In those 11 years fertility has fallen near universally. Speaking as a millennial, I never saw my career as a means towards changing the world or some life mission driven by passion; I just wanted to find stable employment to hopefully find some financial security and keep my ass in health insurance (I foolishly contracted a childhood condition that left me somewhat disabled). Graduating into the great recession and trying to stay on the treadmill of employment as I flee one layoff or another hasn't left much space in life for a lot else.
I actually feel quite fortunate these days (for a number of reasons) that I never wanted children (also for a number of reasons); if I had I can imagine that it would be quite a disappointment at how it has become ever more infeasible.
Except the correlate isn’t as people propose here poverty but wealth, as wealth increased fertility has decreased. I would note that having kids doesn’t mean having a brood like people did in the past. One or two children is by far the norm in my cohort and I have one. Growing up families were not uncommon with 4-6 kids, now it’s unheard of.
I think the change the world mentality is distinctly GenX, and arguably we did pretty profoundly. I know my career changed a lot of things for many people. But you hear time and time again from people who had great careers or impacted the world in some way that the changes that mattered most to them were the ones they made at home with their family.
I believe the biggest correlate is actually religion, and I've suspected for some time now that Nietzsche was really onto it quite early with the whole "Death of God" thing.
That said, I can say that while I may in theory be able to afford a kid today, I couldn't after a layoff, which does happen to me sometimes. Frankly, I like my current employment, but I'm starting to get some bad vibes sadly. The thing is that kids need support for like 2 decades and it's hard to imagine a job lasting that long. I always remember the scene from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life" where the dad walks in and tells the kids he can't afford them anymore so he's going to sell them to science, and I can at least find it all pretty amusing.
So you’re saying the Japanese are godless ubermench and they were Christian they wouldn’t be seeing population decline?
My grandmother lived in a family of five kids and her parents were unemployed (her father was disabled in a factory accident in the 1920’s) during the Great Depression and homeless. Most of the world is considerably poorer yet have more children. You can afford to have children, they’re only expensive if you lavish wealth on them. That’s not strictly necessary, education is free. What people usually mean is they don’t want to sacrifice their standard of living or disrupt their way of life. That’s fair - but literally everyone can afford to have kids, that’s why so many kids are born into poverty yet reach adulthood. :-)
Christian or apparently anything else; the specific religion doesn't seem all that relevant actually (which says some things about religion I think).
I suppose I am currently mildly homeless which does tend to make the thought a bit harder. Also, as a man, I am not able to make children no matter how much money I'm given; there are other things necessary that I do not have. Anyway, the idea really just does seem infeasible for a few reasons - money is just one of them.
I suspect wealth is the causal agent for lack of religion - not just wealth concentrated in a few and the rest in extreme poverty. Being an opiate for the masses, it’s important to have god when life is essentially not worth living. As the median wealth increases opiates are less necessary to forestall abject misery. Likewise, the need to have many children decreases.
But, there is nothing quite like raising a new life, one that for whom you loom as large as your parents loom for you, for better or worse. Your choice as to which. Maybe your parents were worse. But you can be better. That’s powerful stuff man, and worth it.
I am profoundly sorry to hear about your struggles. I have had my own that are enough to curl anyone’s hair. A king once called a Buddhist monk and ordered him to give him the most valuable treasure that can be. The monk took the crown off his head and inscribed in it “this too shall pass.”
> we finally start recognizing that men too can be victims of systemic issues.
This has always been known to at least some. There are reasons that the left pushes for universal healthcare - because they are aware that systemic issues can affect everyone. The alternative is personal responsibility - pull yourself up by your bootstraps, ironically first written as a joke because it's literally impossible, but then unironically praised as an ideal of American individualism.
Honestly, I think American men are caught in a bad feedback loop that results in them voting for ever more toxic political representation that then shreds whatever safety nets they can and results in more estrangement from society, and it's a trap they will not escape from; it's too far gone to be fixed at this point.
The problem is that things are not supported by politicians in a vacuum. It's not a la carte in a 2 party system. If we put unrelated and unacceptable policies alongside universal healthcare you can't be surprised if it doesn't attract some demographics.
I'm still waiting for the politician who's gonna have the figurative balls to say "let's fix school/college because they are failing boys". When the issue was women not getting enough degrees there was no problem calling this a national cause, now crickets.
What if girls’ biological differences predispose them towards success in educational institutions? Then we need some sort of specialized education in order to provide the boys more intensive socialization?
Would you have dated her at all if she had been honest about how miserable she is up front? If her inherent personality is just miserable, then how else is she supposed to navigate through life?
You work on yourself first, then date. That's for her to figure out. No one owes miserable people a chance. I'm not sure why you're suggesting lying is acceptable just so she can date. Weird opinion.
Perhaps we could call it putting your best self forward to make a good first impression? The advice I've often seen is to treat a date like a job interview - is full honesty expected there? In fact, in a romantic context, is full honesty ever appropriate? If you said something like, we're probably both around 7 on the attractiveness scale, make similar incomes, aren't getting any younger, and probably can't do much better; let's settle for each other - how would that sort of honesty play?
I don't think treating dating like a job interview is a good idea unless you are interviewing them. You can either put your personality out there and be rejected or you can fake it, and then when you do out your actual self out there get rejected later down the road.
I agreed with your first comment, but this isn’t quite fair. People put their best foot forward not because they are lying or pretending their negative qualities don’t exist, but because showing the positive ones can often lead someone to overlook and accept the negative ones, whereas leading with the negative rarely works the other way around.
You dress up for interviews, more than you would to go get a coffee, and likely more than an average day at the office. Is that lying?
People also dress up for dates. They wear makeup and nice shoes. They’re not liars; they’re dating.
I always wondered (and still do) what people feel when they dress up to date. I've always thought of it as hiding my true personality. Showing someone different. Playing a role.
Does everyone feel like that?
Nope. I don’t spend every day walking around in my best threads. But I do spend some time doing it, and it feels special and important, and it shows I respect the occasion and the other party enough to put in the work. Moreover, it shows that I’m willing to put in the work for something I might care about. None of those are lies.
And all of that makes an impression before anyone has said a word.
And when to stop working on yourself and start dating? Which metric to fulfill? Unfortunately there are people that are predisposed to certain difficult personality traits. Personality heritability is about 50%. So working on it is a limited affair. Nobody is perfect, and dating is about finding someone who is comfortable with your imperfections and your with theirs. Nobody owes me anything more than basic human rights and dignity. And what I expect I try to give to others.
Old people in Texas get their property taxes frozen I believe at 65. But honestly it might be better for them to downsize into something more appropriate and perhaps free up the larger houses for families. My mother has basically just turned my parents' house into an eBay warehouse full of junk that she intends to sell one day. I can't say that I have any big problem with that at the end of the day, but if you think getting young families into housing is a more important goal for society, then it does seem like a waste.
Meanwhile, I'm pretty sore about the 10% year over year thing, particularly when I hear about how Republicans run a low-tax state or that a wealth tax is unconstitutional/infeasible. I pay my wealth tax every year, but I suspect I'm too poor for the kind of wealth tax they mean. I can at least enjoy the irony.
> Old people in Texas get their property taxes frozen I believe at 65.
True but if you're turning 65 after you're tax bill has grown 10% for over a decade as your transitioning to your fixed income years; it's not a good thing just to freeze the tax bill. You might not have time to earn and save enough to cover the value it gets frozen at. It does help soften the blow for many though.
> But honestly it might be better for them to downsize into something more appropriate and perhaps free up the larger houses for families.
I wholeheartedly despise this line of thought, unless it's coming from their individual decision to downsize. You're basically treating the house like a commodity. It's a Home this person lived in, raised family in, hopes to continue hosting holidays in, where grandchildren can go to visit, etc. They should be able to use it until they decide to leave. On average, they only have another decade or so of life left anyway after their taxes get frozen at 65, let them enjoy their home.
If you despise that thinking, then we need to regulate the housing market to discourage seeing housing as an investment as we see it today. Everyone expects, more or less, for real estate to climb in value but nobody wants to square that with these other emotional ideas attached to housing.
It either is an asset or it’s a commodity as far as the market goes. If you want generational housing and for housing to be generally affordable something has to give. Kill it as an asset class and you get what you’re looking for.
10 years is a long time in the housing market. Assets sitting for 10 years under utilized is another way to think about it.
These two ideas - that housing is an investment and that people shouldn’t be incurring tax burdens on them like this - do not square
It's fine to be an investment. It can climb in value. But it doesn't need to be such a need to force the liquidity. Your example of "under utilized asset" and downsizing must then translate down to some metric of square-footage per resident. How exactly to you propose to regulate the housing market with this in mind, in a reasonable manner. Because, to me I think of the 2 sides. Growing households and shrinking ones. On the shrinking side, we want the government enforcing laws requiring homes get sold as each child moves out to adult hood? Then again as each spouse dies? On the growing family side, they get to move into a bigger house only as each child is born? This is just insane right?
I personally do not think 10 years is that long in housing. Sure a lot can change in housing over that time but at any given moment, If I'm in need of housing and supply doesn't exist, I can build a custom home in less than 2 years. I can buy in a development basically immediately. This might not be a global truth but it's the state of things in Texas specifically, and has been for a long time. Affordability is the limiting factor, not time.
I think the property taxes in Texas make sense if RE grows at rate of inflation. For a long time, we had affordable housing and now that's not necessarily the case. So the rules/laws need to change to protect people from getting priced out due to taxes is all. It's an issue that didn't bother anyone before because they were assuming their raise in income would cover the raise in taxes. But wages don't increase 10% annually like our taxes do (whole other topic LOL!) so they get put in a hole. Anyone coming into the market now knows the prices, it's all available information, and they can decided if they want to move here or not. It could all be a bubble that pops and corrects one day, but not until inbound population growth slows down.
market churn (which is in part informed by time) matter with affordability.
I don’t propose what you’re saying either. A land value tax is more than sufficient, by any research I’ve seen on this topic. It doesn’t in any sense mean what you’re saying here. Only that under utilized land (usually classified as unbuilt or vacant) is taxed more heavily. Thats one facet. The other is that it shifts the property tax off of building values and onto land values can make both buildings and land less expensive. This has a knock off affect of reducing the value of real estate holdings to varying degrees in terms of value in the short term but stabilizes in the medium and long term.
That would be better in my view but as it exists today, we instead have to rely on building more housing or putting more existing supply in the market, neither of which in broad strokes are happening in a way that keeps pace with demand unfortunately
Also: not everyone who can afford to buy a home can buy a home built from scratch. There are different classes of home buyers and the vast majority aren’t moving into custom homes like that. Its unreasonable to think that it’s common place in aggregate
I don’t know that it’s possible to intrinsically make real estate non appreciable per se, but you can shift it to be more commodity like and stop treating it special and pass regulations that encourage selling and discourages holding, which as a land value tax, would be a good start. Removing the mortgage interest deduction would be another
Removal of sub class zoning for housing would also be beneficial. Its one thing to zone an area for industrial vs housing but it should not be permitted that when land is zoned for housing they can zone specifically for single occupancy homes for example.
> If you despise that thinking, then we need to regulate the housing market to discourage seeing housing as an investment as we see it today
Quite the opposite, regulation of the housing market rarely ends well. There's quite a few countries that can speak to the horrible deadlocks that occur when regulation suffocates the housing market.
There's nothing particularly wrong with investment per se, now if you make the market so regulated such that there's no competition, you're destroying any kind of forces that push the price down, or if you make the investment so costly the prices go up to compensante.
Heck, there's even countries where the regulation was so insane it was far better to hold an empty home than to actually rent it out.
I once awoke to see a large spider running away from me on my bed. I was a bit displeased with that until I learned that they hunt roaches. I figured if it was running away from me, then it figured (perhaps incorrectly) that I was not to be messed with and so the food chain in my house remained as it should be.
They would be 1.7cm long if they were 100 time smaller than the average human. Seems to check out.
I’m glad you weren’t referring to weight. The average human weighs 60-80kg, depending on what region you’re in. The heaviest spider is the Goliath, grows up to 13cm, but only weighs up to 135grams…
I don't know that hydrogen was a "scam" per se - I think of fuel cells as essentially an alternative battery technology. It wasn't clear 20-30 years ago that lithium batteries would progress as much as they did, and so fuel cells were perhaps a reasonable hedge.
Corporations were also engineered to be un-killable. The way to reach them is to go after the people who run them. Obviously, if that’s the analogy, then the miners are quite secure anyway.
You're arguing that it's a poison (it isn't) but even worse you're proposing a cure that's far worse. So "go after them" in other words would mean: construct a global authoritarian surveillance apparatus that hunts down energy consumers?
I actually feel quite fortunate these days (for a number of reasons) that I never wanted children (also for a number of reasons); if I had I can imagine that it would be quite a disappointment at how it has become ever more infeasible.