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Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

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Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#21

Post by asdsa5325 »

kanox wrote: post #13

Correlation is not causation. Low birth rates and high home values are both also highly correlated to education and women in the workforce and high income and economic growth and trendy hipster bars and many other nice things. Picking just two items and claiming that "people don't have children because homes are expensive" is not very enlightening at all.

Literally from the article:

> As a further caveat, the correlation observed here is by no means proof that home value growth causes fertility declines. One alternative explanation could be the possibility that there is clustering into certain counties of people with careers that pay well enough for expensive homes but make it difficult to have children before 30; this could cause both trends observed in the chart above. There are many other confounding factors that could explain this relationship as well, such as the possibility that cultural values or the cost of child care varies across counties with some correlation to home values.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#22

Post by nostrademons »

Robotbeat wrote: post #17
mattigames wrote: post #3

With the rapid destruction of soon-to-be-depleted resources and worsening climate change I argue that "Baby Recovery" is a very misleading titling of birth rate decline; the next generation will likely have a better quality of life if there are _fewer_ of them, not more.

That is ridiculous. Wages have never been higher, and there have never been more people. There are incredibly strong network effects from having more people (in cities, etc), and the benefit of international trade relies on more people to enable better specialization. All kinds of incredibly important markets, like semiconductors (including computer chips, solar power) and even mining rely on having a lot of people t…

It's not untrue, but it is nuanced.

Basically, Malthus was right for some people. More people tends to benefit capital and harm labor, because it increases both the potential labor pool and potential market size for capitalists & entrepreneurs but increases competition for laborers. It tends to benefit specialists and harm generalists, because specialists can more easily find buyers for their skills while generalists have to try harder to stand out from everyone else. It tends to benefit landowners (who already own part of the fixed supply of property) at the expense of renters (who must compete with more people for housing).

While I'd agree that more population is overall good for humanity (if only because there's more of it), what's good for humanity is not necessarily good for individual humans. However, since the groups that it is good for tend to be the groups that set the prevailing narrative, these distinctions usually get papered over.

There's a credible theory that Black Death lead to the Renaissance, because the depopulation of Europe allowed laborers to bargain for higher wages and kickstarted the growth of a permanent middle class. There's a bunch of resources on this if you google [black death lead to renaissance], but the Wikipedia page has a good overview:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#23

Post by cruzai »

kanox wrote: post #13

Correlation is not causation. Low birth rates and high home values are both also highly correlated to education and women in the workforce and high income and economic growth and trendy hipster bars and many other nice things. Picking just two items and claiming that "people don't have children because homes are expensive" is not very enlightening at all.

100% agreed with this, We know that prices of the home have been going up, we also know that employment is going up, so why not saying unemployment rate with that. This is what happens when you have a lot of positive results. You will have a bias, and this is a classic example of a highly biased study.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#24

Post by rz2k »

Bucephalus355 wrote: post #7
mattigames wrote: post #3

With the rapid destruction of soon-to-be-depleted resources and worsening climate change I argue that "Baby Recovery" is a very misleading titling of birth rate decline; the next generation will likely have a better quality of life if there are _fewer_ of them, not more.

I very much see what you’re saying and think a lot of current data backs up your view. I do want to point out that Thomas Malthus in the 1700’s had a very similar argument though and “overpopulation” was to then as “global warming” is today in some (only some) regards. At the very least, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “families are the platoons of society”. I never wanted kids, but as I got into my 30’s, you can fe…

Malthus had an interesting idea about some resources growing geometrically and others growing arithmetically. There wasn't real world data to back up the supposition. His conclusions seem to have been based on naive mathematical understandings, and misinterpreting processes that approximate logistic functions being at different stages of transitions. With changing marginal growth rates, even similar processes could appear to be fundamentally different from each other if they are in different stages.

Climate science in this century is based on mathematically sophisticated models, and beyond the comparative theoretical rigor, they have been shown to have good predictive power.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#25

Post by sandworm101 »

lkrubner wrote: post #20

From previous: " In nations in the West, an important limiting factor is the ability to get one’s own apartment. That is, the ratio of average male wage to average rent. In the USA, the happiest year for this ratio was 1958, when people were spending 22% of their income on rent, on average. Not by coincidence, this was the peak year of the Baby Boom. In some sense, it was the best year in history to be a young white…

>> which is why 1958 remains the peak year for teenage pregnancy in the USA.

There are plenty more factors impacting teenage pregnancy than the cost of rent. I also hesitate to talk about teenage pregnancy rates in any sort of positive light. There is a very fine line between a 18yo married to her "high school sweetheart" who has a great job, and an unwed 17yo highschool senior who, in 1958 society, had a very rough time. I'd suggest that the later was the more common.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#26

Post by knuththetruth »

Robotbeat wrote: post #17
mattigames wrote: post #3

With the rapid destruction of soon-to-be-depleted resources and worsening climate change I argue that "Baby Recovery" is a very misleading titling of birth rate decline; the next generation will likely have a better quality of life if there are _fewer_ of them, not more.

That is ridiculous. Wages have never been higher, and there have never been more people. There are incredibly strong network effects from having more people (in cities, etc), and the benefit of international trade relies on more people to enable better specialization. All kinds of incredibly important markets, like semiconductors (including computer chips, solar power) and even mining rely on having a lot of people t…

>Wages have never been higher, and there have never been more people.

Wages have essentially been flat for most workers since the 1970s[0]

>This zero-sum Malthusian thinking is not only untrue, but following it collectively will make us much, MUCH poorer and worse off.

I agree, but unless the US is willing to claw back wealth from the robber barons of our age, build a sustainable future with social services on par with other developed countries, people are going to respond to the tenuousness of their circumstances in this fashion.

[0] https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-wages-arent-growing-in-america

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#27

Post by asdsa5325 »

ekianjo wrote: post #12
plassma wrote: post #4

“Children are expensive”

They are expensive because we want them to be. We have never had so much disposable income and so few children in History.

You must be referring to this:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96

Note that the real definition of "disposable income" just means income after taxes. Since housing costs come out of disposable income, and housing costs have been increasing far faster than income, you are not actually on base.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#28

Post by jetrink »

sandworm101 wrote: post #25
lkrubner wrote: post #20

From previous: " In nations in the West, an important limiting factor is the ability to get one’s own apartment. That is, the ratio of average male wage to average rent. In the USA, the happiest year for this ratio was 1958, when people were spending 22% of their income on rent, on average. Not by coincidence, this was the peak year of the Baby Boom. In some sense, it was the best year in history to be a young white…

>> which is why 1958 remains the peak year for teenage pregnancy in the USA. There are plenty more factors impacting teenage pregnancy than the cost of rent. I also hesitate to talk about teenage pregnancy rates in any sort of positive light. There is a very fine line between a 18yo married to her "high school sweetheart" who has a great job, and an unwed 17yo highschool senior who, in 1958 society, had a very rough…

> I'd suggest that the later was the more common.

I doubt that was the case. According to the CDC[1], less than 15% of teenage births were to unmarried teenagers in the 1950s. In 1960, the birth rate for teenagers aged 15-17 was a quarter that of teenagers aged 18-19.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr49/nvsr49_10.pdf

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#30

Post by mattigames »

Robotbeat wrote: post #17
mattigames wrote: post #3

With the rapid destruction of soon-to-be-depleted resources and worsening climate change I argue that "Baby Recovery" is a very misleading titling of birth rate decline; the next generation will likely have a better quality of life if there are _fewer_ of them, not more.

That is ridiculous. Wages have never been higher, and there have never been more people. There are incredibly strong network effects from having more people (in cities, etc), and the benefit of international trade relies on more people to enable better specialization. All kinds of incredibly important markets, like semiconductors (including computer chips, solar power) and even mining rely on having a lot of people t…

Its disingenuous to only point out only the positive network effects of having more people and not negative ones such as:

- Global Warming (https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/32/2/150/1610588)

- Happiness level https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/06/the-price-of-happines...

- Pollution rates (along with cancer rates) https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-most-polluted-cities-in...

I never said the word "over-population" because such concept is so emotionally charged and too subjective; the threshold for over-population depends heavily in the amount of resources available and the ability (and willingness) to distribute them; the same number of people that is normal today may be over-population tomorrow depending on how much damage we do to our own resources in the next years due to climate change or other major negative issues with uncountable repercussions in human life.

Also we need to be talking numbers; does such positive network effects continue after 10 billion humans? 20 billion? 100 billion? Surely even in that optimistic theory there must be a limit.

BTW claiming that wanting less humans is anti-human is extremely disingenuous and probably an ad-hominem of sorts, e.g. its more pro-sharks to have 2 well-fed ones in an aquarium than 20 that will live starving lives.

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