The Doomed Generation

[rousseau]

They have no way to save, no way to buy a house, no way to start a family. It's physically impossible, not just hard, but impossible without taking massive financial risks. This is what I'm getting at. Unfortunately I used the word population.

You lament that immigration is required for population growth, and regret using the word population?
Personally I wonder why population growth is still considered a good thing.
If there were more houses than people, houses would be very affordable. With a growing population and a decades-long failure to build affordable housing, what you see is what you get. These things are not disconnected.

Housing is just a part of it, a reasonably big part of it, but just a part. In practice it's every economic factor that's in play: cost of tuition, vehicles, housing, stagnant wages, pensions disappearing, inflation, precarious work. Unless the parents have money kids being born today are going to have a hard time.

I think (I’m no economist) ALL those matters would be less of an issue without population pressures.

Likely also true, although I can imagine that the situation is far more complex than I can comprehend.

The current situation in Canada is that baby boomers need health care and are all retiring, while there aren't enough ranks coming in from behind to replace them and care for these people. That's why we put such an emphasis on immigration. But the Liberals screwed it up and let in too many people creating unneeded pressure on housing and the economy. We also have a shortage of construction workers to build homes.

I can't pretend to have wrapped my head around all the logic, but it would seem that the government didn't want to let our population deflate.

 

[bilby]

They have no way to save, no way to buy a house, no way to start a family. It's physically impossible, not just hard, but impossible without taking massive financial risks. This is what I'm getting at. Unfortunately I used the word population.

You lament that immigration is required for population growth, and regret using the word population?
Personally I wonder why population growth is still considered a good thing.
If there were more houses than people, houses would be very affordable. With a growing population and a decades-long failure to build affordable housing, what you see is what you get. These things are not disconnected.

Housing is just a part of it, a reasonably big part of it, but just a part. In practice it's every economic factor that's in play: cost of tuition, vehicles, housing, stagnant wages, pensions disappearing, inflation, precarious work. Unless the parents have money kids being born today are going to have a hard time.

That's literally been true for all of human history.

For most of that history, most parents couldn't even dream of themselves or their children having tuition, a vehicle, housing (except a miserable shack provided by their landlord who was also their sole option as employer), wage increases, or any kind of pension. Inflation is a symptom of the existence of wage increases as a general expectation, and as such is a good thing (in moderation), and is not currently out of control or likely to become so in the developed world. Precarious work is a symptom of having an option about what work you might take, and of being denied the descent into abject poverty that made vile work for starvation wages a commonplace in the past.

Kids are (as they always were) going to have a hard life. It's even possible that they might have it a little harder than their parents did, which is understandably distressing for their parents. But they certainly won't have it as hard as their great grandparents did, nor as any of their earlier anscestors did; So let's not be too hyperbolic in our pessimism.

 

[rousseau]

They have no way to save, no way to buy a house, no way to start a family. It's physically impossible, not just hard, but impossible without taking massive financial risks. This is what I'm getting at. Unfortunately I used the word population.

You lament that immigration is required for population growth, and regret using the word population?
Personally I wonder why population growth is still considered a good thing.
If there were more houses than people, houses would be very affordable. With a growing population and a decades-long failure to build affordable housing, what you see is what you get. These things are not disconnected.

Housing is just a part of it, a reasonably big part of it, but just a part. In practice it's every economic factor that's in play: cost of tuition, vehicles, housing, stagnant wages, pensions disappearing, inflation, precarious work. Unless the parents have money kids being born today are going to have a hard time.

That's literally been true for all of human history.

For most of that history, most parents couldn't even dream of themselves or their children having tuition, a vehicle, housing (except a miserable shack provided by their landlord who was also their sole option as employer), wage increases, or any kind of pension. Inflation is a symptom of the existence of wage increases as a general expectation, and as such is a good thing (in moderation), and is not currently out of control or likely to become so in the developed world. Precarious work is a symptom of having an option about what work you might take, and of being denied the descent into abject poverty that made vile work for starvation wages a commonplace in the past.

Kids are (as they always were) going to have a hard life. It's even possible that they might have it a little harder than their parents did, which is understandably distressing for their parents. But they certainly won't have it as hard as their great grandparents did, nor as any of their earlier anscestors did; So let's not be too hyperbolic in our pessimism.

These are fair points, but the change in quality of life is more extreme than you're giving it credit for. It's not 'slightly' worse off than our parents, it's 'quite a bit worse' off.

Does an entire generation of people being unable to afford kids not sound extreme to you? And this is what I'm trying to explain that doesn't seem to be getting through. This isn't just a blip in generational well-being, this is an enormous change in the world that my generation is living through. Sure we're not slaves in ancient Rome, but things are bad for many of us.

 

[Elixir]

Does an entire generation of people being unable to afford kids not sound extreme to you?

Kids that don’t exist because parents couldn’t afford them, are not suffering.
But that’s not an entire generation by a long shot.

My mom was born in 1917. THAT was a tough time to be growing up, at least in northern Idaho. 12 years old and American workers were starving - literally. Grandpa was a farmer, fortunately. There was no money for anyone to buy what he sold, but at least my mom and four siblings had food.

 

[rousseau]

Does an entire generation of people being unable to afford kids not sound extreme to you?

Kids that don’t exist because parents couldn’t afford them, are not suffering.
But that’s not an entire generation by a long shot.

My mom was born in 1917. THAT was a tough time to be growing up, at least in northern Idaho. 12 years old and American workers were starving - literally. Grandpa was a farmer, fortunately. There was no money for anyone to buy what he sold, but at least my mom and four siblings had food.

You guys need to spend some time on Reddit following the posts of younger people. Starvation isn't altogether uncommon for us either. Or best case just eating very, very poorly.

 

[bilby]

Does an entire generation of people being unable to afford kids not sound extreme to you?

It sounds hyperbolic, and demonstrably nonsensical.

Poor people still have more kids than wealthy people.

What you are bemoaning is that middle class people now, for the first time in history, have the choice as to whether and when to have kids, and are basing that novel choice on their financial situation.

"Let's not have kids until we can afford to give them the best possible start" is a laudible sentiment, but to turn that around and say that not meeting that (hitherto unattainable) bar means that society is cruelly denying people the right to a family is, frankly, bizarre.

Would you prefer to be living in your parents era, when the decision to wait and have kids only once you were financially stable was typically rendered moot, when the wife missed her period? When unplanned preganacy was as commonplace as unplanned thunderstorms, and people just muddled through as best they could?

Having choices is always harder to handle than having no choice at all. But that doesn't mean it's worse.

 

[Elixir]

The contraceptive pill ranks as one of the most important inventions in human history, and it saved us from otherwise certain disaster.

To worry about population decline, some scant six decades later, seems pretty daft.

100% agree with that. It would be good to slow our impact by all means possible. Population reduction resulting from shifting personal priorities is probably the most benign population-reducing factor possible.