Why Are Children So Expensive?

I wrote this a few months back, but never got around to posting it. Scott’s post on wage stagnation reminded me to post it, because I discuss some of the same things here, while he ignored what I think is the most obvious cause of wage stagnation.

Someone posted on twitter, asking why kids became expensive. I answered mostly about the spiritual reasons: the unwillingness to sacrifice. And that’s true; kids are affordable, IF you’re willing to make the necessary sacrifices.

However, as Nick B Steves has said, ordinary virtue should not require heroic effort. You can have many kids if you’re willing to make extraordinary effort to do so, but any sane and healthy society should make it relatively easy to have many kids, ours does not. So,I’m going to show why kids are so expensive.

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Wages

The first reason is wages. Inflation-wise wages have been stagnant since about the 70s. Despite massive increases in productivity, people are not making more real money.

Wages are determined by where the demand for labour and the supply of labour meet: how many jobs are there and how many people need jobs. This is elementary economics, but I’m going to make it clear here, because when it comes to discussing labour supply and demand, I notice people tend to make self-serving analyses as if basic economic principles change when it comes to labour, so I want to make it clear:

The more jobs that need to be filled, the higher the demand for labour, so this pushes wages up. If the jobs to be filled decreases, demand for labour decreases, which pushes wages down. If the size of the labour force increases, labour supply increases, which pushes wages down. If the size of the labour force decreases, labour supply decreases, pushing wages up.

Over the past 60 years or so, there have been multiple major trends both increasing the labour supply and decreasing labour demand.

The biggest trend is feminism. Feminism pushed women into the workforce which (more or less) doubled the labour force over a period a few decades. This pushed wages down hard.

The second major trend is immigration. Since the Immigration and Nationality Act was passed in 1965, opening immigration up, 59 million immigrants (as of 2015) have arrived in the US. The US population in 1965 was 194 million, in 2015, it was 321 million, for a total growth of 127 million. 46% of US population growth since 1965 has been from immigration.

That is a unnaturally massive growth in the labour supply, which has had a massive downward pressure on wages.

I will note here, that keeping wages low has been a near explicit part of the arguments for immigration. “Labour shortage” is synonymous with “wage shortage”; when employers argue that there are not enough workers, what is really being said, is they are not paying enough to attract workers. “Jobs Americans won’t do” is synonymous with “Jobs Americans won’t do unless paid more than currently offered”.

To make matters worse, the 1965 INA opened up immigration from third world countries, where wages were already naturally low. So labourers being imported into America would be willing to work for much below what an American would accept as reasonable, increasing the downward pressure on wages.

While these two trends where increasing labour supply, other trends were decreasing labour demand. Particularly off-shoring and mechanization.

Off-shoring moved industry from high-wage America to low-wage third-world countries, while mechanization has replaced human workers with machines. Both of these have had large depressive effects on labour demand, and therefore wages, particularly in non-service, low-skill occupations, which are the easiest jobs to both automate and move.

You can’t afford children, because you’re not getting paid decent wages because capital has systematically forced you into competition with poor third-world labour, imported labour, and your wife over jobs, forcing wages down.

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Housing Costs

Housing costs are the single biggest expense (rivaled only by taxes) to your average person, and housing costs have exploded.

In 1960, the median house price was $58,000 (in 2000$). In 2000, the median house price was $119,600. In 2015, the median house price was $294,200 (in 2015$), which comes to $213,700 in 2000$.

In 55 years, housing prices have almost quadrupled, while wages have stagnated.

One of the major reasons is the increase in housing size. Since 1975, housing size has doubled. But that does not explain a quadrupling in housing costs. It would at best explain a doubling, but should be less than doubling because new marginal square footage should theoretically be cheaper due to the fixed costs in a home.

Another major drivers of house pricing includes increased demand from the fracturing of the family. In an intact nuclear family, two parents and their children share 1 house (possibly with a grandparent or two). In a divorced family, two parents and their children share 2 houses. An unmarried man and an unmarried woman have 2 houses (roommates amerloriate this to an extent). A single mother with children and her baby daddy have 2 houses. Etc. Throw on top of this the shift from multi-generational homes, and the fracturing of the family and the turn away from marraige has had a large, but, AFAIK, unmeasured effect on home prices (this would make a good study proposal for any economists out there).

Another major driver is immigration. 59 million people needing housing is a huge upward driver of housing demand and therefore housing prices.

A third major driver is schooling and safety. “Good schools” is a major driver of house prices and “safe neighbourhoods” because most parents, understandably, want their kids to get a good education and to be able to live without worry they’ll won’t become involved with or victims of drugs, gangs, and crime. Everybody is also aware that “good schools” and “safe neighbourhoods” are politically-correct codes words for schools and neighbourhoods without poor minorities who statistically make schools bad and neighbourhoods unsafe.

Because federal laws make discrimination in housing on any basis but price illegal, the only way to keep schools good and neighbourhoods safe is to discriminate on price. This puts a huge upward pressure on price, as people move to high price neighbourhoods to escape poor minorities (who may then follow them, because they too want good schools and safe neighbourhoods, forcing the process to repeat, escalating prices even higher).

Because of this, safe, affordable housing is functionally illegal in American cities and prices ever increase.

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Two Income Trap and Child Care

The increased upward pressure on housing prices has the side effect of forcing more families into the two income trap, so they can afford a good house.

This has a variety of effects that increase costs, making children expensive.

Child care is the largest of these. As I’ve explained before, affordable child care is impossible, so child care will immediately eat up a significant portion the second income. Child care by itself, is a major factor of why children are so expensive.

A second income usually requires a second vehicle (more on this below), another major fixed expense. A stay-at-home parent has time to cook home made meals, mends clothes, and participate in other cost-saving activities; a dual income household will eat out more often, purchase more expensive pre-made food, have to replace clothes, etc.

The two income trap imposes a number of large extra costs on families and removes many cost-savings that an at-home parent allows.

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Taxes

I was going to write about the increasing tax burden here, but I couldn’t find much much data on the overall US tax burden; most of it was just federal tax rates, and calculating overall tax burden for the average middle class person over time is much more effort than I’m willing to put in to a blog post.

But according to this 2012 NYT article, the overall tax burden has been declining somewhat, except for low-income people, who continue to pay minimal taxes.

So we’ll say increasing taxes probably aren’t particularly responsible for kids costing too much.

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Vehicles

Among average people, vehicles are second largest major fixed expense after housing, and they have generally gotten more expensive over time, primarily as more families have moved to being two car households and gas has gotten more expensive.

This site compared a few classic cars and all have increased by half to almost doubling since 1965 (inflation-adjusted). But these are classics and so might no be applicable.

According to Wiki, the Chevrolet Impalla was the best-selling full-size car in 1965 and is still the best-selling today, so we’ll use this and assume other similar cars are competitively priced. In 1965, a 4-door V-8 sedan Impala was 2,779, which comes to $20,910.17 in 2015$. The base price of a new Impala in 2015 was $27,700. An increase of about a third.

But large families need more than five seats. The 1965 Impala 9-passenger station wagon was $3,073, $23,122.33 in 2015$, the 6-passenger was $22,347.32. You generally can’t buy station wagons today, because US regulations classified them as cars, making them uneconomic to produce under US fuel standards, which was a major regulatory backfire for environmentalists, as families switched to minivans and SUVs, which were much worse on fuel. The best-selling SUV in 2015 was the Ford Escape, which started at $24,000, but only can seat 5 passenger. The best-selling minivan, is the Dodge Grand Caravan, it seats 7 passengers, and started at $22,000. The Chevy Express was the cheapest 9+-passenger I found on a site, and it starts at $29,000 for the cargo version, so probably just a bit more for a passenger vehicle.

So, it looks like 3-4 child family vehicles are significantly more expensive to buy, as are larger 8+ child family vehicles, but, contrary to my expectations, the large 5-7 child families are about the same.

Except that the SUV’s and vans cost a lot more in fuel and as mentioned above, 2-income families now almost always need 2 vehicles.

Gasoline costs have increased: with the exception of the 1973 and 1979 oil crises (when prices hit $3/gallon, post-WW2 gas prices generally stayed between $1.50-$2/gallon (in 2015$). Since 2000, gas prices have ranged between $2.50-$3.80 per gallon. Since 2006, gas prices have generally been higher than the $3/gallon they were at the peak of the oil crises. During this time gasoline usage has also been increasing, likely largely due to increasing suburbanization.

Another hidden cost: older vehicles were generally easier to repair and maintain at home, but the increased inclusion of electronics in vehicles, makes it increasingly difficult to repair without very expensive specialized electronic equipment, necessitating an increasing reliance on professionals for maintenance and repair, adding significant cost.

So, the need for two vehicles due to the two income trap has increased the cost of vehicles significantly for your average family, while vehicles themselves have become moderately more expensive. The cost of gasoline has increased significantly while consumption has increased.

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Food

Food is generally the fourth biggest cost to families after housing, taxes, and vehicles. The average American spends less on food, as a percentage of income, then they used to. Hoever, good expenditures have stopped declining and been flat over the last 15-20 years.

However, this is deceptive, if you look at average household size since 1960, it mirrors average household size relatively closely. The levelling off of food costs as income share matches the levelling off of household size. This suggests food costs have been mostly constant per person, but less kids means less spending on food.

In a time of major productivity gains and stagnant wages, food costs have not really shrunk.

A major cause of this is the increase in eating out. It costs more to eat pre-made food than it does to make your own food. The average American now spends about 43% of their food budget on eating out. As well, when eating in, they are more likely to buy expensive pre-made meals than making their own. All this increases food bills.

The primary cause of this increase in eating out and in eating pre-made foods, is the two-income trap. When one parent was at home, they had sufficient time and energy to create homemade food, saving money. When both parents work, food preparation time becomes a luxury often foregone due to a lack of time and motivation.

In addition, to eating out costing more, eating out itself has increased in cost.

In economics, there’s an informal purchasing power parity index known as the Big Mac Index, that can roughly how close inflation rates measure actualy close consumer price data.

In 1968, when it first came out, a Big Mac cost $0.49, $3.34 in 2015$. In 1986, the first year of the Big Mac Index, it cost $1.60, $3.46 in 2015$. In 2000, $2.51, or $3.45 in 2015$. In 2015, the most recent year the BMI measured, it cost $4.79.

The cost of a Big Mac stayed relatively even until sometime after 2000. Since then there has been a ~40% increase in the cost of a Big Mac beyond inflation. My anecdotal experience in Canada and basic market competitiveness theory, suggests that this growth is probably true across eating out on average.

So eating out, which is 40% of your food bill, is now 40% more expensive than it used to be.

I’ll also note here, that the rapid growth of Big Mac costs past inflation, suggests that inflation has been severely underestimated, in which case, everything I’ve posted is much worse than the numbers suggest. I’ve always been skeptical of CPI, but a 40% extra increase over 15 years in something as basic and omnipresent as a Big Mac heightens my doubts.

Food costs haven’t really increased, but they haven’t particularly decreased either.

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Education

Saving for college is a major expense for many middle-class families. Lots of ink has already been spilled over this, so I’m not going to repeat much. College has been increasing in price much faster than wages. 8 times as much according to this article.

A lot of young people start off with a lot of college debt. The average student loan borrower has $37k in debt upon graduation. That’s a lot of money, the equivalent of a down payment on a house. Instead of buying a house and accumulating capital, they’re paying off usury.

And they’re not really getting anything of increased value for this debt. The money is being burned in cost disease and their job prospects are worse than those of college grads decades ago.

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Consumer Debt

Now, one of the major destroyers of people is usury. The average millennial has $42,000 in debt, the plurality of which is credit card debt. The average American is $33,000 in debt. I’ve already written about usury (and inflation) before, but debt and debt payments are major

Usury takes advantage of the average person who is not mentally equipped to fully understand the implications of debt and compounding interest. It shackles them in debt bondage. The average American spends $280k over their lifetime just on interest. The average person with credit card debt pays $1.1k in interest each year.

Household debt has increase from 31% of income in 1951 to about 100% now (it was up to 120% during the housing boom). All this debt means increased interest payments to banks.

Usury is strangling the average household, particularly the young.

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Communication Technology

This is a simple one, but the average American user spends $47/month on mobile phones and $132 on cable and internet. That’s almost ~$180/month. When I was growing up, cable was rare and internet and mobiles practically non-existent. And this is just monthly bills, not including the purchase of HD TV’s mobile phones, and computers. This is a huge added expense most families take on.

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Personal Choice

Finally, personal choice is why you can’t afford children. This is what my tweets harped on. People can’t afford children, because they are unwilling to sacrifice for them.

People eat out instead of making meals at home (driven by the two-income trap). People buy larger houses than they should (driven by “safe schools” and the two-income trap). People by two cars (driven by the two-income trap) and new cars. People go into consumer debt. People take useless degrees. People buy luxuries.

There are major structural issues making children expensive, which I’ve outlined above, but on the individual level, you can probably afford children if you are willing to sacrifice. People have been raised and become accustomed to luxuries they can’t afford (hence the massive amount of consumer debt most have). This may be due to structural issues, but on an individual level you can probably afford kids if you sacrifice.

Don’t go into debt for a useless degree; take trades or get a useful degree. If one of the parents stays home and engages in traditional money-saving practices (such as home-cooking and coupon-clipping), the family can avoid buying a second vehicle and paying child care costs. This will require buying a smaller house, children may have to share rooms and you may have minimal private space. Luxuries in entertainment and food may need be cut back. Cable cut. Home internet forgone for mobile only, or vice versa. It may require moving to a lower cost county or state.

Your grandparents raised 6 kids in a small 3-bedroom house with no TV, 1 car, minimal entertainment or luxuries, home-cooked meals, and penny-pinching. You can too if you will it enough and are willing to sacrifice for it.

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The reason you can’t afford children is because wages stagnated while costs increased across the board.

Wages have been destroyed by a rapidly expanding labour pool due to immigration and feminism. At the same time, housing costs skyrocketed due to the two-income trap, a quest for safe schools and neighbourhoods, rapidly and artificially expanding population, and family breakdown. The two-income trap necessitated two vehicles, which along with gas greatly increased transportation costs.

Education has trapped the young in debt, while general usury eats people alive and prevents them from accumulating capital.

Finally, you’ve been raised to be accommodated to a lifestyle and luxuries you can’t afford and which you finance with debt.

On a personal level, you can overcome this and have children by making major sacrifices. On a societal level, it is insane and unhealthy to require the average person to make inordinate sacrifices just to be able to afford children. Any decent and sane society will do what it can to make raising a family comfortably affordable to most people.

Our society has been designed to destroy your ability to have children without either being rich or taking on massive usurious debt and making inordinate sacrifices.

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Post-Script: I am not blaming immigrants for immigration, minorities for integration, or women for feminism. All of these are structural issues basically forced upon an unwilling populace by government and capital. Immigrants, minorities, and women followed, as would be expected, the incentives given them, and I generally don’t fault people for following incentives unless it’s a heinous evil, which none of the individual actions taken under this incentive structure would be. In fact, minorities and women probably suffered the most under this regime. Immigrants generally benefited, but being foreigners had minimal hand in the original changes in the 1960s.

The ones at fault are government and capital who imposed a destructive economic incentive structure upon society so they could destroy wages and increase consumption to feed their greed and lust for power. They are the ones who caused this and the ones responsible for why you can’t afford children.

Make sure you aim the blame properly.

17 comments

  1. Greetings from south of you… I’m in a place properly joined with the maritime provinces in culture, but American by history and politics.

    Am glad to get your take on this question. I wrote a longish response to Scott’s piece.* TL:DR is that prices need to be set with knowledge gained across time, and an inflationary currency makes it impossible for the vast majority of people to effectively do so. Even high IQ people with masters degrees and PhDs face daunting problems in making simple economic choices (Where to live, what home to buy, college? Salaried job or self-employed? &c. &c,) when measuring by a fuzzy and ever-changing standard, ie. fiat currency. There is just no way to predict how much of a loan will need to be paid back, or how much of savings will be available to spend and not be inflated or taxed away. Granted one never knows these things for certain, there is always the possibility of war and other disasters. But ordinary people could do the math back when real money was in use. Today I can’t do the math and I have masters degree sophistication in mathematics – options pricing, exponential growth, interest rates, its all old hat. But without functioning markets it gets very complicate to tease out the real value of assets and the real value of any wage a client agrees to pay me. So all one has is faith and stubborn adherence to the old ways, or else one can ‘enjoy the decline’ and drop out.

    I have become somewhat possessed by the idea that feminism – the intrests of those discontented with monogamy – is the root cause of all our political and cultural woes. I try to find consolation in God’s order and God’s faithfulness; that throughout history inversions come, God punishes, and some point the righteous prevail. Only the love of the Lord is eternal.

    *Link to my comment @SlateStarCodex https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/25/wage-stagnation-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/#comment-725162

  2. Why does NRx like SSC so much? Scott Alexander acknowledges your existence but has never been flattering. Is it because Effective Altruism is an interesting concept somehow?

  3. The minimum wage in 1950 is worth $9/hr in today’s money. 18k/yr, assuming no taxes and a 40 hr work week.

    But I think analyzing the economic angle of this is barking up the wrong tree. The only economic aspect of note here is the price of housing, which is an effect of black and brown colonization of cities. To this we can perhaps add debt, but men used to have kids, and lots of kids, even when in debt and otherwise dire economic straits.

    The problem is female liberation.

    The migratory worker of the Old West was poor as dirt, but he would hop the train, wife and five kids in tow, to wherever he could get a seasonal job. Obviously this is not an ideal circumstance, socially or economically, but he still had five kids, and that is what we want.

    Most people do not consciously and independently desire to have large families. We love sex and we love our kids when we have them. For all of evolutionary history, this was sufficient to ensure large families and the propagation of the race. But if you tell a woman that if, after kid #2, she can take a pill that stops her from having kids, she will do it, and her husband will say OK, because he feels genetically secure, and now he can save his money for a nicer car and a yearly vacation in Bermuda.

    And that’s exactly what happened. I have an ancestor who was an Irish immigrant to the US. He worked in a factory and lived in a crowded tenement in Boston and had eleven kids despite being dirt poor because he was a good Catholic who liked fucking his wife and hated birth control. Men will be patriarchs no matter how poor they are, or how expensive raising kids is, when the Church and State back up his patriarchy.

  4. The other cost I did not see was health insurance. True, many employers cover this, but not for the whole family (that is extra) and many exclude (or require extra payment) for maternity coverage. Not to mention the deductibles and the 80/20 coverage on what is an expensive hospital stay to give birth (along with the OB and the Anesthesiologist).

  5. >”Why does NRx like SSC so much? Scott Alexander acknowledges your existence but has never been flattering. Is it because Effective Altruism is an interesting concept somehow?”

    I can answer for myself; Statistically speaking, pretty much ALL writing by lefties is incoherent or entirely rhetorical. The insight that that writing provides for us regarding its authors’ state of mind is limited to: ~ the author of this work is likely entirely consumed by a) irrational emotional reaction to life events or b) a lust for power and status that justifies any misleading, lying sort of b.s.

    It appears that Scott Alexander has dedicated his mind toward understanding maladaptive behavior, ie. lunacy, AND he occasionally directs his observational powers toward himself.

    In best Leonard Nemoy voice: ‘Fascinating, Captain’

  6. You need to look into the tax angle in more depth. By the time most families pay federal taxes (income and SS and gas), state taxes (many states have an income tax), local taxes at the county and city level (property taxes and sales taxes), I would say many Americans are paying easily 1/3 of their earnings before and after taxes.

    I recall making a low $40k’s salary in the mid west 20 years ago. I estimated before and after my check that I worked almost 5 months of the year for the government. Needless to say I concluded I should have just worked at Wal Mart or such instead of getting an education. Not like it really pays off for everyone.

    I would agree that salaries are flat.

  7. Sorry for the OT comment. But could you fix the reaction times feed? It’s filled up with ‘comment on…’ from the Sailer feed. Thanks for making it, I really do appreciate it.

  8. Mr. Northerner

    Thanks for the interesting post. I thought I would share my reaction as a practitioner of patriarchy (I have 6 youngish children and I live not far from the geographic center of the continental US).

    In many parts of the country it requires no heroic effort to raise a large number of children, it simply requires disinterest in the newly-minted “all american life” given the possibility of high wages for young women (young childless women make more than age-peer men). If you and your wife both work life with 6 youngish kids will be miserable and financially difficult, and by settling for one income you are absolutely leaving money on the table. But, there is nothing more fulfilling and more rewarding (including in perfectly material ways).

    For each of your cost dimensions:

    Wages:

    I think the stagnation of real wages has been somewhat overstates. The average 201X household has luxuries and conviences inconceivable for the 1973 household. The worst stagnation has been among HS dropouts and very low skilled men. These groups have been hit very hard by immigration and wage arbitrage.

    Housing:

    This is a big issue is economically dynamic urban areas, but very afforable housing can be found in midsized cities and rural areas. Many of these places have some social dysfunction, but they are pretty safe. Urban areas have always had lower birth rates.

    Taxes:

    If you are a mid-wage earner and have 6 kids you will have negative federal tax liability. State and local taxes will take a small bite but this is not a cause.

    Vehicles:

    You are right that the cost of new vehicles is higher, but overall ownership costs are down. Vehicles are far more reliable and require less maintenance and on a vehicle like an E350 the maintenance is still pretty easy to do for a minimally competent man – if he finds it worth his time. Also, fuel in the US is pretty cheap and newer vehicles get much better gas mileage than the 70s version.

    Education:

    This is a tricky one. We homeschool, but I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. Your wife must be competent or your kids will be undereducated (I see it all of the time) Good private school is very expensive. Decent public universities are competent in science and engineering and aren’t too expensive. You can still work your way through if diligent, so I don’t see that as a big burden on parents.

    Debt and Luxuries:

    See above. Lots of kids is a lifestyle choice and it does cost money. The days when kids are economic assets (short term) for the majority of people are unlikely to return. Get rid of cable/satellite, you won’t have much time for TV with a bunch of children. Books are cheaper than ever, go to a used book sale, use the library.

    There is a lot more to say about the social pathologies underlying our kid free landscape…

  9. Excellent, meaty article. You do a great job tying together a lot of disparate threads into a thesis with a real gut punch to it. Between the thousand little rats (globalism, open borders, financialization, multiculturalism, credentialism, etc) gnawing away our prosperity at one end, and our burgeoning greed and addiction to comfortable palliatives on the other, we’ve squeezed ourselves to the point where the true basics of life (like starting a family) are unavailable, even as shiny toys to consume video games and porn have never been more available.

    As you rightly point out, having a sizable family is still possible, but it takes uncommon virtue these days, which is, well, uncommon. Good policy should incentivize people to live wholesome, pro-social lives, but what we have encourages us to indulge in orgies of self-focused consumption just to ameliorate the stress of living in urban bughives. Gotta boost that GDP, goy!

  10. Since I was banned from twitter. I couldn’t reply to that thread about Jesus’ siblings. However I think this debate will be quite informative. As to why I believe that Mary did bear biological children:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHGak3tRQwY

    And why the fact that Jesus’ Brethren cannot be other than biologically related in terms of being his siblings.

  11. Twitter is a trap. We need insight, not one liners. You belong among the bloggers.

  12. I have three more to add to the very good list above. 1. Pensions. Without the security of a pension, the more children one had, the less likely it would be that the parents, in their dotage, would become homeless or be forced into the workhouse. 2. Survival rates. It was more important to have a large family when individuals died more often of disease and infections. 3. Purpose. The move away from family farms and businesses (caused by death duties and other aspects of modernity) meant that children weren’t as necessary. In earlier days, children could (a) be used as labor and (b) one or more of a large family would probably be bright enough to keep the business going as the father got older.

  13. The problem is that young traditional women (and you need a young traditional young woman if you want to have many children) is significantly less than the demand for them. Those women who, in spite of propaganda, decide to have children at a young age can find husbands with whom economic issues cease to play any role at all.

    The number of men who do not expect (because they have no chance) to get a young traditional girl and prefer to devote themselves to hedonism, autistic things, watching anime is constantly growing.

    So men have two ways: either to become part of the financial elite in a short time, or to go to an environment with a different family culture (sects or migration to more patriarchal countries)

  14. Very good article. Its so expensive in the US now that Latino immigrants are now well below replacement.

    Coldly, as Reason magazine put it “Maybe people aren’t having children because they don’t want children.”

    Also the issue Brian Ash brought up about pensions . Children not being able or willing to take care of parents was an issue in the Middle Ages, they had church annuities much like social security,

    In modernity in a world where there is interest at normal rates , having say one child and investing the rest will provide you with more income than any child could afford to spare you.

    Assuming a reasonably priced home , putting the cost of a second or third child into the home and investments and a state pension or social security is better security than more kids. And note too if those kids have grandkids, they can’t afford to help you.

    House sharing is certainly doable but that will take some cultural shifts to work out.

    in the US the most fertile group is the Amish who are growing so fast that they are already the majority population in parts of the State of Pennsylvania and while the fertility will decline and infant mortality will rise, them and other like them will probably end up the majority population in a hundred and half to two hundred years.

    As for fixing any of the other issues will require removal of the US elites from all power. and replacement with populist ideologues

    Otherwise or innate cultural drive to screw the working man will come to the fore every time

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