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A lot of those people were able to do it without debt which made it far less precarious. I have equally pessimistic view of the future so I built my house one

A lot of those people were able to do it without debt which made it far less precarious. I have equally pessimistic view of the future so I built my house one piece of wood at a time with cash. I bought a piece of shit car with cash. I've never used debt, I just got all the things I have by buying shit cars and shit land and slowly slowly making things better until I have nice things. For much of the youth, this is impossible. The permitting and regulatory process for houses is hostile to slow and DIY building so even if you can get cheap land near jobs (you can) you can't do it without predicting 30 years of mortgage payments. The pandemic monetary policy (more recently) and cash-for-clunkers(longer ago) trashed the used car markets. Increased regulation, licensing, insurance requirements and liability made childcare far less affordable. Also in the old days "neglect" was stuff like actually starving your kids to death so if you were broke you could work or do domestic stuff to save money and leave them home or to run around outside without Karen having them snatched by CPS. Annihilation isn't so worrying, it's the surviving that's scary.

bluGill 4mo ago
Their existence was even more precarious because they were one crop failure from starvation. They couldn't save food for long, and even if they tried an army is likely to come and take it all (if mice didn't get it first). Dept is bad, but it isn't nearly as bad as the things they dealt with.
- mothballed 4mo ago
  Most people worry more about what they'll do if they survive than what they'll do if they die to the point I don't think "what if we all die" even barely registers in the calculation of whether to have kids. IF you all starve it's all a moot point. In even an African village everyone who wanted a house could just build it on the copious land available with whatever materials you could find-- I would assert having a home is more precarious now than even medieval or even pre-historic times as the regulations and law will banish you to the street today if you just build whatever you can afford to build as was done in practically all times before. I don't spend much time worrying about what I'll do for my kids if the nuclear apocalypse happens. I would still have kids if it was 90% chance of the apocolypse, whereas I'd probably not have kids if there were a 30% chance I make just enough to survive but not so much I can pay child support and I sit in a jail cell while everyone around me does nothing but rags on me for being a deadbeat and failure of a father. Note: Also, except for the first few years, having kids made your situation less rather than more precarious in the agrarian age
- doctorwho42 4mo ago
  Umm, have you ever heard of pickling? Root cellars? Canning? I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation. They could survive a bad harvest every so often, its when the weather changed due to drought/etc. that caused famine.
  - mothballed 4mo ago
    Everything about being a male parent was far less precarious, and being a female parent was less precarious after childbirth. There was literally basically no liability if the children died, and not only that, the people around you would likely understand and sympathize with you. You could just make a best effort and if you failed, chalk it up to bad luck and try again. And if you died of starvation, welp your responsibilities in life have ended. That's a lot more inviting to having children than the current status quo. Society today still doesn't really do dick to help parents but not only that they've built unprecedented apparatus around jailing, ridiculing, condemning, and harassing parents for any perceived weaknesses in their strategy including failing to foresee their financial situation decades into the future.
    - circlefavshape 4mo ago
      Have you been neglecting to pay your child support?
    - bluGill 4mo ago
      While child death was common, there is no reason to think it was somehow less devastating to the families it happened too.
      - mothballed 4mo ago
        There is every reason to think legal consequences + misfortune of a child are more devastating than just misfortune of a child. For one, for instance people have had all their children removed when a single child has a fragile bone disease or similar poorly explained illness causing injury or death and CPS accuses the parents of abuse and causes the trauma of not just losing/injury of the child but also losing all your children and possibly being charged. There are cases of people adopting abused children and documenting the prior abuse at time of adoption, but then having their other kids removed when doctors find the signs of the prior documented abuse when the child dies despite the best efforts of the person adopting the child. I don't know why on earth you would think the trauma of having the legal system + other people attacking you + possibly losing custody of your other kids wouldn't cause more devastation. The whole system is geared around causing additional devastation for families this happens to compared to in prior times. Maybe the chance of having a child die or an unfixable injured is less than before, but the weight of consequences to consider are higher than before.
- datadrivenangel 4mo ago
  Modern civilization is ~2-3 years of correlated bad harvests away from major disaster. If food costs 20x what it used to, a good number of people will starve or die in the political turbulence that will follow...
  - zoomerwaffen 4mo ago
    Sounds like France circa 1790.
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    Modern society has much better transportation. The odds of correlated bad harvests around the world are much worse than local bad harvest in the past. I guarantee every place on earth will have a bad harvest, sometimes two in the next 20 years, but since there is enough harvest overall we are fine.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  - marcosdumay 4mo ago
    > ~2-3 years of correlated bad harvests Yes, but that's quite an event. The odds are better that a major disaster causes those worldwide correlated bad harvests than the other way around.
trevithick 4mo ago
I'm glad you addressed that your house-building strategy isn't feasible almost anywhere. There was an interesting article posted to HN on this topic a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31470400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31470400

bluGill 4mo ago

Their existence was even more precarious because they were one crop failure from starvation. They couldn't save food for long, and even if they tried an army is likely to come and take it all (if mice didn't get it first). Dept is bad, but it isn't nearly as bad as the things they dealt with.

mothballed 4mo ago
Most people worry more about what they'll do if they survive than what they'll do if they die to the point I don't think "what if we all die" even barely registers in the calculation of whether to have kids. IF you all starve it's all a moot point. In even an African village everyone who wanted a house could just build it on the copious land available with whatever materials you could find-- I would assert having a home is more precarious now than even medieval or even pre-historic times as the regulations and law will banish you to the street today if you just build whatever you can afford to build as was done in practically all times before. I don't spend much time worrying about what I'll do for my kids if the nuclear apocalypse happens. I would still have kids if it was 90% chance of the apocolypse, whereas I'd probably not have kids if there were a 30% chance I make just enough to survive but not so much I can pay child support and I sit in a jail cell while everyone around me does nothing but rags on me for being a deadbeat and failure of a father. Note: Also, except for the first few years, having kids made your situation less rather than more precarious in the agrarian age
doctorwho42 4mo ago
Umm, have you ever heard of pickling? Root cellars? Canning? I hate this fake idea that everyone in the past was one bad harvest from starvation. They could survive a bad harvest every so often, its when the weather changed due to drought/etc. that caused famine.
- mothballed 4mo ago
  Everything about being a male parent was far less precarious, and being a female parent was less precarious after childbirth. There was literally basically no liability if the children died, and not only that, the people around you would likely understand and sympathize with you. You could just make a best effort and if you failed, chalk it up to bad luck and try again. And if you died of starvation, welp your responsibilities in life have ended. That's a lot more inviting to having children than the current status quo. Society today still doesn't really do dick to help parents but not only that they've built unprecedented apparatus around jailing, ridiculing, condemning, and harassing parents for any perceived weaknesses in their strategy including failing to foresee their financial situation decades into the future.
  - circlefavshape 4mo ago
    Have you been neglecting to pay your child support?
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    While child death was common, there is no reason to think it was somehow less devastating to the families it happened too.
    - mothballed 4mo ago
      There is every reason to think legal consequences + misfortune of a child are more devastating than just misfortune of a child. For one, for instance people have had all their children removed when a single child has a fragile bone disease or similar poorly explained illness causing injury or death and CPS accuses the parents of abuse and causes the trauma of not just losing/injury of the child but also losing all your children and possibly being charged. There are cases of people adopting abused children and documenting the prior abuse at time of adoption, but then having their other kids removed when doctors find the signs of the prior documented abuse when the child dies despite the best efforts of the person adopting the child. I don't know why on earth you would think the trauma of having the legal system + other people attacking you + possibly losing custody of your other kids wouldn't cause more devastation. The whole system is geared around causing additional devastation for families this happens to compared to in prior times. Maybe the chance of having a child die or an unfixable injured is less than before, but the weight of consequences to consider are higher than before.
datadrivenangel 4mo ago
Modern civilization is ~2-3 years of correlated bad harvests away from major disaster. If food costs 20x what it used to, a good number of people will starve or die in the political turbulence that will follow...
- zoomerwaffen 4mo ago
  Sounds like France circa 1790.
- bluGill 4mo ago
  Modern society has much better transportation. The odds of correlated bad harvests around the world are much worse than local bad harvest in the past. I guarantee every place on earth will have a bad harvest, sometimes two in the next 20 years, but since there is enough harvest overall we are fine.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- marcosdumay 4mo ago
  > ~2-3 years of correlated bad harvests Yes, but that's quite an event. The odds are better that a major disaster causes those worldwide correlated bad harvests than the other way around.

trevithick 4mo ago

I'm glad you addressed that your house-building strategy isn't feasible almost anywhere. There was an interesting article posted to HN on this topic a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31470400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31470400