Baby shortfall is so bad that the labor shortage will last for years
fortune.com
fortune.com
I get that birth rates are also low in Europe so a good social safety net can't be all of the solution, but I know an awful lot of people in the US who'd like to have kids, or who'd like to have more of them, but it's such a bonkers-bad financial decision that they can't bring themselves to do it. That is, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of desire in the US to have more kids, but you're punished so badly for it that people avoid it anyway. I think fixing our healthcare system and improving our public pension scheme to something better than "if you have to rely on it, you're probably fucked" would help a ton.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/05/20/how-many-...
(for the record, I have some kids, but damn can I ever understand why people choose not to, even when they do want them)
The problem is at a young age you don't know the important things to include in your formulas or how to value them. What's it going to cost to pay someone to make decisions for you when you start having trouble making them for yourself? It's going to cost a lot to set that up with someone trustworthy ahead of time. If you've done a halfway decent job of raising your kids they will do that for free and you don't even have to set it up. They will be watching you and making sure you are ok. They will do it because they love you, not because you are paying them.
If my kids don't want to help me that's their right and I'd make other plans while asking God why I did to deserve such ungrateful kids.
Outside of euthanasia when you become physically infirm, there is no other way to live through old age.
The key was much, much lower costs for things like housing and healthcare, and a really solid union retirement package better than what even most union jobs offer these days.
Notably, money tied up in mandatory retirement schemes isn't available for use in zero-sum competition for things like housing. You might spend responsibly, but when others "defect" and sacrifice what should be retirement savings for advantage today, suddenly the housing you can afford is a bit worse than it was before (worse school district, in particular), and you're even more tempted to do the same. Repeat across an entire society and pretty soon savings rates are catastrophically low—check some savings-at-same-age charts for various generations to see this in action, the differences are huge (though that's not the only factor causing it).
Not having kids will create other problems for retirees. Retirement is fundamentally the working supporting the retired. In 1940 there were 42 workers for every retiree in the US. Today there are three and by 2030 there will be two. Three to two may not sound like a lot but that's a 50% increase.
Retirement is going to be way, way more expensive in the future.
> so a good social safety net can't be all of the solution
Total fertility(# of kids per woman) is falling basically everywhere and nobody has found a way to increase it once it starts falling.
That doesn't mean a better social safety net is a bad idea but I don't think increasing fertility is great argument for it.
It doesn’t seem to be a solution at all since European countries consistently have lower birth rates than the US.
> but I know an awful lot of people in the US who'd like to have kids, or who'd like to have more of them
I think for the most part that’s just a rationalization. Dual income no kids is just easier and fun.
I don’t understand this… you’ve immediately invalidated your own hypothesis and yet here we are…
Shifting social norms, the liberalization of society, the polar shift towards the self, has caused folks to pursue more personal, pleasurable ends than the good-pain that is raising a family.
You might shift the needle a fraction of a point with social spending here or there, but it is bailing the titanic with a bucket.
If anything, the economic policy might well be downstream of the social. Why the hell should “I” pay for “you” when it doesn’t benefit me. Or vice-versa…
He says we can fix that with immigrants. But if there is something causing people to not want to “reproduce,” it seems like that needs to be fixed. Otherwise, you’re just shifting the burden of dealing with whatever that is onto immigrants trying to raise their families here. Like, I’m glad I’m raising my kids here instead of in Bangladesh. But it’s a lonely and isolating here in comparison to the way it is back home.
Making people reproduce will take a wholesale change in the American way of life. This would include wholesale changes in food, healthcare, health insurance, housing, inequality and a general well-being of humanity. One party in our country is actively attempting to reduce liberties (this party is red in color if this is not obvious), which makes living in this country a precarious position.
As an older child-free millennial, I am living the scenario described in the article. I can assure you that my life path hasn't been easy for the first 35 years. I have zero interest in making my life even more difficult for the remaining 35, for the sake of society.
Make healthcare easy, then we'll talk. Until then, I thank immigrants in America.
Like I said, the happy-path lifestyle structure in America is not suited to reproduction. Sure we must try to fix the problem but we all know it's not going to happen soon. I am likely to die before significant changes happen.
Until then, I still want skilled labor in the right places. I will continue to welcome immigrants who fill that gap.
Long ago your kids were like a retirement policy.
Now society says that's bad. You can't and shouldn't have kids to provide for your own future. No the kids are there, in the ultimate hypocrisy, to provide for everyone elses future via compulsory taxes funding social programs. So everyone else benefits from your raising them, while you disproportionately shoulder the costs, creating a massive "free rider" problem.
I don't know why this is being downvoted. If you listen to any republican biased radio/TV, you'd hear people blaming young people all the time. It's like they hate me for not having children BECAUSE it reduces the size of the labor force.
Sorry republicans. I ain't bringing any kids to this world to serve YOU.
> If native born democrats won’t have them, then when they consume services in retirement, they’ll be free riding on republicans and immigrants.
No one is preventing Republicans from having as many babies as they want. Go ahead. Make 100s of them and train them to be skilled. If they can't, I am happy with immigrants filling the gap. The real question is, why do Republicans feel the need to ask "others" to do what they want instead of doing it themselves?
Let me introduce you to people I like to call Muslims. I was just at a wedding for the daughter of a family friend we haven’t seen in years. She comes over to our table to say hi, and my mom is like “so when are you giving us the next big news?” And she’s like “auntie, after the honeymoon” because it wasn’t a joke.
> If you truly believe in liberty, you also agree to let people live their lives.
Republicans believe in liberty from the government, not liberty from social and moral norms.
> The real question is, why do Republicans feel the need to ask "others" to do what they want instead of doing it themselves?
Because kids are a positive externality that society needs and everyone benefits from. Nobody likes it when they do the work and other people won’t carry their weight.
I don't believe Muslims is a political party. But yes, I agree that Republicans in America are closer to Muslim theological societies than western liberal societies.
> Republicans believe in liberty from the government, not liberty from social and moral norms.
And liberty from government is exactly what I seek. I don't want government telling me to produce children.
> Because kids are a positive externality that society needs and everyone benefits from. Nobody likes it when they do the work and other people won’t carry their weight.
Right. And I have been shortchanged enough in life where I also don't like that I did so much work but others didn't carry their weight. My life also matters. I am battered and I cannot afford (mentally, physically and financially) to raise children in the precarious American society. We are in agreement then that other people need to carry their weight before I start having children.
It seems more and more clear that increasingly competitive economic conditions are the reason people in the developed world have fewer kids.
And I do mean consume. These adult immigrants pay taxes into the US without having benefitted from US taxpayer provided K-12 education themselves, and we get to consume their labor without having contributed to their upbringing.
It's honestly shocking people have kids at all in the US. Any random chucklhead can call and make up whatever they like to CPS. If you get divorced, you can actually be thrown in debtors prison if you can't come up with a certain amount even if you never even spent close to that amount on the child when you were married (see American dude who was taken hostage while contracted in Iraq, he was imprisoned upon return because he didn't pay CS while being a hostage to terrorists). If you let the kid walk to the park or home you may end up with criminal charges, nevermind both parents need to be busy at work to provide the standard of care CPS requires to not take away the children. And if you're a woman in some states and you find out the kid has debilitating disease you may be forced to go all the way to term knowing you're going to wreck their life and your own.
I'm also a parent and although I fully execute my duty to the best of my abilities in the interest of the child I never found it to be particularly advantageous position to be in. You're basically on-call constantly for an often rote and laborious task and there is no guarantee you're going to enjoy it. If you do it well nobody (except if you're very luck the child) gives a fuck and if you fail or have remarkably bad luck you end up in prison. I doubt I'm the only one that just tries to enjoy it to the extent to keep my sanity, for the same reason I would try to keep smiling while in prison.
My personal advice is if someone has an enjoyable life now and don't absolutely have to have children, stop and think hard about the fact you may turn a lifestyle you enjoy into a responsibility you can't back out of.
a shrinking population is a disaster overall. productivity goes down, more elderly, social services strained, smaller taxable cohorts. the needs will still be there, the money and the people to solve them won’t.
In real life we've seen when such a city loses people or revenue, the trauma of the pullback is devastating and the bloat and corruption do not simply go away. Detroit, 1970s NYC after the suburban flight, and the people clinging to shrinking regions of Japan come to mind.
As our countries have a population pullback wealth will shrink, corners will be cut, innovation will slow, and likely more coal than ever will be burned.
Climate change, war, pollution. An endless list of problems due to humanity's greed. There is no changing the trajectory at this point. Human's are in denial about our future but we've already laid our beds.
No opinion one way or the other with regards to kids/no kids. Just thought I'd point it out :)
It seems we're trending (hopefully) to a more sustainable future. Consumerism as we know if today may not exist in the near future. If the only thing we care about is producing Food, Housing and Art/Culture; we will have plenty of people.
Everyone has a vested interest in growth. Unfortunately, many wealthy people have short-term (single lifetime) interests in the reverse.
When retirement is tied up in stocks for the majority of Americans, everyone is an investor.
1) In richer countries with better working conditions "working age" can be, and for many people has already been, extended into the 70s and 80s. "Working age" and 'retirement' are new concepts, not a fixed part of being human.
2) While so-called 'unemployment' is low, labor force participation rate has continued to drop: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab... Broken out by age: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/civilian-labor-force-particip...
Both of these things mean that there is still a lot of room to accommodate a decreasing "working age" population.
Lot's of exciting changes in store!