'Baby Bust': Why Fewer Young People Expect to Become Parents (2013)
knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu
knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu
So if you're looking at income, for 2 kids, your break-even for stay-at-home is north of 100k per year. That's absurdly high.
Combine that with infant kid rearing coinciding with the most expensive purchase of one's life (housing) and you see how impossiblly punishing it is for someone not making 200k+ in yearly income
In Georgia the ratio is 6:1 for infants. However there is a national daycare certification group NAEYC which has stricter ratios. The daycare where my kids went was NAEYC certified and the ratio was 4:1 for infants.
As someone who has a partner who spent years working in a wide variety of childcare (from "high end" to "low end"), these ratios are _routinely_ ignored. There's also significant pressure to come in when sick. She was very sick - "Well, good thing there's a bathroom in your room, huh?"
On the rare occasions they really couldn't meet staffing levels and didn't open for the day? Congratulations, everyone gets the day off! Unpaid, of course! Why, yes, we're still billing families the normal weekly/monthly rate...
If you've not had an infant with a cold, let alone a room full of them, even 4:1 is cutting pretty close. Sure, when all are healthy and happy, you can maybe go up in ratio. But when things are going not so well then infants need pretty constant care. And things are usually not going well in the winter time.
If RSV or covid is going around, even 1:1 care is pushing it. Our daycare had four in the PICU after a bout of RSV went through. Some are still on a canula, months later. That amount of phlegm really messes with the little ones.
Find a better team—that's not normal behavior.
I'm gonna say to my 7 year old daughter "hey I read this comment on hackernews .. so sorry daddy won't be there to deal with you.. cause I'm like burnt out, so I'm gonna go skiing, take care of yourself"
It's not a bad choice, but treating the consequences of that choice as a reason for slacking at work as being more valid than others when the outcome to the team is the same (i.e. less time doing work) is the issue.
Maybe you don't have a solution "in sight" because by eliminating tax analysis you're conspicuously skipping the Child Tax Credit[1], which is pretty clearly aimed right at this issue.
It doesn't make children into a revenue source or anything, but it's a real and tangible action taken by "our politicians" to address exactly the problem you claim they're ignoring.
[1] Also the Child and Dependent Care Credit, also any of the various state policies in the same realm, also the deductability of child care expenses, etc... Basically tax policy IS THE MECHANISM by which government tries to address this problem. And you totally missed it!
So the child tax care credit is $2,000 cash for each kid, then $5,000 of your child care costs are pre-tax. Criticize that all you want, but why lie about it? Or be ignorant and sanctimonious?
There's room for argument for what the right kind and amount of public assistance for child rearing should be. But blanket statements like "useless" (or no "solution in sight" upthread) seem ridiculous. Clearly there's useful aid for parents in the modern US.
The credit is $2k per kid, plus a $6k cap for the CADC credit. If you're spending $144k on care[1] this credit isn't for you. That's just ridiculous. Don't ask the federal government to pay you a 4x urban minimum wage just to have kids, that's not a good use of my tax dollars (and I say that as a fellow parent).
But a few thousand dollars to help out folks on the margin can absolutely keep people in the workforce and out of poverty. Just don't expect your boutique day care in Sunnyvale or whatever to be a free ride.
[1] You clearly aren't. You're just confused about the generosity of this benefit, or more likely make too much and are on the phase-out schedule for high income taxpayers.
The CADC goes down based on income, and I think it is superseded by the DCFSA at higher incomes, although that magic always alludes me in TurboTax.
That doesn't obviate the point that the US federal government provides really quite reasonable (if not super generous by western standards) child care benefits, and thus all the hyperbole above ("no solution", "useless", etc...) is basically wrong.
So techies are even less likely to reproduce, because as you say, no one is interested in encouraging them and the HCOL areas they live in have wicked child care costs. So maybe we should just be happy with our below replacement birth rate, and figure out other ways to live in a world worth increasingly fewer people?
But there is no reason for the cost of childcare to go up and up. Literally just enable better pregnancy/parenthood laws and create an abundance of childcare centers so that costs can go lower.
If you want childcare to be cheaper for parents it must be subsidized, or we need higher unemployment to make childcare a more attractive field (though I’d argue you don’t want people caring for your kids out of desperation for a job), or we must make housing cheaper/less competitive so that people can afford to do this out of passion.
I think it’s worth it from a societal standpoint, though.
There is also a surprisingly significant administrative burden, so you typically need administrators to handle things like state licensing compliance (including surprise inspections), parent communication, teacher scheduling, billing, payroll and all that entails, cleaners, scheduling and contracts for photographers and activities, new enrollment, tours, marketing efforts, insurance, etc. These are typically older teachers, so they’re not the most technically savvy group, and perhaps less productive when tech is involved than you might think. And parents expect to be able to text them, pay online, etc nowadays, so they have to use some tech. But the upshot is sometimes they can pinch-hit to meet your ratios.
SaaS has gotten surprisingly expensive, too, that was sucking a big hole in our budget when I first started helping out, and while I’ve trimmed it significantly, it’s still surprising how greedy they are compared to eg 5 years ago (looking at you, Gusto). Ditto thinks like online payments with credit cards, had to put a stop to that asap.
The school I help with is a nonprofit, so there are no shareholders, and the building is a little more than 10% of our operating budget, so it’s not landlords. There is no “excess money” for us, but maybe there is in one of the corporate operations.
I generally think early childhood care should be better subsidized in the US.
If we're going to be brutually economic about it: Are you invested in stocks or bonds at all? If our population collapsed, so would those. Today's investors' wealth is tied to the success of future generations.
That's brutally market-oriented. The brutal economics looks like starvation.
Procreation is a choice on an individual level but on a societal level it is not a choice at all, it is absolutely mandatory. So, someone's got to do it, and if you're not going to do it, then it's not unreasonable for you to contribute to others who are doing it.
Furthermore, if you benefit from future workers in any way in the future without having kids of your own, if you did not help pay for those kids then you're effectively benefiting from something you didn't do shit for: namely raising those kids who became workers who ended up paying for your pension, keeping the lights on, keeping your ETFs growing, paying for your healthcare, etc., etc... So you should pay, or you should have kids.
It absolutely is not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Mov...
If you're a 12 year old teenager who doesn't know anything about society and economics.
If you apply this logic to any resource that is being paid for collectively (like roads or maybe safety/rescue service), but not being used by everyone at all times, it becomes very evident why "others" pay for something that benefits the collective.
Your future living situation may be in part dependent on the economic strength of the nation you're living in, and thus there's collective onus on ensuring that future. It's reasonable to believe that one ingredient in a vibrant economy is people, sufficiently many doing sufficiently interesting and valuable things. At the end of the day, the only way to have future people is to have children now. Thus, collectively, we should be interested in supporting the work of building future generations to be sufficiently populous, vibrant, and motivated, even if we are motivated only by our own future wellbeing.
And I suppose you can magnify this argument to the degree that you feel collective responsibility toward our shared civilizations. And negate it to the degree that you believe we'll someday within your practical lifespan achieve miraculous technology like functional and practical immortality.
The problem isn't that people in the West need to make greater sacrifices than their ancestors did. It's that they no longer want to make small ones. The price tag you mention is what you pay if you don't want to make any lifestyle changes. Not moving closer to one's parents, so that they could provide child care. Not cutting down discretionary spending, not giving up on career goals.
I'm not saying this to judge people, but I think the fallacy here is that we assume things would improve if we offered longer parental leaves, child subsidies, state-run childcare, or whatever - but in every country where such programs are implemented, they don't really make any difference. There may be other reasons to do it, but I guess the only tried and true way to fix fertility is famine and war...
Moralization of having kids (and birth control) also has a large impact on this—it's not uncommon to hear younger folks say they don't believe it's ethical to have kids.
Exactly, countries like Sweden have implemented a lot of policies to help parents. The current fertility rate is 1.8 (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SWE/sweden/fertility-r...).
also, take in account that immigrants from poorer countries can usually boost fertility rate of their new country... but the general trend reverts to the local (previous) average as soon as the new citizens get accustomed to the local society and habits.
- People have kids as retirement plans.
- There's religious and instituional pressures to have more kids. Most people don't think about how they're brainwashed by instituions that have a political motive to expand their group size. The end result is that someone that doesn't have kids is heavily scrutinized. Made even worse in societies where your 'face' and reputation are everything since things like the legal system might not be as strong.
- The minimums for raising a kid in the west is much different. You simply can't just have 8 kids and send them off their chimney sweeping jobs when they turn 12. You can't just have the kids, and wander off to the bar all night while their 13 year old sibling watches them.
- Western countries also put a lot of emphasis on sex education and provide resources like contraceptives.
It’s also about risk. In developed societies, it’s still somewhat reasonable (though this is starting to wane) for a couple with dual incomes to be able to establish themselves well enough that the risk of being put out on the street is minimal. Once even a single kid enters the picture however, this changes; the required income level for both parents to both provide the desired quality of care for the child and achieve reasonable insurance against financial disaster is quite high and well above the earning potential of a huge percentage (probably the majority) of the population. How much the parents are willing to sacrifice has little bearing on this.
The impoverished aren’t as affected by this because they’re already living on knife’s edge, and having kids won’t change that much. A poorer population boosts birthrates but making people poorer is not how nations should go about fixing their population problems.
Aside from that, I feel that it’s a mischaracterization to pose giving up on who a person had been prior to becoming a parent (career goals, etc) as “small”. It’s anything but minor and among the biggest course changes a person can make, and in a well functioning society one shouldn’t need to choose between the two — one should be able to continue to pursue their goals mostly unencumbered and be a parent, and the only reason this isn’t possible now I believe comes down to the benefits of the vast productivity improvements of the past several decades only being reaped by a select few at the top.
Lack of birth control.
> The problem isn't that people in the West need to make greater sacrifices to raise children.
The problem is that the standard that you’re expected to meet in raising a child is significantly higher. Is it biologically required that you have full time coverage of someone watching your toddler? No. Is it legally required? Yes. Do most grandparents want to be live in caretakers to young children? No, they have better things to do. Do you have to pay a fortune for the service? Yes.
Is it biologically required to meet a certain standard of living to raise a child, a standard that generally requires 2 parents salaries in the west? No. Is it legally required? No, but you might sets them up for failure later in life, and means they’ll struggle too when they get to be your age.
The whole thing is people who want to be parents have a drive to make sure their kids live at least as good a life as they did (or at least should).
If that seems financially hopeless in the west… we have effective birth control and can delay until it is possible.
Sometimes the point in time when you are financially stable enough to have children is also the point at which you are biologically unable to have them (everything is more difficult after ~35 or so). If there’s no promise of financial stability any time is as good as any other.
Fixing the “problem”is a complicated mix of social/psychological problems and financial problems related to wealth inequality. Blaming millennials or whoever for being selfish is a bad take.
It’s also often not feasible even in cases where grandparents (or other relatives) are willing, due to the modern necessity for people to move to where employment prospects (and/or other economic factors, e.g. housing costs) are best, separating families with great distances.
The OP did not blame them or call them selfish. He just pointed out that we have tried a lot of proposals to make it easier for parents and they have not solved the problem. People over focus on the financial side without taking into account the emotional side.
(OP quote: "I'm not saying this to judge people, but I think the fallacy here is that we assume things would improve")
The thing to compare is societies with birth control and higher rates of reproduction vs those with lower. Comparing with or without easily accessed birth control doesn’t tell us much.
Why, for example, is South Korea’s birth rate so much lower than France or the USA?
Very authoritarian cultures that forbid birth control are also less relevant.
This part ain't correct, if you actually traveled properly in such places you would find much better community/family support for raising kids compared to typical western young couple situation. I ain't saying every single young family is better off like this, but on average the difference is often staggering.
What I mean - for us, both having high intensity jobs that required 17+ years of hard studies and moving across various parts of Europe, going from couple/married but without children into having 2 small kids a massive shock in every single aspect of life since we raise them largely on our own, families are very far. Families in such places face on average significantly less shock in such situation, mostly they continue in their lives as before (the guy) and women take care of kids for some time as is expected. Of course this is slowly changing into that western model as people get better white collar jobs in big cities.
Does it? I would argue that, in societies where a woman is not expected to work anyway (either due to cultural limitations or lack of jobs or both), the relative sacrifice required to raise a child is less than in the West.
Add to that that it's more common in those societies to have multi-generational households, with readily available (and also jobless) grandparents.
The expectations of what should be provided to a child are also much smaller, for better or for worse.
The difference is that (in addition to birth control) in those situations having children does not really make a material difference (barring extreme food shortages). There's no career to heed, usually no mortgage or daycare to pay, there's no cars so no need to worry about getting that SUV, education is also not always a primary concern. The family just makes do with where they would have lived and pack in a few more kids. The main extra cost is feeding a few more mouths, which is usually manageable. But sometime down the line the children can help around the house or supplement family income.
This also translates to other things, if people are having families in their early 20s, the third generation has relatively young grandparents. If they're having them in the late 20s, early 30s, the third generation has grandparents who are in their 60s and not as capable of chasing after toddlers all day.
Being expected to give up on career goals also comes down to the same issue, when you're primarily focused on staying afloat, your career goals are also just to not have things get worse.
Famine or war would not reverse this in the West, unless it was at apocalyptic levels such as to cause a total cultural reset back to a society where women are seen as child factories first.
In the middle is a group who would actually lose a lot by having children, so they don't.
It's funny that you describe fertility as something which needs to be fixed. I see it as a very fortunate thing that humanity is voluntarily choosing to stop expanding its population in a situation of global ecological overshoot.
You must have reserves and be mobilised like a warrior in every aspect – financially, mentally, physically.
It's not just post-tax for you, daycare providers also pay taxes so it's a double whammy. Most European countries give you a tax credit (which would help a lot more than tax deductions) and have special generous tax schemes for the providers themselves to ensure they get licensed & declare their revenues. Without these schemes, you end up with the current situation where upper-class folks hire nannies under the table and essentially stiff the government instead.
France had the same issue and fought it successfully in the 80s by making sure providers make more money by being declared and licensed. It would not that hard with enough federal government intervention. Which will likely not happen because white Americans still think more like German people ("why would you be a working mom") than French people ("why would you stay at home").
People often consider their desires to be prime movers, when there they are perfectly aligned with the systems of incentives they inhabit.
This is the true lesson of malthus' principle of population, not the narrow take that humans exhaust the planet and therefore doomed to extinction.
Of course low-income groups also suffer from lack of access to contraception, so it's not as straightforward, but that is the birds' eye overview of how it typically works.
I'm also suspicious that "wealthier" countries are subjected to more substances which disrupt fertility than poorer countries.
This isn't to mention the fact that having children completely upends your time. Hobbies and free time are seldom available after children. This affects both parents, and it feels like people really don't want to give these things up these days. Really, short of parents constantly pushing you to have kids, there doesn't seem to be a lot of motivation to have kids.
At least children will be yours. Whatever you do on your job will belong to somebody else. Somebody else is going to reap all that career growth of yours. You will get an insignificant amount of money for the effort, that you will be forced to spend on way overpriced things.
Everyone in my generation X generation said they wouldn’t have children. We still laugh about that at the toddler play dates. We are older than our parents when we had kids. But you get to a point where the things that drive you earlier in your career make less a difference once you’ve achieved them, and life takes priority over changing the world in some way. You realize the world overall can be changed during working hours, but the most impact you’ll ever have is in the world of the children in your life. Finally you realize 72 hours of work a week isn’t more effective than 35 hours balanced with a human life on the rest.
I actually feel quite fortunate these days (for a number of reasons) that I never wanted children (also for a number of reasons); if I had I can imagine that it would be quite a disappointment at how it has become ever more infeasible.
I think the change the world mentality is distinctly GenX, and arguably we did pretty profoundly. I know my career changed a lot of things for many people. But you hear time and time again from people who had great careers or impacted the world in some way that the changes that mattered most to them were the ones they made at home with their family.
That said, I can say that while I may in theory be able to afford a kid today, I couldn't after a layoff, which does happen to me sometimes. Frankly, I like my current employment, but I'm starting to get some bad vibes sadly. The thing is that kids need support for like 2 decades and it's hard to imagine a job lasting that long. I always remember the scene from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life" where the dad walks in and tells the kids he can't afford them anymore so he's going to sell them to science, and I can at least find it all pretty amusing.
My grandmother lived in a family of five kids and her parents were unemployed (her father was disabled in a factory accident in the 1920’s) during the Great Depression and homeless. Most of the world is considerably poorer yet have more children. You can afford to have children, they’re only expensive if you lavish wealth on them. That’s not strictly necessary, education is free. What people usually mean is they don’t want to sacrifice their standard of living or disrupt their way of life. That’s fair - but literally everyone can afford to have kids, that’s why so many kids are born into poverty yet reach adulthood. :-)
I suppose I am currently mildly homeless which does tend to make the thought a bit harder. Also, as a man, I am not able to make children no matter how much money I'm given; there are other things necessary that I do not have. Anyway, the idea really just does seem infeasible for a few reasons - money is just one of them.
But, there is nothing quite like raising a new life, one that for whom you loom as large as your parents loom for you, for better or worse. Your choice as to which. Maybe your parents were worse. But you can be better. That’s powerful stuff man, and worth it.
I am profoundly sorry to hear about your struggles. I have had my own that are enough to curl anyone’s hair. A king once called a Buddhist monk and ordered him to give him the most valuable treasure that can be. The monk took the crown off his head and inscribed in it “this too shall pass.”
You must either be right at the tail end of Gen X, or you had kids REALLY late. I'm in the middle of Gen X, didn't have a kid until I was 35, and my kid is about to turn 18.
The broader sense of the world is an intellectual exercise. The world is a spinning ball of uncaring rock covered in a crust of self replicating carbon structures. You might slightly perturb the movements of that crust in some remote way, they might even shape some rocks to look like your long gone carbon structure, but you don’t change anything at that scale.
At a certain point your local experience and the present matter more. Particularly the stronger influence you’ve had on the world at large the more empty it feels in the end, because you are still you, you still only live 24 hours a day, there is no score, no game over you won screen, and the impact that matters most to you is the way your children look at you as you take your last breath.
By all means make the world better for all man. But realize for you it’s nothing, literally. For your own world, there is no greater impact than your child.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
>His legacy is one of inventing the two chemicals that did the greatest environmental damage. Environmental historian J. R. McNeill stated that he "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history." Author Bill Bryson remarked that he possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny." Science writer Fred Pearce described him as a "one-man environmental disaster".
I alao thought that getting education outside of public one-size-fits-all school was a conservative thing (religious schools, private schools) - especially if enabled by a voucher. Is that is what politics are about?
Economical concerns are surely part of the equation but I also suspect that in Western Culture adults tend to have a more individualistic stance and this could also be a factor.
What I mean is: as soon as we start getting some sort of economic independence we tend to focus on our own hobbies, travels, interests. Those of us who are lucky enough in being in a long lasting relationship would hopefully do this together... but we are always aware that the moment a child enters our life, we can forget most of it, at least for a decade.
> It’s not to say that everyone is in a good position to have kids.
Yes, I'd say that it's up to each individual to determine that, and it seems that more and more are deciding that they are not.
It is probably both a subconscious thing that - along with other factors - will make you postpone the decision until it is either too late, or your spouse somehow puts you in front of an ultimatum.
As I said in another message I have living proof that things can work out fine among relatives and friends both, so I am sure that it could be done. Neither me nor my MSO (Most Significant Other) were really into the idea of having children though, so we passed.
C'est la vie, and la vie est belle.
It takes work and energy, and we do some things differently than we used to, we’ve had to relearn some things, but it’s not putting the fun parts of life on pause for 10 years. You adapt, and still have a lot of fun, and you get to see these little people learn and grow, which is amazing. Ours are in a pun-making phase, which is hilarious and terrible.
Your observations are valid, but you can't just sidestep the financial aspect of it, my dude. This is, like, 70% of the hardship of having kids from what I've found. Like this:
> If we need to drive 9 hours, we might break that into three days, and visit places that are about 3 hours apart. If we fly somewhere and it’s long, we try to go to immediately go to a hotel as close as possible to the airport so that we can all conk out if we need to.
Is straight up not possible for a family of 3 or more with a total household income of less than $150k in the US. On-premise airport hotels that aren't complete chaos are usually $200/night and many people in the US get hardly any vacation time (which is a whole other problem in its own right).
I’ve never wanted children (vehemently so) but my SO needed some convincing and it’s something I struggle with, I’m not sure if it’s really what she wants or my desires are just too strong. We’ve had this conversation between us of course and she’s not really sure either, she thinks she’ll be fine though.
I’d love to hear your perspective.
Do you feel like you’ve accomplished more than your peers? Led a more fulfilling and liberating life that allowed you to focus on yourselves? Or did that get old past age 40?
I often feel that I did not manage to accomplish enough, personally. But:
- I know people who are immensely more affluent than me (high school fellows) who did not have any child, either, and did not need to work. For me they accomplished even less than me.
- On the other hand, both my sister (who is 3 years older and has a son) and another friend of mine (former colleague) I would say made good use of their time and resources, because they lived what to me looks like a full life, managed to pursuit their interests, cultivate hobbies etc... and also raised a decent human adult on top, which is quite an achievement in itself.
What I am trying to say is "if I had won scientific or sport prizes or written a successful book... maybe I could say this would have been impossible if I had to take care of one (or more probably more than one) child". And I cannot even say that I decided to not have children because I was focused on winning a Nobel (or developing my startup, or become a renowned martial artist...) and yet EVEN WITHOUT THE CHILD I failed for some other reason.
I have a normal life, some stuff I did may seem huge to others (assuming they share some of my interests) but while I can dream of having the money of my former schoolmate and say "boy, what I could have done if I were in his place" I am pretty sure that nobody is thinking "wow, if I had lived a childen-free adulthood like Pamar...".
I am not regretting it (maybe I'll soon do when it is time to retire, will keep you posted) but I would never say to anyone "if you want to live your life to the fullest, like me, forget having children", either.
But no one seems willing to suggest that maybe people today are just so self centered, that they don't want such a distraction from minecraft/halo/call of doodoo.
If people can't manage to look out of the windshield of the car they're driving for more than 11 seconds at a stretch, because it's distracting from their cell phone usage, when their life is literally endangered, why would they choose to take on a lifelong commitment to another child besides themselves?
If a society wants healthy familles it can choose to have them.
> If a society wants healthy familles it can choose to have them.
So what is Switzerland doing wrong that it needs to fix so it can do better than the USA at least?
Immigration.
Not necessarily wrong but why some countries have higher birth rates. Subsidize current citizens costs for more natural born citizens. More people/workers - immigration.
Maybe this would be a better link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#Replace...
I was trying to answer to the reply and not denigrate Switzerland in any way. Expensive travel magnets though.
Getting together regularly with family or friends is usually very healthy. I suggest people watch the documentary “Happy” 2012 by Roko Belic. It was introduced in a class to help with stress among many other supportive topics.
This is a classic area where government support would make a huge difference: don’t have a bunch of small businesses competing with Starbucks on rent, and have things like healthcare paid for out of a huge pool of employees.
So to begin thinking about having kids you'd need to make a few very hard choices: 1. forget of owning a home in your life time based on a regular salary 2. earn at least +1.5K AUD/month per child
Sometimes it's easier for a parent to stay at home and usually it's the woman, because when the children are small they are better taken care by her. So it's at least 1 - 1.5 year off work. After that before children grow at least to 3-4 years old it's always going to a doctor or needing time to stay at home with the child. This disadvantages the career of a person staying at home and you need that second income to pay for the childcare.
People aren't stupid, that's why when the going gets tough they don't want to have additional problems to worry about.
So that being said, barring childcare (and major health problems which are very rare), my kids are almost completely subsidized by the US government.
They cost me (by my own estimate) about $30,000 in marginal non-discretionary spending - housing, clothing, food, transportation, medical visits, etc.
(There's also lessons, vacations, arts and crafts, holiday gifts and the like, but those are highly variable and my own choice.)
My tax burden without 4 dependents is nearly $28,000 higher than with them.
Just anecdata (I also call major shenanigans on the "$1 million" needed to raise a kid" meme ... so far I've racked up 42 "kid-years" on ~ $1 million total net income And I'm doing a lot better financially than I was when I first became a dad....)
Mr. Friedman should interview the women after their biological window has closed, and see if there answers have changed. Not doing so is ignoring the full picture of how we conceptualize an idea like having children over the course of our entire lives.
At least the baby shortage will help with the teacher shortage.
This will never fly because blah blah reasons blah blah inequity, etc. But seems would help incentivize productive parents.
So, the same as today basically? It's been this way nearly my entire life and I'm middle aged.
I’d personally rather fund more children and new families, then whatever the hell happened in the past five years with the deficit. More people means more future tax payers as well.
Let me help there. Everyone's to pay. But let's make that clear as the statement implied whoever is demanding higher demography would fund it, by some miracles.
I'm not myself against funding the future of the civilization our lineage built. But we are already taxed significantly, more so to fund wars from what I see. already gave up properly financing a solid health care and education system.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/117-2022/h385
I'm sure you can find more data yourself, Google search isn't that far gone yet.
Steelmanning, it would be interesting to hear from the opposition why they don't support the bill. For example, I could see an opponent argue that this is not something that should be done at the Federal level, and such an argument would not make that person "love[s] the idea of limiting access to contraception" as GP has asserted. I could also see some unease about defining it as a "right" because that can have significant legal implications.
> Conservatives love the idea of limiting access to contraception and abortion
It's obvious that Conservatives are mostly against abortion, but what about contraception in general? Are there some non-fringe Conservatives that are coming out in favor of legal restrictions on condoms or birth control pills or similar?
A lot of things in politics can be murky. US republican votes on certain issues, is not one of them. If this stuff is obvious to me, and I don't even live there, I have to wonder how it is you can be so under-informed to genuinely think that Republican legislators are not against the restriction of contraception.
If this stuff is obvious to you, and you don't even live here, then perhaps you're oversimplifying the issue and making some unsubstantiated conclusions.
What are some of the arguments against the bill that you evaluated before you concluded that they "love the idea of limiting access to contraception?" Did you actually look at those arguments before you concluded that there couldn't possibly be any other reason for opposing the bill than that they love limiting access?
I would agree that there probably are some of them who do want to limit access, but the original claim of "Conservatives love the idea of limiting access to contraception" needs a lot more substantiation than what we've been given, and clearly has burden of proof on it.
In the House, it was voted for by 100% of Democrats, and voted against by 96% of Republicans. The text, in full, if you want to read it is here: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/hr8373/text
It's not very long. I've read it. It is the answer to what you want to know, straight from the horses mouth. There is no uncertainty or middle-man telling you how to interpret things. Just read it, and then consider that 96% of Republicans did not wish for that bill to go to congress.
You can then try to surmise what plausible reasoning they might have had to object. Just be somewhat critical, otherwise you'll just reaffirm what you already wanted to believe.
Don't know what else I can suggest on this matter.
> A person has a statutory right under this Act to obtain contraceptives and to engage in contraception, and a health care provider has a corresponding right to provide contraceptives, contraception, and information related to contraception.
The outcome of the vote is pretty clear and convincing evidence of how the Republican Party feels about this issue.
> (1)Contraception
> The term contraception means an action taken to prevent pregnancy, including the use of contraceptives or fertility-awareness based methods, and sterilization procedures.
Abortion is an action taken to prevent pregnancy, so to me this law includes a right to an abortion. Again, if you think abortion is equivalent to birth control pills or condoms, then sure the conclusion that republicans just love the idea of restricting "contraception" seems clear. But if you see any difference or nuance between the two, which I think is pretty reasonable, then there's a pretty good explanation of why they voted against it: They think abortion is murder. They are against murder. You can disagree with them that it's murder, but it's quite disingenuous to suggest that they just love restricting contraception unless you also clarify that by "contraception" you mean "abortion."
Nonsense. The literal meaning of the word "contraception" is "to prevent conception." Abortion, by definition, takes place after conception (i.e., pregnancy), and that's the whole reason anti-abortionists have concerns about it. Don't conflate the two concepts to suit your own ends.
The real reason that conservatives want to restrict access to contraception are far more sinister than this, but I won't get into that in a public forum.
Because I try very, very hard not to believe things without evidence, and I haven't seen any evidence yet. From my sibling comment on this law, this bill would have guaranteed the right to an abortion because the way they define contraceptive includes abortion. This then seems like evidence that Conservatives love the idea of restricting abortion (which they absolutely do). It is a fallacy of composition to say they favor restricting contraceptives. If you do that, you may as well broaden the category more and say they love restricting health care, or that they love to restrict free market transactions, though such is clearly not warranted because generally speaking conservatives hate the idea of restricting free market transactions (unless they're jailing people simply for ingesting plants (an allusion to the war on drugs, which they definitely seem to love, but I digress)).
Nonsense. The two terms are clearly defined in the bill and neither of them are defined as any acts, drugs, or devices that would take place or be utilized after conception (i.e., pregnancy).
(1)
Contraception
The term contraception means an action taken to prevent pregnancy, including the use of contraceptives or fertility-awareness based methods, and sterilization procedures.
(2)
Contraceptive
The term "contraceptive" means any drug, device, or biological product intended for use in the prevention of pregnancy, whether specifically intended to prevent pregnancy or for other health needs, that is legally marketed under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, such as oral contraceptives, long-acting reversible contraceptives, emergency contraceptives, internal and external condoms, injectables, vaginal barrier methods, transdermal patches, and vaginal rings, or other contraceptives.
Following this line of thought though, does this mean that if someone is against teachers providing gun education classes, then they are in favor of restricting or eliminating gun rights? There would definitely be some overlap, probably even mostly, but I could see someone arguing that gun rights are important but school isn't the most appopriate place for that to be taught.
I'm not going to have a conversation with someone who won't argue in good faith. There's obviously a middle ground here that starts at puberty that you purposely chose to ignore.
But regardless, my second point doesn't depend at all on the age group. So sure, ad hominem is an easy way to avoid having to reconcile uncomfortable logic.
Your second point was a ridiculous attempt to bring guns into the conversation. "Gun rights" are a uniquely American concept and have nothing to do with understanding one's own body, sexuality and reproduction. These concepts are not just universal human concerns; they are core to the functioning of the animal kingdom.
"In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote in concurrence. “Because any substantive due process decision is 'demonstrably erroneous,' we have a duty to 'correct the error' established in those precedents"'
and many sibling posts have cover the current legislative initiatives to restrict birth control.
So yes, the far-right does want to roll back access to birth control, the right to marriage equality, the right to privacy between consenting adults. The American far-right wants a big brother government enforcing their personal morality on the whole country, right into our bedrooms and bathrooms.
I think an employer like Hobby Lobby doing that is gross, but it's not as simple as you've made it sound.
As a point of comparison, the Supreme Court wouldn't take up a hypothetical case filed by a company that refused to provide nursing rooms, because Republicans don't oppose breastfeeding at work (yet...)
So, it seems reasonable then that someone could be supportive of Hobby Lobby in this case because they highly value the right to religious freedom, rather than because they "love restricting contraception."
This is not what evidence shows. Should you have some showing otherwise, though, please provide it.
Nobody has pointed out any examples that are for contraceptives like condoms or birth control pills, but don't include abortions. All the examples have lumped in abortions as "contraceptives," which is a fallacy of composition (contraceptives is a much broader category than abortion is). Yes, conservatives are generally speaking very much against abortion because they believe it is murder. They do love to restrict murder. They do not (at least not that I've seen any evidence for) love to restrict condoms or birth control pills.
> You seem to be implying that conservatives support contraception. > This is not what evidence shows. Should you have some showing otherwise, though, please provide it.
No, I'm not claiming that at all. I don't think (at a public/policy level) most conservatives give a rats ass for or against condoms or birth control pills.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGfNZiCWW7c
It's in Russian, but subtitles with auto translation work great. And you can just check this website:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/russian-federation/
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/
https://www.populationpyramid.net/india/
Even before current war Russia had almost 1,000,000 death tall to COVID-19 and now likely close to 1M people left the country in recent migration waves and a lot of them will never come back. And war loses just tip of the iceberg.
It’ll be interesting to see what China does when their demographic crunch comes. Mao famously claimed any decimation by the USSR, would be countered by Chinese women pumping out massive amounts of new babies to compensate.
From what I understand, the success has been very limited.
The Mao claim sounds like classic Mao logic. Did he plan for toddler division to spearhead the counter attack?
Right now, the rich are disproportionately punished for having children while the poor are basically paid for it. How about flip flopping that?
Whom you are talking about are upstart "upper middle" who have a good wage but no capital of their own, and the rich are generally happy to have them thrown under the bus rather than face them as equals.
The method of throwing under the bus is have them overwork for a wage and then second job to waste that wage on "fueling economic growth". Not turning these into anything permanent.
Universal health care would also be a huge boon, the costs of providing health care are quite high.
In the past our society seemed a lot more inclined to share and pool resources to raise the next generation... now it feels like society will only do the bare minimum to prevent kids from dying, but other than that isn't eager to take on a communal parenting role, instead forcing the entire burden on parents.
You can be like "well then they shouldn't have such high expectations, expect and accept a lifestyle drop, and send their kids to public school" but you're yelling at a river to change course.
systems are about incentives and our current system in the US has us in a death spiral, immigration is used as a short-term stopgap to reduce impact of low birth rates but just accelerates the death spiral in the long term
You'd have to pay a lot of individuals to have babies and then become full-time parents. Not only is that expensive, it seems inefficient. Our society structures childrearing like that only because women used to have a lower status and had to perform unpaid labor and bear children whether they wanted to or not (edit: and then later, it was still unthinkable not to have children; only now has that sentiment been becoming less common).
It reminds me of how the American South had an economy that was inefficient because they relied on slavery. They wouldn't have been able to pay all those slaves the full value of their labor anyway, so after slavery ended, they had to find some other ways to get that labor (e.g. sharecropping) and also restructure their whole economy over the course of a hundred years to become more industrialized.
I predict that either we'll find some way to make people want to have babies and raise kids intrinsically again, or we'll restructure the whole economy to pay people for the labor of childrearing and bearing children, integrating it into the market-based economy somehow.
It’s a bit controversial, since there was at the same time an opposite effect in central/Eastern Europe:
> The decline of serfdom in Western Europe has sometimes been attributed to the widespread plague epidemic of the Black Death, which reached Europe in 1347 and caused massive fatalities, disrupting society.[2] Conversely, serfdom grew stronger in Central and Eastern Europe, where it had previously been less common (this phenomenon was known as "second serfdom").
People saw kids as a source of income through all the history. It's just that the modern ethical liberal sees somebody else's kids in that role.
I can't speak for anyone besides myself, but my anecdote is: I was a DINK (Dual-Income; No Kids) for a long time. Both the wife and I earned well. I thought I didn't want kids (I didn't not want kids either). Wife got preggers, she quit her job to be a SAHM. This cut our household income in half. We have to live on a strict budget now, but, given the option, I would never want more money and fewer kids. I want many more kids.
It's absurdly expensive to raise kids, especially before they're school age, and I spent a lot of 2023 unemployed. I am very happy that I didn't have to worry about an infant while also looking for a job.
[1] I'm sure not all of them are bad but what I saw was calling kids "cum goblins" and the like, acting like they're some kind of blight on the world.
Less pressure on the housing market, so maybe owning a home becomes actually feasible for regular people. Hopefully, prices come down enough so that renting stops being a thing.
Lowers labor supply, thus increasing competition for it, especially, hopefully, in the lower salary bracket. Or maybe, even better, less of human life would be wasted mopping floors and what not, because hiring some sucker is cheaper than buying a robot or whatever.
Less people means less pollution and general toll on the surroundins (less water used for irrigation, less overfishing and so on).
Hopefully motivating people to get children includes making raising them suck less for those, who decide to have them.
Less disposable lives means higher cost and lower probability of armed conflicts.
Obviously it brings problems of it's own. Thing is, people not having children has probably more to do with some sort of societal crisis, than with better access to contraception, sex ed and what not. Population has exploded in the last 100 years, maybe it was a bubble of sorts all along, and now it's starting to burst?
Anyways, fine by me. We either make living suck less, or make less people go through that. Seems like a win-win to me.
People with moderate incomes can barely afford to house and feed themselves, even with a partner. Introduce a dependent child into the mix and the subsequent ~30% increase in fixed expenses and it is easy to see why fewer and fewer people are having children.
Personally I wouldn’t want children because of the increasingly bleak outlook for humanity. Climate change is looking increasingly dire, and fascism is seeing a frightening upswing.
Here’s an interesting recent interview on the topic with a leading Finnish demographer: (Financial Times, paywall)
https://www.ft.com/content/500c0fb7-a04a-4f87-9b93-bf65045b9...
Twenty years ago, Finland appeared to have it all. The birth rate was rising and the proportion of women in the labour force was high. Policymakers from around the world, including the UK and east Asia, came to learn about the Nordic model behind it: world class maternity care; generous parental leave; a right to pre-school childcare.
But maybe they got it wrong. Despite all the support offered to parents, Finland’s fertility rate has fallen nearly a third since 2010. It is now below the UK’s, where the social safety net is more limited, and only slightly above Italy’s, where traditional gender roles persevere.
“The strange thing with fertility is nobody really knows what’s going on. The policy responses are untried because it’s a new situation. It’s not primarily driven by economics or family policies. It’s something cultural, psychological, biological, cognitive.”
At the Family Federation, Rotkirch oversees a unique series of surveys, which ask young people not just how many children they are planning to have, but how many they would ideally like to have.
Her findings suggest that children do not fit into many millennials’ life plans. Once it was a sacrifice not to have children; now starting a family means sacrificing independence. “In most societies, having children was a cornerstone of adulthood. Now it’s something you have if you already have everything else. It becomes the capstone.”
I'm sorry, but which part of Europe would that be? People cannot afford a house and rents are going up like crazy, energy is expensive, taxes are high..?
But the overall trend of shrinking fertility is unmistakable over a substantially longer period than just the past few years. There isn’t a direct link to the economy, as the Finnish demographic researcher explains in the interview I linked.
Beg your pardon? Have you seen the price of real estate/child care/energy/... in Europe?
The cost of having and raising a child in Finland is minimal compared to the U.S.
2. That's cool for Finland, but Finland is not necessarily representative of Europe as a whole;
3. And even though, ‶better than the US for a someone who's socially high enough to be able to work in NY″ is probably not representative of the average Finn, and still does not make it ‶great″.
I dont know about for whole EU, but I have friends in Germany / Spain and even people who are both working on some middle IT positions can hardly afford 2 bedroom appartment and a car after taxes. Situation is much worse in poorer countries like Poland or expensive one like Switzerland.
Also I lived in UK and have family there. It's not quite EU, but rich country nontheless. And a lot people struggle there just to pay their mortage because with high interest rates their repayments also spiked almost 2x.
Friends of mine are on high IT salaries that when average Joe with non-IT offline job making 30% less money. And job market is brutal there too - if you lose your job it's possible to find new one, but you'll land on lower salary.
I think I read an article about Korea that attributed the precipitous drop in birthrate to an advertising campaign that equated children to being a burden in order to lower what was at the time a very high birthrate.
To my mind, the most likely reason is that for most people having kids is not a priority. Need more money, worried about climate change/terrorism/fear-in-vogue, etc.
I have two kids, they were born when I was in my 30's. I wish that I could have had them earlier...you are able to recover more when you are younger.
But the actual cost of having a child is food off your plate, second hand clothes, and a stay at home parent.
The problem is that is probably not the lifestyle upper middle class people want.
That's the big issue. Middle class households today need both parents working to afford a decent home, 2 cars, and health insurance.
Of course many could downsize to a smaller home, 1 car, fewer vacations, etc. But those are the financial trade offs that increasingly fewer couples seem to want to make.
Something tells me not.
And why is this is a question we should answer. Inability to afford birth control? Sex as the one redeeming "happy" thing after slaving away for a guy who wears a suit 5 days per week? Religion also plays a part -- lots of mainstream religions eschew birth control such as condoms and lots of poor people are religious. Are they poor because they have so many kids?
The guy is doing okay -- his income is somewhere over $200k/year -- but this expense is a _big_ fraction of his total income. For him, childcare costs are basically the difference between leasing a new Ferrari and living in a mansion, and buying clothes from Ross and begging his parents for money. (Which, I've learned, he does.)
There are two factors in play. First, he lives in a large and diverse American city, and wants to insulate his children from bad influences. Second, he's under a great deal of, essentially, peer pressure to "Keep up with the Joneses" -- in other words, to keep up appearances relative to other members of his social group.
It's insanity, of course.
But, in his position, it would be difficult to raise a child cheaply. The outcomes might be quite poor. So, either way, there's difficulty and worry.
There are also the opportunity costs of parenting, which are considerable, but that's a different matter.
For elementary school we rented an apartment for 6 months to get an address in a decent school, it wasn't a guaranteed ticket but a risk we took because it was cheaper than private school. We were able to get in and worked closely with the school and our kids to make sure they were learning what they needed to get to the next school. They both got to a magnet middle school thankfully which was goal #2 but I mean even the magnet school is still like a zoo (sex in bathrooms, drugs, etc). Again, we work closely with the school and our boys, teaching them a lot of the skills they're not getting at school (it's very time consuming and basically a second job for me and my wife). My oldest is now in 8th grade and tested recently for the top magnet STEM HS in DFW. He feels pretty confident about it but we find out March 1 if he got it, that's goal number #3.
Looking back, my wife and I both strongly agree just moving 45 miles north to suburbs with actual functioning public schools would have been so much better. Yeah sure, we live in a hot neighborhood (north oak cliff), downtown, uptown, and deep ellum are < 3 miles away but we never go down there anymore anyway. Suburbs with good schools and other amenities geared toward families are where it's at.
What was your biggest concern about school? That they would become involved in bad behavior? Or that they wouldn’t be educated?
My experience from public school is that it’s basically worthless. Could you treat it as social time and make up for the school in your own?
school performance and education which correlates to behavior. Obviously, when you drop your kids off at school you want to be confident they're going to be ok so behavior is important. My wife and I have found that low teacher rollover is also a good indicator of a school's quality. The top magnet schools in the district have the lowest teach rollover which is another vote for that metric.
We do a lot of educating at home but it's a tough row to hoe. You're basically homeschooling and the last thing my kids want to do when they get home from school all day is more work.
"Keeping up with the joneses" doesn't come into play at all.