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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

#111

Post by BeetleB »

manfredo wrote: post #100
BeetleB wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it better? Consider what happens if you lose that job. How much money do you need saved up to live the next 6 months in both scenarios? If I pay $750K/yr, I need $325K saved up to pay rent for 6 months. That will take me 1.3 years of saving to get to that threshold (assuming I pay for nothing else - food, etc). If I pay $50K/yr, I need $25K saved up to pay rent for 6 months. It will take me 4 months. Depending on…

You're assuming that people would have to live in the same place after their employment ends (you do bring this up later, though). This definitely isn't the case for me; I've moved every single time I've changed jobs. The point remains, in the first scenario the person has $250,000 worth of disposable income. In the latter it's only $150,00. The former is in a much better position to build up saving. Heck, even one y…

I'm a glad your comment is more nuanced this time. Your original one had:

>Compared to, say, someone making $200,00 post tax and spending only 25% of that on rent it is strictly better.

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

#112

Post by jsonne »

anoncoward111 wrote: post #90

There's correlation here, but likely not causation. The real underlying cause in the drop in birth rates is an increase in working hours, an increase in commuting times, an increase in college tuition and health care costs, and also an increase in divorce rates. These days, even getting married is an expensive financial arrangement. Having kids is just another layer on that. Housing prices have increased because of c…

How do you square that with somewhere like Denmark with it's equally abysmal yet they have way less working hours and a large social safety net?

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

#114

Post by fixermark »

anoncoward111 wrote: post #110
hshehehjdjdjd wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting married is expensive? How so?

The legal fees themselves aren't very expensive. If you can resist the societal pressures to have a large and extravagant wedding with many guests, then even the wedding itself isn't particularly expensive. The main cost of getting married is getting divorced. Legal fees add up a lot here, and the division of assets is costly. Now, you could argue your marriage won't end in divorce, but 60% of marriages in the US do.

Perhaps worth noting: that "60% of marriages end in divorce" number is quirky when you pull back the skin.

60% of marriages end in divorce, but most people who marry do not get divorced from their first marriage. The 60% number is bumped out due to the segment of the population that get married 3 or 4 times.

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

#115

Post by defterGoose »

tanilama wrote: post #42
lkrubner wrote: post #20

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…

Ironically, the hiking home prices benefits this generation the most as well.

In some alternate reality where everyone's goals and chosen locale are identically that of their parents, yes.

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

#116

Post by fixermark »

Karishma1234 wrote: post #93

I think this is a wonderful way to tackle climate change. Higher housing if leads to lower birth rates then it might be good for planet. I wonder if there is analysis been done as to what birth rates we need to achieve to ensure the planet is fit to live for our kids.

I believe the driving factor of climate change isn't total world population though; it's fossil fuel exhaust generated for energy. There's correlation with total population but not necessarily direct linkage; if there are fewer people, but each person is consuming 2.5x as much electricity as the generation before, we wouldn't expect to see the fossil fuel burn rate lower.

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

#117

Post by knuththetruth »

firic wrote: post #107
knuththetruth wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US solved the problem in the postwar period by taxing the wealthy at high rates, providing subsidized housing and education, and numerous other social democratic benefits to their population. This, combined with liberal immigration policies, resulted in tremendous growth.

and of course by bombing all of the competitors factories making the US a monopoly in manufacturing.

Yes, that of course was important. But given that today we see greater social mobility in wealthy social democracies than is present in the US demonstrates that this was not the exclusive cause.

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

#118

Post by manfredo »

BeetleB wrote: post #111
manfredo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that people would have to live in the same place after their employment ends (you do bring this up later, though). This definitely isn't the case for me; I've moved every single time I've changed jobs. The point remains, in the first scenario the person has $250,000 worth of disposable income. In the latter it's only $150,00. The former is in a much better position to build up saving. Heck, even one y…

I'm a glad your comment is more nuanced this time. Your original one had: >Compared to, say, someone making $200,00 post tax and spending only 25% of that on rent it is strictly better.

I stand by the notion that the first scenario (making $1M and spending $750k in rent) is strictly better than the second. Of course I also agree that making zero dollars and spending $750k in rent is considerably worse than spending $50K rent. But that wasn't part of the original comment.

Essentially, I claimed that Scenario X is better than scenario Y, but now you're saying "but! What if scenario X suddenly becomes scenario Z?".

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

#119

Post by nostrademons »

manfredo wrote: post #88
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would gladly earn $1 million per year and spend 75% of it on rent No, you wouldn’t. As income goes higher, long-distance transportation becomes (a) more comfortable and (b) smaller as a fraction of income. De-camping to Washington State and commuting to San Francisco doesn’t make sense at $200,000; it does at $1 or 2 million.

I'm not sure I follow. Assuming the $1 million is post tax, it equates to $250,000 post tax and nearly entirely disposable income. Compared to, say, someone making $200,00 post tax and spending only 25% of that on rent it is strictly better. The point that the above commenter is making is that if the percentage of income spent on rent is higher, but the purchasing power adjusted income is higher it can cancel out. I'…

I think he's saying that as absolute incomes get higher, commuting cost as a percentage of income drops, because commuting cost is largely fixed regardless of income. And so it makes more sense to live in a low-COL region and commute to a high-COL region.

For the average person, flying to work every day is unrealistic. If you are making $1M/year, it suddenly becomes very realistic. Same day roundtrips between SFO and Seattle via coach are about $200 when purchased 3 months out. Times 200 workdays/year, that's only $40K/year. You end up way ahead financially buying in Seattle and commuting by plane to your job in SF, if you're willing to stomach the ~6 hours/day of commuting time.

Then if you don't want to spend an hour and a half in the terminal, you can fly private jet. Private jet time apparently runs about $5k/hour. At ~600 hours/year, you're looking at about 3 million a year to commute by private jet from Seattle to SFO. Still out of your price range at a million in salary, but quite doable if you were making say $10m, and your commute time isn't much worse than sitting in traffic on 101 between Google and the Marina.

Replace Seattle with Las Vegas and all 3 of (housing, flight time, expense) get better. Round-trip to Vegas is about an hour and a half; coach prices go as low as $59 and private jet prices would be about $1-1.5M/year; and houses can be had for $200K, freeing up lots of money for flying.

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

#120

Post by anoncoward111 »

jsonne wrote: post #112
anoncoward111 wrote: post #90

There's correlation here, but likely not causation. The real underlying cause in the drop in birth rates is an increase in working hours, an increase in commuting times, an increase in college tuition and health care costs, and also an increase in divorce rates. These days, even getting married is an expensive financial arrangement. Having kids is just another layer on that. Housing prices have increased because of c…

How do you square that with somewhere like Denmark with it's equally abysmal yet they have way less working hours and a large social safety net?

I've visited Denmark before as an American :) It's a pretty nice place-- sure there are pretty generous payments to most members of society, but there is still some petty crime and different social classes and lack of major mobility.

I am not precisely sure if they have less working hours. I mean, anecdotally, I don't know any Danes who have 10 minute commutes working 4 days a week, 6 hours a day or something like that, and making $7,000 post tax per month. Like, that sounds mythical in America and in Denmark.

I would just equate Denmark's birthrate either to cultural differences (white birth rates are lower than arab, latino, african etc), or to the same pressures that American workers have-- the Danish pressures are just slightly less extreme.

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