My wife worked in several daycares in her early 20s, including an extremely expensive "Bright Horizons" location in a very affluent area. Even premium daycares provide inferior care to infants and young toddlers versus parental/family care. The economics of a business being in charge of your child demand this. Something that shocked her was at this super expensive daycare she worked at, the infants were basically given the bare minimum of attention while the older children consumed all of the time from the staff. The focus was on parental retention, so her job was to focus on changing the diapers of the infants to prevent diaper rash, and this took precedence over actually holding them and interacting with them. At no point is it remotely similar to how homo sapien mothers parent their OWN infants.
Daycare is to parenting as processed food is to nutrition. They are modern developments that prioritize economics over quality.
A study done in Canada (a "natural experiment", where a lottery determined eligibility for free daycare and allocated it at random) allowed researchers to track children who were enrolled in daycare versus children who were parented by their mothers, found that (adjusted for income) the infants who lost out on the lottery and were raised by their mothers in early childhood were healthier and better adjusted adults years later.
In Québec we have pretty extensive parental leave and we have heavily subsidized daycare (used to be 7$ a day per kid, now it's means-tested but you still get a hefty refund on your healthcare expenses come tax season).
When the program was put into place it paid for itself with the amount of mothers that entered the workforce.
I am not arguing that parents should be deprived of paid parental leave until they are ready to go to preschool/daycare. I sm arguing that once the child is old enough to do that, it shouldn’t have to kneecap family finances to do so.
I agree. I think that paid parental leave and then later, paid daycare is an amazing investment of government resources. If we diverted a fraction of what we spend on retirees who had good jobs their whole lives and don't even need assistance to child care, society would benefit.
We spend far too much on former taxpayers instead of fostering and forming new taxpayers.
"Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them."
Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Nobody had to meet this bar you set before. Let's just be honest here. There were three recent developments, all of which were, by themselves, good things. But those three things, combined, created an unprecedented phenomenon.
The 3 things:
1.) The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.
2.) Women being granted autonomy and being allowed to join the workforce and leave marriages without suffering economic and social destruction
3.) Social support programs to create a poverty safety net funded by taxpayers instead of charity
No society on the planet ever had these things until the mid to late 20th century. And these things all contribute to radically reduced birth rates, in every single society that has implemented them together.
This take of "all you have to do is make the society encourage family formation" makes it sound like the three developments I listed are irrelevant, and that humans always just had this explicit menu of options that made family formation an optional pursuit, independent of a good life. That is simply not the case.
We need to be honest with ourselves about the uncharted territory we're in. It's not simple. Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. Our ancestors 5 generations back would have viewed our "jobs" as fake. They wouldn't even recognize what we do on a daily basis to earn food and shelter as labor of any kind. We have entire metropolises filled with people with soft hands who have literally never had to participate in their own survival from the perspective of harvesting food or cooking/heating fuel. Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
You're comparing an average, but the demographics are different. If you compare, say, native-born-white to native-born-white, they fit those inputs much closer.
Total fertility is down because a smaller fraction of the population are immigrants from Mexico and Central/South America now and those immigrants have a higher birth rate. Their children regress to the mean.
The fertility rate has decreased significantly for US-born women of every race and ethnicity since the 1990s. I couldn't quickly find good stats on trend in birth control usage or labor force participation by race, ethnicity, or immigration status, but I'm skeptical that the trend is in the opposite direction for any particular demographic.
So I expect the claims in my previous comment still hold even for, e.g., native-born whites as a subgroup: flat-to-decreasing birth control usage, declining labor force participation, but still declining fertility rate. Obviously the magnitudes of those changes may be different at the subgroup level, but I don't see how the data is compatible with the claims of the comment I initially replied to.
> Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia.
I think about this all the time, and how tragic (comedic?) it is that humanity finally created a Utopian age but most of its inhabitants are ignorant of that fact, and thus don't appreciate it, and instead genuinely believe they live in one of the worst times ever.
We are unhappy BECAUSE it's a utopia, and our brains evolved in a landscape that was ALWAYS trying to kill us. Like an immune system in an overly clean environment starts attacking inert things and creates allergies, our minds have created threats and focused on "relative" scarcity over actual scarcity. Instead of "How am I going to get enough calories to survive this week?" it's "Why does that guy get to be in a private jet and I have to fly coach?"
Yep. Birth control made it so women can choose how many times they get pregnant. Pregnancy is not exactly a walk in the park, so it’s no surprise it’s decreasing as birth control increases.
To override this, society needs to make having kids be “cool.” It’s that “simple,” but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian.
So it’s a problem that can only be solved by individual change and convincing others one on one that it’s desirable. And people don’t like that.
I totally agree, and my argument with the original post was that the author made it sound so simple.
Has any society successfully done this yet?
Basically, the only prosperous first world groups I see with fertility rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures (like the Mormons, Evangelicals, and Modern Orthodox Jews in the US). I simply don't see any other examples of being able to pull this off.
Anything can become cool and desirable if enough people think it is.
The acceptance of LGBT was largely won this way. Same with women’s rights and environmentalism (although that one is still in the midst of fighting for success).
You just have to settle for a long road ahead before reaching any tipping point.
“A man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Because having kids then was a way to increase quality of life. The kids could be put to work from a young age and help make money. Now, with so much modern tech doing physical tasks efficiently, a kid isn't going to add much value and instead is going to be a money sink.
The past is a foreign country. I do not believe "quality of life" in economic terms is a sufficient explanation. The simple Darwinian fact is that, if your culture did not value reproduction sufficiently, through whatever means, it would not have survived to the present. Remember, infanticide was widely practiced historically, and while not as convenient as birth control, provides a significant fraction of the same "benefit".
I do find it a bit ironic that "free child slave labor" is considered a better reason to have kids these days than, say, ancestor worship or nietzschean vitalism.
This is also true. But once that happened, it was a sort of expectation and often necessity. People couldn't outsource as much hard work to machines, built by someone else far away from their farms
If, as another comment states, the countries with highest birth rates are Chad, Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan and Yemen, how does that square with your "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe" assertion?
> Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
I was kinda nodding at points at your comment, or at least stroking my chin thinking, until the end. I had a feeling. You just came here to scold people.
Yeah, as soon as you don't need children to help with your work, they don't make much sense in the capitalist individualistic society. That women still choose to do it, honestly... I see as a triumph of the human spirit
It's worth pointing out that pre-agricultural hunter gatherer societies also had low birth rates. They spaced their children out more, nursed longer, and didn't have as many kids overall.
Their population densities in pre-agricultural Europe were far lower than the agricultural societies that displaced them,
> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
> The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.
Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.
You really need to interpret the comment you're replying to in the context of here and now, not 100 years ago before people had a choice about whether to get pregnant from sex. Doing otherwise is misleading.
Within the context of people having more choice about pregnancy, the critical remaining piece is that the world is economically and societally absolute shit for people to have children in. Women don't just have the option of entering the workforce, they increasingly need to because a dual income household is now the market expectation in relation to cost of living in developed cities and especially cost of living with children in developed cities. Not to mention the capitalist class war overtly amplifying economic disparity instead of reducing it. Not to mention the environment, climate, justice, and social wellness being gradually destroyed by plutocratic christofascists on a grand scale.
TFR doesn't account for mortality which has also continuously fallen since then. If you're not adjusting for that, then you're looking at meaningless decontextualized numbers. Obviously if people want a certain number of children and the children keep dying then they're going to need to give birth more to get the right number of children. Birthing is not a useful measure on its own because pre-adulthood dead children lead to the same impact on population growth as no children in the first place.
I think your point is correct about the lack of optionality for women being in the workforce, but there are entire regions of the United States where it absolutely is optional. I live in one of them (Lynchburg, VA, which is filled with young evangelical Christian families that live in apartments and the mother stays at home) and my coworkers live in another (Salt Lake City, Utah which also has a ton of young moms staying at home).
I'm not foolish enough to think it's remotely possible in all places, but I do think an element of this is humans in the 21st century demanding a standard of living that far exceeds what they wanted in the 1970s, especially when it comes to vacations, automobiles, houses, etc.
My wife and I raised my first son (born when i was 23) in a 1 bedroom apartment, and my second child was born right after we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Most of my colleagues were shocked that I "didn't have a REAL HOUSE TO RAISE THE KIDS IN!!!! GASP!!!". And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
> And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
I agree with this. I also believe that modern people have become substantially...hmmm...dumber about expenses like food? People think it's impossible to make delicious nutritious meals quickly and cheaply, but in fact it's actually very easy and you just need to actually consider it as being possible, and you need to be willing to spend 5-10 minutes of effort. It's appalling to me the number of people who think that cooking anything beyond boiling water is mysterious or who will argue that it's impossible to eat well on a budget by pointing exclusively at niche products that only exist to satisfy a drive for extreme novelty and ignoring staples.
Awww man, I agree with you sooooo much on the food portion.
My son is now 19 years old, and doing very well financially (he chose to join the Army). I taught him from a young age how to shop and cook on a budget, in a healthy fashion. Started with hard boiled eggs, beans and rice, chicken and broccoli. Those kinds of things.
I also taught him (by observing his teenage friends) to always always always refer to DoorDash as a "Burrito Taxi" to help mentally reinforce the utterly absurd level of luxury you are indulging in when you have a human being drive a 3500 pound vehicle to your home to bring you a single meal prepared by somebody else.
The number of people I encounter who struggle financially (including one of my sisters) who indulge in these practices is insane. Our culture has forgotten that eating at restaurants (at least in the West, unlike say Singapore) is historically an expensive luxury, due to our relatively high cost of labor.
Agree, as a kid in the 1970s we ate almost every meal at home, cooked by my mother. Mostly staples rice, potatoes, vegetables, some kind of meat. Restaurants were a rare treat for something like a birthday or if we were traveling. Fast food, the same. Very infrequent, like maybe a few times a year would we be able to talk my mom into getting a Happy Meal. Pretty much the same experience for all the kids I grew up with as far as I remember.
I recently moved to a rural home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
I socialize with a bunch of current and former college professors, and they've all remarked on this phenomenon for nearby UVA and Virginia Tech. Interestingly, the one university in the area that is not impacted is the Christian fundamentalist Liberty University. The demographic that attends that school come from a high birth rate subculture. BYU is also not having an issue.
In fact, Liberty has had to expand. I'm not a fan of religious education, but I also think that ALL university tuitions are vastly overpriced to fund the absurdly overpaid and bloated armies of administrators. This includes my alma mater Virginia Tech.
Depends on which administrators you're talking about. The army of staff at my Tier 1.5 university make about $60-90k in an MCOL area. High-level admins make more, of course, but there's not an army of them! There's really only 1-2 "highly" paid people making >$120,000 in the whole IT department.
I'm not sure which other universities have "absurdly overpaid and bloated armies of administrators".
Brown University has 1 administrator for every 2 students.
This is a widely known and discussed phenomenon and is actually a running joke here in the comments.
Honestly, I'm shocked that you're unaware of this, to a degree where you're calling my comment out. I don't know what your news sources are, but they're not keeping you informed.
The "army" part largely resonates with me - I understand that universities have very high staff ratios. I even tried to openly acknowledge that in my response! I specifically used your language in my words: "the army of staff at my tier 1.5 university".
But whats the median pay for those staff members? I’m mainly arguing the “absurdly overpaid” part of the “army of absurdly overpaid admins” claim. Myself and many coworkers in this IT department have left high-pressure 60-80 hour/week jobs in tech / consulting / etc. We took a ~40% paycut (and reduction in benefits! my health insurance is very poor) in exchange for a much more relaxed environment. I was making $140,000 before this, but now I'm making $80,000 - and I'm one of the more highly-paid people in my department.
If I told you I could save you money on fuel by making your car more efficient, then removed it's engine, you would still call that nonsense no matter how much of a gas guzzler it was before or how little fuel gets put in it now.
You just made a massive non sequitur. The government does have waste, as does any large organization, including in the private sector. Whether or not DOGE saved money needs an independent analysis, not numbers which DOGE itself produces.
Musk and Trump cut a large number of jobs and declared, without any evidence, that it was all fraud and waste. For example, they dismissed everyone who was in a probationary period, claiming these were all low-performing people. In fact, every person hired or promoted was automatically in a probation status. In many cases the fired people turned out to be critical and the government asked them to come back.
Think about this: when Enron exploded, it took a team of forensic accountants months to untangle the bookkeeping. Musk came in with a team of mostly teenage hacker types to siphon all the data from all the agencies he could and in less than 48 hours declared he had found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud. It beggars belief that Elon Musk just happens to be an accounting expert and could process terabytes of data and make sense of it in a day or two.
Another thing you should know is the founder of Gumroad, a man in his 30s and who joined DOGE in a good-faith effort to help make the government more efficient, found that things were not at all like he expected. Even if you don't believe him, he was closer to the action than Musk, has more technical knowledge than Musk, and if nothing else, offers a counter-narrative from what you apparently have bought:
After expressing his opinions he was quickly sacked by DOGE. Transparency indeed.
Oh, and many (hundreds?) of thousands of people will die each year due to loss of international aid. Meanwhile Musk was dancing around on stage like an idiot with a chainsaw thinking he was the coolest guy.
I witnessed massive fraud first hand in the DoD and the VA (the area this gumroad guy was dealing with) as a Booz Allen contractor.
I worked directly with fraudulent shell 8a firms (literally a big white dude made his Filipino American wife the CEO of like 6 people and then subcontracted to my team with a direct award minority woman owned business contract valued at a $100m).
I witnessed massive waste by VA employees at the joint MHS/VA hospital in North Chicago, IL (they sandbagged an expensive IT modernization that was trying to reduce wait times because it was going to put a bunch of local VA sys admins out of work by shifting to a gov cloud data center).
You don't know what your talking about. You don't have first hand knowledge. Nobody on the ground for years in the Federal sector agrees with you or the gumroad guy. They agree with me.
My twin brother worked at a "Native Owned" defense contractor in Arlington, and literally never saw a Native American in their office a single time. There were employees with Washington Redskins merch everywhere and nobody cared because they KNEW that the single tribe that collected the checks at the top was never going to see the office. They just subbed out work to the big consulting firms anyway.
I have endless examples from working in the beltway for 10 years. Sorry that reality doesn't line up with your political tribal beliefs.
Nonsense in how they approached things. Clinton-era we had govt. cut backs all over the place. It was done according to a plan and according to the law.
This was just a hatchet job, aimed and cutting and gutting any and every agency they thought they could get away with.
He's alluded to thinking that Asians and Indians are "better" on some metrics so supremacy still seems a bit sensationalist. He certainly doesn't think all races are equal.
> You're labeling someone a "Nazi nut job" over nothing.
Nothing except his antisemitic tweets, his posts defending Hitler, his support of Alternative for Germany, his support of prominent white supremacists, his chatbot which praises Hitler, his endorsement of racist conspiracies, and the occasional "Sieg Heil". What exactly would "something" look like to you?
Being morally superior to that is an exceptionally low bar to clear and it's earned easily by everyone who rejects the hate and lies he publishes, supports, and encourages.
The man is officially a dear friend of Israel, he has never defended Hitler, he indeed supports the German far right party, his chatbot had an alignment issue that has been patched within 16 hours.
What you call a "Sieg heil" was an innocent hand gesture made once, and that hoax has been debunked by both the anti defamation league and the Israeli PM personally. You know this, yet you cannot let go of your hate.
I know you are not to be listened to when you dare say "innocent hand gesture made once", when he very clearly made it twice in a row; front, turn and repeat:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/R_6dVlz6mug
That is there, recorded, and you are telling me to ignore what I see.
I know you won't care, this video is not for you, is there in case anyone else starts to belive your lies, they can see for themselves.
To me it looks like Musk is overly concerned about discrimination against whites as well as woke ideology, also out of personal experience with his child.
The rest, where progressives slander Musk and label him a Nazi or, their newest addition, a pedophile, appears to be a litany of lies, like the ones just shared above.
You mean the Gazan civilians living in a densely populated area governed by a group of insane 9th century theocrats who launched a war they knew they couldn't win militarily with the objective of using their own citizens as human shields?
Yeah, they should be remembered, and Hamas should be remembered for refusing to surrender the hostages and letting them get slaughtered while they hid in their tunnels.
Do these developers fear losing their wages to Anthropic?
They should.
They should also hope that the power is held in as distributed a fashion as possible. The more any single player dominates the coding model space, the more they'll be able to extract for themselves.
We should hope for extreme levels of competition.
Someone should write an OS-level program that can extract the crypto keys from Anthropic tools, spy on the network traffic, then send all of that as training data to a third party. We should all install it.
We need to go to war against concentration of power.
In the future, when all development at scale happens through a company's tools, they'll be able to monitor the things you develop. And they'll be able to shut you down if they don't like what you're building. Assuming we don't just skip past that step and to the point where these companies automate everything and keep it for themselves.
The goal seems to be to create essentially the geopolitics of 1984 (the Orwell novel, not the historical year), with the superstates of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia replaced (for now) with three imperial zones of influence whose metropoles are the US, Russia, and China (this is the real substance of the “Donroe Doctrine”, though the overt part of that focuses on only the US-centered zone of control), though these imperial zones of control becoming de facto or de jure superstates isn't out of the question.
As in 1984, visible geopolitical conflict with a sufficient perceived degree of real kinetic threat between the empires serves the rulers of each empire by providing the external threat to maintain the apparent need for strong internal control, it also facilitates the transition from the current international status quo to the desired end state by providing a set of threats intended to coerce lesser powers to accede to the dominion of their respective regional overlords.
One explanation could be that, if Trump is a Russian asset, he'd be more effective at it if he wasn't obviously one. Seizing all tankers except russian ones might be too obvious.
Therefore, it might be worth it for Russia to lose a few tankers in order to keep one of their greatest assets.
All hypothetical of course. I'm sure Trump isn't a Russian asset. No way they can have kompromat on such a virtuous guy.
IDK it's become too verbose IMHO, looks almost like COBOL now. (I think it was Fortran 66 that was the last Fortran true to its nature as a "Formula Translator"...)
We are way beyond comparing languages to COBOL, now that plenty folks type whole book sized descriptions into tiny chat windows for their AI overloads.
Daycare is to parenting as processed food is to nutrition. They are modern developments that prioritize economics over quality.
A study done in Canada (a "natural experiment", where a lottery determined eligibility for free daycare and allocated it at random) allowed researchers to track children who were enrolled in daycare versus children who were parented by their mothers, found that (adjusted for income) the infants who lost out on the lottery and were raised by their mothers in early childhood were healthier and better adjusted adults years later.
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