>Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated. This matters because young offenders are the raw material that feeds the prison system: As one generation ages out, another takes its place on the same horrid journey.
Another factor which will soon impact this, if it isn't already, is the rapidly changing nature of youth. Fertility rates have been dropping since 2009 or so. Average age of parents is increasing. Teen pregnancy on a long and rapid decline.
All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.
> the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources
This is both good and bad. Having a child is very difficult, but it gets harder as you get older. You lack a lot of monitory resources as a teen or the early 20s, but you have a lot more energy, as you get older your body starts decaying you will lack energy. A kid had at 40 will still be depending on your when you are 55 (kids is only 15), and if the kids goes to college may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring. Plus if your kids have kids young as well as you, you be around and have some energy for grandkids.
Don't read the above as advocating having kids too young, it is not. However don't wait until you think it is the perfect time. If you are 25 you should be seriously thinking in the next 2 years, and by 30 have them (if of course kids are right for you - that is a complex consideration I'm not going to get into). Do not let fear of how much it will cost or desire for more resources first stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.
An older friend conveyed to me pretty much the exact same thing you are, that he cannot imagine having kids at 40 because you will not be able to keep up with them energy wise. You get old and your body really starts to give in.
Alright Geoff, thanks, but you are 54 and do zero exercise, have a diet of eating out at fast food and fast casual restaurants, a body type that would be described as "meatball", and a list of medical conditions which all scream lifestyle change.
Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.
Physical shape is not the same or even proportional to the ability to pull all-nighters.
I know two men 18 years apart in age who became fathers at the same time - two months apart to be exact. Even though the older is an avid gym-goer, it's only the younger who can pull off popping back into full strength after less than 6h of sleep.
Newborns keep you up but an all-nighter is a stretch. Also, you're looking after your kid and trying to get them to sleep, not trying to churn out code to get something to market/go to prod.
Both of mine had colic and went through difficult teething. I've pulled all-nighters to deliver something and it's much easier than several weeks of sleepless nights with an infant.
I always needed more than 8 hrs of sleep, now that I am into my 50s, I feel well after 4 hours. Anecdotes are good. My grandfather got to 100 not sleeping more than a few hours a night after he turned 55 and he raised my cousins as their parents were shite. I know whining young parents who complain about lack of sleep, I know older parents who never do as they were happy finally having a kid. Etc.
My youngest was born when I was 47. He’s now 9. I also have a 13 yr born when I was 43. I’m tired but I don’t think it’s from the kids. (More I’m tired of working - been burning the candle at both ends for nearly 40 years.) The biggest difference of having kids at this age is that I don’t have time to myself or for myself like other parents around me so are by now empty nesters or close.
> Alright Geoff, thanks, but you are 54 and do zero exercise, have a diet of eating out at fast food and fast casual restaurants, a body type that would be described as "meatball", and a list of medical conditions which all scream lifestyle change.
> Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.
Aging sucks! Obviously you can do everything wrong, and mess your body up pretty good. You can also do everything right, and just have bad luck. Lingering injury, hereditary health conditions, things add up. By the time you are in your 60s, it takes a combination of good habits and good luck to be in good shape. It's comforting to point to active older people and say "I'm going to grow up to be just like them". Just aware of survivorship bias.
Good news: most studies show that adults that do moderate exercise have a lower rate of fall-related injuries in old age than those that do little to no exercise.
My son was born when I was 45 and I absolutely could not be more happy about it. I am in way better shape than I was at 30, I finally started taking that seriously, and also I am way wiser, more patient, and have more money.
So if you hear anyone telling you they can't imagine late fatherhood ignore them, they obviously aren't good at imagining things.
While generally true, you are not the only one aging around you, and some sickness/accident stuff can happen with higher probability as years add up.
The chance you will need to take care of both your kids and your parents in your 50s is pretty high (not even going into you and your partner), while facing declining health yourself.
Could be easily manageable, or not. Ask me in a decade.
But one thing is darn true - if a good long term stable match is not there, no point pushing for kids. World really doesnt need more damaged folks struggling their whole lives to overcome shitty childhood. And thats fine, parenthood is not for everybody and there can be an amazing life to be had instead (and I mean it in best way possible, but that life shouod not be spent behind the desk and on the couch)
>Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.
Interrupt that 60 year old's sleep twice a night with a newborn crying, add a bunch of new responsibilities, and I'll be impressed if he even makes it to the meet.
You're comparing people who have made exercise their #1 priority in life to people who have made their kids and supporting their families financially their top 2 priorities. It's a bullshit comparison.
You think someone going to a trail running meet has made exercise their #1 priority?
My father is 63, raised three children and has had a successful long marriage and retired from a good career. He also goes works out daily and did for most of my childhood. He didn't make exercise his number one priority.
I had my children at 36 and 38, and I'm the mother, and energy-wise, I've had no issues. Yes, they considered me to be of "advanced maternal age" in the OB department and gave me special treatment due to it, but my doctors told me that the "advanced maternal age" threshold (35) was based off outdated research anyway. In the bay area, most of the mothers I've met were around that age, and my friends are having their kids at the same age.
It was really nice that I had time to establish my career and figure things out before having kids.
The issue here is this can lead people to pushing it till 40+.
I was talking to a nice girl up until she mentioned still wanting kids in her late 40s. Maybe I’m old school, but telling someone you froze your eggs the same day you meet them is weird.
Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle.
This rapidly transformed into no, get your masters, get 8 years of experience. Earn at least 300k as a couple. Then and only then should you consider a family. Childcare is 3k plus a month in many places.
For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it.
In my 30s I’ve let go of expecting anything. This world has already given me so much.
Nobody said you should wait that long. As for your anecdote, what’s wrong with figuring out early during dating whether you plan on having children or not? People should talk about those things early, since there is hardly anything that makes a relationship more incompatible long term, and leads to more (even mutual) heartbreak and sorrow than having to break up with a person solely because their most uncompromisable life plan differs.
In my 20s, it felt indeed weird to bring that up early for me, because I wasn’t ready yet and didn’t even really know what I wanted yet. Later in life, when dating we always talked about potential family planning and general outlook on life early. (Unless it was never meant to be a serious relationship to begin with.)
This wasn’t even a first date, it was like she said hi to me at an event and just started taking about having a family.
Felt really awkward for small talk.
My point was the economy should support having a family in your 20s if that’s what you want to do. You shouldn’t need a well paid career, a quality lifestyle that supports a family should be available for everyone.
I imagine universal health care, paid family leave ( for months not weeks) and affirmative (free?) childcare could bring that gap.
At a point it isn’t even an age issue. A lot of people will never earn enough to really support a family, and that’s a failure of the social contract.
You should be able to get a job as a Walmart clerk, have your partner work part time and still afford to have a family.
I think I’ve muddled my own point here, but it should be easier. Maybe that Walmart clerk could own a house ?!
I do agree with your point about society. The reason we waited are way beyond monetary issues, and we would have waited regardless, but people should be able to support a family without an “advanced” career if they choose so.
I think it would be hard to find someone that does not agree with you on the street.
These conversations should not need to happen but they do because of the current inequality that exists. A couple can't change the world so they talk about these things since it's their best option
Society does kinda support this. People with low-paying jobs actually have the most kids. You just need more income if you want to have kids at a good time and send them to higher-end schools, including K-12.
Absolutely. It serves as a filter, if people are being honest. It also highlights the bizarre dating culture and view of life we've adopted. This dating culture has produced a good deal of rotten fruit.
The ultimate purpose of dating is to meet your future spouse. We're turned it into some kind of senseless sexual escapade, and this has poisoned the relations between men and women. It makes them exploitative and dehumanizing in spirit: sprinkling them with the waters of "consent" doesn't change that, as the subjective cannot abolish the objective. We've reduced sex to something that is merely pleasurable and contradicted its intrinsic and essential function which is procreative by employing an array of technologies that impede and interfere with healthy procreative processes. This creates a mindset not unlike that of a drug user who is obsessed with getting another hit with no thought given to the damage, or the bulimic who wants the sensual satisfaction of eating, but not the calories.
The psychophysical reality of sexual intercourse is much more than some passing physical pleasure. It mobilizes processes in us that are completely oriented toward bonding and the strengthening of the relationship in preparation for children. Whence the stereotype that men will often exit quickly in the morning after a one night stand with a strange woman? Because both can feel, if only subconsciously, that the processes of bonding are taking place, and who wants to bond — and in such a profound and intimate way — with someone they've just met? In this regard, the character of Julianna in Vanilla Sky makes an astoundingly profound and accurate remark for a movie coming out of Hollywood: "Don't you know when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not?" Our capacity for sexual intimacy is likewise dulled.
(Masturbation is even worse. Those processes bond us with a fictional harem of the imaginary and close us within ourselves. For social animals like us, this is a recipe for misery.)
We thwart and ignore our biological nature to our own detriment. The procreative prime spans the mid-twenties into the early 30s. Statistically, most people should be having families by their mid-20s. Our culture confuses people and creates a pointless obstacle course that leads them to postpone such things either because they're too immature (and encouraged to remain so, also by this unserious dating culture) or because they believe they must achieve some arbitrary milestones first. Furthermore, family and community support has been dashed by a culture of hyperindividualism.
The causes of demographic decline are not a mystery. People simply either don't think deeply enough, or they don't want to make the cultural changes necessary to restore normalcy.
This is a much more reasonable position than many will believe. I think writing like a 19th century nonfiction author probably contributes to that aha
Edit:
To be clear I appreciate this comment and agree with it in the large. It’s hard to talk about these things without being quickly dismissed in the current zeitgeist.
You have far too much of an obsession with sex here and really need to stop and take a breath.
Dating culture is evolved to help you find a mate based on YOUR choices and capability not your parents or class level. This allows you to “trial” compatibility over shorter time and find better fits.
What you seem to be talking about is 'Online Hookup Culture' which is more of a hobby if we are being honest than a way of finding a mate. And ultimately probably STILL better when faced with a society increasingly not finding mates or having kids at all. So basically all of your thoughts are self-contradictory due to a bit of self righteousness here.
Please don’t let your hangups around sex (correct or not) become a world view. It’s not a healthy obsession.
Sexual escapades are only senseless if you rigidly believe sex is only for specific things, and adopt a model where human beings are property and can be owned. While sex does have a biological purpose, that in itself doesn't mean it has to be limited to that purpose.
Sex is fun and most sex doesn't lead to procreation, nor is intended to. The last 50 times I've had sex, me and partner(s) involved have had no intention of making a baby, and that's fine. Nature/God agrees with me, because the number of children most families have are typically far less than the number of times the parents have had sex.
There's a lot of times people want sex and don't want it to be some big life changing event. I won't marry someone like that.
> This creates a mindset not unlike that of a drug user who is obsessed with getting another hit
Everyone wants pleasurable things with a minimum of bad or unwanted consequences. This is called being smart and using your God-given brain and free will. This doesn't make anyone a drug user. This puritanical war on pleasure can only serve authoritarian and anti-human ends, which is often an explicit or implicit base of forms of slavery/indenture, and is the main reason why I strongly advocate against it.
> The psychophysical reality of sexual intercourse is much more than some passing physical pleasure.
Anything that feels really good will beget attachment because you want more of it. When it's attached to a person, you're going to want to be around that person more. And of course, human beings are naked apes with courtship and bonding instincts and all that good stuff. But people bond over things other than sex, and any good relationship or marriage will have many bonds other than the sexual one. Indeed, marriages where sex is the only reason they got together are as hollow as this drug user strawman you trotted out.
> Masturbation is even worse.
People who become overly dependent on parasocial relationships with fictional anything, whether that's a harem, video game, movie star, person mentioned in a religious book, etc. need help. I masturbate from time to time and it does not give me any problems, but I'm not addicted to it. But I would rather lonely people masturbate themselves into a coma than sexually assault others simply because of people who will say masturbation is wrong but at the same time won't consider other things like legalizing prostitution.
> they don't want to make the cultural changes necessary to restore normalcy.
I don't. The old way sucked. Robots and AI should be doing all our menial work, and the possibilities for pleasure are endless. The people who just can't exist without an employer giving them meaning because they never got enough approval from their daddies need to move to another planet.
> Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle
This has literally only been true for about 30 years out of the sum total of human history, would you like to guess when those 30 years happened to be?
Obviously the answer is "1950s america".
For the rest of human history, you needed something beyond the education you received until the age of 18 in order to support a family.
Income in this context means trading labor for cash.
In the past, huge amounts of household work were done without any such exchange.
Today, child raising, cleaning, cooking, provisioning, and more remain unpaid household labor. The people who do that work were not idle 800 years ago, and they are not idle today.
Women and kids would tend to animals and food came directly from the animals. They both would tend the fields when work did not required physical strength - and thre was plenty of such work too. The crafts women did were for sale or trade. They would also sell on the market whatever excess household produced.
If we are talking about "centuries" quite a lot of people including men did not worked as in being employed for salary. But their work was economical - necessarily so.
Being stay at home mom today is mostly battling boredom and demotivation. Or then, making up things to do. It is not the same as milking cows or making cheese.
> Being stay at home mom today is mostly battling boredom and demotivation. Or then, making up things to do. It is not the same as milking cows or making cheese.
I was a stay at home parent for my daughter. It was extremely far from battling boredom (except perhaps for first year and a half, if that, and even then anyone who is actually interested in child development will not find it boring) and it was the opposite of demotivating.
Rather than speak in such broad generalizations, I think it would be better to restrict your claims to specific, real stories.
In foraging societies - ie, most people for the vast majority of human history - people worked ~15–20 hours/week on subsistence tasks. The rest was leisure or social time (ie, time for being a human later rebranded as 'idleness').
Industrialization has pushed inequality to extremes while raising hours worked - even as productivity keeps shooting up. There's no good reason for people to tolerate this; it's just exploitation.
Those hours worked are carefully defining a lot of work away. Most things people eat need hours of preparation that isn't counted in you 15-20 hours for example. When you relook at what people did most of the time you realize they had to work really hard for a lot more hours to survive.
How many hours a day would you estimate that primates in the wild "work"? Without commenting on quality of life it seems readily apparent to me that many foraging animals have large amounts of leisure time.
> Most things people eat need hours of preparation that isn't counted in you 15-20 hours for example.
Yeah, and we now expect women to work 40+ hour work weeks and house work on top of that. That is the thing causing societal reproduction rates to plummet.
Let's just do the math: a day has 24 hours. The recommendation for healthy sleep is 8 hours. Then, you work for 8 hours, with 1 hour added for the unpaid lunch break. That's the two largest blocks, leaving 7 hours to distribute... dedicate 3 hours for the "staying alive" stuff (preparing for going to work in the morning, aka breakfast, shave, getting dressed, preparing dinner, eating dinner, have a shower and at least some unwind time to fall asleep).
And that in turn leaves only 4 hours for everything else: running errands (aka shopping, dealing with bureaucracy, disposing of trash, cleaning), just doing nothing to wind down your mind from a hard day at work, hobbies, social activities (talking with your friends and family or occasionally going out) and, guess what, actually having sex.
Easy to see how that's already a fully packed day. Society just took the productivity gains from women no longer having to deal with a lot of menial work (washing dishes and clothing, as that got replaced by machines, and repairing clothes) and redistributed these hours to capitalism.
And now, imagine a child on top of that. Add at least half an hour in the morning to help get the kid ready for school, an hour to drive the kid to errands (because public transit is more like "transhit"), and another two hours to help the kid with homework because that workload is ridiculous and you don't want the kid to fall behind kids of parents rich enough to afford private tutors. But... whoops, isn't that just about the entire "everything else" time block? And younger children need even more work, constantly changing nappies, going to the doctor's all the time because it's one new bug every new week and sometimes the bug also catches you cold...
You're inventing sexism where there isn't any. The men who expect their wives to work 40+ hour weeks are not (at least as a group) the ones dumping all housework and childcare on them.
The time constraints that come with a dual income certainly make the logistics of having children more difficult though.
> The men who expect their wives to work 40+ hour weeks are not (at least as a group) the ones dumping all housework and childcare on them.
I'm not talking about men, I'm talking about society itself. Try renting a family home on a single income in any moderate popular area. Owning a home is outright out of reach for even more people.
Yes I agree the dual income expectation is super backwards when it comes to raising a family. First your income isn't enough to have a family unless you’re earning in the top 5%. Second, as you point out, managing a home and a property takes time and effort, much more than just a few hours a week. Add kids in the mix and unless you have full time childcare it’s not feasible. You pretty much have to sacrifice one of the two incomes paying for labor you can otherwise do yourself. I understand the social reason we moved toward dual income but there’s still a lot to iron out. It’s a whole lot easier to have a family if society could figure out a way to support the homemaker during childrearing years—some of us actually want to raise our own kids. And we need to figure out how to make life accessible to single income situations. Inevitably since dual income has become an expectation the markets have adjusted to that reality which leaves single income households short.
Look man if you want to write a refutation of Marshall Sahlins' work, go ahead. I might even read it. But I'm not going to just take the word of a random commentator - are you even in anthropology?
Like, this is a broad consensus thing. There's not really much debate; ethnographic studies have backed it up. Where are you getting your info from?
There seem to be two main points of critique there:
1. That there was war and war sucked; disease; and also infant mortality was high - therefore life sucked back then. None of that really factors in to the debate of how much free time people had; and those thing are all still very much with us (especially in America).
2. That food prep and gathering firewood takes time. Well, gathering firewood is also known as 'going for a walk in nature', and it's actually good for you. You can chat with your friends while you do it. It's not like your average job. It might not be technically 'idle', but it's a lot closer to 'idle' than flipping burgers in a sweatbox.
Same with food prep - picking through some dried beans, or stirring a pot every 30 mins and making sure it doesn't boil over, while you tell stories around the table just isn't comparable to working in an Amazon warehouse pissing into plastic bottles.
It's critique, and you can buy it if you want; but there's nothing there I would call substantial.
1. The choice isn't between having free time and having modern maternity care. And it's not what was being debated. Like, yeah, antibiotics and anesthetic are great to have, but working 40+ hours a week isn't a prerequisite for them to exist so I have no idea why you're bringing it up.
2. Sitting around the table, singing songs, telling stories, or quietly reflecting; all working at my own pace, in the comfort of a home that's been owned outright for generations, surrounded by organic soil free from pesticides and plastic.
3. I read your link, not every cited article. I've personally lived that way, and I know what I'm talking about. There's a big difference between shucking corn with your family or stacking logs, and shuffling numbers at a bullshit job which exists to make two or three incredibly rich people thousands of miles away a tiny bit wealthier. That said, if there's something more you'd like to bring to the discussion, bring it.
You’re not really responding to what he’s saying. You’re sitting at the middle of the story, where the family is no longer surviving, but rather thriving. It’s probably possible to do this, but it’s a difficult stage to reach, and maintaining it requires a LOT of resources.
And anyways, if you’re a hunter-gatherer, you’re following your prey, not sitting around growing corn to be shucked while you sing songs or whatever.
By the way, my buddies and I tell each other stories at work all the time? You can do this at work too, you know. What you seem to be doing is imagining a world where you’ve outsourced all your labor to “it’ll get done” land, then combined hunter-gatherer lifestyles with agrarian lifestyles
You've taken the position that there's some issue with original affluent society but none of the points you're raising run counter either to it or to the adjacent observation that modern quality of life almost certainly doesn't require anywhere near the hours worked at present. Unless you consider economic inequality to be a prerequisite for it anyway.
No, I'm taking the position that there are massive issues with the work estimates in "The Original Affluent Society" in response to a poster that seems to think a small farm in the 1980s is comparable to being a hunter gatherer 20-200kya
A, being homeless and being in a gatherer society are very different things.
And B, even if you wanted to live that way you can't any more; because the commons has been relentlessly exploited past its breaking point for centuries.
I shouldn't really have to explain any of this, but people generally seem to have some weird ideas and blind spots surrounding our history as a species.
In many countries the only obstacle is the legality of living on government lands. In Canada there are people living a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle on crown land. The option is totally available for many people who chose not to do it.
> the only obstacle is the legality of living on government lands
Yes, the obstacle of living illegally on land that has been systematically over-exploited for centuries (or too harsh to bother), without any community or experience. Not sure I'm seeing your point.
People do it so it's definitely possible. Most people chose not to do it because it's a hard life with a horrible quality of life. Being a hunter-gatherer and living a nomadic life is not and was never easy or fun.
Children helped support their families, I don’t see the face value problem with that. The fact remains that humans have been having kids in their teens and 20s for millennia, until very recently in western liberal societies.
In less wealthy countries, usually the compromise is that husbands are significantly older than their wives. A woman is ready for marriage at 16-20 but a man isn't ready until 25-35. Also they don't own single-family houses unless they're in totally rural areas.
Whether something should be the case has little bearing on whether it has been the case for any length of time particularly in something as flexible as the organization of society. It should largely be fine to point at something and say "I would like things to work this way" and try to organize society in that direction.
It does not have to be a replica of of 50s society though. In particular, I do not think the model of "men go out to work, women look after home and kids" is a great one.
There are lot of alternatives. Men can be primary parents (I was, once the kids got to about the age of eight or so, and was an equal parent before that) and they could stay at home (I continued working, but I was already self-employed and working from home, and my ex never worked after having children).
I think the ideal set up (it would have been so for me) would have been for both parents to work part time.
Of course it still comes back to, you should be able to raise a family on the equivalent of one full time income.
Of course, if the leisured society predicted a few decades ago had come to pass it would be one part time salary.
The model of men work while women watch the kids was most of history. Of course is completely ignors 'womens work' which was very needed for survival and defined by things you could do while also watching kids. for the first few years kids eat from mom so she cannot get far from them (after that she is probably pregnaunt again thus restarting the cycle). Mens work was anything that needed to be done that could not be done when pregaunt or nursing a kid.
today men have the ability to watch kids thanks to formula (though it is better for the kids to eat from mom - this is rarely talked about because it is easy to go too far and starve a baby to death in the exceptions).
> I think the ideal set up (it would have been so for me) would have been for both parents to work part time.
Beautifully said, very progressive also!
I am a big fan of the 4-day work week (for the same amount of money as 5 days), it's been transformative for my life. The extra energy and focus you get from that 1 day translates to higher productivity in the 4 days where you do work. Sadly, the current "squeeze em', bleed em' dry, and drop em'" brand of capitalism is incompatible with the majority of the people to experience how good life can be like that.
I certainly ain't looking forward to them raising the retirement age to 1337 by the time I get to retire.
It's like a race where they repeatedly move the finishing line because the organizers took the medals and sold them, while waiting for you to drop dead so they don't have to give you what you are due.
Who wouldn't be a fan of 80% of the work for 100% of the pay? It's a built-in raise equal to or greater than what you'd get from changing jobs, without the switch in seniority or experience.
> Who wouldn't be a fan of 80% of the work for 100% of the pay?
If you, as an employer, want a motivated, energetic workforce who are not slacking off, it's also in your interest to give that opportunity to your employees, as multiple experiments have shown that 4-day work results in increased productivity and employee retention.
Knowledge work does not have 1-1 correspondence between time spent and productivity. Things get VERY non-linear, to the point that more than 50 hours of real knowledge work a week is often LESS productive than 40 hours.
Aside from the peer comment pointing out the bleedingly obvious, there's also a bit of history here:
In 1907 Justice Henry Bourne Higgins, President of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court, set the first federally arbitrated wages standard in Australia.
Using the Sunshine Harvester Factory as a test case, Justice Higgins took the pioneering approach of hearing evidence from not only male workers but also their wives to determine what was a fair and reasonable wage for a working man to support a family of five.
Higgins’s ruling became the basis for setting Australia’s minimum wage standard for the next 70 years.
Each award is also complex, and covers a range of issues in the employment. For example, this is the Professional Employee award:
https://awards.fairwork.gov.au/MA000065.html just working out what the minimum wage would be for a graduate engineer with 2 years experience is a complex, detailed matter.
But yes, probably, for most professions you could reasonably expect to support a family of 5 on the award, depending on location and definition of "support". Affording a house would largely depend on an additional inheritance, though.
Is "inheritance" used in a different way here similar to how "award" is, or are you saying you often need to inherit money from your family in order to be able to buy a house in Australia?
No, it's used in the same way as elsewhere in the Anglosphere. And yes, as in the rest of the Anglosphere, generally you need an inheritance to be able to afford to buy property.
"in the high cost of living areas" is the rest of that sentence.
It is perfectly doable, even common, to buy a home in low and medium COL areas without any assistance from family, living or dead. The fact that you can't do this in NYC or SF is not an indictment of anything other than NYC and SF.
> or are you saying you often need to inherit money from your family in order to be able to buy a house in Australia?
Tell me a place in any Western society (outside of run-down rural areas/flyover states) where an average employee (i.e. no ultra-rich tech hipster bros) is able to afford a home before the age of 30 purely by his own savings and income. That is frankly no longer a reality for most people.
No reasonable person considered high school advanced education in the 70's let alone 2000. If 85%+ of people get it for half a century, it is by definition not advanced.
> For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it.
I hear ya. My spouse developed mental illness after sons 4,5 were born. A spouse can sabotage a lot of things when they set their mind to it - and their mind never stops. Not even at 3am. The first year was hard. The second was harder. After 5ys we run out of adjectives. After 15y we're using Dr.Seuss letters to spell out how things are.
What was the nature of her illness and was it directly related to the kids? If you don’t mind me asking, of course. That sounds like a very challenging thing all the best
Psychosis, bipolar, BPD, NPD, pretty much all the *PDs. She switched it up.
> was it directly related to the kids
As in stemmed from? No.
As far as challenge related to the kids, it was 1) keeping the them as safe as possible when she was not and 2) proving some semblance of parenting. Both were difficult-to-impossible, given that kids are trapped at home, thanks to eradication of free range areas.
Some of it is economics but some of it is the structure of relationship choice. Feminist scholar Eva Illouz in Why Love Hurts talks about the reasons why women find it hard to get into committed relationships where they feel safe having children:
Not least the idea that if you keep dating you can find somebody better than you've found so far -- a problem that's worse in large cosmopolitan cities where the dating pool is large and perceived to be large.
…which is not necessarily problematic either. I was 43 and my wife 41 when our daughter was born. Our child has had a great life and so have we. While I’m 60 now and don’t have quite the same energy I had at 20-30’something, everything has worked out well for us.
Everyone’s path, goals and priorities is different and as long as would-be parents consider the trade offs all around, it’s hard to be prescriptive about this.
> Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle.
No argument there. The complex socioeconomic forces that has created this dilemma are going to tough to unwind.
> In the bay area, most of the mothers I've met were around that age, and my friends are having their kids at the same age
San Francisco has the highest rate of geriatric pregnancies in USA. We are in a statistical bubble where having kids late is normal (because careers and hcol).
Bubble implies that it's going to burst. I don't see it. Women aren't going to stop wanting careers, and HCOL is coming for everybody. I expect the whole country to join SF in this "bubble".
Bubble in this context means a unique environment that is unlike places on the outside of said bubble. It's not referring to a bubble like in the sense of a inflating market bubble.
The desire to work and have children is going nowhere. Like Hollywood, the careers are going to go away. The money that lubricates the Bay Area is all from the Middle East now, and the return on in-region labor dollars is declining.
I’m sure the return on in region labor dollars decline that you note is real but is it regional? Where in the US is the return on labor dollars not declining? Housing costs, including taxes, seems to be the big problem in the Bay Area. Workers are still productive, but they require higher pay to offset the demand for housing caused by all the foreign “lubrication” and tech-49ers.
The US is already a bubble. Government is currently trying to make it burst as fast as possible. Getting back to the point where what women want doesn't matter again. HCOL will be a luxury term, life in debtors prisons will be the new norm.
It’s just the technical medical term. I don’t think “advanced maternal age” is much better (advanced age at 35?). Besides, advanced age is exactly what geriatric means.
My ex-wife was 37, and I was an year older, when our younger one was born and energy was not the problem so I agree with you that 35+ should not be a problem.
However, a lot of people are having kids significantly older than that.
I not know whether I could cope with a baby 20 years later. Contrary to stereotypes I used to get up faster and more fully if a baby cried in the night. On the other hand, having a baby might energise and motivate me! Not planning to try it out though!
I had kids in my late 30s and they tested my patience and emotional regulation to an extent greater than any other experience of my life. I was somewhat emotionally volatile in my 20s and I can't imagine my kids having better outcomes if I'd had to learn to parent at that time in my life.
My children are 12 years apart in age and being a parent in my 20s was a much better experience. I had less money, but I had more time. I wiser now, but I had more energy. I could relate to being a kid more.
I'm not suggesting it's better. But people seem to automatically assume that being older when having kids as better. I know some much older parents who were not good parents. I know I would not make a good parent to a younger child now that I'm in my 40s.
I did not have more time in my 20s. In my 20s and early 30s, I was busy “getting out there”. Building my life, my interests, my foundation (not just my career). Now I have a happy life to stand on, and can devote more time, attention, and energy to my family.
I don’t deny that your way can work out as well. But OPs advice was “get children before you are 30, don’t wait until after”. Whereas my honest advice, based on my experience, is “wait until you are 35, you’ll be much more stable life in several regards”.
Which approach is best for you depends on a lot of things. For me, I can honestly say, there is no way I would be where I am if I had had kids in my 20s or even early 30s, and I also wouldn’t have been as good a father as I am right now based on how I’ve grown since then. Both things that my child directly benefits from.
I was “getting out there” too! So many major life milestones. But actually it has never stopped. Most of my major career changes happened after the second child. I have entirely new interests now.
I feel like I do have the unique perspective having actually done both. I don't need to assume what kind of parent I was in my 20s because I was that parent. And I'm a different parent now. But being a younger parent was a great experience despite any other consequences.
That’s interesting. Because I genuinely feel I’m much better cut out to be a parent now. Is it different for you? I have so much patience and understanding, and I see that lacking in many of the younger parents around me. I see them and I remember myself.
And the life I have would just not have been possible if I had a child back then. Not even if I completely sacrificed family time and attention back then, which I never would have wanted.
But I guess we have to agree to disagree. For you, being a younger parent worked out better. For me, I’m certain I got my child at the right time. In any case, I find OPs general recommendation that if you want children, you should have them by 30, to be ill-advised to the point of being harmful. Many people would benefit from waiting until later.
I'm 32, and I think I currently have much less patience and understanding than I did at say 22. Life has basically broken me to the point that I simply don't have the capacity for these things that I used to.
Haha, I like to joke that I reached peak intellectual capacity around 26 and peak emotional maturity around 14 and both have been dropping from their peak since then.
It also depends on the person. I was not an adult at 27. I realized I was one at 32 though.
Kids at 27 would have been a bad bad idea. Kids at 32 as well (wrong partner). I’m even older now but I am with the right partner and naturally want kids now. Before her, the topic wouldn’t even cross my mind.
I think it’s really hard to give general advice if one doesn’t mention how their advice interacts with other variables
The advice was to start before you are 30, not finish then. If you have multiple kids my advice is the last should be around 35 maybe 40 but space them out
We have 4 kids and I relate to them really well I think, not to the level where I’m engrossed in descriptions of the latest Roblox game but they’re just younger humans, not some alien species… I’m in my mid 40’s and our youngest is 10.
I also have plenty of energy, the only real change I’ve noticed getting older is I’m in bed a bit earlier than I was in my 20s.
I don’t understand why people think midlife is some kind of drained, lifeless decrepitude
Or possibly you would have learned emotional regulation sooner.
Kids change you, for the better if you let it. There's nothing like a completely helpless infant who is totally dependent on you to wear down your selfish tendencies.
Obviously I think the answer to this question depends so much on individual circumstances that all any of us can do is offer anecdotes. I think that while energy levels do decline as you get older, the degree of the decline depends largely on how much you stay in shape. My partner and I are very active and find ourselves only marginally less physically energetic in our 30s as our 20s. I've seen friends of ours with more sedentary lifestyles having a much sharper decline. If you're inclined to stay in shape then I don't think age makes as big of a difference (within reason.) But YMMV.
I had a kid at 22, I am now 40 with a kid going to college. I can echo this exact sentiment.
However at 22 I wasn't the experienced person I am today. Nor was I stable, nor could I jump on opportunities like my peers could.
If having a child in your early 20s would mean not losing opportunities in progressing in a career, at least with enough free childcare and food to feed the children, people could be more inclined to have children while they get their life together. Our culture of moving away from home is also a big problem -- having 2 sets of grandparents helping raise a child REALLY helped me at my youth not miss out on youth and still raise my child.
kids between 25-32 is something our society should aim to be as practical and pleasant as possible.
> #2 is childcare. Cheap, plentiful, good quality.
This costs infinite money.
It's impossible to scale, because nobody wants an environment where their child is not getting attention from compassionate, engaged adults throughout the day. To get the same level of care as a stay at home parent, you need as many care workers as there are families with young children. And if you pay those workers comparably to the average wage, you need to tax the entire wages of one parent in each family to cover the care costs.
It's probably much cheaper to write checks to families encouraging them to have one parent care for their own children full time.
But I'm not going to tell someone they can't work.
My wife was stay-at-home, until she couldn't take it any more, and then returned to work. Even though it cost us more overall (childcare, second car, etc).
I think willing to take a cut in one's standard of living so that the mother stays at home and raises the children would revitalize society beyond any of the above-mentioned options.
Or... Raise wages while reducing housing and insurance costs so that a single wage earner home can support their family. What my grandpa and grandma used to call "the middle class".
I concur. Kids would have been much better at 20 than at 30. I can barely keep up with what they want to do now. If you live in a decent country it’s not even that expensive. Most states really want people to have children, so the basics are often supported or free.
We were 38 with our first. I strongly agree that is too late to have them, especially given the likelihood of birth defects. Thankfully, we avoided issues there.
A few years in and I feel "back on my feet", but it was harder for being older.
You speak way off base. Many, possibly most people in their early 40s can have kids and still keep up with them well into their 50s. Not only is it easier than ever to pull this off for many modern reasons of health and lifestyle decisions, it's not even exceptionally hard unless you're unlucky with your health or do something to really fuck it up. Even decades ago, many many men at least were commonly fathering children in their 40s and even 50s, and rearing them.
You write your comment about the maximum safe age for having children as if most people (at least in the advanced countries and moderately reasonable income brackets) were living the lives of 19th century industrial workers.
I think having kids when you’re in your early 30s is the way to go but having kids at any age is great. I think waiting until later is a mistake because you want a full life with your kids and ideally you can bless your parents with grandkids (they most likely want one, even if they say they don’t). But not having kids because you “waited too long” is a bigger mistake.
Kids take a lot of energy but they also give you a lot, no matter the age. We are biologically hardwired to rise to the challenge of having kids no matter the age.
I think having kids before you are 30 is fine, but we had our second kid when my wife was 36 and it was also fine. I think when you get in your forties as a man or late thirties as a woman it can be tougher.
Also, adopt. Before I was a parent I thought of a child as "mine" because of biology. Really you see that you shape people and form a connection with them because they are part of your family.
> Don't read the above as advocating having kids too young, it is not.
Depending on the circumstances in a persons country, maybe getting children at a young age isn't that dumb. I'd argue that the best time to get kids is as a university student. You get free daycare, the government doubles your stipend (and it's extended), your housing subsidy increases, you generally have more free time as a student, grandparents are younger and able to help more and you have more energy and can more easily deal with lose of sleep.
As a bonus, when your kids move out, you're not even 40 year olds.
The only real issue is: Have you meet the right partner yet?
> I'd argue that the best time to get kids is as a university student. You get free daycare, the government doubles your stipend (and it's extended), your housing subsidy increases, you generally have more free time as a student...
Where... where do you live? I'm all for having kids as soon as possible, but I was barely able to provide for just myself during university.
I'm in Denmark. You get around $1100 per month from the government as a university student, you then get around the same amount per child (not sure if a couple get half of that each). Still if you're two students, with a child, that's at least $3300 a month. That's not a lot of money, but there are also government loans you can get, and again, free daycare and subsidies for housing. It's not a get rich scheme, but it's also only meant to be temporary i.e. until you finish your studies.
That sound more like "Børnetilskud". Everyone gets that, regardless of being a student or not, that's just help to buy clothes and stuff like that for your child. It's paid out every quarter.
There's a bunch of stuff like that, some can be "stacked", some are mutually exclusive, some are "per child" some is per adult. Some are only available to single parents, some are only available if both parents are enrolled in an education, some are only available if you make less than a certain amount.
Yes and no, the government is trying to steer young people in the direction of engineering, nursing, doctors, teachers and trades (carpenter, bricklayer and so on), but it's not clear where the people are suppose to come from. Essentially Denmark is missing people in also every profession. There aren't enough people. My wife works in a field where unemployment is 12, not percent, but 12 people. So if you're unemployed, qualified to work in the EU and have a recognized education, applying for jobs in Denmark isn't a bad bet.
Various governments have also attempted to boost birth rates, but unsuccessfully.
there are also age correlated birth defects, the cause of which have not been adequately determined in all cases but the high correlation does suggest a relation.
> If you are 25 you should be seriously thinking in the next 2 years, and by 30 have them
I need to push back on this because no one is actually an adult at the age of 25 despite those people wishing it were so. You do not have your shit figured out and assuming a partner of similar age, neither do they. It's only starting in your 30s where you start to understand what it is to be a responsible adult to yourself and to the world.
So please, do not seriously consider having kids in your 20s, for all our sakes.
Isn’t your brain still forming until you’re like… 26? It’s probably more correct to say that 25 year olds are children in that case. Other ages are mostly arbitrary.
This is a level of infantilization that I think becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People don’t magically become adults, they learn to be adults based on the situations they are placed in.
It seems to me like when you move the definition of “adulthood” back to age X, fewer people function like adults prior to age X.
most ppl in my region have kids 35+ in order to first find a place in life that can support children. i don't see any issues with that.
having energy is subjective and does not really depend on being young or old. some old folks are full of energy and live really active lives. It depends on your state of mind and lifestyle more than age.
We did wait for the “perfect” time, and are very happy we did.
I got my son at almost 40, and I’m positive I’m a much better parent because of that. Sure, kids cost energy, but at 40 and 50 you’re not geriatric. I often get the opportunity to compare our parenting style to younger parents, and it’s clear that they often have some emotional growing up to do themselves. They complain about normal parenting things that we just shrug about, they are torn between their career and raising a kid, and most importantly they often lack patience, where to us it just comes natural.
My wife and I had our first at age 15. Then another at 22. And our last at 27. I've raised children while on welfare and while a software engineer.
I was more patient as a teen than I am now in my 40s. Now I am tired. All the time. I fear I would literally die of exhaustion if I had to maintain more irregular hours than I already do due to insomnia that I have developed over the last half decade.
> they often lack patience, where to us it just comes natural.
Having kids fast-tracked me to a critical increase in patience. I've grown so much in less than three years because of my kids. I'm not sure this growth would have ever happened so quickly through other means.
And I'll always have a special, particular respect especially towards my firstborn for causing that in me, and for enduring my shortcomings in the meantime.
I didn’t say get pregnant at 50. I said I became a parent at almost 40, my wife is a couple of years younger. No problems whatsoever, and I seem to have more energy for parenting (and especially patience) than the parents in their 20s who haven’t even found themselves yet.
Paternal age is also a contributor. Children with fathers over 40 see an increase in potential diseases, a shorter lifespan and higher infant mortality, likely due to DNA mutations.
According to that page, the whole issue seems to be very nuanced. It also contains the quotes I attached below.
Be it as it may, I conclude that there is an elevated risk for problems the older you get (although for some issues, cause and effect may be reversed, which is hard to resolve), but that that risk may not be so significant as to outweigh other advantages.
> A simulation study concluded that reported paternal age effects on psychiatric disorders in the epidemiological literature are too large to be explained only by mutations. They conclude that a model in which parents with a genetic liability to psychiatric illness tend to reproduce later better explains the literature.[9]
> Later age at parenthood is also associated with a more stable family environment, with older parents being less likely to divorce or change partners.[43] Older parents also tend to occupy a higher socio-economic position and report feeling more devoted to their children and satisfied with their family.[43] On the other hand, the risk of the father dying before the child becomes an adult increases with paternal age.[43]
> According to a 2006 review, any adverse effects of advanced paternal age "should be weighed up against potential social advantages for children born to older fathers who are more likely to have progressed in their career and to have achieved financial security."[63]
It seems kids procreated by older parents (aged 35 years or older) have increased risk of Down Syndrome. The effect is most pronounced when both parents are older than 35 years: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12771769/
> A kid had at 40 will still be depending on your when you are 55
I had my kids 25-35; all 5 are adults. We live together as is befitting a 4 income economy.
> and if the kids goes to college
Do you mean go away to college? Yeah. No.
> may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring.
Me and peers are all working grey. End of career happens with first major illness intersects with the lack of health insurance and we die.
> Plus if your kids have kids
If one of my a sons pairs off with someone and they both work, they'll still be 2 typical incomes short of self sustenance.
BUT, if they got married and then married another couple, the 4 of them only have to find one more adult - the one who will parent during the work day. After the last child enters school, the core 4 can kick parent 5 to the curb.
> Do not let fear of how much it will cost
No fear. Just math.
> or desire for more resources first
But if they had more resources they might only need 3 or even 2 adults working full time to afford basic bills.
> Do not let ... it ... stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.
Parents can (and do) parent while living in their car...
SO what? That is well below retirement age and life expectancy. MY younger one turns 18 when I will be 58, and I am a single parent. Baring accidents or the severely unexpected (which can happen at any age - plenty of people die in the 30s or 40s) its not a problem.
> That is well below retirement age and life expectancy.
What is below RA/LE? My comment addressed common financial realities. It applied to every adult age, up to and including death.
> MY younger one turns 18 when I will be 58
okay.
> and I am a single parent.
You may be interested to know that parenting can be get much harder than that. ex: I would have loved my difficulty level to be dialed down to Single Parent.
> Baring accidents or the severely unexpected
I agree that some folks do experience year after year after year of luck.
> (which can happen at any age - plenty of people die in the 30s or 40s)
I agree that not having life-changing advantage & luck is pretty dang common.
> its not a problem.
What's not a problem? Taken together, your comment seems to be lacking a subject.
I did the best I could. If you could share which of my points you were responding to, that might help.
As someone who is 34 with two kids (toddler and newborn), I completely agree with your comment. My wife and I had difficulty having kids, or we would've had them sooner, but I completely agree with having kids before 30. My energy is still solid, don't get me wrong. But it doesn't compare to energy in your 20s. People think too much about the financial aspect. You can continue building and growing financially even with kids, you just need to be smarter and more disciplined. A lot of people use the financial argument, but I think more and more, it is only a cope for not having had kinds sooner. All my kids will be in their 20s when I'm in my 50s; not bad, but having kids in your 20s is the way to go.
If you do decide to wait longer, be aware that there are hilarious differences geographically. When we had our first kid in SF, the other dads pushing swings were around the same age as me (fortyish). Moving back to Georgia… oh my god, the parents of kids my second kid’s age were babies! (There are “graybeard dad” Facebook groups etc., but the average vibe is way different)
Even regionally. My kid goes to an urban school where the majority of parents are those with at least an undergraduate degree, and are at least my age.
Family friends have kids in a rural school with parents being those that haven’t moved 10 miles from the community where they grew up and small-town soap opera dynamics.
On the flip side the average age of parents in Utah is extremely low and the crime rate is also below average. So it may be more nuanced than you would think.
The flip-side of an aging society with declining fertility is that older people, with fewer children are likely to be less sympathetic to children, and you could see the incarceration rates increase, or remain steady, as less severe infractions are punished more harshly.
We recently saw this play out in the Queensland, Australia, state election where the opposition party, which was pretty much out of ideas, ran a scare campaign about youth crime in regional areas. Neighbourhood Facebook Groups where CCTV footage of "suspicious youth" are a mainstay and an aging population did the rest of the job and they won the election and passed "adult time for adult crime" laws: whether you agree with these or not, "adult time" in Australia means that the youth incarcerated will be adults in their 20s and 30s when they get out.
The Australian state of New South Wales routinely strip-searches young children, but again, there isn't much outcry.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out elsewhere. The worst case scenario is that kids will be politically scapegoated ("why should childless and aging taxpayers fund education?"), and it leads to a further decline in fertility rates.
Australia has had pretty terrible “jail children like adults” opinions for a long time. Politics in Melbourne constantly turns on fears of youth [black immigrant] crime waves that are making people afraid to leave the house.
Queensland seems to be making a lot of noise about that at the moment as well.
Seems to be this weird reasoning (and I know it has cropped up in the US too) that - if they did an 'adult' crime they should be tried as an adult. It totally ignores what we know about developing brains - they are not fully developed, they don't consider consequences the same way as older people.
That's not to say they should be allowed to 'get away with it', but we need to take into account that it's not really the same thing as adults doing it.
> That's not to say they should be allowed to 'get away with it', but we need to take into account that it's not really the same thing as adults doing it.
However, they -clearly- do get away with it, continually the current method of punishment is not deterring them from crime. These are not 'oh he made poor decisions style crimes', you're not paying attention or are not living in this area if you think so.
“The residents living in these areas have been let down for too long under the former Government who allowed serious repeat youth offenders to avoid adequate punishment and let them continue to terrorise these communities,”
Current deterrents clearly are not working. There are only so many levers the government can pull. Children learn poor lessons and inadequate supervision from their families, but if they are taken from their home the media screams 'stolen generation' so in the end individuals terrorised by them have to deal with the burden of their continued long term criminal behavior.
You may believe that children can be rehabilitated, I'd dearly love this to be the truth, however my observations show that its not a reflection of reality.
I’m not trying to play down any problems or say nothing should be done.
In fact I’m not expressing any beliefs other than the (very well supported) notion that children’s brains are not fully developed and therefore they shouldn’t be dealt with in the same way as adults because that’s just dumb and is likely not to help.
Can you expand on "that's just dumb"? I don't understand what argument this is trying to make.
All people have different brains; some are very low-intelligence and impulsive by nature and training, and this can apply at any age. The point of this punishment is not to apply a sort of cosmic morality according to the true culpability of a soul. Abstract principles about whether the person 'deserves' a punishment aren't actually relevant regardless of what shape their brain is. The point is the real-life consequence of their criminality on others, and how to stop them hurting people. We must stop them hurting people; let's figure out how.
This dedication to abstracted principles and cosmic morality over fixing the actual issue is really problematic; I see this more and more these days.
> The point of this punishment is not to apply a sort of cosmic morality according to the true culpability
Except that is very much part of the justice system, and when people talk about "trying kids as adults" it is exactly about holding them culpable as if they were adults.
> We must stop them hurting people; let's figure out how.
I very much agree. "Lock 'em up and throw away the key", "they knew what they were doing!" and, an actual slogan from the queensland elections, "adult crime, adult time" don't really show a search for a solution. They're just appeals to base vengefulness.
Yes, kids commiting serious crimes need to be stopped. Victims and the wider society need to be safe. Yes the systems in Australia have been failing at this, over and over.
But young brains don't take consequences into account in the same way older brains do. They don't understand the impact that their actions will have on others or themselves in the longer term and aren't especially likely to consider harsher consequences as a deterrent because they aren't thinking about consequences. They literally aren't wired that way.
If your goal is actually reducing crime experienced by the community, you need to look at why kids are getting to that point, what's gone wrong in their upbringing, maybe holding parents more culpable, and intervening earlier. Otherwise you're not going to achieve anything more than a few appealing soundbites. And the problem with all of that in an Australian context is that there is a hidden subtext here - it's often (far from always, but often) First Nations kids who are causing the problem, and there is a long history of state intervention in First Nations families being - there's no other way to put this - actively evil.
It's a tough situation involving under-developed brains, ongoing generational trauma and all sorts of other crap.
"The evidence shows that the younger children are locked up, the more likely it is that they will go on to commit more serious and violent crimes. As shown in the HWE report making the justice system more punitive through longer sentences, harsher bail laws, and building more children’s prisons is the wrong approach.
That is because offending by children is a symptom of underlying causes and unmet needs that we are failing to address. The proposed measures in the Bill are likely to result in more crime, not less."
So I agree, action needs to be taken, people need to be safe. Trying kids as adults is a simplistic sop to anger, not a good solution and flies in the face of evidence.
I am very conflicted on this. On one hand I absolutely despise that hating the children attitude and I believe we are reaping what we are sowing. On the other hand there are serial offenders that are not being dealt appropriately. My naive solution is to keep the current, more permissive system for first offenders and then treat repeat offenders as adults.
I mean if you are a teen, succumb to peer pressure and do something stupid like stealing a car, I fully believe that we should not throw the book at you. We need to dispel you of the notion that this is not a big deal and that you will get away with it, while ensuring that we do not harm your future prospects.
But if being arrested, handcuffed and taken in front of a judge is not enough to make you understand that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated, and you do steal a car again a few weeks later, then yes, we will have to escalate instead of saying "nothing we can do, it's just a kid". Otherwise we are literally sending the message that they can act with impunity.
Lead concentration in America "rapidly increased in the 1950s and then declined in the 1980s" [1]. There is a non-linear discontinuity among kids born in the mid 80s, with linear improvements through to those born in the late 2000s [2].
Arrest rates for violent crimes are highest from 15 to 29 years old (particularly 17 to 23-year olds) [3]. They're particularly low for adults after 50 years old.
We're around 40 years from the last of the high-lead children. 17 years ago is the late 2000s.
It is insane to just confidently assert that the only factor in the decrease in crime is Lead. Treating an insanely nuanced issue as an absolute doesn't make your argument more compelling, it is actually kind of baffling.
Why bother stopping at crime rates with that confidence?
The 1st recorded cases of fatty liver disease and T2D in children were in the 1980’s are have continued growing since - lead must have been protecting children’s health.
Testosterone has been on a sharp decline during this same time period - lead must promote healthy testosterone production.
Debt of all kinds, from the national debt, to household debt, to student loans debt has increased exponentially and consistently with lead removal - lead must promote financial literacy.
If you do the same comparison of the rates of leaded gasoline during childhood to adulthood crime rates across different countries which have different histories of leaded gasoline usage, you notice that the correlation persists. While of course correlation does not imply causation, it's a link that's fairly well-established in literature, it's not a spurious correlation, and we know that lead has concrete neurological effects, so it's plausible from a pharmacological basis.
Since 1970 testosterone has declined 1% per year and it’s well established higher testosterone is linked to impulsive and violent criminal behavior and in countries like the US crime rate is at a 50 year low correlating with this decline starting 1970.
There are many factors that correlate and potentially contribute to a reduction in incarceration rates.
There are estimated 1.8-1.9M incarcerated. Since 1980 to the present there are well over 1M violent crimes (rape, murder, aggregated assault, robbery) per year. Let’s look at another factor that might contribute to falling incarceration rates that tend to explain this discrepancy in incarceration vs total crimes…conviction rates:
Murder: ~57.4% in 1950 vs. ~27.2% in 2023—a ~2.1x difference.
Rape: ~17.3% in 1950 vs. ~2.3% in 2023—a ~7.5x difference.
Aggravated Assualt: ~19.7% in 1950 vs. ~15.9% in 2023—a ~1.2x difference.
The neurological effects of lead don’t tend to explain away falling police clearances nor convictions.
There have been a lot of studies that show the correlation with lead up and down and varied by lead in different cities countries with different phaseout timelines.
Kevin drum and Rick Bevin both did a ton to lay this out systematically.
As leaving drum has noted, Lead is NOT the only contributor to crime, but it was the cause of the largest variations for most of the 20th century.
But it's so satisfying to one's ego that a single cause is the issue. All complexity of societal changes in the last 50 years can be outmanuevered. Simplification is sexy.
It’s satisfying to know that we’ve eliminated a major environmental toxin with so many awful effects. It doesn’t mean that lead explains everything, but it is a lot better than the “we built enough prisons to lock up all the bad guys, maybe we should build more” alternative hypothesis/proposal I’ve heard.
Maybe they were doing similar things with lead or something else is a big factor. Perhaps the rise of ever more cheap entertainment for young males who are most likely to commit crime. That's a global thing.
Yes, leaded gasoline was being banned in many rich countries at about the same time, and there's a positive correlation between the year it was banned and the year that violent street crime began to decline.
Kids that grew up huffing leaded exhaust are more bad decisions inclined than they would otherwise be. It's not just crime. The most heavily leaded cohort in the US is also known for drunkly crashing their muscle cars and wasting their youth smoking pot in a commune.
Bad decisions like these get less common with age, partly because of consequences (jail, death, etc), partly because getting up to no good requires free time, ambition and freedom, all of which are in shorter supply with age and the resultant responsibilities competing for every individual's supply of these resources.
So if the replacement cohort of people who are coming into prime crime age decline to participate at the same rates the crime rate goes down.
I see, so since a large majority of crime is done by young people, peaking between 15-25, they are basically comparing a whole new generation of kids who didn't have developmental brain issues vs their elders.
Were the older people who grew up with lead exposure also experiencing higher rates of impulsive crime in the late >1990s relative to the new and prior generations? That would help eliminate the major differences in economics/culture/politics of their upbringing (for ex: mass flight of families moving to the suburbs to raise their young kids after the 1970s crime wave scared them away).
I think lead is nasty stuff, but if it was the single cause of high crime, surely we'd see a similar effect in other domains, like a rebound effect on IQs (another thing lead was blamed for)?
Instead the Flynn Effect seems to have been strongest during the era of high lead, and it's tailing-off now.
I'm not convinced these tests measure what they claim to. Even assuming they do, IQ scores offer little practical value.
The human body and mind are always adapting, however subtly, to changing environments. So I wonder -- are IQ tests assessing abilities that may no longer be optimal today?
Homer likely had an exceptional memory, as did many ancient Greeks that participated in oral traditions. But how relevant is memorizing epics in the modern world?
People also have fewer possessions worth stealing and trying to hock? It's not like TVs and radios cost that much anymore. People wear less jewelry.
Though this is not a significant factor, it might be worth putting on the list still.
The most valuable things on a person these days (credit cards, phone) are also incredibly easy to lock down and make worthless. Many of the things like jewelry, are also now rendered essentially worthless because a lot of jewelry now is cheaply sourced; pawning off crap from fast fashion is not going to be worth it.
Bicycles and tools seem to be the main things still stolen. They are often left unattended locked to poles or in the back of cars which can be easily broken in to, and can be immediately flipped for a lot of money.
I was thinking that as I was getting ready to sell my house. I'm not a particularly materialistic person to start with, but there are hardly any physical objects in my home that I value that much besides (a) some photo albums/pictures and yearbooks - and for newer generations these are mostly digital I guess, (b) my violin and (c) my espresso machine and grinder. I guess you could throw my cellphone in there as well - easy to replace but would be a PITA, like losing my wallet. It'd be a pain to replace all my furniture and other stuff but I certainly don't feel any attachment to those things.
I feel you. I’m selling my house and I joke that I’ll give someone a better deal if they just take everything in it as part of the sale. A suitcase for my clothes, my computer, and some physical mementos is all I need to keep. Even the clothes are optional, but I don’t feel like buying a new wardrobe.
My coffee grinder may have been on my list, but I moved countries and the power is incompatible hah.
Right, there has been a huge reduction in home burglaries over the past several decades. The only stuff really worth stealing anymore is cash, drugs, and firearms.
That's funny to see. Sometimes I get stressed about the lack of security around my house, but I'll stop and think, if someone broke in what would this hypothetical thief actually steal anyway?
I was wondering about this the other day. Do people even steal car radios/amps/subs anymore? When I was a kid in the 90s, having your car radio stolen was typical.
The more modern equivalent has long been the catalytic converter. I don't know how well legislative efforts to crack down on the resale of used catalytic converters has gone though.
Let's add an example to illustrate the difference:
Let's say that there is a correlation between the number of flights between London and New York, and the prices of sulfur. The correlation is near perfect.
When your neocortex is working, you ignore it. You can't create any plausible scenario how this could work (it doesn't exist within your latent space) so you don't learn anything from it, it doesn't even register in your brain as anything worthy of notice.
But everybody with the cerebellum only absolutely does learn it. And completely for real, not just as some fun factoid, but as a fact that they know the same way you know that airplanes have wings, and everybody knows it, only you don't.
Then, one day out of nowhere people start buying sulfur. Your questions are met with laughter and mockery "dude, everybody's buying sulfur, are you autistic?". And you don't know, because you haven't even learned the pseudo facts that everybody else bases their reasoning on.
This is only a made up example, but this is exactly how it works.
One thing I've learned in my decades on this planet is that just about never is one explanation for a human condition mostly correct. Lead is a convenient technical explanation that underestimates the impact of upbringing and community.
It doesn't explain a lot of factors of juvenile delinquency that existed for generations before lead service lines or leaded gasoline.
Industry and highways and other high sources of lead pollution were built in the areas with higher juvenile delinquency. Not in rich, privileged areas. I think you can also correlate the rise in violent crime to amount of lead contamination in the soil, some articles claiming down to the city block level.
Maybe industry and highways increase lead exposure which leads to crime, or maybe areas already high in crime are cheaper so that's where industry and highways go?
Specifically violent crime. Poor areas had more violent crime. These areas got dumped with more lead pollution. The rise percentage wise correlates almost perfectly with lead levels, with poor (and now polluted) areas rising more than well off areas. And then the drop, where after lead was removed from petrol you get a significant drop, but still less of a drop in areas more lead soil contamination, such of those blocks next to a highway. We know the developmental effects on young brains from lead; it is why we banned it.
I don't think it shifts the red blue much which is probably what you're getting at.
I think it absolutely affects the quality of politicians we get though. The best that a given generation can offer is probably lower if that generation huffed a lot of lead gas. So as they age out and younger people hit peak career and fill those roles things will probably improve a bit.
I was mostly thinking that the politicians all look so incompetent — with some exceptions of course — that if it wasn't real, it'd be a very unfunny joke exactly because of how much caricature-like and exaggerated personalities the politicians have.
You could, if you wanted to misdiagnose the problem.
You'd have more success blaming COVID inflation and the general public's poor education in economics and lack of understanding why eggs were $3.50/dozen. (Today they are $6.00/dozen)
No. Much of the American electoral landscape is still shaped by the systemic remnants of slavery, reconstruction and segregation, and the post-Trump landscape by the cultural trauma of having elected a black president. Although I'm sure all of the lead poisoning didn't help.
No. Much of the American electoral landscape is still shaped by the systemic remnants of slavery, reconstruction and segregation, and the post-Trump landscape by the cultural trauma of having elected a black president.
There’s supposedly a cycle of attitude between generations. If your parents are X, you want to be Y. If your parents are Y, you want to be Z. If your parents are Z, you want to be X
No. You can’t blame lead. There is zero justification for making the average person less responsible for their own worldview and choices in leadership.
Well, that’s the first time I’ve heard anyone explicitly say they don’t want to understand causal factors because it would reduce the ability to tell people they should bootstrap themselves.
Your points say old people have more lead, but then you say young people are more violent. That doesn't square with the articles point that incarceration rates are falling.
We may have swung the pendulum a little too far towards deliberate, though. The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off. We need to figure out how to build an economy and society that can facilitate deliberate responsible parentage younger and more often. Luckily we have generations to solve the problem, but it’s there looming.
A plane at 75,000 feet can descend for a long time and then level off without crashing. Eventually population will stop declining. Everyone needs to just chill about a declined birthrate.
The plane only levels off by taking the fact that it has no power to its engines seriously, troubleshooting, and then restoring power. That’s all I’m suggesting we start to do.
What is your proof that it will not decline further? If you have no proof, then at the very least the cause must be investigated. After all, the concern is that the current rate of declining birth rate, means extinction in a few centuries.
You don't just shrug that off and say "oh well, it'll probably be just fine."
Sure I do. You have zero proof that decline goes below a world population of 1 billion. This belief that it must always grow is based on just a fear. Very similar to the fear that gays marrying will cause everyone else to stop. Hasn't happened.
I wasn’t as clear as I should have been: I am not talking about global population and humans going to zero in some hyperbolic nightmare fantasy. I am talking about one society, e.g. US population, living with the values and freedoms and technology we enjoy today, sustaining itself. Our society will cease to exist because of course humans aren’t just going to stop making babies. It’s just that the ones that do achieve positive replacement rate will have different society than us. The call to action is that if we want our comfortable society to persist, we have to swing back to a positive replacement rate at some point time (preferably before we become an irrelevant global minority), and also figure out how to insulate against the other faster growing societies, eventually. I never argued we always have to go up, that only matters in the context of ways to combat other more rapidly growing populations.
the only reason for population growth is that economy (asset valuation) is based on future projection of consumption (which is based on population) and social security, which is based on future taxpayer paychecks.
the idea behind "population growth" is that we will need future slaves to prop up our social security and asset bubbles.
think of a country as an ant colony, what happens if population decreases? the queen will get less food
> We don't just shrug off the fantasy that there will be zero children born in "a couple of centuries"??
That's not a fantasy, it's the inevitable outcome of sub-replacement fertility, which is the state we find ourselves in (though my intuition says it will take longer than "a couple of centuries" to get to zero).
It's the inevitable outcome of everybody continuing it for all the generations that remain. As soon as there aren't enough people to manufacture contraceptives, it will of course grow. But after a few generations, there will be more land, water, animal and plant life, copper, cobalt, gold and such per person, and people can easily say "that shrinkage sucked, let's grow". You assume that things will always be the way they are now, which is of course false.
....assuming the sub-replacement rate continues forever, which is a hefty assumption. It's quite certain that a greater-than-replacement rate can't continue forever (eventually, the mass of the humans would be greater than the mass of the planet), though that has been the world we've lived in up to now.
There are subpopulations with high birth rates. They are very small currently, but if you really think the general population will die off for want of reproduction, eventually they will comprise a sufficiently large fraction of the population to raise the overall birth rate.
Or, you continue to grow the population through immigration.
The US is unique (or maybe there are a handful of others, I don't know) in its ability to welcome immigrants who, within two generations, largely see themselves as Americans first and not as the identity of their grandparents. American identity politics has eroded this somewhat but it is still largely true, for example, that grandchildren of immigrants will usually have a very poor grasp of their grandparents' native languages.
This only works if you indoctrinate. I’d say the current US phenomenon is something between raw relocation and true indoctrination. The entire point of my comment was related to maintaining the society we all enjoy (not FUD about some zero population earth as it was construed). If you progressively and move other people into your society but they don’t share your core values then your society dies. If you indoctrinate and accept only those who share your values, then your society can sustain. I’m talking basics like shared desire to respect and uphold a constitution, having a language everyone is expected to know to perform civic functions, equal playing field for both wages and taxes. I’m not saying societies shouldn’t evolve. I’m suggesting that there is a difference between thoughtful social progress and feeling like an alien in your own city.
I disagree. Immigration suppresses wages. Which suppresses native born childmaking, which fuels more government charity, erm, welfare, which dampens productivity, which erodes civil liberties.
American is not seen as promoting human rights, and to infer all immigrants are good is naive, hate to get off my porch about this. sits back down on rocking chair whistling “I Wish I was In Dixie” and widdling a hangman with the noose almost finished, just a few more threads
> Immigration suppresses wages. Which suppresses native born childmaking, which fuels more government charity, erm, welfare, which dampens productivity, which erodes civil liberties.
Japan and Korea have almost no immigration and abysmally low birth rates. Your arguments don't really hold water. Having children is actually more of a burden on the state, as those kids need schools, (in most western countries publicly funded) healthcare, etc. Taking in a healthy immigrant at 20 is better almost all round from a purely economic point of view.
And immigration doesn't suppress wages any more or less than having tons of kids would over the long term. A person "taking" a job is still a taking a person whether they were born or immigrated. This is ignoring the fact that more people over time enlarge the economy and opportunity in it. Would the United States be a better country today if it didn't accept the mass immigration from Italy, Ireland, and Eastern Europe between 1850-1914 and had 1/4 the population?
> We may have swung the pendulum a little too far towards deliberate, though. The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off.
The US alone doubled it's population since the 1950s. Enough scaremongering.
> The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off.
Why? Why are we sure that the population will not settle? Or that our increased productivity won't offset a change in labor?
I do worry societies will fail to handle side effects like the temporary increased demand for elder care, but no real fear of total societal collapse.
Birth rates won’t “hold steady” because people don’t die at equal rates. If birth rate is below replacement, old people die off first, the population’s average age goes down every year, and birth rate increases.
A society that is producing children will not die off. The U.S. saw over 3.6 millions births in 2024.
> This is not going to happen when you can just import people from other countries.
That's basically the same solution as dumping toxic waste overseas: you're just shifting the problem (depopulation) to someplace poorer and probably less able to deal with it.
Birthrates are declining everywhere, and the current global fertility rate is at replacement (so don't expect it to stay that high). In the future, there's going to be no magical place from which you can "import" all the people you need, because you chose not to make them yourself.
Every country on earth is trending downwards. A lot of currently immigrant-exporting countries (e.g. Vietnam, India, Mexico) have sub-replacement levels of birth. They're going to have absolutely massive problems in a few decades when a lot of their youth have left and they're stuck with an inverted population pyramid.
There's a tendency for people in developed (particularly western) countries to feel entitled to immigrants. It's weird to think you'll not only have people changing your diapers when you're 90, but that your country should actively bring in people and deprive poorer countries of similar care, then leave those poor working class immigrants to fend for themselves once they're old.
It's the same mindset that drove society since the 1950s: it makes my life convenient, who cares if it makes life harder for people far from me or after I'm dead? And now we're all living with the accumulated consequences of all that (depleted ozone, climate change, ocean acidification, microplastics, oceans stripped of life, teflon pollution, deforestation, CO2 rising rapidly).
And that may well be the ultimate resolution (that individual-liberty-preserving capitalist societies with unrestricted access to contraception die off). However, if we like how life works right now then we’ll have to work to sustain it. There’s probably a capitalism-preserving way to incentivize children…
People keep poking at the wrong reasons, but in some societies it is quite dire. South Korea with this year of 1, when 2.1 means 'static', means more than halving the population every 30 years or so.
For a reverse comparison, if you take a penny and double it every day, you end up with > $5M in 30 days. And yet this birthrate issue doesn't take into account plague, war, natural disasters, and potential issues with lack of food(starvation). And the worst of it?
Is that I believe it is 100% environmental.
People think "having children" is a conscious choice. And sure, there is some of that. But at the same time, it is the very point of existence for an organism. Actually producing children (not just performing the sex act) is an evolutionary requirement. It is literally the primary drive of existence. Risky behaviour is ingrained into us, if it enables the possibility of reproduction. The drives and energy we place into everything we do, has a background drive that is sexual in nature. We seek to excel, to impress the opposite sex.
Like it or not (I'm not like that, I decide, not my hormones!), this is effectively an accepted fact of animal psychology. It's a part of who we are, our culture is designed around it, and every aspect of our lives is ruled by it.
Why am I on about this??
Well, my point is that this is a primary drive, interlaced so deeply that it affects every aspect of who we are. Reproduction, the production and raising of offspring is an act we are, naturally, compelled to. Forced to. Need to do.
Unless of course specific chemicals, maybe microplastics or all of the "forever chemicals" in our blood, are blocking that process.
Again, people will chime in with the popular "But it's expensive". No. Just no. Nope! My point above is that this is primal drive. People have had children in the depression, on purpose. Historically people, even with contraceptives, have had children regardless.
If it's about money, why is the birth rate declining in countries with free daycare, universal health care, and immensely strong support for parents post birth? Mandated career protection for mothers, months and months of time off after birth all paid. Immense tax breaks making children almost a profitable enterprise. In fact, in some European countries, it is more affordable to have kids than at any time in human history... and the birth rate still declines. It's just not about money. It just is not.
Why I think this is immensely important, is because we aren't seeing a rate, but an ongoing declining rate. The rate isn't just the lowest in human history, but the rate continues to decline. It's not '1' for South Korea, it's 1 right now, and will be 0.5 eventually.
What happens when no one can have children?
I further ask this, because the entire future of the species is at risk. People get all "who cares about going on", but wars do happen, plagues do happen, and I assure you I'm happy to be here, regardless of what the survivors of the bubonic plague thought at the time. Yet if we see a plague that kills 1/2 the population, where does that leave this equation? And what happens if we see a war that kills mostly those of child bearing age? What then?
My secondary concern in all of this is, we have very specialized roles these days. There was a time where a person could be a "a physicist", yet now there are 1000s of sub-specialties in such fields. And not everyone in the population is capable of expanding science. Of discovering 'new'.
My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress. There simply will not be enough people intelligent in a way functional to, say, physics, to expand that field.
So if our population decreases too far, we may not be able to resolve issues with, say, forever chemicals. Or with microplastics. Our capacity to do research and resolve such issues may vanish.
Couple that with a graph that is constantly declining, and a simple 50% death rate in a plague, could mean the extinction of the human race.
So my real concern here is, we aren't swinging the pendulum on purpose. It's happening to us. We're in the middle of an extinction event.
The entire point of having human intelligence is being able to ignore or overthink or delay or prevent any primal urges. We also have urges to kill and rake and destroy but I doubt you’re going “laws are bad because they prevent out primal urges”.
Also appeals to evolution are extremely weak and lazy and unproven.
Urges to kill and rake and destroy? The first, yes. The second, lack of care by some.
Yet the first is aggression often born from, again, reproductive drive. You don't see moose smashing the horns together for fun, they do it to exhibit dominance. All creatures strive to say "I'm the best!", in hundreds of subtle and overt ways. "Success" at any act means "I'm a better mate!".
All of human culture, all of human drive, all of our existence is laced, entwined, and coupled with this drive. You may think your fancy pants brain is the ruler of all, but it's not, for the very way you think, is predicated by an enormous amount of physiological drives, the primary being "reproduce".
Saying that "citing concepts from entire branch of science" is weak, is a very weird thing to do.
Throughout most of human history we have had less than a billion people.
More people are alive today than have ever lived.
And you are concerned that the population will drop by a half?
Everyone will be richer and better off. The amount of pollution and resource use will be solved too. The underlying input to that is the number of people.
One third of arable land is undergoing desertification
Insects and other species are dying off precipitously
Corals and kelp forests too, entire ecosystems. Overfishing etc.
My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress.
That’s silly when AI can already make 1 person do the job of 100, and soon will be doing most of the science — it has already done this for protein folding etc. And it will happen sooner than in 30 years.
This argument you and Musk make about needing more humans for science is super strange. Because you know the AI will make everything 100x anyway. And anyway, I would rather have the current level of science than ecosystem collapse across the board.
> More people are alive today than have ever lived.
Assuming you meant died instead of lived to avoid a potentially nonsensical reading, this is not true.
It seems this factoid[0] has been around since the 1970s, and at least in 2007 it was estimated to be 6% of people who'd ever lived being currently alive [1]
[0] In the original sense of factoid - being fact-like, but not a fact (i.e. not true). C.f. android, like a man
And you are concerned that the population will drop by a half?
If you read more carefully, I am concerned by two things. A reduction to 0, and the lack of control over this. I think you don't get how the rate is continuing to decline, and further, that knowing why is important.
And I have not said we need "more humans". Instead, I said we need a base number of humans.
> If you read more carefully, I am concerned by two things. A reduction to 0, and the lack of control over this.
I think you need to drop back to reality to reassess your concerns. Barring a major disaster, there is no risk of extinction. Population decline is a factor only in economic terms, as demographics alone will require a significant chunk of a nation's productivity potential to sustain people who left the workforce. However, countries like the US saw it's population double in only two or three generations, and people in the 50s weren't exactly fending off extinction.
Population is a london horse manure problem. In both directions.
In 30 years time, people might be uploading their consciousness to computers, or colonising the moon. Making dire warnings about a concept like breeding that we might just get rid of seems foolish at best.
>We're in the middle of an extinction event.
No we are not. Lmao. Same way Horse Manure didnt snuff out life in London.
But it's not uniform. In the span of ~60 years, the average birth rate doesn't matter as much as the distribution and how much the children model their parents.
Small example (multiply all numbers by 1M), average birth rate of 1.5 can be a group of 4 people where one had 0 children, one had 1, one had 2, one had 3. If each child has as many children as its parents, next generation, 0 have 0 children, 1 has 1, 2 have 2, 3 have 3, for a new average of 2.33.
If you take a higher starting average but a tight spread [2, 2, 2, 2], the next average is only 2. Or if you have [0, 1, 2, 3] but kids model society instead of parents, you get 1.5 again.
Of course children didn't model their parents the past couple of generations, but times may be changing.
> All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.
Or the less popular more controversial hypothesis: the steepest decline in births is among the poor, a population with, on average, worse impulse control and more issues with mental health, and since all qualities are at least partly heritable...
Surprisingly, the fertility rate among the affluent does not appear to be nearly as impacted.
> the steepest decline in births is among the poor, a population with, on average, worse impulse control and more issues with mental health, and since all qualities are at least partly heritable...
Surprisingly, the fertility rate among the affluent does not appear to be nearly as impacted.
Generally, fertility rates are higher among poorer populations compared to wealthier populations. This pattern is observed both at the national level, with poorer countries generally having higher fertility rates than wealthier ones, and at the individual level, with poorer families tending to have more children than wealthier families.
> Generally, fertility rates are higher among poorer populations compared to wealthier populations.
Yes, but they were even higher in the past. Fertility has declined among the poorer classes much more than among higher income classes, probably due to the availability of contraceptives and abortion:
You're half implying this but I wonder if the change in youth culture comes from the simple ratio of adults vs kids in the social circle around each kid. Youth culture needs a lot of kids around to get amplified. When most of the people around you are adult you may tend to adopt the culture of the adult world rather than creating your own.
Or maybe it's just today's youth are too neurotic, anti-social, and screen-addicted to go out into the real world and misbehave? They're also having less sex, and drinking less as well. Also consider that it's much harder to get away with crimes today than it was decades ago, and penalties for getting caught are often more severe.
Incarceration isn't the same thing as crime. If the most populous state by far (California, almost 40m people in 2025) passes a law[0] that stealing things under $950 is a misdemeanor rather than a felony, then crime can continue while incarceration rates drop.
This is a very one sided presentation of the facts. This fact is generally used to suggest that theft is all a liberal blue state issue. The highest felony theft amount in the US is in red Texas and is $2500. Around 40 states have a *HIGHER* felony $ limit for theft than California. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense to not spend $10K+ to jail someone for stealing $500 of stuff. There are more cost effective ways to rehabilitate people. However, our society doesn't prioritize helping as much as punishing.
The whole hoopla around the felony status is just a proxy. when you commit a bunch of felonies there's all sorts of coded in law and process (sentencing guidelines) that apply (as well as KPIs, cops and prosecutors care about being able to say they put felons away) so you can't really be habitually felonious very much without winding up behind bars.
Below the felony threshold the system is far more free to let you go back out and keep doing what you're doing.
So the actual dollar threshold of felony theft is really just a crappy (because not all states go equally hard on non-felony crime) proxy for the rate of recidivism.
I thought the biggest issue was that DA's simply won't prosecute for these if they're nonviolent crimes, opting to drop the case? Austin, TX has a similar DA who refuses in much the same way.
Yeah search for "California store owner kills" and "Texas store owner kills" and see the variety that comes up. In Texas the people are the militia and defend their property. That limit doesn't matter there.
People are increasingly shopping at chain stores, where the staff generally aren't interested in risking their lives for some shareholders. The same phenomenon of stores locking up products on their shelves is happening in both places.
Sounds like crime is real bad in Texas if citizens are having to take the law into their own hands.
My state has guns and a felony theft limit higher than Cali and we neither have store clerks regularly killing people nor businesses closing due to theft.
Your own link points out that $950 is just taking into account inflation. When the law was created in 1982 the amount was $400, which was about $981 in 2014.
Inflation would eventually make stealing a candy bar a felony. Or we could updated the numbers periodically
There are many reasons why crime is in decline, but ultimately its economic.
Crime used to pay. Your expected return on a crime was pretty good for the risk involved. Nowadays though, because of technology, risk has increased while the returns have also decreased. Barriers to entry for crimes worth committing are now way higher. Robbing a gas station decades ago could yield a nice chunk of cash that could probably pay bills for a month. But now with less people using cash and cost of living increasing, there’s no point. Most registers have pitiful amount of cash. And mugging strangers on the street is likely even worse. No one carries wads of cash anymore.
The hot industry to be in is ransomware. The sums are vast and the risk is low if you do it right. But it’s very white collar, it requires skills that your typical low level criminal won’t have.
Overall, it means there’s a lot of crimes that are done not for any financial reason, just for personal satisfaction.
I am doubtful widespread recordings are making much of a change. Unless you are Luigi Mangione, are police actually following video footage trying to tie up a crime? Even with a city wide alert, he almost escaped.
It has been a common refrain that someone has an AirTag or other electronic surveillance they used to identify a thief, for which the police do nothing.
They actually do use the footage in a lot of cases. Bigger cities often have staff dedicated to just trying to extract raw footage from Temu-quality CCTV recording devices that most places own.
there's a major difference between an AirTag or tracking or some other form of relatively complex new-fangled technology that can be easily made to seem confusing or unreliable or even just inadmissible to a judge or jury, and high definition video evidence. if you're in a public place and there are a hundred video cameras, you're obviously going to be less inclined to do something illegal. this particularly being true for violent mob/gang activity
Even if you leave your phone at home to create an alibi for yourself, it is very likely that CCTVs will see you enroute to the crime scene, if not at the crime scene itself. Between businesses with cameras, front door cameras on houses, and traffic cameras, it's very difficult to travel anywhere without leaving a trace that investigators can pick up after the fact if they're sufficiently motivated.
I have a (likely lifelong) mostly-unrealised project to try and document all the things necessary to maximise the anonymity of committing a petty crime, with the vague notion of turning it into a meta-story about the joys of pointless intellectual pursuits that cost far more than they materially return.
wi-fi/phone signal jammer would have to be included. most cctv operates wirelessly over wi-fi and no one is phoning the police with their phone signal jammed
This is good news. The level of crime and number of offenders has decreased.
Quotes from the article:
> As of 2016—the most recent year for which data are available—the average man in state prison had been arrested nine times, was currently incarcerated for his sixth time, and was serving a 16-year sentence.
> But starting in the late 1960s, a multidecade crime wave swelled in America, and an unprecedented number of adolescents and young adults were criminally active. In response, the anti-crime policies of most local, state, and federal governments became more and more draconian.
> Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated.
Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated
Well also, the number one crime these youths were getting arrested for was drug possession. With drug trafficking being second. 15 years ago the vast majority of people in prison in texas were there for drug possession or trafficking. If all of a sudden everyone's drug of choice is marijuana, and it's being decriminalized everywhere, I have to think that makes it hard to get the numbers you used to get in terms of arrests.
Not that this is a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that while arrests did go down, I don't necessarily believe that the prevalence of pot smoking decreased.
One benefit is that this new environment should help them to have better futures than the youths that came before them.
>ike all complex phenomena 1960s crime wave probably has many causes, but lead poisoning stands out
And the ones who didn't get sent to prison, stunt their career by being useless hippies or drive their muscle cars drunk so habitually that laws got passed are the current heads of most public and private institutions.
So things will likely improve a bit when those people age out as their replacements will likely be picked from an unleaded pool.
To dig deeper, not only are young people doing less drugs (good), but we've also stopped being so unbelievably fucking crazy with our policing of drugs. In many places marijuana is basically decriminalized, although not outright legal. Not too long ago even just carrying around marijuana could land you decades in prison, depending on how black you were.
Still can in many states, although the average internet seems to be unaware of this. I saw someone getting torn apart for defending their husbands felony marijuana possession conviction as “not a bad person” because people think that today you only get that charge if you were driving a truck full of the stuff with a body in the back, but in e.g. Florida it’s still up to 5 years for 20g plain possession.
The prison industry is very profitable and influential. If prison populations are dropping naturally, you might imagine that politicians might start looking for some new population to incarcerate.
If most prisoners are younger, starting their incarceration incidents in their teens or twenties, then basically the fewer young people you have, the less people in prison:
Freakonomics argued that crime correlates to whether or not abortion is available.
If it is not, crime rates are up, and by a lot.
If it is, crime rates are down.
When you flip from one to the other, takes about 15/20 years for the effect to show up.
Rationale is that forcing parents to have their kids when they're not ready for them significantly increases delinquency in young adults.
This is apparently the only possible theory at the moment. It's not proven, of course, but the other theories which were given have been found lacking. This is the only theory which has some evidence, and hasn't been found to be wrong.
Please be careful about Freakonomics and the other PopSci books like it. Many of the claims it makes have either been disproven, shown to be flawed, or do not reflect consensus among serious researchers. Some examples here:
Availability of pornography has cut down the rate of rapes significantly. Too bad the republicans are going to try to ban all porn pretty soon, according to their stated agenda. They do love their wealthy donors that run the prison-industrial-complex.
This would be a good theory if it was supported at all by data. There has been a decrease but if you squint it's a flat line. The best you can really say is that the availability of pornography is neutral.
I have seen the data that suggests strongly that pornography lowers rapes. You've put up no data to refute that, so until you do I will continue believing the data I saw. If you do put up some actual data to support your claims (instead of just saying "nuh uhh"), I'll review it and then provide my own.
There are numerous articles all over the internet both supporting my claim, as well as negating it, depending on the agenda of the source - there are many people that are morally opposed to porn that would want my claim to be false (and they would still want to ban porn even if that increases rape). Here's some articles that support:
I can't verify the source since this data is 20 years old and I can't remember where it came from, but at the time it seemed like a good enough source, and this was before "truth" lost all meaning in the age of the conservative-bent "my feelings are as good as your facts" world we currently live in.
The rate of homicides and other violent crime have also declined significantly over the same period, so unless you contend that pornography also caused that, the data shows that it does not increase the rate of rape.
Nice try moving goalposts, but the data I showed correlates reduction in RAPE with availability of porn, nothing more, nothing less. You can also say that people dying in car accidents reduced during the same time, and seatbelt laws enacted during that time would be the cause. Nothing you've provided disproves that access to porn has no effect on rape. You've only moved goalposts.
But sure, let's ban all porn and watch the rape cases start increasing - I'm sure that's the best way forward. /s
Uh, yep? I absolutely did that. Your goalposts were in a crazy place. If your goalposts are “rape has to be a special type of violent crime even though rapists frequently (kind of by definition) commit other violent crimes” then yes, I moved them to where pretty much everyone else has them: among other heinous, violent crimes that share the same downward trend over the same period of time.
>the data I showed correlates reduction in RAPE with availability of porn
I could also draw a graph of rapes going down from 1990 and mp3 usage going up, would that indicate that there is a causal relationship between the two?
>nothing more, nothing less.
That is factually untrue. I showed you data of another correlation. That would be the more or less.
Unless the porn and rape graph is meaningful but the rape and murder graph is not? Or the rape and assault graph? Only porn has a meaningful correlation to rape? If your assertion is that rape does not correlate with other violent crime then the onus is on you to provide data and explain why.
Also I’m not anti-porn at all. I think it’s great and consenting adults should be able to watch other consenting adults do whatever. But I have never seen a worse argument for it than “porn line go up rape line go down down therefore causality”. It is a fantastical and indefensible assertion based on anecdotes at best. It is basically what I would come up with if my specific goal was to not be taken seriously.
It’s simpler and less nefarious than that. Kids have to meet up to produce offspring. If kids don’t meet up, no drugs, no sex, no kids having kids. Video games, smart phones, and chat apps are more likely the cause of this change.
Someone else commented about a correlation between violent video games and reduction in crime. I feel like 'people are inside playing games' is as much of an explanation for that as is 'violent games give violent people an outlet'.
I am not a violent kid, but when I was young I would cause some mischief in the form of making fires in the forest and using pipe to blow paper darts into open windows. Then when video games came up, we stopped going outside and played video games together.
Coincidentally, cyber crime is massively rising and a lot of the perpetrators are relatively young in my experience. I feel like maybe violent crime is dropping because these people found different ways of getting what they want, like selling bogus investment schemes online.
It’s clearly very easy to correlate low crime with free healthcare, education, unemployment, social safety net.
Compare the US to every other OECD country.
Nobody outside the US would even waste their time on having the discussion it is so blaringly obvious, but those in the US suffering the effects will denounce it till the cows come home.
What do you mean by education? The USA has higher PISA scores than peer countries and also has high rates of tertiary education. Do you think that middle class educated people having high student debt burdens causes crime?
Women's contraceptives in the states require a prescription. Which requires a doctor's appointment + insurance. If you are poor or live with strict parents (ironically), you are much less likely to seek them out.
Condoms are their own bag of worms. I think there are cultural differences in condom use here, as well as the same problem with them being a cost. This doesn't even touch on men being shady with stealthing and pressure.
On the other hand, the abortion clinic requires only an appointment and a way to get there.
In the 1980s, condoms were "behind the counter" things you had to ask for and suffer the critical eye of the pharmacy worker (at least in small town USA).
For me, this is a bit of a suspicious explanation, because Europe is a patchwork of abortion laws, with some countries being traditionally strictly religious and other less so, but the crime stats don't copy that.
Communist Romania once banned even contraceptives, and yet it never became a violent crime haven, not even after Communism fell. (Which was some 25 years after the ban, so the unwanted kids should still have been in their prime criminal age.)
Maybe the correlation isn't causational, maybe it only works in specific demographic groups...
How much of this is due to smartphones? The years seem to line up.
2014 seemed like the big year where smartphone ubiquity changed US teen culture. Less boredom, dumb adventure, drinking, etc. (For better or worse but in this case better.)
A big part. But pagers too. The decline of drug "turf" crime when things transitioned to networks of contacts correlated with the decline in violence on the streets which probably only accelerated with smart phones. No longer worth fighting over corners.
Devils advocate: smartphones have made antisocial tiktok trends, "fast money" hacks and paint an unrealistic portrait of success. Before, only rappers could be young and rich and flashy. Now, seemingly regular teens are millionaires and this is constantly fed into young people's feeds.
If your point is that the benefits of crime reduction due to smartphones are outweighed by harms to mental health, then I think most people would disagree.
But this is also probably painting far too rosy a picture of what Meta is doing.
I hear your point as: up until then scams, gambling and Ponzi schemes were for adults with strong purchasing power (could sink all the family's money in one single decision), when with smartphones everyone gets to enjoy screwing themselves directly.
My hot take is that previous generations weren't better prepared for the adult world than today's kids. They were more "mature" (sex, violence, abuse resistance) in some respects, but not specially ready for caring about society.
I think taking available stimulants, like nicotine and caffeine, were also ways of coping as they generally help with ADHD focus (or the lack thereof). I know anecdotally that I really hit my academic stride in college when I took up both habits. I still notice a small difference after coffee (gave up smoking a long time back).
We may see a boom in crime as functional illiteracy rates climb, which is already correlated with criminal behavior. A generation that is weaned on having a computer do everything by voice command and gaining passive knowledge exclusively through videos will have more living on the margins who can't function well in a society that needs some base level of competence in understanding and interpreting text.
This points more towards organized crime rings targeting stores, taking large amounts of the same popular items, then reselling them on eBay or Amazon. If you have a smallish number of people doing a largish number of crimes, this won't be reflected in incarceration statistics (particularly if the resellers rarely get caught).
Even the organized crime ring panic was made up. The data presented to congress was completely wrong and various organizations had to publicly eat crow about it.
I know that in recent years Target has announced that they were investigating, in partnership with local and federal law enforcement, organized theft rings. It was publicly reported on here in Minneapolis.
Or maybe they're low sales-volume items in a low profit margin store and it's cheaper to put some things behind glass than post up a security guard to deal with the fact that almost everyone, even nice old ladies at the grocery store, steal things sometimes?
The Atlantic suggests this results from the release of those convicted during a decades long crime wave, which apprently took place when many of us grew up. Perhaps it also tracks with a progressive decline in law enforcement. Whether that is because crime waves not longer exist or whether it is some other reason is a question for the reader. A substanbtial amount of crime is now done via internet. Few are ever convicted.
It is absolutely bonkers to me this ever was a crime. I don't like the stuff but where I am from it was basically like smoking (which now no one does anymore); seeing people getting prison time really, at that time, made me think 'land of the free, my ass'.
^ This. The drug war was an attempt for conservatives to punish poor people for using a harmless drug (marijuana) to help cope with systemic inequality, and kids for wanting to have fun.
From 1950-1970, America introduced new mandatory minimums for possession of marijuana. First-time offenses carried a minimum of 2-10 yrs in prison and a fine of up to $20,000. They repealed these minimums in 1970 because it did jack shit to stop people smoking. The govt even recommended decriminalizing marijuana in 1970, but Nixon rejected it.
But then came The Parents. As fucking usual, parents "concerned for their children" began a years-long lobbying and marketing effort to convince the public any kind of drug was evil and harming kids. Through the 1980s their lobbying spread to all corners of the government, influencing messaging and policy. So finally in 1986, Reagan introduced new mandatory minimums for marijuana, based on amount. Having 100 marijuana plants was the same crime as 100 grams of heroin. And then they went further; if you we caught with marijuana three times, you got a life sentence. Life. For pot. In 1989, Bush Sr. officially declared the "new" War on Drugs. And we've all been paying for it ever since.
This article claims that about 32k people in 2021 were for cannabis related offense, and simply carrying that to today would be 23% of the prison population: the largest offense type. https://www.lastprisonerproject.org/cannabis-prisoner-scale
Of course it does. The framing is from the establishment. The surge in crime and rise in prison population is because we criminalized existence EG "the war on drugs". Now we're getting rid of some of the worse things.
Good grief. There should be a federal law against that much Google Javascript and tracking on a government website without offering a non-Google, no-JS alternative.
The NCVS measures self-reported victims not convicts.
It does not measure criminal charges, convictions or imprisonment.
The NCVS is only focused on a subset of crimes, some of which do not carry prison sentences. For example, it excludes drug offences. It excludes manslaughter and homicide. It excludes financial crimes.
The survey is only given to census recipients, i.e., households and individuals.
Non-residential addresses are not included. It only targets a subset of crime victims.
Perhaps better sources to look at would be UCR, SRS and NIBRS.
I'd like to see stats on how many people are getting arrested for petty crimes e.g. marijuana (which isn't even a crime in some contexts any more) back then vs now.
as a followup to that (excellent) book, here's Barry Glassner - A Culture of Fear. The Better Angels of Our Nature talks about how violence has always been declining. A Culture of Fear talks about how the rate of that decline has been increasing since the 90s but people actually perceive things as becoming more dangerous rather than less, and attempts to come up with an answer as to why that may be the case.
The most obvious answer is large-scale media. I can learn about a shooting on the other side of the country within hours of it happening, and think "that could happen where I am". Likewise with any other news, which by definition is about out-of-the-ordinary events. There's more news about violence because there's more news, not because there's more violence, but it feels like there's more violence.
Piling onto this, humans have both recency and frequency biases that, combined with the attention-as-currency news industry, tend to lead to an increase in the perceived danger of violent crime that's entirely disconnected from the actual statistical danger of violent crime. You hear about more crimes, you hear about each crime more often, and your estimate of how much crime there actually is increases.
"if it bleeds, it leads" is (or was, i'm old) a common saying regarding the news media. It may be that there is more news that scares us because scaring us is profitable
20 century features pretty much largest genocides ever. Multiple of them. And in addition, things that we do not count as genocides, but still involved deliberate killing of millions.
That particular book was criticized by historians a lot.
Maybe that violence is just better organized now. Personal violence is declining (assault, murder, ...), but not organized violence (war, genocide, ...).
Does that mean we can stop keeping mouth wash and deodorant behind lock and key on store shelves and resume locking up the criminals making messes of our cities?
It's unclear if the decline in prisoners stems from a decline in crime. While I generally believe the statistics that violent crime has decreased, it may be the case that the judicial system and even the government in general just have no enthusiasm for prosecuting or punishing it.
In short, no, they won't stop locking it up. They wouldn't even if there was a decline in petty crime... those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5.
I live in a deep Red Bible thumping, back the blue, law and order county / state.
About 7 years ago a former schoolmate of mine shot a man 6 times over a bad drug deal, fled the state to California. He was captured by the US Marshal and brought back to the county jail where he bonded out after 3 month.
After his bonding out, he drove over to the victim’s parent’s house and performed a drive-by shooting, injuring none but did kill livestock.
He was arrested again, taken to the county jail, and bonded out after several months.
The issue finally reached a plea bargain, they dropped all charges related to both shooting, had him plead guilty to felony firearms charge, and gave him time served and 5 years probation.
This man is a grown adult with felony priors, and got a proverbial slap on the wrist. Never saw a day of state prison, likely never will.
If this is how we treat serious violent crime, I’m not surprised in TFA at all.
I live in super liberal Illinois, which recently ended cash bail. It was a rough transition period but now it is fully implemented and every judge and prosecutor knows how everything works.
Cook County Jail (Chicago and close-in suburbs) population is higher than it has been in over a decade. They had to reopen a section of the jail to deal with it. Because people who do what that guy did no longer get to bond out. If someone fled to California and got brought back by the Marshal’s service, he’s sitting in jail until trial. And he is the one that needs to negotiate and offer concessions.
Note: crime is now dropping a lot [1]. Trying setting the date range to “last 28 days”
The end of cash bail was the right idea, though. At the time it ended there were ~100 homicide defendants out on bail (usually $150K+), yet there were hundreds of people held for months or years on petty offenses for want of under $250 to bail out.
Wouldn't wish my worst enemy to be held in the CCJ, though. Easily one of the worst detention facilities in the USA.
I disagree. Cash bail is about holding someone's money hostage to secure their presence at court... the problem always was the violation of 8th amendment rights. By demanding excessive bail, the person couldn't possibly cough up the amount, which forced them to utilize bail bondsmen instead. Except that turns bail into a fine, because unlike true bail which is returned when they appear at court, bonds are retained by the bail bondsman.
Simply obeying the 8th amendment would have fixed everything, and so much better too.
In some cases, high bail was used because judges were pussies who refused to deny bail to those who were actual threats to the public (see this alot whenever you hear bullshit about some killer whose bail is set at $5 million or whatever). Other times, it was just the status quo, and judges were giving no real consideration to the problem.
The whole concept of pretrial detention is fraught with problems.
At least in Illinois, the theory is that now most defendants should be able to be free, or on house arrest, until their trial.
Illinois doesn't allow bondsmen, which, while it meant you got your bond back† it also meant that, unlike other states, you couldn't pay a smaller amount to a bondsman for him to get you out. So I imagine in Illinois at least, more people were stuck in pretrial due to (as you say) excessive bail.
One issue is that a lot of defendants have zero cash, or zero access to their cash. You can't pay your own bond. Someone has to pay your bond for you. You can't go to an ATM and get the money out. You can't access the Internet to sell your shares or take a loan against your real estate. These people are stuck in pretrial until their case is resolved, which can take over a decade in some instances.
I had a cellmate who was wrongfully arrested and had a $20K bond set. He was homeless. I proved the case was frivolous and sent him to court with the paperwork. The judge agreed, but gave the prosecution 60 days to respond. He reset the bail at $200. I offered to pay it, but instead he just asked to use my phone credit. He spent all day calling his homeless friends and over the next three days over a dozen of them walked to the jail and dropped off $10 and $20 bills until he had enough to leave.
If a judge sets excessive bail, which the vast majority do, then you can appeal it. It's usually immediately appealable. In most states this would be a 6-stage appellate process to exhaust your rights. Each level taking usually one to two years.
The conditions in county jails are vastly more punitive than even the harshest supermax prisons, generally. Absolutely abominable conditions. I remember one recent case where a homeless person was grabbed off the street for having a bag of white powder. He was put in pretrial detention. He pled guilty to possession of cocaine and took (IIRC) a 5-year prison sentence. Just before he was shipped out the lab results came back as negative for cocaine. The bag was powdered milk he had obtained from a food bank. The judge asked why he pled guilty and he simply pointed out the conditions of the jail were so harsh that he couldn't take it. Pretrial detention vastly increases both the conviction rate (you're more likely to plead guilty even if the charges are wrong) and also the length of sentence (people dressed in suits coming from the street just look less criminal and are sentenced a lot lighter, compared to people in Hamburgler outfits coming from jail).
I think the writing is on the wall, though. There has been an absolute ton of hardcore litigation in the last decade on the legality of bail, and the intermediate appellate courts are striking it down. I think if SCOTUS had a slightly different makeup, then we'd see bail abolished at the federal constitutional level right now. The reason for the new statutes in Illinois and other states, counties and cities is that they are getting ahead of the problem. Better to fix it now than get sued down the road.
† You'd rarely get it back. Often the judge would impose a fine, if you were sentenced, that would swallow your bond. One bonus, though, is that you could usually make your bond do "double-duty" by using it to bail out, but at the same time signing it over to an attorney to pay his costs. When the case reaches disposition the bond would go directly to the lawyer.
>I think the writing is on the wall, though. There has been an absolute ton of hardcore litigation in the last decade on the legality of bail, and the intermediate appellate courts are striking it down.
I think this bodes ill, myself. I expect a slowly-but-steadily rising culture that just skips out on trials altogether, because there are no immediate (or even longterm) costs to doing so. Though you might argue that in such cases judges will just issue bench warrants, this too will stop when everyone involved becomes too apathetic and demoralized to do so.
Bail would be fine if it were carefully set such that the person can always scrape and afford it, enough that they wouldn't risk losing it but still low enough that they can gather it. Is there any reason at all that your anecdote had the judge set it to $20k? That's ridiculous. And for a homeless man as well... that's constructive bail denial. That judge should be censured and forced to retire.
Just once I would like to see a policy adjustment that wasn't absurd overcompensation. I turn 51 in a few months so I've got maybe 2 decades left but I don't think it's going to happen.
One issue is that most bails hearings I saw (and I sat through thousands) in Illinois were basically one-minute affairs with literally zero evidence presented on the person's ability to pay. I've heard that bond hearings in Illinois are now significantly longer and more evidence-based.
The judges were just making emotional decisions based on the heinousness of the crime, the ethnicity of the person, whether their family was in the room supporting them, etc. And the outcome was essentially random and arbitrary.
The cellmate who had the $20K bail set was a completely arbitrary number. It was a victimless offense to do with paperwork. All I did was file FOIA requests to prove no offense had been committed. I was infuriated that the judge reset bail to $200 knowing the guy was clearly innocent, and also knowing he was homeless.
Judges were ordered again and again and again in Illinois to run their bond hearings in a fairer manner, but it never happened.
So we're now in the situation we're in. A lot of detainees are on house arrest, and this is better for their mental health, but also presents enormous problems of their own. If you are ordered released on house arrest, but you have nowhere to go, then you get stuck. If you are on house arrest, often you can't get a job, so how do you pay rent and eat? Often if you're on house arrest the judge won't allow you to even leave to obtain groceries or medicine, which is a problem.
These are hard problems. I don't want to be the one trying to solve them because there is no way to make everyone happy.
There should be statutory limitations for prosecutors concerning the use of plea deals. No more than 1% of cases in any calendar year should be permitted to even offer plea deals, so that they use that tool sparingly and only when appropriate. If they waste it out of laziness or apathy, then the subsequent cases that year would have to be brought to trial.
This would cut down on alot of the bullshit (and not just for cases like the one you describe, but where plea bargaining is used to bully people into pleading guilty where they are not).
Most convictions are due to plea deals. If you limit that tool, people would simply have charges dropped due to Sixth Amendment violations and people languishing in prison awaiting trials. It would be gridlock.
"Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States."
I think a public trial serves as a form of oversight. Widespread plea bargaining means we'll never know how many of these people even committed crimes, much less how the justice system operates.
>If you limit that tool, people would simply have charges dropped
So you mean that charges that don't matter are often pressed anyway, because prosecutors have a cheat code to short circuit the long and arduous process of trial which is supposed to be long and arduous? No thanks.
If they could prosecute fewer cases, then they would pick the ones that mattered. Last time I did grand jury duty, it was 40 cases every day, most of them bullshit drug possession charges.
Or maybe, maybe they really do have so many important cases that this would become a problem. Then it should become a problem, so the public is forced to realize it must fund a more robust judicial system that can handle that high load. Either way, I do not want prosecutors using plea deals. And you shouldn't either.
>"Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States."
There was a slow day at the grand jury, and the assistant DA was talking to us jurors. Claimed that our small city had about 4000 cases per year, and only 30 or so ever went to trial. How can justice be served if that's the case? He certainly thought that he was doing justice, but some of those people were just pleading out so that they could put an end to the nonsense, and not out of any true guilt. Whether they were forced to go to trial so that they would be then compelled to assert their (true) innocence, or whether the prosecutor would just stop making up bullshit charges, we'd all be better off. He genuinely thought of trials as some sort of fun distraction instead of what it really was... the entire point of his job. It was fucked up.
The trouble with our world isn't that there aren't solutions, it's that when someone proposes them, they sound outlandish to people who subconsciously want the problems to persist.
Sixth Amendment is the right to a speedy trial. They would have to expand the courts to thousands of more courts to get that done. And then there are appeals, and appeals of appeals, etc.
Not to mention lawyer fees would go up 10x or 100x for any simple thing.
Want to get charged $10k for a speeding ticket? This is how it happens.
>They would have to expand the courts to thousands of more courts to get that done.
Possibly. But if they're denying justice because "it would cost too much to do it correctly", then maybe the taxpayers just have to pony up more cash.
But it's also possibly the case that they don't need more courts, they just have to stop focusing on bullshit drug charges that absolutely no one gives a shit about. If drug addicts want to commit slow suicide doing the stuff, let them. If you want to instead focus on the drug dealers, there are simple policies that would put street dealers out of business instantly.
Your objections don't really line up with your goals, no matter what your goals happen to be. Think about it all a bit more carefully.
The problem is not the judge that approved a plea deal - the problem is the prosecutor who gave (negotiated maybe is a better term) such a lousy plea deal. After fleeing the state and being brought by US Marshal service I would think the prosecutor should have pushed for some state jail time.
Asset Protection manager here. Our protection decisions are based on theft trends independent from our staffing. And generally, the theft scales with how much business a store receives, rather than how many staff they employ.
More staff won't solve theft significantly because thieves carry the target merchandise to a less securely monitored area of the store. If they see an employee in an aisle, they'll move down another aisle where there isn't. And you can't have a person everywhere.
If anything, putting something behind glass increases staff because we have to keep that area covered as much as possible so we get those sales.
> those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5.
Maybe in some cases that's true, but it's definitely not true for the few big box stores I frequent in SF where this practice occurs. The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise. I'm not sure who pays for the tactical gear wearing security guards at the entrance looking ready for Iraq, but it can't be cheap.
> The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise.
Are you certain, or were they running 3 people ragged who will burn out in a month and quit? Constant motion can make it seem like there are more people, but I also remember the 1990s and seeing at least one person per department in a Kmart, some just monitoring their area. A bigbox store like Target would've had 2 people for the cash registers up front, at least one in customer service, and one per department during off-peak hours. If you're telling me you're seeing a dozen people for certain, I'll believe you, but I am wondering if it wasn't actually fewer.
And besides all that, I was thinking more along the lines of CVS and Walgreens, which are the stores I know of locking everything behind glass.
Depends on the area. The area I lived in last year, it was rare to enter a Walgreens that wasn't actively being pillaged by shoplifters. I remember when they announced they were closing the only local Wal-mart (due to excessive shoplifting, allegedly) -- that same day the shoplifters went in like a swarm of locusts and stripped it bare. They had police at both exits, but they were powerless.
pengaru did not say anything about organized shoplifting. The lock and key were definitely a thing, and still are. Please read comments before responding to them.
Putting poor, desperate people in jail isn't going to solve the systemic issues that create poor, desperate people.
Locking up people for petty theft is almost certainly FAR more expensive than the cost of the materials being stolen. It costs tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to house an inmate every year, to say nothing of the damage it causes that inmate. Prisons make criminals more likely to commit crime in the future.
A person would have to be stealing like 40 bottles of mouthwash every single day for it to be cheaper to jail an inmate rather than just replace the mouthwash for the business. Cases like that also clog the justice system and prevent solving more serious crimes, deplete shared resources like police and public defenders, and overcrowd prisons.
Even if you aren't a prison abolitionist like me, surely the rational approach here isn't "Pay more and increase the likelyhood the petty criminal becomes a serious criminal". It just makes zero rational sense to try and solve the issue that way.
Prisons make criminals more likely to commit crime in the future.
Prisons make people less likely to become criminals.
Your comment focuses on prison and the impact it has on a single criminal who is caught, convicted, and put in prison. Sometimes this is a useful way to look at things.
I think it's far more useful to consider prison's impact on all the people who are not in prison. It serves as a crime deterrent.
Your claim that prisons reduce the likelihood of the population at large is not obvious on its face, as the US has very high rate of incarceration, but still has moderately high crime rates. Can you supply some data?
Your claim that prisons reduce the likelihood of the population at large is not obvious on its face
Are you saying that, irrespective of the chance of being caught and convicted, and of the severity of the likely punishment, the likelihood of someone committing a crime is constant?
Here is a study supporting the assertion that prisons increase (or do not reduce) the likelihood of someone reoffending in the future
That has nothing to do with the point I made, which was about people becoming criminals. I said nothing about the behaviour of existing criminals.
> Are you saying that, irrespective of the chance of being caught and convicted, and of the severity of the likely punishment, the likelihood of someone committing a crime is constant?
I'm saying that prison sentences are not a deterrent to crime, and, in fact, increase the amount of crime done. Research has consistently shown that the threat of being caught is considerably higher deterrent than prison time, and that harsh sentences don't influence behavior:
> That has nothing to do with the point I made, which was about people becoming criminals.
We are discussing crime. Which has a total sum. You can reduce that sum by preventing people from being criminals or you can reduce that sum by reforming criminals. I believe you need both. So it is important to remember that prisons negatively contribute to reforming people, increasing total crime, while research shows they don't contribute to preventing people from being criminals.
We need other systems, systems that prevent people from becoming criminals AND reduce the likelihood of re-offending if they do.
I'm saying that prison sentences are not a deterrent to crime, and, in fact, increase the amount of crime done. Research has consistently shown that the threat of being caught is considerably higher deterrent than prison time, and that harsh sentences don't influence behavior:
Would the threat of being caught be a deterrent if the sentence were 1 day?
You might be half joking, but your hypothesis is interesting to show how many different reasons can exist for the same phenomenon. Lots of people here talking about lead, for whatever reason, but also decriminalisation of drugs, abortion, etc. Most are logical explanations, even if contradictory. Very nice to see how we need to be super aware of statistics; we can force the numbers to say anything we want.
An interesting and upbeat article.. But the death rate from overdose went from 9 to 32 per 100000 in the last 2 decades. Using their entrance logic, if I understand what this means afa per annum, couldn't that amount to a few hundred per 100000 who are not cycling into long prison terms because they are dead?
There's been something like 900k excess deaths since 1968 compared to if the rate was just flat since then. That's a lot of people who probably had a much higher chance of incarceration than average even if you only consider drug law and the more recently someone was born the more likely they are to have already overdosed at any given age.
Problem isn't with people who are in prison. Problem is with people who are out of prison with prison experience - most of them are thoroughly criminalised for life. So one should count people who served serious time behind bars, and now out - ideally, age-corrected, because people age out of crime and someone who got in jail at 18 and left at 50 is probably ok and isn't a big danger. That is the metric that society should strive to minimise.
It's essentially that once you leave prison you have zero resources, usually all your friends are gone, often your family shuns you, you can't get a job due to your record and lack of skills, you can't rent any accommodation due to background checks, and you are on a knife-edge parole that will send you back for any tiny infraction.
And it's easy for someone to just give in and go back to prison. Prison is only scary the first time. After that you walk back in and meet people you know who don't judge you. You know the staff. You know the routines. Do a few more years for the parole violation and see if things have changed next time around. If not, repeat ad infinitum.
Is it possible that incarceration had the intended effect? Did an entire generation grow up seeing their fathers and uncles locked up and decide that there must be a better way?
Absolutely not at all. I have a lot of experience with the justice system and I can tell you that incarceration has almost no positive benefits for those that are redeemable.
And for those who cannot function in the real world (i.e. serious untreatable mental problems resulting in constant criminality) we need to find a softer way to keep them separated from being able to harm the public.
I would argue that not having a male role model in your life is way worse than seeing the consequences enacted on another.
This even if their was a gain from watching others suffer, the lack of discipline, guidance, sternness, is way more detrimental than the positives of fearing the consequences
From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, the proportion of Americans in prison each year never exceeded 120 per 100,000
That's a funny way of saying 0.12%. Is there a reason for this? It sure doesn't make it easy to compare the numbers they're giving with other numbers given as percentages.
I guess if you're considering a sufficiently small population you could go from ~600,000 people in Vermont * 120/100,000 -> ~720 imprisoned people in Vermont trivially, but we're the second smallest state. This certainly doesn't scale to cities over a million. At least I'd start having to think harder about it.
It also lets you abstract away or compare to stats that are scaled to population but might not be 1:1 with a person, e.g. "thefts per 100,000 population per year" where one person might either commit or be the victim of multiple thefts in a year.
120 per 100,000 includes significant digits. 0.12% could be anywhere from 120-124 per 100,000. You'd really want 0.120%, but that's confusing for different reasons.
Worse would be 1,000 per 100,000, which is 1% but there's no way to tell that it's not rounded or truncated.
I would presume, perhaps incorrectly, that “120 per 100,000” has 3 significant digits and “12 per 10,000” has 2.
I’ve never seen a period used like that in census data. It seems like a conscious choice because the period is confusing when used in the middle of a phrase. 12E1 makes more sense but is abnormal notation for many people.
From what I've read, mostly sentencing reform and less aggressive drug prosecution/more drug diversion. That and the general trend for crime to recede in wealthy, stable societies.
It's not just law enforcement and sentencing - there are verifiable numbers for the results of certain crimes - homicides and auto theft come to mind - and most have declined precipitously.
E.g. Boston had 1,575 reports of auto theft in 2012, compared with 28,000 in 1975; Massachusetts had 242 murders in 1975, and 121 in 2012. (a 56% drop in homicide rate, as population went up 14%)
That car theft number is blowing my mind. I would have easily guessed 10x that.
Are there any aspects of the crime that make it less appealing? Electronic counter measures too good? Price of replacement parts no longer carry a premium? Too easy to get caught?
I would bet that the pervasive use of electronic records has something to do with it, too. According to this 1979 report from the Nat'l Assoc. of Attorneys General, in the 70s there were a lot of paths to retitling a stolen vehicle back then, which along with the the rise of chop shops and easier export of stolen cars, supported a large stolen-car economy: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/59904NCJRS.pdf
Consumer goods went on a 50 year deflation streak while health care, housing, and education pumped to the moon. That's its own problem, but it's hard to steal any of those three things.
The answer is likely unknowable, but I can think of several factors that tie into the plummeting birth rate:
- While the Freakanomics citation of widespread access to abortion has been debunked as a sole cause, I think it remains credible for at least a contributing factor. Fewer young people born to folks who are too poor/busy/not wanting to raise them is doubtlessly going to reduce the number of young offenders who become the prison system's regular customers their whole lives.
- Beyond just abortion, contraceptives and contraceptive education have gotten much more accessible. For all the endless whining from the right about putting condoms on cucumbers poisoning children's minds with vegetable-based erotica, as it turns out, teens have sex, as they probably have since time immemorial, and if you teach them how to do it safely and don't threaten their safety if they do, they generally will do it safely.
- Additionally, there has been a gradual ramp-up in how badly negative outcomes stack in life, and "messing up" on your path to adulthood carries higher costs than it ever has. Possibly contradicting myself, teens are having less sex than ever, as all broad forms of socializing have decreased apart from social media, which is exploding but doesn't really present opportunities to bone down. Add to it, young people are more monitored than they've ever been. When I was coming up, I had hours alone to myself to do whatever I wanted, largely wherever I wanted as long as I could get there and my parents knew (though they couldn't verify where I was). Now we have a variety of apps for digitally stalking your kids, and that's not even going into the mess of extracurricular activities, after school events, classes, study sessions, sports, etc. that modern kids get. They barely have any unmonitored time anymore.
- Another point: alternative sexuality (or the lack thereof) is more accepted than it's ever been by mainstream society, and anything that isn't man + woman is virtually guaranteed to not create unwanted pregnancy unless something truly interesting happens.
- Lastly, I would cite that even if you have a heterosexual couple who is interested in having kids, that's harder than ever. A ton of folks my age can't even afford a home, let alone one suitable for starting a family. The ones that do start families live either in or uncomfortably close to poverty, and usually in one or another variety of insecurity. The ones that can afford it often choose not to for... I mean there's so many reasons bringing kids into the world right now feels unappealing. It's a ton of work that's saddled onto 2 people in a categorically a-historic way, in an economy where two full time salaries is basically mandatory if you want to have a halfway decent standard of living, and double that for one that includes children. That's not even going into the broader state of the world, how awful the dating market is especially for women, so many reasons and factors.
Any stressed animal population stops reproduction first. I don't see why we'd think people would be any different.
I think that demographically we might be in a trough, of new born children. Also children born to the last major cohort (the children of the baby Boomers) are just becoming tweens and young teens, or very young adults. There might be a spike in crime, in the next 10 years, as they start to mature. It helps that they are more spread out, and not born in the same few years like the Boomers were, (a more flattened and spread curve).
Very rough midpoint years;
Baby Boomers 1949,
Gen X 1979,
Millennial 2009.
At least in Seattle, crime is "way down" because many businesses have stopped reporting it, because the police don't respond to less serious crimes anymore.
A shopkeeper friend of mine closed his business in Seattle after multiple lootings of his place and the police never showing up. He relocated to a bedroom community.
Crime statistics are not necessarily accurate, and politicians have an interest in minimizing those statistics one way or another.
You have any data to support that? I've lived in Seattle for 40 years, and crime here is way less of a concern now than it ever has been. Especially violent crime.
My experience also seems to match statistics. So, it would seem that your friend's experience might be the outlier -- I'm not saying they are wrong, I'm saying their experience doesn't match the data and there's at least one anecdote (mine) that runs counter to their anecdote. Seems like a good opportunity to try and find data that supports your hypothesis?
I'm not sure the data backs up your assertion -- in fact, it looks to me like Seattle's crime rate is roughly steady -- and bad -- over the last 20 years.
from 1999-2018 (most recent I can find a chart for), Violent crime ebbed and flowed but ended essentially where it started: 680/100k residents, almost double the US average. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/us/wa/seat.... I believe this uses FBI numbers.
I note that the Axios article says 2025 is on track to be a big drop; I have no idea what crime seasonality is, so I'd take that news story with a grain of salt until the year is out. Either way I just don't think Seattle's crime rates are "way less of a concern" over the last 40 years. Well, people may have become acclimated or stopped caring. But the rates are high, and don't look to have changed that much.
OK, but that drop occurred roughly when Kurt Cobain died. Since then it hasn't moved that much. I believe you that Belltown is safer than 1993. That's just not that recent!
Googling "crime down in seattle due to lower reporting rates" results in:
"While crime rates in Seattle have recently shown a decrease, some reports suggest this may be partially attributed to a decline in reporting rather than a genuine reduction in criminal activity. Specifically, some authorities have noted that crimes against businesses, in particular, are frequently not reported."
"The police chief specifically mentioned that a 10% drop in property crime might not be entirely accurate because many business-related crimes go unreported."
Police reports aren't the only source of data. If this was a widespread impact then there would be other sources of data that could be used to build this case.
Additionally, we cannot make policy decisions on "just trust me, my friend said...". Maybe we can't get a perfect signal, but if you are going to challenge the prevailing data, I expect you to bring something novel beyond vibes. It doesn't have to be perfect, but a single anecdote plus "I believe it" is not sufficient to oppose what the data we do have is consistently saying -- crime is lower in Seattle, and has been consistently lowering over time.
13% of American households experienced food insecurity in 2023, which means "these households were uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food."
5% (6.8 million households) experienced "very low food security" which is "normal eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake was reduced at times during the year because they had insufficient money or other resources for food"
American food security is so bad in plenty of places that we can still get notable increases in academic performance just by giving people food
Lack of access to food is literally holding the US back.
Just because a lot of people are fat, doesn't mean it is evenly distributed.
That is just a right talking point about how we are so spoiled. Plenty of kids need food. Kids learn better when not hungry. And Republicans are cutting school food programs.
That's what the article goes on to describe, yes. Declining crime rates mean fewer new prisoners, but high recidivism rates plus long sentences means many old prisoners are still in prison. As those old prisoners die off or for whatever reason don't commit more crimes after release, the total population declines.
Mandatory minimum sentences can be 10, 15 or 20 years depending on the quantity of drug and other factors. Often just for possession. The US spent several decades filling our prisons with people using those sentences, and we still do, just not as aggressively.
i fear the new avenues of business sought by companies that operate for-profit prisons - i don't expect they'll just eat the losses of declining populations in their main moneymakers, and we're already starting to see them work on detention facilities for DHS etc.
Prisons are ancient history. The latest chapter is the tough on crime states have glorious high speed pursuits. All those Challengers blasting away at 140 mph in the breakdown lane, rollover 10-50 pits, suspects at gunpoint, now published in 1080 on YouTube for some state and county agencies. A single pursuit may result in two or three disabled police vehicles that need to be replaced. A prepped vehicle is over $100k. In 2024 Arkansas had 500+ high speed pursuits, resulting in three suspect deaths and three civilian deaths. Additionally, nine civilians, 14 troopers, and 83 suspects were injured. and easily over 1,000 vehicles trashed.
Each of these videos puts most film car chases to shame. There must be 20 channels dedicated to this. Participating states I've seen are mostly Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, and California. But any agency can publish a video, particularly if there is a shooting death and an official investigation.
But do you think they'd start letting more people into the country, just to charge to detain and deport them? It's actually sort of an ideal solution. Big business gets back labor that it can threaten to deport if it demands anything, then they can clean up on the public-private deportations. Factory managers could send ICE a list of their most annoying employees to visit. It would be so 80's, I almost typed "the INS."
They fail to mention the reason the prison population soared in the 70's and 80's, because of ultra-harsh prison sentencing for drugs. In retrospect, those laws appear to have been deliberately designed to create a massive and permanent prison population, far beyond what locking people up only for non-consensual crimes could ever sustain.
Now, most of those laws have been rolled back. In the past 10-15 years the number of people locked up at the state level for drug crimes is down 30% even though drug arrests remain high. And those still getting locked up are getting shorter sentences. (though over 40% of inmates at the federal level are still there for drugs)
I'm not sure why they failed to mention such a key issues related to incarceration. They repeatedly refer to the surge in crime in the drug war era as a "crime wave". And they link to 3 other pro-drug war articles by the same author. Maybe Keith Humphreys had a bad trip in his youth and now he's making it everyone's problem.
I don't believe that, at least not in the whole nation (certain cities may be an exception). US cities used to be a lot more violent three decades ago. Fudging manslaughters statistics is not easy.
I suspect the reason is the same as with everything else - kids glued to screens don't have time or even stamina for gang activity, all their attention being consumed by a highly addictive product at hand.
After covid they changed who will go to jail for what because they decided overcrowding with covid was killing inmates. I think it was the right thing to do at the time.
However since 2021ish crime has been skyrocketing. It's definitely time to figure out the next steps. I want to live in a peaceful, safe society. It makes sense to separate those that can't help but destroy the peace.
It has also been stated that something like 90% of crime is performed by a very small percentage of people and most of it is just the same person over and over and over. Those people must be separated from society.
https://archive.is/pe7eH
>Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated. This matters because young offenders are the raw material that feeds the prison system: As one generation ages out, another takes its place on the same horrid journey.
Another factor which will soon impact this, if it isn't already, is the rapidly changing nature of youth. Fertility rates have been dropping since 2009 or so. Average age of parents is increasing. Teen pregnancy on a long and rapid decline.
All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.
> the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources
This is both good and bad. Having a child is very difficult, but it gets harder as you get older. You lack a lot of monitory resources as a teen or the early 20s, but you have a lot more energy, as you get older your body starts decaying you will lack energy. A kid had at 40 will still be depending on your when you are 55 (kids is only 15), and if the kids goes to college may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring. Plus if your kids have kids young as well as you, you be around and have some energy for grandkids.
Don't read the above as advocating having kids too young, it is not. However don't wait until you think it is the perfect time. If you are 25 you should be seriously thinking in the next 2 years, and by 30 have them (if of course kids are right for you - that is a complex consideration I'm not going to get into). Do not let fear of how much it will cost or desire for more resources first stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.
Lifestyle is key here.
An older friend conveyed to me pretty much the exact same thing you are, that he cannot imagine having kids at 40 because you will not be able to keep up with them energy wise. You get old and your body really starts to give in.
Alright Geoff, thanks, but you are 54 and do zero exercise, have a diet of eating out at fast food and fast casual restaurants, a body type that would be described as "meatball", and a list of medical conditions which all scream lifestyle change.
Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.
Physical shape is not the same or even proportional to the ability to pull all-nighters.
I know two men 18 years apart in age who became fathers at the same time - two months apart to be exact. Even though the older is an avid gym-goer, it's only the younger who can pull off popping back into full strength after less than 6h of sleep.
Newborns keep you up but an all-nighter is a stretch. Also, you're looking after your kid and trying to get them to sleep, not trying to churn out code to get something to market/go to prod.
Both of mine had colic and went through difficult teething. I've pulled all-nighters to deliver something and it's much easier than several weeks of sleepless nights with an infant.
Yeah true getting sick at that age is rough.
A sick kid will absolutely keep you up all night, and kids love germs, so they get sick a lot
I always needed more than 8 hrs of sleep, now that I am into my 50s, I feel well after 4 hours. Anecdotes are good. My grandfather got to 100 not sleeping more than a few hours a night after he turned 55 and he raised my cousins as their parents were shite. I know whining young parents who complain about lack of sleep, I know older parents who never do as they were happy finally having a kid. Etc.
My youngest was born when I was 47. He’s now 9. I also have a 13 yr born when I was 43. I’m tired but I don’t think it’s from the kids. (More I’m tired of working - been burning the candle at both ends for nearly 40 years.) The biggest difference of having kids at this age is that I don’t have time to myself or for myself like other parents around me so are by now empty nesters or close.
> Alright Geoff, thanks, but you are 54 and do zero exercise, have a diet of eating out at fast food and fast casual restaurants, a body type that would be described as "meatball", and a list of medical conditions which all scream lifestyle change.
> Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.
Yup, this is very much key.
Aging sucks! Obviously you can do everything wrong, and mess your body up pretty good. You can also do everything right, and just have bad luck. Lingering injury, hereditary health conditions, things add up. By the time you are in your 60s, it takes a combination of good habits and good luck to be in good shape. It's comforting to point to active older people and say "I'm going to grow up to be just like them". Just aware of survivorship bias.
Good news: most studies show that adults that do moderate exercise have a lower rate of fall-related injuries in old age than those that do little to no exercise.
My son was born when I was 45 and I absolutely could not be more happy about it. I am in way better shape than I was at 30, I finally started taking that seriously, and also I am way wiser, more patient, and have more money.
So if you hear anyone telling you they can't imagine late fatherhood ignore them, they obviously aren't good at imagining things.
While generally true, you are not the only one aging around you, and some sickness/accident stuff can happen with higher probability as years add up.
The chance you will need to take care of both your kids and your parents in your 50s is pretty high (not even going into you and your partner), while facing declining health yourself.
Could be easily manageable, or not. Ask me in a decade.
But one thing is darn true - if a good long term stable match is not there, no point pushing for kids. World really doesnt need more damaged folks struggling their whole lives to overcome shitty childhood. And thats fine, parenthood is not for everybody and there can be an amazing life to be had instead (and I mean it in best way possible, but that life shouod not be spent behind the desk and on the couch)
>Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.
Interrupt that 60 year old's sleep twice a night with a newborn crying, add a bunch of new responsibilities, and I'll be impressed if he even makes it to the meet.
You're comparing people who have made exercise their #1 priority in life to people who have made their kids and supporting their families financially their top 2 priorities. It's a bullshit comparison.
You think someone going to a trail running meet has made exercise their #1 priority?
My father is 63, raised three children and has had a successful long marriage and retired from a good career. He also goes works out daily and did for most of my childhood. He didn't make exercise his number one priority.
This is ridiculous. I’m 40 and in moderately good physical condition (I can lift and run many miles).
I am perfectly capable of keeping up with my kids.
My 72 year old father who is also in good condition keeps up with my 3 year old son.
The difference I see between a reasonably fit 40 year old and not is the massive gap.
I had my children at 36 and 38, and I'm the mother, and energy-wise, I've had no issues. Yes, they considered me to be of "advanced maternal age" in the OB department and gave me special treatment due to it, but my doctors told me that the "advanced maternal age" threshold (35) was based off outdated research anyway. In the bay area, most of the mothers I've met were around that age, and my friends are having their kids at the same age.
It was really nice that I had time to establish my career and figure things out before having kids.
The issue here is this can lead people to pushing it till 40+.
I was talking to a nice girl up until she mentioned still wanting kids in her late 40s. Maybe I’m old school, but telling someone you froze your eggs the same day you meet them is weird.
Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle.
This rapidly transformed into no, get your masters, get 8 years of experience. Earn at least 300k as a couple. Then and only then should you consider a family. Childcare is 3k plus a month in many places.
For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it.
In my 30s I’ve let go of expecting anything. This world has already given me so much.
Nobody said you should wait that long. As for your anecdote, what’s wrong with figuring out early during dating whether you plan on having children or not? People should talk about those things early, since there is hardly anything that makes a relationship more incompatible long term, and leads to more (even mutual) heartbreak and sorrow than having to break up with a person solely because their most uncompromisable life plan differs.
In my 20s, it felt indeed weird to bring that up early for me, because I wasn’t ready yet and didn’t even really know what I wanted yet. Later in life, when dating we always talked about potential family planning and general outlook on life early. (Unless it was never meant to be a serious relationship to begin with.)
This wasn’t even a first date, it was like she said hi to me at an event and just started taking about having a family.
Felt really awkward for small talk.
My point was the economy should support having a family in your 20s if that’s what you want to do. You shouldn’t need a well paid career, a quality lifestyle that supports a family should be available for everyone.
I imagine universal health care, paid family leave ( for months not weeks) and affirmative (free?) childcare could bring that gap.
At a point it isn’t even an age issue. A lot of people will never earn enough to really support a family, and that’s a failure of the social contract.
You should be able to get a job as a Walmart clerk, have your partner work part time and still afford to have a family.
I think I’ve muddled my own point here, but it should be easier. Maybe that Walmart clerk could own a house ?!
I do agree with your point about society. The reason we waited are way beyond monetary issues, and we would have waited regardless, but people should be able to support a family without an “advanced” career if they choose so.
I think it would be hard to find someone that does not agree with you on the street.
These conversations should not need to happen but they do because of the current inequality that exists. A couple can't change the world so they talk about these things since it's their best option
Society does kinda support this. People with low-paying jobs actually have the most kids. You just need more income if you want to have kids at a good time and send them to higher-end schools, including K-12.
Sounds like her biological clock was ticking very very loudly
Yeah, this is exactly something to discuss early. My wife and I were on the same page from earlier in dating about having kids in our 20s.
Absolutely. It serves as a filter, if people are being honest. It also highlights the bizarre dating culture and view of life we've adopted. This dating culture has produced a good deal of rotten fruit.
The ultimate purpose of dating is to meet your future spouse. We're turned it into some kind of senseless sexual escapade, and this has poisoned the relations between men and women. It makes them exploitative and dehumanizing in spirit: sprinkling them with the waters of "consent" doesn't change that, as the subjective cannot abolish the objective. We've reduced sex to something that is merely pleasurable and contradicted its intrinsic and essential function which is procreative by employing an array of technologies that impede and interfere with healthy procreative processes. This creates a mindset not unlike that of a drug user who is obsessed with getting another hit with no thought given to the damage, or the bulimic who wants the sensual satisfaction of eating, but not the calories.
The psychophysical reality of sexual intercourse is much more than some passing physical pleasure. It mobilizes processes in us that are completely oriented toward bonding and the strengthening of the relationship in preparation for children. Whence the stereotype that men will often exit quickly in the morning after a one night stand with a strange woman? Because both can feel, if only subconsciously, that the processes of bonding are taking place, and who wants to bond — and in such a profound and intimate way — with someone they've just met? In this regard, the character of Julianna in Vanilla Sky makes an astoundingly profound and accurate remark for a movie coming out of Hollywood: "Don't you know when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not?" Our capacity for sexual intimacy is likewise dulled.
(Masturbation is even worse. Those processes bond us with a fictional harem of the imaginary and close us within ourselves. For social animals like us, this is a recipe for misery.)
We thwart and ignore our biological nature to our own detriment. The procreative prime spans the mid-twenties into the early 30s. Statistically, most people should be having families by their mid-20s. Our culture confuses people and creates a pointless obstacle course that leads them to postpone such things either because they're too immature (and encouraged to remain so, also by this unserious dating culture) or because they believe they must achieve some arbitrary milestones first. Furthermore, family and community support has been dashed by a culture of hyperindividualism.
The causes of demographic decline are not a mystery. People simply either don't think deeply enough, or they don't want to make the cultural changes necessary to restore normalcy.
> Masturbation is even worse[...] We thwart and ignore our biological nature to our own detriment.
Masturbation is part of our biological nature and has been occurring for millions of years. Every primate does it.
This is a much more reasonable position than many will believe. I think writing like a 19th century nonfiction author probably contributes to that aha
Edit:
To be clear I appreciate this comment and agree with it in the large. It’s hard to talk about these things without being quickly dismissed in the current zeitgeist.
You have far too much of an obsession with sex here and really need to stop and take a breath.
Dating culture is evolved to help you find a mate based on YOUR choices and capability not your parents or class level. This allows you to “trial” compatibility over shorter time and find better fits.
What you seem to be talking about is 'Online Hookup Culture' which is more of a hobby if we are being honest than a way of finding a mate. And ultimately probably STILL better when faced with a society increasingly not finding mates or having kids at all. So basically all of your thoughts are self-contradictory due to a bit of self righteousness here.
Please don’t let your hangups around sex (correct or not) become a world view. It’s not a healthy obsession.
Sexual escapades are only senseless if you rigidly believe sex is only for specific things, and adopt a model where human beings are property and can be owned. While sex does have a biological purpose, that in itself doesn't mean it has to be limited to that purpose.
Sex is fun and most sex doesn't lead to procreation, nor is intended to. The last 50 times I've had sex, me and partner(s) involved have had no intention of making a baby, and that's fine. Nature/God agrees with me, because the number of children most families have are typically far less than the number of times the parents have had sex.
There's a lot of times people want sex and don't want it to be some big life changing event. I won't marry someone like that.
> This creates a mindset not unlike that of a drug user who is obsessed with getting another hit
Everyone wants pleasurable things with a minimum of bad or unwanted consequences. This is called being smart and using your God-given brain and free will. This doesn't make anyone a drug user. This puritanical war on pleasure can only serve authoritarian and anti-human ends, which is often an explicit or implicit base of forms of slavery/indenture, and is the main reason why I strongly advocate against it.
> The psychophysical reality of sexual intercourse is much more than some passing physical pleasure.
Anything that feels really good will beget attachment because you want more of it. When it's attached to a person, you're going to want to be around that person more. And of course, human beings are naked apes with courtship and bonding instincts and all that good stuff. But people bond over things other than sex, and any good relationship or marriage will have many bonds other than the sexual one. Indeed, marriages where sex is the only reason they got together are as hollow as this drug user strawman you trotted out.
> Masturbation is even worse.
People who become overly dependent on parasocial relationships with fictional anything, whether that's a harem, video game, movie star, person mentioned in a religious book, etc. need help. I masturbate from time to time and it does not give me any problems, but I'm not addicted to it. But I would rather lonely people masturbate themselves into a coma than sexually assault others simply because of people who will say masturbation is wrong but at the same time won't consider other things like legalizing prostitution.
> they don't want to make the cultural changes necessary to restore normalcy.
I don't. The old way sucked. Robots and AI should be doing all our menial work, and the possibilities for pleasure are endless. The people who just can't exist without an employer giving them meaning because they never got enough approval from their daddies need to move to another planet.
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> Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle
This has literally only been true for about 30 years out of the sum total of human history, would you like to guess when those 30 years happened to be?
Obviously the answer is "1950s america".
For the rest of human history, you needed something beyond the education you received until the age of 18 in order to support a family.
People supported families with single incomes with less than high school education for centuries before the 1950s.
All the other members of the family were active and produced useful things - both kids and women. The iddle lifestyle was limited to richer classes.
Who said anything about the idle lifestyle?
Implied by "single income".
In reality in most families all family members were contributing something to the household income.
Income in this context means trading labor for cash.
In the past, huge amounts of household work were done without any such exchange.
Today, child raising, cleaning, cooking, provisioning, and more remain unpaid household labor. The people who do that work were not idle 800 years ago, and they are not idle today.
Women and kids would tend to animals and food came directly from the animals. They both would tend the fields when work did not required physical strength - and thre was plenty of such work too. The crafts women did were for sale or trade. They would also sell on the market whatever excess household produced.
If we are talking about "centuries" quite a lot of people including men did not worked as in being employed for salary. But their work was economical - necessarily so.
Being stay at home mom today is mostly battling boredom and demotivation. Or then, making up things to do. It is not the same as milking cows or making cheese.
> Being stay at home mom today is mostly battling boredom and demotivation. Or then, making up things to do. It is not the same as milking cows or making cheese.
I was a stay at home parent for my daughter. It was extremely far from battling boredom (except perhaps for first year and a half, if that, and even then anyone who is actually interested in child development will not find it boring) and it was the opposite of demotivating.
Rather than speak in such broad generalizations, I think it would be better to restrict your claims to specific, real stories.
In foraging societies - ie, most people for the vast majority of human history - people worked ~15–20 hours/week on subsistence tasks. The rest was leisure or social time (ie, time for being a human later rebranded as 'idleness').
Industrialization has pushed inequality to extremes while raising hours worked - even as productivity keeps shooting up. There's no good reason for people to tolerate this; it's just exploitation.
Those hours worked are carefully defining a lot of work away. Most things people eat need hours of preparation that isn't counted in you 15-20 hours for example. When you relook at what people did most of the time you realize they had to work really hard for a lot more hours to survive.
How many hours a day would you estimate that primates in the wild "work"? Without commenting on quality of life it seems readily apparent to me that many foraging animals have large amounts of leisure time.
> Most things people eat need hours of preparation that isn't counted in you 15-20 hours for example.
Yeah, and we now expect women to work 40+ hour work weeks and house work on top of that. That is the thing causing societal reproduction rates to plummet.
Let's just do the math: a day has 24 hours. The recommendation for healthy sleep is 8 hours. Then, you work for 8 hours, with 1 hour added for the unpaid lunch break. That's the two largest blocks, leaving 7 hours to distribute... dedicate 3 hours for the "staying alive" stuff (preparing for going to work in the morning, aka breakfast, shave, getting dressed, preparing dinner, eating dinner, have a shower and at least some unwind time to fall asleep).
And that in turn leaves only 4 hours for everything else: running errands (aka shopping, dealing with bureaucracy, disposing of trash, cleaning), just doing nothing to wind down your mind from a hard day at work, hobbies, social activities (talking with your friends and family or occasionally going out) and, guess what, actually having sex.
Easy to see how that's already a fully packed day. Society just took the productivity gains from women no longer having to deal with a lot of menial work (washing dishes and clothing, as that got replaced by machines, and repairing clothes) and redistributed these hours to capitalism.
And now, imagine a child on top of that. Add at least half an hour in the morning to help get the kid ready for school, an hour to drive the kid to errands (because public transit is more like "transhit"), and another two hours to help the kid with homework because that workload is ridiculous and you don't want the kid to fall behind kids of parents rich enough to afford private tutors. But... whoops, isn't that just about the entire "everything else" time block? And younger children need even more work, constantly changing nappies, going to the doctor's all the time because it's one new bug every new week and sometimes the bug also catches you cold...
You're inventing sexism where there isn't any. The men who expect their wives to work 40+ hour weeks are not (at least as a group) the ones dumping all housework and childcare on them.
The time constraints that come with a dual income certainly make the logistics of having children more difficult though.
> The men who expect their wives to work 40+ hour weeks are not (at least as a group) the ones dumping all housework and childcare on them.
I'm not talking about men, I'm talking about society itself. Try renting a family home on a single income in any moderate popular area. Owning a home is outright out of reach for even more people.
Yes I agree the dual income expectation is super backwards when it comes to raising a family. First your income isn't enough to have a family unless you’re earning in the top 5%. Second, as you point out, managing a home and a property takes time and effort, much more than just a few hours a week. Add kids in the mix and unless you have full time childcare it’s not feasible. You pretty much have to sacrifice one of the two incomes paying for labor you can otherwise do yourself. I understand the social reason we moved toward dual income but there’s still a lot to iron out. It’s a whole lot easier to have a family if society could figure out a way to support the homemaker during childrearing years—some of us actually want to raise our own kids. And we need to figure out how to make life accessible to single income situations. Inevitably since dual income has become an expectation the markets have adjusted to that reality which leaves single income households short.
Look man if you want to write a refutation of Marshall Sahlins' work, go ahead. I might even read it. But I'm not going to just take the word of a random commentator - are you even in anthropology?
Like, this is a broad consensus thing. There's not really much debate; ethnographic studies have backed it up. Where are you getting your info from?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#Crit...
There seem to be two main points of critique there:
1. That there was war and war sucked; disease; and also infant mortality was high - therefore life sucked back then. None of that really factors in to the debate of how much free time people had; and those thing are all still very much with us (especially in America).
2. That food prep and gathering firewood takes time. Well, gathering firewood is also known as 'going for a walk in nature', and it's actually good for you. You can chat with your friends while you do it. It's not like your average job. It might not be technically 'idle', but it's a lot closer to 'idle' than flipping burgers in a sweatbox.
Same with food prep - picking through some dried beans, or stirring a pot every 30 mins and making sure it doesn't boil over, while you tell stories around the table just isn't comparable to working in an Amazon warehouse pissing into plastic bottles.
It's critique, and you can buy it if you want; but there's nothing there I would call substantial.
1. how many hours a day would you work if it meant not watching 6 of your 7 children die.
2. How'd you get those dried beans out of their pods? Where'd you get that pot? Where'd you get the water?
3. You didn't actually read the critique did you, you the wikipedia paragraph characterizing the critiques.
1. The choice isn't between having free time and having modern maternity care. And it's not what was being debated. Like, yeah, antibiotics and anesthetic are great to have, but working 40+ hours a week isn't a prerequisite for them to exist so I have no idea why you're bringing it up.
2. Sitting around the table, singing songs, telling stories, or quietly reflecting; all working at my own pace, in the comfort of a home that's been owned outright for generations, surrounded by organic soil free from pesticides and plastic.
3. I read your link, not every cited article. I've personally lived that way, and I know what I'm talking about. There's a big difference between shucking corn with your family or stacking logs, and shuffling numbers at a bullshit job which exists to make two or three incredibly rich people thousands of miles away a tiny bit wealthier. That said, if there's something more you'd like to bring to the discussion, bring it.
You’re not really responding to what he’s saying. You’re sitting at the middle of the story, where the family is no longer surviving, but rather thriving. It’s probably possible to do this, but it’s a difficult stage to reach, and maintaining it requires a LOT of resources.
And anyways, if you’re a hunter-gatherer, you’re following your prey, not sitting around growing corn to be shucked while you sing songs or whatever.
By the way, my buddies and I tell each other stories at work all the time? You can do this at work too, you know. What you seem to be doing is imagining a world where you’ve outsourced all your labor to “it’ll get done” land, then combined hunter-gatherer lifestyles with agrarian lifestyles
Where'd the corn come from? hunter gatherers had teosint. How'd you turn a tree into logs? Where'd the house come from, where'd the table come from?
You've taken the position that there's some issue with original affluent society but none of the points you're raising run counter either to it or to the adjacent observation that modern quality of life almost certainly doesn't require anywhere near the hours worked at present. Unless you consider economic inequality to be a prerequisite for it anyway.
No, I'm taking the position that there are massive issues with the work estimates in "The Original Affluent Society" in response to a poster that seems to think a small farm in the 1980s is comparable to being a hunter gatherer 20-200kya
You can still do this now, it's just called "being homeless" and it actually sucks.
A, being homeless and being in a gatherer society are very different things.
And B, even if you wanted to live that way you can't any more; because the commons has been relentlessly exploited past its breaking point for centuries.
I shouldn't really have to explain any of this, but people generally seem to have some weird ideas and blind spots surrounding our history as a species.
In many countries the only obstacle is the legality of living on government lands. In Canada there are people living a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle on crown land. The option is totally available for many people who chose not to do it.
> the only obstacle is the legality of living on government lands
Yes, the obstacle of living illegally on land that has been systematically over-exploited for centuries (or too harsh to bother), without any community or experience. Not sure I'm seeing your point.
People do it so it's definitely possible. Most people chose not to do it because it's a hard life with a horrible quality of life. Being a hunter-gatherer and living a nomadic life is not and was never easy or fun.
No they didn’t, read some history. ‘Cottage industry’ and ‘child labor’ are good search terms to use.
Children helped support their families, I don’t see the face value problem with that. The fact remains that humans have been having kids in their teens and 20s for millennia, until very recently in western liberal societies.
That was only true for 1950s USA if you were a white male with a pretty good job and a wife staying home taking care of the kids.
In less wealthy countries, usually the compromise is that husbands are significantly older than their wives. A woman is ready for marriage at 16-20 but a man isn't ready until 25-35. Also they don't own single-family houses unless they're in totally rural areas.
Whether something should be the case has little bearing on whether it has been the case for any length of time particularly in something as flexible as the organization of society. It should largely be fine to point at something and say "I would like things to work this way" and try to organize society in that direction.
> Obviously the answer is "1950s america".
And the 50s to 80s anywhere else in the civilized world.
It does not have to be a replica of of 50s society though. In particular, I do not think the model of "men go out to work, women look after home and kids" is a great one.
There are lot of alternatives. Men can be primary parents (I was, once the kids got to about the age of eight or so, and was an equal parent before that) and they could stay at home (I continued working, but I was already self-employed and working from home, and my ex never worked after having children).
I think the ideal set up (it would have been so for me) would have been for both parents to work part time.
Of course it still comes back to, you should be able to raise a family on the equivalent of one full time income.
Of course, if the leisured society predicted a few decades ago had come to pass it would be one part time salary.
The model of men work while women watch the kids was most of history. Of course is completely ignors 'womens work' which was very needed for survival and defined by things you could do while also watching kids. for the first few years kids eat from mom so she cannot get far from them (after that she is probably pregnaunt again thus restarting the cycle). Mens work was anything that needed to be done that could not be done when pregaunt or nursing a kid.
today men have the ability to watch kids thanks to formula (though it is better for the kids to eat from mom - this is rarely talked about because it is easy to go too far and starve a baby to death in the exceptions).
> I think the ideal set up (it would have been so for me) would have been for both parents to work part time.
Beautifully said, very progressive also!
I am a big fan of the 4-day work week (for the same amount of money as 5 days), it's been transformative for my life. The extra energy and focus you get from that 1 day translates to higher productivity in the 4 days where you do work. Sadly, the current "squeeze em', bleed em' dry, and drop em'" brand of capitalism is incompatible with the majority of the people to experience how good life can be like that.
I certainly ain't looking forward to them raising the retirement age to 1337 by the time I get to retire.
It's like a race where they repeatedly move the finishing line because the organizers took the medals and sold them, while waiting for you to drop dead so they don't have to give you what you are due.
Who wouldn't be a fan of 80% of the work for 100% of the pay? It's a built-in raise equal to or greater than what you'd get from changing jobs, without the switch in seniority or experience.
A 4 day work week can always be implemented as 4 10 hour days instead of 5 8 hour days.
> Who wouldn't be a fan of 80% of the work for 100% of the pay?
If you, as an employer, want a motivated, energetic workforce who are not slacking off, it's also in your interest to give that opportunity to your employees, as multiple experiments have shown that 4-day work results in increased productivity and employee retention.
Knowledge work does not have 1-1 correspondence between time spent and productivity. Things get VERY non-linear, to the point that more than 50 hours of real knowledge work a week is often LESS productive than 40 hours.
For most of human history, there were no formal schools.
You might want to brush up on your history.
Aside from the peer comment pointing out the bleedingly obvious, there's also a bit of history here:
that you're clearly unaware of.* https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/harvester-...
* https://www.fwc.gov.au/about-us/history/waltzing-matilda-and...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvester_case
Can a man support a family of 5 on minimum wage in Australia, or did it stop working?
Minimum wage is more complicated in Australia. There are effectively minimum wage levels set per profession, known as awards.
This is the list of awards: https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/awards/lis... it's pretty extensive
Each award is also complex, and covers a range of issues in the employment. For example, this is the Professional Employee award: https://awards.fairwork.gov.au/MA000065.html just working out what the minimum wage would be for a graduate engineer with 2 years experience is a complex, detailed matter.
But yes, probably, for most professions you could reasonably expect to support a family of 5 on the award, depending on location and definition of "support". Affording a house would largely depend on an additional inheritance, though.
Is "inheritance" used in a different way here similar to how "award" is, or are you saying you often need to inherit money from your family in order to be able to buy a house in Australia?
No, it's used in the same way as elsewhere in the Anglosphere. And yes, as in the rest of the Anglosphere, generally you need an inheritance to be able to afford to buy property.
"in the high cost of living areas" is the rest of that sentence.
It is perfectly doable, even common, to buy a home in low and medium COL areas without any assistance from family, living or dead. The fact that you can't do this in NYC or SF is not an indictment of anything other than NYC and SF.
> or are you saying you often need to inherit money from your family in order to be able to buy a house in Australia?
Tell me a place in any Western society (outside of run-down rural areas/flyover states) where an average employee (i.e. no ultra-rich tech hipster bros) is able to afford a home before the age of 30 purely by his own savings and income. That is frankly no longer a reality for most people.
You seem pretty defensive over me asking whether a word was used in the way I expect it was.
Huh? Maybe that’s when you saw people on TV for the first time.
High school was advanced education in 2000. Basic education ended around grade 6-8.
No reasonable person considered high school advanced education in the 70's let alone 2000. If 85%+ of people get it for half a century, it is by definition not advanced.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Grad-ra...
Whoops, that was a typo, i meant 1900 :)
I don't know the 1900 stats but I bet in that case you're right :)
> For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it.
I hear ya. My spouse developed mental illness after sons 4,5 were born. A spouse can sabotage a lot of things when they set their mind to it - and their mind never stops. Not even at 3am. The first year was hard. The second was harder. After 5ys we run out of adjectives. After 15y we're using Dr.Seuss letters to spell out how things are.
What was the nature of her illness and was it directly related to the kids? If you don’t mind me asking, of course. That sounds like a very challenging thing all the best
> What was the nature of her illness
Psychosis, bipolar, BPD, NPD, pretty much all the *PDs. She switched it up.
> was it directly related to the kids
As in stemmed from? No.
As far as challenge related to the kids, it was 1) keeping the them as safe as possible when she was not and 2) proving some semblance of parenting. Both were difficult-to-impossible, given that kids are trapped at home, thanks to eradication of free range areas.
Some of it is economics but some of it is the structure of relationship choice. Feminist scholar Eva Illouz in Why Love Hurts talks about the reasons why women find it hard to get into committed relationships where they feel safe having children:
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...
Not least the idea that if you keep dating you can find somebody better than you've found so far -- a problem that's worse in large cosmopolitan cities where the dating pool is large and perceived to be large.
> this can lead people to pushing it till 40+
…which is not necessarily problematic either. I was 43 and my wife 41 when our daughter was born. Our child has had a great life and so have we. While I’m 60 now and don’t have quite the same energy I had at 20-30’something, everything has worked out well for us.
Everyone’s path, goals and priorities is different and as long as would-be parents consider the trade offs all around, it’s hard to be prescriptive about this.
> Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle.
No argument there. The complex socioeconomic forces that has created this dilemma are going to tough to unwind.
Society is not "broken" whatever that means.
Half the population has an IQ less than 100. Do not expect the low-IQ group to ever get a masters or earn 300K as a couple, etc.
Caveat- this may have to be amended due to the watering-down of educational standards in the USA.
> In the bay area, most of the mothers I've met were around that age, and my friends are having their kids at the same age
San Francisco has the highest rate of geriatric pregnancies in USA. We are in a statistical bubble where having kids late is normal (because careers and hcol).
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/mother-birth-age...
Bubble implies that it's going to burst. I don't see it. Women aren't going to stop wanting careers, and HCOL is coming for everybody. I expect the whole country to join SF in this "bubble".
Bubble in this context means a unique environment that is unlike places on the outside of said bubble. It's not referring to a bubble like in the sense of a inflating market bubble.
The desire to work and have children is going nowhere. Like Hollywood, the careers are going to go away. The money that lubricates the Bay Area is all from the Middle East now, and the return on in-region labor dollars is declining.
I’m sure the return on in region labor dollars decline that you note is real but is it regional? Where in the US is the return on labor dollars not declining? Housing costs, including taxes, seems to be the big problem in the Bay Area. Workers are still productive, but they require higher pay to offset the demand for housing caused by all the foreign “lubrication” and tech-49ers.
For movies, it’s cheaper to lots of work in Atlanta
Bubble: used to refer to a situation (esp. good or fortunate) that is isolated from reality or unlikely to last.
The US is already a bubble. Government is currently trying to make it burst as fast as possible. Getting back to the point where what women want doesn't matter again. HCOL will be a luxury term, life in debtors prisons will be the new norm.
I wish they called it "advanced maternal age" here. They use the delightful phrase "Geriatric pregnancy" in Australia
It’s just the technical medical term. I don’t think “advanced maternal age” is much better (advanced age at 35?). Besides, advanced age is exactly what geriatric means.
Mother's age of 35 at estimated due date.
So, if the due date is beyond your 35th birthday but you give birth early it's still a advanced maternal age pregnancy.
My wife is a retired nurse ( American ), she uses that term when referring to such pregnancies.
so people feel better about having kids when its riskier?
You'll probably be 80 by the time your oldest grandkid enters kindergarten. How energetic will we be in our 80s? That's the bit that's scary to me.
Same here. The issue is mainly the likelihood of getting pregnant after about 36, from what the fertility folks shared with us. It drops off a cliff.
It also depends on your health and fitness.
My ex-wife was 37, and I was an year older, when our younger one was born and energy was not the problem so I agree with you that 35+ should not be a problem.
However, a lot of people are having kids significantly older than that.
I not know whether I could cope with a baby 20 years later. Contrary to stereotypes I used to get up faster and more fully if a baby cried in the night. On the other hand, having a baby might energise and motivate me! Not planning to try it out though!
I had kids in my late 30s and they tested my patience and emotional regulation to an extent greater than any other experience of my life. I was somewhat emotionally volatile in my 20s and I can't imagine my kids having better outcomes if I'd had to learn to parent at that time in my life.
My children are 12 years apart in age and being a parent in my 20s was a much better experience. I had less money, but I had more time. I wiser now, but I had more energy. I could relate to being a kid more.
I'm not suggesting it's better. But people seem to automatically assume that being older when having kids as better. I know some much older parents who were not good parents. I know I would not make a good parent to a younger child now that I'm in my 40s.
I did not have more time in my 20s. In my 20s and early 30s, I was busy “getting out there”. Building my life, my interests, my foundation (not just my career). Now I have a happy life to stand on, and can devote more time, attention, and energy to my family.
I don’t deny that your way can work out as well. But OPs advice was “get children before you are 30, don’t wait until after”. Whereas my honest advice, based on my experience, is “wait until you are 35, you’ll be much more stable life in several regards”.
Which approach is best for you depends on a lot of things. For me, I can honestly say, there is no way I would be where I am if I had had kids in my 20s or even early 30s, and I also wouldn’t have been as good a father as I am right now based on how I’ve grown since then. Both things that my child directly benefits from.
I was “getting out there” too! So many major life milestones. But actually it has never stopped. Most of my major career changes happened after the second child. I have entirely new interests now.
I feel like I do have the unique perspective having actually done both. I don't need to assume what kind of parent I was in my 20s because I was that parent. And I'm a different parent now. But being a younger parent was a great experience despite any other consequences.
That’s interesting. Because I genuinely feel I’m much better cut out to be a parent now. Is it different for you? I have so much patience and understanding, and I see that lacking in many of the younger parents around me. I see them and I remember myself.
And the life I have would just not have been possible if I had a child back then. Not even if I completely sacrificed family time and attention back then, which I never would have wanted.
But I guess we have to agree to disagree. For you, being a younger parent worked out better. For me, I’m certain I got my child at the right time. In any case, I find OPs general recommendation that if you want children, you should have them by 30, to be ill-advised to the point of being harmful. Many people would benefit from waiting until later.
> I have so much patience and understanding
I'm 32, and I think I currently have much less patience and understanding than I did at say 22. Life has basically broken me to the point that I simply don't have the capacity for these things that I used to.
Haha, I like to joke that I reached peak intellectual capacity around 26 and peak emotional maturity around 14 and both have been dropping from their peak since then.
It also depends on the person. I was not an adult at 27. I realized I was one at 32 though.
Kids at 27 would have been a bad bad idea. Kids at 32 as well (wrong partner). I’m even older now but I am with the right partner and naturally want kids now. Before her, the topic wouldn’t even cross my mind.
I think it’s really hard to give general advice if one doesn’t mention how their advice interacts with other variables
The advice was to start before you are 30, not finish then. If you have multiple kids my advice is the last should be around 35 maybe 40 but space them out
We have 4 kids and I relate to them really well I think, not to the level where I’m engrossed in descriptions of the latest Roblox game but they’re just younger humans, not some alien species… I’m in my mid 40’s and our youngest is 10.
I also have plenty of energy, the only real change I’ve noticed getting older is I’m in bed a bit earlier than I was in my 20s.
I don’t understand why people think midlife is some kind of drained, lifeless decrepitude
> I don’t understand why people think midlife is some kind of drained, lifeless decrepitude
I think people have a variety of health conditions and lifestyle choices, some of which do indeed result in less energy in mid-life.
A lot of people are "emotionally volatile" in their 20s because they don't have the growth in responsibility and maturity motivated by being a parent.
Or possibly you would have learned emotional regulation sooner.
Kids change you, for the better if you let it. There's nothing like a completely helpless infant who is totally dependent on you to wear down your selfish tendencies.
Obviously I think the answer to this question depends so much on individual circumstances that all any of us can do is offer anecdotes. I think that while energy levels do decline as you get older, the degree of the decline depends largely on how much you stay in shape. My partner and I are very active and find ourselves only marginally less physically energetic in our 30s as our 20s. I've seen friends of ours with more sedentary lifestyles having a much sharper decline. If you're inclined to stay in shape then I don't think age makes as big of a difference (within reason.) But YMMV.
I had a kid at 22, I am now 40 with a kid going to college. I can echo this exact sentiment.
However at 22 I wasn't the experienced person I am today. Nor was I stable, nor could I jump on opportunities like my peers could.
If having a child in your early 20s would mean not losing opportunities in progressing in a career, at least with enough free childcare and food to feed the children, people could be more inclined to have children while they get their life together. Our culture of moving away from home is also a big problem -- having 2 sets of grandparents helping raise a child REALLY helped me at my youth not miss out on youth and still raise my child.
kids between 25-32 is something our society should aim to be as practical and pleasant as possible.
Was also a young parent. Empathetic yes to all.
Securing stable health insurance dictated most of my career decisions. I was captive to turrible gigs, had to pass on a lot of opportunities.
Want to revitalize our society?
#1 is Medicare for All. More startups, more risk taking & innovation, higher birth rate, etc.
#2 is childcare. Cheap, plentiful, good quality.
#3 is housing. Again: Cheap, plentiful, good quality. Plus, rentals better suited for young families (eg more 2 & 3 bedroom units).
> #2 is childcare. Cheap, plentiful, good quality.
This costs infinite money.
It's impossible to scale, because nobody wants an environment where their child is not getting attention from compassionate, engaged adults throughout the day. To get the same level of care as a stay at home parent, you need as many care workers as there are families with young children. And if you pay those workers comparably to the average wage, you need to tax the entire wages of one parent in each family to cover the care costs.
It's probably much cheaper to write checks to families encouraging them to have one parent care for their own children full time.
Most provinces in Canada have $10/day childcare
So the workers there are paid $10 / day?
$50 if they’re watching 5 kids, $100 for 10, etc.
That’s assuming 0 overhead.
No, it's subsidized. The same way public schools or libraries or universities are.
> write checks to families
Ideally, yes.
But I'm not going to tell someone they can't work.
My wife was stay-at-home, until she couldn't take it any more, and then returned to work. Even though it cost us more overall (childcare, second car, etc).
I think willing to take a cut in one's standard of living so that the mother stays at home and raises the children would revitalize society beyond any of the above-mentioned options.
Or... Raise wages while reducing housing and insurance costs so that a single wage earner home can support their family. What my grandpa and grandma used to call "the middle class".
This is a very good comment. I had my first kid in my mid-20s and my next two in my late 30s.
There are definitely pros and cons, but overall I'd recommend kids in mid- to late-20s.
>However don't wait until you think it is the perfect time.
Yes! There is no perfect time to have kids, but there will definitely be a time when having kids isn't biologically likely anymore
I concur. Kids would have been much better at 20 than at 30. I can barely keep up with what they want to do now. If you live in a decent country it’s not even that expensive. Most states really want people to have children, so the basics are often supported or free.
We were 38 with our first. I strongly agree that is too late to have them, especially given the likelihood of birth defects. Thankfully, we avoided issues there.
A few years in and I feel "back on my feet", but it was harder for being older.
You speak way off base. Many, possibly most people in their early 40s can have kids and still keep up with them well into their 50s. Not only is it easier than ever to pull this off for many modern reasons of health and lifestyle decisions, it's not even exceptionally hard unless you're unlucky with your health or do something to really fuck it up. Even decades ago, many many men at least were commonly fathering children in their 40s and even 50s, and rearing them.
You write your comment about the maximum safe age for having children as if most people (at least in the advanced countries and moderately reasonable income brackets) were living the lives of 19th century industrial workers.
You can. However it gets more dificult
I think having kids when you’re in your early 30s is the way to go but having kids at any age is great. I think waiting until later is a mistake because you want a full life with your kids and ideally you can bless your parents with grandkids (they most likely want one, even if they say they don’t). But not having kids because you “waited too long” is a bigger mistake.
Kids take a lot of energy but they also give you a lot, no matter the age. We are biologically hardwired to rise to the challenge of having kids no matter the age.
I think having kids before you are 30 is fine, but we had our second kid when my wife was 36 and it was also fine. I think when you get in your forties as a man or late thirties as a woman it can be tougher.
Also, adopt. Before I was a parent I thought of a child as "mine" because of biology. Really you see that you shape people and form a connection with them because they are part of your family.
> I think having kids before you are 30 is fine, but we had our second kid when my wife was 36 and it was also fine.
Which is another important point: if you want multiple children you probably want to have your first earlier than you might otherwise.
> Don't read the above as advocating having kids too young, it is not.
Depending on the circumstances in a persons country, maybe getting children at a young age isn't that dumb. I'd argue that the best time to get kids is as a university student. You get free daycare, the government doubles your stipend (and it's extended), your housing subsidy increases, you generally have more free time as a student, grandparents are younger and able to help more and you have more energy and can more easily deal with lose of sleep.
As a bonus, when your kids move out, you're not even 40 year olds.
The only real issue is: Have you meet the right partner yet?
> I'd argue that the best time to get kids is as a university student. You get free daycare, the government doubles your stipend (and it's extended), your housing subsidy increases, you generally have more free time as a student...
Where... where do you live? I'm all for having kids as soon as possible, but I was barely able to provide for just myself during university.
I'm in Denmark. You get around $1100 per month from the government as a university student, you then get around the same amount per child (not sure if a couple get half of that each). Still if you're two students, with a child, that's at least $3300 a month. That's not a lot of money, but there are also government loans you can get, and again, free daycare and subsidies for housing. It's not a get rich scheme, but it's also only meant to be temporary i.e. until you finish your studies.
According to Google the the amount you get per child per month in Denmark is 1450-881 DKK (227-138 USD) depending on the age of the child.
That sound more like "Børnetilskud". Everyone gets that, regardless of being a student or not, that's just help to buy clothes and stuff like that for your child. It's paid out every quarter.
There's a bunch of stuff like that, some can be "stacked", some are mutually exclusive, some are "per child" some is per adult. Some are only available to single parents, some are only available if both parents are enrolled in an education, some are only available if you make less than a certain amount.
That's amazing.
I'm in Spain, absolutely different landscape here. I guess your government is trying to boost both higher education and birth rates.
Yes and no, the government is trying to steer young people in the direction of engineering, nursing, doctors, teachers and trades (carpenter, bricklayer and so on), but it's not clear where the people are suppose to come from. Essentially Denmark is missing people in also every profession. There aren't enough people. My wife works in a field where unemployment is 12, not percent, but 12 people. So if you're unemployed, qualified to work in the EU and have a recognized education, applying for jobs in Denmark isn't a bad bet.
Various governments have also attempted to boost birth rates, but unsuccessfully.
Stupid sexy socialism.
there are also age correlated birth defects, the cause of which have not been adequately determined in all cases but the high correlation does suggest a relation.
> If you are 25 you should be seriously thinking in the next 2 years, and by 30 have them
I need to push back on this because no one is actually an adult at the age of 25 despite those people wishing it were so. You do not have your shit figured out and assuming a partner of similar age, neither do they. It's only starting in your 30s where you start to understand what it is to be a responsible adult to yourself and to the world.
So please, do not seriously consider having kids in your 20s, for all our sakes.
> no one is actually an adult at the age of 25 despite those people wishing it were so. You do not have your shit figured out
Too strong.
You're an adult who doesn't have their shit figured out. Some people never get it figured out, others take into their 30s, 40s or even 50s.
And then in your 60s, you've got new shit to figure out.
Isn’t your brain still forming until you’re like… 26? It’s probably more correct to say that 25 year olds are children in that case. Other ages are mostly arbitrary.
This is a level of infantilization that I think becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People don’t magically become adults, they learn to be adults based on the situations they are placed in.
It seems to me like when you move the definition of “adulthood” back to age X, fewer people function like adults prior to age X.
most ppl in my region have kids 35+ in order to first find a place in life that can support children. i don't see any issues with that.
having energy is subjective and does not really depend on being young or old. some old folks are full of energy and live really active lives. It depends on your state of mind and lifestyle more than age.
We did wait for the “perfect” time, and are very happy we did.
I got my son at almost 40, and I’m positive I’m a much better parent because of that. Sure, kids cost energy, but at 40 and 50 you’re not geriatric. I often get the opportunity to compare our parenting style to younger parents, and it’s clear that they often have some emotional growing up to do themselves. They complain about normal parenting things that we just shrug about, they are torn between their career and raising a kid, and most importantly they often lack patience, where to us it just comes natural.
My wife and I had our first at age 15. Then another at 22. And our last at 27. I've raised children while on welfare and while a software engineer.
I was more patient as a teen than I am now in my 40s. Now I am tired. All the time. I fear I would literally die of exhaustion if I had to maintain more irregular hours than I already do due to insomnia that I have developed over the last half decade.
The condition you're in now is a result of what you went through previously.
Someone with no one to care about until their 40s is supposed to be in a much better shape than someone who raised three kids for the last +25 years.
Congrats on making it though, I completely understand why you would feel tired all the time!
> they often lack patience, where to us it just comes natural.
Having kids fast-tracked me to a critical increase in patience. I've grown so much in less than three years because of my kids. I'm not sure this growth would have ever happened so quickly through other means.
And I'll always have a special, particular respect especially towards my firstborn for causing that in me, and for enduring my shortcomings in the meantime.
> but at 40 and 50 you’re not geriatric.
biologically, and for pregnancy, yes you are.
I didn’t say get pregnant at 50. I said I became a parent at almost 40, my wife is a couple of years younger. No problems whatsoever, and I seem to have more energy for parenting (and especially patience) than the parents in their 20s who haven’t even found themselves yet.
It's actually the age of the egg that matters most, not the age of the mother during pregnancy.
Paternal age is also a contributor. Children with fathers over 40 see an increase in potential diseases, a shorter lifespan and higher infant mortality, likely due to DNA mutations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_age_effect
According to that page, the whole issue seems to be very nuanced. It also contains the quotes I attached below.
Be it as it may, I conclude that there is an elevated risk for problems the older you get (although for some issues, cause and effect may be reversed, which is hard to resolve), but that that risk may not be so significant as to outweigh other advantages.
> A simulation study concluded that reported paternal age effects on psychiatric disorders in the epidemiological literature are too large to be explained only by mutations. They conclude that a model in which parents with a genetic liability to psychiatric illness tend to reproduce later better explains the literature.[9]
> Later age at parenthood is also associated with a more stable family environment, with older parents being less likely to divorce or change partners.[43] Older parents also tend to occupy a higher socio-economic position and report feeling more devoted to their children and satisfied with their family.[43] On the other hand, the risk of the father dying before the child becomes an adult increases with paternal age.[43]
> According to a 2006 review, any adverse effects of advanced paternal age "should be weighed up against potential social advantages for children born to older fathers who are more likely to have progressed in their career and to have achieved financial security."[63]
It seems kids procreated by older parents (aged 35 years or older) have increased risk of Down Syndrome. The effect is most pronounced when both parents are older than 35 years: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12771769/
How are these two measures different? Oocyte formation happens before birth.
I believe freezing eggs is considered to be keeping them at the age they were when frozen?
> I got my son at almost 40, and I’m positive I’m a much better parent because of that.
I think so too. Now to be sure to balance things, while I was 42 when we had our kid, my wife was only 28.
10 years later and things are still great.
> A kid had at 40 will still be depending on your when you are 55
I had my kids 25-35; all 5 are adults. We live together as is befitting a 4 income economy.
> and if the kids goes to college
Do you mean go away to college? Yeah. No.
> may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring.
Me and peers are all working grey. End of career happens with first major illness intersects with the lack of health insurance and we die.
> Plus if your kids have kids
If one of my a sons pairs off with someone and they both work, they'll still be 2 typical incomes short of self sustenance.
BUT, if they got married and then married another couple, the 4 of them only have to find one more adult - the one who will parent during the work day. After the last child enters school, the core 4 can kick parent 5 to the curb.
> Do not let fear of how much it will cost
No fear. Just math.
> or desire for more resources first
But if they had more resources they might only need 3 or even 2 adults working full time to afford basic bills.
> Do not let ... it ... stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.
Parents can (and do) parent while living in their car...
SO what? That is well below retirement age and life expectancy. MY younger one turns 18 when I will be 58, and I am a single parent. Baring accidents or the severely unexpected (which can happen at any age - plenty of people die in the 30s or 40s) its not a problem.
> That is well below retirement age and life expectancy.
What is below RA/LE? My comment addressed common financial realities. It applied to every adult age, up to and including death.
> MY younger one turns 18 when I will be 58
okay.
> and I am a single parent.
You may be interested to know that parenting can be get much harder than that. ex: I would have loved my difficulty level to be dialed down to Single Parent.
> Baring accidents or the severely unexpected
I agree that some folks do experience year after year after year of luck.
> (which can happen at any age - plenty of people die in the 30s or 40s)
I agree that not having life-changing advantage & luck is pretty dang common.
> its not a problem.
What's not a problem? Taken together, your comment seems to be lacking a subject.
I did the best I could. If you could share which of my points you were responding to, that might help.
As someone who is 34 with two kids (toddler and newborn), I completely agree with your comment. My wife and I had difficulty having kids, or we would've had them sooner, but I completely agree with having kids before 30. My energy is still solid, don't get me wrong. But it doesn't compare to energy in your 20s. People think too much about the financial aspect. You can continue building and growing financially even with kids, you just need to be smarter and more disciplined. A lot of people use the financial argument, but I think more and more, it is only a cope for not having had kinds sooner. All my kids will be in their 20s when I'm in my 50s; not bad, but having kids in your 20s is the way to go.
If you do decide to wait longer, be aware that there are hilarious differences geographically. When we had our first kid in SF, the other dads pushing swings were around the same age as me (fortyish). Moving back to Georgia… oh my god, the parents of kids my second kid’s age were babies! (There are “graybeard dad” Facebook groups etc., but the average vibe is way different)
Even regionally. My kid goes to an urban school where the majority of parents are those with at least an undergraduate degree, and are at least my age.
Family friends have kids in a rural school with parents being those that haven’t moved 10 miles from the community where they grew up and small-town soap opera dynamics.
[dead]
Crime rates in Georgia are higher. So there's that.
On the flip side the average age of parents in Utah is extremely low and the crime rate is also below average. So it may be more nuanced than you would think.
confounding factor: Mormons
>the parents of kids my second kid’s age were babies
Babies can have kids?
A parent who’s forty with a newborn will feel that the 20-year old with a newborn is “babies havin’ babies” as Strong bad would say.
Strong Bad - now thats a throwback!
The flip-side of an aging society with declining fertility is that older people, with fewer children are likely to be less sympathetic to children, and you could see the incarceration rates increase, or remain steady, as less severe infractions are punished more harshly.
We recently saw this play out in the Queensland, Australia, state election where the opposition party, which was pretty much out of ideas, ran a scare campaign about youth crime in regional areas. Neighbourhood Facebook Groups where CCTV footage of "suspicious youth" are a mainstay and an aging population did the rest of the job and they won the election and passed "adult time for adult crime" laws: whether you agree with these or not, "adult time" in Australia means that the youth incarcerated will be adults in their 20s and 30s when they get out.
The Australian state of New South Wales routinely strip-searches young children, but again, there isn't much outcry.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out elsewhere. The worst case scenario is that kids will be politically scapegoated ("why should childless and aging taxpayers fund education?"), and it leads to a further decline in fertility rates.
Australia has had pretty terrible “jail children like adults” opinions for a long time. Politics in Melbourne constantly turns on fears of youth [black immigrant] crime waves that are making people afraid to leave the house.
https://raisetheage.org.au/
Queensland seems to be making a lot of noise about that at the moment as well.
Seems to be this weird reasoning (and I know it has cropped up in the US too) that - if they did an 'adult' crime they should be tried as an adult. It totally ignores what we know about developing brains - they are not fully developed, they don't consider consequences the same way as older people.
That's not to say they should be allowed to 'get away with it', but we need to take into account that it's not really the same thing as adults doing it.
> That's not to say they should be allowed to 'get away with it', but we need to take into account that it's not really the same thing as adults doing it.
However, they -clearly- do get away with it, continually the current method of punishment is not deterring them from crime. These are not 'oh he made poor decisions style crimes', you're not paying attention or are not living in this area if you think so.
I wish i could dig up the study from Townsville crime statistics (this is the closest i could find https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/101697 )
The key takeway is:
“The residents living in these areas have been let down for too long under the former Government who allowed serious repeat youth offenders to avoid adequate punishment and let them continue to terrorise these communities,”
Current deterrents clearly are not working. There are only so many levers the government can pull. Children learn poor lessons and inadequate supervision from their families, but if they are taken from their home the media screams 'stolen generation' so in the end individuals terrorised by them have to deal with the burden of their continued long term criminal behavior.
You may believe that children can be rehabilitated, I'd dearly love this to be the truth, however my observations show that its not a reflection of reality.
I’m not trying to play down any problems or say nothing should be done.
In fact I’m not expressing any beliefs other than the (very well supported) notion that children’s brains are not fully developed and therefore they shouldn’t be dealt with in the same way as adults because that’s just dumb and is likely not to help.
Can you expand on "that's just dumb"? I don't understand what argument this is trying to make.
All people have different brains; some are very low-intelligence and impulsive by nature and training, and this can apply at any age. The point of this punishment is not to apply a sort of cosmic morality according to the true culpability of a soul. Abstract principles about whether the person 'deserves' a punishment aren't actually relevant regardless of what shape their brain is. The point is the real-life consequence of their criminality on others, and how to stop them hurting people. We must stop them hurting people; let's figure out how.
This dedication to abstracted principles and cosmic morality over fixing the actual issue is really problematic; I see this more and more these days.
> The point of this punishment is not to apply a sort of cosmic morality according to the true culpability
Except that is very much part of the justice system, and when people talk about "trying kids as adults" it is exactly about holding them culpable as if they were adults.
> We must stop them hurting people; let's figure out how.
I very much agree. "Lock 'em up and throw away the key", "they knew what they were doing!" and, an actual slogan from the queensland elections, "adult crime, adult time" don't really show a search for a solution. They're just appeals to base vengefulness.
Yes, kids commiting serious crimes need to be stopped. Victims and the wider society need to be safe. Yes the systems in Australia have been failing at this, over and over.
But young brains don't take consequences into account in the same way older brains do. They don't understand the impact that their actions will have on others or themselves in the longer term and aren't especially likely to consider harsher consequences as a deterrent because they aren't thinking about consequences. They literally aren't wired that way.
If your goal is actually reducing crime experienced by the community, you need to look at why kids are getting to that point, what's gone wrong in their upbringing, maybe holding parents more culpable, and intervening earlier. Otherwise you're not going to achieve anything more than a few appealing soundbites. And the problem with all of that in an Australian context is that there is a hidden subtext here - it's often (far from always, but often) First Nations kids who are causing the problem, and there is a long history of state intervention in First Nations families being - there's no other way to put this - actively evil.
It's a tough situation involving under-developed brains, ongoing generational trauma and all sorts of other crap.
For reference, here's what the Australian Human Rights Commission has to say - https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025.04.15%20...
"The evidence shows that the younger children are locked up, the more likely it is that they will go on to commit more serious and violent crimes. As shown in the HWE report making the justice system more punitive through longer sentences, harsher bail laws, and building more children’s prisons is the wrong approach.
That is because offending by children is a symptom of underlying causes and unmet needs that we are failing to address. The proposed measures in the Bill are likely to result in more crime, not less."
So I agree, action needs to be taken, people need to be safe. Trying kids as adults is a simplistic sop to anger, not a good solution and flies in the face of evidence.
tl;dr - It's dumb.
For those who are downvoting me, please explain why i'm being downvoted and how your logic translates specifically to the Queensland crime problem.
Queensland isn’t special dude. You are word for word having the exact same thoughts as I’ve heard in Melbourne, England and the USA.
I am very conflicted on this. On one hand I absolutely despise that hating the children attitude and I believe we are reaping what we are sowing. On the other hand there are serial offenders that are not being dealt appropriately. My naive solution is to keep the current, more permissive system for first offenders and then treat repeat offenders as adults. I mean if you are a teen, succumb to peer pressure and do something stupid like stealing a car, I fully believe that we should not throw the book at you. We need to dispel you of the notion that this is not a big deal and that you will get away with it, while ensuring that we do not harm your future prospects.
But if being arrested, handcuffed and taken in front of a judge is not enough to make you understand that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated, and you do steal a car again a few weeks later, then yes, we will have to escalate instead of saying "nothing we can do, it's just a kid". Otherwise we are literally sending the message that they can act with impunity.
It's lead.
Lead concentration in America "rapidly increased in the 1950s and then declined in the 1980s" [1]. There is a non-linear discontinuity among kids born in the mid 80s, with linear improvements through to those born in the late 2000s [2].
Arrest rates for violent crimes are highest from 15 to 29 years old (particularly 17 to 23-year olds) [3]. They're particularly low for adults after 50 years old.
We're around 40 years from the last of the high-lead children. 17 years ago is the late 2000s.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10406...
[2] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP7932
[3] https://kagi.com/assistant/d2c6fdd5-73dd-4952-ae40-1f36aef1e...
It is insane to just confidently assert that the only factor in the decrease in crime is Lead. Treating an insanely nuanced issue as an absolute doesn't make your argument more compelling, it is actually kind of baffling.
Why bother stopping at crime rates with that confidence?
The 1st recorded cases of fatty liver disease and T2D in children were in the 1980’s are have continued growing since - lead must have been protecting children’s health.
Testosterone has been on a sharp decline during this same time period - lead must promote healthy testosterone production.
Debt of all kinds, from the national debt, to household debt, to student loans debt has increased exponentially and consistently with lead removal - lead must promote financial literacy.
If you do the same comparison of the rates of leaded gasoline during childhood to adulthood crime rates across different countries which have different histories of leaded gasoline usage, you notice that the correlation persists. While of course correlation does not imply causation, it's a link that's fairly well-established in literature, it's not a spurious correlation, and we know that lead has concrete neurological effects, so it's plausible from a pharmacological basis.
Since 1970 testosterone has declined 1% per year and it’s well established higher testosterone is linked to impulsive and violent criminal behavior and in countries like the US crime rate is at a 50 year low correlating with this decline starting 1970.
There are many factors that correlate and potentially contribute to a reduction in incarceration rates.
There are estimated 1.8-1.9M incarcerated. Since 1980 to the present there are well over 1M violent crimes (rape, murder, aggregated assault, robbery) per year. Let’s look at another factor that might contribute to falling incarceration rates that tend to explain this discrepancy in incarceration vs total crimes…conviction rates:
Murder: ~57.4% in 1950 vs. ~27.2% in 2023—a ~2.1x difference.
Rape: ~17.3% in 1950 vs. ~2.3% in 2023—a ~7.5x difference.
Aggravated Assualt: ~19.7% in 1950 vs. ~15.9% in 2023—a ~1.2x difference.
The neurological effects of lead don’t tend to explain away falling police clearances nor convictions.
Where are these conviction rate statistics from? What are they measuring? (is it reporting of crime to a conviction on that crime?)
There have been a lot of studies that show the correlation with lead up and down and varied by lead in different cities countries with different phaseout timelines.
Kevin drum and Rick Bevin both did a ton to lay this out systematically.
As leaving drum has noted, Lead is NOT the only contributor to crime, but it was the cause of the largest variations for most of the 20th century.
But it's so satisfying to one's ego that a single cause is the issue. All complexity of societal changes in the last 50 years can be outmanuevered. Simplification is sexy.
It’s satisfying to know that we’ve eliminated a major environmental toxin with so many awful effects. It doesn’t mean that lead explains everything, but it is a lot better than the “we built enough prisons to lock up all the bad guys, maybe we should build more” alternative hypothesis/proposal I’ve heard.
There was a crime decline in many rich countries from the 1990s as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop#Decline_since_the_e...
Maybe they were doing similar things with lead or something else is a big factor. Perhaps the rise of ever more cheap entertainment for young males who are most likely to commit crime. That's a global thing.
Yes, leaded gasoline was being banned in many rich countries at about the same time, and there's a positive correlation between the year it was banned and the year that violent street crime began to decline.
So reducing lead exposure immediately changes your brain to do less crime?
Kids that grew up huffing leaded exhaust are more bad decisions inclined than they would otherwise be. It's not just crime. The most heavily leaded cohort in the US is also known for drunkly crashing their muscle cars and wasting their youth smoking pot in a commune.
Bad decisions like these get less common with age, partly because of consequences (jail, death, etc), partly because getting up to no good requires free time, ambition and freedom, all of which are in shorter supply with age and the resultant responsibilities competing for every individual's supply of these resources.
So if the replacement cohort of people who are coming into prime crime age decline to participate at the same rates the crime rate goes down.
No, there's an offset of about 18 years, if I remember correctly?
I see, so since a large majority of crime is done by young people, peaking between 15-25, they are basically comparing a whole new generation of kids who didn't have developmental brain issues vs their elders.
Were the older people who grew up with lead exposure also experiencing higher rates of impulsive crime in the late >1990s relative to the new and prior generations? That would help eliminate the major differences in economics/culture/politics of their upbringing (for ex: mass flight of families moving to the suburbs to raise their young kids after the 1970s crime wave scared them away).
That's an interesting question, and I don't know the answer.
I think lead is nasty stuff, but if it was the single cause of high crime, surely we'd see a similar effect in other domains, like a rebound effect on IQs (another thing lead was blamed for)?
Instead the Flynn Effect seems to have been strongest during the era of high lead, and it's tailing-off now.
I'm not convinced these tests measure what they claim to. Even assuming they do, IQ scores offer little practical value.
The human body and mind are always adapting, however subtly, to changing environments. So I wonder -- are IQ tests assessing abilities that may no longer be optimal today?
Homer likely had an exceptional memory, as did many ancient Greeks that participated in oral traditions. But how relevant is memorizing epics in the modern world?
The only reasonable conclusion is that lead causes crime by making people smarter.
or maybe intelligence doesn't correlate with likeliness to commit crime?
plenty of criminals are intelligent.
below study claims test score variances are mostly related too declarative knowledge side note, i wonder how internet had an effect on iq scores.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
Lack of boredom is also a factor.
Social media and modern games are keeping them occupied.
People also have fewer possessions worth stealing and trying to hock? It's not like TVs and radios cost that much anymore. People wear less jewelry. Though this is not a significant factor, it might be worth putting on the list still.
The most valuable things on a person these days (credit cards, phone) are also incredibly easy to lock down and make worthless. Many of the things like jewelry, are also now rendered essentially worthless because a lot of jewelry now is cheaply sourced; pawning off crap from fast fashion is not going to be worth it.
Bicycles and tools seem to be the main things still stolen. They are often left unattended locked to poles or in the back of cars which can be easily broken in to, and can be immediately flipped for a lot of money.
I was thinking that as I was getting ready to sell my house. I'm not a particularly materialistic person to start with, but there are hardly any physical objects in my home that I value that much besides (a) some photo albums/pictures and yearbooks - and for newer generations these are mostly digital I guess, (b) my violin and (c) my espresso machine and grinder. I guess you could throw my cellphone in there as well - easy to replace but would be a PITA, like losing my wallet. It'd be a pain to replace all my furniture and other stuff but I certainly don't feel any attachment to those things.
I feel you. I’m selling my house and I joke that I’ll give someone a better deal if they just take everything in it as part of the sale. A suitcase for my clothes, my computer, and some physical mementos is all I need to keep. Even the clothes are optional, but I don’t feel like buying a new wardrobe.
My coffee grinder may have been on my list, but I moved countries and the power is incompatible hah.
Right, there has been a huge reduction in home burglaries over the past several decades. The only stuff really worth stealing anymore is cash, drugs, and firearms.
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41284-021-00284-4
That's funny to see. Sometimes I get stressed about the lack of security around my house, but I'll stop and think, if someone broke in what would this hypothetical thief actually steal anyway?
Also, TVs have gotten way larger on the screen size, making them harder to transport in a hurry, and are often screwed to the wall.
I was wondering about this the other day. Do people even steal car radios/amps/subs anymore? When I was a kid in the 90s, having your car radio stolen was typical.
The more modern equivalent has long been the catalytic converter. I don't know how well legislative efforts to crack down on the resale of used catalytic converters has gone though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44365162
Let's add an example to illustrate the difference:
Let's say that there is a correlation between the number of flights between London and New York, and the prices of sulfur. The correlation is near perfect.
When your neocortex is working, you ignore it. You can't create any plausible scenario how this could work (it doesn't exist within your latent space) so you don't learn anything from it, it doesn't even register in your brain as anything worthy of notice.
But everybody with the cerebellum only absolutely does learn it. And completely for real, not just as some fun factoid, but as a fact that they know the same way you know that airplanes have wings, and everybody knows it, only you don't.
Then, one day out of nowhere people start buying sulfur. Your questions are met with laughter and mockery "dude, everybody's buying sulfur, are you autistic?". And you don't know, because you haven't even learned the pseudo facts that everybody else bases their reasoning on.
This is only a made up example, but this is exactly how it works.
No it's not. Not entirely anyway.
One thing I've learned in my decades on this planet is that just about never is one explanation for a human condition mostly correct. Lead is a convenient technical explanation that underestimates the impact of upbringing and community.
It doesn't explain a lot of factors of juvenile delinquency that existed for generations before lead service lines or leaded gasoline.
Industry and highways and other high sources of lead pollution were built in the areas with higher juvenile delinquency. Not in rich, privileged areas. I think you can also correlate the rise in violent crime to amount of lead contamination in the soil, some articles claiming down to the city block level.
Which order did these things happen in?
Maybe industry and highways increase lead exposure which leads to crime, or maybe areas already high in crime are cheaper so that's where industry and highways go?
Specifically violent crime. Poor areas had more violent crime. These areas got dumped with more lead pollution. The rise percentage wise correlates almost perfectly with lead levels, with poor (and now polluted) areas rising more than well off areas. And then the drop, where after lead was removed from petrol you get a significant drop, but still less of a drop in areas more lead soil contamination, such of those blocks next to a highway. We know the developmental effects on young brains from lead; it is why we banned it.
Seriously? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_c...
I'll do you one better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
And abortion access.
Probably not. That played out in the last wave of crime reduction.
Can we blame lead for the US’ electoral landscape too?
I don't think it shifts the red blue much which is probably what you're getting at.
I think it absolutely affects the quality of politicians we get though. The best that a given generation can offer is probably lower if that generation huffed a lot of lead gas. So as they age out and younger people hit peak career and fill those roles things will probably improve a bit.
I was mostly thinking that the politicians all look so incompetent — with some exceptions of course — that if it wasn't real, it'd be a very unfunny joke exactly because of how much caricature-like and exaggerated personalities the politicians have.
You could, if you wanted to misdiagnose the problem.
You'd have more success blaming COVID inflation and the general public's poor education in economics and lack of understanding why eggs were $3.50/dozen. (Today they are $6.00/dozen)
No. Much of the American electoral landscape is still shaped by the systemic remnants of slavery, reconstruction and segregation, and the post-Trump landscape by the cultural trauma of having elected a black president. Although I'm sure all of the lead poisoning didn't help.
i don't know why there are two copies of this comment now, I didn't post it twice.
No. Much of the American electoral landscape is still shaped by the systemic remnants of slavery, reconstruction and segregation, and the post-Trump landscape by the cultural trauma of having elected a black president.
> Can we blame lead for the US’ electoral landscape too?
More of a pet theory, but voters born between 1950 and 1980, boomers and Gen X, have had a well-documented set of policy preferences.
What if I told you voters born between nnnn-yyyy had a set of policy preferences?
There’s supposedly a cycle of attitude between generations. If your parents are X, you want to be Y. If your parents are Y, you want to be Z. If your parents are Z, you want to be X
Boomers were essentially statistically indistinguishable from Millennials in the 2024 presidential election: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-generations-voted-trump-...
No. You can’t blame lead. There is zero justification for making the average person less responsible for their own worldview and choices in leadership.
Well, that’s the first time I’ve heard anyone explicitly say they don’t want to understand causal factors because it would reduce the ability to tell people they should bootstrap themselves.
What exactly are you claiming?
Your points say old people have more lead, but then you say young people are more violent. That doesn't square with the articles point that incarceration rates are falling.
We may have swung the pendulum a little too far towards deliberate, though. The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off. We need to figure out how to build an economy and society that can facilitate deliberate responsible parentage younger and more often. Luckily we have generations to solve the problem, but it’s there looming.
A plane at 75,000 feet can descend for a long time and then level off without crashing. Eventually population will stop declining. Everyone needs to just chill about a declined birthrate.
The plane only levels off by taking the fact that it has no power to its engines seriously, troubleshooting, and then restoring power. That’s all I’m suggesting we start to do.
What is your proof that it will not decline further? If you have no proof, then at the very least the cause must be investigated. After all, the concern is that the current rate of declining birth rate, means extinction in a few centuries.
You don't just shrug that off and say "oh well, it'll probably be just fine."
Sure I do. You have zero proof that decline goes below a world population of 1 billion. This belief that it must always grow is based on just a fear. Very similar to the fear that gays marrying will cause everyone else to stop. Hasn't happened.
I wasn’t as clear as I should have been: I am not talking about global population and humans going to zero in some hyperbolic nightmare fantasy. I am talking about one society, e.g. US population, living with the values and freedoms and technology we enjoy today, sustaining itself. Our society will cease to exist because of course humans aren’t just going to stop making babies. It’s just that the ones that do achieve positive replacement rate will have different society than us. The call to action is that if we want our comfortable society to persist, we have to swing back to a positive replacement rate at some point time (preferably before we become an irrelevant global minority), and also figure out how to insulate against the other faster growing societies, eventually. I never argued we always have to go up, that only matters in the context of ways to combat other more rapidly growing populations.
the only reason for population growth is that economy (asset valuation) is based on future projection of consumption (which is based on population) and social security, which is based on future taxpayer paychecks.
the idea behind "population growth" is that we will need future slaves to prop up our social security and asset bubbles.
think of a country as an ant colony, what happens if population decreases? the queen will get less food
We don't just shrug off the fantasy that there will be zero children born in "a couple of centuries"??
What on earth am I reading?
We do. Because as you said it's a fantasy.
You should play a game of Age of Empires, and have your Villager population halved at some point of the game. See what happens then.
> We don't just shrug off the fantasy that there will be zero children born in "a couple of centuries"??
That's not a fantasy, it's the inevitable outcome of sub-replacement fertility, which is the state we find ourselves in (though my intuition says it will take longer than "a couple of centuries" to get to zero).
It's the inevitable outcome of everybody continuing it for all the generations that remain. As soon as there aren't enough people to manufacture contraceptives, it will of course grow. But after a few generations, there will be more land, water, animal and plant life, copper, cobalt, gold and such per person, and people can easily say "that shrinkage sucked, let's grow". You assume that things will always be the way they are now, which is of course false.
Yes. We’re saying that shrinkage sucked and it’s time to grow. It’s sooner than you’d imagined, perhaps.
....assuming the sub-replacement rate continues forever, which is a hefty assumption. It's quite certain that a greater-than-replacement rate can't continue forever (eventually, the mass of the humans would be greater than the mass of the planet), though that has been the world we've lived in up to now.
There are subpopulations with high birth rates. They are very small currently, but if you really think the general population will die off for want of reproduction, eventually they will comprise a sufficiently large fraction of the population to raise the overall birth rate.
Or, you continue to grow the population through immigration.
The US is unique (or maybe there are a handful of others, I don't know) in its ability to welcome immigrants who, within two generations, largely see themselves as Americans first and not as the identity of their grandparents. American identity politics has eroded this somewhat but it is still largely true, for example, that grandchildren of immigrants will usually have a very poor grasp of their grandparents' native languages.
This doesn't work forever. The birth rates in developing countries are also falling.
This only works if you indoctrinate. I’d say the current US phenomenon is something between raw relocation and true indoctrination. The entire point of my comment was related to maintaining the society we all enjoy (not FUD about some zero population earth as it was construed). If you progressively and move other people into your society but they don’t share your core values then your society dies. If you indoctrinate and accept only those who share your values, then your society can sustain. I’m talking basics like shared desire to respect and uphold a constitution, having a language everyone is expected to know to perform civic functions, equal playing field for both wages and taxes. I’m not saying societies shouldn’t evolve. I’m suggesting that there is a difference between thoughtful social progress and feeling like an alien in your own city.
Declining fertility is a global phenomenon.
I disagree. Immigration suppresses wages. Which suppresses native born childmaking, which fuels more government charity, erm, welfare, which dampens productivity, which erodes civil liberties.
American is not seen as promoting human rights, and to infer all immigrants are good is naive, hate to get off my porch about this. sits back down on rocking chair whistling “I Wish I was In Dixie” and widdling a hangman with the noose almost finished, just a few more threads
> Immigration suppresses wages. Which suppresses native born childmaking, which fuels more government charity, erm, welfare, which dampens productivity, which erodes civil liberties.
Japan and Korea have almost no immigration and abysmally low birth rates. Your arguments don't really hold water. Having children is actually more of a burden on the state, as those kids need schools, (in most western countries publicly funded) healthcare, etc. Taking in a healthy immigrant at 20 is better almost all round from a purely economic point of view.
And immigration doesn't suppress wages any more or less than having tons of kids would over the long term. A person "taking" a job is still a taking a person whether they were born or immigrated. This is ignoring the fact that more people over time enlarge the economy and opportunity in it. Would the United States be a better country today if it didn't accept the mass immigration from Italy, Ireland, and Eastern Europe between 1850-1914 and had 1/4 the population?
So you hate the statue of liberty and America?
> We may have swung the pendulum a little too far towards deliberate, though. The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off.
The US alone doubled it's population since the 1950s. Enough scaremongering.
So we need a Thanos snap and go to half the population to recreate the 1950s growth economy?
> The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off.
Why? Why are we sure that the population will not settle? Or that our increased productivity won't offset a change in labor?
I do worry societies will fail to handle side effects like the temporary increased demand for elder care, but no real fear of total societal collapse.
Birth rates won’t “hold steady” because people don’t die at equal rates. If birth rate is below replacement, old people die off first, the population’s average age goes down every year, and birth rate increases.
A society that is producing children will not die off. The U.S. saw over 3.6 millions births in 2024.
This is not going to happen when you can just import people from other countries.
> This is not going to happen when you can just import people from other countries.
That's basically the same solution as dumping toxic waste overseas: you're just shifting the problem (depopulation) to someplace poorer and probably less able to deal with it.
Birthrates are declining everywhere, and the current global fertility rate is at replacement (so don't expect it to stay that high). In the future, there's going to be no magical place from which you can "import" all the people you need, because you chose not to make them yourself.
Every country on earth is trending downwards. A lot of currently immigrant-exporting countries (e.g. Vietnam, India, Mexico) have sub-replacement levels of birth. They're going to have absolutely massive problems in a few decades when a lot of their youth have left and they're stuck with an inverted population pyramid.
There's a tendency for people in developed (particularly western) countries to feel entitled to immigrants. It's weird to think you'll not only have people changing your diapers when you're 90, but that your country should actively bring in people and deprive poorer countries of similar care, then leave those poor working class immigrants to fend for themselves once they're old.
It's the same mindset that drove society since the 1950s: it makes my life convenient, who cares if it makes life harder for people far from me or after I'm dead? And now we're all living with the accumulated consequences of all that (depleted ozone, climate change, ocean acidification, microplastics, oceans stripped of life, teflon pollution, deforestation, CO2 rising rapidly).
The world needs better solutions.
... until, obviously, those countries' populations start declining as well?
Not too far at all considering the level of overpopulation and resulting environmental crisis we're in.
> ...society will die off.
*capitalist society will die off. ( )
See also: automation, ai, robots.... we probably don't need as many people / are headed for work shortages anyway.
And that may well be the ultimate resolution (that individual-liberty-preserving capitalist societies with unrestricted access to contraception die off). However, if we like how life works right now then we’ll have to work to sustain it. There’s probably a capitalism-preserving way to incentivize children…
Too far is an understatement.
People keep poking at the wrong reasons, but in some societies it is quite dire. South Korea with this year of 1, when 2.1 means 'static', means more than halving the population every 30 years or so.
For a reverse comparison, if you take a penny and double it every day, you end up with > $5M in 30 days. And yet this birthrate issue doesn't take into account plague, war, natural disasters, and potential issues with lack of food(starvation). And the worst of it?
Is that I believe it is 100% environmental.
People think "having children" is a conscious choice. And sure, there is some of that. But at the same time, it is the very point of existence for an organism. Actually producing children (not just performing the sex act) is an evolutionary requirement. It is literally the primary drive of existence. Risky behaviour is ingrained into us, if it enables the possibility of reproduction. The drives and energy we place into everything we do, has a background drive that is sexual in nature. We seek to excel, to impress the opposite sex.
Like it or not (I'm not like that, I decide, not my hormones!), this is effectively an accepted fact of animal psychology. It's a part of who we are, our culture is designed around it, and every aspect of our lives is ruled by it.
Why am I on about this??
Well, my point is that this is a primary drive, interlaced so deeply that it affects every aspect of who we are. Reproduction, the production and raising of offspring is an act we are, naturally, compelled to. Forced to. Need to do.
Unless of course specific chemicals, maybe microplastics or all of the "forever chemicals" in our blood, are blocking that process.
Again, people will chime in with the popular "But it's expensive". No. Just no. Nope! My point above is that this is primal drive. People have had children in the depression, on purpose. Historically people, even with contraceptives, have had children regardless.
If it's about money, why is the birth rate declining in countries with free daycare, universal health care, and immensely strong support for parents post birth? Mandated career protection for mothers, months and months of time off after birth all paid. Immense tax breaks making children almost a profitable enterprise. In fact, in some European countries, it is more affordable to have kids than at any time in human history... and the birth rate still declines. It's just not about money. It just is not.
Why I think this is immensely important, is because we aren't seeing a rate, but an ongoing declining rate. The rate isn't just the lowest in human history, but the rate continues to decline. It's not '1' for South Korea, it's 1 right now, and will be 0.5 eventually.
What happens when no one can have children?
I further ask this, because the entire future of the species is at risk. People get all "who cares about going on", but wars do happen, plagues do happen, and I assure you I'm happy to be here, regardless of what the survivors of the bubonic plague thought at the time. Yet if we see a plague that kills 1/2 the population, where does that leave this equation? And what happens if we see a war that kills mostly those of child bearing age? What then?
My secondary concern in all of this is, we have very specialized roles these days. There was a time where a person could be a "a physicist", yet now there are 1000s of sub-specialties in such fields. And not everyone in the population is capable of expanding science. Of discovering 'new'.
My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress. There simply will not be enough people intelligent in a way functional to, say, physics, to expand that field.
So if our population decreases too far, we may not be able to resolve issues with, say, forever chemicals. Or with microplastics. Our capacity to do research and resolve such issues may vanish.
Couple that with a graph that is constantly declining, and a simple 50% death rate in a plague, could mean the extinction of the human race.
So my real concern here is, we aren't swinging the pendulum on purpose. It's happening to us. We're in the middle of an extinction event.
And it's only going to get far, far worse.
The entire point of having human intelligence is being able to ignore or overthink or delay or prevent any primal urges. We also have urges to kill and rake and destroy but I doubt you’re going “laws are bad because they prevent out primal urges”.
Also appeals to evolution are extremely weak and lazy and unproven.
No it’s not, the point is to outperform other predators and be the apex. Always has been.
Urges to kill and rake and destroy? The first, yes. The second, lack of care by some.
Yet the first is aggression often born from, again, reproductive drive. You don't see moose smashing the horns together for fun, they do it to exhibit dominance. All creatures strive to say "I'm the best!", in hundreds of subtle and overt ways. "Success" at any act means "I'm a better mate!".
All of human culture, all of human drive, all of our existence is laced, entwined, and coupled with this drive. You may think your fancy pants brain is the ruler of all, but it's not, for the very way you think, is predicated by an enormous amount of physiological drives, the primary being "reproduce".
Saying that "citing concepts from entire branch of science" is weak, is a very weird thing to do.
Throughout most of human history we have had less than a billion people.
More people are alive today than have ever lived.
And you are concerned that the population will drop by a half?
Everyone will be richer and better off. The amount of pollution and resource use will be solved too. The underlying input to that is the number of people.
One third of arable land is undergoing desertification
Insects and other species are dying off precipitously
Corals and kelp forests too, entire ecosystems. Overfishing etc.
My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress.
That’s silly when AI can already make 1 person do the job of 100, and soon will be doing most of the science — it has already done this for protein folding etc. And it will happen sooner than in 30 years.
This argument you and Musk make about needing more humans for science is super strange. Because you know the AI will make everything 100x anyway. And anyway, I would rather have the current level of science than ecosystem collapse across the board.
> More people are alive today than have ever lived.
Assuming you meant died instead of lived to avoid a potentially nonsensical reading, this is not true.
It seems this factoid[0] has been around since the 1970s, and at least in 2007 it was estimated to be 6% of people who'd ever lived being currently alive [1]
[0] In the original sense of factoid - being fact-like, but not a fact (i.e. not true). C.f. android, like a man
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
And you are concerned that the population will drop by a half?
If you read more carefully, I am concerned by two things. A reduction to 0, and the lack of control over this. I think you don't get how the rate is continuing to decline, and further, that knowing why is important.
And I have not said we need "more humans". Instead, I said we need a base number of humans.
> If you read more carefully, I am concerned by two things. A reduction to 0, and the lack of control over this.
I think you need to drop back to reality to reassess your concerns. Barring a major disaster, there is no risk of extinction. Population decline is a factor only in economic terms, as demographics alone will require a significant chunk of a nation's productivity potential to sustain people who left the workforce. However, countries like the US saw it's population double in only two or three generations, and people in the 50s weren't exactly fending off extinction.
> What happens when no one can have children?
That sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie.
Children of men, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men
Population is a london horse manure problem. In both directions.
In 30 years time, people might be uploading their consciousness to computers, or colonising the moon. Making dire warnings about a concept like breeding that we might just get rid of seems foolish at best.
>We're in the middle of an extinction event.
No we are not. Lmao. Same way Horse Manure didnt snuff out life in London.
But it's not uniform. In the span of ~60 years, the average birth rate doesn't matter as much as the distribution and how much the children model their parents.
Small example (multiply all numbers by 1M), average birth rate of 1.5 can be a group of 4 people where one had 0 children, one had 1, one had 2, one had 3. If each child has as many children as its parents, next generation, 0 have 0 children, 1 has 1, 2 have 2, 3 have 3, for a new average of 2.33.
If you take a higher starting average but a tight spread [2, 2, 2, 2], the next average is only 2. Or if you have [0, 1, 2, 3] but kids model society instead of parents, you get 1.5 again.
Of course children didn't model their parents the past couple of generations, but times may be changing.
The entire premise of the article is that fewer crimes are being committed by youth because arrests are down.
That's wrong, actually what's happening is police have just given up on arresting kids who will be released.
> All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.
Or the less popular more controversial hypothesis: the steepest decline in births is among the poor, a population with, on average, worse impulse control and more issues with mental health, and since all qualities are at least partly heritable...
Surprisingly, the fertility rate among the affluent does not appear to be nearly as impacted.
> the steepest decline in births is among the poor, a population with, on average, worse impulse control and more issues with mental health, and since all qualities are at least partly heritable... Surprisingly, the fertility rate among the affluent does not appear to be nearly as impacted.
Generally, fertility rates are higher among poorer populations compared to wealthier populations. This pattern is observed both at the national level, with poorer countries generally having higher fertility rates than wealthier ones, and at the individual level, with poorer families tending to have more children than wealthier families.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link...
> Generally, fertility rates are higher among poorer populations compared to wealthier populations.
Yes, but they were even higher in the past. Fertility has declined among the poorer classes much more than among higher income classes, probably due to the availability of contraceptives and abortion:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gs5lgb_bIAAYoo1?format=jpg
You're half implying this but I wonder if the change in youth culture comes from the simple ratio of adults vs kids in the social circle around each kid. Youth culture needs a lot of kids around to get amplified. When most of the people around you are adult you may tend to adopt the culture of the adult world rather than creating your own.
We still need to improve the numbers regarding single (&absent) parent households.
With this and robotics advancement maybe everything could work out.
Or maybe it's just today's youth are too neurotic, anti-social, and screen-addicted to go out into the real world and misbehave? They're also having less sex, and drinking less as well. Also consider that it's much harder to get away with crimes today than it was decades ago, and penalties for getting caught are often more severe.
Incarceration isn't the same thing as crime. If the most populous state by far (California, almost 40m people in 2025) passes a law[0] that stealing things under $950 is a misdemeanor rather than a felony, then crime can continue while incarceration rates drop.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47
This is a very one sided presentation of the facts. This fact is generally used to suggest that theft is all a liberal blue state issue. The highest felony theft amount in the US is in red Texas and is $2500. Around 40 states have a *HIGHER* felony $ limit for theft than California. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense to not spend $10K+ to jail someone for stealing $500 of stuff. There are more cost effective ways to rehabilitate people. However, our society doesn't prioritize helping as much as punishing.
The whole hoopla around the felony status is just a proxy. when you commit a bunch of felonies there's all sorts of coded in law and process (sentencing guidelines) that apply (as well as KPIs, cops and prosecutors care about being able to say they put felons away) so you can't really be habitually felonious very much without winding up behind bars.
Below the felony threshold the system is far more free to let you go back out and keep doing what you're doing.
So the actual dollar threshold of felony theft is really just a crappy (because not all states go equally hard on non-felony crime) proxy for the rate of recidivism.
I thought the biggest issue was that DA's simply won't prosecute for these if they're nonviolent crimes, opting to drop the case? Austin, TX has a similar DA who refuses in much the same way.
Yeah search for "California store owner kills" and "Texas store owner kills" and see the variety that comes up. In Texas the people are the militia and defend their property. That limit doesn't matter there.
People are increasingly shopping at chain stores, where the staff generally aren't interested in risking their lives for some shareholders. The same phenomenon of stores locking up products on their shelves is happening in both places.
Sounds like crime is real bad in Texas if citizens are having to take the law into their own hands.
My state has guns and a felony theft limit higher than Cali and we neither have store clerks regularly killing people nor businesses closing due to theft.
Your own link points out that $950 is just taking into account inflation. When the law was created in 1982 the amount was $400, which was about $981 in 2014.
Inflation would eventually make stealing a candy bar a felony. Or we could updated the numbers periodically
It’s very hard to record crime rates in prisons.
Incarcerating people likely to commit crimes will mean their future crimes are much less likely to be reported.
This does not mean less crime, it means crime just isn’t being recorded.
Even the most rigorous studies account for crimes committed in prisons.
You know that the bar is higher in Texas for it to be a felony, right?
The "California decriminalized theft" narrative is nonsense.
There are many reasons why crime is in decline, but ultimately its economic.
Crime used to pay. Your expected return on a crime was pretty good for the risk involved. Nowadays though, because of technology, risk has increased while the returns have also decreased. Barriers to entry for crimes worth committing are now way higher. Robbing a gas station decades ago could yield a nice chunk of cash that could probably pay bills for a month. But now with less people using cash and cost of living increasing, there’s no point. Most registers have pitiful amount of cash. And mugging strangers on the street is likely even worse. No one carries wads of cash anymore.
The hot industry to be in is ransomware. The sums are vast and the risk is low if you do it right. But it’s very white collar, it requires skills that your typical low level criminal won’t have.
Overall, it means there’s a lot of crimes that are done not for any financial reason, just for personal satisfaction.
By necessity criminals are having to move up the corporate ladder to have access to that which is worth appropriating.
not forgetting that CCTV is absolutely ubiquitous and high def, where previously it was reasonably rare and low quality
I am doubtful widespread recordings are making much of a change. Unless you are Luigi Mangione, are police actually following video footage trying to tie up a crime? Even with a city wide alert, he almost escaped.
It has been a common refrain that someone has an AirTag or other electronic surveillance they used to identify a thief, for which the police do nothing.
They actually do use the footage in a lot of cases. Bigger cities often have staff dedicated to just trying to extract raw footage from Temu-quality CCTV recording devices that most places own.
there's a major difference between an AirTag or tracking or some other form of relatively complex new-fangled technology that can be easily made to seem confusing or unreliable or even just inadmissible to a judge or jury, and high definition video evidence. if you're in a public place and there are a hundred video cameras, you're obviously going to be less inclined to do something illegal. this particularly being true for violent mob/gang activity
And most young people would rather have social media that lets them easily be tracked than staying anonymous for the purposes of committing crimes.
Even if you leave your phone at home to create an alibi for yourself, it is very likely that CCTVs will see you enroute to the crime scene, if not at the crime scene itself. Between businesses with cameras, front door cameras on houses, and traffic cameras, it's very difficult to travel anywhere without leaving a trace that investigators can pick up after the fact if they're sufficiently motivated.
I have a (likely lifelong) mostly-unrealised project to try and document all the things necessary to maximise the anonymity of committing a petty crime, with the vague notion of turning it into a meta-story about the joys of pointless intellectual pursuits that cost far more than they materially return.
wi-fi/phone signal jammer would have to be included. most cctv operates wirelessly over wi-fi and no one is phoning the police with their phone signal jammed
This is good news. The level of crime and number of offenders has decreased.
Quotes from the article:
Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated
Well also, the number one crime these youths were getting arrested for was drug possession. With drug trafficking being second. 15 years ago the vast majority of people in prison in texas were there for drug possession or trafficking. If all of a sudden everyone's drug of choice is marijuana, and it's being decriminalized everywhere, I have to think that makes it hard to get the numbers you used to get in terms of arrests.
Not that this is a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that while arrests did go down, I don't necessarily believe that the prevalence of pot smoking decreased.
One benefit is that this new environment should help them to have better futures than the youths that came before them.
Like all complex phenomena 1960s crime wave probably has many causes, but lead poisoning stands out - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
>ike all complex phenomena 1960s crime wave probably has many causes, but lead poisoning stands out
And the ones who didn't get sent to prison, stunt their career by being useless hippies or drive their muscle cars drunk so habitually that laws got passed are the current heads of most public and private institutions.
So things will likely improve a bit when those people age out as their replacements will likely be picked from an unleaded pool.
Bold of you to assume the "microplastic'd pool" will be any better
Drugs. Don’t overthink things.
To dig deeper, not only are young people doing less drugs (good), but we've also stopped being so unbelievably fucking crazy with our policing of drugs. In many places marijuana is basically decriminalized, although not outright legal. Not too long ago even just carrying around marijuana could land you decades in prison, depending on how black you were.
Still can in many states, although the average internet seems to be unaware of this. I saw someone getting torn apart for defending their husbands felony marijuana possession conviction as “not a bad person” because people think that today you only get that charge if you were driving a truck full of the stuff with a body in the back, but in e.g. Florida it’s still up to 5 years for 20g plain possession.
https://www.findlaw.com/state/criminal-laws/marijuana-posses...
> Rapidly declining numbers of youth
May be the result of a rapidly declining birth rate.
Crime is still happening. The arrests are just not being made. There is a readon why us stores have more and more stuff behind locks.
> There is a readon why us stores have more and more stuff behind locks
To foment hysteria in feeble minded neurotics?
Why would stores be interested in fomenting hysteria in feeble minded neurotics?
The prison industry is very profitable and influential. If prison populations are dropping naturally, you might imagine that politicians might start looking for some new population to incarcerate.
No it isn’t.
One of the biggest ones, GEO, only made $30m last year with a margin of 1.1%.
Another one, CXW, made $84m.
SSTI is losing money.
Microsoft makes $284m… per day.
Have you compared Microsoft’s published lobbying budget to that of the private prison industry?
Microsoft spent ~8x on lobbying compared with GEO group.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/microsoft-corp/summary?id=d... https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/geo-group/summary?id=D00002...
In part due to simple demographics?
If most prisoners are younger, starting their incarceration incidents in their teens or twenties, then basically the fewer young people you have, the less people in prison:
https://populationeducation.org/u-s-population-pyramids-over...
Compare 1960 to 2020.
Freakonomics argued that crime correlates to whether or not abortion is available.
If it is not, crime rates are up, and by a lot.
If it is, crime rates are down.
When you flip from one to the other, takes about 15/20 years for the effect to show up.
Rationale is that forcing parents to have their kids when they're not ready for them significantly increases delinquency in young adults.
This is apparently the only possible theory at the moment. It's not proven, of course, but the other theories which were given have been found lacking. This is the only theory which has some evidence, and hasn't been found to be wrong.
Please be careful about Freakonomics and the other PopSci books like it. Many of the claims it makes have either been disproven, shown to be flawed, or do not reflect consensus among serious researchers. Some examples here:
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/freakonomics-what-...
I doubt there is a single explanation. I think it's multiple factors.
Unleaded gasoline could also be a factor. Every country has shown drops in crime rates when leaded gasoline was phased out.
If I recall, leaded gasoline was phased out in the 80ies, which fits a drop in crime rates in the 90ies.
The drop in crime also correlates very well with releases of popular violent video games: http://www.gamerdad.com/blog/2008/04/08/downard-spiral/
And lead paint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
Unfortunately, the current US administration and congress are trying to expose us to more lead: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/03/republicans-...
Yes but I'd say reduction of lead use in general.
Availability of pornography has cut down the rate of rapes significantly. Too bad the republicans are going to try to ban all porn pretty soon, according to their stated agenda. They do love their wealthy donors that run the prison-industrial-complex.
A lot of the current drop has decriminalization of drugs as a contributing factor. Same principle.
This would be a good theory if it was supported at all by data. There has been a decrease but if you squint it's a flat line. The best you can really say is that the availability of pornography is neutral.
I have seen the data that suggests strongly that pornography lowers rapes. You've put up no data to refute that, so until you do I will continue believing the data I saw. If you do put up some actual data to support your claims (instead of just saying "nuh uhh"), I'll review it and then provide my own.
Can you share that data
There are numerous articles all over the internet both supporting my claim, as well as negating it, depending on the agenda of the source - there are many people that are morally opposed to porn that would want my claim to be false (and they would still want to ban porn even if that increases rape). Here's some articles that support:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sunny-side-of...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.h...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201601...
The data I saw, probably about 20 years ago...
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d6f248400fd5308b6d5d0...
I can't verify the source since this data is 20 years old and I can't remember where it came from, but at the time it seemed like a good enough source, and this was before "truth" lost all meaning in the age of the conservative-bent "my feelings are as good as your facts" world we currently live in.
The rate of homicides and other violent crime have also declined significantly over the same period, so unless you contend that pornography also caused that, the data shows that it does not increase the rate of rape.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-1990-vs-202...
Nice try moving goalposts, but the data I showed correlates reduction in RAPE with availability of porn, nothing more, nothing less. You can also say that people dying in car accidents reduced during the same time, and seatbelt laws enacted during that time would be the cause. Nothing you've provided disproves that access to porn has no effect on rape. You've only moved goalposts.
But sure, let's ban all porn and watch the rape cases start increasing - I'm sure that's the best way forward. /s
>Nice try moving goalposts
Uh, yep? I absolutely did that. Your goalposts were in a crazy place. If your goalposts are “rape has to be a special type of violent crime even though rapists frequently (kind of by definition) commit other violent crimes” then yes, I moved them to where pretty much everyone else has them: among other heinous, violent crimes that share the same downward trend over the same period of time.
>the data I showed correlates reduction in RAPE with availability of porn
I could also draw a graph of rapes going down from 1990 and mp3 usage going up, would that indicate that there is a causal relationship between the two?
>nothing more, nothing less.
That is factually untrue. I showed you data of another correlation. That would be the more or less.
Unless the porn and rape graph is meaningful but the rape and murder graph is not? Or the rape and assault graph? Only porn has a meaningful correlation to rape? If your assertion is that rape does not correlate with other violent crime then the onus is on you to provide data and explain why.
Also I’m not anti-porn at all. I think it’s great and consenting adults should be able to watch other consenting adults do whatever. But I have never seen a worse argument for it than “porn line go up rape line go down down therefore causality”. It is a fantastical and indefensible assertion based on anecdotes at best. It is basically what I would come up with if my specific goal was to not be taken seriously.
You've proven nothing here except that you are willing to move goalposts to try win pointless internet arguments. Congrats on that!
>Availability of pornography has cut down the rate of rapes significantly.
Oh for the love of $DEITY, this is some /r/shithackernewssays. Rape is not a crime about sex. Please don't do this.
That correlation has pretty much been debunked.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime...
Dubunked does not mean critiqued.
America closes a college per week and multiple primary schools per week. There are fewer youth to commit crime or otherwise.
In NYC the black community has a majority of pregnancies not end with the birth of a child. This is where abortion policy is focused.
It’s simpler and less nefarious than that. Kids have to meet up to produce offspring. If kids don’t meet up, no drugs, no sex, no kids having kids. Video games, smart phones, and chat apps are more likely the cause of this change.
Someone else commented about a correlation between violent video games and reduction in crime. I feel like 'people are inside playing games' is as much of an explanation for that as is 'violent games give violent people an outlet'.
I am not a violent kid, but when I was young I would cause some mischief in the form of making fires in the forest and using pipe to blow paper darts into open windows. Then when video games came up, we stopped going outside and played video games together.
Coincidentally, cyber crime is massively rising and a lot of the perpetrators are relatively young in my experience. I feel like maybe violent crime is dropping because these people found different ways of getting what they want, like selling bogus investment schemes online.
It’s clearly very easy to correlate low crime with free healthcare, education, unemployment, social safety net.
Compare the US to every other OECD country.
Nobody outside the US would even waste their time on having the discussion it is so blaringly obvious, but those in the US suffering the effects will denounce it till the cows come home.
What do you mean by education? The USA has higher PISA scores than peer countries and also has high rates of tertiary education. Do you think that middle class educated people having high student debt burdens causes crime?
Free tertiary education.
The US has vastly higher illiteracy than OECD countries.
US has much higher tertiary education attainment than the OECD average. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
People with tertiary education who paid a lot for it or are in debt for it do not commit large numbers of crimes!
Not sure what you mean by "illiteracy" which is measured in different ways. US PISA reading scores are higher than all but 2 EU countries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
I'd wager that the foster system is a huge factor. Poverty is likely the rest.
When you don't give a human resources, they will find a way to take it. When you force humans with no resources to have kids, well...
Why abortion and not contraceptives?
Maybe people who are bad at pre-planning are also potentially poor parents.
Women's contraceptives in the states require a prescription. Which requires a doctor's appointment + insurance. If you are poor or live with strict parents (ironically), you are much less likely to seek them out.
Condoms are their own bag of worms. I think there are cultural differences in condom use here, as well as the same problem with them being a cost. This doesn't even touch on men being shady with stealthing and pressure.
On the other hand, the abortion clinic requires only an appointment and a way to get there.
In the 1980s, condoms were "behind the counter" things you had to ask for and suffer the critical eye of the pharmacy worker (at least in small town USA).
It's no wonder we had so many teen pregnancies.
Why not both
one can be prevented by the other
No contraceptive method is 100% effective.
hence "can be"
We don’t need airbags because injury can be prevented by seatbelts.
The "don't need" part is a fictitious part you inserted into the argument and not a claim I made.
Injury "can be" prevented by seatbelts, that is a valid claim.
I don't know what else you could have meant when you answered the question "Why not both" with "one can be prevented by the other".
The implied meaning is: "Not both because one can be prevented by the other".
Your reptilian reflexes have impaired your ability to read or have meaningful discussions. Good bye.
Hence "both".
not prevented… (trust me :)) but best we can do!!
They probably aren’t using them.
Unless abortion is considered a crime by itself?
For me, this is a bit of a suspicious explanation, because Europe is a patchwork of abortion laws, with some countries being traditionally strictly religious and other less so, but the crime stats don't copy that.
Communist Romania once banned even contraceptives, and yet it never became a violent crime haven, not even after Communism fell. (Which was some 25 years after the ban, so the unwanted kids should still have been in their prime criminal age.)
Maybe the correlation isn't causational, maybe it only works in specific demographic groups...
[dead]
That would also explain why the current administration is banning abortion. Got to keep the prison slaves flowing.
How much of this is due to smartphones? The years seem to line up.
2014 seemed like the big year where smartphone ubiquity changed US teen culture. Less boredom, dumb adventure, drinking, etc. (For better or worse but in this case better.)
A big part. But pagers too. The decline of drug "turf" crime when things transitioned to networks of contacts correlated with the decline in violence on the streets which probably only accelerated with smart phones. No longer worth fighting over corners.
Devils advocate: smartphones have made antisocial tiktok trends, "fast money" hacks and paint an unrealistic portrait of success. Before, only rappers could be young and rich and flashy. Now, seemingly regular teens are millionaires and this is constantly fed into young people's feeds.
That might be true but it’s another topic.
If your point is that the benefits of crime reduction due to smartphones are outweighed by harms to mental health, then I think most people would disagree.
But this is also probably painting far too rosy a picture of what Meta is doing.
I hear your point as: up until then scams, gambling and Ponzi schemes were for adults with strong purchasing power (could sink all the family's money in one single decision), when with smartphones everyone gets to enjoy screwing themselves directly.
My hot take is that previous generations weren't better prepared for the adult world than today's kids. They were more "mature" (sex, violence, abuse resistance) in some respects, but not specially ready for caring about society.
Or maybe video games. Lots of teen boys staying at home playing Xbox instead of getting into trouble.
I blazed that trail in the 80s.
One more thing to throw into the mix. The treatment of ADHD might be helping:
"ADHD medication still reduces risks, but benefits have weakened over time"
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
I once asked myself, "What did people with ADHD as severe as mine do before there was medication?"
The obvious answer was: drugs. People like me used to do a lot of drugs.
I think taking available stimulants, like nicotine and caffeine, were also ways of coping as they generally help with ADHD focus (or the lack thereof). I know anecdotally that I really hit my academic stride in college when I took up both habits. I still notice a small difference after coffee (gave up smoking a long time back).
We may see a boom in crime as functional illiteracy rates climb, which is already correlated with criminal behavior. A generation that is weaned on having a computer do everything by voice command and gaining passive knowledge exclusively through videos will have more living on the margins who can't function well in a society that needs some base level of competence in understanding and interpreting text.
While my Target puts Legos behind plexiglas. While my Safeway puts deodorant behind plexiglas.
Statistics are amazing.
Even crime stats are "down". Don't report, don't convict - done.
This points more towards organized crime rings targeting stores, taking large amounts of the same popular items, then reselling them on eBay or Amazon. If you have a smallish number of people doing a largish number of crimes, this won't be reflected in incarceration statistics (particularly if the resellers rarely get caught).
Even the organized crime ring panic was made up. The data presented to congress was completely wrong and various organizations had to publicly eat crow about it.
"This points more towards" -- you have any source towards this? :)
Why selectively put this onus on the person you've responded to and not the person at the top of this thread?
Um. The same could be said to you? I don't see what your point is.
I know that in recent years Target has announced that they were investigating, in partnership with local and federal law enforcement, organized theft rings. It was publicly reported on here in Minneapolis.
Many, many of those claims were found to be significantly exaggerated. It bothers me immensely that people still talk about this nonsense.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-14/column-ret...
Or maybe they're low sales-volume items in a low profit margin store and it's cheaper to put some things behind glass than post up a security guard to deal with the fact that almost everyone, even nice old ladies at the grocery store, steal things sometimes?
What makes you think almost everyone steal things sometimes?
Well 40% admit to it but those are just the honest dishonest people
https://losspreventionmedia.com/new-survey-reveals-more-than...
The Atlantic suggests this results from the release of those convicted during a decades long crime wave, which apprently took place when many of us grew up. Perhaps it also tracks with a progressive decline in law enforcement. Whether that is because crime waves not longer exist or whether it is some other reason is a question for the reader. A substanbtial amount of crime is now done via internet. Few are ever convicted.
Marijuana possession was the number one crime and is now legal in a majority of states. This seems like the high-order bit.
It is absolutely bonkers to me this ever was a crime. I don't like the stuff but where I am from it was basically like smoking (which now no one does anymore); seeing people getting prison time really, at that time, made me think 'land of the free, my ass'.
^ This. The drug war was an attempt for conservatives to punish poor people for using a harmless drug (marijuana) to help cope with systemic inequality, and kids for wanting to have fun.
From 1950-1970, America introduced new mandatory minimums for possession of marijuana. First-time offenses carried a minimum of 2-10 yrs in prison and a fine of up to $20,000. They repealed these minimums in 1970 because it did jack shit to stop people smoking. The govt even recommended decriminalizing marijuana in 1970, but Nixon rejected it.
But then came The Parents. As fucking usual, parents "concerned for their children" began a years-long lobbying and marketing effort to convince the public any kind of drug was evil and harming kids. Through the 1980s their lobbying spread to all corners of the government, influencing messaging and policy. So finally in 1986, Reagan introduced new mandatory minimums for marijuana, based on amount. Having 100 marijuana plants was the same crime as 100 grams of heroin. And then they went further; if you we caught with marijuana three times, you got a life sentence. Life. For pot. In 1989, Bush Sr. officially declared the "new" War on Drugs. And we've all been paying for it ever since.
It is not a harmless drug though. Less harmless than most others, but not harmless.
At what point in the last 30 years did cannabis possession account for even a plurality of incarcerated persons, in any state or federally?
Cannabis is not the high order bit.
Well apparently 43% of American inmates are incarcerated for drug related offenses. https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
This article claims that about 32k people in 2021 were for cannabis related offense, and simply carrying that to today would be 23% of the prison population: the largest offense type. https://www.lastprisonerproject.org/cannabis-prisoner-scale
32,000 people is about 1% of all those incarcerated.
How do the two sets of states compare on crime rates since the change?
Of course it does. The framing is from the establishment. The surge in crime and rise in prison population is because we criminalized existence EG "the war on drugs". Now we're getting rid of some of the worse things.
Crime is also down compared to where it was if you ask people directly [0].
[0]: https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/multi-year-trends/crimeType
Good grief. There should be a federal law against that much Google Javascript and tracking on a government website without offering a non-Google, no-JS alternative.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs
https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/data/custom-graphics/person/all_all...
The NCVS measures self-reported victims not convicts.
It does not measure criminal charges, convictions or imprisonment.
The NCVS is only focused on a subset of crimes, some of which do not carry prison sentences. For example, it excludes drug offences. It excludes manslaughter and homicide. It excludes financial crimes.
The survey is only given to census recipients, i.e., households and individuals. Non-residential addresses are not included. It only targets a subset of crime victims.
Perhaps better sources to look at would be UCR, SRS and NIBRS.
I'd like to see stats on how many people are getting arrested for petty crimes e.g. marijuana (which isn't even a crime in some contexts any more) back then vs now.
This is interesting. I don't know why it's happening. However, this book deserves a mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur... . It shares statistics on how violence has been decreasing throughout the history of humanity.
I don't know how good that book actually is, but I read acoup blog and it criticizes that book very often. Instead it recommends readers to Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization instead https://www.amazon.com/War-Human-Civilization-Azar-Gat/dp/01...
as a followup to that (excellent) book, here's Barry Glassner - A Culture of Fear. The Better Angels of Our Nature talks about how violence has always been declining. A Culture of Fear talks about how the rate of that decline has been increasing since the 90s but people actually perceive things as becoming more dangerous rather than less, and attempts to come up with an answer as to why that may be the case.
The most obvious answer is large-scale media. I can learn about a shooting on the other side of the country within hours of it happening, and think "that could happen where I am". Likewise with any other news, which by definition is about out-of-the-ordinary events. There's more news about violence because there's more news, not because there's more violence, but it feels like there's more violence.
Piling onto this, humans have both recency and frequency biases that, combined with the attention-as-currency news industry, tend to lead to an increase in the perceived danger of violent crime that's entirely disconnected from the actual statistical danger of violent crime. You hear about more crimes, you hear about each crime more often, and your estimate of how much crime there actually is increases.
"if it bleeds, it leads" is (or was, i'm old) a common saying regarding the news media. It may be that there is more news that scares us because scaring us is profitable
This has often been attributed to banning lead additives from gasoline.
20 century features pretty much largest genocides ever. Multiple of them. And in addition, things that we do not count as genocides, but still involved deliberate killing of millions.
That particular book was criticized by historians a lot.
Maybe that violence is just better organized now. Personal violence is declining (assault, murder, ...), but not organized violence (war, genocide, ...).
The best stat is that nearly 90% of prisoners had absent fathers.
Does that mean we can stop keeping mouth wash and deodorant behind lock and key on store shelves and resume locking up the criminals making messes of our cities?
It's unclear if the decline in prisoners stems from a decline in crime. While I generally believe the statistics that violent crime has decreased, it may be the case that the judicial system and even the government in general just have no enthusiasm for prosecuting or punishing it.
In short, no, they won't stop locking it up. They wouldn't even if there was a decline in petty crime... those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5.
I live in a deep Red Bible thumping, back the blue, law and order county / state.
About 7 years ago a former schoolmate of mine shot a man 6 times over a bad drug deal, fled the state to California. He was captured by the US Marshal and brought back to the county jail where he bonded out after 3 month.
After his bonding out, he drove over to the victim’s parent’s house and performed a drive-by shooting, injuring none but did kill livestock.
He was arrested again, taken to the county jail, and bonded out after several months.
The issue finally reached a plea bargain, they dropped all charges related to both shooting, had him plead guilty to felony firearms charge, and gave him time served and 5 years probation.
This man is a grown adult with felony priors, and got a proverbial slap on the wrist. Never saw a day of state prison, likely never will.
If this is how we treat serious violent crime, I’m not surprised in TFA at all.
I live in super liberal Illinois, which recently ended cash bail. It was a rough transition period but now it is fully implemented and every judge and prosecutor knows how everything works.
Cook County Jail (Chicago and close-in suburbs) population is higher than it has been in over a decade. They had to reopen a section of the jail to deal with it. Because people who do what that guy did no longer get to bond out. If someone fled to California and got brought back by the Marshal’s service, he’s sitting in jail until trial. And he is the one that needs to negotiate and offer concessions.
Note: crime is now dropping a lot [1]. Trying setting the date range to “last 28 days”
[1] https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/vrd/home.html
The end of cash bail was the right idea, though. At the time it ended there were ~100 homicide defendants out on bail (usually $150K+), yet there were hundreds of people held for months or years on petty offenses for want of under $250 to bail out.
Wouldn't wish my worst enemy to be held in the CCJ, though. Easily one of the worst detention facilities in the USA.
I disagree. Cash bail is about holding someone's money hostage to secure their presence at court... the problem always was the violation of 8th amendment rights. By demanding excessive bail, the person couldn't possibly cough up the amount, which forced them to utilize bail bondsmen instead. Except that turns bail into a fine, because unlike true bail which is returned when they appear at court, bonds are retained by the bail bondsman.
Simply obeying the 8th amendment would have fixed everything, and so much better too.
In some cases, high bail was used because judges were pussies who refused to deny bail to those who were actual threats to the public (see this alot whenever you hear bullshit about some killer whose bail is set at $5 million or whatever). Other times, it was just the status quo, and judges were giving no real consideration to the problem.
The whole concept of pretrial detention is fraught with problems.
At least in Illinois, the theory is that now most defendants should be able to be free, or on house arrest, until their trial.
Illinois doesn't allow bondsmen, which, while it meant you got your bond back† it also meant that, unlike other states, you couldn't pay a smaller amount to a bondsman for him to get you out. So I imagine in Illinois at least, more people were stuck in pretrial due to (as you say) excessive bail.
One issue is that a lot of defendants have zero cash, or zero access to their cash. You can't pay your own bond. Someone has to pay your bond for you. You can't go to an ATM and get the money out. You can't access the Internet to sell your shares or take a loan against your real estate. These people are stuck in pretrial until their case is resolved, which can take over a decade in some instances.
I had a cellmate who was wrongfully arrested and had a $20K bond set. He was homeless. I proved the case was frivolous and sent him to court with the paperwork. The judge agreed, but gave the prosecution 60 days to respond. He reset the bail at $200. I offered to pay it, but instead he just asked to use my phone credit. He spent all day calling his homeless friends and over the next three days over a dozen of them walked to the jail and dropped off $10 and $20 bills until he had enough to leave.
If a judge sets excessive bail, which the vast majority do, then you can appeal it. It's usually immediately appealable. In most states this would be a 6-stage appellate process to exhaust your rights. Each level taking usually one to two years.
The conditions in county jails are vastly more punitive than even the harshest supermax prisons, generally. Absolutely abominable conditions. I remember one recent case where a homeless person was grabbed off the street for having a bag of white powder. He was put in pretrial detention. He pled guilty to possession of cocaine and took (IIRC) a 5-year prison sentence. Just before he was shipped out the lab results came back as negative for cocaine. The bag was powdered milk he had obtained from a food bank. The judge asked why he pled guilty and he simply pointed out the conditions of the jail were so harsh that he couldn't take it. Pretrial detention vastly increases both the conviction rate (you're more likely to plead guilty even if the charges are wrong) and also the length of sentence (people dressed in suits coming from the street just look less criminal and are sentenced a lot lighter, compared to people in Hamburgler outfits coming from jail).
I think the writing is on the wall, though. There has been an absolute ton of hardcore litigation in the last decade on the legality of bail, and the intermediate appellate courts are striking it down. I think if SCOTUS had a slightly different makeup, then we'd see bail abolished at the federal constitutional level right now. The reason for the new statutes in Illinois and other states, counties and cities is that they are getting ahead of the problem. Better to fix it now than get sued down the road.
† You'd rarely get it back. Often the judge would impose a fine, if you were sentenced, that would swallow your bond. One bonus, though, is that you could usually make your bond do "double-duty" by using it to bail out, but at the same time signing it over to an attorney to pay his costs. When the case reaches disposition the bond would go directly to the lawyer.
>I think the writing is on the wall, though. There has been an absolute ton of hardcore litigation in the last decade on the legality of bail, and the intermediate appellate courts are striking it down.
I think this bodes ill, myself. I expect a slowly-but-steadily rising culture that just skips out on trials altogether, because there are no immediate (or even longterm) costs to doing so. Though you might argue that in such cases judges will just issue bench warrants, this too will stop when everyone involved becomes too apathetic and demoralized to do so.
Bail would be fine if it were carefully set such that the person can always scrape and afford it, enough that they wouldn't risk losing it but still low enough that they can gather it. Is there any reason at all that your anecdote had the judge set it to $20k? That's ridiculous. And for a homeless man as well... that's constructive bail denial. That judge should be censured and forced to retire.
Just once I would like to see a policy adjustment that wasn't absurd overcompensation. I turn 51 in a few months so I've got maybe 2 decades left but I don't think it's going to happen.
One issue is that most bails hearings I saw (and I sat through thousands) in Illinois were basically one-minute affairs with literally zero evidence presented on the person's ability to pay. I've heard that bond hearings in Illinois are now significantly longer and more evidence-based.
The judges were just making emotional decisions based on the heinousness of the crime, the ethnicity of the person, whether their family was in the room supporting them, etc. And the outcome was essentially random and arbitrary.
The cellmate who had the $20K bail set was a completely arbitrary number. It was a victimless offense to do with paperwork. All I did was file FOIA requests to prove no offense had been committed. I was infuriated that the judge reset bail to $200 knowing the guy was clearly innocent, and also knowing he was homeless.
Judges were ordered again and again and again in Illinois to run their bond hearings in a fairer manner, but it never happened.
So we're now in the situation we're in. A lot of detainees are on house arrest, and this is better for their mental health, but also presents enormous problems of their own. If you are ordered released on house arrest, but you have nowhere to go, then you get stuck. If you are on house arrest, often you can't get a job, so how do you pay rent and eat? Often if you're on house arrest the judge won't allow you to even leave to obtain groceries or medicine, which is a problem.
These are hard problems. I don't want to be the one trying to solve them because there is no way to make everyone happy.
There should be statutory limitations for prosecutors concerning the use of plea deals. No more than 1% of cases in any calendar year should be permitted to even offer plea deals, so that they use that tool sparingly and only when appropriate. If they waste it out of laziness or apathy, then the subsequent cases that year would have to be brought to trial.
This would cut down on alot of the bullshit (and not just for cases like the one you describe, but where plea bargaining is used to bully people into pleading guilty where they are not).
Most convictions are due to plea deals. If you limit that tool, people would simply have charges dropped due to Sixth Amendment violations and people languishing in prison awaiting trials. It would be gridlock.
"Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States."
https://legalknowledgebase.com/what-percentage-of-criminal-c...
I think a public trial serves as a form of oversight. Widespread plea bargaining means we'll never know how many of these people even committed crimes, much less how the justice system operates.
> Most convictions are due to plea deals.
Probably, but why should that matter?
>If you limit that tool, people would simply have charges dropped
So you mean that charges that don't matter are often pressed anyway, because prosecutors have a cheat code to short circuit the long and arduous process of trial which is supposed to be long and arduous? No thanks.
If they could prosecute fewer cases, then they would pick the ones that mattered. Last time I did grand jury duty, it was 40 cases every day, most of them bullshit drug possession charges.
Or maybe, maybe they really do have so many important cases that this would become a problem. Then it should become a problem, so the public is forced to realize it must fund a more robust judicial system that can handle that high load. Either way, I do not want prosecutors using plea deals. And you shouldn't either.
>"Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States."
There was a slow day at the grand jury, and the assistant DA was talking to us jurors. Claimed that our small city had about 4000 cases per year, and only 30 or so ever went to trial. How can justice be served if that's the case? He certainly thought that he was doing justice, but some of those people were just pleading out so that they could put an end to the nonsense, and not out of any true guilt. Whether they were forced to go to trial so that they would be then compelled to assert their (true) innocence, or whether the prosecutor would just stop making up bullshit charges, we'd all be better off. He genuinely thought of trials as some sort of fun distraction instead of what it really was... the entire point of his job. It was fucked up.
The trouble with our world isn't that there aren't solutions, it's that when someone proposes them, they sound outlandish to people who subconsciously want the problems to persist.
Sixth Amendment is the right to a speedy trial. They would have to expand the courts to thousands of more courts to get that done. And then there are appeals, and appeals of appeals, etc.
Not to mention lawyer fees would go up 10x or 100x for any simple thing.
Want to get charged $10k for a speeding ticket? This is how it happens.
>They would have to expand the courts to thousands of more courts to get that done.
Possibly. But if they're denying justice because "it would cost too much to do it correctly", then maybe the taxpayers just have to pony up more cash.
But it's also possibly the case that they don't need more courts, they just have to stop focusing on bullshit drug charges that absolutely no one gives a shit about. If drug addicts want to commit slow suicide doing the stuff, let them. If you want to instead focus on the drug dealers, there are simple policies that would put street dealers out of business instantly.
Your objections don't really line up with your goals, no matter what your goals happen to be. Think about it all a bit more carefully.
The problem is not the judge that approved a plea deal - the problem is the prosecutor who gave (negotiated maybe is a better term) such a lousy plea deal. After fleeing the state and being brought by US Marshal service I would think the prosecutor should have pushed for some state jail time.
Asset Protection manager here. Our protection decisions are based on theft trends independent from our staffing. And generally, the theft scales with how much business a store receives, rather than how many staff they employ.
More staff won't solve theft significantly because thieves carry the target merchandise to a less securely monitored area of the store. If they see an employee in an aisle, they'll move down another aisle where there isn't. And you can't have a person everywhere.
If anything, putting something behind glass increases staff because we have to keep that area covered as much as possible so we get those sales.
> those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5.
Maybe in some cases that's true, but it's definitely not true for the few big box stores I frequent in SF where this practice occurs. The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise. I'm not sure who pays for the tactical gear wearing security guards at the entrance looking ready for Iraq, but it can't be cheap.
> The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise.
Are you certain, or were they running 3 people ragged who will burn out in a month and quit? Constant motion can make it seem like there are more people, but I also remember the 1990s and seeing at least one person per department in a Kmart, some just monitoring their area. A bigbox store like Target would've had 2 people for the cash registers up front, at least one in customer service, and one per department during off-peak hours. If you're telling me you're seeing a dozen people for certain, I'll believe you, but I am wondering if it wasn't actually fewer.
And besides all that, I was thinking more along the lines of CVS and Walgreens, which are the stores I know of locking everything behind glass.
Depends on the area. The area I lived in last year, it was rare to enter a Walgreens that wasn't actively being pillaged by shoplifters. I remember when they announced they were closing the only local Wal-mart (due to excessive shoplifting, allegedly) -- that same day the shoplifters went in like a swarm of locusts and stripped it bare. They had police at both exits, but they were powerless.
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This turned out to not actually be a thing: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shopli...
pengaru did not say anything about organized shoplifting. The lock and key were definitely a thing, and still are. Please read comments before responding to them.
Come visit SF and let's go shopping downtown.
Putting poor, desperate people in jail isn't going to solve the systemic issues that create poor, desperate people.
Locking up people for petty theft is almost certainly FAR more expensive than the cost of the materials being stolen. It costs tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to house an inmate every year, to say nothing of the damage it causes that inmate. Prisons make criminals more likely to commit crime in the future.
A person would have to be stealing like 40 bottles of mouthwash every single day for it to be cheaper to jail an inmate rather than just replace the mouthwash for the business. Cases like that also clog the justice system and prevent solving more serious crimes, deplete shared resources like police and public defenders, and overcrowd prisons.
Even if you aren't a prison abolitionist like me, surely the rational approach here isn't "Pay more and increase the likelyhood the petty criminal becomes a serious criminal". It just makes zero rational sense to try and solve the issue that way.
Your comment focuses on prison and the impact it has on a single criminal who is caught, convicted, and put in prison. Sometimes this is a useful way to look at things.
I think it's far more useful to consider prison's impact on all the people who are not in prison. It serves as a crime deterrent.
> Prisons make people less likely to become criminals.
Here is a study supporting the assertion that prisons increase (or do not reduce) the likelihood of someone reoffending in the future. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/715100
Your claim that prisons reduce the likelihood of the population at large is not obvious on its face, as the US has very high rate of incarceration, but still has moderately high crime rates. Can you supply some data?
> Are you saying that, irrespective of the chance of being caught and convicted, and of the severity of the likely punishment, the likelihood of someone committing a crime is constant?
I'm saying that prison sentences are not a deterrent to crime, and, in fact, increase the amount of crime done. Research has consistently shown that the threat of being caught is considerably higher deterrent than prison time, and that harsh sentences don't influence behavior:
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...
> That has nothing to do with the point I made, which was about people becoming criminals.
We are discussing crime. Which has a total sum. You can reduce that sum by preventing people from being criminals or you can reduce that sum by reforming criminals. I believe you need both. So it is important to remember that prisons negatively contribute to reforming people, increasing total crime, while research shows they don't contribute to preventing people from being criminals.
We need other systems, systems that prevent people from becoming criminals AND reduce the likelihood of re-offending if they do.
> Locking up people for petty theft is almost certainly FAR more expensive than the cost of the materials being stolen
Who pays matters.
We pay. We pay to house inmates. It costs us a TON of money to house prison populations.
This article claims that the inmate costs per state range from $23k/year (Arkansas) to $307k/year (Massachusetts).
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-sta...
In the light of that dynamic I fund it curious that Russian prisons population is rapidly declining too, but for very different reason.
You might be half joking, but your hypothesis is interesting to show how many different reasons can exist for the same phenomenon. Lots of people here talking about lead, for whatever reason, but also decriminalisation of drugs, abortion, etc. Most are logical explanations, even if contradictory. Very nice to see how we need to be super aware of statistics; we can force the numbers to say anything we want.
This is an amazing domain for correlation vs causation, because a lot of hypotheses make sense.
An interesting and upbeat article.. But the death rate from overdose went from 9 to 32 per 100000 in the last 2 decades. Using their entrance logic, if I understand what this means afa per annum, couldn't that amount to a few hundred per 100000 who are not cycling into long prison terms because they are dead?
There's been something like 900k excess deaths since 1968 compared to if the rate was just flat since then. That's a lot of people who probably had a much higher chance of incarceration than average even if you only consider drug law and the more recently someone was born the more likely they are to have already overdosed at any given age.
Problem isn't with people who are in prison. Problem is with people who are out of prison with prison experience - most of them are thoroughly criminalised for life. So one should count people who served serious time behind bars, and now out - ideally, age-corrected, because people age out of crime and someone who got in jail at 18 and left at 50 is probably ok and isn't a big danger. That is the metric that society should strive to minimise.
It's essentially that once you leave prison you have zero resources, usually all your friends are gone, often your family shuns you, you can't get a job due to your record and lack of skills, you can't rent any accommodation due to background checks, and you are on a knife-edge parole that will send you back for any tiny infraction.
And it's easy for someone to just give in and go back to prison. Prison is only scary the first time. After that you walk back in and meet people you know who don't judge you. You know the staff. You know the routines. Do a few more years for the parole violation and see if things have changed next time around. If not, repeat ad infinitum.
Is it possible that incarceration had the intended effect? Did an entire generation grow up seeing their fathers and uncles locked up and decide that there must be a better way?
Absolutely not at all. I have a lot of experience with the justice system and I can tell you that incarceration has almost no positive benefits for those that are redeemable.
And for those who cannot function in the real world (i.e. serious untreatable mental problems resulting in constant criminality) we need to find a softer way to keep them separated from being able to harm the public.
I would argue that not having a male role model in your life is way worse than seeing the consequences enacted on another.
This even if their was a gain from watching others suffer, the lack of discipline, guidance, sternness, is way more detrimental than the positives of fearing the consequences
there is no research to support the notion that mass incarceration leads to a reduction in crime; full stop.
The scholarly debate is over how large and how lasting the effect is, not whether any evidence exists.
Is it not that studies show how mass incarceration increases likelihood of children to be offenders, not make them less likely to do so?
e.g., an incarcerated parent before the age of 12 increases the chances of being in jail after 18 by 230%
I genuinely don’t recall anything to support the idea that incarceration decreases crime, in general, at all…
I guess if you're considering a sufficiently small population you could go from ~600,000 people in Vermont * 120/100,000 -> ~720 imprisoned people in Vermont trivially, but we're the second smallest state. This certainly doesn't scale to cities over a million. At least I'd start having to think harder about it.
> 120 per 100,000 ... Is there a reason for this?
Crime statistics (e.g. homicides) are often quoted as 'n per 100,000 population'.
It's probably also easier for mental math, e.g. here's a city with 1 million population, that's 10 100Ks, so 1200 people in prison.
It also lets you abstract away or compare to stats that are scaled to population but might not be 1:1 with a person, e.g. "thefts per 100,000 population per year" where one person might either commit or be the victim of multiple thefts in a year.
120 per 100,000 includes significant digits. 0.12% could be anywhere from 120-124 per 100,000. You'd really want 0.120%, but that's confusing for different reasons.
Worse would be 1,000 per 100,000, which is 1% but there's no way to tell that it's not rounded or truncated.
"120" and "0.12%" both have 2 significant digits. "120." and "0.120%" have 3 significant digits.
I would presume, perhaps incorrectly, that “120 per 100,000” has 3 significant digits and “12 per 10,000” has 2.
I’ve never seen a period used like that in census data. It seems like a conscious choice because the period is confusing when used in the middle of a phrase. 12E1 makes more sense but is abnormal notation for many people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
> Trailing zeros in an integer may or may not be significant, depending on the measurement or reporting resolution.
120 is either two or three significant figures, and you can't know which without knowing how the number was arrived at.
Prison is big business in the U.S., so I fully expect red alerts going off and panic attacks sweeping the country.
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The question not even asked by the article is ... why?
From what I've read, mostly sentencing reform and less aggressive drug prosecution/more drug diversion. That and the general trend for crime to recede in wealthy, stable societies.
It's not just law enforcement and sentencing - there are verifiable numbers for the results of certain crimes - homicides and auto theft come to mind - and most have declined precipitously.
E.g. Boston had 1,575 reports of auto theft in 2012, compared with 28,000 in 1975; Massachusetts had 242 murders in 1975, and 121 in 2012. (a 56% drop in homicide rate, as population went up 14%)
That car theft number is blowing my mind. I would have easily guessed 10x that.
Are there any aspects of the crime that make it less appealing? Electronic counter measures too good? Price of replacement parts no longer carry a premium? Too easy to get caught?
This paper argues that electronic locks played a large role: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41284-024-00452-2
I would bet that the pervasive use of electronic records has something to do with it, too. According to this 1979 report from the Nat'l Assoc. of Attorneys General, in the 70s there were a lot of paths to retitling a stolen vehicle back then, which along with the the rise of chop shops and easier export of stolen cars, supported a large stolen-car economy: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/59904NCJRS.pdf
Consumer goods went on a 50 year deflation streak while health care, housing, and education pumped to the moon. That's its own problem, but it's hard to steal any of those three things.
The answer is likely unknowable, but I can think of several factors that tie into the plummeting birth rate:
- While the Freakanomics citation of widespread access to abortion has been debunked as a sole cause, I think it remains credible for at least a contributing factor. Fewer young people born to folks who are too poor/busy/not wanting to raise them is doubtlessly going to reduce the number of young offenders who become the prison system's regular customers their whole lives.
- Beyond just abortion, contraceptives and contraceptive education have gotten much more accessible. For all the endless whining from the right about putting condoms on cucumbers poisoning children's minds with vegetable-based erotica, as it turns out, teens have sex, as they probably have since time immemorial, and if you teach them how to do it safely and don't threaten their safety if they do, they generally will do it safely.
- Additionally, there has been a gradual ramp-up in how badly negative outcomes stack in life, and "messing up" on your path to adulthood carries higher costs than it ever has. Possibly contradicting myself, teens are having less sex than ever, as all broad forms of socializing have decreased apart from social media, which is exploding but doesn't really present opportunities to bone down. Add to it, young people are more monitored than they've ever been. When I was coming up, I had hours alone to myself to do whatever I wanted, largely wherever I wanted as long as I could get there and my parents knew (though they couldn't verify where I was). Now we have a variety of apps for digitally stalking your kids, and that's not even going into the mess of extracurricular activities, after school events, classes, study sessions, sports, etc. that modern kids get. They barely have any unmonitored time anymore.
- Another point: alternative sexuality (or the lack thereof) is more accepted than it's ever been by mainstream society, and anything that isn't man + woman is virtually guaranteed to not create unwanted pregnancy unless something truly interesting happens.
- Lastly, I would cite that even if you have a heterosexual couple who is interested in having kids, that's harder than ever. A ton of folks my age can't even afford a home, let alone one suitable for starting a family. The ones that do start families live either in or uncomfortably close to poverty, and usually in one or another variety of insecurity. The ones that can afford it often choose not to for... I mean there's so many reasons bringing kids into the world right now feels unappealing. It's a ton of work that's saddled onto 2 people in a categorically a-historic way, in an economy where two full time salaries is basically mandatory if you want to have a halfway decent standard of living, and double that for one that includes children. That's not even going into the broader state of the world, how awful the dating market is especially for women, so many reasons and factors.
Any stressed animal population stops reproduction first. I don't see why we'd think people would be any different.
>how awful the dating market is especially for women
"World Ends, Women Most Affected."
> how awful the dating market is especially for women,
Don't worry, I assure you it's just as terrible on the other side of the fence.
I think that demographically we might be in a trough, of new born children. Also children born to the last major cohort (the children of the baby Boomers) are just becoming tweens and young teens, or very young adults. There might be a spike in crime, in the next 10 years, as they start to mature. It helps that they are more spread out, and not born in the same few years like the Boomers were, (a more flattened and spread curve).
Very rough midpoint years; Baby Boomers 1949, Gen X 1979, Millennial 2009.
When they decide change the threshold for arrests, like the SF robberies or under some dollar amount.
Crime is also way down over the last 20 years:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...
At least in Seattle, crime is "way down" because many businesses have stopped reporting it, because the police don't respond to less serious crimes anymore.
A shopkeeper friend of mine closed his business in Seattle after multiple lootings of his place and the police never showing up. He relocated to a bedroom community.
Crime statistics are not necessarily accurate, and politicians have an interest in minimizing those statistics one way or another.
You have any data to support that? I've lived in Seattle for 40 years, and crime here is way less of a concern now than it ever has been. Especially violent crime.
My experience also seems to match statistics. So, it would seem that your friend's experience might be the outlier -- I'm not saying they are wrong, I'm saying their experience doesn't match the data and there's at least one anecdote (mine) that runs counter to their anecdote. Seems like a good opportunity to try and find data that supports your hypothesis?
I'm not sure the data backs up your assertion -- in fact, it looks to me like Seattle's crime rate is roughly steady -- and bad -- over the last 20 years.
Seattle had the highest burglary rate in the nation of any large city as recently as 2023 (1201 per 100k residents!). https://www.safehome.org/resources/crime-statistics-by-state...
from 1999-2018 (most recent I can find a chart for), Violent crime ebbed and flowed but ended essentially where it started: 680/100k residents, almost double the US average. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/us/wa/seat.... I believe this uses FBI numbers.
Seattle Police report 5394 violent crimes in 2024, with 755k residents that's ~700 violent crimes per 100k, or roughly where it was in both 1999 and in 2018. https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2025/04/28/crime-drops-2...
I note that the Axios article says 2025 is on track to be a big drop; I have no idea what crime seasonality is, so I'd take that news story with a grain of salt until the year is out. Either way I just don't think Seattle's crime rates are "way less of a concern" over the last 40 years. Well, people may have become acclimated or stopped caring. But the rates are high, and don't look to have changed that much.
Look back further - https://images.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/F...
In the 80s and 90s, violent crime rates were well above 1000/100k residents, and property crimes 12k/100k.
OK, but that drop occurred roughly when Kurt Cobain died. Since then it hasn't moved that much. I believe you that Belltown is safer than 1993. That's just not that recent!
Googling "crime down in seattle due to lower reporting rates" results in:
"While crime rates in Seattle have recently shown a decrease, some reports suggest this may be partially attributed to a decline in reporting rather than a genuine reduction in criminal activity. Specifically, some authorities have noted that crimes against businesses, in particular, are frequently not reported."
"The police chief specifically mentioned that a 10% drop in property crime might not be entirely accurate because many business-related crimes go unreported."
It is a fact that CVS didn’t lock up the toothpaste until a few years ago. There must be a reason.
“Data on the things that no one is reporting”
Don't be facile.
Police reports aren't the only source of data. If this was a widespread impact then there would be other sources of data that could be used to build this case.
Additionally, we cannot make policy decisions on "just trust me, my friend said...". Maybe we can't get a perfect signal, but if you are going to challenge the prevailing data, I expect you to bring something novel beyond vibes. It doesn't have to be perfect, but a single anecdote plus "I believe it" is not sufficient to oppose what the data we do have is consistently saying -- crime is lower in Seattle, and has been consistently lowering over time.
Nothing has to be reported for a retail business to note that shrink is going up.
Why isn't shrink going up?
Um you are more gracious than me. I will just flat out call out as his friend as lying
This is why the headline statistic for crime tracking is usually homicide, which is also down.
Because of those tough on crime republicans.
Lets see if cutting education has any impact over the next 20 years.
Crime reduction is strongly correlated with an aging population. Crime is largely a young man's game.
Young and hungry, without opportunity. Also something being cut with reduced food aid and education.
Education? Free Food Aid? In the US, people are not starving
13% of American households experienced food insecurity in 2023, which means "these households were uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food."
5% (6.8 million households) experienced "very low food security" which is "normal eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake was reduced at times during the year because they had insufficient money or other resources for food"
American food security is so bad in plenty of places that we can still get notable increases in academic performance just by giving people food
Lack of access to food is literally holding the US back.
Just because a lot of people are fat, doesn't mean it is evenly distributed.
That is just a right talking point about how we are so spoiled. Plenty of kids need food. Kids learn better when not hungry. And Republicans are cutting school food programs.
> After peaking at just more than 1.6 million Americans in 2009
> But a prison is a portrait of what happened five, 10, and 20 years ago.
Is this just a result of the dropping crime rates since the mid 90s, but on a 20ish year lag?
That's what the article goes on to describe, yes. Declining crime rates mean fewer new prisoners, but high recidivism rates plus long sentences means many old prisoners are still in prison. As those old prisoners die off or for whatever reason don't commit more crimes after release, the total population declines.
Mandatory minimum sentences can be 10, 15 or 20 years depending on the quantity of drug and other factors. Often just for possession. The US spent several decades filling our prisons with people using those sentences, and we still do, just not as aggressively.
this is great news. but...
i fear the new avenues of business sought by companies that operate for-profit prisons - i don't expect they'll just eat the losses of declining populations in their main moneymakers, and we're already starting to see them work on detention facilities for DHS etc.
Prisons are ancient history. The latest chapter is the tough on crime states have glorious high speed pursuits. All those Challengers blasting away at 140 mph in the breakdown lane, rollover 10-50 pits, suspects at gunpoint, now published in 1080 on YouTube for some state and county agencies. A single pursuit may result in two or three disabled police vehicles that need to be replaced. A prepped vehicle is over $100k. In 2024 Arkansas had 500+ high speed pursuits, resulting in three suspect deaths and three civilian deaths. Additionally, nine civilians, 14 troopers, and 83 suspects were injured. and easily over 1,000 vehicles trashed.
Each of these videos puts most film car chases to shame. There must be 20 channels dedicated to this. Participating states I've seen are mostly Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, and California. But any agency can publish a video, particularly if there is a shooting death and an official investigation.
Detention facilities for deportations is an inherently fast shrinking population.
at some point, maybe. i have no trust in DHS whatsoever.
But do you think they'd start letting more people into the country, just to charge to detain and deport them? It's actually sort of an ideal solution. Big business gets back labor that it can threaten to deport if it demands anything, then they can clean up on the public-private deportations. Factory managers could send ICE a list of their most annoying employees to visit. It would be so 80's, I almost typed "the INS."
what you're describing is more or less already happening. don't think h1b visaholders won't become a target.
You think if an H1B is canceled that they would illegally overstay?
Just get a few more Ciavarellas[0] elected and boom! Kids for Cash 2.0 - Little Timmy will never mouth off in class ever again.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Ciavarella
> i don't expect they'll just eat the losses of declining populations in their main moneymakers
Most of them (probably all) have contracts that stipulate they get paid per bed they provide, whether or not it's occupied.
sure, but if the beds are empty, they're less likely to get new contracts.
GOOD
Bad news for prison owners
They fail to mention the reason the prison population soared in the 70's and 80's, because of ultra-harsh prison sentencing for drugs. In retrospect, those laws appear to have been deliberately designed to create a massive and permanent prison population, far beyond what locking people up only for non-consensual crimes could ever sustain.
Now, most of those laws have been rolled back. In the past 10-15 years the number of people locked up at the state level for drug crimes is down 30% even though drug arrests remain high. And those still getting locked up are getting shorter sentences. (though over 40% of inmates at the federal level are still there for drugs)
I'm not sure why they failed to mention such a key issues related to incarceration. They repeatedly refer to the surge in crime in the drug war era as a "crime wave". And they link to 3 other pro-drug war articles by the same author. Maybe Keith Humphreys had a bad trip in his youth and now he's making it everyone's problem.
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Sorry, is this sarcasm?
That's a frequent racist dog-whistle to justify systemically unjust (read: racist) policing; I'm surprised to see it on HN.
Everything bad is due to lack of intelligence and everything good is caused by intelligence. Average day on the HN.
The irony is that seeing things that way implies a massive lack of intelligence.
Intelligent people can have a too narrow lens of the world too. Like when sociological issues becomes all about culture and intelligence.
you shouldn’t be :)
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Do you have any clear examples of this that demonstrate the consistency of the pattern you're describing?
Sure, a quick search unfortunately gives you result after result!
https://www.wsmv.com/2025/06/23/family-woman-murdered-nashvi...
https://nypost.com/2025/02/28/us-news/career-criminal-free-w...
https://www.fox26houston.com/news/the-judge-did-her-job-defe...
https://nypost.com/2025/02/22/us-news/nyc-career-criminal-ty...
https://nypost.com/2025/06/21/us-news/plucky-nyc-victim-94-v...
https://www.fox5ny.com/news/nyc-judges-violent-perps-report
https://nypost.com/2025/03/22/us-news/meet-wanda-licitra-nyc...
https://nypost.com/2025/04/24/us-news/hooligan-whose-alleged...
https://nypost.com/2025/06/25/us-news/serial-perv-who-tried-...
https://nypost.com/2025/01/07/us-news/nyc-sees-staggering-14...
https://nypost.com/2025/03/07/us-news/maniac-busted-for-slug...
https://nypost.com/2024/08/11/us-news/brute-charged-in-attac...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/blue-states-bail-laws-panned-poli...
Even the Fox links go back to the NY Post. lol.
I don't believe that, at least not in the whole nation (certain cities may be an exception). US cities used to be a lot more violent three decades ago. Fudging manslaughters statistics is not easy.
I suspect the reason is the same as with everything else - kids glued to screens don't have time or even stamina for gang activity, all their attention being consumed by a highly addictive product at hand.
only because the US is soft on crime - so soft that drugs that were illegal are no longer illegal
Does this include those sent to the gulag in El Salvador?
Crime has been going down since the 90s, video games and online porn probably helped this
The Black southeast is still in over the Soviet Union’s rates during the 1930s https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/LA.html. Racialized carceral warfare.
After covid they changed who will go to jail for what because they decided overcrowding with covid was killing inmates. I think it was the right thing to do at the time.
However since 2021ish crime has been skyrocketing. It's definitely time to figure out the next steps. I want to live in a peaceful, safe society. It makes sense to separate those that can't help but destroy the peace.
It has also been stated that something like 90% of crime is performed by a very small percentage of people and most of it is just the same person over and over and over. Those people must be separated from society.