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I once attended a lecture by a well known statistics professor, who demonstrated a similar correlation between the price of a kg of apples and the rate of divorce in his country.
Or was the professor simply drawing from an enormous number of metrics to find a spurious relationship (and report just that).
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
I think it’s pretty arrogant to conclude that the human race is somehow exempt from the concept of a carrying capacity. Wages are higher because of inflation, the floor has moved, and it’s relatively meaningless as the cost of rent, healthcare, and food has greatly outpaced such growth. To put it bluntly, your semiconductors are insignificant if we can’t house and feed our population.
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.
It's a rather specific sample (2010-2016, ages 25-29). I wonder how much of this is coincidence. Is it not possible that both birthrates and home prices have nothing to do with one another but happen to be just following independent trends?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s pretty arrogant to conclude that the human race is somehow exempt from the concept of a carrying capacity. Wages are higher because of inflation, the floor has moved, and it’s relatively meaningless as the cost of rent, healthcare, and food has greatly outpaced such growth. To put it bluntly, your semiconductors are insignificant if we can’t house and feed our population.
It's also pretty shortsighted to underrate human advances in adapting their abilities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are expensive because we want them to be. We have never had so much disposable income and so few children in History.
As income potential increases, so does the opportunity cost of raising children. If you're making $50k/year, you're not giving up month-long European vacations by having kids. If you're making $500k/year, you might be.
I once attended a lecture by a well known statistics professor, who demonstrated a similar correlation between the price of a kg of apples and the rate of divorce in his country.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link...
Correlation vs cause is no problem for HN if the correlation in question confirms a bias!
I once attended a lecture by a well known statistics professor, who demonstrated a similar correlation between the price of a kg of apples and the rate of divorce in his country.
Are apples and divorces plausibly related? Or was the professor simply drawing from an enormous number of metrics to find a spurious relationship (and report just that).