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This is really the message of Abundance. If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbeari

• rluna828 5mo ago
  Some mathematicians ran some numbers and diferent societies have different lowlying fruit. None of his improvements get societies to 2.1, but will theoretically move them to ~1.8. I'll find the source if people ask. 1. End toxic masculinity (machismo) in middle east and LatAM. No woman who knows how to read want to beaten or enslaved. 2. Jobs and Housing: Europe and America respectively. More three bed-room houses would add kids in California for example. Jobs for young people would children in Spain. 3. End afterschool tutoring and add spaces at universities. In Japan, Korea, China having more than one child means less money for tutors for the first kid (boy or girl). This is the easy stuff. For the extreme right, male literacy is inversely proportional with fertility too. lol! For my lefty friends, women are currently having as many kids as they would like, that's a oppression or tragedy or unfair.
  • em-bee 5mo ago
    incidentally a few years ago china banned tutoring, but to my understanding it was mainly because most tutoring places were scams, and maybe also because mostly rich parents would spend the money, thus giving them an advantage.
  • alehlopeh 5mo ago
    How is machismo causing women in Latin America to not know how to read? And which ones are enslaved exactly? This is a ridiculous assertion.
    • trumpdong 5mo ago
      They said women who can read don't like machismo.
      • cultofmetatron 4mo ago
        plenty of women in LATAM love possessive jealous men. I've seen it first hand.
  • rembal 5mo ago
    And middle east and latin America have much higher birthrates than Europe, East Asia and the US. I guess most women there must be really unsophisticated (I know you don't mean straight up illiterate).
• pj_mukh 5mo ago
  Agreed with all of this but, "cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment" That's not true, its that the cost to build the apartment is far too high and the cost is totally passed on to a the public, thereby hovering up any disposable income that might go towards having a child. There can be a profit margin, but the cost needs to be low.
  • scoofy 5mo ago
    My point is only that we can see the value capture of the housing shortage by looking at the delta of housing development COGS and housing prices. I generally agree with you that there is plenty of room for profit margin, but when we see housing prices diverging significantly from lowest-cost construction prices, then we can measure our shortage. My main point is that, because housing takes a very long time to build en masse, you'd want the housing to start being built before people need it. It's like any other strategic reserve we have. Since demand can spike, and we can rarely see the spikes coming, but we know they will come, just be prepared by subsidizing the development of that thing. We do it for food, oil, weapons, vaccines, you name it. If we know we will need it in the future anyway, and it take a long time to produce, we create strategic reserves. We should do that for housing.
    • lucketone 5mo ago
      > We do it for food, oil, weapons, vaccines, you name it. Much easier to have a reserve of X, if X can be put in a warehouse and transported later. After reading comments here, I think that US has plenty of cheap housing… but… cheap housing is in places where people don’t want to live. (Demand is low, price is low) If you actually plan to use your own money to build a reserve of housing, better double-tripple check if anybodyz will want to live there.
• shimman 5mo ago
  No, that is you are reading into what abundance is. Abundance is mostly neoliberal economic ideas repackaged for the current iteration of consultants where workers are entirely excluded from the processes, unions are the enemy, and regulation is actually evil this time (pinky swear this time!). Thank fuck voters aren't buying this garbage. I also find your retort equally misleading. Social housing is a solved issue. The problem is that we are letting greedy developers dictate the type of housing to be built. Kinda what the book abundance never mentions, who actually are the ones with power and how they are wielding it to thwart progress. Blaming democratic societies is even more frankly bizarre too. America has always been deeply antidemocratic and has thwarted the will of the people at every opportunity of progress (every delegate voted against the bill of rights when first mentioned (took a threat of violence to add it), labor rights, ending slavery, universal suffrage); the problem has always been authoritarians against the people.
  • scoofy 5mo ago
    You clearly did not read the book or understand the message. I say this as someone who thinks we need a wealth tax (or at least a tax on unrealized semi-liquid capital gains). >America has always been deeply antidemocratic Okay, buddy. No need to open a history book to understand what an undemocratic state actually looks like. There are plenty of actual, totalitarian monarchies that still exist.
    • gessha 5mo ago
      You can call something undemocratic without needing to compare it to the actual worst country on this planet.
  • matchbok3 5mo ago
    We are letting developers dictate what housing gets built? Are you a parody account? Do you understand the thousands of housing regulations in every single parcel of land in the country? Please do 2 minutes of research into FAR, inclusionary zoning, height limits, setbacks, zoning, etc. I seriously can't tell if you are some left-wing parody account or actually serious. Either way, oooof!
• jrmg 5mo ago
  This is really the message of Abundance. I both liked Abundance and think there’s truth to what you’re saying. But it wasn’t what I took away from the book (perhaps it was in there - but what I really got was ‘for a better future we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot, and be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing’)
  • scoofy 5mo ago
    I mean, I agree with what you're saying, but it misses that abundance means abundance. Consumer staples should cost near the price of production, and where margins are out of control, the government should step in and end the rent-seeking... that is what abundance is. If we live in a society where there is no price appreciation in owning an apartment to rent because another apartment can be build next door, then we live in a society where your dollar goes further, and cannot be captured by the wealthy cornering the market. What we have now is the opposite. We know that housing demand will rise in the future, simply because there will be more people. Instead of the rich investing in housing production to meet this need, we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production, thus the rich can capture all that value in price appreciation from rent-seeking alone (technically more of it), instead of wasting their time operating a business that builds things.
    • mullingitover 5mo ago
      > we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production In my quite affluent city, the most affluent neighborhood has yard signs up every fifty feet expressing that they are furious that the city might develop city-owned parking lots (which are nowhere near their neighborhood) to be high density housing. One-bedroom apartments in the city center are going for over $3,000 per month. The rich aren't simply locking up existing housing, their principal concern is preventing any housing from being created, even if it has no effect on them.
      • scoofy 5mo ago
• jiggawatts 5mo ago
  I’m in my fourties’ unable to afford a three bedroom apartment in my city with an income in the top two or three percentile. I’ve had boomers tell me with a straight face that “they did it” so it can’t be that hard despite a 5x increase in housing costs relative to income. I’d have to spend every single post tax dollar for two decades to afford an actual house. Not counting interest and other taxes and council rates. I’d have to work for 70+ years to afford a nice house in a nice suburb! “Have more children!” “Make housing affordable!” “My retirement fund is all in property and banks!” There’s your problem.
  • gradstudent 5mo ago
    > nice house in a nice suburb! There's your problem. Everyone wants to live in the same set of well established well resourced neighbourhoods. But there's too many of us. Go out in the 'burbs and accept that owning a house implies a commute you will dislike (among a host of other compromises).
    • int_19h 5mo ago
      It's everyone's problem if the end result is that there aren't enough children to replenish the population.
      • bombcar 5mo ago
        The grandchildren of today's Amish children will herd their sheep through the abandoned urban cores.
    • jiggawatts 5mo ago
      Are you joking right now? I’d have to move a thousand kilometres to some shit hole country town to afford a house on a salary I earn by working as a principal consultant in the central business district! Now imagine the same scenario but with a school teacher, nanny, gardener, or inset job title here that is tied to a specific location. When “existence here with the rest of us who have pulled the ladder up after us” becomes untenable for entire generations then you don’t get to complain when nobody is around to clean your gutters or wiper your arse when you’re too old to it for yourself. Our children our are our future and they’re being told to jump through flaming hoops… that aren’t even in the same city as their parents!
• broken-kebab 5mo ago
  It's 2026 now and we know for sure that applying purely economic stimuli did nothing substantial to birthrate anywhere. FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.
  • scoofy 5mo ago
    Economic stimulus does nothing about affordability of goods in a shortage. Quite the opposite, economic stimulus just causes inflation for goods in a shortage. Which is exactly what we’ve seen for 15 years.
    • broken-kebab 5mo ago
      It's a bit of evasion. If you support the claim that it's housing which keeps Western societies birthrate low, you building your theory on the same sand of "economy prevents youth from having kids".
      • scoofy 5mo ago
        Income is not wealth. The crisis is caused by the inability for the median income here to build wealth. That people can’t separate the two is a large part of the problem. As long as your saving is being eaten by asset inflation, no matter how fast you’re running, you’re still on a treadmill.
        • echelon 5mo ago
          The economic argument is oversold. Poor people have kids more than any other demographic. Smartphones are why we don't have kids. Unlimited dopamine is why we don't have kids. The internet is why we don't have kids. Women like having fun and independence and don't want to be stay at home nannies. Modern life is TOO FUN. Fun is why there are no more babies. Babies are not fun. Babies are what you do in the 1950's when you're bored out of your mind with nothing to do. Babies are what you do when you have to wait until next week for your Reader's Digest to arrive in the mail. Babies are the anti-dopamine. For the first time in history, we're not bored out of our fucking minds 24/7. Our brains are fully occupied. There isn't space for babies now that we have the internet. ---- Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight? The answer is probably "fuck no". And you know why. Look at the countries still having kids - they're mostly places where women don't have equal rights and smartphone / internet penetration is low.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• accurrent 5mo ago
  I agree that affordable housing is crucial, but the idea that this is 'impossible in a democratic society' ignores global realities. Several democracies heavily subsidize housing—look at Vienna's social housing model or Singapore's HDB system. Yet, this has not solved the birthrate problem; Singapore’s fertility rate recently hit a record low of 0.87. Ironically, the highest birth rates globally occur where economic security is non-existent, a state of living none of us want to return to. What is truly worrisome about a country like India is that it is facing sub-replacement fertility before fully industrializing. In states with highly unique identities like Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, the native population has already fallen well below the 2.1 replacement mark. While internal migration from higher-fertility northern states fills the gap, it creates significant political and cultural friction. In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population. In a developing nation like India, they risk growing old before they grow rich, leaving an aging population without the robust safety nets or fiscal runway of the West- we might even see the country slide backwards into sub-saharan African levels of poverty
  • scoofy 5mo ago
    "Effectively impossible" does not mean "impossible." Yes, Vienna's housing policy is effective... It's also the only place in the world that manages it. I would argue that it is ideal, but nearly impossible to implement. We can't escape the fact that Vienna operates what is effectively a sovereign wealth fund to create all that housing, which works with the subsidiaries of Austria's actual sovereign wealth fund in development. It's a nice system to be born into, it's nearly impossible to bootstrap. >the highest birth rates globally occur... Nobody is suggesting returning above replacement rate births. Falling below replacement rate is only a problem long term because it happens slowly, but exponentially. It will cause a displacement crisis that will rival climate change. Lowering world population would probably be a good idea, theoretically, but again, there's a difference between a linear decline and an exponential decline. >In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population. I don't see how this is relevant. One can be both for "abundance" and taxes on wealth.
• chr1 5mo ago
  Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up. If you subsidize building houses, you merely will drive up standard of living without moving childbearing age. The problem is about priorities not resource constraints. And solution will be either enough people/countries dying childless and miserable to force the remaining to assign higher priority to children, or technological development of artificial womb and lifespan enhancing drugs to make it possible to have children at 40 when their brain starts to work.
  • xyzzyz 5mo ago
    Exactly. If you subsidize the abundance for everyone, the effect will just be raised expectations floor.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • Drupon 5mo ago
    >Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up. Absolute bullshit drivel because there's no GrEAt ApARmenTs by 1920 STanDArDs available in any major cities like there were in the 20s. Everyone has to rent a GreaT ApARtMENt bY 1920 StAnDaRDs instead because they just LOVE renting GrREAT ApaRTmeNTs BY 1920 StanDARds instead of buying them for the equivalent of a car payment today.
  • tpm 5mo ago
    > Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up. This statement is not true in locations where you can make decent money.
  • pyrale 5mo ago
    Can you point to such places for sale in a reasonably sized city? Cuz where I am, any appartment priced cheap is instantly bought up and remodeled into an unaffordable 2020's standards appartment.
• TurdF3rguson 5mo ago
  Except that 100k years of not being economically secure at childbearing age and having kids anyway... disagrees with you.
• dgoldstein0 5mo ago
  The economics almost certainly play a role, but I think the better way to think about it is how we economize time too. if you are chasing a career, putting in 40,50,60 hours a week - how can you take time off to have a kid? who is going to take care of the kid? Increasingly having kids has gotten more expensive - housing, childcare costs, and general expected investment/supervision of children. In agricultural societies, kids often helped out with the farming; send them to school and they are around less to help. Say that kids can't roam around outdoors unsupervised, and caregivers have to spend even more time watching (older) children. Etc. And as people increasingly move further from where they grew up to chase good jobs, that means they are on average further from their families who would have helped with childcare in previous generations. The economic realities factor in too - people are waiting longer to get married because they want to date financially stable people, and financial stability is on average taking longer to achieve. But if you had to move to a more expensive city, further from family... that's a recipe for couples where both work and perhaps have to work to make their finances work. Babies have become a luxury item in these higher cost of living places. if we want more children, we need to make it easier to be a parent. Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option.
  • Ntrails 5mo ago
    > Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option. As GP states, heavily pushing subsidies has not been shown to work. The one thing we know works is restricting access to birth control - I'd bet good money that ups the birth rate in no time. Leave as an exercise for the reader whether it is a good idea xD
    • boston_clone 5mo ago
      Let's not speak so airily of forced pregnancies.
    • pastage 5mo ago
      > heavily pushing subsidies has not been shown to work Subsidies only come into affect after you have children. They can not work alone society has a much greater affect. They work wonders at making parenting possible while being part of the work force. You only get the subsidies when you have children, the question is how you are supposed to feel secure enough to have children.
• socalgal2 5mo ago
  There's no evidence of this what-so-ever Every indication points in the opposite direction. The more abundance the less kids. Read the data. Your intuition is just flat out wrong. People don't want kids because they don't want kids. Pretty simple. Society changes with abundance. That abundance leads to more leisure activities more education which leads to a more diverse set of options for life and so more people choose some option that does not include having children.
• throwaway629532 5mo ago
  > If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. I’m 24 and have enough money. I want kids. I think I won’t be able to have any. Most of my friends are in the same boat.
  • Angostura 5mo ago
    If not money, what are the types of issue you face?
    • missedthecue 4mo ago
      Pairing seems to be the primary issue. The old social technology we had to increase the amounts of intersexual cooperation have for various reasons been discarded, but they have not been replaced with anything.
• pyrale 5mo ago
  > This is effectively impossible in a democratic society Why exactly would a democratic society oppose this? Are you conflating democratic and capitalist? Most if not all postwar European societies had ambitious social housing projects that aimed to secure housing for young workers.
• tw04 5mo ago
  > and we are going to learn just how impossible it is as western society slowly collapses under the weight of its own social programs. Social programs aren’t what’s causing western society to collapse. Wealth consolidation on the other hand…
  • lucketone 5mo ago
    Wealth was quite consolidated when most population were peasants.
    • tw04 5mo ago
      The wealth distribution in England in the 1500s had the top 1% controlling roughly 25% of the wealth. The top 1% in America today controls roughly 32% of the wealth. Tell us more about the peasants who got significant time off because the ruling class knew endless work resulted in an unhappy populace. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
• jschveibinz 5mo ago
  No disrespect, but historical evidence does not support this argument. I've seen similar claims made in other threads. Fertility rates have been decreasing (multiple factors) since 1850, even while general prosperity has been increasing. There is a connection between economic uncertainty and marriage/families over the short run. But the most likely causes of declining birth rates are cultural: modernization, freedom, female economic participation, contraception, later marriage or no marriage, etc. The world has advanced, and the requirement to procreate has diminished. There is lower want/need from eligible individuals. My parents had no money at all when they married and they were able to scrape together enough to raise three children.
  • ilovecake1984 5mo ago
    You are missing a major driver of this. The main reason fertility rates have been decreasing is because of decreasing infant mortality. The number of children surviving to adulthood has been relatively stable until recently.
    • jjk166 4mo ago
      And more specifically there is a delay between when technology lowers the infant mortality rate and it becomes culturally normal to have the smaller number of children leading to the same number of adult descendants, so you typically get 1-2 generations with way higher populations than preceding generations and then the rest after that is just this large initial population having a normal number of kids. This means you get massive populations and intense crowding decades after the fact.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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• moltar 4mo ago
  Yeah, exactly that. Most friends I have in Canada only started to have families once they were able to secure appropriate-sized dwelling. Which didn’t happen until late 30s. And current generations possibly cannot afford it at all in many jurisdictions. And stories I read from back in the day were “a factory worker and a teacher bought and paid off a house in downtown Ottawa in 3 years” are just insane. If I had that kind of purchasing power today I’d have more kids for sure.
• rafaelmn 4mo ago
  At no point in history did we have economic security at child bearing age and the assumption that it has a correlation with number of children seems to go against the data.
• blini-kot 4mo ago
  gee I wonder what other economic system was known for its apartment-building programs >western society slowly collapses good riddance