Birth rates fall when societies get richer, not when they get poorer. Additionally, rates are falling all the same in the states with the most generous welfare policies.
Birth rates fall when infant mortality falls, which tends to coincide with societies getting richer.
At the same time, countries tend to get richer when their birth rates fall, as people are spending their time working to produce economic value instead of having kids.
Compare say France, with a fertility rate of 1.82 and a GDP per capita of $43k to South Korea with a fertility rate of 0.88 and a GDP per capita of $42k.
Do not mistake correlation with causation. And do not mistake society getting richer with the individuals in a society having more access to the time and space necessary for raising a family.
Rents are "unearned" in the same way all appreciation is unearned. You spend your money on something, anybody else could also have spent that money on it, but the person who does spend the money on it enjoys the appreciation, if any, because they pay the opportunity cost.
> because land value always goes up
Tell that to the people who left urban St. Louis and Detroit and Cleveland in droves over the last 75 years. Their land didn't just go down in value; it went to less than zero. You'd literally have to pay somebody to take it and it's a huge burden on those municipalities.
The problem with Georgism is that, yes, land is different than other things in that you can't make more of it, but it's also the same as most things in most ways that matter.
So someone who buys and empty piece of land, and holds it while everyone else around them invests money in the neighbourhood, deserves the gain they realize. That's an interesting worldview.
>Tell that to the people who left urban St. Louis and Detroit and Cleveland in droves over the last 75 years.
Tell them that I was speaking in general? If the value of your home can explode or crater for reasons outside your control, perhaps it would be wiser for housing to not be so expensive so that families need to have everything invested in their home.
>The problem with Georgism is that, yes, land is different than other things in that you can't make more of it, but it's also the same as most things in most ways that matter.
That isn't really an argument that the fixed supply of land doesn't matter, you're just asserting that it doesn't. It also doesn't suggest anything we should be doing instead, so what are you contributing here?
> It also doesn't suggest anything we should be doing instead
We should just simply allow a free market in housing and housing construction. That's the obvious solution on the table and the one we should try before we bother revisiting eccentric tax schemes from the 19th Century.
> Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%. IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults.
> Some among the medical staff and social workers involved in the case thought that Jenn reacted strangely to the discovery of her children’s injuries. She didn’t show emotion or seem bothered. Her affect was “flat,” according to the D.S.S. report. The hospital’s abuse specialist concluded that the baby girl’s fractures were “diagnostic of physical abuse” and that the bruises were “inflicted.” D.S.S. concluded the boy’s injuries were also the result of abuse. A factor in this determination was that Robbie and Jenn did not have “a plausible explanation” for the injuries. “We had no idea,” Robbie told me later.
What’s perverse is that the state can take your kids away without a trial and on the basis of evidence this flimsy, and the expectation is that you are guilty unless you can provide an explanation they’re happy with. To add insult to this obvious injury, you will be held to account for your affect when dealing with the state apparatus charged with taking your children away and subjected to weird psychologizing by people without any particular psychological expertise (as if there is a correct way to respond to these questions in the first place). A tired and overworked social worker who just came from collecting six kids from a drug den can operationalize a gut feeling that your responses were “flat” and you’ll go to bed that night not knowing where your children are or when (if ever) you’ll get them back.
The idea that this only ever happens to bad people who deserve it is naïve in the extreme, and the annals of CPS are full of cases of outrageous mishandling and overreach.
> But we’re talking about kids, so people turn off their brains and assent to ann extra-legal task force that can swoop in and break up a family on a hunch.
I think the reality is that making an error in either direction can lead to tragic consequences.
Sorry, I deleted that part right after posting it, because I thought it was a little bit uncharitable. But I stand by the general sentiment, and I would just say that in our system of law and government, we have decided to solve this problem in one direction, which is to say that you are innocent until proven guilty. Taking an innocent person’s children away from them is an outrageous harm, and nobody should be subjected to it on the basis that extreme caution may save some other kids someday.
People should not feel guilty about saying plainly, no, you cannot take my children out of their home, just because an abundance of caution might help you prevent some real cases of abuse elsewhere.
> A common view among Gen Z or younger Millennials I know is that not only will you have a lower quality of life than your parents (and your kids probably will too), you'll have a lower quality of life even to elder Millennials (who happened to enter the housing market 5 years earlier than you).
This meme has reached the level of conventional wisdom, so any response feels a bit like trying to empty the Atlantic Ocean with a thimble, but the evidence that Gen Z and Millennials are in any way materially worse off than their parents is very weak.
And that's before we account for the truly massive and unprecedented wealth transfer that's about to happen when the Boomers really start dying in big numbers.
When it's all said and done Millennials are going to be the richest generation of all time and still talking about how uniquely bad they have it, which I guess is the most Millennial thing imaginable.
Yeah, it's practically become a cliche that if you want to downplay wealth inequality (which is gargantuan), you cite income inequality (which is quite moderate by comparison) instead and subtly try to pretend that they're the same thing (they're not) or equally important (they're not).
Nonetheless, this meme has reached the level of conventional wisdom, so any response feels a bit like trying to empty the Atlantic Ocean with a thimble.
The ultrawealthy know that there is no way to sate the desires of the poor to tax the rich but they can get away with pretending that "the rich" are exemplified not by them by people earning $150k with no assets and lead the charge to tax them to the hilt.
If you normalize by age, younger generations are wealthier than previous generations. A 50 year old gen-xer is wealthier than 50 year boomers were, a 25 year old z-er is wealthier than previous generations were at that age, etc.
Yes, wealth inequality is increasing. There is more variation in that set of 50 year old gen-x'ers than there was in that set of 50 year old boomers.
But on average and normalized for age, younger generations have both more wealth and more income than older generation.
I don't get the Economist, but I'm wondering how bimodal the distribution is - are we seeing a small cohort run away with the game or is everyone better off?
With where I am compared to family, that's my bet - people doing absurdly well in tech are screwing up the numbers. And I'm not even close to what some people casually toss out on here.
Yeah it's honestly insane to me the number of my peers who own homes (expensive ones sure...) And eat out way more than I ever remember and have subscriptions for every entertainment service imaginable and who take multiple international trips per year, but will then talk about how everyone's living paycheck to paycheck.
My parents are shocked by how often we eat out. And not without cause. These life conveniences are way more common today, and we have the money to support it. And before someone talks about dual income, my parents both worked and we are single income.
By all measures, material standard of living has improved.
In reality people are more stressed out today not because of money but because they choose to live complicated, stressful lives mainly driven by unhealthy social media addictions. That's why they feel materially poorer than their parents despite all evidence to the contrary.
If someone is prettier than you or has more luck with women than you and it's in your face every single days you'll feel shitty no matter how much money you have.
> eat out way more than I ever remember and have subscriptions for every entertainment service imaginable and who take multiple international trips per year
> By all measures, material standard of living has improved.
Ah! You've fallen for it. Those are not the same thing. Consumer luxuries do not a standard of living make.
Material standard of living is a secure home, ready and sufficient access to nutritious food, ready access to remedies and ease for illness, welcoming opportunities for fulfilling work, etc
Access to all of those things is eroding, and for essentially everyone (not just young people). You can have 5 ways to watch a video now, and your choice of 500 varieties of sugar water, and can hop on a plane instead of taking a road trip, but none of those have made the life of yourself or your family meaningfully improved.
The conflation of idle luxuries for secure living is a trap that lets people not notice as real standards continue to decline.
And you've fallen for the idea that simply since I'm a believer in using real economic data, I must also believe in all the various consumeristic nonsense that Americans engage in, which is their real source of unhappiness.
> The conflation of idle luxuries for secure living is a trap that lets people not notice as real standards continue to decline.
I agree, which is why you should have read my comment:
> In reality people are more stressed out today not because of money but because they choose to live complicated, stressful lives mainly driven by unhealthy social media addictions. That's why they feel materially poorer than their parents despite all evidence to the contrary.
That's the end point. People work too much to make money so they can afford junk and material improvements in their life, instead of working to make their life nice. My family had less growing up and was much better off. As adults, my wife and I have chosen to replicate my parents and her parents way of life (one working parent, heavy time spent with family and friends, no divorce, no broken families, no spending all day at work, prioritizing life over money, etc). That works. Always has. Doesn't matter how many yachts you own. If you don't have a loving wife / husband and a good family or you never see them, and you have no friends (not the fake superficial friendships many Americans have, but actual friends), then you're always going to be sad.
Oh, I read them as saying that the experience of hardship was materially inaccurate and just a psychological fiction fed by social media and perpetually measuring against others.
I still read it that way on a second look, but maybe I'm reading it wrong.
These numbers don't appear to be adjusted for inflation, but even if they were, I still wouldn't trust it. Lot of people know by now that the government fudges those numbers to understate them.
They are adjusted for inflation (standardized to "2019 prices"). In unadjusted nominal terms, the average annual wage in 1900 was in the order of hundreds of dollars.
It actually seems like it's the behaviors of other poor people, which those in poverty cannot escape, that "fucks people up." It's not privation. It's proximity to violence and abuse (both of which are highly correlated with -- note: not demonstrated to be caused by -- poverty).
It also begs the question of nature vs. nurture. If researchers won't take this seriously, then nobody should take their findings seriously. It's almost impossible to untangle, "single-fatherhood leads to bad outcomes because kids need a father figure in the house" from, "single-fatherhood leads to worse outcomes because the type of person who would abandon their children is likely more impulsive and less conscientious than average and those traits are heritable."
Fair point in theory and I'm not familiar with the literature, but I'd guess at least some researchers have studied ways of controlling for this: eg, looking at cases where father dies early and mother does not remarry, single mothers who adopt or do artificial insemination, etc.
Yes, my (limited) understanding of the literature is that this is exactly what they do. You don’t see the same single-fatherhood effects when looking at the children of widows, for example.
> But let’s say you can narrow it down to one good one, and you can find the time to read it. You plunk down an absurd $30 (of which, I’m told, less than $3 goes to the author) for a bulky hardcover and you quickly discover that the author doesn’t have all that much to say. But a book is a big thing, and they had to fill it all up, so the author padded it. There are several common techniques.
> One is to repeat your point over and over, each time slightly differently. This is surprisingly popular. Writing a book on how code is law, an idea so simple it can fit in the book’s title? Just give example after example after example.
> Another is to just fill the book with unnecessary detail. Arguing that the Bush administration is incompetent? Fill your book up with citation after citation. (Readers must love being hit over the head with evidence for a claim they’re already willing to believe.)
> I have nothing against completeness, accuracy, or preciseness, but if you really want a broad audience to hear what you have to say, you’ve got to be short. Put the details, for the ten people who care about them, on your website. Then take the three pages you have left, and put them on your website too.
People get blocked for all kinds of reasons, most of them relatively innocent.