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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

#431

Post by harambae »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #81
jokethrowaway wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree with you. People are overall better off because of technological improvement, but making a living is harder (wages didn't grow with prices, modern life has more costs attached to it). Also families are much more unstable nowadays, with divorces being common. Children growing up in stable families do better in several parameters, therefore instability has a ripple effect on society.

Divorces aren't rare, but they also hit a 50-year low last year. This wasn't a COVID outlier, it's the continuation of a trend. Lots of reasons for this that don't necessarily undercut your argument though (e.g., fewer people getting married in the first place). https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces

Did you scroll down to "Share of children who were born outside of marriage" on your link? Because it's way up.

Is it really better that divorces are down when people aren't even bothering to get married before having kids?

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

#432

Post by dragonwriter »

harambae wrote: post #431
HelloMcFly wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Divorces aren't rare, but they also hit a 50-year low last year. This wasn't a COVID outlier, it's the continuation of a trend. Lots of reasons for this that don't necessarily undercut your argument though (e.g., fewer people getting married in the first place). https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces

Did you scroll down to "Share of children who were born outside of marriage" on your link? Because it's way up. Is it really better that divorces are down when people aren't even bothering to get married before having kids?

> Is it really better that divorces are down when people aren't even bothering to get married before having kids

The value of stability in marriage is not just stability for kids, so yes.

That being said, the import of people having kids before getting married when is hard to assess without data on both the single vs. cohabiting parenting split (which the source has some reference to) and on the stability among unmarried cohabiting parental couples.

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

#433

Post by harambae »

tibbydudeza wrote: post #86
NDizzle wrote: post #4

Sorry for letting you down, everyone. Three is our limit!

Most middle class homes in our suburbs only have 3 bedrooms so that sort of caps kids to 2 or less. While we have a public schooling system if you want you kid into the "better" schools you need to pay extra for additional teachers to reduce the classroom ratio and facilities.

>Most middle class homes in our suburbs only have 3 bedrooms so that sort of caps kids to 2 or less.

I grew up in a family of 5 with 3 bedrooms. My brother and I shared a room (as did my parents). Bunk bed setup. I wouldn't consider myself poor growing up, it's a normal thing here.

In places like Hong Kong I think it gets quite a bit more extreme than this.

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

#434

Post by harambae »

t0bia_s wrote: post #358
jeffbee wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your observations of your own peer cohort are not informative. People get older, their friends get older, they all have babies at the same time. It appears to you like a baby boom but demographically it isn't data. We already have enough vital statistics data to know that 2020 has clobbered the birth rate in the US.

I'm not from US. I just share my personal view.

Where are you from?

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

#435

Post by dragonwriter »

tibbydudeza wrote: post #86
NDizzle wrote: post #4

Sorry for letting you down, everyone. Three is our limit!

Most middle class homes in our suburbs only have 3 bedrooms so that sort of caps kids to 2 or less. While we have a public schooling system if you want you kid into the "better" schools you need to pay extra for additional teachers to reduce the classroom ratio and facilities.

> Most middle class homes in our suburbs only have 3 bedrooms so that sort of caps kids to 2 or less.

No, it doesn't.

Heck, my wife’s parents had an urban studio apartment and two kids when she was growing up, so I don't think three more bedrooms than that provides a hard cap of two kids.

In fact, I lived in a suburban middle class home with three bedrooms and three kids, so I know it doesn't.

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

#436

Post by souprock »

tibbydudeza wrote: post #86
NDizzle wrote: post #4

Sorry for letting you down, everyone. Three is our limit!

Most middle class homes in our suburbs only have 3 bedrooms so that sort of caps kids to 2 or less. While we have a public schooling system if you want you kid into the "better" schools you need to pay extra for additional teachers to reduce the classroom ratio and facilities.

Most rooms can hold 3 bunk beds. If the bunk beds are only 2-level and you put two kids in the lower part, that comes to 9 kids per room. Babies can stay with you.

That's a 10x density increase. You can have 20 kids now. Since the kids leave home at about age 20, you can have 1 kid per year without ever stopping.

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

#437

Post by stevekemp »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #163
stevekemp wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really does depend where you live; we paid €250/month for daycare for our child from the age of 1 upwards. Even having a baby is very expensive in the USA, in terms of costs for the delivery, and the very very short maternity leave available to the majority of women. By contrast we had almost a year of paid leave, and paid something like €250 for a birth - which was mostly based around the cost of the room we ha…

How does the total fertility rate in your country compare to the US (1.78 in 2020), considering your country's pro-natalism policies?

1.41 births per woman (2018).

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

#438

Post by carapace »

refurb wrote: post #417
carapace wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You’re worried about the Doomsday Clock? You realize it’s just made up right?

North Korea isn't made up. The tension between Pakistan and India isn't made up.

And the Doomsday Clock was "just made up" by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists not a bunch of yahoos.

> In addition to Rabinowitch and Goldsmith, contributors have included: Morton Grodzins, Hans Bethe, Anatoli Blagonravov, Max Born, Harrison Brown, Stuart Chase, Brock Chisholm, E.U. Condon, Albert Einstein, E.K. Fedorov, Bernard T. Feld, James Franck, Ralph E. Lapp, Richard S. Leghorn, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Lord Boyd Orr, Michael Polanyi, Louis Ridenour, Bertrand Russell, Nikolay Semyonov, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, A.V. Topchiev, Harold C. Urey, Paul Weiss, James L. Tuck, among many others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_of_the_Atomic_Scienti...

Recognize?

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

#439

Post by 0xfaded »

mikem170 wrote: post #398
toss1 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> somehow make houses a toxic asset that cost exactly the value the provide in the form of a roof, and no more. Wow, that seems like a plan just bulging with answers to the question: "What Could Go Wrong?". Yikes Pretty clearly, rent control doesn't work either, it just creates two distorted markets. Homeless shelters don't work except for a few cold nights. Housing projects don't usually create good conditions eith…

Fiddling with the demand side causes problems. Better would be to lift the restrictions on supply, loosen the zoning laws. /Soapbox (not aimed at you): I've been reading zoning regulations in several localities. "Land of the free" my ass! More like control and conformity. It doesn't make sense to me why accessory dwelling units are not allowed in areas with high demand, or more duplexes, triplexes, and walkups. There…

Yep, building sufficient housing such that demand never rises above supply is a great way to keep housing representative of it's true value.

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

#440

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

hntrader wrote: post #379
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average life expectancies are very very deceptive. If lots of babies die (which was the norm for much of history), then it's gonna skew the mean massively downwards in a way that doesn't reflect the observed distribution, conditional on not dying as a baby. For instance, my understanding is that life expectancy at age 5 in both Africa and the UK are approximately equal.

"approximately equal" Right, because of basic modern medical care, which hunter gatherers don't have, often dying of problems with their teeth in their 20s, untreated infections, etc. And that's only one of a deluge of reasons as to why hunter gatherer life was much more difficult than modern life, even modern life in relatively poor countries. We can have a debate about whether life is easier in current South Sudan…

Sure, I'm not trying to disagree with you on the general point.

I'm just pointing out that the metric you used is pretty deceptive, like the average life expectancy for Romans was mid-30's, but that definitely wasn't the modal age of death (that would have been 0).

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