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I agree with basically all of this, but I need to nitpick two things
From what I recall, a ton of this is driven by them shopping on behalf of their families, which drives their "share" of consumer spending way up. However, I think "women be shopping and men are fine to live the life of a monk + a PC/Xbox" is very true and accurate to my life experience.
This trope/concept really bothers me. I think "revealed preference" totally falls apart when constraints and other limitations are placed on behavior. People cannot express their true preferences when their choices are limited by exogenous factors.
I will use my own life as an example, as I'm not sure how to demonstrate this empirically.
My girlfriend and I live in downtown Toronto, working solid but not extremely lucrative white collar jobs. We will be comfortably middle class, we'll probably eventually own a home, if we play our cards well a cottage too. But unlikely we'll flying around first class on vacations, to set the stage. We're in our late (late) 20s.
We live in a 600sqft 1+1 apartment. It's pretty affordable at this point (thanks rent control). If we re-leased the unit it would be $400ish more a month. To get an extra bedroom/move to an apartment in the 900sqft range would be close to an additional $1000ish a month.
We can fairly comfortably afford our current lifestyle, and I'm actually pretty confident having a kid wouldn't tank our "net income" too much as the additional child costs (not including daycare) would be offset by not buying $11 tacos when out with friends (or PC parts, or whatever).
However, we have no fucking space. So we'd need to get a bigger apartment, which would be pretty expensive. An extra $1000 a month + a kid + the astronomical cost of daycare is a nightmare. There are programs now to make daycare cheaper, and that does help. Although I think they have waitlist nightmares, etc.
This problem will resolve itself eventually. Another ~5 years should see each of us go through one or two promotion cycles, and then having a kid and the subsequent space upgrades are actually doable.
However, at that point I'll be in my mid 30s. I feel very strongly I don't want to be cranking out kids in my 40s. I have a niece and nephew who I love to hang out with, and I can feel how my youthful energy helps me keep up and engage with them. I can also feel this energy fading slightly with age. I don't want to be doing this in my 40s. So depending on timing, we'll very likely have 1 child. There's a decent chance we'll have 2 kids, as long as something doesn't set us back on the "income go up" track.
I would prefer to have 2 kids, but have a sinking feeling it'll end up being 1.
Is having 1 kid despite telling you I was 2 my revealed preference? Or my response to a ton of limitations and issues that I have no power to fix, only adapt to?
Great posts, it does sound like you're having a rough time of it and hopefully it gets better for you.
Thanks, I didn't know that was how it's calculated; I think the broader point still stands though, e.g if a guy eats bachelor chow by himself but his girlfriend enjoys cooking big elaborate meals, it's true that he's the one eating but it's also consumption that wouldn't have happened without the girlfriend being in the picture.
This just kind of depends how you define "revealed preference"; it would be silly to say a prisoner's revealed preference is to to stay in prison because he hasn't broken out, obviously he's there because he's forced to and similarly there are real economic constraints on people that perhaps prevent them from having more children then they would have in an ideal world.
In your case though, I think the other posters are correct in the sense that your revealed preference is to value a host of other things over more children; you could value having them more but don't want to [for very understandable reasons!]. This isn't to mean that you don't want children or that it's irrational or morally wrong that you don't want to downgrade your quality of life, but I think framing it in this way is helpful in understanding the shitty incentives that are increasingly driving society.
I'm not familiar with Canada so don't have any practical advice unfortunately, but good luck whatever you and your girlfriend end up deciding, hope it goes well for you both.
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It's kind of funny how you thank rent control and then describe all the predictable downstream consequences of rent control like high market rate rents and difficulty in relocating. There are grandparents with an empty nest facing the exact reverse scenario an rent control prevents this from being remedied.
I'm not a fan of rent control, and I fully understand and agree how shitty of a policy it is.
I vote for the most economically literate politicians in every election (which is about as effective as spoiling my ballot, which I have also done). So I've done my part.
However, the clusterfuck that is housing policy carries on with or without me, so you fucking bet I am going to work what I can to my advantage.
Also, I find anti-rent control people (read: the entirety of /r/neoliberal) somewhat obnoxious in their "just get rid of rent control bro it's that easy it'll fix the market" prescription. They are right, in a vacuum. However, when NIMBYs get to block everything forever for any reason, getting rid of rent control is marginal at best.
4plex houses are being denied in Toronto neighborhoods because they "change neighborhood character" despite them being literally the most gentle form of density possible. They're also legal "as of right" but it turns out that was a total bait and switch because other zoning laws prevent them despite being "as right". Less than 400 4plex homes have been approved in 2 years, so it's safe to say this was an absolute fucking scam of a policy "win".
If any politician ran on a platform of "I'll get rid of rent control, making zoning identical to Japan, and cut development charges dramatically" I'd be out there knocking on doors for them every day, and I'd probably suck their dick too.
Unfortunately, the median voter is fucking retarded and this is an "instant lose" platform. So I'll keep abusing rent control until a better option presents itself.
The highest TFR economically 'normal' metroplex in the continental USA is Houston, which famously has no official zoning(although in practice there's lots of unofficial zoning, it's still far less than most everywhere else).
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I'd never fault someone for behaving rationally in the imperfect system. I just found it funny that you cheered on rent control then listed like the most central downsides. I see the cheering was sarcastic.
I viscerally hate "/s" but it does lead to these situations
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Sir, Irish immigrants of the past would raise a dozen kids in that space. Get to it!
This is true, it's also true that poor people (both in western nations, and worldwide) crank out more kids than wealthier people. So realistically if people who work as fast food cashier's and factory laborers can afford to have kids, us, with our mid-tier white collar jobs can too.
However:
/1) that sounds miserable, and like my life would become significantly more stressful with the addition of financial concerns (something I shaped my entire life around avoiding) and a space that is already too small for 2 humans and a dog becoming 3 humans + dog. We could put the crib in the den but then we'd need to throw out a huge # of our possessions, which are currently stored in the den about as efficiently as I could pack in floor to ceiling IKEA shelving and standardized boxes.
I guess one could snarkily point to "well that's just your revealed preference you don't actually want kids" which like okay? But I'm really sad and resentful at the state of society which forces to me to choose between security and less stress or my biological imperatives. So it doesn't feel like I secretly don't want kids but think I do, it feels like I'm choosing between two shitty options that I don't like.
/2) western society pushes a very strong narrative (not explicitly, but strong nonetheless) that your kids "quality" of life should equal or exceed your own.
If born right now, my kid wouldn't have a backyard to play in. We live across the street from a park, but it's downtown so it sometimes has homeless tents in it. Checking for needles in the sand of playgrounds is almost SOP down here. Moving to a fancy neighborhood (lots of "I support my neighbors in tents" lawn signs but never tents in their parks, weird...) is obviously out of the question (see: cost). This also means we have to take what we can get with school quality as there is a nice price premium for neighborhoods with the best schools.
I guess by the time the kid is old enough to have coherent memories we'd be making enough money to take them on vacation, etc, you get a bit of runway there.
But comparing my (extremely middle class) childhood to the childhood we could provide to a hypothetical child, it does raise the uncomfortable thought of
Can I provide an equal or better childhood than I had right now? Maybe, maybe not, trending towards not. If the answer is not it feels like I've failed as a parent and as a "successful" citizen. Which is uncomfortable and unpleasant.
And as a carrot on the stick in front of me, that answer changes to "definitely yes" come out household income increases another ~$50k annually, which is hopefully only a few years and job hops away...
It's also tough because my current career (mid tier finance, better than accounting, worse than IB) is extremely cognitively and time demanding. If I want to make more and move up, these demands will increase, until you get high enough they start decreasing again as you delegate to delegators. So the next 5 years of increasing my earnings will put my kid into a zero sum fight with my job for my time and energy.
/3) there's no village anymore. We moved away from family to live downtown because this is where the good jobs are and commuting 45min-1+hr each day is a hard no, massive evidence this makes you miserable. None of our friends are having kids for all the reasons I've explained, or OP has. So we'd be soaking it solo until we met other parents at school I guess. Makes it hard to trade kids to eachother to achieve informal childcare economies of scale, and grandma/grandpa live hours away.
/4 bonus) Unrelated, and not a great reason to not have kids, but im absolutely fucking horrified at the state of the education system right now. Between the corruption/inefficiency, complete inability to teach based on best practices, DEI insanity, and insane lack of funding (these kids are the future, why aren't we pouring money into them?!?!?!?) means I now also feel like 1) we need to ensure we are near a school that is less captured/ran by retards (now we're paying a school district premium on living costs) and 2) that I will need to dedicate substantial time to ensure my kid is actually getting a good education.
This has turned into an emotionally gratifying venting session, so thanks lol
I want to have kids, but every macro trend in society right now makes having kids a painful trade off, stressful, expensive, or very time consuming.
For point three, do you really think your childless friends wouldn't be lining up to babysit? Maybe it's just my bubble but everyone likes little kids and is willing to do some 'work' to get to hang out with them.
That's a great question, I kind of assumed "no" but truthfully, I've never asked.
I'm sure it has been studied already, but there is an interesting young adult arrested development phenomenon going on for white collar yuppies. We're all pushing 30, but our lifestyles would be 100% recognizable to our 24 year old (or functionally, our 20 year old) selves.
I've even been hanging out with a social group in their early 30s through sports, and aside from slightly higher rates of marriage and condo ownership, basically everyone does the "white collar job, black out fri/sat, Pilates and brunch on Sunday".
So it doesn't feel like anyone would want a kid near them, but I can't say I've ever asked.
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I can't say I've never encountered communities like this, but certainly not in the US. I know some Albanian families overseas who wouldn't consider it unusual and a bit of an imposition to babysit at below market rates.
Grandparents charging money to babysit/complaining about babysitting is not something I have seen from normies- white, black, conservative, liberal, hispanic, anglo, Christian, secular, old, young everyone seems to really look forwards to family and close friends having babies when they're not unemployed or drug addicts or something and really want to help. Bring casseroles, ask to babysit, just drop by to help mom.
Europeans and yankees may do things differently, of course.
Different worlds.
Grandparents, aunts, and uncles don't necessarily charge money money or complain. But they don't necessarily do anything, either. My uncles and aunts, who were on reasonably good terms in general, never ever babysat my brother or I. My parents never, ever babysat my younger cousin. They just didn't. We still got together for holidays. I tried to meet up with some in-laws to introduce the cousins, but it didn't work out, they were a bit busy, this seems normal, I guess. I went to a wedding with three young children, and got some compliments on managing them, but no offers of help.
My parents and in-laws will watch the kids sometimes, a couple of nights a year, if we make all the arrangements to get together and find a space.
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We had a baby in a 500 sq ft apartment, didn't want to continue that way, threw out and gave away a bunch of our possessions, and moved across the country in a single vehicle to a place where we could afford a 2400 sq ft house on one income for five years (though we're going to have to make some changes soon). This is fine, because we aren't working white collar finance jobs that require a city. Also, we like that kind of thing. There are real industries as well, several of the fathers in my homeschool group growing up worked for the missile company, for instance.
Inconveniently, trading kids is just not a thing in American culture, even church culture, even with cousins (or when I was a kid, actually. My introverted parents were responsible for all childcare despite living in the same area as grandparents and siblings). If the kids are invited to something, I have to stay there and supervise them the entire time, and do nothing else. Everything is Childcare, including church, and hanging out with mother friends, and going out to restaurants. C'est la vie.
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A few years from now the COL in Toronto will have increased a commensurate amount, and you will be saying the same kind of thing.
If you want kids, you have two options:
So far we've been beating CoL inflation, so the trend lines look good (even modelling the inevitable slowdown in wage growth with age). It just takes time, which biology doesn't seem to have gotten the memo about.
I haven't done the math, but I also wonder how well this actually plays on net. The best and highest paying jobs are in Toronto. If I move to Calgary and my wages and CoL both decrease (or stagnate), am I ahead? Especially because I can always sell a Toronto home and move to Calgary later, but the reverse doesn't work (assuming Toronto house price growth continues to outpace Calgary).
Also, thanks to my parents I am an east-coast latte-sipping downtown elitist lib-pilled yuppie (see my flair). So moving to Calgary (and Alberta generally, although I liked Austin so if Calgary was cool I'd deal with the awful governance) is not a very appealing option. Soy-jacking aside, I love the vibe of big cities, and the absurd fun and convenience they provide.
Finally, all my friends and family are in Southern Ontario. Most of my friends live a 15 minute walk/5 minute bike from my apartment. If we moved 3000km to have a kid, we'd be completely isolated from everyone we know (which isn't a permanent issue, as you make new friends, but damn...).
You may be beating CoL inflation in some basket-of-goods sense; you may even have more than doubled your salary (starting from a pretty low number) in the last ten years -- but you still can't afford a house, and the average home price in Toronto has been quite consistent in doubling every ten years since well before you were born. How much more than twice your current salary will you be making ten years from now, that you will be able to afford the house that you can't afford now?
This is... mostly false? O&G in Calgary offices pay quite well. Not "Bay Street Investment Banker" well, but it sounds like you are not that.
You don't have a home to sell -- you can't afford one and your rent money is disappearing instead of being (partially) stashed away as equity. This is unlikely to change for you in the future.
Says the guy from Toronto
"I like having fun, I can always have kids later" is... not a really unique attitude, but not a long walk from "I don't really want kids that bad".
And now you want to inflict this pain on your own (hypothetical) kid -- you need to break the cycle somewhere man.
I do actually hope to double my salary in the next ~5 years. I'm currently in PE-adjacent consulting and plan to move into actual PE once I get bored where I am.
Even without a doubling, I'm pretty confident we'll be able to buy in Toronto in the next 5-8 years, I mean hell, prices are so good right now we've been debating going all-in and being house-poor. It seems quite miserable though, I have worked extremely hard to not be paycheck to paycheck, so going back to that level of penny-pinching... Ugh
You make a fair point, I'm sure the O&G gang need people to do modelling, etc. I was interviewing at a mining company way back when and they were just so boring and dry. Maybe O&G attracts more charismatic people.
I know I know, Toronto governance is absurdly bad. I think what differentiates it is that Toronto is run poorly because no one does anything, Danielle Smith and her merry gang seem to be actively trying to break everything. Which feels worse I guess?
It's not so much "city fun kid boring", I fucking loved growing up in Toronto. I want my kid to experience that. And Toronto is so much better now than when I was a kid.
The Toronto escape plan is probably Hamilton, which I actually think is super under-rated. Although with Metrolinx shitting the bed on electrification that plan just got less attractive.
This comment is gonna be an answer to all the comments you've posted, so apologies in advance if its a bit scattershot/accusatory.
I completely respect the desire to raise your kids in Toronto, while maintaining a quality of life approximately equal to your own. However, I'd urge you to reconsider how you view the challenges facing you. I've personally seen the apartment that my grandparents raised their kids in, and they raised 3 children in a small 2 bedroom apartment. Space challenges are almost always actually about the challenge of giving up space, and not about the physical impossibility of fitting in a child.
I'd also like to point out that your career trajectory lines up with your family planning; your (hypothetical) child won't need to have their own room until they're a couple of years old. That matches up with when you expect your salary increases enough to be able to comfortably sustain a 2-bedroom apartment - the best time to have a kid is now, because you'll be able to afford a bedroom for them, when they need it.
These two statements are contradictory with respect to your desire to provide a better life for your children. If Toronto is so much better now than when you were a kid, how could it possibly be a downgrade in quality of life if you raise them up in Toronto now?
As for education, look into IB. Cheaper than Private school, more rigorous than Ontario High Schools.
I agree, Hamilton is underrated, but have you considered the towns in the Greater Toronto Area, such as Burlington, or Oakville? Boring yes, but damn good places to raise a kid.
Thanks for sending me your thoughts!
I have no doubt we could raise a kid here, for a bit. It would be a huge pain, but you are right it's likely the timing would work alright between career progression and the space needs of the family. I mentioned this before, but there is something shitty about having to "downgrade" versus your childhood. Scary thought if there's some job losses and we get stuck here, the den doesn't even have a door.
Honestly, the timing thing you mentioned is a compelling point. I think that's been percolating in my head for a while, and one of the reasons I latched onto this topic. The narrative of "we can't do it yet" is starting to have some cracks in the foundation (is this what brain development feels like?).
This is kind of in the weeds, but the existence of tents in Toronto parks doesn't mean all of Toronto is worse off. The city is bigger and more full of interesting places all over. It just sucks not having a backyard, OR living in a fancier neighborhood. I have never seen tents in Ramsden park (in Forest Hill) for example, but downtown residents don't lean on their city councilors very much (or have the wealth/clout to make their lives suck).
To be honest I find the existence of Burlington and Oakville both mildly offensive to my sense of what makes for a good city (terrible for the environment, unsustainable financially, and deeply opposed to anything changing ever). I don't want my kid to be shackled to me until they're 16, and despite being an avid cyclist in Toronto, I would be very uncomfortable with my kid biking around the streets of Oakville with their friends (not because of crime/stranger danger, because of oblivious drivers and a complete lack of bike infrastructure or respect for cyclists). And they can't walk anywhere because everything is at car distance.
My friends and I were taking the streetcar to and from school in packs at age 11/12, it was great. We could bike (or walk) to each other's houses without riding on or near mega-roads with average speeds north of 60km/h.
Also living in Hamilton means I can at least live and work in downtown Hamilton and have a quick commute. In Oakville or Burlington I'm either taking the GO train into Toronto (awful, especially now that electrification got fucked) or I am driving to some random business park in perpetually worsening YoY traffic (proven to be shitty to your life satisfaction).
This has turned into a shameless downtown elitist rant. Thank you for your perspective. I think you are right, I have not been considering the play you get with timing in the first few year's of your child's life. They don't get born with a need for a full on room to themselves, that takes time.
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No offense, but I started out predisposed to believing you, but the more you post, the more I think the revealed preferences people are correct, at least in your particular case. Whatever you wish to be true, large, especially capital cities in the west have been on a trajectory of being increasingly fun and cool for the young, childless and high-powered careerist, while becoming less and less affordable for families. The same goes for all the popular jobs. You pay a significant premium to have a job that is fun, and if that premium is so expensive that you can't afford kids, it means you value that fun higher than kids. No, people in the past didn't have fun jobs, in fact if boring and dry is the worst you can come up with, that's probably a top 1% job in terms of satisfaction right there, certainly in the past and to some degree even currently.
I did my PhD in London. For my career, and probably even for that of my wife, it would have been MUCH better to stay there. My PhD supervisor was ready to take me over as a postdoc, and she is quite successful. My wife, meanwhile, had worked with Friston (the neuroscientist), and would have had a decent shot at getting a postdoc there as well. But we both chose against it, for multiple reasons, but primarily because raising kids in London sucks. My PhD supervisor had her first child almost simultaneously with mine (just a few weeks difference), and I really can't see her getting more than one. We went back to [small university city in germany] and are now on our second child and counting. We will probably have three, maybe four (though more are unlikely, since we didn't start early enough and I'm also not a particular fan of having babies past 40).
And it was totally worth it! Kids really are the greatest meaning-generators. Fun also gets a lot cheaper; Suddenly, I don't need to go on expensive vacations or the like. All the simple things that have become boring for me, if I do it with our eldest and she is having fun, I have fun as well through the magic of empathy. Hell, even playing peekaboo with our baby is lots of fun. And no, doing it with other kids isn't the same.
Tbh, I'd say that you're stuck in a local maximum that is pleasant and fun right now but will lead to you being dissatisfied in the long-term, and you even recognise that fact, but you don't leave bc you aren't willing to suffer a little in the valley on the way towards a better maximum.
No offense taken! I post here because I find the people (generally) smart and insightful. Exposing my ideas/thoughts/beliefs to the gang means I get challenged, and I learn something about their beliefs, or mine. It would be silly to expose them to public scrutiny and then get mad!
I do feel slightly misunderstood, although maybe I instead misunderstand you.
I am not putting off having kids because I love slamming craft beers with the boys. I am putting off having kids because housing is expensive (and other reasons, elaborated earlier).
You're right, capital cities are expensive. It honestly feels kind of like a lose/lose trap. If I live and work in the periphery, I risk not earning enough money to escape renting, especially with the rate of growth of housing costs (I have 0 faith this issue will be satisfactorily resolved in my lifetime, the political situation around it is too broken).
If I live in the city, I make more, but everything is more expensive. If I live in the periphery and work in the city, I can have cheaper CoL with higher salary, but an absurd amount of my waking hours are now spent driving or on a train.
I also do have a preference (hah) for growing up in the city. I really liked being raised in Toronto. I would love to give this experience to my kid. Maybe this is an unreasonable or unrealistic want.
Thankfully, I'm also getting far enough in my career that I could sometime in the nearish future make a lateral move to a smaller city and be some flavor of finance manager and make "can afford a house" money. But for entry level jobs, you're looking at a ~20k haircut on your starting salary if you're not in the big city.
Grinding finance in Toronto has always felt like the best option in a sea of shitty options. Plus from a personal level I derive a lot of enjoyment from living here (not just the craft beers, but also the vast majority of the people I know and love live here).
This is very true
This I'm less convinced by, most alternatives right now don't feel like there's a better maximum at the end of them. Although I'm obviously not omnipotent.
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The West is like this in general. Despite what Ottawa would have you believe, it's a different country out here- one where you can afford a house at the price of [what you perceive as] your Canadian identity.
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Church
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This is way more effort than my shitpost deserves. I actually agree with you, was just having some fun.
LOL
Honestly I'm mostly here for the free one-way therapy venting dump
The fact you read it at all is gratifying, have a lovely day!
Also my Family Doctor basically said what you said to me verbatim the other day lmao. While he wasn't wrong, the fact he's a millionaire with an S-class who's last exposure to housing costs was the 1970s made it land somewhat poorly.
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