Interesting blog..
Is it not strange to see a post with 126 points and zero comment?
"in nearly all of these societies everyone got married and was expected to get around to having children because the community required them rather than necessarily because they wanted to."
I wonder if this is the uncomfortable truth behind low birth rates in the modern world, and nobody ever really _wanted_ to raise kids so much as they just kinda had to (especially if they wanted to have sex)
We have socialized the gains of children (via their adult tax receipt used to pay for benefits and healthcare) but (largely) privatized the costs of children solely onto their parents.
In the modern world, if you do not have children, but instead save your income in a retirement fund, you have an even better claim to the labor of the next generation than the childrens' parents through your increased retirement fund.
Privatized X matched with socialized anti-X is the classic condition for a moral hazard to emerge.
Good point - I also think we have a race to the bottom w.r.t housing. When homes were abundant one income could support a household (ish). Then we added more women to the workforce at the same time NIMBYism took hold and peer competition meant you needed two incomes. Then fewer people had kids and you needed two stressed out incomes without the expense (in time and money) of kids to support one. Hell, the “who’s hiring” thread sometimes has companies talking about massive overtime being expected, hard to raise a kid like that.
Perhaps in time we’ll see more polycule formation driven by housing costs…
(These are all on average of course, there are still high earners who manage)
Average amount of living space per person in a new house has nearly doubled in just the last 50 years. Price per square foot is pretty much the same as decades before (adjusted for inflation).
Isn't it the abundance of housing?
>>When homes were abundant one income could support a household
Was it the case, though? Could one income support household with 3000sq ft house, big new truck and college for each kid back then?
No, but it also is much harder to buy smaller homes (especially townhouses, etc.), and you didn't actually need a vehicle nearly as much as you do now. The NIMBYs I mentioned made it much harder to have a decent ~1200 sqft home where your family needed one (or no) vehicle for their daily life.
College is actually another good example- sending more people to college mostly just meant everyone else _also_ needed to go to college in order to compete with their peers for jobs that didn't used to require a degree. We can see this across borders - jobs that require a bachelor's in the US often require a master's in Europe, because too many people in Europe have master's degrees compared to the number of jobs that should actually need one.
People often have master's degrees in Europe, because master's has been the primary university degree since the middle ages. Bachelor's degrees only started becoming popular in most European countries with the Bologna Process ~20 years ago. And the industry hesitated accepting them for a long time, often considering them little more than glorified dropouts.
It was mostly about the perception that people with a bachelor's degree had not learned anything useful yet.
There is a lot of variation between countries, but European countries often have a dual-track system in higher education. You can choose between the academic track (universities) and the vocational track, with more people ending up in the vocational track. Some fields are available in the academic track, some in the vocational track, and some in both. Professional fields such as healthcare, business, and engineering are often available in both, with the tracks preparing for different roles in the field (such as nurse vs. doctor).
Imagine being used to an educational system with two kinds of degrees. Some indicate practical studies preparing for a job, while others tell of longer theoretical studies and specialization. Suddenly the system changes and you start seeing a third kind of a degree: shorter theoretical studies without going particularly deep in anything. What use do you have for people like that?
I know plenty of people with “only” engineering bachelors degrees from my Alma Mater who would easily outperform people I’ve met with masters, so the same thing as the masters-holders I suppose?
It's not about being better or outperforming someone. A doctor is not supposed to be a better nurse. Similarly, engineers in the academic track are taught different things and prepared for different roles than engineers in the vocational track.
If you just need an engineer, someone from the vocational track will probably be more productive than an academic engineer due to more relevant education. Assuming a similar level of talent, of course. You only hire an academic engineer if you have an actual need for theoretical education. Or if you have a job where the specifics of the education don't really matter. Or if the academic engineer is from a higher-tier institution and likely more talented, despite the education.
You did not went into massive debt for life for that.
One bit difference is that European system did not had first three years of college as "life experience, basically generic study without specialization, basically another high school" thing.
You picked a field and studied that one. And that was structured as five years old study. If you are in the middle, you are eligible for the same positions as those who did not study at all - because you are not qualified yet.
In that system, demanding bachelor is the opportunity cost. Because basically there should be a trade school for that.
Like a nurse - before you would go to nursing high school and become qualified nurse there. The new demand to have bachelor made studies longer and did not brought higher quality nor was needed. Same with kindergarten teachers. Same with basic administration etc.
What actually happened was whole bunch of positions that did not required university suddenly formally requiring it. And half baked school programs to get you diploma. And 40-50 years old people going to diploma mills so that they can be formally better competitive apply to positions that required only high school before.
You also need to consider the distribution of housing sizes. The average being driven up by rural or suburban McMansions is not representative of the conditions of million of people living in large cities.
A mean is a type of average (i.e. a single figure that attempts to summarize the data). There can be a geometric mean average, an arithmetic mean a average, a median average, a mode average, etc.
It is often used ambiguously to intentionally create ambiguity as it allows for reaching muddied conclusions, which evoke more emotion.
I dream of a world where all data comes with at least quintile if not decile level distribution details. Especially in the digital age, I cannot think of a single good reason to not provide that detail.
Homelessness is not related to the housing prices. With any job one can afford to rent a room.
Homelessness is a complex issue, but a healthcare is the main cause. Lack of proper treatment of addictions and mental illness is the main cause of homelessness.
That is simply not true. Homelessness goes up and down with housing prices. You can see that in the data.
If housing is cheap, mentally sick person or even addict can get one in an easier way. And their relatives have easier time to help their mentally ill relative find a place.
Being homeless makes both addictions and mental illness worst, to the point of unsulvable.
But it also affects your safety net. If rent is 60% of your income, it's much easier to drown in it than if it's 30%. Especially considering once you start drowning, you'll need to pull 3 months' rent out of somewhere for the deposit of a new (cheaper) place.
It also makes it make more sense to live in a car. A car costs the same, mostly everywhere, so if you're in a stupidly expensive location, it might start to sound reasonable to live in a van.
Drugs, poor financial literacy and insanity are the main reasons, but expensive housing is also there.
> (largely) privatized the costs of children solely onto their parents.
The single greatest component of the property tax is the local public schools. Federal taxes pay for free lunches at those schools. Approximately half of Social Security’s budget go towards needy families. Over half of college students receive federal aid, and over a quarter receive state aid.
To privatize something implies motion from public to private. What costs of parenthood do you believe have been privatized over the last 200, 100, 50 or 25 years? I genuinely don’t believe that there’s a single one, but I sincerely know that I could be wrong.
> To privatize something implies motion from public to private.
Only if you’re being pedantic.
Taking on the responsibility to raise children will completely take over your life. Not even considering the financial cost of daycare or missing second income, the opportunity cost is enormous.
Free lunches and college aid are supposed to offset the costs of parenting?
All of the costs of parenting are privatized except for schooling, but even to do that one well costs an enormous amount from the parent
also you're asking which costs have been privatized in the last 200 years, but the entirety of the costs were (always) private and only a small amount has been socialized.
that’s the wrong framing. simpler way is just looking at what the US doesn’t have compared to equivalently well off nations. childcare, parental leave, medical care are all things that are taken up by the comparatively larger wages US families have
I don't think any simple trick like that is enough. If people are allowed to choose their own paths, they will make different choices, and every aspect of the society has an impact on the choices they make. If we want a society where people have the right number of children on the average (not too few and not too many, as in the societies discussed in the blog), everything must be designed around that.
For example, if having kids is optional, many people will choose to not have kids. Then those who do have need more than two kids on the average to sustain the population. But we have this cultural ideal of a family with two kids, which impacts the design of everything from homes to cars and from furniture to hotels. As well as the expectations on how much effort parents should devote to support each child.
Yes, saw that I had a typo - I meant insane deductions.
You are right that many countries do - but they are simply not high enough to make it worthwhile and make the same economical sense at not having kids does.
The problem with subsidies is society does not benefit from kids simply existing. Society benefits from well raised kids. Kids not raised well end up costing society.
As “well raised” is not possible to measure, this is not a feasible solution.
One work around has been to bet that those with earned incomes are likelier to raise their kids well, so the subsidies can be non refundable earned income tax credits.
But I doubt sufficient people have sufficient tax liabilities that offset the costs of the minimum quality of life many people require for their kids and them to have.
It always gets a bit fascist to go down this path - but it is at least intellectually interesting.
One way to subsidize parents is to give free child care. As a bonus, the government get to decide exactly how these kids are being raised.
But yeah, it is a material investment for the society to take - which is likely why we have seen the cost of kids being transferred to the parents (and lower birth rates).
Deciding who is going to raise children well implies deciding who can raise children implies deciding who can have children. It’s a pretty straightforward line.
This is a great framing. I've often thought that social security eligibility should be based on how many kids you've had. If you're not recruiting into the Ponzi scheme you shouldn't participate in the "earnings"
Mostly because Bret is a good historian and it's going to be difficult for non-specialists to credibly nitpick it. Also it's quite a long read.
And he's not got to that question yet: "So this week we’re going to look at marriage patterns, particularly the question of age at first marriage. Then next week, we’re going to turn to the implications those patterns have for child-bearing and child-rearing"
But I think you're missing the other aspect of the population pyramid, extremely high child and maternal mortality. It's more that everyone, especially women, was a conscript in the War on Death. And even then people are generally having fewer children than humanly possible, because they're also starvation-constrained. From the article:
"We’ll be coming back to some of these points when we talk about fertility next week, but the mortality rate for pre-modern societies is very high, thus necessitating a lot of births, but it is not so high that societies need to approach a maximum ‘natural fertility’ (the birth rate using absolutely no means of birth control) to hit replacement and slow growth. But these are also peasant households with significantly constrained resources. So the question becomes how to restrain fertility to a high, but not maximum level."
I trust his judgment of the time and places he studies. It's also easy to trust, since it's more or less what I believed already.
However, I'm wary about the generalization to pre-modern societies in general. Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs, but also because when I started digging into the church books for my own genealogy, I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected. Maybe not a majority, sure, and maybe not on average (and also, we're way out of both the time and the geography Bret studies). The past is never quite as I imagined.
I agree with you, but a few slight caveats to your point that I think are worth noting.
> Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs
A lot of anthropological research is done on non-agrarian societies. The author limited himself to peasants here, so that limits some (far from all) of the variation.
> I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected
The author also limits himself to age at _first_ marriage; I’d expect a lot more variation in age at remarriage. And even if divorce was rare compared to today, death of a spouse was much more common. So you’d expect to see quite some remarriages in the family tree
> Is it not strange to see a post with 126 points and zero comment?
Can't speak for everyone, but acoup is regularly referred to here. Some people, including me, read it regularly anyway so we don't even click on the HN posts most of the time.
I read this particular article Saturday on my morning coffee for example. I didn't upvote it when it got posted on HN, but I've done it before on other acoup articles. Without ever going to the comments.
> I wonder if this is the uncomfortable truth behind low birth rates in the modern world, and nobody ever really _wanted_ to raise kids so much as they just kinda had to (especially if they wanted to have sex)
I don't know how "uncomfortable" the truth is. In Islam, there's a principle that getting married (and presumably having kids) is half your religion. People were talking about social frameworks to incentivize marriage and reproduction 1,400 years ago. Maybe some people are uncomfortable with it now.
Putting religion aside, there's a biological aspect to this as well. Having children rewires your brain. People who don't have kids yet have little ability to know how they'll feel about it in advance. Talking about what people "want" a priori doesn't really make sense.
To use an analogy, I recently visited Napa and really enjoyed it. I had talked myself into the idea I wouldn't like it--too bougie, etc. But of course I liked Napa. Most people like Napa. It's literally famous for being enjoyable. I wasn't special or different, I had just developed intellectual reasons to think I'd dislike something that's more of a brain-stem level experience to begin with.
This is a good argument. It’s hard to be wise about what one might like or dislike in possible lifestyle choices.
But there are some possible enlightening questions for this and other brain-stem-level experiences like marriage and babies:
- did millions of years of evolution program my brain stem to like this?
- do lots of other people in other places and times do X, and after they’ve done X, do it again?
I think our brain stems and simpler functions must be very similar to one another. After all, visual illusions, the smell of bacon, and stories of human drama have similar effects on ~everyone.
I’m not sure it does require everyone’s brain. I love being a dad (and thought I would before having kids too) but there are a LOT of parents who regret having kids. The strong stigma against admitting regret, especially for moms, means that if anything it’s underreported.
And having it be part of a religion’s expectations seems like that suggests for some people at least it’s more duty than desire, does it not?
I’m sure there’s some people like that. I also expect that many of those people, though not all, are more disappointed about their life trajectories that likely wouldn’t have changed even if they hadn’t had kids.
There is nothing simple you can say about the blog in under 1,000 words other than 'neat'. It's also one of a longer series of blog posts about life at the time so you have a good 45min of reading before you can even start saying anything intelligent about it. Up votes are just a way to tell other people that this is a really good site you should read.
> I wonder if this is the uncomfortable truth behind low birth rates in the modern world
Well, you could ask people in age why they don't get in couple and have children, you could look at studies trying to understand why otherwise comparable countries have different birth rates.
Or you could wonder if the uncomfortable truth hidden from us is a fable about individuals' personal character.
This is a very US culture war take. Places like Japan and the Scandinavian countries also worry about low birth rates, but (eg) criminalizing abortion is simply not on the table.
Even outside of abortion, a lot of discussion is about wanting women back in the kitchen, dependent on partner. Simultaneously being forced to marry to have resources and simultaneously being unable to leave it things dont work well
In Scandinavia women are a part of the draft and parental leave is being equalized such that men can leave the workforce as long as women to take care of kids.
There is no pressure for women to get kids at all (besides what their mother might say).
> Now that it’s become impossible to pretend that a fœtus is anything other than a separate human, the debate has become about whether it’s a justified homicide or not.
This is a very theocratic answer.
I know zero people who regard a fetus as "a separate human". Last time I did, it was the 90s and I was in a Catholic secondary school in the UK. Since then, even famously-Catholic Ireland has liberalised their abortion laws.
That one can also make an argument that says "it doesn't even matter if you think they're a separate human or not, we don't force people do donate kidneys and that has the same risk as a pregnancy", doesn't change the fact that even thinking a foetus is a person is primarily a religious position at this point.
I believe the point is "separate, as in not the same as the mother". It's not the mother - it has different DNA. This is the problem with the whole "a woman's right to do what she wants with her own body" response: It's not her body. Or at least, it's not all her body. Part of it is a different individual. And so her right to do what she wants with her own body is inextricably intertwined with another individual that she does not have that same right over.
But, in the sense that you took it: We currently can save children born prematurely at 22 weeks. Normally such a child would live within and attached to the mother for another 18 weeks, but if we need to, such a child can live outside but attached to a bunch of machines.
So, at least separable, even if not usually separate.
>This is the problem with the whole "a woman's right to do what she wants with her own body" response: It's not her body.
It is. Or so I claim. Renders the rest of the argument moot.
Also, no woman is aborting fetuses for fun. The whole issue is a waste of time and just a way to get people riled up for no reason, at the expense of women losing rights because doctors now have to watch their back for even more liability.
You would be surprised. I know of some "women rights activists" who basically do this for bragging rights, or maybe some kind of "rite of passage". And some doctors who talk about aborting 9 month fetuses as if it was giving them a boner.
I also know a celebrity who had an abortion, because she didn't feel like moving to a bigger apartment (which she could easily afford, given that she and her partner are making millions in income).
It’s a lie, not just outside the norm. Later term abortions are all for medical reasons. See data in MotherJones link.
But people against women’s rights will have you believe there is some sort of epidemic where women are choosing to go through 8 months of pregnancy, and then wake up in an evil mood, go to the doctor’s office, and order an abortion off the combo menu to get their jollies off.
And if that wasn’t crazy enough, that there are doctors that would just go ahead and do it.
It is not homicide and never was. The homicide point is just an excuse.People who want to criminalise abortion do not care about lives after being born in the slightest.
It is about punishing women for sex about wanting them to suffer if they have risky pregnancy.
We need to stop pretending conservatives have honest motivations.
I’m pro choice but when I was at a catholic high school my peers and the adults seemed genuinely convinced that abortion was literally killing a human - akin to infanticide. I think many of them indeed opposed abortion based on this. It’s part of why the debate was intractable - it even brings in the hard problem of consciousness, and we don’t have an answer to that.
I think occasionally a blog post of his gets a lot of comments, so people generally submit his new blog posts to him, but not every one engenders discussion.
The article seems to revolve around defining an archetypal average peasant, which reminded me of [1]. While the article is well-written, I feel like I walk away with very little, given the story's focus on generalities.
The point of this series is to address the subset of his readers/commenters/his followers on twitter who have various flavors of delusions of the past being some utopia of multi-generational housing/family units and that wasn't just the reflection of harsh economic realities. He's already written blogs addressing the extreme on the other end where people assume too much economic freedom and upward mobility like is typical in video games.
He's done other blog series in the past that are more specific about specific things. His best work is on ancient military tactics and strategy. Every now and then he does these "baseline knowledge/understanding" series when he gets fed up with a particular group of idiots in his comments. It's like a teacher getting a class and being like "oh, you really are this dumb, I guess I gotta teach prerequisites before we dive in" even if they're not the best person to teach those prerequisites.
As a former history student I thought the ancient era was the most difficult because of the lack of good sources. It's easy to see why people fall victim to the tin-foils who propagate theories about alien pyramids etc. Pedagogues like Bret are a countermeasure but there's unfortunately not enough of them.
Thanks for the useful clarification. I guess I'm not the target audience, then. I was a bit surprised by the article, given other works from that blog were much more to my taste.
Yet, I don't know if that pertains to peasantry as they didn't have much of a choice depending where they lived. The article talks about Europe as if it was somewhat homogeneous (and mostly divided west & east)
Can highly recommend Bret Devereaux for those interested in no-bs history on the ancient world. I found him on YT, he speaks well and is a rare break from the enshittification/slop avalanche there.
This series at least doesn't, and the author points it out in the first part, as is many other articles, he can't really speak of cultures far removed from what he's specialized in, Roman Republic and Roman Empire, and anything outside of it is more of an overview.
Interesting blog.. Is it not strange to see a post with 126 points and zero comment?
"in nearly all of these societies everyone got married and was expected to get around to having children because the community required them rather than necessarily because they wanted to."
I wonder if this is the uncomfortable truth behind low birth rates in the modern world, and nobody ever really _wanted_ to raise kids so much as they just kinda had to (especially if they wanted to have sex)
We have socialized the gains of children (via their adult tax receipt used to pay for benefits and healthcare) but (largely) privatized the costs of children solely onto their parents.
In the modern world, if you do not have children, but instead save your income in a retirement fund, you have an even better claim to the labor of the next generation than the childrens' parents through your increased retirement fund.
Privatized X matched with socialized anti-X is the classic condition for a moral hazard to emerge.
Good point - I also think we have a race to the bottom w.r.t housing. When homes were abundant one income could support a household (ish). Then we added more women to the workforce at the same time NIMBYism took hold and peer competition meant you needed two incomes. Then fewer people had kids and you needed two stressed out incomes without the expense (in time and money) of kids to support one. Hell, the “who’s hiring” thread sometimes has companies talking about massive overtime being expected, hard to raise a kid like that.
Perhaps in time we’ll see more polycule formation driven by housing costs…
(These are all on average of course, there are still high earners who manage)
Average amount of living space per person in a new house has nearly doubled in just the last 50 years. Price per square foot is pretty much the same as decades before (adjusted for inflation).
Isn't it the abundance of housing?
>>When homes were abundant one income could support a household
Was it the case, though? Could one income support household with 3000sq ft house, big new truck and college for each kid back then?
No, but it also is much harder to buy smaller homes (especially townhouses, etc.), and you didn't actually need a vehicle nearly as much as you do now. The NIMBYs I mentioned made it much harder to have a decent ~1200 sqft home where your family needed one (or no) vehicle for their daily life.
College is actually another good example- sending more people to college mostly just meant everyone else _also_ needed to go to college in order to compete with their peers for jobs that didn't used to require a degree. We can see this across borders - jobs that require a bachelor's in the US often require a master's in Europe, because too many people in Europe have master's degrees compared to the number of jobs that should actually need one.
People often have master's degrees in Europe, because master's has been the primary university degree since the middle ages. Bachelor's degrees only started becoming popular in most European countries with the Bologna Process ~20 years ago. And the industry hesitated accepting them for a long time, often considering them little more than glorified dropouts.
Interesting! Sounds like European industry imposes enormous unnecessary costs (especially opportunity cost) on new entrants.
It was mostly about the perception that people with a bachelor's degree had not learned anything useful yet.
There is a lot of variation between countries, but European countries often have a dual-track system in higher education. You can choose between the academic track (universities) and the vocational track, with more people ending up in the vocational track. Some fields are available in the academic track, some in the vocational track, and some in both. Professional fields such as healthcare, business, and engineering are often available in both, with the tracks preparing for different roles in the field (such as nurse vs. doctor).
Imagine being used to an educational system with two kinds of degrees. Some indicate practical studies preparing for a job, while others tell of longer theoretical studies and specialization. Suddenly the system changes and you start seeing a third kind of a degree: shorter theoretical studies without going particularly deep in anything. What use do you have for people like that?
I know plenty of people with “only” engineering bachelors degrees from my Alma Mater who would easily outperform people I’ve met with masters, so the same thing as the masters-holders I suppose?
It's not about being better or outperforming someone. A doctor is not supposed to be a better nurse. Similarly, engineers in the academic track are taught different things and prepared for different roles than engineers in the vocational track.
If you just need an engineer, someone from the vocational track will probably be more productive than an academic engineer due to more relevant education. Assuming a similar level of talent, of course. You only hire an academic engineer if you have an actual need for theoretical education. Or if you have a job where the specifics of the education don't really matter. Or if the academic engineer is from a higher-tier institution and likely more talented, despite the education.
You did not went into massive debt for life for that.
One bit difference is that European system did not had first three years of college as "life experience, basically generic study without specialization, basically another high school" thing.
You picked a field and studied that one. And that was structured as five years old study. If you are in the middle, you are eligible for the same positions as those who did not study at all - because you are not qualified yet.
It’s getting more expensive, but I was mostly thinking of opportunity cost
In that system, demanding bachelor is the opportunity cost. Because basically there should be a trade school for that.
Like a nurse - before you would go to nursing high school and become qualified nurse there. The new demand to have bachelor made studies longer and did not brought higher quality nor was needed. Same with kindergarten teachers. Same with basic administration etc.
What actually happened was whole bunch of positions that did not required university suddenly formally requiring it. And half baked school programs to get you diploma. And 40-50 years old people going to diploma mills so that they can be formally better competitive apply to positions that required only high school before.
Yeah, I do not know why this is downvoted. It is largely true. You went to university to study a field and that meant masters.
The bachelor was added so that basically people could transfer to American system without wasting time. Otherwise it was seen as unfinished degree.
> Isn't it the abundance of housing?
You also need to consider the distribution of housing sizes. The average being driven up by rural or suburban McMansions is not representative of the conditions of million of people living in large cities.
> Average amount of living space per person in a new house has nearly doubled in just the last 50 years
I have no trouble believing that. But what about the mean?
Also, what happens if you include not-new houses?
Median also doubled, though the value is a bit lower. But median 50 years ago was also lower than average.
>>not-new houses
If you zoom out for 50y it does not matter. New house built 20y ago is an old house now, but still much bigger than old houses 50y ago.
I think you mean ‘what about the median?’ The mean is the average.
A mean is a type of average (i.e. a single figure that attempts to summarize the data). There can be a geometric mean average, an arithmetic mean a average, a median average, a mode average, etc.
It is often used ambiguously to intentionally create ambiguity as it allows for reaching muddied conclusions, which evoke more emotion.
I dream of a world where all data comes with at least quintile if not decile level distribution details. Especially in the digital age, I cannot think of a single good reason to not provide that detail.
Yes, or even just a simple distribution chart, which makes intuitive sense to someone who might not know about percentiles.
Also, the homeownership rate of married, unmarried, and divorced individuals are all higher today than in 1980.
What changed is the number is the relative number of people in each category (far fewer married people).
Houses are much more affordable with two incomes than one.
Homelessness rates say opposite. What that say there is inequality
Homelessness is not related to the housing prices. With any job one can afford to rent a room.
Homelessness is a complex issue, but a healthcare is the main cause. Lack of proper treatment of addictions and mental illness is the main cause of homelessness.
That is simply not true. Homelessness goes up and down with housing prices. You can see that in the data.
If housing is cheap, mentally sick person or even addict can get one in an easier way. And their relatives have easier time to help their mentally ill relative find a place.
Being homeless makes both addictions and mental illness worst, to the point of unsulvable.
But it also affects your safety net. If rent is 60% of your income, it's much easier to drown in it than if it's 30%. Especially considering once you start drowning, you'll need to pull 3 months' rent out of somewhere for the deposit of a new (cheaper) place.
It also makes it make more sense to live in a car. A car costs the same, mostly everywhere, so if you're in a stupidly expensive location, it might start to sound reasonable to live in a van.
Drugs, poor financial literacy and insanity are the main reasons, but expensive housing is also there.
> (largely) privatized the costs of children solely onto their parents.
The single greatest component of the property tax is the local public schools. Federal taxes pay for free lunches at those schools. Approximately half of Social Security’s budget go towards needy families. Over half of college students receive federal aid, and over a quarter receive state aid.
To privatize something implies motion from public to private. What costs of parenthood do you believe have been privatized over the last 200, 100, 50 or 25 years? I genuinely don’t believe that there’s a single one, but I sincerely know that I could be wrong.
> To privatize something implies motion from public to private.
Only if you’re being pedantic.
Taking on the responsibility to raise children will completely take over your life. Not even considering the financial cost of daycare or missing second income, the opportunity cost is enormous.
Also parents still pay taxes…
Free lunches and college aid are supposed to offset the costs of parenting?
All of the costs of parenting are privatized except for schooling, but even to do that one well costs an enormous amount from the parent
also you're asking which costs have been privatized in the last 200 years, but the entirety of the costs were (always) private and only a small amount has been socialized.
that’s the wrong framing. simpler way is just looking at what the US doesn’t have compared to equivalently well off nations. childcare, parental leave, medical care are all things that are taken up by the comparatively larger wages US families have
daycare
used to be an extended familiy or village thing, now its on the ~1.7 parents per kid to earn enough to pay a commercial supplier.
This is likely one of the most important points IMHO in the modern discourse on having kids.
A way to alleviate it could be to give insane tax deductions for having kids - we will likely reach a point where we have to.
I don't think any simple trick like that is enough. If people are allowed to choose their own paths, they will make different choices, and every aspect of the society has an impact on the choices they make. If we want a society where people have the right number of children on the average (not too few and not too many, as in the societies discussed in the blog), everything must be designed around that.
For example, if having kids is optional, many people will choose to not have kids. Then those who do have need more than two kids on the average to sustain the population. But we have this cultural ideal of a family with two kids, which impacts the design of everything from homes to cars and from furniture to hotels. As well as the expectations on how much effort parents should devote to support each child.
> If people are allowed to choose their own paths
At a macro scale this idea is futile, as people make decisions in a context.
Yes,people should have full agency - also to do things that does not make financial sense.
But if we want something as a society, it needs to make financial sense.
And yes this has consequences, that is why we have a market, so we can service each other under these consequences.
Many countries do in some form or another. But the subsidies are trivial compared to the huge expenses of raising a child well.
Yes, saw that I had a typo - I meant insane deductions.
You are right that many countries do - but they are simply not high enough to make it worthwhile and make the same economical sense at not having kids does.
The problem with subsidies is society does not benefit from kids simply existing. Society benefits from well raised kids. Kids not raised well end up costing society.
As “well raised” is not possible to measure, this is not a feasible solution.
One work around has been to bet that those with earned incomes are likelier to raise their kids well, so the subsidies can be non refundable earned income tax credits.
But I doubt sufficient people have sufficient tax liabilities that offset the costs of the minimum quality of life many people require for their kids and them to have.
It always gets a bit fascist to go down this path - but it is at least intellectually interesting.
One way to subsidize parents is to give free child care. As a bonus, the government get to decide exactly how these kids are being raised.
But yeah, it is a material investment for the society to take - which is likely why we have seen the cost of kids being transferred to the parents (and lower birth rates).
> It always gets a bit fascist to go down this path - but it is at least intellectually interesting.
Can you elaborate on what you mean here? Having well-raised kids is fascist? Which part did you mean?
Deciding who is going to raise children well implies deciding who can raise children implies deciding who can have children. It’s a pretty straightforward line.
Imposing structures on who and how can raise kids. Almost all western countries have scars around this.
Well that's easy to fix: tie the tax deduction to kids meeting some minimal reasonable performance bar.
This is a great framing. I've often thought that social security eligibility should be based on how many kids you've had. If you're not recruiting into the Ponzi scheme you shouldn't participate in the "earnings"
Hmm yes, I can’t see any possible issues with incentivizing having lots and lots of children, especially in the age of modern medicine…
Mostly because Bret is a good historian and it's going to be difficult for non-specialists to credibly nitpick it. Also it's quite a long read.
And he's not got to that question yet: "So this week we’re going to look at marriage patterns, particularly the question of age at first marriage. Then next week, we’re going to turn to the implications those patterns have for child-bearing and child-rearing"
But I think you're missing the other aspect of the population pyramid, extremely high child and maternal mortality. It's more that everyone, especially women, was a conscript in the War on Death. And even then people are generally having fewer children than humanly possible, because they're also starvation-constrained. From the article:
"We’ll be coming back to some of these points when we talk about fertility next week, but the mortality rate for pre-modern societies is very high, thus necessitating a lot of births, but it is not so high that societies need to approach a maximum ‘natural fertility’ (the birth rate using absolutely no means of birth control) to hit replacement and slow growth. But these are also peasant households with significantly constrained resources. So the question becomes how to restrain fertility to a high, but not maximum level."
I trust his judgment of the time and places he studies. It's also easy to trust, since it's more or less what I believed already.
However, I'm wary about the generalization to pre-modern societies in general. Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs, but also because when I started digging into the church books for my own genealogy, I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected. Maybe not a majority, sure, and maybe not on average (and also, we're way out of both the time and the geography Bret studies). The past is never quite as I imagined.
I agree with you, but a few slight caveats to your point that I think are worth noting.
> Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs
A lot of anthropological research is done on non-agrarian societies. The author limited himself to peasants here, so that limits some (far from all) of the variation.
> I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected
The author also limits himself to age at _first_ marriage; I’d expect a lot more variation in age at remarriage. And even if divorce was rare compared to today, death of a spouse was much more common. So you’d expect to see quite some remarriages in the family tree
FYI:
IIRC, he estimated mortality at
- 10% after the age of 20 (women due to childbirth, men due to war) and
- 50% before
in one of the earlier essays of this series.
> Is it not strange to see a post with 126 points and zero comment?
Can't speak for everyone, but acoup is regularly referred to here. Some people, including me, read it regularly anyway so we don't even click on the HN posts most of the time.
I read this particular article Saturday on my morning coffee for example. I didn't upvote it when it got posted on HN, but I've done it before on other acoup articles. Without ever going to the comments.
If acoup is new to you, start here:
https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/
It's what made it famous originally.
Then it added actual history lessons on top of the media and video game commenting.
> I wonder if this is the uncomfortable truth behind low birth rates in the modern world, and nobody ever really _wanted_ to raise kids so much as they just kinda had to (especially if they wanted to have sex)
I don't know how "uncomfortable" the truth is. In Islam, there's a principle that getting married (and presumably having kids) is half your religion. People were talking about social frameworks to incentivize marriage and reproduction 1,400 years ago. Maybe some people are uncomfortable with it now.
Putting religion aside, there's a biological aspect to this as well. Having children rewires your brain. People who don't have kids yet have little ability to know how they'll feel about it in advance. Talking about what people "want" a priori doesn't really make sense.
To use an analogy, I recently visited Napa and really enjoyed it. I had talked myself into the idea I wouldn't like it--too bougie, etc. But of course I liked Napa. Most people like Napa. It's literally famous for being enjoyable. I wasn't special or different, I had just developed intellectual reasons to think I'd dislike something that's more of a brain-stem level experience to begin with.
This is a good argument. It’s hard to be wise about what one might like or dislike in possible lifestyle choices.
But there are some possible enlightening questions for this and other brain-stem-level experiences like marriage and babies:
- did millions of years of evolution program my brain stem to like this?
- do lots of other people in other places and times do X, and after they’ve done X, do it again?
I think our brain stems and simpler functions must be very similar to one another. After all, visual illusions, the smell of bacon, and stories of human drama have similar effects on ~everyone.
I’m not sure it does require everyone’s brain. I love being a dad (and thought I would before having kids too) but there are a LOT of parents who regret having kids. The strong stigma against admitting regret, especially for moms, means that if anything it’s underreported.
And having it be part of a religion’s expectations seems like that suggests for some people at least it’s more duty than desire, does it not?
I’m sure there’s some people like that. I also expect that many of those people, though not all, are more disappointed about their life trajectories that likely wouldn’t have changed even if they hadn’t had kids.
There is nothing simple you can say about the blog in under 1,000 words other than 'neat'. It's also one of a longer series of blog posts about life at the time so you have a good 45min of reading before you can even start saying anything intelligent about it. Up votes are just a way to tell other people that this is a really good site you should read.
> I wonder if this is the uncomfortable truth behind low birth rates in the modern world
Well, you could ask people in age why they don't get in couple and have children, you could look at studies trying to understand why otherwise comparable countries have different birth rates.
Or you could wonder if the uncomfortable truth hidden from us is a fable about individuals' personal character.
You could, but asking people what they want instead of looking at what they actually do is pretty unreliable.
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This is a very US culture war take. Places like Japan and the Scandinavian countries also worry about low birth rates, but (eg) criminalizing abortion is simply not on the table.
Even outside of abortion, a lot of discussion is about wanting women back in the kitchen, dependent on partner. Simultaneously being forced to marry to have resources and simultaneously being unable to leave it things dont work well
Again, American.
In Scandinavia women are a part of the draft and parental leave is being equalized such that men can leave the workforce as long as women to take care of kids.
There is no pressure for women to get kids at all (besides what their mother might say).
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> Now that it’s become impossible to pretend that a fœtus is anything other than a separate human, the debate has become about whether it’s a justified homicide or not.
This is a very theocratic answer.
I know zero people who regard a fetus as "a separate human". Last time I did, it was the 90s and I was in a Catholic secondary school in the UK. Since then, even famously-Catholic Ireland has liberalised their abortion laws.
That one can also make an argument that says "it doesn't even matter if you think they're a separate human or not, we don't force people do donate kidneys and that has the same risk as a pregnancy", doesn't change the fact that even thinking a foetus is a person is primarily a religious position at this point.
I strongly believed this until the moment I saw the live ultrasound of my then unborn son. He moved and stretched exactly like he does now.
> Now that it’s become impossible to pretend that a fœtus is anything other than a separate human
If it was, then it could live on its own…without a literal cord attached to another human, within another human.
Attached, meaning not separate. And, within, meaning not separate.
I believe the point is "separate, as in not the same as the mother". It's not the mother - it has different DNA. This is the problem with the whole "a woman's right to do what she wants with her own body" response: It's not her body. Or at least, it's not all her body. Part of it is a different individual. And so her right to do what she wants with her own body is inextricably intertwined with another individual that she does not have that same right over.
But, in the sense that you took it: We currently can save children born prematurely at 22 weeks. Normally such a child would live within and attached to the mother for another 18 weeks, but if we need to, such a child can live outside but attached to a bunch of machines.
So, at least separable, even if not usually separate.
>This is the problem with the whole "a woman's right to do what she wants with her own body" response: It's not her body.
It is. Or so I claim. Renders the rest of the argument moot.
Also, no woman is aborting fetuses for fun. The whole issue is a waste of time and just a way to get people riled up for no reason, at the expense of women losing rights because doctors now have to watch their back for even more liability.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/raw-data-abor...
> Also, no woman is aborting fetuses for fun.
You would be surprised. I know of some "women rights activists" who basically do this for bragging rights, or maybe some kind of "rite of passage". And some doctors who talk about aborting 9 month fetuses as if it was giving them a boner.
I also know a celebrity who had an abortion, because she didn't feel like moving to a bigger apartment (which she could easily afford, given that she and her partner are making millions in income).
Nine months?!? That definitely seems outside the norm. Most people would be horrified by that barring -extreme- circumstances.
It’s a lie, not just outside the norm. Later term abortions are all for medical reasons. See data in MotherJones link.
But people against women’s rights will have you believe there is some sort of epidemic where women are choosing to go through 8 months of pregnancy, and then wake up in an evil mood, go to the doctor’s office, and order an abortion off the combo menu to get their jollies off.
And if that wasn’t crazy enough, that there are doctors that would just go ahead and do it.
It is not homicide and never was. The homicide point is just an excuse.People who want to criminalise abortion do not care about lives after being born in the slightest.
It is about punishing women for sex about wanting them to suffer if they have risky pregnancy.
We need to stop pretending conservatives have honest motivations.
I’m pro choice but when I was at a catholic high school my peers and the adults seemed genuinely convinced that abortion was literally killing a human - akin to infanticide. I think many of them indeed opposed abortion based on this. It’s part of why the debate was intractable - it even brings in the hard problem of consciousness, and we don’t have an answer to that.
Not "Almost everyone involved in the modern birth rate discussion" is a pro-natalist, come on.
I think occasionally a blog post of his gets a lot of comments, so people generally submit his new blog posts to him, but not every one engenders discussion.
The uncomfortable truth is that people are poisoning themselves into extinction. Births succesfully controlled for.
The article seems to revolve around defining an archetypal average peasant, which reminded me of [1]. While the article is well-written, I feel like I walk away with very little, given the story's focus on generalities.
[1]: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...
There is a discussion of the statistical model he’s considering and why it is relevant even if it is imperfect in the first post of the series: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...
The point of this series is to address the subset of his readers/commenters/his followers on twitter who have various flavors of delusions of the past being some utopia of multi-generational housing/family units and that wasn't just the reflection of harsh economic realities. He's already written blogs addressing the extreme on the other end where people assume too much economic freedom and upward mobility like is typical in video games.
He's done other blog series in the past that are more specific about specific things. His best work is on ancient military tactics and strategy. Every now and then he does these "baseline knowledge/understanding" series when he gets fed up with a particular group of idiots in his comments. It's like a teacher getting a class and being like "oh, you really are this dumb, I guess I gotta teach prerequisites before we dive in" even if they're not the best person to teach those prerequisites.
As a former history student I thought the ancient era was the most difficult because of the lack of good sources. It's easy to see why people fall victim to the tin-foils who propagate theories about alien pyramids etc. Pedagogues like Bret are a countermeasure but there's unfortunately not enough of them.
Always amazes me what we can piece together or at least put upper and lower bounds on from proxy sources.
Thanks for the useful clarification. I guess I'm not the target audience, then. I was a bit surprised by the article, given other works from that blog were much more to my taste.
I think there are too many words an too many jumps for it to be well written.
What specifically did you think was missing? It seems to me to be a summary of existing work, and for specific details you'd go read the cited works?
infamous the air force average strikes again.
Yet, I don't know if that pertains to peasantry as they didn't have much of a choice depending where they lived. The article talks about Europe as if it was somewhat homogeneous (and mostly divided west & east)
Can highly recommend Bret Devereaux for those interested in no-bs history on the ancient world. I found him on YT, he speaks well and is a rare break from the enshittification/slop avalanche there.
I sometimes wonder why such essays mostly extrapolate 'western' history to the entire world.
This series at least doesn't, and the author points it out in the first part, as is many other articles, he can't really speak of cultures far removed from what he's specialized in, Roman Republic and Roman Empire, and anything outside of it is more of an overview.