I can barely afford to provide for my own long-term survival, let alone a poor little defenseless child.
Maybe if cronyism wasn't driving the price of everything higher in the USA, then I could afford to properly care for a child. But gone are the days where raising a child meant "another mouth to feed". These days, food is just 1/20th of the overall bill
Ehh, the economic positive to children is sometimes hard to work in. But I can’t look at family businesses with six children “employed” as a straightforward calculation. That was once the norm, and is no longer commonplace in the US. I imagine you’d have to take this into account to do a proper comparison with decently contrasting cultures.
I get where you are coming from. Children were an easy source of labor back in the day.
But now, children are purely a cost center, and not a predictable/inexpensive one either. They get sick, they need schooling. Food + a crib are the least of a parent's worries.
To be blunt, this is a tragedy of the commons scenario. The costs are primarily on the parents, and then society gets the benefits (in the short term, of the spending by the parents, in the long term by the productivity and spending of the grown child). This is why smart policy makes it easier to have children--because overall some level of population growth causes economic growth which makes everyone's lives better.
However, I don't know of any country in the world that has cracked the nut of encouraging people to have children. It seems that personal freedom (of not having kids) is only counterbalanced by either lack of birth control (developing countries) or societal pressure (I'm thinking of various religious groups in the USA which tend to have many children per parenting couple).
Americans in general are having less babies. Last year more non-white babies were born than white babies, and due to the opiod crisis the white life expectancy went down while it's rising for other groups. America is in the early stages of a really interesting demographic shift. It will be interesting to look back on how the politics of this era shape out.
I am suspicious of this statistic since it is only a measure of racial purity. At some point we need to give up on this measure since it originally meant just a drop of blood is enough to be non-white. During slave days 15/16 white was still not white.
According to the Census Bureau in 2015 the US white population contracted (more white people dying than being born + immigrating) for the first time in US history outside of war (that decline continued for 2016 as well). The average non-hispanic white person is now 43 years old. The decline was slight, 0.02%, basically the opioid overdoses are the difference between expansion and contraction for white people.
Demographically, there are 198m non-hispanic whites, 59m hispanics, 47m blacks, 22m asians. The average hispanic age is 29, and the median overall age in the US is 38. The youngest state at the median is Utah at 31; the oldest is Maine at 45 (!).
Unsurprisingly, when the financial incentive is don't do X people prefer not to do X.
The truth is, we need to socialize the cost of child care and having children. Or we need immigration.
The latter has always been the cheaper (for society) option but given all the resentment that has built up in the US, we are probably better off going with the former.
People might consciously site economic or other reasons for this, but I think the real reason is that education about birth control has sufficiently permeated the country that people are simply making the choice. I suspect that an overwhelmingly large number of past pregnancies were unplanned, while now more of them are planned. We’re just seeing the natural number that would occur when people actually make the choice as opposed to leaving it up to chance as was done in most of history.
The concept of asking people why they are making the choice presupposes that they have the option of making the choice to begin with.
I agree. I could list dozens of reasons that I think having children is a bad idea but ultimately, I know that if I actually wanted them, none of those reasons would matter. We are all quite adept at rationalising our wants.
As one example, the rate of teens giving birth has plunged by about 54% in 20 years (the pregnancy rate has similarly dropped). From 48.8 per 1,000 teen girls, to 22.3. There was a 46% drop in just eight years, from 2007 to 2016.
There is that and there are other things to distract people as well. People now have pretty much all the porn and entertainment they can watch as well as other internet-enabled distractions in their lives. You could be in the middle of nowhere and have the ability to get distracted by people hundreds, thousands of miles away.
Our finances are not in great condition. We have little solid support from extended family. I was recently diagnosed with a very serious illness where death is a non-zero possibility.
But you know what? We have three kids and they are our treasures. Life is hard, sacrifice is required, and more days than not I find myself struggling to find the motivation to get out of bed. That is, until my children come and say good morning...then there is joy (not necessarily happiness, but definitely joy).
Our children may not have all of the “necessities” in life, but they will have love and, more importantly, the responsibility to love others: their ailing parents, their struggling siblings, society at large.
Well worth the read for parent and non parent alike.
Basically, as I recall the book, kids are a huge amount of work for 20 years that may or may not result in another human being who you like. But if you do get that result, it's a profound payback; without equal among human relationships.
imo having a kid now is like buying a horse (or maybe 2 horses). By the time a baby born today would have graduated college, there's a good chance we'll have achieved artificial general intelligence. Pretty much impossible to say what exactly would happen at that point, but, in the past kids were a pretty immediate roi, they could work on the farm, more recently arguably the roi is possibly negative but, for instance, one of my uncles takes care of my aging grandparents; but if we are anywhere near to agi a kid wouldn't even be useful for that. I mean I like kids but we're talking easily 250k+ dollars for a single one. In practice for me it would be a lot more than that since the cost of my lifestyle would go up dramatically. (source: am 25 year old american male)
I love this comment. It was precisely my attitude eighteen years ago.
I was supremely confident that Moore's Law and work by AGI researchers would usher in the Singularity well within my lifetime, and that my offspring would either be incorporeal AIs or corporeal AIs in robotic shells. I would be uploaded into a giant virtual connectome powered by a Dyson sphere and live a thousand subjective lifetimes in a real year. My life insurance policy named Alcor as the sole beneficiary and I wore a bracelet with pre-vitrification instructions on it.
Now I have two human biological children, and Moore's Law has given us duckface selfies on Instagram celebrities and consumerist bliss via StitchFix. All the AGI researchers of that time have given up and gone into human bias control and polyamorous relationships in intentional communes with other futurists or disappeared into sketchy Chinese universities. Kurzweil will die ignominiously.
The exaflops of global processing power that the AGI researchers of 2001 wish they had is here, and is being harnessed to the valiant purpose of ensuring you can watch double anal videos in high definition in your Uber ride en route to the gastropub recommended by Yelp.
Mark my words today. Give it a decade or two. Humans don't want to ascend. They want to consume. Every technological advancement we make will go into facilitating this.
I think the path to ai is a little bit clearer today than it was back then.
Also, Kurzweill is currently a head of engineering at google, not that I'm a rabid fanboy.
I agree technological developments can play out unexpectedly, in some ways I am more "amish" than my peers (e.g. no cellphone (I use google voice on my laptop), I have a whitelist of websites I allow to display images, I use adblock to block out portions of certain websites e.g. suggestions on youtube/stack overflow).
But on the other hand, the year of the linux desktop is finally here, and with new os's like nix or guix, you can have a much more fine tuned and deep control over your operating system. Technology also gives us tools to take back control from some of it's more dystopian society level side effects.
Even if my expectations about AI completely dissapointed me, I still think it would be a good idea to wait 15 years to have kids anyway just for reliable genetic engineering.
Also for the record I think it will be a dyson swarm, and I am unsure if our machine overlords will bother "uploading" us, I would suspect they'll keep us around as a museum piece lol. Maybe earth will become like a modern day native american reservation where some equivalent to gambling is allowed and we all get handouts from the machines while what's left of our culture that's not amish amuses itself with our various "soma" (brave new world) equivalents.
Perhaps my imagined future world really isn't that different from yours XD.
If I read the list correctly, 6 of the 8 top reasons pertain to money / finances.
3 of the 5 people here with me attributed this to essentially selfishness / unwillingness to sacrifice for others (future generations)
2 of the 5 said that the respondents have strong social consciences and are being responsible for not bringing children into the world that they weren't sure they could support.
It doesn't really matter to me either way [happy father of two teenage daughters who push boundaries but kick ass in academics and sports]. It's just good to realize / understand / remember that rational, intelligent people can form different conclusions from the same information.
Having children has always been a choice, e.g. historical birthrates are closely coupled to harvest success. So people are choosing to have fewer children now, and most of that has to do with opportunity costs.
Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" (https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/046...) has some data showing that parents are putting more and more time into children. (And his argument is that it is mostly unnecessary, i.e. it doesn't correspond to improved outcomes for children, given a relatively normal stable family.) I wonder how much of this is just changed social expectations (e.g. call Police / Child Services if you see a kid walking home along from school), how much is social signaling, how much is reduced family support.
My partner and I would like 3, maybe 4. In my culture, you don't have kids until you're married and have secured a house/home (a 2-3 bdrm apt or condo would do). We're spending our fertile years trying to move up the ladder and save as much as we can so that we can secure a home. By the time we get the house, we won't the fertility to have 3-4 we'll be lucky if we can get 2.
22 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 59.9 ms ] threadMaybe if cronyism wasn't driving the price of everything higher in the USA, then I could afford to properly care for a child. But gone are the days where raising a child meant "another mouth to feed". These days, food is just 1/20th of the overall bill
But now, children are purely a cost center, and not a predictable/inexpensive one either. They get sick, they need schooling. Food + a crib are the least of a parent's worries.
However, I don't know of any country in the world that has cracked the nut of encouraging people to have children. It seems that personal freedom (of not having kids) is only counterbalanced by either lack of birth control (developing countries) or societal pressure (I'm thinking of various religious groups in the USA which tend to have many children per parenting couple).
Demographically, there are 198m non-hispanic whites, 59m hispanics, 47m blacks, 22m asians. The average hispanic age is 29, and the median overall age in the US is 38. The youngest state at the median is Utah at 31; the oldest is Maine at 45 (!).
The truth is, we need to socialize the cost of child care and having children. Or we need immigration.
The latter has always been the cheaper (for society) option but given all the resentment that has built up in the US, we are probably better off going with the former.
The concept of asking people why they are making the choice presupposes that they have the option of making the choice to begin with.
I think this helps too.
But you know what? We have three kids and they are our treasures. Life is hard, sacrifice is required, and more days than not I find myself struggling to find the motivation to get out of bed. That is, until my children come and say good morning...then there is joy (not necessarily happiness, but definitely joy).
Our children may not have all of the “necessities” in life, but they will have love and, more importantly, the responsibility to love others: their ailing parents, their struggling siblings, society at large.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/books/review/all-joy-and-...
Well worth the read for parent and non parent alike.
Basically, as I recall the book, kids are a huge amount of work for 20 years that may or may not result in another human being who you like. But if you do get that result, it's a profound payback; without equal among human relationships.
I was supremely confident that Moore's Law and work by AGI researchers would usher in the Singularity well within my lifetime, and that my offspring would either be incorporeal AIs or corporeal AIs in robotic shells. I would be uploaded into a giant virtual connectome powered by a Dyson sphere and live a thousand subjective lifetimes in a real year. My life insurance policy named Alcor as the sole beneficiary and I wore a bracelet with pre-vitrification instructions on it.
Now I have two human biological children, and Moore's Law has given us duckface selfies on Instagram celebrities and consumerist bliss via StitchFix. All the AGI researchers of that time have given up and gone into human bias control and polyamorous relationships in intentional communes with other futurists or disappeared into sketchy Chinese universities. Kurzweil will die ignominiously.
The exaflops of global processing power that the AGI researchers of 2001 wish they had is here, and is being harnessed to the valiant purpose of ensuring you can watch double anal videos in high definition in your Uber ride en route to the gastropub recommended by Yelp.
Mark my words today. Give it a decade or two. Humans don't want to ascend. They want to consume. Every technological advancement we make will go into facilitating this.
And being a parent is actually pretty cool.
Also, Kurzweill is currently a head of engineering at google, not that I'm a rabid fanboy.
I agree technological developments can play out unexpectedly, in some ways I am more "amish" than my peers (e.g. no cellphone (I use google voice on my laptop), I have a whitelist of websites I allow to display images, I use adblock to block out portions of certain websites e.g. suggestions on youtube/stack overflow).
But on the other hand, the year of the linux desktop is finally here, and with new os's like nix or guix, you can have a much more fine tuned and deep control over your operating system. Technology also gives us tools to take back control from some of it's more dystopian society level side effects.
Even if my expectations about AI completely dissapointed me, I still think it would be a good idea to wait 15 years to have kids anyway just for reliable genetic engineering.
Also for the record I think it will be a dyson swarm, and I am unsure if our machine overlords will bother "uploading" us, I would suspect they'll keep us around as a museum piece lol. Maybe earth will become like a modern day native american reservation where some equivalent to gambling is allowed and we all get handouts from the machines while what's left of our culture that's not amish amuses itself with our various "soma" (brave new world) equivalents.
Perhaps my imagined future world really isn't that different from yours XD.
3 of the 5 people here with me attributed this to essentially selfishness / unwillingness to sacrifice for others (future generations)
2 of the 5 said that the respondents have strong social consciences and are being responsible for not bringing children into the world that they weren't sure they could support.
It doesn't really matter to me either way [happy father of two teenage daughters who push boundaries but kick ass in academics and sports]. It's just good to realize / understand / remember that rational, intelligent people can form different conclusions from the same information.
Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" (https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/046...) has some data showing that parents are putting more and more time into children. (And his argument is that it is mostly unnecessary, i.e. it doesn't correspond to improved outcomes for children, given a relatively normal stable family.) I wonder how much of this is just changed social expectations (e.g. call Police / Child Services if you see a kid walking home along from school), how much is social signaling, how much is reduced family support.