4 ms·

> My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays i

> My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better. Most people aren't having children[0], largely because they can't afford them. This is probably selection bias. My kid has a better life than I did, but that's mainly because I have avoided the addictions my parents had. [0]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population-grew-in-2021-slowest-rate-since-founding-of-the-nation.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population...

reissbaker 5y ago
Largely because they can't afford them. Number of children inversely correlates to income [1], with the poorest families having the most children and the richest families having the fewest. You're right that birth rates are falling, but I don't think you're right about largely why. 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
- flerchin 5y ago
  This is an interesting point. You seem to be implying that rising incomes are causing people to choose to have fewer children. However, it could just as easily be that having children is a drag on people's incomes.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    Maybe the people with the high incomes live in areas where the cost of having children is higher? You often hear about people making 200k at Google on here sharing a two bedroom apartment with a roommate. Personally lack of a additional bedroom in my home prevents me from having another child, and home prices prevent me from moving.
    - telotortium 5y ago
      Nobody at Google making $200k has to share a two-bedroom apartment, even in the Bay Area. I was easily able to afford a $2000/month 1-bedroom in Mountain View in 2014 on a salary around $110k, and the same apartment today has only increased in price by 30%, whereas starting salaries have increased much more. Is it more economical to share a 2-bedroom apartment when you're starting out? Of course, and many new grads share apartments both for money and, just as importantly, social benefits in a place where you might not know anyone else.
  - reissbaker 5y ago
    It's probably too much of a broad trend for that to be the case. As entire countries get wealthier, their birth rates drop: it's true in the US, Japan, Germany, Sweden, wherever. If you see a GDP per capita line going up, you will also see a birth rate line going down in nearly all cases. I suspect it's more likely something else: for example, access to and usage of birth control, access to other family planning controls, abortion, etc. Edit: or even just access to entertainment that isn't "having sex." I remember a conversation with a (very) old woman who'd had many, many children; she said that... well, there wasn't much else to do back then...
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      And the old woman did not have access to IUDs. Nowadays, you can have sex with zero risk of pregnancy.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        No, no, no. There's a low risk. The risk is not "zero".
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        The point is it is so low, that combined with access to abortion, sex and having children are effectively decoupled.
        giantg2 5y ago
        Yet that is not what was stated. The risk of pregnancy is not zero. If we really want to get into it, abortions are not 100% effective either. So yeah, extremely unlikely, but still a possibility that one has a child.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        You are technically correct, the best kind of correct. The context of the conversation, however, was that people had children as a non intentional byproduct of having sex, which presumably people had more of due to lack of other entertainment options. To which I thought it was noteworthy to point out that children are effectively no longer a byproduct of just having sex, especially for the demographics in which birthrates are declining. Hence, regardless of the amount of sex people are having, I would expect the birthrate to still decline.
  - hooande 5y ago
    No. Declines in fertility are correlated with increasing incomes. Broadly (not uniformly), in all cultures through out time. It's a thing, look it up.
    - flerchin 5y ago
      Definitely true. But the causation may be backwards. Perhaps people are making the decision not to have kids based on how expensive it would be, the expense in opportunity cost and career advancement is higher with the more income you have.
giantg2 5y ago
I don't know. Better how? Bigger houses, fancier possessions, etc? Sure. It seems there's less freedom, and less exploration by kids today. Everything is recorded and documented. It's too expensive or too dangerous for kids to go do stuff. If you make a mistake today, it will follow you forever - little chance to apologize and fix whatever broke (seems more people want to use full force of law to press charges or sue over minor issues even when the person wants to make it right). I wasn't in the early 80s and didn't have complete free run, but the independence and responsibilities that came with it seem far better than the digital nightmare kids are living in these days. Just my opinion.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  > less exploration by kids today. I don't see how this can be true. By the time I started high school a decade ago I realized that 90% of human knowledge was freely available to me on the internet. And I explored every crevice of it. The world is at our fingertips in a way it never was before.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Yes, information is accessible. I don't really call that exploration unless they are doing something with it for real. You can watch all the YouTube videos or read Wikipedia articles, but that's lacking if there's no real world experience/implementation. Watch a video with a science experiment? Great, now try it. It also can't teach how to be independent, interact with friends, or what to do if you get lost (without having your cell phone solve it for you). My friends and I would ride our bikes around the neighborhood and on trails, go fishing, build lean-tos or whatever in the woods, shoot model rockets, play sports, etc. Sure, some TV and video games too. We even had dial-up later on. But we were out in the world, being active, and thinking for ourselves. Those experiences are much more formative than consuming content created by someone else.
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      I think this is a lot of nostalgia talking. Learning things through the internet absolutely forced me to be independent. If I wanted to find something all I needed was to look for it. Instant messaging made it easier to interact with friends, not harder. I can't deny that the experiences youth have today are different than those that were had pre-internet, but I will absolutely push back against the notion that they are worse. Building stuff with your hands is undoubtedly a cherished childhood experience for many, but just because kids are interacting over the internet doesn't mean they're not thinking for themselves. In fact, I would say they're thinking for themselves even more since the options are so much vaster. Is building an elaborate world in minecraft or roblox really that different from building lean-tos or model rockets?
nostrademons 5y ago
Note that the selection bias has existed throughout history. Every kid assumes that having children is the natural order of things, because their sample usually consists of their friends and all their friends' parents (by definition) had kids. However, when I look at my parents' friends (or even siblings), a lot of them were childless or died young. U.S. fertility rates today [1] aren't appreciably different from what they were in the late 70s and early 80s. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fertility-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert...

reissbaker 5y ago

Largely because they can't afford them. Number of children inversely correlates to income [1], with the poorest families having the most children and the richest families having the fewest. You're right that birth rates are falling, but I don't think you're right about largely why. 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

flerchin 5y ago
This is an interesting point. You seem to be implying that rising incomes are causing people to choose to have fewer children. However, it could just as easily be that having children is a drag on people's incomes.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  Maybe the people with the high incomes live in areas where the cost of having children is higher? You often hear about people making 200k at Google on here sharing a two bedroom apartment with a roommate. Personally lack of a additional bedroom in my home prevents me from having another child, and home prices prevent me from moving.
  - telotortium 5y ago
    Nobody at Google making $200k has to share a two-bedroom apartment, even in the Bay Area. I was easily able to afford a $2000/month 1-bedroom in Mountain View in 2014 on a salary around $110k, and the same apartment today has only increased in price by 30%, whereas starting salaries have increased much more. Is it more economical to share a 2-bedroom apartment when you're starting out? Of course, and many new grads share apartments both for money and, just as importantly, social benefits in a place where you might not know anyone else.
- reissbaker 5y ago
  It's probably too much of a broad trend for that to be the case. As entire countries get wealthier, their birth rates drop: it's true in the US, Japan, Germany, Sweden, wherever. If you see a GDP per capita line going up, you will also see a birth rate line going down in nearly all cases. I suspect it's more likely something else: for example, access to and usage of birth control, access to other family planning controls, abortion, etc. Edit: or even just access to entertainment that isn't "having sex." I remember a conversation with a (very) old woman who'd had many, many children; she said that... well, there wasn't much else to do back then...
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    And the old woman did not have access to IUDs. Nowadays, you can have sex with zero risk of pregnancy.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      No, no, no. There's a low risk. The risk is not "zero".
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        The point is it is so low, that combined with access to abortion, sex and having children are effectively decoupled.
        giantg2 5y ago
        Yet that is not what was stated. The risk of pregnancy is not zero. If we really want to get into it, abortions are not 100% effective either. So yeah, extremely unlikely, but still a possibility that one has a child.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        You are technically correct, the best kind of correct. The context of the conversation, however, was that people had children as a non intentional byproduct of having sex, which presumably people had more of due to lack of other entertainment options. To which I thought it was noteworthy to point out that children are effectively no longer a byproduct of just having sex, especially for the demographics in which birthrates are declining. Hence, regardless of the amount of sex people are having, I would expect the birthrate to still decline.
- hooande 5y ago
  No. Declines in fertility are correlated with increasing incomes. Broadly (not uniformly), in all cultures through out time. It's a thing, look it up.
  - flerchin 5y ago
    Definitely true. But the causation may be backwards. Perhaps people are making the decision not to have kids based on how expensive it would be, the expense in opportunity cost and career advancement is higher with the more income you have.

giantg2 5y ago

I don't know. Better how? Bigger houses, fancier possessions, etc? Sure. It seems there's less freedom, and less exploration by kids today. Everything is recorded and documented. It's too expensive or too dangerous for kids to go do stuff. If you make a mistake today, it will follow you forever - little chance to apologize and fix whatever broke (seems more people want to use full force of law to press charges or sue over minor issues even when the person wants to make it right). I wasn't in the early 80s and didn't have complete free run, but the independence and responsibilities that came with it seem far better than the digital nightmare kids are living in these days. Just my opinion.

colinmhayes 5y ago
> less exploration by kids today. I don't see how this can be true. By the time I started high school a decade ago I realized that 90% of human knowledge was freely available to me on the internet. And I explored every crevice of it. The world is at our fingertips in a way it never was before.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Yes, information is accessible. I don't really call that exploration unless they are doing something with it for real. You can watch all the YouTube videos or read Wikipedia articles, but that's lacking if there's no real world experience/implementation. Watch a video with a science experiment? Great, now try it. It also can't teach how to be independent, interact with friends, or what to do if you get lost (without having your cell phone solve it for you). My friends and I would ride our bikes around the neighborhood and on trails, go fishing, build lean-tos or whatever in the woods, shoot model rockets, play sports, etc. Sure, some TV and video games too. We even had dial-up later on. But we were out in the world, being active, and thinking for ourselves. Those experiences are much more formative than consuming content created by someone else.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    I think this is a lot of nostalgia talking. Learning things through the internet absolutely forced me to be independent. If I wanted to find something all I needed was to look for it. Instant messaging made it easier to interact with friends, not harder. I can't deny that the experiences youth have today are different than those that were had pre-internet, but I will absolutely push back against the notion that they are worse. Building stuff with your hands is undoubtedly a cherished childhood experience for many, but just because kids are interacting over the internet doesn't mean they're not thinking for themselves. In fact, I would say they're thinking for themselves even more since the options are so much vaster. Is building an elaborate world in minecraft or roblox really that different from building lean-tos or model rockets?

nostrademons 5y ago

Note that the selection bias has existed throughout history. Every kid assumes that having children is the natural order of things, because their sample usually consists of their friends and all their friends' parents (by definition) had kids. However, when I look at my parents' friends (or even siblings), a lot of them were childless or died young. U.S. fertility rates today [1] aren't appreciably different from what they were in the late 70s and early 80s. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fertility-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert...