immigration.
No other developed nation uses the immigration approach that the US uses. Everyone else favors a merit based system and favors immigrants that can pay for their social benefits. This is why Canada is so annoyed with the US right now on immigrants crossing the border into Canada. [1] A few thousand illegal immigrants cross over each month and Canada is begging the US to make it stop. Out of the entire planet, only the US is held to a different standard, everyone else is allowed to restrict unskilled labor immigration. The US is uniquely backwards in its approach to heavily limiting skilled labor and simultaneously allowing unlimited amounts of unskilled labor.
Where's the international condemnation for Canada's approach to restricting hispanic immigration into their nation? Why are they not called racist for it? They're a mere 1.5% hispanic, specifically because they won't allow unskilled labor from Latin America into the country.
That's an extremely ugly, hypocritical double standard. If the US behaves exactly as Canada does, it's called racist, xenophobic, etc.
I'll note that the sole reason the Republicans are supporting / allowing the low skill immigration approach (and why they've blocked Trump's attempt to shift to a merit system), is that it benefits business margins: they want as much cheap labor as they can get to suppress wages. It's why the Koch brothers are such big proponents of it.
The vast, endless supply of unskilled labor that has flooded the US for decades is partially responsible for low wage growth among lower skilled workers in the US over that time. If there's always more low-skilled labor, wages will not rise for low-skilled laborers. It's basic supply and demand. As automation increasingly hammers low-skill laborers, that effect will get dramatically worse.
The other critical reason why the US is going to be forced to end its immigration policies: you can't support an increasingly generous welfare state matched against vast inflows of unskilled labor that can't pay for its own benefits programs. This is why other developed nations follow a pay-your-way merit system. If you can't support yourself, Canada generally isn't letting you in. A couple million low-skill immigrants coming into their nation would bankrupt their welfare system and collapse their healthcare system. The US welfare state is now more generous than Canada's, so how is the US expected to continue to afford it? You want universal healthcare? You can never have that unless you change the immigration system to restrict inflows of unskilled labor.
The US should flip its policies: continue to allow in some reasonable amount of low-skill labor, and allow in a lot more high-skill labor (which helps pay for the benefits cost of the low-skill labor). As the US moves gradually toward universal healthcare, and continues to increase the generosity of its welfare state, this will become a fiscal necessity, just as it is in all other developed nations and for the exact same reason.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-immigration-border...
The only difference is we can't move all our food factories abroad, so the labor travels here.
But yah, open the borders. That's the only immediate solution.
The 90's had our greatest economic growth, and the borders were basically wide open then.
[0] http://www.newsweek.com/ann-coulter-shooting-immigrants-ille...
The current US policy by this administration is causing even documented immigrants to reconsider or just give up and leave.
I'm what you would call a (potential) high-skilled immigrant (STEM Phd soon completed at top tier college). Clearly, the current policies don't make me want to stay. The path to permanent residency (i.e. proper immigration) is getting harder and harder.
No longer that two days ago we got an email about "public charges" (i.e. -legal- public help that would make Dhs/State consider us a burden to the US) and how we should be careful not to use those while in the US, otherwise we can get denied entry/visa. Yikes.
Hardly any are undocumented. Of course, for many the documents are forged. Maybe they have your social security number; hope you don't mind! BTW, identity theft is illegal.
Oh, also, in all states and countries an unregistered firearm is not illegal. It is undocumented. If I enter your home without permission, I'm an undocumented resident.
We have a decent immigration system in terms of getting the right kinds of advanced folks.
The problem is we are also unwilling to do what needs to be done to stem the tide of unskilled illegal labor that flows into the nation.
Who will pick strawberries? Who will clean your hotel room? Etc.
It's the classic who will do "X" dirty job argument.
All you're doing by continuing the exploitation is keeping such automation from being developed, as you rob it of it's market.
It is so predictable that the whole "but what about the farmers" is touted as a reason to flaunt immigration laws. The farmers are not owed such a subsidy by the American people. They will adapt if they are forced to. They would be stupid to do so before they are forced to.
Sure, and who cares about the people who can't afford food in the meantime while we wait for the new Eli Whitney? You are proposing fixing one problem by creating numerous more problems.
You also shouldn't treat poor people as a single group. Yes, some poor people will be receiving these higher wages but no all. There are still people lost in the transition just like there would be people lost in the transition waiting for innovation from Eli Whitney.
Let's frame this a different way...
"Who will actually spend the money to develop a strawberry picking machine when there are piles of people that are willing to do it for below minimum wage and no health care?"
Having some group you use at near slave labor status can hold back technological innovation.
There is a seasonal / migrant worker visa for this reason. For instance, near me, Kiawah Island's resorts are partly staffed with Jamaican guest workers because the seasonal nature of the job. In high school I worked as a bagger at a grocery store on another island that was incredibly seasonal, so we had Russian guest workers during the summers.
Some jobs probably just wouldn't get done without either A) a wage increase or B) guest workers, e.g. particularly brutal agricultural tasks. We can allow the necessary workforce in for these tasks if need be.
> It's the classic who will do "X" dirty job argument.
The poor.
Having grown up in an area with a large Hispanic influx, they did. I currently live in an area with little to no Hispanics, but we do have a lot of poor African-Americans. They do the jobs I grew up seeing Central and South Americans work.
The problem with the illegal influx from southern nations, is they can also crowd out native blue collar markets by working for less, and are willing to live an impoverished standard of living. We should not be forsaking our own countrymen so we can get cheap lawn care from a wage-slave underclass living in third-world conditions on American soil.
The poor here just aren't willing to do that work at that price. The supermarkets aren't willing to pay more for the produce. Something has to give and in both countries I'm sure it's going to be the rules on visas.
1859: But who will pick cotton? Perform household chores?
We will either develop a technological solution or gasp the wages and benefits for picking strawberries will rise to such a point that it makes sense to pick that up as a career choice.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-21/the-myth-...
The biggest reason for that IMO is because Mexico has been doing relatively well over the past couple of decades. You don't attempt a very risky illegal crossing if you can get a job and support your family where you are.
The repeal of NAFTA will restart the immigration wave as the Mexican economy tanks.
Though I would add that doing it via a more realistic temporary work visa program would be preferable to encouraging an illegal crossing industry to flourish.
You're not at all wrong, I grew up with a lot of illegal friends. Good number of them have since gone on to become American citizens through hard work and determination and have built good lives for themselves.
Maternally, I'm a second generation American. My grandparents came to America post-WWII with nothing but an offer of employment, and ended up retired with the classic condo beach life. The classic story of rags to middle class American riches. There's a reason that's been the American tale, coming to a faraway land in search of prosperity takes drive. We filter for hard workers.
The problem is the black-market / underbelly aspects of this pool, and that very desperation and drive that drove them here has them put up with conditions we should be ashamed of be it in California, Iowa, or Appalachia. Businesses exploiting that cheap source of labor drive down the ability for those trying to live a basic American life.
America’s secret superpower is the ability to assimilate pretty much any people within four generations give or take
The Muslims will (continue to) integrate as well. It takes a couple of generations.
Japanese Americans? Chinese Americans? Indian Americans?
Plus, the very concept of some sort of empirical “cultural incompatibility” seems highly questionable. I mean, it’s not like cultures change over time or anything like that.
If any Catholic actually thinks this, they must be deeply ignorant of Catholic theology. According to the Catholic Church, anyone baptised using water and with a Trinitarian formula is Christian. Most Protestant denominations baptise people in this way, so most baptised Protestants are Christians according to traditional Catholic theology.
(And this is not something new introduced with Vatican II either, it historically dates back to the Donatist schism in 4th century North Africa.)
So, from the viewpoint of traditional Catholic theology, Protestants are heretics, but their beliefs about baptism are close enough to the Catholic belief that their heresy doesn't invalidate their baptisms. (Different story for ordination and the eucharist, since Protestant theology on those topics is further away from Catholic theology.) Whereas, non-Trinitarian Christians, the Catholic Church views their beliefs to directly touch on what the sacrament of baptism is about, so their non-Trinitarianism invalidates their baptisms from the Catholic viewpoint.
This is largely an issue of apostolic succession; regardless of the theology of the communities about ordination and the eucharist (which do differ critically), the sacraments cannot be valid because they are valid, in Catholic doctrine, only when performed by a validly ordained bishop (ordination) or consecrated by a validly ordained priest (Eucharist); the absence of episcopal apostolic succession (or, in much of protestantism, even the episcopal office) means that there are no validly ordained bishops and priests around. Now that is intimately tied to the doctrine around ordination, but even if the doctrine around the substance of the sacrament of the eucharist were identical, the absence of a valid minister of the sacrament would be critical.
> Whereas, non-Trinitarian Christians, the Catholic Church views their beliefs to directly touch on what the sacrament of baptism is about, so their non-Trinitarianism invalidates their baptisms from the Catholic viewpoint.
Well, there's two issues there. Sure, it's debatable whether a non-Trinitarian would have the requisite intent to validly (if, necessarily, illicitly) perform a baptism in the eyes of the Catholic Church, but what is more certainly fatal of most baptism by non-Trinitarians would be the failure to baptise using a Trinitarian formula, which is required for the sacrament to be valid, whether or not it is licit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valid_but_illicit
> This is largely an issue of apostolic succession
There are two different cases here. Protestants differ in their ecclesiology; some retain belief in episcopal apostolic succession, others reject it. Of course, those Protestants who reject episcopal apostolic succession, there are (from the Catholic viewpoint) no valid bishops, and hence no valid priests, and hence no valid Eucharist. On the other hand, the Anglicans, and some (but not all) of the Lutheran churches, claim to have bishops with valid apostolic succession. In the case of the Anglicans, the Catholic Church has decided that their eucharistic theology is so different that their episcopal consecrations and ordinations are invalid as a result (Apostolicae curae, 1896). Presumably, the same judgement would apply to other Protestant denominations claiming episcopal apostolic succession also.
From the doctrinal point of view, there are no non-Catholic Christians, just Catholics of various degrees of imperfection, is and everyone who intends to join Christianity, or to join someone else to it, intends joining to the Catholic Church as the two are identical and coextensive.
[0] it does recognize particular churches, but they are part of rather than separate from the universal Church; in addition to those in full communion with Rome, these include Christian communities who are out of Communion with Rome but who retain valid episcopal apostolic succession, including the various Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches, among others.
> Generally Protestants don't recognize the authority of the church at all (i.e. Sola scriptura).
Sola scriptura is a doctrine of a subset of protestantism; there are Protestants who don't adhere to it but instead to prima scriptura, or to doctrines that aren't clearly either. It is certainly not the case that Protestants as a whole reject ecclesiastical authority.
I'm pretty sure you know about this, but for laymen who may not be familiar with the terminology.
The word "catholic" (little c) literally means "universal". And it is a strong doctrine of the "Catholic church" (big C) that the group of worshipers is singular and universal.
I guess Protestants have a harder time deciding who's a Christian; probably acceptance of the Nicean Creed is a popular standard, though I prefer "anyone who seeks to imitate Christ".
Rome absolutely accepts them as Christians.
It views them as wrong, but it does that for plenty of Christians that don't completely reject it's authority, too.
> The central point of Lutheran Protestantism is that it's open source: anybody with a Bible can decide for themselves how to implement it without asking for permission.
It would seem to me that the central point of Lutheran Protestantism is that there is a right way to implement Christianity, that right way is clear in Scripture, and having intermediaries between the believer and the Scripture is a barrier to the believer finding the truth in Scripture.
Lutheranism also seems generally pretty strongly defined by a particular opinion on what the right answers are, or at least a wide range of them, though somewhat internally divided by the degree of certainty ascribed to those answers.
Also I think you are right that many Protestants believe their opinions are clearly implicated by scripture, but it should be obvious on reflection that Scripture is not self-interpreting.
Strictly speaking, there is a distinction between "sponsor" and "witness". The sponsor must be a Catholic, the witnesses can be non-Catholic Christians. However, in my personal experience (having had one child baptised Catholic, and the other will be baptised soon), everyone just collectively treats the "sponsor" and "witnesses" as "godparents". The parish just tells people "one godparent must be a Catholic". The sponsor is just the first godparent listed on the baptism certificate.
As far as parents go, technically there is no requirement that either parent be Catholic, or even Christian. A Buddhist couple could ask for their child to be baptised as Catholic. Now, in practice, priests will be extremely hesitant about fulfilling such a request, but strictly speaking it is allowed.
One Catholic parent is the usual heuristic but it isn't actually the rule so isn't absolutely binding. For example, if a non-Catholic is known to regularly attend Catholic services, but for whatever reason is hesitating in formally converting, a priest may very well agree to such a parent's request to baptise their child.
The fundamental problem, as I see it, is religion.
Lets cut through the code words then and have a direct counterexample to what you're trying to say.
Nigerians are primarily Muslims. They are also highly educated and among the most entrepreneurial immigrants to the USA. And while there's a "Nigerian prince" joke every now and then, they really are doing relatively well in the USA. Like, "better than Asians" with regards to college education statistics.
https://www.chron.com/news/article/Data-show-Nigerians-the-m...
Nigerians are basically the perfect counterexample to the "Religion" (aka: Islam) problem that is so often brought up. High rates of college completion, high rates of business / entrepreneurs, high-rates of integration. Overall, clearly net-positive to the USA.
> Other Asian immigrants in the US were also either not religious, or (like with Koreans and Filipinos) adopted the same religion as the dominant culture.
What about Indians? Who are usually either Hindu or Muslim? Indians are also highly educated and start a large number of businesses.
I'm personally Catholic. I'd obviously prefer it if immigrants would come with the same Religion as me, but the statistics are in. Nigerians, Indians, and a whole host of other immigrants kind of do perfectly fine in America. There's no need for them to be Christian or otherwise "mainstream".
Indeed, bringing in immigrants on the basis of religion is severely anti-American IMO. America is certainly big enough to sustain Hindu, Muslims, and other religious groups. Especially if those people are coming in highly-skilled, highly educated, and overall are a benefit to our society.
So maybe it is religion, just not the whole religion, but rather particular sects. All Christians are not like the Pentecostals or the Mormons, and similarly all Muslims are not the same.
The sect of Osama Bin Laden was "Wahhabism", which is relatively rare outside of Saudi Arabia. And even then, the Saudi Princes who work with the USA are often pro-Wahabbism, so the USA can't even deride that sect (even if its the primary sect of Al-Qaeda). Because there's still "good guys" who follow that particular sect.
Note that the "Bin Laden" family was a very rich and entrepreneurial group of people. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Laden_family) Some of them were huge investors in the US before their "black sheep" messed up their family name forever.
The Middle East is complicated. Like, super super complicated. Honestly, the bin Ladens in general (aside from the infamous one) should be welcome to the USA. A bit unfortunate about their "black sheep" sibling.
-----------
Besides, if "Religion" was the problem, why did the USA DESTROY the only secular, maybe even atheist, group in the Middle East? (aka: Iraq Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athists).
Reason: the world is complicated. And thinking about it in terms of Religion only is a mistake. ISIS for example is a combination of yes, Wahhabism, but ALSO has the support of former Ba'athists.
And the Ba'athists believe in Secularism and secular law. They seemed to have joined in the ISIS fun not because of religious reasons, but because they wished to take over Iraq and saw aligning themselves with the fundamentalist Wahhabists as the best path forward and creating a unified Arab State.
So yes, we are fighting secular (arguably an atheist) groups in the Middle East. The world is a very complicated place. Yes, we have enemies some places, but Muslims exist across the entire world. You can't paint the issues of one region as a blight on all Muslims.
Even then: I'd imagine that we should welcome the many Iraqis who have helped the USA and are now getting targetted by ISIS in their country. We have friends in the region and we are turning them away with our immigration policies. We've turned our back on our closest supporters of that region, and I wouldn't be surprised if a large number of them have died because of their pro-US support or actions.
TL;DR: Immigration policy is hard.
Nigeria is split close to 50-50 between Muslims and Christians. The north is majority Muslim, the south is majority Christian.
More like 50%/50%
> What about Indians? Who are usually either Hindu or Muslim?
Most are Hindu or Sikh
Oh right, Pakistan is where the Muslims come from. Apologies, its sometimes hard to remember everything about the world.
But yeah, neither of those are Christian. Both are IIRC Polythistic religions, about as different from Christianity as possible. Muslims for example believe in Abraham and the existence of Jesus. Their story is... very different but Allah is clearly the God of Abraham / Yahweh.
So if anything, Muslims are "closer" to the mainstream religion of the USA than Hindu's or Sikhs
This hurtful stereotype doesn't even work for the majority of the Bin Laden family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Laden_family), let alone the majority of Muslims.
I think that MAYBE a case can be made against the Wahhabi philosophy / sect (and similar sects). Maybe, but that's the furthest I'd go towards deriding a religious group in its entirety. Things are especially complicated because a large number of pro-Wahhabi Saudi princes are working very closely with the USA on this issue.
Do you know what works for a significant number of them? Antisemitism. Homophobia. Ingrained misogyny. Hate towards atheists.
I don't think that Muslimphobia is an appropriate response to Antisemitism.
Look: the Nazis were primarily Christian. We recognized the political movement of the Nazis as independent of their religion.
People today still don't realize that the Ba'athists of Iraq (who eventually joined with ISIS) were SECULAR. Hint: Religion is at best, a minor component to the violent middle-eastern philosophy. The Middle East is far more complicated than a group of religions.
There is a concept, and this concept goes BEYOND religious grounds (as it is taking hold in the Ba'athist reminants of Northern Iraq). Middle Easterners long for the re-establishment of their lost Empires from the middle ages. They dream of a reunified Arab State. (Or at least, that's the shared dream of the violent ISIS members in general)
And yes. Ba'athists believe it should be secular and pan-religious. They're also authoritarian and incredibly violent. But its important to keep these political groups in mind. But yes, even the secular groups dream of re-establishing their former empire. And yes, Wahhabists believe it should be a religious theocracy. But there's a lot of subgroups to this political movement.
Don't mistake the political situation with the religious undertones. Besides, a Muslim from Nigeria typically doesn't give a rats ass about this "pan-Arabic" stuff. So the religious stuff is purely a distraction.
I know that Jews have been suffering more attacks in Europe recently including one in Berlin that wasn't a jew but wore a kippah to "prove it was not dangerous" and got attacked. So ignoring the issue or just sidelining issue is not ideal.
https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/styles/inline/public...
Antisemitism is on the rise. But blaming it squarely on Muslims is just plain wrong. The above Swastika was found at the infamous Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally.
I don't necessarily have answers. But I'm also not entirely sure why Muslims get all the blame here. There are plenty of Muslims who are literally thousands of miles away from these incidents (ie: Nigerian Muslims) who really shouldn't be lumped together with the rest of the crap going on.
Many Hindus believe that the numerous deities are different forms or aspects of one ultimate deity. As such, they are much closer to monotheism than you think. It can be described as "inclusive monotheism", as opposed to the "exclusive monotheism" of the Abrahamic religions.
Sikhism is not polytheistic at all, it is very monotheistic.
Christianity itself has been accused of polytheism. Many Jews, Muslims, and non-Trinitarian Christians argue that there is no real difference between Trinity and tritheism. Many Protestants accuse the Catholic and Orthodox cult of Mary and the Saints of bordering on polytheism. Mormonism (admittedly on the fringe of Christianity) sees the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three separate "beings", although it redefines the word "God" to refer to those three beings collectively. Mormon theology also implies that God the Father has a wife (the Heavenly Mother), and of other gods ruling over other universes (or parts of the universe.)
Of course, part of this could just be physical proximity: these warring groups tend to be neighbors or even in the same places, causing friction. But, for now at least, we have lots of Indians (Sikhs and Hindus) here in the US and don't have the problems with them that we do with others.
This seems to be more true of mutually exclusive religions that are historically geographically close together for an extended period of time than ones which happen merely to be doctrinally similar, and to be more (but certainly not exclusively) true of political conflicts between religious communities rather than theological conflicts.
> But, for now at least, we have lots of Indians (Sikhs and Hindus) here in the US and don't have the problems with them that we do with others
Part of that is because the people who would have problems are still mistaking South Asians with Middle Easterners and also (whether or not they do that) assuming they are Muslim. Give it some time, they’ll get their own targeted hate. (Hinduism already gets some through the Christian anti-yoga movement.)
You mean like European Christian colonizers and the indigenous peoples of North and South America?
They shared neither language nor religion (US was overwhelmingly protestant). At the time, they were considered a distinct race from your typical white American due to their Sicilian heritage. Their diet was also significantly different, to the point where some states actually sent out social workers teaching Italian families to cook "American" foods -- the fear being their pasta-heavy diets would prevent them from integrating. Politically, they were far more pro-labor and were viewed as agitators, socialists and anarchists -- far removed from the political mainstream during the roaring 20s. They were hated and feared enough that there was a mass lynching of 11 Italian-Americans in Louisiana.
Seriously, though, Catholics and Protestants? There was a reason it was a big deal that Kennedy was the first Catholic president.
And that was the secularized, polite face of the common religious belief that both the Papacy as an office and the particular occupants of that office were the literal referent of the biblical Antichrist, and that “Papists” were, therefore, followers of the Antichrist.
And do you agree with the observers? If so, do you have sources to back up the claim? I ask you not to accuse you of anything but because I watched a Kurzgesagt video a while back saying most of the immigrants have integrated well over the next few generations.
It just takes time to integrate, and I'd say those who argue that Europe isn't integrated are looking st more recent immigrants, or older generations, and not the ones who would most likely be integrated already.
Each definition changes the answers significantly, I'd think.
California has never been "straddled" with unemployable farm workers over winter...
YMMV
Your argument is that the jobs these people do might be automated away so they shouldn't come here. Is that correct?
I would counter that many of these jobs can't easily be automated and that these workers are much more adaptable than you give them credit for. You just aren't going to see robots picking strawberries or hanging sheetrock on a large scale anytime soon for economic and technical reasons. Delivery drivers and dishwashers have very low cpaex vs robots that could do the same. These immigrants also start small companies at higher rates than native born Americans.
I guess I just don't get the rationale for keeping out low skill workers. The pay for goods an services, provide labor, start businesses, and generally do quite well.
There is economics in the cultural change - as people get wealthier and government welfare becomes more reliable the forces behind maintaining and growing the family decreases. Wealthy people in the past still had many more kids than they do now though, so there's probably a bigger explanation.
It should be acceptable for any population to ebb and flow, as changes in internal and external forces occur. Deciding to import warm bodies because your economic ponzi appears to require it seems like short term thinking. It would be better if the ponzi itself was addressed and the population allowed to ebb for awhile.
People are easy to attract to your country when you really need them ... unless you've managed to make that country undesirable.
Women are the ones who have to sacrifice the most for children, so now that they have a choice, they don't do it nearly as much: some have none, others only have 1 or 2 and they've had enough. For replacement rate, every woman needs to have 2.1 kids on average, and not nearly enough women want to have 3+ kids to make up for all the women having fewer (which also includes infertile women don't forget).
And also with men and women being much more equal, men are expected to invest much more effort in child-rearing now, instead of just banging their wives and then letting them deal with the consequences while they do other stuff with their time. Well they don't want to deal with 6 kids either, and many don't want to deal with any.
It may sound stupid but it was not obvious a hundred years ago. The wife is pregnant again, well, must be an act of god.
Try to imagine. There is no google search to find out how to make children. The closest library is far away and it's not that common to go to school and learn to read. That leaves you with the opinions of the family, the neighbors and the priest, who don't know much either and offer contradictory explanations.
I have to assume you're trolling, but to be charitable, here[0] is the Wikipedia article on the history of birth control. It starts in 1800 BC with ancient Egyptian writings describing the use of acacia and honey as a spermicide.
People knew where babies came from way before the internet.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_birth_control
I think you missed the GP's primary point. Just because someone in the entire world had the requisite knowledge might mean nothing at all to another someone a mere few hours of travel away, let alone on the other side of the world.
That's why written language was such a huge invention[1]. Then the printing press. Then the telegraph, radio, and telephone. Finally, the Internet. I'm sure I missed a few, but you get the idea.
[1] A moment of silence for the Libary at Alexandria, please
For example, here's an article on Samuel Pepys and a sexual manual from 1680 which quite clearly demonstrates that the nature of carnal knowledge was generally known at the time[0]. Along with death and mortal fear, sex and birth comprises one of the archetypal constants of the human experience. It's everywhere. It also happens to be knowledge that's necessary to continue the species, which humans have proven quite good at.
I guarantee that our parents knew how babby was formed, as did their parents, as did their parents, etc. Even our hominid ancestors before the formation of language understood it, because even animals understand it at an instinctive level.
[0]http://theappendix.net/posts/2013/06/this-misterie-of-fuckin...
The problem for something like contraception, which is the context here, is in understanding the details. Those details are sorely lacking in plays, songs, fairy tales, and old wives' tales.
> It also happens to be knowledge that's necessary to continue the species
No knowledge is actually necessary, as mere ignorant performance of the act is sufficient.
It's pretty easy to read this thread and see how much dislike there is toward children.
The only people who can afford kids are either extremely rich or extremely poor.
Yeah, but most don't focus on it. Paul Ryan is parroting his father and is not particularly brave or interesting. He's just a guy looking for a new cause to champion, because then he can just be the first, rather than compete. It has little to do with the "issue", which is a non-issue.
> US is going to face the same low birth rate problems as other advanced economies
Weaseling in "advanced economies" (which means countries without vast natural resources to exploit or what?) is not compelling as part of a narrative, as much as it's a nonsequitor.
This confuses cause and effect. Two-earner families tend to be two-earner families because you need two incomes in expensive cities (which vote D regardless of familial status). Single-earner families get much on much less in smaller cities and rural areas that tend to be more conservative.
we're full-on protectionists now. immigrants threaten what we got (a high-status nation dominated by wealthy white people), so they got to go, despite being the primary driver of our properity.
as a bonus, wealth disparity will only accelerate as the economic pie stops growing, because the existing capital holders have great advantage in capturing the remaining income streams, further driving down birth rates.
meanwhile, countries like china and india have tons of economic headroom because their populations are 4-5 times that of the US, but at lower economic levels. those countries will eventually eclipse the US if we stay on this path.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-abou...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/06/us/politics/u...
However, this does expose a gaping hole in capitalism, that it can only deliver improvements to the masses under conditions of growth. With falling birthrates and immigration, we will need to find a more sustainable political economy.
Nonetheless, immigration is falling for dystopic reasons, not good ones (i.e. other countries are more attractive in a positive sense). It's falling because of authoritarianism, xenophobia, and a program of ethnic cleansing targeted at the most vulnerable people that is being performed by ICE.
EDIT: The last paragraph is justified because there are 325M people in the US and 11M undocumented people. There may be a marginal effect on jobs, but the bulk of the economy is made up of everyone else. We're talking about 3% of the population.
Wait what? Are we talking child credits, abortion, progressive income taxes, mortgage tax credit?
The only people who are coming in are reasonably well off, but desperate to move.
Happy because we have plenty of people on Earth and in the US. We don't need more people.
Scared because so many of our economic structures assume infinite population growth.
With the productivity gains of the last few decades this shouldn't be a problem. That is, if those productivity gains actually went into something useful, instead of appreciating my 401K.
I would love for governments all over the world to finally reach a scarcity mindset. Unfortunately, the earliest governments to try that were pwned by imperialists.
But these days power dynamics aren't so linear anymore due to WMDs.
Most of the earth is empty now due to desert belts, and we almost have the technology for terraforming them but do not have enough people to need that.
Losing people instead is really scary because that will mean we won't have large enough economy to afford large geoengineering projects, and will be caught in runaway effects of permafrost melting without possibility to do anything.
There are two things that give me hope that number of people on earth will keep increasing: first is technologies for increasing lifespan, and reproductive age, second is that subcultures that encourage not having children, will die off naturally.
How many people here would say that they have actively decided not to have children? I am just curious.
At the end of the day, the kids go home with their own parents.
Plenty of people do. For many different reasons.
Some people do not like kids, some people like their life as it is, some people are in a relationship that they are happy in but that they are sure of that it won't survive having children, some people carry genes that they do not wish to pass on and so on. The list is endless, probably at least as long as the list of reasons why people do want children, possibly even longer.
1) I'm a woman married to another woman. Yes, one of us could get a donor, but it's one more hurdle, and it means we won't ever have one accidentally.
2) Debt. We've got some debt that needs to be paid off, and babies are expensive.
3) We'd need a bigger home. Right now the house we're in is paid off in full, and we'd have to go through the whole home-selling/buying process if we wanted enough space for kids.
4) Health concerns. I'm depressed, diabetic, and have fibromyalgia. My doctor says I also likely have PCOS and due to that I might not even be fertile. So I'm not a good candidate to try to get pregnant. My wife has her own health concerns, which are genetic, and she doesn't want to pass them down to a kid. I don't want to pass on the fibro or diabetes either. They both suck.
5) We're happy as is. We've got cats instead of kids (insert lesbians-with-cats joke here?). A lot of our friends have kids, so we're both pretty content to just be "aunties" to all our friends' kids.
If a couple wants kids, and they can't pull it off in the Bay Area and it's a high priority item, you can bet they are on the way out.
It's not as if SV is the only place in the world with a job market. Though if you're early 20's and have nothing to lose in the world then it might be a good spot to start simply because what you make there in a couple of years can buy you a home cash somewhere else if you play it smart and keep your costs way down.
The trick is that reestablishing an entire friend network and getting comfortable in an area takes time. The first year or two in a place is usually more difficult and I suspect this gets even harder as you get older and people are paired off.
If you live in the bay area in your 20s with roommates and then pick up and move to Austin or Boulder at 30 it's probably hard to make friends (though I'd guess dating is probably a lot easier).
There are jobs in other cities. The idea that there is "little or no job market" outside of NYC and San Francisco is -- I'm sorry, there's no other way to say it -- absurd. The fact that you forward this claim with such smugness -- "rrrright" -- makes it all the more baffling.
Where are you getting these ideas? Click-bait articles about the Rust Belt?
A few figures on median income. These cities were chosen at random:
- Cincinnati-Middletown Ohio metro area was $60,260
- Indianapolis-Carmel Indiana metro area was $56,750
- Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro-Franklin Tennessee metro area was $60,030
Compare to:
- Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Washington metro area was $78,612
- San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA Metro Area was $96,677
- New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA Metro Area was $71,897
So, look, San Francisco is an outlier, even by the standards of big, growing cities with lots of jobs. But look at those others. The median income in Cincinnati is about $10k less than in New York City.
Do you think the cost of living in New York City is only about $10k more per year than in Cincinnati? Of course not.
The cost of living differences between the cities in that first group and the cities in the second group far, far, far outpace those earnings differences. So, you're wrong on both counts. The cheaper cities aren't "slightly less expensive;" they are vastly less expensive.
But that's never what these guys mean.
It's always casually advanced as a blanket statement about the hopelessness of living somewhere that you can't smell the ocean. I don't know why it became popular to demonstrate such obvious ignorance about the job markets of inland cities, but here we are.
I, for example, know precisely nothing about the job market in, say, Salt Lake City, but that's why I don't make statements on the internet about the job market in Salt Lake City.
Technology is everywhere, it is almost impossible to find a place where there are no tech jobs. But the bigger cities tend to have more of them and for better pay and Silicon Valley, New York, DC, Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and so on will have the best paid jobs but also the highest cost of living.
Silicon Valley is an outlier in many respects, you should not calibrate your worldview by it. If you mean by tech job: a place where I can sit in a chair and make 7 figures easily then indeed, there are no tech jobs outside of SV and Seattle.
It makes the people who claim it look ridiculous, but they seem to think it makes them look — I don’t know what — something not ridiculous. They don’t merely say it; they say it with aplomb and even contempt. (Maybe because they get universal agreement every time they bring this up with people in their real life?)
The person we’re responding to in this thread is an almost archetypical example. Is this some sort of “winner take all” bias? It’s very weird.
Programmers in the most expensive cities are doing fine. But this cultural wisdom is doing very real harm to people who would be much better off in cheaper cities. They think, “well, sheesh, it’s hard here, but I probably couldn’t even find a job in Pittsburgh.”
And that’s factually, dangerously wrong.
Part of this could be a need to feel that one's own choice was rational or ideal. People make decisions based on emotion, and then invent reasons to justify the decisions.
A related factor could be the fact that a person could be compelled to move if they knew of a better place, but moving is a pain.
Another possibility is being unreasonably picky. Maybe somebody feels they need to be near all of the big internet giants, not that they can simultaneously work at them all.
A failure to consider cost-of-living may lead one to an unreasonable cut-off point. If a person does normal software development and sets a minimum salary of $300,000 then yes, there are "no jobs" in nearly every location.
If you accept that the South and the Midwest are legitimate places to live, then you're forced to really consider it, which is difficult -- moving long distances is hard! It's much easier to conclude that those places aren't real options.
If you want to talk about quality of life, that's another issue.
If you're not a gun-loving church-going conservative, you're not going to be very happy relocating to the South. It's already horribly hard to make friends over the age of 30 (this comes up here on HN often), and moving someplace where the locals are diametrically opposed to your worldview is not going to help with that.
This response isn’t like a little wrong, or a bit of hyperbole — it’s egregiously and embarrassingly wrong. It’s not just, like, your opinion, man. It’s a factually absurd, untravelled, ignorant comparison.
For my specialty, there's lots of places where I could go to get a job. But it might be the only job there. I had some silly company try to recruit me to La Crosse, Wisconsin not long ago. The work sounded really interesting and was a good fit for me, but it's most likely the only company in that town that would have such a job for me. That town isn't near anything. So if I were to relocate there, and the job didn't work out, I'd be screwed: I'd be forced to relocate again (at my own expense most likely) to someplace else. I've seen quite a few jobs like this: these jobs try hard to recruit people like me, thinking that because I'm older and experienced that surely I have a family (nope) and want to "settle down" in some nice small town (nope) and will be happy to take a low salary because the cost of living is supposedly so low (it really isn't, only housing prices are low in places like that, and they're not that much lower).
You forgot many options, such as slightly less expensive area with good job market. Or much less expensive area with reasonable job market. I'm not even sure I know of a place that's only slightly less expensive but has little to no job market.
That is, uh, about 10% of the San Francisco cost or 20% of the general Bay Area cost. Salaries are more like 50%, and of course that also means a lower income tax bracket. Other stuff is cheaper too, like food and gasoline. Last I checked, the price of gasoline was about 50% of what you have to pay.
The finances work out fine. I have 11 kids.
At age 35, probably 2/3 of the childbearing years are gone. (could be all gone, could have another dozen years) You'd better hurry.
This is a 4-bedroom house, supposedly for $275,000 but likely to go cheaper:
https://www.trulia.com/p/fl/indialantic/421-e-riviera-blvd-i...
There are a couple smaller places, a tad cheaper, on neighboring streets.
One can work for Raytheon, Northrop Grummen, Harris, Lockheed Martin, Thales, GE (trains), and several cybersecurity startups. All of those are doing well. Doing less well I think, there is also: Intersil (a wireless chip company), DRS (a military optics company), NASA contractors, etc.
I don't believe this place is particularly special. All across America, there are smallish cities in which the finances work out for tech professionals.
I think it related to the general availability of contraception and that the work involved in caring for children has increased, while the number of carers has decreased.
The trend toward migration means grandparents are often not nearby to help care for kids. This coupled with the fact that in most cases both parents need to work increases the difficulty in raising kids dramatically.
I’ve also noticed that, while grandparents are not around to help, fathers often still don’t involve themselves in childcare.
All this coupled with how expensive kids are means that if you can satisfy yourself with one child, people often do. Enough that it depresses the birth rate significantly in any case.
Are people really living in marriages where the husband does nothing? This is a genuine question. My family is Indian, and I grew up in America, but from what I remember, my mom and dad spent most of their time taking care of my brother and I, whether that be by cooking, paying bills, cleaning the house, taking care of the car, driving us around, etc. Our grandparents lived in India, and only immigrated permanently in our teenage years, and both my parents worked (my mother even went to college). Indian culture is not known for an equal sharing of responsibilities, but that was my experience in my family. What are these husbands doing, if not taking care of their families? Watching TV? What? How is doing nothing productive for your family considered societally acceptable for men? As a man, I've always felt it was a societal imperative that everything I do directly benefit my wife and children.
In my own family the actual way it worked out was that both of them indulged their fixations and muddled through the rest without much discipline or mutual encouragement. This was imperfect but mostly worked for me up until my teen years, at that point I was neither something to indulge in or make plans with, unless one of them had concocted a story involving me - and then I was obliged to go along with it. That was not great for my psyche.
And I presume in more dysfunctional families they end up getting into an argument about everything, or one is an abuser and gets away with doing less.
In our case, I worked a full-time tech job while my ex either wasn't working at all, or for a while was in a technical school (which wasn't taking all that much of her time), plus for a while we had several rental houses that we had to do repairs and upgrades on. So I did auto repair, tile installation, plumbing repair, etc., while she did most of the cooking and cleaning, and some things we shared like painting.
The tasks you mention are amazingly important. However, many people today feel "male-coded" tasks encompass the following alone: take out trash, mow lawn, take car for oil change or car wash, set up TV. That set of tasks is not complex.
Frankly, I don't know why his wife puts up with him.
I just feel like I’m normalizing their actions by acting like it’s no big deal. I think one of the reasons that this kind of attitude amongst fathers continues, is because it’s seen as somewhat normal and socially acceptable.
If the kids small, and they can’t work, then it’s possible to get trapped in a marriage for financial reasons...
Meanwhile, at least in early years, mother spends 16 hours a day looking after kids. Essentially the father gets some downtime, but mother has to look after kids constantly (maybe gets a little help but that’s it). And if you /never/ get any downtime it tends to drive you into depression... causes other issues.
Now that you mention it, I've seen this in some friends and colleagues, working in the tech sector. I always chocked it up to tech workers often being socially atypcial. Didn't realize it was considered normal. Just doesn't match my experience with my parents, or the adults I grew up with (who granted, were mostly vietnamese and phillipino due to where we lived), and I don't see it in my wife's family (irish). My dad always earned more than my mom, but when he came home, he would always be the one to do things with my brother and I and leave my mom to rest. Moreover, my mom was always so thankful that she no longer had to work.
Ya have to laugh!
http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/05/falling-fert...
Maybe you address in your post, but as stated this doesn't make a lot of sense. Fertility is falling across all demographics and in all developed countries and has been for decades – are you saying everybody everywhere has experienced a personality shift over that time?
And while fertility probably does have some genetic component, I think that's a small piece of it compared to prevailing economic conditions (having kids is friggin expensive and this generation is deeply in debt) and social mores (whether there's powerful religions pressure to have kids). Genetics neither explains this nor provides a way out of it.
And there are lots of other factors involved as well. I think the differences in fertility between Germany and France are particularly illustrative.
Sounds like a tautology to me.
If this were true wouldn't that mean that the genes for the heritable part of the "want to have kids" personality type would be overrepresented in the population, because they came from parents who had kids?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreeableness
Asians with the highest income level have lowest birth rate.
Given that it is mostly whites who have been leading in STEM there is a high chance that US will lose its competitive advantage in these fields.
You're technically correct, but minorities are only slightly higher (birth rate wise) than whites.
"It’s official: Minority babies are the majority among the nation’s infants, but only just"
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/23/its-official...
I would argue, based on historical data, that if wealth inequality was reduced in conjunction with higher education levels of minority women, their birth rates would dip again (higher income levels and higher education obtained by women are prime drivers of lower birth rates). This discounts cultural drivers, but my hunch is those decline with each passing generation (ie catholicism and its disdain for contraception/family planning).
I'd bet the ones that have closer incomes to the black/hispanic population have closer birthrates
Programs that apparently target wealth inequality such as subsidising fathering bastard children have actually hurt minority women as they tend to have more and more fatherless children who eventually end up in the world of abuse, drugs and crime.
That's really the crux of the problem. Then add to that the fact that people who do have children young are put in a comparative disadvantage to their peers.
I desperately want to have kids and my girlfriend is on board, but she makes next to nothing and I make quite a lot of money. I tried an online calculator and if things go awry between us, I'll be paying her roughly a quarter of my post-tax income for the next two decades here in California.
That's just too big a gamble for me. So even though I desperately want children and I can afford them and everything would probably work out fine -- here I am, aging and childless while my girlfriend nears infertility because I can't justify the math to myself.
Also, you'd be insane not to get married before having kids. It's a legal contract between you and your partner that kinda comes in handy if you get disabled, die, etc...
I've been together with my wife for almost 20 years now and I still make decisions where I consider "what would happen if my partner would die/leave me/etc". And one good thing of being in a long relationship with someone is that these things can be discussed transparently among ourselves, otherwise you wouldn't be able to discuss simple issues like life insurance.
And yes, getting married gives implicit legal protections and a lot of those legal protections are all about "what would happen if" scenarios...
Yes, not having kids means missing out on certain (important) human life experiences. But so is if you DO have kids, it automatically means you will miss out on things that can't be done now because you don't have the money/time/etc that goes into having those kids. And in terms of "when you're gone away" I'm not seeing how having kids changes that, you still die and stop existing afterward, it's your kids that keep on living. You may feel good/proud about having them live after you die, just as an artist may feel good about their work living for many years in the minds of people. Personally I've decided to focus on one thing "make sure I don't regret too many things when I'm n my death bed". That means planning and doing things that I think I would regret not having done otherwise but of course, there will always be some regrets, simply because we always tend to regret/miss the things we haven't done if by no other reason.
We may prefer having kids over other things or vice versa but I disagree with a general state of the form "not having kids is a clear loss", there are pros and cons.
Apart from the examples in the article, I am also judging from my own experience and I personally reached the point where the money simply does not matter compared to the possibility of being a parent.
0 - https://www.self.com/story/the-cost-of-infertility
Edit: Also agree with others about potential relationship problems you guys may be experiencing
Since you say you can afford it anyway, as you make "quite a lot of money", and millions of people with much less raise children, it seems as trough you don't want desperately want to have kids, but perhaps you like the idea but don't want to spend money on other people in your family.
I have no intention of getting married, so: No I won't.
No offense, but that is a silly attitude. Marriage isn't about love, it's a legal contract two parties agree to. It entitles you to rights like power of attorney, ability to make health decisions for each-other, inheritance, etc. In addition, it also has non-trivial tax benefits, especially if one of you isn't working.
Honestly, having kids without getting married is pretty irresponsible in my opinion, simply because of the very important legal benefits that come from marriage.
But whatever, this isn't /r/relationships....
And you're right: This isn't the place for relationship advice, nor was I asking for any.
Once you have them and have fallen in love with them, you'll find that their happiness is worth working things out with their mother, rather than breaking up. If you can't man up enough to put up with her shit (assuming there is any) and you do break up, the money will be going to your kids, who you'll love, and giving that money won't be as objectionable as you imagine.
For me, I used to break up with women over silly arguments that embarrass me now to think about. Now, when such emotions surface, it always leads to me thinking about my kids and what a break-up would do to them. When you have kids, you're in a relationship with their mother and with them also. When you're mad at her, you're still having fun with them, and that lets you work through your issues with her, as their happiness includes her presence. The same applies to her, if you're being an asshole for awhile. So breaking up after kids is not as likely as you fear.
No, that money certainly won't be going to my kids. It's utterly ridiculous to pay that amount of money for child support for one child.
This is essentially incentivizing my partner to break up with me: "Hey <GF>, if you dump him, you get a $60k check for the rest of your life for sitting on your ass." Incidentally, this is far more than she has ever made.
There has been a meme for a couple decades now, that kids are so expensive and will cost millions of dollars to raise, etc. This meme is doubtless responsible for much of the reduced birthrate.
You can spend as much or as little as you desire on kids. I grew up shopping at Goodwill, but now I buy $40 shoes that my kids will wear for 6 months before outgrowing. That's my choice, as there are cheaper new shoes and much cheaper used shoes. Somebody else might buy their kids $120 shoes and complain to their friends how expensive their kids are. It's a shame that people like to promote this myth of the expense of kids.
If you can get over your trust issue with your GF, her not needing to give up a high paying job and being able to be home with the kids is a win. She won't feel like she's missing out on something and your kids get a much better childhood.
It seemed necessary for me to qualify my encouragement for you to not abandon the idea of kids, on the condition that you could make yourself feel safe in the relationship, since it seemed like you did not.
It just makes me sad to see successful people deciding not to have kids, given the subject of this thread and given the very few number of my friends, my wife's friends, my family, and my wife's family that had kids.
If this is the attitude you have toward your partner then I stand by my other comment. You've got bigger problems with your relationship than just having kids.
> Incidentally, this is far more than she has ever made.
What the fuck does it matter what your partner makes? Your money is her money and her money is yours. You share everything--good and bad. That is what good partnerships are about. You are a team...
But again, I digress. This isn't /r/relationships, but yes, you've got a bad attitude w.r.t. relationships. Best of luck in all your future endeavors...
How would the color of someone's skin affect their skills in these fields?
Many middle class white and asian families are putting off children because of the cost of living. Just to make a decent 2-earner income, you need both to have at least a college degree. After graduating college and landing a job you're still making historically low wages relative to the cost of living.
Take those historically low wages and try and buy a house. Home ownership (a staple milestone for young families) is still wildly unaffordable in most healthy economic zones. When home ownership is pushed later, and later in life, couples don't feel "settled" and ready to build a family.
Back in the day (and in poor countries with no pension funds) people knew that they had to have children because otherwise nobody would support them when they were old and they'd die. Right now people are confident that they will get a pension when they are old, so there is no reason for them to have kids.
They consider children as an inconvenience, miss out on the marvel of parenthood, and basically make the nation die off gradually.
Plus of course - lowering wages and women having to work, thus making having a child a huge problem.
The average or median worker in the United States cannot depend on a pension, it is impractical for the vast majority of Americans to consider what we commonly think of as retirement and stopping work. http://time.com/money/4258451/retirement-savings-survey/
Come to the height of their careers in the 70's through the 90's. The decades of self. With Michael Douglas's character's "Greed is good!" as a centerpoint.
They're where the wealth has gone. Leaving following generations without the security to settle down and raise families.
Everyone wanted something for nothing. Well, you turned something into nothing. Sold your own kids and grandkids out.
Speaking generally.
And it's not the aides providing 24/7 coverage, who are getting rich. (Having been dealing increasingly with this, recently with some friends. Most of the aides are immigrants who are making relatively low hourly wages. The bills, however, can (well) exceed the full household expenses for a staunchly middle-class family of four. And many eventual estates have to pay those until they're more or less broke, when the government picks up.)
I need to reduce my commenting. This here is anecdote. And I'm pretty steamed about what I've been watching happen in the U.S., for the past 3+ decades.
In Europe with the free healthcare, the elderly can be kept on care for a very long time, all covered by the taxes of the younger workers. This is gonna become a huge hole in the budget.
China, that's where.
China will become the new world superpower, filling the vacuum left by the US in its decline. That's the legacy that the Boomers have left behind.
Of course, you're not likely to get an Einstein if a bunch of uneducated idiots breed either, but most really remarkable people like that come from pretty "normal" parents, though admittedly usually from family backgrounds that are at least middle-class, and not impoverished, and where they had good opportunities and education.
If you want to increase your chances of making more Einsteins, there's two things you have to do as a society: 1) minimize poverty, illiteracy, poor education, etc., and 2) increase the birthrate (while making sure as many of those kids as possible grow up in economically and emotionally stable homes). You're not going to get Einsteins from a bunch of dirt-poor subsistence farmers, nor from a tiny cabal of wealthy people.
And yet population has grown by 120 million [1]. There are a lot of problems in the world, but I don't think low fertility rates is one of them.
http://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table
Even if the children-per-woman rate has decreased sharply, the population can still be increasing for decades afterwards, because there are still a sharply higher absolute number of women in the relatively-lower-rate birthing generation, thanks to the rate having been higher in the past when they were born.
Not caring about lower fertility rates because you don't realize that there's a temporary lag keeping the population increase high seems very careless.
Yes, having kids brings some limitations with it, but it's also one of the very best experiences that one can have.
I hear a lot of young professionals express fear that they can't afford "a big enough house" or that "the city isn't good for kids." Here's the thing, the kids do not care. They don't think they they live in a small apartment. They just think their home is next door to the bakery that sells their favorite oatmeal cookies. That they can walk to beautiful parks and libraries and schools. It's just normal to them, they're happy, and they aren't comparing themselves to the 50's era stereotypes of what "lifestyle" is "healthy" for kids.
SF is a great place for kids. All the parks and rec programs are so much fun and so cheap, the kids here have access to the abundant cultural and educational resources that aren't available at any price in most of the world.
I say this not because anyone should be convinced to have a kid. But, if you want to have children and the thing that is holding you back is a materialistic fear that you won't be able to "provide a good enough life" for them, or that the city "won't be a good place for them," just know that isn't necessarily true.
The best way I know how to express this for young urban professionals is to compare it to world travel. You probably know people from your home town who have never left, and how their world view is kind of small. It's not that they need to move away from home, but you know from experience how much traveling has opened your mind and enriched your life, and you wish they would choose to have that experience too. If they say to you "oh, but travel is so expensive," you know that isn't necessarily true, you can have an amazing travel experience on a dime if you want to.
Parenting is a lot like that. What kids care about is having parents that love them and care about them. If you can do that part, they won't care too much about the rest.
Yet, I agree, nothing beats walking them to day care and then to work and having a dog to play with in a park a few blocks away. Having access to some of the best food in the world and lots of evening family friendly events is quite a perk and a dream.
Another thing though that I hear a lot, people who choose to live in the subburbs here also find the "unique" culture of SF a bit much for a kid to get exposed to so early. A bit too gritty and real lol, but I applaud you for being so open.