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Basement Fertility

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Re: Basement Fertility

#141

Post by maxerickson »

moonchrome wrote: post #103
entropi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, imagine x couples, each of whom has 3 kids in their lifetimes. In 80 years, there are now 3x/2 couples. In 160, there are 9x/4. There are now 11 billion people. Every 150 or so years, having 3 kids roughly doubles the population. (A better model would be a birth/death process with a #kids distribution with a mean 3 and death age with a mean 80, but not necessary to make my point, I think.) This is exponantial gro…

Not everyone survives or has children - which is why I said 2-3 - it has to be above 2 for replacement, it's not a new concept - lookup replacement fertility rate

Above replacement is exponential growth.

Re: Basement Fertility

#142

Post by BirAdam »

jstarfish wrote: post #139
BirAdam wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just a Ponzi scheme due to population growth pressure and the old cashing out. It's also a Ponzi scheme because younger folks are literally paying for the older folks through taxation. Low interest rates also disincentivize saving while subsidizing the accumulation of debt, and spurring more investment into asset classes (land and stocks mostly). This creates a Ponzi like effect where in as long as people ke…

> because younger folks are literally paying for the older folks through taxation. This is symbiosis, not a scheme. Like them or not, the older folks literally built and/or paid for everything the young end up inheriting. The young are otherwise parasites.

Older generations also created a debt level in the USA (public and private) that the young will be burdened with. They created corrupt governments that waged horrifying wars around the globe. They built nuclear weapons that threaten the globe. They did a lot of good too, but I wouldn’t call it symbiosis.

Re: Basement Fertility

#143

Post by thelamest »

rossdavidh wrote: post #7

It would have been good to see an x-y plot of living with parents vs. fertility. Eyeballing the maps he showed, I don't see a great correlation. Scandinavia has mediocre fertility compared to the rest of Europe, but the lowest percentage living with their parents. Other nations like Greece do satisfy his hypothesis, but a real test would be to plot those two percentages on an x-y plot and see how well they correlate…

For more numerous and granular data points, Eurostat doesn’t seem to measure this below country level, however US Census does. At least, I can easily find maps and papers which use that reference, but not the exact data table quickly. I know I had to grep and visual grep IPUMS dumps with similar projects before.

In the meanwhile, I’m biased to buy the hypothesis and have reasonable trust in the studies Caplan quoted, but a graph would be properly convincing.

Re: Basement Fertility

#144

Post by throwaway48292 »

cgrealy wrote: post #97
antiverse wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing really inherently racist about it, or bullshit. Mass immigration is a serious subject matter, one that deserves scrutiny and ruthless questioning. Avoiding the questions by calling it racist doesn't make it go away. It's been around for a lot longer than 2010. It has been a popular subject matter in Europe for decades [1]. I guess someone just decided to finally put a more official, catchy title to it…

"mass immigration" != "great replacement" The "Great Replacement" specifically talks about this as being a deliberate plan by "wealthy elites", and again, is racist paranoid bullshit. If you're going to talk about a specific thing, you can't just generalise it to every concern around immigration. And while there are genuine concerns around immigration, like housing capacity, how to help migrants settle in, etc., most…

It is a deliberate plan by wealthy elites...

to outsource raising children to places that can do it for less & ensure competition for low-paid jobs stays high...

what difference does it make

Re: Basement Fertility

#146

Post by barry-cotter »

ismail wrote: post #41

A Typical WEIRD (western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic) finding. For much of human history children have been raised in multi-generational homes. Just being raised by parents is relatively new. I recall reading in a book [0] that proposes this as one of the reasons we have such an issue with mental health etc. with our children. This also seriously hampers learning as wisdom is not passed down. [0] free…

Just W. Northwest Europe has primarily been nuclear families for over 1,000 years. Education, industrialization, wealth and possibly democracy made them more like that but West of the Hajnal line has been like that for a very long time.

Re: Basement Fertility

#147

Post by bobthechef »

jstarfish wrote: post #137
fleddr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is striking in this development is the destruction of our social fabric. From African village model to the nuclear family is a massive step, made possible by the nation state. Arguably this impoverishes community/extended family life. The most extreme form can regularly be read in the news: somebody found dead in their home, undetected for weeks or months. But not even that is enough. Even within the scope of th…

While it has its issues, I'm not altogether convinced that the nuclear family is a bad thing. We seem to function best at tribal scale. Jokes aside, most family units are functional. Family scales well. Large-enough families invite dysfunction jokes, but they have a shared genetic interest. You can always coerce or compel family to do things like share resources or settle disputes against their own self-interest. Mor…

No post body was provided.

Re: Basement Fertility

#148

Post by barry-cotter »

monksy wrote: post #113

> best way to make large homes affordable is to allow the construction industry to build freely. No. Not even close. Once developers get into this, they always seek to achieve the highest price as possible. > Deregulation leads to low prices which leads to ample living space This is only true when there is desirable livable space, affordable materials to build the housing, cheap labor, and honest people who are doing…

> No. Not even close. Once developers get into this, they always seek to achieve the highest price as possible.

If only competition was possible, to drive down developers’ market power, so their economic profits were driven down. One might do this by allowing many developers to build, and making the factors of production going into making housing plentiful. One might make building tall buildings legal, or building densely, for example.

Re: Basement Fertility

#149

Post by jtsiskin »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #4
bombcar wrote: post #3

A huge difference is even a few generations ago, the "growing family" would be the one owning the house, and grandparents (their parents) would move in with them - now it's inverted; only the grandparents have a house or can afford one, and so the "growing" or potentially growing family is living with them. It doesn't seem as much a difference but it is a really big one.

If I were a woman, there is no way I would entertain the idea of having kids without my name on the title or lease of the house.

… why does gender affect it? As a man, you would be fine with it?

Re: Basement Fertility

#150

Post by monksy »

barry-cotter wrote: post #148
monksy wrote: post #113

> best way to make large homes affordable is to allow the construction industry to build freely. No. Not even close. Once developers get into this, they always seek to achieve the highest price as possible. > Deregulation leads to low prices which leads to ample living space This is only true when there is desirable livable space, affordable materials to build the housing, cheap labor, and honest people who are doing…

> No. Not even close. Once developers get into this, they always seek to achieve the highest price as possible. If only competition was possible, to drive down developers’ market power, so their economic profits were driven down. One might do this by allowing many developers to build, and making the factors of production going into making housing plentiful. One might make building tall buildings legal, or building de…

They're not going to build unless they can make a lot of profit on it.
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