As a millennial, I cannot comprehend how 39% of people could have kids at 25. In between the financial crises, pandemics, and grinding hard to some day afford something meaningful. like actually appealing real estate, I am not close to having means to support another person.
I think there's a baseline for the "child in household" metric. Some % of people will always want to have kids, no matter what circumstances. It's inelastic for them - whether times are great or they are just getting by, or even if they are below the poverty line, they will have kids. Maybe one in six, or one in five. I think a large proportion of people for whom the choice is dependent on circumstances are choosing to not have kids anymore, at least in their 20s.
- You don't live in a big city. Your overheads are quite low. You live in a low-tax state. The amount you'd pay in taxes in California is probably enough to have one more kid in Nevada.
- You have familial wealth and / or help. You're with someone you want to be with, your parents are young enough to help you raise the munchkins.
- When all your friends are having kids in their early 20's, there's plenty of pressure to have one too.
I think community support is more important than all those factors.
Having children is much easier when you are close to parents, friends, and family that share the load. If your family willing to babysit, that saves like 20K a year in a metro area. If your friends have kids, you don't have to choose between personal social time and child rearing.
The realities of the world are set up such that you have positive feedback making it easier if your peers are having lots of kids, and negative feedback making it harder if your community is having fewer kids.
I have friend groups that have lots of kids and it works out great for them. They socialize multiple times a week for dinners during the week or barbecues on the weekend. One parent will passively watch the kids while the other six or seven parents hang out and enjoy themselves. This lightens the load on everyone.
I have five kids. Had three of them by 25 and my wife was stay at home. We didn't originally have the means to support them. Between grinding it out, tightening belts, and earning more over time you figure it out.
My oldest can remember scraping by but my youngest will only know being rich by most people's standards. I'm the oldest from a big family, so is my wife. A bunch of our friends are as well and from what I can tell it's more common than not for the older siblings to remember harder times than the younger ones.
It's not like you have to be set in life or comfortable to have kids. I honestly wouldn't be as successful without them. Having kids and struggling to making ends meet really lights an fire under your ass.
Budget up, cut waste, find other sources of revenue. Eating out 6x a week, buying expensive coffee and the latest iPhone might pale in comparison to making a Little You.
>Eating out 6x a week, buying expensive coffee and the latest iPhone might pale in comparison to making a Little You.
Are you joking?
What it really means is cutting back on things that actually affect quality of life. Like not being able to spend time with your child because you are working 3 jobs, so they grow up needing therapy and have barely any connection to you. Not having space for them to have their own room, so they grow up with no privacy and strained family relationships. Not being able to feed yourself and your child sufficiently due to cost and being time-poor, so you send them to school without lunch and everyone pities them. Not taking your child to the dentist, so they grow up with lifelong health issues. Not taking your child to the psychiatrist, so they grow up with undiagnosed mental health issues that compromise every aspect of their capability to be happy and educated during childhood and teenage years. Living in a bad neighbourhood so your child goes to a bad school (with lifelong educational consequences), barely ever experiences nature and can't go roam outside. This list is just a very limited subset of the real consequences.
Why is the inevitable result some hard life working 3 jobs? If you care enough you will make it happen. Babies are expensive but they aren't life-changing expensive.
>Babies are expensive but they aren't life-changing expensive.
I can't comprehend how you can say that. This is an actual human being with basically unbounded ability to benefit from absorbing your time and resources.
>Why is the inevitable result some hard life working 3 jobs?
It is a spectrum. The earlier comment in the chain stated "Some % of people will always want to have kids, no matter what circumstances. It's inelastic for them". This is the reality for some people in that spectrum. Anecdotally i'd say for -most- people. At some point, in my opinion, the consequences are bad. Saying it's just about not buying an iPhone seems like a rich person perspective from someone that has no idea how most people live and raise children
>Eating out 6x a week, buying expensive coffee and the latest iPhone might pale in comparison to making a Little You
Every time I read this I can't help but think that either I'm delusional, or the person writing it. Are there truly people who eat out 6x times a week? Anecdotal and all, but I don't know a single person who does this.
It would also be interesting to count up the expenses of everything you write here, and compare them to "making Little You", because my feeling is that the amount you would save on these things is a small fraction of what it costs to raise "Little You".
My wife and I are both successful professionals and we’re just now buying our first place in Southern California at almost 40. Meanwhile, a single guy I work with is buying a house at double the price we bought ours for at the age of 25. How? Mommy and daddy helped out with a downpayment. It just is what it is. We’re proud we did it on our own.
That's just consolation fiction in the same vein as "bullies are cowards".
I think the parent comment's take was better: It just is what it is. I'm happy with what I have, and I don't feel the need to imagine scenarios in which people better off than me are secretly unhappy.
I agree. My parents helped with my down payment and cosigned on my home and my partner's parents on theirs. Both were vehicles for them to pass on generational wealth and, more importantly, give an early start to our credit scores. There is no malice or control attached, just parents genuinely wanting the best for their kids.
Don't think so. I know many people here in the Netherlands who own a home at the age of 25 thanks to their parents, and their parents are generally actually nice people who just want to help their children out. It makes their kids happy and they like seeing their kids happy.
It goes beyond making their kids happy. If you see your family as an expending unit, helping your kids finance their education and buy a house is probably the most impactful thing you can do financially. Having a house early saves you a ton on rent and that’s even more important when you are young and have a low salary.
No surprise. Life is too precarious in America. You start at 18 with immense debt, jump through hoops in college, find a starting salary job, pay off student loans, buy a car on debt, rent an expensive apartment, dating sucks, isolation and loneliness, spend days and nights grinding for corporate America, PIPs, unreasonable expectations, then get laid off a few times while rent/housing price keeps rising, bullshit healthcare that takes too much of your time and energy - and suddenly you are 35 with undeveloped social skills, high debt, loneliness, PIP for corporate America, and no real assets to speak of.
It strikes me that we just have our head in the sand when it comes to dating.
From the sample of young guys I know, the ripped guy on trenbolone that takes great shirtless pictures is fucking so many women that he actually says he is picky on tinder. All the other guys are playing video games. The ripped guy has zero interest in relationships and giving up what he has now. The video game guys have zero chance at a relationship.
No mystery that this setup is going to produce a highly neurotic society that almost no one is happy in besides the small group of guys working on a sex addiction.
The other stuff you mention is really not much different than the past.
Min wage in 1990 was $3.35 an hour and average new car price was $15k. All my money at 20 went to a piece of shit car that constantly broke down and needed repair. That was pretty much everyone I knew. That is a time when even the $15k new car was basically a piece of shit by modern standards. There was never a time in the past when the average person had it easy economically sipping champagne. Dating though you have a point.
Dating today is tough for many reasons, most of which are systemic. To go on a bit of a tangent from the main discussion here, a certain amount of the difficulty is self inflicted. People are convinced that dating apps are their only option, but my experience has been the opposite in practice. The actual trouble is how so few people are actually willing to meet and give others a chance IRL. I host a bar games meetup in Los Angeles, a place you'd think would be teeming with youngish people looking to go out and have fun with new friends, and yet a meetup in a hip part of town like the Arts District may only have 4 attendees. Everyone complains about how hard dating is, but so few are willing to put down their phone and actually go out and find people. Even if they do, they come up with excuses as to why everyone is not their exact type. There's women I meet all the time who are obsessed with a certain archetype of man, and even if they happen to stumble upon that kind of man by chance, they refuse to approach. Men are no better either.
What I'm saying is that these are choices people make. Companies like Tinder and the media we live vicariously through have definitely trashed the landscape, but we are also our own worst enemies, and I see that as the biggest problem. I'm not the most accomplished in terms of dating, but all of my long term relationships came out of just meeting people organically. I'm not even particularly good looking. I'm bald and have a touch of gray hair, but I've still managed to find opportunities with women. Even when I was fat I wasn't as hopeless as I thought I was at the time. Some people truly lose the genetic lottery, but at least 90% don't actually fall in that category.
I just hope someone reads this and figures out that a big part of the problem with dating comes from within. Not everyone has to be in a relationship or be some kind of Casanova. But if it's something a person wants then they need to get out of their own way. The culture today convinces people to remain in their own way because it's not profitable for people to stop using apps and TV.
> There was never a time in the past when the average person had it easy economically sipping champagne.
There's truth to both claims. Things have always been difficult. I think there are also ways in which opportunities were more accessible to some, and the only thing holding those opportunities back today is an economical bust-boom similar to those that many of our elders were able to benefit from. Where I live, many of those in my parents generation got into careers they weren't educated or experienced in because the economic condition incentivizes businesses to hire anyone with a pulse. That can happen again, but we haven't had anything like that (outside of some sectors of tech) for at least 15 years. Many younger people found themselves to be "failures" because they needed far more debt and time investment than their parents only to end up with less than they had at the same age.
To your point, things often seem harder because our expectations are higher than those of early generations, both in terms of person expectations and material expectations.
> And you want us to reach life milestones sooner?
Its pretty clear based on the conclusions of the article that the author doesn't have much credibility.
Don't forget, there's no guarantee college = paying job.
Its been shown with quite a lot of supporting evidence that experienced workers crowd out the entry-level jobs used by College Alumni, when their primary work isn't available.
It used to be 'Everyone has a mortgage, and they do it for the mortgage'. Now its 'Everyone has rent, and they do it for the rent and food'.
To top it off, I find it common that older generations underestimate the amount of "wiggle room" they had that's barely available to the generations that follow them. My parents and other parents in their generation have told me countless stories of the ways they practically walked into jobs without experience, or the businesses they started from virtually nothing, and all the good deals that were afforded to them; yet these experiences can be nearly impossible to replicate today. Go ahead and "pound the pavement" with only a go-getter attitude and no experience, and see how that works out for you. I'm not the only one of my generation who were told by their parents to "just walk in and ask the manager for a job" or "offer to make them coffee or sweep their floors just to get your foot in the door" only to be met with laughter and being told to fuck off. Want to start a business like your parents did? Oh, well that's too bad, because the tax advantage they had was since sealed up by the IRS and the same industry now requires several forms of regulatory approval that didn't exist in 1987. But maybe you just want a low key, honest, and reasonably playing job, in which case your own parents may be voting against increasing minimum wage because "how dare they expect more than $3.75 an hour in 2023! I paid my way through college on $3.75 /hr!"
Also: because the cost of living – especially housing – is so much higher, taking a risk like starting a business or a new job is a lot more, well, risk and requires a larger amount of savings.
Companies expect people to work constantly, especially since the pandemic. It’s ridiculous. Tech is totally different than what it was 10 years ago in terms of demands on people’s time.
> Companies expect people to work constantly, especially since the pandemic. It’s ridiculous. Tech is totally different than what it was 10 years ago in terms of demands on people’s time.
Totally! The expectations have completely changed.
Engineering used to be more like Architecture. You design stuff and then you manufacture it. But "managers" seem to want to treat it more like the warehouse where X number of packages must be shipped in this sprint.
Unfortunately the data is matched against the poverty line which is a bad measure when the cost of living is significantly higher than the poverty line.
You'd probably see a much larger statistically significant move towards the negative if you accounted for many of the commonly known issues such as college graduations. Several of the milestones are measured in such a way that anyone taking a minimum wage job would meet several of those milestones since the poverty level is 13,590. That won't even cover rent let alone food, 150% of that is 20,385, after tax 18,346 net, not enough for food and rent so clearly not financially independent but counted as such in this study.
I'm an old fart, and my details are: out of parent's houses at 20, out of school at 24, financially independent at 25 and married at 26. Never had kids though, at least none with 2 legs. Was 1-2 years younger than my cohorts, and there was a wave of delaying kids until parents were 40-ish that seems to have weakened. Whole lot of girls with older parents it seems.
What's today's trends with people going for advanced or professional degrees?
I moved out of my parents’ at 18, finished undergrad and started my PhD at 21, married and had my first child towards the end of grad school at 26, and currently have 3 kids. Total household income is about $325k in a MCOL area.
We became homeowners in 2019 during a narrow window of affordability and available housing inventory in our area. Had we waited, covid and the subsequent inflation and decreased inventory would have kept homeownership out of reach.
It was extremely stressful at the time, but we made the strategic decision to have kids young while we have the energy. I can’t imagine being 10 years older and being able to keep up with everything.
> What's today's trends with people going for advanced or professional degrees?
The vast majority don't actually make it through to graduation. In a 6 year period , something like 12-20% graduate for a 4 year degree depending on how they've (the college) decided to measure. Metrics aren't tracked to determine how much repeatability happened. That, for the most part is for those who can afford to go to school full time indefinitely which in Today's dollars amounts to roughly $15,000 per 6 months living expenses (if your smart without including books and tuition costs).
Most degrees have general education that act as weed out classes that are designed and structured to fail. Core Physics in Engineering, Economics/Anthro in Business.
Many classes also misrepresent the time commitment needed to succeed in the class. I've seen some 3-unit classes that have so many assignments that you had to spend 28 hours a week just completing them. In a 12 unit full-time load you would need to be able to put in 68+ hours a week for 16 weeks with just one of those classes. Sometimes you get two. Normally a 3-unit class should never require more than 9 hours of coursework a week but that rarely happens consistently.
Older people going back to school would find themselves having to go to the emergency room if they had any stress related medical conditions with that kind of work load.
Physics has the 3 question two test, where each question depends on the previous question's correct answer. You can only get the last problem wrong on either of those tests to pass. Its perfection or nothing.
Economics is plagued with non-deterministic answers in their testing methodology for at least 30% of the questions for any course using Pearson resources (almost all use them). The reading material doesn't match the tested material, and you have to choose which answer is correct among 3 or 4 correct answers. By choose I mean guess because that's what it is without determinism properties which these lack but the professor and school lack rigor in applying it to coursework.
I'm largely self-taught after failing college coursework for nearly two decades. Self taught through MIT's OCW and I do IT System's Administration/engineer responsibilities, no degree. Systems and Signals was probably one of the most important OCW courses I took (where they discuss these properties rigorously). I've completed up past Calc 3 into DiffEQ/Linear Algebra, I couldn't pass the physics because they inconsistently handle rounding rules on those causality spiraled tests. I gave up after try/fail #9 (not the same professor/college) where I got the only perfect at the college for the bundled lab portion/project which was pooled among all physics courses at that college, but not the three question test. The project was designing an egg drop that survives a 4 story drop with set materials from a pool of materials divied up exclusively between teams, I took the lead and we did it with a plastic bag, paper, and water. Escalating the academic dishonesty issues (students selling previous tests in the class to other students loudly with the teacher turning a blind eye), resulted in no action because the teacher had seniority over the Dean (straight from the Dean's mouth).
Organic Chem is often one as well. Many of these course sections have an 8% pass rate or worse.
Systemic issues reported get ignored, the escalation path is professor -> chair -> dean -> board of trustees. All teachers, all with the bureacratic mindset that doing any action will affect their standing so its better to do nothing at all in anything but clear cut fraud. Paying a teacher to teach, and then having them refer you to Khan Academy videos, not teach (no lecture), and autograde/refuse to correct issues on tests where material tested didn't match course materials; isn't fraud in their mind. Incidentally, they also don't consider revoking access to digital materials you purchased through a specific date, which are LMS locked, without any refund, fraud either after you withdraw. There's no requirement for investigatory action upon report and these people are all co-workers who are in it together.
There's a lot of fraud involved with colleges and they largely have blanket legal protection. Unless you go to school outside the US you are faced with this, and predatory loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcy or cases of outright fraud. ITT tech happened in early 2000s, it was clearly fraud, and they only recently reached a settlement in 2022 to discharge the existing debt (but not refund interest payments).
While that agreement was reached, I personally haven't heard from anyone involved in that actually completing the process for the discharge. Last I heard you had to submit additional paperwork that had to be just right which was error prone and stalling tactics. I've a few friends from HS where they went that route and regretted it. They are in their 40s now, not a homeowner, no kids, no wife, critically stunted from overbearing debt imo.
The only other alternative for qualifications is professional certifications, and the same companies are involved with the same fraudulent practices. Extract as much money as possible, have government contracts for blanket legal protection, eliminate due process. Its rapidly becoming an unlivable world where you can't get ahead unless you were born wealthy or steal it.
Most of us are raised from a young age to not steal, the existing environment encourages those who steal and get away with it, at the expense of those that follow ethics, morals and rules. Cheating and academic dishonesty is rampant because fraud & corruption is endemic to the system.
Employers use the claim that you aren't qualified even when you are, simply because you don't have a certification or degree. I've turned down many job offers because they wanted me to come work for them at half-off for work I've a decade of experience at. Imagine what people who have no experience and no college have to deal with.
Thanks for sharing your experiences! It's a bittersweet feeling for me to look back at how I refused a traditional education having known only a fraction of what you do.
My observation is that the base M.O. of academic-corporate apparatus is for any given transaction to be at least a low-level scam. Unless a business is a family mom-and-pop store making fresh pastries at a reasonable price, just expect anything being sold to you to involve some amount of shenanigans. The system leaks and misallocates currency so badly that ripoffs are the only way to get ahead. To have more subscribers, simply make canceling subscriptions confusing and time consuming. If the CEO wants a third home on Martha's Vineyard, he has the cooks use the same amount of pizza dough for the large as for the medium. You want that car at a reasonable price? Be prepared to have features that have been basic to vehicles for decades crumble apart after 80k miles. Don't forget that you can't put a price on education, so use that "good debt" to buy a bunch of paper weights you'll only read 10% of, and expect to be a "self learner" because important people like professors and corporate vice presidents don't have time to do their jobs. If they let you subvert the system, it's just because they know you need to "hit the ground running." Don't ask, don't tell!
If dishonesty and swindling were somehow eliminated from the economy, the entire system would collapse. People must fail for others to win, and the system can only grow and replicate if it can create more failures, but not so much failure that the losers have nothing left to lose.
> Imagine what people who have no experience and no college have to deal with.
Hell, even with experience, employers by default assume that you are the one misleading them, despite many if not most job ads containing overt dishonesty. It works out for them if they can convince candidates that they are all at least somewhat inferior compared to it, and many fall for that. Someone will take that low paying dev job, especially given how few opportunities that seem to be for junior devs now in contrast to when I got started.
> Most of us are raised from a young age to not steal, the existing environment encourages those who do that get away with it, at the expense of those that follow ethics, morals and rules. Cheating and academic dishonesty is rampant because fraud & corruption is endemic to the system.
This is not new, but I do agree it's more noticeable, and probably will continue to be so as real wage continues to drop. People get more desperate and less socially inclined as financial stress increases, and it has been doing so with _less_ social safety net for at least as long as anyone who reads this has been alive.
It’s anecdotal but based on 20-30 years observations. Recall reading something about the Y chromosome being more fragile so age and lab work would agree with this. Just knew lots of 40-ish coworkers and buddies with lots of girls and few boys.
In part I think it’s because young people’s worlds have massively expanded, on average. I traveled to 5 continents mostly without parents as a teenager, and I’m a pretty average guy who just put his mind to it. It’d be unthinkable for my parents to have done the same.
In part I think we also have more time, life expectancy grew by about 7 years in the past 50 years. And our ability to have kids at a later age is growing with medical advances. Going to school for longer and getting kids later, makes sense in that context.
Anyway I think it’s a bit misleading to take particular ages and then compare percentages (e.g. 21yos with a kid in 1980 vs 2021) This way of presenting data can exaggerate the differences, average age of first kid would be better for example. I don’t know how to call this statistics phenomenon, but imagine the light blue area to be ‘kids in the house at 21yo’ and then imagine a minor shift in the average age of having the first kid, the resulting figure would seem much more pronounced than the minor shift in average age. Would’ve been nice to see the data presented differently.
When I see these generational comparisons, I often wonder how much of it simply comes down to urbanization. Urbanization brings High Cost of Living and higher Stakes. Homes are more expensive and a higher barrier. People can't live alone so they put off cohabitating or marrying.
Anecdotally when I travel to the Midwest or other rural environments, I see meet lots of people who married young, bought houses young, and started families much earlier than peers in the city
I'd say the contemporary perception of moral philosophy is so far removed from Aristotle and the Socratics a modern audience may not even recognize e.g. the Nichomachean ethics as a discussion about moral philosophy if you go through some of its key arguments and points without citing it as a source.
I have a small advancement in moral philosophy for you, though this “simple solution” requires some retooling of terms.
This “Objective Morality” proposes that existence is the ultimate good, and not existing is bad (for the existent.)
Good is the conservation of the potential of being
Bad is the waste of the potential of being
Evil is the corruption and perversion of the potential of being
This idea of an “existential potential of being” is the a priori of life or dynamic systems in general, and the “Objective” context relates to the rule, not the subjectivity of who it is good for. The benefit of objectivity resolves to the most encompassing domain of evaluation (individual or group or principle of intrinsic aspect, etc.)
> Adults who are 21 are less likely than their predecessors four decades ago
It usually takes four years to graduate college, if you go at 18 that means you exit at age 22. Seems that people going to college more now than they did 40 years ago could have a huge impact on this result.
I think there's a baseline for the "child in household" metric. Some % of people will always want to have kids, no matter what circumstances. It's inelastic for them - whether times are great or they are just getting by, or even if they are below the poverty line, they will have kids. Maybe one in six, or one in five. I think a large proportion of people for whom the choice is dependent on circumstances are choosing to not have kids anymore, at least in their 20s.