We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by WillPostForFood » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

brandmeyer wrote: post #215

agent008t wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Inflation can be easily created - just create more dollars and credit them to people's bank accounts; you will soon see all kinds of prices going up.

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.

2008 policies wasn't that effective at putting money in people's pockets though. 2020 was more effective, but probably to early to tell if it is inflationary until lockdowns go away and people have more options to spend?

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

#232

Post by bonestamp2 » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

usefulcat wrote: post #195

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?

You can find cheap housing, the problem is it's all in places where most people don't want to live. For example, Detroit, or any of thousands of small towns all over the US. Not picking on Detroit, it's just an obvious example of a large city that used to have a much larger population.

That does make sense at least. The places with the least opportunity and/or desirability are going to be the cheapest.

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

#233

Post by Balgair » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

bcrosby95 wrote: post #221

Balgair wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd speculate this is because if you are either rich or poor you have stability in that your life circumstances aren't going to change that radically, In the U.S. this may be due not to 'stability', but Medicaid. To be clear, Medicaid benefits are a hot mess of bureaucracy. To paraphrase Voltaire: 'The point of Medicaid is to ensure that no two people are covered under the same set of rules'. That said, Medicaid co…

I've never heard of anyone paying $80k for a c-section out of pocket, and I know a lot of people that got them. Hell, my wife had to have 2 and the total bills were around $25k, and we paid around $2k out of pocket after insurance.

Again, I'm just going off of what google returned to me about the area where I live. The costs are going to vary wildly from state to state.

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

#234

Post by agent008t » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

brandmeyer wrote: post #215

agent008t wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Inflation can be easily created - just create more dollars and credit them to people's bank accounts; you will soon see all kinds of prices going up.

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?

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

#235

Post by threwawasy1228 » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #146

yortpyperty wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a new father, I share this perspective. To get an anecdotal sense of our financial struggle, we have 2-4x the net worth that my parents when they were our age, but cannot afford the same house that I grew up in and doubt we ever will.

But why would you expect to be able to afford the same house even with higher net worth? I mean, my folks bought a house I can afford either but when they bought it, it was on the edge of the city, not a desirable area in a 2nd tier city. That’s why it was cheap. Now it’s in a historic neighborhood, highly desirable in a city where everyone wants live. I could afford a house similar to the one they bought in terms of…

Show me an affordable house in on the edge of NYC in the "undesirable" neighborhoods. Even if you pick neighborhoods past where subway lines end (a very undesirable quality for city property to have) that also happen to be high crime areas it is still too expensive for anyone to purchase. Like two examples look at New Lots/East New York and South Ozone Park/Jamaica. Both fit my description above, they are at the very edge of subway access, and are high crime areas, and both are too expensive for normal middle class people to buy property in.

Contrast this with great people I've met who are ~60 now, who just stumbled into the east village/alphabet city in the 1980s in their mid-20s and bought up cheap houses while bumming around paycheck to paycheck. What area of NYC or the valley can I do that in now? If the answer is none, and you can't point me to a city in the midwest or south where buying up cheap affordable property IS going to turn me into a multimillionaire when I'm ~50 what does that mean for our growth/stagnation culturally and as a country? This is the difference, there is no place that even has the faintest whiff of a city that is about to take off where such gains would even be possible.

In other countries that have similar issues in Europe, where a lot of cities are unbelievably expensive there are two solutions that you see a lot. One is that it is culturally common to live with your entire extended family and not be able to afford a house, and the second is welfare or new home ownership incentives that make it more viable. "Rugged Individualism" in American mindsets and cultures makes both options seem untenable but clearly we have to adapt.

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

#236

Post by JasonFruit » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

notsureaboutpg wrote: post #149

Teever wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that they didn't think like this but that they couldn't. Thanks to readily available and affordable birth control individuals have much more freedom to make reproductive choices that benefit themselves. What those individual freedoms do to society as a whole is another issue but it is entirely within the ability of western governments to increase birthrates through policy. The fact that they don't is most in…

This isn't true. There were ancient, relatively effective methods of birth control. And if you really couldn't care for kids they became orphans. Also with larger extended families and closer knit societies many people would "gift" their kids to others who were barren. 5 out of my mother's 15 cousins were adopted (without their parents dying).

Hey, you're dead, though I'm seeing a lot of perfectly fine comments from you that contribute valuable things to discussions. You might want to do something about that.

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

#237

Post by scatters » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

r3drock wrote: post #191

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?

One explanation is rising amounts of space per person, the apartments are just getting bigger.

And decreasing household size.

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

#238

Post by nineplay » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

beaconstudios wrote: post #91

yesenadam wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the mainstream media is, by definition, normative" ELI5 please? or, you know, 10ish.

sure thing - so the idea is that the mainstream media exists to prop up the status quo. Not in the sense that it was invented for that reason, but the incentives at play force the media to essentially play to the confirmation bias of their audience in order to be competitive. Given that the media also pretends to present an objective truth (the idea of objective truth is also a very modernist ideal, but I don't want…

> prop up the status quo.

> play to the confirmation bias of their audience

I wonder how much overlap their is between the two. It seems to me that lately, if anything, the media pushes the narrative that the status quo is hopelessly corrupt in order to confirm to their audiences conformation bias.

People on all sides of the political spectrum are eating up stories about who's to blame, whether it's the government or the billionaires or probably, more typically, both with the assumption that whatever both are doing is at the expense of the common man.

I'm not trying to imply that those stories are accurate or inaccurate, just that they are the stories you see rising to the top of reddit or FB or other social platforms as proof of what the poster believes.

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

#239

Post by carapace » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

cat199 wrote: post #216

carapace wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not even remotely true. The vast majority of humans had very very stable futures. Like tens of thousands of years stable. Civilization as we know it is very very recent and unstable.

> That's not even remotely true. I beg to differ - when's the last time you heard of a famine or major war in the 1st world? (same cannot be said of elsewhere, it is true)

> when's the last time you heard of a famine or major war in the 1st world?

Does what we're doing (I'm Team USA) in the Middle East count?

In re: expectations of a stable future and the pros and cons of modern civilization, in the USA more people have died in car accidents than in all the wars we've fought.

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

#240

Post by conductr » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

rimiform wrote: post #229

opwieurposiu wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Kids might make your life better, but they probably would have been better off had you stuck to your plan of not having them.

Not existing is better than existing? Suicide rates should be 99% then right, because if you’re not a 1%er it’s not worth living.

That said, I do fear my kid will live to see something we’ve made apocalyptic movies about. Hell, we all might.