As a corollary to this: it's perhaps not surprising that the remaining conflict we do see is spearheaded by our increasingly aged heads of state, men and women who grew up in the shadow of WW2 and the peak of the Cold War.
Yet in the article he says “ The upside is that — and this is admittedly a strange time to suggest it — the world is going to be a lot less violent”.
Saddam Hussein was hardly a teenager when he invaded Kuwait, and Putin is no spring chicken. I don’t know what the answer is, but I suspect this guy doesn’t either.
It’s a shame though, since the collapse of the Soviet Union the share of the worlds population dying in warfare has collapsed. It was already on a strong downward trend after the end of WW2. Let’s hope Ukraine is an outlier.
I think woodruffw meant that the conflict in the Old World might be spearheaded by those people who still have a romantic infatuation by war, which has been steadily declining since like WW1 but manages to hold on in some capacity to these days. Eventually we'll get to the point where people – contemporary young people, future born people – would not see physical violence as a means of settling political disagreements. Partly because they would know how precious life is in a low-fertility environment.
Ultra orthodox women in Israel have the highest life expectancy and a negligible child mortality rate but they’re having more kids than any African country.
Oman is a fairly developed country and they have twice as many kids per woman compared to poor Ukraine and almost-starving North Korea.
Cultural background is a huge influence in fertility. African immigrants in Europe have more children the poorer they are, the opposite of locals.
The birth rate in Oman has collapsed since the 90s to a bit above replacement level.
You’re right about the Haredi though. Congratulations, on a discussion of demographics across billions of people, you found one community of less than 2 million that buck the trend. Good for you.
Cultural background can have an influence, sure, but generally not enough to have a macro level effect. Hence the global trend.
Yes I have, it was horrible with millions dead. Few wars are not horrible whether in Africa or anywhere else. The fact remains that globally deaths per 10k people due to war was in serious decline at that time.
Kim Jong Un is not old (nor his sister). Putin was only 8 during the Cuban Missile Crisis so he only sees a caricature.
I'm not sure a younger generation growing up without fear of nuclear war is a safer thing. I suspect that most of the current heads of state being old and belligerant is correlation rather than causation.
Don't worry, there will be inexpensive automated drones to do the killing soon enough.
Kim Jong Un is a funny case. There's a reason we call North Korea the "hermit kingdom."
Putin was a child during the missile crisis, but he cut his teeth in the KGB of the 70s and 80s. His mentors and leaders were, in all likelihood, veterans of the Great Patriotic War.
(To be clear: I don't think that the risk of war ends with the deaths of these particular generations of leaders. But I do think we're seeing a particularly outmoded approach to war at the moment.)
> "(To be clear: I don't think that the risk of war ends with the deaths of these particular generations of leaders. But I do think we're seeing a particularly outmoded approach to war at the moment.)"
It will still be older people calling the shots, since they have had time to accumulate power and rise in the ranks, but the risk of war increases with the elders of future generations because they have no direct experience or cultural memory of its horrors; "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."
You refer to nuclear war? It would be awful, without a doubt, especially at a full scale, but even a full scale nuke exchange would not come close to rendering the world uninhabitable. Many of the 50's scenarios on nuclear winter were exaggerated. (a good thing overall if it helped prevent people from pushing certain buttons or turning certain keys)
Some parts of sub-Saharan Africa still have high fertility, but those who have seen increased economic development have also seen at least the start of the same demographic transition.
Last time I checked population growth forecasts, the models mostly predict worldwide population contraction within a century.
Substantial increases in longevity could delay that, but avoiding it entirely would take fairly substantial efforts to encourage more children.
As someone with a single child, I'd say substantially improved childcare provisions would be necessary, but insufficient - I could afford a lot of childcare, but having a child is still a lot of work.
Efforts to normalise more help, might help, but some of the options that might help in that respect (e.g. more au pairs, live in aid) are actively countered by high house prices.
China's one child policy means China has had a particularly low fertility rate for decades. Even now, it's "up" to 1.6. That's lower than Russia, which is far from replacement level. Child policy only takes effect after something like 20-25 years. So China's population will be well into decline before the first effect of canceling the one-child policy will be observed, in 2030-2035 (2010 - 2015 + 20 years).
Additionally Health services in China don't match those in the West, so they will lose people far faster.
China is in a much worse state than even Eastern Europe when it comes to population. It doesn't look like it, but China went into decline 3 years ago and will not stop declining until at least 2060. And it will be quite a steep decline starting in 2030 or so.
Fertility rate worldwide has plummeted and the population has peaked. Including these as war relate statistics is disingenuous.
On a different note, population reduction is good for the environment and long term survival of the species but terrible for the economy and wealth - especially of some countries.
Is it bad for wealth? I had read that the Black Plague that took out 1/3 of the European population actually made people (the survivors, of course) wealthier.
That was a very temporary effect due to lords competing for workers. Eventually the king stepped in and stopped it. 'The same thing would probably happen now too.
See: California and other states prevent rent increases during the pandemic.
If the economy is based more and more on automation maybe it is possible to keep smaller population at even higher living standard and UBI. We might loose few by then trillionaires in a process but who really gives a shit about those.
The point is that Russia's fertility rate is particularly low, and Russia can't really afford a long term compounding effect of their already low rate, with the loss of a significant number of young men. While that is unlikely to affect their thinking about the war in the short term, the article has a point that the perceived impact may well be higher when families are generally smaller.
That one piece of good news. When it comes to fertility, babies, and even deaths ... wars just don't matter. Even WW2 made a tiny dent in world population.
Worth is a measure of value and value is a measure of usefulness or importance. Ecology is a self-perpetuating system that depends on itself to produce itself. Everything in it depends on everything else in it, so its value is to be able to continue itself. Ecology is valuable to ecology.
What's really funny is that humans don't even seem to respect their own worth, as humans depend on ecology to survive, yet they seem hell-bent on destroying it so that they can't survive anymore. An abnormal growth that spreads until it kills its host.
You're asking a nonsense question. If humans didn't exist, the concept of worth wouldn't exist either, other than in the context I described in my first paragraph.
Many theories of economic growth say that it is fundamentally generated by new ideas. When you have fewer people, you have fewer new ideas. So innovation might slow: in some models it even reverses.
I don't have any articles to back this shower though up, but I assume people fear becoming the English post pax-romana. Being in a world where you can't even conceive to rebuild something your ancestors built is a bit disturbing. If you're not progressing, you're backsliding.
Innovation exists because of a need to find a way to support a growing population. We don't need to be continuously innovating. It's OK to take a break.
Skills have _not_ been passed on, greed made people outsource in a lot of areas, with disastrous consequences as far as knowledge preservation is concerned.
We have so many people who's ability to contribute is under utilized. Surely elevating these people is a more efficient way to capitalize on the resources invested.
New ideas just aren't generated uniformly at a rate of say, 0.001 per person per year.
They are generated by highly educated people with genetic ability, who also have the means for a stable adulthood and at least a modicum of free time to develop their curiosities.
Not to mention the means to go into science. Very frequently another industry will pay more, and that person never becomes a scientist/researcher.
My understanding is that part of this panic is due to how society is structured somewhat as a pyramid scheme. Social benefits to retirees are expected to come from the economic productivity of a younger working class. Large businesses which are designed to make high-level execs wealthy at the expense of their lowest-level employees require a steady stream of fresh meat. I think some of the economic changes we're seeing is related to declining fertility rates.
I've also seen economic growth as piggybacking on population growth. There's another disadvantage to diminishing population, of course: care of the elderly.
We’ve borrowed trillions of dollars from future generations, and have guaranteed ourselves trillions more in retirement benefits.
If the population goes down, each individual is going to have a massive burden of debt and taxation to shoulder. And you can imagine a scenario where this creates a feedback loop of dramatic economic decline.
Who is going to pay your pension and wipe your incontinent butt? Population decline may be fine but we need new economic and social models to support an older population.
Its good for the planet, but in the short to medium term people are worried that the burden of caring for a growing elderly population (who control the politics and capital) will fall on a dwindling number of youthful taxpayers
As with everything, it has pros and cons. If you care more about the environment than the economy, then I guess it's a good thing.
The problem is that we have structured our entire system essentially as a pyramid scheme, where the ever more children coming from behind will mean that the standard of living keeps increasing.
As with every pyramid scheme, once enrollment stops, then the pyramid collapses.
I think theoretically, it's not necessarily about more and more children being born, but rather about productivity increasing. As long as generations manage to be increasingly more productive, then the pyramid keeps going. Obviously, population and output are heavily correlated, hence the issue.
Given how bleak the outlook is at the moment for the people coming into their parenthood years, I don't think anyone can blame them for not wanting to procreate.
Will the population decline fast enough to save the planet? Seems doubtful. We use far too many resources and the population will increase for a while until it will start decreasing.
I’m a first-generation child of immigrant parents. So is my wife. In our families, we have a lot of cousins around our age. Many are childless. Similar story amongst our circle of friends.
In Canada, we’ve supplemented our low birth rate and labour force with immigration. We’re small enough that it can continue to work for a while. But given the investment made by our immigrant parents and by our government, it behooves us to work hard, contribute to society and pay back that debt.
Yet, with fewer children, we’re losing the opportunity for those returns. If our parents came for a better life, we should keep making more smart children, with the capacity for new ideas and innovation, in an environment that fosters and promotes that.
Given all of the places in the world, we won the genetic lottery. Makes little sense to squander it.
I also reject the notion that humanity is a cancer on the planet. Growth is the route to solving our problems.
The two most important factors in having successful children are: 1. having two parents and 2. having older parents at child birth.
There’s a ton of data on this. Maybe it’s correlation only, but it also makes sense. Parenting is too difficult for a single person. And waiting until you’re established and stable will give your kids a better environment for growth.
The age might very well be correlation, not causation.
Wealthy 50-years-olds having their firstborns, then promptly leaving them vast inheritance — boom! you get “successful” children merely because they got quite a boost. Meanwhile, you don't see not-so-wealthy 50-years-olds having new kids because they had them already at 25 and that was enough.
Also, there is a whole host of implications from having kids earlier. Like, you being just 30 when they go to school — or young adults having 65-year-old parents to care of when they'd be rather establishing their own life.
If stability arrives only in your mid to late 30s, leaving only a handful of fertile years (assuming no prior medical problems picked-up in younger life) then it stands to reason that a women will be far less successful at producing a large family than one in say, her early 20s. For men, I would agree with you. But then the calculation is rather different.
It's a pretty delicate balancing act, and one that's getting harder because of the increasing complexity of modern society.
The issue is that differentiated careers - ones where you are hard to replace, your company will pay you more than commodity wages, and they'll give you time off for a sick kid because replacing you will cost more than just letting you take a day off when necessary - require a long period of time to become differentiated and hard to replace. That could be spending your 20s in med school and residency, or in law school and being an associate, or bouncing between lower-level engineering jobs before you get the experience needed to tackle big projects. But in most fields, it does take up most of your 20s, which means you really only get stability, trust, and the ability to downshift for family life in your 30s.
Ideally, on a societal level, you should be able to raise a family on one of those "commodity" wages. But that's not happening, largely because many of the necessities of life - housing, health care, and education - have become differentiated professions where owners and practitioners can get premium wages. We need to allow shantytowns and village doctors again before we can have large amounts of people having kids in their 20s.
> two most important factors in having successful children are: 1. having two parents and 2. having older parents at child birth.
This ignores the genetic confounding.
The reason "older parents" have "successful kids" is because those same parents have genes which make their kids successful. Decades of twin studies have shown that parenting really doesn't matter, but parents do (because of the genes they impart).
Is it really? What makes it better? My mother was 22 when I born. I went through a lot of pain as a child because of her an my dad’s emotional issues (I don’t blame them, they were young.) It took me until my late 20s to really work through some of the crap I went through as a child. Compare that to my cousin who’s parents were in their mid to late 30s. He’s had a much more stable life than I had. He’s already got a much better head start in life than me, and I think a big component of that was the maturity of his parents.
Very good point. Back in the day in my culture you had multi generation families living in the same house. This helps everyone, parents get more people to help, the children grow around respective role models (uncles, grandfather, etc. for boys, aunts, grandmother, etc. for girls), etc. It still exists for some people, but less common.
Today things are so messed up, the economy, the push in secular cultures to even destroy the nuclear family, all this is taking a toll on society. Eventually it might be too late to recover.
As far as age is concerned, just doing a Google search shows there's a ton of data both in support and against having kids at various ages. There is no single dimension called "success", there are all kinds of health, economic, and educational considerations and they're all impacted in different ways by age. Furthermore it also looks like where the study was conducted plays a big role, which leads me to think this is more of a correlation than a causation. Studies in Europe seem to focus a lot more on health in which case being younger seems to be the best time to have kids. Studies in the U.S. seem to focus a lot more on crime and educational attainment, in which case being older seems to be the best time to have kids.
Waiting to have kids is the worst advice you can give someone. It’s a very difficult thing to have kids to begin with (contrary to what the “abstinence only” crowd would have you believe) and waiting can be the difference between having kids and heartbreak.
> contrary to what the “abstinence only” crowd would have you believe
Sounds like a straw man fallacy. My faith both advocates for abstinence before marriage, and getting marriage as soon as it viable (physically, mentally, financially, etc.).
I agree with this. I wasn’t ready to have kids at 30. I had my son at 33. Only now am I entering some stability in my career. I am very fortunate to have made wise decisions in my youth that shaped my trajectory. I made the most of the opportunities I had. I’ve squandered many too.
I don’t actually wish I had my son earlier. I’m happy with our current situation. I’m able to give him access to a plethora of resources and attention so he can flourish. He’s turning 4 this year. I wish I could make more of him because I think this world is better with him in it, than not.
No, I said “early if possible” only because we cannot change the realities of biology. My wife is the same age as me, and we can likely have 1 more before she’s “done.” If we could have 3 or 4 with ease, we would.
An alternative solution would be for men to marry young. It’s a reasonable solution. But my wife’s age and maturity is a huge benefit too. She wasn’t ready to be a mom at 25 or 30.
You’re welcome. Lots of negative comments and downvoting on my comment, so I’m glad at least one person understood what I was trying to say.
We are just coming out of a pandemic that is not actually over and has wreaked havoc on our health and economy. It’s pretty indisputable that the world and future sucks in a lot of ways right now.
But if the world is going to end (I.e. climate change, WW3, population decline), would you rather go out with a whimper, or your head held high knowing you did your best to build that bright and positive future we all want?
and condemn them to overcome all the mistakes young parents (and possibly economically challenged parents, with many more mouths to feed) make also due to lack of experience
We wouldn't be here if our ancestors didn't face hardship.
Our evolutionary cousins (eg. gazelle) are still being born and hunted on the savannah and many will get eaten alive. I think we've got it pretty good, all things considered.
When I had no money I didn't wish that I'd never been born. My parents didn't have college degrees or loads of resources.
Wishing for an ideal environment to raise children is pretty much a modern invention that doesn't correlate to history and nature.
Life isn't as bad as the news and the zeitgeist keep telling us. People are paid to make us feel this way.
> Our evolutionary cousins (eg. gazelle) are still being born and hunted
because they have no choice.
We do.
> When I had no money I didn't wish that I'd never been born
"make a lot of poor kids. They won't wish to never be born"
doesn't sound like good advertisement to me...
> My parents didn't have college degrees or loads of resources
That's why they had a lot of kids.
I am not talking about "reverse darwinism" which is BS, but about the fact that even the gazelle you talked about know that focusing on a few individuals is the key to helping your offspring. They make a lot of them, so that some of them sill survive.
It's very simple logic.
> Wishing for an ideal environment to raise children is pretty much a modern invention that doesn't correlate to history and nature.
We agree on this: you have to be young and reckless to not consider all the things that could go wrong before actually doing them.
What's the end game? Even if we continue to grow population now, we can't forever. At some point we have to reach a solution for a population equilibrium.
I know. We need to do better to help everyone with this problem. But I prefer to face these difficulties with an optimistic mindset, rather than resign myself to being powerless against the grim reality.
Unless you’re wealthy and/or live in an are insulated from the effects, you’re signing kids up for a world that is going to be drastically different and worse due to climate change.
Humans have done a pretty good job of overcoming the planet's carrying capacity through social and technological means. At some point, human's current organization and ability hits a limit and there is a period of stagnation, or regression. To me, and to others, these are not hopeful times. In the world that I live in, the best means I have to support myself also disconnect me from real community.
Living in the Bay Area, there is no real sense of permanence. Many people are here because salaries are so high, but if they don't stay high they will need to leave. Many people are pushed out because the area has become so unaffordable. Many of my closest friends live day to day not knowing if their visa will be renewed. A friend at my company just relocated to Vancouver because he didn't luck out in the visa lottery. I have several friends who are looking to leave because they cannot provide stability for their children. I myself am renting. I would like to stay here permanently, but the houses on my street have doubled in price (not value) over the last two years. I still may be able to afford to buy one, but the idea of paying more than 10k/month for an 1300 square foot house is hard to swallow.
California of course has tried to address these problems, and has been trying to address them for a long time. Overall, these efforts have been a failure sometimes doing more harm than good (see prop 13). California hasn't even been able to build a functioning high speed rail system even though it has been fully funded for over 20 years. The society that made these places does not seem to be the society that we need to fix their problems.
We have many people, with many ideas. We don't need more people to keep having new ideas. We just need to provide a stable environment for the people that we do have, and give them the space to express themselves.
Edit: btw, if it is true that new ideas are what we need, then the best way forward is adoption. What better way to get a new idea into a desirable place?
How are we not a cancer on the planet, though?
We are literally responsible for the 6th largest mass extinction in history, based on greed for fossil fuels, animal products & rearing unnecessary children who serve the Need Machine (life/DNA) needlessly, and this is with all the knowledge and technology we have, in fact the more we had and the more we destroyed to get here.
We are like addicts to the drug of life, too scared of admiting we have to stop spawning other addicts as a mean to an unreachable end.
We do not accomplish anything by "creating a need and satisfying it". We do not accomplish anything by creating every problem and solving some of them (or even all of them).
Life is a cancer on this planet. Life is extractive of the natural resources. Name a single life form that leaves the planet “better” than if it had not been there?
Is your preference that Earth be devoid of life? Looks like Mars or Venus? And nothing of consequence exists there?
That’s obviously not what you meant, but it’s the natural extension of your argument.
If you think about it, the planet doesn’t give a shit if we live or die. It is not sentient. Neither does the Sun, nor the Milky Way, or the other galaxies. Whether we live or die, blow the planet up or not, is irrelevant to it all.
Somehow, humanity was given a gift. By God or the universe, but you have to admit that it’s pretty miraculous. And the fact that you and I are debating each other about the merits of humanity’s continued existence over the Internet is pretty wild too. But again, it is insignificant to the overall timeline of the universe.
Given that it’s all meaningless, why not spend your time here giving it meaning? If you believe we are a cancer, why not spend your time ensuring that you are not that cancer?
Furthermore, children are a fantastic way to continue contributing to society’s search for meaning. If you don’t want to have children, to me that indicates that you don’t feel you provide value.
I’m here to tell you that you do. And that you’d probably be a good parent, that would produce a child that also provides value.
>Russia is dying. In just the first week of Putin’s war, the country lost somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 men, according to western sources, an immense and needless tragedy for the poor families left behind to grieve.
>country does not have enough men to spare.
144 million people live in Russia. This war is a terrible tragedy but it will not depopulate the country. It won't even depopulate Ukraine through casualties, although it's having a fair effect due to refugees (44M population, millions of refugees). Putin does not care about the families of the fallen, he is playing Civilization and you can't expand your borders without moving your pieces.
The article fails to mention France which is managing the low children crisis better than most.
Macron moved down the compulsory school age start from 6 (primary school) down to 3 (kindergarten).
Governments should help families by providing easier access to daycares and kindergartens. Helping young parents get some rest with their first child(ren) will encourage them having more children.
I'm a parent of two young children, a 3 years old and a 6 months old. This is the hardest period of my life since high school.
I'm 34 and in our circles I'm the youngest dad. Most of other dads' are in their late 30s all the way to early 50s.
Yet I do feel I'm making a difference, especially considering that I'm Italian (high longevity + few children).
I've been also inspired by my choices of parenthood by the movie IDIOCRACY:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBvIweCIgwk
I was delighted when I red in the Elon Musk biography that he had also saw the movie and that was also one of the reasons for being a parent of multiple kids.
>Macron moved down the compulsory school age start from 6 (primary school) down to 3 (kindergarten). Governments should help families by providing easier access to daycares and kindergartens.
I'm guessing what they mean is that it removes some of the financial barriers to parents during early childhood: they can return to work because their child is in school/daycare for most of the day, at limited to no cost to them.
Even if they aren't both working, it allows the home partner to return to being a full time homemaker, and all that that entails: pursuing hobbies or volunteer opportunities, managing the family social life, planning parties and outings, etc. All of these things are potentially much more fulfilling and life giving than spending up to a decade burning yourself to the ground waiting for multiple kids to finally be in full time school so you can have your days back.
Because now government know exactly how many kids it has to fund daycare for and where the facilities should be.
I’d even go as far as parental leave should be completely covered until there is government provided daycare, so as the decision to have kids doesn’t carry too much of an economic burden.
If you prefer to not send your kid to daycare or to continue to work while you have the option of caring for your kid, that's up to you. Where did I praised removal of options? What option is being removed here?
That makes sense. Such a system would also have to include transportation, food, etc. It's probably a good move if the funding is there. France is wealthy enough I think.
It’s interesting that you say this because, and this doesn’t change my opinion about its value, education is strongly correlated with a decrease in birth rates in developing and developed countries. There’s also a strong correlation between high marks at a young age and high degrees of success later in life, regardless of grades or performance in between. Taken together, Macron’s policy could actuallly harm the birth rate.
I completely agree that families should get more support. I’m just not so sure it’s necessarily that straightforward.
My own intuition is that the norm of both parents working is hard on fertility. I can't imagine what it would be like without a dedicated full-time parent.
> I’m just not so sure it’s necessarily that straightforward.
Not to sound snide, but I also don't think it's as straightforward as linking two correlative effects. High grades in school is also often predictive of economic background, race, gender etc... that themselves are correlated to birth rates. I don't see here much reason to believe that providing early childhood care would decrease birth rates.
You don’t. Correlation doesn’t equal causation, of course. My point was that GPs solution might not be enough, not that it was unviable. I tried to demonstrate that by showing that in the worst case it could potentially backfire, not that it necessarily will. I was painting in pretty broad strokes though, mostly because I don’t have any better ideas, so I could see how it just comes across as FUD.
How about we increase wages so people can afford to work less? Because we are more productive than ever. No thanks on more government-run programs for daycare facilities. No thanks to making participation mandatory at 3 years old for compulsory education outside the home. I prefer they give direct cash to parents in the form of more generous direct payments like they were doing for the last year and a half during the pandemic, thereby empowering parents to make the best decision for their own households. Idgaf about Macron until he publicly gives an account for why France was degrading its nuclear plants prematurely and failing to build more in a timely fashion. And he should also talk about what France will contribute to NATO in the form of defense budget spending as a share of GDP, along with Germany and other western European countries that were slacking off for years. He can otherwise shut up about compulsive kindgarten at 3 rather than 6, because that is subversion of parental authority.
More shitty government programs or opportunities for bad and dishonest people to indoctrinate the young from earlier ages, particularly now that some bureaucrats would want to use their responsibilities as if they constitute the power to subvert parental involvement, are a huge no from me.
We spent too much already and these politicians only gave us inflation. Now you advocate for them to have more control and say over education by recommending more of their services? Nah, way more efficient, empowering, and aligned with freedom & democracy if parents in a household just get direct cash every month rather than government-run facilities. No thanks. Way too many problems with more gov. Give cash instead, solve the problem. And foster good working environment so wages go up and people can choose to work less and still have a family.
> How about we increase wages so people can afford to work less?
If you want people generally to work less and earn more, how are you going to reduce the amount of work there is for them to do? Also how are you going to provide the additional goods and services these people will be able to afford (inflation? What dat?) if less work is being done to provide them? Sounds fascinating.
> Also how are you going to provide the additional goods and services these people will be able to afford
We could start manufacturing those more expensive but better quality goods, which most of people could not afford. There is no problem with manufacturing enough goods. There is problem that many people only have money for the cheapest shit which breaks easily and needs to be replaced soon which costs even more money and destroys environment.
I’m not saying you are wrong, but everyone working less and being richer is an outcome, not a policy. How do you think we should achieve that? Making higher quality goods sounds like it would take more work, not less.
It’s all very well saying “we could just”, but how would you bring about this change? How do you persuade people to want different things and make different choices? That’s the interesting question.
Whole discussion was started because your question "how are you going to provide the additional goods and services these people will be able to afford" seems nonsensical. How? With increased production. Increasing production is not a problem.
With automation or employing more people. We are not at a full production capacity now, we could produce more, but we don't because there is no demand currently for more.
The US had close to full employment. Two thirds of the unemployed find a job within 6 months, they’re not really unemployed just between jobs. Of course there are spots of higher unemployment due structural reasons that need addressing, but at the macro scale their just not going to to make an even fractional change. Not the mass scale global transformation your talking about. China is running out of in tapped labour too.
Production is expanding elsewhere in SE Asia but those countries are much smaller and taking time and a lot of capital to ramp up.
Where are all these new workers going to come from, and if they could work productively already why aren’t they?
> Where are all these new workers going to come from, and if they could work productively already why aren’t they?
Why would they work more productively if that is not needed? They would have to make more things, which people wouldn't buy because there is overproduction. If you have order for 1000 items every week, you make 1000 items every week, even when you could make 5000 items every week. You can slow your production line, this way workers are more relaxed and you have time for maintenance. It's not like every employee out there is used at 100% utilisation, that would not be sustainable. Many times you employ as many people as you can just because it's cheaper than using more automation. If you need to produce more and can't find employes, you can pay them more. If you can't find enough employes at all, that means price per employee is so high that you can now employ some robots. Yeah, it takes time, but global change in time of employment is also not going to happen overnight.
> Also how are you going to provide the additional goods and services these people will be able to afford
So, we provided more products to people who now have money. And now you are asking "Who will pay". Well, the people who now have the money to pay for it? That was the reason for increased production in the first place?
Most of our gains in productivity have been captured by either housing pricing or massive government bureaucracies which serve just to “employ” people and have them duffle paper around. We don’t need to work nearly as much to produce this level of comfort
While I agree we could live more simply, I feel you'd need a lot more to justify your assertions. The fact is we have access to a lot more luxuries than we did in the past. Are they necessary? No by definition. Are they even worth it? Very debatable. But to act like our lives have not changed at all except for house prices going up is dishonest.
100%. Also worth noting from Sowell how house prices did go up, but by comparison the prices per square foot relative to how our parents and grandparents started out are not too bad tbh. (They were all humble and started out in much more meager real estate than many people have now, for example 600 or 1000 or 1200 square foot living conditions vs 2500+ average now per home).
The point is people can afford houses if they are willing to compromise on size, in the way previous generations did. A lot are choosing to rent instead. That’s a choice.
This whole conversation has nothing to with what I said. I’m mostly talking about massive taxes and light fiscal policies that are basically transferring wealth to people with access to capital
Your comment said most of the gains in productivity have been captured by housing or government bureaucracies. This is not true. The quality of everything has gone up substantially from the coffee we drink, to the fresh produce around the calendar, to the conveniences at home. We live in a luxury society where a fresh avocado in the middle of winter is less than $1. Where we can order just about anything we need at the click of a button from around the globe. This is where our productivity has gone.
I hate it when people jingle a few trinkets and say look how good everything is. Who cares about avocado? Can you take a few months off to relax? Can you take 2 years off to change careers? Can a woman stay home to take care of her kids for a few years? Can you buy a house without paying for 30 years for it? My friends in the US pay USD3900 for daycare for 1 child.
If this is done to guarantee a nice ubi and access to rigorous education opportunities based on proven merit and results year over year, sounds good to me. Great safety net, can be funded efficiently in a way that respects individuals, the Constitution, Democracy. Sounds great!!!
AFAIK French policy was driven by mothers that want to continue working. Most jobs and careers just aren't possible to do with halved working hours even if it was paid well.
That's the European approach that children belong to whole community not only their parents and the authority and the burden is shared. I don't get why are you so hell bent on having exclusive authority over your child?
> Most jobs and careers just aren't possible to do with halved working hours even if it was paid well.
Nah. That’s what people used to say abou WFH too. All this is purely due to capricious employers and institutions, not because of some natural law. If companies had their way, we’d be working 80h/week. That’s true for both low paying and high paying jobs.
> That's the European approach that children belong to whole community not only their parents and the authority and the burden is shared. I don't get why are you so hell bent on having exclusive authority over your child?
I suspect you're trolling, but in case you're not:
As a European, I do have a lot of community centric philosophy - but given the government (local and country) incompetence in virtually all matters of education and the universally awful opinion all teachers I know hold of the government and their interference and policies regarding education and child care - I do not think that wanting the best for your kids that you love and wanting to be able to raise them yourself with individual attention and perspective is really that strange.
If there are good schools, I have no problem with my kids going to them, as long as it doesn't interfere with their growth and education.
> Most jobs and careers just aren't possible to do with halved working hours
I just don't buy this; it feels like a lack of imagination. Sure, today, very few firms that traditionally employ full-time, salaried employees would even consider the idea of hiring twice as many half-time workers, but there's no inherent reason why it couldn't work.
Certainly, there are hurdles: some per-employee costs are fixed regardless of how many hours they work. But this is just an argument to fix them (because they're stupid in general), not to avoid the situation. Most part-time and contract workers in the US don't get benefits like health insurance and retirement plans. But this is an argument to fix those broken programs, not throw our hands up and claim the status quo is the only option.
Corporate profits and executive pay growth is generally far outstripping the wages paid to mid- and low-level employees. There's no reason why most companies can't pay their employees more equitably, and stop with all the pay inequality garbage.
> That's the European approach that children belong to whole community not only their parents and the authority and the burden is shared. I don't get why are you so hell bent on having exclusive authority over your child?
I'm not a parent, but childhood education these days seems more about pushing government propaganda and training kids to be obedient little employees (not to mention providing much-needed free day-care for parents), than about nurturing creativity and curiosity, and giving kids the tools they need to be productive, yet critical-thinking, independent people. I look at stories of 12-year-old kids getting arrested at school for asinine reasons[0] and wonder what the hell is happening.
I don't think people need "exclusive authority" over their children in general, but I do think the current state of public (and even private, in many cases) education could easily drive parents to not want their kids to be a part of it.
> That's the European approach that children belong to whole community (...). I don't get why are you so hell bent on having exclusive authority over your child?
No one has authority over the children beyond their parents and who their parents trust at church or mosque or synagogue or temple after many decades of trusting them in public and in the community and in interactions with each other. Trying to subvert this process by leveraging state-sponsored compulsory separation at 3 years old between babe and mother is nonsense. The more this small handful of wealthy sophists think they deserve authority over a child or have authority over a child's education, insofar as the parents are not guilty of deprivation or harm per reasonable & already universal controls that exist for these things, the more there will be significant backlash against these types of ideas.
Communities don't share the burden except to the extent that the parents need it and want it and share access to their household with members of their chosen communities and faiths. That is how it works in the entire massive United States and other Western Democracies, barring these irresponsible western European countries that seem to be possessed by increasingly idiotic ideas on how much control they want over our kids but how little responsibility they will show on serious urgent matters like nuclear reactor construction and adequate defense spending. The French should be absolutely ashamed and should repent.
When a state tries a state-sponsored approach to compulsively being responsible for teaching children with a monopoly on violence, especially contrary to what the parents may want to teach their child, that becomes a cause for jihad.
The state has some minor say over laws around children when tax money is being used to supplement the costs of raising a child.
Obviously at the end of the day most of a child's upbringing is the parents' prerogative but at the same time if people want to pull the "it takes a village" bs, as a gay man who will not have children (and not use any of the resources that tax dollars goes into) I believe that certain things like a child's education _should_ be managed by the government.
If the village does not have a say in village matters, then it makes me wonder why the hell everyone was allowed a say when it came to things like gay marriage, etc.
germany has made it a law that allows every employee to reduce their working hours to 20/week (with equivalent reduced pay), it's just a matter of people making use of it.
EDIT: apparently any kind of reduction is possible (even 2 hours per week) but the reduction needs to be sensible and the employer needs to agree. if they don't you can sue, and if the judges decide that your requested reduction is reasonable they must comply (i guess that means, you can ask for 2 hours a week and get it if the employer agrees, but if the employer doesn't agree you probably won't convince a judge either)
mothers wanting to send their children to kindergarten does not translate into needing to make it mandatory to do so. a better response would have been to make it a legal right (but not an obligation) combined with the necessary financial support or offer of government paid kindergarten spaces. the latter is lacking in germany for example.
School teacher - easy; Lawyer - doable; Doctor - already done; Auto mechanic - no problem; Bank teller - easy; Construction worker...
Ok. I can't come up with any. I'm sure there must be some, but they don't come to mind. Most people work the number of hours it takes to earn the standard of living they accept. Work is never done. There's always more to do. That is never the question.
Preschool in my district is 4 days a week, 2.5hrs / day.
That's a JOKE. Meant only for people who don't work.
But they also got another levy on taxes for "technology" and "new buildings".
They don't need more money, they just need to better spend the money they have.
Private daycare costs around $2000/month. That's more than tuition on the university ($1000/month or so).
So I just wish that once kids are in preschool age the preschool offered something reasonable
Also, have i mentioned that public preschool is not free? On top of taxes, we pay $400/month or so for 4 days a week, 2.5hrs/day preschool. It's nuts.
Oh, and they insert a random "teacher development days" where preschool is closed. Can't they do development in summer, when the school is closed anyway?
Yep. When every person who wants kids has to make these economic decisions their aggregate choices are reflected in population dynamics. "Just choose not to have kids then" en mass results in socio-economic states present systems are not robust against. Incentive engineering is basic economics, and no amount of rhetoric around "just have more kids" is going to change the material realities would be parents face.
I am responsible for a household. Stop trying to invalidate an idea or a set of of propositions based on this variety of cheap ad-hominy bs. You’re trying to read between the lines of the post to see if you can neatly categorize a challenge as being part of some bucket you sneer at. That comes across as being dishonest or intellectually lazy.
Direct cash to households with kids during almost two years of pandemi has lifted many children out of poverty and given parents more freedom and flexibility. Plenty of evidence of this.
When you’re getting direct cash and wages are good and bureaucrats aren’t inflating their way to Power, you can even afford to work less so one of the parents is always around if they want. That’s how it should be and can be and will be.
> He can otherwise shut up about compulsive kindgarten at 3 rather than 6, because that is subversion of parental authority.
How does replacing one form of authoritarianism with another, perhaps preferable to some, form of authoritarianism make things better?
> More shitty government programs or opportunities for bad and dishonest people to indoctrinate the young from earlier ages, particularly now that some bureaucrats would want to use their responsibilities as if they constitute the power to subvert parental involvement, are a huge no from me.
As opposed to shitty private sector programs run by profiteers?
> We spent too much already and these politicians only gave us inflation.
Because if Macron lacks wisdom for proper energy management of the people when people are in cold times and need reasonable electricity, and if he is unable to be disciplined on basic matters pertaining to defense spending and defense readiness, why on earth would anyone trust him to be wise oj compulsive state-sponsored kindgarten at 3 years old? Tearing a babe away from mother so soon to give them state-sponsored educational materials? Nah. He’s a control freak like any other bureaucrat. Otherwise it’d be straight cash to the household every month and more parental supervision. More parental choice, not less.
Direct cash infusions to households would not affect inflation. Giant bailouts for huge corporations and for huge corrupt political super pacs definitely does though. Read the book Utopia For Realists for the chapter on direct cash to households and the compiled evidence done over decades in the United States and even Canada.
Try repeating your shitpost in the light of the reality that right now, entire families are being blown apart by evil warfare between Ukraine and Russia.
So no, it's not such a simple reductionist shit-take like you're offering. Be more mature and serious or be banned. There's no more time for bullshit. We can measure the consequences of his actions and ideas by seeing the struggle of the nuclear reactors, which wouldn't have been a problem if France leadership including Macron was truly wise and privy to what the people need at a basic level - which is cheap and reliable electricity for fuck's sake.
And NATO defense spending should've been 2% of GDP for a long time, but they failed even in times of great relative peace by comparison in 2014 when they were below where they are supposed to be. No serious person, in the face of rockets obliterating their nation, could resort to such a shitty reductionist take like yours unless they were just looking to troll rather than to understand that YES, it's possible to say that someone is bad and why and how.
How is this working out for him and France now with energy costs skyrocketing and old pipelines and new pipelines from Russia no longer guaranteed because of immaturity across the board at all levels of leadership now culminating in barbarism in 2022 of all times? So yes, it's possible to prove that Macron made bad choices, because of what the consequences are.
Not at all personal. But these ideas are in a public square that influences young technologists who are impressionable and may take these ideas into their cliques and circles and sub-communities, which will then influence bad ideas further.
It's coming to an end by people advocating for the truth more aggressively in light of what's all over the news and readily accessible. You said something very immature to a serious topic and thus received a frank response. There was no personal attack though. I don't know you, so how can I attack you personally or as a person? I didn't attack you at all. Re-read the message. I told you to be more mature and to stop being immature. Because reductionist one-liners that disregard good-intentioned expositions for the sake of advocating for the truth...show immaturity. And that is much more of a personal attack, by the way, than anything I said. The entire context of the conversation was Macron and how his being a terrible leader means he should have no say in anything, let alone when a state can tear away a child from his or her parents. Ukraine was provided as an example of that, because it relates to France's defense spending as a share of GDP (which historically has not been adequate) and because of France's idiotic policies on nuclear reactors some recent years ago now coming to bite them in the ass because of, you guessed it, Macron and other "leaders" such as him. These things show awful leadership skills on their parent, and consequently are evidence for why they should not be trusted as leaders in general. Not just because his stance on education is wrong, boneheaded, and even evil. And these are urgent and important subjects on account of inaccessible energy and inadequate defense spending resulting in many lives being lost and society regressing if these things are not corrected swiftly.
Nothing personal intended friendo, it's the internet - but notice that I'm the one who in the last handful of messages has made arguments, whereas that other comment you made was not an argument. You did not contest or object to the logic.
The cost of living has increased proportionally, not exactly leaving a lot of room for additional retirement savings.
Plus, proper retirement saving is hard. Saving 10% in a method that negates inflation only nets you 4.5 years of income at retirement age. You’ll need to drop your living costs by over 3x to live to a median age, unless you don’t retire in the traditional sense.
There are a number of issues mixed together here so it is easy to attack. However, the main argument: direct cash with increased privatization vs public services is valid and should not be rejected out of hand. This approach could work better - at least it is not guaranteed to be worse.
You aren't...attacking anything. :) That's my view too! Allow households and taxpayers and consumers to make their best choices on which services they like, even if it's private. Let the best teams win!
Are you seriously going to tell me that starting PayPal, having two divorces, 8 kids, and rolling that into Tesla and SpaceX makes someone the smartest entrepreneur? I thought entrepreneur included all parts of life. Elon is not a savior, he's smart, but he got lucky too.
No it wasn't a joke but also you are also blowing out of proportion my reasoning for having children. There have been dozens of reasons why I had kids. One of them, very small compared to the others, is the Idiocracy movie.
The idea that smart people have less kids is dangerous for society and I wanted to "be the change that you want to see in the world".
Now if you want to take that and blow it out of proportion and say THE ONLY REASON WHY YOU HAD KIDS IS WATCHING THE IDIOCRACY movie you are using Reductio ad Absurdum, you are enlarging my claims until they are absurd.
Try instead to watch the movie and then comment on whether Idiocracy is applicable to real world or not.
compulsory education is hardly an incentive to child bearing. if anything those who have kids wish to decide what is best for kids without state compulsions
A lot of places have bizarre over-parenting practices that add social pressures on anyone who has children. I would have been much more inclined to have children in a place that either doesn't freak out about free range children like when I grew up or has a set public system over one that makes you feel guilty for not being bio enough, not choosing the right
private schools, not getting private tutors, etc, etc.
It is interesting to watch parents burn out and get divorced so their children can have a better life than the one social pressures dictate.
Before this new law, in France kindergarden already existed and 98% of children were already attending kindergarten. (It has always been free as well) I don't think this has been done to tackle the low fertility problem in France, but more to enforce a standardization of the education of young children.
> Macron moved down the compulsory school age start from 6 (primary school) down to 3 (kindergarten).
There’s a bit more to the story than you may think here... you also aren’t allowed to be homeschooled. It’s illegal. They ban religious practices for minors (wearing hijabs, for instance).
Also giving you children to the state to be taught is somewhat disturbing.
EDIT: By deferring to others to teach your children, they won’t learn your culture, traditions and will (statistically) be worse off than if you teach them yourself.
My wife and I settled on making less money (still more than enough), but raising our kids ourselves. It’s hard, but easily the most rewarding thing. Plus our kids are WAY ahead in most areas. Imagine, your children are learning from other children all day at school... is that better than learning from adults all day? No.
When they get older we will probably consider a “pod” or one teacher for 6-8 kids with a family we know. You can pay the teacher far more and the parents can be more involved (we can effectively dictate the curriculum). I’m also planning on having my kids help me with work by 8-10. They can learn to participate and be productive far earlier.
We have plenty of evidence supporting the fewer kids per teacher the better the scores.
I also suspect the more a teacher cares the better the scores.
As mentioned, from the evidence, there’s already a solid correlation.
I think with the additional details the causation is likely also there (less students per teacher, highly motivated and engaged teacher). Anyone debating that point IMO is intentionally misleading. There is a clear causation between homeschooling and better outcomes. The only “question” I’ve seen in articles (none in reality) has to do with socioeconomic status. However, if you control for that, you’ll still see better outcomes (aka homeschooled kids in socioeconomic category Y will still out perform public school kids in socioeconomic category Y)
> Anyone debating that point IMO is intentionally misleading.
No need to poison the well with unfounded accusations of bad faith.
> There is a clear causation between homeschooling and better outcomes.
As I've said, causality has not been established. Even if we stipulate that smaller class sizes have a causal positive effect, it's nowhere near enough to account for the improvement in scores when home schooling. Selection effects are most likely to dominate, as they do in almost all education research.
Home-schooling isn't solely positive, it is also associated with worse outcomes in STEM. This is not surprising as most home schoolers don't got enough STEM knowledge to properly teach the subject. The net benefit you tend to see comes when you average all grades, since STEM is a fairly small portion the net is still positive, but you still see a significant decrease in STEM ability in home-schooled kids
> There’s a bit more to the story than you may think here... you also aren’t allowed to be homeschooled. It’s illegal.
I believe this isn't correct. Homeschooling is legal in France, although restricted. You need to be able to prove your kids are receiving a proper education.
> They ban religious practices for minors (wearing hijabs, for instance).
I also think this is incorrect. Religious signs are forbidden in public school for students and teachers alike (as France is a secular country), but there's no law preventing minors practicing religion.
Ah fair. perhaps I was thinking Germany (where your child can be removed). France still has regular inspections, can be denied and you have a curriculum you must adhere to (at least tests / categories).
>Religious signs are forbidden in public school for students and teachers alike (as France is a secular country), but there's no law preventing minors practicing religion.
If you call a religiously important piece of clothing a "religious sign" then technically that's true, but not really
French view is that religion has no place in school or public administration. There's a clear separation between religion and state, including public schools. That being said, the government has no matter to forcing spiritual beliefs or clothes in private space.
Homeschooling is a super american thing and tbh, should not be allowed. If you're so scared of your children ever interacting with anyone apart from you, you probably shouldn't be a parent.
The Americans value freedom more. As far as I know, only western Europe considers children as belonging to the state, not the parents.
Many Romanians who moved to places like Norway were shocked to see how children are treated there. In Sweden they have banks of the blood of all the babies since 1975 in storage forever ( https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKU-registret ). Scary stuff.
What about the freedom you're denying your child by excluding them from social interactions due to your mistaken puritanical attempts to 'protect' them by home schooling?
I mean, there is no justification. You're actually harming your child. Sure, maybe you're a better maths teacher than the one in the school, but school isn't really about learning such nonsense..
The PKU-registry article you linked explains how one can opt out of having one's sample stored after the genetic screening:
> Den enskilde kan begära att begränsa hur provet får användas eller få sitt blodprov kasserat. Kassering innebär enligt biobankslagen att provet kastas eller anonymiseras
> The individual can ask to restrict how the sample may be used or have it discarded. According to the biobank law, discarding a sample involves either destroying or anonymizing it.
Non-homeschooling is probably one of the more recent developments in education in modern times, but yes, it must be this "super american thing" that can't be allowed. God forbid parents have a say in how their children are being raised.
Society tends towards least common denominator in the American political system, so one means of resisting the damage from that context is more parental choice.
Whatever verbal logic is given to justify compulsory earlier access it will be just talk until it's actually proven that it has the effect of increasing the birthrate.
It may have the opposite effect and then we'll come up with a different verbal logic to justify why it decreased the birth rate.
Verbal logic was given to justify the war against poverty in the sixties and sixty years and trillions of dollars later USA has a higher poverty rate than then. I'm not saying it was a bad idea, just that forecasters were wrong en masse.
So this may work or not, but honestly nobody knows, and those giving verbal logic for why it will succeed are purely speculating.
I don't have children but find it interesting that one way you propose that government can make it easier for families to have children is to create services that involve the children spending even less of their childhood with their family.
I agree education of a child is very important. Not necessarily public education, although that can be quite good in some respects.
But if a government wants to make it easier to have children wouldn't it make more sense to come up with policies that allow a couple to afford to raise children on a single income? That way, one parent is always able to spend time with the children when needed.
>Governments should help families by providing easier access to daycares and kindergartens. Helping young parents get some rest with their first child(ren) will encourage them having more children.
As a new parent of a 14 month year old boy - kindergartens have very low impact on our decision to have more children. We're lucky enough that we can afford to rent an apartment for my in-laws and that they are retired so they can take care of our son. Putting him in to kindergarten at this age would be traumatic to him and to us (parents) - he's only starting to figure things out and abandoning him to a stranger who have to split their time/attention between 10 other children at this stage seems cruel. Not to mention kindergartens are disease incubators and we would probably spend first few months getting him adjusted and treating him at home while he's sick (+ catching stuff from him).
The thing that would actually impact our decision to have more children (early-mid 30s) :
- fully paid maternity leave - right now it's 100% for first 6 months and after that it's capped at national average - which is >70% pay cut for both of us
- despite both of us earning significantly above average - there's 0 decent opportunities to buy a family home right now - everything that's worth something is long gone off the market, and if something comes up people with cash to buy upfront show up faster than you can dial the ad
The rest is outside of governments control, biggest thing being wife has to give up career for a non-trivial ammount of time (even if I took out some maternity leave realistically she has to take at least 6 months off).
I suspect that retirement age plays a non-trivial part in this as well - having retired parents to fall back on as support when having multiple children while having active careers is very valuable.
>We're lucky enough that we can afford to rent an apartment for my in-laws and that they are retired so they can take care of our son. Putting him in to kindergarten at this age would be traumatic to him and to us (parents) -
So you agree that having someone extra to watch over your kids is something that's needed? For most people, that is kindergarten.
>he's only starting to figure things out and abandoning him to a stranger who have to split their time/attention between 10 other children at this stage seems cruel.
Almost every kid does this. I have, so have all other kids. It's really not that bad, your kid needs to learn to socialize eventually. It's a bit insulting to call it 'cruel' to bring your kid to kindergarten.
>Not to mention kindergartens are disease incubators and we would probably spend first few months getting him adjusted and treating him at home while he's sick (+ catching stuff from him).
Yes, that's how the human immune system is supposed to work.
Having kids for the economy and what else is selfish. Kids should not be brought to fix things screwed up by their parents and grandparents. These kids are used like the fuel cells like in The Matrix, not because there is some benefit to them, there is none btw.
Life itself is pretty hard for most people, most just don't accept truth and make up a reason to cope. Copium. It's heartbreaking seeing children fleeing their home, losing everyone they know like in Syrian and now Ukraine just in last decade.
Then there is climate change, which will be devastating in near future. Even IPCC report is manipulated by lobbying.
What is funny to me is that some people who are all about the free market fail to recognize incentives when it comes to children. Sure, there are non-monetary considerations (big ones!) but the economic costs of having children (both out of pocket and opportunity) are continuing to rise.
If you want more of something, subsidize it, either explicitly or by reducing its relative costs. Here's an off the cuff list of suggestions which would reduce the cost of children:
* Accessible free or low cost daycare/childcare
* Accessible low cost health care
* Cheaper housing near job centers
I'm sure there are more.
But how are we going to pay for all that? Consider it an investment allowing a country to continue to have a growing tax base.
In a sort of backwards way, it's almost like people in their 30s need to be offered a secure mini-retirement to feel like it's reasonable to have kids. (Not to mention housing being a pain.)
Kids are frighteningly expensive. If I had none, I’d live in a bigger house, have more free time and would be much more free to move to pursue better opportunities than I am now. In many places your first consideration when looking for a house is which school your kids are going to.
I explain it to people of reproductive age as such: Kids cost roughly $270k (2022 inflation adjusted from earlier USDA data) to raise from birth to 18. Each child. Can you afford a Supercar or a fancy boat? If not, how can you afford a kid? And more than one? Good. Luck.
> Kids cost roughly $270k (2022 inflation adjusted from earlier USDA data) to raise from birth to 18. Each child. Can you afford a Supercar or a fancy boat? If not, how can you afford a kid?
an 18 year auto loan sounds like a bad idea. but $15k (nominal) per year is less than state university tuition.
Back out from current housing, healthcare, food, fuel and other non discretionary costs to what wage/income you’d need to be in the black including the cost of children. Last I checked, the math doesn’t pencil out until you’re hitting ~$50k-$60k/year, a bit below median income ($67k/year), and you’re cutting it really close.
Reasoning from first principles is depressing sometimes.
If you were to step outside society and design something from the ground up, one of your easiest assumptions would be "larger families should have easier access to larger housing", wherein reality the exact opposite is true.
An aggressive federal housing construction plan targeting families would do an untold amount of good.
This was basically what women being stay at home mothers and full time homemakers was. And it is certainly a good thing that women are no longer socially forced into that role. But rather than adjusting to the doubling of the labor force, the government continued to maintain this policy of full time employment being 40 hours per week. Economic feedback then made sure that having two incomes was no longer a choice, with most of the surplus being channeled upwards as housing rent. Looking at the big picture, modern full time employment should actually be somewhere around 15 hours per week.
Warning: whining ahead. What are countries really doing to promote "fertility"? The impression we get is that it's difficult, tiresome, thankless, expensive, and opens you up to systemic abuse from schools (especially pre-schools and post-secondary education), healthcare providers, and various other institutions designed to suck money from your pockets. You get to live isolated in single-family single-generation households with little to no help from family and friends; the only help you get is what you can pay for. Anything that goes wrong is Your Fault. And no one cares if you are struggling. It's Your Fault for choosing to have children. Why should your elite hyper-intelligent childless megabrain coworkers take on any burden to accommodate your needs? Children are a luxury, after all.
Isn't it a wonder why we can't get fertility rates up?
While I found things to like in the article, the comparison to ‘Children of Men’ is very strained. In the book women couldn’t get pregnant for unspecified reasons, but they desperately wanted to. The world the article refers to is one in which people choose not to have children generally for economic reasons.
I'm not sure the two motivations are that different in effect. If you can't have kids for medical reasons vs you can't because it's ruinously expensive what really is the difference?
Crudely speaking, birth rates in poor countries are higher than in rich countries. An within countries, birth rates amongst the poor tend to be higher than the rich.
A country having high GDP or personal income doesn't mean that things like housing, healthcare, childcare, or education are more affordable. For things like that where the buyer tends to have low leverage in the transaction costs tend to climb with ability to pay. In countries with strong lending infrastructure that goes past the limits of cash and into what buyers can borrow. This decomposes to local communities too, in my city incomes are high relative to most of the US but cost of labor and all of the above services are also expensive. Median household income isn't enough to afford a 3 bedroom place to live so you can imagine that's causing some problems.
People who are infertile do not bear children, period.
People who are poor often do have children, and in greater numbers, due to a variety of factors. The fact that they have trouble supporting those children is besides the point. The children are still born.
This is where the Children of Men analogy gets a bit strained. Today, fewer people have children because fewer people want to, not because they're biologically unable.
It’s not that expensive. To be honest having kids make you make a lot of fiscally responsible decisions. It separates the wheat from the chaff.
That said as soon as my kids are 18 I’m getting a really expensive sports car, but maybe a used one because years of parenting have ruined my ability to wastefully spend money.
It doesn't have to be that expensive in terms of dollars (although there's often strong social pressure to spend all your disposable income on private preschools/travel soccer/expensive colleges), but it's very expensive in terms of time. And for higher income people, that time commitment has a much higher opportunity cost.
If you can afford a "really expensive" sports car then I'm not sure your reference on fiscal responsibility is comparable to what most people experience. Assuming you're talking about a non-special used Ferrari or something, that's $200k + $20k a year. Most people have trouble coming up with $200k for a down payment and are nowhere near dropping that on a car. Preschool is $25k a year though, so in a sense the upkeep there is higher.
Why would you live anywhere that preschool is $25k a year? I'm happy to pay a little more tax so that all children in my country (Germany) get exactly the same chance.
It's where I grew up so density of family is a big reason not to move. Social policy in places like Germany does sound like a better overall deal than what we have in the US, hopefully we can shore things up here because most people don't even really have the option to move even if they wanted to.
Yeah sorry, I was assuming 'tech worker' and 'enough money to choose where to live' in that statement which I guess doesn't apply to everyone, but I suspect applies to the majority of HN users..
No, for me it’s a corvette. I guess it’s the same price as a Model S but if I don’t get the C8 it’s gonna be a C6 for about $25-40k
Once I had kids (found out we were expecting) I stopped fucking around, bought a condo within a month, and I was from that day on a mission to make money. Didn’t give a shit about hours, didn’t give a shit about free sodas, it was all how much does it pay?
If anyone offered me $5k/yr more I’d quit on the spot. Whenever a recruiter called, I was interested.
In a way kids are expensive but to me the kick in the pants it gave me led to making far more money and honing my mind and realizing what’s important and what isn’t.
I’m a few years beyond you and my expensive sports car was really cheap (a saturn sky). But I 100% agree with your sentiment. When I found we were pregnant in the mid 80s I stopped all screwing around and got to work. It’s was a necessary transition.
The book is tragic in a different way - it’s our inevitable extinction being portrayed.
In real life we may see some of the nasty sociopolitical consequences of that, but they aren’t irreversible. We can repopulate the depopulated regions, we can restart farming there (now with more automation and better quality of life). We don’t necessarily share the fate of the humanity of the book.
The West has already made its choice. We have chosen to do nothing about declining birth rates among the native population and have instead chosen to supplement the population with immigration from developing nations, or whatever term you wish to use for those countries where birth rates are still high. The numbers are plain to see. Where once an extended family was the norm (it takes a village…) now families are atomised. 2 parent or increasingly 1 parent families. Even when an extended family exists (grandparents are still alive, everyone is still married and on friendly terms) it is common for people to move to where the work is. This may be many minutes or hours away from the new offspring.
There really isn't much of a choice, and even then it's not a long term solution. From the article:
"Morland talks of the trilemma facing ageing nations, whereby you can have two of the three: ethnic continuity, a thriving economy or a comfortable lifestyle without the huge stress of mixing child-raising and a modern economy. Israel has sacrificed the latter, Japan has chosen to take the economic hit, while Britain’s leaders have given up its ethnic continuity. But that, alas, was a short-term solution, since young immigrants don’t magically avoid the fate of Father Time any more than the rest of us do."
In homogenous societies like japan, Sweden, and Denmark it usually leads to a lot of ethnic contradictions once the immigrant population passes a certain threshold.
Once has to wonder whether it’s healthy when more than 50% of your population feels alienated by the country and often has more loyalty and love for the homeland he or she fled.
The immigration system of most European countries is also very broken. More than 60% of immigrants to France don’t even have a high school education and gun crime in Sweden is now among the highest in Europe (despite being the lowest in the 90s) due to Somali gangs.
People are tribal and not every country was birthed as a “melting pot” like the US or Canada. These days the words integration and assimilation are considered racist when talking about immigrants so societies in these countries will simply further polarize.
Do you think immigration has disadvantages? Could you name them?
For some people the disadvantages outweigh the advantages (like offering a solution to birth rates, provided low birth rates are a problem). Immigrants and their descendants can and have swung election results. Nothing wrong with this but for some people this is too big of a disadvantage.
This shouldn't surprise you, there are many countries with very little immigration, very strict immigration laws, and low birth rates, so for them the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, and they are not even democracies.
Immigration is much more complex than a yes/no or a 0-100 scale. What cultures do the immigrants come from? How is the host culture's traits for integrating them? What persons from the foreign society actually become immigrants?
The USA is historically incredibly successful in attracting and integrating immigrants that go on to have great success. While e.g. Sweden appears to have an alarmingly high proportion of immigrants that go on to act in ways that are detrimental to their society. There might exist examples that illustrate the example in a way that's even more obvious.
> We have chosen to do nothing about declining birth rates among the native population and have instead chosen to supplement the population with immigration from developing nations, or whatever term you wish to use for those countries where birth rates are still high.
It's a temporary solution at best because birth rates are falling worldwide and doing so much faster than expected. [1]
> Even when an extended family exists (grandparents are still alive, everyone is still married and on friendly terms) it is common for people to move to where the work is.
Do you mean to imply that people are forced to move to where the work is or that they choose to move there? Because that makes a big difference.
“…it is common for people to move to where the work is.”
This really resonates. In my 30-40’s peer group, zero of them live in or near their home city/town. Some grandparents have been financially successful enough that they bought a second home to be near their grandchildren, but the “new norm” seems to be both parents work full time to make ends meet without any other parenting support.
My gut feeling is that there's a strong correlation between rent prices and fertility rates. You can't have kids if you can't work out where to put them.
That said, I'm generally quite relaxed about the population trend: the 18th and 19th century had ballooning populations in Europe, and collapsing populations everywhere else. I don't think it's going to get to the point where there are serious overpopulation problems in the global south - at least, nowhere near what we already have in Europe.
The opposite is also true: you’re competing for housing with childless people, who can afford higher rents. Less kids=more disposable income=higher tolerance for rent increases
This article actually addresses this, and is one component of the larger problem:
"Older people tend to vote for their own self-interests, and in the case of Britain, end up controlling the government in power; voters with pensions and homes opt for lower growth and restricted housebuilding, further raising the cost of home ownership for the young and so pushing down the fertility rate still further. If we’re playing a generational blame game for the lack of children…"
> strong correlation between rent prices and fertility rates.
I assume you mean a positive correlation.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of the former Eastern Block countries experienced both, a reduction in fertility and too much housing. The latter because so many left for the west. So many buildings were empty that quite a bit of housing stock was removed, see e.g. [1].
I agree with your gut feeling, and I disagree quite strongly with most of the sentiment found in the comments of this article, stating that the lack of children stems from selfishness or responsibility towards the planet.
High rents and other features of contemporary society make it difficult and expensive to have children. These things also make it difficult to get enough time for children, with the amount of income-generating work that's required. Then, most of the care is offloaded to professional caretakers, as this gives a significant improvement to the budgets of time and money.
My suspicion is that many who state that they skip kids due to the environment or personal reasons, actually just need a fig leaf to cover the fact that they're financially unable to support kids while maintaining a lifestyle that makes children net positive for their own quality of life. For most, this would be a pretty painful admission to make, but there's plenty of observations indicating it's true for many.
In contrast to most people here, I believe that this is actually a pretty big problem. It's not as bad as having a birthrate of 4 and sprinting into a demographic catastrophe, but economic growth in the sense of making all aspects of life better and cheaper is critical if we want to make civilization sustainable. Balanced demographics and kids raised with love, care, plenty and care from capable parents are a very important part of that. This is one of the things I actually believe the conservatives get right.
> This is one of the things I actually believe the conservatives get right.
If you go back into the early history of conservatism, there was a breed of conservative that wanted to protect traditional social relations against the social dislocation of early capitalism.
The problem is, the people doing the social dislocation, the people doing the enclosures and clearances, were also those who benefited the most from the traditional social relations, aristocrats, etc. So the idea developed in two divergent directions: the first, the conservatives, who tried to protect traditional society by moral education, enforcement, entreaty, etc, the second, the early socialists, who tried to protect traditional society by protecting traditional social relations (usually land rights) through politics.
As you can imagine, this cuts in opposite directions: the first group would want to protect, for instance, traditional aristocratic privilege, while the second might want to abrogate it, in order to prevent an aristocrat from taking their land. Both sides would be seeing themselves as 'conserving' the status quo.
This was all about three hundred years ago in the UK, or much less in Spain, or Mexico, or Russia. The current dominance of 'conservative liberals' in all nations shows that the first direction, where you protect the veneer of tradition while allowing unfettered capitalism to trash its innards, won out. The last socialist revolutionaries of the old sort were people like Zapata, protecting their societies against the encroaching Haciendas. Today, there is nothing left to protect, so that's why modern socialists don't have much truck with whatever shreds of traditional culture remain.
> they must shudder at the thought that in the average week the country loses another 2,000 through population decline
Anecdotally, it seems a surprising number of these young men are already fathers (of children they could barely support). Furthermore, there is a male surplus built into birth rates, and the number of men is not the limiting factor in population growth.
It's quite obvious the reason is economic. Establishing healthy families is really difficult.
> that there is almost no civil war in countries where 55 per cent or more of the population is aged over thirty.’
> ‘While it cannot be said that youthfulness “causes” war,’ he writes, ‘or that maturity “causes” peace, a society’s age structure creates background conditions against which other things either do or don’t spark conflict.’
A plausible correlation would be; a spike in population growth would cause both an excess of young men, and a shortage of resources (which is a cause for war).
Birth rates have been declining in the West since the late 1950s/early 1960s. Of course it won't carry on forever, because there is a point where you must have children in order to survive. And survive is what people do best.
I'm not too worried. Just like how mRNA vaccines were a technology that was mostly ready for prime-time and was just waiting for a pressing scenario I think that artificial wombs are mostly a solved problem and are the solution to this situation.
I think that the development of artificial wombs with a dash of genetic customization will lead to a new baby boom in the next 10-20 years.
The high fertility rate in Israel is almost entirely due to the country's Haredi ultra-Orthodox Jews. Among them women are tightly controlled, abortion is murder and birth control is taboo. Consequently, the average fertility rate per woman is 7.1. That's one way of solving the fertility crisis, but perhaps not a good one.
Thats a feature, not a bug. Israel will probably become the first democratic country were “outbreed them” was a successful political strategy.
The ultra orthodox are a solid voting block That currenty controls 15 out of the 120 seats in the Knesset. they almost always align with the far-right religious zionists or the right-wing Likud. Right wing governments encourage their growth while working to decrease that of Muslims.
And it has worked very well. The Israeli left, which dominated politics until the 80s has been decimated since their voter base is not having children. The country is going right, fast. The ultra-orthodox also secure the Jewish majority in Jerusalem and Israel, an added bonus.
In Sweden it’s not that uncommon to have three kids, even among the crowd you referred to. We also have good childcare that doesn’t cost a fortune for the family, and state-provided parental leave with very good terms. More countries could do like this if they wanted too.
I value my time but I can still choose to give some (a lot) of that time to my kids. That time doesn’t feel wasted to me. I have also not given up on all of my own interests.
As for the meaning of life – it is what you make of it, really. And that’s true regardless of whether one has kids or not.
My understanding from the previous comment, is that you were pushing a different narrative, specifically that ppl are having more children than in the past because welfare and child care, etc.
What does this actually mean? You say this like women have no agency. They may not follow a typical set of rules, but to reduce their choices to 'the result of being tightly controlled' is very insulting. There are actual reasons many of these communities intentionally have many children
At least for me and my spouse, we need stability. It is impossible to raise 2 children when you know you are going to be a slave to the bank for 30 years and have no guarantees of job and healthcare.
If healthcare alone would have been taken care of, we might have considered 2 kids. But for now, I hesitate to have even 1.
It's not impossible to raise children in these conditions. I just turned 40 and have an 8 1/2 and 6 1/2 year old in the living room next to me reading books to each other.
There are 2 of them, and one of me. I am 'enslaved' to the bank for the next 20 something years. I am self-employed in the trades. I have very solid foundation in fixing and building things, which seems to survive many economic downturns as things that are needed to be done, are needed to be done regardless if a booming market or not - You just may face a bit more competition at that point.
Not ranting against you, or picking on your decisioning - Obviously it is a super-personal choice, and I'm glad thoughts have been put in place about many factors involved.
That being said, I've heard "I'm going to wait until I am 100% fully stable and secure to do **" my entire life. While I will agree that there are certain conditions and 'times of lives' that are extremely bad* ideas to do large things, especially when it comes into involving other dependents, I really don't think 100% stability is ever achievable.
You or your significant other could be taken out by a car tomorrow, or be caught in a fire, or even hit by lightening.
Obviously I had my first child when I was in the lower 30's -- for me, I'm finding this to be a very nice timeframe that worked in my life. I was far less stable than I am now, in the conventional sense of having a savings account, or owning a house, and I've managed to both purchase a house, and while hardly rich by any conventional notions of the world, when the car(s) break, or the house needs a roof, I am able to have those things done by either paying $ outright, or using prior life skills to offset the labor charges of those things making them more financially easier to swallow. My point is, now I am 40. They are still pretty little, and yeah, children require an insane amount of work and energy input to not only 'maintain', but 120% of what you have to offer to really enjoy the experience. I, personally, wouldn't want to be any older than I am now while having children at the ages they are - Advil is frequently consumed by now, part of growing up rolling around on a skateboard, part doing manual trades for (most) of my working life thus far, and part just being 40 and out of the 'Spring Chicken' age.
Time goes by, and with it, we get older. There is no way of changing that. The other factors in modern life, the money, the housing, the 'stability' can ebb and flow both by actions of your own and by actions too varied to even account for -- But time goes one direction.
I wish you the best, and strongly suggest if you want to have a child, and it's not 'the worst time possible' to do as such (drug addictions, homeless, uh, similar things) then perhaps ditch some of the fear of 'stability' (that truly very few have; none if you acknowledge life can end at any time for any of us) and get to doing the living!
Hard times happen to many; Even us single parent folk (and yeah, it makes things a bit harder, that's for sure) but I can promise you, if you care and you're willing to put the effort in, boy, it's worth it!
I love children. But I cannot take care of them. Spouse and I have made the conscious decision of not ever going for more than 1. We just cannot afford it.
I understand your concerns, and many share them. However, stability is an illusion. Everything changes, and more often than not, that's a good thing.
Healthcare is important, everyone deserves that, kid or not. - Europe has that figured out more so than the (richer) US. But you don't need a massive house to raise two kids (although a bit of garden would help).
I'd say to wait for a state that you could call "stability" may be imply a wait until it's too late; your decision making should incorporate other factors such as your biological age, your levels of energy and support potentially available from grandparents where still applicable. If you map all of these out over time, you will see that while jon stability may or may not improve most other facctors will worsen irreversibly.
I think there is are different kinds of stability.
The problem in America is the rat race never ends and that it is FAR TOO EASY to lose your hard earned wealth. Lawsuits, divorce, healthcare costs, daycare, tutoring all suck money away very quickly.
Furthermore, laws are set up in a way that can take away your earning potential. A small criminal records from 20 years ago can affect your career at a private business. A loss of drivers license will impede you from getting to work. A health issue will get you disability and FMLA but set you behind in the corporate rat race so fast that you will regret it.
In America, the fall is precipitous. You could have been a model citizen for 40 years of your life. But only one slip up (say a critical health diagnosis) and you are on the slippery slope down.
This, as opposed to Asian countries which have a free market and yet, the fall is not precipitous. In most other countries, if you have been a model citizen for 40 years, it's very hard for your life to fall apart.
Related, a few months ago Dr. Brickell provided a fascinating discussion about this topic.[1]
A minor note, when I was in Japan I heard the term obachan as mildly derogatory slang for old people (e.g., the old lady who throws elbows if you are in her way). I hadn't heard of the similar term rougai referenced in this article.
Many people who bought a house in their 30s thinking they’re going to flip it in 30 years for 4x their purchase price are going to be in for a surprise.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadSaddam Hussein was hardly a teenager when he invaded Kuwait, and Putin is no spring chicken. I don’t know what the answer is, but I suspect this guy doesn’t either.
It’s a shame though, since the collapse of the Soviet Union the share of the worlds population dying in warfare has collapsed. It was already on a strong downward trend after the end of WW2. Let’s hope Ukraine is an outlier.
Oman is a fairly developed country and they have twice as many kids per woman compared to poor Ukraine and almost-starving North Korea.
Cultural background is a huge influence in fertility. African immigrants in Europe have more children the poorer they are, the opposite of locals.
You’re right about the Haredi though. Congratulations, on a discussion of demographics across billions of people, you found one community of less than 2 million that buck the trend. Good for you.
Cultural background can have an influence, sure, but generally not enough to have a macro level effect. Hence the global trend.
I'm not sure a younger generation growing up without fear of nuclear war is a safer thing. I suspect that most of the current heads of state being old and belligerant is correlation rather than causation.
Don't worry, there will be inexpensive automated drones to do the killing soon enough.
Putin was a child during the missile crisis, but he cut his teeth in the KGB of the 70s and 80s. His mentors and leaders were, in all likelihood, veterans of the Great Patriotic War.
(To be clear: I don't think that the risk of war ends with the deaths of these particular generations of leaders. But I do think we're seeing a particularly outmoded approach to war at the moment.)
It will still be older people calling the shots, since they have had time to accumulate power and rise in the ranks, but the risk of war increases with the elders of future generations because they have no direct experience or cultural memory of its horrors; "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."
This only makes sense if the population declines faster than the habitability of the earth does.
Last time I checked population growth forecasts, the models mostly predict worldwide population contraction within a century.
Substantial increases in longevity could delay that, but avoiding it entirely would take fairly substantial efforts to encourage more children.
As someone with a single child, I'd say substantially improved childcare provisions would be necessary, but insufficient - I could afford a lot of childcare, but having a child is still a lot of work.
Efforts to normalise more help, might help, but some of the options that might help in that respect (e.g. more au pairs, live in aid) are actively countered by high house prices.
https://www.afd.fr/en/actualites/dramatic-drop-fertility-acr...
Something like 45% of the US geography is essentially unpopulated - with tons of resources.
It’s nice, I guess, but America’s economic growth comes from the overpopulated areas: Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Austin, etc.
I’m not directly disagreeing with you. Obviously both America and China can be happy !
The severe droughts in that area mean limited water and grassland for grazing.
I can’t see any major development beyond what’s there already with limited water.
Some minor growth comes with the cyclical oil booms but coal is politically dead.
Additionally Health services in China don't match those in the West, so they will lose people far faster.
China is in a much worse state than even Eastern Europe when it comes to population. It doesn't look like it, but China went into decline 3 years ago and will not stop declining until at least 2060. And it will be quite a steep decline starting in 2030 or so.
Fertility rate worldwide has plummeted and the population has peaked. Including these as war relate statistics is disingenuous.
On a different note, population reduction is good for the environment and long term survival of the species but terrible for the economy and wealth - especially of some countries.
See: California and other states prevent rent increases during the pandemic.
If the economy is based more and more on automation maybe it is possible to keep smaller population at even higher living standard and UBI. We might loose few by then trillionaires in a process but who really gives a shit about those.
Nature being nature, no doubt another "invasive species" would evolve along.
What's really funny is that humans don't even seem to respect their own worth, as humans depend on ecology to survive, yet they seem hell-bent on destroying it so that they can't survive anymore. An abnormal growth that spreads until it kills its host.
How are skills passed two generations into the future? We would have to start over.
They are generated by highly educated people with genetic ability, who also have the means for a stable adulthood and at least a modicum of free time to develop their curiosities.
Not to mention the means to go into science. Very frequently another industry will pay more, and that person never becomes a scientist/researcher.
If the population goes down, each individual is going to have a massive burden of debt and taxation to shoulder. And you can imagine a scenario where this creates a feedback loop of dramatic economic decline.
The problem is that we have structured our entire system essentially as a pyramid scheme, where the ever more children coming from behind will mean that the standard of living keeps increasing.
As with every pyramid scheme, once enrollment stops, then the pyramid collapses.
I think theoretically, it's not necessarily about more and more children being born, but rather about productivity increasing. As long as generations manage to be increasingly more productive, then the pyramid keeps going. Obviously, population and output are heavily correlated, hence the issue.
Given how bleak the outlook is at the moment for the people coming into their parenthood years, I don't think anyone can blame them for not wanting to procreate.
I’m a first-generation child of immigrant parents. So is my wife. In our families, we have a lot of cousins around our age. Many are childless. Similar story amongst our circle of friends.
In Canada, we’ve supplemented our low birth rate and labour force with immigration. We’re small enough that it can continue to work for a while. But given the investment made by our immigrant parents and by our government, it behooves us to work hard, contribute to society and pay back that debt.
Yet, with fewer children, we’re losing the opportunity for those returns. If our parents came for a better life, we should keep making more smart children, with the capacity for new ideas and innovation, in an environment that fosters and promotes that.
Given all of the places in the world, we won the genetic lottery. Makes little sense to squander it.
I also reject the notion that humanity is a cancer on the planet. Growth is the route to solving our problems.
The two most important factors in having successful children are: 1. having two parents and 2. having older parents at child birth.
There’s a ton of data on this. Maybe it’s correlation only, but it also makes sense. Parenting is too difficult for a single person. And waiting until you’re established and stable will give your kids a better environment for growth.
Wealthy 50-years-olds having their firstborns, then promptly leaving them vast inheritance — boom! you get “successful” children merely because they got quite a boost. Meanwhile, you don't see not-so-wealthy 50-years-olds having new kids because they had them already at 25 and that was enough.
Also, there is a whole host of implications from having kids earlier. Like, you being just 30 when they go to school — or young adults having 65-year-old parents to care of when they'd be rather establishing their own life.
Look at our prison population and you’ll find people raised by a very young single parent.
Look at people that graduate from university and you’ll see the opposite.
It strongly correlates with just about any measure you can think of. And it is true across race, gender, immigration status, etc.
The issue is that differentiated careers - ones where you are hard to replace, your company will pay you more than commodity wages, and they'll give you time off for a sick kid because replacing you will cost more than just letting you take a day off when necessary - require a long period of time to become differentiated and hard to replace. That could be spending your 20s in med school and residency, or in law school and being an associate, or bouncing between lower-level engineering jobs before you get the experience needed to tackle big projects. But in most fields, it does take up most of your 20s, which means you really only get stability, trust, and the ability to downshift for family life in your 30s.
Ideally, on a societal level, you should be able to raise a family on one of those "commodity" wages. But that's not happening, largely because many of the necessities of life - housing, health care, and education - have become differentiated professions where owners and practitioners can get premium wages. We need to allow shantytowns and village doctors again before we can have large amounts of people having kids in their 20s.
This ignores the genetic confounding.
The reason "older parents" have "successful kids" is because those same parents have genes which make their kids successful. Decades of twin studies have shown that parenting really doesn't matter, but parents do (because of the genes they impart).
Today things are so messed up, the economy, the push in secular cultures to even destroy the nuclear family, all this is taking a toll on society. Eventually it might be too late to recover.
Sounds like a straw man fallacy. My faith both advocates for abstinence before marriage, and getting marriage as soon as it viable (physically, mentally, financially, etc.).
I don’t actually wish I had my son earlier. I’m happy with our current situation. I’m able to give him access to a plethora of resources and attention so he can flourish. He’s turning 4 this year. I wish I could make more of him because I think this world is better with him in it, than not.
No, I said “early if possible” only because we cannot change the realities of biology. My wife is the same age as me, and we can likely have 1 more before she’s “done.” If we could have 3 or 4 with ease, we would.
An alternative solution would be for men to marry young. It’s a reasonable solution. But my wife’s age and maturity is a huge benefit too. She wasn’t ready to be a mom at 25 or 30.
It’s a difficult dilemma and balancing act.
We are just coming out of a pandemic that is not actually over and has wreaked havoc on our health and economy. It’s pretty indisputable that the world and future sucks in a lot of ways right now.
But if the world is going to end (I.e. climate change, WW3, population decline), would you rather go out with a whimper, or your head held high knowing you did your best to build that bright and positive future we all want?
and condemn them to overcome all the mistakes young parents (and possibly economically challenged parents, with many more mouths to feed) make also due to lack of experience
We wouldn't be here if our ancestors didn't face hardship.
Our evolutionary cousins (eg. gazelle) are still being born and hunted on the savannah and many will get eaten alive. I think we've got it pretty good, all things considered.
When I had no money I didn't wish that I'd never been born. My parents didn't have college degrees or loads of resources.
Wishing for an ideal environment to raise children is pretty much a modern invention that doesn't correlate to history and nature.
Life isn't as bad as the news and the zeitgeist keep telling us. People are paid to make us feel this way.
reality is grim
> Our evolutionary cousins (eg. gazelle) are still being born and hunted
because they have no choice.
We do.
> When I had no money I didn't wish that I'd never been born
"make a lot of poor kids. They won't wish to never be born"
doesn't sound like good advertisement to me...
> My parents didn't have college degrees or loads of resources
That's why they had a lot of kids.
I am not talking about "reverse darwinism" which is BS, but about the fact that even the gazelle you talked about know that focusing on a few individuals is the key to helping your offspring. They make a lot of them, so that some of them sill survive.
It's very simple logic.
> Wishing for an ideal environment to raise children is pretty much a modern invention that doesn't correlate to history and nature.
We agree on this: you have to be young and reckless to not consider all the things that could go wrong before actually doing them.
People can't afford to do either.
Unless you’re wealthy and/or live in an are insulated from the effects, you’re signing kids up for a world that is going to be drastically different and worse due to climate change.
Pretty complicated when the housing market and labour market are such that, on average:
* You don't own a house (= less money)
* You only have a fixed-term contract (= low financial stability, banks less likely to lend you money)
* To get a job, you will likely have to move away from family/relatives (= no support network)
* You & your partner likely have to work full-time (= less time for child care)
Living in the Bay Area, there is no real sense of permanence. Many people are here because salaries are so high, but if they don't stay high they will need to leave. Many people are pushed out because the area has become so unaffordable. Many of my closest friends live day to day not knowing if their visa will be renewed. A friend at my company just relocated to Vancouver because he didn't luck out in the visa lottery. I have several friends who are looking to leave because they cannot provide stability for their children. I myself am renting. I would like to stay here permanently, but the houses on my street have doubled in price (not value) over the last two years. I still may be able to afford to buy one, but the idea of paying more than 10k/month for an 1300 square foot house is hard to swallow.
California of course has tried to address these problems, and has been trying to address them for a long time. Overall, these efforts have been a failure sometimes doing more harm than good (see prop 13). California hasn't even been able to build a functioning high speed rail system even though it has been fully funded for over 20 years. The society that made these places does not seem to be the society that we need to fix their problems.
We have many people, with many ideas. We don't need more people to keep having new ideas. We just need to provide a stable environment for the people that we do have, and give them the space to express themselves.
Edit: btw, if it is true that new ideas are what we need, then the best way forward is adoption. What better way to get a new idea into a desirable place?
Children raising children has got to be one of the biggest jokes that nature plays on us.
We are like addicts to the drug of life, too scared of admiting we have to stop spawning other addicts as a mean to an unreachable end. We do not accomplish anything by "creating a need and satisfying it". We do not accomplish anything by creating every problem and solving some of them (or even all of them).
Is your preference that Earth be devoid of life? Looks like Mars or Venus? And nothing of consequence exists there?
That’s obviously not what you meant, but it’s the natural extension of your argument.
If you think about it, the planet doesn’t give a shit if we live or die. It is not sentient. Neither does the Sun, nor the Milky Way, or the other galaxies. Whether we live or die, blow the planet up or not, is irrelevant to it all.
Somehow, humanity was given a gift. By God or the universe, but you have to admit that it’s pretty miraculous. And the fact that you and I are debating each other about the merits of humanity’s continued existence over the Internet is pretty wild too. But again, it is insignificant to the overall timeline of the universe.
Given that it’s all meaningless, why not spend your time here giving it meaning? If you believe we are a cancer, why not spend your time ensuring that you are not that cancer?
Furthermore, children are a fantastic way to continue contributing to society’s search for meaning. If you don’t want to have children, to me that indicates that you don’t feel you provide value.
I’m here to tell you that you do. And that you’d probably be a good parent, that would produce a child that also provides value.
Or not. Your decision. :-)
>country does not have enough men to spare.
144 million people live in Russia. This war is a terrible tragedy but it will not depopulate the country. It won't even depopulate Ukraine through casualties, although it's having a fair effect due to refugees (44M population, millions of refugees). Putin does not care about the families of the fallen, he is playing Civilization and you can't expand your borders without moving your pieces.
Governments should help families by providing easier access to daycares and kindergartens. Helping young parents get some rest with their first child(ren) will encourage them having more children.
I'm a parent of two young children, a 3 years old and a 6 months old. This is the hardest period of my life since high school. I'm 34 and in our circles I'm the youngest dad. Most of other dads' are in their late 30s all the way to early 50s.
Yet I do feel I'm making a difference, especially considering that I'm Italian (high longevity + few children). I've been also inspired by my choices of parenthood by the movie IDIOCRACY:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBvIweCIgwk I was delighted when I red in the Elon Musk biography that he had also saw the movie and that was also one of the reasons for being a parent of multiple kids.
How is compulsory use easier access?
I’d even go as far as parental leave should be completely covered until there is government provided daycare, so as the decision to have kids doesn’t carry too much of an economic burden.
If the government mandates kindergarten attendance, well, now it's much more important to put funding for kindergartens in your next bill.
If every parent of a three-year-old has to think about finding a kindergarten, that's a lot more political clout behind getting better kindergartens.
And so on and so forth.
I have no numbers but as a French, I know literally nobody who have not been to school/kindergarten at 3.
Starting school at 3, while not mandatory before the law, was just the norm for barely everyone.
I completely agree that families should get more support. I’m just not so sure it’s necessarily that straightforward.
Not to sound snide, but I also don't think it's as straightforward as linking two correlative effects. High grades in school is also often predictive of economic background, race, gender etc... that themselves are correlated to birth rates. I don't see here much reason to believe that providing early childhood care would decrease birth rates.
More shitty government programs or opportunities for bad and dishonest people to indoctrinate the young from earlier ages, particularly now that some bureaucrats would want to use their responsibilities as if they constitute the power to subvert parental involvement, are a huge no from me.
We spent too much already and these politicians only gave us inflation. Now you advocate for them to have more control and say over education by recommending more of their services? Nah, way more efficient, empowering, and aligned with freedom & democracy if parents in a household just get direct cash every month rather than government-run facilities. No thanks. Way too many problems with more gov. Give cash instead, solve the problem. And foster good working environment so wages go up and people can choose to work less and still have a family.
Not rocket science
If you want people generally to work less and earn more, how are you going to reduce the amount of work there is for them to do? Also how are you going to provide the additional goods and services these people will be able to afford (inflation? What dat?) if less work is being done to provide them? Sounds fascinating.
We could start manufacturing those more expensive but better quality goods, which most of people could not afford. There is no problem with manufacturing enough goods. There is problem that many people only have money for the cheapest shit which breaks easily and needs to be replaced soon which costs even more money and destroys environment.
It’s all very well saying “we could just”, but how would you bring about this change? How do you persuade people to want different things and make different choices? That’s the interesting question.
Production is expanding elsewhere in SE Asia but those countries are much smaller and taking time and a lot of capital to ramp up.
Where are all these new workers going to come from, and if they could work productively already why aren’t they?
None of this makes a lick of sense.
Why would they work more productively if that is not needed? They would have to make more things, which people wouldn't buy because there is overproduction. If you have order for 1000 items every week, you make 1000 items every week, even when you could make 5000 items every week. You can slow your production line, this way workers are more relaxed and you have time for maintenance. It's not like every employee out there is used at 100% utilisation, that would not be sustainable. Many times you employ as many people as you can just because it's cheaper than using more automation. If you need to produce more and can't find employes, you can pay them more. If you can't find enough employes at all, that means price per employee is so high that you can now employ some robots. Yeah, it takes time, but global change in time of employment is also not going to happen overnight.
So, we provided more products to people who now have money. And now you are asking "Who will pay". Well, the people who now have the money to pay for it? That was the reason for increased production in the first place?
Or increase taxes on capital and redistribute the gains, rather than relying on wages.
That's the European approach that children belong to whole community not only their parents and the authority and the burden is shared. I don't get why are you so hell bent on having exclusive authority over your child?
Nah. That’s what people used to say abou WFH too. All this is purely due to capricious employers and institutions, not because of some natural law. If companies had their way, we’d be working 80h/week. That’s true for both low paying and high paying jobs.
I suspect you're trolling, but in case you're not:
As a European, I do have a lot of community centric philosophy - but given the government (local and country) incompetence in virtually all matters of education and the universally awful opinion all teachers I know hold of the government and their interference and policies regarding education and child care - I do not think that wanting the best for your kids that you love and wanting to be able to raise them yourself with individual attention and perspective is really that strange.
If there are good schools, I have no problem with my kids going to them, as long as it doesn't interfere with their growth and education.
(My kids go to local state schools, fwiw).
If the village had a say in my matters, the village can sure as hell have a say in everyone else's matters, imo.
I just don't buy this; it feels like a lack of imagination. Sure, today, very few firms that traditionally employ full-time, salaried employees would even consider the idea of hiring twice as many half-time workers, but there's no inherent reason why it couldn't work.
Certainly, there are hurdles: some per-employee costs are fixed regardless of how many hours they work. But this is just an argument to fix them (because they're stupid in general), not to avoid the situation. Most part-time and contract workers in the US don't get benefits like health insurance and retirement plans. But this is an argument to fix those broken programs, not throw our hands up and claim the status quo is the only option.
Corporate profits and executive pay growth is generally far outstripping the wages paid to mid- and low-level employees. There's no reason why most companies can't pay their employees more equitably, and stop with all the pay inequality garbage.
> That's the European approach that children belong to whole community not only their parents and the authority and the burden is shared. I don't get why are you so hell bent on having exclusive authority over your child?
I'm not a parent, but childhood education these days seems more about pushing government propaganda and training kids to be obedient little employees (not to mention providing much-needed free day-care for parents), than about nurturing creativity and curiosity, and giving kids the tools they need to be productive, yet critical-thinking, independent people. I look at stories of 12-year-old kids getting arrested at school for asinine reasons[0] and wonder what the hell is happening.
I don't think people need "exclusive authority" over their children in general, but I do think the current state of public (and even private, in many cases) education could easily drive parents to not want their kids to be a part of it.
[0] https://www.copblock.org/140900/stupid-reasons-police-arrest...
This really looks like trolling.
Communities don't share the burden except to the extent that the parents need it and want it and share access to their household with members of their chosen communities and faiths. That is how it works in the entire massive United States and other Western Democracies, barring these irresponsible western European countries that seem to be possessed by increasingly idiotic ideas on how much control they want over our kids but how little responsibility they will show on serious urgent matters like nuclear reactor construction and adequate defense spending. The French should be absolutely ashamed and should repent.
When a state tries a state-sponsored approach to compulsively being responsible for teaching children with a monopoly on violence, especially contrary to what the parents may want to teach their child, that becomes a cause for jihad.
Obviously at the end of the day most of a child's upbringing is the parents' prerogative but at the same time if people want to pull the "it takes a village" bs, as a gay man who will not have children (and not use any of the resources that tax dollars goes into) I believe that certain things like a child's education _should_ be managed by the government.
If the village does not have a say in village matters, then it makes me wonder why the hell everyone was allowed a say when it came to things like gay marriage, etc.
EDIT: apparently any kind of reduction is possible (even 2 hours per week) but the reduction needs to be sensible and the employer needs to agree. if they don't you can sue, and if the judges decide that your requested reduction is reasonable they must comply (i guess that means, you can ask for 2 hours a week and get it if the employer agrees, but if the employer doesn't agree you probably won't convince a judge either)
mothers wanting to send their children to kindergarten does not translate into needing to make it mandatory to do so. a better response would have been to make it a legal right (but not an obligation) combined with the necessary financial support or offer of government paid kindergarten spaces. the latter is lacking in germany for example.
Hmmm... let me look around my neighborhood...
School teacher - easy; Lawyer - doable; Doctor - already done; Auto mechanic - no problem; Bank teller - easy; Construction worker...
Ok. I can't come up with any. I'm sure there must be some, but they don't come to mind. Most people work the number of hours it takes to earn the standard of living they accept. Work is never done. There's always more to do. That is never the question.
Preschool in my district is 4 days a week, 2.5hrs / day.
That's a JOKE. Meant only for people who don't work.
But they also got another levy on taxes for "technology" and "new buildings".
They don't need more money, they just need to better spend the money they have.
Private daycare costs around $2000/month. That's more than tuition on the university ($1000/month or so).
So I just wish that once kids are in preschool age the preschool offered something reasonable
Also, have i mentioned that public preschool is not free? On top of taxes, we pay $400/month or so for 4 days a week, 2.5hrs/day preschool. It's nuts.
Oh, and they insert a random "teacher development days" where preschool is closed. Can't they do development in summer, when the school is closed anyway?
Being a parent sux.
Getting "direct cash" that a young family could use for daycare doesn't make any difference if there's nowhere for them to spend it.
Direct cash to households with kids during almost two years of pandemi has lifted many children out of poverty and given parents more freedom and flexibility. Plenty of evidence of this.
When you’re getting direct cash and wages are good and bureaucrats aren’t inflating their way to Power, you can even afford to work less so one of the parents is always around if they want. That’s how it should be and can be and will be.
How does replacing one form of authoritarianism with another, perhaps preferable to some, form of authoritarianism make things better?
> More shitty government programs or opportunities for bad and dishonest people to indoctrinate the young from earlier ages, particularly now that some bureaucrats would want to use their responsibilities as if they constitute the power to subvert parental involvement, are a huge no from me.
As opposed to shitty private sector programs run by profiteers?
> We spent too much already and these politicians only gave us inflation.
What does this have to do with anything?
Also you complain about inflation but also want more direct cash infusions?
Direct cash infusions to households would not affect inflation. Giant bailouts for huge corporations and for huge corrupt political super pacs definitely does though. Read the book Utopia For Realists for the chapter on direct cash to households and the compiled evidence done over decades in the United States and even Canada.
He’s a $BAD. Otherwise he’d do $THING_I_WANT.
I mean, even if both parts turn out to be true I doubt this is how it works.
So no, it's not such a simple reductionist shit-take like you're offering. Be more mature and serious or be banned. There's no more time for bullshit. We can measure the consequences of his actions and ideas by seeing the struggle of the nuclear reactors, which wouldn't have been a problem if France leadership including Macron was truly wise and privy to what the people need at a basic level - which is cheap and reliable electricity for fuck's sake.
And NATO defense spending should've been 2% of GDP for a long time, but they failed even in times of great relative peace by comparison in 2014 when they were below where they are supposed to be. No serious person, in the face of rockets obliterating their nation, could resort to such a shitty reductionist take like yours unless they were just looking to troll rather than to understand that YES, it's possible to say that someone is bad and why and how.
https://phys.org/news/2018-11-france-nuclear-reactors-macron...
How is this working out for him and France now with energy costs skyrocketing and old pipelines and new pipelines from Russia no longer guaranteed because of immaturity across the board at all levels of leadership now culminating in barbarism in 2022 of all times? So yes, it's possible to prove that Macron made bad choices, because of what the consequences are.
Why the assumption that my criticism of your criticism of the French leadership has anything to do with the war in Ukraine?
I think, friendo, you are taking this too personally. It’s just an Internet forum and I only objected to your logic.
It's coming to an end by people advocating for the truth more aggressively in light of what's all over the news and readily accessible. You said something very immature to a serious topic and thus received a frank response. There was no personal attack though. I don't know you, so how can I attack you personally or as a person? I didn't attack you at all. Re-read the message. I told you to be more mature and to stop being immature. Because reductionist one-liners that disregard good-intentioned expositions for the sake of advocating for the truth...show immaturity. And that is much more of a personal attack, by the way, than anything I said. The entire context of the conversation was Macron and how his being a terrible leader means he should have no say in anything, let alone when a state can tear away a child from his or her parents. Ukraine was provided as an example of that, because it relates to France's defense spending as a share of GDP (which historically has not been adequate) and because of France's idiotic policies on nuclear reactors some recent years ago now coming to bite them in the ass because of, you guessed it, Macron and other "leaders" such as him. These things show awful leadership skills on their parent, and consequently are evidence for why they should not be trusted as leaders in general. Not just because his stance on education is wrong, boneheaded, and even evil. And these are urgent and important subjects on account of inaccessible energy and inadequate defense spending resulting in many lives being lost and society regressing if these things are not corrected swiftly.
Nothing personal intended friendo, it's the internet - but notice that I'm the one who in the last handful of messages has made arguments, whereas that other comment you made was not an argument. You did not contest or object to the logic.
>> Be more mature and serious or be banned
I don’t buy your good intentions. Have a lovely day!
Ok. How?
I don’t even see that much early retirement, instead of getting our mountains of things.
Or is this advice only for the proletariat, who for some reason will behave differently?
Plus, proper retirement saving is hard. Saving 10% in a method that negates inflation only nets you 4.5 years of income at retirement age. You’ll need to drop your living costs by over 3x to live to a median age, unless you don’t retire in the traditional sense.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
He and the brave employees of Space X will guide life to the stars.
He didn't do that.
You turned my quote in "I'm having kids because of Idiocracy"
You are using Reductio Ad Absurdum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
It is interesting to watch parents burn out and get divorced so their children can have a better life than the one social pressures dictate.
There’s a bit more to the story than you may think here... you also aren’t allowed to be homeschooled. It’s illegal. They ban religious practices for minors (wearing hijabs, for instance).
Some people are took that as directed at Muslim community — https://m.timesofindia.com/world/europe/france-passes-anti-r...
Also giving you children to the state to be taught is somewhat disturbing.
EDIT: By deferring to others to teach your children, they won’t learn your culture, traditions and will (statistically) be worse off than if you teach them yourself.
My wife and I settled on making less money (still more than enough), but raising our kids ourselves. It’s hard, but easily the most rewarding thing. Plus our kids are WAY ahead in most areas. Imagine, your children are learning from other children all day at school... is that better than learning from adults all day? No.
When they get older we will probably consider a “pod” or one teacher for 6-8 kids with a family we know. You can pay the teacher far more and the parents can be more involved (we can effectively dictate the curriculum). I’m also planning on having my kids help me with work by 8-10. They can learn to participate and be productive far earlier.
This has not been determined. Homeschooling is correlated with better outcomes, but I'm quite certain causality has not been established here.
I also suspect the more a teacher cares the better the scores.
As mentioned, from the evidence, there’s already a solid correlation.
I think with the additional details the causation is likely also there (less students per teacher, highly motivated and engaged teacher). Anyone debating that point IMO is intentionally misleading. There is a clear causation between homeschooling and better outcomes. The only “question” I’ve seen in articles (none in reality) has to do with socioeconomic status. However, if you control for that, you’ll still see better outcomes (aka homeschooled kids in socioeconomic category Y will still out perform public school kids in socioeconomic category Y)
No need to poison the well with unfounded accusations of bad faith.
> There is a clear causation between homeschooling and better outcomes.
As I've said, causality has not been established. Even if we stipulate that smaller class sizes have a causal positive effect, it's nowhere near enough to account for the improvement in scores when home schooling. Selection effects are most likely to dominate, as they do in almost all education research.
https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/the-homeschool-math-gap...
I believe this isn't correct. Homeschooling is legal in France, although restricted. You need to be able to prove your kids are receiving a proper education.
https://www.parentconcept.com/french-home-education-law
> They ban religious practices for minors (wearing hijabs, for instance).
I also think this is incorrect. Religious signs are forbidden in public school for students and teachers alike (as France is a secular country), but there's no law preventing minors practicing religion.
If you call a religiously important piece of clothing a "religious sign" then technically that's true, but not really
secular mean No religion in politics that doesn't mean forcing your views how to wear your clothes on everyone.
Many Romanians who moved to places like Norway were shocked to see how children are treated there. In Sweden they have banks of the blood of all the babies since 1975 in storage forever ( https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKU-registret ). Scary stuff.
I mean, there is no justification. You're actually harming your child. Sure, maybe you're a better maths teacher than the one in the school, but school isn't really about learning such nonsense..
> Den enskilde kan begära att begränsa hur provet får användas eller få sitt blodprov kasserat. Kassering innebär enligt biobankslagen att provet kastas eller anonymiseras
> The individual can ask to restrict how the sample may be used or have it discarded. According to the biobank law, discarding a sample involves either destroying or anonymizing it.
It was normal I think even 200 years ago.
So your argument is, random american parents know more than society in general who define educational standards because... that's how it always was?
LOL. But I mean, yeah. 80% of Americans believe in Angels and 15% of you have passports so why am I even trying.
It may have the opposite effect and then we'll come up with a different verbal logic to justify why it decreased the birth rate.
Verbal logic was given to justify the war against poverty in the sixties and sixty years and trillions of dollars later USA has a higher poverty rate than then. I'm not saying it was a bad idea, just that forecasters were wrong en masse.
So this may work or not, but honestly nobody knows, and those giving verbal logic for why it will succeed are purely speculating.
If you decide to have children, care for them.
I hate this "the society as a whole has to care for the children" attitude and putting them in someone else's care as soon as possible.
Note that I do not hate children, nor parents and I don't mind spending money on education and care for children.
I just think the solution should be to work less and be able to live a meaningful life.
Later in life, children should care for their elderly parents.
This system is far superior to the "go die in a house full of old people" approach.
Mind again: I am not talking about taking care of someone with special needs like Alzheimer's etc.
I agree education of a child is very important. Not necessarily public education, although that can be quite good in some respects.
But if a government wants to make it easier to have children wouldn't it make more sense to come up with policies that allow a couple to afford to raise children on a single income? That way, one parent is always able to spend time with the children when needed.
As a new parent of a 14 month year old boy - kindergartens have very low impact on our decision to have more children. We're lucky enough that we can afford to rent an apartment for my in-laws and that they are retired so they can take care of our son. Putting him in to kindergarten at this age would be traumatic to him and to us (parents) - he's only starting to figure things out and abandoning him to a stranger who have to split their time/attention between 10 other children at this stage seems cruel. Not to mention kindergartens are disease incubators and we would probably spend first few months getting him adjusted and treating him at home while he's sick (+ catching stuff from him).
The thing that would actually impact our decision to have more children (early-mid 30s) :
- fully paid maternity leave - right now it's 100% for first 6 months and after that it's capped at national average - which is >70% pay cut for both of us
- despite both of us earning significantly above average - there's 0 decent opportunities to buy a family home right now - everything that's worth something is long gone off the market, and if something comes up people with cash to buy upfront show up faster than you can dial the ad
The rest is outside of governments control, biggest thing being wife has to give up career for a non-trivial ammount of time (even if I took out some maternity leave realistically she has to take at least 6 months off).
I suspect that retirement age plays a non-trivial part in this as well - having retired parents to fall back on as support when having multiple children while having active careers is very valuable.
So you agree that having someone extra to watch over your kids is something that's needed? For most people, that is kindergarten.
>he's only starting to figure things out and abandoning him to a stranger who have to split their time/attention between 10 other children at this stage seems cruel.
Almost every kid does this. I have, so have all other kids. It's really not that bad, your kid needs to learn to socialize eventually. It's a bit insulting to call it 'cruel' to bring your kid to kindergarten.
>Not to mention kindergartens are disease incubators and we would probably spend first few months getting him adjusted and treating him at home while he's sick (+ catching stuff from him).
Yes, that's how the human immune system is supposed to work.
Life itself is pretty hard for most people, most just don't accept truth and make up a reason to cope. Copium. It's heartbreaking seeing children fleeing their home, losing everyone they know like in Syrian and now Ukraine just in last decade.
Then there is climate change, which will be devastating in near future. Even IPCC report is manipulated by lobbying.
https://twitter.com/MrMatthewTodd/status/1490987272044703752
If you want more of something, subsidize it, either explicitly or by reducing its relative costs. Here's an off the cuff list of suggestions which would reduce the cost of children:
* Accessible free or low cost daycare/childcare
* Accessible low cost health care
* Cheaper housing near job centers
I'm sure there are more.
But how are we going to pay for all that? Consider it an investment allowing a country to continue to have a growing tax base.
an 18 year auto loan sounds like a bad idea. but $15k (nominal) per year is less than state university tuition.
Reasoning from first principles is depressing sometimes.
https://www.zippia.com/research/should-i-have-a-baby/
This alone says a lot.
If you were to step outside society and design something from the ground up, one of your easiest assumptions would be "larger families should have easier access to larger housing", wherein reality the exact opposite is true.
An aggressive federal housing construction plan targeting families would do an untold amount of good.
Isn't it a wonder why we can't get fertility rates up?
Crudely speaking, birth rates in poor countries are higher than in rich countries. An within countries, birth rates amongst the poor tend to be higher than the rich.
People who are infertile do not bear children, period.
People who are poor often do have children, and in greater numbers, due to a variety of factors. The fact that they have trouble supporting those children is besides the point. The children are still born.
This is where the Children of Men analogy gets a bit strained. Today, fewer people have children because fewer people want to, not because they're biologically unable.
That said as soon as my kids are 18 I’m getting a really expensive sports car, but maybe a used one because years of parenting have ruined my ability to wastefully spend money.
Once I had kids (found out we were expecting) I stopped fucking around, bought a condo within a month, and I was from that day on a mission to make money. Didn’t give a shit about hours, didn’t give a shit about free sodas, it was all how much does it pay?
If anyone offered me $5k/yr more I’d quit on the spot. Whenever a recruiter called, I was interested.
In a way kids are expensive but to me the kick in the pants it gave me led to making far more money and honing my mind and realizing what’s important and what isn’t.
In real life we may see some of the nasty sociopolitical consequences of that, but they aren’t irreversible. We can repopulate the depopulated regions, we can restart farming there (now with more automation and better quality of life). We don’t necessarily share the fate of the humanity of the book.
"Morland talks of the trilemma facing ageing nations, whereby you can have two of the three: ethnic continuity, a thriving economy or a comfortable lifestyle without the huge stress of mixing child-raising and a modern economy. Israel has sacrificed the latter, Japan has chosen to take the economic hit, while Britain’s leaders have given up its ethnic continuity. But that, alas, was a short-term solution, since young immigrants don’t magically avoid the fate of Father Time any more than the rest of us do."
Once has to wonder whether it’s healthy when more than 50% of your population feels alienated by the country and often has more loyalty and love for the homeland he or she fled.
The immigration system of most European countries is also very broken. More than 60% of immigrants to France don’t even have a high school education and gun crime in Sweden is now among the highest in Europe (despite being the lowest in the 90s) due to Somali gangs.
People are tribal and not every country was birthed as a “melting pot” like the US or Canada. These days the words integration and assimilation are considered racist when talking about immigrants so societies in these countries will simply further polarize.
For some people the disadvantages outweigh the advantages (like offering a solution to birth rates, provided low birth rates are a problem). Immigrants and their descendants can and have swung election results. Nothing wrong with this but for some people this is too big of a disadvantage.
This shouldn't surprise you, there are many countries with very little immigration, very strict immigration laws, and low birth rates, so for them the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, and they are not even democracies.
The USA is historically incredibly successful in attracting and integrating immigrants that go on to have great success. While e.g. Sweden appears to have an alarmingly high proportion of immigrants that go on to act in ways that are detrimental to their society. There might exist examples that illustrate the example in a way that's even more obvious.
It's a temporary solution at best because birth rates are falling worldwide and doing so much faster than expected. [1]
> Even when an extended family exists (grandparents are still alive, everyone is still married and on friendly terms) it is common for people to move to where the work is.
Do you mean to imply that people are forced to move to where the work is or that they choose to move there? Because that makes a big difference.
[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet...
This really resonates. In my 30-40’s peer group, zero of them live in or near their home city/town. Some grandparents have been financially successful enough that they bought a second home to be near their grandchildren, but the “new norm” seems to be both parents work full time to make ends meet without any other parenting support.
That said, I'm generally quite relaxed about the population trend: the 18th and 19th century had ballooning populations in Europe, and collapsing populations everywhere else. I don't think it's going to get to the point where there are serious overpopulation problems in the global south - at least, nowhere near what we already have in Europe.
"Older people tend to vote for their own self-interests, and in the case of Britain, end up controlling the government in power; voters with pensions and homes opt for lower growth and restricted housebuilding, further raising the cost of home ownership for the young and so pushing down the fertility rate still further. If we’re playing a generational blame game for the lack of children…"
I assume you mean a positive correlation.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of the former Eastern Block countries experienced both, a reduction in fertility and too much housing. The latter because so many left for the west. So many buildings were empty that quite a bit of housing stock was removed, see e.g. [1].
[1] https://www.eisenhuettenstadt.de/Leben-Wohnen/Wohnen-und-Bau...
High rents and other features of contemporary society make it difficult and expensive to have children. These things also make it difficult to get enough time for children, with the amount of income-generating work that's required. Then, most of the care is offloaded to professional caretakers, as this gives a significant improvement to the budgets of time and money.
My suspicion is that many who state that they skip kids due to the environment or personal reasons, actually just need a fig leaf to cover the fact that they're financially unable to support kids while maintaining a lifestyle that makes children net positive for their own quality of life. For most, this would be a pretty painful admission to make, but there's plenty of observations indicating it's true for many.
In contrast to most people here, I believe that this is actually a pretty big problem. It's not as bad as having a birthrate of 4 and sprinting into a demographic catastrophe, but economic growth in the sense of making all aspects of life better and cheaper is critical if we want to make civilization sustainable. Balanced demographics and kids raised with love, care, plenty and care from capable parents are a very important part of that. This is one of the things I actually believe the conservatives get right.
If you go back into the early history of conservatism, there was a breed of conservative that wanted to protect traditional social relations against the social dislocation of early capitalism.
The problem is, the people doing the social dislocation, the people doing the enclosures and clearances, were also those who benefited the most from the traditional social relations, aristocrats, etc. So the idea developed in two divergent directions: the first, the conservatives, who tried to protect traditional society by moral education, enforcement, entreaty, etc, the second, the early socialists, who tried to protect traditional society by protecting traditional social relations (usually land rights) through politics.
As you can imagine, this cuts in opposite directions: the first group would want to protect, for instance, traditional aristocratic privilege, while the second might want to abrogate it, in order to prevent an aristocrat from taking their land. Both sides would be seeing themselves as 'conserving' the status quo.
This was all about three hundred years ago in the UK, or much less in Spain, or Mexico, or Russia. The current dominance of 'conservative liberals' in all nations shows that the first direction, where you protect the veneer of tradition while allowing unfettered capitalism to trash its innards, won out. The last socialist revolutionaries of the old sort were people like Zapata, protecting their societies against the encroaching Haciendas. Today, there is nothing left to protect, so that's why modern socialists don't have much truck with whatever shreds of traditional culture remain.
Anecdotally, it seems a surprising number of these young men are already fathers (of children they could barely support). Furthermore, there is a male surplus built into birth rates, and the number of men is not the limiting factor in population growth.
It's quite obvious the reason is economic. Establishing healthy families is really difficult.
> that there is almost no civil war in countries where 55 per cent or more of the population is aged over thirty.’
Correlation, not causation.
Literally the next sentence.
A plausible correlation would be; a spike in population growth would cause both an excess of young men, and a shortage of resources (which is a cause for war).
I think that the development of artificial wombs with a dash of genetic customization will lead to a new baby boom in the next 10-20 years.
Israel is barreling toward religious extremism.
The ultra orthodox are a solid voting block That currenty controls 15 out of the 120 seats in the Knesset. they almost always align with the far-right religious zionists or the right-wing Likud. Right wing governments encourage their growth while working to decrease that of Muslims.
And it has worked very well. The Israeli left, which dominated politics until the 80s has been decimated since their voter base is not having children. The country is going right, fast. The ultra-orthodox also secure the Jewish majority in Jerusalem and Israel, an added bonus.
1) They reckon that things like "growing a family" are not the "meaning of life"
2) They value their time and respect the child, so they feel responsibilities on both sides
This is by all means a 1st world problem and immigration is a natural way to address the problem IMO.
I value my time but I can still choose to give some (a lot) of that time to my kids. That time doesn’t feel wasted to me. I have also not given up on all of my own interests.
As for the meaning of life – it is what you make of it, really. And that’s true regardless of whether one has kids or not.
This graph tells a different story. What is your interpretation?
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SWE/sweden/birth-rate#....
The graph says that’s not the case.
God we agree.
What does this actually mean? You say this like women have no agency. They may not follow a typical set of rules, but to reduce their choices to 'the result of being tightly controlled' is very insulting. There are actual reasons many of these communities intentionally have many children
If healthcare alone would have been taken care of, we might have considered 2 kids. But for now, I hesitate to have even 1.
There are 2 of them, and one of me. I am 'enslaved' to the bank for the next 20 something years. I am self-employed in the trades. I have very solid foundation in fixing and building things, which seems to survive many economic downturns as things that are needed to be done, are needed to be done regardless if a booming market or not - You just may face a bit more competition at that point.
Not ranting against you, or picking on your decisioning - Obviously it is a super-personal choice, and I'm glad thoughts have been put in place about many factors involved.
That being said, I've heard "I'm going to wait until I am 100% fully stable and secure to do **" my entire life. While I will agree that there are certain conditions and 'times of lives' that are extremely bad* ideas to do large things, especially when it comes into involving other dependents, I really don't think 100% stability is ever achievable.
You or your significant other could be taken out by a car tomorrow, or be caught in a fire, or even hit by lightening.
Obviously I had my first child when I was in the lower 30's -- for me, I'm finding this to be a very nice timeframe that worked in my life. I was far less stable than I am now, in the conventional sense of having a savings account, or owning a house, and I've managed to both purchase a house, and while hardly rich by any conventional notions of the world, when the car(s) break, or the house needs a roof, I am able to have those things done by either paying $ outright, or using prior life skills to offset the labor charges of those things making them more financially easier to swallow. My point is, now I am 40. They are still pretty little, and yeah, children require an insane amount of work and energy input to not only 'maintain', but 120% of what you have to offer to really enjoy the experience. I, personally, wouldn't want to be any older than I am now while having children at the ages they are - Advil is frequently consumed by now, part of growing up rolling around on a skateboard, part doing manual trades for (most) of my working life thus far, and part just being 40 and out of the 'Spring Chicken' age.
Time goes by, and with it, we get older. There is no way of changing that. The other factors in modern life, the money, the housing, the 'stability' can ebb and flow both by actions of your own and by actions too varied to even account for -- But time goes one direction.
I wish you the best, and strongly suggest if you want to have a child, and it's not 'the worst time possible' to do as such (drug addictions, homeless, uh, similar things) then perhaps ditch some of the fear of 'stability' (that truly very few have; none if you acknowledge life can end at any time for any of us) and get to doing the living!
Hard times happen to many; Even us single parent folk (and yeah, it makes things a bit harder, that's for sure) but I can promise you, if you care and you're willing to put the effort in, boy, it's worth it!
Healthcare is important, everyone deserves that, kid or not. - Europe has that figured out more so than the (richer) US. But you don't need a massive house to raise two kids (although a bit of garden would help).
I'd say to wait for a state that you could call "stability" may be imply a wait until it's too late; your decision making should incorporate other factors such as your biological age, your levels of energy and support potentially available from grandparents where still applicable. If you map all of these out over time, you will see that while jon stability may or may not improve most other facctors will worsen irreversibly.
The problem in America is the rat race never ends and that it is FAR TOO EASY to lose your hard earned wealth. Lawsuits, divorce, healthcare costs, daycare, tutoring all suck money away very quickly.
Furthermore, laws are set up in a way that can take away your earning potential. A small criminal records from 20 years ago can affect your career at a private business. A loss of drivers license will impede you from getting to work. A health issue will get you disability and FMLA but set you behind in the corporate rat race so fast that you will regret it.
In America, the fall is precipitous. You could have been a model citizen for 40 years of your life. But only one slip up (say a critical health diagnosis) and you are on the slippery slope down.
This, as opposed to Asian countries which have a free market and yet, the fall is not precipitous. In most other countries, if you have been a model citizen for 40 years, it's very hard for your life to fall apart.
A minor note, when I was in Japan I heard the term obachan as mildly derogatory slang for old people (e.g., the old lady who throws elbows if you are in her way). I hadn't heard of the similar term rougai referenced in this article.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNqCRvDbCVI