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Comment by vannevar | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure that one of the ideas that Western societies still promote is the notion that a claim should be consistent with the evidence, and that if it is not, it is probably wrong. And if it's very obviously inconsistent with the evidence, it may in fact be crazy. And there's a ton of evidence that raising a child in 2026 is substantially more expensive today than it was 75 years ago.

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If you compared the costs of the items and services that people paid for for their children in the 1950s to the costs of those same exact items and services today I would bet they were the same or cheaper.

That's burying the fact that people have had done a lot more work that does not show up in pure econ stats. Care provided by stay at home primary caretaker or the offloading of that care to extended family those are huge things that you can't simply wrangle out of raw data.

More broadly there’s a lot of societal infrastructure in terms of just cultural norms that are no longer the same or intact at all. For example, grandparents are not really involved in child rearing anymore in the West. That’s why I just focused on the material costs, the issue is really not a material one but a cultural one or a matter of societal constitution.

I would take that bet. Let's start with housing, which has almost doubled as a share of income since 1960. (See e.g. [1]). Same thing with medical care (including insurance premiums, since more medical costs were out-of-pocket back in the 50s and 60s).[2] Groceries are a bit cheaper as a share of discretionary income, but only by a few percentage points.[3] And of course we're assuming no one goes to college, which wasn't true even in the 50s and 60s. College costs have soared since then.

1. https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=18800

2. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

3. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-fa...

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