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

nytimes.com

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

#251

Post by globular-toast »

opwieurposiu wrote: post #217
ianai wrote: post #41

This is probably mostly covid related. But I personally don’t even consider kids. Kids are a life long commitment. I’d only make that commitment if I felt long term stability or at least optimism. Austerity and cynicism dominate the US right now though. It’s a recipe for strife, struggle, and things that rip families and countries apart. It doesn’t have to be this way in the US.

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…

Your ancestors were just fucking without contraception. They weren't trying to "pass on the torch" or anything silly like that.

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

#252

Post by boh »

agent008t wrote: post #205
rsync wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US anyway) is highly dependent on population growth." I came to this discussion ctrl-f'ing for "deflation" and while I got zero hits, your comment is close enough ... I will abstract one level deeper and rephrase what you said as: "Much of the financial system is highly dependent on economic growth." There continues to be fervent discussion of the results of QE over…

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.

Having things cost more isn't an issue if the economy grows at relatively the same rate as the nation's money supply. For the economy to be considered inflationary, the money supply has to outgrow economic growth. The OP is making the argument (at least how I interpret it) that economic growth has been stagnant, and that the money supply hasn't been effectively put to work in the real economy. The US inflation rates are more a reflection of central bank activity vs the actual economy (which is deflationary).

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

#253

Post by samr71 »

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.

Such doom and gloom! You really believe the future is gonna be so bad that children would be better off not existing at all?

The world has huge issues, sure, but it's still far better to be alive now than any time in human history. The only way the future could be worse is if this idea becomes mainstream and the prophecy self-fulfilling.

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

#254

Post by conductr »

keiferski wrote: post #199
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.

The Cold War seems to have evaporated entirely from the collective imagination. For nearly half a century, people had a not unreasonable expectation that a nuke might end the world at any moment. Prior to that, you had WW2, the Depression, WW1, slums and brutal industrial factory jobs and before that mostly subsistence farming. The idea that life today is so precarious and difficult is absurd. We just aren’t used to…

> We just aren’t used to difficulty

This is it absolutely. We can’t even fully understand how easy our lives are. I’m an adult with mouths to feed, yet both my wife and I barely know how to cook. And that’s only our biggest problem assuming we have access to food. We certainly have no clue how to procure food outside of retail.

This is part of what worries me for my kids. It’s been so easy, the equilibrium is more difficult. As we know from covid, weather events, etc our whole way of life is a fragile house of cards.

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

#255

Post by fullshark »

theNJR wrote: post #96

This study seems relevant https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023121996854 > Fewer young adults are engaging in casual sexual intercourse now than in the past, but the reasons for this decline are unknown. And this recently discussed article https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/opinion/sunday/endocrine-... > Scientists are concerned by falling sperm counts and declining egg quality. Endocrine-disrupting chemic…

Table 2 has several hypothetical factors that seem more likely culprits

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

#256

Post by motohagiography »

shortandsweet wrote: post #165
motohagiography wrote: post #64

Birthrates are a powerful, but lagging/post-hoc indicator of public policy effects. It's worth noting that we tend to associate high birthrates with poverty and negative social outcomes. Except, when rates are low we (western countries) use immigration from high-birthrate societies to shore up the population replacement rate, as the article notes. When you look at who is having kids in the US and Canada, the families…

I don't understand your view that population growth is required to manage debt. Isn't it inflation that reduces the future value of such debts?

Population growth ostensibly creates economic growth, which generates tax receipts to pay down public debt. We're about to hit a wave of massive inflation, which rewards asset owners and punishes workers and savers.

Further, I used to think that millennials were poorer than they think they are, but then it clicked they absolutely understand, and that's why they behave exactly like the poor people they subconsciously recognize they in fact are.

If you took the traditional criticisms of how the poor manage their lives you'd get things like, a lack of long term planning, blowing money on gaudy status signalling to attract other poor partners or mates, a temporary and transactional attitude to work, lots of unsecured high interest debt, hyperbolic reactions to perceived slights, superstitious beliefs, extreme promiscuity, isolating and sabotaging people who make their own way as not being authentic, a lot of people would unironically say those are racist and classist stereotypes, without seeing that they accurately describe the lives of ostensibly middle class white millennials.

They know they're poor and they're acting like it, and they have less hope than policymakers imagine. Inflation wouldn't make a difference because they don't have any savings, and they don't have assets, it's just another force they're subject to.

"So we drink and dance and screw, because there's nothing else to do..."

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

#257

Post by tenacious_tuna »

treis wrote: post #161
logshipper wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could not agree more. Whereas historically having kids used to be a "social" decision in various respects, it has now become a socio-economic decision for the reasons you point out. If anything, I would argue that the economic shock of the pandemic (aside from the horror stories you hear from WFH parents who have kids) and the inequality it has exposed in our financial systems has cemented the idea for a lot of mid…

It was always a socio-economic decision. Kids were your retirement plan before we came up with things like 401ks.

This is a very interesting perspective to me, because I know it’s relatively common in non-Western (or maybe just non-American?) cultures that parents move back in with their kids when they get old, or more generally that extended familial units are far more cohesive than they are in the States.

....Which then means your extended family (and own children) are indeed a ‘retirement plan’, because the expectation is that they’ll be around to support you when you’re unable to support yourself.

But the intensely individualistic American lifestyle doesn’t lend itself to that thinking very well, so there’s less incentive for folks to have kids for their own interest.

(Indeed, as a mid-20s couple, we’re more often told the ways in which children _limit_ the lives of the parents, rather than augment them.)

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

#258

Post by gautamcgoel »

ldbooth wrote: post #100
ploika wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much more of the decrease in the past century is due to increased access to education and full time employment for women, increased availability of contraception, and decreasing child mortality.

That is tied to the changing of jobs as well. Jeremy Diamond has a lot to say bout this in Guns,Germs,and Steel. My grandfather was raised on a farm, where at the age of 16-18 he was fully employed without a college education or debt. Today, parents plan their families with a view toward paying for college. Corporations own the housing stock and get between people and equity, pushing up the cost of housing. It's so m…

It's Jared, not Jeremy.

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

#259

Post by gruez »

carapace wrote: post #228
keiferski wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Cold War seems to have evaporated entirely from the collective imagination. For nearly half a century, people had a not unreasonable expectation that a nuke might end the world at any moment. Prior to that, you had WW2, the Depression, WW1, slums and brutal industrial factory jobs and before that mostly subsistence farming. The idea that life today is so precarious and difficult is absurd. We just aren’t used to…

The Cold War is still going on. We are still at risk of nuclear destruction. Not only are the old weapons still around but we are making new ones for some crazy reason. (Check the Doomsday Clock, I'm not the only person who has noticed that atomic war is still threatening this planet.) You have to take the long view: For approximately a million years we lived in very stable societies (as judged by the artifacts and a…

>(Check the Doomsday Clock, I'm not the only person who has noticed that atomic war is still threatening this planet.)

AFAIK in recent years it's only moving forward because of other man-made calamities (eg. climate change), not because of atomic war.

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

#260

Post by deelowe »

shortandsweet wrote: post #185
rsync wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US anyway) is highly dependent on population growth." I came to this discussion ctrl-f'ing for "deflation" and while I got zero hits, your comment is close enough ... I will abstract one level deeper and rephrase what you said as: "Much of the financial system is highly dependent on economic growth." There continues to be fervent discussion of the results of QE over…

Why do you feel we're living in deflationary times?

Because we are. Without taking action to curb it, the US will start to see deflation take hold. This is due to an overall aging demographic who are beginning to leave the workforce, an overall increase in savings/investment across the population, lowered rates of consumption, the younger demographic having less children, higher rates of education and on and on.

This has already begun to in both Germany and Japan. In the former, they've been able to curb things through government intervention. Japan on the other hand has really struggled.

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