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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

#311

Post by toss1 »

agent008t wrote: post #234
brandmeyer wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was true, then the monetary policies of the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 pandemic would both have created consumer price inflation. They haven't. We've seen some asset price inflation instead. In effect we did create a bunch of dollars and credited them to people's home equity and mutual funds... where it just sat there doing a whole bunch of nothing to consumer prices and wages.

Take it to the extreme. What do you suppose would happen if every American household is credited with a billion dollars tomorrow?

Good thought experiment

Not nearly as much inflation as you might think

Most of everyone's newfound Billion would sit idle

The inflation would come from the $200K/year everyone was spending, as in if you just gave everyone $200K*expectedRemainingLifeExpectancy, you'd get the same consumer inflation

The extra billions would go into inflating assets.

The key concept here is velocity of money - really interesting concept that surprisingly (at least at first for me) falls out of the formulas in Econ1 classes. It does relatively equate to the actual turnover of a piece of currency, as in how many times does that George Washington bill change hands in the year after you spend it?

The key policy hack is to give help to people who will SPEND the money, not to banks and corps who will just park it in investments.

That gets the multiplier effect you need out of crashes.

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

#312

Post by wishysgb »

mgolawala wrote: post #299
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?

Home prices keep reaching new heights in some areas due to: 1) Migration. Immigration from outside the country, but also internal immigration within the country from less economically vibrant parts to more economically vibrant regions. 2) Falling interest rates keeping the monthly mortgage payment the same or lower despite higher principals 3) Expectations that the price trend for homes will continue to look like the…

In my opinion the thing that is leading most to inflation in addition to your points above, is that there are way too many land lords anyone who makes a little money goes and buys a house, increasing demand.

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

#313

Post by snarf21 »

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…

I agree with you. The only way out of this is via automation. If we have high enough automation, costs will drop despite lack of growth. In the end the world will be a stark 0.001% who own the automation and the flat 99.999% who subsist on leisure and boredom.

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

#314

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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?

I also would like to hear rsync's answer. But I'll make a guess:

The (world) population is no longer growing (much). But productivity growth hasn't stopped. The result is that stuff gets cheaper, that is, the same number of dollars buys more. That's deflation.

Worse, we've gotten to the point where many people have what they need - not necessarily everything they want, but most of what they need. (I'm not going to buy twice as much food if my salary doubles. I'm not going to drive twice as many cars. I'm not going to buy a house that's twice as big. I'd use almost all the money to pay off debt and to invest.) That makes it hard to create inflation in the basic stuff, because you can't make demand exceed supply.

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

#315

Post by dodobirdlord »

agent008t wrote: post #234
brandmeyer wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was true, then the monetary policies of the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 pandemic would both have created consumer price inflation. They haven't. We've seen some asset price inflation instead. In effect we did create a bunch of dollars and credited them to people's home equity and mutual funds... where it just sat there doing a whole bunch of nothing to consumer prices and wages.

Take it to the extreme. What do you suppose would happen if every American household is credited with a billion dollars tomorrow?

The economy isn’t a linear response system. Thought experiments about extremes tell us little or nothing about non-extreme areas of the domain.

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

#317

Post by Barrin92 »

opwieurposiu wrote: post #217
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.

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…

>I can not guarantee my genes will win, but if I fail to reproduce I guarantee they will lose.

It's probably not so wise to make decisions based on anthropomorphizing genes. They don't want anything other than to replicate, given that they're replicators and if they didn't they wouldn't continue to exist, that's all there is to it, it's a pretty meaningless affair.

I feel paying more attention to one's cultural legacy probably makes more sense than passing one's hair colour on.

That's not to say that having kids can't be fulfilling because many people get a lot of joy out of raising kids, but having attachment to a bunch of nucleotides seems kinda degrading to be honest

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

#318

Post by ChrisLomont »

boh wrote: post #142
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…

Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US anyway) is highly dependent on population growth. Many existing entitlements were created during periods of uncommon birth-rates with the expectation that the babies being born will grow and reproduce at the same rate as their parents. This growth hasn't materialized, and much of the existing growth can be attributed to immigrant inflows. Regardless of the environ…

>You have more economic growth if you give 1 million people $100 dollars (since they are more likely to spend it on goods/services) vs giving $100 million to one person (who will likely spend the bulk of their money on financial instruments).

The US spends the majority of it's Federal Budget on giving small amounts of money to the non-rich, to the order of trillions of dollars per year.

Also, when someone puts money into a financial instrument, that money usually flows immediately into productive use. Capital flows are attributed with about 30% of the economic growth over the last century, which is a huge increase in quality of life, especially for the most poor.

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

#319

Post by 015a »

willcipriano wrote: post #290
brandmeyer wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was true, then the monetary policies of the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 pandemic would both have created consumer price inflation. They haven't. We've seen some asset price inflation instead. In effect we did create a bunch of dollars and credited them to people's home equity and mutual funds... where it just sat there doing a whole bunch of nothing to consumer prices and wages.

Thought experiment: You print a trillion dollar bill and throw it in a underground vault. You look around. "Hey no inflation" so you print some more. You keep this up for a while. Years pass and someone finds the vault and begins to spend the money inside, what happens? Right now much of that printed money is sitting in stocks and bonds, what happens when that is no longer a great place to be? What if those dollars d…

Exactly this; the Fed has been printing like crazy, but the new money has relatively low velocity. Velocity is required for inflation, not just the money itself.

Look at stock market prices of the past ten years; its the largest bull market in US history. The US Dollar isn't getting inflated by the printing; the stock market is.

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

#320

Post by michaelt »

beaconstudios wrote: post #138
yesenadam wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I have to explain something to people who don't know all the specialist terms, I like to state things in terms of concrete real-world examples.

After all, I can think of several concrete interpretations of "propping up the status quo" that are pretty different.

For example, perhaps you think the media's gossip coverage props up the status quo by making already-famous people more famous.

On the other hand, maybe you're arguing that media brands are all owned by Jeff Bezos types, and they prop up the status quo by denying airtime to eating the rich and overthrowing capitalism.

Or you could argue that Fox News tells its viewers what they want to hear and every other media outlet does the same; and what all readers want is the status quo reinforced.

Or perhaps you see propping up the status quo in the media's attempts to be 'unbiased' in political reporting, like when one party says X should be higher and they find someone from the other party to say X should be lower.

Perhaps you're thinking of newspapers' comment sections, where newspapers hire pundits with political opinions that their readers will find right on.

Maybe you see the latest twitter storm is the current status quo, and reporters who follow such things as helpless to do anything but chase the latest trends to get clicks.

Perhaps you see 'propping up the status quo' in the area of broad, unquestioned ideas like love of country, the flag, mom and apple pie.

Maybe you feel reporters are too credulous when listening to politicians, and they're propping up the status quo every time they take someone in government at their word, or fail to point out when someone contradicts themselves.

Perhaps you see the media as a smokescreen, distracting people with low-impact high-emotion issues like who can use which toilet to distract people from The Real Issues.

It's hard for people to know if they agree with you, as some of those interpretations are a lot more radical than others.

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