TBH, it seemed such an obvious point you're making that I assumed the author had to be comparing inflation-adjusted dollars, but from the (very little) digging that I did, it looks like that's not the case.
I would assume that downward trend has continued as inflation has spiked in the past few years and people had to spend more of their money in other areas.
> I assumed the author had to be comparing inflation-adjusted dollars
As did I.
90s weddings remind me of the Friends episode where Monica was scoping out her wedding. Chandler revealed how much money he had by writing it on a price of paper (that is, the audience never saw the dollar value), and Monica said something like "oh, we can go with best one, plan A" and Chandler said he didn't want to spend that much money "on one party". I've always wondered what amount of money that was.
Inflation has made prices higher, but people's purchasing power has been decreasing all this time. Salaries, benefits etc have all not been keeping up with inflation for decades. It is why young people are marrying later, not able to afford to buy property etc. All the gains the economy has made over the past handful of decades have been captured by a small percentage of the population.
There's certainly some flukiness to being the only major country on the planet that hadn't been shelled and bombed to smithereens in the preceding decades. That's not the whole story, but it's certainly part of it.
Hard to believe that people who suffered the atrocities of the first half of the 20th Century were tremendously optimistic about the future, yet birthrates were MUCH higher across the world.
The birth control pill wasn’t on the market in the first half of the 20th century (1960) and there was more religious pressure not to use contraception (e.g. how many women faced significant external pressure to be married housewives and mothers and weren’t even allowed to pursue careers?). Lack of choice masked true preferences – but as we could see from things like the big spike in divorces when it was legalized, there were costs to that.
While acts of war separate couples and would confound the analysis a bit, I think there is typically a big spike in births following wars. Baby boomers most notably being born after WWII. Optimism is dynamic and not a set threshold, wrapping up wars leads to new found optimism about the future. How terrible the recent past was is not all that relevant as it is about the trajectory.
If anything having a terrible past may make the bar lower for experiencing optimism, as it's easier to expect a better future when the overall bar is lower. Hopefully explaining that well enough and it's certainly not the only issue, but I believe we see the same thing on the stock market when large class action settlements are reached with a corp and the stock then rises as it is forward looking and optimistic now that the 'awful past' is settled. First-gen immigrants tend to have larger families as the impetus to move countries is an optimistic endeavor itself.
And while a reach, I think through this lens you can make an argument as to why lower classes tend to have more children than middle classes (currently in the US). It's easier to expect better for your children when you are at the bottom of the barrel (no where to go but up), whereas the middle class is in an increasingly precarious position.
I think you're spot on. And all of the various theories and analysis are pretty laughable if one has any sort of historical context.
- "People don't have kids because they're afraid of climate change" - Wildly overestimates the number of people who figure climate change into their life plans, and it discounts the numerous catastrophes people have feared and experience in the past while continuing to have high birth rates.
- "People don't have kids because everything is too expensive" - My father-in-law has 11 siblings and they grew up in a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom home. His story is not unique.
"having kids is almost completely intentional"....in countries where this is the case due to birth control, abortion, feminism (and other cultural shifts), the birth rate plummets.
Delving into the reasons why people opt to have fewer or no children when given the choice consistently across races, religions, cultural background, etc would be a book-length endeavor, but to me it really is that simple. There are numerous reasons someone wouldn't want to have more children, and they tend to find one of them when given the choice.
I worked construction during the summers in college. There's quite a bit of sedentary work on a job site. In my experience, the guys who worked on their feet and did hours of physical labor were in pretty good shape. They burned a lot of calories and consumed a lot of calories: fast food, sweet tea, gatorade, beer at night. The more senior folks often ran heavy equipment like track hoes and bulldozers. Those guys were seated all day long, but their eating and drinking habits didn't change. Every one of the machine operators I worked with was overweight and had various health problems. Heavy smoking and drinking surely didn't help.
It depends - construction workers in the US especially look like shit, given the crap that they eat - fast food, sodas and then beers after the job.
Go look at construction workers elsewhere, especially Asia, they're ripped.
Because the food they eat is most likely home cooked and not the fast food garbage we get here. Even the food at kiosks is pretty good, since it's freshly cooked.
The men and women who protested with MLK Jr. risked physical harm and death. Many of them paid the ultimate price. So it's hard to argue they didn't have much to lose.
I do take your point, though. Civil disobedience and a digital trail of "undesirable" behavior isn't compatible with a high-earning life in the corporate world.
I think the info is even more outdated than that. The article is from August 2024 but it cites "a recent survey by Databricks" that from what I can tell isn't linked to, so who knows what data they're referring to.
I was deep into the big data ecosystem in the 2010s. Those numbers feel like they're from 2017 or so. Scala has been on a slide every since.
A text-based tool like this certainly puts a ceiling on presentation quality. Whether that really matters is situational. In most cases, content is more important than style once a certain threshold of "not hideous" is reached.
The same tradeoffs apply to a text-based diagram tool like mermaid.js vs more traditional diagramming tools like Miro.
My coworkers' Miro diagrams are prettier than my mermaid diagrams. But mine are composable and able to be versional controlled. I'm able to create complex diagrams many times faster using a text-based tool.
Ultimately, slides and diagrams are for conveying knowledge. If you're able to convey the same knowledge with significantly less effort, that outweighs the loss of "style points" in most situations (internal knowledge-transfer, meet-ups, etc).
Slight tangent counterpoint; sometimes conveying knowledge requires the prettier / flair of a miro/lucid/figma or even full infographic style solution.
I like md, and I like mermaid, and I like text / simple. But I know to help others, sometimes the visual medium and storytelling justify the alternatives.
Yep. Totally agree. It's situational. IMO, a marginally prettier presentation is rarely worth the opportunity cost of what else I could get done with the time, but sometimes it is.
In fact, weddings decreased in inflation-adjusted cost between 1990 and 2023: https://ktvz.com/stacker-lifestyle/2024/03/01/how-us-wedding...
I would assume that downward trend has continued as inflation has spiked in the past few years and people had to spend more of their money in other areas.
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