[rich_sasha]

I often wonder about this.

Cost of having children is definitely very high. But I wonder if this is in part due to shifts in global culture.

Was the cost lower in the past? Perhaps state schools and nurseries were better and more available. But also less money went into things we grew accustomed to as consumers - fancier cars, new phones, holidays. Also non-consumerist things - perhaps people worry more about quality education for their potential kids. When children were more of a necessity, families found the money somehow.

Housing is expensive. But it is more so in booming megacities where the good jobs are. Were people more content in the past to plod along in their small town buying their affordable house?

This isn't a "drink less lattes" takedown, I have kids too and feel the pinch - and above all I might just be looking at it all wrong. But I'm having a hard time reconciling this observation with the fact that we are so much richer as a society than we were in say 1970. Presumably even the poorer people are, in absolute terms, wealthier than they were then.

[AnimalMuppet]

In the 1800s, you had fewer closets, because people didn't have enough clothes to need more than a chest.

In the 19... well, at least the 1950s, maybe even the 1970s, kids didn't each need their own bedroom, and bedrooms were smaller. (I mean, if you've got neurodivergent kids, it's really helpful for them to have their own space.) It didn't have that much of a yard; you didn't need a power mower for it. Our standards have changed.

In the 1970s, you probably drove a car that didn't have air conditioning, unless you lived in Arizona or something. Your house may not have had it, either.

It's not just lattes. It's housing and cars. The houses people lived in in the 1970s are now in the "less desirable" parts of town. The cars people drove... well, they may have been top-of-the-line cars in those days, but the equal functionality now is a very low-end car.

You can maybe survive as a family the way a family did in the 1950s - one breadwinner working a factory job, one car, small house, no cell phone plan, no cable TV, books from the library. But it's not the 1950s anymore and nobody wants to live that way.

[ryandrake]

> But I'm having a hard time reconciling this observation with the fact that we are so much richer as a society than we were in say 1970. Presumably even the poorer people are, in absolute terms, wealthier than they were then.

Is this really true though? Yes, in 1970, we did not have computers in our pockets, fine. But, in 1970, my parents owned their own home in their 20s just from the tiny salary of a single school teacher. They financed their educations without loans. They had easy and cheap access to health care. Their day-to-day costs still allowed them to save money. They had a strong safety net and a local community that cared.

We don't have any of that today, but we do have billionaires skewing the "average" higher and higher. I wouldn't say that anyone but them are in real terms wealthier today than in 1970.