[scoofy]

This is really the message of Abundance.

If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. To do that, you cannot have supply constrained zero-sum shortage anywhere in society. It means that the cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment so people can just save up and buy one early on in their career.

We need to not just allowing housing to get built, but actually we need to go as far as subsiding housing that nobody needs so that it's built before that need ever arises.

This is effectively impossible in a democratic society, and we are going to learn just how impossible it is as western society slowly collapses under the weight of its own social programs. It's honestly horrifying to watch.

[accurrent]

I agree that affordable housing is crucial, but the idea that this is 'impossible in a democratic society' ignores global realities. Several democracies heavily subsidize housing—look at Vienna's social housing model or Singapore's HDB system. Yet, this has not solved the birthrate problem; Singapore’s fertility rate recently hit a record low of 0.87.

Ironically, the highest birth rates globally occur where economic security is non-existent, a state of living none of us want to return to. What is truly worrisome about a country like India is that it is facing sub-replacement fertility before fully industrializing. In states with highly unique identities like Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, the native population has already fallen well below the 2.1 replacement mark. While internal migration from higher-fertility northern states fills the gap, it creates significant political and cultural friction.

In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population. In a developing nation like India, they risk growing old before they grow rich, leaving an aging population without the robust safety nets or fiscal runway of the West- we might even see the country slide backwards into sub-saharan African levels of poverty

[scoofy]

"Effectively impossible" does not mean "impossible."

Yes, Vienna's housing policy is effective... It's also the only place in the world that manages it. I would argue that it is ideal, but nearly impossible to implement. We can't escape the fact that Vienna operates what is effectively a sovereign wealth fund to create all that housing, which works with the subsidiaries of Austria's actual sovereign wealth fund in development. It's a nice system to be born into, it's nearly impossible to bootstrap.

>the highest birth rates globally occur...

Nobody is suggesting returning above replacement rate births. Falling below replacement rate is only a problem long term because it happens slowly, but exponentially. It will cause a displacement crisis that will rival climate change. Lowering world population would probably be a good idea, theoretically, but again, there's a difference between a linear decline and an exponential decline.

>In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population.

I don't see how this is relevant. One can be both for "abundance" and taxes on wealth.

[throwaway2037]

Not to repeat myself too much here, but Japan also handling housing very well for two reasons: (1) NIMBYism does not exist by law (and practice) and (2) there is almost zero protected homes for historical/architectural reasons. As a result, you can build and build and build in Japan. There are few limitations except a uniform national building code. Tear down and rebuild (bigger) is constant in big cities in Japan.

[nazgul17]

Exponential decay isn't impossible to manage if the exponent is reasonable (i.e. closer to 1, i.e. if the average number of children per woman was closer to 2.1). It's just going down too fast.

[HaloZero]

My understanding of Singapore work culture though is it's intense and competitive. Yes the housing is cheaper and more accessible but it's the same age to get there (maybe a bit earlier). You aren't "economically secure" earlier in life than in Western countries. I don't know enough Vienna's system to speak for it.

[echelon]

This has nothing to do with economic security.

Everyone is now dopamine maxxing on smartphones and internet. There's no desire to have kids because kids were a pre-internet and pre-modernity phenomena.

Now that we're fully entertained, there's little need for having children. The FYP has enough entertainment to overcome the biological itch.

Evolution did not anticipate social media and hyper addictive algorithms.

We're microdosing on pleasure and that's desensitized every biological urge to raise children.

Technology did this.

[onion2k]

Evolution did not anticipate social media and hyper addictive algorithms.

People have been having children later since about the 1930s. The change has been gradual, so it's only really hitting hard now because they've not had any children during the years when it's relatively easy, and now some can't. That could still be due to technology but not social media exclusively.

Coincidently though, this aligns pretty much perfectly to people's stability also shifting to happen later in life. Specifically the economic stability to raise a family on a single income. That's not really possible any more, so it shouldn't be a surprise that people don't do it.

Just to add a little factual data to this point, the fertility rate in England and Wales has been below two children per woman since the 1970s.

[trhway]

>That could still be due to technology but not social media exclusively.

the tech before social media - TV:

https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/tv-birth-control/

"TV As Birth Control

...

The impact of the new TV programming in rural India has been profound—and very positive, say Jensen and Oster. Their interviews revealed that when the new TV services arrived, women’s autonomy increased while fertility and the acceptability of domestic violence toward women significantly decreased."

[onion2k]

How can you tell that tech is the cause of people not having children, and not just what they're doing because they don't have children to fill their time?

I don't think you can point to the rise of tech as a casual just because it's popular. If people aren't having children they'll do something else instead. To say what that is you need more evidence that what people are doing.

[echelon]

Exactly.

We've been replacing biological imparatives with strange forms of nonbiological entertainment.

And it's increased now to the point that it's in endless supply and constantly attached to us.

[badpun]

Germany, Italy and Japan already had a fertility crash in the seventies, way before the social media dopamine maxxing.

[Qem]

People from the 70s are in their 50s today. Approaching retirement age, but most still able and employed. Things will get interesting in those countries as they hit old age and quit the workforce in a large wave.

[nemothekid]

>Everyone is now dopamine maxxing on smartphones and internet

Childbirth has been collapsing for decades before Mark had launched "thefacebook.com". Japan's TFR cratered in 1960 and never recovered. Did Japan have smartphones in 1960?

[jandrewrogers]

Vienna massively depopulated in the mid-20th century, so it had a large excess of underused real estate. Vienna is only now starting to come back to its former population. It is like making the observation that housing is cheap in Detroit.

We need to make cheap housing work in places that have not experienced large-scale depopulation.

[toomuchtodo]

> We need to make cheap housing work in places that have not experienced large-scale depopulation.

This will require incredible subsidies both to build and maintain, which I fully support, but I think is politically untenable due to everyone’s unwillingness for taxes to go up while the developed world already carries enormous sovereign debt loads (>100% GDP).

We ate the seed corn, broadly speaking, to maximize the gains for some at the expense of the young and the future. Hopefully I’m wrong, and both taxes go up and the bond market will support more borrowing in the near term for spending that actually delivers value.

[jandrewrogers]

In the long run this trend will depopulate all the cities, so we'll get there one way or another.

[toomuchtodo]

May the economically fittest mega cities win I suppose.

[em-bee]

large parts of vienna have also been destroyed in the wars, for example 80000 apartments were destroyed or unusable. so it's not underused real estate but more like empty space in the city to develop from scratch. any other city that is not densely packed can have that. new development currently happens on empty space that was never developed before.

[kopirgan]

Lol "unique identity" just for 2 states is left political propaganda. Don't fall for it. Every state (for that matter, most districts) in India is unique and none are unique because there's so much in common. Depending on how you look at it.

Coming to main topic, much of West doesn't have fiscal runway. But your point about getting old before getting rich is valid. But it is not all bad news.

IMHO one of main challenges for a democracy like India is, planning just about anything that involves land, capital takes just as long as in, say, US or UK due to lots of consensus building, "activism" delays, lawsuits etc. And by the time the thing is built - be it airports, roads, sewage pipes or water treatment etc., the population is far far higher. And it turns out inadequate almost like back to square 1.

Now THAT problem will reduce or go away. You take 20 years to debate a new garbage disposal facility and overcome NIMBY brigades? no issues! The population stays same when you stop arguing and get it done.

[accurrent]

> Lol "unique identity" just for 2 states is left political propaganda. Don't fall for it. Every state (for that matter, most districts) in India is unique and none are unique because there's so much in common. Depending on how you look at it.

Err...My point being that it's not like Biharis who move to West Bengal and Tamil Nadu are welcomed with open arms. West Bengal itself is a masterclass in what happens when you dont industrialise and implement birth control policies.

> Coming to main topic, much of West doesn't have fiscal runway. But your point about getting old before getting rich is valid. But it is not all bad news.

If USA's quality of life reduces people can still expect to live better lives than they do in India.

>IMHO one of main challenges for a democracy like India is, planning just about anything that involves land, capital takes just as long as in, say, US or UK due to lots of consensus building, "activism" delays, lawsuits etc. And by the time the thing is built - be it airports, roads, sewage pipes or water treatment etc., the population is far far higher. And it turns out inadequate almost like back to square 1.

Do you think China and Singapore just build like that? If you do you're kinda wrong. A LOT of time is put into planning and gaining consensus. Yes, the means aren't the same as India or USA, but Singapore for instance regularly holds ground level consultation with many people from different walks of life. Strong manning things leads to worse outcomes and both China and Singapore know this and only exercise it when absolutely necessary. The real issue is competent leadership. In most parts of the world only the most undesirable enter politics. It seems like the take away Indians and Americans have at looking at Singapore and China is StrongMan=Good without realising that it was a democracy that placed man on the moon, invented computing and more. The success of China and Singapore is predicated on their leadership and excellent civil service.

[throwaway2037]

China (I assume you mean mainland) and "gaining consensus" (before large infra projects) in the same sentence? You lost me here.

[accurrent]

You probably have not lived in China (or singapore) and are hence making the comment. What usually happens is some authorities float a project idea on the news. At this point the idea would be toyed with. Depending on feedback gathered via academic studies and social media responses, if the project is seen as controversial the projects scope will be adjusted to some common ground that works well enough for most of the identified stakeholders involved - this is what the civil servants are paid to do. In china this usually is an ongoing dialog between local and central government. In Singapore this usually means focus groups and discussion. Neither countries really want to deal with angry citizens (but will do so extremely harshly when the need arises).

This is in stark contrast to a place like India where pulling up bulldozers to solve problems is becoming increasingly common. Politicians will command building of infrastructure just to satisfy voters without thinking through long term consequences. Often you get projects which exist just to check of the fact that they have built something even if that thing is utterly useless once complete.

[throwaway2037]

    > You probably have not lived in China (or singapore) and are hence making the comment.

Followed by:

    > This is in stark contrast to a place like India

First: Do I need to have lived in China to have an opinion about anything in China?

Second: Apply your same silly "lived in" rule to your comment about India. The hard part about building in India: It is a democracy with a (somewhat) functional court system and (somewhat) free media, so you cannot steal/take people's property without just compensation. In China? Forget it. The govt does whatever it wants.

    > without thinking through long term consequences

Yeah, I am sure that China has never done that!

[thelastgallon]

That problem won't go away because India is not at 80 - 95% urbanized like the west. There are still ~50% in villages, who will continue to migrate to cities.

The problem is India only has a few metros. India should be building 100+ new cities and rapidly urbanize. Cities are engines of growth. The slow migration from villages to legacy metros amplifies the infrastructure problems.

[kopirgan]

Yes. Actually it'll make sense to build new cities instead of pumping billions paying inflated land cost to build roads, rail etc. and metro systems that only pull even more crowds. Let the main cities rot, be replaced over time by new ones. Most empires did that, globally.

[dgoldstein0]

The economics almost certainly play a role, but I think the better way to think about it is how we economize time too.

if you are chasing a career, putting in 40,50,60 hours a week - how can you take time off to have a kid? who is going to take care of the kid?

Increasingly having kids has gotten more expensive - housing, childcare costs, and general expected investment/supervision of children. In agricultural societies, kids often helped out with the farming; send them to school and they are around less to help. Say that kids can't roam around outdoors unsupervised, and caregivers have to spend even more time watching (older) children. Etc. And as people increasingly move further from where they grew up to chase good jobs, that means they are on average further from their families who would have helped with childcare in previous generations.

The economic realities factor in too - people are waiting longer to get married because they want to date financially stable people, and financial stability is on average taking longer to achieve. But if you had to move to a more expensive city, further from family... that's a recipe for couples where both work and perhaps have to work to make their finances work. Babies have become a luxury item in these higher cost of living places.

if we want more children, we need to make it easier to be a parent. Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option.

[Ntrails]

> Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option.

As GP states, heavily pushing subsidies has not been shown to work.

The one thing we know works is restricting access to birth control - I'd bet good money that ups the birth rate in no time. Leave as an exercise for the reader whether it is a good idea xD

[pastage]

> heavily pushing subsidies has not been shown to work

Subsidies only come into affect after you have children. They can not work alone society has a much greater affect. They work wonders at making parenting possible while being part of the work force. You only get the subsidies when you have children, the question is how you are supposed to feel secure enough to have children.

[acdha]

One thing to remember is that “heavily pushing subsidies” needs to be more comprehensive than it tends to be when you look at the details: people decide to delay kids for many reasons and societies often fail to address all of them – e.g. if you subsidize childcare but still have a work culture which expects long hours or sidelines mothers, the existence of the subsidy lessens the impact but probably doesn’t get too many people to change their answer. It’s fairly common to find reports of gaps in the supports for even the more generous societies which lead to people stopping at 1-2 kids when they might otherwise have wanted more.

These days, the big factors include not having dealt with climate change: parents are being asked to make a big gamble that the future will be better, and having all of the evidence suggest otherwise is a widely-cited deterrent.

[boston_clone]

Let's not speak so airily of forced pregnancies.

[jiggunjer]

Literally what china is doing now

[GoblinSlayer]

I was home alone, it was fine. What do you mean by "kids can't roam around outdoors unsupervised"?

[dgoldstein0]

In the US at least, we've gotten to the point that kids under 10 are rarely trusted to be alone and parents risk neglect charges by leaving them. Even the 10-13 range could be a risk. The problem is if someone calls the cops or social services, enough of those departments will take it seriously that as a parent, you really don't want to risk it.

It's a problem, because it's raised the bar for expected supervision effort, likely far beyond what is really needed.

[makeitdouble]

Depending on where you live, police will be called.

[somenameforme]

Then pass Karen's Law and start fining the people making those calls if made without good reason to believe of imminent or reasonable danger to the child. It not only screws up society, but is a complete waste of resources.

[tw04]

> and we are going to learn just how impossible it is as western society slowly collapses under the weight of its own social programs.

Social programs aren’t what’s causing western society to collapse. Wealth consolidation on the other hand…

[lucketone]

Wealth was quite consolidated when most population were peasants.

[tw04]

The wealth distribution in England in the 1500s had the top 1% controlling roughly 25% of the wealth.

The top 1% in America today controls roughly 32% of the wealth.

Tell us more about the peasants who got significant time off because the ruling class knew endless work resulted in an unhappy populace.

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

[chr1]

Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up.

If you subsidize building houses, you merely will drive up standard of living without moving childbearing age.

The problem is about priorities not resource constraints.

And solution will be either enough people/countries dying childless and miserable to force the remaining to assign higher priority to children, or technological development of artificial womb and lifespan enhancing drugs to make it possible to have children at 40 when their brain starts to work.

[somenameforme]

This is definitely not true. As recently as the 50s the cost of a 2/2 house was about 14% of a single median personal income per month. [1] In contemporary times median personal income is about $45k, so that'd be about $525 per month. And they paid lower taxes as well. In contemporary times people pay dramatically more for housing without getting much of anything more in return. People often claim overall housing size has increased which is true, but lot sizes have slightly decreased. So all that means is in the 1950s you also had a much bigger yard instead of walk-in closets or whatever.

[1] - https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Housi...

[tpm]

> Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up.

This statement is not true in locations where you can make decent money.

[pyrale]

Can you point to such places for sale in a reasonably sized city?

Cuz where I am, any appartment priced cheap is instantly bought up and remodeled into an unaffordable 2020's standards appartment.

[xyzzyz]

Exactly. If you subsidize the abundance for everyone, the effect will just be raised expectations floor.

[Drupon]

>Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up.

Absolute bullshit drivel because there's no GrEAt ApARmenTs by 1920 STanDArDs available in any major cities like there were in the 20s. Everyone has to rent a GreaT ApARtMENt bY 1920 StAnDaRDs instead because they just LOVE renting GrREAT ApaRTmeNTs BY 1920 StanDARds instead of buying them for the equivalent of a car payment today.

[moltar]

Yeah, exactly that. Most friends I have in Canada only started to have families once they were able to secure appropriate-sized dwelling. Which didn’t happen until late 30s. And current generations possibly cannot afford it at all in many jurisdictions. And stories I read from back in the day were “a factory worker and a teacher bought and paid off a house in downtown Ottawa in 3 years” are just insane. If I had that kind of purchasing power today I’d have more kids for sure.

[jschveibinz]

No disrespect, but historical evidence does not support this argument. I've seen similar claims made in other threads.

Fertility rates have been decreasing (multiple factors) since 1850, even while general prosperity has been increasing. There is a connection between economic uncertainty and marriage/families over the short run. But the most likely causes of declining birth rates are cultural: modernization, freedom, female economic participation, contraception, later marriage or no marriage, etc.

The world has advanced, and the requirement to procreate has diminished. There is lower want/need from eligible individuals.

My parents had no money at all when they married and they were able to scrape together enough to raise three children.

[ilovecake1984]

You are missing a major driver of this. The main reason fertility rates have been decreasing is because of decreasing infant mortality. The number of children surviving to adulthood has been relatively stable until recently.

[jjk166]

And more specifically there is a delay between when technology lowers the infant mortality rate and it becomes culturally normal to have the smaller number of children leading to the same number of adult descendants, so you typically get 1-2 generations with way higher populations than preceding generations and then the rest after that is just this large initial population having a normal number of kids. This means you get massive populations and intense crowding decades after the fact.

[broken-kebab]

It's 2026 now and we know for sure that applying purely economic stimuli did nothing substantial to birthrate anywhere. FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.

[keerthiko]

> FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.

I don't think this assertion holds true at all: https://i.redd.it/5wy659956rsc1.png

[nearbuy]

I don't think this shows that people who can afford housing have more kids. And it shows that even households earning over $700k/year are now below replacement (replacement fertility rate is about 2.1).

In the graph, fertility rates decline with income until around $275k. Those aren't families who can't afford housing. Those are well-off families with low birth rates. The birth rates start to climb in that chart only for the ~4% wealthiest families.

Also, you might reasonably conclude from that chart that rich women (in the $400k+ brackets) have more children, but that's not what the chart is actually showing. It's a synthetic total fertility rate, and not the actual TFR. They look at how many children women in that income bracket had this year, and estimate how many children they would have had if kept that reproductive rate for their whole reproductive period. That's going to misestimate the true rate due to selection effects. So, for example, a women who only wants one child is more likely to choose to have that child at 30, when her family income is higher, than at 18. But that doesn't imply she would have had more children if she had more money.

To put it another way, even if giving people more money had no effect whatsoever on their total fertility rate, you'd still expect the graph to curve up like that due to how people time their pregnancies.

[echelon]

Every economic bracket got smartphones and internet.

The men are playing Fortnite. The women are on TikTok and Instagram.

Babies went off trend so we could collectively do dopamine maxxing as a species.

Evolution didn't anticipate this.

[r14c]

Evolution doesn't work like that. What we have here is a dead end. For whatever reason, this system isn't advantageous from an evolutionary perspective, so we don't reproduce. That's natural selection.

[echelon]

You're right, but it's a fun phrase.

So what we have now is the vast majority of humans being self-selected out of the gene pool by smartphones.

It would be ironic if this was the great filter.

[fragmede]

Will we discover life extension technology before we stop having children and humanity simply dies off? Between Altered Carbon and Children of Men, I feel like that's a book and a blockbuster movie waiting to be written.

[broken-kebab]

If this chart showed what you seem to believe it shows, there would be glaring difference between brackets, similar to secular Jews vs Orthodox. What it probably shows is that pro-procreation minority partners has more leverage in pushing their wives/husbands towards having kids when they can appeal to already high economic/social status. Not making a significant change overall though.

[scoofy]

Economic stimulus does nothing about affordability of goods in a shortage. Quite the opposite, economic stimulus just causes inflation for goods in a shortage. Which is exactly what we’ve seen for 15 years.

[broken-kebab]

It's a bit of evasion. If you support the claim that it's housing which keeps Western societies birthrate low, you building your theory on the same sand of "economy prevents youth from having kids".

[gopher_space]

I have a large extended family and we're fairly tight-knit. Lots of family gatherings each year. When questions like this pop up we can just ask the "kids" what they think (kind of a neat idea). Here's the top three replies from last Thanksgiving:

1) We can't afford it. 2) There isn't really a "dating scene" anymore. 3) I'm not starting a family in this country.

and that's the end of things because we either can't or won't address their concerns.

[sltkr]

The problem with "just" asking people is that people aren't always aware of the reasons for their own behavior, and even if they are, they are prone to giving socially desirable answers, _especially_ in a social setting like a family Thanksgiving dinner.

Point 1 about affordability is directly contradicted by the fact that low income households are having the most children (except for a tiny minority of ultra rich), and those kids are rarely starving to death.

Point 2 is true, and probably a factor, but even married couples and partners sharing a household are having less children than before.

Point 3 is another excuse: fertility rates are low in _all_ industrialized nations in the world, from Canada, Italy, to Australia, to Japan, with perhaps Israel as the only exception. Meanwhile the countries with high fertility rates are absolutely terrible places to live like Afghanistan or Somalia.

[trumpdong]

Affordability is relative to a lifestyle though. Not starving to death is the absolute lowest level.

[scoofy]

Income is not wealth. The crisis is caused by the inability for the median income here to build wealth. That people can’t separate the two is a large part of the problem.

As long as your saving is being eaten by asset inflation, no matter how fast you’re running, you’re still on a treadmill.

[echelon]

The economic argument is oversold. Poor people have kids more than any other demographic.

Smartphones are why we don't have kids.

Unlimited dopamine is why we don't have kids.

The internet is why we don't have kids.

Women like having fun and independence and don't want to be stay at home nannies.

Modern life is TOO FUN.

Fun is why there are no more babies.

Babies are not fun.

Babies are what you do in the 1950's when you're bored out of your mind with nothing to do.

Babies are what you do when you have to wait until next week for your Reader's Digest to arrive in the mail.

Babies are the anti-dopamine.

For the first time in history, we're not bored out of our fucking minds 24/7. Our brains are fully occupied.

There isn't space for babies now that we have the internet.

----

Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?

The answer is probably "fuck no".

And you know why.

Look at the countries still having kids - they're mostly places where women don't have equal rights and smartphone / internet penetration is low.

[thelastgallon]

Babies are also free labor. They are just like the AI agents of today, parents had their children do a variety of things around the farm, instead of paying for tokens, they had to feed them, thats all.

[Izikiel43]

> Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?

Yes, next question

[scoofy]

This is an unfalsifiable pet theory. It is hardly worth discussing.

[peyton]

Yep, the real answer’s electricity.

[linkregister]

Early childhood public spending as a percentage of GDP has a strong positive correlation with fertility. That is, among nations that have already experienced the fertility drop associated with women's employment.

1. The Economics of Fertility: A New Era, p50, https://www.nber.org/papers/w29948

[roenxi]

I strongly recommend that report to anyone interested, there is a lot of interesting work in it, even just to skim the pictures like I did. That said, I have to say I really don't think "Early childhood public spending as a percentage of GDP has a strong positive correlation with fertility" is a useful takeaway from it. True, yes. Useful no.

Firstly, assuming we're looking at pg 50, seems to be correlation not causation - causation could be reversed (no children -> no need to spend). Secondly, there are so many correlations in that report that picking out any specific one is a bit random.

Also it isn't immediately clear if they're population weighting since the graph makes the US look like an equal to LUX instead of a 300 million person behemoth. To me that seems to make the correlation a minor curio.

[linkregister]

1. Proven causation is a high bar for drawing conclusions in conversation or on a website.

2. Luxembourg is the only microstate in the chart. Fixation on a singular outlier is not useful.

[pj_mukh]

Agreed with all of this but,

"cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment"

That's not true, its that the cost to build the apartment is far too high and the cost is totally passed on to a the public, thereby hovering up any disposable income that might go towards having a child.

There can be a profit margin, but the cost needs to be low.

[scoofy]

My point is only that we can see the value capture of the housing shortage by looking at the delta of housing development COGS and housing prices. I generally agree with you that there is plenty of room for profit margin, but when we see housing prices diverging significantly from lowest-cost construction prices, then we can measure our shortage.

My main point is that, because housing takes a very long time to build en masse, you'd want the housing to start being built before people need it.

It's like any other strategic reserve we have. Since demand can spike, and we can rarely see the spikes coming, but we know they will come, just be prepared by subsidizing the development of that thing. We do it for food, oil, weapons, vaccines, you name it. If we know we will need it in the future anyway, and it take a long time to produce, we create strategic reserves. We should do that for housing.

[lucketone]

> We do it for food, oil, weapons, vaccines, you name it.

Much easier to have a reserve of X, if X can be put in a warehouse and transported later.

After reading comments here, I think that US has plenty of cheap housing… but… cheap housing is in places where people don’t want to live. (Demand is low, price is low)

If you actually plan to use your own money to build a reserve of housing, better double-tripple check if anybodyz will want to live there.

[jrmg]

This is really the message of Abundance.

I both liked Abundance and think there’s truth to what you’re saying.

But it wasn’t what I took away from the book (perhaps it was in there - but what I really got was ‘for a better future we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot, and be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing’)

[scoofy]

I mean, I agree with what you're saying, but it misses that abundance means abundance. Consumer staples should cost near the price of production, and where margins are out of control, the government should step in and end the rent-seeking... that is what abundance is. If we live in a society where there is no price appreciation in owning an apartment to rent because another apartment can be build next door, then we live in a society where your dollar goes further, and cannot be captured by the wealthy cornering the market.

What we have now is the opposite. We know that housing demand will rise in the future, simply because there will be more people. Instead of the rich investing in housing production to meet this need, we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production, thus the rich can capture all that value in price appreciation from rent-seeking alone (technically more of it), instead of wasting their time operating a business that builds things.

[mullingitover]

> we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production

In my quite affluent city, the most affluent neighborhood has yard signs up every fifty feet expressing that they are furious that the city might develop city-owned parking lots (which are nowhere near their neighborhood) to be high density housing.

One-bedroom apartments in the city center are going for over $3,000 per month.

The rich aren't simply locking up existing housing, their principal concern is preventing any housing from being created, even if it has no effect on them.

[yongjik]

I think there should be a relatively simple solution. Tax the homeowners proportional to their homes' market value. Either you get enough tax revenue to build more houses, or the tax burden is too high for those NIMBY to remain at their beautiful suburban homes, and their houses will be back on the market.

But no, when we propose that, all those affluent bourgeois feeding on the young are suddenly poor grandmas just wanting to live the rest of their lives in peace.

Make up your mind, people. Are we going to fix the problem, or are we going to blame Jeff Bezos because some suburban schmucks oppose building apartments. Frankly I don't think Jeff Bezos even cares about apartments. (He has enough money to buy a city block, why would he care.) But it sure feels more righteous to hate Jeff Bezos than argue about real estate tax.

[jrmg]

Are you in California?

Most states (and other countries) do tax the homeowners proportional to their homes’ market value. California with its tax proportional to value at purchase is the outlier.

[GrinningFool]

In the places I have lived, the value of the property for tax calculations was significantly lower than the market value.

[ericd]

I think it’s largely just that people just don’t want to live near poor people, because they think they have bad culture/values/behavior, and will be risky to live near.

Based on comments I’ve seen at city council meetings about this stuff, there’s also some aspect of feeling like infrastructure is already overstressed, traffic is already bad, etc, which is largely an artifact of car-centric development patterns being incredibly wasteful/inefficient, and capping out at relatively low densities. But the existing development pattern is usually not a good fit for mass transit - the utilization is usually too low.

I think the California approach of aggressively upzoning near public transit is pretty good, except that it might cause resistance to public transit expansion.

[mullingitover]

> people just don’t want to live near poor people

This kind of thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when all the poor people get crammed into one place.

Singapore does it right by having high quality housing which happens to have a certain amount subsidized for lower income people. You get a mix of incomes and not a slum.

A lot of California's housing development also incentivizes this type of arrangement: permitting can be fast-tracked and local NIMBYs can be steamrolled if a development allocates some, but not all, of the development to be designated as affordable.

[scoofy]

“A society grows great when old men build five-over-ones whose shade will immediately cover their favorite park bench for 4 days per year.”

[jrmg]

I think that’s compatible with my take:

Be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good (abundant, cheaper housing in this case) rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing (existing house value, amongst many other things, in this case).

[jiggawatts]

I’m in my fourties’ unable to afford a three bedroom apartment in my city with an income in the top two or three percentile. I’ve had boomers tell me with a straight face that “they did it” so it can’t be that hard despite a 5x increase in housing costs relative to income.

I’d have to spend every single post tax dollar for two decades to afford an actual house. Not counting interest and other taxes and council rates. I’d have to work for 70+ years to afford a nice house in a nice suburb!

“Have more children!”

“Make housing affordable!”

“My retirement fund is all in property and banks!”

There’s your problem.

[vkou]

Meanwhile, I grew up in an 800 sq ft apartment that housed my parents, my father's parents, me, and my sibling.

Objectively, you don't need a house with a lawn and a back yard to have children, and have them grow up healthy and successful.

[gradstudent]

> nice house in a nice suburb!

There's your problem. Everyone wants to live in the same set of well established well resourced neighbourhoods. But there's too many of us. Go out in the 'burbs and accept that owning a house implies a commute you will dislike (among a host of other compromises).

[jiggawatts]

Are you joking right now?

I’d have to move a thousand kilometres to some shit hole country town to afford a house on a salary I earn by working as a principal consultant in the central business district!

Now imagine the same scenario but with a school teacher, nanny, gardener, or inset job title here that is tied to a specific location.

When “existence here with the rest of us who have pulled the ladder up after us” becomes untenable for entire generations then you don’t get to complain when nobody is around to clean your gutters or wiper your arse when you’re too old to it for yourself.

Our children our are our future and they’re being told to jump through flaming hoops… that aren’t even in the same city as their parents!

[gradstudent]

> I’d have to move a thousand kilometres to some shit hole country town to afford a house on a salary I earn by working as a principal consultant in the central business district!

I didn't suggest anyone should quit their job. What I said was consider making tradeoffs. Space and affordability in exchange for a longer commute and other distance-related headaches.

>Our children our are our future and they’re being told to jump through flaming hoops… that aren’t even in the same city as their parents!

Nobody is owed the same opportunity as their parents. If the children of the well off have the right to live where they grew up then entire suburbs become enclaves of generational rights-holders.

Many of these problems would go away if cities de-centralised; from one central hub business district to many business districts. The problem, as I see it anyway, is unwillingness to invest in resources and infrastructure, to make satellite developments attractive for business and residents.

[rustystump]

I am with you sans shit hole country town. Talk about a large brush.

[int_19h]

It's everyone's problem if the end result is that there aren't enough children to replenish the population.

[bombcar]

The grandchildren of today's Amish children will herd their sheep through the abandoned urban cores.

[trumpdong]

Why should it have to? Other countries build vertically in the urban cores. Many places in Europe even build small towns this way. One of the only good things about Europe is that I get to live really close to where I work, and not even have a commute.

[chopin]

Where in Europe should that be? I live in Germany and for example Stuttgart has a shortage of nurses because they can't afford living in a 1 hour commuting range (one way).

[trumpdong]

in the USA you wouldn't not be able to afford it - it just wouldn't exist. There would be no homes inside a 1 hour commuting range.

[rembal]

A different perspective from Poland: house affordability is equally as bad, so the argument could have been "young people don't have babies because they can't afford three bedroom apartments". But the country had a major baby boom in the 80s, during a (relatively mild) civil war and in the middle of a major economic crisis, when getting anything other than vinegar was a huge problem. And I clearly remember ppl living with 3 kids in studio apartments, playing with a lot of kids while waiting in mile long-lines for totally mundane rationed foodstuffs, school classes starting at 2 pm and ending at 8pm (too many kids), and my parents reaching out via their network to a director of orthopedic shoe factory because even money couldn't get you that kind of stuff. And in the 40 years since we had sustained growth rates comparable only to China or South Korea, and similar problems with childbirths. I don't buy any economic arguments.

[Tade0]

That baby boom was an echo of the first post-war baby boom and fueled by a record 274k newly built apartments in 1979 - a culmination of a decade of ramping up construction when Edward Gierek took over and started borrowing money on a massive scale[0].

As a father of two I can tell you right now why demographics in Poland are in the gutter: most families need two incomes to survive, but:

-Companies insist every employee works full time.

-Women often have nothing to come back to after maternity leave.

-Daycares, kindergartens etc. are open for 9h at most, so pray your commute isn't too long if you have two or more kids.

-Commutes to these institutions have become longer as on one hand more people live in the suburbs while on the other urban planners kinda sorta forgot you need to carve out some land for a school/kindergarten when you're planning a new residential area, so if you live in a recent-ish building forget about leaving the car at home.

Most people seeing all these obstacles just settle on one child, whom they can leave and pick up in shifts.

My family copes by living on a single income, which is still possible today if you're a software engineer, but most likely won't be long term.

[0] In hindsight it wasn't a terrible plan - there was enormaous demographic potential

[inglor_cz]

I suspect that getting contraceptives was also complicated during the Jaruzelski Junta days.

[throwaway629532]

> If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30.

I’m 24 and have enough money. I want kids. I think I won’t be able to have any. Most of my friends are in the same boat.

[Angostura]

If not money, what are the types of issue you face?

[missedthecue]

Pairing seems to be the primary issue. The old social technology we had to increase the amounts of intersexual cooperation have for various reasons been discarded, but they have not been replaced with anything.

[pyrale]

> This is effectively impossible in a democratic society

Why exactly would a democratic society oppose this? Are you conflating democratic and capitalist?

Most if not all postwar European societies had ambitious social housing projects that aimed to secure housing for young workers.

[blini-kot]

gee I wonder what other economic system was known for its apartment-building programs

>western society slowly collapses

good riddance

[rafaelmn]

At no point in history did we have economic security at child bearing age and the assumption that it has a correlation with number of children seems to go against the data.

[TurdF3rguson]

Except that 100k years of not being economically secure at childbearing age and having kids anyway... disagrees with you.

[socalgal2]

There's no evidence of this what-so-ever

Every indication points in the opposite direction. The more abundance the less kids. Read the data.

Your intuition is just flat out wrong. People don't want kids because they don't want kids. Pretty simple. Society changes with abundance. That abundance leads to more leisure activities more education which leads to a more diverse set of options for life and so more people choose some option that does not include having children.

[shimman]

No, that is you are reading into what abundance is. Abundance is mostly neoliberal economic ideas repackaged for the current iteration of consultants where workers are entirely excluded from the processes, unions are the enemy, and regulation is actually evil this time (pinky swear this time!).

Thank fuck voters aren't buying this garbage.

I also find your retort equally misleading. Social housing is a solved issue. The problem is that we are letting greedy developers dictate the type of housing to be built. Kinda what the book abundance never mentions, who actually are the ones with power and how they are wielding it to thwart progress.

Blaming democratic societies is even more frankly bizarre too. America has always been deeply antidemocratic and has thwarted the will of the people at every opportunity of progress (every delegate voted against the bill of rights when first mentioned (took a threat of violence to add it), labor rights, ending slavery, universal suffrage); the problem has always been authoritarians against the people.

[scoofy]

You clearly did not read the book or understand the message. I say this as someone who thinks we need a wealth tax (or at least a tax on unrealized semi-liquid capital gains).

>America has always been deeply antidemocratic

Okay, buddy. No need to open a history book to understand what an undemocratic state actually looks like. There are plenty of actual, totalitarian monarchies that still exist.

[gessha]

You can call something undemocratic without needing to compare it to the actual worst country on this planet.

[matchbok3]

We are letting developers dictate what housing gets built?

Are you a parody account?

Do you understand the thousands of housing regulations in every single parcel of land in the country? Please do 2 minutes of research into FAR, inclusionary zoning, height limits, setbacks, zoning, etc.

I seriously can't tell if you are some left-wing parody account or actually serious. Either way, oooof!

[rluna828]

Some mathematicians ran some numbers and diferent societies have different lowlying fruit. None of his improvements get societies to 2.1, but will theoretically move them to ~1.8. I'll find the source if people ask. 1. End toxic masculinity (machismo) in middle east and LatAM. No woman who knows how to read want to beaten or enslaved. 2. Jobs and Housing: Europe and America respectively. More three bed-room houses would add kids in California for example. Jobs for young people would children in Spain. 3. End afterschool tutoring and add spaces at universities. In Japan, Korea, China having more than one child means less money for tutors for the first kid (boy or girl). This is the easy stuff. For the extreme right, male literacy is inversely proportional with fertility too. lol! For my lefty friends, women are currently having as many kids as they would like, that's a oppression or tragedy or unfair.

[em-bee]

incidentally a few years ago china banned tutoring, but to my understanding it was mainly because most tutoring places were scams, and maybe also because mostly rich parents would spend the money, thus giving them an advantage.

[rembal]

And middle east and latin America have much higher birthrates than Europe, East Asia and the US. I guess most women there must be really unsophisticated (I know you don't mean straight up illiterate).

[alehlopeh]

How is machismo causing women in Latin America to not know how to read? And which ones are enslaved exactly? This is a ridiculous assertion.

[trumpdong]

They said women who can read don't like machismo.

[cultofmetatron]

plenty of women in LATAM love possessive jealous men. I've seen it first hand.