81–90 of 102 posts
Porn became easier to access. Men became less horny.
The men part doesn't really matter because birth rates are determined more by women's behaviors than anything else. And the paper does focus on women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44.
I think the cause is mobile phones giving more people exposure to social networks https://blog.est.im/2026/stdin-09 ppl are now having better options than raising a baby.
It gets me beffudled people actually think addiction to the virtual crack of social media is a better option.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
retire? Retiring only on Social Security is pretty tough, and $1.2M would provide like $4K/month income which on top of Social Security may allow for modest lifestyle in some low COL area. Wrt. the original post i'd agree with GP - better information/education is probably the most powerful birth control.
If you don't have children to inherit your fortune to, you can retire with full exhaustion of capital - that will yield way more than 4k$/month. Plus, if you don't have children there is not much holding you in the US - you can look at 2nd world countries. I.e. That money buys you a good retirement lifestyle in Mexiko, Brazil, Argentina etc. Or Vietnam, Thailand etc. if you are more into asia.
As a lone elderly person you're likely to be scammed and lose a lot of that capital near the end, without close people that like and support you. Elders are incredibly vulnerable to financial scams, specially those enabled by technologic means they are not familiar with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They compared AT&T users with an iPhone (the only place you could get an iPhone) to users with other carriers. Since people using other carriers also experienced 2008, it's not that.
Even if you control for age and wealth, the people who used iPhones in 2008, i.e. tech hipsters, are obviously different in tangible ways from the people who didn't use iPhones in 2008. It's not possible to prove causality from that.
Sheesh, when the addictive scrolling was scrolling through your emails and BB Messenger messages...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re just making up numbers
Actually raising a child costs more than $1.2M - just $20K/year invested in S&P500 over the last 20 years would have grown to more than $1.2M. Or those $20K/year could be spend on the child. And $20K/year is pretty low.
The future markets of a shrinking world, with consumer and worker cohorts dwindling year after year, will be very different from the last 20. This is paradoxal reasoning. Your're counting on going childless, while the market remains the same, other people keep having children to grow the market. But if everybody else does the same it doesn't work. The mean investment probably will give negative returns, in a fast shrinking world.
Here's an anecdote that today's kids are too young to have experienced, but their parents also weren't around for it. I was in middle school when the iPhone became popular. It was pretty sudden, so the social effect was obvious. Their parents probably bought them iPhones because they were addicted too, but it's different when you're in school. Since then have been hoping for a day when this gets undone.
What was this social effect like, according to your memory?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe some people realized that they could wait a few years and still have kids later, and others didn't think about having kids purely though the lens of evolutionary biology.
Before political correctness hit this area, doctors' observations led to classifying any first pregnancy past 25yo as geriatric. Healthcare progresses in some areas, some (like DS) are rigid to socially defined trends.
Porn became easier to access. Men became less horny.
Here's an anecdote that today's kids are too young to have experienced, but their parents also weren't around for it. I was in middle school when the iPhone became popular. It was pretty sudden, so the social effect was obvious. Their parents probably bought them iPhones because they were addicted too, but it's different when you're in school. Since then have been hoping for a day when this gets undone.