A theory im playing around with that the apparent Vulgarity and crudeness of American country/redneck/Conservative culture is actually an adaptive mode of Counter signaling akin to Orthodox Jewish or Amish cultural adaptations to maintain high birth rates and internal cultural coherence in the face of the homogenizing anti-natalist effects of Mainstream Global-liberal-urban monoculture...
American redneck/conservative culture, and Orthodox Jews especially are unique in being the only wealthy cultures to maintain high birth rates beyond the global middle-income, and that both adapted and are defined by their hostile largely hostile relationship with the the most advanced strains of the global mono-culture found in Urban America and the Urbanized anglo-world.
Nations as far afield as Hungary, China, and Iran are trying to save themselves from declining birthrates... Should they try to import American Country culture?
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Countries will try what they can to reverse declining birthrates, but it won't save them ultimately. There are macro reasons for declining birthrates, larger than countries or culture. You can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. You'll eventually run out of resources and/or your toxic byproducts will kill you. And people are already feeling both. Everything is becoming more expensive. That trend won't stop. People want to maintain their standard of living. So they'll have fewer children. Because children are expensive. And they might actually care about the quality of life of their children. And of what use are children if there is no environment to sustain them?
The assumption here is that we are approaching the growth limit, while in reality we’re nowhere close to depleting the resources especially considering the possible technological advances. The current population was thought to be unsustainable pre-green revolution.
The decline in the standards of living, the cost disease, etc. is essentially artificial and caused by the nature of the modern regulatory state.
For millenia people somehow managed to have multiple children, without having access to the modern technology — no washing machines, no diapers, no microwaves, no medicine, no agricultural machines that allow us to grow food on massive scale, no nothing — yet they somehow did that through wars, famines, plagues to this day; and somehow the modern western people fail to do that becase children are "expensive", despite that not a single thing related to raising children should be expensive given the capabilities of modernity.
For most of that time, when people had lots of children, many of them died in said wars, famines, and plagues, or just from everyday diseases. The mother often died in or after childbirth as well.
What is the saying? Consumption always expands to meet the income available? Children are just one example of this--possibly one of hte clearest examples, in fact. Obviously calories are cheap, and people are rich enough to afford much more space per person. But if you tried to raise a child like an 1800s farmer (minimal or no schooling, having them work on your farm from a young age, 12 people in a 1 room house, everyone sleeping on the floor, no electricity or running water, letting them walk to a neighbor alone, etc) you'd be locked up for child abuse (and they wouldn't be set up to do very well in the modern world).
Even if you think about these labor saving devices... many of them correspond to tasks that weren't done at all or were much easier in the past. When your house is small and 1 room, cleaning is much easier than when it's large with many rooms. A simple wood floor is easier to sweep than if you have a mix of tile, wood, carpet, etc. You don't need a dishwasher or laundry machine if you have the absolute bare minimum of dishes and clothes. Or take medicine: If the only medicine you could possibly access is what you can make from herbs, well that's certainly cheaper than buying something expensive at the pharmacy! It just might be completely useless and your child might die.
Yeah, the thing is, you don't have to live as 1800s farmer given that you have access to 2000s technology.
They didn't have tower cranes, mass production industrial factories, reinforced concrete, CAD software, modern materials science, etc..
By all accounts building a separate room for each one of your 12 children should be very cheap but yet it isn't. Same for everything else material.
Just see how cheap electricity production was butchered in the last years, first by shutting down nuclear plants and now by restrictions on oil and gas trade. Energy prices could have been much lower without expending a single thought and brought down even further if the humanity started mass producing nuclear reactors at scale.
Take a look: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5859811/. Essential pharma is in fact dirt cheap to produce.
Even the Romans did it!! 2000 years back from now.
Yeah, that's the problem right there.
The website seems to have eaten my comment, so I'm going to be lazy and summarize a bit. Feel free to ask for more details.
Yes, for all of these categories, you could consume them at an 1800 level for relatively cheap (I could pedantically debate this, but I won't because I don't think the overall point is affected). However, we consume vastly more per person. We use more energy per person, for controlling the temperature of our buildings, for transportation, for shipping goods all over the world. We have more advanced medicine. Yes, some additional cost is artificial, but some of it is because people want things that didn't exist in 1800. Building the same building now is probably easier than in 1800, but we're not talking about that, we're talking about replacing a one-room log-and-thatch cabin with a multi-story structure with many rooms, electric wiring, plumbing, glass windows, etc.
And, even if it were legal to raise a child in 1800s conditions, most people would freely choose not to, I think. Of course, there's also no need to have 12 kids, since survival rates have improved (one of the effects of consuming more per child!). Overall, I don't think there's any confusion as to what people mean when they say that kids are expensive, or why this is the case.
The central point of my argument is that these additional costs are massive, mind-boggling, enormous. If you got rid of insane bureaucratic overhead in every facet of modern production and business, and made different trade-offs on safety, and selected personnel via nothing but ruthless market competition as opposed to credentialism or quotas or whatever else, then you'd get a world as alien to us as our world is to someone from 1800s.
It's a pity that the verbose version of your comment got lost because I think this difference in worldviews can be only productively discussed in details, diving deep into a particular industry, dissecting it's practices, costs, regulations, etc.
Yet somehow when it comes to raising children we manage to get it worse than these 1800s people
These things aren't that hard, I could literally do most of them on my own..
Probably the hardest part is to build the structure itself, but it is my understanding that the modern tech allows to do that really fast and cheap too... especially if you design a building once and mass produce it.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchevka and this was in 1970s - they've built a shit ton of them - under a less than efficient economical system, so to speak.
The fact that a so-called "middle class" man often needs to work several years to buy a property that's barely suitable for a family with e.g. 3 children, is obscene by itself.
On the other hand the construction industry is regulated to hell and back, not to mention their suppliers, which is the one and only real cause of high housing costs.
Why didn't they choose that back then, in such case?
Bumping up survival rates to modern rates is simple and cheap. Hygiene, vaccinations, antibiotics, plentiful food, vitamins, C-sections... what did I miss?
(see e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2665340/) for a sample of child mortality causes in the Middle Ages.
Sure, but I think even in the hyper-competitive world you describe, raising each child would still be much more expensive than it was in the 1800s. I suspect that if you freed up that income, most people would default to using it on more consumption for themself and their few children, rather than having many children.
I can recreate most of what I had, I just don't know if it answers your particular questions:
Energy is very cheap, and we consume a lot more of it. Do you want to drive your kids to school, activities, a friend's house? Do you want goods from all over the world shipped to your local stores? Do you want heating, cooling, electricity, hot and cold water running water on demand? It could be even cheaper, yes, but would that result in people having more kids, or using more energy on what they already have?
Yes, many aspects of medicine are cheap, and the industry as a whole is massively regulated with tons of waste and bullshit. But A) most of the expensive things are still things that people want, even if the marginal value per dollar is less than the basics (medicine is probably a luxury good, and B) I once again suspect that additional income would mostly not go toward having more children.
Did the Romans have hot and cold running water, under pressure, in every house and apartment?
Now to the rest of this comment:
You may have these skills, but most people don't, and in any event doing them for an entire house is time consuming.
Sure, and many of the early Levittown suburbs were built this way, effectively on a production line. Why did we stop doing it? I would guess because once people could afford it, they wanted homes that were more custom, although I have no data here. Home construction is labor-intensive and thus subject to Baumol's cost disease.
I agree that this situation is obscene, but it is absolutely not the only cause, unless you are including all of the restrictions on what you can build where (zoning, environmental review, parking minimums, etc.)
I have no idea what you're asking. In 1800 most people had no choice.
We didn't, really. We upgraded a bit to where there are a handful of floor plans and some modularity, but the vast majority of new developments are cookie-cutter repetitions of their neighbors, pre-cut and packaged, to be assembled simply.
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