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

#241

Post by lurquer » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

shortandsweet wrote: post #185

rsync wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US anyway) is highly dependent on population growth." I came to this discussion ctrl-f'ing for "deflation" and while I got zero hits, your comment is close enough ... I will abstract one level deeper and rephrase what you said as: "Much of the financial system is highly dependent on economic growth." There continues to be fervent discussion of the results of QE over…

Why do you feel we're living in deflationary times?

Don’t mean to butt in, but personally, the fact that I’m typing this on a piece of $300 hardware (phone) that would have cost millions in the 80’s, hundreds of thousands in the 90’s, and definitely over a thousand in the 00’s is a good indicator.

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

#242

Post by ivanche » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

wcarss wrote: post #143

bradleyjg wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The point is precisely that neither of them is an outlier within their respective time -- they are normal people who want "normal" housing: i.e. just enough to raise a family in. The parents born in the 30s-50s could largely afford to purchase homes large enough to raise a family in, but far fewer people born in the 70s-90s will be able to do the same.

This is highly dependent on society/nation standards. I grew up in a 750 sqft apartment (family of 5). My wife grew up in a 440 sqft (family of 4). Now I consider 250 sqft/person to be a palace, but in the US it's probably considered unlivable.

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

#243

Post by WillPostForFood » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

usefulcat wrote: post #195

shortandsweet wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can find cheap housing, the problem is it's all in places where most people don't want to live. For example, Detroit, or any of thousands of small towns all over the US. Not picking on Detroit, it's just an obvious example of a large city that used to have a much larger population.

There is a lot of cheap housing in places that people are willing to live, but people need a push to change. Allowing work from home, schools, and lockdowns have been helping provide the push. Most cities have reasonable housing prices, it is just distorted by a few areas which have become extremely unaffordable.

Detroit is an interesting example. People did want to live there, but as the jobs declined, so did the city. If jobs can come back, the city can come back.

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

#244

Post by keiferski » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

carapace wrote: post #228

keiferski wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Cold War seems to have evaporated entirely from the collective imagination. For nearly half a century, people had a not unreasonable expectation that a nuke might end the world at any moment. Prior to that, you had WW2, the Depression, WW1, slums and brutal industrial factory jobs and before that mostly subsistence farming. The idea that life today is so precarious and difficult is absurd. We just aren’t used to…

The Cold War is still going on. We are still at risk of nuclear destruction. Not only are the old weapons still around but we are making new ones for some crazy reason. (Check the Doomsday Clock, I'm not the only person who has noticed that atomic war is still threatening this planet.) You have to take the long view: For approximately a million years we lived in very stable societies (as judged by the artifacts and a…

You are dramatically underestimating the difficulty of hunter gatherer life.

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

#245

Post by newsclues » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

shortandsweet wrote: post #185

rsync wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US anyway) is highly dependent on population growth." I came to this discussion ctrl-f'ing for "deflation" and while I got zero hits, your comment is close enough ... I will abstract one level deeper and rephrase what you said as: "Much of the financial system is highly dependent on economic growth." There continues to be fervent discussion of the results of QE over…

Why do you feel we're living in deflationary times?

Exactly. Just because tech is cheaper doesn’t mean food or my cost of living has decreased.

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

#246

Post by 2lwxxtj » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

rimiform wrote: post #229

opwieurposiu wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not want to have kids. Then one day I realized that for the past 3 billion years my ancestors had been passing the torch. I was not going to be the one to let down the team. I felt a duty to give my genes a chance to fight it out in darwin's cage match. I can not guarantee my genes will win, but if I fail to reproduce I guarantee they will lose. Looking back, I am not sure this justification makes any sense, bu…

Kids might make your life better, but they probably would have been better off had you stuck to your plan of not having them.

I get the impression that you are not very happy in life.

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

#247

Post by tenacious_tuna » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

nathancahill wrote: post #110

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…

A different environmentalist worldview that I was raised with (as one of four kids of environmentalist parents): Kids raised with an environmental mindset will have a larger positive impact than having fewer or no children. Their impact will outweigh their environmental footprint.

I’m curious how the logic works for that. I’ve always assumed that there’s effectively no way for an individual human to net-negative their own emissions/energy consumption/whatnot, just because of the sheer amount of material they need/use/consume (at least, in a Western society). A few outliers (Greta Thornberg?) may be able to effect sufficient policy to counteract their own environmental impact, but in the general case I don’t see how raising a kid with a strongly environmental-conscious mindset is at all better than just... not having a kid.

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

#248

Post by beaconstudios » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

nineplay wrote: post #238

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…

> prop up the status quo. > play to the confirmation bias of their audience I wonder how much overlap their is between the two. It seems to me that lately, if anything, the media pushes the narrative that the status quo is hopelessly corrupt in order to confirm to their audiences conformation bias. People on all sides of the political spectrum are eating up stories about who's to blame, whether it's the government or…

It gets interesting when the status quo becomes "everything is corrupt, including the status quo". See also: selling of expensive anticapitalist clothing, revolution as a brand, etc. Self referentiality and the emptying of meaning from symbols is an important symptom of postmodernism.

> People on all sides of the political spectrum are eating up stories about who's to blame, whether it's the government or the billionaires or probably, more typically, both with the assumption that whatever both are doing is at the expense of the common man.

I'm hoping that the dam breaks and systems theory and postmodernism drive a new cultural revolution, but I'm not holding my breath.

The truth is usually that bad things happen because of unintended consequences of systems behaviour, not because of conspiracy, but to look for an agency behind these things is what people tend to do.

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

#249

Post by ryder9 » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

lurquer wrote: post #241

shortandsweet wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you feel we're living in deflationary times?

Don’t mean to butt in, but personally, the fact that I’m typing this on a piece of $300 hardware (phone) that would have cost millions in the 80’s, hundreds of thousands in the 90’s, and definitely over a thousand in the 00’s is a good indicator.

that's economies of scale and manufacturing momentum, nothing to do with deflation

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

#250

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

engineer_22 wrote: post #134

sn41 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Amish are fleeing high land prices in Pennsylvania. There is development of a sort.