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The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

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Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#31

Post by kypro »

> No obvious policy or economic factor can explain much of the decline.

I mean, if people literally can't afford to have kids what do we expect to happen to the birthrate? I want kids more than anyone I know yet realistically I'm never going to have them. I'm 33 now and like most people in their early 30s I'm no where near in a stable enough position to raise kids. I mean who the hell even owns a home Here in the UK there's a very clear trend – if you work for a living you don't have kids because you have neither the time, space, or money to do so. However most of my family has lots of kids but that's because in UK you get a free home and living expenses paid for for choosing to have kids instead of working. Realistically this is the only way a working class person is able to "afford" a place of their own and have kids because you just can't do it on a salary of £25,000.

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#33

Post by marginalia_nu »

pjc50 wrote: post #12

The other day someone was complaining about too many people in the housing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35962521 The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, th…

Having children requires an element of hope, of faith in a bright the future. If you're convinced of nothing but dark days ahead, bringing children into the world would be a cruelty.

Media messaging, especially on social media, has gotten extremely dark and catastrophic. Looking at the screen you'd think the sky was falling several times every day. If global warming isn't doing us in, the nazis are literally back for real this time, or putin is hatching schemes, or there's the new Tau Ceti VI strain of Covid, or delayed side effect from the vaccines, or vikings on capitol hill, or race riots, or police brutality, or inflation, or deflation, or financial crisis, or public debt, or forever chemicals, or mass surveillance, or xi jinping, or killer bees, or vanishing bees, or microplastics, or actual space aliens. Et c.

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#34

Post by dumpsterdiver »

pjc50 wrote: post #12

The other day someone was complaining about too many people in the housing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35962521 The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, th…

> Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?

Why would they want more housing? That would only devalue their rental properties.

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#36

Post by scotty79 »

jphoward wrote: post #17
atemerev wrote: post #5

I don't understand why this is a problem. We are moving through demographic transition, as the world reaches its carrying capacity for human populations. So, we are safe from overpopulation crisis, from future unemployment crises, etc.

It's a problem when it happens suddenly because you end up with a 'top heavy' age distribution. The elderly pensioners:young earners ratio explodes and society security/national insurance cannot afford healthcare/pensions etc. This is compounded by what was (until recently) a steady increase in life expectancy. The really frustrating aspect of this is pensioners, who have traditionally huge voter turnouts during elec…

This is only disturbing for people who think human work creates the economic value we need. While in reality most of our economic value is created by machines. We don't feel it because it's mostly captured by billionaires so it seems that we still need to work as much as we used to.

So the future with less workers is just a future with poorer billionaires and they don't like that which explains why all the media owned by them are trying to scare us about againg population scenario.

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#37

Post by albertgoeswoof »

pjc50 wrote: post #12

The other day someone was complaining about too many people in the housing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35962521 The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, th…

> Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it?

This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false. People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more. As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date.

USA actually has an advantage here as population growth decline is lower than most other developed nations (eg most EU states, Japan, Korea etc)

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#38

Post by Aeolos »

pjc50 wrote: post #12

The other day someone was complaining about too many people in the housing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35962521 The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, th…

Precisely this.

The incentives to have children are being removed one by one, it's becoming impossible to find affordable housing & education unless you are born rich, the social fiber is being eroded more and more with every passing year so the 0.1% can become even more filthy rich.

Add to that the younger generations being keenly aware of the deteriorating environment due to global warming (which older generations are happy to ignore), and is there really any wonder why birth rates are down across the board?

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#39

Post by pjc50 »

secretsatan wrote: post #27
pjc50 wrote: post #12

The other day someone was complaining about too many people in the housing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35962521 The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, th…

It seems the thinking is shifting to making them have kids whether they want to or not.

Yeah, the Blue State solution: bans on abortion, moving towards banning contraception again. While simultaneously making it legally risky for obstetricians to work there, and banning certain medical interventions, so the maternal mortality rate goes up. (Someone find the American life expectancy thread on here from a few months ago?)

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#40

Post by knallfrosch »

bboygravity wrote: post #11
dumpsterdiver wrote: post #8

> But something changed around the time of the Great Recession; the birth rate fell precipitously, and it did not recover when the economy improved. I'm going to guess that this is generational shock. That generation got burned hard, and now they are weary. I suspect when another generation passes they will forget.

Also "the economy improved" doesn't mean that people could afford a house or kids. It could just as well mean that companies and the 1 percent got way richer.

That's what 2,000 people tell Paul Krugman every time he tells them 'the economy is fine' in his New York Times column. It's quite entertaining to watch, altough troubling. He's smart, he gets a lot of direct feedback, and yet he doesn't understand it at all.

Put simply, the economy isn't "working" when people can afford less food by the month, renting gets harder by the week, used cars are double as expensive, new cars are unavailable and building a house is nothing more than a dream that we inherited from previous generations.

Krugmann just thinks Americans are stupid: "You don’t want to say that Americans are stupid"

See: Why Are Americans So Negative About the Economy? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/opinion/americans-negativ...

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