Yes: our politicization of science and theirs will take a somewhat different form. And yes: if our politicization of science is is less complete, or briefer, it may not set us back as much... but RFK Jr. is out there purging scientists from the federal government if they disagree with his preferred theories about vaccines. This is not going to advance medical science in the US.
>The problems existing now are not the same as those of two empires from 100 years ago.
I agree.
Not exactly by a long shot.
More like the Reagan era in the US where the pressure to dissolve scientific opportunity was strongest against places that conducted tasks more like Bell Labs most of all.
Eventually "all" was lost as labs that did survive best were not primarily "research", but that was the component which was jettisoned in an attempt to stay afloat.
If the ball was not dropped that badly that far back, Chinese research and especially their military would still be decades behind without any doubts.
NASA would have been on Mars a long time ago.
So you've got a good point, you learn even more when you look directly at the USA and not 100 years back.
Especially if you want to see how it can have a lasting influence on understanding what you're doing wrong right now.
Why? Is it bothersome because it's perceived to be an overused comparison? If the comparison works, it works. Lessons can be learned from history, even if adjusted for changes in technology and society.
Lysenkoism destroyed the sciences for USSR. Stalin picked the crony himself. If your problem is “I don’t like people using bad men as comparison points” maybe you can point to someone who was a good person but still intentionally went out of their way to stymie or destroy the sciences. It’s pretty hard to do that because I can’t think of one. William Jennings Bryan ? Anthony Comstock ? William Proxmire ? And even those folks are not considered good by most or many
Why wouldn't they persuade no one? Just because we know how their history ended doesn't mean their beginnings can't be repeated, cycles of the same bullshit appear in history and they often rhyme with one another.
Do you think Stalin and Hitler as we know were the same Stalin and Hitler as experienced in the 1920s-1930s? If you shed the baggage, can't parallels be drawn to the modern era?
Authoritarianism of the 2020s looks quite different from the 1920s, the 2020s have the Competitive Authoritarianism flavour of it, it's different, it will attack institutions in different ways than simply shutting them down and imprisoning members, it's more subtle, more disperse, but still has the same underlying traits. Comparisons are apt, even if just as a reminder of how things historically evolved from the pre-authoritarian phase into a full-blown one, remembering to trace that is as convincing now as it was in the 1950s...
I've worked in Django across most of my career at a few places for many years.
Every time I work with another framework I am reminded of how well Django has adhered to initial principles (batteries included) while adapting to changes with new technologies.
It has a great community behind it and for that to exist for so long is something remarkable. Other frameworks have advantages in some places. But for overall tooling I think it still is the best choice for anything large and complex yet not a bad choice for micro projects either.
Surprisingly no mention of AI in an article about mass layoffs at a tech company. Wonder if that line has finally had all the juice squeezed from it to explain away layoffs and outsourcing.
AI works as a smokescreen when doing product development layoffs, but you can't really use it for sales, which is still very human-to-human, or when canceling entire projects like they're doing in XBox Game Studios.
I knew this was coming when Microsoft brought Activision. As ex game industry I nearly started crying at the news.
Mergers always lead to layoffs, games aren't doing great as they're not essential in an iffy economy.
Microsoft is seeing the writing on the wall and cutting internal studios. It's much cheaper to just pay 3rd parties to release on Gamepass vs having to fund an entire games development.
I don't think we even see a real "Xbox" in the future. You'll have Xbox branded living room PCs with Windows. They're working on a gaming mode that I guess optimizes Win 11 a bit.
Getting a AAA games job will be much more difficult in the future.
They are struggling to make the case for buying games from the Windows Store instead of Steam and they are struggling to make the case to buy an Xbox Console instead of a Sony or Nintendo Console.
If we see Xbox branded PCs in the living room- that's more a sign of pivoting due to failure than anything else.
The aspect I wonder about for windows vs xbox(console) is that I find it hard to imagine they make much money on the consumer side for windows, yet they have a certain support burden for maintaining/advancing the windows platform and DirectX. I assume xbox contributes heavily to making it worth their while to work on DirectX, but without it there seems to be a lot of beneficiaries that don't contribute back - so what's Microsoft's motivation to have their own API?
Even when D3D12 came out there was commentary how very close it was to Vulkan, which was supposedly largely the work of DICE engineers working for AMD to create the preliminary Mantle implementation.
I don't think consumer spending power is the limiter in the games space at the moment. They've simply run out of new customers.
The explosive growth of the gaming industry over the 90s-2010s was fueled by continuously unlocking new swathes of consumers. Games went from being for kids, to being for adults and kids, to people who would never consider themselves "gamers" with mobile, which in turn created the "whaling" industry of microtransaction fueled F2P. But there's only so many new, large groups of people with money. What we're seeing now is a correction, with growth estimates collapsing back down to what you'd expect from a mature industry.
I don't know all of the economics, and I certainly hadn't considered what you laid out in your 2nd paragraph until I read through it--but as a father, I am certainly spending far less on games for my children/self. We just don't have the money.
> Getting a AAA games job will be much more difficult in the future.
If it's outsourced to 3rd parties, in theory, shouldn't the number of jobs be the same?
Or are you alluding to AAA games not being as viable to the industry as it once was?
I am asking mostly because I seldom play AAA games (for some reason most of them turn me off), and I mostly play indie or retro titles. But I always recognized myself as an outlier, and I would presume most people are primarily interested in the big releases.
> games aren't doing great as they're not essential in an iffy economy.
Historically, games have actually performed extremely well in economic downturns.
Likely because they're extremely cheap entertainment if you count $ per hour of entertainment, but that's just my view on it.
And gaming as a whole is doing great. The only part that's falling off a cliff is the woke garbage life service games AAA studios have been releasing for the last ~10 yrs or so.
Whenever the studios didn't make dumb political messaging the core of the game... And instead made a good gameplay loop first, they've generally succeeded pretty well. It takes skill to make a game centered around political messaging and have it be good, (e.g. spec ops the line, MGS, metaphor:refantazio ), and none of the woke garbage that flopped ever had anything even attempting to create a world in which this messaging made sense. So we're left with completely nonsensical catering to politics no average person cares about whatsoever.
I mean we've even got single dev games that got to the charts of steam (schedule I).
Who gives a flying toss about political content in a game? That sounds like a weird right wing thing. Either the gameplay is good, or its not. Why does woke matter, and why should anyone care?
I don't recall reading any official statements, ever, that said layoffs were due to AI replacing engineers. Do you have examples? I think that line gets thrown in by reporters that don't know what they're talking about, or HN/LinkedIn users that haven't actually read the statement.
I could easily be wrong; I can't say I've thoroughly perused every layoff statement from big tech, but I frankly don't even see how it would be positive PR that you're replacing workers with machines, much less worth outright lying about.
> Microsoft Corp. began job cuts that will impact about 9,000 workers, its second major wave of layoffs this year as it seeks to control costs while ramping up on artificial intelligence spending.
And AI is a bullet point in the "Takeaways, powered by Bloomberg AI" section as well.
It will always be like this until scale ramps up and costs come down as infrastructure ramps up. China's advantage is always communicated as cheap labor but it's also the ability to almost infinitely scale production lines in a short period of time. America has mostly lost the muscle memory and tooling to do this. And that ability to scale matters with materials costs.
There are incentives that would benefit domestic producers and companies but those take time and don't make good soundbites for politicians.
The blunt tariff sledgehammer that was dropped isn't going to do it. Small experiments like the one in the article will try and mostly fail. Meanwhile producers will find loopholes and workarounds to tariffs. And the margins and viability of domestic designers and businesses will continue to weaken.
Consumers will increasingly eat the cost and lose the convenience.
I think it is worth mentioning how much more cheap capital is available for manufacturing. Chinese state policy—- monetary, fiscal, and social—- pushes up the savings rate, enormously lowering consumption, while restricting the range of consumer financial products. That puts more savings in state banks and keeps interest rates low.
This has come up at the expense of their own consumption however, and a reliance on exports instead. Thankfully China has been focusing on diversifying their export markets along with increasing internal consumption in the last decade.
There are the obvious explicit government initiatives to boost consumption, but they've also made some strides in reducing goods and luxury taxes. An Apple iPhone used to be 20-40% more in China (it is technically imported because it is made in an SEZ), but they are only priced at slightly higher than the states now. Cars used to be a huge splurge but cheap EVs are affordable by anyone with an OK job now (although you might not be able to park it if you live in a big city). On my trip a couple of months ago, the malls were booming in a way that I didn't see in 2016 when I left China.
Factorio taught me about supply chains, manufacturing bottlenecks, and tooling dependencies. These concerns don't really crop up in day-to-day programming, but they reveal a lot about why we struggle manufacturing anything in USA anymore.
If it's about supply chains and the like, Eve Online might be a better fit, it's got the factor of time, deal-making, social interaction, theft, war, blockades, undercutting, etc in there as well.
like, I can see a high school class set up their corporation, get mining set up, maybe own a station, get production running... but then a nullsec alliance is like haha fuck you and completely undercuts them, or the recurring player event where they block / destroy anything coming into or out of the main trade hub starts.
Factorio is pretty predictable... or maybe I've played it too often so I know what to consider for the long term. I should get some mods or change some settings to create calamities like in the old Sim City.
But we don't have a shortage of people who understand those things. You can learn them with a passive interest while hanging around with your laptop on the weekends. We have a shortage of people who understand how to actually make things in a non-copy/paste environment.
There are so many ways that mother nature says "fuck you, fuck your work" that you never get contact with in virtual environments. In fact the whole point of virtual environments it to remove that brutality. We have a dramatic shortage of young people who are interested in learning how to wrangle with mother nature OS rather than computer OS.
When I did IT in manufacturing, we outsourced most of the 'understand how to actually make things' tooling type people jobs. We didn't need them full time and could get way better experts via outsourcing than we could hire.
What we needed were wage slaves paid low enough to make the economics work, even in our small town without many employers that was the tricky bit. Especially every year when health insurance premiums went up. You want to help American manufacturing, move healthcare costs off their back and to the government.
>You want to help American manufacturing, move healthcare costs off their back and to the government.
This would be a big help but maybe too little too late. Maybe we just enjoyed an era of living off the backs of Chinese labor. Now with their increasing wealth, their own desire to move up the chain and their abysmal birthrates, that era is ending.
India also does not have a great birthrate and other structural problems while other asian countries dont have the numbers to completely replace China. It might be that many products we enjoyed just dont make sense anymore if no other country is willing to pick up the slack or there isn't some amazing innovation in automation. Other products might survive with massive inflation.
To be able to design any manufacturable item, you have to know that a wrench is used to tighten bolts, and a screwdriver must be able to reach the screw. There are people who don't. Some of them graduated engineering school with me.
I think you're both right. If the wood shop class was a class in how to run a wood shop (not just in how to run a lathe) it would be the best of both worlds.
Factorio is often described as a game for software developers (i.e. it feels like you're programming when you play). Are those really the critical skills that allowed China to grow in manufacturing so quickly?
I'm not sure shop classes fill that need either...
We bees to put injection molding machines in schools, CNC machines cutting the tooling, teach people how to make real things in real factories with realistic costs.
This is the expertise that left these shores 20 years ago. Tooling manufacturing, automation, semiconductor etc.
They have, at least in some places. Where I live (Austin TX) I've been in multiple high schools that have extensive Manual machine shop/3d printing/CNC/Electronics/etc labs for students to use. It might even be at the point where the nicest/most complete machine shops in town are actually in the suburban high schools. Go to the local FIRST https://www.firstinspires.org/ competition and talk to the kids from the high schools in the more expensive parts of town where their parents are getting tens of thousands of dollars in donations every year for the teams. Whether any random kid can use them is a different story, but they do 'work' if by success having both of your school's FIRST team leads go to MIT is any indication, as happened last year at the HS my kid graduated from.
So at least some of our students are being given the opportunity, and there are multiple paths to success, but maybe the largest difference is that while truly talented multi disciplinary young engineers (and I work with a few) are rare, they always have been. The real questions are probably around social issues, does giving your kid a phone remove the boredom that encourages them to tinker with stuff in the garage, is there a sweet spot of being able to afford an old car, but to poor to pay to fix it, force kids to learn hands on repair skills. Does being able to stop at radio shack/surplus/frys/metal supply/etc and browse racks of stuff on the way home from school encourage kids to build stuff to impress their friends, or is having it delivered in the mail enough. AKA, like me the other day, I stopped a microcenter to get a pedestrian computer peripheral I could have ordered from amazon, but discovered a ESP camera module that gave me 'ideas'.
I'm afraid we have far more basic problems than that - illiteracy in their fingers. We have people who can't use a knife or scissors, let alone a power tool.
3D printing is an excellent introduction to just making an actual object in the real world. It's cheap and accessible, and has obvious design limitations to fall into and learn from. The step from 3D printing to full CNC is a lot less than the step from nothing to 3D printing.
Not to mention intact families where parents had sufficient discretionary time (i.e. jobs that paid the bills with reasonable weekly hours) and a culture of prioritizing passing down knowledge to children and creating spaces in the home for them to pursue their individual interests and talents. People are not just atomized economic units.
3D is heavily used in China as well for small scale manufacturing and prototyping. It is a good place to start for middle or high school kids, and is pretty accessible and rather safe
The idea isn't to teach working with wood necessarily, the idea is to teach how to handle the myriad common problems that crop up when dealing with physical manufacturing.
3D printing would be good too, because on the surface it's just "model -> filament -> extruder -> built". But as anyone who has done 3D printing knows, it's constantly fighting 20 different parameters to try and coax your print to actually work out well. And even when you have it nailed down there are still 20 different things that can randomly sabotage it. And even with all that accounted for you still sometimes get off prints.
Not just that - the idea is to give students a taste of what it's like to make things with their hands. 3D printing is cool too, but it's much less hands-on.
Went to middle/high school in the 2000s and had not one second of home econ or shop or anything related to it, not even theoretical. The only tools I remember working with other than a pair of scissors, compass and ruler were a glue gun and a scalpel in science labs.
In Factorio you throw iron ore in an electric furnace and it turns into iron plates. In reality you need coal or coke or charcoal to reduce iron to its metal form. Steelmaking is one of the largest single source of CO2 for a reason.
This is just one example among many. The truth is every single facet of industrial production is incredibly complex and there does not exist a single video game that captures all the nuance. Period. Factorio abstracted away all the boring details of industrial production and that is why it is good entertainment. But it’s still just entertainment. To think someone would become knowledge about industrial production because he played Factorio is like thinking someone is a good driver because he played Mario Kart.
Getting kids aware of and interested in a topic is an important step. I mentor a high school robotics team, not because I have an illusion that those students could skip college and walk into a robotics design job, but because it gets them exposed to mechanics, engineering, programming, experimentation, working in a team, competing against nature and other teams, etc. Ultimately, I think it helps them refine their framework for “what do I like [or dislike] doing?”
China's biggest advantage wasn't just the ability to scale (which means available labor), but also having entire supply chains in relative proximity, tons of small manufacturers making all the little parts needed, all located in southern China.
That's a bit less true than it used to be. Shenzhen supposedly used to work that way. When some small factory ran out of capacitors in board assembly, they'd send a runner to Huaqiangbei for another reel. But now ordering has mostly moved online. There's less of a role for all those tiny stalls stocking components.
That just cuts out a layer in the distribution chain. The part you want is probably manufactured not too far away.
The US used to have manufacturing cities where you could get everything you needed in specific industries. There was the New York City garment district for clothes. Mary Quant, inventor of the miniskirt, writes in her autobiography, "Quant by Quant", about her first visit to New York with a native guide. She was getting things set up for manufacturing in days instead of the months it took in the UK.
Detroit had cars, of course. Most of the auto parts suppliers were nearby. Now, the US auto industry is very spread out. "Trenton Makes, the World Takes" is still on a huge sign in Trenton, NJ., but it's more nostalgia then reality. Waterbury, Connecticut had watch manufacturers and other mechanical precision devices.
Those centers of industry are mostly gone. Even Hollywood is in troublel
Cheap labor is the key in that scaling, though? Human labor is still far more flexible than anything else that we have. And a big part of that flexibility is how cheaply you can turn it off. There is a reason seasonal employment is a thing.
I live in Philadelphia. We had a lot of manufacturing here, but most of that vacated the city center in the 1970s and 1980s. I recently was doing some research into urban renewal around my neighborhood, and found a paper about the city's efforts to address a concentrated population of perpetually drunk homeless men, mostly centered in my neighborhood, mostly squatting in abandoned buildings or living in flophouses. The city's approach was effectively to remove them and spread them out - and bulldoze the neighborhood to make way for a federally funded highway, now I-95. A lot of manufacturing businesses just called it quits - the owners had made their money on the backs of cheap labor and hadn't really set up any kind of succession plan, but could retire comfortably. Others moved, mostly out of the city, and by the 90s, that labor was moving overseas.
And that's why I don't really foresee that kind of manufacturing coming back here. In order to survive the race-to-the-bottom pricing that the majority of Americans crave, you need a large labor force that will accept some form of sub-par living conditions. But if you can't earn a living wage, you can't afford to participate in the economy in a way that supports the manufacturing, and then you're back to those mid-century slums.
I'm dramatically oversimplifying things, my main point here is, I didn't really put together how much of early 20th century American manufacturing relied on chronically drunk homeless men.
When a consumer is buying labor embodied in a product, they don’t care whether that labor are unionized or what their wage per hour/day is.
They do care what the wage per unit produced is, which is why we see a lot of US manufacturing moving towards higher levels of automation to let the embodied labor per finished unit be lower and thus competitive in the market.
There are roughly half as many employed in manufacturing compared to 25 years ago. The declining trend started before this. At the same time American manufacturing output is at an all time high, measured in dollars. Wages are up. There are more jobs for things like mechanical engineers and millrights, fewer in packaging and assembly.
It is less a craving and more just a general response to availability? It isn't that people have a craving to spend less on things. But, if something is readily available for less, why would you pay more? Indeed, would you expect people to pay more for your goods, if someone else has equivalent goods for cheaper? Why?
Maybe? Clothing is a big counter to your claim here. As is anything that can be reliably machined.
Yes, there is "cheap" clothing. No, the more expensive clothing isn't necessarily better. A bog standard t-shirt is a bog standard t-shirt. With a minimum of quality control, and anything on top of that is not adding to the utility of it.
The machining revolution really hurts a lot of the idea that labor in is indicative of quality.
As a counterexample, some casual googling about cotton suggests that there is an ideal workflow which will result in superior cotton fibers before harvesting. Here is a quote from the conclusion section of the linked article:
"Cotton fiber quality is shaped by a mix of genetics, growing conditions, and field management techniques. High-grade cotton relies on precise measurements of fiber length, strength, and micronaire, along with maintaining proper color and cleanliness throughout its growth. These elements play a key role in determining processing efficiency and market value across the supply chain."
At the most basic, if one farmer harvests his cotton with no consideration of the above issues, whereas another farmer carefully studies, prepares, tests, etc based on the above considerations, wouldn't there be added value and added cost of production?
I personally believe that in a past era, farmers intuitively learned these factors and competed with each other to make their best harvests, and the bog standard t-shirt got a quality buff as a fringe benefit.
Whereas nowadays, the farmer has to drop quality for quantity to compete with digitally-connected markets.
You can personally believe it, but you also need to provide some evidence to the claim. Farmers that can't afford the R&D team necessary to learn a lot of this stuff will have trouble competing here. Such that, I'm comfortable claiming this sort of advantage will only consolidate the profits into bigger corporations.
And, indeed, if you look into high quality cotton supply, you find there are relatively few names.
Lower cost of a good is a generally good indicator that the good is low quality
Unfortunately the inverse is not true at all
Higher cost on a good is not at all a reliable indicator of whether or not the good is high quality
There is a pretty big incentive for producers and sellers to produce low quality goods and convince consumers they are high quality, so they can sell them for a high margin
Not necessarily, but it's total shit when you buy a t-shirt and it unravels after only wearing it a few times. That QC doesn't always happen is what's the problem, so buying the cheapest isn't wise.
I mean... sure? Has that been happening for you? I have had some shirts that didn't last as long as others. Oddly, I don't think they are the ones I paid the least for.
I'm fortunate that my clothes still last quite a while, so I don't know what to say. Still have some t-shirts from the 90s, oddly.
I can say that if you wash cottons with synthetics, that will shorten the life of the cottons. If you use any "stretch" or "no iron" clothing, you almost certainly have a synthetic mix. It isn't that they are lower quality. Nor are they designed to not last as long. They are designed for that stretch and to look flat as their main goal.
While it's true that they aren't designed to not last as long, not lasting as long is a side effect of their design decisions.
The primary reason for the tendency of clothing to wear out faster is the textile manufacturing processes allow for the production of thinner fabrics at a cheaper cost per yard. As anyone who sews or knits can tell you, thinner fabric wears out faster. It allows companies like Zara, H&M, Walmart, Rack, et al to sell their product at marginal cost increase for higher YoY profits with a faster replacement cycle.
Furthermore, it's a plainly stated business strategy of fast fashion that fungibility and the production of disposable consumables is core to their business. As that type of fashion cannibalized market share from more traditional brands that banked on quality more than affordability in the 90s, those same brands responded by creating separate imprints ( Off Fifth, Rack, et al ) or just wholesale adoption of the approach ( e.g. H&M ).
Fast forward to 2025 and we're having a conversation about whether or not the quality delta in clothing is real or a Mandela Effect. The reality is unfortunately the more banal "number go up by any means necessary" explanation.
Mostly agreed. This is what I meant by them not necessarily being lower quality. In many ways, it is a by product of the race to super thin threads. Which, amusingly, used to be a sign of ultra high quality. :D
And clothing has always been a consumable. Always.
It's the second thing. Americans are proud to pay for things they can afford. They look down on people who aren't paying their "fair share." For example, music and movie piracy was never the domain of the average consumer; it's mostly been for broke young people and enthusiasts who don't like DRM and the limits it puts on use. And part of the reason for that is that Spotify and Netflix et al. made it possible to continue consuming "respectably". If physical media were still the norm, piracy would be rampant, but not because Americans tend towards it naturally; bevause they would have been pushed toward it by the imperative consume wedded with the inability to pay.
A lot of dumb "just so" tales in economics are willful miscategorization of desperation as choice.
> It's where people pay me their excess money and get nothing in return, increasing their desperation
Wait, isn't that called 'campaign finance'?
The problem with competing with entrenched market interests is they can use their economic advantages to make the market impossible for newcomers to enter leading to de facto monopolies.
The anecdote that I heard was about GM, They'd have two guys doing two jobs on the same line, one of them would go off drinking for the day and the other guy just did both jobs half-assed, then they would switch the next day.
The assertion is that during times of high work, you have far fewer of them drinking. Pair that with low cost worker tenements and you are able to scale up manual tasks much more rapidly than what you see in most US locations nowadays.
I'm familiar with that for say, digging a ditch, or the n-martini lunch. Less so with "perpetually drunk and homeless" factory workers operating potentially dangerous machinery.
I interned at Daimler-Benz and assembly line workers had company-employed drink trolleys which would take your order early in the shift for what partially subsidized drinks/snacks you wanted delivered for your breaks during your shift. A tone would sound in the factory and workers would converge on the break area near them and pick up what they’d ordered earlier that day. On the menu was beer and plenty of workers would have multiple beers over the course of their shift.
These weren’t what you picture when someone says “perpetually drunk and homeless”, but I think a lot of Mercedes were assembled by workers with a perpetual low-level of alcohol on-board.
I worked a summer job at a factory that made box cars. 10x10 or larger sheets of 1/4 inch plate steel lifted on stacks with chain hoists, box cars tacked together, then put on a large rotisserie, so it could be turned as all the seams were welded. Anyhow, At lunch we all went out for shots and beers, and perhaps a doobie or two. While I did not see it, people did get squished. I survived my summer, but I did pickup a nicotine habit that lasted 20 years.
China's advantage is, and always will be, that the costs of labor in US are bloated by a huge amount of overhead for every working resident
In 2023, the BLS reported that benefits alone accounted for about 31% of total compensation, with wages and salaries comprising the remaining 69%. [1] This 31% includes direct costs like health insurance, retirement contributions, and paid leave.
Now in addition, consider employer-paid expenses that are not benefits or employee compensation: FICA, FUTA, SUID, SDI, FMLA, etc. That depends on your geography, but it can be up to 25-40% additional costs [2]
The all-in cost is at least 35% or more in additional spend [3]
In addition, none of the above capture indirect costs of compliance/overhead, with varied state and federal schemes.
As you can see, we are at a range of ~35-50% of additional costs for each new hire
Now, importantly, try to imagine the effect of this bloat at a national level: Every US business is effectively carrying deadweight of additional ~35-50% costs on its pricing decisions to its customers. Why? Because the bloat is embedded into every domestic input, like raw materials, services, utilities, you name it. This cost spike may impact a few foreign industries dependent on US inputs, but it certainly explodes over US shores, spiking prices of the inputs that most US producers depend for their final goods and services. Now think of what happens to domestic costs of doing business and operating a physical business in US.
So when your cost of production have additional ~35-50% overhead because of all sort of market-distorting mechanisms, blaming china for "cheap labor" is a convenient scapegoat, when in reality the blame should be on US policy of making our jobs artificially expensive.... to fund the state bloat.
Some of it is China’s willingness to make big capital investments. My wife was shocked at the low price of beech mushrooms at Ren’s Market and I found out these are grown in a huge factory in China where they are very proud that they only have to handle the mushrooms with a forklift. Contrast that to those white button Agricus mushrooms each of which is cut out from the mycelium individually with a knife.
When you look at solar panels and lithium batteries their biggest advantage is that they invest in large scale heavily automated factories. For really labor intensive and low value things like those dog beds Chinese labor is already too expensive and production is going to places like Bangladesh.
We have plenty of capital here. Far more than China.
The problem is the capital cannot be put to good use here. Either because (1) there's too much uncertainty around project progress (think oil pipelines stuck for decades in permitting limbo), or (2) the ROI doesn't work when you pay insanely high bloated compliance costs of hiring US staff.
Even our sky high productivity cannot overcome the large lard deadweight each of us has to carry, on behalf of the elite class
I remember a time when every product sold around the world carried the "MADE IN USA" brand. It included random trinkets.
That would come back quickly, if we all decided we had enough of antiwork laws, enough with all the deadweight, and focused on building instead of regulating.
OK. In that case lets not use "bloat", and instead just call it the biggest subsidy for the middle and upper classes, coming from the backs of the unemployed, lower class
Guess who's uninsured? Its not the META employee with fertility benefits.
Satire is whomever cannot see why Trump would be voted by the working class: whomever thinks the status quo was to the benefit of the lower, blue collar class... while the middle and upper class ride their (untouchable) govt benefits (SSN) to a secure retirement because the elite class has a secure bureaucratic job (while the lower classes struggle to find 1 part time job).
Meanwhile, the chinese eat the lunch of the working class who see their jobs being exported abroad, because no employer wants to pay for subsidies/retirement/salaries of an elite bureaucratic deadweight class (that makes the rules for themselves, and forgets the neediest).
The chinese eat the lunch of the working and neediest americans, who see their jobs being exported abroad, because of a huge, elite bureaucratic deadweight DC class that was paid to allow regulatory capture, while enjoying sucking US treasure that funded their benefits and retirement.
That same deadweight class in power right now, pushing this narrative that the meager benefits we have are still too high for what we're worth. As they begin the next phase of destroying and looting our country - Make America Poor Again.
Your narrative completely missed all of the monetary inflation that was created to keep prices from going down due to cheaper manufacturing. That was the wealth received from offshoring, having been centralized as monetary creation. But rather than this wealth being spent on deliberate goals to mitigate the economic damage of that offshoring (individual and industrial), a rallying cry of fake "fiscal responsibility" prevented most such public spending. So the new money was instead simply given away to banks to bid up to the asset bubble, ultimately putting that centralized wealth into private hands of asset holders while pricing wage earners out of the asset markets.
That was the political con of the past thirty+ years. Now that it has run its course, the game shifts to the next con - which seems to be turning America into some kind of impoverished authoritarian work camp where we appreciate being able to do unskilled factory work that China no longer wants to do. Acknowledging the last con gets the rubes to buy right into it. Finally some validation, what a breath of fresh air! Oh, and don't you know the real problem right now is actually them "illegals" ? Definitely not these elites, nope. This current bunch is totally different than that last bunch. See how they don't even respect those laws or norms the previous elites respected? So refreshingly different!
An elite that actively wants to let go of his own government sinecure, power and status (from reduction in team size, the ever-important status power signal at bigcorps) , is very different from an elite that wants to grow his team and status
That's a weird framing making for a very odd conclusion, given that he is expanding the powers of the government, claiming those powers vest directly in him, and increasing the number of enforcers of that power. It's like the CEO of a company eliminating the R&D department, cutting everyone else's pay, and bulking up on security guards to perform random searches looking for pretexts to fire more people. From my perspective, the bureaucracy was an ever growing amount of administrative overhead, but it was at least moderating authoritarian power and keeping the worst impulses of autocracy at bay.
I do agree they are not the same - reverting to autocracy is throwing the towel in on the American experiment. Previous elites in power at least had the decency to view their looting as a symbiotic parasitic relationship. What is the same is the dynamic of distracting the rubes with feel-good populist outrage while shamelessly robbing them blind.
The Netherlands has a social welfare system and it's economy is not collapsing.
However the Dutch government doesn't have an ideological fascination with factories. It has a more rational approach to make money with things that the Netherlands is actually good at.
I think what compounds it is that in the US dead weight States still have political power- when realistically all the bets should be on California,Texas and New York and the rest of the country should be grateful.
Perhaps the answer is a combination of a significant UBI (paid for by general federal spending, I could think of many worse reasons to accrue national debt) coupled with a much lower minimum wage? Incentivize companies not to treat labor as a cost sink, while still ensuring that people have enough capital to cover their cost of living. I'd wager productivity would also go up (and mental depression would go down) if things weren't quite as dire as they currently are.
In China it is naturally cheap, they have humongous super advanced vertical and horizontal supply chains at their doorstep.
Need plentiful, cheap three phase electricity? - check. Need some obscure part at scale and immediately?- check. Need advanced engineering? - check. etc. etc.
It's at the point where for many industries the risk/reward just do not make any sense at all (it'll just be loss making no matter how you spin it, government supports etc).
The chinese gov't also funds those things - but just not via taxes collected from people's incomes. They collect "profit" off foreign exports, debase the local currency to pay for it.
> taxing individuals directly begets the familiar resentment
but on the other hand, taxing individuals means those individuals should have some say over what taxation gets spent on (in theory), where as an authoritarian regime can simply ignore the populous.
I still think taxing individuals are better, despite it being slower and less agile at adapting.
Well, when you explain it like that, of course I have to agree.
Maybe 20 years ago I had the very clever original idea ( /s ) of allowing tax payers some autonomy over how to allocate at least some of their taxes. Like maybe I could earmark 5% of what I pay towards public school lunchs and restoring habitat for wild salmon.
I'm sure it's a terrible idea. Any more, I just want some experts to survey known tax regimes, summarize their pros and cons. Somehow ground this evergreen slap fight so we're not stuck rehashing what color to paint the bikeshed.
Want to build electronics? You'll need a variety of parts and raw materials that China and its surrounding countries produce, and the US doesn't*.
Want to make clothing? You'll need many different fabrics, buttons, zippers, dyes, etc that China and its surrounding countries produce, and the US doesn't*.
Want to make toys? You'll need plastics, dyes, injection-molding processes, etc that China and its surrounding countries produce or provide, and the US doesn't*.
And this goes all the way back to the mining, the farming, and the refining. The US just doesn't do these things*, even in the cases where we actually have the natural resources here.
This is all way before you even get to the point of engaging with China's skilled manufacturing workforce. (Because yes: these jobs do require skills; you can't just walk in off the street with zero prior experience or training and be correctly assembling widgets or sewing garments within the hour.)
* To counter pedants: Yes, the US may produce some small amounts of some of these things. But we don't produce them at anything like the scale required to ramp up full-on mass production of anything that relies on them to supply the demand of the entire country.
This take and the article get it utterly wrong. The ONLY real headline is,
"Americans have gotten so used to free money they can no longer even imagine producing anything and selling it at a reasonable price".
I'm a small farmer and can sell my garlic all day for $1 a bulb. But it's A LOT of work. If I bump the price to $5 less people buy but that doesn't mean I get to give up and say, "oh well, can't produce in America I guess... "
It's more than that, we've simultaneously allowed for monopolization and rollup of wholesale markets. So in context of the story, the US manufacturer is in a squeeze play between supply cost escalations through the Trump tax regime, and the on the demand side with the big retailers like Kroger and Walmart.
The "made in USA" stuff is bullshit, the policy people DNGAF. The people actually making stuff are screwed. This about about shifting taxation from income and capital gains to consumption.
Turns out China buys Iranian oil, China makes cheap products out of this oil. China builds lots of new cheap coal plants, west fades theirs out but moves part of their production to China.. etc.
Use of coal in Chinese energy production is not growing, peaked in 2013 according to their stats. They are also building massive solar and nuclear capacity.
But anyway, half of all global coal production is consumed in China. I hope they will manage to get rid of coal in the next 20 years.
It's not just cheap labor. It's labor that is abused, sometimes enslaved.
It's also lack of environmental regulation adherence. China has environmental regulations but they don't always demand compliance. I read about companies paying for scrubbers to be installed in factories and when a team comes to take a tour, still with original filters and low run hours.
Maybe 20 years ago? Wages are rising salaries and employers are playing nice so their employees don't jump ship elsewhere. The day of your employer keeping your ID card captive is long gone (unless you are a naked official).
> China has environmental regulations but they don't always demand compliance.
That was also a lot more common 20 years ago than today. These days, cities/provinces are held accountable for AQI reductions, so pretend inspections no longer help their metrics. But I totally get it, there is a lot of material from 2000 to 2015 or so, and they basically live forever on the internet.
>The study, which focuses on 2023 and early this year(2024), adds to a growing body of evidence that Beijing is using forced labor and mass internment camps to control the Uyghurs — and ramps up pressure on the European Union to finalize plans for a bloc-wide ban on imports of products made with forced labor.
Your comment:
>Maybe 20 years ago?
Unless it is suddenly 2030 and I missed the time shift, I am talking the past year or two.
That 8% is only if you include the labor costs of final assembly at the GM plant. But their inputs also were built by labor. GM buys turbochargers not out of thin air, but from Garrett Motion inc., in Plymouth Michigan, who also has sizeable labor costs. Repeat not just for turbochargers, but for the rest of GM's input supply line. If you include only their direct suppliers, the cost of a new car that goes to human wages is about 30-40%.
Chinese turbocharger suppliers have lower labor costs and therefore BYD, Changan, Great Wall and others have more pricing power vs GM and Ford products.
Yes, their song, tang, han, and shark models are all turbocharged.
But my broader point is that their entire supply chain is comprised of lower labor cost inputs. Whether it be the EV batteries, the windshield, or the air valve in each of the four tires.
> Maybe Americans could build cars that people living in Asia actually want? Hint someone in Jakarta doesn't want a 40k pick-up truck.
You'd be surprised. One of the things that really raised my eyebrows in Thailand was slum shacks with a gleaming new muscle pickup parked beside it. For some reason these are really popular and people spend an inordinate amount of income on them.
Counterpoint: cost of living is ridiculously cheaper in China vs. USA. Workers can be paid 3x less and still have a better QoL. It's a vastly more efficient economy in terms of human capital.
Counterpoint: China is the undisputed leader in renewable energy technology, including battery storage. I don't think they are doing it purely for environmental reasons, but they are doing it.
But the main reason why that cost of living is ridiculously cheaper is because human labor is so much less expensive. There's no free lunch - if the output is that much cheaper, that difference has to come out of someone's pocket eventually, even if it's not the person directly manufacturing the thing but someone down the line from them.
Or you can look from it from the opposite direction and imagine what would have happened if there was full freedom of movement between China and US (i.e. no visas etc) and thus an actual free market for labor. If you expect workers in such situation to steadily migrate from China to US but not vice versa (at least until cost of labor equalizes), this implies that the workers in China are somehow worse off in absolute quality of life even when accounting for relative cost-of-life differences. That is, if the relationship between two countries wasn't economically exploitative in some way, we wouldn't need to restrict the free flow of labor at the border.
America's cost of living issues are mostly because of bad regulation. The big three rising costs are housing, healthcare, and education, and all 3 have been horribly misregulated by the US gov leading to massive spikes in price.
> But the main reason why that cost of living is ridiculously cheaper is because human labor is so much less expensive.
That's a really bizarre take that is obviously false. The disenfranchised migrant laborer or prison slave producing your American groceries is earning approximately as much as a Chinese peasant, i.e. basically nothing.
There is however a vast difference in what the organization looks like above the laborer. In America: vast profits and consolidation. By contrast, China has more small businesses (think street food) and large enterprises are SOE or otherwise constrained by the political system.
As far as I know, this is not the case for migrant laborers at least, who often get paid more than federal minimum wage (because otherwise they can't get enough people even if they are undocumented immigrants).
In any case, if those were the main two reasons for the disparity, then we wouldn't see the same for other first world countries which have neither cheap migrant labor nor prison slaves. Yet cost of living is still significantly more expensive in, say, Finland than it is in China.
And why is cost of living ridiculously cheaper in China?
If you pay less in wages, goods cost less.
If you have less environmental regulations/ignore them, goods cost less.
Yes, they are the leader in renewable energy tech. They have also cornered the market with regards to the rare minerals that are some/most of the inputs. The link is not a coincidence.
In the US, housing and real estate have been driven up significantly to the benefit of the really rich. Increased rent, and increased house cost for existing structures just ends up lining the pockets of people rich enough to get priority access to new, cheap debt issuance. Inflation benefits those who are closest to the new money creation, while screwing those furthest away. All the while, everything gets more expensive with increasing rents.
it is exactly the case in china - just with different numbers. It's why shanghai and beijing has some of the highest property price to income ratios. Just like in san fran.
There's cheap property in the USA - rural areas and lower populated areas. Just like there are in china.
I agree. A lot of modern trade for the US is built around arbitrage on purchasing power. If all else costs the same, and you have to decide whether to pay someone $2 per hour to do it or $20, $2 always wins unless shipping it over is more expensive than the difference, which almost always isn’t.
Average salary in China has gone up quite a bit. It might be 1/3 but it's not $2.
I had a friend move his factory to China because the packaging and other costs were so much cheaper. I wish I'd asked for a breakdown. He didn't factor in/expect wages to be much of a savings.
I just pulled a random number but what I intended to say is that as long as differences in purchasing power exist and the dollar is the stronger currency, trade will move to where your dollar has more purchasing power for labor, as long as moving the finished goods back to the US isn’t prohibitively expensive.
That sounds like a very good argument for cracking down on illegal immigration, either by bringing people out of the shadows or by removing them. Currently American is going the removal route.
> China's advantage is always communicated as cheap labor but it's also the ability to almost infinitely scale production lines in a short period of time. America has mostly lost the muscle memory and tooling to do this.
...
>There are incentives that would benefit domestic producers and companies but those take time and don't make good soundbites for politicians.
I heard a very compelling argument (at least to me), that the difference, as you say, isn't the labor. The labor cost difference is something like 5% in the China vs 8% in the US. The difference is ramp up time. If you have a product ready to be built, you can get it to market much faster manufacturing in China than the US.
As an example, the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada took about 2 years (June 2014-July 2015)[1]
Tesla Gigafactory in China took 168 days to construct (January 2019-October 2019)[1]
The cost of the factory construction, materials and labor, isn't the biggest loss when deciding where to build your factory. The biggest cost is the opportunity cost of not manufacturing your product for 15 months and the potential of losing any first to market advantage if you have competition.
The time to get your product to market, especially if you're a new company with no income operating on investor money, the time spent trying to manufacture in the US can sink your company. The cost difference is much more manageable and, depending of the product, can often times be overcome by the price of shipping.
There's an attitude shift, too. US manufacturing is stuck in the past. If you want to build a widget, you want it finished, welded assembled and painted. you've got to do a bunch of work and take it to four different places before you're done. China's got a one stop shop attitude to get your widget made.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTjEVB5p2/
I don't know if you're wrong in general, but your dates for the factory construction show 9 months in China vs 13 months in the US, not the 5 months vs two years you claim.
>Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated. This matters because young offenders are the raw material that feeds the prison system: As one generation ages out, another takes its place on the same horrid journey.
Another factor which will soon impact this, if it isn't already, is the rapidly changing nature of youth. Fertility rates have been dropping since 2009 or so. Average age of parents is increasing. Teen pregnancy on a long and rapid decline.
All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.
> the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources
This is both good and bad. Having a child is very difficult, but it gets harder as you get older. You lack a lot of monitory resources as a teen or the early 20s, but you have a lot more energy, as you get older your body starts decaying you will lack energy. A kid had at 40 will still be depending on your when you are 55 (kids is only 15), and if the kids goes to college may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring. Plus if your kids have kids young as well as you, you be around and have some energy for grandkids.
Don't read the above as advocating having kids too young, it is not. However don't wait until you think it is the perfect time. If you are 25 you should be seriously thinking in the next 2 years, and by 30 have them (if of course kids are right for you - that is a complex consideration I'm not going to get into). Do not let fear of how much it will cost or desire for more resources first stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.
I had my children at 36 and 38, and I'm the mother, and energy-wise, I've had no issues. Yes, they considered me to be of "advanced maternal age" in the OB department and gave me special treatment due to it, but my doctors told me that the "advanced maternal age" threshold (35) was based off outdated research anyway. In the bay area, most of the mothers I've met were around that age, and my friends are having their kids at the same age.
It was really nice that I had time to establish my career and figure things out before having kids.
The issue here is this can lead people to pushing it till 40+.
I was talking to a nice girl up until she mentioned still wanting kids in her late 40s. Maybe I’m old school, but telling someone you froze your eggs the same day you meet them is weird.
Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle.
This rapidly transformed into no, get your masters, get 8 years of experience. Earn at least 300k as a couple. Then and only then should you consider a family. Childcare is 3k plus a month in many places.
For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it.
In my 30s I’ve let go of expecting anything. This world has already given me so much.
Nobody said you should wait that long. As for your anecdote, what’s wrong with figuring out early during dating whether you plan on having children or not? People should talk about those things early, since there is hardly anything that makes a relationship more incompatible long term, and leads to more (even mutual) heartbreak and sorrow than having to break up with a person solely because their most uncompromisable life plan differs.
In my 20s, it felt indeed weird to bring that up early for me, because I wasn’t ready yet and didn’t even really know what I wanted yet. Later in life, when dating we always talked about potential family planning and general outlook on life early. (Unless it was never meant to be a serious relationship to begin with.)
This wasn’t even a first date, it was like she said hi to me at an event and just started taking about having a family.
Felt really awkward for small talk.
My point was the economy should support having a family in your 20s if that’s what you want to do. You shouldn’t need a well paid career, a quality lifestyle that supports a family should be available for everyone.
I imagine universal health care, paid family leave ( for months not weeks) and affirmative (free?) childcare could bring that gap.
At a point it isn’t even an age issue. A lot of people will never earn enough to really support a family, and that’s a failure of the social contract.
You should be able to get a job as a Walmart clerk, have your partner work part time and still afford to have a family.
I think I’ve muddled my own point here, but it should be easier. Maybe that Walmart clerk could own a house ?!
I do agree with your point about society. The reason we waited are way beyond monetary issues, and we would have waited regardless, but people should be able to support a family without an “advanced” career if they choose so.
I think it would be hard to find someone that does not agree with you on the street.
These conversations should not need to happen but they do because of the current inequality that exists. A couple can't change the world so they talk about these things since it's their best option
Society does kinda support this. People with low-paying jobs actually have the most kids. You just need more income if you want to have kids at a good time and send them to higher-end schools, including K-12.
Absolutely. It serves as a filter, if people are being honest. It also highlights the bizarre dating culture and view of life we've adopted. This dating culture has produced a good deal of rotten fruit.
The ultimate purpose of dating is to meet your future spouse. We're turned it into some kind of senseless sexual escapade, and this has poisoned the relations between men and women. It makes them exploitative and dehumanizing in spirit: sprinkling them with the waters of "consent" doesn't change that, as the subjective cannot abolish the objective. We've reduced sex to something that is merely pleasurable and contradicted its intrinsic and essential function which is procreative by employing an array of technologies that impede and interfere with healthy procreative processes. This creates a mindset not unlike that of a drug user who is obsessed with getting another hit with no thought given to the damage, or the bulimic who wants the sensual satisfaction of eating, but not the calories.
The psychophysical reality of sexual intercourse is much more than some passing physical pleasure. It mobilizes processes in us that are completely oriented toward bonding and the strengthening of the relationship in preparation for children. Whence the stereotype that men will often exit quickly in the morning after a one night stand with a strange woman? Because both can feel, if only subconsciously, that the processes of bonding are taking place, and who wants to bond — and in such a profound and intimate way — with someone they've just met? In this regard, the character of Julianna in Vanilla Sky makes an astoundingly profound and accurate remark for a movie coming out of Hollywood: "Don't you know when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not?" Our capacity for sexual intimacy is likewise dulled.
(Masturbation is even worse. Those processes bond us with a fictional harem of the imaginary and close us within ourselves. For social animals like us, this is a recipe for misery.)
We thwart and ignore our biological nature to our own detriment. The procreative prime spans the mid-twenties into the early 30s. Statistically, most people should be having families by their mid-20s. Our culture confuses people and creates a pointless obstacle course that leads them to postpone such things either because they're too immature (and encouraged to remain so, also by this unserious dating culture) or because they believe they must achieve some arbitrary milestones first. Furthermore, family and community support has been dashed by a culture of hyperindividualism.
The causes of demographic decline are not a mystery. People simply either don't think deeply enough, or they don't want to make the cultural changes necessary to restore normalcy.
You have far too much of an obsession with sex here and really need to stop and take a breath.
Dating culture is evolved to help you find a mate based on YOUR choices and capability not your parents or class level. This allows you to “trial” compatibility over shorter time and find better fits.
What you seem to be talking about is 'Online Hookup Culture' which is more of a hobby if we are being honest than a way of finding a mate. And ultimately probably STILL better when faced with a society increasingly not finding mates or having kids at all. So basically all of your thoughts are self-contradictory due to a bit of self righteousness here.
Please don’t let your hangups around sex (correct or not) become a world view. It’s not a healthy obsession.
This is a much more reasonable position than many will believe. I think writing like a 19th century nonfiction author probably contributes to that aha
Edit:
To be clear I appreciate this comment and agree with it in the large. It’s hard to talk about these things without being quickly dismissed in the current zeitgeist.
Sexual escapades are only senseless if you rigidly believe sex is only for specific things, and adopt a model where human beings are property and can be owned. While sex does have a biological purpose, that in itself doesn't mean it has to be limited to that purpose.
Sex is fun and most sex doesn't lead to procreation, nor is intended to. The last 50 times I've had sex, me and partner(s) involved have had no intention of making a baby, and that's fine. Nature/God agrees with me, because the number of children most families have are typically far less than the number of times the parents have had sex.
There's a lot of times people want sex and don't want it to be some big life changing event. I won't marry someone like that.
> This creates a mindset not unlike that of a drug user who is obsessed with getting another hit
Everyone wants pleasurable things with a minimum of bad or unwanted consequences. This is called being smart and using your God-given brain and free will. This doesn't make anyone a drug user. This puritanical war on pleasure can only serve authoritarian and anti-human ends, which is often an explicit or implicit base of forms of slavery/indenture, and is the main reason why I strongly advocate against it.
> The psychophysical reality of sexual intercourse is much more than some passing physical pleasure.
Anything that feels really good will beget attachment because you want more of it. When it's attached to a person, you're going to want to be around that person more. And of course, human beings are naked apes with courtship and bonding instincts and all that good stuff. But people bond over things other than sex, and any good relationship or marriage will have many bonds other than the sexual one. Indeed, marriages where sex is the only reason they got together are as hollow as this drug user strawman you trotted out.
> Masturbation is even worse.
People who become overly dependent on parasocial relationships with fictional anything, whether that's a harem, video game, movie star, person mentioned in a religious book, etc. need help. I masturbate from time to time and it does not give me any problems, but I'm not addicted to it. But I would rather lonely people masturbate themselves into a coma than sexually assault others simply because of people who will say masturbation is wrong but at the same time won't consider other things like legalizing prostitution.
> they don't want to make the cultural changes necessary to restore normalcy.
I don't. The old way sucked. Robots and AI should be doing all our menial work, and the possibilities for pleasure are endless. The people who just can't exist without an employer giving them meaning because they never got enough approval from their daddies need to move to another planet.
> Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle
This has literally only been true for about 30 years out of the sum total of human history, would you like to guess when those 30 years happened to be?
Obviously the answer is "1950s america".
For the rest of human history, you needed something beyond the education you received until the age of 18 in order to support a family.
Income in this context means trading labor for cash.
In the past, huge amounts of household work were done without any such exchange.
Today, child raising, cleaning, cooking, provisioning, and more remain unpaid household labor. The people who do that work were not idle 800 years ago, and they are not idle today.
Women and kids would tend to animals and food came directly from the animals. They both would tend the fields when work did not required physical strength - and thre was plenty of such work too. The crafts women did were for sale or trade. They would also sell on the market whatever excess household produced.
If we are talking about "centuries" quite a lot of people including men did not worked as in being employed for salary. But their work was economical - necessarily so.
Being stay at home mom today is mostly battling boredom and demotivation. Or then, making up things to do. It is not the same as milking cows or making cheese.
> Being stay at home mom today is mostly battling boredom and demotivation. Or then, making up things to do. It is not the same as milking cows or making cheese.
I was a stay at home parent for my daughter. It was extremely far from battling boredom (except perhaps for first year and a half, if that, and even then anyone who is actually interested in child development will not find it boring) and it was the opposite of demotivating.
Rather than speak in such broad generalizations, I think it would be better to restrict your claims to specific, real stories.
In foraging societies - ie, most people for the vast majority of human history - people worked ~15–20 hours/week on subsistence tasks. The rest was leisure or social time (ie, time for being a human later rebranded as 'idleness').
Industrialization has pushed inequality to extremes while raising hours worked - even as productivity keeps shooting up. There's no good reason for people to tolerate this; it's just exploitation.
Those hours worked are carefully defining a lot of work away. Most things people eat need hours of preparation that isn't counted in you 15-20 hours for example. When you relook at what people did most of the time you realize they had to work really hard for a lot more hours to survive.
How many hours a day would you estimate that primates in the wild "work"? Without commenting on quality of life it seems readily apparent to me that many foraging animals have large amounts of leisure time.
> Most things people eat need hours of preparation that isn't counted in you 15-20 hours for example.
Yeah, and we now expect women to work 40+ hour work weeks and house work on top of that. That is the thing causing societal reproduction rates to plummet.
Let's just do the math: a day has 24 hours. The recommendation for healthy sleep is 8 hours. Then, you work for 8 hours, with 1 hour added for the unpaid lunch break. That's the two largest blocks, leaving 7 hours to distribute... dedicate 3 hours for the "staying alive" stuff (preparing for going to work in the morning, aka breakfast, shave, getting dressed, preparing dinner, eating dinner, have a shower and at least some unwind time to fall asleep).
And that in turn leaves only 4 hours for everything else: running errands (aka shopping, dealing with bureaucracy, disposing of trash, cleaning), just doing nothing to wind down your mind from a hard day at work, hobbies, social activities (talking with your friends and family or occasionally going out) and, guess what, actually having sex.
Easy to see how that's already a fully packed day. Society just took the productivity gains from women no longer having to deal with a lot of menial work (washing dishes and clothing, as that got replaced by machines, and repairing clothes) and redistributed these hours to capitalism.
And now, imagine a child on top of that. Add at least half an hour in the morning to help get the kid ready for school, an hour to drive the kid to errands (because public transit is more like "transhit"), and another two hours to help the kid with homework because that workload is ridiculous and you don't want the kid to fall behind kids of parents rich enough to afford private tutors. But... whoops, isn't that just about the entire "everything else" time block? And younger children need even more work, constantly changing nappies, going to the doctor's all the time because it's one new bug every new week and sometimes the bug also catches you cold...
You're inventing sexism where there isn't any. The men who expect their wives to work 40+ hour weeks are not (at least as a group) the ones dumping all housework and childcare on them.
The time constraints that come with a dual income certainly make the logistics of having children more difficult though.
> The men who expect their wives to work 40+ hour weeks are not (at least as a group) the ones dumping all housework and childcare on them.
I'm not talking about men, I'm talking about society itself. Try renting a family home on a single income in any moderate popular area. Owning a home is outright out of reach for even more people.
Yes I agree the dual income expectation is super backwards when it comes to raising a family. First your income isn't enough to have a family unless you’re earning in the top 5%. Second, as you point out, managing a home and a property takes time and effort, much more than just a few hours a week. Add kids in the mix and unless you have full time childcare it’s not feasible. You pretty much have to sacrifice one of the two incomes paying for labor you can otherwise do yourself. I understand the social reason we moved toward dual income but there’s still a lot to iron out. It’s a whole lot easier to have a family if society could figure out a way to support the homemaker during childrearing years—some of us actually want to raise our own kids. And we need to figure out how to make life accessible to single income situations. Inevitably since dual income has become an expectation the markets have adjusted to that reality which leaves single income households short.
Look man if you want to write a refutation of Marshall Sahlins' work, go ahead. I might even read it. But I'm not going to just take the word of a random commentator - are you even in anthropology?
Like, this is a broad consensus thing. There's not really much debate; ethnographic studies have backed it up. Where are you getting your info from?
There seem to be two main points of critique there:
1. That there was war and war sucked; disease; and also infant mortality was high - therefore life sucked back then. None of that really factors in to the debate of how much free time people had; and those thing are all still very much with us (especially in America).
2. That food prep and gathering firewood takes time. Well, gathering firewood is also known as 'going for a walk in nature', and it's actually good for you. You can chat with your friends while you do it. It's not like your average job. It might not be technically 'idle', but it's a lot closer to 'idle' than flipping burgers in a sweatbox.
Same with food prep - picking through some dried beans, or stirring a pot every 30 mins and making sure it doesn't boil over, while you tell stories around the table just isn't comparable to working in an Amazon warehouse pissing into plastic bottles.
It's critique, and you can buy it if you want; but there's nothing there I would call substantial.
1. The choice isn't between having free time and having modern maternity care. And it's not what was being debated. Like, yeah, antibiotics and anesthetic are great to have, but working 40+ hours a week isn't a prerequisite for them to exist so I have no idea why you're bringing it up.
2. Sitting around the table, singing songs, telling stories, or quietly reflecting; all working at my own pace, in the comfort of a home that's been owned outright for generations, surrounded by organic soil free from pesticides and plastic.
3. I read your link, not every cited article. I've personally lived that way, and I know what I'm talking about. There's a big difference between shucking corn with your family or stacking logs, and shuffling numbers at a bullshit job which exists to make two or three incredibly rich people thousands of miles away a tiny bit wealthier. That said, if there's something more you'd like to bring to the discussion, bring it.
You’re not really responding to what he’s saying. You’re sitting at the middle of the story, where the family is no longer surviving, but rather thriving. It’s probably possible to do this, but it’s a difficult stage to reach, and maintaining it requires a LOT of resources.
And anyways, if you’re a hunter-gatherer, you’re following your prey, not sitting around growing corn to be shucked while you sing songs or whatever.
By the way, my buddies and I tell each other stories at work all the time? You can do this at work too, you know. What you seem to be doing is imagining a world where you’ve outsourced all your labor to “it’ll get done” land, then combined hunter-gatherer lifestyles with agrarian lifestyles
You've taken the position that there's some issue with original affluent society but none of the points you're raising run counter either to it or to the adjacent observation that modern quality of life almost certainly doesn't require anywhere near the hours worked at present. Unless you consider economic inequality to be a prerequisite for it anyway.
No, I'm taking the position that there are massive issues with the work estimates in "The Original Affluent Society" in response to a poster that seems to think a small farm in the 1980s is comparable to being a hunter gatherer 20-200kya
A, being homeless and being in a gatherer society are very different things.
And B, even if you wanted to live that way you can't any more; because the commons has been relentlessly exploited past its breaking point for centuries.
I shouldn't really have to explain any of this, but people generally seem to have some weird ideas and blind spots surrounding our history as a species.
In many countries the only obstacle is the legality of living on government lands. In Canada there are people living a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle on crown land. The option is totally available for many people who chose not to do it.
> the only obstacle is the legality of living on government lands
Yes, the obstacle of living illegally on land that has been systematically over-exploited for centuries (or too harsh to bother), without any community or experience. Not sure I'm seeing your point.
People do it so it's definitely possible. Most people chose not to do it because it's a hard life with a horrible quality of life. Being a hunter-gatherer and living a nomadic life is not and was never easy or fun.
Children helped support their families, I don’t see the face value problem with that. The fact remains that humans have been having kids in their teens and 20s for millennia, until very recently in western liberal societies.
Whether something should be the case has little bearing on whether it has been the case for any length of time particularly in something as flexible as the organization of society. It should largely be fine to point at something and say "I would like things to work this way" and try to organize society in that direction.
In less wealthy countries, usually the compromise is that husbands are significantly older than their wives. A woman is ready for marriage at 16-20 but a man isn't ready until 25-35. Also they don't own single-family houses unless they're in totally rural areas.
Aside from the peer comment pointing out the bleedingly obvious, there's also a bit of history here:
In 1907 Justice Henry Bourne Higgins, President of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court, set the first federally arbitrated wages standard in Australia.
Using the Sunshine Harvester Factory as a test case, Justice Higgins took the pioneering approach of hearing evidence from not only male workers but also their wives to determine what was a fair and reasonable wage for a working man to support a family of five.
Higgins’s ruling became the basis for setting Australia’s minimum wage standard for the next 70 years.
Each award is also complex, and covers a range of issues in the employment. For example, this is the Professional Employee award:
https://awards.fairwork.gov.au/MA000065.html just working out what the minimum wage would be for a graduate engineer with 2 years experience is a complex, detailed matter.
But yes, probably, for most professions you could reasonably expect to support a family of 5 on the award, depending on location and definition of "support". Affording a house would largely depend on an additional inheritance, though.
Is "inheritance" used in a different way here similar to how "award" is, or are you saying you often need to inherit money from your family in order to be able to buy a house in Australia?
No, it's used in the same way as elsewhere in the Anglosphere. And yes, as in the rest of the Anglosphere, generally you need an inheritance to be able to afford to buy property.
"in the high cost of living areas" is the rest of that sentence.
It is perfectly doable, even common, to buy a home in low and medium COL areas without any assistance from family, living or dead. The fact that you can't do this in NYC or SF is not an indictment of anything other than NYC and SF.
> or are you saying you often need to inherit money from your family in order to be able to buy a house in Australia?
Tell me a place in any Western society (outside of run-down rural areas/flyover states) where an average employee (i.e. no ultra-rich tech hipster bros) is able to afford a home before the age of 30 purely by his own savings and income. That is frankly no longer a reality for most people.
No reasonable person considered high school advanced education in the 70's let alone 2000. If 85%+ of people get it for half a century, it is by definition not advanced.
It does not have to be a replica of of 50s society though. In particular, I do not think the model of "men go out to work, women look after home and kids" is a great one.
There are lot of alternatives. Men can be primary parents (I was, once the kids got to about the age of eight or so, and was an equal parent before that) and they could stay at home (I continued working, but I was already self-employed and working from home, and my ex never worked after having children).
I think the ideal set up (it would have been so for me) would have been for both parents to work part time.
Of course it still comes back to, you should be able to raise a family on the equivalent of one full time income.
Of course, if the leisured society predicted a few decades ago had come to pass it would be one part time salary.
The model of men work while women watch the kids was most of history. Of course is completely ignors 'womens work' which was very needed for survival and defined by things you could do while also watching kids. for the first few years kids eat from mom so she cannot get far from them (after that she is probably pregnaunt again thus restarting the cycle). Mens work was anything that needed to be done that could not be done when pregaunt or nursing a kid.
today men have the ability to watch kids thanks to formula (though it is better for the kids to eat from mom - this is rarely talked about because it is easy to go too far and starve a baby to death in the exceptions).
> I think the ideal set up (it would have been so for me) would have been for both parents to work part time.
Beautifully said, very progressive also!
I am a big fan of the 4-day work week (for the same amount of money as 5 days), it's been transformative for my life. The extra energy and focus you get from that 1 day translates to higher productivity in the 4 days where you do work. Sadly, the current "squeeze em', bleed em' dry, and drop em'" brand of capitalism is incompatible with the majority of the people to experience how good life can be like that.
I certainly ain't looking forward to them raising the retirement age to 1337 by the time I get to retire.
It's like a race where they repeatedly move the finishing line because the organizers took the medals and sold them, while waiting for you to drop dead so they don't have to give you what you are due.
Who wouldn't be a fan of 80% of the work for 100% of the pay? It's a built-in raise equal to or greater than what you'd get from changing jobs, without the switch in seniority or experience.
> Who wouldn't be a fan of 80% of the work for 100% of the pay?
If you, as an employer, want a motivated, energetic workforce who are not slacking off, it's also in your interest to give that opportunity to your employees, as multiple experiments have shown that 4-day work results in increased productivity and employee retention.
Knowledge work does not have 1-1 correspondence between time spent and productivity. Things get VERY non-linear, to the point that more than 50 hours of real knowledge work a week is often LESS productive than 40 hours.
> For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it.
I hear ya. My spouse developed mental illness after sons 4,5 were born. A spouse can sabotage a lot of things when they set their mind to it - and their mind never stops. Not even at 3am. The first year was hard. The second was harder. After 5ys we run out of adjectives. After 15y we're using Dr.Seuss letters to spell out how things are.
What was the nature of her illness and was it directly related to the kids? If you don’t mind me asking, of course. That sounds like a very challenging thing all the best
Psychosis, bipolar, BPD, NPD, pretty much all the *PDs. She switched it up.
> was it directly related to the kids
As in stemmed from? No.
As far as challenge related to the kids, it was 1) keeping the them as safe as possible when she was not and 2) proving some semblance of parenting. Both were difficult-to-impossible, given that kids are trapped at home, thanks to eradication of free range areas.
…which is not necessarily problematic either. I was 43 and my wife 41 when our daughter was born. Our child has had a great life and so have we. While I’m 60 now and don’t have quite the same energy I had at 20-30’something, everything has worked out well for us.
Everyone’s path, goals and priorities is different and as long as would-be parents consider the trade offs all around, it’s hard to be prescriptive about this.
> Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle.
No argument there. The complex socioeconomic forces that has created this dilemma are going to tough to unwind.
Some of it is economics but some of it is the structure of relationship choice. Feminist scholar Eva Illouz in Why Love Hurts talks about the reasons why women find it hard to get into committed relationships where they feel safe having children:
Not least the idea that if you keep dating you can find somebody better than you've found so far -- a problem that's worse in large cosmopolitan cities where the dating pool is large and perceived to be large.
> In the bay area, most of the mothers I've met were around that age, and my friends are having their kids at the same age
San Francisco has the highest rate of geriatric pregnancies in USA. We are in a statistical bubble where having kids late is normal (because careers and hcol).
Bubble implies that it's going to burst. I don't see it. Women aren't going to stop wanting careers, and HCOL is coming for everybody. I expect the whole country to join SF in this "bubble".
Bubble in this context means a unique environment that is unlike places on the outside of said bubble. It's not referring to a bubble like in the sense of a inflating market bubble.
The desire to work and have children is going nowhere. Like Hollywood, the careers are going to go away. The money that lubricates the Bay Area is all from the Middle East now, and the return on in-region labor dollars is declining.
I’m sure the return on in region labor dollars decline that you note is real but is it regional? Where in the US is the return on labor dollars not declining? Housing costs, including taxes, seems to be the big problem in the Bay Area. Workers are still productive, but they require higher pay to offset the demand for housing caused by all the foreign “lubrication” and tech-49ers.
The US is already a bubble. Government is currently trying to make it burst as fast as possible. Getting back to the point where what women want doesn't matter again. HCOL will be a luxury term, life in debtors prisons will be the new norm.
It’s just the technical medical term. I don’t think “advanced maternal age” is much better (advanced age at 35?). Besides, advanced age is exactly what geriatric means.
My ex-wife was 37, and I was an year older, when our younger one was born and energy was not the problem so I agree with you that 35+ should not be a problem.
However, a lot of people are having kids significantly older than that.
I not know whether I could cope with a baby 20 years later. Contrary to stereotypes I used to get up faster and more fully if a baby cried in the night. On the other hand, having a baby might energise and motivate me! Not planning to try it out though!
An older friend conveyed to me pretty much the exact same thing you are, that he cannot imagine having kids at 40 because you will not be able to keep up with them energy wise. You get old and your body really starts to give in.
Alright Geoff, thanks, but you are 54 and do zero exercise, have a diet of eating out at fast food and fast casual restaurants, a body type that would be described as "meatball", and a list of medical conditions which all scream lifestyle change.
Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.
Physical shape is not the same or even proportional to the ability to pull all-nighters.
I know two men 18 years apart in age who became fathers at the same time - two months apart to be exact. Even though the older is an avid gym-goer, it's only the younger who can pull off popping back into full strength after less than 6h of sleep.
My youngest was born when I was 47. He’s now 9. I also have a 13 yr born when I was 43. I’m tired but I don’t think it’s from the kids. (More I’m tired of working - been burning the candle at both ends for nearly 40 years.) The biggest difference of having kids at this age is that I don’t have time to myself or for myself like other parents around me so are by now empty nesters or close.
Newborns keep you up but an all-nighter is a stretch. Also, you're looking after your kid and trying to get them to sleep, not trying to churn out code to get something to market/go to prod.
Both of mine had colic and went through difficult teething. I've pulled all-nighters to deliver something and it's much easier than several weeks of sleepless nights with an infant.
I always needed more than 8 hrs of sleep, now that I am into my 50s, I feel well after 4 hours. Anecdotes are good. My grandfather got to 100 not sleeping more than a few hours a night after he turned 55 and he raised my cousins as their parents were shite. I know whining young parents who complain about lack of sleep, I know older parents who never do as they were happy finally having a kid. Etc.
> Alright Geoff, thanks, but you are 54 and do zero exercise, have a diet of eating out at fast food and fast casual restaurants, a body type that would be described as "meatball", and a list of medical conditions which all scream lifestyle change.
> Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.
My son was born when I was 45 and I absolutely could not be more happy about it. I am in way better shape than I was at 30, I finally started taking that seriously, and also I am way wiser, more patient, and have more money.
So if you hear anyone telling you they can't imagine late fatherhood ignore them, they obviously aren't good at imagining things.
While generally true, you are not the only one aging around you, and some sickness/accident stuff can happen with higher probability as years add up.
The chance you will need to take care of both your kids and your parents in your 50s is pretty high (not even going into you and your partner), while facing declining health yourself.
Could be easily manageable, or not. Ask me in a decade.
But one thing is darn true - if a good long term stable match is not there, no point pushing for kids. World really doesnt need more damaged folks struggling their whole lives to overcome shitty childhood. And thats fine, parenthood is not for everybody and there can be an amazing life to be had instead (and I mean it in best way possible, but that life shouod not be spent behind the desk and on the couch)
Aging sucks! Obviously you can do everything wrong, and mess your body up pretty good. You can also do everything right, and just have bad luck. Lingering injury, hereditary health conditions, things add up. By the time you are in your 60s, it takes a combination of good habits and good luck to be in good shape. It's comforting to point to active older people and say "I'm going to grow up to be just like them". Just aware of survivorship bias.
Good news: most studies show that adults that do moderate exercise have a lower rate of fall-related injuries in old age than those that do little to no exercise.
>Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.
Interrupt that 60 year old's sleep twice a night with a newborn crying, add a bunch of new responsibilities, and I'll be impressed if he even makes it to the meet.
You're comparing people who have made exercise their #1 priority in life to people who have made their kids and supporting their families financially their top 2 priorities. It's a bullshit comparison.
You think someone going to a trail running meet has made exercise their #1 priority?
My father is 63, raised three children and has had a successful long marriage and retired from a good career. He also goes works out daily and did for most of my childhood. He didn't make exercise his number one priority.
I had kids in my late 30s and they tested my patience and emotional regulation to an extent greater than any other experience of my life. I was somewhat emotionally volatile in my 20s and I can't imagine my kids having better outcomes if I'd had to learn to parent at that time in my life.
My children are 12 years apart in age and being a parent in my 20s was a much better experience. I had less money, but I had more time. I wiser now, but I had more energy. I could relate to being a kid more.
I'm not suggesting it's better. But people seem to automatically assume that being older when having kids as better. I know some much older parents who were not good parents. I know I would not make a good parent to a younger child now that I'm in my 40s.
I did not have more time in my 20s. In my 20s and early 30s, I was busy “getting out there”. Building my life, my interests, my foundation (not just my career). Now I have a happy life to stand on, and can devote more time, attention, and energy to my family.
I don’t deny that your way can work out as well. But OPs advice was “get children before you are 30, don’t wait until after”. Whereas my honest advice, based on my experience, is “wait until you are 35, you’ll be much more stable life in several regards”.
Which approach is best for you depends on a lot of things. For me, I can honestly say, there is no way I would be where I am if I had had kids in my 20s or even early 30s, and I also wouldn’t have been as good a father as I am right now based on how I’ve grown since then. Both things that my child directly benefits from.
I was “getting out there” too! So many major life milestones. But actually it has never stopped. Most of my major career changes happened after the second child. I have entirely new interests now.
I feel like I do have the unique perspective having actually done both. I don't need to assume what kind of parent I was in my 20s because I was that parent. And I'm a different parent now. But being a younger parent was a great experience despite any other consequences.
That’s interesting. Because I genuinely feel I’m much better cut out to be a parent now. Is it different for you? I have so much patience and understanding, and I see that lacking in many of the younger parents around me. I see them and I remember myself.
And the life I have would just not have been possible if I had a child back then. Not even if I completely sacrificed family time and attention back then, which I never would have wanted.
But I guess we have to agree to disagree. For you, being a younger parent worked out better. For me, I’m certain I got my child at the right time. In any case, I find OPs general recommendation that if you want children, you should have them by 30, to be ill-advised to the point of being harmful. Many people would benefit from waiting until later.
I'm 32, and I think I currently have much less patience and understanding than I did at say 22. Life has basically broken me to the point that I simply don't have the capacity for these things that I used to.
Haha, I like to joke that I reached peak intellectual capacity around 26 and peak emotional maturity around 14 and both have been dropping from their peak since then.
It also depends on the person. I was not an adult at 27. I realized I was one at 32 though.
Kids at 27 would have been a bad bad idea. Kids at 32 as well (wrong partner). I’m even older now but I am with the right partner and naturally want kids now. Before her, the topic wouldn’t even cross my mind.
I think it’s really hard to give general advice if one doesn’t mention how their advice interacts with other variables
The advice was to start before you are 30, not finish then. If you have multiple kids my advice is the last should be around 35 maybe 40 but space them out
We have 4 kids and I relate to them really well I think, not to the level where I’m engrossed in descriptions of the latest Roblox game but they’re just younger humans, not some alien species… I’m in my mid 40’s and our youngest is 10.
I also have plenty of energy, the only real change I’ve noticed getting older is I’m in bed a bit earlier than I was in my 20s.
I don’t understand why people think midlife is some kind of drained, lifeless decrepitude
Or possibly you would have learned emotional regulation sooner.
Kids change you, for the better if you let it. There's nothing like a completely helpless infant who is totally dependent on you to wear down your selfish tendencies.
Obviously I think the answer to this question depends so much on individual circumstances that all any of us can do is offer anecdotes. I think that while energy levels do decline as you get older, the degree of the decline depends largely on how much you stay in shape. My partner and I are very active and find ourselves only marginally less physically energetic in our 30s as our 20s. I've seen friends of ours with more sedentary lifestyles having a much sharper decline. If you're inclined to stay in shape then I don't think age makes as big of a difference (within reason.) But YMMV.
I had a kid at 22, I am now 40 with a kid going to college. I can echo this exact sentiment.
However at 22 I wasn't the experienced person I am today. Nor was I stable, nor could I jump on opportunities like my peers could.
If having a child in your early 20s would mean not losing opportunities in progressing in a career, at least with enough free childcare and food to feed the children, people could be more inclined to have children while they get their life together. Our culture of moving away from home is also a big problem -- having 2 sets of grandparents helping raise a child REALLY helped me at my youth not miss out on youth and still raise my child.
kids between 25-32 is something our society should aim to be as practical and pleasant as possible.
> #2 is childcare. Cheap, plentiful, good quality.
This costs infinite money.
It's impossible to scale, because nobody wants an environment where their child is not getting attention from compassionate, engaged adults throughout the day. To get the same level of care as a stay at home parent, you need as many care workers as there are families with young children. And if you pay those workers comparably to the average wage, you need to tax the entire wages of one parent in each family to cover the care costs.
It's probably much cheaper to write checks to families encouraging them to have one parent care for their own children full time.
But I'm not going to tell someone they can't work.
My wife was stay-at-home, until she couldn't take it any more, and then returned to work. Even though it cost us more overall (childcare, second car, etc).
I think willing to take a cut in one's standard of living so that the mother stays at home and raises the children would revitalize society beyond any of the above-mentioned options.
Or... Raise wages while reducing housing and insurance costs so that a single wage earner home can support their family. What my grandpa and grandma used to call "the middle class".
I agree with you. I don't have all the answers, but I agree with you. Things aren't the same. My political views have evolved so much over the span of 20-years. I don't know what the answer is, but at a spiritual level, you are completely right.
I concur. Kids would have been much better at 20 than at 30. I can barely keep up with what they want to do now. If you live in a decent country it’s not even that expensive. Most states really want people to have children, so the basics are often supported or free.
We were 38 with our first. I strongly agree that is too late to have them, especially given the likelihood of birth defects. Thankfully, we avoided issues there.
A few years in and I feel "back on my feet", but it was harder for being older.
You speak way off base. Many, possibly most people in their early 40s can have kids and still keep up with them well into their 50s. Not only is it easier than ever to pull this off for many modern reasons of health and lifestyle decisions, it's not even exceptionally hard unless you're unlucky with your health or do something to really fuck it up. Even decades ago, many many men at least were commonly fathering children in their 40s and even 50s, and rearing them.
You write your comment about the maximum safe age for having children as if most people (at least in the advanced countries and moderately reasonable income brackets) were living the lives of 19th century industrial workers.
I think having kids when you’re in your early 30s is the way to go but having kids at any age is great. I think waiting until later is a mistake because you want a full life with your kids and ideally you can bless your parents with grandkids (they most likely want one, even if they say they don’t). But not having kids because you “waited too long” is a bigger mistake.
Kids take a lot of energy but they also give you a lot, no matter the age. We are biologically hardwired to rise to the challenge of having kids no matter the age.
> Don't read the above as advocating having kids too young, it is not.
Depending on the circumstances in a persons country, maybe getting children at a young age isn't that dumb. I'd argue that the best time to get kids is as a university student. You get free daycare, the government doubles your stipend (and it's extended), your housing subsidy increases, you generally have more free time as a student, grandparents are younger and able to help more and you have more energy and can more easily deal with lose of sleep.
As a bonus, when your kids move out, you're not even 40 year olds.
The only real issue is: Have you meet the right partner yet?
> I'd argue that the best time to get kids is as a university student. You get free daycare, the government doubles your stipend (and it's extended), your housing subsidy increases, you generally have more free time as a student...
Where... where do you live? I'm all for having kids as soon as possible, but I was barely able to provide for just myself during university.
I'm in Denmark. You get around $1100 per month from the government as a university student, you then get around the same amount per child (not sure if a couple get half of that each). Still if you're two students, with a child, that's at least $3300 a month. That's not a lot of money, but there are also government loans you can get, and again, free daycare and subsidies for housing. It's not a get rich scheme, but it's also only meant to be temporary i.e. until you finish your studies.
That sound more like "Børnetilskud". Everyone gets that, regardless of being a student or not, that's just help to buy clothes and stuff like that for your child. It's paid out every quarter.
There's a bunch of stuff like that, some can be "stacked", some are mutually exclusive, some are "per child" some is per adult. Some are only available to single parents, some are only available if both parents are enrolled in an education, some are only available if you make less than a certain amount.
Yes and no, the government is trying to steer young people in the direction of engineering, nursing, doctors, teachers and trades (carpenter, bricklayer and so on), but it's not clear where the people are suppose to come from. Essentially Denmark is missing people in also every profession. There aren't enough people. My wife works in a field where unemployment is 12, not percent, but 12 people. So if you're unemployed, qualified to work in the EU and have a recognized education, applying for jobs in Denmark isn't a bad bet.
Various governments have also attempted to boost birth rates, but unsuccessfully.
I think having kids before you are 30 is fine, but we had our second kid when my wife was 36 and it was also fine. I think when you get in your forties as a man or late thirties as a woman it can be tougher.
Also, adopt. Before I was a parent I thought of a child as "mine" because of biology. Really you see that you shape people and form a connection with them because they are part of your family.
there are also age correlated birth defects, the cause of which have not been adequately determined in all cases but the high correlation does suggest a relation.
> If you are 25 you should be seriously thinking in the next 2 years, and by 30 have them
I need to push back on this because no one is actually an adult at the age of 25 despite those people wishing it were so. You do not have your shit figured out and assuming a partner of similar age, neither do they. It's only starting in your 30s where you start to understand what it is to be a responsible adult to yourself and to the world.
So please, do not seriously consider having kids in your 20s, for all our sakes.
Isn’t your brain still forming until you’re like… 26? It’s probably more correct to say that 25 year olds are children in that case. Other ages are mostly arbitrary.
This is a level of infantilization that I think becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People don’t magically become adults, they learn to be adults based on the situations they are placed in.
It seems to me like when you move the definition of “adulthood” back to age X, fewer people function like adults prior to age X.
As someone who is 34 with two kids (toddler and newborn), I completely agree with your comment. My wife and I had difficulty having kids, or we would've had them sooner, but I completely agree with having kids before 30. My energy is still solid, don't get me wrong. But it doesn't compare to energy in your 20s. People think too much about the financial aspect. You can continue building and growing financially even with kids, you just need to be smarter and more disciplined. A lot of people use the financial argument, but I think more and more, it is only a cope for not having had kinds sooner. All my kids will be in their 20s when I'm in my 50s; not bad, but having kids in your 20s is the way to go.
most ppl in my region have kids 35+ in order to first find a place in life that can support children. i don't see any issues with that.
having energy is subjective and does not really depend on being young or old. some old folks are full of energy and live really active lives. It depends on your state of mind and lifestyle more than age.
We did wait for the “perfect” time, and are very happy we did.
I got my son at almost 40, and I’m positive I’m a much better parent because of that. Sure, kids cost energy, but at 40 and 50 you’re not geriatric. I often get the opportunity to compare our parenting style to younger parents, and it’s clear that they often have some emotional growing up to do themselves. They complain about normal parenting things that we just shrug about, they are torn between their career and raising a kid, and most importantly they often lack patience, where to us it just comes natural.
> they often lack patience, where to us it just comes natural.
Having kids fast-tracked me to a critical increase in patience. I've grown so much in less than three years because of my kids. I'm not sure this growth would have ever happened so quickly through other means.
And I'll always have a special, particular respect especially towards my firstborn for causing that in me, and for enduring my shortcomings in the meantime.
My wife and I had our first at age 15. Then another at 22. And our last at 27. I've raised children while on welfare and while a software engineer.
I was more patient as a teen than I am now in my 40s. Now I am tired. All the time. I fear I would literally die of exhaustion if I had to maintain more irregular hours than I already do due to insomnia that I have developed over the last half decade.
I didn’t say get pregnant at 50. I said I became a parent at almost 40, my wife is a couple of years younger. No problems whatsoever, and I seem to have more energy for parenting (and especially patience) than the parents in their 20s who haven’t even found themselves yet.
Paternal age is also a contributor. Children with fathers over 40 see an increase in potential diseases, a shorter lifespan and higher infant mortality, likely due to DNA mutations.
According to that page, the whole issue seems to be very nuanced. It also contains the quotes I attached below.
Be it as it may, I conclude that there is an elevated risk for problems the older you get (although for some issues, cause and effect may be reversed, which is hard to resolve), but that that risk may not be so significant as to outweigh other advantages.
> A simulation study concluded that reported paternal age effects on psychiatric disorders in the epidemiological literature are too large to be explained only by mutations. They conclude that a model in which parents with a genetic liability to psychiatric illness tend to reproduce later better explains the literature.[9]
> Later age at parenthood is also associated with a more stable family environment, with older parents being less likely to divorce or change partners.[43] Older parents also tend to occupy a higher socio-economic position and report feeling more devoted to their children and satisfied with their family.[43] On the other hand, the risk of the father dying before the child becomes an adult increases with paternal age.[43]
> According to a 2006 review, any adverse effects of advanced paternal age "should be weighed up against potential social advantages for children born to older fathers who are more likely to have progressed in their career and to have achieved financial security."[63]
It seems kids procreated by older parents (aged 35 years or older) have increased risk of Down Syndrome. The effect is most pronounced when both parents are older than 35 years: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12771769/
> A kid had at 40 will still be depending on your when you are 55
I had my kids 25-35; all 5 are adults. We live together as is befitting a 4 income economy.
> and if the kids goes to college
Do you mean go away to college? Yeah. No.
> may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring.
Me and peers are all working grey. End of career happens with first major illness intersects with the lack of health insurance and we die.
> Plus if your kids have kids
If one of my a sons pairs off with someone and they both work, they'll still be 2 typical incomes short of self sustenance.
BUT, if they got married and then married another couple, the 4 of them only have to find one more adult - the one who will parent during the work day. After the last child enters school, the core 4 can kick parent 5 to the curb.
> Do not let fear of how much it will cost
No fear. Just math.
> or desire for more resources first
But if they had more resources they might only need 3 or even 2 adults working full time to afford basic bills.
> Do not let ... it ... stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.
Parents can (and do) parent while living in their car...
SO what? That is well below retirement age and life expectancy. MY younger one turns 18 when I will be 58, and I am a single parent. Baring accidents or the severely unexpected (which can happen at any age - plenty of people die in the 30s or 40s) its not a problem.
> That is well below retirement age and life expectancy.
What is below RA/LE? My comment addressed common financial realities. It applied to every adult age, up to and including death.
> MY younger one turns 18 when I will be 58
okay.
> and I am a single parent.
You may be interested to know that parenting can be get much harder than that. ex: I would have loved my difficulty level to be dialed down to Single Parent.
> Baring accidents or the severely unexpected
I agree that some folks do experience year after year after year of luck.
> (which can happen at any age - plenty of people die in the 30s or 40s)
I agree that not having life-changing advantage & luck is pretty dang common.
> its not a problem.
What's not a problem? Taken together, your comment seems to be lacking a subject.
I did the best I could. If you could share which of my points you were responding to, that might help.
The flip-side of an aging society with declining fertility is that older people, with fewer children are likely to be less sympathetic to children, and you could see the incarceration rates increase, or remain steady, as less severe infractions are punished more harshly.
We recently saw this play out in the Queensland, Australia, state election where the opposition party, which was pretty much out of ideas, ran a scare campaign about youth crime in regional areas. Neighbourhood Facebook Groups where CCTV footage of "suspicious youth" are a mainstay and an aging population did the rest of the job and they won the election and passed "adult time for adult crime" laws: whether you agree with these or not, "adult time" in Australia means that the youth incarcerated will be adults in their 20s and 30s when they get out.
The Australian state of New South Wales routinely strip-searches young children, but again, there isn't much outcry.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out elsewhere. The worst case scenario is that kids will be politically scapegoated ("why should childless and aging taxpayers fund education?"), and it leads to a further decline in fertility rates.
Australia has had pretty terrible “jail children like adults” opinions for a long time. Politics in Melbourne constantly turns on fears of youth [black immigrant] crime waves that are making people afraid to leave the house.
Queensland seems to be making a lot of noise about that at the moment as well.
Seems to be this weird reasoning (and I know it has cropped up in the US too) that - if they did an 'adult' crime they should be tried as an adult. It totally ignores what we know about developing brains - they are not fully developed, they don't consider consequences the same way as older people.
That's not to say they should be allowed to 'get away with it', but we need to take into account that it's not really the same thing as adults doing it.
> That's not to say they should be allowed to 'get away with it', but we need to take into account that it's not really the same thing as adults doing it.
However, they -clearly- do get away with it, continually the current method of punishment is not deterring them from crime. These are not 'oh he made poor decisions style crimes', you're not paying attention or are not living in this area if you think so.
“The residents living in these areas have been let down for too long under the former Government who allowed serious repeat youth offenders to avoid adequate punishment and let them continue to terrorise these communities,”
Current deterrents clearly are not working. There are only so many levers the government can pull. Children learn poor lessons and inadequate supervision from their families, but if they are taken from their home the media screams 'stolen generation' so in the end individuals terrorised by them have to deal with the burden of their continued long term criminal behavior.
You may believe that children can be rehabilitated, I'd dearly love this to be the truth, however my observations show that its not a reflection of reality.
I’m not trying to play down any problems or say nothing should be done.
In fact I’m not expressing any beliefs other than the (very well supported) notion that children’s brains are not fully developed and therefore they shouldn’t be dealt with in the same way as adults because that’s just dumb and is likely not to help.
Can you expand on "that's just dumb"? I don't understand what argument this is trying to make.
All people have different brains; some are very low-intelligence and impulsive by nature and training, and this can apply at any age. The point of this punishment is not to apply a sort of cosmic morality according to the true culpability of a soul. Abstract principles about whether the person 'deserves' a punishment aren't actually relevant regardless of what shape their brain is. The point is the real-life consequence of their criminality on others, and how to stop them hurting people. We must stop them hurting people; let's figure out how.
This dedication to abstracted principles and cosmic morality over fixing the actual issue is really problematic; I see this more and more these days.
> The point of this punishment is not to apply a sort of cosmic morality according to the true culpability
Except that is very much part of the justice system, and when people talk about "trying kids as adults" it is exactly about holding them culpable as if they were adults.
> We must stop them hurting people; let's figure out how.
I very much agree. "Lock 'em up and throw away the key", "they knew what they were doing!" and, an actual slogan from the queensland elections, "adult crime, adult time" don't really show a search for a solution. They're just appeals to base vengefulness.
Yes, kids commiting serious crimes need to be stopped. Victims and the wider society need to be safe. Yes the systems in Australia have been failing at this, over and over.
But young brains don't take consequences into account in the same way older brains do. They don't understand the impact that their actions will have on others or themselves in the longer term and aren't especially likely to consider harsher consequences as a deterrent because they aren't thinking about consequences. They literally aren't wired that way.
If your goal is actually reducing crime experienced by the community, you need to look at why kids are getting to that point, what's gone wrong in their upbringing, maybe holding parents more culpable, and intervening earlier. Otherwise you're not going to achieve anything more than a few appealing soundbites. And the problem with all of that in an Australian context is that there is a hidden subtext here - it's often (far from always, but often) First Nations kids who are causing the problem, and there is a long history of state intervention in First Nations families being - there's no other way to put this - actively evil.
It's a tough situation involving under-developed brains, ongoing generational trauma and all sorts of other crap.
"The evidence shows that the younger children are locked up, the more likely it is that they will go on to commit more serious and violent crimes. As shown in the HWE report making the justice system more punitive through longer sentences, harsher bail laws, and building more children’s prisons is the wrong approach.
That is because offending by children is a symptom of underlying causes and unmet needs that we are failing to address. The proposed measures in the Bill are likely to result in more crime, not less."
So I agree, action needs to be taken, people need to be safe. Trying kids as adults is a simplistic sop to anger, not a good solution and flies in the face of evidence.
I really don't think so. I've travelled and lived abroad. But maybe you have and can tell me how its the same. I would think you can't even begin to imagine the crimes that i'm talking about.
I am very conflicted on this. On one hand I absolutely despise that hating the children attitude and I believe we are reaping what we are sowing. On the other hand there are serial offenders that are not being dealt appropriately. My naive solution is to keep the current, more permissive system for first offenders and then treat repeat offenders as adults.
I mean if you are a teen, succumb to peer pressure and do something stupid like stealing a car, I fully believe that we should not throw the book at you. We need to dispel you of the notion that this is not a big deal and that you will get away with it, while ensuring that we do not harm your future prospects.
But if being arrested, handcuffed and taken in front of a judge is not enough to make you understand that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated, and you do steal a car again a few weeks later, then yes, we will have to escalate instead of saying "nothing we can do, it's just a kid". Otherwise we are literally sending the message that they can act with impunity.
If you do decide to wait longer, be aware that there are hilarious differences geographically. When we had our first kid in SF, the other dads pushing swings were around the same age as me (fortyish). Moving back to Georgia… oh my god, the parents of kids my second kid’s age were babies! (There are “graybeard dad” Facebook groups etc., but the average vibe is way different)
Even regionally. My kid goes to an urban school where the majority of parents are those with at least an undergraduate degree, and are at least my age.
Family friends have kids in a rural school with parents being those that haven’t moved 10 miles from the community where they grew up and small-town soap opera dynamics.
On the flip side the average age of parents in Utah is extremely low and the crime rate is also below average. So it may be more nuanced than you would think.
Lead concentration in America "rapidly increased in the 1950s and then declined in the 1980s" [1]. There is a non-linear discontinuity among kids born in the mid 80s, with linear improvements through to those born in the late 2000s [2].
Arrest rates for violent crimes are highest from 15 to 29 years old (particularly 17 to 23-year olds) [3]. They're particularly low for adults after 50 years old.
We're around 40 years from the last of the high-lead children. 17 years ago is the late 2000s.
It is insane to just confidently assert that the only factor in the decrease in crime is Lead. Treating an insanely nuanced issue as an absolute doesn't make your argument more compelling, it is actually kind of baffling.
Why bother stopping at crime rates with that confidence?
The 1st recorded cases of fatty liver disease and T2D in children were in the 1980’s are have continued growing since - lead must have been protecting children’s health.
Testosterone has been on a sharp decline during this same time period - lead must promote healthy testosterone production.
Debt of all kinds, from the national debt, to household debt, to student loans debt has increased exponentially and consistently with lead removal - lead must promote financial literacy.
If you do the same comparison of the rates of leaded gasoline during childhood to adulthood crime rates across different countries which have different histories of leaded gasoline usage, you notice that the correlation persists. While of course correlation does not imply causation, it's a link that's fairly well-established in literature, it's not a spurious correlation, and we know that lead has concrete neurological effects, so it's plausible from a pharmacological basis.
Since 1970 testosterone has declined 1% per year and it’s well established higher testosterone is linked to impulsive and violent criminal behavior and in countries like the US crime rate is at a 50 year low correlating with this decline starting 1970.
There are many factors that correlate and potentially contribute to a reduction in incarceration rates.
There are estimated 1.8-1.9M incarcerated. Since 1980 to the present there are well over 1M violent crimes (rape, murder, aggregated assault, robbery) per year. Let’s look at another factor that might contribute to falling incarceration rates that tend to explain this discrepancy in incarceration vs total crimes…conviction rates:
Murder: ~57.4% in 1950 vs. ~27.2% in 2023—a ~2.1x difference.
Rape: ~17.3% in 1950 vs. ~2.3% in 2023—a ~7.5x difference.
Aggravated Assualt: ~19.7% in 1950 vs. ~15.9% in 2023—a ~1.2x difference.
The neurological effects of lead don’t tend to explain away falling police clearances nor convictions.
There have been a lot of studies that show the correlation with lead up and down and varied by lead in different cities countries with different phaseout timelines.
Kevin drum and Rick Bevin both did a ton to lay this out systematically.
As leaving drum has noted, Lead is NOT the only contributor to crime, but it was the cause of the largest variations for most of the 20th century.
But it's so satisfying to one's ego that a single cause is the issue. All complexity of societal changes in the last 50 years can be outmanuevered. Simplification is sexy.
It’s satisfying to know that we’ve eliminated a major environmental toxin with so many awful effects. It doesn’t mean that lead explains everything, but it is a lot better than the “we built enough prisons to lock up all the bad guys, maybe we should build more” alternative hypothesis/proposal I’ve heard.
Maybe they were doing similar things with lead or something else is a big factor. Perhaps the rise of ever more cheap entertainment for young males who are most likely to commit crime. That's a global thing.
Yes, leaded gasoline was being banned in many rich countries at about the same time, and there's a positive correlation between the year it was banned and the year that violent street crime began to decline.
Kids that grew up huffing leaded exhaust are more bad decisions inclined than they would otherwise be. It's not just crime. The most heavily leaded cohort in the US is also known for drunkly crashing their muscle cars and wasting their youth smoking pot in a commune.
Bad decisions like these get less common with age, partly because of consequences (jail, death, etc), partly because getting up to no good requires free time, ambition and freedom, all of which are in shorter supply with age and the resultant responsibilities competing for every individual's supply of these resources.
So if the replacement cohort of people who are coming into prime crime age decline to participate at the same rates the crime rate goes down.
I see, so since a large majority of crime is done by young people, peaking between 15-25, they are basically comparing a whole new generation of kids who didn't have developmental brain issues vs their elders.
Were the older people who grew up with lead exposure also experiencing higher rates of impulsive crime in the late >1990s relative to the new and prior generations? That would help eliminate the major differences in economics/culture/politics of their upbringing (for ex: mass flight of families moving to the suburbs to raise their young kids after the 1970s crime wave scared them away).
I think lead is nasty stuff, but if it was the single cause of high crime, surely we'd see a similar effect in other domains, like a rebound effect on IQs (another thing lead was blamed for)?
Instead the Flynn Effect seems to have been strongest during the era of high lead, and it's tailing-off now.
I'm not convinced these tests measure what they claim to. Even assuming they do, IQ scores offer little practical value.
The human body and mind are always adapting, however subtly, to changing environments. So I wonder -- are IQ tests assessing abilities that may no longer be optimal today?
Homer likely had an exceptional memory, as did many ancient Greeks that participated in oral traditions. But how relevant is memorizing epics in the modern world?
People also have fewer possessions worth stealing and trying to hock? It's not like TVs and radios cost that much anymore. People wear less jewelry.
Though this is not a significant factor, it might be worth putting on the list still.
The most valuable things on a person these days (credit cards, phone) are also incredibly easy to lock down and make worthless. Many of the things like jewelry, are also now rendered essentially worthless because a lot of jewelry now is cheaply sourced; pawning off crap from fast fashion is not going to be worth it.
I was thinking that as I was getting ready to sell my house. I'm not a particularly materialistic person to start with, but there are hardly any physical objects in my home that I value that much besides (a) some photo albums/pictures and yearbooks - and for newer generations these are mostly digital I guess, (b) my violin and (c) my espresso machine and grinder. I guess you could throw my cellphone in there as well - easy to replace but would be a PITA, like losing my wallet. It'd be a pain to replace all my furniture and other stuff but I certainly don't feel any attachment to those things.
I feel you. I’m selling my house and I joke that I’ll give someone a better deal if they just take everything in it as part of the sale. A suitcase for my clothes, my computer, and some physical mementos is all I need to keep. Even the clothes are optional, but I don’t feel like buying a new wardrobe.
My coffee grinder may have been on my list, but I moved countries and the power is incompatible hah.
Bicycles and tools seem to be the main things still stolen. They are often left unattended locked to poles or in the back of cars which can be easily broken in to, and can be immediately flipped for a lot of money.
Right, there has been a huge reduction in home burglaries over the past several decades. The only stuff really worth stealing anymore is cash, drugs, and firearms.
That's funny to see. Sometimes I get stressed about the lack of security around my house, but I'll stop and think, if someone broke in what would this hypothetical thief actually steal anyway?
I was wondering about this the other day. Do people even steal car radios/amps/subs anymore? When I was a kid in the 90s, having your car radio stolen was typical.
The more modern equivalent has long been the catalytic converter. I don't know how well legislative efforts to crack down on the resale of used catalytic converters has gone though.
Let's add an example to illustrate the difference:
Let's say that there is a correlation between the number of flights between London and New York, and the prices of sulfur. The correlation is near perfect.
When your neocortex is working, you ignore it. You can't create any plausible scenario how this could work (it doesn't exist within your latent space) so you don't learn anything from it, it doesn't even register in your brain as anything worthy of notice.
But everybody with the cerebellum only absolutely does learn it. And completely for real, not just as some fun factoid, but as a fact that they know the same way you know that airplanes have wings, and everybody knows it, only you don't.
Then, one day out of nowhere people start buying sulfur. Your questions are met with laughter and mockery "dude, everybody's buying sulfur, are you autistic?". And you don't know, because you haven't even learned the pseudo facts that everybody else bases their reasoning on.
This is only a made up example, but this is exactly how it works.
One thing I've learned in my decades on this planet is that just about never is one explanation for a human condition mostly correct. Lead is a convenient technical explanation that underestimates the impact of upbringing and community.
It doesn't explain a lot of factors of juvenile delinquency that existed for generations before lead service lines or leaded gasoline.
Industry and highways and other high sources of lead pollution were built in the areas with higher juvenile delinquency. Not in rich, privileged areas. I think you can also correlate the rise in violent crime to amount of lead contamination in the soil, some articles claiming down to the city block level.
Maybe industry and highways increase lead exposure which leads to crime, or maybe areas already high in crime are cheaper so that's where industry and highways go?
Specifically violent crime. Poor areas had more violent crime. These areas got dumped with more lead pollution. The rise percentage wise correlates almost perfectly with lead levels, with poor (and now polluted) areas rising more than well off areas. And then the drop, where after lead was removed from petrol you get a significant drop, but still less of a drop in areas more lead soil contamination, such of those blocks next to a highway. We know the developmental effects on young brains from lead; it is why we banned it.
I don't think it shifts the red blue much which is probably what you're getting at.
I think it absolutely affects the quality of politicians we get though. The best that a given generation can offer is probably lower if that generation huffed a lot of lead gas. So as they age out and younger people hit peak career and fill those roles things will probably improve a bit.
I was mostly thinking that the politicians all look so incompetent — with some exceptions of course — that if it wasn't real, it'd be a very unfunny joke exactly because of how much caricature-like and exaggerated personalities the politicians have.
You could, if you wanted to misdiagnose the problem.
You'd have more success blaming COVID inflation and the general public's poor education in economics and lack of understanding why eggs were $3.50/dozen. (Today they are $6.00/dozen)
No. Much of the American electoral landscape is still shaped by the systemic remnants of slavery, reconstruction and segregation, and the post-Trump landscape by the cultural trauma of having elected a black president. Although I'm sure all of the lead poisoning didn't help.
No. Much of the American electoral landscape is still shaped by the systemic remnants of slavery, reconstruction and segregation, and the post-Trump landscape by the cultural trauma of having elected a black president.
There’s supposedly a cycle of attitude between generations. If your parents are X, you want to be Y. If your parents are Y, you want to be Z. If your parents are Z, you want to be X
No. You can’t blame lead. There is zero justification for making the average person less responsible for their own worldview and choices in leadership.
Well, that’s the first time I’ve heard anyone explicitly say they don’t want to understand causal factors because it would reduce the ability to tell people they should bootstrap themselves.
Your points say old people have more lead, but then you say young people are more violent. That doesn't square with the articles point that incarceration rates are falling.
We may have swung the pendulum a little too far towards deliberate, though. The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off. We need to figure out how to build an economy and society that can facilitate deliberate responsible parentage younger and more often. Luckily we have generations to solve the problem, but it’s there looming.
A plane at 75,000 feet can descend for a long time and then level off without crashing. Eventually population will stop declining. Everyone needs to just chill about a declined birthrate.
The plane only levels off by taking the fact that it has no power to its engines seriously, troubleshooting, and then restoring power. That’s all I’m suggesting we start to do.
What is your proof that it will not decline further? If you have no proof, then at the very least the cause must be investigated. After all, the concern is that the current rate of declining birth rate, means extinction in a few centuries.
You don't just shrug that off and say "oh well, it'll probably be just fine."
Sure I do. You have zero proof that decline goes below a world population of 1 billion. This belief that it must always grow is based on just a fear. Very similar to the fear that gays marrying will cause everyone else to stop. Hasn't happened.
I wasn’t as clear as I should have been: I am not talking about global population and humans going to zero in some hyperbolic nightmare fantasy. I am talking about one society, e.g. US population, living with the values and freedoms and technology we enjoy today, sustaining itself. Our society will cease to exist because of course humans aren’t just going to stop making babies. It’s just that the ones that do achieve positive replacement rate will have different society than us. The call to action is that if we want our comfortable society to persist, we have to swing back to a positive replacement rate at some point time (preferably before we become an irrelevant global minority), and also figure out how to insulate against the other faster growing societies, eventually. I never argued we always have to go up, that only matters in the context of ways to combat other more rapidly growing populations.
the only reason for population growth is that economy (asset valuation) is based on future projection of consumption (which is based on population) and social security, which is based on future taxpayer paychecks.
the idea behind "population growth" is that we will need future slaves to prop up our social security and asset bubbles.
think of a country as an ant colony, what happens if population decreases? the queen will get less food
> We don't just shrug off the fantasy that there will be zero children born in "a couple of centuries"??
That's not a fantasy, it's the inevitable outcome of sub-replacement fertility, which is the state we find ourselves in (though my intuition says it will take longer than "a couple of centuries" to get to zero).
It's the inevitable outcome of everybody continuing it for all the generations that remain. As soon as there aren't enough people to manufacture contraceptives, it will of course grow. But after a few generations, there will be more land, water, animal and plant life, copper, cobalt, gold and such per person, and people can easily say "that shrinkage sucked, let's grow". You assume that things will always be the way they are now, which is of course false.
....assuming the sub-replacement rate continues forever, which is a hefty assumption. It's quite certain that a greater-than-replacement rate can't continue forever (eventually, the mass of the humans would be greater than the mass of the planet), though that has been the world we've lived in up to now.
There are subpopulations with high birth rates. They are very small currently, but if you really think the general population will die off for want of reproduction, eventually they will comprise a sufficiently large fraction of the population to raise the overall birth rate.
Or, you continue to grow the population through immigration.
The US is unique (or maybe there are a handful of others, I don't know) in its ability to welcome immigrants who, within two generations, largely see themselves as Americans first and not as the identity of their grandparents. American identity politics has eroded this somewhat but it is still largely true, for example, that grandchildren of immigrants will usually have a very poor grasp of their grandparents' native languages.
I disagree. Immigration suppresses wages. Which suppresses native born childmaking, which fuels more government charity, erm, welfare, which dampens productivity, which erodes civil liberties.
American is not seen as promoting human rights, and to infer all immigrants are good is naive, hate to get off my porch about this. sits back down on rocking chair whistling “I Wish I was In Dixie” and widdling a hangman with the noose almost finished, just a few more threads
> Immigration suppresses wages. Which suppresses native born childmaking, which fuels more government charity, erm, welfare, which dampens productivity, which erodes civil liberties.
Japan and Korea have almost no immigration and abysmally low birth rates. Your arguments don't really hold water. Having children is actually more of a burden on the state, as those kids need schools, (in most western countries publicly funded) healthcare, etc. Taking in a healthy immigrant at 20 is better almost all round from a purely economic point of view.
And immigration doesn't suppress wages any more or less than having tons of kids would over the long term. A person "taking" a job is still a taking a person whether they were born or immigrated. This is ignoring the fact that more people over time enlarge the economy and opportunity in it. Would the United States be a better country today if it didn't accept the mass immigration from Italy, Ireland, and Eastern Europe between 1850-1914 and had 1/4 the population?
This only works if you indoctrinate. I’d say the current US phenomenon is something between raw relocation and true indoctrination. The entire point of my comment was related to maintaining the society we all enjoy (not FUD about some zero population earth as it was construed). If you progressively and move other people into your society but they don’t share your core values then your society dies. If you indoctrinate and accept only those who share your values, then your society can sustain. I’m talking basics like shared desire to respect and uphold a constitution, having a language everyone is expected to know to perform civic functions, equal playing field for both wages and taxes. I’m not saying societies shouldn’t evolve. I’m suggesting that there is a difference between thoughtful social progress and feeling like an alien in your own city.
> We may have swung the pendulum a little too far towards deliberate, though. The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off.
The US alone doubled it's population since the 1950s. Enough scaremongering.
> The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off.
Why? Why are we sure that the population will not settle? Or that our increased productivity won't offset a change in labor?
I do worry societies will fail to handle side effects like the temporary increased demand for elder care, but no real fear of total societal collapse.
Birth rates won’t “hold steady” because people don’t die at equal rates. If birth rate is below replacement, old people die off first, the population’s average age goes down every year, and birth rate increases.
A society that is producing children will not die off. The U.S. saw over 3.6 millions births in 2024.
> A society that is producing children will not die off.
This isn’t true. Right now each woman has to produce ~2.3 children for a population with no immigration to replace itself every year. This rate changes but can never fall below two, naïvely. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#Replace...
> This is not going to happen when you can just import people from other countries.
That's basically the same solution as dumping toxic waste overseas: you're just shifting the problem (depopulation) to someplace poorer and probably less able to deal with it.
Birthrates are declining everywhere, and the current global fertility rate is at replacement (so don't expect it to stay that high). In the future, there's going to be no magical place from which you can "import" all the people you need, because you chose not to make them yourself.
Every country on earth is trending downwards. A lot of currently immigrant-exporting countries (e.g. Vietnam, India, Mexico) have sub-replacement levels of birth. They're going to have absolutely massive problems in a few decades when a lot of their youth have left and they're stuck with an inverted population pyramid.
There's a tendency for people in developed (particularly western) countries to feel entitled to immigrants. It's weird to think you'll not only have people changing your diapers when you're 90, but that your country should actively bring in people and deprive poorer countries of similar care, then leave those poor working class immigrants to fend for themselves once they're old.
It's the same mindset that drove society since the 1950s: it makes my life convenient, who cares if it makes life harder for people far from me or after I'm dead? And now we're all living with the accumulated consequences of all that (depleted ozone, climate change, ocean acidification, microplastics, oceans stripped of life, teflon pollution, deforestation, CO2 rising rapidly).
And that may well be the ultimate resolution (that individual-liberty-preserving capitalist societies with unrestricted access to contraception die off). However, if we like how life works right now then we’ll have to work to sustain it. There’s probably a capitalism-preserving way to incentivize children…
People keep poking at the wrong reasons, but in some societies it is quite dire. South Korea with this year of 1, when 2.1 means 'static', means more than halving the population every 30 years or so.
For a reverse comparison, if you take a penny and double it every day, you end up with > $5M in 30 days. And yet this birthrate issue doesn't take into account plague, war, natural disasters, and potential issues with lack of food(starvation). And the worst of it?
Is that I believe it is 100% environmental.
People think "having children" is a conscious choice. And sure, there is some of that. But at the same time, it is the very point of existence for an organism. Actually producing children (not just performing the sex act) is an evolutionary requirement. It is literally the primary drive of existence. Risky behaviour is ingrained into us, if it enables the possibility of reproduction. The drives and energy we place into everything we do, has a background drive that is sexual in nature. We seek to excel, to impress the opposite sex.
Like it or not (I'm not like that, I decide, not my hormones!), this is effectively an accepted fact of animal psychology. It's a part of who we are, our culture is designed around it, and every aspect of our lives is ruled by it.
Why am I on about this??
Well, my point is that this is a primary drive, interlaced so deeply that it affects every aspect of who we are. Reproduction, the production and raising of offspring is an act we are, naturally, compelled to. Forced to. Need to do.
Unless of course specific chemicals, maybe microplastics or all of the "forever chemicals" in our blood, are blocking that process.
Again, people will chime in with the popular "But it's expensive". No. Just no. Nope! My point above is that this is primal drive. People have had children in the depression, on purpose. Historically people, even with contraceptives, have had children regardless.
If it's about money, why is the birth rate declining in countries with free daycare, universal health care, and immensely strong support for parents post birth? Mandated career protection for mothers, months and months of time off after birth all paid. Immense tax breaks making children almost a profitable enterprise. In fact, in some European countries, it is more affordable to have kids than at any time in human history... and the birth rate still declines. It's just not about money. It just is not.
Why I think this is immensely important, is because we aren't seeing a rate, but an ongoing declining rate. The rate isn't just the lowest in human history, but the rate continues to decline. It's not '1' for South Korea, it's 1 right now, and will be 0.5 eventually.
What happens when no one can have children?
I further ask this, because the entire future of the species is at risk. People get all "who cares about going on", but wars do happen, plagues do happen, and I assure you I'm happy to be here, regardless of what the survivors of the bubonic plague thought at the time. Yet if we see a plague that kills 1/2 the population, where does that leave this equation? And what happens if we see a war that kills mostly those of child bearing age? What then?
My secondary concern in all of this is, we have very specialized roles these days. There was a time where a person could be a "a physicist", yet now there are 1000s of sub-specialties in such fields. And not everyone in the population is capable of expanding science. Of discovering 'new'.
My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress. There simply will not be enough people intelligent in a way functional to, say, physics, to expand that field.
So if our population decreases too far, we may not be able to resolve issues with, say, forever chemicals. Or with microplastics. Our capacity to do research and resolve such issues may vanish.
Couple that with a graph that is constantly declining, and a simple 50% death rate in a plague, could mean the extinction of the human race.
So my real concern here is, we aren't swinging the pendulum on purpose. It's happening to us. We're in the middle of an extinction event.
The entire point of having human intelligence is being able to ignore or overthink or delay or prevent any primal urges. We also have urges to kill and rake and destroy but I doubt you’re going “laws are bad because they prevent out primal urges”.
Also appeals to evolution are extremely weak and lazy and unproven.
Urges to kill and rake and destroy? The first, yes. The second, lack of care by some.
Yet the first is aggression often born from, again, reproductive drive. You don't see moose smashing the horns together for fun, they do it to exhibit dominance. All creatures strive to say "I'm the best!", in hundreds of subtle and overt ways. "Success" at any act means "I'm a better mate!".
All of human culture, all of human drive, all of our existence is laced, entwined, and coupled with this drive. You may think your fancy pants brain is the ruler of all, but it's not, for the very way you think, is predicated by an enormous amount of physiological drives, the primary being "reproduce".
Saying that "citing concepts from entire branch of science" is weak, is a very weird thing to do.
Throughout most of human history we have had less than a billion people.
More people are alive today than have ever lived.
And you are concerned that the population will drop by a half?
Everyone will be richer and better off. The amount of pollution and resource use will be solved too. The underlying input to that is the number of people.
One third of arable land is undergoing desertification
Insects and other species are dying off precipitously
Corals and kelp forests too, entire ecosystems. Overfishing etc.
My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress.
That’s silly when AI can already make 1 person do the job of 100, and soon will be doing most of the science — it has already done this for protein folding etc. And it will happen sooner than in 30 years.
This argument you and Musk make about needing more humans for science is super strange. Because you know the AI will make everything 100x anyway. And anyway, I would rather have the current level of science than ecosystem collapse across the board.
> More people are alive today than have ever lived.
Assuming you meant died instead of lived to avoid a potentially nonsensical reading, this is not true.
It seems this factoid[0] has been around since the 1970s, and at least in 2007 it was estimated to be 6% of people who'd ever lived being currently alive [1]
[0] In the original sense of factoid - being fact-like, but not a fact (i.e. not true). C.f. android, like a man
And you are concerned that the population will drop by a half?
If you read more carefully, I am concerned by two things. A reduction to 0, and the lack of control over this. I think you don't get how the rate is continuing to decline, and further, that knowing why is important.
And I have not said we need "more humans". Instead, I said we need a base number of humans.
> If you read more carefully, I am concerned by two things. A reduction to 0, and the lack of control over this.
I think you need to drop back to reality to reassess your concerns. Barring a major disaster, there is no risk of extinction. Population decline is a factor only in economic terms, as demographics alone will require a significant chunk of a nation's productivity potential to sustain people who left the workforce. However, countries like the US saw it's population double in only two or three generations, and people in the 50s weren't exactly fending off extinction.
Population is a london horse manure problem. In both directions.
In 30 years time, people might be uploading their consciousness to computers, or colonising the moon. Making dire warnings about a concept like breeding that we might just get rid of seems foolish at best.
>We're in the middle of an extinction event.
No we are not. Lmao. Same way Horse Manure didnt snuff out life in London.
Or maybe it's just today's youth are too neurotic, anti-social, and screen-addicted to go out into the real world and misbehave? They're also having less sex, and drinking less as well. Also consider that it's much harder to get away with crimes today than it was decades ago, and penalties for getting caught are often more severe.
But it's not uniform. In the span of ~60 years, the average birth rate doesn't matter as much as the distribution and how much the children model their parents.
Small example (multiply all numbers by 1M), average birth rate of 1.5 can be a group of 4 people where one had 0 children, one had 1, one had 2, one had 3. If each child has as many children as its parents, next generation, 0 have 0 children, 1 has 1, 2 have 2, 3 have 3, for a new average of 2.33.
If you take a higher starting average but a tight spread [2, 2, 2, 2], the next average is only 2. Or if you have [0, 1, 2, 3] but kids model society instead of parents, you get 1.5 again.
Of course children didn't model their parents the past couple of generations, but times may be changing.
> All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.
Or the less popular more controversial hypothesis: the steepest decline in births is among the poor, a population with, on average, worse impulse control and more issues with mental health, and since all qualities are at least partly heritable...
Surprisingly, the fertility rate among the affluent does not appear to be nearly as impacted.
> the steepest decline in births is among the poor, a population with, on average, worse impulse control and more issues with mental health, and since all qualities are at least partly heritable...
Surprisingly, the fertility rate among the affluent does not appear to be nearly as impacted.
Generally, fertility rates are higher among poorer populations compared to wealthier populations. This pattern is observed both at the national level, with poorer countries generally having higher fertility rates than wealthier ones, and at the individual level, with poorer families tending to have more children than wealthier families.
> Generally, fertility rates are higher among poorer populations compared to wealthier populations.
Yes, but they were even higher in the past. Fertility has declined among the poorer classes much more than among higher income classes, probably due to the availability of contraceptives and abortion:
You're half implying this but I wonder if the change in youth culture comes from the simple ratio of adults vs kids in the social circle around each kid. Youth culture needs a lot of kids around to get amplified. When most of the people around you are adult you may tend to adopt the culture of the adult world rather than creating your own.
This is interesting -- it does put into context some of what was hyped up recently in the news, for example, the Fairlife Core Power microplastics. While it is higher in Core Plastics, it's not off by an order of magnitudes compared with other milk products.
The other question I have -- what does someone who consumes very little microplastics look like? Increased lifespan, decreased risk of cancer (by how much), does it have lead-like outcomes, etc... Avoiding microplastics seems like a lot of inconvenience (at least for an individual) -- I'd want to make sure the payoff at the end is worth it.
I would think -as microplastic particles have been found even in creatures in the deepest parts of the ocean- that it is nigh impossible to avoid them.
It's interesting to see a CEO express thoughts on AI and coding go in a slightly different direction.
Usually the CEO or investor says 30% (or some other made up number) of all code is written by AI and the number will only increase, implying that developers will soon be obsolete.
It's implied that 30% of all code submitted and shipped to production is from AI agents with zero human interaction. But of course this is not the case, it's the same developers as before using tools to more rapidly write code.
And writing code is only one part of a developer's job in building software.
He’s probably more right than not. But he also has a vested interest in this (just like the other CEOs who say the opposite), being in the business of human-mediated code.
Presumably you're aware that the full name of Microsoft's Copilot AI code authoring tool is "GitHub Copilot", that GitHub developed it, and that he runs GitHub.
I was talking about the Microsoft CEO quote everyone is misquoting. He said something to affect of "at Microsoft we have _some_ repos where up to 30% of the code is _generated_". This could mean they have one C++ repo for one tool that has 30% generated header files without any LLM usage at all. Of course that is probably not what he meant and the least generous view, but I find it extremely suspect to believe that any large company, much less Microsoft, would have third of their code produced by LLMs. I find it hard to believe any profitable software company has that high of a percentage.
Around 10 years ago I thought they were a terrible practice. A win for graphic designers that wanted simple and nice looking at the expense of usability.
But over time people learn and its standard. And as the NN group article points out: it has become familiar and known today.
My favorite iteration of this was in the This American Life mobile app that used a graphic of an actual hamburger instead of 3 stacked gray lines. This was also about 10 years ago I believe. Unfortunately I can't find any reference or graphic depicting it.
The problem is not only do all text labels have different sizes in one language, they also have completely different unrelated sizes in other languages.
Standardized icons can be laid out easily regardless of language
the RTL languages are also a pain point, and even German can make your UI designing difficult for length of words. Really, the high variability of width for i18n'ed words in general is I think where the icon-heavy approach originated.
Sort of. 上 means both up and previous, 下 means down and next. Maybe there was miscommunication about contexts when the button meant next and when it meant down in the UI.
No it isn't. That's why hieroglyphics became indecipherable for nearly 2000 years, while all the various alphabetic systems invented during that time--and many of those invented long before--remained readable.
Yes, that's the obvious reason for it, but having a reason doesn't make the icons any more comprehensible. Good luck using those appliances if you're a visitor who doesn't have the manuals and hasn't learned each manufacturer's unique iconography.
That's depends very much on age, class, geographic location. Someone could have grown up imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, hence learning Russian as a second language. Nonetheless they deserve appliances, websites and infrastructure which they can use and understand.
But the designs literally go from bad to good once people know how to use them. Unlike war, which is bad whether people are used to it or not. If you're insisting the hamburger design is bad for some other reason rather than people not knowing how to use it, it's the same mistake the designers made in the first place when they insisted it was good despite people not knowing how to use it.
> go from bad to good once people know how to use them
perhaps, but there is still the issue or cognitive load in certain designs or combination of designs even if people are used to them, which can objectively make them 'better' or 'worse' vs others
Off base when considering the likes of Palantir and many others.
Not a fan of the person or many of Meta's business practices. But Meta has given a lot back with Llama and PyTorch, among many other open source contributions. Which others in the space are not doing.
> Llama [...] among many other open source contributions
Llama is not Open Source. Don't buy Meta's marketing that's trying to dilute the term. Llama is only available under restrictive terms that favor Meta.
Fair point. I cannot amend my original comment but you are correct in that the weights have restrictions which go against the nature of Open Source software.
React made quite a mess of the web just so we couldn't browse with JavaScript disabled, thereby allowing Facebook to track us through those like buttons that popped up everywhere.
Are there hidden barbs in llama and pytorch too? I'm not close enough to them to know.
Not a fan of Facebook or React (though React Native is IMHO the one eyed among the blind for cross platform mobile development), but I think that's a bit far fetched. I do think Facebook has (or had?) genuinely an engineering culture that wants to give something back.
This is true. I've been to several conferences where FB sent engineers to talk about their open source projects or how they used a particular language or framework.
I remember the conflicted feeling of strongly disliking their products and leadership but liking their contributions. Same energy but more intense in both directions many years later.
From my personal experience, yes, but your mileage may vary. I tried to like Flutter multiple times, but can't. Capacitator etc feel fairly hacky. All the other options are comparatively obscure.
It helps that I like React alright. I don't think it's particularly well designed or enjoyable to use, and I hate debugging React code, but it's manageable with good development practices. Same goes for JS/TS. Not great, not terrible.
React is the defacto standard of web development for a reason. That's not the reason you can't browse the web with JS (it would be Angular if it wasn't React or others). And just because you use React, doesn't mean Meta can track you.
Their point was that (i) React becoming the defacto standard played into the hands of Meta, who are interested in tracking people. (ii) Tracking is made easier by running arbitrary JavaScript in the browser. And (iii) before SPAs were big (pre-React), more people used to completely disable JS in their browser.
Not saying I buy this theory. Just trying to explain what I think they were alluding to, as I had the impression you missed it and went in a different direction.
I'm not sure their tech contributions in any way offset the various scandals they've had with data and like, actively targeting teens when it appears they're in a vulnerable state. Who cares about friggin 'open source' Llama when they've done evil stuff like that. Their 'social credit' is way deep in the red, esp with people who have no knowledge of those contributions.
They are incredibly ruthless and shameless in my opinion.
Yes they would? Mega corps can afford to commoditize various layers which prevents competition from accessing any profit. Meanwhile Meta et al can capture that profit in their own layers instead.
Bread and circuses to keep the people happy while they do they shady stuff behind closed doors. This is millenia old. Can't say that as fact but it certainly looks that way when you examine their record.
Remember when they were into swaying elections, giving extra data to Cambridge analytica? Here's more
First, the only model creators ones who have not "given back" in the way you mean, are OpenAI and Anthropic, everyone else has at least some models in the open.
Second, I would argue that it's strange how we are discounting the contribution of OpenAI and Anthropic, because being the first to show that something valuable is possible actually counts for quite a lot in my book. Competition and open-source copies are nice, but the value add attribution in ai labs feels really strange at times.
What Meta has given, so far, are decent copies, which mostly serve their own needs and are making it harder for the above companies (who actually have to generate revenue through AI efforts, because it's all they do) to exist. And that's fine and all, Meta can do what they want to the degree the law permits, but I have a hard time understanding them as the good guys in the AI space, unless I squint very heavily.
I don't think it's a big stretch to say that Meta has not only been more successful than Palantir at mass surveillance, but has also likely caused a greater magnitude of harm (a lot through negligence) when considering events like the genocide in Myanmar.
That's OK. The maintenance and visual aspect of plants can be good for mental health.
If you want cleaner air you have to move air through a filter at high speed. I have some consumer grade purifiers but the Corsi–Rosenthal Box [1] is easily the most effective of what I have. Both in feeling and measured. And it costs less than $100.
The past is a different country. The problems existing now are not the same as those of two empires from 100 years ago.