"A new analysis of global rankings of life expectancy over seven decades shows the UK has done worse than all G7 countries except the USA."
"According to the OECD, state the researchers, the UK recently became the second most economically unequal country in Europe after Bulgaria."
Me personally, I dont even think I'll be reaching retirement age if I continue to live in the UK, and thats not through not wanting to work, but thats because of the how the UK has become. Everything has just got too expensive living in the UK now.
More people died during the period of time energy prices rose rapidly recently than during the covid pandemic in the UK, but you cant point this stuff out to people in the street because they'll have a go back, a form of denial of the situation in the UK.
Its become very dog eat dog, quality of work in decline but costs still going up.
Crime in my experience is also off the scale and the attitude of the police now means I no longer report crimes to them.
So yes this sort of article is portrayed as positive spin but is in fact deceitful spin.
> More people died during the period of time energy prices rose rapidly recently than during the covid pandemic in the UK
Any source for this? And this seems possibly meaningless at face value.
Total deaths have generally been increasing in the UK since 2011. [1]
I assume that's because of an aging population.
And just glancing at this graph of total deaths with 5 year average [2] I think it's doubtful that excess deaths from the energy crisis exceeded pandemic deaths.
So the statement would have more value if it were about excess mortality rate.
There does seem to be some evidence that non-covid excess mortality rate increased due to the energy crisis (and possibly exceeded covid excess mortality at the time) [3] but I don't think it's clear by how much (especially when you consider there was increased non-covid excess mortality even in the summer).
Other sources speculated on different causes for the excess mortality but it doesn't really seem like anyone knows. [4]
There are some BMJ articles that might better explain it but they're not on sci-hub yet.
> Me personally, I dont even think I'll be reaching retirement age if I continue to live in the UK, and thats not through not wanting to work, but thats because of the how the UK has become. Everything has just got too expensive living in the UK now.
Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT.
It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US [0].
I'm a relatively new immigrant to the US, Seattle area, spaniard but moved from the UK. I'm actually extremely tempted to move back to Spain and my experience in the US so far has been very negative.
Very high cost of living, inflation, uncertainty due to layoffs, salaries down due to a combination of lack of raises and stocks going down, housing price still increasing despite the high interest rates, which have made real estate even more unaffordable. To top things up the green card priority dates for my immigrant class have gone back, so I have even more uncertainty of when I will achieve permanent resident status.
I don't know the circumstances of the people that you describe, but Europe is looking way more attractive than the US. The whole reason why I left Spain was lack of jobs and low salaries, but Covid and remote seem to have incredibly improved the situation (I know from second hand accounts).
The only reason I'm holding on is a combination of sunken cost fallacy and an unjustified optimism in the future. It took me years and tons of effort to move my family to this country, so I'm not ready to give up just yet. I'm also aware than my bad experience is in part due to random circumstances, and if the situation improves (both for me personally, and for the country as a whole) my experience will be different.
Still, I give it a 50%/50% chance that in 3 years I will hate my situation here, give up and move back home.
If you're open to it I feel like the sweet spot right now, specially for Spanish speakers, is to work remotely from somewhere in LATAM, earning in dollars or euros and spending in local currency.
For one, because if there are enough people to pay higher prices, the market will reflect that and the locals will have to deal with the new costs despite the fact that there are no local jobs paying enough to afford these things. So yeah for people who are already merchants (likely a minority) it's great; everyone else gets poorer. Thus, inequality increases. This is already playing out in US cities.
I won't pretend to know about this stuff. What I can tell you is that, since covid and the advent of remote work, so many countries have been rushing to launch some sort of "digital nomad" visa, precisely to attract this new type of worker. So clearly they've determined the model to be a net positive for the economy.
I cannot pretend to have an adequate breadth of geopolitical knowledge on this topic nor an understanding of the underlying reasons behind the various governments and the advent more recent "nomad visas".
However my knee-jerk reaction is that, the various programs governments will incentivize regarding foreign investment and relocation are not necessarily in the best economic or social interests of the locals for a given area, despite that governments intent.
One story I recall from earlier this year was regarding Lisbon and the backlash against their visa [1]. From the article it's obvious there were other (tax) incentives that existed prior to the nomad visa, however it appears to me that the visa was a turning point in public discourse on the topic, as it incentivized highly paid individuals to relocate to Lisbon (4x the average Portuguese salary).
Though I don't disagree that it could still have been weighed by the government and determined it to be a net-positive still.
Portugal has been handing out extremely desirable EU residency to very wealthy people for more than 10 years, in exchange of real estate investment. I don't blame them, together with Greece they were the hardest hit by the last global crisis. But of course that was going to noticeably drive prices up. A lot (most?) of those investments are now airbnbs which is the real problem they have. I don't think this can be compared with the recent wave of nomad visas that are little more than extended tourist permits.
If foreign money decides to entirely stop spending in developing economies and only spends money in developed economies, it seems like the outcome would be even worse. As in, developing economies will never develop and developed economies will continue to hoard all the wealth.
Classic history lesson is mensa musa, who was so wealthy (at least in terms of gold), wherever he travelled inflation followed in his wake.
That said, I’m not sure there is much literature on the negative economic side of tourism, or work tourism specifically. My suspicion, is that while it tends to create inflationary pressure, it still increases local wealth generally, and rarely are there very extreme negative situations (like locals who live in regions that can grow quinoa that can no longer afford it resulting in serious nutrition issues).
I lived in 5 countries in 10 years, and I'm not up for geo-arbitrage to scrap a few more dollars in my income. If I got a global remote job, rather than moving halfway across the world, I rather move close to my family and friends.
Plus, some countries in LATAM have the same issues we dislike about the US but magnified (e.g. inequality).
It's not geo-arbitrage, the extra income is a side benefit. For me personally, I'm happier in these parts, and I too lived in very many places. I enjoy the slower pace of life, greater sense of community, and lesser individualism. Living in the West today feels like constant competition. But of course it's far from perfect and not for everyone.
> I'm a relatively new immigrant to the US, Seattle area
> I don't know the circumstances of the people that you describe, but Europe is looking way more attractive than the US
The US is giant. I always find it funny when people try to use anecdotal evidence of their lived experience in a single expensive city in the US to describe the entirety of the US, when that is absolutely, unequivocally, not representative of the vast majority of the US. Check out the prices of an apartment in Seattle[0] vs Austin[1], or NYC[2], or Pittsburgh[3], or Indianapolis[4].
When I lived in Seattle, I was paying around $1900 a month for a microstudio with around 600 square feet. According to the website I pasted below, that would get you a 4 bedroom apartment in Indianapolis (which sounds about accurate, I'm currently spending less than that for a 1400 square foot 2 bedroom apartment on the east coast).
In other words, it would be like if I moved to London and then declared the entirety of Europe (not just the UK because the US is around 96% the size of all of Europe[5]), and then declared that Europe just isn't for me because of how expensive it is in London, and how the culture is and... etc.
Now, I'm not denying your experience and I believe you 100% having lived there myself. I also am not going to pretend picking up and moving across the country is something you can just do at a whim's notice. I'm only cautioning against extrapolating your experience on this single city to describe an entire country that is almost the size of the entire continent of Europe.
Someone from Europe and who likes European culture will probably be OK in Seattle (except for the problems the OP cited). They're not going to be happy living in Pittsburgh or especially Indianapolis. You're entirely ignoring the quality of life and culture differences that come with these different places. There's a reason people want to live in NYC and Seattle, and not in Indianapolis.
100%. I'm also a Spaniard and immigrating next year to Bay Area and I can say that I'd only move to a handful of cities in the US. The cultural shock was too hard in places outside major metros. And I've lived in South East Asia!
E.g., around CalPoly most people just... Went home after work? No meeting up to do something, have a drink, etc. They just went home and stayed there. I found it super strange.
I wouldn't call it "passé" as such, I think it's just very difficult because everyone is basically going in wildly different directions and there's no unity or commonality. Why spend a lot of time and effort being friends with people that you have absolutely nothing in common with, and frequently find to have repulsive opinions?
The comment I'm replying to mentions europeans in Silicon Valley, so probably their experience is closer to mine in Seattle than someone in Alabama.
Other than that I explicitly address in my comment that my experience is particularly bad and I'm willing to give this country a fair try. However, if the answer is to cut my salary in half and move to Pittsburgh, at that point I rather return to southern europe.
The UK shot itself in the foot hard with Brexit, and has become a quite undesirable place for many for that reason. Doesn't mean that the US is necessarily doing great.
Which part of the US? It's so dramatically different from city to city, state to state.
Software developer or equivalent income capable tech job, remote, university city/town. It's a fairly easy set-up (unless you're already very rooted somewhere). They're relatively inexpensive to live in (you can actually buy a real house at $100k per year!), and there are tons of safe choices (specifically with a low murder rate). Primary downside is far weaker food/nightlife/etc. vs what you get in major cities.
Because reactionaries successfully channeled discontent about declining material conditions into a reductive scapegoating of the EU and faced no meaningful opposition from what is now a center-right Labor Party, post Blair.
>> Because reactionaries successfully channeled discontent about declining material conditions into a reductive scapegoating of the EU and faced no meaningful opposition
Yes. From the Left as well as the Right. Jeremy Corbyn is an example of the former.
>> ... from what is now a center-right Labor Party, post Blair.
Labour Party.
It seems traditional party politics were not the primary factor. There were Leavers on both Left and Right. Centrists were less likely to be Leavers than those on the wings of their party.
Demographic factors were more determining of a Leave vote than political affiliation: Age (older vs younger), region (England/Wales vs Scotland/N.Ireland), population density (rural vs urban), income (low earning vs high earning)
Clap for Carers during Covid was a national psychological experiment to measure conformity. Brexit was the closest you could get to resurrecting the Nazi party in the UK 60 years later as another conformity experiment.
How do you measure conformity across a country?
TV Set top boxes being paused at 8pm on Thursday, wifi connected devices seeing a weakening signal, social media posts.
The internet is a security services and big businesses surveillance tool wet dream.
Whats been interesting since is how various websites and their algorithms are being used to challenge your view point. What Eli Pariser highlighted in his Ted talk 12 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s) has grown to all the major US tech companies because if everyone has their nose in a device connected to some website, the state can control people in deniable spooky hacker ways.
Remember intelligence is a cheaper and easier form of nipping problems in the bud before you have to puts boots on the ground, beit military boots or police boots, and at least here in the UK every element of the state is involved in surveillance, including the NHS and the educational system.
Sure, Brexit wasn't good for the EU either. It's a negative-sum event.
That's in addition to the sudden shock from the invasion of Ukraine, making it politically necessary to switch fuel even at cost which your linked article starts with.
Europe is vast, culturally much more diverse than US for better and worse. States have almost absolute independence, so they don't adapt to rules from above if they don't want to, there is no easy 'federal' lever to ie enforce laws everywhere, voting is democratic and representatives are very diverse, nothing like 2-party US system.
Economy in the west is not that stellar mainly due to much more focus on social aspects, more paid time off, free education including universities, free healthcare, we take care of the poor, disabled etc. Of course none of this is free, we all pay for it. Economies in the east have their own issues, relatively poor and corrupt is never a good mix.
Some people don't give a fuck about anybody else, its just me or just the closest ones, and for those US system looks much better and numbers alone do support it. Only to the point when societal issues hit back. Or you want to raise kids, and they want to study on university. Or not to worry about your health issues, which will inevitably come to all of us unless you die suddenly without any prior health issues.
So yes its by choice, but I don't think most folks understand that choice, done for them in the past, without them having a say.
Yeah well said. But I wonder if the choice would continue to look good to Europeans if the economic consequences continue as in the article I mentioned for another 15, 30, 45 years etc.
There's a thing I remember but not well enough to search for, where someone was asked to forecast the challenges the UK was about to face, and they went through the decades of the 20th century showing how the biggest and most obvious fears of each period had basically nothing to with how events actually unfolded.
Importantly, it’s lack of trade barriers but all the rest of the mix, too. Ie if one part of a bilateral trade deal doesn’t honor IP rights of the other side there’s problems. Also linking countries with hugely different wage levels can be destabilizing to the more developed. Those factors probably could have been mitigated.
Brexit caused the UK to not be in the free trade area commonly called the EU, which meant that the EU didn't have convenient trade with the UK and the UK didn't have convenient trade with the EU.
A global pandemic happened simultaneously with this.
* while salaries are higher than eg most of Europe, they're still nowhere near the US - US salaries are often at least double (or more, a lot more)
* their cost of living and taxes are high
* they're backwards and insular (maybe you think the US is too, but the US has 350 million people, Australia has like 25, lol, so insular takes on a whole new meaning there)
* they're not as diverse as the US (sure, London is diverse, but still, the diversity of the US smokes them all, so many different cities here with so many different demographics, climates etc etc)
I'm saying that as a Scandi who's lived in UK, Canada, Australia and now US. Of course the US has a lot of problems too, but as a destination for skilled immigrants, the others don't even compare IMO.
I'm Australian and though I don't live there now, I did for 27 years. Most of the things you're describing are just a function of the people you were hanging out with. I knew people like that, and I chose different friends.
People definitely used gay as a slur when I was in high school, and then people grew out of it because it was childish and awful. Perhaps it was at about the time that some of us came out as gay.
Diversity is certainly not uniform in the country, obviously, and exposure is a critical part of being well rounded. We had a lot of people from PNG and Sri Lanka where I grew up, and when I went to Uni there were a lot of foreign students from Kenya and other places. Being weird or racist about it would have been pretty fucking unacceptable to me and my friends. But I have met people who are indeed weirdly racist or sexist.
Also, I have noticed a pretty broad shift in this from people in my parents generation to people in my generation, and I'm sure again to people younger than myself. I think this actually happening in lots of places though, not just Australia.
As far as swearing goes... Yes? We swear a lot. It works for us!
We have lots of problems, and a truly horrendous history of colonial violence -- which we have at least begun to address in history class in schools in the last thirty years. Lots more work to do. I'm sorry you had a bad go of it, but please don't assume that you have a picture of every Australian.
Of course not all Australians are like that. But I've lived in many different countries and in my experience nowhere even comes close to how ubiquitous, accepted, even encouraged all the above are in Australia, how large a share of the population really are like that. Let's be real, it's not small. And sure, you can make a bubble of good people around you, but you have to exist outside it as part of your everyday life, and that's not easy if you're the type to notice these things. In the US, you could never ever get away with saying half the things that are casually said in an Australian workplace, at a social gathering etc etc, it simply would not be tolerated. I mean, try to imagine a white American acting all surprised and impressed a dark skinned person speaks good English, and chirpily complimenting them for it. It would never happen, lol. But in Australia it's par for the course. Anyway this is my experience and how I see it, completely understand if others see it differently. But I do think anyone who's under the impression Australia doesn't still have a loooot of catching up to do are kidding themselves.
All the points of criticism you've asserted as being true in the present tense in all of Australia are heavily, increasingly pushed back on these days.
Sure, Australia may have been slower to catch up than the rest of the world; it's a small, isolated country. But it's all changing very quickly now, and indeed has been for a long time.
I grew up in Melbourne in the 80s surrounded by many different cultures, and spent time living in Sydney in the 00s. Sure racism existed but has been increasingly unacceptable ever since I was young and is not tolerated among anyone I know of now. "Gay" as a pejorative has been unacceptable among anyone in inner Melbourne and Sydney since the early 00s - i.e., for at least 20 years.
No doubt you'll find exceptions and segments of the population that are slower to reform, just as you do in all places/cultures. Most of that is circumstantial; reform happens when people are exposed to people from different walks of life they become aware of them and more tolerant of them. That's how it's always happened, everywhere. Moralising about these kinds of things really serves only to feel morally superior in yourself, rather than understanding the society you're critiquing.
To slur the whole country with your observations of a particular region/cohort at a particular time is to succumb to the same kind of failing of which you're accusing others.
Another famous example would be AFL - the racism on display not just in the stands but within the teams and the AFL org itself, would be unimaginable in any other country. Imagine if fans, teammates, coaches etc abused black NFL players the way black AFL players get abused. It would not be tolerated, and it would never happen, it's completely unimaginable.
These are not cherry picked examples, they're just two manifestations of the massive problem.
But Australia and Australians get a pass because "it's Australia".
It's not flattering to be unable to realize and admit maybe your country has some work to do. (it's not an attack on you personally)
You've literally posted a copy+paste comment in response to both responders, and you've included cases/references that don't support your claims nor refute mine (or my sibling commenter's for that matter). You seem much more interested in grandstanding and stereotyping than engaging fair-mindedly with what is a difficult and important issue.
The HN guidelines specifically state that "comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive" and ask us to "eschew flamebait" and "avoid generic tangents".
With that in mind I don't want to perpetuate the flamewar but will try only to correct the record:
The article you linked makes absolutely no mention of the kind of behaviour you described in your earlier comment as being "rampant" at the ABC; it's about reactions from some audience members to Stan Grant's (and other presenters') comments during the introductory coverage of King Charles' coronation; it's a complex topic and one worthy of contemplation and earnest discussion, but it has no relevance to your original claims.
> Another famous example would be AFL ... It would not be tolerated ... But Australia and Australians get a pass because "it's Australia"
In no sense are any occurrences of racism "tolerated" or is anyone getting "a pass" for anything; the whole reason you know about them is they attract widespread condemnation and meaningful action.
All of these cases date back a significant amount of time, pertain to a small segment of the population, have attracted widespread condemnation, have led to major investigations, sanctions, reforms and broad progress in the way these issues are understood and handled, and instigated ongoing discussions and programs to continue to improve the way issues for indigenous/PoC players are recognised and accommodated.
Issues like this are not isolated to Australia, and these occurrences in Australia have somewhat mirrored the way issues of race in sport and politics have become prominent in the U.S. and many other parts of the world in recent years.
None of this is to say that occurrences like those you originally described never happen, nor that "maybe [our] country has some work to do". I didn't and don't dispute that, but the work is being done (going as far as a planned referendum for a constitutional amendment to give the indigenous population a formal voice to parliament, which has strong popular support) and meaningful progress is being made, just as it is in many places in the world that still have "work to do".
Anyway, I literally had to check the title of this article to remind myself that the topic is Are you a late bloomer in work or love? Maybe you’re right on time - i.e., nothing to do with this nationalistic flamewar.
So I'm certainly out of this discussion.
But if your ultimate point is "your country has some work to do", well, sure, of course.
I've lived in Australia my entire life (born here) and I can't think of a time in my working life where any of what you confidently declare is "common place and accepted" was anything like that - at least not within the city professional demographic I'm familiar with, which does trend middle class.
And the city-based tech industry in Australia is hardly a whites-only monoculture - far from it - so if you were in that sector and declared "racism was rampant" I squint my eyes a little wondering where exactly this managed to be possible. Which isn't to say it doesn't exist or isn't a problem elsewhere, but within the workplace? It would be surprising for it to be "casual" given the demographics of the sector.
Another famous example would be AFL - the racism on display not just in the stands but within the teams and the AFL org itself, would be unimaginable in any other country. Imagine if fans, teammates, coaches etc abused black NFL players the way black AFL players get abused. It would not be tolerated, and it would never happen, it's completely unimaginable.
These are not cherry picked examples, they're just two manifestations of the massive problem.
But Australia and Australians get a pass because "it's Australia".
It's not flattering to be unable to realize and admit maybe your country has some work to do. (it's not an attack on you personally)
Montréal and Toronto have become hubs for AI. That prediction was reasonably accurate.
You need to distinguish between which education systems produce people who innovate, vs which countries' capital markets companies get floated on. Compared to the US, the EU doesn't have any large cohesive stock market.
We will soon see how differing national attitudes to strong/weak regulation on AI (vs say data privacy) decide where the investor money goes; just like how national energy and regulatory policy on crypto mining in the last 5 years decided where mining moved to. There's lots of fashionable chatter about AI regulation, but I'm going to predict that there isn't anything like even a weak transnational treaty, meanwhile the 2024(/25) US/UK/Canada elections will see AI-driven exploits pushing the limits.
And the UK is now chasing the tail end of the crypto boom with a promise to have weaker regulation. [0]
Few years ago we acquired something in Montreal related to AI, and it's interesting because when we tried to get the team to relocate to California many weren't interested. A lot of the key personnel ended-up moving, but they still kept a significant presence in the city. Even today, when hiring they'll have engineers indicate early in the process they won't ever move (despite pretty much everyone considered for that office being eligible for an O-1 due to the nature of the work being done there).
What's interesting is we opened a satellite location in Toronto and it was a completely different experience. First thing people asked coming into interviews was about relocating to the US and if we could sponsor their visa. The demographics also skewed heavily toward recent immigrants to Canada.
The irony was, the Toronto location was opened specifically to house developers that simply couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration.
>Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning.
Anecdotally, as an American expat in SE Asia and Australia for the past 14 years, I've NEVER met a British expat who's keen to return. Tax, crime, weather, etc.
The 2016 predictions were political and not based on reality. Changing H1B rules to make income requirements stricter isn't exactly "hostile to foreign talent". top talent will go to the US as long as it pays the best with the most opportunities.
I agree that the 2016 predictions were political but the underfunding of USCIS and the insane backlogs have started to have an impact on our R&D pipeline, though none of this is going to other European countries - the talent is returning to India and China instead.
Anecdotally, a very good friend of mine who's an Indian national did his BS and PhD in EE (specifically in VLSI and Semiconductors) from a Tier 1 program (ie. Cal, MIT, Stanford, UIUC) and was working with a major Semiconductor company. His F-1 wasn't converted to H1B (or his O-1 app was messed up) so now he's heading back to India with a chip on his shoulder and 10+ years of experience in a technology we are trying to regain expertise in.
This same story happened with Chinese immigrants 10-15 years ago, with the 2008 recession causing a number of Chinese nationals to lose work sponsorship and thus return to China. A lot of those guys ended up founding major startups, becoming professors at top Chinese institutions, and advisors to the Government there.
Where have you heard all that stuff? At pro-immigration pitches before elections? What is this hostility towards top foreign AI talent someone supposedly has to be afraid of?
I've noticed the same thing, though I already left quite a while ago. It saddens me because when I first moved there the country provided a lot of opportunity and I grew a ton. I used to really like living there, in London specifically.
A friend started as a construction worker in the suburbs at 18 right out of high school. Now he is 40 and has a general contracting firm so large he grew out the local bank - they couldn’t write him more loans as it centralized risk.
My neighbor was a corporate guy downtown, opened up a brewery as a side hustle in a very run down neighborhood, shortly quit his corporate job and he has 3 locations now.
I think there is a failure to think outside the prescribed paths. There are some with disabilities and trauma that prevent them from doing anything but surviving, and I understand that and feel for them. But there are plenty - the majority - of people who are able bodied and need to invent their own futures.
Or maybe just be a victim forever but I don’t think that’s a good outcome.
Those two data points are extremely anecdotal and have survivorship bias. According to data I can find online, in 2021 while 549 breweries opened, 319 closed. As the number of breweries has gone up each year, a significant amount of closures also occurred. Your neighbor could have easily been one of those.
More than 50% of small businesses fail in the first year of business according to well published and cited industry data. These are all people who tried to "invent their own futures" and it did not work out. That also doesn't mean that the remaining percentage were successful. Many of them have their owners working much more than corporate full time for less money then they'd be working on a cushy 9-5 job.
For an opposite anecdote to yours, a family opened up an ice cream shop around the corner. They had good business and made ok money, but closed after 2 years. Why? Not only was the end of the day profit not great, they were heavily sacrificing time with their own family in order to run the day to day operations. They could have hired more people to handle those day to day hurdles, but that would have meant almost no take home pay.
We should encourage people to "invent their own futures" but we also have to be realistic, because we don't have good safety nets for what happens when inventing your future fails, which means you have to make your own safety net. It's also not always trivial to re-enter corporate gigs after you've been doing something else for years, especially if closing of your small business has burned you out.
It takes much more than just a good idea to make a small business succeed.
In my experience with local businesses (alt-weekly newspaper for the college / queer bar scene), the same people were starting clubs that lasted for a year or two, then closed, then they started up a new one. It was about trying out a new business plan that may or may not work and if it doesn't, clearing the slate and starting over.
The people who succeeded eventually landed on one with staying power, and the people who didn't eventually gave up. I bring it up to say that a single owner can be responsible for multiple business failures, and like you say, no one remembers those once you're successful.
I am 36 and working on my 4th company over a period of 16 years. I've started even more projects that never materialized into companies. I worked for 4 years at a startup in-between failures. Besides working at the startup, I made minimum wage or less (12/16 years).
I'm 4 years into my current company, and things are just beginning to work.
it depends on the scale. want to start a small cafe in a strip mall? if the mall has some unleased space, and is having problem filling it, you can cut a deal.
my BIL did this, and negotiated a 5 year lease for a percent of his gross sales.
the burger joint took off, and the landlord is very happy...he is paying twice the going rate due to success.
the landlord took the risk, could have been $0.
second hand restaurant equipment can be bought at a discount. food suppliers offer credit, 30 - 60 days.
if you are willing to put in the work, there are ways to get started other than borrowing money from a bank.
Nobody likes the pull your self up by your own boot straps advice, but it works.
I know many people who started with nothing but being the best right hand person they could. They ended up with the business one way or another when the owner retired. I personally can think of 3 like that without trying.
The rule of incorporation in the US is to minimize the cost of failure to the individual.
> if the mall has some unleased space, and is having problem filling it, you can cut a deal.
> and negotiated a 5 year lease for a percent of his gross sales.
> the landlord took the risk, could have been $0.
Gross sales. That's sales before expenses. Your brother-in-law took on literally all the risk in this scenario. Unless the zombie apocalypse started in that very mall, any store was going to sell some burgers and your brother-in-law was going to be paying out to the landlord before he had covered his own costs.
Yep. You got it. No upfront investment, all the risk.
But, he had ran a similar operation before. So he had an idea of what needed to be done, and how to do it.
That’s not how banks work. They will want you to either buy in or put up collateral. You can’t just walk into a bank, say “here’s the detailed plan for my club, please give me a $100 000 unsecured loan.”
Note that you can buy in via personal debt, but that is not “leave with nothing”.
This very website managed to summarize what's going on in reality back in 2017 and it remains completely true.
Because you simply go "oh they just keep trying" and I'm sitting here thinking, "well that's interesting, they're losing all this money and can just keep trying?"
The moral really comes down to this: Those who keep on challenging despite failures have a chance at finding success; those who fear failure and don't challenge will never find success.
There's an old saying that goes: "Where there's a will, there's a way."
You won't find success if you are always playing the victim card, complaining that it's the state or some big bad boogeymen oppressing you from challenging yourself.
Escaping unstable living situations by repeatedly grinding through improbable moonshots, requires you to have the emotional and financial stability necessary to repeatedly expend effort and money on attempts that fail to pay off. This can be achieved through self-worth produced by a supportive and non-traumatic upbringing, a financial safety net, finding ways to make daily life more worthwhile and recharging, and/or loved ones acting as an emotional support network. For people without this, attempting stressful tasks will only destabilize your living situation and result in burnout and suffering.
They were on your side all along, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered with the uncomfortable conversation about how they don't think your idea is going to be successful.
I really dislike stats like these, because it doesn't show the odds of getting a cushy corporate job. About 10% of the people who did a diploma with me took a technical job. Many went on to become insurance agents, HR, real estate agents, selling food, and so on. Some figured out that they can't make it as an architect or engineer, and start successful bakeries. If you choose to live outside a major town, your odds of getting a corporate job are probably lower than your odds of running a brewery.
People today talk about FAANG jobs and such but right after I graduated, all of FAANG (except Apple) were crazy oversized startups losing money. I was one of the few who stuck it out in the tech industry because I just wanted to program for a living, and I was willing to take lower salaries doing PHP than I would working at KFC. I ended up freelancing for about 5 years because many employers couldn't figure out how to make apps profitably, right until venture capital came to the country and the first unicorns appeared.
Even if you fail you learn so much in the process. I’ve had many failures in my entrepreneurial career, but during those failures I earned a salary, I had health insurance, and even in the “failure” acquisitions I had jobs despite no shareholder payout.
And now I have way less fear, way more risk tolerance, so much knowledge about things. Taking risks and doing new things is less risky to me because I can always make my own future. I have enough connections and history to take jobs, or raise capital for something new. It might work, it might not, but I’m willing to try and it’s so much more fun. Of course I want the lottery ticket but I’ve had enough singles and doubles to be very comfortable. It required many 60 hour weeks and sacrifices but I feel so alive, all the time.
My immigrant parents worked their ass off in their small business, 24/7. No health insurance, no benefits, and no barely anytime to spend with their kids.
Can everyone run their own general contracting firm? Both of your examples require workers. Good for the outliers who are doing well, but if their employees can't keep up with the cost of living that's a problem, right?
> but if their employees can't keep up with the cost of living that's a problem, right?
The sad truth is that employees that can’t afford the cost of living have little leverage and might be replaceable by employees that will work for even less (because they have to, not because they want to).
The theory requires appropriately high land value taxes. If land owners can simply hold onto land for cheap, and let the rest of society pay disproportionately more for their land’s security via cops and courts, then they are under no rush to sell.
I'm sincerely happy for their success, and it an important feature of the US that some sharp, driven people are able to create a substantial fortune for themselves.
In some ways this is in direct conflict with working-class people being able to assemble a stable life where they can depend on being able to work diligently and have some stability in life. I think the total wealth of society could be greater if we adjusted some laws and the tax code to make it more possible for working class people to have a real shot at a stable life through diligent, hard, work.
> make it more possible for working class people to have a real shot at a stable life through diligent, hard, work
The problem with this is that, ultimately, if you view yourself as "working class", as opposed to being an entrepreneur, then your shot at a stable life through diligent, hard work is not dependent on the laws and the tax code, it's dependent on the overall business environment and what kinds of employers you can find. Which means, on luck.
If you are a lucky working class person, you will be able to find an employer who (a) recognizes your diligence and hard work, (b) is able to manage the business risks of the company so that they can afford to reward you accordingly, and (c) does in fact reward you as you deserve, i.e., is willing to share the benefits of the business with you even though you're not an owner, you're just an employee.
I'm not saying there are no such employers out there; but my description should make it evident that they will be rare. Far too rare for all diligent, hard-working working class people to benefit from them. The diligent, hard-working working class people who aren't lucky enough to find one of those employers will have to live with whatever they can get, which will range all the way from "okay but not great" down to "sweatshop".
The only way to escape this crapshoot is to be an entrepreneur--i.e., to own at least a piece of whatever business your livelihood depends on (and in practice it has to be a large enough piece that your voice will carry weight in business decisions). In other words, dealing with unavoidable business risks due to the fact that the world is always changing and businesses have to adjust, is something that, all things considered, you are better off not outsourcing to an employer.
> what happens when everyone is an entrepreneur? who will work the actual jobs?
If everyone is an entrepreneur, then all of the production is being done by entrepreneurs. That means the "actual jobs" are now being done by entrepreneurs, i.e., people who own their own businesses (or a significant share in them) and produce as owners instead of employees. There is nothing at all impossible about such an economy, although of course it would be a loss for many entities in our current economy (such as large corporations who owe their profits to rent seeking, buying favorable regulations from the government, artificial monopolies, etc. instead of to actual productive advantage).
> That means the "actual jobs" are now being done by entrepreneurs, i.e., people who own their own businesses (or a significant share in them) and produce as owners instead of employees.
In cases where whatever is being produced inherently cannot be produced without a very large number of people acting in coordination (for example, designing and building cars in a large factory), yes, the mode of production I am describing would basically be a co-op. The problem at that scale, of course, is that each individual owner's share is now so small that they lose confidence that their input will have significant weight in business decisions. It's not impossible to operate co-ops effectively at this scale, but observation suggests it's very difficult, which is why such co-ops are rare compared to conventional corporations for operations at this scale.
But there is no reason why all production, or even a majority of production, needs to be of a kind that must be produced that way. Most entrepreneurs own small businesses, and most businesses in existence are small businesses, and in some sectors of the economy (for example, many kinds of services), small businesses actually do most of the production, and much of the production is indeed done by the owners, not by employees they hire. So in an economy where everyone was an entrepreneur, much if not most of the production would be done that way, much as it is now, only more so.
one could posit that a reason that large monolithic businesses exist (with centralized control etc) is because at scale you can get efficiency (to a limit i suppose)
with many small sized business interacting i wonder how it could keep efficiency with so many interacting parts (many middle-men for lack of a better word)?
> one could posit that a reason that large monolithic businesses exist (with centralized control etc) is because at scale you can get efficiency (to a limit i suppose)
Exactly--to a limit. But if you look at how large corporations work, it is at least highly plausible that they are over the limit--i.e., that they are larger, in some cases much larger, than the optimal size of a firm in their particular line of business.
The reason such large corporations can survive while being well over the optimal size of a firm in their line of business is government regulation. Government regulations favor larger businesses because the larger the business, the easier it is to absorb the costs of regulatory compliance. (And also the easier it is to buy regulations that favor your company.)
> with many small sized business interacting i wonder how it could keep efficiency with so many interacting parts
A free market does this naturally via the price mechanism. You can still have economies of scale, and in a free market we would expect most businesses to be at or near the optimal size of firm for their line of business.
Large corporations have coordination problems too--that's a key reason why there are limits to economies of scale. At some point the coordination problems outweigh any efficiencies from scale and the business gets less efficient overall if it continues to get larger.
>what happens when everyone is an entrepreneur? who will work the actual jobs?
I think you might be surprised by how few people actually want to be business owners. Lots talk about wanting to be a big baller, but to actually put your capital on the line and put in the hours year after year with risk of losing it all, not to mention being where the buck stops for all decision making - it's just not something most people want to do, if they can avoid it.
> I think you might be surprised by how few people actually want to be business owners.
I'm not surprised by it at all (though I'm not the poster you were responding directly to--that poster might be, I don't know).
I'm just pointing out that you can't avoid the tradeoff I described: if you are not a business owner, you are putting yourself at the mercy of those who are, since you are going to have to be employed by one of them. At the end of the day, business risks are real and cannot be avoided, and those who do not want to be directly exposed to those risks must realize that they are forgoing the associated rewards.
It also means you spend every waking hour running a business. Which is fine if you want to, but if you love programming/baking/gardening/etc, one realizes you'll spend very little time doing that, and most of your time doing everything but. Running a business is fun for some, but not everyone actually wants to do that.
Aren't these just anecdotes though? What was their background? What time period did they do these things? Did they have support growing up? A strong network? How many other friends or neighbors do you have and what are their outcomes? Has anyone failed? Why?
Sorry, but I'll trust the data around economic equality above random stranger anecdotes online.
Yeah, I myself am doing wonderful as well, but I'm not so narcissistic as to imagine that's some special property of "not being a victim".
1) there is lots of opportunity in the market
2) the opportunities in the market are less common and more difficult, in labor, luck, or expertise required than the past 3 generations experienced.
How are these two contradictory things?
Put another way, at the individual level, there is still lots of opportunity. But at the aggregate level there is a squeeze.
That's pretty unusual to graduate college at 18, and then to start as a construction worker with a college degree. But my anecdote would be my uncle who started as a diesel mechanic from a young age. He worked hard all his life but never made a lot of money and then died of cancer at 60.
Great that these people had success. But how many breweries are there a town of 10k people, 1 or 2 maybe. These are the 1% success stories. The economics doesn't allow each of us to open businesses that succeed, there just isn't that much demand. Such as amazon wiping out many small stores, before that walmart killing small cities downtowns when they built one of the edge of town. That doesn't mean there were not some other new businesses to be formed, but there's a limit.
Blatant goalpost shifting. Conversation was about how representative the anecdotes were to the documented reality of the rate of small business failures. Now, you’re discussing global poverty.
But even if we go with your scrambling goalposts, small business start rates have declined markedly over the past 50 years at the noted high rate of failure:
The very next video Youtube recommended did a great job of critiquing that video, in my opinion, digging deeper into the statistics and showing how the 1% are skewing those statistics significantly and hiding declines for poor people, as well as other stats such as mental illness, things are getting much worse, especially in richer countries, and those stats are being ignored by people trying to push that the world is only getting better and better over time.
> I think there is a failure to think outside the prescribed paths.
because the prescribed paths work for a larger population. it doesn't need ingenuity, and less luck. hence why it is generic advice.
economies cannot support everyone being an entrepreneur. if you want to be a go-getter that's fine. you're in like company here. but its dumb or at least disingenuous to think of this as a predictably available example for all.
> Or maybe just be a victim forever but I don’t think that’s a good outcome.
Alternatively, recognize that you have two anecdotes of people succeeding. It doesn't mean there aren't systemic issues, and people can both strive to succeed in the current system and push for its change.
It's dull reading tl;dr: bootstrap yourself like my friends.
Everything starts small and takes time. The moment someone gets successful there is some tendency to try and tear them down, find out why they were privileged, what connections they had, and worst case say they got lucky. If it weren’t for people trying to do something - anything - taking a risk - not knowing if it will succeed but not caring if it goes under or not - there wouldn’t even be anything. No art, no startups, no creative endeavors.
Especially among the highly educated in our western system, people desire guaranteed paths. “Check these boxes and get this, get this credential and get that.” Everything in reality is hustle and sales.
As another anecdote a former gym trainer is now a firefighter. She tried a long time to be a firefighter but couldn’t break into it despite passing all the tests - there is a whole application process following all the tests and credentials and it’s quite complex. So after a few years she started sniffing out where the firefighters hung out, their bars, and went out there and spoke to them, told them her story, made connections. She did get accepted following that because the people who could make it happen helped her, after she took the initiative to think outside the box and meet them in a unique way.
All the successful people have a different story. And your definition of success can vary greatly. But to say society is making success impossible is simply untrue - I see so much opportunity and so many upcoming people all the time. Unless you are disabled or traumatized or have some other issue, I can’t take someone who blames society for their lack of “being where they want to be in life” seriously. Not in America at least.
> But to say society is making success impossible is simply untrue - I see so much opportunity and so many upcoming people all the time.
It's not impossible. It's harder than it was 20-50 years ago. Real wage growth has stagnated since the 1970s. The cost of higher education has grown at a faster rate than wages can keep pace. Young people (those under say 35) can't afford to buy homes, with the rate of home ownership amongst this age group dropping by ~20% since 1993. The median age of a home owner is now 56 years old, the highest it's ever been.
It takes but a moment to look up these things and realize there are systemic issues at play, but no, continue to share anecdotes and hyperbole.
I think you and the person you're responding to are dealing in absolutes. In some ways it is harder, but in others it's easier. The world's knowledge is literally at people's fingertips now. Almost any creative skill someone has can be leveraged to make money. In many ways it's the easiest it's ever been to start a business or make money.
But, as you mention, homes are priced insanely high. The flight to the coasts has caused anything within 50-100 miles of the ocean to go crazy price wise. That is much harder on people.
Healthcare is a mess. One of the biggest small business unlocks the US gov. could do is pass universal healthcare. So many people are tied to companies for healthcare, and boom we would see if we could break that tie would be like the tech boom all over again, if not greater.
> The world's knowledge is literally at people's fingertips now. Almost any creative skill someone has can be leveraged to make money.
There are two ways to read this sentence. One optimistic, people can monitize their skills! The other pessimistic, anyone with the same skills as me can easily compete with me. Thats why it seems that skills that are highly specialized are rewarded most these days. And the average joe doesn't have highly specialized skills, otherwise they wouldn't be average. And if prices are a race to the bottom through vigorous competition, you will find that the largest capital owners will be the biggest winners, since they already have a leg up.
>But, as you mention, homes are priced insanely high
Homes in some areas are higher. Others they have increased with inflation and are more affordable due to lower interest rates.
The "life is so hard these days" crowd is living in a bubble. They live in a coastal city and have debt from their expensive school that they may be struggling to pay back. [Not coincidentally this describes lots of the media].
Reality is that the majority of people don't go to college. And the majority of those that do graduate with reasonable debt into jobs that pay well enough to pay it off. Simply put, it's easier to live today than virtually any other time in American history.
> The moment someone gets successful there is some tendency to try and tear them down, find out why they were privileged, what connections they had, and worst case say they got lucky
> So after a few years she started sniffing out where the firefighters hung out, their bars, and went out there and spoke to them, told them her story, made connections. She did get accepted following that
You’re saying that people tear down successful people by saying they’re privileged or have connections (but implying that they’re not successful because of these things and rather because they took a risk), and then immediately say that if it weren’t for the connections, she wouldn’t be successful? Seems contradictory to me. There’s no recipe for success, so discounting the luck factor also seems disingenuous.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that your friends “made it” but I doubt that it’s solely their own doing without any “insider” help. It’s the same thing now, applying for companies - if you don’t have a referral, you’re not getting to the front of the line for callbacks.
Personally, I’m against glorifying hustle culture and this sort of risk taking, because it implies that everyone can do it and if you’re not successful then you aren’t taking enough risks.
> Especially among the highly educated in our western system, people desire guaranteed paths. “Check these boxes and get this, get this credential and get that.”
But that’s how it used to be - and it’s not so anymore. I think it’s a valid complaint.
> You’re saying that people tear down successful people by saying they’re privileged or have connections (but implying that they’re not successful because of these things and rather because they took a risk), and then immediately say that if it weren’t for the connections, she wouldn’t be successful?
When people say "oh, they're successful because of their connections," they generally don't mean because they went out did a bunch of customer acquisition work, they mean because they have a dad who's a bigwig at Amazon or something.
True, but my point is that merit only takes you so far. If you really want to “make it”, you need merit AND an underlying freedom to take risks.
If what you have is the only means of survival, your appetite for risk is strongly diminished. So when someone claims that “you would have made it if you took risks” is a little two-faced.
> All the successful people have a different story. And your definition of success can vary greatly. But to say society is making success impossible is simply untrue - I see so much opportunity and so many upcoming people all the time.
There is a difference between "anyone can" and "everyone can at the same time".
The economy grows only a few percent a year. That means the society as a whole is an almost-zero-sum game. In the long term, things will get better. But in the time scale relevant to individual success, they remain mostly the same. If you are successful, most of that success is at the expense of other people. The majority can't be successful at the same time.
I’m taking the (sadly) unpopular view that you are better being optimistic, hopeful, confident you can succeed, working towards your goals.
It is tough when the pessimism is there. But I look around me and see so much to be positive about and hopeful for.
And 3% of 23 trillion is a lot of new cash. But yes, it all goes to the rich, or whatever. Don’t bother being hopeful, don’t bother trying something new, you can’t overcome whatever etc. etc.
Can people choose to be optimistic, hopeful, and confident? Or are those traits something shaped by genetics and life experience?
Also, 3% of $23 trillion is not that much, if you divide it by 330 million. That's what success looks like if we are talking about success for everyone at the same time.
I'm repelled by "millennials are choosing experiences over things!" which I perceive as disingenuous and/or vapid.
Let people afford a home and family-raising, and without a lifetime of student loan debt required for BS jobs.
And stop trying to twist the forced economic exploitation of us, to sell us your avocado mindfulness spa package, like a gratuitous insult thrown on top of everything else.
Is that angst I’m reading? That’s because you are judging your experiences. Lucky for you we have a corporate sponsored mindfulness bagged lunch that is non-optional. Now be happy and get back to work.
Cost of living isn't going up. The value of our money is going down, and real wages are stagnant. Technology is, at it has always been, deflationary, but we see none of those benefits.
Basically, the typical process of getting iterative raises has become fighting to tread water. Saving cash or cash-derived assets is somewhat meaningless because you're guaranteed a future where the savings buy a fraction of what they do when you put it away.
No. The cost of living IS going up. Corporations bought a huge chunk of the housing stock and have been fixing the prices and squeezing renters. Everything else you said is still true, though.
The point of the article.. (the positive spin as you put it) is that one's mental state due to increased wisdom and experienced puts one in a better position to achieve or appreciate the milestones that may have not worked out at a younger age. Fame in the example of the musician, finding appreciation in a partner in the older couple, etc.
The message is around things happening in their due course rather than in some sort of age-delimited set of phases.
While idealistic, it's more optimistic than the feeling of having failed many of us feel as we compare ourselves to others.
I’m not going to argue that reaching traditional life milestones isn’t harder for a lot of young folks today, but that isn’t really the focus of the article in my opinion. A lot of the folks mentioned are from one or two generations prior, and took unconventional paths to get to their present life. A lot of wildly successful people say they didn’t really start to figure life out until their 30s or 40s. I think the spirit of the article is “you never know when your time might come”.
So many people I know in tech have incredibly highly paid jobs, much much higher than their parents. That doesn't even include the immigrants from much less developed countries.
While I understand the anger that our parent's generation had an easier life, we have reached limits to growth, like a jar full of bacteria 99% full. Articles like these help reduce people's anxiety over the drop in living standards that will force them to make changes which they would not make voluntarily. Our parent's lifestyles were never sustainable.
What you might have that your parents didn’t have is a longer life expectancy. Not for sure, but it is a good idea to consider the deadlines in your head.
Fwiw, life expectancy is dropping in the US, in part due to lifestyle choices, but also due to deaths of despair. The increase in deaths of despair is indicative of adversity in the greater population - not just those who essentially commit suicide via drugs or alcohol.
It's dropped by much yet, but I anticipate life expectancy to drop further - and become more significant in relation to previous generations as economic adversity increases, also making adequate medical care harder to come by.
Do not have kids before buying a house. This will almost certainly guarantee you’ll never reach escape velocity to buy a house if you have standard income levels.
Also, it doesn’t actually matter much when you have kids. As long as you have a fertile partner and sufficient resources you can basically have them whenever.
The time to have kids depends on what parenting style you want. If you want a more hands off approach where you mostly just prevent kids from making stupid decisions while they decide their own course in life, it’s fine, perhaps advantageous being an older parent. If you prefer though to micromanage your kid and learn about life with them as you go along and get in arguments with them about the best way to do things, being younger is better.
> It's more like you may never have what your parents had.
That’s a natural consequence of economic mobility.
It would suck in a different way if everyone always had more than their parents in absolute (inflation-adjusted) amounts and obviously, not everyone can have more in percentile terms.
It doesn't feel like life is actually getting harder, it feels like people's expectations of what will be given to them is just unrealistic. If you bought into the idea that just getting a college degree would guarantee a dreamlike future with a great job and a house, I don't know what to tell you. There were never any promises made to that effect by people who mattered. Maybe some vague memory of a TV show or an old movie misled you into believing this? In reality, life has always been hard, dreams have always been crushed or deferred. But now we have instantaneous access to all recorded information, are constantly entertained, never get lost, and can travel anywhere on the planet in a day.
If you live in Australia, it’s hard to disagree with the numbers.
The average Australian in 1984 could buy a home that cost 3.3 times their annual income. In 2023, it's 10 times what the average person earns in a year.
Some of these examples are great - a pattern I see so much with my parent's generation is that they get locked into the same pattern of life. The same group of people, the same routines and the same hobbies for decades. I think that it's the natural path as we age - and you have to actively make choices to fight it if you don't want that.
However, there's only some aspects of life in which you truly have choice later in life. The cold hard truth of biology (especially female biology) is that probabilities of successfully having children start declining pretty quickly at a certain point.
And if you don't start saving for retirement early enough? You won't have a pension. If you don't buy a house when you're (relatively) young? At some point you'll find it very hard to get a mortgage.
It's great to write a relatively shallow piece about how you don't need to hit milestones so early - but that's a symptom of an underlying system which is increasingly disenfranchising young people and not giving them the opportunity to have ownership in society.
Expectations are important and are missing from the equation here. Not everyone needs children, a fat pension or a large house to be fulfilled. It is also perfectly fine to be with the same group of people, have the same routines and the same hobbies for your entire life.
The less you want, the fewer milestones you need to hit.
I used to think my dad was boring because he never really wanted to do anything. Worked the same mid-level job for 30+ years, had no friends--just took care of us. A couple years back he passed away, smile on his face. Told me he did everything he ever wanted. Told me not to work so hard.
I think about this all the time whenever I'm stressed about claiming my "ownership in society."
That's a good point. Trying to attain milestones because of some absorbed societal pressure is a recipe for unhappiness.
But that's not really what this article says. If they had someone who said "I thought I needed kids, then I didn't and I'm totally happy with it" that would be aligned with that message. But to have someone who says "I didn't have kids until I was 50" is a bit dishonest, because biological realities make that almost impossible (for women, anyway).
It's really uplifting to show lots of examples of people who took a different path and found happiness in a less conventional way. It's less uplifting to show lots of examples of people who did the conventional stuff, but later in life, because statistically that is unlikely to be possible for most people who leave those things until later. It feels more like building false hope.
The article presents kids as an option after 50 for men, not women, and that’s reasonable. It’s a popular thing to do to draw similarities between decreases in fertility between men and women, but it’s not helpful. There’s a plethora of risks that increase for men, but they all go from “negligable” to “slightly less negligable”.
> The less you want, the fewer milestones you need to hit.
Doesn't feel like a good answer to the complaint that young people today can't possibly hit all the milestones their parents did, and their grandparents took for granted.
The same amount of life, the same amount of effort and dedication, in a seemingly improving and more advanced world, still buys you less life milestones than it did for your elders. If anything, this sounds like a social analogue of a textbook case of inflation.
In 1970, a US couple might have an “imaginarily fair” claim on 1/100Mth of America.
Now, that same age couple might only have a claim on about 1/167Mth of America. That’s about 40% less land or share of other inherently-constrained resources per American. Other countries have had more pressure on their populations.
It’s no surprise that “buying a big lot with a freestanding house” was a lot more attainable when there were 40% fewer people chasing that dream. Part of it is inescapable math.
Inflation adjusted housing prices were basically steady from 1950 to 2000. Yet the US population went from 150 million to 300 million.
It is surprising that for most of the 20th century housing was very affordable and then something changed in the late 20th century that culminated in two housing disasters in the 21st (the first is the housing crash and now a housing market that basically excludes all but the rich).
With interest rates consistently over 7% and sometimes over 16%, a simple price chart doesn’t tell the full affordability story.
When rates fall under 4%, house prices will naturally be higher in desirable areas because a lot of buyers are buying on monthly payment, not headline purchase price. Cheaper mortgages make for more expensive houses.
You said that the size of the population determines housing cost.
Now, when I showed you this is totally wrong, beyond any doubt, you changed the story. Now it's the interest rates that determine housing cost.
This is like trying to have a discussion with an antivaxer. No matter what they say, you prove them wrong, and then they change their story, pretending like the nonsense they said before never existed.
Look up a chart of mortgage rates. You're still wrong. Bye!
Huh, I never thought about it this way. I'm not 100% convinced this is valid math, but I can't find any obvious fault with it. Thanks, I have something to think through.
EDIT: in the 50 years since 1970s the US economy wasn't still - technology made huge leaps across all industries, and lots of wealth has been created. One would think this would offset the population growth, but it seems that it didn't.
Yeah, but people aren't satisfied with just any land. They want the same land everybody else wants in the big cities. They want to be near the population center, but the land there was already relatively filled back then. The computation naturally pushes the prices up to levels that most cannot afford it.
This makes housing into a lucrative investment, which probably drives prices up even further. Nobody wants to see the value of their investment fall, so they fight against anything nearby that would decrease it (NIMBY).
This is a good perspective, but I'm not sure I fully agree. I wonder if it's just that the nature of work, the nature of "what pays well," has changed.
Sure, my grandparents had a nice house, but they also worked the mines (literally). Would I say that the work they do is less effort than making $200k+ sitting in bed writing some code, while drinking Starbucks?
If you don't adapt to the times, you're going to have a bad time no matter what era you are in.
The mythical "middle class on easy mode" of boomers isn't coming back, it should be considered a historical anomaly. A vacuum in time where post-WW2 all but the US was in ruins, giving it economic free reign for a few decades.
That being said, I admit it's not as simple as international competition only. Quite a few life supporting institutes (healthcare, education, housing) are downright dysfunctional for various other reasons.
I'm not sure the "various other reasons" are unrelated. Give people a comfortable, secure life and they will be happy and productive. Chip away at that and you start to unravel every other part of society.
It's bad enough that we have to work for most of our waking hours for ~45 years, but this used to achieve a middle class existence and relative security, an essential basis to form a family.
Now you can be a working couple (twice as much labor as before) and struggle to achieve middle class basics. And even if you do, the world is so volatile that it can be taken away from you on any given day.
Expectations go both ways too. Literally like an itch, the more you scratch the more it will itch after the most transient moment of relief.
People tend to foolishly believe that their wants and desires are in some static container that once filled will lead to satiation as opposed to the reality that the more the container is filled, the bigger the container gets and at the same time it gets harder and harder to add to the container.
Perhaps I'm jaded but taking life advice from the WSJ seems a little odd.
First of all, most of this piece is self-acceptance repackaged as 'everything is alright' style thinking. Everything is not alright for many people. Things are objectively worse for a lot of folks and suggesting things are just meant to be is just lazy.
Self-acceptance though is totally good to practice. I would go back in time and do more work on myself so I could accept the good things in my life faster with more integrity. But I can't, so I have no choice to but to accept that maybe I'll be a slightly older father. I can't actually change that but I also am not under any illusions that being an older parent would be better, all else being equal. That's just absurd. All else isn't equal though. I personally think siring a child at ~50 is fine but only if you think you'd be a better parent.
> I personally think siring a child at ~50 is fine but only if you think you'd be a better parent.
I think most people would be far better parents if they waited until at least around 30. At 50, I think their only problems would be their health and lifespan, which is not as big of a deal in my opinion. If you know what you're doing as a parent and have your finances straight, your kids don't really need you after graduating from college anyway.
Some people (males) are better parents at 50, some are horrible at 20 and only slightly better at 25.
I became father at 38, second time at 40. I am much better father than I would be 10 years ago. I've done some cool shit before this happened, reinvented myself few times, tons of extreme/adrenaline sports, backpacking around the world, bought house for parents, and I have very little left to prove to myself and absolutely nothing to anybody else.
I understood exactly what makes me 'tick' and long term happy, understand myself and women much much better, so I could pick (hopefully) a lifetime partner and mother of our children more appropriately. All this takes time, for some like me a bit more to grok properly. Not even going into career and financial stability, those are obvious and not that important once you are above 'poor' threshold.
Its fine for a guy to be parent a bit later, just be sure to use that extra free time to make yourself the best version of yourself, and not waste it on shallow stuff like couch binge watching or parties, grow out of such things since there are much much better things to do in life, like rock climbing. And recognize toxic/broken relationships, take a (hard) lesson and move away from them, unfortunately you can't fix broken people.
I had my first child when I was 38. Not as part of a well-conceived strategy, just, like, that's how life turned out. My wife was 33.
All in all, I'm happy that we did end up having kids, but if I could go back through my life and rearrange things in some godlike way that let me still marry the same person and have the same children, I'd definitely have kids earlier.
I feel like it's hard in my 40s to have the same energy that I did 10 years ago, and raising kids is definitely something you have to pour energy into. Also, my mother died a year and a half ago, in her mid-70s, and I really feel like both she and my kids would have benefited from having longer together. My father is 80 now and while he remains healthy, it seems very unlikely that he'll actually see his grandchildren grow up. My father-in-law died when his first grandchild was an infant.
I think it'd also be nice to have my late 40s as a time when I could really heavily concentrate on my career because my kids were old enough to handle a lot of the small day-to-day things by themselves, since this feels like probably my prime earning time.
None of this is stuff that makes me say, "I screwed up, I should have made any sacrifice to have it different." Overall, life is great. But if you're 28 and you're thinking, "I could go either way -- wait a decade to have kids or have them now," I'd personally recommend "have them now."
As 35 and a parent of two young children, I strongly agree. It's a message I'd send back to my 23 year old self, even though I also know that at 23, I wouldn't believe it: if you feel you'd like to have kids, have them now. Those extra years didn't change me that much, but having kids at 23 would mean regaining most of the autonomy by the time I'm 40, instead of 50. In terms of energy and prospects of doing anything interesting with it, the difference between 40 and 50 seems much bigger than that between 23 and 33.
Alas, parenthood experience is both rewarding and challenging in ways that are near-impossible to properly communicate to non-parents. Perhaps that's for the better, as otherwise humanity would've gone extinct long ago.
Going from kids at 35 to kids at 23 sounds like a bridge too far to me. Your points about having kids later are fair enough, but kids at 23 basically means giving up any opportunity to have a life of your own as an adult. You're going from being a kid yourself directly to being a parent.
To each their own, but I doubt this would be a good idea for most people (or their kids). 28-32 range seems like a more reasonable compromise. Then you at least get your 20s (or most of them) to have some fun, figure yourself out, get your career going, have a failed relationship or two, etc. before taking on 1000% more responsibility and limiting yourself in many different ways.
Also, just speaking for myself personally, I'm 38 (with a 4 year old) and actually feel healthier and more energetic now than I did during my 20s due to taking diet, exercise, sleep, and other health/lifestyle things much more seriously. I don't know if I'll continue to feel this way into my 40s, but I guess my point is that age definitely isn't the only factor--I'm not even sure it's the most important.
Fair enough, and you're likely right that 23 is a bit too early. I'm writing this from a perspective of being 35, with a 4 year old and an almost-2 year old. It's fine now, and I too feel OK in terms of energy levels - but I also fear that, by the time the kids grow up enough for my wife and I to regain some degree of autonomy, neither of us will be strong enough to make good use of it. But maybe it's just me panicking a little.
Agree with this, had my kid at the age of 44, exactly ten years older than my dad was when I was born. My parents both died in the last couple of years and although I have some photos of them with my son, their only grandchild, it saddens me that they never got to spend more time together. My mother's situation was especially cruel as she got Alzheimers and declined pretty quickly - went into a home two months before the first lockdown.
And it is worth pointing out that it may be safer to have a kid at 33 today then it was at 26 fifty years ago. People were smoking, the air was dirtier, a lot of medical imaging was rarer, etc.
Having kids later in life keeps the total population smaller while still allowing the same number of people to exist spread out over time. This has a theoretical positive effect of reducing crowding. Would you rather your children have the opportunity to live in a house, or be permanent apartment/condo dwellers?
I guess it’s highly regional, but for the US as a whole at least hasn’t had a population decline in ever. Which means that following your logic, sooner is better. I think a more practical bit of advice, if a house if a concern, is to buy a house to raise your children in.
> Which means that following your logic, sooner is better.
This is a collective action problem. Everyone benefits in terms of room with a smaller population. But yes, the individual benefits by defecting from the collective action.
> if a house if a concern, is to buy a house to raise your children in.
Not raise in, live in. It would be economically convenient to pass your house down to one of your children at the point when you are downsizing for retirement and they are wanting to begin a family.
I can't agree with this more. Starting a family should not be taken lightly as some kind of whimsical selfish destiny.
When people have kids later, it's because they're not ready. Some people are never ready because they are needed more elsewhere. Family will consume all of your free time, money, and effort. It's a big sacrifice.
I think a lot of people are simply anxious and have trouble making long-term commitments, and conflate that feeling with this abstract idea of readiness. No one is "ready" to do something for the first time including child-rearing.
Nobody forces you to spend 200k on a student loan, and people which nonestly and dutyfully paid back theirs -or never applied for one!- shouldn't pay off yours. I am pretty sure even in the US there are many well-earning people that didn't went to college.
It is just that it is seen as a must b/c marketing something works with most people.
One top-important thing in life you need are connections, solves many things.
I've been quite successful in work so far and I've hit most of the traditional milestones like owning a car, buying a house, and what not, but love? Haha, I am so comically behind my peers that it has stopped hurting and almost become funny at this point.
I've stopped believing it'll happen, hope just leads to suffering. I'm far too broken and messed up as a person.
I thought a lot like you and ended up meeting my partner when I was 30. I was way behind pretty much everyone I knew. But, now it seems I'm the most happy out of all those people. It took that long for me to figure out who I was, know what I wanted, and find someone who matched up.
Can I ask what you do? I feel that it is hard to go outside and do many activities on my own without looking out of place, especially for someone like me.
The older you get, the harder it is to make new romantic relationships.
You can sort of make up for this by having extensive experience younger in life, so you can more aptly navigate the fewer opportunities you'll have as you age.
If you don't have that skill, good luck.
I don't think therapy is capable of really teaching this either. You can read a book about how to play soccer, but you actually need to spend ten thousand hours with the ball. If you start playing soccer at 3yo, you'll be a natural. If you start at 30yo, well, it can be done but it's not going to look very traditional and it's going to be much harder.
I think the "pickup artist" movement and the rise of people like Andrew Tate illustrate the problem well. Applying a deliberate strategy to engineer romantic relationships usually ends poorly, but I can see why so many men are attempting it.
I'd say the opposite. There has been a massive, concerted, sustained effort to make us think we want more things that we actually want.
A description I stole (I'd give credit where due, but I don't remember the source): Advertising is designed to make the person you are envy the person you could be with their product. That is, advertising attempts to steal your satisfaction and then offers to sell it back to you.
Take cars, for instance. I have a car that drives just fine. Ah, but with the car in the advertisement, the girls look at me with interest. If I want that, I need to go buy that car. (Maybe those ads are the reason that the first sign of a midlife crisis is going out and buying a fancy new car.) The point of the ads is to make me want to buy a car when I don't actually want a car. Same, and equally obvious, with beer, soft drink, and potato chip commercials. It's more subtle with some other kinds of ads, but it's still there.
This has been going on for decades - for all of our lives, in fact. (The difference now compared to the 1960s is that we don't have the same thing going on in cigarette ads.)
What's happening now is that more and more people have maxed out, either financially or emotionally. Financially is "I can't make enough money or borrow enough money to continue to play this game." (The decline of the middle class may drive this, at least in part.)
The emotional part of maxing out is when you realize: "I've tried that kind of thing a bunch of times. Buying this one isn't going to satisfy me. I don't actually have to buy it to find that out; I already know."
A related phenomena is the realization that you can't actually have it all. You can't have the fulfilling job and the high pay and lots of vacation time and the nice car and the nice house and the boat and lots of money in the bank. Women can't have the nice career and be there with their kids (neither can men, but for most families, the women are the ones getting pinched on that particular front.) You have to choose what is more important, and try to get that, even if it costs you other things that you also want. "You can have it all" is a lie, and people are starting to see that.
Oh I totally agree about advertising. My comment wasn’t well thought out.
I guess I mean it’s more about not building wealth: go live your life, don’t save for a pension. Don’t strive for a bigger house to build roots and a family, just rent one in a cool city and have fun! Don’t buy a car outright and maintain it like your fuddy duddy parents, just lease one and be happy.
Still a badly thought out comment I’m afraid but I can’t quite put my finger on it
This is almost like you're saying the same thing as me. We, the advertisers, can make more money from you if you lease your car instead of buying it, if you rent your apartment instead of buying a house, if you spend everything instead of saving for retirement.
So maybe you're seeing a sub-species of the broader thing I'm seeing.
> Ah, but with the car in the advertisement, the girls look at me with interest. If I want that, I need to go buy that car. (Maybe those ads are the reason that the first sign of a midlife crisis is going out and buying a fancy new car.)
Wanting to attract and competing to attract a desirable mate is a basic mechanism of nature that enables the propagation of species. Those ads might use it specifically to show cars can help, but the underlying desire would still be there without the ads.
Why in the world would The Man conspire to make you not want those things?
The more possessions and money you desire, the harder you work to buy more things in the economy, pushing up GDP, and driving up the value of stocks, real estate, etc. that rich people own.
The conspiracy is not to "own" those things, even though in most cases you still need them. So don't fret that you're still renting and don't own your own place and pay no attention to the fact that your rent goes to an enormous REIT that you'll pay for the rest of your life as opposed to when you finally own your home free and clear. Don't worry about owning possessions, just send subscription services a monthly fee, each and every month for the rest of your life, unlike that book on your shelf that you can read now or when you're 80.
Wanting possessions definitely fuels you to work hard, but you know what gives people even more drive? Existential threats like not being able to afford food or keep a roof over your head. A man with his own house and his own car and no debts is a man you don't have much leverage over. A man who needs to keep sending you a monthly flow of money in order to have shelter, entertainment and whatever else is a man who you control on a fundamental level.
"The Man" would rather have you renting rather than owning. There are also those who see the increased cost of life as a good thing because it would help the Earth due to decreased consumption and a lower population.
They'd prefer GDP growth to slow bc people were satisfied with less, vs people getting mad as fuck about poor living standards and starting to flip cars over and k*ll politicians.
More like, a concerted media effort to nudge people to churn out kids. People can chill on the rat race, so long as they churn out kids so that the wheels keep turning
I was a bit of a late bloomer when it comes to career, and the beginning was very challenging to land my first junior developer position. I'll never forget the guy who hired me commenting something along the lines of "it's unfortunate you didn't start earlier, you could've gone so much further", or something similar. He ended up being a great mentor, but that comment always bothered me and is the thing I remember most about him.
Now several years later and I'm very happy where I'm at. And I've come to the realization, if I had gone directly into CS in college, there is a fairly good chance I may have gotten burned out by now and moved on to something completely different. So the "right on time" idea resonates with me, but YMMV.
Now what are the chances that a woman would get pregnant at 51?
It is what it is. While I’m an only child and will never have biological grandchildren (married and by choice), my aunt who is 82 years old has been able to see her two daughters get married and have six kids and between those six kids have four kids.
The tradeoffs are real.
> This time, quitting her job led to a debut solo album, television appearances and sold-out shows
And for every one of her, there are thousands of singers in obscurity that are probably just as talented making $.0006 per play on Spotify and doing free gigs for tips at the local nightclub.
Life is what it is, but not meeting those deadlines have real consequences. I’m no wunderkind. While I was on a perfect timeline up until I was 32 - graduated at 22, house and married at 28, etc - it’s probably because I did feel pressure that I had to start over between 32-34 (2006).
But, myself and my best friend since high school were on similar paths through high school and college - top of our classes (we went to different schools), went to the same college on academic scholarships, etc. I know what the road not taken looks like. He got married at 26 and been married for 20+ years and didn’t give up half his stuff because of divorce at 32. He captured the upside from real estate and didn’t make as many dumb decisions before he was 35.
Again, I’m not jealous nor have I ever been.
While he has literally 6 times more saved than I do for retirement and he is one day younger than I am, I made the best of my situation of being an empty nester and a remote worker so I don’t have to retire to enjoy the life of a retired person (see the second link). You play with the cards you are dealt.
I told him a long time ago that I realize that we aren’t on the same road and I’m always pushing for him. We are both in a good place now.
I spent years and years comparing myself against imaginary milestones, putting off my happiness for some constantly shifting goal instead of focusing on trying to cultivate daily moment to moment experiences that make me happy.
I had a recent shro trip that really gave me perspective for how much of my life I've spent just being anxious, thinking I couldn't be happy because I wasn't living the /right/ life.
There is no /right/ life. And you don't one day reach an expiration date on fullfilment.
Idk if I’m just hopelessly naive or what, I’ve never compared myself to others or pinned happiness on some sort of life timeline. I like the Porsche 911 gt3 but I’ll never have one but that doesn’t make me sad or depressed. Many people further up the corporate ladder at my job are younger than me but it doesn’t bother me for some reason. Again, maybe I’m just naive in a blessed way.
I imagine they were more interested in the age of the partner as men can produce offspring until very late in their life (see Al Pacino for a recent example) whereas women do undergo some physical changes that make them incapable after a certain age. If it was a 51 year old man but a 20 year old woman, that's a very different story than both of them being well over 40.
Everyone knows a man can get a woman pregnant at 51, what would be surprising is a woman having a successful pregnancy without complications at that age. If that's what happened why not include it, if not and she was younger, I fear women make takeaway a false message here.
idk how much it would derail the discussion. The first paragraph said specifically “she couldn’t get pregnant” after trying for five years, indicating fertility problems.
If she was in her thirties then that would've turned the discussion into East Palestine. If she was in her fifties it would've proved their point better than the man's story and they would've used hers instead.
> would’ve turned the discussion into East Palestine
I guess you’re right about that. There’s so many illogical people on the internet without reading comprehension. I thought you speaking about a specific kind of discussion.
Possibly but not likely. It specifically said “she” couldn’t get pregnant. Not “they” couldn’t get pregnant.
My interpretation seems to be the most correct one based on the juxtaposition. He finally found the “right one” but “she couldn’t get pregnant.”
Of course, he could have lied or not looked into his own fertility issues. Being skeptical should always be a given when reading articles like this.
But also, what you’re saying goes against what many other people here have been commenting (i.e. “it’s well known that men can have children late in life”).
And let’s say that he did have fertility issues. My point would still stand, the mentioning of her age wouldn’t derail the discussion. (Which I think you’re agreeing with)
the counterpoints to that are that everything you observed are based on pervasive assumptions. which would be reflected in what everyone else wrote. which are perpetuated by the same health professionals and individuals that don't look into men's fertility realities first.
but for example, why do we know its just "she couldn't get pregnant", were their other partners? was there an accident in the past? was one of her ovaries taken out in a procedure? the article doesn't say, the only thing for us to assume is that they tried and tried and tried and eventually one egg stuck.
mentioning her age shouldn't derail a discussion whether she was 25 or 43 or other. that part we agree on, or at least I agree on, I think you're suggesting that she was closer in age and "therefore it would be okay", which is different than my observation entirely.
My point was that if you take the article at face-value and believe that the journalist did her due diligence and that the man in the article was telling the truth, then you can _presume_ (not assume) that the woman had fertility issues so her age wouldn’t matter regardless.
Also, you must have missed the paragraph in my last comment where I acknowledged it does make sense to be skeptical when reading articles like this, which is what you’re doing in recognizing that people make assumptions and then those assumptions pervade culture, media, etc etc.
Yes, I get that men have fertility issues too. Yes, there’s been a history of women being blamed for fertility issues. Yes, the medical community used to do XYZ and still does ABC today when dealing with fertility issues, etc etc.
Yes, I know all of those things and I still have the same opinion. Nothing in those first 2 paragraphs of the article set off any BS alarms for me.
If you want to be one of those “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” or “anybody can write anything on Wikipedia” proselytizers, then that’s your prerogative. I’ve outgrown that and that seems to be where we disagree.
> If you want to be one of those “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” or “anybody can write anything on Wikipedia” proselytizers, then that’s your prerogative. I’ve outgrown that and that seems to be where we disagree.
nah just on this topic because I see how it happens
article could have mentioned the partners ages and we simply have an absence of it to guess over based on our own/preferred “lived experiences”
Men can remain fertile well into their seventies and even into the eighties, with occasional random stories of a man in his nineties impregnating a woman. It does not happen the other way round, unfortunately.
At least when it comes to love and marriage I definitely think settling that in yours 20s is best, or being on course to settle it. I think dating becomes very hard after 30 and there are big generational gaps and I think the fertility industry is not a good solution. I think its sub-optimal trying to find a partner as you get older.
Ideally, the numbers Stanford listed (married at 26...) would have been preferable to me at least. It might be good to figure out why people miss that and figure out how to improve it rather than counting on the last resort of fertility treatments in your 40s.
I understand the sentiment, but I think plenty of people do in fact need to "settle", because they have unrealistic expectations and are very unlikely to get what they want.
> It might be good to figure out why people miss that
In Western societies at least, often it is women working on their careers, which may take at least into their 30s before they've reached the desired level. It is a choice that these women make, so I don't think it can be "improved" unless different choices are taken.
Everyone's talking about declining fertility but nobody's talking about declining energy. Raising children is hard work, at least if you want to do it all yourself and do a good job. I wish every day that my body was 20 years younger. And I wish my parents were 20 years younger too, they'd be a lot more able to provide support and enjoy their grandchildren. By the same token I'll be quite old when my kids have children, if I even live to see it.
One of the interesting stats I learned recently is that if you are not a parent by the age of 30, there is a 50% chance that you will never be a parent.
Your (or their) conclusion from that data is wrong. You could just as easily say that if you aren't a parent at age 30, there is a 50% chance that you decided you wanted to be childless at 20.
There isn't enough data to conclude one way or another. We need to know how many of those people over 30 still desire children but tried and failed, and then tried IVF and failed (or couldn't afford it), and/or tried adoption but couldn't afford it or failed.
You need a lot more data to come to the conclusion you did.
> how many of those people over 30 still desire children but tried and failed, and then tried IVF and failed (or couldn't afford it), and/or tried adoption but couldn't afford it or failed
You're also missing some big ones:
- people over 30 who have overly busy work schedules that prevent them from dating even though they want a partner and possibly kids
- people over 30 who really want a romantic partner but can't find anyone who likes them, or lack the skills to engage in a healthy romantic relationship
- people over 30 who for career reasons are stuck in a place that likely does not have any compatible partners within reasonable distance
- people over 30 who want kids but aren't financially ready and voluntarily not having kids until/unless ready (but would if they suddenly make bank at 35).
I don't really know what I'm talking about here, but why would adoption cost that much more than having a biological child? Just reducing it to numbers you already skipped thousands of pregnancy, delivery, early infancy doctor costs. On the other hand, adopted children may be more likely to need therapy or other care later in life.
Besides, isn't the government desperate for children to be adopted? The state has to pay all their expenses until then, and obviously it's in the best interest of the community for them to be adopted. I don't see why they would have any incentive to charge a lot of fees.
That's survivorship bias. You have eliminated from the sample all the people who wanted to have kid and already have one. It's unsurprising that people who don't want kids and will never have some are overly represented in the new sample.
I don't think there is survivorship bias here. If you simply track the percentage of people having children over their lifetime you can build stats like this as a type of ground truth in relation to census data etc.
The issue is not the veracity of the statistics. The statistic is correct (I have never implied otherwise by the way - no idea why I'm downvoted so much as what I wrote is perfectly true, the proportion of people who don't want kids is higher once you remove people who already had kids).
The issue is in the interpretation. Your sampling is biased so the immediate conclusion is false. If you want kids and are over 30, your chances are better than 50%.
Related to this, the delta between those who want kids but will end up never having them is about 15% at the moment, which is a surprisingly large % of the population. You aren’t guaranteed what you want, especially when it comes to kids.
The society that figures out how to properly overlap child rearing in an educational environment will survive. I’m fascinated with how much the world is going to change in the next century with most of the world set to shrink and be dominated by the elderly.
I have been think about this also. I am about to turn 50 in six months, and probably will not have the opportunity to have children (I am not dating 20-30 year olds).
I see more of the population in the US going the way of Asian cultures (I am first generation Indian) where you have multi generational house holds being more common. It is going to be a painful cultural shift, especially for the highly individualistic American culture - but that is the only way I see future generations surviving.
For one, welfare and retirement programs won't work. Those require at least an equal replacement population. Either the younger generation will be paying a lot more in with no return in later life, or they just won't be able to support the system.
That's only because Japan doesn't want to bring in immigrants. There isn't a problem in countries like the US that have always been based on a culture of immigration.
I'd guess in the US, where the average age at first birth is 27. This is rather early by developed world countries; in most it's closer to 30, and in some it's above 30.
there is no average US citizen, it makes no sense to assert based on that. Demographics are fundamentally groups of groups, that are different. People here on YNews would recognize quickly "overfitting" or other statistical errors, but this demographic human quality somehow eludes public conversation.
no - in real life, each person has a child at some age. An aggregate of those numbers is still showing individual lives. Similar reasoning for "2.5 children" .. that is "average" but exactly zero people out of millions have 2.5 children in reality.
no sorry, its a beginner mistake to think that there are average people at all. For example, people who are not adults.. there is no meaning to "average" for children at 2 years, 6 years, 8 years, 12 years.. they are different. Its not an average.. it is a collection of groups.. Human populations are collections of groups that overlap in characteristics.. there is no "average" person
from the other side, a real number product of mean, average etc. is .. a number. You can do lots of math with numbers, and you will get consistent results in a number sense.. but the model is not the creation
I think it's a good mentality for a lot of things, education for example, or starting a business. It's kind of terrible that we've decided that learning ends at 25 and a lot of people feel bad or out of place when they attend university at 40. Makes no sense at all especially in the current age.
But having kids is the one thing where age matters. If you have a kid at 50, there's a good chance you are going to need assistance when they're barely in their twenties. I've had a few friends like this whose parents were very old, and they needed to take care of them when they didn't even have their own stuff together. I think it's better to either have kids early or not at all.
In my newfound wisdom I came to realise that comparing is not a game you can win. The thing with smarts, success, money, etc. is there will always be someone that’s done better than you. There is value to playing the game, even if it is to appreciate its rules and give yourself enough experience to then go on your own. Late bloomers don’t really bloom late, they bloom all the way to being noticed. The important is to take their example and not wait to be noticed. They would keep on blooming regardless and we should too, even if our bloom is greyish, boring and subpar to others. Blissful ignorance may be easy, blissful knowledge is different, not better but blissful still.
Neocon wsj writers decide that “waiting until you can afford to have kids when you’re old” is normal because they want you to slave away at your jobs all so that capitalists can accrue more and more. If bullshit like this becomes mainstream then they can justify extracting more and more out of you indefinitely until you die empty handed and completely unfulfilled. They’ll raise the retirement age, lower your benefits, and make sure you have no way to pass down any generational wealth. Forget your kids having grandma and grandpas!
I’m on a plane across the country because my mother just died from a stroke at the age of 61. I’m 32. She’ll never see grandchildren from me (her only child) and she’ll never see what I amount to fully. There’ll be no reconciliation for the terrible childhood and whatnot. I figured maybe when I had kids that maybe things could be more fixed. It won’t happen now. My father will likely die soon because he doesn’t have a strong will to live on his own and is in much worse health than my mother. He should’ve died three years ago when he had a heart attack but he got very lucky that the ambulance came when it did.
I would’ve had kids already but due to the insane market we’ve had going on in the USA - I couldn’t afford to start a family and had to divorce my ex wife due to financial issues. I’m an exceptionally well earning person - in the top 1%. But my wife wasn’t and so we couldn’t afford to start a family in the Bay Area and decided to move on. We didn’t want to be stuck with dealing with greedy landlords and no privacy.
I hate articles like this because it tries to normalize what isn’t and should never be normal.
So sorry for your loss. I was roughly your age when I lost my father and had to travel across the world to attend his funeral. Your comment resonated with me so much that I'm pretty much done for today wrt to work, I can't think of anything else. Thank you for sharing.
There's an implicit value judgement that having children means you have "bloomed". You may have indeed, just into someone who has children. There's nothing more to it than that.
Intellectually I understand why society values breeders. I understand the need for fostering the betterment of humanity by having a future generation. I just disagree that it requires or merit biological birth unless we have a population crisis. As far as I am aware, the US does not have that problem, so I won't judge someone for forgoing baby making.
I hate the pretense that baby making for normies is anything other than creating workers for the ruler class. Maybe they're optimistic that somehow their children will become part of that? On average, that's simply not the case.
To me, there is more to having children than breeding. Having children is something that, generally, ages well. You see your children grow, become adults, start their careers, start their own families, etc. You find new satisfaction and joy as your children age and progress in life.
Compare this to a child-free lifestyle. I know many child-free people. Fundamentally, their lives at 50 are not so different than their lives at 30. The main differences are they have more money, but they’re also fatter, uglier, have less energy, and are more jaded. The law of marginal utility dictates that, while they are still happy, they enjoy their life less over time.
My decision to have children was less about breeding and more about not living an ever-shittier version of my late 20s life.
I can’t help but feel that your reductive description of child-free people says more about how you see your own choices than it does about theirs. Surely a sufficiently-motivated child-free person can use their advantages wrt time and money to not be fat, ugly, and jaded. More time for exercise, more money for travel, etc. And there are plenty of people with kids who are fat, ugly, low-energy, and jaded – I’d argue that number taken proportionally is probably even higher than it is for people who chose not to have kids, provided they made that choice consciously and they take initiative in life to make meaning out of it.
Whether or not someone can use their time to not be fat, not be ugly, etc. is irrelevant. The could have done those same things in their early 20s and been less fat and less ugly. My point is that as you age, without kids, most peoples’ options for spending time is the same subset of things they could do in their late twenties and early thirties, except they will do those things worse as they age.
Is travel at 50 really fundamentally different than travel at 30? Other than having a bit more money, my opinion is not really. In many ways, travel at 30 is better, even with less money.
> My point is that as you age, without kids, most peoples’ options for spending time is the same subset of things they could do in their late twenties and early thirties, except they will do those things worse as they age.
They wouldn't be limited to options that don't build. You can have children and build a family, but you can also choose to dedicate your resources to building a business, or a skill, or knowledge, or whatever. Doesn't matter that you lose energy as you age and make lesser contributions, because you're kind of transforming it into something more persistent that you value. That could be a family, but it doesn't have to be.
> Is travel at 50 really fundamentally different than travel at 30? Other than having a bit more money, my opinion is not really. In many ways, travel at 30 is better, even with less money.
Even with relation to travel, maybe you dream of having a deeper understanding of one or more cultures or pieces of history and each travel contributes a bit to that.
It seems like you think the point of traveling is just to enjoy the travel itself, a momentary pleasure, but I don't see the point of travel if you return in the same state as when you left. It's only when something changes, when a contribution to something was made, that a travel was worthwhile. I don't think that ability to contribute to something (interpersonal relations, business, knowledge, etc.) is all that much affected between being 30 and 50.
> I don't see the point of travel if you return in the same state as when you left. It's only when something changes, when a contribution to something was made, that a travel was worthwhile.
I don't think the vast majority of people achieve this with the vast majority of their travels. Kind of curious what are some examples of that in your own life, especially the 'when a contribution to something was made' bit.
As someone kind of in a similar situation at the moment, I do think you're kind of right about this (not for everyone, of course).
I have felt several times that "Is this just it now? We're not going to do anything terribly different, just work/eat/hobbies/occasional trip, pretty much on a loop, while our health just keeps getting worse?" I do feel having children would change that, but for various reasons (not all of them great reasons, imo) we still haven't had them yet.
> To me, there is more to having children than breeding. Having children is something that, generally, ages well. You see your children grow, become adults, start their careers, start their own families, etc. You find new satisfaction and joy as your children age and progress in life.
I hate to point out that it doesn't always- your children may hate you (difference in politics or lifestyle) or abandon you. Or they may be simply too resource constrained to do anything other than visit you on holidays. I guess the lifestyle in most Western cultures has normalized elder neglect and loneliness anyways. Though I recognize there are many examples to the contrary. On average most families relegate care of the elderly to homes or caretakers if independence is no longer an option. I guess I don't see the point of children if they don't actively care for you till death. Do I expect too much, or just reject the Western norm?
Are parents skinnier, more beautiful, more energetic, and less jaded at 50? I think that's just aging in general, and would apply to both parents and not. Anyway, that line aside, I think people are just pretty different and find different paths to fulfillment through life, even if it's not always obvious from the outside.
Personal anecdote only: My life at nearly 40 is a tremendously better version of anything before it, even my 20s. No drama, way more peace of mind, little to no job stress, some disposal income, many hobbies both old and new, and most importantly... time. I'm not constantly focusing on the needs of kids, just what my partner and I feel like doing (both in the instant and in life in general).
I lost my job recently and feel great. Time to breathe and regather, without having to worry about making kids homeless or moving them outside of their school system. Don't wake up to crying babies and come home to shouting matches and needing to cook for 4. No homework help, just learning whatever we want to. Or taking the night to just relax and watch TV, try a new board game, go out somewhere new, take a new class, spend time in nature. It's pretty great. Every time we see or hear about someone else's kids, we feel absolutely sure in our choice -- not that we ever doubted it to begin with.
Far from feeling meaningless, I get to pursue work and hobbies that bring fulfillment, because they're well considered and taken for want, not need, and not dependent on the financial or time constraints of someone else.
It's only shittier if your stop growing. At this age I'm still contemplating a new degree, making new friends, evaluating new careers and cities (and frankly lifestyles), all with the financial resources and mental and emotional maturity I never had in my 20s. It's pretty great, and it was the exact outcome I hoped for. I knew I didn't want kids as early as my early teens, and got a vasectomy in by mid 20s. Both turned out to be terrific decisions.
Probably this sounds selfish. In truth I've always really valued community, and spend most of my adult life working in nonprofits and mission driven orgs, along with making a ton of friends all over the world. I love people, just prefer adults with their own interests rather than kids that I have to groom into something. The idea of living vicariously through them has no appeal to me (as someone subjected to the same from my own parents, in a nearly joyless childhood).
Another big reason I didn't want to create children (as opposed to adopting) is that there are way more than enough Americans already, each of whom consumes dramatically more resources than a child raided elsewhere. From a social and global standpoint it's not really sustainable, and probably quite likely apocalyptic, to keep having kids without really having a plan for their future in regards to climate and democracy, both of which are in rapid decline. That seems more selfish to me than not having them at all. Adoption seemed like an accept middle ground, but my partner didn't want kids (adopted or not) so I didn't pursue it.
Are there people who just settle into a routine after 30, never really changing much again? Sure, but that could happen with or without kids. That's up to you to prevent, as a parent or not. But I know more happy childfree couples than I do parents. Maybe it's a self selecting crowd. The happy couples probably don't want to spend time with kids, so we find each other. Likewise, the happy parents tend to fade from my life and have their own play dates and whatnot. To each their own...
I totally agree that there are too many people, Americans or otherwise. Even though I've decided to have children, I'm keeping the child count below the replacement rate, and I believe doing otherwise is immoral.
That being said, I'm not saying that it's impossible for you to have a fulfilling life at 40 years old. My point is that, in my experience, 70 year olds with kids seem more fulfilled than 70 year olds without. Perhaps that's just a reflection of me and my role models.
I actually do know a few older childfree folks who are quite happy with their hobbies and have no regrets, but the sample size there is so small as to be worthless. And there's probably a sizable generation gap there too, since it wasn't always this socially acceptable to not have kids (especially women). We probably won't see the societal impacts for another few decades.
But statistics aside, I think there is also a deliberate tradeoff there in terms of optimizing for the present vs the future. Some folks think of children as an investment for their future, someone to take care of them and provide companionship when they're older... but often at the cost of surrendering several decades of their mid-life for child rearing.
Conversely, for those who don't want kids, some of us choose to frontload our life's pursuits towards the prime middle years instead, traveling and doing stuff and meeting new people etc. while we're still physically healthy mentally sharp. Some chronic illness is always around the corner, and being stuck with disabilities in a nursing home, with or without kids, doesn't really excite.
Not having kids means planning for the future is a bit different, not just in finances but also risks and costs. We can choose to make a planned exit at some point without that decision being blocked by next of kin, opting for some happy accident doing something fun (space travel? free solo climbing? or just medication). I'd much rather shave off a decade or two of my life if that means a higher quality of life for the preceding decades... quality, not quantity :) Even without something that drastic, planning for retirement looks very different when you have no college funds or weddings to save for. Even homeownership (which is largely out of reach for my generation anyway) ceases to be as important a consideration. You can live more fully in the present time, instead of forever optimizing for some future state that may or may not ever come.
And that's to say nothing of where society will be in 40-50 years... probably not gonna be pretty, lol, and not something I'd want to subject kids (or myself) to unless we make drastic improvements.
In the meantime, though, what we have is the here and now. Might as well live it now instead of worrying about living it someday later.
Don't use the term "breeders" that's weird and seems like you're trying to apply a negative term to it. I'm not sure why it's become acceptable to refer to it this way. I suspect it's a modern movement to discredit having children as a valuable, worthy life goal and make it sound more like it's a dirty animalistic behavior that we're too smart for.
"As far as I am aware, the US does not have that problem"
Not true, we don't have a replacement population. This means all of your welfare programs and retirement programs will not have enough people in the younger generation to pay into them and support them.
"I hate the pretense that baby making for normies is anything other than creating workers for the ruler class."
Where did you pick this view up? Yes people have to work to survive. What do you think society would look like if you just did away with all the modern conveniences and the "ruling class". Do you just assume you'd be able to sit around doing nothing or pursue your "creative goals"??? No, you'd be gathering firewood and hunting all day, hoping you don't die of starvation or freeze to death.
This is such a silly naive stance. I hear it all the time and it sounds so childish. I assume it's some Marxist trope young people pick up from college sociology class and think they sound smart. What you want is a class of plebs doing the manual labor for you so you don't have to do be a "worker". Someone has to do the shit work, just not an elitist like you right?
My suggestion to you is to find an actual purpose and stop stewing in your hateful anti-humanist outlook. Having kids can be that purpose, but you could actually just go out and do something to be helpful to other humans too.
> What do you think society would look like if you just did away with all the modern conveniences and the "ruling class".
You're drawing an association the ruling class and modern conveniences. Those are two incredibly different things.
I have a really hard time believing that because a small group of people have a disgusting amount of wealth, somehow modern conveniences are "divined" from that
They're not. Someone HAS to work to provide basic necessities like food, electricity, heat, emergency services etc.
What you want is for those plebs to provide that to you, while you essentially become the new ruling class that sits around benefiting off the working peasants.
I love how you hardcore Marxists only take the good parts of what you say while conveniently leaving out the guy that's gonna be wallowing in the ditch for you.
> I love how you hardcore Marxists only take the good parts of what you say while conveniently leaving out the guy that's gonna be wallowing in the ditch for you
Uhh no? I just think that the people working in ditches should be compensated a living wage, preferably through forcing the ultra rich to pay their fair share in taxes and redistributing
> This means all of your welfare programs and retirement programs will not have enough people in the younger generation to pay into them and support them.
So step 1 for sustainability: remove said programs, as the alternative is either A) acknowledging they are just a pyramidal scheme or B) removing individual freedoms and forcing people to have children they don't want to have, just to support the programs you want to have.
Step 3, don't enforce your borders or immigration laws and bring in a "replacement" population.
You're right, they are pyramid schemes. Which is why I think it's dangerous to put important programs like this in the government's hands and make your population reliant on them.
but also, yes, I totally agree with you that some of this "oh you're a late bloomer, you'll want to do it when your older" stuff comes off as condescending if you actually just don't want to own a house with 2.5 kids.
>The coalition agreement PM Netanyahu signed with ultra-Orthodox party Shas promises to broaden the reach of Israel’s rabbinical courts far beyond family law – and grant them a status equal to that of civil courts
This is a really interesting comment thread. I see everything from "leave Seattle move to Indianapolis" to Europe's economy, pulling yourself up from your bootstraps, etc. a lot of fair and interesting comments from all walks of life.
I recently read Vaclav Smil's book, "The rise and fall of manufacturing in America." With the fall of manufacturing in America, I think America gave up on the one social agreement that makes capitalism work. If you keep your nose clean, stay out of trouble, and give 40 hours solid work a week to an employer, you can and should have the means to support a family and have a modest life. In my opinion, that's the only thing that keeps capitalism afloat if the top 2% keep to that agreement.
We're entering a new era of Victorian living. I think it's hard to argue against that. Politics are swaying each and every way to divide and conquer the majority.
Money is money. Most of us on this site can easily secure sufficient shelter, food, and transportation. However love can be so fragile and hard to find. I could master a dozen fields before finding love.
