Countries are freaking out because of reduced births. This is not rocket science. Have a system where people are happy, have access to healthcare, and have access to free time to meet people and increase relationships. Money itself helps but you also need a good work life balance to do things and meet people. So make life affordable and worth living and guess what happens, I can guess. Can you?
As two working with my wife with no family around and 2 kids below 3 years old yeah, it's fucking hard.
And we're even lucky to have no financial issue, I keep telling my wife we're even part of the' 'lucky ones'' (although friends that have the grandparents and all have it easier on my opinion, I see them still partying and restaurants and shit, while we can't really do that - or rarely and less enjoyable for now)
Also both working, kid is 5 now, so its easier, not so sick all the time, no family around, was very hard when she started going to kindergarden, always sick, always someone had to miss from work.
Hell yeah, imagine this year our 2 yo (was with a nanny before) and his little sister started kindergarten together lmao, 8 months of permanent one of them minimum sick + sometimes teeth + once me very sick, my wife had it rough
We missed so much work or home working + managing one of the kids
I dont need to imagine, I spent home every year at least 2 months on sick leave, and then people ask us when we will have another one, I say no more, system doesnt make it easy when kid is sick.
Before people had family to help, now most of the people dont have anyone to help, and its not easy to raise a kid when you lose 50% of your income when kid is sick.
Yes, and we are very grateful. We tried to put ourselves into remote positions that offer flexibility at the cost of perhaps more upward mobility career wise. We are prioritizing the kids right now in our lives and we have our careers to focus on after they are off to school.
Just thinking about the logistics - how do working couples handle 15 weeks of holiday for kids when each get 5 weeks?
Then how can anyone afford a place for the kids to live when the average house price is something like 8 times the average household income with two working parents?
The system as a whole is not designed around having children any more. More and more time and money have been taken from families until there’s nothing left but work.
More and more people don’t have that help though, because those people also need to work or in case of many boomer parents don’t want to spend that much time with their grandkids.
Not sure how it is everywhere but it’s becoming more rare for daycares to pay by the day. Most now just charge for a spot, whether you’re there 3 or 5 days, it’s the same price. It’s the biggest cost for our kid we have by far, also doesn’t help there’s 0 support here in the US. One of my siblings lives in the UK and their kids went, for free, to nursery from a month after their 3rd birthday. It was each day for half a day I think or 3 whole days a week. Here we’re sitting with our youngest until he’s 6 because his birthday is 2 weeks after the cut off date for the school year. Totally ridiculous.
I mostly don't believe in daycare. I believe that it's much better to have one-on-one interactions with ones actual parents.
A parent is going to be much more focused and dedicated. Back in the day it was normal for the middle class (i.e. the actual middle class-- school principals, university professors, lawyers, the better engineers) to have taught their children to read well by the age of four and to then send them to schools that were quite serious even at that age.
Basically-- individual tutoring by parents. The 2*sigma thing.
It's better to have children and for them to be at daycare than to not have children though. With badly educated children you at least continue your family, but I want society to move away from this kind of thing, and to having a world with actual well-educated people, where people have a good chance of taking care of their children themselves.
But that of course requires actually changing society and instituting shorter working hours.
I’ve thought about this and tbh if I had a couple more hours in the day it would ease so many issues without having to drop out of the workforce entirely.
A 30-32 hour workweek where I or my partner could get our kid out of school at 2:30 when the day ends (rather than arranging for afterschool- which we’re waitlisted for lol- or a sitter), or run a couple errands/clean before the toddler gets out of daycare would be LIFE CHANGING.
Right now, one of our biggest stressors is trying to make the timing of everything work. It’s constant juggling.
Yes. Time is fantastic, and we need more of it allocated for people's use of it for themselves.
If instituted it'll be great for children, for politics-- since more ordinary people will actually have the ability to participate in it, for community and recreation-- religion, sports, woodworking, advanced cooking, etc. would probably explode, and this would give people better knowledge, so they'd buy higher-quality goods, which ensures that some people in their working lives, will be making things that couldn't be made today, because people don't understand that they need those tools, or don't have the time to learn to do things properly.
The three-day work week is fair. People should have most of their week to themselves and their communities. Working 5 out of 7 days (or often more) is insanity.
Pretty much, yes, and that means that at least one person needs to be at home, almost all the time, so in practice, a 2.5 day work-week.
I think a three day work week will make this feasible though, and a four day work week is a sufficient stop-gap measure to get us to something which is at least not critically unstable.
It's not going to "decimate" the species lol. Human population could deflate naturally and it'd be fine. There would simply need to be new economic paradigms and considerations, but our species would not "collapse."
Yes, we all know what 'decimate' means. So you're saying the world is going to end if we naturally slide back to 7.2b people from 8b people? Get a grip and stop being dramatic...
Lmao that's not how it works...populations could shrink, sure. But at a certain point people will have kids again. It's never going to go down to 0, that is absolutely absurd.
The wealthily are not the ones having kids. This is more of an idiotarcy issue than a weather issue.
We will be come a two class system of people who live off the government and people who work to pay for the others to live off the government. Look at daycares and see the ratio of people who get free childcare to who have to pay. The poor are breeding the educated are not. This system will not play out well for us in the long run.
My childcare for one kid is $2,600/mo. Median rent for a 2 bedroom apartment is $3,000-$3,500/mo.
So ya, $70k... after taxes that is even a little more than my entire $90k/year ($45/hr) job out the window just on rent and childcare. But we also like food and stuff. If my wife didn't work a similarly decent job we would be fucked.
I get this argument, but I think it's a bit more complex than that.
Couples have been working two jobs pretty much forever; it was only a short time in the 40s and 50s where a single income was sufficient. Prior to that, both parents almost always worked.
The difference is that raising children is more time consuming now (and expensive) and families have less support from families to do so.
A wife in the 1920s for example on the farm would be taking care of a myriad of farm tasks while their children helped out; even if the kids went to school they probably didn't attend during planting and harvest and most were done by age 12 anyways. Grand parents and uncles and cousins and aunts would be involved in child care when the kids were too young to help out. In places where there was no family, your neighbours would help out (and you would do the same).
Today, families do not often have those familial and/or community supports. Children are economic dead weights well into their teens, many into their 20s.
I am not arguing that we should put kids to work in the mines, but the problem is a lot more complicated than simply "people need two incomes to survive now". People have needed two incomes to survive for literally thousands of years.
This so why I feel government subsidies for day care covering the cost wound be greatly beneficial to not only the parents, but that saved money can be spent elsewhere and reduce financial stresses.
Not even that, I have a 3 month old and my sister was talking about how soon she’ll be going to bed at 7 and sleeping in 10 hour stretches and I just went….. I get home at 6, you mean to tell me I get one hour with my baby a night like that’s a good thing?!?
A society where people are happy results in fewer children. Children are a huge amount of work, so if you're content with your lifestyle, why would you want them? Citizens of rich countries have so many other ways to choose to spend their lives now, and it shows.
They haven’t really tried. They’ve given lip service to this problem. Compare the effort to what a country does in war - full reshaping of the economy and massive reactivation of the industrial base.
Okay, so what part of the current budget should we cut to make room for this wartime level effort? It seems like a bad time to dump a wartime level amount of funding & production into the economy unless we compensate for it elsewhere. Not just because of current inflation, but the debt problem too.
Also, the economy was reshaped yes.. and our iron fist control did help us win the war. However, the population at home wasn't exactly living in the best conditions as a direct result of that. Most goods had to be rationed.
I’m not an expert at exactly what the solution should be. I’m just trying to emphasize that governments haven’t really tried to fix the birth rate crisis.
I don’t think this is true. I think people just don’t want kids. Life without kids is easy and fun and people in rich countries don’t want to give that up.
Sweden and plenty of other countries have all of the above and it has not increased rates at all, so that’s obviously not the solution. Hell, Japan has some of the most generous policies and it hasn’t made a dent. It’s a lot more complicated than that
I can see it in my oldest kid friend group, she just graduated high school and none of her friends wants kids. It’s not just the cost for them, it’s also the politics (here in the US) that’s very anti-women, it’s the environment, it’s them seeing how much you need to sacrifice of your time and freedom to raise a child, and especially for women it means you’re a target for losing your job or not getting a promotion. That’s outside of the extreme mental and physical changes a pregnancy can bring, that can last for years.
They’ve seen the stories, it’s not hard to find and read about. They’re more educated than ever before on life is like as adult, they see the struggles with money, jobs and housing. They see the complete lack of will from any politician to help out “the people”. It’s not a healthy society to start a family.
Anyway, might be biased but that’s what’s going around in my kids circles. We live in an area that’s quite conservative politics and world views wise as well.
A lot just has to do with social attitudes and the variety of other things people would rather do than have or raise children. We can say "oh if people had to work less they'd have more kids", but they're already working less than most people in the past and have fewer kids.
Let's be realistic for people who aren't having kids an extra day off is just going to become a longer weekend in which there are still a bunch of more fun things to do than deal with kids.
Especially in today's environment, the rules on how to deal with kids are much stricter, you're incentivized to pour all your resources into one child basically, and there's no real community support. It's not an environment that supports having more than the replacement rate.
Social darwinism wants the "right" people to have kids and the "wrong" people not to
The people that push these policies that harm your ability to have children think you're inferior and undeserving of having children. They want rich people to have more kids, not you
I think it has as much to do with racism as class.
Fun part of this is that very poor people seem to not care as much, so its esentially punishing middle-class, arguably the most mobile people in terms of skills/individual contributions.
That’s exactly why it’s done. It means the rich can still go to places to take care of themselves (as is done historically), the middle class ends up adapting (by not having kids) and the lower class just keeps popping babies because they don’t have the ability (or education) to move around the laws. So you get more of a divide between the classes, and they (the politicians and their sponsors) get their cheap workers and soldiers.
“Fertility rates tend to be higher in poorly resourced countries but due to high maternal and perinatal mortality, there is a reduction in birth rates. In developing countries children are needed as a labour force and to provide care for their parents in old age. In these countries, fertility rates are higher due to the lack of access to contraceptives and generally lower levels of female education. The social structure, religious beliefs, economic prosperity and urbanisation within each country are likely to affect birth rates as well as abortion rates, Developed countries tend to have a lower fertility rate due to lifestyle choices associated with economic affluence where mortality rates are low, birth control is easily accessible and children often can become an economic drain caused by housing, education cost and other cost involved in bringing up children. Higher education and professional careers often mean that women have children late in life. This can result in a demographic economic paradox.”
There are countries that are a lot poorer than ours where birth rates are much higher
The difference is that those are communal societies . Raising children is seen as a village responsibility and not just a parental one. You often have whole generations under one roof.
Further, I think the rise in the internet has exacerbated the situation. It’s simply a lot easier to be distracted than before.
I don't disagree with wanting all those things for people, but if you stop and think about where you find the highest birth rates, it's often in the toughest, poorest places. I think there's other causes.
Also, child mortality is high in toughest, poorest places. Also, birth control and in general medical facilities are not good. Is that what we regress back to?
By chance in those toughest poorest places, do they have time to socialize and fall in love or on the scary side are they being raped with no access to abortion?
>By chance in those toughest poorest places, do they have time to socialize and fall in love or on the scary side are they being raped with no access to abortion?
See, you are able to name the cause.
It is not money that got society into this population death spiral. I would not count on money to get us out of it.
poor places... as in, places where you don't work 50-60 hr weeks standard and they live in places with a ton of community functions that are not gatekept by money to make raising a child possible?
Basically it's more about conservative. Conservative and traditional society has higher birth rates. Given if a single earning person can sustain a family. Which most countries except West provides.
Women’s rights aren’t causing that, your comment is heavily biased. Children are literally free labor. In poor places there are no IT or machinery jobs. It’s mostly physical labor and if you have 8 kids, even at minimum wage you’re making 8X more than with 0 kids. This is why as society gets richer birthrates fall as there are less and less needs for physical labors.
Those kinds of policies are against the spirit of modern day western capitalism and don't increase corporate profit or GDP (they don't immediately transfer more money from the working class to the wealthy). So the system is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I guess the theory was that people would just keep having more and more kids indefinitely as long as GDP kept going up but that didn't end up happening.
I think alot of people would agree with that, maybe alot of them live in Nordic countries. If your given time and financial stability your mind isn't full of the business of life, you think a bit clearer. But if all countries cared about natural resources and the environment places wouldn't be destroying so much of it just because the prices got to low. I believe Nordic countries do a better job at not picking on the misfortunate.
You didn’t read the study. The fertility drop effects ONLY impacted high income families. The study does not support your brain dead conclusion at all. It only impacted wealth family’s decision to have an additional child, not whether families decided to have a first child. Wealthy French families chose not to have a baby because the government wouldn’t pay them an additional 93 euros a month to have another baby. This is not convincing evidence at all sorry.
I will have to spend more time reading but I have a feeling the numbers are distorted by the people who decided to keep their income within means testing in order to qualify for the handout. The regression analysis is difference in difference at the income qualifying levels and obviously that could distort the sample.
Not that simple. Birth rate is dropping even in Scandinavian countries. These countries give crazy amount of welfare, subsidized housing, excellent work-life balance, etc. On the other hand, look at poor war-torn countries like Gaza. Their birth rate is sky high.
Yeah, you can't force people who don't want kids to have kids, but there are people who want kids in life (having time, financial stability) let's them, but those who want that life need both time and facial ability to do so.
The fire movement is not "frugal people." The fire movement is wealthy people. The high earners are the only ones who can afford to sock away that much money. It's really just the wealthy living like the rest of us, and giving it a name to sound better.
Ok. But that has no bearing on the conversation at hand. One frugal fire couple does not help the average family afford a house in market geared towards 2 incomes.
Okay. Well try to use google properly. It’s not that you need two incomes to upgrade your lifestyle it’s that things are so expensive you need two incomes to maintain a lifestyle and have kids that used to require one income.
Plenty of single parent raise their kids with public school, providing their kids with basic necessities. Just make your own avocado toasts. It’s doable, really.
Enough would be: enough to not have homeless, budget out some small luxuries (camping or a trip to an inexpensive beach, maybe a shopping trip idk ) . Pay for transportation to and from places (in America we need a car unless you live in New York). Idk some call it the 90s lifestyle- my friends mom was a restaurant manager and she had enough to raise 5 children and own multiple houses. I’m sure I’m leaving things out.
Now how we measure that in terms of dollar amounts, that’s a lot harder. It is a variable. But I mean, I didn’t say I was gonna solve the questions; just try to get us closer by having somewhat of a definition for what is needed.
How to make housing affordable- look at Japan: they had a housing issue in the 80s, today, less so. They may have over corrected because houses in Japan are very inexpensive, but we should consider what they did to lower the price. If I remember correctly, they built 2 houses for every child born or something like that.
Regardless, it’s a lot of money to fix these issues. The next question is how do we reduce it?
There’s 3D printers that print homes. I’m sure we could work out a cost and system that makes sense. I feel like there is robot labor that is currently untapped here that would make everything much cheaper.
Everything has an effect though, so that may affect the employment of people around them.
UBI always comes to my head when I think of the robots. But then we’re back at square 1.
Ooo my city has been approving mixed housing. Which is great! A super good idea! It’s getting more houses on the market, but even with the interest rates, the prices are not falling.
I just threw ideas out there. If the government spent money on something I wanted, it would be a bullet train system in America between cities
Making housing affordable is quite easy. Simply build an additional 10-15 M extra homes in the US over the next decade and sell them to US families (not companies).
Not sure what you assumed the average price of a house is exactly. The average build cost even in an Exurb is $250k here. So, more like $3-4tn or 3-4 years of the military budget, assuming you're building actual homes with the goal of creating families. Small studio apartments can be lower toward 120-150k.
1.1. The construction sector is currently short more than 650,000 workers. Literally, 650,000 open unfilled positions and climbing. And thats just based on current demand / current build pipelines. And that's just the construction sector, there's also an acute shortage of building inspectors, fire marshals, (physical) IT contractors also known as cable monkeys, and more I'm forgetting.
Wages average less than $14/hr already, and the construction sector employs 3.2 million currently. Labor makes up more than 40% of the average home's build cost. The solution to the shortage is to, of course, pay more. However, people already balk at today's home prices.. imagine them 25%+ higher (because the build price influences the existing market, setting a floor)
Also, not everyone can work construction. it's a very physically demanding job, mainly filled by relatively younger workers (whom are more and more going to college instead)
So now we're stuck in a chicken and egg problem. Companies won't raise wages significantly because they don't know if the demand is there for significantly pricier houses..
This is why construction can happen at warp speed if you're willing to dump money into the problem. If your offering an average wage, you get an average timeline and most companies have jobs lined up for months-years.
1.2. an average of 1.4 million homes are built each year by these 3.2 million workers. So, even if you found 4 million people to come work construction and doubled the workforce, it'd still take 10+ years to accomplish your goal of building 10-15M homes.
1.3. yeah we do need legislation to regulate corporate home buying, but it's not as simple a fix as you think because it's also these corporations that fund new home builds.. a real estate giant goes to a bank and gets a loan to build a new development
if they're not allowed to own homes.. how are they supposed to build them ? by definition they own the homes until they sell them off and find a buyer..
so if you outright ban them from owning homes, you actually crater new home building. Only a small minority of developments are 100% pre-brought, the vast majority are done by companies on more or less a whim.. sometimes it takes years of a house sitting empty before a buyer comes along.
the military employs 1 million directly and supports 3 million through industrial contracts. A third of the budget is for asset upkeep, from our hundred+ international bases to our aircraft/ships. it's basically mandatory spending. what do you suggest we do, dock the nuclear aircraft carrier and leave it unmanned for a season while praying it's not needed ? quite frankly it'd probably cost more than it'd save just to figure out the safety of leaving everything unmanned and sitting there 1yr+
not to mention repairing it all the next year..
and lastly 2.1. it's closer to 4 trillion even if you build small homes in an exurb, just at current wages and material prices. if your talking building out new dense apartments, the land space alone is astronomical today in cities too.
source: IT contractor for a new home development offered infinite overtime
I envisioned that housing built by this program would be mostly high density homes -
Like 8 story buildings with 80 units in each 800-1200 square feet. Hopefully the build cost (labor/materials - not land) would be ~100k per unit. The goal would be to produce boring, cost efficient cheap housing; not necessarily your dream home.
Regarding the labor market - you’re probably right about a lot of things - and I’m not sure what price you’d have to pay for labor. However I don’t think you’d really have to exceed current home builder salaries BUT you’d have to actually train people. A lot of the issue in the construction market is that the decent wages require years of work to achieve. You’d have to make the entry wage probably 60k a year to pull people into it.
Time frame - yea it might take longer than I want. Such a massive project might take 20 years instead of 10.
I wasn’t using this program to legislate corporate home buying directly. I’d just say “homes
Built by this specific project can only be sold to American families” - not do anything else to the rest of the market. I do agree that allowing companies to build some luxury rental properties can be good.
Regardless- this type of project CAN be accomplished. It’s merely a choice to not pursue it. Counties have done similar things historically and have created low price housing for their populations that last almost a century.
For $100k, you could build 650sqft if you're using the cheapest possible labor (long timelines) and cheapest materials. Not including the land cost, which will differ much more significantly depending where you build it. (this additional cost varies from $0.25 a square foot in Nowhere, Nowhere, to $1,000+ a square foot in NYC. Most cities outside of the top 10 average around $100/sqft in the urban core and $30/sqft in the suburbs. The top 10 COL cities are closer to $300/sqft+ in the core and $60/sqft+ in the suburbs). Also not accounted for: permits, inspections, apartment managers / upkeep, trash management costs, any water features like a pool, a mail room and receptionist (or a contract for individual delivery), appliances / furnishing, and finishings (everything from doors to shelves to etc), and of course long term upkeep/ repairs
If you're version of barebones is "has central AC/heating, fiber internet access, more than bare minimum windows, decently well built" or any combination of that, and not a literal Budget Suites slum style basic apartment with a window unit you have to buy yourself, then you're starting at $300/sqft raw build cost (so for $100k, you'd get 330 sqft)
'Nice' apartments, the type you aspire for with amenities, no bugs around, super well built but modest, push $500/sqft. Luxury begins at about $1,000/sqft build cost, that's where you start getting marble counter tops and other truly fancy things.
Again, none of these estimates even include land cost, so Im sure you can see that $100k isn't feasible. Bare minimum, you'd be at $150k to get Budget Suites quality apartments after the land and upkeep.
I wish I could post site photos, because people would be shocked how little you get even for $250-300k today. You don't get some luxury huge apartment for that, if you want a basic 800-1000sqft unit with HVAC that's bare minimum and it's gonna be shoddy construction and built in an Exurb even paying that..
On the labor market: ... did you hear the part about 'there are 650,000 active unfilled listing's just from current demand'
If your goal is 20 years, you need to up the workforce 50% or 1.5 million people. That 2.2 million combined. Probably not even possible to fill with our current population, unemployment is near record lows.
60,000 would be a doubling of the average hourly rate (barely any construction is salaried outside of government jobs). So home prices would go up near 25%. It's also still not nearly enough.. the problem isn't only low pay, but the average construction worker is already hitting 48hrs a week.
I can tell you firsthand it's not enough. I'm only working this contracting job until I graduate college and get something with real earning potential (the low wage of 15/hr is made up for by my youthful ability to clock 80hr weeks). Even the lowest paying field of engineering, civil engineering, starts at an average of 80k+ for 40hrs. tech jobs are even more cushy.
As contractors, the vast majority also don't get a 401k match, we (are supposed to) pay the self employment tax aka both parts of FICA, and we don't get healthcare (something that is fine in my youth, but not a good long term career path for sure). As contractors, you don't get any paid time off. Get sick? better hope you have savings. Get fired / 'not hired' ? better hope you have savings because contractors don't qualify for unemployment in most places. Get pregnant ? not only are you forbidden from most sites by OSHA regulation, but as a contractor you only get unpaid FMLA. Not to mention the whole buying your own tools, work clothes, not getting paid for commute time, having no paid lunch breaks (or paid breaks in general), etc etc
To even make construction a legitimately desirable career, and fill current demand over the course of the next few decades, wages are going to have to effectively triple at the bare minimum (healthcare costs 13k+ a worker, time off, etc). I can't even estimate how much you'd have to increase wages to draw in 2.2 million workers from other careers, and build out that many homes over 20yrs.
I think that's a good idea, but should be broadened to something like 'permanent residents of the US' -- plenty of people migrate here each year intending to stay permanently, and they aren't citizens yet.
I agree some effort should be undertaken, but I think at best it's a 50yr+ project to get 10 million homes. Even that would still require a 25% expansion of home production (so, equivalently, 700,000 new construction workers dedicated to this single project)
And I don't think the military budget should be cut for it, entitlement programs and the national debt should be reigned in. We could fund this program today, except instead we spend that $1.5tn a year on paying debt interest.
That really depends on what you mean by govt build housing. For example Singapore build housing for their entire country in the 1940s and it was an astounding success. If you refer to low income housing in the US in the last few decades - then yea.
Govt build housing as a term varies a ton. It really depends how/what is built. Recently the govt hasn’t built anything - but it very easily could.
This guys gets it. It's not the perks or free time or even gender inequality. It's all about enabling single income households where women can stay at home.
Anyone can stay home but women still carry and give birth so given a choice an overwhelming majority of men will work and women will stay home. Nothing wrong with either, but a matter of what is more prevalent and practical.
Because pregnancy, birth recovery, and breastfeeding and/or pumping all take up a huge amount of time. Women can work, but men have a pretty big comparative advantage there.
Without going back to the evolutionary drawing board, the only way to truly close the gap is to not have children, which is obviously not ideal. It is up to individual families to decide what makes sense for them, but the deck is and will forever be stacked against women being the breadwinner.
This is the only solution to the demographics problem, and it's not even a good one. Anyone who thinks throwing money at it will change anything is delusional.
The barriers for couples who want to have even 1 child are endless. No job security, no support from the state, buying a house is impossible, wages are shit, healthcare is more and more predatory than supportive, both parents are expected to work, marriages don't last etc. No sane person will have 1 child when they are worried about not being able to pay rent or get sick.
No European country has either the will or the capacity to transform its economy to the point that people will feel comfortable with having children again. Simply forget about it.
The alternative than is these countries and thus western civilization dying out because the immigrants have proven they don't assimilate in Europe. France will be one big banuielle
Okay but will there be good paying jobs for these children to have when they grow up? What about a planet that’s not in the grips of catastrophic climate upheaval? The way automation and AI have been progressing do we actually need all that many more children?
They can, but they shouldn't have to. This will increase the fertility rate the most. The culture where women are expected to work a full time job is the biggest drain on fertility rate, moral judgment aside. Unless we can get over this fact, there won't be any progress in this domain.
Just as rapidly rising births has significantly changed the world in the past 50-60ish years, rapidly declining births will significantly alter the world in the coming decades.
The population dropping steadily is preferable to it taking a nosedive as many systems around the world depend on predictable, non-reactionary change.
The government and the big corporations that lobby for laws that fuck us over and benefit them.. they don't care about climate change, but they do care about women birthing them replacement minimum wage workers to keep the system in place that gets them richer!
Most of the Earth is beginning to suffer from low childbirths. Yes, you have a lot of women locking it up, which is their right to do but also there is a scientific/biological thing going on. If you seen the movie “children of men”, you know what I am getting at.
It was a biological event. we actually are experiencing that right now because men sperm count is dropping rapidly right now. The next 10 to 20 years on earth is going to be extremely interesting for mankind.
a_little_hazel_nuts | 1 year, 6 months ago
Countries are freaking out because of reduced births. This is not rocket science. Have a system where people are happy, have access to healthcare, and have access to free time to meet people and increase relationships. Money itself helps but you also need a good work life balance to do things and meet people. So make life affordable and worth living and guess what happens, I can guess. Can you?
nowhereman86 | 1 year, 6 months ago
The system is now normalized for two incomes in a household. It is damn near impossible to have two parents working full time raise a child.
a_little_hazel_nuts | 1 year, 6 months ago
Yep. Being a parent is a full time job, they're asking parents to have 2 full time jobs and to have the energy for that is tough.
RedditTooAddictive | 1 year, 6 months ago
As two working with my wife with no family around and 2 kids below 3 years old yeah, it's fucking hard.
And we're even lucky to have no financial issue, I keep telling my wife we're even part of the' 'lucky ones'' (although friends that have the grandparents and all have it easier on my opinion, I see them still partying and restaurants and shit, while we can't really do that - or rarely and less enjoyable for now)
Organized-Konfusion | 1 year, 6 months ago
Yea.
Also both working, kid is 5 now, so its easier, not so sick all the time, no family around, was very hard when she started going to kindergarden, always sick, always someone had to miss from work.
RedditTooAddictive | 1 year, 6 months ago
Hell yeah, imagine this year our 2 yo (was with a nanny before) and his little sister started kindergarten together lmao, 8 months of permanent one of them minimum sick + sometimes teeth + once me very sick, my wife had it rough
We missed so much work or home working + managing one of the kids
Really tough
Organized-Konfusion | 1 year, 6 months ago
I dont need to imagine, I spent home every year at least 2 months on sick leave, and then people ask us when we will have another one, I say no more, system doesnt make it easy when kid is sick.
Before people had family to help, now most of the people dont have anyone to help, and its not easy to raise a kid when you lose 50% of your income when kid is sick.
RedditTooAddictive | 1 year, 6 months ago
Definitely..
I admit I'm lucky as I was early into Bitcoin, otherwise would be rough
Best of luck to you!
Sirdigbyssidekick | 1 year, 6 months ago
We are out there, double income double kids! It’s hard but it’s also rewarding and we have a good rhythm with our family and work life balance.
My wife and I are also in pretty good paying jobs that offer very flexible schedules and that helps tremendously with two young ones (4 & 1.5)
ambitionlless | 1 year, 6 months ago
Just imagine how hard it'd be if they weren't flexible.
Sirdigbyssidekick | 1 year, 6 months ago
Yes, and we are very grateful. We tried to put ourselves into remote positions that offer flexibility at the cost of perhaps more upward mobility career wise. We are prioritizing the kids right now in our lives and we have our careers to focus on after they are off to school.
roodammy44 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Just thinking about the logistics - how do working couples handle 15 weeks of holiday for kids when each get 5 weeks?
Then how can anyone afford a place for the kids to live when the average house price is something like 8 times the average household income with two working parents?
The system as a whole is not designed around having children any more. More and more time and money have been taken from families until there’s nothing left but work.
nowhereman86 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Not unless you have older generations or family living close by to help. Even then you probably need some day care or summer camp time v
PeterPlotter | 1 year, 6 months ago
More and more people don’t have that help though, because those people also need to work or in case of many boomer parents don’t want to spend that much time with their grandkids.
goodandweevil | 1 year, 6 months ago
I’m gobsmacked that summer and school vacations are still a thing.
I applied for my school-aged kid’s summer camp in January and we still have 3 weeks of summer vacation unaccounted for.
roodammy44 | 1 year, 6 months ago
I think it’s great they are a thing, just wish workers got long enough holidays to make it work with children
Bain_not_Vayne | 1 year, 6 months ago
This. Two incomes in a household significantly impacted the birthrate. Not blaming women's participation on labor force tho.
impossiblefork | 1 year, 6 months ago
The solution will have to be reducing the work hours.
It could even be that a four day work week is too much as well, and that it should be a three-day work week.
PeterPlotter | 1 year, 6 months ago
Not sure how it is everywhere but it’s becoming more rare for daycares to pay by the day. Most now just charge for a spot, whether you’re there 3 or 5 days, it’s the same price. It’s the biggest cost for our kid we have by far, also doesn’t help there’s 0 support here in the US. One of my siblings lives in the UK and their kids went, for free, to nursery from a month after their 3rd birthday. It was each day for half a day I think or 3 whole days a week. Here we’re sitting with our youngest until he’s 6 because his birthday is 2 weeks after the cut off date for the school year. Totally ridiculous.
impossiblefork | 1 year, 6 months ago
I mostly don't believe in daycare. I believe that it's much better to have one-on-one interactions with ones actual parents.
A parent is going to be much more focused and dedicated. Back in the day it was normal for the middle class (i.e. the actual middle class-- school principals, university professors, lawyers, the better engineers) to have taught their children to read well by the age of four and to then send them to schools that were quite serious even at that age.
Basically-- individual tutoring by parents. The 2*sigma thing.
It's better to have children and for them to be at daycare than to not have children though. With badly educated children you at least continue your family, but I want society to move away from this kind of thing, and to having a world with actual well-educated people, where people have a good chance of taking care of their children themselves.
But that of course requires actually changing society and instituting shorter working hours.
catburglar27 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Say it out loud for the people in the back. In reality, most people disagree with you. They'd call you 'lazy'.
Especially in Japan (where I work). I've been given so many tasks that even 5x8 is not enough and I end up working OT. Same for my colleagues.
I don't see this ever happening in Japan.
KnowledgeMediocre404 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Or even paying people enough to support a family on one income and normalizing men staying home so families are able to make their own choices.
goodandweevil | 1 year, 6 months ago
I’ve thought about this and tbh if I had a couple more hours in the day it would ease so many issues without having to drop out of the workforce entirely.
A 30-32 hour workweek where I or my partner could get our kid out of school at 2:30 when the day ends (rather than arranging for afterschool- which we’re waitlisted for lol- or a sitter), or run a couple errands/clean before the toddler gets out of daycare would be LIFE CHANGING.
Right now, one of our biggest stressors is trying to make the timing of everything work. It’s constant juggling.
impossiblefork | 1 year, 6 months ago
Yes. Time is fantastic, and we need more of it allocated for people's use of it for themselves.
If instituted it'll be great for children, for politics-- since more ordinary people will actually have the ability to participate in it, for community and recreation-- religion, sports, woodworking, advanced cooking, etc. would probably explode, and this would give people better knowledge, so they'd buy higher-quality goods, which ensures that some people in their working lives, will be making things that couldn't be made today, because people don't understand that they need those tools, or don't have the time to learn to do things properly.
hereditydrift | 1 year, 6 months ago
The three-day work week is fair. People should have most of their week to themselves and their communities. Working 5 out of 7 days (or often more) is insanity.
Houjix | 1 year, 6 months ago
Someone needs to stay in the kitchen to feed the kids
impossiblefork | 1 year, 6 months ago
Pretty much, yes, and that means that at least one person needs to be at home, almost all the time, so in practice, a 2.5 day work-week.
I think a three day work week will make this feasible though, and a four day work week is a sufficient stop-gap measure to get us to something which is at least not critically unstable.
nowhereman86 | 1 year, 6 months ago
I mean if it decimates the species we got a bit of a problem. Then we will truly be a society where only the very wealthy can have children…
We would have essentially traded sexism for classism.
Solid-Mud-8430 | 1 year, 6 months ago
It's not going to "decimate" the species lol. Human population could deflate naturally and it'd be fine. There would simply need to be new economic paradigms and considerations, but our species would not "collapse."
uncle-brucie | 1 year, 6 months ago
Reducing the population by 10% is not the same as collapsing.
purpleplatipuss | 1 year, 6 months ago
In China, South Korea and Japan, the population is expected to fall by around 50%.
nowhereman86 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Look up the definition of the word decimate.
Solid-Mud-8430 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Yes, we all know what 'decimate' means. So you're saying the world is going to end if we naturally slide back to 7.2b people from 8b people? Get a grip and stop being dramatic...
nowhereman86 | 1 year, 6 months ago
If we don’t elevate the birth rate above replacement levels that’s exactly what will happen
Solid-Mud-8430 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Lmao that's not how it works...populations could shrink, sure. But at a certain point people will have kids again. It's never going to go down to 0, that is absolutely absurd.
Only about half of the countries in the world are sub-replacement rate. And almost all of them sustain or still grow their population through immigration. At most, population just isn't going to keep exponentially growing, which is a good thing not a bad thing.
I have no clue where you're getting this made-up fantasy about humanity disappearing from earth, but it just isn't based in reality.
nowhereman86 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Man I think you guys need to look up the definition of the word decimate. It does not mean collapse…
Technically it means taking out 10% of a population…but at these rates we’d probably loose more than that.
Bain_not_Vayne | 1 year, 6 months ago
Well... Maybe the problem would resolve when elderly begin to sell their assets.
Prince_Ire | 1 year, 6 months ago
You mean have their assets taken by nursing homes and hospitals to pay for exorbitant costs
ThornyRose_21 | 1 year, 6 months ago
The wealthily are not the ones having kids. This is more of an idiotarcy issue than a weather issue.
We will be come a two class system of people who live off the government and people who work to pay for the others to live off the government. Look at daycares and see the ratio of people who get free childcare to who have to pay. The poor are breeding the educated are not. This system will not play out well for us in the long run.
Prince_Ire | 1 year, 6 months ago
Doesn't help that a lot of women don't like the idea of a house husband even if they make enough to do fine on one income
Solid-Mud-8430 | 1 year, 6 months ago
My childcare for one kid is $2,600/mo. Median rent for a 2 bedroom apartment is $3,000-$3,500/mo.
So ya, $70k... after taxes that is even a little more than my entire $90k/year ($45/hr) job out the window just on rent and childcare. But we also like food and stuff. If my wife didn't work a similarly decent job we would be fucked.
Sorge74 | 1 year, 6 months ago
It's fine, we just created a system where only the rich and the poor can have kids. We were planning to gut the middle class anyways.
Spoonfeedme | 1 year, 6 months ago
I get this argument, but I think it's a bit more complex than that.
Couples have been working two jobs pretty much forever; it was only a short time in the 40s and 50s where a single income was sufficient. Prior to that, both parents almost always worked.
The difference is that raising children is more time consuming now (and expensive) and families have less support from families to do so.
A wife in the 1920s for example on the farm would be taking care of a myriad of farm tasks while their children helped out; even if the kids went to school they probably didn't attend during planting and harvest and most were done by age 12 anyways. Grand parents and uncles and cousins and aunts would be involved in child care when the kids were too young to help out. In places where there was no family, your neighbours would help out (and you would do the same).
Today, families do not often have those familial and/or community supports. Children are economic dead weights well into their teens, many into their 20s.
I am not arguing that we should put kids to work in the mines, but the problem is a lot more complicated than simply "people need two incomes to survive now". People have needed two incomes to survive for literally thousands of years.
Aggravating_Kale8248 | 1 year, 6 months ago
This so why I feel government subsidies for day care covering the cost wound be greatly beneficial to not only the parents, but that saved money can be spent elsewhere and reduce financial stresses.
Thattimetraveler | 1 year, 6 months ago
Not even that, I have a 3 month old and my sister was talking about how soon she’ll be going to bed at 7 and sleeping in 10 hour stretches and I just went….. I get home at 6, you mean to tell me I get one hour with my baby a night like that’s a good thing?!?
MoneyWorthington | 1 year, 6 months ago
A society where people are happy results in fewer children. Children are a huge amount of work, so if you're content with your lifestyle, why would you want them? Citizens of rich countries have so many other ways to choose to spend their lives now, and it shows.
Praet0rianGuard | 1 year, 6 months ago
>This is not rocket science.
Apparently it is since no Western country has been able to combat falling birth rates.
Juls7243 | 1 year, 6 months ago
They haven’t really tried. They’ve given lip service to this problem. Compare the effort to what a country does in war - full reshaping of the economy and massive reactivation of the industrial base.
DrDrago-4 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Okay, so what part of the current budget should we cut to make room for this wartime level effort? It seems like a bad time to dump a wartime level amount of funding & production into the economy unless we compensate for it elsewhere. Not just because of current inflation, but the debt problem too.
Also, the economy was reshaped yes.. and our iron fist control did help us win the war. However, the population at home wasn't exactly living in the best conditions as a direct result of that. Most goods had to be rationed.
Juls7243 | 1 year, 6 months ago
I’m not an expert at exactly what the solution should be. I’m just trying to emphasize that governments haven’t really tried to fix the birth rate crisis.
bopitspinitdreadit | 1 year, 6 months ago
I don’t think this is true. I think people just don’t want kids. Life without kids is easy and fun and people in rich countries don’t want to give that up.
LastWorldStanding | 1 year, 6 months ago
Sweden and plenty of other countries have all of the above and it has not increased rates at all, so that’s obviously not the solution. Hell, Japan has some of the most generous policies and it hasn’t made a dent. It’s a lot more complicated than that
PeterPlotter | 1 year, 6 months ago
I can see it in my oldest kid friend group, she just graduated high school and none of her friends wants kids. It’s not just the cost for them, it’s also the politics (here in the US) that’s very anti-women, it’s the environment, it’s them seeing how much you need to sacrifice of your time and freedom to raise a child, and especially for women it means you’re a target for losing your job or not getting a promotion. That’s outside of the extreme mental and physical changes a pregnancy can bring, that can last for years.
They’ve seen the stories, it’s not hard to find and read about. They’re more educated than ever before on life is like as adult, they see the struggles with money, jobs and housing. They see the complete lack of will from any politician to help out “the people”. It’s not a healthy society to start a family.
Anyway, might be biased but that’s what’s going around in my kids circles. We live in an area that’s quite conservative politics and world views wise as well.
GhostReddit | 1 year, 6 months ago
>It’s a lot more complicated than that
A lot just has to do with social attitudes and the variety of other things people would rather do than have or raise children. We can say "oh if people had to work less they'd have more kids", but they're already working less than most people in the past and have fewer kids.
Let's be realistic for people who aren't having kids an extra day off is just going to become a longer weekend in which there are still a bunch of more fun things to do than deal with kids.
Especially in today's environment, the rules on how to deal with kids are much stricter, you're incentivized to pour all your resources into one child basically, and there's no real community support. It's not an environment that supports having more than the replacement rate.
APenguinNamedDerek | 1 year, 6 months ago
Social darwinism wants the "right" people to have kids and the "wrong" people not to
The people that push these policies that harm your ability to have children think you're inferior and undeserving of having children. They want rich people to have more kids, not you
purpleplatipuss | 1 year, 6 months ago
This is not a real thing and exactly the opposite is occurring. Immigrants tend to have the most babies.
APenguinNamedDerek | 1 year, 6 months ago
Yes, uneducated people do that
But this isn't a cohesive system put together by mastermind shadow people
Sorge74 | 1 year, 6 months ago
> Social darwinism wants the "right" people to have kids and the "wrong" people not to
This is stupid, because a single mother of 4 gets free day care, free insurance, free food. And I support those things.
It's just the middle class that gets fucked.
APenguinNamedDerek | 1 year, 6 months ago
Yeah, that's why people try to strip away government services that allow for this.
ferrodoxin | 1 year, 6 months ago
I think it has as much to do with racism as class.
Fun part of this is that very poor people seem to not care as much, so its esentially punishing middle-class, arguably the most mobile people in terms of skills/individual contributions.
APenguinNamedDerek | 1 year, 6 months ago
Yeah, that's basically what they're ultimately doing
V-RONIN | 1 year, 6 months ago
No if that was true womens rights wouldn't be being gutted to hell right now
PeterPlotter | 1 year, 6 months ago
That’s exactly why it’s done. It means the rich can still go to places to take care of themselves (as is done historically), the middle class ends up adapting (by not having kids) and the lower class just keeps popping babies because they don’t have the ability (or education) to move around the laws. So you get more of a divide between the classes, and they (the politicians and their sponsors) get their cheap workers and soldiers.
V-RONIN | 1 year, 6 months ago
And then what happens next? The poor get sick of it and overthrow the rich.
APenguinNamedDerek | 1 year, 6 months ago
Can you explain why
coldlightofday | 1 year, 6 months ago
“Fertility rates tend to be higher in poorly resourced countries but due to high maternal and perinatal mortality, there is a reduction in birth rates. In developing countries children are needed as a labour force and to provide care for their parents in old age. In these countries, fertility rates are higher due to the lack of access to contraceptives and generally lower levels of female education. The social structure, religious beliefs, economic prosperity and urbanisation within each country are likely to affect birth rates as well as abortion rates, Developed countries tend to have a lower fertility rate due to lifestyle choices associated with economic affluence where mortality rates are low, birth control is easily accessible and children often can become an economic drain caused by housing, education cost and other cost involved in bringing up children. Higher education and professional careers often mean that women have children late in life. This can result in a demographic economic paradox.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4255510/#:~:text=In%20developing%20countries%20children%20are,lower%20levels%20of%20female%20education.
Ok_Whereas_4585 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Honestly I think it’s missing the point
There are countries that are a lot poorer than ours where birth rates are much higher
The difference is that those are communal societies . Raising children is seen as a village responsibility and not just a parental one. You often have whole generations under one roof.
Further, I think the rise in the internet has exacerbated the situation. It’s simply a lot easier to be distracted than before.
dixiedownunder | 1 year, 6 months ago
I don't disagree with wanting all those things for people, but if you stop and think about where you find the highest birth rates, it's often in the toughest, poorest places. I think there's other causes.
vasu_devan | 1 year, 6 months ago
Also, child mortality is high in toughest, poorest places. Also, birth control and in general medical facilities are not good. Is that what we regress back to?
a_little_hazel_nuts | 1 year, 6 months ago
By chance in those toughest poorest places, do they have time to socialize and fall in love or on the scary side are they being raped with no access to abortion?
Eric1491625 | 1 year, 6 months ago
>I think there's other causes.
>By chance in those toughest poorest places, do they have time to socialize and fall in love or on the scary side are they being raped with no access to abortion?
See, you are able to name the cause.
It is not money that got society into this population death spiral. I would not count on money to get us out of it.
[OP] Salami_Slicer | 1 year, 6 months ago
Buddy,
Making people poorer won’t boost birth rates
americanoperdido | 1 year, 6 months ago
I’m not so sure.
It is said: Bed is the poor man’s opera.
Far_Cat9782 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Literally all of history disagrees with you but go on.
roodammy44 | 1 year, 6 months ago
It might if people can’t afford contraception
Persianx6 | 1 year, 6 months ago
poor places... as in, places where you don't work 50-60 hr weeks standard and they live in places with a ton of community functions that are not gatekept by money to make raising a child possible?
Dry-Expert-2017 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Basically it's more about conservative. Conservative and traditional society has higher birth rates. Given if a single earning person can sustain a family. Which most countries except West provides.
V-RONIN | 1 year, 6 months ago
Lack or reproductive care/knowledge? Womens rights?
Drago_09 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Women’s rights aren’t causing that, your comment is heavily biased. Children are literally free labor. In poor places there are no IT or machinery jobs. It’s mostly physical labor and if you have 8 kids, even at minimum wage you’re making 8X more than with 0 kids. This is why as society gets richer birthrates fall as there are less and less needs for physical labors.
Sweepel | 1 year, 6 months ago
That sounds like too much effort, let’s just increase immigration instead to plug the hole in the birth rate.
lifeofrevelations | 1 year, 6 months ago
Those kinds of policies are against the spirit of modern day western capitalism and don't increase corporate profit or GDP (they don't immediately transfer more money from the working class to the wealthy). So the system is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I guess the theory was that people would just keep having more and more kids indefinitely as long as GDP kept going up but that didn't end up happening.
a_little_hazel_nuts | 1 year, 6 months ago
Fist Bump, thank you.
planetofthemushrooms | 1 year, 6 months ago
Nordic countries have all of those things in spades but they still have falling birth rates.
a_little_hazel_nuts | 1 year, 6 months ago
Climate change is becoming more noticeable in certain areas, like places with ice caps.
planetofthemushrooms | 1 year, 6 months ago
Sounds like its better for the birth rate to drop.
a_little_hazel_nuts | 1 year, 6 months ago
I think alot of people would agree with that, maybe alot of them live in Nordic countries. If your given time and financial stability your mind isn't full of the business of life, you think a bit clearer. But if all countries cared about natural resources and the environment places wouldn't be destroying so much of it just because the prices got to low. I believe Nordic countries do a better job at not picking on the misfortunate.
UnCommonSense99 | 1 year, 6 months ago
The big problem is when the kids are young. Childcare costs are painful, you just moved to a bigger house and you are early in your career.
By the time the kids are all in school and your pay goes up it's a lot easier.
NoGuarantee678 | 1 year, 6 months ago
You didn’t read the study. The fertility drop effects ONLY impacted high income families. The study does not support your brain dead conclusion at all. It only impacted wealth family’s decision to have an additional child, not whether families decided to have a first child. Wealthy French families chose not to have a baby because the government wouldn’t pay them an additional 93 euros a month to have another baby. This is not convincing evidence at all sorry.
I will have to spend more time reading but I have a feeling the numbers are distorted by the people who decided to keep their income within means testing in order to qualify for the handout. The regression analysis is difference in difference at the income qualifying levels and obviously that could distort the sample.
ferrodoxin | 1 year, 6 months ago
Its not rocket science if you just look at "people".
But some "people" are very worried that different "people" may benefit more from these programs so tjey are unpopular.
ramxquake | 1 year, 6 months ago
They tried that in Scandinavia. No effect.
geft | 1 year, 6 months ago
Not that simple. Birth rate is dropping even in Scandinavian countries. These countries give crazy amount of welfare, subsidized housing, excellent work-life balance, etc. On the other hand, look at poor war-torn countries like Gaza. Their birth rate is sky high.
a_little_hazel_nuts | 1 year, 6 months ago
Yeah, you can't force people who don't want kids to have kids, but there are people who want kids in life (having time, financial stability) let's them, but those who want that life need both time and facial ability to do so.
telefawx | 1 year, 6 months ago
Tax something if you want less of it, subsidize something if you want more of it.
“Child benefits” don’t subsidize children, they subsidize work. You may think that’s semantics; but it’s not.
If you really want to fix the issue, give the husband a huge tax break if he has a stay at home wife.
dudeatwork77 | 1 year, 6 months ago
What about a wife with a stay at home husband?
telefawx | 1 year, 6 months ago
Sure. But subsidizing the two income trap, creates more two income traps.
dudeatwork77 | 1 year, 6 months ago
I just googled what two income trap is and it just sounds like people choosing to upgrade their lifestyle due to having more money.
CompostableConcussio | 1 year, 6 months ago
But then eventually everyone does it. And now you can only afford housing with two incomes.
dudeatwork77 | 1 year, 6 months ago
There are frugal people out there especially those in the fire movement
Individual-Nebula927 | 1 year, 6 months ago
The fire movement is not "frugal people." The fire movement is wealthy people. The high earners are the only ones who can afford to sock away that much money. It's really just the wealthy living like the rest of us, and giving it a name to sound better.
CompostableConcussio | 1 year, 6 months ago
Ok. But that has no bearing on the conversation at hand. One frugal fire couple does not help the average family afford a house in market geared towards 2 incomes.
telefawx | 1 year, 6 months ago
Okay. Well try to use google properly. It’s not that you need two incomes to upgrade your lifestyle it’s that things are so expensive you need two incomes to maintain a lifestyle and have kids that used to require one income.
dudeatwork77 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Plenty of single parent raise their kids with public school, providing their kids with basic necessities. Just make your own avocado toasts. It’s doable, really.
telefawx | 1 year, 6 months ago
I don’t even get the point you’re making.
randomly-what | 1 year, 6 months ago
Or…stay at home same sex spouse and other spouse works. Don’t need genders involved in this.
V-RONIN | 1 year, 6 months ago
Or just....pay people enough and give them more work life balance? Make housing affordable?
telefawx | 1 year, 6 months ago
What’s enough, how do you get them enough, and how do they make housing affordable?
nicolatesla92 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Just in an attempt to throw out ideas:
Enough would be: enough to not have homeless, budget out some small luxuries (camping or a trip to an inexpensive beach, maybe a shopping trip idk ) . Pay for transportation to and from places (in America we need a car unless you live in New York). Idk some call it the 90s lifestyle- my friends mom was a restaurant manager and she had enough to raise 5 children and own multiple houses. I’m sure I’m leaving things out.
Now how we measure that in terms of dollar amounts, that’s a lot harder. It is a variable. But I mean, I didn’t say I was gonna solve the questions; just try to get us closer by having somewhat of a definition for what is needed.
How to make housing affordable- look at Japan: they had a housing issue in the 80s, today, less so. They may have over corrected because houses in Japan are very inexpensive, but we should consider what they did to lower the price. If I remember correctly, they built 2 houses for every child born or something like that.
Regardless, it’s a lot of money to fix these issues. The next question is how do we reduce it?
There’s 3D printers that print homes. I’m sure we could work out a cost and system that makes sense. I feel like there is robot labor that is currently untapped here that would make everything much cheaper.
Everything has an effect though, so that may affect the employment of people around them.
UBI always comes to my head when I think of the robots. But then we’re back at square 1.
telefawx | 1 year, 6 months ago
Or we can de-regulate zoning to make building easier and give people more of their own money. Maybe government spending isn’t the answer…
nicolatesla92 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Ooo my city has been approving mixed housing. Which is great! A super good idea! It’s getting more houses on the market, but even with the interest rates, the prices are not falling.
I just threw ideas out there. If the government spent money on something I wanted, it would be a bullet train system in America between cities
Juls7243 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Making housing affordable is quite easy. Simply build an additional 10-15 M extra homes in the US over the next decade and sell them to US families (not companies).
Would only cost us about 1 years military budget.
DrDrago-4 | 1 year, 6 months ago
1.1. The construction sector is currently short more than 650,000 workers. Literally, 650,000 open unfilled positions and climbing. And thats just based on current demand / current build pipelines. And that's just the construction sector, there's also an acute shortage of building inspectors, fire marshals, (physical) IT contractors also known as cable monkeys, and more I'm forgetting.
Wages average less than $14/hr already, and the construction sector employs 3.2 million currently. Labor makes up more than 40% of the average home's build cost. The solution to the shortage is to, of course, pay more. However, people already balk at today's home prices.. imagine them 25%+ higher (because the build price influences the existing market, setting a floor)
Also, not everyone can work construction. it's a very physically demanding job, mainly filled by relatively younger workers (whom are more and more going to college instead)
So now we're stuck in a chicken and egg problem. Companies won't raise wages significantly because they don't know if the demand is there for significantly pricier houses..
This is why construction can happen at warp speed if you're willing to dump money into the problem. If your offering an average wage, you get an average timeline and most companies have jobs lined up for months-years.
1.2. an average of 1.4 million homes are built each year by these 3.2 million workers. So, even if you found 4 million people to come work construction and doubled the workforce, it'd still take 10+ years to accomplish your goal of building 10-15M homes.
1.3. yeah we do need legislation to regulate corporate home buying, but it's not as simple a fix as you think because it's also these corporations that fund new home builds.. a real estate giant goes to a bank and gets a loan to build a new development
if they're not allowed to own homes.. how are they supposed to build them ? by definition they own the homes until they sell them off and find a buyer..
so if you outright ban them from owning homes, you actually crater new home building. Only a small minority of developments are 100% pre-brought, the vast majority are done by companies on more or less a whim.. sometimes it takes years of a house sitting empty before a buyer comes along.
not to mention repairing it all the next year..
and lastly 2.1. it's closer to 4 trillion even if you build small homes in an exurb, just at current wages and material prices. if your talking building out new dense apartments, the land space alone is astronomical today in cities too.
source: IT contractor for a new home development offered infinite overtime
Juls7243 | 1 year, 6 months ago
I envisioned that housing built by this program would be mostly high density homes - Like 8 story buildings with 80 units in each 800-1200 square feet. Hopefully the build cost (labor/materials - not land) would be ~100k per unit. The goal would be to produce boring, cost efficient cheap housing; not necessarily your dream home.
Regarding the labor market - you’re probably right about a lot of things - and I’m not sure what price you’d have to pay for labor. However I don’t think you’d really have to exceed current home builder salaries BUT you’d have to actually train people. A lot of the issue in the construction market is that the decent wages require years of work to achieve. You’d have to make the entry wage probably 60k a year to pull people into it.
Time frame - yea it might take longer than I want. Such a massive project might take 20 years instead of 10.
I wasn’t using this program to legislate corporate home buying directly. I’d just say “homes Built by this specific project can only be sold to American families” - not do anything else to the rest of the market. I do agree that allowing companies to build some luxury rental properties can be good.
Regardless- this type of project CAN be accomplished. It’s merely a choice to not pursue it. Counties have done similar things historically and have created low price housing for their populations that last almost a century.
DrDrago-4 | 1 year, 6 months ago
For $100k, you could build 650sqft if you're using the cheapest possible labor (long timelines) and cheapest materials. Not including the land cost, which will differ much more significantly depending where you build it. (this additional cost varies from $0.25 a square foot in Nowhere, Nowhere, to $1,000+ a square foot in NYC. Most cities outside of the top 10 average around $100/sqft in the urban core and $30/sqft in the suburbs. The top 10 COL cities are closer to $300/sqft+ in the core and $60/sqft+ in the suburbs). Also not accounted for: permits, inspections, apartment managers / upkeep, trash management costs, any water features like a pool, a mail room and receptionist (or a contract for individual delivery), appliances / furnishing, and finishings (everything from doors to shelves to etc), and of course long term upkeep/ repairs
If you're version of barebones is "has central AC/heating, fiber internet access, more than bare minimum windows, decently well built" or any combination of that, and not a literal Budget Suites slum style basic apartment with a window unit you have to buy yourself, then you're starting at $300/sqft raw build cost (so for $100k, you'd get 330 sqft)
'Nice' apartments, the type you aspire for with amenities, no bugs around, super well built but modest, push $500/sqft. Luxury begins at about $1,000/sqft build cost, that's where you start getting marble counter tops and other truly fancy things.
Again, none of these estimates even include land cost, so Im sure you can see that $100k isn't feasible. Bare minimum, you'd be at $150k to get Budget Suites quality apartments after the land and upkeep.
I wish I could post site photos, because people would be shocked how little you get even for $250-300k today. You don't get some luxury huge apartment for that, if you want a basic 800-1000sqft unit with HVAC that's bare minimum and it's gonna be shoddy construction and built in an Exurb even paying that..
On the labor market: ... did you hear the part about 'there are 650,000 active unfilled listing's just from current demand'
If your goal is 20 years, you need to up the workforce 50% or 1.5 million people. That 2.2 million combined. Probably not even possible to fill with our current population, unemployment is near record lows.
60,000 would be a doubling of the average hourly rate (barely any construction is salaried outside of government jobs). So home prices would go up near 25%. It's also still not nearly enough.. the problem isn't only low pay, but the average construction worker is already hitting 48hrs a week.
I can tell you firsthand it's not enough. I'm only working this contracting job until I graduate college and get something with real earning potential (the low wage of 15/hr is made up for by my youthful ability to clock 80hr weeks). Even the lowest paying field of engineering, civil engineering, starts at an average of 80k+ for 40hrs. tech jobs are even more cushy.
As contractors, the vast majority also don't get a 401k match, we (are supposed to) pay the self employment tax aka both parts of FICA, and we don't get healthcare (something that is fine in my youth, but not a good long term career path for sure). As contractors, you don't get any paid time off. Get sick? better hope you have savings. Get fired / 'not hired' ? better hope you have savings because contractors don't qualify for unemployment in most places. Get pregnant ? not only are you forbidden from most sites by OSHA regulation, but as a contractor you only get unpaid FMLA. Not to mention the whole buying your own tools, work clothes, not getting paid for commute time, having no paid lunch breaks (or paid breaks in general), etc etc
To even make construction a legitimately desirable career, and fill current demand over the course of the next few decades, wages are going to have to effectively triple at the bare minimum (healthcare costs 13k+ a worker, time off, etc). I can't even estimate how much you'd have to increase wages to draw in 2.2 million workers from other careers, and build out that many homes over 20yrs.
I think that's a good idea, but should be broadened to something like 'permanent residents of the US' -- plenty of people migrate here each year intending to stay permanently, and they aren't citizens yet.
I agree some effort should be undertaken, but I think at best it's a 50yr+ project to get 10 million homes. Even that would still require a 25% expansion of home production (so, equivalently, 700,000 new construction workers dedicated to this single project)
And I don't think the military budget should be cut for it, entitlement programs and the national debt should be reigned in. We could fund this program today, except instead we spend that $1.5tn a year on paying debt interest.
telefawx | 1 year, 6 months ago
Government built housing is a failure. Empowering developers to build what the market can handle is the answer.
Juls7243 | 1 year, 6 months ago
That really depends on what you mean by govt build housing. For example Singapore build housing for their entire country in the 1940s and it was an astounding success. If you refer to low income housing in the US in the last few decades - then yea.
Govt build housing as a term varies a ton. It really depends how/what is built. Recently the govt hasn’t built anything - but it very easily could.
V-RONIN | 1 year, 6 months ago
These are indeed the problems we need to solve
telefawx | 1 year, 6 months ago
I have it solved, stopped thinking government can solve it. De-regulate and give people more of their own money.
Houjix | 1 year, 6 months ago
How about the government forgive credit card debt
BestCatEva | 1 year, 6 months ago
The US gov does not have any power over corporations. It’s the other way around in capitalism. The gov isn’t for the people.
V-RONIN | 1 year, 6 months ago
Or just credit scores would be a good start
McMagneto | 1 year, 6 months ago
This guys gets it. It's not the perks or free time or even gender inequality. It's all about enabling single income households where women can stay at home.
telefawx | 1 year, 6 months ago
It can be the man staying at home who cares.
McMagneto | 1 year, 6 months ago
Anyone can stay home but women still carry and give birth so given a choice an overwhelming majority of men will work and women will stay home. Nothing wrong with either, but a matter of what is more prevalent and practical.
telefawx | 1 year, 6 months ago
Agreed.
CompostableConcussio | 1 year, 6 months ago
Why does it have to be only women?
McMagneto | 1 year, 6 months ago
Last time I checked, women in child bearing years give birth to children.
CompostableConcussio | 1 year, 6 months ago
Ok. What does that have to do with them not working?
MoneyWorthington | 1 year, 6 months ago
Because pregnancy, birth recovery, and breastfeeding and/or pumping all take up a huge amount of time. Women can work, but men have a pretty big comparative advantage there.
CompostableConcussio | 1 year, 6 months ago
So your solution is to widen the gap between men and women, not close it?
MoneyWorthington | 1 year, 6 months ago
Without going back to the evolutionary drawing board, the only way to truly close the gap is to not have children, which is obviously not ideal. It is up to individual families to decide what makes sense for them, but the deck is and will forever be stacked against women being the breadwinner.
jh125486 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Ahhh, that’s why we subsidize golf courses and private jets!
Right?
telefawx | 1 year, 6 months ago
Correct. The rich want more of those things so they subsidize them.
hahyeahsure | 1 year, 6 months ago
weird, who'd've thought?
adding more lines so the automod doesn't boot the comment because of length requirements length requirements length requirements length requirements length requirements length requirements length requirements length requirements length requirements length requirements length requirements
[OP] Salami_Slicer | 1 year, 6 months ago
Apparently peeps are wondering why French fertily has been dropping, turns out the French is slow cooking the golden goose
Time_Explanation4506 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Don't worry they'll import a bunch of Syrians and Afghan men to make up the difference
ChocolateDoggurt | 1 year, 6 months ago
And none of their skilled jobs will be filled and they'll find out why immigration doesn't just magically fix labor issues.
-Cosmic_79- | 1 year, 6 months ago
This is the only solution to the demographics problem, and it's not even a good one. Anyone who thinks throwing money at it will change anything is delusional.
The barriers for couples who want to have even 1 child are endless. No job security, no support from the state, buying a house is impossible, wages are shit, healthcare is more and more predatory than supportive, both parents are expected to work, marriages don't last etc. No sane person will have 1 child when they are worried about not being able to pay rent or get sick.
No European country has either the will or the capacity to transform its economy to the point that people will feel comfortable with having children again. Simply forget about it.
Time_Explanation4506 | 1 year, 6 months ago
The alternative than is these countries and thus western civilization dying out because the immigrants have proven they don't assimilate in Europe. France will be one big banuielle
Rin-Tin-Tins-DinDins | 1 year, 6 months ago
Okay but will there be good paying jobs for these children to have when they grow up? What about a planet that’s not in the grips of catastrophic climate upheaval? The way automation and AI have been progressing do we actually need all that many more children?
McMagneto | 1 year, 6 months ago
They can, but they shouldn't have to. This will increase the fertility rate the most. The culture where women are expected to work a full time job is the biggest drain on fertility rate, moral judgment aside. Unless we can get over this fact, there won't be any progress in this domain.
jingqian9145 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Why encourage increasing birth rate when we are dealing with over population and climate change? Isn’t in our best interest to reduce the population?
TheGoldenMonkey | 1 year, 6 months ago
Just as rapidly rising births has significantly changed the world in the past 50-60ish years, rapidly declining births will significantly alter the world in the coming decades.
The population dropping steadily is preferable to it taking a nosedive as many systems around the world depend on predictable, non-reactionary change.
Hapankaali | 1 year, 6 months ago
France isn't experiencing overpopulation and has fairly modest carbon emissions per capita.
whataablunder | 1 year, 6 months ago
The government and the big corporations that lobby for laws that fuck us over and benefit them.. they don't care about climate change, but they do care about women birthing them replacement minimum wage workers to keep the system in place that gets them richer!
Junjo_O | 1 year, 6 months ago
It is in our best interest, not corporate’s though.
cohbrbst71 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Hey France, you’re not America. Stay in your lane. That suffering is part of the American Dream of what used to be but is now just suffering to live
ebostic94 | 1 year, 6 months ago
Most of the Earth is beginning to suffer from low childbirths. Yes, you have a lot of women locking it up, which is their right to do but also there is a scientific/biological thing going on. If you seen the movie “children of men”, you know what I am getting at.
lordnacho666 | 1 year, 6 months ago
I saw the movie but I never understood what caused births to stop?
ebostic94 | 1 year, 6 months ago
It was a biological event. we actually are experiencing that right now because men sperm count is dropping rapidly right now. The next 10 to 20 years on earth is going to be extremely interesting for mankind.
Teh_Ocean | 1 year, 6 months ago
The microplastics in my balls wont affect my decision to have children if I always buy condoms because that’s less expensive than childcare
ebostic94 | 1 year, 6 months ago
We have bigger issues than micro plastics.
ChocolateDoggurt | 1 year, 6 months ago
Like wealth inequality.