Life, Work, Death and the Peasant: Family Formation
acoup.blog
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"in nearly all of these societies everyone got married and was expected to get around to having children because the community required them rather than necessarily because they wanted to."
I wonder if this is the uncomfortable truth behind low birth rates in the modern world, and nobody ever really _wanted_ to raise kids so much as they just kinda had to (especially if they wanted to have sex)
In the modern world, if you do not have children, but instead save your income in a retirement fund, you have an even better claim to the labor of the next generation than the childrens' parents through your increased retirement fund.
Privatized X matched with socialized anti-X is the classic condition for a moral hazard to emerge.
Perhaps in time we’ll see more polycule formation driven by housing costs…
(These are all on average of course, there are still high earners who manage)
Isn't it the abundance of housing?
>>When homes were abundant one income could support a household
Was it the case, though? Could one income support household with 3000sq ft house, big new truck and college for each kid back then?
College is actually another good example- sending more people to college mostly just meant everyone else _also_ needed to go to college in order to compete with their peers for jobs that didn't used to require a degree. We can see this across borders - jobs that require a bachelor's in the US often require a master's in Europe, because too many people in Europe have master's degrees compared to the number of jobs that should actually need one.
One bit difference is that European system did not had first three years of college as "life experience, basically generic study without specialization, basically another high school" thing.
You picked a field and studied that one. And that was structured as five years old study. If you are in the middle, you are eligible for the same positions as those who did not study at all - because you are not qualified yet.
Like a nurse - before you would go to nursing high school and become qualified nurse there. The new demand to have bachelor made studies longer and did not brought higher quality nor was needed. Same with kindergarten teachers. Same with basic administration etc.
What actually happened was whole bunch of positions that did not required university suddenly formally requiring it. And half baked school programs to get you diploma. And 40-50 years old people going to diploma mills so that they can be formally better competitive apply to positions that required only high school before.
There is a lot of variation between countries, but European countries often have a dual-track system in higher education. You can choose between the academic track (universities) and the vocational track, with more people ending up in the vocational track. Some fields are available in the academic track, some in the vocational track, and some in both. Professional fields such as healthcare, business, and engineering are often available in both, with the tracks preparing for different roles in the field (such as nurse vs. doctor).
Imagine being used to an educational system with two kinds of degrees. Some indicate practical studies preparing for a job, while others tell of longer theoretical studies and specialization. Suddenly the system changes and you start seeing a third kind of a degree: shorter theoretical studies without going particularly deep in anything. What use do you have for people like that?
If you just need an engineer, someone from the vocational track will probably be more productive than an academic engineer due to more relevant education. Assuming a similar level of talent, of course. You only hire an academic engineer if you have an actual need for theoretical education. Or if you have a job where the specifics of the education don't really matter. Or if the academic engineer is from a higher-tier institution and likely more talented, despite the education.
The bachelor was added so that basically people could transfer to American system without wasting time. Otherwise it was seen as unfinished degree.
You also need to consider the distribution of housing sizes. The average being driven up by rural or suburban McMansions is not representative of the conditions of million of people living in large cities.
Homelessness is a complex issue, but a healthcare is the main cause. Lack of proper treatment of addictions and mental illness is the main cause of homelessness.
If housing is cheap, mentally sick person or even addict can get one in an easier way. And their relatives have easier time to help their mentally ill relative find a place.
Being homeless makes both addictions and mental illness worst, to the point of unsulvable.
It also makes it make more sense to live in a car. A car costs the same, mostly everywhere, so if you're in a stupidly expensive location, it might start to sound reasonable to live in a van.
Drugs, poor financial literacy and insanity are the main reasons, but expensive housing is also there.
I have no trouble believing that. But what about the mean?
Also, what happens if you include not-new houses?
It is often used ambiguously to intentionally create ambiguity as it allows for reaching muddied conclusions, which evoke more emotion.
I dream of a world where all data comes with at least quintile if not decile level distribution details. Especially in the digital age, I cannot think of a single good reason to not provide that detail.
>>not-new houses
If you zoom out for 50y it does not matter. New house built 20y ago is an old house now, but still much bigger than old houses 50y ago.
What changed is the number is the relative number of people in each category (far fewer married people).
Houses are much more affordable with two incomes than one.
A way to alleviate it could be to give insane tax deductions for having kids - we will likely reach a point where we have to.
You are right that many countries do - but they are simply not high enough to make it worthwhile and make the same economical sense at not having kids does.
As “well raised” is not possible to measure, this is not a feasible solution.
One work around has been to bet that those with earned incomes are likelier to raise their kids well, so the subsidies can be non refundable earned income tax credits.
But I doubt sufficient people have sufficient tax liabilities that offset the costs of the minimum quality of life many people require for their kids and them to have.
One way to subsidize parents is to give free child care. As a bonus, the government get to decide exactly how these kids are being raised.
But yeah, it is a material investment for the society to take - which is likely why we have seen the cost of kids being transferred to the parents (and lower birth rates).
Can you elaborate on what you mean here? Having well-raised kids is fascist? Which part did you mean?
For example, if having kids is optional, many people will choose to not have kids. Then those who do have need more than two kids on the average to sustain the population. But we have this cultural ideal of a family with two kids, which impacts the design of everything from homes to cars and from furniture to hotels. As well as the expectations on how much effort parents should devote to support each child.
At a macro scale this idea is futile, as people make decisions in a context.
Yes,people should have full agency - also to do things that does not make financial sense.
But if we want something as a society, it needs to make financial sense.
And yes this has consequences, that is why we have a market, so we can service each other under these consequences.
The single greatest component of the property tax is the local public schools. Federal taxes pay for free lunches at those schools. Approximately half of Social Security’s budget go towards needy families. Over half of college students receive federal aid, and over a quarter receive state aid.
To privatize something implies motion from public to private. What costs of parenthood do you believe have been privatized over the last 200, 100, 50 or 25 years? I genuinely don’t believe that there’s a single one, but I sincerely know that I could be wrong.
used to be an extended familiy or village thing, now its on the ~1.7 parents per kid to earn enough to pay a commercial supplier.
Only if you’re being pedantic.
Taking on the responsibility to raise children will completely take over your life. Not even considering the financial cost of daycare or missing second income, the opportunity cost is enormous.
Also parents still pay taxes…
All of the costs of parenting are privatized except for schooling, but even to do that one well costs an enormous amount from the parent
also you're asking which costs have been privatized in the last 200 years, but the entirety of the costs were (always) private and only a small amount has been socialized.
Well, you could ask people in age why they don't get in couple and have children, you could look at studies trying to understand why otherwise comparable countries have different birth rates.
Or you could wonder if the uncomfortable truth hidden from us is a fable about individuals' personal character.
And he's not got to that question yet: "So this week we’re going to look at marriage patterns, particularly the question of age at first marriage. Then next week, we’re going to turn to the implications those patterns have for child-bearing and child-rearing"
But I think you're missing the other aspect of the population pyramid, extremely high child and maternal mortality. It's more that everyone, especially women, was a conscript in the War on Death. And even then people are generally having fewer children than humanly possible, because they're also starvation-constrained. From the article:
"We’ll be coming back to some of these points when we talk about fertility next week, but the mortality rate for pre-modern societies is very high, thus necessitating a lot of births, but it is not so high that societies need to approach a maximum ‘natural fertility’ (the birth rate using absolutely no means of birth control) to hit replacement and slow growth. But these are also peasant households with significantly constrained resources. So the question becomes how to restrain fertility to a high, but not maximum level."
However, I'm wary about the generalization to pre-modern societies in general. Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs, but also because when I started digging into the church books for my own genealogy, I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected. Maybe not a majority, sure, and maybe not on average (and also, we're way out of both the time and the geography Bret studies). The past is never quite as I imagined.
> Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs
A lot of anthropological research is done on non-agrarian societies. The author limited himself to peasants here, so that limits some (far from all) of the variation.
> I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected
The author also limits himself to age at _first_ marriage; I’d expect a lot more variation in age at remarriage. And even if divorce was rare compared to today, death of a spouse was much more common. So you’d expect to see quite some remarriages in the family tree
IIRC, he estimated mortality at
- 10% after the age of 20 (women due to childbirth, men due to war) and
- 50% before
in one of the earlier essays of this series.
Can't speak for everyone, but acoup is regularly referred to here. Some people, including me, read it regularly anyway so we don't even click on the HN posts most of the time.
I read this particular article Saturday on my morning coffee for example. I didn't upvote it when it got posted on HN, but I've done it before on other acoup articles. Without ever going to the comments.
If acoup is new to you, start here:
https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/
It's what made it famous originally.
Then it added actual history lessons on top of the media and video game commenting.
I don't know how "uncomfortable" the truth is. In Islam, there's a principle that getting married (and presumably having kids) is half your religion. People were talking about social frameworks to incentivize marriage and reproduction 1,400 years ago. Maybe some people are uncomfortable with it now.
Putting religion aside, there's a biological aspect to this as well. Having children rewires your brain. People who don't have kids yet have little ability to know how they'll feel about it in advance. Talking about what people "want" a priori doesn't really make sense.
To use an analogy, I recently visited Napa and really enjoyed it. I had talked myself into the idea I wouldn't like it--too bougie, etc. But of course I liked Napa. Most people like Napa. It's literally famous for being enjoyable. I wasn't special or different, I had just developed intellectual reasons to think I'd dislike something that's more of a brain-stem level experience to begin with.
But there are some possible enlightening questions for this and other brain-stem-level experiences like marriage and babies:
- did millions of years of evolution program my brain stem to like this?
- do lots of other people in other places and times do X, and after they’ve done X, do it again?
I think our brain stems and simpler functions must be very similar to one another. After all, visual illusions, the smell of bacon, and stories of human drama have similar effects on ~everyone.
And having it be part of a religion’s expectations seems like that suggests for some people at least it’s more duty than desire, does it not?
[1]: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...
Yet, I don't know if that pertains to peasantry as they didn't have much of a choice depending where they lived. The article talks about Europe as if it was somewhat homogeneous (and mostly divided west & east)
He's done other blog series in the past that are more specific about specific things. His best work is on ancient military tactics and strategy. Every now and then he does these "baseline knowledge/understanding" series when he gets fed up with a particular group of idiots in his comments. It's like a teacher getting a class and being like "oh, you really are this dumb, I guess I gotta teach prerequisites before we dive in" even if they're not the best person to teach those prerequisites.