Keep in mind that there is probably a significant selection effect going on there. In other words, if you don't plan on having children, expensive cities are still an option for you. Whereas if you plan on having children, they are not.
My wife and I live in an expensive city. It's pretty fun.
Except, we just had a child. She's pretty fun too. In fact, we think we might like another.
She makes all the fun stuff in the city irrelevant (not heading to the bars these days), and the bad stuff in the city pretty horrible.
* She's inhaling poison every morning I walk her to creche.
* If I let her ride a bike on our street she will die.
So, thinking to ourselves "this is crap" we decided "let's have dad get a remote job and buy a cheap place in the country". She hates her job anyway.
Lo and behold, a few days after we said "all right, that's it, we're doing it" she gets two interviews for jobs she'd really like, in her sector (museums and heritage) - In the city (around the corner, in fact).
So, if she gets the job we're staying in the city and not having another kid. If she doesn't we're moving to the country and probably having another kid.
In all this, you'll notice I never said "we could find a place with more room within a reasonable distance from her potential new job" - because it's not really an option. They're quite expensive, and on top of that, banks here (not the US) make it quite challenging to get a mortgage. We've managed to save a reasonable deposit (if we could get a mortgage) but can't quite buy a place in the city for cash. We could get a place in the country for cash, though.
I dont know if I'll have the time to give kids my full attention.
I found my brother was/is the reason I'm a nerd. Sure my dad was a database manager, but I spend hours daily with my brother gaming. I dont even think I wanted to spend a half hour with my 'boring' dad.
When you frame things that way, the answer for parents who are considering another child is pretty much always to give the child the gift of life. In the developed world, at least.
Probably they'll tell you where you can stick your notions.
Eh, if anyone should have kids, it should be the financially well off and educated people.
Remember that your logic isnt going to stop impoverished people from having 4 kids and welfare.
I suppose we may differ on this but I don't really view that as a negative. I don't think there's a pool of "potential people" from which we draw when making a new person. An infinite number of beings don't exist, and won't. I actually would love to see more work on the nature of consciousness and the self, and what exactly gives a new foetus or baby its awareness of the fact that it exists.
And yet I'm not entirely consistent internally because even though "I want someone to hang out with when I'm old" is part of the reason kids sound fun, most of it is "bringing a new being capable of experience joy into the universe", so I guess I sort of agree, in a roundabout sense.
And it goes both ways: I would do the same for them.
Just had this with my brother. He's got a fairly expensive illness. I asked if he needed help. It never even occurred to him to ask - he's pretty independent. But if he has to have help, I'll try to help.
Then there are siblings who are a literal burden on their families. Some people just use others and walk all over everyone. Someone in my extended family tried to burglarize the home of someone else in the family. That’s not someone I want in my family.
Then again, individual action is utterly meaningless. With ~8billion people it just doesn't matter what I do. Only large-scale action that brings about systemic changes matters. And hey, maybe one of my kids will be the one to help fix it!
Then again, if people viewed 2 as a nominal max then we'd still be on the right path (a bit below replacement rate would be OK generally speaking)
But I already brought one life in to the world when I worry about global collapse and am not sure I want to do that for another.
But siblings are pretty great!
But if I have an only child I can afford a better school for them..
Anyway, still thinking. So is the partner.
Also, "fuck the job" is easy to say except it's not my job, it's the opportunity for my partner to do the thing she's wanted to do her whole life and has worked her ass off for. It's crazy hard to actually build a career in museums and heritage (related... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16792942) and maybe she shouldn't have to give that up.
Then again, being in an industry where employment is that tenuous sounds like a crappy way to spend life.
I hear you about the career thing. I have sacrificed immensely to be able to afford a family. But now, when I am surrounded by my children, I think about all of the possibilities that lay ahead of them, all the grand adventures they will have and the adversities they will overcome, and I remark to myself, "I made all of this possible".
This couldn't be more wrong. Every new life is another body consuming resources.
> All species expand to fill their ecological niche.
This doesn't apply to humans. Unlike other animals, we've mastered agriculture and can produce our own food. But there are still non-renewable resources that we're constantly consuming and will eventually run out of, but we'll continue to reproduce.
> If you abstain from having children, their spots will just be taken up by other people's children.
This implies the inverse, that if I choose to have children, someone else will react by choosing not to. If I choose not to, that won't cause someone else to have more to "take up my spot". There will still be fewer children.
> We are powerless to influence the number of people
On an individual scale, yes. My choice to not have children has no significant impact on the population. But lots of people choosing to not have children does. Your argument is similar to the one made by people who don't vote because they think their one vote won't change the outcome of the election.
> but we can influence the proportion of people who have an environmentalist bent.
This part is at least true.
So after you decide not to have children, other people will have children. Eventually, their descendents will take up the space in the earth's carrying capacity that your descendants would have taken up. There is nothing you can do to stop this. So the best strategy is to change the proportion of people who have an environmentalist bent. Children are an effective way to accomplish that.
In addition to worrying about the carbon footprint of another kid, I have a much bigger concern that
* We will do nothing regarding climate change (seems likely)
* The predictions for Business as Usual will have been too conservative (seems likely given that the Arctic is melting well ahead of schedule, and who knows how clathrates pan out)
* Temps rise by a good 8C or so in the next 8 decades
* My child, or their children, will die horribly in a new global Holodomor as our resource chains (webs, really) collapse and the world's civilizations implode.
Anyway, I already had one. But I have a deep, pervasive dread that I have doomed them to the above. However, I also might be wrong! Maybe it just gets a bit warmer and they can open a nice winery in Sweden and it's all fine.
Given how much the West flirts with the replacement rate, I think you should do whatever you feel like doing.
I'm reminded of how few heads of EU states are parents
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/do-childless-leaders-mean-...
Basically, two incomes are useful, so both people in a relationship pursue careers. Now they have more money to compete on the housing market. This seems like a good move, so others follow suit. At first this is largely a win for people who pursue this route. But, as more people do this, it becomes necessary in order to compete for real estate in good neighborhoods.
Now there is an advantage to be had by putting off having a family even longer, or having even less children. So people do this. But as more and more people follow suit, the advantage evaporates. And so on and so forth until you have demographic implosion.
For the life of me, I can’t see a way out of this in the short term. Maybe a wholesale transition to remote work?
If the graphs were plotted with increase in population against the change in fertility then those places would be outliers.
Texas zoning and tax on houses work.
The funny thing about housing prices is that a state in the US has handled house prices so well with an economy that is doing well but Texas is often ignored in these discussions.
Also, negative externalities of Texas' built environment (lung disease, cancer, potentially more autism near motorways(still early stages of research) dead people on roads, inability to travel or perform basic tasks for those who can't or prefer not to drive, being impoverished by your automobile, and the potential collapse of global civilization due to climate change) are not priced in, so often the neighbors or the rest of the world are paying for those houses.
Texas zoning also paved over all the marsh land that would've kept the city from flooding.
I've theory-crafted other potential policies like "require any increase in office build density to be matched by increased residential density". That seems more potentially game-able than simply increasing density of properties the market had determined are valuable.
If there are less people, then pressure for good neighborhoods goes down, and we'll reach an equilibrium. I think it only seems like a ratchet because we're in the middle of a downturn after a 5000 year run of exponential growth.
Doesn't mean it doesn't suck to live in this time in terms of housing -- but in other terms, life is pretty outstanding. The two income thing is mostly new, but then compare the amount of time that medieval women spent on childcare and providing clothing. It's so much better now that they're not expected to spend every spare moment at the spinning wheel.
Given the vast differences in climate impact between different populations and consumption habits, this doesn't seem to be the case.
Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be "We're above the carrying capacity of Earth for Rich Americans".
As well, what makes you think we will reach an equilibrium for good neighborhoods? Some housing will be abandoned, causing blight; blight causes good neighborhoods to become less desirable, and they spiral down from there.
Detroit is a great example of what happens when neighborhoods lose people.
I was mainly talking about the SF case, where lower global population should make it more affordable rather than causing things to be abandoned. This is what is playing out in Tokyo, which is still growing while the countryside is abandoned. As for the small towns, it sucks, but dying small towns has been a thing for quite a while now as agriculture has become more mechanized. Detroit's kind of the odd man out being a depopulating metropolis, so I'd actually argue that it's a terrible example, at least for the next 100 years.
The impact of global population on SF is and will be negligible.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-inc...
If families have at most 1 earner, then the worse case scenario is to have 0 earners, being one down. If most families have 2 though, when you fall to 0, you're much, much worse off compared to the norm.
People with kids vs people without. People with college degrees in high demand profession vs people without. Basically, every time we push people in drove toward a more efficient "lifestyle", the worse off people who don't are.
In case of food, it comes to your nearest super market. So its not just overproduction of food, its also supply chain optimization.
Obligatory link going deep into this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
There are 500$/mo rents everywhere and food costs are the lowest in history.
If you dont care to keep up with the Joneses and have minimum wage people cook you food, you can easily live off 1 low-income salary.
The cheapest I see is $625, which is 25% more than $500/month.