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The window for great-grandmothers is closing

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Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#61

Post by [deleted] »

jncfhnb wrote: post #48
cacheyourdreams wrote: post #5

Aren't life expectancy at birth figures heavily skewed by infant mortality rates. I think this is quite a commonly misunderstood statistic for this reason. So while it's true that in the past a new born baby's chances of becoming a great grandparent were much lower than they would be today, that would mainly be due to the low chances of them ever reaching adulthood and becoming a parent at all, rather than the chance…

Pretty sure the probability of making it to adulthood has never been below 50% excluding war, plague, or famine (which were common, so hard to normalize)

[deleted]

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#62

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

binarymax wrote: post #2

I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties. That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.

There may be "many" people not thinking about it, but there are measurably and verifiably not plenty, which has a definition something like "more than enough". Fertility rates in western countries, including the United States, are below replacement level. There is a far more disturbing dystopia waiting for us than Idiocracy.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#63

Post by gmane »

cacheyourdreams wrote: post #5

Aren't life expectancy at birth figures heavily skewed by infant mortality rates. I think this is quite a commonly misunderstood statistic for this reason. So while it's true that in the past a new born baby's chances of becoming a great grandparent were much lower than they would be today, that would mainly be due to the low chances of them ever reaching adulthood and becoming a parent at all, rather than the chance…

I thought this as well, but I did a little research before responding, and it looks like even though this is broadly true, people still weren't living particularly long before the modern era. For example, in Ancient Greece, a man who lived to 15 would expect to live to 37-41 years, in Rome if a man made it to 20 they could expect to live to 60, in the late medieval if you made it to 25 you could expect to live to ~48 [0]. You still need to make it to 60 to be a great grandparent, assuming you and your kids are having kids at ~15 years of age (edit: and that might be a friendly assumption given how high infant mortality was).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#64

Post by keybored »

> It’s slightly paradoxical — in the past, I’ve thought about how since life expectancy is increasing, there probably will be more great-grandmothers. But on the other hand, people are having children much later too.

Apparently two or more independent variables create a paradox.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#65

Post by levocardia »

gampleman wrote: post #20
cacheyourdreams wrote: post #5

Aren't life expectancy at birth figures heavily skewed by infant mortality rates. I think this is quite a commonly misunderstood statistic for this reason. So while it's true that in the past a new born baby's chances of becoming a great grandparent were much lower than they would be today, that would mainly be due to the low chances of them ever reaching adulthood and becoming a parent at all, rather than the chance…

Exactly. While life expectancy from adulthood (say 20 yo) has increased (i.e. UK males have gone from expected average 60y to 80y between 1841 to 2011 [1]), it hasn't increased nearly as much as the life expectancy from birth (i.e. 33% vs 98% increase over that period). [1]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

The increase for a 40 year old is still nearly 14 years of extra life, though. That's a big difference.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#66

Post by ccppurcell »

Just a little point that the life expectancy given there is "at birth" and unless I'm mistaken, it's the mean. Which means infant mortality contributes enormously to this figure. It's a misconception that in the past you would only rarely see someone much older than 50. I'm not sure how this would affect the analysis. But it's worth bearing in mind. I'm sure there were plenty of great grandparents before 1900. That usage of great seems to stem from the 1500s. https://www.etymonline.com/word/great-grandfather#etymonline...

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#67

Post by ffitch »

I once read that the significant growth of life expectancy could be attributed to lowering rate of child mortality, and that life expectancy for adults has changed less dramatically. If that’s the case, the point that overall life expectancy going from 47 to 72 affected the “grandmother window” is probably inaccurate.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#68

Post by danbruc »

earthscienceman wrote: post #10
CalRobert wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, but for some reason pointing this out is considered massively classist in some quarters. I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation.

You see, the thing is, it's deeply classist. It's also misplaced outrage. The poors have been doing this for millenia and we still have a society that progresses rapidly and much of the heavy lifting that moves us forward is done by folks you and others here are denigrating. If they believe the things you disparage it's because the governments and systems that the "smart" and wealthy have created have utterly failed…

The poors have been doing this for millenia [...]

Why the poor? And is poor the correct label or is this just strongly correlated with the actual reason? In the past children were desirable as sources of additional income and for support at old age, is this still relevant? Otherwise it seems that you would want fewer children if you are poor because they obviously come with additional costs. Is it the cost of contraceptives or abortions instead of a deliberate choice? If it is not poverty directly but worse education because of poverty, how exactly would that work? How much education do you need to realize that additional children will cause additional costs? What other mechanisms are there? In the end it will probably be a mix of factors, but the phenomenon seems more complex than it looks like at first glance.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#69

Post by keybored »

binarymax wrote: post #2

I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties. That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.

I remember that scene. But I think it’s more about neurosis bias: thinking that there will ever be a perfect time to have children. Which never comes. So it just never happens. Contrast that with having children young. Maybe you might be financially worse off in the long run. But most people seem to make it work.

So if the goal is to have children eventually? The young parents win.

In any case. Shouldn’t people be a bit embarrassed to embrace such an upper-middle class sneerfest in current year? Idiocracy? Christ.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#70

Post by mschuster91 »

binarymax wrote: post #2

I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties. That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.

> While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties.

On average, birth rates have been shrinking virtually everywhere on this planet over the last decades.

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