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

nytimes.com

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

#171

Post by seneca »

mywittyname wrote: post #162
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Austerity and cynicism dominate the US right now though. This is greatly exaggerated by news media and social media, especially with everyone stuck at home. The contrast between what I read online and what I see in the real world has never felt larger. Austerity refers to reduced government spending, which is the opposite of what we’re experiencing right now. We’re spending so much that my CPA friends are working o…

What I experience in real life is pretty bad. My extended family went from being really close and compassionate to hateful and unable to be in the room with others. Your world might be nice, but not everyone else's is.

> My extended family went from being really close and compassionate to hateful and unable to be in the room with others.

I can't speak to your personal situation, but from what I've seen this is usually driven by the exact trends the person you're responding to is pointing out. Exaggerated media and politics.

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

#172

Post by keiferski »

ianai wrote: post #41

This is probably mostly covid related. But I personally don’t even consider kids. Kids are a life long commitment. I’d only make that commitment if I felt long term stability or at least optimism. Austerity and cynicism dominate the US right now though. It’s a recipe for strife, struggle, and things that rip families and countries apart. It doesn’t have to be this way in the US.

Pretty much every single generation other than your parents (assuming you’re 25-40) had a tougher time and lived in a world with a more uncertain future. Every generation, going back millions of years.

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

#173

Post by Dirlewanger »

refurb wrote: post #155
ianai wrote: post #41

This is probably mostly covid related. But I personally don’t even consider kids. Kids are a life long commitment. I’d only make that commitment if I felt long term stability or at least optimism. Austerity and cynicism dominate the US right now though. It’s a recipe for strife, struggle, and things that rip families and countries apart. It doesn’t have to be this way in the US.

Makes sense. Time are certainly filled with more strife and struggle than the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, polio epidemics and two World Wars.

Seriously, people need some fucking perspective. Yeah, things aren't too hot right now, but that's because all you do is consume the 24/7 newscycle and worry about what some nobody on Twitter is agonizing over about Disney's latest TV show. The world is the safest it's ever been. Aside from Covid, many massive killers of the past are no longer a problem. Our ancestors would be shaking their heads if they saw the prosperous times we live in now, but don't choose to have children.

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

#174

Post by whatshisface »

shortandsweet wrote: post #170
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

That's what I don't understand, if population growth is stagnant or declining, how is it these housing prices are reaching such heights?

Because nobody wants to hold currency for extended periods of time.

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

#175

Post by tomjen3 »

theNJR wrote: post #96

This study seems relevant https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023121996854 > Fewer young adults are engaging in casual sexual intercourse now than in the past, but the reasons for this decline are unknown. And this recently discussed article https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/opinion/sunday/endocrine-... > Scientists are concerned by falling sperm counts and declining egg quality. Endocrine-disrupting chemic…

>Poverty no doubt discourages marriage, but doesn’t always prevent it. And it seems to be positively favourable to generation. A half-starved Highland woman may bear more than 20 children, while many a pampered fine lady is incapable of bearing any and is generally exhausted by two or three. Barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare among those of lower station.

>Luxury may inflame in the fair sex the passion for enjoyment, but it seems always to weaken—and often to destroy—the powers of generation

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Given that he wrote that when North America was a rebellious colony where no chemicals were in common use and that we essentially all much, much, much richer than the rich people he talks about here it seems more likely to be something fundamentally human.

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

#176

Post by lastofthemojito »

wcarss wrote: post #156
lastofthemojito wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This mostly makes sense if real estate is already fully utilised, but it isn't. I can't speak to India, but there's a feeling broadly in North America of having "new development" and "expansion" over time. Cities are much, much larger now than they were 40 years ago, and people imagine that the new farm land subsumed and developed should be available for a similar price relative to income to what it was 'back then'.…

You're right of course, that it's more complex than just land scarcity. But I feel like people sometimes have this strange default sense that something is wrong if things don't stay the same. "My dad fixed diesel engines and provided for a family of 5, so I ought to be able to do the same thing". Well, your dad lived in a different time. You can't be a Holy Roman warrior anymore, and there's also a chance you might not be able to make a good career at being a diesel mechanic at this point.

Sort of like when you have kids and see them everyday, you only vaguely notice them growing up because the change from day-to-day is so subtle? But when the extended family visits once a year, they notice a huge change? The world is constantly changing like that...you might not notice that today is different from yesterday, but today is drastically different from when your parents were your age.

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

#177

Post by Clubber »

shortandsweet wrote: post #170
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

That's what I don't understand, if population growth is stagnant or declining, how is it these housing prices are reaching such heights?

We make up for it with immigration. I believe legal immigration is well over a million a year.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...

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

#178

Post by oflannabhra »

mywittyname wrote: post #162
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Austerity and cynicism dominate the US right now though. This is greatly exaggerated by news media and social media, especially with everyone stuck at home. The contrast between what I read online and what I see in the real world has never felt larger. Austerity refers to reduced government spending, which is the opposite of what we’re experiencing right now. We’re spending so much that my CPA friends are working o…

What I experience in real life is pretty bad. My extended family went from being really close and compassionate to hateful and unable to be in the room with others. Your world might be nice, but not everyone else's is.

(I'm sorry about your family. I'm not trying to discount your experiences, just bring the GP comment proper context). I don't think you understood the parent comment. They weren't saying that everything is rosy, they were saying that the economic doom and gloom portrayed in the media (especially surrounding COVID) does not make the current economic reality. The context was not social polarization.

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

#179

Post by beaconstudios »

pjc50 wrote: post #164
beaconstudios wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Privilege" is a terrible word to have become entrenched for such a useful concept, because many people instinctively get their backs up about being told they're privileged when they don't have to face a challenge that someone else faces. I think people get their backs up because privilege checks as a concept are based largely on stereotypes/generalisations and confrontational behaviour, not empathic individual rela…

> creating competing spaces. Creating a competing space in which everyone agrees your norms are true is completely inadequate if that's not the space that policy gets made in. And within each country, there is effectively only one of those. It doesn't matter if you create a "competing space" in which black lives have equal worth to white ones if the police are operating in a very different one defined by "killology".…

Man, progressivism is so close to an ideology I could get behind, but it's like half a cup of postmodernism and a teaspoon of systems theory. I'm a glass deep on both.

As an ideology you have correctly identified an inequity in treatment by law enforcement based on race, but the lack of systems theory and postmodern understanding leads you (as an ideology) to ascribe this to human perpetrators who actually want this to happen. I'm sure there are racist police out there, but systemic racism is not caused by racist individuals; its caused by the behaviour of systems (the justice system, systems around poverty, long term effects of previous explicitly racist policy). Until progressivism fully discards modernism and embraces postmodernism and systems theory, I don't believe it will be able to solve any of the problems it has identified.

> Besides, when people do create competing spaces they get denounced as "safe spaces" or "filter bubbles", even if everyone in the space knows full well what goes on outside the bubble.

For what it's worth, people criticise safe spaces for the use of the term "safe" implying that opinions are violence (which is just a bad formulation of the fact that bad opinions can lead to violence), and filter bubbles lead to a lack of dialogue, where in my ideal people can live freely in their bubble but agree to join a dialogue with someone from another bubble with mutual consent so we don't all spiral into self referentiality (ie hyper reality) through bias reinforcement.

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

#180

Post by Clubber »

refurb wrote: post #155
ianai wrote: post #41

This is probably mostly covid related. But I personally don’t even consider kids. Kids are a life long commitment. I’d only make that commitment if I felt long term stability or at least optimism. Austerity and cynicism dominate the US right now though. It’s a recipe for strife, struggle, and things that rip families and countries apart. It doesn’t have to be this way in the US.

Makes sense. Time are certainly filled with more strife and struggle than the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, polio epidemics and two World Wars.

>Time are certainly filled with more strife and struggle than the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, polio epidemics and two World Wars.

I really don't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion. I think your outlook may be affected by Mean World Syndrome:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome

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