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What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

derekthompson.org

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Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#671

Post by mensetmanusman »

superice wrote: post #612
mensetmanusman wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know how to use statistics to tell nearly any story though, and I would love to trust statistics… It has to do with unknown unknowns.

And I know how to tell any story, it's called lying. Whether you are lying with statistics or lying in a story does not matter. In the end it all comes down to whether you can validate what you've been told. Most people however will skip validation in favor of 'this sounds reasonable' and most people have a worse intuition for statistics than for stories. That's on them though, let's not blame statistics for that sho…

The point is that if you have over 100 correlates to assess a situation, any particular story you try to tell is probably a lie even with the best intentions.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#672

Post by Aeolun »

Larrikin wrote: post #581
Aeolun wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?

Human biology allows your body to get sick and die from bacteria and viruses, sometimes floating in the air. Human biology let's you get a cut on your hand and die from infection. That was a thing for most of history. Do you think it's weird we don't just let people suffer from those things as well?

You say that as if having children is a disease.

If you are old enough to have a child, you are very likely old enough to successfully raise one. Otherwise the human race wouldn’t exist.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#673

Post by MisterSandman »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #554
lisbbb wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a Dad really sucks, too--I'm unemployed at 52 at what should be the height of my career when my kids really need someone who is making money so help pay for college tuition and my wife has cancer, so save it how rough breast feeding is when breast feeding only last about a year or so anyways.

Good news is if your income is still low by the time they head to college, depending on the state, in-state tuition to a state college will be reasonable or free. If your income is higher by then, it'll probably be ok.

With the current US government, I would not count on the state subsidizing your tuition.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#674

Post by MisterSandman »

creato wrote: post #438
redeux wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only a fluke because we've allowed the resources that once enabled this period to accumulate at the top so that it's not feasible on a broad scale any more.

It was a fluke because the US was unscathed by a war that destroyed much of the industrial and productive capacity in the rest of the world, at the same time vast strides in technology were being made. The US worker had a worldwide monopoly on labor and innovation for 30 years.

As much as I’d like to agree with this, India was literally in the trenches of its own civil war and independence movement AND impacted by the world wars AND figuring itself out as a new country in the early 50s.

Yet Indian middle class was still very distinctly one-income driven.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#675

Post by acdha »

socalgal2 wrote: post #126
bdavbdav wrote: post #19

(Purely anecdotally, my own and my peers experience) We’re seeing educated people waiting longer in life to have children. Fertility drops, assistance from older generations drops, the village has gone, nursery and care prices are ridiculously high, support from the government (UK) is a bit of a farce if you’re earning anything more than a living wage in cities, the opportunity cost of a parent putting a (more develo…

Money is not the issue according to this from 4 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44529456 According to that the issue is culture. We, as a species, have effectively just changed into people who no longer want kids (on average). Changing culture is hard. Sure, every little economic reason might have been some small influence on that culture but fixing the monetary issues will not suddenly snap the culture…

> Money is not the issue according to this from 4 days ago

The article does not say that. In fact, it notes that money (and correlated housing) are significant, generous incentives have a positive impact, but most importantly they need better data because there are complex trade offs around opportunity cost which are inadequately captured by the available data.

> According to that the issue is culture.

This is a much stronger claim than the article makes, especially given their careful recognition of limits in the data, the global nature of the trend, and especially the interrelated nature of economic constraints and preferences. The speculation in your last paragraph aren’t discussed - they’re talking about things like how much people derive satisfaction from careers or the way people’s choices are influenced by their peers, which again are highly related to economic constraints (e.g. if housing costs are a major barrier, odds are that your friends are also affected and so you’re all having fewer kids later). They mention things like travel in the opportunity cost category, but that needs better data to tease out whether people are not having kids because they want to travel or whether people who have decided to delay/not have kids are making the much smaller financial commitment to have a vacation. There’s a lot of thoughtful discussion in that piece about teasing out the interrelated factors and it really highlights that there isn’t a single magic fix.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#676

Post by al_borland »

vjulian wrote: post #477
al_borland wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It worked for hundreds, or maybe, thousands of years. What we’ve been doing for just some decades is already leading to talks of population collapse. Maybe that way wasn’t wrong.

Sex was great back then? For women? Gays? Who? The point you make is backward-looking. I suggest we as a culture look forward instead.

What do you mean by “great”? It was successful in reproduction. That’s what we’re talking about here. People were having families and raising children that went out to have families and raise children.

Gay couples can’t have children (outside of adoption or surrogacy), so I’m not sure how that is relevant to the topic at hand. Gay couples will not be helping with the next baby boom.

We made a change in the culture, from the standpoint of the species continuing to survive into the future. The change put us on what looks like a worse path. Would it not be wise to question those changes to see where it went wrong and course correct, just like we’d do if this was any other problem in any other domain?

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#677

Post by coldtea »

Mawr wrote: post #623
ivape wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it has something to do with the “you are not good enough” treadmill the modern world has everyone on. I don’t think people of yesteryear contemplated if they were ready to start a family. I don’t think they contemplated if a job was the “right fit”, and I doubt they scoured the world looking for their soulmate. So, if you live in our current time period where you are never “complete”, then you may have a hard t…

No need to contemplate anything if your run-of-the-mill average job lets you support your entire family and purchase a house.

They also didn't contemplates it as something ubearable if they had to live many persons or even extended family in the same small house, including rentals, and if two persons had to work hard. Manual laborers, factory workers, etc, farmers where both father and mother worked, still had many children.

It's not like this only happened in the window between 1940s-1980s where the run-of-the-mill average job let you support your entire family and purchase a big enough house.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#678

Post by MisterSandman »

MangoToupe wrote: post #526
bethekidyouwant wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a subsidized childcare in Quebec and the fertility rate is still shit

My understanding is the cost of housing is increasing far faster than inflation in the entire anglosphere.

Quebec housing is not affordable by any means, but still much more affordable than the rest of Canada. Especially when you look at cities like Montreal and compare it to other cities like Toronto.

It’s not just affordability, it’s one big piece but it’s not the only thing.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#679

Post by fc417fc802 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #237
triceratops wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house As a man in a "modern relationship" I strenuously object to this. I mean yeah I want that (who wouldn't?), but I know I'm not going to get it because my partner has a job too so we have to help each other. Literally every one of my married male friends also regularly cooks and cleans.

Since you're posting on Hacker News you're probably in a pretty high income bracket, and your married male friends probably are as well. High income brackets have seen pretty steady marriage rates, and as someone also in this bubble, they tend also to have men with more egalitarian views on marriage. But the flipside is that high-earners tend to delay childbirth-- they have to, because you need a lengthy period of ed…

You pose an interesting theory.

That said the article you linked to is horrendously biased. I'm not sure if I'm maybe pointing out the obvious to you but to me it reads analogously to other well written highly partisan propaganda. It certainly poses some interesting questions to think about but then so do the higher quality far right essays.

I mean the author is unironically positing that single women as a class are better across the board than single men. Why would it be that (apparently) all the best men married all the worst women? How does that make any sense outside of some radically far left filter bubble?

I think a far more convincing theory is that ideological extremism has thoroughly permeated our society, is highly toxic to both critical thinking and functional relationships, and can be seen more prominently among single adults. I'll cite the very article you linked as evidence in favor of my claim.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#680

Post by coldtea »

andrekandre wrote: post #449
Aurornis wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s strange to see that anecdote so highly upvoted when it’s so trivial to look at birth rates by parental age. Reduced teen pregnancies are not the driving factor in recent fertility rate declines at all. It is interesting how an appeal to emotion with a difficult story can lead so many to overlook the obvious shortcomings in that explanation. Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses…

> Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article. its a microcosm of our entire political discourse as of late imo: everyone is talking anecdotes and feels and barely anyone is bringing the receipts (and if they do its barely noticed)

>this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.

The article doesn't make some definitive argument either (I've read it).

It's just serves as starting point for a discussion under the subject, and just like the author the people commenting here have their own theories and hypotheses why that's the case.

As for "the receipts", most of them can be argued in multiple ways. Empirical observations and working theories are still useful.

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