You're baffled people aren't having kids? What bubble do you live in? People straight up can't afford housing much less children. The avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now.
Edit: the replies - y'all are out of touch. Visit an average family in the Midwest with a household income of < $100k/yr that doesn't own a home yet.
I believe you, but we have to go by effects, not intent. If you post swipes like "What bubble do you live in?" (which is already against the site guidelines, btw) on a divisive topic like this, then the odds of a flamewar are high and you're responsible for starting it—the same way you would be responsible for a wildfire if you dropped lit matches in a dry forest, whether you intended a wildfire or not.
Dang, I don't know how this community would resist imploding without you. Your clarity of communication and considerate restraint are deeply appreciated.
I mean you could have a canned answer for such threads, but I liked and learned from how you handled this.
This is unnecessarily confrontational and inaccurate. According to census.gov, the current national homeownership rate is hovering at about 66%, which is about the same rate that it's been (+/- 3%) since they started tracking in 1964 [0][1]. This isn't restricted to old people either: 49% of 30 to 34 year olds and 58% of 35 to 39 year olds owned a home in Q4 2023 [2].
There are certainly regional differences in housing affordability, but the average American lives in a home that they own by the time they're 35.
[1] edit since there's some confusion—here's the direct link to the table I'm citing from, entitled "Quarterly Homeownership Rates for the U.S. and Regions: 1964 to Present"—https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/histtab17.xlsx
If you look into the "definitions" section it defines "Housing Unit. A housing unit is a house, an apartment, a group of rooms, or a single room
occupied or intended for occupancy as separate living quarters."
and "Householder. The householder refers to the person (or one of the persons) in whose name the housing unit is owned or rented [...]"
49% of people aged 30-34 aren't homeowners, 49% of us are homeowners or renters.
> The avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now.
You haven't disproven this statement in any way, you've just linked to some statistics that show we can still afford rent.
No, I'm not. I'm citing the numbers in the table entitled "Quarterly Homeownership Rates for the U.S. and Regions: 1964 to Present"* (emphasis added). That table is talking about homeownership rates, not householdership rates, and the definition they give is this:
> Homeownership Rates. The proportion of households that are owners is termed the homeownership rate. It is computed by dividing the number of households that are owners by the total number of occupied households (table 5 and 6)
Sorry, I just updated my links to include the citation for the age breakdown, which is in fact the link you linked to.
Note the title of the chart you linked to (tab7.xlsx): "Homeownership Rates by Age of Householder" (emphasis added). This is percentage of householders who own the home that they are the householder of.
EDIT: Also, while I'm at it, here's "Homeownership Rates by Age of Householder: 1994 to Present" (again, homeownership), which shows a 39% homeownership rate under 35 years old, which is about the same rate as it was throughout the 90s. It broke 40% in the 2000s for a while before coming back down, but was never higher than about 43%.
> This is percentage of householders who own the home that they are the householder of.
It is not. It's a ratio of homeowners in an age group to the number of renter households in that age group, which is kinda a useless statistic.
To explain why it's a bad metric take this real (but simplified) example. My roommate and I share a "household". Lets pretend that besides my roommate and I there is only one other person aged 30-34 in the US and they own a home.
The Homeownership Rates by Age of Householder chart would say 50%. 1 owner household / 2 total occupied households.
Now if you read that chart and take it to mean that there is only 1 homeowner and 1 renter, you would be misunderstanding what the statistics mean. There are more renters than homeowners in our example but the metric doesn't reflect that because it isn't meant to.
This is a fair argument and as late as it is I don't have a reply—you're right that there are limitations that I hadn't considered, and I'll have to look at the numbers more closely to figure out what they mean *.
However, I want to note that this represents a sudden change of pace from your original "49% of us are homeowners or renters" and "you've just linked to some statistics that show we can still afford rent".
When you misunderstood the situation, you insisted that I "own it" that I was wrong (when I wasn't). It would behoove you to do so yourself instead of pretending you understood the numbers all along.
* Edit: as an initial thought, I'd argue that the same argument often applies to the homeowner number—my wife and I jointly owning one house balances out you and your roommate.
I'm so terribly confused. How can you read this discussion and come to that conclusion? The whole point is that the number being quoted hides the truth.
Living arrangements have suddenly and dramatically shifted.
Man, those are wide age bands. Big difference from more 19 year olds living at home versus 34 year olds.
And flip that statistic, the percentage not living at home went from 80% to 68%.
Significant? Sure. Massive? Doesn’t seem like it.
And looking at home ownership rates for those under 35 years old, historically - its not that much lower, maybe a 10% relative drop.
So sure, fewer young people owning homes, but it’s <10% relative change. That doesn’t scream crisis to me. The vast majority of young people own homes similar to the past.
It's not comparing 18 year olds to 34 year olds, it's comparing the same age range in different time periods, so the size of the band is also irrelevant. Besides which, 18-34 is a standard range used all the time.
And it seems like you didn't even notice my last comment was your own words.
> 49% of people aged 30-34 aren't homeowners, 49% of us are homeowners or renters.
Wait, this is saying less than 50% of people aged 30-34 live in a home that is owned or rented by them (or their spouse)? I can't imagine a region where this is close to true, since probably near 100% where I live either own or rent. Is there a regional breakdown for this? And where do these people live? With their parents or in a shelter?
They're wrong, they got confused because the header column on the data is labeled "age of householder". This is because the data is the ratio of householders who own their homes to total householders, broken down by the age of the householder.
The title of the tables I'm looking at are "Homeownership rates by Age of Householder", which makes it pretty clear what they mean.
I notice that this isn't even close to the claim GP quotes you making. It's wild to me that you're out here telling the other guy to just own up to their "misunderstanding" while furiously backpedaling your own.
There is subtlety of the "renters are probably systematically undercounted due to the vagaries of householding" variety, but that is neither a straightforward effect (a homeowning married couple with 2 of their parents and 3 adult children under the same roof and 1 single renter in an apartment = 50%!) nor is it remotely what you were saying to begin with.
"Homeownership" rate is a bit of a misnomer, since it's the proportion of occupied housing units which are occupied by their owners.
Homeownership by age of householder restricts the reference set of housing units to those which are occupied by a householder in the specified age group.
This turned into a wild and (perhaps understandably) aggressive discussion.
After reading all of the back-and-forths here, I just wanted to thank you for continually being the clarifying force in this discussion, even amidst the downvotes and fallacies.
As a 41-year-old urban homeowner, I knew I was in a lucky category, but I didn't realize how difficult it actually is to know how lucky based on the available data.
HN has a blindness for the vast land area of America that isn't The Bay Area, NYC, Seattle, Boston, and a handful of other insanely expensive locations. Home ownership has probably plummeted in those markets (I don't have the data) but it leads to certain types of comments being passed around as fact.
The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless is really exhausting.
There are also people who pretend like problems highlighted in the Bay Area and other metropolitan cities are unique to them. Yet every time it looks like those are just the first wave of the changes that are heading to other regions first. Like the wave of homelessness. People made fun of SF, then it spread to the broader Bay Area, then LA, then other parts of the country. Turns out the effects of income inequality and how it impacts housing are rippling through the US.
While it may be too doomer, it’s worthwhile to listen and understand the struggles of people who aren’t you to understand what’s coming. Certainly home ownership is rarer even for millennials and Genz is likely going to have even lower rates (its a little too early to compare since they’re too young for it)
A lot of problems highlighted in the Bay Are and other [insanely expensive, dense urban areas in the US] are unique to them. Nobody is calmly walking through a Walgreens in western Minnesota shoving everything they can into bags and walking out the front door while 30 people record it. Nobody is putting glitter bombs in bags for news articles in rural Missouri.
Maybe shifts in housing dynamics happen first in cities then spreads to the suburbs, then the exurbs, then rural areas. Or maybe it's just due to how cities are governed, how many people live there, and how much new housing you get in any one year?
Bay Area is usually just 10-15 years ahead of the rest of the country, because it's a region that culturally tends to embrace the future (good and bad) and run toward it.
Bay Area in 2000 was complaining about illegal immigration, bilingual education, and the lights not staying on, all of which are contemporary issues facing the rest of America from 2015 onward. Bay Area in 2010 was in relative boom times from the tech industry, which again is spreading nationwide as tech jobs start getting more dispersed (though it may reverse thanks to RTO). Starting in 2012, housing prices became utterly unaffordable, which again started spreading nationwide around 2022.
Give it another 5-10 years and yes, people will probably be walking through a Walgreens in western Minnesota shoving everything they can into their bags.
To be fair the lights not staying on in California was a local problem and not a portend of things to come, but ironically caused by a Texas company that was committing insane levels of unrelated fraud and in this case was exploiting a loop hole in the energy grid to shut down their California plants in times of high demand to cause high purchase prices to import from their Texas plants.
It was allowed because it was politically convenient - they were tied into Bush’s inner circle and the energy problems were convenient in making Gray Davis unpopular and causing his recall to then install a Republican governor by the name of Arnold instead. Ironically Arnold created reforms within the political structure of California to solidify Democratic control of the state.
If you’re not familiar with that, look up how Enron fucked with the California power grid and the Bush administration prevented California from discovering it nor making changes to stabilize the grid (or something along those lines - I may have gotten some of the details wrong).
> People made fun of SF, then it spread to the broader Bay Area, then LA, then other parts of the country. Turns out the effects of income inequality and how it impacts housing are rippling through the US.
These aren't automatic, though. Who's to say they aren't produced by policy that's often done first in SF first?
The policy is usually in response to the problems, not vice versa. California is actually dysfunctionally democratic (with a small "d", not "Democratic"). The state constitution gives ballot initiatives powers that they don't have in many other states, and the state has a tradition of individual rights and political activism that means the citizenry isn't shy about using that.
A lot of people in the rest of the country tend to think "Oh, that's just dysfunctional California politics, we'll vote in different policies and things will go differently for us." Yes, you will vote in different policies. No, things will not go differently for you. California voted in different policies too - remember that it's the source of the Reagan Revolution, the hippie generation, the Chinese Exclusion Act, all sorts of policies that took hold nationally but are now the antithesis of what California stands for.
At the root of this is a misperception of the power of politics. Most ordinary people think that laws are laws and the people who make the laws have ultimate power. California (and U.S. history in general) proves that laws are reactions to specific social and demographic forces, and the laws reflect the shape of those forces. Economics drives politics and technology drives economics.
California is also dysfunctionally Democratic (big "D") in that all elected state level offices have gone to Democrats for the last several election cycles. Because the Republican Party has imploded and third parties have failed to gain traction we now live in a single party state. Politicians are selected by Democratic Party leaders and are no longer accountable to voters in any meaningful way.
This problem isn't particular to the Democratic Party. Other states now have single party Republican governments with similar levels of dysfunction and corruption.
The implosion is because the top two system in California ensures that Republican candidates never even get on the ballot because the GOP is so unpopular.
The top two system by the way was a popular ballot initiative championed by Schwarzenegger to remove the gridlock from the state and remove the power of individual parties.
Ironically Schwarzenegger came to power because of shenanigans the Bush administration and Enron were playing with California’s power grid to remove Gray Davis, a popular up and comer who could be a threat.
So in essence, your complaint that only democrats win in California and somehow that’s because of the Democratic Party is ironic because single party rule in California is due to direct efforts by Republicans to make it thus. It just turned out that the federal politics of the GOP shifted the state very solidly blue and turns out single party rule by Democrats seems to be quite popular given how the state flourished in the years following.
> So in essence, your complaint that only democrats win in California and somehow that’s because of the Democratic Party is ironic because single party rule in California is due to direct efforts by Republicans to make it thus
There was no complaint. I don't see the point in such a partisan way of thinking.
> single party rule by Democrats seems to be quite popular given how the state flourished in the years following
This doesn't seem to be the case now. Lots of people are leaving California, as far as I can tell[0].
> But this trend is now shifting, with a sharp increase in the number of higher-income adults moving to California (up 30% in 2022 versus 2021) and a slight decline in the number moving out. The net effect is a strong rebound from the pandemic years.
Basically the trend of pushing out lower income people is continuing because California still struggles to keep CoL under control.
Be careful trying to draw political conclusions from migration data, because it tells an economic story.
The migration data you cite says that the people leaving California are generally lower-income households without higher education. The people entering California tend to be highly educated and have very well-paying jobs [1]. California's housing stock is more or less fixed; actual housing construction is round-off error to the current population. What's happening is that high-earning immigrants are outbidding lower-income residents for the fixed supply of housing, and then faced with soaring housing costs, those lower-income residents are moving to states where their income places them higher on the social pecking order.
Yes, urban hellscape problems tends to spread to other urban hellscapes, but there exist places to live other than urban hellscapes.
There's a peculiar form of blindness that strikes the Urbanite, as if there are no other places to live.
The people who live in flyover country are barely even recognizable as human, so you might as well ask me to move to Mars! How the hell am I going to be seen in public drinking my $12 microbrews or pretending to appreciate the Moma so that other people know I'm the correct class of person? God, what would my parents think? I'd rather die than live there, so that place doesn't even exist for me.
So instead we should be looking at the massive failing small towns all across the area for examples? Humans population grows and it has to go somewhere. Humans are social animals so we congregate. Congregated humans also create opportunities for each other. Yes problems come with that but framing it as “this is the problem of urbanites” when more than half of the world’s population lives in cities is an othering framing that doesn’t actually help anything. There’s plenty of problems from small town communities spread all over the place too.
“It’s those damn young people”. “It’s those damn urbanites”. “It’s those damn techies”. Replace that kind of thinking with religious or racial terms and consider how you’re looking at a very large and diverse group of people.
I live in a mid-sized European city right now, which I'm sure explains a lot of the bias in my response but there do exist relatively affordable cities with a good quality of life, and I'd rather live in a place where I can walk to the supermarket and the pharmacy and the town center rather than have to drive everywhere.
High population density also (generally) means more social activities, which can be important for some people (like myself). Living in a rural area kinda scares me because I'm afraid I'd be quite lonely.
On top of that, for those of us who don't have the privilege to remote work, living in a city is often necessary to have a job.
How’s the situation in European cities? I’ve also wondered if many of the problems are culturally specific to American views on individualism and capitalism and distaste for socialism given how similar many European cities are to large American cities with a major difference being social and cultural norms.
Pretty much. I used to live in a mid-sized mid-West city in the US and still keep in touch. Most everyone I know bought a house, even with the modest wages they had. Why? Because there are plenty of homes in the $100-$200k range, even now.
Hell, you can buy beautiful, updated small mansions in the heart of many small midwestern towns for under $200k.
The trouble is:
1) no local jobs to speak of (unless you want to clerk at the farm & feed or assistant-manage the McDonald’s out by the highway)
2) nearest hospital that can do more than stabilize you before shipping you somewhere better, is over an hour away.
3) the schools are really, really bad
4) no local services or amenities. Hope the nearest state park (if any) is really good. But if it’s a midwestern one it’s probably not.
Remote work, being young and healthy and willing to take a little extra risk, having no kids and planning to have none, and being kinda a home-body (or being really into readily available rural midwestern outdoor activities like hunting and fishing), can make it a viable way to go, but that’s a lot of qualifiers.
In our medium-ish sized midwestern city there are smaller slightly-run-down houses in the low $200Ks, but universally in bottom-half school districts for the city. Solid choice if no kids, though. But also local tech jobs pay at most 50% of big-city equivalents.
They exist, but they’re needles in a haystack. Especially if you exclude rural districts that aren’t cheap because they’re basically captured by the same folks who attend the country club the community’s centered around (there are a few of these, particularly in the Northeast)
There are lots of schools in rural Pennsylvania that still have affordable real estate. Most of them have AP, college in HS courses, clubs, sports, etc. The metrics might not look as good as suburban schools because of the lack of home support or need to work for the larger percentage of disadvantaged students.
I think that's a part that gets ignored in most school comparisons - the largest differences are due to the level of home support, which is highly correlated with better incomes. So we have a cycle of implicit financial segregation. Many schools (in my area) have similar scores and outcomes if we exclude the disadvanged group from the metrics (because unless your child fits that category, that metric doesn't apply to them). So most people end up counting the wrong metrics for their kids.
Plenty of examples of far better options in mid-sized cities that have level 1 or 2 trauma centers, very good school options and lots of local services and amenities. And housing that is under $300k for a single family home.
> The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless is really exhausting.
The algorithm has turned (some) people into whiners and doomers. It really sucks to watch them take defeatist attitudes on everything in life.
I see lots of these young 20-somethings on Reddit thinking their lives are over. It's absurd. They have their entire lives ahead of them, and all it takes is one break into a career.
They even think climate change is going to "kill all of us" before they're elderly. That's not even what the science says.
On the topic of having children, though - people aren't having kids because they're choosing to focus on themselves.
There are ten times as many forms of entertainment today as there were in the 1980s, and people can endlessly consume content in their hands. You can go glamping at a music festival, post it on Instagram, and hook up with new friends and romantic partners you meet. All incredibly easily. Our culture has become built around experience and consumption.
I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children.
It's wild that, not too long ago, you could afford a house and a car on a single income as a mailman. That is unthinkable today. We understand there are ways to be successful, but it's like that saying: anyone can be successful, but everyone can't.
I know a lot of people who spend their money on experiences because they genuinely believe they won't get a retirement, so they might as well enjoy their life while they can. I'm part of this group. I don't think the world will literally be over by then, but the future looks bleak. We've also been drilled from birth that you should never have a child if you can't afford it, and people are taking that advice to heart. And because you can't afford your home on a single income anymore, more and more parents are having to rely on childcare, which is itself expensive.
The issues are just compounding. If you just want to believe that everyone is too enamored by their phones to procreate... that's your prerogative, but yikes.
> It's wild that, not too long ago, you could afford a house and a car on a single income as a mailman. That is unthinkable today.
to be fair it was unthinkable the day before yesterday too. in the history of human civilisation, that kind of setup has only been possible in a handful of countries, for a few skin colours, for a couple of decades. fueled by burning cheap fossil fuels taken from poorer countries
In the history of human civilization, before that kind of setup most people didn't worry about having a house, because they lived in villages, so they lived next to their extended family, and either stayed together under one roof or eventually moved couple hundred meters to the side and built their own.
Expectations for quality of life were lower, sure, but the problem of not being able to find a place to live anywhere near your family or job, that is relatively new and getting worse.
> in a handful of countries, for a few skin colours, for a couple of decades. fueled by burning cheap fossil fuels taken from poorer countries
Also: I know it's trendy to make everything about skin colours these days, but that's a distinct USA-ian bias. The rest of the world doesn't work that way.
I won't argue against exploitation of poorer countries as that, indeed, was a big theme in the last century or two. However, note that whatever many hard problems people in those poorer countries have, affordable housing isn't one of them.
> Also: I know it's trendy to make everything about skin colours these days, but that's a distinct USA-ian bias. The rest of the world doesn't work that way.
Europe's industrialized genocidal tribalism of 20th century, the modern islamic experience as an immigrant in Europe, 21st century genocide in Africa and the Middle East, Japan's war crimes in east asia during WW2. Where is this rest of the world you speak of?
You are proving my point here, by conflating together total war for world domination, anti-immigration sentiments (in case of Islamic immigrants, with a healthy dose of Islamopobia thanks to two decades of US anti-Islamic propaganda), civil wars, ethnic conflicts, regional conflicts, plain old war between nation states, and war crimes against POWs of the same racial group.
The rest of the world is where we can distinguish these different reasons, motivations and patterns, instead of lumping them together with racial discrimination and calling everything "racism".
I was perhaps broadening "skin colour" to include "ethnic" or "national" or "racial" distinctions, but I think that's a distinction without a difference.
If we want to say "The US has been bad", I'm on board and wholeheartedly agree. But using "The Rest of the World" as the counterexample, I'm not sure that will hold up.
I imagine we broadly agree and would love to have a cup of coffee with you some day!
In 1950 you could afford a car and house on one income - but that house as much smaller than the typical house today. You also had one car not two, your wife (this was sexist times - men worked, women stayed home) probably didn't even have a drivers license. If she did she couldn't drive anywhere when you were at work unless she drove you to work. (thus door to door salesmen: sell things those housewives need but cannot easily get because their husband is at work. Send both partners to work and suddenly houses get larger and you have two cars.
Note that despite the above, in 1950 women did often have jobs. It wasn't the "ideal" and it was less common (and even less common if you had kids), but plenty of women had jobs.
In the 1950s the world had gone through two (2) gigantic world wars, one recently, which completely collapsed multiple global empires, killed millions -- especially the young, fit men who are the backbone of the economy -- and devastated multiple countries, many of which were big developed economies.
the US, and certain parts of Europe, were mostly spared this, and as a result could make crazy money because they were the only source of advanced labor around.
it wasn't like that in the Guilded Age or Roaring 20s or Great Depression -- there was a reason all of those labor movements and riots happened then; wouldn't have happened if a one-income mailman could buy a house.
that was a one-off, a time when half the world blew up a few years before.
> In 1950 you could afford a car and house on one income - but that house as much smaller than the typical house today.
"Typical" is doing some really heavy lifting there given the kind of housing stock available in, say, East Coast urban areas. Most of those remotely-affordable houses are a hundred years old in the Boston area, for example.
I would love to see historical rates in urban vs rural/suburban areas for this, alongside migration/growth rates - does something like that exist?
My son (in college) probably won’t be able to afford much of a house in the Bay Area, austin, etc. but originally he was going to become an electrician in Watertown, NY. You can get a house for $120k there, which seems doable on a 50k income.
I've seen it but don't have it on hand. Urban prices certainly seem to have disconnected quite hard from suburban/rural ones, but even suburban/rural might not capture it. I grew up in a not-all-that-wealthy town in Maine about the same size as Watertown, NY--a little smaller actually; an empty half-acre lot there costs more than $120K. (I'd love to move back there, but a house the size of my Boston-area house costs the same as my Boston-area house...)
The formal dining room has now become the home office.
My grandparents raised 5 kids in a 900 sq foot home. They weren't poor. That was the typical home being built in the working class suburbs of Detroit in the early 1950s. Average new home being built today is twice that size for a smaller household.
"your wife (this was sexist times - men worked, women stayed home) probably didn't even have a drivers license"
According to a internet search it seems about half of women had driver's licenses. So this is not accurate. Anecdotal, but I just skimmed The Donna Reed show episode descriptions and a 1961 episode has her fighting a parking ticket, another 1961 episode has her daughter learning to drive.
There doesn't appear to be easily obtainable information on the internet showing how many married women had driver's licenses in 1950 [and just 1950] compared to married men (the federal government did not collect this information), however an article states "In the 1950s many suburban housewives obtained their licenses in order to fulfil their domestic responsibilities." it also states "Perhaps a quarter of women drove before the second world war and more learned to drive during the war."
> It's wild that, not too long ago, you could afford a house and a car on a single income as a mailman.
You can do that today in some parts of the US.
Was there a time when you could do that in NYC? Or San Francisco? Maybe. When the city was down in the dumps and housing prices dropped. Or if you were willing to buy in crappy neighborhoods or on the edge of the city.
It makes me think of my great grandparents. They have a beautiful house in a central location in a major Canadian city worth North of $2.0M. And they did it on the single income of a teacher! I weep for those times.
But oh yeah, when they actually bought the house, it was on the edge of the city where nobody wanted to live. Oh and my grandfather picked up extra jobs to make sure his family of 5 had everything they needed.
There was never a time when it came easy. When people say they can't afford a home what they mean is "I can't afford a house in this specific city that checks all my boxes".
Ddg reckons average mailman salary is about 50k. That’s 1/8th the average house price.
In 1990 it was about 25k with prices about 150k
House prices are about 100k too high, they should be 300k not 400k
One reason for this is more people rely on two incomes to pay for housing, so more money is available for housing, so money transfers from future debt of millenials to existing assets of boomers and gen x.
But on top of that it means two incomes means harder to have kids due to child care.
> But on top of that it means two incomes means harder to have kids due to child care.
Maybe we're also stuck in something of a vicious cycle.
More people not having kids leads to more double incomes. More double incomes means more money to pay higher prices. The market seems to be bearing the higher prices just fine, so they continue to climb...
As someone who is doing well financially I don't think you found the reason.
The gist of it is: There are worlds and circumstances into which people want to bring kids. We mostly failed to create that world and those circumstances. If tou want to know what a solution looks like look at western democracies with high birth rates. E.g. France, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark.
The rest is probably due to individualism. Kids cost time and energy and capitalism tells us we should live our best lives. And the best live does not involve herding 6 kids, even if they are your own.
We created this world willingly, and the low birth rate is a consequence — and so is the need for migration if we wanna stay wealthy. The thing is: now that the genie is out of the bottle we are not gonna be able to force people to have kids. We can just create circumstances in which they are willing to.
I am in my 30s and I am unsure if I will ever be able to retire. I am sure however that I will have to change my job and career multiple times throughout my life. Despite me being financially well off, I am not sure if I would be able to support kids in the future. This is not about being whiny. I just think if I had kids it is my responsibility to throw them into a world that can sustain them. This one can't.
> We mostly failed to create that world and those circumstances. If tou want to know what a solution looks like look at western democracies with high birth rates. E.g. France, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark.
Those countries all have a fertility rate [0] almost identical to the US - three of them are lower if you look at 2020 figures. All of them have been relying on immigration [1] to maintain their demographics, with various levels of backlash in recent years. The US is still ahead of all but Ireland on that immigration list.
In Ireland at least, the narrative around the "housing crisis" and people being priced out of starting families is far stronger than what I get from US media. So I think you need to look elsewhere.
Here's my related guess: many people want to wait until they feel in an appropriate position personally and financially before they have children. That might mean earning a certain amount or feeling like they have a foothold in home ownership or waiting for a future renovation. Only, the world in 2010+ constantly exposes you to bigger options on top of the issue of housing affordability: more adventures, more expensive furnishings, stories of others' salaries, etc. It would be quite easy to push back child-rearing for 5 or more years if you didn't feel like you were quite where you wanted to be, or wonder if you'll ever get there.
It's very interesting how this thread treats the decision to have children as a purely rational, logistical one. I would argue it is not entirely rational/logical.
It also seems pretty straightforward to me that when a person is constantly badgered to justify why they don't have kids, and nobody accepts the simple answer "I don't want kids", they'll probably come up with socioeconomic reasons like these just to get people off their back, but I see only talk like "they just want to keep their Netflix and travel lifestyles" and "housing market/economy"
Capitalism does not tell us we should live our best life. I think there are strong arguments that capitalism (particularly concentrated private investment in housing) causes low birth rates, but I don’t think capitalism itself causes some kind of consumption-fueled decadence causing us to prioritize fun over children.
Except that consumption is exactly what capitalism drives - particularly manufacturing, where a relatively fixed amount of capital (factories & machinery) can drive higher overall profits if more products are made for people to consume - even if those people don't actually need the products.
Apparently (I can't find the source for this, but it stuck in my mind), faced with a glut of production after WW2, the US could either consume more, or work less. The choice was made to consume more, not least because the industrialists could cream off a larger slice of the pie that way.
Having children still fuels consumption though. The difference is what is being consumed vs if that consumption spending were not spent on children. I think you are mixing up the colloquial definition of consumption of ie random plastic crap with the economic definition that is very broad and includes things like paying teachers.
Similarly regarding manufacturing and production glute, if the hard capital is fixed then so too typically is the hard production (not the case for many kinds of capital but it is for manufacturing) or at least capped. Just like with consumption, it’s a problem of what portion of capital is being expended on increasing production of things for children (housing, schools, kid stuff) or not. In both cases this is ultimately driven by the supply and demand stemming from parents themselves. But I don’t think there is a feedback loop because capitalism does not itself care whether capital goes to kids or not, only whether there is enough demand for capital expenditure to be profitable.
> Kids cost time and energy and capitalism tells us we should live our best lives.
Thought experiment for all the unrestrained free-market folk: how can the free hand of the market can solve for low birthrates? Bonus points if the solution doesn't involve government-issued visas.
Free market is a kind of natural selection. People with inner desire to procreate will spread themselves, people without it won't. Pro-natalist cultures (e. g. orthodox jews) will procreate as well.
This inner desire wasn't selected for strongly in the past because there were other mechanisms to nudge people to procreate (social norms, lack of birth control), but I expect it will play a much bigger role in the following generations.
Well technically those who seek to gain from people having children would want to generate som marketing/propaganda that encourages having kids. Families want big safe cars and would pay a premium for that, singles would be more enclined to drive in old used cars, so theres the car industry. Families usually wants big houses so there that, diaper industry etc.
> I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children.
That kind of thing, at least to me, seemed to get old pretty quickly. Probably more importantly though, is that we all get old at some point. When fewer and fewer people have children of their own, what happens when the bulk of people get past retirement age? I think it's a huge problem from both an economic standpoint (if there's no productive workers to keep things going, is the state really going to be able to support you in better than awful conditions as you age?) and from an individual and cultural standpoint.
Claiming a legitimate argument is from "the algorithm" is flimsy, unprovable, unfalsifiable, and does nothing except discredit the person rather than the idea. I could claim your argument is from living a life of privilege, but then I'd be addressing the person rather than the argument.
Our house prices, North of Dallas and deep in the suburbs - far from the bay areas and Seattles, have doubled. That includes my home. People in our profession usually have to live by big cities, like Dallas. But the homes are ridiculously priced and it's insane. My juniors have no hope of owning a home that is big enough to raise a family without years of saving. And they're college educated engineers, some of them married with dual incomes.
My wife and I are expecting. Daycare is expensive, but it's only an outrageous expense if you have two people making up to about 3x minimum wage. Below that, it makes sense (at least in our area) to have one person stay home. But the cheapest state-regulated, licensed daycares are around $1500/mo for full-day infant care.
$18k/yr is a lot to spend on anything when you're making $20/hr for sure, but if you've got two professional people making $75-100k/yr each it becomes a very manageable expense and nobody considers staying home to save that.
$75k is about $56k after taxes. And many people that have children tend to have at least two children, so you can double that $18k to $36k/year for those people.
Once you get to that point, it gets harder to justify having someone work just to take home an extra $20k a year. It starts making more sense for one person to stay home (or work a part-time gig that lets them still raise their children) and the other person to try to make a bit more money on their end instead.
My parents got around the daycare cost problem by my mother running a daycare out of the home, so she was making money while still able to raise us. But I imagine that's become so much more risky nowadays (like legal issues, parental trust, etc) that it probably wouldn't be worth doing that anymore.
And as soon as we both graduated high school she stopped doing it and went back into the workforce elsewhere.
Yeah after taxes and then daycare it gets blurry unless you're making well above US median.
even then, I'm not crazy with the idea of random strangers raising my kids. being "qualified" to run a daycare is mostly paperwork. plus I work remotely, and that means I can see my kid 3 times a day, even if I can't really stick around to do serious parenting in between meetings.
my wife's people are also around, retired teachers no less, so having them pop in on the regular helps a immensely. they had 3 kids, several grandkids, and have educational backgrounds in early childhood development, and I trust them to do everything they can to take care of my kid, even if it means occasionally giving them extra ice cream (but, usually, it's grandpa reading books or working on basic math with them, etc.).
"it gets harder to justify having someone work just to take home an extra $20k a year."
An extra $20k/yr is huge for most people. Median household income is around $80k. I've heard it's more like $100k for married couples with kids, but can't find that Stat. With either number(or even 75% of those after tax), that's a large bump (or subtraction).
This was already assuming the person quitting was making $75k though, per the parent, so presumably the other person is making more (or else they would probably be the one quitting for day care). Which means they're already making double the household median.
And once you get to that level, the person keeping the job getting a new job for a $10k-$20k bump starts becoming feasible (I got a >$60k bump when I last switched jobs), and that can make up the difference right there.
Then you have one person who can take care of the children and have time and energy to help with cooking and cleaning (keeping those costs down, especially if you were getting a lot of takeout before), and can save even more money.
There's plenty of families making this decision nowadays, it's not a hypothetical. It doesn't always make sense for every couple, but the marginal increase of income doesn't always make sense for all the added stress of trying to raise children while having two full-time jobs and the house not completely falling apart.
We don't even have children, and we aren't able to fully keep up with cooking and cleaning on two full-time jobs, we just don't have the leftover energy afterwards.
You're on Hacker News. I work in the Midwest, and I'm probably making half or less of the total compensation of people (with half my years of experience) working in Silicon Valley, which is the target demographic of this site. Yet I'm making significantly more than $80k. 'Lots of income' is the norm here.
And $10-20k isn't a huge bump between jobs. I've gotten that much of a bump, or more, at least six times throughout my career. And I wasn't always a software engineer, so it's not just because I'm in a lucrative career.
I haven't gotten it every time, but often enough that this shouldn't be impossible at least once in someone's career if they're extra motivated by switching to a single income household (unless it's a field known for low salaries, like maybe teachers can't expect that much of a bump, unfortunately).
I'd like to get less takeout. I'd be fine with just lunchmeat on bread or something microwaved for most of my meals, but my wife won't. She insists on a 'proper meal' every day, so on weeks we don't cook those (which almost always take me about 1.5-2 hours to cook) we tend to get a lot of takeout. I hate how much money we spend on it, but we can afford it.
House upkeep has been a challenge. Both of us have been pretty low energy after work, so during the week not much more tends to get done besides dishes, sometimes cooking, and laundry.
And then on the weekend we might be out pretty much all day both days (I work from home, so I feel more of a need to socialize on the weekends to make up for it, but even just extended family social obligations can suck up a weekend) or trying to relax from a long week, so not much tends to get done there either.
And so slowly things that need doing start accumulating, until it becomes this big thing that takes a lot of work (and some proper time off) to tackle.
I know it's not just me either. I know several friends and coworkers that hire maids to keep up with housework. People I know aren't making a ton of money comparatively so I wonder how they afford it. We can afford it but we kind of need to get the house up to a certain level before it's even worth hiring a maid (have to do enough decluttering, for example).
Also doesn't help that I keep saying "Well next week let's do better." and it keeps not happening for one reason or another.
I'm glad someone else spends this amount of time cooking. Look, I actually really enjoy cooking. It's almost zen to me to go from programming all day to just following steps, the most complicated of which is usually something like "now add some ingredient but don't stop stirring." It's mindless in a good way but still creative.
But can we talk about how every single unit of time seems to be distorted like it was written in some relativistic hellscape? Any 30 minute recipe takes just over an hour, any "from scratch" recipe takes me half the day.
I find it interesting how income tends to segregate with marriage, and how that exasperates some inequalities.
Having kids for those highly compensated dual income homes seems narcissistic when you get to the root of it. Like why have kids if we're outsourcing their raising to daycare and schools. The we only care about their accomplishments and leaving them with a large inheritance or paying for a fancy school. Then they go off to live mostly separate lives. Look at how well my kid is doing because I set them up in life, even though I barely raised them and rarely see them now. I don't know?
Telling the monthly rate in Texas is not a great metric in general... you must always add the property tax costs. What are those, 300k'ish houses? You're probably looking at at least another 500 a month in properly tax pushing it up to $2300, then if they are built like this add another $200 in for summer time cooling.
1800/month including tax. Real estate tax is high in TX, but not income tax. I prefer this taxation which has to come from somewhere. NYC has high income tax and real estate tax, and the grocery options could still be not close at all.
How far do you have to drive to go to a supermarket from that development? To a library? (Silly me, expecting people to go to a library in 2024, right?)
If Dallas or Houston or Austin had decent mass transit out to those areas that'd be one thing, but they wouldn't be very "mass", and therein lies one of the problems. Car culture increases isolation and generally shits up the world ever further; somewhere like a YOLO development in the suburbs to exurbs is deleterious to human flourishing and saying "well just buy something where you need a car for everything", as opposed to like the one-off Home Depot run or something, is just trading problems.
Yes, of course! And it's reasonable to think that living in both modest precarity and isolation is worse than living in somewhat more severe precarity; "affordable" places to live are inferior goods!
The problem, fundamentally, is that we, collectively and as a country, need to create more good places, rather than to exile people to the bad but affordable ones. We need a concerted effort to have strong towns and to put cars at the edge and not the center of those towns in order to have a healthy community future, and just sneering that you can buy a house in the hinterlands is both non-responsive and cruel to boot.
I agree with you. However, the discussion about housing is normally around how it's worse now than it was in the past, and these types of dynamics have existed for a long time.
Just looked it up because I was curious. Mortgage + Real Estate tax is right at 1800/month. 4 Bed / 2 Bath, new construction. Kroger is 3 miles away with a "cash and go" type place even closer, so about 8 min by car, 20 min by bike.
Point remains, that there is plenty of affordable housing in the US. It's just not where people want to live, thus supply/demand.
No amount of "fuckcars" ideology will matter here, some people actually prefer driving. I know I do, I don't want to be stuck in a subway or bus.
"How far do you have to drive to go to a supermarket from that development?"
That's the system - resource scarcity and preference. If you live in a densely populated area, prices tend to be higher because real estate is constrained. Zoning won't fix all of that because many people have a preference for SFH, larger sizes, etc. You end up with options and amenities, but it will cost more due to the consolidation. Or you end up with space, needing to drive to amenities, and cheaper prices largely due to less competition.
if you get out Dallas or Austin... where are the jobs?
the number of people working remotely, even now, is still comparatively small.
doesn't matter if the housing rates are 50% lower if your only options are minimum wage at some chain (dollar general, chik fil a, etc.), or scraping for one of the few non-wagie gigs.
that doesn't fix the problem, that just means you're getting paid less, while house prices may have roughly the same ratio of income-to-cost that you'd find in DFW or ATX.
and in exchange now you need a car, need to drive constantly, and have fewer amenities and choices (maybe save for access to churches or walmarts).
shit, even far flung burbs of Austin like Taylor and Hutto are getting pricy compared to when I was last out there. Hutto Hippo oughta make a reappearance and start eating the carpetbaggers who keep moving in around there.
Ad hominem means "against a specific person". He made a general argument. Might be good or bad, but in no way it was an ad hominem. Arguing how a group of people conflate or tend to misrepresent this or that, is not an ad hominem.
"Our profession" can work remotely from anywhere. Whether some companies choose to acknowledge that or not doesn't change the fact that we don't need to live by big cities. Most companies do understand that.
Home ownership rate is a poor statistic to make the point you are attempting to make, particularly because homes are "bought" with debt. Saying someone can "afford" a home because they are in one doesn't speak to being able to afford a home or not. Government programs to promote home ownership by taking riskier debt is an even more complicating factor. That was at the core of the 2008 financial crisis, IIRC.
Here is a statistic that is a better measurement of affordability: "Home Price to Median Household Income Ratio."' It shows homes are less affordable. If we could see the 25th percentile it would likely even paint a bleaker picture, at least if you believe those stats.
If you seriously think 40-49%, whatever ridiculous mis-read stat you're choosing to use this time, of 30-34 year olds are home owners I have a bridge to Hawaii to sell you. I'm 40, make around 300k and know a LOT of people my age and the vast, VAST majority don't own houses. I owned a house in 2016 and sold it, I don't want to own a house because I'm single and they're $800k minimum here, none of my friends want houses because for 99% of us it means moving 45 minutes away to some suburb. Would they take a house a block over here downtown? Absolutely, but that's $2mil+.
I can count how many times I walk into an ACTUAL house, like a free standing house not a condo, apartment, or townhouse - on one hand over ONE year. I think I have 2 friends with houses out of 20+ here in Denver, and I'm of course including condos/ths, anything purchasable. Almost everyone I know over 30 lives in a 1-2 bd apartment. And this is hackernews where I can pretty much assume someone like you is so far from the average American reality you have no idea what's going on.
There's already a post right above this from some compsci engineer talking about how, oh no, there really are a lot more americans making over $100k than you'd imagine!!
You don't have any real humans in your life to use THAT anecdata from? You sound like you're vastly out of that age range, your "you're too confrontational uwu" style of writing and you're obvious lack of knowledge related to the topic at hand.
I have anecdata on the contrary. I'm 25 and with my wife have a household income of ~150k. We own a house in a Midwestern major city, and so does 80% of our friend group. I realize it's an outlier, as should you, because most of the country doesn't have 800k minimum starter houses.
I could not care less about what the lives of 25yos in some midwestern city are like. The vast majority of millennials had to move to major cities for work around the 2008 recession.
What's your cities population? Is it even 100k? How much of your anecdata is actually related to this convo, in the sense of what percentage of your midwest people are even relevant to it? I've lived in at least 8 MAJOR (Houston, Denver, Dallas, Austin, Portland, San Josa) since 2008, those population centers absolutely dwarf whatever you can come up with in the mw to affect this stat.
This is like when someone on here chimes in with their amazing $120k house in Oklahoma. Owning a house at 25, whether you're in BFE Alabama or not is also not common.
Just about 2 million people in the metro area. Not the biggest, but not 100k.
Since I can't reply to your later comment yet, I might just do it here. I live in the city proper. It's Columbus OH just to make it easier for you. I'm sure you'll find a way to reason that's not a major city but it is (multiple Fortune 500 companies HQ'd, major league sport team etc). I live ~10 minutes from downtown and the house was 290k.
"Metro" is what suburbanites use to make it sound like they live somewhere more interesting, know anything about that city and its lifestyle, to people who don't know where, and not some suburb outside of it. So, no that doesn't matter. It's not your city.
People who live in BFE an hour or two north of Dallas, that isn't Dallas, love to say they live in Dallas, then you go further, "dallas metro." Nah. Then they find out you actually live downtown because you're asking for neighborhoods IN the city and call you a downtown pretty boy who probably has to fight off muggers daily. Christ, Fort WORTH is in the "Dallas metro" and it's literally it's own city that NOBODY in Dallas ever visits and has NOTHING in common with Dallas. "The Dallas metro has 10 billion people!" Yeah who never interact with one another and live an hour away.
So they love it till it's actually, you know, big scary city stuff. And that's a huge reason why WE don't claim them back. Hearing someone from Plano (rich af suburb) say they live in Dallas to someone from Texas themselves is so cringe. Because I absolutely know they actually hate Dallas, the city. It's different if the person has no idea where and you're just giving a general area.
It’s more useful for many purposes. You have oddball cities like St Louis where the city is really made up of a ton of small cities and towns—but treating them as separate would be misleading in many contexts.
In our midwestern city, we do live in the city limits proper. But if you drive straight from here to the city center, you’ll pass through at least two other towns before reaching it! There are probably seven or eight tiny to large towns in the same general direction as us, but which are closer to downtown than we are (some are just 5 minutes to downtown by car). And our school district is separate from the rest of the city (and shared by parts of some of those other towns)
Like 30% of the population of our metro area and probably 40% of the money is in another state! And many of them closer to downtown than us.
> That's a good point, I never saw the point of "metros" how they used them in Texas.
One role of that way of categorizing, even in less-atomized cities, is to capture the area that’s basically economically dependent on the city. Nobody (more or less) would live in those suburbs and exurbs if not for the presence of the city. It’s like looking at a lake’s drainage basin.
I live in the city proper. It's Columbus OH just to make it easier for you. I live ~10 minutes from downtown. I'm sure you'll find a way to reason that's not a major city but it is (multiple Fortune 500 companies HQ'd, major league sport team etc). It's also bigger than Portland and Denver (but not their metro areas, see why people use that term?). The metro itself is similar to Portland or Austin in size.
You're 25 in Columbus and most/all of your friends own homes? That's .. really impressive. I was one of the first people I know friend-wise, like out of everyone I know in ever city to buy a house, in Austin, and I was .. around 33 I think. $365k 1970s 3/2 in 2016.
Starting salaries post 2019 have skyrocketed though. It took me about 10 years experience to get over 120k, my ex, her second job at 25 was 150k. My first engineering job was $40k in 2006 or so. 2008 wrecked salaries for a decade. Hopping job to job to make an extra $10k because nobody was giving raises and everyone was treated like trash.
Cool good work man, maybe I'll check it out. My rent in Denver is $3100 for a 2br. Denver is SUPER dense for a mid sized city though, it feels way bigger than Austin/Dallas people+shop+bar+etc wise to me because of that. I never drive.
I mean yeah, I'm definitely an outlier. Neither me and my spouse have student debt which helps massively. And while we've done it without the help of parents, I'm pretty sure some of my friends got some kind of assistance that way.
Columbus is nice because it still feels kinda small and driving is still super comfortable because you can get anywhere in about 15 minutes. I still prefer to bike to work because it feels nice but I'm definitely in the minority here doing that.
You can't disagree with statistics. You are living a very unique lifestyle, that is highly paid in HCOL areas with high standards for housing. That is not the norm whatsoever.
All statistics have absolutely correct data and fundamentally sound designs, right? That's literally the entire argument going on in this conversation you've hopped on. How these statistics are being misconstrued or not.
I moved into programming from bartending after dropping out of school. I am absolutely not ignorant to the lifestyles of all of my friends who aren't engineers.
In fact it's the polar opposite. I am vastly aware of how ignorant my engineer friends are to real people. Like all of my $300k+ friends who have massive houses and 4 kids and 2 suburbans and wonder why a huge portion of their friends, like me, aren't giving them playdates or "cousins" to their kids so they have to go find dad-friends at the kids soccer games who their only real commonality is .. kids.
It's certainly possible that there are errors in the data, but if you suspect that to be the case, the proper argument would be to identify those errors so they can be mitigated, not to dismiss the data in favor of anecdotes, especially anecdotes that may represent outliers.
Whilst I don't disagree with you. That doesn't mean those with mortgages aren't struggling to pay.
Also if true, that is insane that the average american lives in a home that they own by the time they're 35. That is so far and wide not the case here in Australia.
Here in Australia, we don't have fixed rate mortgages for the life of the mortgage we have variable and fixed upto around 1-5 years. Our interest rates have gone from around 2-3% to over 5.8% and the value of homes since COVID have gone up enormously, some 30-40% across our cities and nationally combined 27%.
I know we're just talking about the US here I assume, but I earn a chunk above the average salary and I be considered "at risk" in affording the average cost of a home. I know plenty of people who bought their house 3 years ago right when COVID kicked off, of which they would not have been able to afford it today given the increase in just house prices.
Australia has made a bunch of home-ownership-unfriendly decisions which the US hasn't – e.g. in the US you get a mortgage interest deduction on your primary residence, in Australia you only get it on investment properties (joint filing for married couples, which the US has but Australia doesn't, also helps here); in the US owner-occupier mortgages are normally no-recourse, in Australia they are almost always full recourse; US government policy encourages long-term fixed interest mortgages, the Australian government has no comparable policy
Some of it is also geography – Australia is very centralised, with most people living on the coast. Each state has its population dominated by a single metro area which also serves as the state capital – quite unlike the US where majority of the time the state capital is outside the state's largest metro area.
Australia's comparative lack of rainfall inland is a factor, but political culture, and hence decisions by politicians, also plays a big part – suppose NSW moved its capital to (say) Dubbo or Bathurst? Many government jobs would leave Sydney, followed by many consulting/etc jobs which provide services to the government - right now, central and western NSW has plenty of affordable housing, but a big shortage of jobs providing incomes to pay for that housing. Never going to happen: it would require a degree of originality and thinking outside the box of which Australian politicians are constitutionally incapable.
Some of those things I agree with, however the issue was primarily sparked during COVID like in many countries. Houses prices were relatively affordable prior to COVID and increases in inflation.
Australia kept its record low interest rates in place during COVID, then we had runaway inflation to record high’s like many countries did and our reserve bank failed to increase interest rates even slightly to help with the increases to inflation. We increased overseas migration significantly to help drive growth in the economy which has created an enormous shortage of housing supply. As a result, interest rates have soar’d coupled with record high inflation our cost of living has skyrocketed including housing prices. As I said since 2019-2020 house prices have increased 30%+
Our country has always been centralised to the coast and isn’t necessarily the reason for these costs
People have been complaining about housing affordability in Australia for years. I remember endless discussions of it, media articles about it, and feeling its pain myself, 20 years ago. No denying it has gotten worse, but it was already rather bad.
That said - we bought our house (NSW Central Coast) in late 2015 for AU$550K. At the peak of the COVID price surge, those property value websites were saying it was over AU$1 million. Now they are saying it is only AU$850K. Still gone up a fair bit compared to when we bought it, but also fallen a fair bit off the peak. Of course, those websites are not completely accurate, but what they say is consistent with sale prices of comparable properties in our neighbourhood
> suppose NSW moved its capital to (say) Dubbo or Bathurst?
In a sense they already have, most NSW government departments moved their offices from the Sydney CBD to the Parramatta CBD, which is about 25km west. This helped a tiny bit.
Meanwhile, my multi-millionare ex-boss is struggling to buy a house, because he's being outbid by chinese "students" (lol) to the tune of +$500K over the expected price.
> which is about 25km west. This helped a tiny bit.
It would help a lot more if they added a zero to that number
> because he's being outbid by chinese "students" (lol) to the tune of +$500K over the expected price
I believe that’s a real problem but only in certain suburbs. If you are a well-off Chinese businessperson or government official, and you want to get your money out of China - in case Xi Jinping suddenly decides he doesn’t like you any more - splurging on a residence for your kid at uni in Australia is a good way to do so while complying with the laws of both countries. Still, while it is a real issue in some areas, at a national level I don’t think it makes a huge difference - there’s lots of housing in Australia which isn’t that close to a university campus
Landlords are running a business and get taxed on the rental income of their property. Deducting costs, including interest, same as any other business, is pretty standard and most wouldn't say it's "unfair".
Giving an interest deduction to owner-occupiers is a common policy to promote home ownership. But it's not a "level playing field" with landlords unless you also assess income tax on the imputed amount of rent they are saving by owning.
Reminder that Dubbo (population of only ~40,000) had to have water shipped in on trucks during the recent drought, so there are valid environmental reasons for the current layout too. A lot of those cheaper places are struggling, they cannot support large populations, and it's been said we've used up the good topsoil over the last 200 years so farming may be facing some issues in the coming years too.
I do think we should decentralise, but it will likely look more like Newcastle and Wollongong growing, which will probably feed commuters into Sydney more than they already do.
Also note, Canberra kind of fits your description - a regional "town", servicing the government. And it's also very expensive. As in, recently reported to be the second most expensive place in the country to buy a house, after Sydney. I think our issues are far more political as you point out, so other fixes are just bandaids, but anything that impacts home prices will be unpopular with the dominant voter bloc.
> Reminder that Dubbo (population of only ~40,000) had to have water shipped in on trucks during the recent drought
The Goldfields Water Supply Scheme pumps water over 560 km from Perth to Kalgoorlie; Dubbo is only 380 km from Newcastle. If you were serious about turning Dubbo into the state capital, you would have to give serious thought to building a pipeline to pump water from the Hunter, and then Dubbo would only run out of water if Newcastle was running out of water. (You could also build a pipeline from Sydney to Dubbo, which is only about 20km further, but much more mountainous terrain in the way.)
> I do think we should decentralise, but it will likely look more like Newcastle and Wollongong growing
Newcastle and Wollongong aren't really that much cheaper than Sydney. They are coastal, and everyone wants to live on the coast; also, Wollongong has physical growth limitations due to the Illawarra Escarpment. There's a lot more land on the other side of the Great Dividing Range, and water supply issues could be addressed with sufficient investment in water supply infrastructure.
> Also note, Canberra kind of fits your description - a regional "town", servicing the government. And it's also very expensive. As in, recently reported to be the second most expensive place in the country to buy a house, after Sydney.
Canberra is in some ways Australia's version of Washington DC. Although, DC has a very different social history – e.g. DC has historically (but as of last census no longer) had an African-American majority; and, DC is physically a lot smaller than the ACT is. But, what I am really talking about is an Australian analogue of Sacramento, Albany, Springfield (Illinois), Salem (Oregon), Carson City (Nevada), etc – which is something Australia doesn't have.
All that said, Queanbeyan's median house price is >$50K cheaper than Canberra's, by some measures beneath the average of Australian capital cities. And it is only 20 minutes drive from Canberra. In Sydney or Melbourne, that's what many would call an inner/middle suburb.
> that is insane that the average american lives in a home that they own by the time they're 35. That is so far and wide not the case here in Australia.
You also don't actually need to own a home in order to have kids. I spent the first 8 years of my life with 3 siblings in a tiny 2 bedroom apartment in a student housing development. We bought a home when I was 8, while my parents were in their 30s.
Plenty of other commenters had already pointed out that fallacy of OP's argument, so I decided to take on the idea that homeownership rates have significantly changed instead.
That's, as you say, recent. It bodes ill for the future if something doesn't change, but it can't possibly account for the long-term decline in birth rates being discussed here.
The parent commenter also doesn’t know what the word “housing” means. Being able to afford housing means being able to afford a place to live, it doesn’t mean owning your own house. Just like being able to afford food doesn’t mean owning your own farm, having access to drinking water doesn’t mean owning your own well or river, and having access to the internet doesn’t mean owning your own ISP.
To be clear I agree that affordable home ownership is a big problem, but not being able to afford home ownership is a very different thing from not being able to afford housing, and substituting one concept with the other is just an intentionally dishonest way of muddying the waters of any discussion on the topic.
Ah, I have a hard time remembering that the millennials have taken the boomers' place as the oppressive older generation.
Gen Z doesn't have a monopoly on spending their 20s in a scary financial situation. Let's see what the numbers look like in 10 years—if prior trends (the data I linked to above) are anything to go by, I expect them to be roughly the same as they always have been at about 66%+/-3%.
You better check what the average mortgage payment for new house buyer today and 5 years ago. Diff can be 2-3 times.
Also, actual homeownership is not a perfect proxy for wealth measurement, since it could be that today's gen z are buying 1br condos instead of single family houses like boomers.
You mentioned boomers. They faced higher interest rates, higher unemployment and higher inflation than people do now.
Sure, it may not be effortless coming of working age now, but it would take a staggering level of ignorance and/or entitlement to argue that it’s harder than it was in the 70s when boomers were coming up.
And much lower incomes. We can go back and forth like this all day.
The point you seem to be missing is that it has never been the norm in the US for a 25 year old to own their own home. The closest we ever got to that would be the Silent Generation returning home from WWII and the veterans benefits we were handing out.
My parents (Boomers) rented a dumpy townhouse in their 20s and early 30s while raising two kids. They finally bought their first home at ages 33 and 29 with a 19% interest rate. Money was really tight for the next 5 years or so until my dad's career progressed. This was with a college degree and a management position. Life has always been a challenge for the youngest generation just starting out. Today's 25 year olds look at their parents and forget that their parents have had decades of wealth accumulation and career progression. They didn't start out taking trips to Hawaii every year.
These numbers are all adults under 35, so your argument about generation gaps doesn't apply here. 20-something year olds are included in each decade's numbers, and the rate hasn't substantially changed in the measured decades.
> You better check what the average mortgage payment for new house buyer today and 5 years ago. Diff can be 2-3 times.
That's a separate question from whether people are priced out. If the average mortgage payment is much higher but 39% of people under 35 can still afford a mortgage, then no more people are priced out than were in previous generations.
> Also, actual homeownership is not a perfect proxy for wealth measurement, since it could be that today's gen z are buying 1br condos instead of single family houses like boomers.
True, but I'm not talking about wealth, I'm specifically addressing the question of whether the average American cannot afford to buy a home.
> If the average mortgage payment is much higher but 39% of people under 35 can still afford a mortgage
they afford rate they secured when it was much lower and in many cases houses were cheaper.
Today's 35 first house buyer salary man coming on housing market is also in very miserable situation.
You just stated that over 40% of people under 40 don't own a home. I don't think that proves the point you want it to. And that's before we even get into how much of that home they even "own".
I think this is very confused. People these days are really rich compared to people in the past who had more kids, poorer people in countries like the US have more kids on average than richer ones, and poorer countries on average have more kids than richer ones. (People don't seem to have fewer kids because they're poor; they seem to have fewer kids because they're rich!) Despite major housing issues, people live in bigger, fancier houses than ever, homeownership rates in the US are higher than most of the history of the US, and homelessness, though tragically common, still only directly affects a tiny minority of people, on the order of a fifth of a percent, which is not the sort of thing that seems very connected to the widespread change to having fewer children.
Yes this is my read too. It’s largely a cultural problem, not a resource one. The baseline expectations have gotten so high that not have a giant house and the latest electronics means you somehow can’t afford kids.
If you're responsible for yourself in either the U.S or Canada, and have built some kind of a life as an adult in a place that isn't right next to where your parents still live, assuming they're still together, then children are an expensive liability rather than necessary and relatively cheap labor used for supplying the rich ones with chocolate. Likewise, access to free in or inexpensive birth control and sex education allows a person to make less risky decisions for longer, rather than popping out 5 kids and figuring it out.
If you can figure out a way to afford the liability and it's important to you, great, otherwise it's sort of illogical.
It’s a liability only if consumerism is your only value. Which for a lot of people, is absolutely the case. And it’s only logical if you only care about your own individual desires.
It almost isn’t worth arguing about, though, because the reality is that society is ultimately made up of people that have kids. All the rationalizations in the world won’t change the basic facts of biology.
I completely agree with you. My wife and I made many lifestyle "sacrifices" in order to have kids. I put "sacrifices" in quotes, because driving in a cheaper car than your professional peers is only a sacrifice if you you are consumerist.
Is daycare "consumerism"? Other factors include stagnant wages, collage debts, amd even high medical costs - a vaginal birth with no pain medications and no complications can cost 5-figures (and may include a line-item for a parent holding the baby!).
Inflation has made baby products really expensive (did I mention stagnant wages?), and this is before daycare, which can be cost as much as rent in some locales, unless you're willing to subject your child to informal daycares. None of that is consumerism.
No one should be surprised that a country with a threadbare social safety-net and inflation outpacing childcare costs experiences a fall in birthrate - this can be explained in market-dymamics terms
Plenty of countries with good social nets have worse birth rates. Plenty of other countries with no social nets have high birth rates. I don’t think it’s particularly related, and as I said, I think it’s more of a cultural problem related to values and expectations.
I wish I hadn't included my last paragraph - all the replies are focusing on just that and not everything else I wrote!
I didn't argue a stronger social safety net would fix everything, just that having a weak one exacerbates the financial concerns, and is the major factor that would tip-over those who are not having children for mostly economic-reasons.
I know that feeling and I'm sorry to hear about your frustration.
That being said, I think the critique you're getting may be more fair to your post than you think. You bring up things like college debt and high medical costs, which are not US-like in most of the places with the lowest birth rate, and the day care situation, which often isn't either, in previous paragraphs.
I do think that even if we don't note that the post was likely US-centric, we'd struggle with the fact that it's the poorer people in the US are having more babies than the richer ones when trying to apply your explanation.
The same thing is happening in all western countries, and some other developed countries too.. Even those with free university level education, free health services, etc. Here in the UK we have the free healthcare (and maternity provision is still good), we do have university fees in most the UK, but the costs are far lower than in the US (fees are an order of magnitude lower than at some US universities, and there are cheap loans to cover fees and living costs). We have government subsidies for childcare.
We still have falling birth rates.
I actually think daycare is part of the problem - what is the point of having kids if you do not spend lots of time with them? The biggest advance would be more family friendly working hours.
i have earned a lot less to spend time with my kids, and i am so happy I did. The best thing that happened to me was to lose my job the day my oldest was born. Otherwise I would have been very well paid (I worked for an investment bank) but have hardly known my kids.
Any time I see "parents" require daycare for "their" children, I always think (or in particular cases say): Don't have children if you can't raise them yourself.
I write this with the utmost sincerity: You as the would be father/mother brought your child into this world, the absolute least you could do is be the dad/mom they need in their life.
Don't come at me with how you must sacrifice your career and future for your kids: Of fucking course you have to! The moment you decide to have kids and bring them forth, "your" life is completely at the behest of your kids. That is what having kids means.
If you do not want or cannot handle the duty of sacrificing your life for your kids, do not have kids. There is no existence more tragic than a child born to parents who can not or will not spend their childhood with them.
I got downvoted for a far milder version of what you said. Going to watch this with interest.
I do not think parents can be entirely blamed. We have made having children too difficult for multiple reasons. Yes, you are primarily responsible, but good communities, family friendly work, access to extended family and other things all help.
Children were pretty much never raised exclusively by their parents throughout the history of mankind, were they? So I would put quotes around the word "need" instead.
I'm sure not exclusively, and I don't know what a typical daycare schedule is like because my wife stays at home, but e.g. my 2 year old gets up around 7am, and usually takes an hour to eat her breakfast. Then I guess to drop her off somewhere and get to work by 9, we'd have to leave close to 8. Then we might get home around 6, and it's time to eat dinner (again this takes her an hour), take a bath, and bed time.
So 5/7 days, she'd only get her parents telling her to hurry up and eat followed by putting her to bed. That's almost exclusively being raised by a stranger.
I might not put it as aggressively as the other commenter, but I do wonder why it seems common for my peers to use daycare (if they have kids at all). I know they have the means not to. We'll see what happens when the time comes, but I quite like the idea of home schooling or hybrid schooling depending on what everyone wants. The time you get is so limited; to me at least I don't see what could take priority over spending time with them while we can (again, this applies more to people in my social class who have the means). And when people talk about "sacrificing their career"... my work is the means, not the end. To speak of "sacrificing" career for family is just... baffling. Unless you are a trauma surgeon saving lives every day or an amazing scientist inventing cancer cures, I can't believe anyone would say it. Something like principal engineer or director at a fortune 500? It's just a way to make money.
We lost my dad very suddenly when I was a teenager, so I've always had to consider that no matter how much money I make, I'll never be able to buy more time with him, but I can focus my resources on my family having more time together, and hopefully I can pass my kids that lesson without them having to learn it so directly (or at least so young. At some point we all need to learn that lesson directly). Having a stay-at-home-parent means we're buying 10,400 hours of her and her mom together before age 5. Good deal at almost any price, and it only becomes a better deal when you have more kids. Likewise with remote work, if I get an extra 1.5 hours per workday (commute + seeing them when I take a break), that's almost 400 extra hours together per year. Sometimes my daughter comes and sits on my lap while I'm working on the computer, and I'll put Curious George on for her on another monitor. How lucky I am!
When people in my social strata talk about daycare, I just want to shout at them. Not angry like the other commenter, but in a more pleading tone: don't you realize! Life is fleeting! Didn't anyone tell you! Oh well.
This is a different argument, and a bit weird one. Why do you want to shout at other people for having preferences that are different from yours (or rather your wife's)? For me personally supervising small kids 12/7/365 sounds like hell on earth, I'd prefer almost any other occupation.
Like I said it's more of a "stop! Don't you see what you're missing? You can't have it back!" kind of thing. If you're a neurosurgeon, sure, but are you really going to look back one day and wish you spent one more day in stand-ups or trying to increase conversion or debugging certificate issues or whatever? It's their lives and I'd never say anything (beyond abstract conversation online) but the degree to which it seems so normal is freaky to me. I do think being career-oriented is pushed very strongly by society (or the bubbles I'm in), especially on girls, which is something I worry about for my daughters. It makes me wonder sometimes whether introducing them to church would be a smart move even if I don't think I could ever really get into it.
I wouldn't want to supervise other people's kids all day, but my own? They do all sorts of cute stuff, and sometimes they just want to come sit on you and hug you. It's not even comparable to corporate office work. My biggest worry for them is that they won't get to have that too one day.
What if you have parents who are very willing to be the childcare you need? Is there really, seriously, "no existence more tragic" than a child who spends a few hours a day with a doting 50 year old grandmother? Or with their cousins and aunt and uncle? Or with a kindly neighbour and their kids?
> "Don't have children if you can't raise them yourself."
What do you think of "it takes a village to raise a child"?
I am not in favour of never letting them out of my sight because it is important they develop autonomy and be able to look after themselves. Seeing them growing and learning is one of the joys of being a parent.
The point is being involved, which is good for children and rewarding for parents.
There is some big logical fallacy going on here... there is a very, very vast space in between, as you are implying, staying 24/7 with your children and letting someone else raise your children for you (grandparents, nanny or whatever).
> Any time I see "parents" require daycare for "their" children, I always think (or in particular cases say): Don't have children if you can't raise them yourself.
Then it should be no surprise that fewer people are having children. Many potential parents are seeing a mismatch between their ideal conditions to having a child and their circumstances and/or the state of the world and choosing not to having children (or delaying)
Addendum: some parents think they can raise kids, but discover they cannot in the worst possible way. I don't judge anyone chooses to place a child in daycare, its much better for society than Shaken Baby Syndrome, for instance.
I agree with you entirely. It's hard not to imagine spending as much time with my son as I reasonably can. Even if he's a little challenging sometimes, it's really been one of the most amazing things I've ever been gifted in my life.
Fwiw my parents grew up poorer than me and had a lot of siblings. Listening to one of them, they had to refrain from flushing the toilet to save on water, shared beds, dropped out of high school to get a job etc. It was a totally different world but rightly or wrongly lots of child bearing. Among the older gen siblings (6) about half had kids.. no more than two each. In the subsequent generation again some had kids but only one or two. I have kids, wanted more but wife didn't. In this pace of things the birthrate clearly is going down. If two people have at most two kids then population is going to decline.
> It’s a liability only if consumerism is your only value.
It's a liability if it's a liability. A consumerist liability is buying a brand new car with a loan if it seems like my income might disappear before the payments do. Not knowing how long you'll be able to keep paying rent in the place you've spent your entire adult life is just a logical consideration. Though people are obviously choosing to be consumers too, often it's just the basics that seem out of reach.
However, if you've always wanted kids and it's always been your biggest priority, and there's never been any contravening forces that would make you question that, and you've lucked out and found someone who's completely on board with that, and your income has been stable, and your expenses are manageable, and your parents are nearby and still together, then sure you're choosing to consoom over having kids.
Your last paragraph kind of highlights the point of my previous comment though, which is that the vast majority of people who have children today and who had children in the past had few or none of those things, and were absolutely fine with it. This is a modern hyper optimization of, “I can’t have kids unless they have the absolute perfect life situation.”
At the end of the day, it is a cultural “problem” that potential parents are unwilling to have children. If anything, the material costs of entertainment, food, education, etc. are magnitudes lower today than a century ago, and yet a century ago it was normal to have 3-4 children.
I think you're on the right track. We collectively have an inflated sense of what qualifies as being in an appropriate financial/lifestyle position to have children (I know, because I do it too), but it's not necessarily the same as what qualified decades back. If you have an extra bedroom to fit bunks and can afford a bit more food, public schooling is fairly affordable and a lot of the rest is optional. We just got the bills for our kids' school year and it is nothing dramatic. The extra-curricular stuff (music, sport, etc) is what adds up. Holidays, especially overseas, are expensive. Interior design fit-outs for showy rooms are expensive.
Growing up, I didn't have a console until late teens. My children are 5-11yo and we would have 5+ consoles in the house. Last week, my mother (born in the 50s) was saying that she can't recall having an actual toy of her own while growing up. Now many of us plan to have a bedroom per child, study nooks, a second living room and/or parents' retreat, a dressing room, en suites, pool, and so on.
A century ago it was also normal to have two pairs of parents living near you to help with childcare.
I don't know how common it is today, but it's certainly much less common than it was a century ago.
I've decided not to have kids, but quite a few people I know have been having them, and there's a stark difference in costs between the friends who have family nearby and those who don't. Several new parents I know even decided to move to be near at least one set of parents, at least for the first few years of their kids' lives.
I don't really know anyone who has decided to not have kids primarily because of cost, though. But I don't know if the child-free people I know are typical.
It is still pretty common for parents to live nearby:
> Over all, the median distance Americans live from their mother is 18 miles, and only 20 percent live more than a couple of hours’ drive from their parents.
Although "a couple hours drive" is probably too far to help with daily childcare activities. And in the past the grandparents were likely in the same building or across the street.
I mean, 20% is the difference between the current US fertility rate (1.64) and a rate above 2.
Obviously the 20% of the population more than 2 hours from their parents isn't abstaining from children absolutely, but it's the right order of magnitude to be a significant factor.
> This is a modern hyper optimization of, “I can’t have kids unless they have the absolute perfect life situation.”
I think, in America at least, this is being amplified by a general gut perception that the middle class is shrinking (which does indeed seem to be happening). Even people who aren’t reading about or following the phenomenon can feel it to some degree: as middle incomes have become less common, there are a lot more high earners and more low earners.
Maintaining a high income is not a given, so the perceived risk of failure to remain in the upper-middle class now includes not just falling back to a comfortable middle class existence, but falling further down the ladder, to a place in a growing underclass with a starkly lower quality of life and future prospects.
This creates a feedback cycle: people have this gut feeling that if they don’t compete for high end jobs to live in expensive areas with good schools their kids won’t get into a good college, which is a requirement to maintain membership in this new, enlarged, hypercompetitive upper-middle class. Competition for these houses, colleges, and jobs goes through the roof. Life decisions become more stressful because the perceived stakes are higher. This in turn contributes to choices around kids: will you be able to navigate this such that your kids live a comparably comfortable life to the one you have had? How many kids can you do that for? What will life be like for a kid who for whatever reason can’t be a programmer/doctor/lawyer/etc?
No, I think you're mischaracterizing my argument. I didn't even mention schooling, I didn't mention entertainment, I didn't mention anything material, but I also didn't articulate the thought very well in retrospect.
There's nothing perfect, it's just a roof in the place you've established yourself, and eating, perhaps along with staying mentally and physically fit. It's just a basic question of whether someone's circumstances can be stretched further; in many cases they can, but in many more they can't, and if whatever reason they didn't spend the entire first part of their life aligning all the variables necessary to handle the basics, and getting lucky, then it seems more probable to be a disaster than not.
It's not about perfection, it's really high level stuff. First, get a long-term partner who fits certain criteria. Lets say attraction is last on that list because we've decided not to be perfect, we've decided to be like the previous generation who didn't care about their health or mental well-being at all and get the first person we have sex with pregnant, and take it to completion. Halfway through the pregnancy we realize we're totally incompatible, can't even equitably share space with the other person, and actually they're not even remotely invested in improving as a human. That's fine, it'll work out in the end, ignore your burgeoning depression.
Next step, get a place together. It's not looking good, but ignore that, it's for the sacrifice you've decided to make right now for some reason. You remember that your parents had you in a small 1 bedroom apartment that was probably crap, but they only paid $300 a month for. You currently live in a modest studio that's $1500 a month, and an upgrade to a 1 bedroom would go up to $2500. Maybe we get lucky and get a rustic basement for $1750. There are co-ops, but they have thousands of people ahead of you in line. Of course, there are always small towns in rural areas, so maybe we can move there, maybe get a job in the sawmill.
It's all just silly. If you're in a position to, and want to have kids, then you do, but otherwise there's no intrinsic reason to and getting there could be a tenuous personal decision to introduce a whole lot more strain in probably an already strained position.
If you're in the former camp, great. You still live close to parents probably, have had a stable job for a while that's not going away, there's not a ton of competition for rentals or whatever, and have a great supportive relationship that isn't volatile. You might be surprised, but that can be tough to come by. If you can pull it off you can pull it off.
> At the end of the day, it is a cultural “problem” that potential parents are unwilling to have children. If anything, the material costs of entertainment, food, education, etc. are magnitudes lower today than a century ago, and yet a century ago it was normal to have 3-4 children.
Curiously, the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child was from 1924.
Yeah, it's easier to have kids if you care less about their wellbeing, and if one of the ways of dealing with the expense is sending them to work in a factory.
I'm not sure how to respond to comments like this, because they obviously aren't made in good faith.
Potential parents today aren't choosing between "having kids and sending them to slave away in a factory" and "perfect childhood with every toy imaginable and no financial need."
The contemporary Western world is immensely wealthy on a material and informational basis, orders of magnitude beyond even a half century ago. I don't think people understand this at any level, mostly because they don't know much history.
People used to value the labor of their children. At the dystopian tail-end of it, they valued selling it on the market, which is what's being referenced.
But, generally, my impression from light reading is people throughout history thought of children as progressing pretty quickly into helpfulness. Now, though, people have jobs children can't help with, ever, which keep them too busy to project-manage children into helpfulness around the house. So people have them exclusively for their company (which, again my impression from light reading, has not been at all the historical norm).
If it wasn't a resource problem, giving birth in a US hospital would not cost $30k in shockingly common cases.
I don't want to have kids because I lived through the "just suffer through poverty" experience and it's a great way to raise kids that have to support the psychiatry industry the rest of their lives. Poverty literally breaks a kid's brain, and you CANNOT hide money problems from your children.
That life is one "hey we didn't do good this quarter so you're being let go" away from happening for most of us. So yeah, a lot of us don't want kids.
I feel for your particular situation, but I don't think this explains the overall situation.
Lower-income people within a country seem to have more kids in general: this is very much the case for the US. People with higher incomes and on average, then, more robust financial situations, are the ones more avoiding kids.
The US is, like most places, far richer than it has been historically, and this is even more dramatic globally: a generation and a half ago, most people lived in extreme poverty (<$2.47/day), today less than 10% do. But we see that as countries get richer, they have fewer kids. I don't think it's a good explanation that risk of poverty is what is usually preventing parents from having kids, even if they subjectively feel it is.
That was also concluded by Hans Rosling: the higher the education of people, the fewer kids they have. Best way to address overpopulation is by increasing education worldwide. https://www.teesche.com/bookshelf/hans_rosling_factfulness
I wonder if Rosling’s conclusions are confounded. The human and environmental systems in which we swim are complex, not simple. Education being the key driver of population numbers strikes me as overly simple.
Yeah, look at countries like Finland. Finland has, famously, some of the best government support for new mothers on the planet, comparatively high gender equality, consistently ranks at the top of world education rankings, has a strong, functioning social welfare system, and while housing is not exactly cheap, Finns on average spend 20% of their income on housing, which is not high.
And Finland's fertility rate has completely collapsed, to 1.32 children per woman in 2022.
As societies urbanize and become more educated, children become (economically speaking) a huge burden, not an asset, and that fundamental shift affects birthrates worldwide.
Yeah, this seems obvious to me. However, out of ethical concerns, it is not obvious that the solution is to stop educating people.
Perhaps just reminding would-be parents that if the educated and resilient stop reproducing, they are depriving the world of a thriving and resilient new generation. A clear directive that under-population is a growing concern and a few additional incentives for parents would go a long way too.
Taking a philosophical angle, why is it the "right" choice to serve our genes, the economy, or to create a younger generation to care for the elderly? It is not unethical to unburden oneself of those obligations today, but you can imagine a future where it is.
Housing isn't the sole factor in declining birthrates. Every industrialized nation is going through the same phenomenon and not all of them are having housing crises. It's a combination of various associated costs to raising children (housing, early childcare, food, schooling, extracurriculars, hobbies, etc.) that have risen faster than most people's wages. The nuclear family model also significantly diminished the role of parents and other senior relatives in early childcare which would've created significant savings in terms of both time and money.
Also, living without children or even a partner at all has become significantly more viable in the past 40+ years or so. It wasn't until 1974 when women in the United States could unconditionally open bank accounts out of their free will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Credit_Opportunity_Act. To not marry and have children would've practically been a form of ostracization. So many people, especially women, "settled" into marriage and family life simply because there was no other option. I think the decline in birth rates is a fair tradeoff to forcing fewer people into a lifestyle they did not want which would inevitably result in broken families and broken kids. What society needs to figure out is how to decouple productivity from raw human headcount, as well as how to avert potential humanitarian disasters that may occur when the decoupling happens.
A lot of them are, actually. I'm Irish, we're having a housing (and general cost of living) crisis. I know Portugal and Germany are too.
I don't know about other countries in the EU regarding housing specifically but there's a block wide cost of living crisis going on right now. Life is hard for people in all kinds of ways because of covid, war, climate change.
Note: I'm not trying to claim any of this is the cause of declining birth rates, that's beyond my sphere of knowledge. The purpose of my comment is to note that cost of living issues are not unique to the US right now.
The December Atlantic article on this topic (recently discussed) says the presence of this effect does not correlate with class [0]:
> Although the average number of lateral relatives varies across race and class groups in the U.S., the cousin decline is either imminent or already happening across all of them.
My suspicion is that once the standard of living reaches a certain baseline level (which e.g. even many "poor" people in the US hit) reproduction takes a back seat. This is clearly in part due to an increased availability of birth control and the ability for women to enter the workforce and make these choices for themselves, which wasn't even an option under more patriarchal societies.
I think there's something more subtle there, too. There's so much more to do now for young people in developed countries, even those of relatively modest economic means. This might manifest as furthering one's career, or in pursuit of hobbies, or in travel, or in consumption of entertainment products, or in higher education... or any number of ways. Child rearing takes many of these options off the table, or it curtails and constrains them severely.
It seems like having fewer children is a pretty reasonable response in a world that is more enjoyable and potentially personally rewarding than any has ever been before.
It's the same in Sweden. My friends and I are all a couple of years passed the age our parents were when they had us.
Out of 7 people who have SO's in my social circle, 0 have children. Why? Because they simply don't have the room. The housing market in Stockholm is insane, and even though most earn above average (most are in tech) they can only afford tiny 1BR apartments. Trying to raise a kid in such a place would be impossible.
Unless you want to move out into cheaper areas, that these days are plagued by high-crime and is no real environment for a kid anyway, you're SoL.
Sure, one could move away from Stockholm into smaller towns up north, but then your career will suffer. Also not something most are willing to consider just as they've gotten a foothold in their respective careers.
The next couple of decades are going to be real interesting, and I don't mean that in a good way...
What I don't understand is that native people who make a good income rationalize that they can't afford kids but yet in the same country there are many non-native people that earn considerably less that continue have children at extremely high birthrates. So why does the group that earns a lot of money claim they are incapable of supporting a family and the group that earns very little actually support a large family, in the same country?
Maybe the non-native people that earn less see their future brighter, whereas the native group with good income sees their future darker.
When you come from nothing its easier to give your kids a better future than you had.
Some animals don't breed in captivity. Some human populations also didn't breed because they were in captivity. Even though people have it better number wise, it's still possible to feel trapped.
I don't know exactly how is it on the US (also, AFAIK there's a huge variance of income and housing pricing all around the country), but here on Spain housing is getting worse and worse and worse.
2011 to 2020 ownership rate has fell from 82,6 to 73,9% in the general population, and from 69,3 to 36,1% in under 35yo. Also people is expending more than 40% of their salary to rent [0]
And those are numbers from 2020 (ownership) and 2022 (rental), but I guess that today, specially on big cities, that's way, way worse. I just checked my neighborhood prices (in Madrid) and, since late 2021 when I rented my current apartment, prices have raised +30%, and lots of posting are now for "temporary rentals" of less than one year. That's a model thought for touristic apartments that offer way less protection to the tenant (they can raise prices at will), less stability (they can kick you out no notice) and allows landlords to avoid housing rental laws (for repair, maintenance, etc.).
So it used to be "AirBnBs around me raise housing prices", and now it's "You can only rent AirBnBs".
The societal norms and structures that promoted natalism are gone in western countries for much of the population.
Raising kids is hard work. Ideally you have them young and live close to your family so that you have grandparents to help with childcare.
But our society tells people to wait as long as possible to have kids, and to prioritize career over other things - so once people do have kids, if they ever do so, then often grandparents are too old or far away to fill that traditional role. So lots of people are stuck paying thousands a month for daycare.
Just one of many ways that our system finds innovative ways to extract money out of people for things that used to be free or part of being in a community.
Every support system, from the "family home" where the grandparents have a bed, to the woman not working and taking care of the kids, has been systematically destroyed. Now everyone is expected to work and live alone/as a couple, and they have basically no physical support for raising a child.
I think this is the main issue right here. The others being increased housing cost (you need space for kids) and increasing costs (daycare, kindergarten, nappies etc.).
I would bet this plays a large part - people today respect the difficulty in a way past parents previously did not. Birth rates are certainly declining but I would bet the rates of accidental infant/toddler death are down as well.
That said, I personally know parents that are just taunting SIDS with the way they ignore infant sleeping best practices even though they’ve read the books to know better.
Societal expectation on the care for children grew immensely over the past few generations. When I was a child, parents largely just covered the physical needs and the kids were otherwise left alone to do their own thing. I remember being bored a lot, sitting in a room or roaming the streets.
Nowadays there's a widespread expectation that parents should organize activities, drive their kids' education, just be way more involved in their lives.
That's just the thing, isn't it. You can try to oblige to all best practices and have zero kids in the process, or you can just have the kids and figure it out as you go. No matter the kid mortality rate, the second approach still wins.
The inherent difficulty in raising kids plays a significant role in my decision. Additionally, I feel we are no longer glamorising parenthood as we once did. I remember when I was a kid, before the internet was a thing, it was pretty standard to see ads that claimed parenthood was an experience filled with joy and no challenges. For the past decade or so, though, I feel that parents are much more honest when discussing parenthood's challenges. We heard about post-labour depression, financial struggles, sleepless nights, end of careers and so on. It's a radical life change, and most of us do not want to commit.
singapore gives generous subsidies to working adults with children who hire live-in helpers/nannies. the government spent a lot of money on subsidizing tertiary education and the last thing they need are adults dropping out of the workforce after earning a diploma or a degree.
many families hire a live-in helper, who is typically a low-income migrant worker from a neighbouring country. due to space constraints only the most privileged can hire two or more. as it is with asian tradition, parents primarily involve themselves in the area of discipline and education, and everything else is left to the nannies. the low-income families who cannot afford a helper or the living space for a helper suffer from a lack of enforcing discipline or providing for a growing child and low-income children often grow up maladjusted to the modern working society.
singapore unfortunately, still suffers from a low replacement rate, so the foreign domestic worker (FDW, as it is known) policy while enough to move the dial away from the danger zone that is south korea, is still not enough to ensure singapore is growing comfortably. however, at this point i don't believe allowing
(the FDW policy is generous and broad-based enough to extend to working adults with elderly, which means that subsidies for domestic help pretty much extend to working adults through a significant part of their working life. families often qualify for significant subsidies taking care of multiple generations through several decades.)
However, some of the spaces created for the legal live-in helpers [I've seen in Hong Kong and Singapore] would be considered substandard in the US. I'm talking closet size rooms with no windows big enough for a single bed and a few shelves.
If the US would allow this domestic help and possibly the same rooms, child care would be much easier.
> and live close to your family so that you have grandparents to help with childcare.
Issue with this now is how concentrated certain industries are. Here in the UK, if I want to work in software, you need to move to a handful of expensive cities. London, Oxford, Cambridge, maybe Bristol or Manchester. Maybe some others if you're happy in a non-software job. Certainly not the rural farming town I grew up in, or anywhere within hours of driving.
So people move away. And now I'm faced with either delaying kids so I can get reasonably set-up in a city where a 500sqft flat costs £300,000 or moving away from all my friends and maybe even further from my family to afford a house.
It's really not that hard. You just have to change expectations and lifestyle. I never thought of it as "work" per-se but rather an obligation and responsibility to people brought into the world. It's amazing really. It's probably not for everyone and if someone sees it the same way as doing actual work then maybe it isn't for them.
A parent is wealthy beyond money. Besides, we get tax breaks and if you're not a decent earner you get free things for being a parent.
And I guess when I say it's not that hard - what I mean is that yeah there's effort involved, often time a lot. But it is made out to be this impossible thing. It's not. You figure it out and before you know it the really hard days are over.
So yeah it's work but that shouldn't dissuade anyone from having kids. Anything good takes effort.
It doesn't last that long. Been there, done that. But yeah it's work, of course it is. What I'm saying is it isn't as difficult as it is made out to be - that is it's made out to be this impossible thing. But yeah they break your back sometimes and emotionally it can be daunting. But those very difficult early days end pretty fast.
What we did is mom pumped and put milk in bottles. She's go to be at like 7PM after a feeding off the tap and I'd take over and stay up until 2 or 3 to feed baby and change diapers every 2 or so hours. Then she'd be back at it in the early morning hours.
I could absolutely afford to have children, but have chosen not to. The main reason is that I just don't feel "called" to be a parent. When I think about (and see, from others I know who have kids) the amount of work, and complete shift in lifestyle, it takes to raise a child, I get completely turned off by the idea.
If I had a kid, I'm sure I'd love them, and derive joy from them, but I don't believe the trade off is worth it. Maybe I'll end up being wrong about that, but I'd rather grow old and regret not having kids than regret having them. I think people shouldn't have kids unless they are really sure they want to be a parent. Anything less sounds like a big mistake.
Anyhow, have you actually talked to your childless peers about this? Hopefully there are at least some with whom you feel comfortable bringing up this kind of topic, with people who will give you a thoughtful, non-judgmental answer. I think you might find that they all have a variety of reasons for not having kids, and money may not be a big factor.
"The amount of work".... oh dear. As if caring for other people is only work. From what will you get distracted by having other people around you (kids)? From Instragram? Cycling? Reading books? What intensely important things do you have to do that deserve no distraction?
Having kids is not work. It is not only joy either. It is just the natural way of being a human.
The - natural - way - of - being - a - human!!!
Natural, like sleeping. Eating.
Sure, sometimes kids stress you. But then, nature has made sure that you'll mostly remember the good moments. You don't have to be overly perfect to have kids. Just don't be an overly bad person and talk to them often. Whatever environment they get born in: they will be ok with it. You don't need to be grandiose. Do what you naturally can, what you enjoy. And they'll enjoy it.
Humans are made to adapt to having kids. Kids are made to adapt to non-perfect parents. Just avoid the obviously bad stuff and all is good. Your life is good. You looking back on your life will be good.
Natural way of being a human is shitting under a tree and sleeping on this tree, and certainly isn't writing a comment on this site. I couldn't care less of arguments based on some kind of naturalistic fallacy.
Sleeping in a bed in a house is certainly the way humans prefer it. But thinking a society with not enough kids can survive and thrive, on the other hand, is wrong, because it is biologically impossible. It’s not a fallacy, it’s harsh truth.
There probably is a society where there are "not enough kids", but it certainly does not come remotely close to current one with over 8 billion humans scraping for resources.
The problem is just that we don't live in ONE society having 8 billion members, but in about two hundred different ones. And being in one of those that are in decline is not exactly a good feeling.
Until the global birth rate is sub-replacement for generations, there's no point in even having this conversation. If the issue is that the "right" kind of people ("native" people in advanced economies) aren't having children, but the "wrong" kind (aka the Global South, immigrants, etc.), then that's just racism. There's no baby shortage -- the ethnic makeup of humanity is simply changing and we will need to erase most of those artificial borders in order to survive. We ARE a single society, and pretending that we're not is a mutual suicide pact.
So when your company is going broke you don't care and are happy because in TV they said that the economy is growing? Are you a company-racist because you want your company to be healthy and non declining? Are you not trading with and appreciating other companies because you only love your own?
The same is with countries and their societies.
I will not be that defeatist to say "my country/my region/my continent can go down because there are others". And to say that is not racist.
Not really sure what you're getting at exactly, but I think you're comparing countries in the world to firms in a market, with the point that I must obviously care about my country's fortunes relative to other countries?
In the current order, I sort of do, but that whole Westphalian order of "countries" is artificial (and also relatively new in its specifics, though of course kingdoms and empires go back far longer): we're all related and share one biosphere, and more recently we share one globalized economy. The truth is that we will sink or swim together -- if we have abandoned houses in Peoria because American-born people aren't having their own children, that is an opportunity to house people who come from somewhere without enough housing or infrastructure. The only barrier to this happening is our suicidal apartheid regime of borders and passports that's even newer than the Westphalian system!
Borders are not erected to help you, an ordinary citizen. They are there to divide you against the ordinary citizens on the other side of them.
> "The amount of work".... oh dear. As if caring for other people is only work. From what will you get distracted by having other people around you (kids)? From Instragram? Cycling? Reading books?
What if they prefer Instagram, Cycling and Reading Books rather than raising children? Why are you so concerned about other people's lifestyles? Are you going to pay their rent or help them with their chores?
I decided to have a child, and it was a conscious decision I made with my partner, fully aware that our previous lifestyle would be no more. Deciding not to have a child would have been equally as valid.
I find it funny that this discussion elicits so much passion from people that decided to have children. Do you need validation from other people to justify your own decisions?
Whenever I am asked about it, I say that you should not have children unless you are absolutely certain that you want a child in your life, and that your life is stable enough to accommodate one. The world sucks even in the best of times. To condemn someone to existence when their lives will be made more difficult is selfish and cruel.
No children: no society. Or: a very old, geriatric, undynamic, fearful society with no innovation. Simple.
What happened that after a few hundred thousand years of having families we suddendly need to be "absolutely certain" to have kids? Human nature is the EXACT other way round. What we currently see is an outgrow of pure hedonism. It kills societies (literally, at least in the sense of "no new life").
Concerning "being fully aware that our previous lifestyle would be no more": this in itself partly shows the problem. So our casual life choices are in such a way that it is completely uncompatible with having a family? Sure - when you're 20, you might not be ready. But do we, as a society, promote lifestyles that even when you're 30 are impossible to combine with having kids? Then maybe our lifestyle as a society is wrong, what we tell ourselves to be "good life" is wrong.
And then again... maybe we take having kids too seriously? I really can't say having missed out on much since having kids (and no, we have no nanny). We simply did the stuff people "fear". We went out for dinner together two weeks after our first one was born (together with the baby). And we repeated, until today. We went on those 10 hour flights. We explored foreign countries. We visit museums with modern art. We spent months abroad. Is it always easy? Nope. But it was, overall, not too different from the life before. Kids get used to stuff, parents get used to stuff. Most of us can do it if we let go of the instagrammy thought of having to be perfect. And this is how society always was and always will be.
EDIT:
In the current medical climate where child mortality is very, very low, of course, as a society we CAN afford to have less kids overall. And as long there are a few people who LIKE to have 3 or more kids, we can afford to have some more people having no kids as all. I don't promote growing society ad infinitum. But having sub-replacement birth rates will NOT make our countries better for sure (and the economy is my very LAST concern). France 10-15 years ago can lead as an example with a healthy rate of births, wealth and personal freedom.
In my view, having children without being prepared for them is the most hedonistic thing one can do - creating people for your own reasons without a clear way of supporting them.
As someone without children, I find it strange that I'm perceived as living some hedonistic lifestyle. There are indeed material concerns when it comes to the idea of children, but they tend more towards maintaining housing and especially for me who has some medical needs, health insurance. I'm certainly not traveling all the time or living it up with a fancy brunch every weekend; I'm actually quite happy with a modest living arrangement and diet, but even that seems to get more expensive as time goes on, and my job tenures get shorter as the layoffs come quicker.
You don't feel like you've missed out on much since having children and I think that's a great attitude; I don't feel like I've missed out on much since not having children. We can both be correct in this because we are each our own people with our own wants.
Well, of course, I am not getting at you personally, as I don't know you. And of course I am not getting angry at people around me for not having kids (do I know their reasons well?). I speak more about society as a whole.
Much of what you write are modernity made problems. When we are really getting deep into what is going on, then YOU/ME/WE should not be living on our own alone anyway. YOU/ME/WE, in a healthy society, should be living in a multigenerational home where close to NOTHING changes if there is one more kid running around. OF COURSE having kids is a much more difficult choice when we all have to live on our own, only together with our partner (with which we also have to maintain a PERFECT relationship because there is no other person around or to go to to cool down a bit anyway), we all have to pay for our housing ALONE, plus taxes, plus (in many countries) health insurance, childcare etc. . A more humanly organized society would have much more of us simply live together, share more stuff. But most of us have to start at zero. Which some say is "fair". But in reality, it is making us poorer. Financially, emotionally.
In fact I'm a 30-something man who lives in a multi-generational household (with my parents). I'm under the impression that it's not considered an attractive quality.
You are right: it is not considered attractive. I myself do, as an example, not live in one (that said: all family lives in my region). Because we as a society somehow made "independence" the "cool" way to live.
I was thinking it was a behavioral evolution thing - demonstrating status and suitability as a mate; that sort of thing. But really it just seems like a waste of money if your needs are modest. I only need a room really. The funny thing is that I went through the trouble of buying a house before I realized that.
> What happened that after a few hundred thousand years of having families we suddendly need to be "absolutely certain" to have kids? Human nature is the EXACT other way round.
Human nature was to live out as a hunter-gatherer in some African savannah. Why would this hold any power over how people choose to live their lives in the Year of our Lord 2024?
> Concerning "being fully aware that our previous lifestyle would be no more": this in itself partly shows the problem.
You sound oddly interested in how I make life changing decisions that don't affect you in any way.
This is another example of a thought pattern often encountered. The thought of "being free to do what ever I feel like" and not caring.... is a meme.
> Human nature was to live out as a hunter-gatherer in some African savannah. Why would this hold any power over how people choose to live their lives in the Year of our Lord 2024?
You are taking a thing where Humans have proven to be quite flexible (the style of living) and bring it to a discussion that is, at its base, biological (no babies: no society). Sure, we can now say that it all doesn't matter if our more and more babyless societies go to die.... but is this really the way to go on?
I do not know you personally, but I reply to what you say because it is not only you who says it, but seems to exemplify what at least I see as a problem in society. I recognise thought patterns that I've heard before.
>And then again... maybe we take having kids too seriously? I really can't say having missed out on much since having kids (and no, we have no nanny). We simply did the stuff people "fear".
I'd commend you for that. Not helicopter parenting is the way to go.
The natural way of being a human for thousands of years was to hunt and gather, and then die before 40. But that didn't stop us from progressing past that point.
I was in a similar boat but did end up having a son recently with my wife. I am still pretty sure that I would be happy without kids but I am also happy with a kid. One thing I think people do tend to overestimate is how much work kids will be in the long term. Yes, short term is crazy, the first couple of years are very intense. But they become more and more independent each year and grow into an equal member of your family. Think about your own parents. I don't think mine were significantly constrained in their life after we turned 10. I mean if you think you'd want to go one month long solo travels each years that's a different story but otherwise kids can be pretty independent. I stayed home alone for a week because I didn't want to go on family holiday when I was 15.
If kids stay one year olds forever no one would have kids, you'd go insane. But that's not the case.
I just don't have any interest in kids. They're expensive and they require a ton of sacrifice. I'd rather travel, golf, do hobbies and generally enjoy my life. The only people that seem to want me to have babies are my parents so they can have grand kids... too which I've told them "Thank you for having me, but that's not a valid reason for me to sacrifice my life". I don't really care about the preservation of the human species. I'm going to be dead in the next 40 years or so, why should I care?
Whenever I encounter this attitude I like to remind that person that they should have no voice, whatsoever, in what happens in government and politics anymore. I don't want people who are self-selecting themselves out of the future having any say in what happens for my children. It's fine that you don't want kids, enjoy the golf course I guess. But in general I will discount your opinions to zero on anything else of consequence.
Some parents boast about how they'd impetuously shoot anyone who threatened their offspring. Here you are excluding those who leave behind only ideas and creative works from having a say in the future, in case that threatens your offspring. Reproduction makes people slightly crazy. First it's must have sex, then it's must protect the brood. I resent being manipulated by these mindless instincts, which serve only DNA. Your apparent vision of the purpose of life is a dichotomy between reproducing and golf.
They aren’t mindless. They’re what preserve the species and the arts and the culture and the science etc etc. I’m sorry you feel resentful about normal human instincts.
That's different, then, if it's a thoughtful project carried out in the cause of culture. But then why disenfranchise all the creative and science types, just because their only offspring are the ideas that they nurture? They're doing basically the same thing, they're still investing in the future, and less randomly as well (since you can't ethically control the ideas of your actual flesh and blood children by any means beyond suggestions).
Also, instincts are nothing to be proud of, they're just dumped on us by nature.
>Also, instincts are nothing to be proud of, they're just dumped on us by nature.
But instincts are something to be proud of. They're a product of extremely complex processes that occur over incredible timescales. At a minimum that's remarkable and interesting.
It makes perfect sense. Their preference set is limited to their own desires, for as long as they are terrestrially bound. They have no skin in the game for ensuring that things are functional after they die. Why should I listen to someone who only cares about their own gratification?
This strikes me as not dissimilar to religious people who are terrified of atheists because, without God, they must have no reason not to become mass murderers.
There are many people with kids who have revealed the value they place on the sustainability of the environment, democratic society, or the economy through the lifetime of their children, let alone their children's children, to be zero. Why would you assume that the childless are any more selfish, as a group? Why can one not care about the continuance and betterment of humanity without one's own direct descendents being involved?
Wow, that's a pretty extreme interpretation of all this.
Like a sibling poster, it reminds me of all the religious people who claim that atheists can't be moral because we don't have a god to guide us.
I do have skin in the game, even without kids. On a basic level, I care about the rest of my life, which hopefully will last another 50 years. I care about the planet and about future generations because that's the right thing to do, because short-termism and excessive consumption is a cancer.
And even if I won't have kids, I have nieces and nephews, and I have dear friends who have children. I want them to be able to grow up and live in a good, safe, comfortable world.
Frankly I find your point of view profoundly condescending and insulting. You don't need to have children to care about the future.
There's a bunch of old people that have kids that also very clearly don't give a damn about preserving the world for the next generation. Should they also not be allowed to vote?
Hell, I would bet that childfree people are more likely to support "future-preserving" plans than parents, on average. I'm thinking climate change, Fridays For Future.
Anecdotally, of the 4 sets of parents I know well enough to know their political opinions, none of them are really concerned about preserving the world for their children. I'm vegan, car-free, childfree and vote for the "green" options.
In your system of morality some guy who's condom broke or a rapist are more moral than someone who is infertile, and you are so sure of it you propose taxation to pile on top. Maybe you should reconsider if it makes perfect sense.
GP didn't write a moral judgement, but a practical one. People who don't have/care for kids don't have long-term skin in the game, therefore their influence on the shape of future society should be downweighed. There is a logic to that.
> some guy who's condom broke
Yes, this is how a lot of families are made. Unplanned != unwanted != unloved.
> or a rapist are more moral than someone who is infertile
Again, not about morality. GP's logic isn't about whether one's good or bad, but whether one has skin in the game of continued improvement of society and civilization.
But I guess a better way of scoping it is whether or not the person is a parent (EDIT: or in legal terms, caregiver?). Infertile people can become parents too (and that could be an indication of extra special caring about the future generation). And then people can be biological parents, but not actual parents, e.g. if they give their child away.
But the definition on "skin in the game" varies from person to person. Plenty of people with kids don't consider them as skin in the game. Plenty of people without kids have lots of skin in the game.
Sure you can. The parent was describing a heuristic they apply. If I don't know you, but need to quickly judge whether or not you're likely to care about future over immediate-term, you being a parent is... not the worst proxy I could use.
FWIW, I don't exactly agree with the poster on this. I feel that parents are biased towards near-term almost by definition: caring and nurturing children is an immediate job. Whether or not a typical non-parent is likely to be a "fuck you, got mine" kind of person, I find that parents tend to become more of a "fuck you, my kids got theirs" kind of people. Not out of ill intent - just more of "concrete needs of my kids today trump abstract speculative needs of their generation a few decades from now".
I think it's a bit more than that. The person upthread goes a bit farther than just whether or not someone cares about the future or not. It sounds like they've basically judged all childless people as hedonists who would gladly burn down the world as long as we get in one last round of golf.
Maybe that person doesn't really believe that, but if so, should probably be clearer about their position and not resort to veiled personal attacks.
Been stewing on this comment. You are right, I think, for roughly half of the parents in my peer group. They do indeed act with a "fuck you, my kids got theirs" attitude. But I think the heuristic still works, because the near term things that those parents care about tend to be highly correlated with what makes sense in the long term. Another comment, in this dumpster fire of a thread that I started, noted that becoming a parent makes you crazy. Alas, I think becoming a parent makes you normal. After all, everyone has a parent.
This might surprise you, but people can care about other people that aren't their blood relatives. Don't play morally superior just because you decided to procreate.
I think I would word it differently, but I more or less agree. Skin in the game is important.
Particularly with people who are old with no kids, I don't think they are totally cynical, but they do seem to have an incentive to vote society into schemes where they are taken care of by younger people, at no cost to themselves or their descendants. For instance they could decide the government needs to take out a massive 30 year loan to pay for care homes to be built.
But I also think that just because you have kids, that doesn't mean you're completely aligned with a longer term future. There's going to be a lot of desperate older people needing help from the few young people who are left, and that goes regardless of whether they made any of those young people. I mean sure, if you have kids you are less likely to be as short-termist as a childless old person.
I think it's a major issue that doesn't get talked about enough. People are happy to say "oh but plenty of old people care about society" which is true, but there's also plenty of foreigners who care about society, who can't vote. And it ignores the actual problem that we will be facing, which is that there will be fewer working people supporting older, non-working people. We need a system for equitable power sharing between generations.
> Their preference set is limited to their own desires, for as long as they are terrestrially bound.
This exact same sentence could be used to describe parents who bring children into a world rapidly becoming less hospitable due to climate change, the full extent of which they won't be alive to suffer.
> I will discount your opinions to zero on anything else of consequence
I’d settle for a much higher tax rate for the voluntarily childless to very inadequately offset the lack of contributing to the next generation. Probably the best way to implement this is that the child tax credit should be much bigger.
I'm impressed by the idea that it's even possible to stop people in general from having kids. In 1974 there were 4 billion people, and we were worried about overpopulation, with scare stories in the media on the theme of "standing room only". Now we are 8 billion, and worrying about low birth rates, even in China (see the "lying flat" trend). So, get back to me when we're down to 4 billion again and I'll consider supporting financial incentives to support future human life, but right now I don't see an existential threat from low birth rates. I do however think that it's really cool that people have the capacity to refrain from having kids when they know that it's a bad idea in their specific circumstances. I like this because it shows the malthusian overpopulation doom-mongers to be wrong, and they were getting annoying.
I already pay tax that ends up paying your child support money, builds kindergartens for you, funds schools, even though I have no kids. But no, let's punish me more because I don't fit your view of the world by raising my taxes more, even though I benefit from the existing ones a lot less than you do already.
You seem to have not read what I replied to. It is punishment if I pay MORE taxes than those with children, just because I don't have any, even though those with children benefit more from taxes, taxes that I already pay.
> You seem to have not read what I replied to. It is punishment if I pay MORE taxes than those with children, just because I don't have any, even though those with children benefit more from taxes, taxes that I already pay.
Think if it this way: in the childlessness-tax scenario, the parents would be paying society in-kind by raising kid(s), and you'd paying society with money instead. You're both paying, just in different ways.
Taxes also aren't some kind of payment-in-exchange for services thing. It's foolish to complain about programs because you don't personally benefit from them.
That kind of already happens in countries where government monetarily supports families with children since it's tax money. But the effective difference in taxes isn't probably that large.
It's just peanuts compared to having one less job for a while.
Maybe that is what to do, give tax credits on the order of an income. That way you are basically tax free while having young children, but you'll still want a job when they are a little bit older.
If we really want to go down this route we should do away with parenting. Children our are future therefore the government will be responsible for producing and raising children to meet our necessary societal workforce quotas. Parenting is a messy business that introduces too many quality control issues. Our glorious future means we must have only perfectly standard issue babies that conform to exact government measurements and standards. Men must donate sperm and women will be artificially impregnated until we can figure out how to grow test tube babies.
> If we really want to go down this route we should do away with parenting. Children our are future therefore the government will be responsible for producing and raising children to meet our necessary societal workforce quotas.
Come on, that's just idiotic sarcasm that doesn't even understand the GP's point, let alone actually skewer it. It's as stupid as trying to mock childfree people by sarcastically advocating a total ban on having children, like in ZPG (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069530/).
> Whenever I encounter this attitude I like to remind that person that they should have no voice, whatsoever, in what happens in government and politics anymore. I don't want people who are self-selecting themselves out of the future having any say in what happens for my children.
And you said we should deny political rights to people without children, a pretty mundane life choice all things considered. You're a straight up fascist plain and simple. Good job.
I weep for your offspring as they're probably poisoned by your brand of cruel morality.
It's actually people like you that have no regard for other people's wishes and desires, a downright hostile attitude towards people who live different lifestyles from you and who force their own lifestyle onto others as the "one true way of living", that should be removed from the ability to vote, imo.
Absolutely well said. I agree a 100%. If someone wants to be selfish, let him be, but don’t expect the rest of us to give much credence to his opinions since he very well doesn’t care about our society.
Because parents can't be selfish too? We all have our motivations for doing what we do. People's drive to have children can be selfish. Their drive to not have children can be selfish. There can be selflessness mixed in to either scenario.
Equating not wanting to have children with not caring about society is absurd. While we're throwing around ridiculous ideas: if anyone should have no say in politics of society, it's people who make these kinds of blanket judgments.
> That is bizarre. Someone disagrees with you so all their political rights should be removed? What?
You're misunderstanding him. I think it's more on the line of "freeloaders shouldn't have a say on what work gets done."
The GGP literally said "I don't really care about the preservation of the human species. I'm going to be dead in the next 40 years or so, why should I care?" If someone has that attitude, and explicitly rejects responsibility to go all-in on selfishness, they've pretty clearly given up the moral right to be part of decision-making for the future.
No, they haven't. Again, that's just you saying that because of their disagreement they should have their political rights removed. You are misunderstanding me, in thinking I'm misunderstanding him. I'm understanding him exactly, and I'm saying that saying you "don't really care about the preservation of the human species" is an opinion and that you and GP are bizarrely claiming that those with that opinion should have their political rights removed.
> No, they haven't. Again, that's just you saying that because of their disagreement they should have their political rights removed.
I think there's two aspects where you misunderstand:
1. The original comment is ambiguous about whether they think their "voice...in what happens in government and politics" should be formally removed, voluntarily given up, or just passively ignored.
2. I think simplistically framing this as mere "disagreement" fails to capture what's actually being discussed, and ignores important aspects of governance. It's sort of (but not exactly) like the question if insurrectionists should keep their places in the government they're subverting (e.g. should the Confederate States have kept their seats in Congress, ability to vote for the presidency, have it's members hold important positions in the US government, etc. while they were rebelling)?
> I don't really care about the preservation of the human species. I'm going to be dead in the next 40 years or so, why should I care?
If most Homo sapiens had the same attitude, the species would have gone extinct since forever lol.
You can have any personal goal you'd like, but from the evolution perspective, the purpose of any living organism is to survive and to reproduce, hence preserving its own species. That's why.
The funniest bits about this sort of argument is that I often see people become completely estranged from their parents because the attitude of 'I need my children to take care of me when I'm older' is like a package deal for a whole host of other shitty behaviors.
Oh I mean you have an obligation to be a parent that your kids would want to take care of.
I don't talk to my parents and have no interest in taking care of them, because, like you said, they are horrendous people. I think you're right that the entitlement to your kids time is something that comes with poor parenting.
That doesn't mean that on-net people's kids won't take care of them. Like everything with your kids, it's a two way street.
If they work for money and use it to pay the children to care for them, what difference does it make if they also have kids or not? Why would your kids have to be the ones to care for you for it to “even out”? In that argument, is daycare banned because the child is not cared for by the parents of the child? What if one of the parents dies? Is it ok to pay for help then?
You do realise this system is unsustainable, though ? We just cannot grow infinitely just because .end of life care costs money.
We are way too many, and the #1 source of global warming is human activity. At one point we'll have to stop growing, so the system of how we pay for elderly care has to change.
We don't have to grow infinitely. Population collapse comes with a huge host of problems though.
The problem of elder care isn't purely financial. It's not the model of paying that's the problem. At the end of the day, (kinda oversimplified) money represents a fractional value of the work output of a population. The output of the population depends on the number of people working in productive roles. The value of the currency is related to the consistent output of services and confidence in the existence of your country.
Shifting over an increasing fraction of your population to elder-care is non productive. It has a tension with both stability of currency and value of currency.
This is a false belief, that is increasingly common. Even if you're paying people to take care of you in old age, you are in fact contributing nothing while they are contributing everything. You will be only a burden, because the money is fake and in physical reality not worth anything. It is only in imagined reality that the money is worth anything, because it is something people agree to work for. Future workers will not be so dumb as to waste their life caring for somebody they are not related to, that are not a friend in any way, for no other benefit than fake "money". When the majority of elderly are childless, the cost of elder care and all other labour will increase faster than your bank account can ever keep up. It was different before atomisation of people, there was an exchange in the idea of "society" and "money". Now those concepts are only used to leech, abuse and destroy young working people, so why would they keep playing that foolish game?
Previous generations built the cities, farms, railroads and universities that we all use today. Just because somebody is no longer working does not mean that you are not still benefiting from work they did.
That's a false myth, used to guilt young workers to more easily leech from them. The food you eat today was not farmed by the people who are old now. Your consumer products were made in China, not by the elderly. The infrastructure you use has been repaved and remade several times during the decades that have passed since old people worked.
Except for a few relics, nothing remains today of what the elderly made. The exception being real estate, and that's why the elderly demand to each become a millionaire to let go of any of their real estate.
It's not like today's elderly worked to build something for future generations. They worked to benefit themselves at the moment.
In general when somebody comes to you selling guilt and murky reasons to why you are indebted to them, that's an enemy and a scammer, seeking to leech from honest people. Whether that's an employer, a generation of elderly, the government, a guild or whoever.
That's not giving away your money. That's just saying you will.
You need to either give it to someone all in cash, or transfer all the money in whatever bank accounts you have into someone else's account. Until then, you are a hypocrite.
That's how all money is created. Now it's up to you if you value that note I've issued, or if you value another note that the elderly issued before you were born. All money is created out of thin air in the form of debt notes. All money is debt notes. It can be used as a tool to grease the gears of a common economy, or it can be used as a tool by those in power to enslave others. Like a skilled worker with a good education having to work for 30 or 50 years at extremely high productivity to afford shelter, while an elderly person of today can become a millionaire without lifting a finger because of some real estate he inherited in the 80s – thanks to the monetary system pumping out newly inflated currency chiefly through real estate debt.
Yeah I know. Cash is just paper, that happens to have an agreed upon value by the majority of the population. And the money in a bank account is just a number in a database that happens to have an agreed upon value by the majority of the population.
Your hackernews comment just happens to be some text in a database that has a value which is NOT agreed upon by the majority of the population.
So my point was, since you don't seem to also agree that your money is valuable, please give all your cash to someone who does. And please transfer all the money in your bank accounts to someone else's bank account that does value those numbers.
> Cash is just paper, that happens to have an agreed upon value by the majority of the population.
There really is no such agreement, it is a belief system. And you know that "the majority of the population" has had no say in monetary policy, nor do they understand it. There is no democracy involved and has never been. Billions of dollars, euros and etc are conjured out of thin air and into the hands of the chosen ones as we speak.
Before cash started to rule everything around us, people would carry letters from kings, princes or other nobles, that would instruct subjects to provide the bearer with horses, lodging and hospitality. For example if they were travelling. Or if they were to lead a project. People had to work by decree, people received their benefits and etc by decree.
Just as the rulers today create an endless amount of money out of thin air, monarchs of the past would create noble titles out of thin air. With rights to estates and the servitude of the people who were born there and etc. People defending that oppressive and invented aristocracy system would say "it is the will and decree of God", just like you're now saying that today's oppressive and invented monetary system "is the will of the majority". Because most will always defend the status quo, no matter what.
If the money value is the will of the people, then when did the majority decide they wanted to have high inflation and even hyper inflation? I don't remember any such vote in any country, do you?
> There really is no such agreement, it is a belief system.
If everyone believes it, do they not agree on the same thing?
> And you know that "the majority of the population" has had no say in monetary policy, nor do they understand it.....
I never said they did. It doesn't change the fact that most people still value $1 the same amount.
> If the money value is the will of the people
I never said it was their will, I said they mutually agree to it's value.
> then when did the majority decide they wanted to have high inflation and even hyper inflation?
They didn't. The value of money (or anything) may go up and down over time, for any reason. But in a single moment most people will agree to the value of $1.
But anyway, back to my only point, since you think money is worthless, why don't you give all your money away? Why are you keeping it?
So until you give all your cash away, and transfer all the money in your bank accounts to someone else's bank account, you will remain a hypocrite.
If that's what you're stuck on, I'll gladly let you stay mentally stuck there.
> So until you give all your cash away, and transfer all the money in your bank accounts to someone else's bank account, you will remain a hypocrite.
Except for short-term liquidity you can be damn sure that I don't keep any fiat money in my possession, and neither should anybody else. That's why the stock market keeps going up, everybody wants to get rid off inflation currency as quick as they can.
I guess my incredible hypocrisy is much worse than the geriatric rulers completely destroying the wealth of their nations in less than a generation by enslaving young workers with their fake monetary system.
It’s a normal and perfectly healthy reason to have children if you also love and cherish them. I would bet the number of parents having children for the sole and totally disinterested benefit of the children is approximately zero. The OP not caring about humanity tells me they’re profoundly selfish and therefore probably not capable of the love and cherish part though.
No, it's an incredibly selfish reason to have children.
Certainly people have children for a variety of reasons, but if a big one is "who else will take care of me when I get old?", that's incredibly selfish, and not healthy at all. Loving and cherishing your children regardless doesn't change that.
I love how you've somehow twisted the person upthread's words into the idea that they don't care about humanity. This entire subthread is bizarre.
I respect my father more for telling me he actively doesn't place care expectations on me in his old age. "I made you, you are not responsible for me but I am responsible for you".
Does that mean I won't care for him? Of course not, but it's good to know I haven't come into existence just for that.
You can care about humanity without needing to want to have kids.
Why are we acting like everyone's lifestyle preferences are of paramount importance to everyone else's existence? OP is not taking from any other parents here, and there are still plenty more humans to make more humans.
Is there a hidden fear here that having an enjoyable childless life will somehow spread everywhere and we all die in a generation?
Well, someone will have to take care of him. If it's not his children then probably some nurse in a nursing home. And guess what? That nurse is also someone's child. No children today equals labor shortage tomorrow.
This is one of the most selfish arguments you can make for having kids. You just want someone to take care of you when you are old. If we'll ever have capable robots, you people can stop having children.
Assuming those people are being compensated for the elder care they provide, why is that selfish?
I remember my grandmother moving in with us for a while when I was a kid. It was miserable. Our house wasn't set up for another bedroom. My parents were both stressed out about it and it put a strain on their relationship. My grandmother certainly wasn't thrilled with the situation.
Certainly not all elder care situations are like that, but I bet grandma would have been way more comfortable in an assisted living situation, where people who are trained could have seen to her needs. And my immediate family would have been way more comfortable too.
> Assuming those people are being compensated for the elder care they provide, why is that selfish?
The thing is that an elderly person in care can never compensate those who take care of them, because they do not work and do not produce anything. They can only scam their caretakers by paying with fake fiat money that was allocated to the elderly before their care takers were even born.
I was mainly just challenging the assertion that having children, with at least part of the motivation being care in old age, is selfish.
I interpreted this as not "I will have children so my children can look after me", but rather "I will have children so there will be younger people around, who can (amongst other things) look after older people and do other important things".
Based on that way of looking at it, I think that not having children but still benefiting from younger people is more selfish than not having children and benefitting from younger people (if either of these is indeed selfish).
Basically, I was questioning why it is more selfish to use a resource while contributing to that resource, rather than not contributing but still using.
Put another way, who is more selfish - a farmer who buys some vegetables, or a software developer who buys some vegetables? Yes, they are both paying for them, so they are not directly exploiting anyone. But if no-one wanted to be a farmer, then there would be no vegetables.
Yes, I know this analogy is a stretch, but hopefully you get what I mean. Anyway, I don't think that either having or not having children is inherently "selfish", but there are almost certainly selfish motivations for each.
People's taxes do not cover their EoL care, full stop.
If we are paying the fair market cost of hiring someone to be a carer, the cost of having them not do something else has to be realized. This will mean that cost of carers will skyrocket, meaning that people's care becomes more expensive. If we start to pay the true cost -- and have it paid directly -- then when population collapse happens, a ton of the elderly will die on the street.
Technically that makes everyone who's over the age of 60 a sort of parasite. That doesn't mean we look down on them.
Is a childless teacher refusing to do their part to create the next generation? Arguably a good teacher can have more impact on society than any parent will. How about someone who invents a technology that has decades long repercussions.
George Washington didn't have children. Was he a parasite taking just the benefits from society?
I've got kids, but I'm not naive enough to think that people without kids are all parasites. I think a healthy society has a balance of people doing different things - raising children needs a huge amount of attention and emotional labour, and it's definitely not for everyone. But you can contribute to society in other ways.
> Technically that makes everyone who's over the age of 60 a sort of parasite. That doesn't mean we look down on them.
No, they just frontloaded their contribution. Nothing in the definition says that it has to perfectly meter out its contribution to the symbiosis so that there's never a second where it's not giving some little portion.
> Is a childless teacher refusing to do their part to create the next generation?
I've seen what teachers do, firsthand. It'd be better for everyone if they just sat it out and did nothing. So they're pretty far into the negative.
> but I'm not naive enough to think that people without kids are all parasites.
Nothing naive about it. It's just the definition of parasitism. Taking from the host, giving nothing in return. Sure, some may have some medical issues that prevent it... they have my sympathy. Maybe that's Georgie W's excuse, dunno. But for those that make it a choice, yes, 110% parasite.
> I think a healthy society has a balance of people doing different things
There's nothing healthy about a society that doesn't make the next generation.
> and it's definitely not for everyone.
The trouble is that it really is for everyone. If you think that someone else can have children for you, then you don't get to make society. Which might be a bit of a problem for you, considering that you live in it.
> Technically, that makes you a sort of parasite. You have no trouble taking your share of the benefits that come from living in our society, but refuse to do your part to create the next generation of people who would comprise that society.
The benefits of living in society are generally paid for by OP's tax money, not some imaginary bonds that theoretical children will repay some day afterwards. On the other hand the epithet you used could be easily applied to poor people having bunch of children while on welfare...
> The benefits OP will take in his old age will largely be paid by the children of his generation.
Bringing up the children of OP's generation is paid by OP's taxes. Moreover, parents probably pay less, not more taxes for having children in a lot of western countries.
> You have no trouble taking your share of the benefits that come from living in our society
They didn't ask to be born, did they? Why should that accident of existence saddle them with obligations to birth others? This is such a shallow "yet you participate in society" argument.
It's also a zero-sum argument. Participating in society is likely to amount to giving, not taking. It's like Marxists thinking there's only so much wealth to go round and thus anyone who has any should feel ashamed.
The argument could be made that those who have children are the parasites, selfishly diverting resources to the useless ineffectual new humans that they've made for the fun of it. This argument would be nonsense too, but it wouldn't be worse than the other one.
Yes, how selfish. Giving birth to and raising the children that will grow the food you will eat when you're too old and decrepit to do it yourself.
Do you all just plan on suicide whenever you feel you've hit your peak? Or will you go on, and just look at those who provide for you as suckers too unlucky to have skipped the grift?
I mean, I'm not judging here, but it's clearly parasite behavior.
I will set aside money during my productive years and pay for food when I'm old. Just because the food is not made by fruit of my loins doesn't mean I'm being a parasite.
He is working, creating value for society, capturing only a portion of the value he creates, and deploying that value through consumption of experiences and services.
The fact that you would prefer he spent his money on children, instead of on other experiences, is irrelevant. Your desire to control other peoples spending, and to vilify them, for it, shows only that you are an immoral, authoritarian, asshole, and that you do not respect other people.
It is somewhat sad, that an immoral, authoritarian, freedom, hating, asshole, such as yourself might have children. I only hope that women are able to recognize that you are a monster, and that you do not respect other people.
> It is somewhat sad, that an immoral, authoritarian, freedom, hating, asshole, such as yourself might have children. I
Already have two. My daughter tells me she wants to have six. That seems ambitious, I'd be happy if she has three.
I guess from your perspective this really is sad. That makes me happier than I already was. If you weren't so sad, maybe you could do something about it. My descendants will tell each other stories and legends of the sad childless people who couldn't be bothered to shape society and create the next generation of people, and how they'd just throw barbless insults at those who did.
This is where the difference between affordability and safety come in.
Obviously someone making that much could afford to have kids, but assuming tech hub (e.g. SF) cost of living, it’ll take a few years of salary like that to accrue enough financial padding to be certain that a chain of unfortunate events won’t put them out on the street once the cost of raising a family is added in.
This is why you see a lot of high earners waiting until the last second to have kids, if they do. Financial security like you have while making good money without kids is hard to let go of.
Birthrate by income levels is approaching a dumbbell distribution in industrialized nations. Lower income people have kids due to the lack of options, while ultra-high income people have kids due to the need for heirs (and they can afford to completely offload childcare to dedicated high-quality staff). Those in the middle are stuck because having children is a net negative to the continuation of career advancement, especially women due the unavoidable need for parental leave. The commitmments required to raising children, especially newborns, will disrupt travel plans which is a significant component of the typical middle class lifestyle. Childcare will also cost a significant sum of money, sometimes as much as mortgage payments in high CoL areas, without completely relieving the parents of their duties.
> without completely relieving the parents of their duties.
That's an underappreciated point. Kids in daycares and kindergartens get sick a lot. Those places are pathogen swapping grounds. Especially early on, you may have your kid 2 weeks in, 2 weeks out on average. And the "on average" is a killer, too - you can't schedule when your kid will get sick, so you're effectively on-call all the time anyway, and have to have a job compatible with you just taking off in the middle of the day and getting a day or two of leave, on the spot, at random.
My net worth is north of 5 or 6 million now, on a good day. My salary is mid 5 figures with TC. You just happened to hit a proverbial jackpot, in another sense. You don't think I haven't had my share of exes? You don't think I've ever tried to settle down? You had blind luck in your romantic endeavors. But please don't wear that as some sort of weird badge of honor, it cheapens the whole thing, in my honest opinion.
It could simply be that child rearing and career success are substitute goods, at least for a plurality of the population. I don't like admitting that, but it seems reasonable to suspect.
I'll speak as someone that waited until almost 40 to have kids and who feels, in hindsight, I was being completely selfish. I prioritized my career, my travel, my sleeping in, my social life, my leisure, etc. As soon as you become a parent, you realize you shorted yourself and your kid shared time on earth together. I also just don't have the energy or physical ability to play like I would have at a younger age. It's not something you can really grapple with or consider the magnitude of as a childless person purposely avoiding/delaying it. I don't think it's necessarily intentionally selfish in the moment, as you're living it, but later sometimes you get to reflect back and see your decisions as what they really where with the clarity of hindsight and you'll understand what you really did. It's a weird thing that happens and I think part of the whole "wisdom with age" thing. I think I was just being selfish. All the travel and me stuff I did in my 20s-30s is not really very important, my identity as a parent to the humans I created is my identity now, It's the only part of my identity I really care very much about. Sure I still have hobbies and travel and stuff but it's on an entirely different plane of importance.
What if someone is not waiting on anything and just doesn't want to have kids out of any number of reasons? It's alright if you have regrets, but I don't see it as selfish if you never intended to have kids in the first place.
Well, this is kind of the camp I was in. I never wanted kids, so I said and thought. I knew my wife was kind of on the fence; so I knew it was a possibility. But I was actually kind of expecting her to either A) just one day tell me she had been thinking and wanted a kid or, B) what I actually hoped at the time, her clock would stop ticking while we were busy doing us and the decision would be made due to that. We had long agreed that if we ever did do it, we'd try but if fertility was ever an issue we wouldn't pursue IVF or adoption; we'd just consider it a sign from the universe and live our lives happily childfree. But then, we (ok she) was diagnosed and overcame a huge medical issue and it had us re-evaluate our thoughts on family/life/everything in the process.
Also noteworthy is that I don't project an opinion of selfishness on others; it's what I feel of myself. I can say also, now having a lot of friends that also waited for whatever reason, it's not uncommon in this cohort. It's also very common that people wait then run into fertility issues and the feeling hits harder for them. We've known a ton of people that struggle hard with that, more-so if having kids was already on your must-do list and you just delayed it too long.
So to answer your question more directly, I don't think the person you described is selfish. They may however realize they were if they ever decided to actually have kids and perhaps have some regret do to that.
And you depend on doctors and sewerage workers and programmers and garbage men and police officers and soldiers and physicists and so on. Is it selfish not to become all of these things yourself?
As long as you participate actively in society by working, you are doing your part and are not being selfish.
And my taxes go towards (in most countries) supporting that. Also, the children are not obligated to take care of me. They can choose it as a profession and I will gladly pay them for it, just as I gladly pay any professional in my life for cutting my hair or helping my children if they have trouble at school (even though they themselves do not have to have children and are helping them instead of the other way around). Are the people providing services also selfish for providing them?
Why? Anyone paying taxes to the state has fully earned their right to exist, especially if the state has a welfare system.
Not having children isn't even a new concept. People have done it since time immemorial. What if they had multiple children and then lost them all to the statistically high child mortality rates? Were they being selfish by not furthering their lineage due to external circumstances?
Off the top of my head: not being able to biologically, thinking that they are not able to provide worthy living conditions for the children, abuse in childhood and being afraid of exhibiting the same behaviour, having sick parents/siblings who need a lot of care leaving no time for children, not wanting to increase the burden on the planet... or just plain having the freedom of choice.
It's not a blanket rule and it's more about how you'll feel about yourself, realizing you've been selfish, than it is projecting outwards that anyone without kids must be selfish; that's certainly not the case.
These seem like very clear exceptions and reasons. Take it as a general sentiment, I'm not trying to footnote everything I write online to consider every possible circumstance any human could conceivably encounter. I think you should have known these are clearly not selfish acts. Biologically infertile being selfish? Come on dude.
OK, it sounds like your experience was selfish simply because later ON you had children, and the time you spent alone was time you could've had with your eventual children.
But what of someone who will not have children at all? How is it, literally (in the definition of the word), "selfish" to not have children? From whom are you robbing experience? What is being "taken away" and from whom?
If you want kids, its selfish to bring the other party into existence. Life isn't all great, and you don't have a choice in whether or not you're born.
If you don't want kids, its selfish because you are not supporting the society (other party) that supports your existence. If we don't have kids above the replacement rate, society doesn't continue. If you are fine with that great, but its hypocritical if you plan to continue to benefit from society in your own life.
What of the people that have children but those children do not contribute in any meaningful way to society? Is the implication here that every child born must somehow be a net-positive to society?
I see what you're saying about the replacement rate, but I don't see how, on a smaller scale, someone choosing to not have children is a selfish act within the context of a society that is not yet below "replacement" level.
"I'm not giving anyone else a chance" -- there is no "anyone else". There is nothing being robbed, as there is no other party that literally exists in the universe.
What I hear from millennials is "life is suffering, our future is doomed (global warming, mass extinction, insane politics, increasing loneliness), why would I force some kid to have to grow up in this shit world just for my own fulfillment?"
Which is crazy. Because no one had a life harder than the previous generations.
The amount of technological progress in the past decade is staggering. So many infrastructure issues are now just automated, that we don’t have to think about.
It’s a great time to be alive. And a great time to give someone else that opportunity to experience it too.
Looking at long term trends, the only single thing I can be sure of is the future won't look like the present.
I am currently experiencing a strong drive to start a family. Lets say I get very lucky and cause a pregnancy tomorrow; kid comes out 9 months later, 21 years (± whatever for when school starts), they graduate university and… it's not predictable in the slightest. We might have single-atom transistors as standard, or the factories might be too expensive to mass produce them. We might have solved all genetic conditions, or research might have stalled with Moore's Law. AI might be good enough to make human labour uneconomical, which is a separate issue to if we will arrange our economies to make this a utopia or a dystopia, or it might not. Even without AI, internet connectivity and robotics is enough to make Amazon Mechanical Turk more like its namesake, with the same impact on cost-cutting and outsourcing to whoever has an internet connection. Genetics research, even if limited to no-growth-in-computing scenarios, may also make it affordable for small and dumb terrorist groups to attempt DIY genocides, and even if they fail at their goal that may still cause megadeaths… but we may well also have defences against it, either biological or surveillance. Similar issues for drones and high-powered lasers. We've already got government-affordable ways to put literally every human on the planet under 24/7 surveillance, and that's likely to get cheap enough for organised crime to automate blackmail, but we also already have people doing that with generative AI and the social responses (let alone the legislative) could be almost anything. 3D printed houses and boats are both realities now, will we finally witness large-scale seasteading, or is that fundamentally untenable?
And that's all assuming no world-ending, or even just economy-ending, catastrophes of any kind — no paperclip optimisers, no nuclear wars, no peak-${insert-resource-here}, no environmental issues causing 1e9-scale migration.
Media has them mind broke. The material conditions climate change / etc will inflict on them are nothing compared to the material conditions our ancestors endured before the creation of modern technology.
"Boo hoo, the weather is shitty and some people are moving around because of it" he says, as he doesn't have to worry about Bubonic Plague or Genghis Khan.
I wish people didn't mind people moving around, but (a) the UK gets worried about mere tens of thousands, and (b) "some people" in the case of climate-change induced changes to farming output would, with current economics, be "about three times the total population of Earth when the Black Death started".
Yes they can. People are just too selfish and think of kids as costing lattes and ruining their free time. Believe it or not, kids don't have to be expensive as reports have you believe. They can go to public school, wear hand me downs or walmart clothes, and eat what would have been leftovers.
Most coworkers with kids I've spoken with complain about costs of daycare, babysitting, and Montessori schools. We pay for none of those as they aren't necessary. If even one parent works from home, it's a solved problem. If both do not, evaluate the costs. Many times, you actually lose money by both parents working.
I have a child and we do fine on one salary. Would love more, but either my aging body or god one has determined that would be decidedly more expensive.
ETA: Anyone on the fence who wants a kid - go for it. Don't try to keep up with the Jones' or try to budget them out. Kids are awesome. They're little blank slates who don't need much more than love, attention, education, and sustainance. If you keep waiting for when it's right, it'll never happen.
Yet the message sent to potential parents is so far from that, I won't blame people foregoing having kids.
There's a strong movement pushing for smaller governments and less public and social expenses in general, that directly makes it worse (kids are sick all the time, they need schools, public transportation, libraries, public services in general). You're arguing for giving up on daycare when so many companies are pushing back to office rules.
To your point, if a couple is at the point they couldn't afford lattes if they had kids, I don't see them properly raising that kid without a ton of aid, and looking at the comments we usually have here, most will point the finger at them for not being responsible enough instead.
Free time I guess is a big one. If you value the 'hanging with the boys', clubbing, or really any solo activity it certainly would be a shock. By the time mine came along, I was done with most of that anyways I guess. But my own free time - watching TV, playing games, reading books, or just scrolling on my phone, was largely replaced with building legos, having nerf gun fights, playing board games, etc. One 'hidden' benefit is that you get to be a kid again without seeming weird, and kids toys todays are so much cooler.
I do think 'selfish' was too broad and strong of a claim. I was focusing solely on the thought of people who make way more than enough money claiming a child would ruin their lifestyle/break them. In reality, there are tons of other reasons a person may not want a child that aren't selfish at all.
I don't think i'd use the word selfish, but I do think it's interesting that many people who aren't wanting kids don't do it for the reasons I'd assume.
If you would have told me people choose not to have kids because they already feel they are contributing to bettering the world through some other mission, it would make sense. If you're a doctor or scientist or even a nurse or something where you feel your career is a calling, I can understand feeling stretched thin enough to not want to have kids.
But that's not what many of my anti-kid friends say. They basically say it would interfere with their netlfix watching, video game playing, luxury travel lifestyle.
It's not that kids would take away from other meaningful ways of connecting to humanity, its' that they'd get in the way of their consumption.
Who will buy your products and services 20-30 years from today?
If the question sounds ridiculous, trust me it isn't. You can look at demographics of China, or if you don't particularly care about that but care about finance, long duration government debt.
Life doesn’t need excuses. It happens on its own. Human ability to stop it from happening reliably is rather new.
The poor capitalist is only one sad person. The poor dictator or emperor or tsar is another. The childless by choice middle class city dwellers who suddenly realize there’s no one young enough to provide the products and services they require to continue their hedonistic lifestyles are another still.
There’s a conspiracy theory I don’t subscribe to which says Covid and vaccines are a depopulation program. But we don’t need one…
The reasoning is that you were raised by somebody but when it is your turn you are avoiding the responsibility. If everybody start to think this way the human race will stop existing.
You can't renege on a "responsibility" you didn't sign up for. Furthermore, if someone asked me to make a list of mammals least in danger of extinction, humanity would be at the very top. The idea that we need to keep exponentially growing or face extinction strikes me as remarkably similar to pyramid-scheme thinking.
> Most coworkers with kids I've spoken with complain about costs of daycare, babysitting, and Montessori schools. We pay for none of those as they aren't necessary. If even one parent works from home, it's a solved problem. If both do not, evaluate the costs. Many times, you actually lose money by both parents working
Many (most?) people definitely don't have the luxury of having a parent stay at home.
You are just as selfish as your friends. You just have a different idea about what life you want (and also probably higher income, I bet).
Would you have another kid if you knew it would make your current kid significantly worse off? It's the same argument as that, except that you count the spouse as part of the equation.
If you make conscious choices to keep having kids even though
1. You don't need them to help on your farm or to support you in your old age,
2. Each additional kid further immiserates your spouse and the older kids
If you're in the minority, maybe you're the one who's out of touch?
It's not that they can't afford having children—many of those who are less fortunate than them still have children. It's just that they think the cost of raising children, which likely affects their current lifestyle, is not worth it.
Do the math on a 100k income - everyone lives on inheritances. It's fine if you inherit a couple of mill and can live on all of the 100k. If you need to worry about savings - good luck.
That opinion itself is reflective of a bubble. The people not having kids are all well-off; the lower class is still having lots of kids, whether they own houses or not (and most do - the only places unaffordable are the centers of big cities). You drop below 2.0 kids somewhere around the 40th percentile of income, and pass 50% homeownership around the 20th.
My parents had three kids while living on a single salary that put us below into the poverty line for the first half of my childhood. I had a very happy childhood. Everything I had (even my underwear!) was a handmedown.
I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s possible. It’s a matter of priorities. I’m glad my parents made the hard choices they did.
This comment is spot on IMHO -- yes, of course it is possible. But it isnt desirable for many of us who went thru it.
I similarly grew up at the poverty line as my parents got crushed by double-digit inflation. Based on personal experience, I didnt want the same for my kids -- so we have 2 though we'd love to have 4.
This is the reason that we tell ourselves, but it isn't the reason why we stop having kids. If it were, the human race would have died out millenia ago.
Every single parent I'd wager that made those sacrifices and raised their family would tell you it was the best thing they ever did and that they'd do it again. If you've never been a parent you can't possibly understand it at all.
When you're poorer, especially in countries with less well enforced legal systems, you're not as negatively affected by having more children. Your priority is simply being able to stay fed and taking what work you can get, not buying a home in an area conducive to your highly specialized career. More kids are just another mouth to feed until they become capable of contributing to the family finances (typically at much younger ages than in the West).
This. In poorer parts of the world, you might have an extra mouth to feed for the first 15-20 years, but once your child finishes school and finds work they're contributing to your well-being and to helping feed the younger children. You also need not worry too much about your retirement, because you know your family will support you, and you'll play a role raising your grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Kids as a retirement investment - makes sense in countries that lack safe investments (safe from over-taxation, theft, inflation). Built in interest/growth rate due to breeding next generation.
Unfortunately I have shorted the children market by not breeding when younger. What's the appropriate way to invest in 2.5 children? I presume they are a very illiquid investment.
The other problem with cousins is that brothers and sisters move to distant locations so cousins are often inaccessible even if you have them.
Just buy enough shares in public companies, or apartment units, to get the capital-share-of-income of 2.5 of someone else’s children. Let the parents figure out how to get something out of the wage-share-of-income
This isn't enough of an explanation, because surviving is still harder in such places than it is in wealthy countries with low birth rates. Birth rates are inversely correlated with wealth regardless of housing affordability.
True, I was thinking of colleagues who had moved from Eastern Europe to Ireland and were telling me that it was much more common to have homes without a mortgage, they weren't as likely to be a vehicle for getting rich, NIMBYs weren't such a big thing, etc. Maybe it's a holdover from the Soviet Union.
Not owning a house is not a reason people don’t have kids. After WW II the birth rates in Poland were crazy high despite obviously huge problems with housing - often 2 families had to live in one small 2-room apartment (not a house). Now most people own or can afford to rent yet the birthrate plummeted.
The primary reason for low birth rate is availability of cheap and effective contraception (and cultural changes that led to most people being ok with using it). Change my mind.
Isn't this a bit like claiming that main reason of drowning is water?
The real questions here is why people given opportunity to not have children jumps at it.
My personal opinion is that children are not that great - too much responsibility, too little support from society, too many of them behaves like little psychopaths most of the time (this can be probably cured with strict discipline but stress free upbringing seems to be in vogue). And the things that children "give" in return are rather questionable (especially for people with low emotional needs like me)
Most people probably like the "idea" of children but the practical side of having them is mostly boring ungrateful work that takes greater part of you life away and there is inherent risk that it can never end (I do not understand how anyone would not take into considetation the consequnce of having special needs child)
> The real questions here is why people given opportunity to not have children jumps at it.
Point taken, but that opportunity was not there until about 60 years ago.
I don't think people unwillingness to have kids changed, they didn't have much real choice back then. Well, their willingness to have sex was stronger than willingness to not have kids ;)
I agree, evolution works over thousands of generations. We're still only a few generations from the invention of birth control. We still do a lot of things that used to lead to reproduction, but today lead nowhere. Another thing I've noticed is that women tend to prefer a guy of higher social economic status. But if she has done a lot of schooling, and has a good job, the pool of eligible bachelors is much smaller. Guys are much more willing to marry down.
The most consistent predictor of the decline of the birth rate in a society is increased levels of wealth, which indicates it's in no way that simple.
Personally, I think it is that expectations rise, both for your own life and for that of children once your purchasing power increases. It's harder to give it up than to not have it in the first place. Having children increasingly has to compete with a lot of other rewarding things that require far less commitment and far lower costs.
Having children has also become higher risk, both in absolute costs - as well as risks associated to the likely possibility of divorce and single-parenthood.
It had plenty of risks before too. Doing genealogy, e.g. of one of my great-great grandfather's children, several died young and left behind children, some ran away from responsibilities (one child - my grandmothers first cousin - ended up in care and was adopted because her mother was too poor to care for her and her dad ran off to the US with his brothers, and we didn't learn she existed until a few years after she'd died) or were forced to work abroad for years at a time. Of 12 or so of his children, I think only 4 were in their children's life until they reached adulthood, and at least one of them was a single parent because her husband died young.
The same great-great grandfathers second wife likewise "lost" a brother that was almost certainly taken into care while she and her older brother were left to fend for themselves as teenagers after being orphaned when their father died after having cared for them alone for a few years after their mother died.
My grandmother's mother - married to one of the children of the same great-great grandparents - lost contact with her siblings in her early teens when they were all taken into care when her dad proved unable to deal following her mother's death. While she found a couple of her sisters again later, her dads failure to cope means even now we've not been able to figure out what happened to the rest of her siblings.
While divorce is more common, abandonment, be it intentional due to the difficulty of obtaining a divorce, or unintentional (poverty, disease, death), or absence for noble reasons (e.g. going off to earn money to support the family) still left a lot of people raising children on their own in often awful conditions.
There's a marked increase in the number of situations like that for each generation further back in my family tree among the people I can track.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say something that I "feel" is plausibly true, but I don't have any data to back it up. While life has been objectively harder in the recent past (prior 80 years), life is subjectively difficult today in a way that it wasn't for the past 200 years.
Folks often start out heavily in debt, then they must work competitive jobs which grow more competitive over time to tread water. The combination of sleep debt, social isolation, and general anxiety of going bust is a subjective difficulty which belies the relative comfort of modern life.
This is born out at least partially in the data where "occupational burnout" affects some 65% of employees in the last year.
Maybe for some, but most people don't get college degrees, for example. Most people worked heavily competitive jobs from an earlier age before, and often far harsher work.
E.g. my grandmothers half brother worked in New York Harbour from he was 9. Most of her uncles and aunts worked from early teens, and often moved from home at that age because their parents couldn't afford to keep providing for them and needed them to get employment. Often in backbreaking work that ruined their bodies, and in some cases killed them young.
People might well have a subjective experience that they have it tough, but if so we're failing in teaching people history.
My sister, in the Midwest, has 3 kids. I assume the family makes < $100k/year, I’d be shocked if they made more than that. Money seems tight, but they get by. They have a home on a couple acres of land (in the middle of nowhere).
I haven’t helped to provide any cousins, so they don’t have any. Money is not the constraint for me. I’d probably have a better chance of having kids if I had less money, as it would imply I focused on building relationships instead of a career.
Lots of people without a lot of money have kids. They value having a family over other things and make it work.
Affordability has rarely been a concern for having kids.
I grew up poor and people never "thought" about affording kids, just had them and figured things out along the way.
It seems it's a self-filtering mechanism in the upper classes, that put all kinds stops before having kids (e.g not ready/mature enough yet, not financially stable, etc) and usually end up having one at most.
Ask your parents, did they enjoy raising you without any money? My mom certainly did not enjoy working 2 jobs to bring me up in this world, and while she loves me, I'm pretty sure she would not do it again if she could do it all over.
So while yes, affordability has rarely been a concern, perhaps people are more educated now and realize what having kids would mean for their life, and how much worse it would make their life? And instead of living life for the purpose of being some child making vessels, they want to actually ... I don't know, LIVE?
> My mom certainly did not enjoy working 2 jobs to bring me up in this world
Rich world problems, though. In poorer countries and our poorer past, you'd have been working alongside her as she wouldn't be able to do it all on her own. Poor people have little choice but to bring children into this world. They would not survive without them. Opting to not have children is a luxury.
> perhaps people are more educated now
Or less educated. We seem to have come to believe that children are porcelain dolls that will break if they have to lift the lightest of fingers before they turn 18, even though there is no basis to that. It's just a cultural display.
> Or less educated. We seem to have come to believe that children are porcelain dolls that will break if they have to lift the lightest of fingers before they turn 18, even though there is no basis to that. It's just a cultural display.
Very much so.
Sadly, hand-in-hand with some strange Peter Pan syndrome of many adults remaining eternal children or what's worse, outright demonizing having children, arguably one of the most beautiful things you could ever achieve in life.
Yes, of course. They'd do it all over again without hesitation. Also, we were technically homeless for a time and a church took us in and let us live in their attic.
I'm deeply grateful to have been given the chance to be alive and for all those experiences as a child.
> And instead of living life for the purpose of being some child making vessels
Also, the logical consequence of your position is all poor people should be banned from procreating, trickling off to enormous chunks of third world countries.
I know many couples in Portland Oregon having multiple kids (four or more) on incomes ranging from 60k-over 200k. Moms stay at home too.
You know what they have in common? They're all religious.
The lack of children is a cultural thing based on how much you value kids over things. That's basically it. Those who value children have them. Those who don't don't. I don't understand why this is controversial. Look at Israel.
>Edit: the replies - y'all are out of touch. Visit an average family in the Midwest with a household income of < $100k/yr that doesn't own a home yet.
Ok, but the poster is baffled not about why people aren't having kids, but about why his coworkers aren't having kids. Now since HN is out of touch they poster is probably just as out of touch and you would assume that they worked with people as financially out of touch as they are - therefore:
Among people making enough money presumably to afford having kids why no kids?
// The avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now
And yet somehow places I visit (which lately has been between NY, Ohio, and Florida) has young families living in houses. I am not saying there's no challenge but your comment would imply that these houses are standing empty because nobody can afford them when in reality each one coming to the market is immediately snapped up mainly by families looking to expland.
Young people paying a massive portion of their income (significantly larger than previous generations) just to have a roof, and gaining zero equity in the process. Hence "renting", as opposed to "owning".
>The avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now.
But this is always the case... ~20 years ago when I bought my first home, interest rates were close to 8%, it took a big chunk of my income, and we had to move way out to the sticks in order to afford anything. People are always having to make compromises if they want to buy a home, save for retirement, start a business, have kids, and all the other high-risk things that people want to do in order to seek a better life. Yes house prices are higher today than they were 20 years ago -- and incomes aren't necessarily better -- but if someone absolutely wants to buy a home, there will be options and tradeoffs.
You can buy a house in Shreveport, Louisiana for 10k or less.
There are many towns and cities in the US with extremely low housing costs. Most of West Virginia is a good example as well.
The reason Shreveport always comes to mind when I think of cheap housing is because I always remember that John Carmack and John Romero owned a little lakehouse there and that's where they lived while making Doom.
When Bobby Jindal was running for governor the first time against Kathleen Blanco in 2004, she put out an ad that featured the nappiest, hair sticking up picture of Jindal you could possibly imagine and coupled it with the tagline “Wake up Louisiana, before it’s too late” (implied subtext: and you elect a black man)
I do hear she regretted this on her deathbed stricken with cancer. But more to the point, a friend of mine was at a polling place in Shreveport during that election and witnessed a fistfight between two voters in the parking lot over whether Bobby Jindal was in fact, black or not.
That has nothing to do with the argument about cost of living. OP asked for examples of affordable housing in the US, implying that affordable housing does not exist anywhere. The point is that there are tons of places to live. Of course the social problems in Louisiana are different than in coastal cities (coastal cities have plenty of social problems too).
To your point, if more progressive people were willing to live outside of coastal cities, they could affect social change in places like Louisiana.
What it sounds like you are saying is that racism makes towns/cities outside of the coastal areas unlivable. That is simply not true.
I entirely agree (and I read that book too), I am just saying if you are going to throw a dart and pick Shreveport as an example you need to be aware of what you are getting into. Another good example is the New Yorker article “The Death Penalty in Louisiana” by Rachel Aviv which I submitted to HN years ago.
I can attest to this with N=1 datapoint here. My best friend postponed having kids till they could afford a SFH, but kept pushing it further as the supply dwindled and rates shot up (tier-1 city residents). I can imagine how the number of planned kids could be directly proportional to the number of bedrooms a couple can afford to have.
I am in a circle of people who absolutely could and my experience (including me personally) matches the GP comment. There are certainly people who cannot afford housing, but the kinds of people I know are people who own detached homes in reasonably large cities all by themselves and things are not that different.
I'm pretty sure engineers can still afford kids, it's just very time consuming and you'll have to settle for less in term of vacations/neighbourhood/purchasing power/carrier/&c.
But yes, most people can't afford having kids that's a given
Some of this is cultural. In the past, people would cram 12 kids (yes literally 12) into a 1,200 sq/ft rowhome. God knows where they all slept. I'm not suggesting this was good, people used to have kids and and have far less space.
You realize the wealthier a society, the fewer kids?
It’s 100% a cultural norm issue. I was raised in Canada but have lived in Israel for the past 20 years. The vast majority of my Canadian friends have no kids, and the ones that do have at most 2. In Israel, all of my friends (secular/non-religious) have kids, usually 3 or more. The idea of whether you can or can’t afford a kid does not cross people’s minds. You get married, and you have a kid. If you don’t get married, and you can, you still have a kid. It’s just what’s expected. I have numerous friends who are single and made the choice to have multiple kids via donors. When it is the norm in society, it’s just something you do. I am sure social pressure has an effect. You see your friends having kids, then you want to have kids too, and then your kids become friends with your friends’ kids, and it expands from there.
Financially, life in Canada is much easier as a parent when compared to here, but socially, life in Canada as a parent is much harder when I compare it to here.
I have 3 kids - for me personally it was the best choice I have ever made, but I accept that I no longer have my own life. I live for my kids and I wouldn’t change it for the world. It probably helps that most of my friends are in the same situation.
Anecdotal response; also, at 43, I may be older than others in this discussion, though many of my cohort have only recently started to have kids. If you're only 30 (or 31 like GP), you'll need to wait and see who will have kids.
My friend with the most kids (5) lives in the Midwest had a household income of well under $100k/yr when kid #5 was born (he's a cop, she worked irregular hours because 5 kids). Now that they are older, she might work more and he has been promoted, so it's possible they are above $100k/yr, but if so, it's not much above that.
Prior to kids, they bought a fixer-upper and made it livable over the course of several months of days-off. Granted he had several advantages here: he worked construction jobs to pay his way through college (in-state tuition was laughably low in the early aughts), and his father was a finish carpenter, so the know-how was available, and he graduated with less than $10k in debt.
Kids aren't that expensive. I have a friend in the midwest with 5 kids and his family income is about $60k. They have 3 cars, own their home and go on vacation a few times a year. But they never eat out, and have a strict budget.
People complaining about money and kids and meanwhile their Great Depression era ancestors are looking at them with unending shame.
Exactly. And also: childcare. Here in Canada, you may have to wait 4~5 years to get childcare, and it's very expensive (and you have to pay to enter the wailist). People even joke that your kid is going to be working by the time they get a spot
The US isn't in as good a position as it was e.g. twenty years ago. But it is still great compared to all of human history and even compared to most of the world today. And all throughout the ages, and all over the world, people are reproducing.
Good point, but that's never stopped people before. Even if this is the worst poverty ever inflicted, you'd have to chalk it up to the combination of that plus birth control and/or changed social norms.
Ah yes the good ol' trope of putting house ownership as basic human right, ideally just for me and right after the buy I expect the price to jump to 3x. If you don't have one, you are such a loser, a failure, how can you look at yourself in the mirror?
Completely idiotic approach of cargo-culting previous generations without a pinch of logic. There are highly developed countries (as in overall higher than US, say here in Switzerland) where this mindset is absent long term. Thus most population lives in rent for whole life, nobody is bothered by it, and generally Swiss are among the happiest nations in the world, consistently.
That isn't saying child births here are booming, in contrary, but that has absolutely nothing to do with home ownership and being priced out from owning homes. People simply grok how difficult raising even 2 children well is (as in by far the most difficult project you will ever do, spread over 20-25 years of consistent draining efforts with no guarantee of success even with best effort, while you also need to put some good effort into marriage too), society not really helping that much these days, and decide against it.
Don't blame them, as Bill Burr says there are simply too many people. Rather lets lift whole mankind from poverty and the topic of population explosion will vanish on its own.
This is absolutely correct. Let’s assume a hypothetical 30 year old who bought a house at the absolute peak of 30 year fixed interest rates, 16.64%. The median US home price was $70,400. Assume 20% down.
Let’s also assume a hypothetical 30 year old buying a house in 2023. 30 year fixed rate is 7.00%. The median US home price is $417,700. Assume 20% down.
Looking up inflation, a 1981 dollar is 3.37 2023 dollars.
The 1981 homebuyer pays 57% of the 2023 homebuyer’s down payment, and only pays 19% more each month. And that’s cherry-picking the absolute worst time to buy for that generation.
Your bubble is distorted too. I'm in the Central Valley of California but I work in the Bay area. The software people aren't having kids and complain a lot about housing and all that. And my central valley friends, installing garage doors, fixing machinery, making cabinets, digging pools, all have multiple kids and their own house.
I'm talking about people who don't currently own a home. Yeah, people who bought a house 5+ years ago are doing fucking amazing because it's doubled in value.
This is spot on. White collar dev folks whine how life is hard since they can't own their house close to their work, and rest of mankind just chugs along. HN is a massive echo chamber in many topics like Apple and I suspect this is another one.
Home ownership and prices have no effect on people having kids. Income does. You'll find loads of kids in low income areas but far fewer in middle income areas.
Everyone online complains about wealth being the reason they won't have kids, but it's not the case. Once people make one step up in their career, they want to make another and kids become an impediment. No matter the country, you'll find higher numbers of kids when people (and especially women) are deprived of education and work opportunities. Then you also have eccentric billionaires that have a dozen kids, but they're statistically irrelevant.
If you want families to have kids, cut wages, don't let women work, cram them into undesirable homes, and most importantly, ignore people who say they'd have kids if only they made a little more money. They won't stop once they get a taste of better living. They'll be very stressed out people, but they'll have kids.
I can afford children but swore to never have them nor marry, for the following reasons:
* Life is a hellhole. My children must witness my (and my hypothetical spouse's) deaths; witnessing death is a fucking hellish experience, I motherfucking do not desire to force that experience on anyone let alone my children.
* The world will continue. The Earth has spun and travelled around the Sun for time immemorial and will continue to do so regardless of any decisions I make. My existence and any existences I might create are utterly and absolutely pointless in the grand scale of the universe.
* The human world (in contrast with the world at large) is a fucking hellhole. I have absolutely no desire to bring new life into this human world and tell them, with a straight face: "Welcome! This is hell I brought you into. You will suffer many tragedies, you will be wronged so many times you won't bother keeping count. No, I can't help you. Have fun." What the hell am I, a sadist?
* I have many other activities, dreams, and goals I wish to accomplish that do not and perhaps even run completely counter to having children. Life is short: I only have so many hours left and none I can or will spare for offspring.
* I find the idea of compromising my life with a spouse to be a violation of fundamental human rights. Who am I to demand my spouse to bow to my wishes? Who is my spouse for them to demand I bow to their wishes? The answer is noone: I and any hypothetical spouse are noone. All men are born equal, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thusly, I swore to never marry and (also consequently) never have children. I am far too busy with my own life, kindly and sincerely please fuck off.
So yes, I can afford children. Many children. No, I won't have children. I can't wait until I am automagically ejected from the marriage market I never even wanted to be a part of.
This is, unironically, the most sane comment in this whole thread.
I don't even think you are in a bad place from a mental health standpoint. Hell, I bet you would be a fun person to have a couple of beers with.
I have a child by the way. Not a sadist, but in my hubris I imagine I am able to raise a child and protect him or her from a some of life's misery, and provide an interesting living experience.
In a sense, in my hubris, I am tempting fate, in hope fate doesn't turn its ugly head in my direction and decides to bite me in the ass.
Hi, your first comment ("Life is a hellhole") makes me think that you don't seem to be in a great place mentally right now. It's definitely your choice, and your decisions, but I would advice to review those views with someone else other than the internet. Whatever works for you - a friend, a therapist, a family member or a priest.
Consider this: despite life being "a hellhole full of tragedies", hopefully you don't resent your parents for giving birth to you?
My view is that life is both: full of tragedies and hardship, yes. But also full of wonders and joy. It's a full package, you seem to be only seeing one half of it. And to be clear: children are the same. A package, with joy and love and laugther but also hard work and tiredness and effort.
Hopefully this comment does not sound condescending to you, I am really trying to help. Have a very nice day.
Life is composed of both happiness and tragedies, but tragedies by far outnumber the happiness. If I were to specify an exact number, perhaps somewhere in the vicinity of 9:1 tragedies:happiness.
Some of the tragedies are also guaranteed and unavoidable from the moment you are born.
My conclusion is the result of a long internal deliberation fraught with weighing the countless factors which compose life. This conclusion is mine and mine alone and everyone else should draw forth their own rather than take mine as gospel or inspiration.
I simply do not value life highly enough to be worth forcing another life into experiencing it. I am perfectly happy to have my bloodline and heritage end with my death; it is not worth continuing whatever the arguments put forth.
> Life is composed of both happiness and tragedies, but tragedies by far outnumber the happiness. If I were to specify an exact number, perhaps somewhere in the vicinity of 9:1 tragedies:happiness.
> Some of the tragedies are also guaranteed and unavoidable from the moment you are born.
That's a grim perspective of life. For your personal life, do you think that the happiness you've experienced worth the tragedies that have happened to you? If so, don't you want another human (your child) to experience the same?
If it's not worth it, what makes you keep on living, then? (Assuming that you do.) Or do you wish that you had never been born in the first place?
>For your personal life, do you think that the happiness you've experienced worth the tragedies that have happened to you?
To be brutally honest: No.
I'm sorry if that answer makes anyone uncomfortable.
>If it's not worth it, what makes you keep on living, then? (Assuming that you do.)
I don't want to force the sadness of my death upon my parents and friends; I'll die sooner or later, but there's a difference between the Grim Reaper calling up my number and me just kicking down his door.
>If so, don't you want another human (your child) to experience the same?
I answered the prior question in the negative already, but I will answer this question anyway: No, I don't want to force any experience, good or bad, upon my hypothetical child. I think setting down rails as a parent and pushing my children down them is a gross violation of human rights, specifically the human right to liberty.
If anything, it's the child who gets to set down the rails and demand I, as their parent, help them travel it regardless of my own wishes. Not the other way around.
>Or do you wish that you had never been born in the first place?
If I had the opportunity to answer that question before coming into existence, with the life experience I have today? No, I would have wished to not be born and continued to enjoy solace in the vast void of nothingness.
If you truly believed what you said you believe, you'd wish you and all humans and all living things die asap, instantly, and painlessly from supernova or something. That way, all living things could leave together this horrible world you said. Death is better than life.
You might also wish that the Big Bang had produced matter and antimatter the exact same amount, so they would have perfectly canceled out, and there wouldn't be any matter at all in the universe. Nothing is better than something.
Why are you extrapolating my conclusion as gospel for the masses?:
>My conclusion is the result of a long internal deliberation fraught with weighing the countless factors which compose life. This conclusion is mine and mine alone and everyone else should draw forth their own rather than take mine as gospel or inspiration.
I couldn't care less what others do with their lives, so long as they don't harm or trouble others. It's none of my business.
> I couldn't care less what others do with their lives
From your previous comments, you care about your parents and friends and future children. So now change "all humans" in my previous reply to "people you care"—what's your response?
> This conclusion is mine and mine alone and everyone else should draw forth their own rather than take mine as gospel or inspiration.
If you honestly thought that, you wouldn't have shared your long opinion in this thread. People share comments on HN for others to discuss and debate. You can't just share something and defend it by saying it's your personal thought. Just keep it to yourself, then.
You fit the exact profile of someone who shouldn't bring children into this world. So, congratulations on making the right decision for you and your mental state right now. However, I would caution against extrapolating your one-dimensional opinions about the world into universal facts.
Who said anything about universal facts? I don't give a fuck what people do in their bedrooms because it's none of my business unless their acts convey negative consequences on others, and neither should others mine.
Also, what is it with accusations of my mental state? It takes a sound mind to derive a logical conclusion to the question of having children or not. If you're automatically assuming "people should have children" as a "universal fact", I would question your mental state because you are relinquishing your ability to think.
I've said elsewhere before that humans aren't special, but if there is anything that could set humans apart from other lifeforms it is our seemingly special ability to question and in some cases defy instincts and so-called "universal facts".
You're naive if you think that in the richest moment in the world history people are not making children in the richest regions for financial reasons.
That's nonsense. Poor people always had kids, still do. What changed is that people aren't able anymore to make sacrifices, huge in time and money for kids.
I would add to this is that the social pressures for having children have significantly diminished. I see a lot of people commenting on the side that having kids has become more difficult, which there may be some truth to but what people seem to ignore is that it has gotten a lot easier and more enjoyable to be a single person without kids. Society has adapted to this new cohort of childless adults and are catering to them in new ways.
White Americans just after the second world war controlled a huge fraction of the world's wealth. It's incredibly easy to raise your family in relative comfort when you're part of the only industrialized society on Earth that hasn't been reduced to rubble, the ones being rebuilt owe you billions upon billions of dollars, and you have a reliable underclass of other races to do the most unpleasant bits of labor for you.
Having children when you're rebuilding/are going to your potential death, is a very different circumstance. It's a lot easier to have kids when you have nothing left to lose.
You're a young male off to fight in either of the most brutal wars in history. This might just be the last time you see your wife, so you have nothing to lose in having a child at that point, as you have a much higher chance of never being able to do so later when things are better.
Alternatively you lived in a city reduced to ruins by the war, everything you knew or had is gone and you have no idea when or even if you'll be able to recover. Having a child doesn't involve as much of a concern over whether or not you can give them a better upbringing because things couldn't really get much worse in the first place.
Now, on the other hand, if you're talking about post-war, the world was recovering, there were opportunities everywhere, the future was looking more hopeful. You could just have kids and trust that they'd live a more comfortable life than yourself.
Nowadays, we're at this awkward point where there's just enough uncertainty and instability in the future, yet not bad enough that people have nothing to lose that people would rather wait or just not have any kids at all.
Yeah I mean it makes sense as a story. But it also makes sense not to have a kid if you think you’re going to die at war. Both stories are perfectly believable, I’d say. And likewise it also makes sense not to bring a child into a bombed out hellhole with severely limited food rations.
And in the 50s the future was looking good in some ways, but people also lived under a visceral fear of nuclear annihilation. These are all just feelings people may or may not have.
Ultimately, I think it’s much more complicated than saying that circumstances in the past made it easier for people to decide to have children.
Both sides have good points. Things could easily be improved to facilitate more child-rearing. Most metro areas should get a bump in salaries and hourly rates. I think 30 to 50 percent to cover inflation is doable.
With how poised American infrastructure is for a huge wave of massive investment and upgrades, the economic boom following that will more than justify the increase now to fix what's left of the covid supply chain crunch.
You’d be surprised how disconnected from reality people are. There’s talk in every western country about population aging and housing affordability yet people cant see either. Office workers are out of the child making equation and they are the least aware of the world outside. Being constantly gaslight and ordered around does that to you. But the issue is that the trend is to obliterate all types of income sources outside office cattle farming and fewer people will afford the luxury of a family and friends. The frog is warm but will boil surely.
Eh? If we’re in a “tech is a bubble” conversation then “the average American” conversation is out of the window. Tech workers earn way above the average. If you’re accepting that tech parents have the money to raise kids it stands to reason the OP would wonder why their peers aren’t also raising kids.
There is just one, single reason for the decline of births in so-called developed or developing countries - women emancipation. Anything else is simply a cope from people that are unable to acknowledge the fact that everything has a price.
You are presuming intentions that are absent from my comment. And it doesn't state any "argument".
I am not saying there that it is wrong to give women such freedom, nor that it is right. Maybe there is an alternative cultural setting where women emancipation doesn't bear such consequences. Maybe not. Maybe it is an unavoidable result of our societal progress. Or maybe a flourishing of the society cannot, and shouldn't, be measured in births-to-deaths ratio.
These things I consider unknown. But the cause of the current state of affairs is as stated.
This is likely the stupidest thing I'll read this week, thank you for that. In what way, exactly, are children not expensive? From some research and napkin math, it looks like $300k, not including opportunity cost (so in reality more like $500k), if everything goes right. Hope there's no medical issues, hope there's no car crashes. How many years of salary is that?
At minimum, children do come at an opportunity cost. Either you’re geographically constrained to be near family, one of the parents must not work, or you pay very real direct costs for child care.
False, folks just choose to live in places they cannot afford. Plenty of small towns in the US dying for new blood. You could buy a block's worth of houses for what one in SF, Austin, Seattle, NYC, LA, etc. goes for. Remote work + starlink makes this possible.
Edit: the replies - y'all are out of touch. Visit an average family in the Midwest with a household income of < $100k/yr that doesn't own a home yet.