> That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it.
I'm skeptical of this explanation for falling birthrates just because birthrates are falling across the world and there seems to be no correlation between fertility and financial security. America has low birthrates. Scandinavia (usually considered to have generous welfare states) has low birthrates. Hungary, where the government gives massive tax breaks (IIRC they spend around ~6% of their GDP on child incentives), has low birthrates. Europe, East Asia, India, the Middle East, the Americas, basically the whole world except for central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (which are catching up) has low birth rates. Obviously the economic conditions between basically all the countries in the world varies wildly, but there isn't a consistent relationship between those conditions and fertility.
Also within countries, the number of children people have is not always correlated with wealth (and at times in the past 60 years it has been negatively correlated).
Anyway, I find your argument intuitive, but it doesn't seem to align with the data we have.
Two of my friends with relatively ordinary jobs have stay at home spouses. The cost of daycare is so high that it would basically eat up one of their salaries, and this way they get to actually spend time with their children, which they find to be more filling than a BS career.
It is definitely doable in the US, and I would imagine most Western countries as well. My knowledge outside of them isn't current enough to speak for the rest.
It's do-able, but the housing crisis needs to be resolved. People will never own a house if they didn't have skin in the game by 2021. Salaries are not rising to match housing price inflation.
Specifically, both house prices and interest need to go down heavily. Sadly, they used higher interest to try to lower prices, and that didn't really bring prices down.
More supply isn't helping much either, as there is no diversity of supply, and builds aren't undercutting the market yet.
As a layperson I have a feeling that's not going to happen. The working class has too much wealth tied up in their homes because US society and the government have encouraged people to treat it as a store of wealth instead of a box that shields them from the weather. People talk constantly about "getting on the property ladder", "buying more land because they aren't making more of it", "having a landlord side hustle", etc. A house is a lot more tangible than stocks so people without knowledge of finance feel much better about investing in one (understandably so - also forget about Social Security). Combine this with associated government tax subsidies and mortgage underwriting programs and you've basically created a situation where home prices can't do anything but go up.
Look at the amortization table for the proposed 50 year mortgage: borrowers wouldn't be making a dent in the principal for a good 10 or 15 years. The underlying assumption here is that people would make money via home price appreciation, i.e. speculation, not from creating an actual store of value. We already kicked this can once when the 30-year mortgage became a thing 60 years ago.
Of course one can't draw the current trend line into infinity because of affordability but I highly doubt it'll go down appreciably. I also don't know enough to have a solution to this problem - any ideas?
The uneven demographic curve shows that many elderly current homeowners will have to sell over the next couple decades due to death or moving into assisted living facilities. That will increase supply and reduce demand, although the impact will vary widely by region. Don't expect any major price reductions in popular areas but there may be further collapses in certain rural and economically stagnant areas. You can look at Japan for a preview of how that plays out.
Tax planning can help here. By converting the house to ownership by a tax-advantaged trust , a family absolutely can continue to extract rent from a former property without selling. Doubly so if the mortgage is paid off.
Sure, that can help affluent families in some cases. But many elderly people will be forced to sell (or reverse mortgage) their real estate holdings in order to pay for long-term care. Fees at decent assisted living facilities are often in the $8K per month range now so the only way to afford it is to sell the family home.
that's because "more supply" hasn't been anywhere close to enough supply, judging by historical housing needs by population age demographics. More supply is absolutely the key thing missing, but it needs to be a lot more supply.
Not all of those empty houses will be places people want to live in, but I'd bet a fair amount of them are perfectly fine places people would love to call home if they could only afford them.
> It's do-able, but the housing crisis needs to be resolved.
Why? Almost everywhere a majority of people (and certainly the majority of voters) are already invested in housing and do not want their investment to loose value.
> Specifically, both house prices and interest need to go down heavily. Sadly, they used higher interest to try to lower prices, and that didn't really bring prices down.
People are more willing to spend an ever-growing share of their dual-incomes on housing, which drives housing prices modulo interest. So interest has no actual effect on housing affordability, since it doesn't influence how much people are willing to spend. If you lower interest, prices are simply going to rise such that people spend the same % of their income on housing. If you increase interest, prices will (eventually, slowly, since this is a seller-dominated market) fall to match.
> More supply isn't helping much either, as there is no diversity of supply, and builds aren't undercutting the market yet.
New builds will never be cheaper than existing housing stock. Low-cost new housing is a mirage; new housing is premium by construction.
It doesn't help that new builds seem to focus on the high end for housing (because that is where the profit is). If we keep building more expensive housing it shouldn't be surprising that the average cost of housing increases.
People buying their first house almost never got new housing - ever. They’d buy a starter home, which was older, needed some work, etc.
A big issue here is expectations - people are complaining because they can’t buy their own standalone house in a good neighborhood right next to work - while work is in a high demand, high pay area.
Also, well paid work is centralizing, so so the gradient is getting steeper (or was, pre-remote work).
Guess what, that was never the norm!
But a lot of people did buy in what were at the time low demand, high supply, areas that later became high demand areas! Like early Los Angeles.
Also, everything is getting more expensive relative to ‘hour worked’ because of centralization of capital, and more work force participation.
No, what doesn't help is that the new builds aren't nearly enough. If they were quantitatively sufficient, it wouldn't matter if they all targeted the high end, because the people moving in to it would be pulling demand away from other existing units, with a ripple effect across the whole market.
What many people don't realize is how badly the total housing inventory has fallen behind what is needed for the population since the Great Recession.
It absolutely helps - people who move to high end housing free up other, cheaper apartments (recent economic paper has clearly showed that this works, you can easily find it)
What do you mean, they typically get half the assets and a sizable chunk of the other partner’s salary in alimony that they don’t need to give up if they do become employed, and then if childcare is needed typically this would be an extra child support expense that both parties pay for even if the erstwhile stay-at-home parent has full custody.
How would the stay-at-home parent get a bad deal here?
>> In which of those countries is it possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children?
It seems impossible to do this in 2025 with white collar work because so much of it is tied to HCOL cities (except for hedge funders, FAANG workers who got lucky on timing, bankers, some lawyers.)
From what I can see amongst friends and family -- it is possible with blue collar trades jobs where you can be selective on where in the country you can live and where you have some level of ownership of your practice. There are numerous affordable locations in the country.
I can confirm -- based on how difficult it is to get an appointment -- that my tree guy, electrician, and plumber all make more than me as an executive. Some of these workers further force payments in cash, so they are probably not even paying tax on all their income.
If they're happy to do it to 1970s standards, probably most of them. The standard of what an ordinary life looks like has gone up a lot. Plus when only the man worked looking after a home was a full time job - much less in the way of microwaves and washing machines and whatnot. It is worth remembering that in the early 1900s there were a lot of houses that didn't even have electricity.
The trends [0] are clear. As society offers people more comfort they have less children. Often radically so, having a GDP per capita of above $30k basically means that people stop having enough babies to hit the replacement rate.
// Plus when only the man worked looking after a home was a full time job
If we completely ignore the commonplace role of the maid, nanny or domestic helper — women in 1965 spent the same amount of time on child care and only about 10 more hours on housework a week than women in 2011. According to the 1870 census, “52 percent of employed women worked in ‘domestic and personal service.’” From 1870 through the mid-1900s, that percentage only increased.
//much less in the way of microwaves and washing machines and whatnot
The CPI accounts for these as 'hedonic quality adjustment'.
It's always convenient to benchmark this against 1970s onwards as it was the first year that data on race and ethnicity was included in the income statistics. However 1970 is also a recession year which bottomed out the market and eventually led to an oil crisis for most of the decade.
Adjust for inflation to 2023 and its inarguable.
New house: $23,450 -> $174,468
Average Income: $9,400 -> $69,936
New car: $3,450 -> $25,668
Minimum Wage: $2.10 -> $15.62
And is the summary version that it is just as easy for someone to support a family now as in the 1970s? I'm a bit lost on what view you're invoking those statistics to support.
Appliances are a little more expensive, but I can get a washing machine for ~$300, less if I go to facebook marketplace.
But in my area, a victorian house that's litterally crumbling with no central cooling and not up-to-code wiring where you can't run a hair dryer and coffee machine at the same time?
$180,000
Cost of rent at a similar quality house half the size?
$1600/month
Modern comforts are not the reason people can't afford to live.
Modern mindsets are. 100 years ago you passed as a good parent if your kids weren't all mental asylum cases due to how their home and role models looked like, you didn't beat them regularly to pulp to vent off frustrations, didn't run away, weren't raging alcoholic and just let them grow up on their own, with some input from mother. Some survived, some didn't.
Try to do it now - what about pregnancy leave? Post-birth leave even in situation with no health complications for mother and child? Creche? Pre-school? Post-school activities? Frequent visits to doctors. And so on and on. When are we supposed to do so with our active even if just normal careers? These are massive costs even in Europe, must be absolutely crushing in US.
People come home at the evening, drained from work. Who can efficiently handle well more than 2 small kids on top of all that and other duties that life daily puts on each of us?
There are studies showing that happiness of parents peaks with 2 kids, and 3rd is already a dive into less happiness for most and it doesn't stop there. So massive financial, time and energy costs to reach even replacement rate are not worth it.
We have 2 kids and somehow managing without nanny or parents nearby. 2 families of peers who have 3 kids are almost impossible to get together with - they are barely managing somehow, most of the time, always late by an hour or two to any meeting. Its really a massive jump in complexity. For more, you properly need a nanny or close family helping out massively, it just doesn't work with 2 people working without hitting burnout or two.
But then its delegated parenting - why even bother with more kids if you don't raise your own kids, donate sperm or an egg if you just need to tackle a checkbox in life. Parenting needs are more than fulfilled with 2 kids. If state needs more it needs to create something better than 2-3 decades of nightmare to raise them for regular folks. State help even in Europe (or lack of it) is not something motivating to have more kids.
You've forgotten electricity, depreciation and the need for the house to be wired up to support all the gear. The figures you're quoting are just the price for a one-off purchase, not the total cost of ownership.
> But in my area, a victorian house that's litterally crumbling with no central cooling and not up-to-code wiring where you can't run a hair dryer and coffee machine at the same time?
> $180,000
I'm not familiar with the market you're talking about. What is the median wage in the area that we're comparing $180,000 to?
This is all real numbers from ny recent job search. It was in a rural area in Indiana, a reportedly low COL state. So anything close to a city would've been way more expensive.
> You've forgotten electricity, depreciation and the need for the house to be wired up to support all the gear. The figures you're quoting are just the price for a one-off purchase, not the total cost of ownership.
Cost of total rewire was quoted $30,000. We didn't end up buying that house, but 30k is honestly a drop in the bucket when you're talking about numbers as huge as 180k. So no, the inclusion of electrical wiring is not some big expense that's making housing unaffordable. And houses had electricity in the mid-to-late 20th century... You know, back when it was reasonable to expect to be able to buy a house on one income without even a college degree.
Our electricity bill is usually ~$200/month. This is not what eats most of our paycheck. Our mortgage is far and away our biggest expense.
If houses still costed 20k (a price that many older folks have told me they bought a house for), even with a full rewire bringing it up to $50k, some kid working at Walmart could own a house. Now both renting and buying are prohibitively expensive, and it has nothing to do with modern amenities.
Housing costs are outrageous, far beyond the rate of inflation. That's why many can barely pay their bills. Not because we have electricity and washing machines and and microwaves.
> Cost of total rewire was quoted $30,000. We didn't end up buying that house, but 30k is honestly a drop in the bucket when you're talking about numbers as huge as 180k
It's 15%. That is a substantial chunk of the whole.
> Our electricity bill is usually ~$200/month. This is not what eats most of our paycheck. Our mortgage is far and away our biggest expense.
Your mortgage is what, 20 years? $200 x 12 x 20 ~= $50,000, and around 25% of the mortgage principle. We've found 43% (almost a half house) of the cost so far in the electricity alone. Wiring it up and running the grid aren't cheap. I've always suspected it is illegal to build & sell a house without electricity otherwise there'd probably be a brisk market in them as a cheap option, the savings potential is there.
But that isn't the point, I can't tell if $180k is large or small without a median income to compare it to. If people in the area are earning $90k/yr then it might technically be cheap. A ratio of 3 I think is usual for the 70s.
> If they're happy to do it to 1970s standards, probably most of them [could support a family on one income with an ordinary job].
Our house has the same electrical wiring that it did in 1969. The couple that sold us the house told us they bought it for $20k, which means a cashier could have afforded it back then, but now it's too expensive. Therefore, the fact that it has electricity has no bearing on whether it's prohibitively expensive for most people, and I can make a similar argument for any house built in the mid 20th century.
>Your mortgage is what, 20 years? $200 x 12 x 20 ~= $50,000, and around 25% of the mortgage principle. We've found 43% (almost a half house) of the cost so far in the electricity alone. Wiring it up and running the grid aren't cheap. I've always suspected it is illegal to build & sell a house without electricity otherwise there'd probably be a brisk market in them as a cheap option, the savings potential is there.
Practically all houses had electricity in the 70s. So this is already contradicting what you said earlier if you're citing electricity as the reason no one can afford a house on one income.
>It's 15%. That is a substantial chunk of the whole.
It doesn't matter if it's substantial. I'm only saying it's not so much that it's the reason no one can buy a house and support a family with an ordinary job.
Median income doesn't matter to my point. Housing prices have skyrocketed to the point that most people can't buy a house on one income. No one who's paying attention can deny this fact with a straight face, and your claim that it wouldn't be true if people lived by "1970s standards" is easily proven false by the fact that houses that were built in the 1970s with all the exact same amenities are still overpriced way beyond inflation.
The fact that a Victorian house that's falling apart to the point of being dangerous was listed ANYWHERE for $180,000 serves my point.
Fair enough, call it 50s lifestyle then. I looked it up and if we're talking about the US as a benchmark then turns out [0] the 70s was when women were basically finishing the process of integrating into the workforce. That wasn't an era where one man could support a family. Families were working with a duel income.
Point is that one working man isn't enough horsepower to support a family to modern living standards and never has been. The standard that one person could support was low and in practical terms has only improved over time.
> Median income doesn't matter to my point. Housing prices have skyrocketed to the point that most people can't buy a house on one income.
It matters a lot, that can't be asserted that without considering the ratio of income to house prices - the median income, in nominal terms, has skyrocketed too. Whether the median income or house prices rocketed more and by how much is quite material. If male full time earners are making $90k/year in an area, for example, then a $180k/year house could be said to be quite affordable to a single-income family.
If house prices in my area dropped to $180k then people would be talking about how wonderfully cheap housing had gotten and how great it was now that every young couple could afford a house.
> So this is already contradicting what you said earlier if you're citing electricity as the reason no one can afford a house on one income.
I don't think I actually said that initially, but the numbers you've quoted have convinced me it is at least partially true. The electrical costs appear to be comparable to the amount of money that the house cost according to the numbers you suggested. That is a significant factor in what people can afford. If they avoid almost half a house's worth of expenses then that will go a long way towards being able to afford a house.
It's fascinating and depressing how despite me being in a different country on the other side of the world to you, if I swap the $ for £, your comment is still accurate based on the current situation in the UK.
According to Hans Rosling correlation was more between education level of women and the number of children: the higher women are educated, the less children they decide to have.
Also - the more education men have, and the higher income they have, the less they want to join the military.
It’s a similar type of issue - of course individuals don’t want to submit to a painful process with high risk and sometimes dubious value to them individually if they have other choices.
Most places in the developed world aren’t currently drafting large portions of their population for military service - and a large portion of the population says they’d fight it if they did. Maybe at some point, they wouldn’t have a choice - or the choice would be made very expensive for them to make the other way.
I mean that I know of first hand, just the US and Japan. "Possible" being a low bar that just means that I've seen it at least once.
I don't think data with all of those factors (household income, number of earners per household, gender of the earners, home ownership, and number of children) exists for any country. Do you have data like that for 1960s America or is your argument based on extrapolations from watching Leave it to Beaver?
But if we abstract your hypothesis slightly to: fertility is lower now than in 1960 because people are less financially secure now than they were in 1960, I don't think the data we have supports this.
I have seen it all across the EU. Is pretty doable (granted, you have a University title). But you can absolutely buy a home and have a couple of children which will have absolute all they need.
Yea because the average Joe totally has a university title.
However in Germany a lot of poor people have many children while a lot of academics have less [0].
It's "doable" also doesn't mean its pleasant. I have checked the rural housing market recently and for a somewhat acceptable house you will have to pay easily ~3k per month given you have a somewhat big start capital. Not sustainable if one person loses their job for a while. Not to say it was that much easier back in the day, the housing market is just beyond fucked for most ordinary people.
A decent Flat in Germany, for example near Stuttgart, with good connections with train is about 300k. There are credit lines for 25 years with relative low interest rates. For that you are way lower than 3k per month (assuming 0 downpayment). With 2 people working in a household, you can afford that. Granted, you will not be the "typical" german doing 3 times a year nice vacations. But doing a "real" 1 or 2 week vacation once every 2 years is pretty much standard outside Germany, I think.
The price you noted will not buy you a decent flat in the vicinity of Stuttgart with good train connections. At least not for a family. The prices are around € 4.4K/m2. And that's the median. For newer buildings it's up to € 5.5K.
A 10 second look: the garage place for one car is an extra 20k. The heating is 27 years old, so are the bathroom installations and the kitchen. I, personally don't want to sit on a 27 year old loo. To get this on to a modern level - at least another 50k.
Edit: I just checked on the laws etc. 2-wire electric installations are no longer allowed and property owners are obligated to renew them. In this case that would have to be done in the complete house with all other owners. Congratulations, there go another 50k.
That of the 2 wire is just wrong. At this point I do not know if you want to win the discussion or what. I live in a 2 wire-wired house. As long as I do not change the installation, is all ok.
Wann die Änderung verpflichtend ist
Bei Neuanlagen: Die klassische Nullung darf seit 1973 nicht mehr für neue Installationen verwendet werden.
Bei Modernisierungen: Wenn im Rahmen von Renovierungen oder Erweiterungen gearbeitet wird, müssen betroffene Stromkreise auf ein separates Null- und Schutzleitersystem umgerüstet werden.
Bei unsicheren Anlagen: Ist der Bestandsschutz nicht mehr gegeben, weil Mängel oder Gefahren bestehen, die die Sicherheit für Leib und Leben oder Sachen gefährden, ist eine Umrüstung erforderlich.
You can live without a garage. Can't you? In Germany a car is pretty safe in the street. And I assume, you do not have a 50k+ car, if we are discussing "why can't I buy a house"...
Kitchen and Bath look perfectly usable for many years still... That is what I mean. People say "I will not have a house" but what they mean is: "I will not have a perfect house, with completely new bath and kitchen, garage, lots of room for everything, very well located" well, no, you will not. Sorry.
I agree about heating. But 50k is for the whole building, which will probably have reserves, so it will cost you maybe 5k to 10k spread in 6 months or so. And you get state help because you will surely go for heat-pump, means it even goes a little down. So the price goes to 310k...
The point about the bathrooms and tiles isn't about perfectionism, it's about mould. After 27 years of use I'd renovate wet usage rooms to reduce the health risk for my children. The same goes for the kitchen.
If the owner community decides on a heat pump, the wiring will have to be completely renewed. If the owner community decides on a modern oil heating system, the wiring will have to be renewed.
Parking your cars in the street while there is the option for a garage is somewhat antisocial, but let's not moralise. The garage is not optional, it's not sondereigentum or else it would have to be mentioned, so you'll have to pay.
What you are buying with this property is major financial uncertainty. There is a reason for this price.
I live in the middle of nowhere in Northern Germany. A house where you wont have to tear down the whole place starts at 400k. And that's a basic small sub 100m^2 house with no garden.
Sorry but I wont get myself into 40 year debt for a bungalow.
After my father's death we sold our old family home for ~70k€ 15 years ago. It would have been in the 300-400k range nowadays. My salary certainly did not double - triple in that time frame.
Ill fly to Japan next year. First foreign country vacation in 14 years. Estimated costs 3-4k. I go to concerts every few months so I spend a few hundred bucks there. Other than that most of my money goes into rent and food. I have some somewhat expensive contracts though. 50€ phone, 50€ internet.
Going out is living life though, I wont reduce my quality of life for decades just so I can afford a house.
But in short, I do barely spend money on vacations.
You are certainly not the type I am referring to. Even if you cut all that, will not help a lot.
Anayway my story: never ever sid vacation abroad.Vacation outside my home only every 2 or 3 years. Never eat out. I have no idea how is it to go to a concert. No expensive hobbies. When I was 40 all of that provided 40k for a down payment.
I can manage to save 500-1000€ per month. For me the biggest issue is just the general pricing. Maybe its emotional too, but I have fond memories of my family house when I was a kid and I dont want to buy comparatively a bungalow for quadruple the price.
A flat is barely worth it given you still have to bother with neighbors. Those are also 6 digit numbers up here. Not happening. I want a home like my parents used to have. Regular old German refugee home with a nice garden, 3-4 rooms, 2 levels, 2 bathrooms, small cellar. Sounds big, was a rather small house though. Garden had space and a shed to work in. We sold that for 70k 15 years ago and I wont buy a flat for 130k where I possibly have to bother with noisy neighbors.
Ordinary men have wifes and two children in all those countries. You are also projecting American lifestyle "buying house without family help is necessary" on countries "hungary" where this was not an expectation for a really really long time. Like, generations.
- women don't want to leave the workforce because one salary cannot support a family
- yet women remaining in the workforce, since single-salary is infeasible, thusly doubling supply of workers, lowering salaries, which itself makes it infeasible to single-income a family
Not to pick on women, as a feminist if you ask me, all modern men should have to be houseboys to serve their feminine masters. It does suck but it is necessary to benefit the modern women who did not suffer, in so by causing modern men to suffer -- to make amends for the suffering of all women in the perpetuity of history at the hands of all historical men, neither of which are alive today.
A woman who intentionally went corporate and avoided having kids, and wasted her maternal instincts on someone else's profits, will suffer when their body clock catches up to them, and the company leaves them behind.
You can't go back and get pregnant. And your marriage probably ended in divorce already anyway by now, which is a whole more amount of suffering.
I'm not telling them how to live their lives. I'm just predicting the path that is made based on the choices made.
Everyone is on a journey, and the path their journey takes is partially the choices made. People are allowed to think hard about their choices, and the choices of others.
If they want their path to go their, so be it, and but it's cruel to not discuss the ramifications of choices made.
Well that's the point, men are refusing to suffer.
There is little incentive to walking in a contract, where you are working all the time, no appreciation, love, gratitude or even a thank you. All the time being made to feel like you are not measuring up. And they'd rather be with somebody else apart from you. That done, you also come back from work and do all the chores you would if you remained single.
And if a few years later the other party decided to break the contract, now they take your home, get monthly pensions(with raises), and get to start the process all over again with somebody else at your expense.
Plus these days kids don't stay back with aging parents to care for them, so having kids appears pointless as well.
By and large, let alone an incentive, marriage and children seem to a massive negative for men. Hence I wouldn't be surprised low marriage and birth rates all over the world.
Why would you want to do all this? When you can work, keep the money, and spend it for your pleasure by staying single?
Except that it is men who complain constantly about wanting to marry and have kids while women are much more content being single and have friends.
You dont have to pay alimony of the wife worked thw whole time. That complain is funny in the comtext of men demanding to return back to time where alimony arrangement was necessary protection.
Even in marriage, it is more of women who initiate divorce are report higher hapiness after the divorce. Men report lower hapiness and are more likely yo want to marry again.
> Its in the nature of men to work and provide. That's how men seek fulfilment in life.
i'm sorry, what? it's ingrained in men to be worker-drones and every man sees this as his fulfillment?
yikes. as the kids say, 'touch grass'. translated for older people, "maybe expand your world-view and don't extrapolate your idea of a man to all of men."
Men are workers. Not all work needs to be a "worker-drone", but yes, all men are built towards some form of work, and that work typically is around an item of sorts.
Men can work all sorts of ways, and that can include raising kids. Women tend to be a lot less happier leaving their kids to go toil with the dirt.
What are women, then? Baby-machines, cooks and cleaners, which I guess you don't see as work?
I mean it's not the first time I encounter a dude with the same opinion as you have, but every time I'm surprised by the casual reductionism of our societies. Men make work, Women make baby. Men hard, Women soft. Men strong and powerful. Women weak and emotional.
> Men make work, Women make baby. Men hard, Women soft. Men strong and powerful. Women weak and emotional.
On average those are true though, men work more, women take more care of children, men are harder than women, men are stronger than women, and women are more emotional than men. On average.
It is fine for women to be manly and men to be feminine, but that doesn't negate the fact that most women are feminine and most men are masculine.
Agree to Disagree, I've spent enough time of my life to discuss this exact topic. Men® are Men® and Women™ are Women™, so be it. On average everyone is exactly the same, as long as you look at the same gender. Wait, what's gend...forget it.
"All people are the same" argument basically negates thousands of years of history, basic human knowledge, etc. Biology impacts quite a bit. For example, if your family comes from Asia, chances are your more prone to lactose intolerance than European-based areas. It's also why most Asian dishes don't have any sort of cheese or dairy - there was no real history of that type of agriculture compared to Europe. To ignore all this and throw it out so that people can pretend to be the exact same is to throw all of history out the window, and to pretend that we're not standing on shoulders of giants that helped craft modern civilization as we know it.
Men are Men, and Women are Women. But Women wanted to be like Men, so they did, but Men don't like Women as Men, and Women are shocked to learn this.
> But Women wanted to be like Men, so they did, but Men don't like Women as Men, and Women are shocked to learn this [...] Now people don't even know what a Woman is.
even though i did write that i am done with discussing this topic with people, a sliver of hope was was in my mind. maybe if i continued engaging, you would make a clearer point. but you started by comparing racial, geographical quirks of different cultures to a 50/50 gender split over the whole world. more asian women and men are lactose intolerant, but surely 99% of their women are obedient housewives and 99% of the men are workhorse providers. globally, of course, in every culture. that's just the way things are, respect history, yo.
then you decided to go on a rant about women specifically wanting this and that. and then decided to top it all off with some nice transphobic(call it what you want) bs.
i don't have the energy to seriously reply to this, and even if, it probably wouldn't matter anyways. cheers, Man®
> Except that it is men who complain constantly about wanting to marry and have kids
Easy to want that when "have kids" just means "impregnating your wife". Bet most of them would balk at the prospective of a 2 decade long 24/7 childcare duty routine if they had to do it themselves. Plus, if they really wanted to raise kids, many in orphans would benefit from a parent
Birth rates correlate negatively with education of women. I read somewhere that this is one of the most robust findings in all of social science (and when I asked Gemini just now whether there was such a correlation, it said the same).
There’s a (positive or negative) correlation between birth rates and dozens of factors, because over the period birth rates have been falling, the world has changed dramatically. Issue is we don’t know what is causal. education also correlates with all kinds of other factors like income, type of work, marital status, and political views, meaning birth rates are also likely correlated with all of these factors.
Is it really true that this is not known? Although I only claimed correlation (and am thus surprised that I was downvoted twice, as that claim is obviously true), based on the famous "robustness" of this observation, I strongly suspect that confounding factors like those you mention have already been analysed to death, and found not to eliminate the explanatory power of women's education.
At least, checking these confounders seems an obviously valuable and interesting avenue to explore. If it hasn't been done yet, I wonder what social scientists are doing instead.
I agree that access to birth control is a strong factor and likely heavily confounded with women's education. I think there will have been examples of women's education but lack of birth control (e.g., predominantly Catholic nations, especially early on), not sure if there are many examples in the other direction though.
Unfamiliar with USSR -- is the birth rate high there despite lots of educated women?
A generous welfare state (like the Nordics or Switzerland) does not necessarily mean that the middle class is well off with lots of resources for kids. Usually it's the middle class (+upper class) that pays for the generous welfare state, but gets almost none of the benefits. You don't get/need the welfare, if you earn enough to be considered middle class.
Expensive to have kids is a symptom, not a cause of the issue.
Fewer kids == more investment per kid == more competition for high quality everything == more costs.
Also, more workers in the labor force (aka fewer SAHM’s, etc) == more competition for labor == lower cost for labor (vs historic trends) == can buy less with an hours labor.
The ratio of pay for an hours work to a daycare hour is at historic highs, and there is a reason for that.
If you look at women’s participation in the workforce and overlay it with ratios of worker pay vs buying power, it’s a pretty obvious correlation. There is a reason that labor has been losing ground since the 70’s, and it’s largely because birth control means that women can put off having kids (while still meeting needs like having sex and being in relationships) in order to work and make money and be independent.
The issue here is - whatcha going to do about it?
Most women I know eventually want kids, but then they get screwed by all the younger women who don’t yet want kids making the market, ahem, not very amenable.
And they’re caught in the rat race, which is its own kind of miserable, especially when everyone is competing for the same slots, instead of the roughly half that was the historic norm.
There really is no free lunch though - plenty of horror stories from before too.
My former friend in Finland finished med school, "for free", while living in a really nice apartment "for free", receiving ADHD medications "for free", and then went to a business school "for free". He has not worked a single day in his life and he is in his very late 20s.
I got downvoted, and you replied this... when tuition is not free in most European countries, at least not for higher education. In my country, med school used to cost over $18k, which is probably higher now.
Also the very hidden caveat of low or no tuition fee in some other countries is that you study in their language, not English.
I just watched this. While I completely disliked the heavy emotional focus and bias of the presenter (for example: no interviews with people who don't want children were held, particularly not men), the data seemed solid. There's a peer review pending - I'd like to look at that when it comes out. If the conclusions are solid, we would have to change our societies and economies in such a fundamental way - I don't see that happening in the next 50 years, if at all.
I don't buy that at all. Young people in Russia and next door Finland have equal levels of financial security? What are you basing this on?
But let's say I did accept your premise, I still don't think financial security drives birth rates. In 1957, almost 10% of teenage women gave birth. Do we think 1957 teenagers were having babies because they were all homeowners with secure, well paying jobs?
The best explanation I've heard for the falling birth rates of developed countries is that the cause is a massive increase in social expectation on parents.
It used to be that whether your child made it through childhood was up to God due to the massive number of risk factors beyond the parents' control. Those risk factors are much more easily mitigated in developed countries, so now the responsibility rests solely on the parents, and that's why kids can no longer go outside.
I'm skeptical of this explanation for falling birthrates just because birthrates are falling across the world and there seems to be no correlation between fertility and financial security. America has low birthrates. Scandinavia (usually considered to have generous welfare states) has low birthrates. Hungary, where the government gives massive tax breaks (IIRC they spend around ~6% of their GDP on child incentives), has low birthrates. Europe, East Asia, India, the Middle East, the Americas, basically the whole world except for central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (which are catching up) has low birth rates. Obviously the economic conditions between basically all the countries in the world varies wildly, but there isn't a consistent relationship between those conditions and fertility.
Also within countries, the number of children people have is not always correlated with wealth (and at times in the past 60 years it has been negatively correlated).
Anyway, I find your argument intuitive, but it doesn't seem to align with the data we have.