Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Birthrates are a powerful, but lagging/post-hoc indicator of public policy effects. It's worth noting that we tend to associate high birthrates with poverty and negative social outcomes. Except, when rates are low we (western countries) use immigration from high-birthrate societies to shore up the population replacement rate, as the article notes. When you look at who is having kids in the US and Canada, the families, (or specifically, women) who have 2 or more children are either exceptionally wealthy (90th+ pc) or exceptionally poor.

I'd speculate this is because if you are either rich or poor you have stability in that your life circumstances aren't going to change that radically, and hypothesize it's mainly educated middle class people who are having kids below the population replacement rate, if at all, because their lives do not find a relatively stable equilibrium. The mix of the promise of upward mobility that is always just out of reach, and the risk of "losing it all," creates a condition of constant low-level stress similar to other species that do not breed in captivity.

If you have the Malthusian or environmentalist worldview that fewer people is better, this is a positive (if cynical) development. But even that's not going to work because public debt and entitlements mean shoring up a replacement rate population with immigration from high-birthrate societies. The other thing is the people who are having kids create even more polarized opportunity, where the life outcomes of a 3-kid wealthy home vs. the outcomes of a 3-kid working class or public-dependent home are going to be alien to each other. An (increasingly rare) person from a single-kid middle class home is not only a social minority, but has to create more of their own opportunities because they are an outsider to both societies.

IMO, the covid baby bust is only a symptom of a much larger and longer term macro-decline, and just the beginning of the real and inevitable consequences of the post-war baby-boom generation.

View on HN

Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US anyway) is highly dependent on population growth. Many existing entitlements were created during periods of uncommon birth-rates with the expectation that the babies being born will grow and reproduce at the same rate as their parents. This growth hasn't materialized, and much of the existing growth can be attributed to immigrant inflows. Regardless of the environmental arguments against overpopulation, we are living in a competitive world, and historically, declining birth-rates have often not been favorable for sustaining sociopolitical influence and relevance or economic growth and stability. We are however, living in a unique time were robots and AI can potentially pick up the slack for whatever losses of productivity a lower population may cause. We will however still have to operate in a period of growing stagnation and inequality. Wealth will be less available through incomes (as it already is), and inequality, without the proper counter measures, can inflate to the levels more familiar in Jane Austen's time. You have more economic growth if you give 1 million people $100 dollars (since they are more likely to spend it on goods/services) vs giving $100 million to one person (who will likely spend the bulk of their money on financial instruments). An economy needs many people to spend money to grow, we’re now expected to have less people with less money to spend.

"Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US anyway) is highly dependent on population growth."

I came to this discussion ctrl-f'ing for "deflation" and while I got zero hits, your comment is close enough ...

I will abstract one level deeper and rephrase what you said as:

"Much of the financial system is highly dependent on economic growth."

There continues to be fervent discussion of the results of QE over the last 10 years and the results of various covid stimulus packages and how these things could be inflationary, etc., etc.

Some of this may come to pass - we may, indeed, find ourselves in geographic or temporal pockets of inflation - possibly very high inflation.

Make no mistake, however: the world we are living in is massively deflationary and even dramatic and innovative attempts to maintain (low) inflation are barely keeping us above water ...

Why do you feel we're living in deflationary times?

Don’t mean to butt in, but personally, the fact that I’m typing this on a piece of $300 hardware (phone) that would have cost millions in the 80’s, hundreds of thousands in the 90’s, and definitely over a thousand in the 00’s is a good indicator.

I think computer hardware is one of the few things that decreased in price over time. The price of most other good and services has definitely increased since the '80s.

And despite the same technological improvements, gasoline is decisively more expensive. Technology is purely deflationary, so the situation with phone cost isn't very telling. What is more impactful is the cost of phone service vs median income across those decades, despite technology's deflationary forces.

Gasoline pump prices are highly impacted by taxes and regulations so those don't tell us much about core inflation or deflation. Look at the spot price of crude oil on international markets. The price today is still well below previous peaks.

Been to the grocery store, ordered takeout or tried to buy a house lately? The prices of electronics (calculators, watches) fell consistently throughout the 70s which was a period of very high inflation. You can't cherry pick one sector.

Of course.

It is very difficult to get a good number across all sectors. Despite my post, I’m not all that convinced we are in a deflationary period. The bell-weather asset for me would be Gold, and its price since I’ve been alive wouldn’t make me lean towards deflation.

If anything would, I suppose it would be the number of hours worked. That is, how much labor does it take to support a reasonable lifestyle. In my experience — and I’m an old geezer, so take this with a grain of salt — it seems like a lazy bastard can get by in this world a lot easier than 100 years ago. The degree of manual back-breaking labor that went into earning a dollar has decreased significantly. I don’t know how that would get figured in.

Gold prices aren't highly correlated with inflation so that would be a poor indicator. If you look at the actual historical data, gold isn't a very effective inflation hedge.

>> It is very difficult to get a good number across all sectors.

That's what cost of living indexes are for.

>> The bell-weather asset for me would be Gold

You probably mean to say gold futures or gold-based derivatives. There are more people who think they own "gold" than there is physical gold on this planet. Unless you have a bar in your hand, you own a contract tied to the price of gold, ie paper.

Exactly. Just because tech is cheaper doesn’t mean food or my cost of living has decreased.

Because we are. Without taking action to curb it, the US will start to see deflation take hold. This is due to an overall aging demographic who are beginning to leave the workforce, an overall increase in savings/investment across the population, lowered rates of consumption, the younger demographic having less children, higher rates of education and on and on.

This has already begun to in both Germany and Japan. In the former, they've been able to curb things through government intervention. Japan on the other hand has really struggled.

On the contrary the price of up-keeping a household has increased dramatically.

30-40y ago it was not uncommon for a single pension to cover all expenses of:

- food

- car or two

- paying a mortage

- having 4 kids going to school

- other household expenses

- saving up money

Currently it is not possible. How in such a case do you still think we live in deflation times?

I would rather say that “some things” became cheaper due to technology advancements, but common things inflated so drastically, its literally impossible for young people to start families with sustainable life.

A fairly simplistic empirical examination of the monetary policy since 2009 proves this:

- Historically low mortgage rates

- Decreasing bond yields

- Increasing withdrawals from 401k and other retirement funds

- Increased savings rates for the younger demographic

- Reduction in consumer spending

- Over a decade of QE

Low rates and reduction in consumer spending are rather signs of recession not deflation..

From 2008 crisis pretty much every country in the world is printing money like crazy. Its easy to print more digital numbers, its harder to gain actual land to inhabit ppl.

Thats why properties and land gain so much value lately and thats why its the biggest issue of them all - huge inflation in the housing department.

I also would like to hear rsync's answer. But I'll make a guess:

The (world) population is no longer growing (much). But productivity growth hasn't stopped. The result is that stuff gets cheaper, that is, the same number of dollars buys more. That's deflation.

Worse, we've gotten to the point where many people have what they need - not necessarily everything they want, but most of what they need. (I'm not going to buy twice as much food if my salary doubles. I'm not going to drive twice as many cars. I'm not going to buy a house that's twice as big. I'd use almost all the money to pay off debt and to invest.) That makes it hard to create inflation in the basic stuff, because you can't make demand exceed supply.

>The result is that stuff gets cheaper, that is, the same number of dollars buys more. That's deflation.

It's more about the number of dollars out there. Fractional reserve means that a dollar saved leads to dollars being created. Boomers saving up for retirement meant lots of dollars being created. Boomers withdrawing and buying stuff means lots of dollars will be destroyed. Fewer dollars means dollars become more valuable i.e. deflation.

What do you mean? Inflation can be easily created - just create more dollars and credit them to people's bank accounts; you will soon see all kinds of prices going up.

If this was true, then the monetary policies of the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 pandemic would both have created consumer price inflation. They haven't. We've seen some asset price inflation instead. In effect we did create a bunch of dollars and credited them to people's home equity and mutual funds... where it just sat there doing a whole bunch of nothing to consumer prices and wages.

2008 policies wasn't that effective at putting money in people's pockets though. 2020 was more effective, but probably to early to tell if it is inflationary until lockdowns go away and people have more options to spend?

Take it to the extreme. What do you suppose would happen if every American household is credited with a billion dollars tomorrow?

Good thought experiment

Not nearly as much inflation as you might think

Most of everyone's newfound Billion would sit idle

The inflation would come from the $200K/year everyone was spending, as in if you just gave everyone $200K*expectedRemainingLifeExpectancy, you'd get the same consumer inflation

The extra billions would go into inflating assets.

The key concept here is velocity of money - really interesting concept that surprisingly (at least at first for me) falls out of the formulas in Econ1 classes. It does relatively equate to the actual turnover of a piece of currency, as in how many times does that George Washington bill change hands in the year after you spend it?

The key policy hack is to give help to people who will SPEND the money, not to banks and corps who will just park it in investments.

That gets the multiplier effect you need out of crashes.

Unless everyone moves to protect their new found billion by buying assets, in which case asset prices shoot the roof. This is not a problem, since most assets these days are unproductive, and like you say, no one would notice a difference in their day to day lives. The one place people would notice is housing.

The fix is to see somehow make houses a toxic asset that cost exactly the value the provide in the form of a roof, and no more.

>> somehow make houses a toxic asset that cost exactly the value the provide in the form of a roof, and no more.

Wow, that seems like a plan just bulging with answers to the question: "What Could Go Wrong?". Yikes

Pretty clearly, rent control doesn't work either, it just creates two distorted markets. Homeless shelters don't work except for a few cold nights. Housing projects don't usually create good conditions either.

With housing, the problem is like cars - there is no answer to "what is best?" because everyone needs/wants something different. It is not just 'transportation' or just 'a roof and walls'. I want a sportscar and a 3-bay garage to work on it; you want a pickup truck to haul bursh and supplies for the small cabin you want, and That Guy wants just a lot of Lyft credits and airline miles and a bedroom in a shared apartment because he's rarely there...

It might be better to approach the demand side, just ensure that the regional minimum wages are enough that a full time job is over the poverty level, so people can afford to get housed.

Edit: Moreover, and maybe more on point:

Housing costs are MANY more things than a mere dry bed, hot shower, and place to cook. Housing is different for everyone, from individuals to families. And the cost includes everything -- the rawaccommodations, the quality, the environment & neighborhood, the convenience, the school district, the expectation that more housing and/or amenities and/or jobs will or won't be built or destroyed in the future, and more.

And so the solution is to either ignore all of that, or destroy it?

Moreover, how would you even do it?

Fiddling with the demand side causes problems.

Better would be to lift the restrictions on supply, loosen the zoning laws.

/Soapbox (not aimed at you): I've been reading zoning regulations in several localities. "Land of the free" my ass! More like control and conformity. It doesn't make sense to me why accessory dwelling units are not allowed in areas with high demand, or more duplexes, triplexes, and walkups. There's no safety issues involved. It's simply greedy property owners imposing on others because they are selfish and can get away with it.

It's the obvious solution. There is a problem with a lack of jobs in rural communities. These people need a temporary solution that lets them get back to their feet. Doing demand side stimulus does help them but in a completely different way and this has absolutely nothing to do with the housing market which is the biggest concern right now.

You can call it selfish. But a city becomes a crowded warren without any rules. What is the middle ground?

Japanese style zoning, allowing density to grow as population grows, allowing mixed residential and commercial appropriate to the density, with designated industrial areas, set forth in a way that neighbors are not allowed to micromanage others in an effort to protect property values. They set these formula at a national level. Codes still exist for safety concerns.

I also think that land value taxes are interesting. A five acre undeveloped downtown lot would be taxed based on the surrounding density and market potential, not based on its current development. This would encourage development where it was needed.

I see our current system as broken in a number of ways, especially in regards to suburban sprawl and the regulations enshrining that - minimum square footage, parking and garage spots, etc. And many suburbs are at a low enough density that they won't be able to afford to maintain their infrastructure over time without funds from more densely populated (metro or state) areas.

A lot of it is based on the environment and investment that the existing homeowners have built in the previous decades.

They invested in not only the specific home they bought, but also the neighborhood. They continued investing ever since living there. If they wanted a more dense environment, they would have invested in that sort of location. It costs significantly more to build and maintain less dense-pack areas, from building costs, maintenance costs, to property taxes, and nevermind the emotional investment.

Forced rezoning is to simply declare that: "Nope, you and your neighbors have made the biggest investment in your life in creating and maintaining your home and local environment, but we want it. You won't even compensate you by buying you out with eminent domain, we're just going to destroy everything you've built and the value of your largest asset by cutting down the trees, paving the grass, and putting up block buildings for all the people that want to live there, destroying the peace and quiet you've paid exorbatant costs and taxes to build and maintain and nevermind the habitat destruction for all the plants & animals either."

It does not work for semi-rural suburbs with 2+ acre zoning, and it doesn't work for quaint San Francisco neighborhoods. I could make more of an argument for the city, since cities are already close to sanitized for wildlife. And, having stopped, for now, a farcical proposal for a high-density building literally in my backyard that would have destroyed a certified endangered species habitat, I can certainly say that it is at best an ignorant prescription.

How is it fair to say that some people built X, we want X, since we can't have it, we'll just take it and destroy it?

More to your point, I can tell you that it is nothing do do with "greedy property owners".

It has to do with having INVESTED in a place and its environmaent, for a specific set of reasons, and having already bought, paid for, and borne the taxes and costs of maintaining that environment, and wanting to preserve that which they have paid for.

If they were actually greedy, they would immediately change the zoning laws to allow all that, as they would EACH make a lot more money from their property, and pay less in taxes. They do NOT make those zoning law changes because they agree that each of them will NOT profit from converting to duplexes/triplexes, etc.

You have it backwards.

I understand that you may value your neighborhood.

But I think it is tyrannical for you to tell other people they can't safely develop on their property "because you say so". Why should your vote cancel out that of another citizen who wants to build on their own property? What gives you the right? Why don't you and your neighbors buy the property around you if you want to keep it as is?

Zoning laws are a modern invention. Historically everyone lived in mixed in neighborhoods. The businesses, the business owners, and the workers all needed to be near each other. Commuter train service started changing that, and then the automobile, allowing the rich to separate form the poor. A good bit of current zoning practices originated in the last century for classist and racist reasons, mandating the size of lots and houses to keep poor people out.

The regulatory restrictions on the housing supply cause houses to cost more. I assume you would agree? I feel bad for young people who can't afford a house. Will millennials needs to wait for boomers to die before they can afford to get into a house? It worries me that hedgefunds are buying more and more houses, because it is a rigged market and profitable. It embarrasses me that we don't let homeless people pitch a tent and live somewhere besides hiding in underpasses.

Japan is an example of a country that I would say has better zoning regulations. The regulations are set at a federal level, not by municipalities. As the concentration of residents in an area increases the buildings are allowed to increase in height and more businesses are allowed in the area. Industrial areas are kept separate. It is permissible to build housing in an industrial area if one wants to, but not the other way around. That seems logical and fair to me.

San Francisco is a good example of the problems caused by restrictive zoning. It appears that folks who didn't want to change the character of their neighborhood have changed it quite a bit. The San Francisco of today is nothing like it was two generations ago. Only certain people can afford to live there now. Instead of hippies, free thinkers, and musicians it is now a place known for overpaid tech workers, NIMBYs, and bums. It is so dysfunctional that teachers, fire, and police workers can't afford to live there anymore. Is that the character that current property owners cherish? Or their ever increasing property values?

>>Why should your vote cancel out that of another citizen who wants to build on their own property? What gives you the right? Why don't you and your neighbors buy the property around you if you want to keep it as is?

Good question. And you answered it.

We ALREADY DID BUY THE PROPERTY, each of us did. We, and our forebears decided collectively, as the property owners in our locale, that these are the rules that WE want to live under (plus, my town also voted to tax ourselves to actively fund open land purchases, and often donates to conservation groups).

These Ts & Cs are plain to anyone who wants to move in. If you want a 1-fam+2acres, here you go. If you want to build a dense-pack condo, go elsewhere. I'd love to put up a barn for my carbon fiber fabrication biz, but I knew that was not an option when I purchased - I chose this.

Yes, it increases prices, it also increases value.

The increase in prices also increases the supply, even if not in that exact location. Some towns see the opportunity to make more, and they relax their zoning laws and allow denser development.

Some towns don't, and preserve their open space. But all it takes is a couple massive developments breaking the rules to literally destroy generations of maintaining unbuilt spaces and purchasing open land.

I just do not see where it is on anyone outside the locale has the right to say that it is their right to simply destroy all that investment because they want it. That's no different from me declaring that I want this 100 square mile citiscape to be razed and returned to woodland without paying for it.

Again, the solution is exactly as you suggested: buy it.

If you and your friends are so convinced that it is a greater good to have densepack development, then pay the taxes or form a fund to buy sufficient land and become citizens of the locale in sufficient numbers to change the zoning and build it out.

Just because you are a citizen of the country does not mean you are a citizen of this town. Just because I am a citizen of the country, does not mean I'm a citizen of your town.

I shouldn't be able to set the rules in your town any more than you should be able to set them in mine (and yes, some things like environmental standards should be set on a national or even international level).

The difference seems to be that you place more value on what the group has decided versus what an individual may have wanted. That is the definition of tyranny. You and your gang of neighbors would be telling other property owners what they can and can't do with their property. There's 'no principal involved, just that there are more of you.

I side with the individual unless there is a really good reason not to. I'm even offended that you and your neighbors are not just making decisions that apply to you and your neighbors, but also apply to future generations.

Do you have any opinion on the way the Japanese regulate zoning?

I'm not sure equating local democracy to tyranny is a sound argument. We all, from the locale to the nation, get to collectively decide the rules under which we live.

Or, we can fail to decide, and have it decided by whichever warlords come out on top this season.

Taking your individual liberty argument to it's end, it would be perfectly OK for me to build, one inch from your property line, a factory or party hall just under the legal limits of loudness, smelliness, and traffic. According to you, I could say "Hey, it's my property, pss-off!" (remember, your wish to end zoning).

I've literally watched people in a town that formerly had zoning, then voted it out, then had bad sht happen... and I watched them in real time have the realization that "oh, this sh*t wouldn't have happened if we still had those zoning laws, huh?". Then they vote zoning back in.

No intelligent individual buys zoned property intending to break zoning without knowing it is a gamble to get the variance or vote to change the rules.

It is a group of people who each individually decide to put their own resources into building their individual properties, and the town properties, as they best see fit for their purposes. And it is not like zoning laws are static inherited burdens - they are updated continuously, 2x per year in many towns.

We have individually and democratically decided to live by these rules, and to invest our money and efforts, both individually and collectively in maintaining that.

Your town has made similar types of decisions, but perhaps to different ends.

What right do I have to tell your town what to do, and you, mine? (obviously outside of national issues like environmental laws, or collectively going in and buying enough property in your town to get the voting power to change your town's laws)

I'm curious the name of the town you referenced that voted zoning out, if there's more I can read. I found a reference that modern zoning was started by the Germans in the late 1800s [0]. This article also mentions the the basic idea of zoning goes back to antiquity, but just the distinctions between stinky and noisy outside the walls, dangerous and filthy between the walls, and every thing else inside. Also mentioned was the industrial revolution, and the change from people working in their houses to factories, and needing to separate those. Also mentioned was modern single use zoning, which has a lot of criticisms.

You mentioned a factory 1" from my property. That is an extreme example! The Japanese zoning laws I referenced, and would welcome, do make a distinction between industrial and residential/commercial, and between high density and low density. They key is they are flexible and allow for growth, they are not micromanaged by incumbent homeowners. Low density includes mixed use, and can grow into higher density over time if more people move to an area.

I ask you: What about the ability to build an accessory dwelling unit for grandma on the property you own? Or replacing a single family home with a duplex or triplex? Those aren't nuisance or safety issues, are they? Why are those forbidden in most places? What about introducing small shops and mixed residential/retail properties into residential neighborhoods? How is anything supposed to change for the better if we regulate everything to be frozen in time, with incentive, and keep adding more regulations over time?

I believe that increasingly restrictive zoning, against things like the above, are causing a lot of damage to our society. Lots of poeple can't afford a place to live. Folks have to live somewhere. They tend to aggregate in cities where the jobs are. Lots of people are stuck with long commutes. So many modern neighborhoods are absolutely soulless, without places to gather, places to walk, and variety. People are neatly divided by income level and race, into bubbles that misunderstand and demonize each other, spending way too much time in cars.

Just because 51% of people vote on something doesn't mean it's not a tyranny. That's why they have the phrase "tyranny of the majority". There's principals involved, or there should be. Otherwise it would be ok for the majority to ignore and screw over the minority any time they want. And I think that is happening in this case. It's gone too far. Homeowners have theirs and are artificially restricting the supply of housing. They care more about their property values than they do about other people. I assume there's middle ground to discuss, about things like noise and pets, anticipating growth, allowing variety, what comes after car culture, how to explore alternatives, etc. But justifying the current regulatory regime based on a majority vote, when so many other people are negatively impacted, just makes me sad for what democracy has come to mean in this country.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning

Name of town= Dover, VT

Two things you get wrong: * Zoning - it takes a 2/3 vote to change zoning; the laws are FAR more popular than you think. There is a movement in my state (Mass) to reduce that to 50% to take advantage of your bandwagon.

* Greed: NO, it's the exact opposite. If I could get a variance, I could put a 2nd apt addition on my house and build a duplex in the front yard, and walk away with $millions for those 4 units (nevermind that I'd just trashed the protected wetlands that make up 2/3 of my yard, and the neighborhood). Every one of my neighbors in the whole town could do the same or better. But no one wants to, because we came for the quiet, the trails, the wildlife. It is the opposite of greed.

* There are plenty of neighborhoods with very high population density and low cost housing within 5 miles of this 2ac-zoned town. But "nobody" wants to go there, because, well, the same reason I don't, dense-pack, pavement, noise, traffic, crime, no room to park+++, and plenty of housing IS being built there (a new 200+units 3.5mi away)

Simply trashing the low-density areas that literally generations have invested in building is not a solution.

I hear you like the Japanese model a lot, but I do not know enough about it to have an informed opinion. I do know that Japan is a very different society than ours, demographically, and culturally. You speak of "individual property rights", but I think that you would find that Japan constrains those much more tightly than in the US.

To your specific question about Grandma Apt, Duplex/Triplex/Quad:

A Grandma suite is typically allowed in these zoned towns with a variance, and sometimes restricted to bona-fide family members (not AirB&B suites). The Duplex/Triplex/Quad is specifically not allowed, BECAUSE HAS MASSIVE MEASURABLE DELETERIOUS EFFECTS on services burden, nuisance and safety. Every single issue changes: traffic, burden on school districts, water/sewer, road maintenance, crime.

Of course, a single instance of a single duplex/triple/quad has a negligable effect, just like a single noisy, polluting factory. But, systemically change the rules so that those are everywhere, and everything changes.

Taking one of the most bucolic 25 SqMi, towns with 8.5K people at 350/SqMi, and changing it to quads makes it a lot closer to 40K ppl, 1700/SqMi. Right now, everyone has an individual well and septic system. With that population, the wells and septic would fail and we'd require an entirely new centralized water & sewer system at a cost of $100s of millions. We already have one tiny such development, and it already has caused well failure for itself and the neighboring wells, requiring a expensive mitigation measures, digging temp hookups to adjacent town systems, etc.

So, if you want to show up with several hundred million dollars to build out all that infrastructure, support 5X larger schools, 5X larger fire & police, road maintenance & buildout, and so forth, then maybe that makes sense. But don't act like "oh, just change the zoning because none of it matters" is an actual argument, because with that argument, you show that you literally do not know what you are talking about. Ignoring collateral effects does not make them disappear. Similarly, ignoring that it is 67% vote and not 51%, does not make you look knowlegable.

And you talk about can't afford it in the city, and long commutes. Well, if that's the problem, you need to focus on higher density taller city buildings, and not on changing zoning in the places that geographically require long commutes. I can get on board with that.

I think there is a real case in the cities for taller and higher efficiency apartments, like the tiny house movement, where it is fewer square feet, but just packed with fold-out storage and conveniences. I don't see how allowing such smaller units would change much about the city, BUT I know that I don't know enough about the topic to say (I've liven on Manhattan in a small apt, could have lived OK in a more efficient such unit, but I don't know enough abt the real situation there to want to impose such a rule change on them).

This is a big topic! I'm not for unfettered no-regulation zoning, I think we have established that. I'm going to ramble a bit, maybe get closer to where we disagree...

You described enjoying the wildlife in your neighborhood. I recognize that it's a shame when a good thing becomes popular, and the influx of too many people ruin it. I've seen that happen with inner city neighborhoods (gentrifying) and beach communities (tourists). Sometimes this gets complicated. For example, the beach I mention is still there only because of the millions of dollars funded almost entirely by the state, county, and nearby city, properties owners enjoy federal flood insurance subsidized by everyone, and despite all that the people that live their think it is their private beach and use every legal trick in the book to keep others out, which seems wrong to me. The gentrified neighborhoods I've seen are part of a city, there's much interconnectedness and less friction to moving between neighborhoods, so it seems popular neighborhoods come and go over the decades, and that is going to happen no matter what, trying to stop that risks causing market distortions like in San Francisco, which hasn't been good for the character of the city.

I wonder how long is reasonable to try to freeze a place in time. Going back several generations there were a lot less people in this country. People were a lot less mobile. Goods were produced closer to home, and the jobs that go along with that. The culture changes, faster now than ever. Maybe people now don't want to deal with other people? I don't know about trying to legislate good neighbors, that can only go so far without causing other problems.

As an aside, my ideal rural small town would have a center with small apartment buildings in a shopping district, surrounded by a half mile of neighborhoods and greenways, surrounded by nature. This is what small-town Spain is like. Farmers commute from their apartments to their fields. The city streets are like an extension of ones livingroom, people able easily gather together because they are near to each other. Not saying I'd legislate that, but I'd like to see such things be possible. The regulations we have certainly don't incentive that.

I'm in favor of letting a place slowly grow. I think overzealous regulations cause distortions like the popularity of air bnb, and developers who will only build luxury units due to the costs of working through the red-tape. There's not enough housing where people want it, close to the jobs. I blame suburban sprawl more than small towns. Who knows what work from home will do? Maybe everyone will move to small towns. Or maybe suburbs will decrease in value as they are abandoned for more vibrant city communities. You mention wells and infrastructure limitations, and I recognize that. I'm not for growth that would outpace genuine practicalities. I know enough about this to know that many of today's suburbs may not be able to sustain their infrastructure, the density is too low, there are too few people per mile of road, water, electric, and sewer to afford the upkeep, they already need to be subsidized by more dense areas. Cities are already subsiding suburbs.

I believe that a significant factor in all this is that houses were not considered to be appreciating assets in the past. This has now become primarily a UK/US/CA/AU/NZ thing. Japan is not like that - houses there are no more considered an appreciating asset than cars are in the US. They build them to last 20 years, and build new ones frequently. Land is not so much an investment given that the population is declining and will continue to do so. I was glad when Trump raised the standard deduction, as a back-handed way of phasing out the mortgage interest deduction. I'd also like to see a land value tax - where a city taxes the land based on what the market wants to build on a piece of land, so someone expecting to keep their 5 acres near downtown has to pay dearly for that. I'd like to be sure that corporations don't get more involved in housing supply issues than they already are, they will lobby for more regulatory capture.

The variance for a grandma cottage, or building out a duplex as an extension out the back of the house or raised roof, is subject to approval from folks who are primarily motivated by the bulk of their retirement saving being invested in their house. Most places simply won't approve anything like that. You have to convince everyone that it is in their best interests, and they don't care so much about you. The lengths some people go to can be despicable, their opposition being a thin veneer over their concerns over resale value, some of it not well reasoned. I'm not saying that is always the case, but it happens a lot.

You mentioned supporting more density in cities, and I would agree.

You also mentioned tiny houses, which I know a bit about. You might find it surprising that there are very very few populated places in this country where it is legal to live in one, and not a lot of unpopulated places, either. Some places like Austin are allowing them as accessory dwelling units, because Austin is one of those places that has priced out the people who made it an attractive place to live (Austin is about the music, and musicians can't afford to live there anymore), I think that it is Portland or somewhere nearby is experimenting with "pocket communities", where a cluster of tiny houses can be grouped together around a common space on a couple/few acres. There is a dying town in Texas that welcomes tiny houses on single family lots, desperate for citizens. There is a town in Florida that allows them on single family lots. NY has an interesting hunting cabin loophole. Outside of that there are counties in some western rural areas with minimum zoning laws, I've heard of that in Iowa (minimally they want to know that you are treating your sewage properly). And that's about it. But most people who want a tiny house would like to live near other people like themselves who are not so house-focused. It's difficult to check on this, one has to search each municipality individually, and read through their 100 page zoning documentations. The tiny house sales people don't tell their customers that eventually a neighbor will call the town zoning inspector who will promptly give them a notice to vacate. You can permit it as a shed and use it as a writer cabin, but not live in it. More and more localities are making it illegal to camp on your land, even rural land, or live in anything except a house made specifically as detailed in the codes (the inspectors don't know what to pass it otherwise), of a specific minimum square footage, with minimum parking and garage spaces, with limits on how many unrelated people can live there. It's stifling and hard to escape. I think it is good for a society to have room for people who want to do something different.

EDIT: On the subject of democracy, and a majority versus super majority, voting for exceptions, etc. I don't believe that "there are more of us", no matter how many more, is a valid justification to impose on even a single person. Unless a decision is unanimous there should be morally valid reasons to impose on those who disagree, not just force of numbers. I stand by my remark that imposing on a minority with no other justification is tyranny. In the case of zoning there are relevant reasons for limitations to discuss.

Like I said, it's a big topic, and this has been an interesting conversation. I'm still in favor of Japanese style zoning, allowing for measured growth, set at a federal level, eliminating some of the wrong incentives individual neighbors have to impose on others, and giving people more flexibility in other areas. I don't know if you have any other thoughts, or if we have reached an impasse?

Yes, Big Topic! (showing how there are no easy solutions)

The Democracy/Tyranny/Unanimity issue has problems. Any decision can be expressed as its reverse: [Freedom From] or [Freedom To]. Requiring unanimity allows any individual to exert their will against the remaining 99.9xx% of the people. I want [Freedom From triplexes and all their knock-on effects], you want [Freedom To build triplexes]. If 99% of the ppl agree with your or me, the last one of us standing imposes our decision on the rest. Not even solvable with defaults. The current default here is [Freedom From development], so we should require 100% unanimity to change it? Literal generations have worked with the same set of rules, and continually agreed, voted and paid large sums to support them, so it's kind of specious to argue that it is not a legit default.

Moreover, just changing the rules is like an unfunded mandate - it imposes huge costs on existing people who have already invested massive amounts in the previously defined structure. This applies to towns that do not have centralized services (water, sewer, etc.) as well as those that do - changing the loads by half an order of magnitude is not free. If you want to change it, bring funding too.

I agree with your point about adding to commutes. MIT traffic studies in our area show how the commute traffic suddenly gelled and nearly doubled commute times with just a few hundred cars added from a couple of towns. Changing all of the zoning in the sub/exurbs will only create an absolutely unworkable mess for everyone, including the newcomers who thought they were getting X, but actually will just get Silicon-Valley-style traffic.

I could probably agree that some kind of larger scale planning is appropriate once the density of employers and people exceeds certain thresholds. E.g., when it is already more than 10,000 residents per square mile, and some number of jobs per square mile, then there should be a planned, and probably large scaling up in allowable density, with design for intra-city transport, lower traffic, etc.. BUT, I still question balancing my/our ability/right to impose that vs the fact that this involves problems that The Market is not good at solving well.

Good stuff. Had to get some of the bickering out of the way first, I guess :-)

I agree about the money for services, practicalities need to be respected. I assume doing better in cities could lighten the load in other places, and that is where we can help the most people the fastest.

On the Democracy/Tyranny/Unanimity issue... A lot of regulation seems to be made for the "average person", and it can be difficult if you don't fit in that mold. From a democracy perspective I'd be happy if there were more (metaphorical) space for people who want to try something different, not just in the (disappearing?) unregulated boonies. I mentioned the Japanese federal zoning, but to be honest that does conflict with my tendency towards preferring more local control for most things, only passing control to higher authorities when all the localities agree. Tilting at windmills perhaps. But as a counterpoint I give you Switzerland! (I'm learning more about their more direct/local democracy, and it is interesting)

I still think that negotiating consensus should be the baseline goal in a democracy, trying to understand and accommodate those who strongly object if within the realm of possibility. I really want what I want, and I also want you to have what you really want.

Back to zoning... You threw out a number... I'm not sure if 99% approach zoning issues in the same way you would. You don't sound like a renter, or someone who moves frequently, or someone struggling to pay bills, or stuck with a bad landlord. Or someone having to deal with a corporate apartment complex putting the squeeze on them with valet trash charges and expensive bundled cable, or an unethical corpation falsely claiming damages against your security deposit. Or a 30 something millenial who doesn't fit the corporate mold and is worried to death about affording a place to live, a family, retirement, and loosing the rat race. Or someone who can only afford to live in a camper. Or someone who has to move back in with the kids to afford living on their social security check. Or one of those people outside Houston or Atlanta with a two hour commute. Or someone who doesn't have a car. Or someone down on their luck and would like a secure place to camp where they can get to a supermarket and a bus stop to get to work, and maybe a port-a-pottie, Or someone who lost their life savings all tied up in their house in 2009. or a multigenerational family. Coporations and rich developers can get variances for their profit optimized investments, but the little guy not easily. Well, you get the idea. I apologize, but I get worked up about all of that :-)

I don't know what the vote would be if more options were given to people. But there are a lot of people in a lot of places who are not happy with the way things are. Current zoning sometimes seems like a bad deal from some of these other perspectives, and I agree.

I'm still learning about all this stuff. Like I mentioned before, I am concerned about the financial incentives behind the status quo, and I'm also concerned about the impact to our culture. So many working families struggling even with two incomes, neighborhoods and neighbors replaced by commutes and strangers. The world has been changing fast. My grandfather was a steel worker, didn't finish high school, and owned an extra cottage near the lake and a retirement/rental in Florida. Zoning has such a huge impact on affordable housing (and transportation costs) for so many people. I assume that financiers and corporations aren't helping.

I imagine the basic supply and demand equation will be quite different in another decade or two when the demographically significant boomer generation are dying in large numbers. I think that we're lucky exception amongst developed countries to have a large millennial generation. The assumption is that birth rates will stay low. Maybe much of this will be a moot point.

yup, well it is a big issue, and as usual, the (apparently) easy and obvious solutions don't work out so well. I totally sympathize with all of those worrisome situations. I see a much better solution would be a proper minimum wage.

Seriously, for anyone who has a business and needs to pay anyone else, if they can't make a profit paying a wage such that a full-time job in that locale is above the poverty line and affording decent housing, then they do not have a business. What they have is organized theft. They are either stealing their employee's lives (poverty shortens life), or stealing from the govt (for their extra support checks).

Having a proper wage base would go far in allowing people to afford housing. Yes, it would push the price up, allow for more creation, etc.

I do think you have a key point there about the issues of price and commuting, and in was echoed in your point about the ppl looking for a place to camp. Making more housing available for poor people who cannot also afford the transportation to do long commutes every day does no one any good, especially when most cities already have massive transport problems. We need not just random housing, but housing near the jobs...

Yep, building sufficient housing such that demand never rises above supply is a great way to keep housing representative of it's true value.

The economy isn’t a linear response system. Thought experiments about extremes tell us little or nothing about non-extreme areas of the domain.

> If this was true, then the monetary policies of the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 pandemic would both have created consumer price inflation.

Not really, as this post explains: https://www.lynalden.com/money-printing/

TL;DR: QE is mostly meant for banks, it was used to increase bank reserves (as banks were forced to do by the regulators), and didn't substantially increase the amount of money available in the economy. But this time (COVID-stimulus) might be different.

Have you seen the stock market, housing, and education -- there is a huge amount of inflation. Technology is keeping it in check for a lot of consumer goods but the dollar has lost a huge amount of its value.

You're forgetting the war backed petrodollar

"where it just sat there doing a whole bunch of nothing to consumer prices and wages."

Your primary residence should be thought of as a consumption item, whether you rent or own. If homes cost more to buy or rent since the QE (and they do) then we absolutely have had consumer price inflation.

Too many people consider their house a store of value, a significant portion of their retirement assets, and/or a speculative asset that can be cash out refinanced.

Thought experiment: You print a trillion dollar bill and throw it in a underground vault. You look around. "Hey no inflation" so you print some more. You keep this up for a while. Years pass and someone finds the vault and begins to spend the money inside, what happens?

Right now much of that printed money is sitting in stocks and bonds, what happens when that is no longer a great place to be? What if those dollars decide they want to be used to buy say houses, instead of bonds?

Exactly this; the Fed has been printing like crazy, but the new money has relatively low velocity. Velocity is required for inflation, not just the money itself.

Look at stock market prices of the past ten years; its the largest bull market in US history. The US Dollar isn't getting inflated by the printing; the stock market is.

There's too few building permits being issued these days.

Those dollars have been used to buy houses. Residential real estate prices are up in most areas.

You know, the idea that we have run out of profitable investments is absurd when you consider the massive housing shortage in major cities. Is the truth that we simply banned all those investments and companies like Uber are trying to work around that backwards legislation?

Even with the benefit of a society built in the image of the automobile (toll free roads, free parking everywhere, highways, sprawl) Uber is not profitable.

In 2008 and really also in 2020, the bulk of the created dollars wasn't given to people where it might create consumer price inflation, by a vast degree it was allocated at the top. There it is creating asset price inflation local to the place of major injection.

It's a poor stimulus effect if one is trying to use it to move the economy.

Having things cost more isn't an issue if the economy grows at relatively the same rate as the nation's money supply. For the economy to be considered inflationary, the money supply has to outgrow economic growth. The OP is making the argument (at least how I interpret it) that economic growth has been stagnant, and that the money supply hasn't been effectively put to work in the real economy. The US inflation rates are more a reflection of central bank activity vs the actual economy (which is deflationary).

Yes, but you have to give the dollars to the right people.

> however: the world we are living in is massively deflationary and even dramatic and innovative attempts to maintain (low) inflation are barely keeping us above water

That reflection isn't looking down at the surface of the water, but rather up at the air that we need to head towards to stop drowning. Monetary inflation is a large part of what's killing the middle class. All that offshoring was supposed to cause lower prices to compensate for decreased need for domestic labor. Instead a whole bunch of monetary inflation was induced to force everyone to keep working the same amount, at jobs that no longer exist. As long as the Fed continues with its maladaptive policy that is directly opposed to technological progress, most all productivity gains will continue accruing to the upper class.

If we were truly suffering from an aging society then where is all the inflation? Where are all the rich old people spending their money but not finding enough workers to do everything they saved their money up for?

It's probably because retirement has to be financed by the individuals themselves. Nowadays retirement means cutting spending today so that you can spend tomorrow. There are rich old people who aren't cutting down on spending but simply keep saving their wealth and there are poor old people who are cutting down on spending to build up savings, even though they are officially above the retirement age. This leads to a savings glut which is something you cannot fix by adding even more money into asset markets.

>You have more economic growth if you give 1 million people $100 dollars (since they are more likely to spend it on goods/services) vs giving $100 million to one person (who will likely spend the bulk of their money on financial instruments).

The US spends the majority of it's Federal Budget on giving small amounts of money to the non-rich, to the order of trillions of dollars per year.

Also, when someone puts money into a financial instrument, that money usually flows immediately into productive use. Capital flows are attributed with about 30% of the economic growth over the last century, which is a huge increase in quality of life, especially for the most poor.

>Also, when someone puts money into a financial instrument, that money usually flows immediately into productive use.

Yes but only under the assumption that aggregate demand always exceeds supply, which isn't true nowadays and that's why the economy is broken.

> We are however, living in a unique time were robots and AI can potentially pick up the slack for whatever losses of productivity a lower population may cause.

Productivity growth is currently the lowest it's been since before the industrial revolution. AI and robotics may be revolutionizing a few specific domains. But there's no evidence that they're replacing the need for human labor any time soon.

That probably will happen at some point. But probably not in our lifetimes or even our children's lifetime. We still need able-bodied workers to run the economy.

> Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US anyway) is highly dependent on population growth

It's not the financial system, it's the underlying economy. Back in the day, people had to have kids so there was someone to take care of them in their old age. The financial system abstract, but does not eliminate, that structural feature of the underlying economy. You still need young bodies producing goods and performing services for the elderly non-working population.

As a new father, I share this perspective. To get an anecdotal sense of our financial struggle, we have 2-4x the net worth that my parents when they were our age, but cannot afford the same house that I grew up in and doubt we ever will.

Yup. This is the same phenomenon in India as well - the salary is "high", so you can splurge on furniture, buy reasonably priced cars etc. much easier than earlier generations. But we cannot afford to buy the same house my parents lived in at our income level.

Have you accounted for development induced appreciation? Perhaps a similar home further from the city center would be a more suiting comparison?

Anecdotally, in central New York housing prices have gained only modestly. The 2008 financial crisis didn't have a large effect on prices here either. But... development in central New York is near zero.

Given that good jobs remained in the city center, and commutes are not faster than they used to be, the point is not very relevant.

I think that the internet has eliminated the commute for a lot of service sector jobs. I think that a lot of jobs remain in the city center only because that's the way the older generation has always done it.

The Amish are fleeing high land prices in Pennsylvania. There is development of a sort.

This always feels like a weird argument.

In the part of Maryland (USA) that I live in, quite a few areas are named after families who lived here in colonial times, and they were granted huge swaths of land. But a descendant from one of those families today can't reasonably expect an estate of hundreds of acres. There's just not enough land to go around with the size of today's population.

Obviously, that's taking it to the extreme, but the population of India has probably doubled since 1980 or so. I don't know your age or your parents' ages, but there are certainly far more people in India now than when your parents were your age, so it wouldn't make sense for an equivalent amount of wealth to buy an equivalent piece of real estate compared to previous generations.

This mostly makes sense if real estate is already fully utilised, but it isn't.

I can't speak to India, but there's a feeling broadly in North America of having "new development" and "expansion" over time. Cities are much, much larger now than they were 40 years ago, and people imagine that the new farm land subsumed and developed should be available for a similar price relative to income to what it was 'back then'.

The XXX-acre rural farmland wasn't as valuable as the same space in town when purchased as a lot, but now it holds as many homes as that downtown space used to. Is it worth the same today, relatively, as that space was then? No, they're both worth comparatively way, way more than they were.

I don't mean to suggest that scarcity isn't a part of the equation here, more that there are a lot complex factors involved, e.g. wage levels relative to inflation over time.

You're right of course, that it's more complex than just land scarcity. But I feel like people sometimes have this strange default sense that something is wrong if things don't stay the same. "My dad fixed diesel engines and provided for a family of 5, so I ought to be able to do the same thing". Well, your dad lived in a different time. You can't be a Holy Roman warrior anymore, and there's also a chance you might not be able to make a good career at being a diesel mechanic at this point.

Sort of like when you have kids and see them everyday, you only vaguely notice them growing up because the change from day-to-day is so subtle? But when the extended family visits once a year, they notice a huge change? The world is constantly changing like that...you might not notice that today is different from yesterday, but today is drastically different from when your parents were your age.

Real estate is only expensive in the highly utilized areas.

> The XXX-acre rural farmland wasn't as valuable as the same space in town when purchased as a lot, but now it holds as many homes as that downtown space used to. Is it worth the same today, relatively, as that space was then?

Yes, they are. It's hard to make a direct comparison, because falling interest rates have caused housing prices to go up, and as people have gained income they have chosen to buy much bigger houses. But the per square foot price of a median-sized new home has been stagnant at the $100-120 range (based on CPI) since 1973: https://donsnotes.com/financial/real-estate.html. And falling interest rates have meant that the monthly mortgage payment per square foot has actually gone down over that time.

Is is it you that are the outlier or your dad? What kind of housing did your grandfathers and great-grandfathers have?

I have the same job as my father. Grandparents immigrated at a young age and grew up in the same area of the city.

The point is precisely that neither of them is an outlier within their respective time -- they are normal people who want "normal" housing: i.e. just enough to raise a family in.

The parents born in the 30s-50s could largely afford to purchase homes large enough to raise a family in, but far fewer people born in the 70s-90s will be able to do the same.

My point is that, at least in the US, the post World War II economy was unusual and the factors that lead to it are unlikely to ever be repeated.

We are reverting to the status quo ante about what middle class means.

I agree with the first part of your comment but there wasn’t really a middle class prior to the 20th century.

The petite bourgeoisie would probably be considered upper-middle class today. Even the industrial revolution was only a small period of humanity.

This is highly dependent on society/nation standards. I grew up in a 750 sqft apartment (family of 5). My wife grew up in a 440 sqft (family of 4). Now I consider 250 sqft/person to be a palace, but in the US it's probably considered unlivable.

Exactly. It’s not some fundamental biological fact that you can’t raise a family in fewer than 1500 sq. ft. of house and 1/4 an acre of property. That was just a cultural norm set in a particular time and place.

I don't understand what the value to you is here in arguing that we all ought to just settle for less. More space is preferable, better conditions are preferable, and we do have the capabilities to work toward these things for all humans.

The specific factors of post-WWII America may be unlikely ever to be repeated, but I can't agree that we should all settle for life as it was in the 1910s or earlier on the basis that that's simply 'how life is' -- the status quo is not an argument for itself.

The average (human, at least) life has improved substantially in the last few hundred years in some key ways (admitting that there are some ways it is likely worse). Even if the potential improvements to life track a sigmoid curve, there's no reason at all yet to think we've maxed it out, let alone gone beyond what's possible.

We can absolutely continue to improve, so it seems totally fair to identify and analyze causes, means, and paths to do so, i.e., recognizing "I cannot afford the same standard of life as my parents did" as something that ideally would be different, and discussing patterns of wage growth, economic trends, and policy decisions that might counteract that perceivable regression of quality.

People shouldn’t be made to feel like they would be or are bad parents if they put two kids in a room. Because I think the upshot to that is not going to be some workers’ movement that produces less inequality but instead fewer people that want kids having them due to fear of social stigma.

That's a really good point! I agree that we should be supportive of parents in the face of circumstances they can't directly control, rather than stigmatize them or hold them to an unfair standard. Thanks for explaining it that way.

I also think we can both do that and work to continue to improve circumstances, which to me includes recognizing that the circumstances can be improved.

A sentence with "ought" in it is a signal that what follows is a pointless thought. You can't will things into existence by saying it "ought" to be that way.

As to your other point, some aspects of living conditions are scalable, and others are not--something that's obvious if you're thinking about what "is" rather than what "ought to be." Technology doesn't magic more land into existence. As the population of the country grows (it has grown from 200 million in 1970 to 330 million today) space becomes more expensive. There is no reason to assume that the trend should be toward more space per person. In fact, physics and math tells you the trend should be in the opposite direction.

> A sentence with "ought" in it is a signal that what follows is a pointless thought. You can't will things into existence by saying it "ought" to be that way.

Thanks for making it clear right up front that any time spent trying to communicate with you is wasted. :)

This isn't really true. First, what's considered "big enough to raise a family in" has doubled since the 1950s-1970s. I grew up in an 1,100 square foot house built in the 1950s. The starter homes around us are double that size.

Also, as the U.S. grows, the "frontiers" obviously shift. Since 1970, the U.S. has grown from 205 million to 330 million, and the number of people per house has gone down significantly. Back when it was built in the 1950s, the house I grew up in was in a new development in a boring suburb of D.C--itself a boring city with mainly GS-scale government jobs. Now, with all the tech jobs in the D.C. area, it's become a more desirable, upscale place.

What used to be the boring, middle-class suburb is now somewhere around Kansas City, MO or Greensboro, NC. Houses in those places are just as affordable as the houses you grew up in. In fact, when you account for growing house size and falling interest rates, they are more affordable: https://donsnotes.com/financial/real-estate.html

> The parents born in the 30s-50s could largely afford to purchase homes large enough to raise a family in, but far fewer people born in the 70s-90s will be able to do the same.

Does not explain why home sizes grew 2.5x since the 1950s, while the average household size dropped from 3.4 to 2.5. (which is in large part due to the many single-person households).

There's many indications that we're enjoying much more real estate per person than ever before, real estate which is also much more luxurious and located in much more interesting locations, with better schools, more safety, more amenities etc.

Second, we tend to easily forget that the past wasn't divided equally. Being a woman and running your own household independent from a husband was a pipe dream for many women back then. Buying a home was a pipe dream for many black families, too. There's lots of such examples. This past we speak of where 'we all' had it better is often actually a bit of a narrow view of certain groups of people having it better, ignoring others who definitely didn't. Whereas now the average person is better off, in small part at the expense of a smaller group who used to dominate before.

I’ve been thinking about this lately. Similar to you, the house I grew up in is much more less affordable now than it was when my parents bought it.

However, in my case it’s not really the same house any more. At the time, the location was thought to be on the outskirts of town, away from the desirable areas. As the city grew, this location became the desirable area. If I look to what is now considered the outskirts, I still see new construction in the $300K range (pre-COVID anyway), which is similar to the inflation-adjusted price of the house I grew up in.

At some point we can’t escape supply and demand with more buyers fighting over the same limited housing supply.

Many of my friends have been moving to less popular cities and up and coming towns as they start raising families, and it pays off. Obviously not an option for everyone’s situation, but thankfully the increase in remote work is relieving some of the pressure in overcrowded cities.

That's what I don't understand, if population growth is stagnant or declining, how is it these housing prices are reaching such heights?

Because nobody wants to hold currency for extended periods of time.

Bingo

Or more precisely, once a house attains some value beyond providing a roof over heads, the price of a house is no longer representative of a house, but a government backed asset that can never depreciate lest the pension funds fold.

A single house's price can easily go down. Even an entire city like Detroit MI can devalue. But those mortgage backed securities represent the national average.

With climate change the music may suddenly stop for flood prone areas like Miami once investors stop underwriting 30 year mortgages.

Not when the government is printing it by the trillions.

We make up for it with immigration. I believe legal immigration is well over a million a year.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...

The US is still growing its population, via immigration rather than births.

One explanation is rising amounts of space per person, the apartments are just getting bigger.

When you watch the price of the same unit grow over time, it's not usually because the owners are building more. :)

And decreasing household size.

You can find cheap housing, the problem is it's all in places where most people don't want to live. For example, Detroit, or any of thousands of small towns all over the US.

Not picking on Detroit, it's just an obvious example of a large city that used to have a much larger population.

That's a sort of two way street though. In areas affordable housing exists, there often aren't many opportunities financially speaking, especially in the labor market.

It's one thing to live in a city, work for awhile to bank up capital, and then move somewhere with a low COL area to live comfortably with some supplemental income from the region with knowledge of that nest egg if investments you currently have.

It's an entirely different story to live in such an and accumulate enough capital to purchase a home. Often, jobs are few and far between that are competitive, even after adjusting for COL. Employers in these areas often have less competition for positions and therefor have more leverage. Acquiring debt in these areas when you start your career could make it difficult to climb out of. Its not true with all positions. A lot of healthcare positions can pay better in these areas due to what are essentially government subsidies through medicare/medicaid. You'll occasionally have some industrial organization doing specialized work people with advanced degrees can prosper in but they need to strategically target these areas.

That does make sense at least. The places with the least opportunity and/or desirability are going to be the cheapest.

There is a lot of cheap housing in places that people are willing to live, but people need a push to change. Allowing work from home, schools, and lockdowns have been helping provide the push. Most cities have reasonable housing prices, it is just distorted by a few areas which have become extremely unaffordable.

Detroit is an interesting example. People did want to live there, but as the jobs declined, so did the city. If jobs can come back, the city can come back.

Ah that reminds me, we should not discount racism as a factor. Many would rather become debt slaves for life or forgo children than live cheaply around black people.

Very sad to see this downvoted. I don't know how people can see things like "WTF Happened in 1971?" without realizing the date correlations to the 1968 Fair Housing Act and especially especially to the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act:

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968#Title...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Credit_Opportunity_Act

I don't quite follow - what's your hypothesis here?

Using the word racism so liberally devalues its meaning.

I did live cheaply around black people when I was younger, I lived in a maybe 90% black neighborhood in a literal mansion, for a few hundred a month. It was a dilapidated mansion, and the gunshots from the open air drug market a couple streets over started around 7 most evenings, but it was a mansion and it was cheap. I have fond memories of those times.

But when you talk about raising children...

Here's a link to another story that was on the front page today, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26361352.

It's about a student in Baltimore who failed every class but 3 in his four years of high school, skipped class half the time, and got a 0.13 grade point average.

That put him just short of being in the top half of his class, he was an average student in that school. Can you think of any reasons other than racism that a parent might choose a different neighborhood to live in?

The neighborhood with the mansion has been gentrified for years now, I don't have kids but I still wouldn't seek out a similar neighborhood to what I lived in back then now. My attitudes towards risk and crime are different than they were when I was younger. I guess I am a racist now too?

But yeah, that's certainly one way to save on rent. Worked for me.

Because people want to live in the city. I bet you can find really cheap houses in the countryside.

Iirc A couple of days ago there was even a post up on HN that listed places where the government would give you land for free, and I think also some starting capital.

Home prices keep reaching new heights in some areas due to:

1) Migration. Immigration from outside the country, but also internal immigration within the country from less economically vibrant parts to more economically vibrant regions.

2) Falling interest rates keeping the monthly mortgage payment the same or lower despite higher principals

3) Expectations that the price trend for homes will continue to look like the past. This expectation can lead to people buying more housing than they would normally consume.

4) Shrinking household sizes. You have gone from an average household size of 3.33 in the 1960s to an average household size of 2.53 today. That may not seem like much but you would need ~25% more housing today to accommodate the same population.

5) Larger house sizes. From a median of about 1000 sq ft in 1950 to 2300 sq ft today.

The above can combine to keep pushing up house prices in some areas (as we see in the US) even as the population growth of a country stagnates.

In my opinion the thing that is leading most to inflation in addition to your points above, is that there are way too many land lords anyone who makes a little money goes and buys a house, increasing demand.

Also add; limited housing development.

Most new housing development after the war was gotten by turning farmlands and nature into single family houses. A lot of places have reached the limits of how far one can expand and run into some combination of geographical barriers, legal barriers (e.g. protected park or farmlands), or the barrier posed by time (most people have an upper limit of how long they are willing to commute.)

The next logical step in density, subdivision of existing lots and/or intensifying into homes that accommodate two, three, four families in a place where a single family house stood, is pretty much illegal on most residential parcels in the US. Pre-zoning, neighborhoods were free to densify as they desired, so even in older single family neighborhoods there are sprinklings of slightly more intense development. But in 2021 zoning reform is hotly contested because people feel like they should have control over what their neighbors do with their land, and the overall result is that there isn’t too much developable land left.

Ban building new office space in overcrowded areas. Big corps will be forced to build their offices elsewhere, in remote areas with plenty of land, workers will follow and so do small businesses.

1. Who would pass and enforce such a ban? Local governments are self interested and want more jobs, because it makes politicians look good and jobs require minimal additional services while providing lots of tax money. (See: Bay Area) State has same issues. Feds don't have the rights to do so, and good luck passing that kind of legislation anyways.

2. With the decline of the inner city during the midcentury we already saw what this looked like. It mostly resulted in jobs moving to the suburbs of established big cities, not decentralization of jobs into totally different regions.

Considering how many people insist on their neighborhood staying the same, why haven't they thought long and hard about what it means to let more and more corporations settle in their city without building enough housing to match the new jobs?

What is the definition of overcrowded? Banning office space caps the size of the economy! A very bad result for a nebulous gain. That's like hoping for a recession or praising Gary, Indiana and Youngstown, Ohio for low housing prices.

They choose to set up shop in big cities and in CBDs because there's more opportunity well worth the higher rent. High rent makes buildings more productive because no one is going to waste prime real estate on low productivity or land intensive enterprises.

Some cities are pushing to ease car dependency by mandating businesses support remote working, not further invest in parking, and encourage walking, biking, and mass transit use. Those are ways of improving the land efficiency of businesses.

The gov is able to limit density within the office buildings, so it should be able to limit density within the county limits. I agree, though, that such an initiative would be against the interests of just about everyone, except the future workers who don't exist today and don't have the right to vote.

> Larger house sizes. From a median of about 1000 sq ft in 1950 to 2300 sq ft today.

Maybe it's a California thing, but not so sure about that.

House I grew up in was over 3000sqft and can't think of any friends that had houses smaller than (estimating here) about 2500sqft (in the 70s to 80s). Myself and friends were all lower middle class families. Land and housing was just so cheap then that it was normal.

And yet today, not a single house in this (much more recently built) neighborhood is over 2000sqft. Most of the models are 1300-1500sqft. And of course these houses cost ~40x what my parents paid for the house.

Rich elites buy-out all properties/flats in cities because its a better overall investment taking to account inflation.

People who slave in that situation consider themselves unhappy and thus consider moving to a houses outside of the city. Due to limited infrastructure outside of the cities -> only a part of outskirts are really habbitable for those families. The demand in this case is higher than supply.

Demand is so low only because city politicians are too inefficient in providing new places with infrastructure.

> That's what I don't understand, if population growth is stagnant or declining, how is it these housing prices are reaching such heights?

Housing prices around me are directly correlated to school quality. The same house near a good school is literally 1.5x-2x the price.

The supply of good public schools is very limited. A good private school is ~20-30k a year. Figure that is worth 300k, not even counting that that over the years tuition prices will go up.

So people pay to live near one of the handful of good schools.

Seattle stopped busing kids awhile back, instead aiming to keep kids at "local" schools (IMHO to save money), so now unlike the opportunity I had as a kid (test well, get into a good school in the "right" part of town) the city is perpetuating generational poverty.

This has the effect of making pockets of the city have well rated and poorly rated schools. Previously schools were kinda mixed in quality, good programs and teachers at many different schools. Sure some had a reputation, but now the ratings are incredibly bi-modal, and housing prices follow that distribution.

Oh also in the last decade, the population has increased by 21 million. The growth rate is slowing, but it isn't zero. The way American cities are managed, it isn't possible to add sufficient housing. E.g. in 2019 around 40k people moved to the Seattle metro. 14k building permits were granted[1].

To put that in perspective, the most construction friendly city in America, Houston, approved 38k permits. (Not sure if these are for housing units, are permits overall inclusive of multi family dwellings).

FWIW Dallas got ~131k new people (US Census Bureau)

No surprise there is a problem. American cities are not capable of building fast enough.

[1] https://www.wfaa.com/article/money/economy/dallas-fort-worth...

>Housing prices around me are directly correlated to school quality.

Because "school quality" is basically indistinguishable from "socio-economic status". It has little to do with the quality of buildings or teachers or other resources. It's mostly about the ability and willingness of parents to be involved in their kid's life and the standards they hold.

In the U.S.

1) Population continues to grow due to immigration and higher birth rates among immigrants.

2) Population is growing in some areas and declining in others, which is matched by housing prices increasing in some places but falling in others.

To some extent homes in affluent are expensive because they are expensive. Most rich people don't want to live near poor people and so they'll pay extra for that even if it seems economically irrational.

Interest rates is much of it. Just calculate the total payments for a 30y, 100k mortgage in 1980 when the interest rate was 15%. It's 455k in total. The same amount as a 300k mortgage for today's 3% interest for 30 years, also 455k total. In other words, the monthly payments / total payments are the same and thus just as affordable at 3x higher prices, simply because interest rates dropped so much.

Second, there's indications of further concentration. If you have a 10x10 square of land and 100 people, you can each live on one square (spread-out) You can also all live on one square (concentrated). The price levels of the homes in the lived-squares of course grows the more we concentrate, even if total population is constant.

Concentration isn't a straight-line, e.g. NY depopulated in the 80s, but does tend to arc towards further urbanisation, further concentration, further population density. In large part because cities are knowledge/network centres, and our economy is based on knowledge/networks, whereas before our economy was based on e.g. agriculture, which is the opposite of concentrated. I'd be very interested to see if that will ever change due to a working-from-home / remote-work, and even virtual reality to have meaningful social and entertainment experiences remotely. It used to be if you lived in a small town, there'd be few jobs, few bars to meet people, few concerts to go to, no cinema. Many moved to the city despite higher prices, less room, noise and pollution and crime, in search for work and social life. But with remote work and VR, the calculus might change. (not 100%, but many a little bit, enough to bring a little bit of balance to the ever-growing concentration of people in a few big cities).

Same, but the "outskirts" has gone from a 30 minute drive to work to a 2 hour drive to work. At some point something has to give.

But why would you expect to be able to afford the same house even with higher net worth?

I mean, my folks bought a house I can afford either but when they bought it, it was on the edge of the city, not a desirable area in a 2nd tier city. That’s why it was cheap. Now it’s in a historic neighborhood, highly desirable in a city where everyone wants live.

I could afford a house similar to the one they bought in terms of those qualities. In fact it would likely be cheaper compared to salary.

Show me an affordable house in on the edge of NYC in the "undesirable" neighborhoods. Even if you pick neighborhoods past where subway lines end (a very undesirable quality for city property to have) that also happen to be high crime areas it is still too expensive for anyone to purchase. Like two examples look at New Lots/East New York and South Ozone Park/Jamaica. Both fit my description above, they are at the very edge of subway access, and are high crime areas, and both are too expensive for normal middle class people to buy property in.

Contrast this with great people I've met who are ~60 now, who just stumbled into the east village/alphabet city in the 1980s in their mid-20s and bought up cheap houses while bumming around paycheck to paycheck. What area of NYC or the valley can I do that in now? If the answer is none, and you can't point me to a city in the midwest or south where buying up cheap affordable property IS going to turn me into a multimillionaire when I'm ~50 what does that mean for our growth/stagnation culturally and as a country? This is the difference, there is no place that even has the faintest whiff of a city that is about to take off where such gains would even be possible.

In other countries that have similar issues in Europe, where a lot of cities are unbelievably expensive there are two solutions that you see a lot. One is that it is culturally common to live with your entire extended family and not be able to afford a house, and the second is welfare or new home ownership incentives that make it more viable. "Rugged Individualism" in American mindsets and cultures makes both options seem untenable but clearly we have to adapt.

1980s NYC did not have “the faintest whiff of a city about to take off”. That couple bought property in a crime ridden part of a crime ridden city. Tompkins Square Park was an open air drug market.

The equivalent today is a bad area of Detroit. I’m certain you can find something affordable there today. I doubt it will turn you into a multimillionaire, but if we were having this conversation in 1984 everyone would doubt buying in the East Village would get you anything other than mugged or shot.

Having grown up in the 1990s in the D.C. suburbs, and visiting family in Queens (recent immigrants) I still reflexively do a double take when new associates at my law firm say they're living in Brooklyn, or in D.C., in Capitol Hill. Like--I know you can afford to live somewhere decent!

There’s a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Bed-Stuy. In Billy Joel’s song about being manic there’s a verse:

“I walked through Bedford Stuy alone / even rode my motorcycle in the rain”

because it was something only a crazy person would do. I can never quite get over the fact that a young coworker of mine was living there with his girlfriend. It is mind blowing.

The exact house or equivalent in a similarly populated area as the one your parents bought in? If the former, I imagine it's because the area has developed significantly since.

Exact house.

Makes you wonder whether you ever thought not having a baby might be a sensible option.

Please share the equation that determines the sensible option. I guess we'll disagree over the optimization ...

Indeed. We make some 25x what my parents did, but with them I grew up in a property with a wonderfully large house and many acres of land. Yet here I am stuck in tiny house with no yard to speak of and couldn't possibly afford anything more given current cost of housing and land.

Some contend that this isn't a sign of poverty but rather a sign of wealth.

i.e., suppose every consumption good becomes 10x as cheap overnight. Cars, food, phones, clothes, travel by air, electricity, movies, music.

What would happen to home prices? Well, it's likely they'd skyrocket. All the additional disposable income has to flow somewhere, to some asset, and that's often real estate.

There's some indication that that's been happening. Of course there's many other stories in real estate which clearly indicates we're less well off than before, particularly certain groups.

But there's also many indications we're better off, but simply spending more of our money on RE, because in part, we can, because in part, we want to.

For example, compare the average home size (square footage) in 1950 to 2020 and anywhere inbetween, it's a pretty straight line that ends up a 2.5x increase.

Then compare the average persons per home, it decreased from about 3.4 to 2.5, in large part to the large number of single-person household, a luxury not affordable in the 1950s, especially not to women in a much more patriarchal society than today.

This means we've seen a tremendous increase in the square foot per person. That's a measure of wealth. The fact home prices skyrocketed due to the demand for these luxuries, and the (by definition) ability for Americans to afford to push prices to these levels, should not necessarily be seen as an affordability crisis, but rather as an indication of wealth.

Yes, if prices of bread skyrocketed and we were all consuming less because of it, that's poverty. But if the average bread consumption per household grew by 2.5x, and the average number of people eating that bread in the household dropped by 25%, then you can't quite say that on average we're less well-off, bread-wise.

And homes aren't the same as in the 1950s either. Today's homes are well-equipped with many luxuries and comforts. Finally, high prices are a bit misleading without taking interest rates into account. In the 1980s for example interest rates were 15%, you'd pay your home in full every 6 years in interest alone. Just look at the historical trend of interest rates, they're at record lows. For example, a 30 year mortgage of 100k at the 1980's 15% interest rate, costs as much in total payments, as a 30 year mortgage of 300k at today's 3% interest rate. A 3x price increase alone has absolutely no effect on affordability in the past 40 years due to the massive drop in interest rates. If you take into account the fact that nominal income grew by 5x since the 1980s as well, plus the larger square footage and the fewer people per home, it's easy to see why the cost of a square foot has actually become way more affordable. And given many things got so much cheaper, it's easy to see why so much wealth has flowed to RE.

Definitely don't want to pretend like there's no housing affordability issues anywhere, but I do want to nuance the view a bit that we're generally worse off than previous generations, in which housing is an oft mentioned example. But on balance, it's not really the clearest example for this generational loss of quality of life that people tend to think it is.

A different environmentalist worldview that I was raised with (as one of four kids of environmentalist parents):

Kids raised with an environmental mindset will have a larger positive impact than having fewer or no children. Their impact will outweigh their environmental footprint.

I’m curious how the logic works for that. I’ve always assumed that there’s effectively no way for an individual human to net-negative their own emissions/energy consumption/whatnot, just because of the sheer amount of material they need/use/consume (at least, in a Western society). A few outliers (Greta Thornberg?) may be able to effect sufficient policy to counteract their own environmental impact, but in the general case I don’t see how raising a kid with a strongly environmental-conscious mindset is at all better than just... not having a kid.

I've given a lot of thought to this. Here's a few points I think about:

0. Your own environmental impact is significantly reduced, so the baseline to "counteract" is lower than "Western society".

1. Change happens incrementally. Moving the needle in small ways slowly changes the big picture. Greta is moving the needle in big ways within her lifetime, but like you say, that's not the norm.

2. Raising awareness and leading by example can have an outsized impact in your community.

3. Voting and other political involvement (won't turn this political, but every vote matters, especially for local issues that might be decided by 50-100 votes).

4. Supporting companies that align with your values. Consider the total dollar spend of an individual over the course of their life.

5. Charitable giving. Tons of great work is being done around the world by non-profits. Even if you don't pursue a career in non-profit work, donating is tax deductible and goes a long way.

6. Raising your own children with a similar mindset.

7. Inventing and supporting new sources of energy, materials, and efficiency.

Interesting analysis, but I think you are discounting the number of people in each of these groups. Percentage basis, yes, the rich and poor will have more children. But both groups are not the 80% of the middle (using your 10% cutoffs on either end).

So I don't think children from the non-rich and non-poor society are going to be aliens in the world anytime soon. Sadly though, fewer will know life with siblings. To meet groups of siblings, you'll find more rich and poor - but only at their birth. Any number of those will change positions in society in any direction.

I could not agree more.

Whereas historically having kids used to be a "social" decision in various respects, it has now become a socio-economic decision for the reasons you point out.

If anything, I would argue that the economic shock of the pandemic (aside from the horror stories you hear from WFH parents who have kids) and the inequality it has exposed in our financial systems has cemented the idea for a lot of middle class millenials to have no kids/fewer kids.

It was always a socio-economic decision. Kids were your retirement plan before we came up with things like 401ks.

This is a very interesting perspective to me, because I know it’s relatively common in non-Western (or maybe just non-American?) cultures that parents move back in with their kids when they get old, or more generally that extended familial units are far more cohesive than they are in the States.

....Which then means your extended family (and own children) are indeed a ‘retirement plan’, because the expectation is that they’ll be around to support you when you’re unable to support yourself.

But the intensely individualistic American lifestyle doesn’t lend itself to that thinking very well, so there’s less incentive for folks to have kids for their own interest.

(Indeed, as a mid-20s couple, we’re more often told the ways in which children _limit_ the lives of the parents, rather than augment them.)

> An (increasingly rare) person from a single-kid middle class home is not only a social minority, but has to create more of their own opportunities because they are an outsider to both societies.

I don't follow: is a single kid from a middle class family an outsider to kids from other middle class families where they have 2 or 3 kids? I mean, I understand that middle class is neither rich nor poor, but what's the difference for a unique child compared to middle class families with serveral kids?

Do the siblings typically provide opportunities for their brothers/sisters? (I'm personally launching atm a new endeavor with my brother but I don't see that as particularly common).

I'm also not sure what they're getting at but here's my anecdote FWIW.

I never fit in well with the other welfare kids that came from families with many kids. Nor did I fit in with the middle class and up kids always flexing their Nikes, vacations, cars, and other vapid things I could never dream of getting.

My circumstance did allow me to mingle with the various classes and see how they live and succeed. The poor families rapidly introduce the kids to low pay manual labor jobs in grocery stores, farms and the like. The better off families got their kids fun summer jobs near their summer homes working banana stands or giving guided tours.

The differences become even more stark in college, for those who went that is. The relationships gained from introductions made by the well offs family and friends pay massive dividends immediately if you speak the right language. By which I mean one doesn't speak like a poor person. Between private job offers, highly paid internships, and favor trading the poor kids don't just have the deck stacked against them, they're playing with the cards and chips that've fallen off the table, but only against the other poors.

The one constant between classes is drug use. There's a lot of drug use in all these groups, even the DARE/ROTC/AP kids. The difference is that the poor kids self medicating away their shit hand, while the rich kids are rebelling against their parents, self medicating their home problems like abuse and emotional neglect, or trying to get an edge in classes/work. Rarely do well off kids fall into hardcore addiction. I've seen a lot of kids taken to very expensive rehab clinics multiple times. Poor kids don't get these vacations and access to world class shrinks.

Siblings tend to follow the familial mean. Sure sometimes a rich family has a complete failure of a child, but most of the time they're mediocre middle management coasting through life on their laurels continuing the time honored tradition of trading favors with and smoothing over the rough patches for their kids and siblings. Siblings in poor families do the same things, but with limited means comes limited success.

To clarify, if you are a 3+ kid poor person, you will come from a family that is likely very poor. If you are a 3+ kid rich person, your parents are probably 95th percentile.

If you aren't from the neighbourhood for the first group, you're not trusted, and if you don't just know certain things, you aren't trusted by the second, because each group quietly assumes you're really part of the other. It's what we used to call class, and that's what I meant by being alien to each other.

There are exceptions. The most interesting ones are religious communities. Few people who belong to a church would accept being called poor no matter what their income was, and religious people with middle class jobs have lots of kids as well.

The other anomaly is the new institutional who have the iron stability of things like academic tenure, teachers unions, municipal and state employees, who only receive that stability at an age just as their fertility starts to wane, and usually after sacrificing it to get there.

It would be hard to argue that public policy has been anything but anti-natal for the last 50 years.

I have neither the "Malthusian or environmentalist worldview" nor the opposite, which seems to be dangerously close to a "nationalist or eugenics worldview". In other words: any grievances about birth rate on a population-wide level run the risk of spurning legislation or other changes with the purpose of forcing (with varying level of vehemence) individuals to make reproductive choices they otherwise wouldn't.

Specifically, it's hard to interpret the universal drop in birth rates among societies as they advance on anything but women exercising their newfound freedom not to have children. Many attempts to reverse the trend will thus look to reverse these changes.

To be sure, there are other policy ideas one could advance, and some examples of them working well, such as universal childcare, mandatory parental leave for both genders, and some others that share the distinction of having zero chance to become law in the US.

I'm taking the liberty to advocate for ignoring any population-wide concerns about birth rates because even in the most extreme cases such as Germany or Japan, and even moreso in the US where it's relatively mild, the effect just isn't strong enough to lead to any insurmountable problems. Given a bit more automation and medical advances that keep people not just alive but fit, the problems of an ageing population seem to be solvable, especially as long as there is still significant will to immigrate, which does not seem likely to abate.

Perhaps this is a marker of the divide in worldviews.

If we can't develop a country and a society people willingly want to have kids in, what is it for?

People do want to have kids, but the physical process of going through pregnancy and birth is brutal and dangerous. The people who have to do it quite rationally don't want to do it four times in the same decade once they have any other choice, even if it would be socially optimal. The best thing we can do at this point is develop the technology to create babies outside of human wombs.

> The mix of the promise of upward mobility that is always just out of reach, and the risk of "losing it all," creates a condition of constant low-level stress similar to other species that do not breed in captivity.

I think there's a mix of underlying causes for it, but I think college is one of the big ones. If you want a stable life, college may help. Many people go to college. However it is not conducive to having children while you do it. Then you graduate, and move into the job market.

Except it doesn't have the stability it used to. Pensions are gone, and rewards for loyalty remain too low to be compelling most place. So people job hop to get raises. You have to make sure you earn enough to live stably and comfortably, and also fund your retirement after all. Declining real wages also mean that you hit the "comfortable and stable" stage of life later in life (if at all).

The push to equalize the gender income gap also puts downward pressure on the birth rate, imo. Pushing women to want to be mothers is wrong, but it does seem that it would increase the birth rate. It may also be harder to get to higher paying jobs while handling pregnancy and children, which could discourage having children. To be clear, I'm not blaming women, those were horrible societal acts and I don't think we should revert them, just noting that the birth rate in a more equal society might be lower.

And lastly, I think social media has taken "keeping up with the Jones" to a whole new level where you're trying to compete on a global scale. Even if you can avoid that, there are ads lurking around every corner trying to convince you to spend money on things you don't really need. I'm not against the premise of ads in general, but they're so pervasive now. You can't do anything without someone trying to convince you to buy something. I truly believe it creates more pressure to spend, which creates downward pressure on peoples' ability to save. If ads were really that easy to resist, they wouldn't be worth much, and Google would be a tiny company.

I agree with you. The only way out of this is via automation. If we have high enough automation, costs will drop despite lack of growth. In the end the world will be a stark 0.001% who own the automation and the flat 99.999% who subsist on leisure and boredom.

> In the end the world will be a stark 0.001% who own the automation and the flat 99.999% who subsist on leisure and boredom.

Leisure? Or poverty?

This strikes me as a return to the default state for much of human existence and the current reality for much of the world's population.

I agree, and here's where I have to plug the excellent "Rules for Rulers": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Basically - a bit of an oversimplification, watch the video for a full explanation - democracies only stay democracies because giving people a relatively good life happens to coincide with citizen productivity, which increases leader wealth. If a country relies on a source of revenue that itself doesn't rely on the citizenry, then improving the lives of the citizenry is more or less irrelevant to the leaders, as in authoritarian governments.

That's what makes automation so scary. At a certain point, no country will need rely on the majority of the citizenry to produce wealth. Which means we are screwed.

> I'd speculate this is because if you are either rich or poor you have stability in that your life circumstances aren't going to change that radically,

In the U.S. this may be due not to 'stability', but Medicaid.

To be clear, Medicaid benefits are a hot mess of bureaucracy. To paraphrase Voltaire: 'The point of Medicaid is to ensure that no two people are covered under the same set of rules'.

That said, Medicaid covers ~22% of the U.S. population. The Medicaid yearly income cut-off for a 2-person household is ~$57k/year. Most of the costs of a pregnancy are covered under Medicaid [0].

What are such costs? Well, again, it's very complicated, no birth is 'standard'. And googling this is going to lead to a wide range of answers. But in my local area for a first birth, one baby, no c-section, no epidural, no emergency measures, you're looking at ~$20k out of pocket. And that's with a 'good' HCP. C-sections go to ~$80k, and those are ~20% of first births in my area. Again, the costs will vary wildly depending on many factors.

Then you add in check-ups, vaccinations[1], standard illnesses, ear infections, etc. Medicaid will mostly cover these things, while anyone making more than the cut-off must pay them out of pocket with their HCP discounts, if applicable (again, caution, it's super complex bureaucracy).

The interesting thing is to look at other countries with mostly functional universal healthcare systems. What has happened to their birthrates based on income when you look at how much a mother can be expected to pay for a birth? From what I can recall, there seems to be no real difference as compared to the US, correct?

[0] https://www.growingfamilybenefits.com/medicaid-coverage-duri...

[1] They may be free, but it depends on your HCP. Sometimes the nurse to inject will bill pretty high. I've gotten ~$300 bills for vaccinations before.

I've never heard of anyone paying $80k for a c-section out of pocket, and I know a lot of people that got them. Hell, my wife had to have 2 and the total bills were around $25k, and we paid around $2k out of pocket after insurance.

Again, I'm just going off of what google returned to me about the area where I live. The costs are going to vary wildly from state to state.

> when birthrates are low we use immigration

This is why I don’t believe in ecology. Every 5% we save on water, is being used by our leaders to stuff more population on the same land.

It defeats the purpose of saving: Public policies cancel individual efforts, such as my friends who chose to have no kids for ecology.

Capitalism is a way of forwarding global constraints to individuals, and exponential house prices communicates that the territory cannot survive with more people. Yet, not only do we increase population (so all those “no kids” friends are up for disappointment), but we bring those newcomers to the levels of consumption of middle classes, using lowered prices so they can afford 70% of mid-class consumption levels.

Since our leaders break the relationship between environmental constraints and costs, by offering free housing, food and subsidized public services, people believe it is ok to be 120 people per square kilometer, and we can afford to love and welcome more people. No! Each additional individual emits greenhouse gases! We’re already emitting ~3x the affordable rate! We should have taken the naturally decreasing population to smoothly become more sustainable, but our government decided to add 0,5-1% population per year, artificially! Our land can’t afford more people!

The only solution is having fewer babies worldwide. National borders don’t stop people from moving where opportunity is.

Imposing our point of view to other countries would be neocolonialism. A country should be free to make more babies, if that come from another assignation of resources and if they have control. Unless we start that their babies is our problem (Sorry it’s a bit crude - but this topic is a minefield anyway so I’m just stepping on each of them to test them).

India or China seem to deal well with extremely high density of population (...because their political system can withstand extreme inequality/poverty), while the West’s balance is lower. But with the same density as China, Africa overflows a lot.

Maybe “their babies is our problem” is a natural consequence of the Marrakech Pact (which blurs the lines of economic migrants, paving the road to guaranteeing they can migrate)?

> public debt and entitlements mean shoring up a replacement rate population with immigration from high-birthrate societies

There are very few of these left, and the ones that still exist are also in declining fertility, even if still above replacement.

> When you look at who is having kids in the US and Canada, the families, (or specifically, women) who have 2 or more children are either exceptionally wealthy (90th+ pc) or exceptionally poor

Source?

I don't understand your view that population growth is required to manage debt. Isn't it inflation that reduces the future value of such debts?

Population growth ostensibly creates economic growth, which generates tax receipts to pay down public debt. We're about to hit a wave of massive inflation, which rewards asset owners and punishes workers and savers.

Further, I used to think that millennials were poorer than they think they are, but then it clicked they absolutely understand, and that's why they behave exactly like the poor people they subconsciously recognize they in fact are.

If you took the traditional criticisms of how the poor manage their lives you'd get things like, a lack of long term planning, blowing money on gaudy status signalling to attract other poor partners or mates, a temporary and transactional attitude to work, lots of unsecured high interest debt, hyperbolic reactions to perceived slights, superstitious beliefs, extreme promiscuity, isolating and sabotaging people who make their own way as not being authentic, a lot of people would unironically say those are racist and classist stereotypes, without seeing that they accurately describe the lives of ostensibly middle class white millennials.

They know they're poor and they're acting like it, and they have less hope than policymakers imagine. Inflation wouldn't make a difference because they don't have any savings, and they don't have assets, it's just another force they're subject to.

"So we drink and dance and screw, because there's nothing else to do..."

>They know they're poor and they're acting like it, and they have less hope than policymakers imagine. Inflation wouldn't make a difference because they don't have any savings, and they don't have assets, it's just another force they're subject to.

The entire point is that inflation forces asset owners to do something useful. Inflation is beneficial to those who are dependent on an income.

Millennials actually are less promiscuous and have sex later and less often than their previous generations.

So your points are not only classist, but wrong too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com