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“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.
Women were not pulled out of the home by economics. It was culture- male wages were steadily rising and the US did not experience prolonged unemployment during the period when it shifted from unusual to the default. That cultural shift had knock on economic effects.
The world was and is naturally very cruel. People died (or at least suffered from) starvation, disease, the elements, etc quite often. Most of history was not a place where even the surviving young children could get away without helping out with the crops or other chores, yet alone the able bodied adult women. The world was not kind enough for freeloaders.
Women worked. They did not work a traditional job, but they worked. In the peasant times, women milked cattle, tilled fields, managed crops, kept chickens, cleaned, made clothing (especially necessary at the time where minor scratches and infections could kill and no A/C or heating), hauled water, picked fruits and vegetables and various other tasks.
Many of those tasks are no longer relevant thanks to economic and technological innovations. We've gone from a time of vast malnutrition to vast overnutrition in the western world, having everyone grow their own crops and milk their own cattle is ridiculous now. Even the tasks that do remain like cleaning or cooking are made significantly easier now thanks to technology. Laundry is no longer a chore that one sets most of their day aside for. Things not only make less dirt (imagine the difference between a sooty fire and the modern oven for instance) but cleaning chemicals are also more efficient and don't take as much to make since they're also done by technology now.
Traditional women's work has just been largely automated away. For a short period of time some of the middle class women were in a social situation where working a job wasn't expected but the housework they would have traditionally been doing was also largely gone, so they got to spend more of their days doing stuff like watching soap operas or whatever. But the time of the lazy do nothing housewife was short lived, and it was always going to be short lived. The economic incentives and advantages to having two productive earners instead of one + parasite is clear and obvious. People with nothing to do will be given something to do, they will be productive as well. The world wars accelerated this, but it was always going to happen as long as people and families value money. It can not be reversed unless you change this fundamental desire for wealth part of humanity, good luck.
I always roll my eyes when I see someone object to the argument I’ve never seen anyone make when someone says “women haven’t worked,” as if it’s a stand in statement to claim the prevailing paradigm isn’t radically different from the way of the past.
No. Women haven’t always worked. Women have always labored, in some capacity. Women haven’t always had a traditional, 9am-5pm professional vocation, post May Day Demonstrations and Henry Ford. And it’s why the arguments that denigrate that the value and labor of the housewife and SAHM never made sense, because when you come home after a hard day’s work, dinner still has to get made and laundry still had to get done; regardless.
I think work is a correct term for this, we literally call it "housework" after all. But ok even if we draw a distinction in the terms, so what? Replace instance of "work" with "labored productively" and nothing changes.
But those things are far far easier now, because of technology! Fridges means you don't have to go to the market every single day and the things you buy are way fresher in general. Microwaves and ovens and stoves avoids the hassle of handling and maintaining and cleaning up after the fire. Laundry machines went from spending the whole day tending to clothes, to a few minutes hassle of putting clothes in, switching them over, and pushing a few buttons. Folding is really the only time intensive part of laundry left, and technology is looking to simplify even that.
It's not denigrating housewives to point out simple fact, housework is leagues easier today than the past. That's why people spend tons of money on all those aforementioned machines. Some are so insanely and undeniably useful that even the Amish use them like washing machines
That’s exactly the point I was speaking to. There is a value in discouraging women from participating in the “professional workforce,” that’s wholly distinct from the concept of laboring in general. That’s why I said (incidentally it’s also why Elizabeth Warren wrote the book The Middle Income Trap) once you’re done for the day at work and you come home, dinner still has to be made and the laundry still has to get done anyway. And that’s true whether you stay at home and raise the children or choose to go to work.
Exactly. So it should be even easier for them to stay home.
That is not necessarily true. "Easier" can mean different things. Idle hands are the devil's workshop and whatnot. Suppose you've got a mother of three children, they are a baby, a three year old, and a five year old. In a traditional household, there would be washing day, when she and her neighbors go down to the stream to wash, you all bring your children, and the children splash around in the stream. You would have pastry making day, when your sister brings her kids over, they kick a ball around the street, and you make pastry together. You spend a lot of time making clothes, and your older daughter is gradually also learning to sew, and the younger kids are out watching some other kids kick a ball around.
(This was not true of the American West, but the Dustbowl West sounded like a uniquely nightmarish place to raise children)
Now, you can still invite your friend and her children to the stream, but you're just sitting around watching the children. You can still make pastry together, but you realize this is a bit futile, because the pastry at the store is both better and cheaper, and the children cannot kick the ball around the street, there are cars, and no other kids their age. You can sew with your daughter, but it's just a hobby, and mostly for cosplay. And so on. Armenians have Rug Beating Week, when they air out and beat their rugs, all at the same time. You're replacing a communal activity with having to make up activities to avoid boredom, which feels quite different.
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