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Comment by xyzelement | Hacker News Reader

Just yesterday there was a story on HN about Spain's dying villages and a commenter who I assumed was Spanish attributed theow beth rate to income inequality.

Which is it - low gini for talking to a waiter, high gini for starting a fam?

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It’s not surprising to anyone that two random Spaniards may disagree on whether a number like this is high or low. That’s because Spaniards don’t all get together to agree on a common position for online posting; and because high/low depends on the context and comparison to other countries.

Spain’s gini coefficient indicates it is much more equal than USA, but not as equal as, say, Denmark.

You can’t hold two separate people accountable for their contradictory statements.

"goomba fallacy", if you need a name for this phenomenon.

You can however point out conflicting information.

You can, just don’t demand from from one of these people to explain the difference with what the other person said.

This is opinion, not information. Of course people's opinions will conflict.

I don't think it is a fair comparison. The cost of raising a child can still be too high even in a fairly low gini country.

In fact I'd say gini has nothing to do with birth rate. Birth rate declines when parents have confidence that there is a good likelihood their children will survive to adulthood.

It is often easy to forget that just five hundred years ago almost one of two infants born didn't survive into adulthood. Low birth rates are good. Don't let anyone say otherwise.

  Gini:                 Spain << US
  Youth unemployment:   Spain >>> US
  Living with parents:  Spain >>> US
  First birth age:      Spain >>> US
  Fertility:            Spain << US

In my opinion, low birth rates can't be attributed to income, or income inequality. I feel like it's more about optimism, to have kids you have to be optimistic about the future.

A lot of pessimism is caused by the current inequality.

A lot of pessimism is caused by the relative change of inequality.

True. Feudalism was the norm throughout human history.

But those nobles had limited power because they didn't have the communications technology we have today.

I'm saying this based on anecdotal observations from my biased POV, so take this with a grain of salt. There are income differences, but most are inter-city/region differences. I'd say within a specific city or region, it's low gini, but there's a high gini if you compare cross-region. Income and costs in a village in rural Spain are less than half that of a "mid-tier" city, and less than a third or even quarter of that of Barcelona or Madrid

Low Gini compared to the US, but mediocre for a European country (comparable to France, Germany, Italy; significantly worse compared to low-Gini regions like Scandinavia).

If anyone said this about the country that you’re from (based on this attitude, we all know what my guess is) you’d immediately clock how absurd it sounds.

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