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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

#71

Post by gadders »

ianai wrote: post #41

This is probably mostly covid related. But I personally don’t even consider kids. Kids are a life long commitment. I’d only make that commitment if I felt long term stability or at least optimism. Austerity and cynicism dominate the US right now though. It’s a recipe for strife, struggle, and things that rip families and countries apart. It doesn’t have to be this way in the US.

That's a valid perspective, but times have been a lot worse in the past. It's a good job our ancestors didn't think like this.

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

#72

Post by salawat »

andi999 wrote: post #19
Scandiravian wrote: post #3

I'm surprised by this, as I had expected the opposite. Couples are spending a lot of time together being confined to their home without much entertainment, so I'd expected that to result in more baby making I guess the stress from the uncertainty of the future and lack of personal space more than countered that Time for me to adjust my assumptions about the world... And probably check my privilege, since I'm massivel…

Actually how does one actually do that 'check your privilege'? Is it like a checklist for takeoff:'privilege on? check!'

I don't know, but whenever someone tells me to check mine I cordially remind them it is an overt act of supremacy, if you will, to assign more importance to one person's adversity than another's.

We all have a metaphorical bowl of sh#t to work through in life. Everybody's is different, but we all have to get through it somehow. I'm not getting or letting anyone else get held over a barrel because one person doesn't like the specifics of their own or another's tribulations.

Remember folks, kindly leave your sh#tbowl yardsticks at home, and just enjoy the company of other people.

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

#73

Post by bookmarkable »

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…

Interesting analysis, but I think you are discounting the number of people in each of these groups. Percentage basis, yes, the rich and poor will have more children. But both groups are not the 80% of the middle (using your 10% cutoffs on either end).

So I don't think children from the non-rich and non-poor society are going to be aliens in the world anytime soon. Sadly though, fewer will know life with siblings. To meet groups of siblings, you'll find more rich and poor - but only at their birth. Any number of those will change positions in society in any direction.

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

#74

Post by Tepix »

kmlx wrote: post #24
rocgf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very hard to understand why your comment was downvoted this badly. I thought everyone understands that the planet is overpopulated as it is and that bringing as many children into the world as possible is not a net positive.

it's not overpopulated. this is a myth that has been going on since the 1970s: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/12/12/16766872/overpop...

The author Lyman Stone writes mainly for IFS Institute for Family Studies, which is moderately to strong biased to the right according to https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/institute-for-family-studies/

He also writes for The Federalist, another biased publication: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-federalist/

If you look at the destruction of natural resources world-wide, you don't have to be an expert to see that the current resource usage is unsustainable. At the same time the rich countries are unwilling to give up their status. The trend is going in the wrong direction.

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

#75

Post by avesi »

leesalminen wrote: post #47
mbg721 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The uncertainty isn't just the COVID overload, but also no doulas/support people, and not knowing if the father is even going to be allowed in the building in case something unusual happens.

My wife and I had our first son at the end of 2019, right before the outbreak. We’ve heard from friends that women are delivering wearing a mask now. My wife thinks that she wouldn’t be able to do that and that she would pass out. The level of breathing required to deliver a baby is intense. She has basically threatened the livelihood of my genitalia if I impregnate her during the pandemic. She’s kidding, right? ;)

I delivered wearing a mask last year, it's honestly security theater. A little floppy surgical mask does nothing to contain the breathing of a laboring woman. I was more upset I couldn't kiss my baby when he was first put in my arms.

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

#76

Post by Teever »

gadders wrote: post #71
ianai wrote: post #41

This is probably mostly covid related. But I personally don’t even consider kids. Kids are a life long commitment. I’d only make that commitment if I felt long term stability or at least optimism. Austerity and cynicism dominate the US right now though. It’s a recipe for strife, struggle, and things that rip families and countries apart. It doesn’t have to be this way in the US.

That's a valid perspective, but times have been a lot worse in the past. It's a good job our ancestors didn't think like this.

It's not that they didn't think like this but that they couldn't.

Thanks to readily available and affordable birth control individuals have much more freedom to make reproductive choices that benefit themselves.

What those individual freedoms do to society as a whole is another issue but it is entirely within the ability of western governments to increase birthrates through policy. The fact that they don't is most interesting.

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

#77

Post by kingkawn »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #69
SamuelAdams wrote: post #29

I wonder if there's a good way to model the cost of children over the last 100 years? My guess is fewer people are having children due to the financial costs rising considerably.

I would argue that it's also due to kids having "more" rights via the culture perpetuating entitled rights. So a mild spanking could be consider by many as straight up child abuse. People scoff if you let your kid just poke the world around without asking who, what, where, why. Kids needs to grow into their own and the current culture doesn't allow that.

Sorry you can’t beat your children as you’d like

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

#78

Post by beaconstudios »

Scandiravian wrote: post #70
beaconstudios wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe rather than expanding your assumptions one checked privilege at a time, just drop your assumptions altogether? You simply can't know the experiences of others; even direct communication only transfers a very loose approximation of experience, and that's if both sides are both communicating earnestly and are skilled communicators. So if you can't know the experience of just one person then you certainly can't gr…

I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop assumptions all together. Without assumptions this thread wouldn't have happened Taking the word "privilege" as an example, you have an assumption about what I mean when I use it and that it entails "moral judgement". These are not things I've expressed in any of my posts > try to back leaders who want what's best for all. I'm confused how you can know what's best f…

> I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop assumptions all together.

Dropping assumptions altogether isn't what I meant and is trivially shown to be nonsense. We couldn't live our lives if we didn't assume the sun would come up tomorrow.

What I mean is making unfounded assumptions about other human beings and their experiences.

> Taking the word "privilege" as an example, you have an assumption about what I mean when I use it and that it entails "moral judgement". These are not things I've expressed in any of my posts

Then I've made a mistake, by making an assumption that was unfounded. I'm not claiming to be perfect at avoiding unfounded assumptions about people or what they say, just that it's a better ideal than growing out your set of assumptions. After all, if you take people and keep dividing them into groups based on shared characteristics, take that to its terminal limit and you're simply treating people as unique individuals.

[edit] having reflected further, I think there might be a legitimate meaning behind my thinking of it as a moral judgement, but I'm interested to see if you agree. It's on my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343064

> I'm confused how you can know what's best for all without making assumptions. Could you elaborate?

I don't know what's best for all, nor do I believe that anyone else does - and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims they know what is best for any other person. What I try to do is look for people who navigate through empathy. The way I see it, politics is predominantly driven by finding the "bad people" to blame your voters' problems on and make them stop doing the bad thing. In reality people's behaviours are driven by structural incentives, so I am more inclined to trust people who, instead of pointing fingers at other humans and their moral deficiencies, focus on changing the incentives. I think a lot of green initiatives contain this kind of systems approach, as an obvious candidate; but so do some people of many different political movements. It's basically an individual rather than an ideological thing, hence why I say backing individual leaders.

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

#79

Post by dhosek »

leesalminen wrote: post #47
mbg721 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The uncertainty isn't just the COVID overload, but also no doulas/support people, and not knowing if the father is even going to be allowed in the building in case something unusual happens.

My wife and I had our first son at the end of 2019, right before the outbreak. We’ve heard from friends that women are delivering wearing a mask now. My wife thinks that she wouldn’t be able to do that and that she would pass out. The level of breathing required to deliver a baby is intense. She has basically threatened the livelihood of my genitalia if I impregnate her during the pandemic. She’s kidding, right? ;)

The level of breathing needed to deliver a baby is intense, sure, but the impeding of breathing from wearing a mask is minimal. Early on when I was wearing homemade masks made with shop towels, rubber bands and staples, mask wearing was uncomfortable, but with masks that aren't made out of random elements are fine. My first-grade kids have no problem running, jumping and climbing with their masks on.

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

#80

Post by afavour »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #29

I wonder if there's a good way to model the cost of children over the last 100 years? My guess is fewer people are having children due to the financial costs rising considerably.

I don't know that isolating the cost of raising kids is necessary when you can see the drop in overall wealth by generation. Millenials (who are the prime "kid having" generation right now) own far less wealth than any generation that came before them. Is it really in any way surprising that fewer are having kids?
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