> The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless is really exhausting.
The algorithm has turned (some) people into whiners and doomers. It really sucks to watch them take defeatist attitudes on everything in life.
I see lots of these young 20-somethings on Reddit thinking their lives are over. It's absurd. They have their entire lives ahead of them, and all it takes is one break into a career.
They even think climate change is going to "kill all of us" before they're elderly. That's not even what the science says.
On the topic of having children, though - people aren't having kids because they're choosing to focus on themselves.
There are ten times as many forms of entertainment today as there were in the 1980s, and people can endlessly consume content in their hands. You can go glamping at a music festival, post it on Instagram, and hook up with new friends and romantic partners you meet. All incredibly easily. Our culture has become built around experience and consumption.
I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children.
It's wild that, not too long ago, you could afford a house and a car on a single income as a mailman. That is unthinkable today. We understand there are ways to be successful, but it's like that saying: anyone can be successful, but everyone can't.
I know a lot of people who spend their money on experiences because they genuinely believe they won't get a retirement, so they might as well enjoy their life while they can. I'm part of this group. I don't think the world will literally be over by then, but the future looks bleak. We've also been drilled from birth that you should never have a child if you can't afford it, and people are taking that advice to heart. And because you can't afford your home on a single income anymore, more and more parents are having to rely on childcare, which is itself expensive.
The issues are just compounding. If you just want to believe that everyone is too enamored by their phones to procreate... that's your prerogative, but yikes.
> It's wild that, not too long ago, you could afford a house and a car on a single income as a mailman. That is unthinkable today.
to be fair it was unthinkable the day before yesterday too. in the history of human civilisation, that kind of setup has only been possible in a handful of countries, for a few skin colours, for a couple of decades. fueled by burning cheap fossil fuels taken from poorer countries
In the history of human civilization, before that kind of setup most people didn't worry about having a house, because they lived in villages, so they lived next to their extended family, and either stayed together under one roof or eventually moved couple hundred meters to the side and built their own.
Expectations for quality of life were lower, sure, but the problem of not being able to find a place to live anywhere near your family or job, that is relatively new and getting worse.
> in a handful of countries, for a few skin colours, for a couple of decades. fueled by burning cheap fossil fuels taken from poorer countries
Also: I know it's trendy to make everything about skin colours these days, but that's a distinct USA-ian bias. The rest of the world doesn't work that way.
I won't argue against exploitation of poorer countries as that, indeed, was a big theme in the last century or two. However, note that whatever many hard problems people in those poorer countries have, affordable housing isn't one of them.
> Also: I know it's trendy to make everything about skin colours these days, but that's a distinct USA-ian bias. The rest of the world doesn't work that way.
Europe's industrialized genocidal tribalism of 20th century, the modern islamic experience as an immigrant in Europe, 21st century genocide in Africa and the Middle East, Japan's war crimes in east asia during WW2. Where is this rest of the world you speak of?
You are proving my point here, by conflating together total war for world domination, anti-immigration sentiments (in case of Islamic immigrants, with a healthy dose of Islamopobia thanks to two decades of US anti-Islamic propaganda), civil wars, ethnic conflicts, regional conflicts, plain old war between nation states, and war crimes against POWs of the same racial group.
The rest of the world is where we can distinguish these different reasons, motivations and patterns, instead of lumping them together with racial discrimination and calling everything "racism".
I was perhaps broadening "skin colour" to include "ethnic" or "national" or "racial" distinctions, but I think that's a distinction without a difference.
If we want to say "The US has been bad", I'm on board and wholeheartedly agree. But using "The Rest of the World" as the counterexample, I'm not sure that will hold up.
I imagine we broadly agree and would love to have a cup of coffee with you some day!
In 1950 you could afford a car and house on one income - but that house as much smaller than the typical house today. You also had one car not two, your wife (this was sexist times - men worked, women stayed home) probably didn't even have a drivers license. If she did she couldn't drive anywhere when you were at work unless she drove you to work. (thus door to door salesmen: sell things those housewives need but cannot easily get because their husband is at work. Send both partners to work and suddenly houses get larger and you have two cars.
Note that despite the above, in 1950 women did often have jobs. It wasn't the "ideal" and it was less common (and even less common if you had kids), but plenty of women had jobs.
In the 1950s the world had gone through two (2) gigantic world wars, one recently, which completely collapsed multiple global empires, killed millions -- especially the young, fit men who are the backbone of the economy -- and devastated multiple countries, many of which were big developed economies.
the US, and certain parts of Europe, were mostly spared this, and as a result could make crazy money because they were the only source of advanced labor around.
it wasn't like that in the Guilded Age or Roaring 20s or Great Depression -- there was a reason all of those labor movements and riots happened then; wouldn't have happened if a one-income mailman could buy a house.
that was a one-off, a time when half the world blew up a few years before.
> In 1950 you could afford a car and house on one income - but that house as much smaller than the typical house today.
"Typical" is doing some really heavy lifting there given the kind of housing stock available in, say, East Coast urban areas. Most of those remotely-affordable houses are a hundred years old in the Boston area, for example.
I would love to see historical rates in urban vs rural/suburban areas for this, alongside migration/growth rates - does something like that exist?
My son (in college) probably won’t be able to afford much of a house in the Bay Area, austin, etc. but originally he was going to become an electrician in Watertown, NY. You can get a house for $120k there, which seems doable on a 50k income.
I've seen it but don't have it on hand. Urban prices certainly seem to have disconnected quite hard from suburban/rural ones, but even suburban/rural might not capture it. I grew up in a not-all-that-wealthy town in Maine about the same size as Watertown, NY--a little smaller actually; an empty half-acre lot there costs more than $120K. (I'd love to move back there, but a house the size of my Boston-area house costs the same as my Boston-area house...)
The formal dining room has now become the home office.
My grandparents raised 5 kids in a 900 sq foot home. They weren't poor. That was the typical home being built in the working class suburbs of Detroit in the early 1950s. Average new home being built today is twice that size for a smaller household.
"your wife (this was sexist times - men worked, women stayed home) probably didn't even have a drivers license"
According to a internet search it seems about half of women had driver's licenses. So this is not accurate. Anecdotal, but I just skimmed The Donna Reed show episode descriptions and a 1961 episode has her fighting a parking ticket, another 1961 episode has her daughter learning to drive.
There doesn't appear to be easily obtainable information on the internet showing how many married women had driver's licenses in 1950 [and just 1950] compared to married men (the federal government did not collect this information), however an article states "In the 1950s many suburban housewives obtained their licenses in order to fulfil their domestic responsibilities." it also states "Perhaps a quarter of women drove before the second world war and more learned to drive during the war."
> It's wild that, not too long ago, you could afford a house and a car on a single income as a mailman.
You can do that today in some parts of the US.
Was there a time when you could do that in NYC? Or San Francisco? Maybe. When the city was down in the dumps and housing prices dropped. Or if you were willing to buy in crappy neighborhoods or on the edge of the city.
It makes me think of my great grandparents. They have a beautiful house in a central location in a major Canadian city worth North of $2.0M. And they did it on the single income of a teacher! I weep for those times.
But oh yeah, when they actually bought the house, it was on the edge of the city where nobody wanted to live. Oh and my grandfather picked up extra jobs to make sure his family of 5 had everything they needed.
There was never a time when it came easy. When people say they can't afford a home what they mean is "I can't afford a house in this specific city that checks all my boxes".
Ddg reckons average mailman salary is about 50k. That’s 1/8th the average house price.
In 1990 it was about 25k with prices about 150k
House prices are about 100k too high, they should be 300k not 400k
One reason for this is more people rely on two incomes to pay for housing, so more money is available for housing, so money transfers from future debt of millenials to existing assets of boomers and gen x.
But on top of that it means two incomes means harder to have kids due to child care.
> But on top of that it means two incomes means harder to have kids due to child care.
Maybe we're also stuck in something of a vicious cycle.
More people not having kids leads to more double incomes. More double incomes means more money to pay higher prices. The market seems to be bearing the higher prices just fine, so they continue to climb...
As someone who is doing well financially I don't think you found the reason.
The gist of it is: There are worlds and circumstances into which people want to bring kids. We mostly failed to create that world and those circumstances. If tou want to know what a solution looks like look at western democracies with high birth rates. E.g. France, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark.
The rest is probably due to individualism. Kids cost time and energy and capitalism tells us we should live our best lives. And the best live does not involve herding 6 kids, even if they are your own.
We created this world willingly, and the low birth rate is a consequence — and so is the need for migration if we wanna stay wealthy. The thing is: now that the genie is out of the bottle we are not gonna be able to force people to have kids. We can just create circumstances in which they are willing to.
I am in my 30s and I am unsure if I will ever be able to retire. I am sure however that I will have to change my job and career multiple times throughout my life. Despite me being financially well off, I am not sure if I would be able to support kids in the future. This is not about being whiny. I just think if I had kids it is my responsibility to throw them into a world that can sustain them. This one can't.
> We mostly failed to create that world and those circumstances. If tou want to know what a solution looks like look at western democracies with high birth rates. E.g. France, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark.
Those countries all have a fertility rate [0] almost identical to the US - three of them are lower if you look at 2020 figures. All of them have been relying on immigration [1] to maintain their demographics, with various levels of backlash in recent years. The US is still ahead of all but Ireland on that immigration list.
In Ireland at least, the narrative around the "housing crisis" and people being priced out of starting families is far stronger than what I get from US media. So I think you need to look elsewhere.
Here's my related guess: many people want to wait until they feel in an appropriate position personally and financially before they have children. That might mean earning a certain amount or feeling like they have a foothold in home ownership or waiting for a future renovation. Only, the world in 2010+ constantly exposes you to bigger options on top of the issue of housing affordability: more adventures, more expensive furnishings, stories of others' salaries, etc. It would be quite easy to push back child-rearing for 5 or more years if you didn't feel like you were quite where you wanted to be, or wonder if you'll ever get there.
It's very interesting how this thread treats the decision to have children as a purely rational, logistical one. I would argue it is not entirely rational/logical.
It also seems pretty straightforward to me that when a person is constantly badgered to justify why they don't have kids, and nobody accepts the simple answer "I don't want kids", they'll probably come up with socioeconomic reasons like these just to get people off their back, but I see only talk like "they just want to keep their Netflix and travel lifestyles" and "housing market/economy"
Capitalism does not tell us we should live our best life. I think there are strong arguments that capitalism (particularly concentrated private investment in housing) causes low birth rates, but I don’t think capitalism itself causes some kind of consumption-fueled decadence causing us to prioritize fun over children.
Except that consumption is exactly what capitalism drives - particularly manufacturing, where a relatively fixed amount of capital (factories & machinery) can drive higher overall profits if more products are made for people to consume - even if those people don't actually need the products.
Apparently (I can't find the source for this, but it stuck in my mind), faced with a glut of production after WW2, the US could either consume more, or work less. The choice was made to consume more, not least because the industrialists could cream off a larger slice of the pie that way.
Having children still fuels consumption though. The difference is what is being consumed vs if that consumption spending were not spent on children. I think you are mixing up the colloquial definition of consumption of ie random plastic crap with the economic definition that is very broad and includes things like paying teachers.
Similarly regarding manufacturing and production glute, if the hard capital is fixed then so too typically is the hard production (not the case for many kinds of capital but it is for manufacturing) or at least capped. Just like with consumption, it’s a problem of what portion of capital is being expended on increasing production of things for children (housing, schools, kid stuff) or not. In both cases this is ultimately driven by the supply and demand stemming from parents themselves. But I don’t think there is a feedback loop because capitalism does not itself care whether capital goes to kids or not, only whether there is enough demand for capital expenditure to be profitable.
> Kids cost time and energy and capitalism tells us we should live our best lives.
Thought experiment for all the unrestrained free-market folk: how can the free hand of the market can solve for low birthrates? Bonus points if the solution doesn't involve government-issued visas.
Free market is a kind of natural selection. People with inner desire to procreate will spread themselves, people without it won't. Pro-natalist cultures (e. g. orthodox jews) will procreate as well.
This inner desire wasn't selected for strongly in the past because there were other mechanisms to nudge people to procreate (social norms, lack of birth control), but I expect it will play a much bigger role in the following generations.
Well technically those who seek to gain from people having children would want to generate som marketing/propaganda that encourages having kids. Families want big safe cars and would pay a premium for that, singles would be more enclined to drive in old used cars, so theres the car industry. Families usually wants big houses so there that, diaper industry etc.
> I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children.
That kind of thing, at least to me, seemed to get old pretty quickly. Probably more importantly though, is that we all get old at some point. When fewer and fewer people have children of their own, what happens when the bulk of people get past retirement age? I think it's a huge problem from both an economic standpoint (if there's no productive workers to keep things going, is the state really going to be able to support you in better than awful conditions as you age?) and from an individual and cultural standpoint.
Claiming a legitimate argument is from "the algorithm" is flimsy, unprovable, unfalsifiable, and does nothing except discredit the person rather than the idea. I could claim your argument is from living a life of privilege, but then I'd be addressing the person rather than the argument.
The algorithm has turned (some) people into whiners and doomers. It really sucks to watch them take defeatist attitudes on everything in life.
I see lots of these young 20-somethings on Reddit thinking their lives are over. It's absurd. They have their entire lives ahead of them, and all it takes is one break into a career.
They even think climate change is going to "kill all of us" before they're elderly. That's not even what the science says.
On the topic of having children, though - people aren't having kids because they're choosing to focus on themselves.
There are ten times as many forms of entertainment today as there were in the 1980s, and people can endlessly consume content in their hands. You can go glamping at a music festival, post it on Instagram, and hook up with new friends and romantic partners you meet. All incredibly easily. Our culture has become built around experience and consumption.
I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children.