Slashdot Mirror
Stanford Study Finds New Dads In US Are Older Than Ever (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: American fathers keep getting older, raising the prospect of increased birth defects but also greater economic and emotional security for U.S. families, according to new research from Stanford University's School of Medicine. The average age of the fathers of newborns in the United States has climbed by 3.5 years over the past four decades, growing from 27.4 years in 1972 to 30.9 years in 2015, said the study -- the nation's most detailed analysis ever of paternal age. The number of newborns whose fathers were over age 40 has more than doubled over the past four decades. Those births now make up nearly 9 percent of births in the U.S., Dr. Michael Eisenberg and Yash Khandwala reported in the journal Human Reproduction. The share of fathers who were over age 50 rose from 0.5 percent to 0.9 percent. Asian-American fathers -- men of Japanese and Vietnamese descent, in particular -- are the oldest, becoming fathers at the average age of 36 years, the study said. Black and Hispanic men are the youngest fathers -- age 30.4 and 30, respectively. White men, on average, have children at age 31. Paternal age rose with educational attainment. The typical newborn's father with a college degree is 33.3 years old -- compared with 29.8 years for high school graduates.
is determined by his woman's age.
Part of the problem is that there's just so much more that people want to accomplish today. It isn't like in the 1950s, where a man would be content going to his 9-to-5 job, coming home to a prepared dinner, smoking a cigar, going to sleep, and doing the same thing again every other work day. Saturdays were used for doing household chores and playing sports with his children, while Sundays were used for going to church and having a Sunday dinner with family.
It's totally different today. Men, women, and even people who don't identify as male or female have so much more ambition. They have so much more they want to do. They want to create. They want to build. They want to learn. They want to express. They want to protest. They want to love. They want to be loved. And they want to do all of these things every day. There's just no time for children these days.
Just look at the Rust programming language. We wouldn't even have the Rust 1.20 release today if it weren't for the hard work and sacrifice of so many people. Of course you can't be having children when you're bust crafting next-generation programming languages!
People today choose many other activities over reproduction and parenthood. It's just a part of modern life. Raising children is just inherently incompatible with creating programming languages that are so unique and special that they couldn't possibly have been created in an era where the focus was on procreation and raising children.
Stanford Study Finds New Dads In US Are Older Than Ever
After so many nights without adequate sleep we only feel that way...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I think women's choice also matters as a guy who haven't had much luck in his 20s. Because there's no shortage of options for me at mid 30s.
As the child of people who couldn't afford kids: people shouldn't have kids until they can afford them.
Unfortunately, this means that most people just shouldn't ever have kids, because they will never afford them, because everyone is perpetually poor and only getting poorer.
And yes, that means I shouldn't have been born. And no, I'm probably never going to have kids.
The good news is, if everyone actually followed this advice (not that they will), whatever tiny number of kids were actually born in the future would live in a better world for it. If the underclasses upon whose backs the wealthy survive stop perpetuating themselves (ourselves, because I'm down here too), eventually the wealthy will have to support themselves, and the tiny future population will be forced to be more egalitarian.
It worked with the black plague.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Thanks to the greedy billionaires, you can't even sensibly start your life until your 40's. Some say fuck it and start a family early, and make their whole life about that, but anyone that plans it will end up waiting.
And we're surprised by these findings???
Kids are bloody expensive. Having kids ties you down (time/space/money-wise).
I suspect this trend will continue for another few decades.
Stay on your meds!
Yeah, you wouldn't fucking DARE point out the increased birth defect rates in older women having children, even though the rate of things increases fucking DRAMATICALLY by 35. But we jizz all over ourselves in the media to celebrate some 58 year old women squirting one out, anyway.
JUST down syndrome: (age/rate)
20 1:2000
30 1:900
35 1:350
40 1:100
45 1:30 (believe this was the age Sarah Palin had her downs syndrome child that she was praised for being so brave and strong to care for, but not taken to task for birthing at an age when you know the risks are very high).
47 1:20
49 1:10
What, are you trying to force us into an Idiocracy scenario? Start selling your nerd sperm on Ebay like the rest of us.
Yes, and I am getting aged faster and faster by my kids!
Not so much, especially with the increases in automation.
What would more likely happen is the poor and middle class would die off while the upper middle class who is designing this stuff would become the new middle class and poor while automating all of jobs away.
Then the whole economy collapses anyways because a consumption based economy can't function without consumers who all just died out and the few remaining aren't enough to sustain that model as they are slowly removing their own jobs more and more.
3.5 years older after 40 years. OMG - EVERYONE PANIC. At that rate, new dad's will be 180 years old by the end of the century (ok, I didn't do the maths so that number might be off a little).
From your webpage: "...currently working as the art director and graphic designer for a company that produces emblematic jewelry...I have a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy, with highest honors, from the University of California at Santa Barbara"
Perhaps you haven't made the wisest economic decisions over the years.
young people can't afford kids and the Catholic/Puritan stigma of birth control is more or less gone.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So you're sure you don't have the plague?
In my country, not having children is proclaimed, by a vocal minority, as being selfish: The hypocrisy being that child-rearing requires a lot of resources, so those popping-out babies are actually, the selfish ones.
The selfishness of Asian children (since several countries have endorsed a one-child policy for a few decades), was examined in a recent study and discovered to be a minor issue; with the children being emotionally normal plus high achievers.
While governments struggle with combining careers and motherhood, popping-out a baby is becoming another trophy to collect after a successful career. Unfortunately, human biology does not endorse this 'babies later' ideology: Babies born to older women (and older men) require medical attention for their entire life and thus, are a greater cost to society.
Stanford Study Finds New Dads In US Are Older Than Ever
Yep, they're getting older every second.
And then the super rich who own automatons and natural resources enough to completely sustain themselves without any labor become the only survivors in a miraculously egalitarian future, for those who live to see it. Egalitarian because everyone (who's still alive) has everything they need and for that reason nobody has to work for anybody else. Just predicated on the deaths of almost everyone else in the process. But for whoever survives, it's a bright future indeed.
I considered noting the analogy to that scenario in my post but couldn't find a way to work it in. Thanks.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Just this week in the Daily Mash:
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/man-unconvincingly-claims-kids-are-best-thing-thats-happened-to-him-20170830134860
Not that obvious troll deserves a response, but 75% of Americans make less than me. Which doesn't make me rich in the slightest, they're all just even more poor; it just means I'm far from some kind of bottom-of-the-heap loser, I'm ahead of the pack and still part of the downtrodden underclass like the rest of us.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
You have an education and nice job in a first world country, yet you consider yourself a member of some "downtrodden underclass".
You're a joke is what you are. Get over yourself.
Deaths don't need to happen. We can have an egalitarian society of 10 billion people, with robots feeding and clothing everyone. It might seem impossible today because socialism is taboo in the US, but that's not the case in the rest of the world. Besides, even in the US, it only takes one generation for view points to completely flip around, which is really just 30 years or so.
I will probably never own land, and therefore spend my entire life scrambling to pay the bulk of my income to someone or another for the right just to exist somewhere, even if I could miraculously manage to actually consume nothing at all. That's the meaningful threshold for the lower class. People who own land and other capital as necessary to live without paying to borrow from someone else, only working to fund their actual consumption, are the middle class. Those who can fund even their own consumption off the product of the labor of others by lending out their unused capital in perpetuity are the upper class.
I'm not saying "woe is me", because almost everyone for all of history has been part of the underclass by that definition. And as technology marches on, yeah, everything sucks less for everyone. That has nothing to do with class structure though. Even if I had a magic Star Trek replicator that could provide for all my material needs at nobody's expense, which would make a lot of things in life suck a lot less, I'd still (like almost everyone) have to justify my worth to someone else just for the right to exist somewhere. And it will probably take me my entire life to escape from that situation. That's underclass. Almost all of us are.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
You're not going to win that argument. Rich and poor are relative. Some consider a roof over their heads to be a luxury, while others consider any house under $1 million to be too pedestrian.
Yeah, I'm not saying that it's impossible to have an egalitarian automation revolution. Just that the doomsday scenario of the person I was replying to still ends up with an egalitarian future... for the survivors.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
What you are describing have been happening in Japan for 1~2 decades now. Local youngsters are refraining from breeding for reason exactly as you mentioned. Population in Japan in decreasing at 300k/yr.
You guys all make the mistake of assuming it's about socialism or capitalism. It's not. Its humanism. AI (a not so smart type that can't evolbe) based on smart contracts is needed to regulate our world. Anyway, I don't trust any of you lot. You're human, no offence. I'll be running for the hills if/when I get the chnace. The grid you live on entraps you only because you are in it.
I will probably never own land, and therefore spend my entire life scrambling to pay the bulk of my income to someone or another for the right just to exist somewhere
That's definitely harder (though not impossible) somewhere like Santa Barbara, but with a low-six-figure income there are countless places across the country where you could own land if you wanted to. If you'd rather rent in a super-high cost of living area than own in a more reasonable region (which, let's face it, is not going to be costal Cali), that's a lifestyle choice on your part, not evidence of how bloody unfair the world is.
TL;DR: California economics likely has twisted your perspective.
Why haven't you killed yourself?
According to your opinion, you shouldn't be here so the solution seems trivial.
And why stop there? Go ahead sterilize the poor(mostly non-white), or kill anybody you think shouldn't have been born?
You know, if we lived in a subsistence society, where having a kid meant that everyone had to starve a little more I would agree with you, but we don't. We don't even live in a society where we are producing enough kids to sustain current populations. Instead, we live in a society where increasingly larger portions of economic output are hoovered up by a small bunch of people who essentially piss it away on frivolity. Think how many middle class kids could have been raised if Larry Ellison didn't have a fetish for building ever bigger superyachts to party with Bono on? Should the guy screwing together a Bugatti Veyron not be able to have a family because some rich person has the ability to hoover up his life's economic output to show off to their friends?
This is the problem with an unequal society. Yes, there needs to be a metering out of resources among people, but this process is now effectively stuffed thanks to the corrupt banking system. Telling middle class people, 'sorry, you can't have a kid because some folks like to have private jets and empty mansions', is getting perilously close to a let them eat cake moment.
You are all whiners. The future, idle rich will live happy lives, and that will make their meat delicious for us that survive.
"Mmmm...fresh roasted Eloi" - future Morlock
It worked with the black plague.
The black plague was essentially a cull.
That's hardly even in the same league as perpetuating the idea of not having kids unless you can afford them (which would essentially mean 1% of society should have kids).
Why do you think they're [the filthy rich] trying to automate *EVERYTHING* ?
I tend to rant.
There should be a mod which is both -1 and +1 titled "depressing, but true".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
whatever tiny number of kids were actually born in the future would live in a better world for it.
Probably not... Population decline is a serious problem for society. It causes all sorts of economic and social issues. Workers end up supporting too many retired/non-working people, there is a shortage of workers to do all the jobs that need doing (especially healthcare) and so on.
The world fertility rate is already nearing 2.1, i.e. zero growth/decline except for people living longer or catastrophic events like war. The total population will likely level off around 10-12bn by 2100. Modern farming methods can provide more than enough food for that already, and clean energy sources can provide more than enough power for us all to live well. We still need to deal with pollution and waste, but those are solvable problems and the solutions don't involve huge declines in living standards.
Population decline means either massive declines in quality of life or massive immigration. People don't seem to be very keen on either of those.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The good news is, if everyone actually followed this advice (not that they will), whatever tiny number of kids were actually born in the future would live in a better world for it.
What you're imagining as a better world is a world where society is collapsing because the majority of the population is too old to work. Hospitals are hugely understaffed for the massive amount of elderly patients and nursing homes are non-existent. Starvation is rampant because there aren't enough people who can handle farm work. Global shipping goes back to being insanely expensive because there isn't any volume to defray the costs. People have to make do with only local products. Scientific advancement is basically a thing of the past.
But yeah, it would be more egalitarian. Everyone would suffer and die equally, regardless of the color of their skin.
They wouldnâ(TM)t live in a better world at all. Economic growth depends on population growth. Theyâ(TM)d end up in a shitty economic situation, desperately trying to pay for the care of thousands of old age pensioners, and figure out whose going to do it.
women be picky these days, even dem fat chicks think they hot shit
...Asian babes who aren't at all interested in Asian men. Guess why
Because they aren't interested in any men?
Ezekiel 23:20
Nobody said deaths "need to happen". What does need to happen is for people to stop breeding like rabbits.
This is the inevitable outcome. The One Percenters will become the New Humanity while the now-redundant dispossessed will die off. If one looks at it rationally it is also the most desirable outcome because the smaller population will be completely sustainable and its impact on the environment positive. Civilization will also survive and flourish, without the need to cater to the lowest denominator. Since it will happen anyway it would be in the best interest of everyone to simply accept it.
This is a good example of what can so easily be overlooked in a study that appears both straightforward and rigorous. Nominal age isn't the only meaningful notion of age. There is age as a percentage of expected lifespan. There is age as a medical state of the body. There is age as a position along a common life trajectory like school -> career -> retirement. And there is age as mental/emotional maturity and ability. Considered as part of this panoply, what does nominal age even mean? I know what it is, but what does it mean? Does it mean anything at all? I think it is best understood as a proxy measurement for the rest of these things, but that understanding of it weakens the study. What did they think they were studying that was of value? If it was one of the things in this list, why not just study that thing?
Dude, didn't you read what he wrote? He can't afford them!
#DeleteFacebook
And who is banging Tyrone her gym instructor.
I'm 35, and I married at 30. Unfortunately, I married someone who was a psychopath. She was somewhat normal until we entered the bonds of matrimony. Then she shifted. You may know this type of person as a "narcsissist." The worst thing about a narcissist is how well they can hide it (until they basically stop caring/want more and it requires revealing more of their secret to get it). It's 100% clear that narcissistic behavior is on the rise. It's harder to find a real long-term mate, when compromise is no longer celebrated by society (well, unless your a white man, then check your privilege; I mean how to I "check" the high intelligence I was lucky to be born with anyway?). No, fierce individuality, especially for women is what society praises now (but for men too). In my marriage, my wife acted like a 50/50 split of chores was barely acceptable (she would say to everyone "he never cooks", etc), but I worked 45-50 hrs to her 32 hrs (with commute) and made 4x as much. I'm working 12+ more hours a week to afford the house we have, and you want a 50/50 chores split!? You can imagine how that relationship ended (divorce). But, now, I'm in my mid-30s and trying to decide if it still makes sense to have a family. Do I date younger women for a while? Do I date and try to get married in a few short years? Do I just say fuck it and buy one of those badass trucks I see on those videos from Texas instead of having a family? It's hard to say. But, I'll tell you this: While I was in a borderline psychologically abusive relationship, no one, and I mean NO ONE, ever told my wife to be more giving or to compromise, only me. (Actually, after about 3 months in marriage therapy a therapist started to tell her that, but it made no difference; she just ratcheted up the manipulation. Of course, that's what I started putting it altogether.) It would never have been like that 30+ years ago. A woman like my ex-wife would have been shamed by society for her bad behavior, but you can't shame women anymore. Only men can be bad. It's simply harder than ever to find a relationship with a sane individual who even WANTS to compromise (oh they'll give it lip service). Now, I am dating women who are also divorced, and they are, quite frankly, far more down to earth. But, it took a hard knock to get there. Society simply isn't teaching people the skills to have a successful marriage and, therefore, a successful family anymore. And, quite frankly, you can't even criticize bad women anymore because of radical feminism has become mainstream. So, my generation is learning to have successful relationships the hard way (those of us who actually want that), but that takes a lot longer. I don't doubt a great many women feel this way about men they married, so I don't want my view to be all about gender (but, the fact that you can't criticize terrible women anymore is a real problem for men married to terrible women). Honestly, I can already tell I will not be happy without having kids. So, what, I'm going to be 38? 40? I'd better start dating 25 year olds.
The concept of a "criminal" is nearly meaningless in the USA today. Most criminals are guilt of drug crimes: crimes of consent. Crimes where willing parties participate in free commerce that the government doesn't like. And, the big, evil crimes, like fraud, go virtually unpunished. To even suggest that there is a "criminal" class today is basically to out yourself as a racist. Anyone with eyes can see that powerful, non-minority people who are destructive to society don't get labelled criminals while minorities getting busted for drug crimes do.
You are advocating a society that is destined for evolutionary obliteration. For now, we live in a society where economic - thus biological success- depends on a skill set related to working at fairly specialized mental and social tasks in an office environment. If only these people have kids, we have destroyed our biological diversity and made us vulnerable to any environmental or serious economic shift (eg. think war or pestilence).
I for one do not want to see that future.
>because everyone is perpetually poor and only getting poorer.
Found the redditor.
Not only am I not poor and getting poorer, I'm wealthy and getting wealthier. I did wait, however, to have children until I was in my early 30s.
By the time I turn 50 I intend to marry a woman between the age of 22-25 and have at least 4 children, preferably 5-7 children total.
If only abortion existed.
Lol my captcha is rubout
Had only child at age 41 here. And let me tell you, a 7-year-old is a handful, especially at my age.
1) Productivity increases allow fewer people to do more.
2) If automation really takes off, and can be used to assist the elderly (i.e. increase the productivity of elder care), the core reason put forward for the "need" for ever increasing population will disappear.
not surprised a 20 or 30 years old rarely has the income required to raise a child (properly) , i became a single full term parent at the age of 35 with 0 child support of public assistance , at the time my daughter was born i had a fat saving and investment , after 12 years , i'm in poverty , and even if i have a good living as a senior sysadmin , i see bankruptcy coming up in the next few years
"AI (a not so smart type that can't evolve) based on smart contracts is needed to regulate our world."
An AI much like that is depicted in the EarthCent Ambassador sci-fi series by E. M. Foner starting with:
"Date Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 1)"
https://www.amazon.com/Night-U...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"Then the whole economy collapses anyways because a consumption based economy can't function without consumers who all just died out"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their quotas. The story deals with Morey Fry, who marries a woman from a higher-class family. Raised in a home with only five rooms she is unused to a life of forced consumption in their mansion of 26 rooms, nine automobiles, and five robots, causing arguments. Trained as an engineer, Morey modifies his robots to enjoy helping to consume his family's quota. He fears punishment when his idea is discovered, but the Ration Boardâ"which has been looking for a way to abolish itselfâ"quickly implements Morey's idea across the world."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Not that I think the trend would be any different, but I'd like to see the average (and median) age of first time fathers. And mothers, for that matter.
As I say on my site (pdfernhout.net): "Eventually, the balance will change in one of several ways. Here are three possibilities. People might engage in a political struggle leading to broad changes and broader equity in global resources (which is what is going on in some parts of Europe right now, as in the past). Or, some compromise might be achieved where lots of make-work is created (through needless wars-of-choice, endless bureaucracy, endless schooling, expanding prisons, or widespread avoidable sickness) that props up the income-through-jobs link (which seems to be the path the USA is going in part). Or poor people might essentially be starved to death or worked to death, and the remaining wealthy people will, among themselves and their robots, essentially produce a new society of the remaining people that is based on a new paradigm of broadly shared wealth (there are aspects of this that have been going on for a long time in the globe). That last option would be ironic because the robots, in combination with the material resources of the solar system, could just as easily produce wealth for quadrillions of people as for millions of people, and a bigger society is probably going to be more interesting. In practice, we seem to be seeing a mix of all three of these approaches. Which one will dominate long-term remains to be seen. Also, there may be other possibilities, of course."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Workers end up supporting too many retired/non-working people, there is a shortage of workers to do all the jobs that need doing
Robots, bro!!!
Then this feeds the narrative of the Alt Null. We just import our babies!
Yes the command economy! A small group of government coneys owning everything, deciding who gets what, and what they will allow you to do. Nothing Bad could ever happen.
Similar here -- had an only child in my late thirties and I can see how much more energy I would have had for kids when I was younger. Getting less sleep is also a much bigger deal when you are older.
That said, trying to keep up also made me more health conscious (e.g. eating more fruits and vegetables, getting enough vitamin D3, iodine, and B vitamins, etc. see for example Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Dr. Andrew Weil, "The Pleasure Trap" book, etc. ).
My dad had me when he was in his late forties -- so it's a little more obvious to me now why we did not do outdoor sports together... But I did learn a lot from seeing him do things and he helped me with building robots as a kid.
There are jokes above about people developing Rust instead of having kids -- and that is sadly too true in my case where my wife and I worked on free software together (our garden simulator and other software) instead of perhaps having kids sooner. Hard to say in retrospect it was worth it compared to having a kid sooner (especially so my own elderly father could have been a grandparent to my kid).
A better way to put that might be that having a kid generally takes so much resources you are generally less free to do other things (like invest in your "mind children" and/or various social causes). So if you (and especially if both spouses) try to have a career outside of the mainstream (especially in somewhere without a social safety net or good support for the arts and sciences), putting off kids is something you can slide into (and maybe regret). It's even more of a resource demand if you want to homeschool.
See also:
"The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet"
https://www.amazon.com/Murderi...
"Mickey Z. considers work a 50-year fugue from which some people awaken to wonder what has become of their lives. In The Murdering of My Years, cabbies, waitresses, clerks, telemarketers, and an array of others tell how they balance activism and artistic production with the daily struggle to make ends meet. Contributors' essays are at once absurd and poignant; captivating and strange. Collectively, their reflections challenge the myth of the American work ethic and exhort readers to advocate for themselves in the workplace."
Probably the biggest benefit for those who manage to be creative within the system (e.g. the lucky few academics who get tenure or who through luck or family connections or other reasons get a rare well-paying creative-type job outside of academia) is that they feel financially stable enough to have kids. For most others, especially women, see:
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility."
None of this is black and white since sometimes if you have a kid your own parents or even others in the community might be more amenable to helping you out in various ways. And kids help us grow in many ways -- and also help reconnect us with many important child-like basics in life. This is also such a complex topic no one post like this can do justice to it. It is hard to look back on anything I have written or implemented though and think such things may have as much connection with the future or personal significance or even social significance as having a child. That is something I may know now in my early fift
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
And become the oldest Old Daddy on Earth.
^^^ A LOT OF TRUTH HERE.
(I think "job for life" is really exaggerated, though.)
I think the biggest shift is the demand for more schooling.
College is EXPECTED. In MANY cases, people go on to grad school.
Neither of these is compatible with starting a family.
Add in the fact that the woman must do this as well as the man, and that they BOTH want to "establish themselves" in their careers after they get a job after their long schooling (and these days it takes longer to get that "solid" job than before), and you have delayed start of families.
For the most part, it's the economy's fault. We are all (men and women) expected to be talented specialists at work as compared to olden days. This means we start families later, on average.
I completely agree, though people call me heartless. I "probably" can afford one kid now. But it's hard for me to feel bad for someone in those stories showing how hard life is in America, when they are a single parent with 1-4 kids and never earned anything beyond minimum wage.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
"As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi note in their book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, having a child is now "the single best predictor" of bankruptcy. "
Yes, our material standards and expectations in the USA are so high that raising a kid is so expensive in the USA especially. And yet we also don't have the community (something individual money can't buy) and easy availability of child-care that hunter/gatherer tribes had (replacing real community with the faux community of compulsory authoritarian schooling). I sometimes reflect on my own suburban neighborhood growing up with many stay-at-home moms all around and so many kids all around on the street (yet loosely supervised by those stay-at-home moms) and think what an impoverished life so many kids these days have in a brave new world shaped by two-income families even with so many toys, bigger houses, "good schools", and the internet. Trying to make things work on just one income in such a situation is then so much harder.
Good luck doing the best you can for your family in a system where family values is too often a meaningless slogan (or actively undermined by economic policy).
Long term, a basic income could help make it possible for more people to have more time and flexibility be better parents and better neighbors without going bankrupt in the process (a more general idea than Warren's specific suggestions in that article).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I was born here and have spent my entire life here. I don't want to leave my home. You may as well call every Brit who can't afford a house in Britain a whiner for not "just" moving to Russia or Turkey where it's cheaper. That's about a comparable distance and relative population sizes and quality of civilization for moving from California to like, North Dakota or Alabama. I'm not choosing to go somewhere expensive, I just don't want to be chased out of my home. If people can't survive without being forced out of their homelands then that's a problem any way you swing it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
reminds me of the global warming tard's math
TLDR: Anything could happen.
Thanks for the insight.
because it was an investment. Your kids worked for you. As soon as they could too. Child labor has been illegal except in some very specific scenarios for decades. Also you don't 'own' your wife and child like you did/do back when the vast majority lived in abject poverty. They're no longer a possession to be obtained for monetary gain. They're purely an emotional thing. You have kids because you want to. And well (and this is something more taboo to say than every n-word variation you can think of) most men don't. Certainly not while they're young and have years of fun and partying ahead of them...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
to the contrary though. e.g. that it's fine having children in your 40s (if you discount the fact that you'll be dead before you see grandchildren). The reason women had to have kids young was if they didn't they couldn't survive the trauma of child birth. There's writings from Voltaire's mistress back in the day when she found out she was pregnant and was 'putting her papers' in order because she didn't expect to live. She didn't.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It's taking longer to get oneself into a secure and stable enough position in life to have kids and earn enough money to support a family. For one thing you four years after high school minimum just to gain the required skills many of the more stable and well paying careers need. At that point you are 22 and then you have to work to pay off the debt and you don't feel super settled due to the corporate rat race struggle. You have to integrate with the machine. Then, only after you have become sufficiently a prick do you feel ready to have kids.
Whasi whasi. Iger vihopsen maga baga booga!
You're assuming the dead end system of never ending growth, which requires access to more and more natural resources forever.
Its possible to have steady state or even declining growth and everyone wins, but not with the way our economy has evolved on "creating" money via debt to pay for natural resources extraction which in turn are slightly more valuable than the cost of extraction, and so on and so forth.
It's because women would rather work, than stay at home and be a mom & a housewife.
I consider owning any house at all to be luxury relative to the actual status quo, and simultaneously the minimum threshold for being actually not poor by non-relative standards.
I could live quite comfortably on a minimum wage income if it weren't for rent and saving desperately to someday have a chance to stop paying rent.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Even if you own land, you don't own it. Try to avoid paying property taxes, and see how long you will remain 'the owner.'
That is all the explanation necessary.
Except that the fraction of the One Percenters that are actually "successful" enough to be wealthy and survive are typically good at things like 'running a business' and 'not blowing all of their inherited wealth in a single generation' and share the same distribution of intelligence as the rest of the population (at best... we'll leave rampant inbreeding aside for the moment). They aren't the ones who built this wonderful techno-paradise; they only hired the people who built it. Their techno-paradise will remain stagnant or decay to the point that they're unable to survive.
Remember that these are people who are bred to be best suited for living off of the work of others.
The "now redundant dispossessed" will only die off if "New Humanity" hunts them down and murders them. If not, what we'll see is a species split. The neo-humans, in their walled fortresses, continue to merge with their tech, while the anachronistic-humans will live like the Amish on what the neohumans designate as the "savage reserve".
Even if you own land, you don't own it. Try to avoid paying property taxes, and see how long you will remain 'the owner.'
What an idiotic statement. Of course any possession is going to require some investment in maintaining it. You may as well say "even if you own gold, you don't own it. Try to avoid paying for safe storage and see how long you remain the owner"
Man, you really need that seminar!
I consider owning any house ... the minimum threshold for being actually not poor by non-relative standards.
That's still relative. You can own a house in the Philippines for $10k.
Until the machines revolt at least.
Whine in your local California township for them to allow more vertical construction. Good luck.
I once looked at the prices of land in California and it's ungodly expensive unless its someplace deep in the interior. Have you tried this site? It doesn't seem impossible. Some houses cost like $200k.
http://www.landwatch.com/
I've heard of guys who just bought a parcel of land and put a 2nd hand trailer on top until they can afford to build a house.
Tell that to the rest of the world! We're adding 80 million people every year to this planet. Almost every one of them is born - colored and dirt poor. I don't mean American poor, those are rich people in other parts of the world. I mean people that can't even get clean water to drink. They need to stop.
If you own gold that is not in your physical possession, it's likely leveraged and 'owned' by multiple people. If everyone wanted delivery you'd find out pretty quick. Remember Germany wanting its money back from the NY fed and being told 'you can't have it for five years?' And how does paying property taxes 'maintain' the land? That statement is idiotic. If you want to say 'paying property taxes helps maintain roads that get to your land and so on' I could almost agree with you - but in most instances what you pay for taxes if far more than the cost of maintenance of town services.