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Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

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Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#11

Post by conanbatt »

Bucephalus355 wrote: post #7
mattigames wrote: post #3

With the rapid destruction of soon-to-be-depleted resources and worsening climate change I argue that "Baby Recovery" is a very misleading titling of birth rate decline; the next generation will likely have a better quality of life if there are _fewer_ of them, not more.

I very much see what you’re saying and think a lot of current data backs up your view. I do want to point out that Thomas Malthus in the 1700’s had a very similar argument though and “overpopulation” was to then as “global warming” is today in some (only some) regards. At the very least, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “families are the platoons of society”. I never wanted kids, but as I got into my 30’s, you can fe…

And Malthusian theory is a joke of economics from beginning to end.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#13

Post by kanox »

Correlation is not causation.

Low birth rates and high home values are both also highly correlated to education and women in the workforce and high income and economic growth and trendy hipster bars and many other nice things.

Picking just two items and claiming that "people don't have children because homes are expensive" is not very enlightening at all.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#15

Post by surfmike »

kanox wrote: post #13

Correlation is not causation. Low birth rates and high home values are both also highly correlated to education and women in the workforce and high income and economic growth and trendy hipster bars and many other nice things. Picking just two items and claiming that "people don't have children because homes are expensive" is not very enlightening at all.

The article specifically says they might not be causal. The correlation is interested, however; anecdotally I know many of my friends feel like buying a house is a necessary prerequisite before having kids so a causative effect is plausible.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#16

Post by chongli »

kanox wrote: post #13

Correlation is not causation. Low birth rates and high home values are both also highly correlated to education and women in the workforce and high income and economic growth and trendy hipster bars and many other nice things. Picking just two items and claiming that "people don't have children because homes are expensive" is not very enlightening at all.

You could also say that women in the workforce are correlated with high home prices and educated women are correlated with women in the workplace.

I think there really is no root cause here. They're all interconnected factors.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#17

Post by Robotbeat »

mattigames wrote: post #3

With the rapid destruction of soon-to-be-depleted resources and worsening climate change I argue that "Baby Recovery" is a very misleading titling of birth rate decline; the next generation will likely have a better quality of life if there are _fewer_ of them, not more.

That is ridiculous. Wages have never been higher, and there have never been more people. There are incredibly strong network effects from having more people (in cities, etc), and the benefit of international trade relies on more people to enable better specialization. All kinds of incredibly important markets, like semiconductors (including computer chips, solar power) and even mining rely on having a lot of people to sell to to pay for the upfront and continuous high costs of setting up these operations. The economies of scale are incredibly important. Additionally, a shrinking population means that the working-age population shrinks relative to those who are too old to work. That means less care and less quality of care (and at greater cost) for the elderly. It also means the elderly will be forced to work longer. Does this sound like improved quality of life?

This zero-sum Malthusian thinking is not only untrue, but following it collectively will make us much, MUCH poorer and worse off. It's a common way of thinking on both the left and the right, and it is fundamentally anti-human and contradicted by reality.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#18

Post by [deleted] »

robotrout wrote: post #5
mattigames wrote: post #3

With the rapid destruction of soon-to-be-depleted resources and worsening climate change I argue that "Baby Recovery" is a very misleading titling of birth rate decline; the next generation will likely have a better quality of life if there are _fewer_ of them, not more.

There won't be fewer of them, because they will be supplemented by immigrants. Many western countries are actively encouraging 3rd world immigrants in an effort to bolster their faltering entitlements ponzi scheme with more warm bodies.

[deleted]

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#19

Post by rz2k »

mattigames wrote: post #3

With the rapid destruction of soon-to-be-depleted resources and worsening climate change I argue that "Baby Recovery" is a very misleading titling of birth rate decline; the next generation will likely have a better quality of life if there are _fewer_ of them, not more.

What are the limiting factors contributing to quality of life? Raw natural resources or post-processing and value added by people to those resources?

The idea back in the twentieth century that overpopulation underlaid all problems seemed to be based on a subconscious idea that capital stock maintains itself and stuff produces itself.

It takes far fewer acres, gallons of water and farmer-hours to feed a person in 2018, because the economy is more developed. Same goes for almost everything people need in their day to day lives, because a larger population supports more specialized occupations. On an entrepreneurial site with people who like to build things there is going to be some bias towards appreciating individual self-sufficiency, like a household version of autarky, but it isn't the path to producing the good and services that are important to supporting a high quality of life for people.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#20

Post by lkrubner »

From previous:

"In nations in the West, an important limiting factor is the ability to get one’s own apartment. That is, the ratio of average male wage to average rent. In the USA, the happiest year for this ratio was 1958, when people were spending 22% of their income on rent, on average. Not by coincidence, this was the peak year of the Baby Boom. In some sense, it was the best year in history to be a young white male in the USA. It was the year when it was easiest for an 18 year old male to get out of high school, get their own apartment, marry their high school sweetheart, and start a family. And of course, young people did this in huge numbers, which is why 1958 remains the peak year for teenage pregnancy in the USA."

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike...

1958 is when men had the best wage to rent ratio, and that helped create families and have children. And likewise, nowadays, as rents increase faster than wages, we should expect the birth rate to decline.

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