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Notes -
“Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise” link
This is trending on Twitter so might as well discuss it here anonymously.
I know more than a few people say it’s just vibes and the data is good but I think this article makes a strong point that a real loss of social capital has actually made younger people poorer. And I believe this links into the fertility debate because the goods that you could buy before with social capital are especially needed with children. Having kids has gotten very expensive. I think everyone knows education, housing, and health care have boomed in costs. Being single means you don’t need to take on these costs. You can have kids if you are poor and live off government resources or you can have kids if you are rich but it’s a financial disaster for the upper middle class.
I largely come down to diversity (mass migration) and the Great Migration killing American social capital that the boomers had. Before these things occurred we had cheap urban housing because people weren’t afraid of their neighbors and cheap public schools. And homogenous urban environments have a lot of social capital for their residents. Also you had cheap babysitters because your neighbors were like you and you trusted them. Your kids could just go to the park alone. So childcare was free. I feel comfortable blaming diversity on rising housing costs (zoning the poor away from good communities) and for rising educational costs (falling public school quality).
So yes I think today’s generation is poorer in a lot of ways that really matter due to less social capital (but richer in other ways). And I do think the ways we are poorer today are especially bad for fertility where you now need to buy those goods in the market but they were free before.
Conflating Great Migration and mass migration makes me think you’re reasoning backwards.
As I understand it, immigration slumped during the Depression and didn’t recover until Reagan. Wiki shows a different trend but still suggests the bulk of migration happened before WWI. So I find it unlikely that immigration could explain the effects you want.
Actually, when are those effects, exactly? Because I think it makes a huge difference if you point at the 60s vs 70s vs 80s. Depending on the specific point, I can think of a dozen technologies which have changed how people handle their kids, even without talking about demographics or gang violence.
I think you’re skimming over economics in your rush to blame black people. Automation and the World Wars pulled more and more women out of the home. That alone should have had a bigger effect on childcare.
Do you disagree that a commons of free public schools has declined recently? Or were the schools NEVER good? I follow Moses Kagan on Twitter who I just affluent liberal in LA and I remember one of his tweets were that he would have just paid up for a house in a suburb because of how much it would have saved him on private school tuition. This seems like a common thought to people today that you can’t send your kids to public schools outside of the right suburbs.
What caused this?
I point to migration both internally and externally.
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