We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US • Hacker News Board

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#131

Post by toomuchtodo » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

jnwatson wrote: post #85

toomuchtodo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

700 million people in the world face food scarcity at any one time. The world is overpopulated and its resources strained by the existing 7.4 billion humans (CO2 budget, natural resources reserves, etc).

Practically speaking, we make enough food for all the humans on this planet, and we'll likely be able to until at least 10 billion people exist. The reason that folks face food scarcity is a distribution problem, not a production problem. We don't do a good job at making sure people don't go hungry, even in the US.

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/photo/biodiv-clearcut/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/06/phosphat...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/sea-runni...

https://www.siwi.org/latest/the-worlds-natural-aquifers-at-r...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/groundwat...

https://www.idtechex.com/en/research-article/the-meat-indust...

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/36/21994

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#132

Post by missedthecue » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #80

SamuelAdams wrote: post #29

I wonder if there's a good way to model the cost of children over the last 100 years? My guess is fewer people are having children due to the financial costs rising considerably.

I don't know that isolating the cost of raising kids is necessary when you can see the drop in overall wealth by generation. Millenials (who are the prime "kid having" generation right now) own far less wealth than any generation that came before them. Is it really in any way surprising that fewer are having kids?

Don't poorer people have more kids on average?

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#133

Post by beaconstudios » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

Scandiravian wrote: post #112

beaconstudios wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop assumptions all together. Dropping assumptions altogether isn't what I meant and is trivially shown to be nonsense. We couldn't live our lives if we didn't assume the sun would come up tomorrow. What I mean is making unfounded assumptions about other human beings and their experiences. > Taking the word "privilege" as an example, you have an assumption about what…

> just that it's a better ideal than growing out your set of assumptions. After all, if you take people and keep dividing them into groups based on shared characteristics, take that to its terminal limit and you're simply treating people as unique individuals. I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful, assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of assumpti…

> I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful, assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of assumptions

To be clear, I don't think privilege-checking causes more harm than not-privilege-checking. But I think it causes less good than the version of privilege-checking that is applied to everyone regardless of demographic privilege, which is to say, empathy.

By being choosy about who deserves empathy, rather than your ideal being focused on general human equality you propagate class divides but simply change which ones you value. I think it's a mixup between empathy and sympathy. You end up valuing the humanity of the disenfranchised more than the privileged, which is dangerous. You can think that people who are marginalised deserve better without either thinking those who are privileged deserve worse, or that they are active perpetrators of said marginalisation. I'm not saying you necessarily make this mistake yourself - I don't know your feelings on the matter - but I see people go down this line of reasoning all the time after acknowledging the concept of class privilege and I just think we can do better than that.

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#134

Post by engineer_22 » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 3:13 PM UTC

sn41 wrote: post #107

yortpyperty wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a new father, I share this perspective. To get an anecdotal sense of our financial struggle, we have 2-4x the net worth that my parents when they were our age, but cannot afford the same house that I grew up in and doubt we ever will.

Yup. This is the same phenomenon in India as well - the salary is "high", so you can splurge on furniture, buy reasonably priced cars etc. much easier than earlier generations. But we cannot afford to buy the same house my parents lived in at our income level.

Have you accounted for development induced appreciation? Perhaps a similar home further from the city center would be a more suiting comparison?

Anecdotally, in central New York housing prices have gained only modestly. The 2008 financial crisis didn't have a large effect on prices here either. But... development in central New York is near zero.

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#135

Post by bradleyjg » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 3:14 PM UTC

yortpyperty wrote: post #97

motohagiography wrote: post #64

Birthrates are a powerful, but lagging/post-hoc indicator of public policy effects. It's worth noting that we tend to associate high birthrates with poverty and negative social outcomes. Except, when rates are low we (western countries) use immigration from high-birthrate societies to shore up the population replacement rate, as the article notes. When you look at who is having kids in the US and Canada, the families…

As a new father, I share this perspective. To get an anecdotal sense of our financial struggle, we have 2-4x the net worth that my parents when they were our age, but cannot afford the same house that I grew up in and doubt we ever will.

Is is it you that are the outlier or your dad? What kind of housing did your grandfathers and great-grandfathers have?

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#136

Post by yortpyperty » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 3:20 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #135

yortpyperty wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a new father, I share this perspective. To get an anecdotal sense of our financial struggle, we have 2-4x the net worth that my parents when they were our age, but cannot afford the same house that I grew up in and doubt we ever will.

Is is it you that are the outlier or your dad? What kind of housing did your grandfathers and great-grandfathers have?

I have the same job as my father. Grandparents immigrated at a young age and grew up in the same area of the city.

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#137

Post by lastofthemojito » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 3:21 PM UTC

sn41 wrote: post #107

yortpyperty wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a new father, I share this perspective. To get an anecdotal sense of our financial struggle, we have 2-4x the net worth that my parents when they were our age, but cannot afford the same house that I grew up in and doubt we ever will.

Yup. This is the same phenomenon in India as well - the salary is "high", so you can splurge on furniture, buy reasonably priced cars etc. much easier than earlier generations. But we cannot afford to buy the same house my parents lived in at our income level.

This always feels like a weird argument.

In the part of Maryland (USA) that I live in, quite a few areas are named after families who lived here in colonial times, and they were granted huge swaths of land. But a descendant from one of those families today can't reasonably expect an estate of hundreds of acres. There's just not enough land to go around with the size of today's population.

Obviously, that's taking it to the extreme, but the population of India has probably doubled since 1980 or so. I don't know your age or your parents' ages, but there are certainly far more people in India now than when your parents were your age, so it wouldn't make sense for an equivalent amount of wealth to buy an equivalent piece of real estate compared to previous generations.

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#138

Post by beaconstudios » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 3:21 PM UTC

yesenadam wrote: post #113

beaconstudios wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure thing - so the idea is that the mainstream media exists to prop up the status quo. Not in the sense that it was invented for that reason, but the incentives at play force the media to essentially play to the confirmation bias of their audience in order to be competitive. Given that the media also pretends to present an objective truth (the idea of objective truth is also a very modernist ideal, but I don't want…

Thank you. :-) Although ..you seem to have used as many jargony or cliché phrases in this paragraph as the previous one, it doesn't seem at a significantly lower level. "exists to prop up the status quo" .. "the incentives at play" .. "play to the confirmation bias of their audience" .. "the status quo is presented as the objective ideal" All these seem a bit murky, rather hand-wavy. Maybe it's not possible, or would…

It's jargon-y because I'm using terminology you don't regularly use. I talk like this all the time, not to try to sound smart or academic (I really value clear communication, some ideas are just hard to communicate clearly) but because these are the terms I think in. I am trying to translate from my terms into what I assume are yours though (leaning on some cultural assumptions here), so please bear with me.

> (Sorry if this comment is a waste of time.)

I find these exercises inherently valuable because I need to learn to make these ideas understandable if I am to try to help popularise them, which I would like to.

> How would you go about finding out if something actually "exists to prop up the status quo" or not?

So I'm using a concept called teleology here. It's a way of thinking about the purpose of a system in terms of its outcome. The media "props up the status quo" in the same way that Darwinian evolution "adapts species to their environment". There's no conscious agency there; no one is at the helm of evolution, making it do so (with apologies to biblical literalists).

So how do you find out if the media props up the status quo? The same way you find out if Darwinian evolution adapts species to their environment: you observe it and see if your hypothesis holds up over time. If the media's reporting lines up with assumptions you would make from your deepest beliefs, then either both the media and you are perfect truth-uncoverers (which would be impressive given epistemology, ie the study of how we can know things, is still a hotly-debated topic 2000 years after its creation), or the media is blowing smoke up your ass.

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#139

Post by PragmaticPulp » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 3:22 PM UTC

yortpyperty wrote: post #97

motohagiography wrote: post #64

Birthrates are a powerful, but lagging/post-hoc indicator of public policy effects. It's worth noting that we tend to associate high birthrates with poverty and negative social outcomes. Except, when rates are low we (western countries) use immigration from high-birthrate societies to shore up the population replacement rate, as the article notes. When you look at who is having kids in the US and Canada, the families…

As a new father, I share this perspective. To get an anecdotal sense of our financial struggle, we have 2-4x the net worth that my parents when they were our age, but cannot afford the same house that I grew up in and doubt we ever will.

I’ve been thinking about this lately. Similar to you, the house I grew up in is much more less affordable now than it was when my parents bought it.

However, in my case it’s not really the same house any more. At the time, the location was thought to be on the outskirts of town, away from the desirable areas. As the city grew, this location became the desirable area. If I look to what is now considered the outskirts, I still see new construction in the $300K range (pre-COVID anyway), which is similar to the inflation-adjusted price of the house I grew up in.

At some point we can’t escape supply and demand with more buyers fighting over the same limited housing supply.

Many of my friends have been moving to less popular cities and up and coming towns as they start raising families, and it pays off. Obviously not an option for everyone’s situation, but thankfully the increase in remote work is relieving some of the pressure in overcrowded cities.

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#140

Post by PebblesRox » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 3:23 PM UTC

mbg721 wrote: post #26

jasode wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Couples are spending a lot of time together [...], so I'd expected that to result in more baby making But a counteracting force is that some couples think 9 months ahead and are afraid of delivering their baby in a COVID-overloaded hospital. COVID makes the opportunities for conception easier but adds to the stress and uncertainties of delivery and postnatal care. (So maybe more sex activity but also more contra cep…

The uncertainty isn't just the COVID overload, but also no doulas/support people, and not knowing if the father is even going to be allowed in the building in case something unusual happens.

Caring for a baby once it's born is also harder without the support available from family to bring food, babysit older kids, etc.