7 ms·

Then you will see 1001 theories about why the population is declining. People in their 30's can't afford a house, let alone raising a family. A whole population

by lp4vn 3y ago

Then you will see 1001 theories about why the population is declining. People in their 30's can't afford a house, let alone raising a family. A whole population inside a certain age group seems completely unable to grasp this basic reasoning.

kevinwang 3y ago
That makes sense, but it feels to me like the more educated and higher-income young adults are the ones delaying kids / choosing not to have kids. It feels like lower-income young adults are more likely to start families.
- jdewerd 3y ago
  Mmm-hmm, and the same group will jump at the opportunity to wag their finger and blame those lower-income young adults for the consequent economic hardship.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    That's not hypocritical, if you're not swinging from the rafters shouting about how a declining birthrate is the end of the world.
- downrightmike 3y ago
  That's a good example of anecdotal evidence
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Higher incomes tends to correlate with better long term planning, and better controlled risk taking. Having a higher income also correlates with having grown up in a higher income household, and thus having more expensive ideas of what table-stakes childrearing looks like. So, as some well paid techbro, I probably had a relatively well-off childhood, and my perceived cost of having a kid is going to include A) paying for their entire college education B) paying for childcare, because I met my SO through my similar socioeconomic social circle and thus they also have a career C) moving to the suburbs where I can own a house large enough to house a family and D) still maintaining a level of wealth such that I can smooth over any unexpected expenses/life events.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    And with our medical system, children are like a reverse lottery ticket (to borrow a term I saw elsewhere on HN) - if they're born with a medical issue, they may take millions in care - something I've seen personally happen to coworkers. I've got enough anxiety trying to maintain my own health insurance.
    - ejb999 3y ago
      couples with two generous 6 figures salaries are not generally the people worried about unexpected huge medical expenses - they have good jobs, and good insurance.
      - hotpotamus 3y ago
        Tech jobs have had massive layoffs in the last few years. I've literally seen couples at the same employer laid off together. Certainly I've seen many colleagues with young children laid off and scrambling. My coworker literally told me a few weeks ago that her husband was laid off and as a result they had had to switch to our company insurance which was less generous. Tying your family's healthcare to the whims of your employer is one more risk that Americans are expected to endure. It's merely one factor among many, I'm sure, but don't the results, ever decreasing fertility, speak for themselves?
        OkayPhysicist 3y ago
        The healthcare costs issue is infuriating, because it's one that has an obvious, well-tested solution, that could be implemented tomorrow, if the gluttons in power chose to.
        b112 3y ago
        It's merely one factor among many, I'm sure, but don't the results, ever decreasing fertility, speak for themselves? Why would you attribute decreasing fertility, something that affects every western nation on the planet, as something to do with US health care? It even affects Russia, China, Japan, literally every "modernized" nation. People have had condoms and other methods to prevent pregnancy, but no one ever cared about the cost of kids before the last few decades. This is merely an excuse, for what is really happening... Lack of fertility due to some environmental factor. If it was cultural, Japan and China ... nations most divergent from US and Western cultures, would not be affected the same way. It doesn't matter about access to the pill, or other measures, nations with or without the pill in wide use have low birth rates. Nations strong on women's rights, and more "traditional" views on women, also have reduced fertility and births. It's not cultural. It's not choice. It's not cost. It's not conscious. There is, quite literally, something affecting a drive to procreate, which is entirely different from the drive to have sex. Given that it's not cultural, and that it's not access to contraceptives, one has to wonder what it could be. Microplastics? Electricity? The types of food consumed, eg preservatives in modern foods seen in all the above countries? There can be guesses, but no one is even doing any substantial research into this. Meanwhile, the planet's population is set to halve within 30 years. And if this trend continues, if fertility / birth rates continue to decline as they have been, we will likely be down to 500M people worldwide before the 2100s. That is an immensely alarming trend, which leads to human extinction by the 2200s, due to "whatever it is" completely blocking all attempts to have offspring. This trend also doesn't take into account a global plague, or re-emergence of world war, or devastating health issues due to global warming. Should that happen, with "loads of our current, younger offspring" killed in war, or by plague, the trend is astonishingly scary and disturbing. Sorry to be a bit excessive in my reply, but the whole fertility thing is greatly disturbing to me.
- Spivak 3y ago
  Financial instability will do that to ya. You finally achieve a somewhat comfortable lifestyle but that requires DINK status to keep up the mortgage payments and then you look at having kids and it pushes you over the edge because daycare alone is half your mortgage. But when you thrive in financial instability and have a lifestyle that works with a parent that's out of work or not having stable income having kids doesn't add much to that.
- slothtrop 3y ago
  Seems to me very high income families have more kids, or otherwise, families with a stay-at-home mom will have far more children than in two-income households. Among the pressures here is a lack of support from grandparents, the affordability of daycare, availability of maternity leave (and by extension, the tolerance workplaces will have for it and how often). It's such that middle-class earners can see a dramatic change in lifestyle if they have more kids, which they don't want to compromise. In poor countries, it doesn't matter: the woman will stay at home, child mortality is high, you won't have contraceptives usually, etc. Another child is another worker (like the old days over here).
tylersmith 3y ago
And until they see it they'll never work to increase their value and move on to a stage where they can afford a house. It's a self-fulfilling cycle destroying multiple generations at this point.
- RexySaxMan 3y ago
  I think you and the parent are thinking of different age groups.
jdewerd 3y ago
Yeah, well, after 50 years of policy choices between "make housing affordable" and "make housing a good investment" and always choosing the latter, they now have an enormous vested interest to look after. Even if it doesn't really make sense to blame the gays or tiktok, they're absolutely going to do it anyway because the alternative points to policy changes that could lose them their ill-gotten gains.
VFIT7CTO77TOC 3y ago
Sounds good, except that fertility rate correlates inversely with income. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility If you gave a population a $10k raise (in a hypothetical world with no inflation) the birth rate would probably DECREASE
- jdewerd 3y ago
  Right, low income causes kids, so what we need are more poors! We don't enact regressive policies because we want money, we only do it because we love you! It couldn't possibly be that the causal arrow points in the other direction, that kids are an economic burden, cause hardship in an already economically strained population, and those who escape do so in part because they choose not to have kids. Nah, couldn't be.
  - VFIT7CTO77TOC 3y ago
    Being economically strained is relative. Middle class people clutch their pearls at the thought of having children before they have completed their master's degree, have their 4 bedroom house in a safe neighborhood with good schools, maxed out retirement accounts, and a membership to Whole Foods. Broke people have a different idea of what necessities are so they have no problem pumping out kids.
- slothtrop 3y ago
  Wealthy nations have easier access to contraceptives and low child mortality, and women joined the workforce. It's not so cut and dry as a mere question of income. Even your source has a section for contrary findings and fertility j-curve when using HDI rather than GDP.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  This is not totally correct. One reason it appears that fertility is inversely correlated with income is hidden confounding variables. Among comparable populations (within the same country, as a starting point) income is positively related to income. https://www.niussp.org/fertility-and-reproduction/income-and-fertility-a-positive-relationship/ https://www.niussp.org/fertility-and-reproduction/income-and...
sershe 3y ago
Somehow it works fine literally anywhere else in the world. My parents, who were both engineers, had me when they were living in a 500sqft flat shared with my grandma. Then they moved out to a 700sqft flat and had my sister :) Of course, people in their 30ies could easily afford a house pretty recently, too - before post-covid-printing spike (when the fertility was already low), price-to-income ratio was only slightly higher than it had been historically; before even accounting for increased sqft of the new houses.

by lp4vn 3y ago

kevinwang 3y ago

That makes sense, but it feels to me like the more educated and higher-income young adults are the ones delaying kids / choosing not to have kids. It feels like lower-income young adults are more likely to start families.

jdewerd 3y ago
Mmm-hmm, and the same group will jump at the opportunity to wag their finger and blame those lower-income young adults for the consequent economic hardship.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  That's not hypocritical, if you're not swinging from the rafters shouting about how a declining birthrate is the end of the world.
downrightmike 3y ago
That's a good example of anecdotal evidence
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Higher incomes tends to correlate with better long term planning, and better controlled risk taking. Having a higher income also correlates with having grown up in a higher income household, and thus having more expensive ideas of what table-stakes childrearing looks like. So, as some well paid techbro, I probably had a relatively well-off childhood, and my perceived cost of having a kid is going to include A) paying for their entire college education B) paying for childcare, because I met my SO through my similar socioeconomic social circle and thus they also have a career C) moving to the suburbs where I can own a house large enough to house a family and D) still maintaining a level of wealth such that I can smooth over any unexpected expenses/life events.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  And with our medical system, children are like a reverse lottery ticket (to borrow a term I saw elsewhere on HN) - if they're born with a medical issue, they may take millions in care - something I've seen personally happen to coworkers. I've got enough anxiety trying to maintain my own health insurance.
  - ejb999 3y ago
    couples with two generous 6 figures salaries are not generally the people worried about unexpected huge medical expenses - they have good jobs, and good insurance.
    - hotpotamus 3y ago
      Tech jobs have had massive layoffs in the last few years. I've literally seen couples at the same employer laid off together. Certainly I've seen many colleagues with young children laid off and scrambling. My coworker literally told me a few weeks ago that her husband was laid off and as a result they had had to switch to our company insurance which was less generous. Tying your family's healthcare to the whims of your employer is one more risk that Americans are expected to endure. It's merely one factor among many, I'm sure, but don't the results, ever decreasing fertility, speak for themselves?
      - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
        The healthcare costs issue is infuriating, because it's one that has an obvious, well-tested solution, that could be implemented tomorrow, if the gluttons in power chose to.
      - b112 3y ago
        It's merely one factor among many, I'm sure, but don't the results, ever decreasing fertility, speak for themselves? Why would you attribute decreasing fertility, something that affects every western nation on the planet, as something to do with US health care? It even affects Russia, China, Japan, literally every "modernized" nation. People have had condoms and other methods to prevent pregnancy, but no one ever cared about the cost of kids before the last few decades. This is merely an excuse, for what is really happening... Lack of fertility due to some environmental factor. If it was cultural, Japan and China ... nations most divergent from US and Western cultures, would not be affected the same way. It doesn't matter about access to the pill, or other measures, nations with or without the pill in wide use have low birth rates. Nations strong on women's rights, and more "traditional" views on women, also have reduced fertility and births. It's not cultural. It's not choice. It's not cost. It's not conscious. There is, quite literally, something affecting a drive to procreate, which is entirely different from the drive to have sex. Given that it's not cultural, and that it's not access to contraceptives, one has to wonder what it could be. Microplastics? Electricity? The types of food consumed, eg preservatives in modern foods seen in all the above countries? There can be guesses, but no one is even doing any substantial research into this. Meanwhile, the planet's population is set to halve within 30 years. And if this trend continues, if fertility / birth rates continue to decline as they have been, we will likely be down to 500M people worldwide before the 2100s. That is an immensely alarming trend, which leads to human extinction by the 2200s, due to "whatever it is" completely blocking all attempts to have offspring. This trend also doesn't take into account a global plague, or re-emergence of world war, or devastating health issues due to global warming. Should that happen, with "loads of our current, younger offspring" killed in war, or by plague, the trend is astonishingly scary and disturbing. Sorry to be a bit excessive in my reply, but the whole fertility thing is greatly disturbing to me.
Spivak 3y ago
Financial instability will do that to ya. You finally achieve a somewhat comfortable lifestyle but that requires DINK status to keep up the mortgage payments and then you look at having kids and it pushes you over the edge because daycare alone is half your mortgage. But when you thrive in financial instability and have a lifestyle that works with a parent that's out of work or not having stable income having kids doesn't add much to that.
slothtrop 3y ago
Seems to me very high income families have more kids, or otherwise, families with a stay-at-home mom will have far more children than in two-income households. Among the pressures here is a lack of support from grandparents, the affordability of daycare, availability of maternity leave (and by extension, the tolerance workplaces will have for it and how often). It's such that middle-class earners can see a dramatic change in lifestyle if they have more kids, which they don't want to compromise. In poor countries, it doesn't matter: the woman will stay at home, child mortality is high, you won't have contraceptives usually, etc. Another child is another worker (like the old days over here).

tylersmith 3y ago

And until they see it they'll never work to increase their value and move on to a stage where they can afford a house. It's a self-fulfilling cycle destroying multiple generations at this point.

RexySaxMan 3y ago
I think you and the parent are thinking of different age groups.

jdewerd 3y ago

Yeah, well, after 50 years of policy choices between "make housing affordable" and "make housing a good investment" and always choosing the latter, they now have an enormous vested interest to look after. Even if it doesn't really make sense to blame the gays or tiktok, they're absolutely going to do it anyway because the alternative points to policy changes that could lose them their ill-gotten gains.

VFIT7CTO77TOC 3y ago

Sounds good, except that fertility rate correlates inversely with income. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility If you gave a population a $10k raise (in a hypothetical world with no inflation) the birth rate would probably DECREASE

jdewerd 3y ago
Right, low income causes kids, so what we need are more poors! We don't enact regressive policies because we want money, we only do it because we love you! It couldn't possibly be that the causal arrow points in the other direction, that kids are an economic burden, cause hardship in an already economically strained population, and those who escape do so in part because they choose not to have kids. Nah, couldn't be.
- VFIT7CTO77TOC 3y ago
  Being economically strained is relative. Middle class people clutch their pearls at the thought of having children before they have completed their master's degree, have their 4 bedroom house in a safe neighborhood with good schools, maxed out retirement accounts, and a membership to Whole Foods. Broke people have a different idea of what necessities are so they have no problem pumping out kids.
slothtrop 3y ago
Wealthy nations have easier access to contraceptives and low child mortality, and women joined the workforce. It's not so cut and dry as a mere question of income. Even your source has a section for contrary findings and fertility j-curve when using HDI rather than GDP.
jeffbee 3y ago
This is not totally correct. One reason it appears that fertility is inversely correlated with income is hidden confounding variables. Among comparable populations (within the same country, as a starting point) income is positively related to income. https://www.niussp.org/fertility-and-reproduction/income-and-fertility-a-positive-relationship/ https://www.niussp.org/fertility-and-reproduction/income-and...

sershe 3y ago

Somehow it works fine literally anywhere else in the world. My parents, who were both engineers, had me when they were living in a 500sqft flat shared with my grandma. Then they moved out to a 700sqft flat and had my sister :) Of course, people in their 30ies could easily afford a house pretty recently, too - before post-covid-printing spike (when the fertility was already low), price-to-income ratio was only slightly higher than it had been historically; before even accounting for increased sqft of the new houses.