331–340 of 1001 posts
Why do we obsess over growing everything all the time?
we have a diseased misanthropic culture. i dont know where it came from but its existential.
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In general the “housing is too expensive” people mean “I looked at every available house in both San Francisco and New York City, and didn’t find anything cheap!”
That's what it feels like to me. Hey I checked all the houses in a jet set fart sniffing town and there's nothing!
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Free childcare makes it so much easier. Can’t imagine leaving 80% of my salary at the daycare, but some in the UK do that.
My wife worked in several daycares in her early 20s, including an extremely expensive "Bright Horizons" location in a very affluent area. Even premium daycares provide inferior care to infants and young toddlers versus parental/family care. The economics of a business being in charge of your child demand this. Something that shocked her was at this super expensive daycare she worked at, the infants were basically giv…
If productivity gains had ever filtered down to the population instead of being frittered away by the wealthy in orgies of creation and destruction, it would be easy to afford a population decline. Productivity went up 90% since 1979, and pay went up 30%. We could support 2x the ratio of retirees to workers as 1979 at the same level of comfort. Instead, we build huge houses (for wealthy people) and tear them down, an…
Why would you expect income increases to track productivity gains?
While economic concerns may be worsening the issue - I don't think they're the root cause as many would like to say.
I think the root cause is that we have outsmarted our biology. Once you give people education on the risks of sex and pregnancy, a focus on consent, easy access to contraceptives, knowledge of the responsibilities of child-rearing, and a world of other activities and pursuits - they simply stop having children at or above replacement rate.
Once given the knowledge and choice, humans do not have enough children to sustain a population.
No one wants that answer because it means we can't just blame it on [[CURRENT_PROBLEM]]. And it means there are no real 'solutions'.
People in their 20's will see peak world population in their lifetime. It will be fascinating to see how society changes over the decades that follow that.
I like to hang out on fertility twitter. It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources. They're all looking for the recipe to get peopl…
What do you make of the birth rates being much higher and stable among married couples, and of the birth rates among women in their 30s increasing? These don't really correspond to your take.
This is the number one reason for the decrease in fertility. Unplanned pregnancies are becoming a thing of the past.
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If you want to punch up try aiming higher than the upper-middle class. Other countries have MRIs and drugs as part of universal healthcare.
Ya but those countries also do not enjoy private health insurance and for-profit care providers. The ability to purchase shares in both the hospital that is treating you and the company that authorizes your treatment is a uniquely american priviledge.
I don't think anyone enjoys them per se.
Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth plans. Not only did many of my neighbors lose their jobs, but others are simply fearful of living their lives. We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might ju…
I certainly don’t agree with the things the administration is doing, but this seems like just hysteria. You are putting off your family growth plans because they might deport a theoretical future undocumented nanny? It is strange to me how generalized partisan fear has become.
When armed men can take you out of your home or your car and whisk you away without a judicial warrant and without due process, it is very reasonable to be afraid.
The primary cause of low birth rates is that society does not value children. Sure we talk a big game, everything is 'for the children' obviously. However, we publicly divest from schools, we invest in technologies that devalue humans and human labor. Growing up we make people believe they need to be millionaires just to not be swallowed up by the 9-to-5 meat grinder (this is true actually). It's no wonder young peop…
I've wondered if massive one time payments would be a solution. Like 100k for the first kid, 90k for the second, etc. Obvious moral hazard around having kids just for the payment, but if population decline is actually a big problem, it isn't necessarily worse. Fixing the rest of what you mentioned is obviously a good idea too, but what better way to increase society's value on children than giving them a literal valu…