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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

#271

Post by tenacious_tuna »

conductr wrote: post #240
rimiform wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're making a leap in OP's reasoning: they didn't say that for _currently existing_ people it's better to not be existing. I suspect the point is more that it will be better for future generations to limit the _size of_ future generations, lest we increase the amount of strain on the climate/energy production/water scarcity/etc.

I also think OPs reasoning has more to do with the considerations of inflicting the potentially post-apocalyptic future on those future generations: there is an arguable moral duty to ensure that whatever offspring you have will have a (generally) good life, and that if you aren't reasonably sure of that it's A Bad Thing to have said offspring.

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

#272

Post by abootstrapper »

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…

> When you look at who is having kids in the US and Canada, the families, (or specifically, women) who have 2 or more children are either exceptionally wealthy (90th+ pc) or exceptionally poor

Source?

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

#273

Post by solosoyokaze »

beaconstudios wrote: post #179
pjc50 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> creating competing spaces. Creating a competing space in which everyone agrees your norms are true is completely inadequate if that's not the space that policy gets made in. And within each country, there is effectively only one of those. It doesn't matter if you create a "competing space" in which black lives have equal worth to white ones if the police are operating in a very different one defined by "killology".…

Man, progressivism is so close to an ideology I could get behind, but it's like half a cup of postmodernism and a teaspoon of systems theory. I'm a glass deep on both. As an ideology you have correctly identified an inequity in treatment by law enforcement based on race, but the lack of systems theory and postmodern understanding leads you (as an ideology) to ascribe this to human perpetrators who actually want this…

> As an ideology you have correctly identified an inequity in treatment by law enforcement based on race, but the lack of systems theory and postmodern understanding leads you (as an ideology) to ascribe this to human perpetrators who actually want this to happen. I'm sure there are racist police out there, but systemic racism is not caused by racist individuals; its caused by the behaviour of systems (the justice system, systems around poverty, long term effects of previous explicitly racist policy). Until progressivism fully discards modernism and embraces postmodernism and systems theory, I don't believe it will be able to solve any of the problems it has identified.

Weren't all of those systems designed, implemented and enforced by individuals? Racist policy makers, racist voters... from a systems perspective, systemic racism is the function of individual racism aggregated over time.

If anything, it seems modern and not post-modern to extract racist individuals from systemic racism as they are part of and the origination of the systems themselves. It's treating humans as something outside of the system, which is a view I'd align more with modernism.

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

#274

Post by im3w1l »

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.

Ah that reminds me, we should not discount racism as a factor. Many would rather become debt slaves for life or forgo children than live cheaply around black people.

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

#275

Post by vp8989 »

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.

"where it just sat there doing a whole bunch of nothing to consumer prices and wages."

Your primary residence should be thought of as a consumption item, whether you rent or own. If homes cost more to buy or rent since the QE (and they do) then we absolutely have had consumer price inflation.

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

#276

Post by Dirlewanger »

carapace wrote: post #207
Dirlewanger wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, people need some fucking perspective. Yeah, things aren't too hot right now, but that's because all you do is consume the 24/7 newscycle and worry about what some nobody on Twitter is agonizing over about Disney's latest TV show. The world is the safest it's ever been. Aside from Covid, many massive killers of the past are no longer a problem. Our ancestors would be shaking their heads if they saw the pros…

I was reflecting just this morning how glad I am that I don't have children. (And I don't follow the 24/7 newscycle or use Twitter.) You want perspective? The Doomsday Clock is still set to 100 seconds before midnight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock > Aside from Covid ... Covid isn't the last virus. And the tools we use to fight it are also the tools we could use to make worse ones. (Every tool is also…

Doomsday Clock is a politically-driven relic from the Cold War era. We don't trust politicians to be experts on the climate, so why do we trust a bunch of scientists to be foreign policy experts?

I contend there's a lot of potentially existential threats out there, but to use it as a crutch for not having children is weak, especially when people still procreated through much worse times.

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

#277

Post by calebm »

globular-toast wrote: post #251
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…

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

Maybe not consciously, but what about subconsciously?

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

#278

Post by bradleyjg »

threwawasy1228 wrote: post #235
refurb wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1980s NYC did not have “the faintest whiff of a city about to take off”. That couple bought property in a crime ridden part of a crime ridden city. Tompkins Square Park was an open air drug market.

The equivalent today is a bad area of Detroit. I’m certain you can find something affordable there today. I doubt it will turn you into a multimillionaire, but if we were having this conversation in 1984 everyone would doubt buying in the East Village would get you anything other than mugged or shot.

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

#279

Post by wcarss »

bradleyjg wrote: post #261
ivanche wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is highly dependent on society/nation standards. I grew up in a 750 sqft apartment (family of 5). My wife grew up in a 440 sqft (family of 4). Now I consider 250 sqft/person to be a palace, but in the US it's probably considered unlivable.

Exactly. It’s not some fundamental biological fact that you can’t raise a family in fewer than 1500 sq. ft. of house and 1/4 an acre of property. That was just a cultural norm set in a particular time and place.

I don't understand what the value to you is here in arguing that we all ought to just settle for less. More space is preferable, better conditions are preferable, and we do have the capabilities to work toward these things for all humans.

The specific factors of post-WWII America may be unlikely ever to be repeated, but I can't agree that we should all settle for life as it was in the 1910s or earlier on the basis that that's simply 'how life is' -- the status quo is not an argument for itself.

The average (human, at least) life has improved substantially in the last few hundred years in some key ways (admitting that there are some ways it is likely worse). Even if the potential improvements to life track a sigmoid curve, there's no reason at all yet to think we've maxed it out, let alone gone beyond what's possible.

We can absolutely continue to improve, so it seems totally fair to identify and analyze causes, means, and paths to do so, i.e., recognizing "I cannot afford the same standard of life as my parents did" as something that ideally would be different, and discussing patterns of wage growth, economic trends, and policy decisions that might counteract that perceivable regression of quality.

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

#280

Post by ldbooth »

gautamcgoel wrote: post #258
ldbooth wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah thanks, touche!
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