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Half a million fewer children? The coming COVID baby bust:
The COVID-19 episode will likely lead to a large, lasting baby bust. The pandemic has thrust the country into an economic recession. Economic reasoning and past evidence suggest that this will lead people to have fewer children. The decline in births could be on the order of 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births next year. We base this expectation on lessons drawn from economic studies of fertility behavior, along with data presented here from the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the 1918 Spanish Flu.
[...] When the public health crisis first took hold, some people playfully speculated that there would be a spike in births in nine months, as people were "stuck home" with their romantic partners. Such speculation is based on persistent myths about birth spikes occurring nine months after blizzards or major electricity blackouts. As it turns out, those stories tend not to hold up to statistical examination (Udry, 1970). But the COVID-19 crisis is amounting to much more than a temporary stay-at-home order. It is leading to tremendous economic loss, uncertainty, and insecurity. That is why birth rates will tumble.
[...] There is ample evidence that birth rates are, in fact, pro-cyclical. This is shown, for instance, in the work by Dettling and Kearney (2014) described above. Their analysis of birth rates in metropolitan areas finds that all else equal, a one percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a 1.4 percent decrease in birth rates. Schaller (2016) analyzes the relationship between state-level unemployment rates and birth rates, and finds that a one percentage-point increase in state-year unemployment rates is associated with a 0.9 to 2.2 percent decrease in birth rates. Other evidence shows that women whose husbands lose their jobs at some point during their marriage ultimately have fewer children (Lindo, 2010). This suggests that transitory changes in economic conditions lead to changes in birth rates.
[...] What are the likely implications of the COVID-19 episode for fertility? The monthly unemployment rate jumped from 3.5 percent to 14.7 percent in April and to 13.3 percent in May. Note that the BLS also indicate that technical issues in collecting these data likely mean that the actual unemployment rates in those months were likely 5 and 3 percentage points higher, respectively. That would bring them to about 19.7 and 16.3 percent. Although it is difficult to forecast the 2020 annual unemployment rate, assuming a 7 to 10 percentage-point jump to 10.6 to 13.6 percent seems reasonable. Based on the findings presented above, this economic shock alone implies a 7 to 10 percent drop in births next year. With 3.8 million births occurring in 2019, that would amount to a decline of between 266,000 and 380,000 births in 2021.
On top of the economic impact, there will likely be a further decline in births as a direct result of the public health crisis and the uncertainty and anxiety it creates, and perhaps to some extent, social distancing. Our analysis of the Spanish Flu indicated a 15 percent decline in annual births in a pandemic that was not accompanied by a major recession. And this occurred during a period in which no modern contraception existed to easily regulated fertility.
Combining these two effects, we could see a drop of perhaps 300,000 to 500,000 births in the U.S. Additional reductions in births may be seen if the labor market remains weak beyond 2020. The circumstances in which we now find ourselves are likely to be long-lasting and will lead to a permanent loss of income for many people. We expect that many of these births will not just be delayed – but will never happen. There will be a COVID-19 baby bust. That will be yet another cost of this terrible episode.
Journal References:
1.) Melissa S . Kearney, Phillip B . Levine. Subsidized Contraception, Fertility, and Sexual Behavior, (DOI: rest.91.1.137)
2.) Melissa S. Kearney, Riley Wilson. Male Earnings, Marriageable Men, and Nonmarital Fertility: Evidence from the Fracking Boom, Review of Economics and Statistics (DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00739)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 03 2020, @10:05PM (55 children)
Messy URL, enjoy it: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fertility-rate#:~:text=United%20States%20-%20Historical%20Fertility%20Rate%20Data%20,%20%20-1.100%25%20%2067%20more%20rows%20
Scroll down the page, you'll see that the US has not had a sustainable fertility rate since about 1972. I forget the exact number, but it's close to 2.1 that's "sustainable". These are the numbers used by immigration advocates to "justify" increasing immigration, and to justify amnesty for illegals.
Bear in mind that fertility rates INCLUDE recent immigrants and illegal. That may help you to understand that white, black, and Native Americans are being displaced by immigrants. And, maybe help to understand why abortion is such a bad idea.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 5, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 03 2020, @10:22PM (40 children)
Bad for who?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @11:19PM (33 children)
It's bad for the baby, obviously. It's a violent death, done silently behind closed doors with the dying child unable to scream due to liquid in the lungs.
In case you think it's a woman's rights thing and us men should have no say, I'll just point out that the women I know are all the strongest opponents. Maybe guys like a hope for avoiding child support. Personally, I like how abortion primarily kills the children most likely to become leftist voters. Anyway, I don't know a woman who supports it. Probably half the women I know would be happy to impose the death penalty for both the abortionist (the hit-man) and the customer. Rape is no exception. I know a woman who raised her rape baby, and every year she travels to Washington DC to march in protest against abortion. Other women that I know have settled for small local protests due to expense and, in one case, having a dozen kids to raise. They go out to a street corner or bridge a few times per year to hold signs and pray. Women love babies.
So babies don't like abortion and women don't like abortion. I think it must have been imposed by the patriarchy.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Mykl on Thursday December 03 2020, @11:27PM (26 children)
I know you're a troll, but I can't resist.
I love this. "Life is so precious that we should kill people to protect it".
Funny how many "pro-life" people also support the death penalty...
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @12:20AM (22 children)
We make a distinction between innocent life and guilty life. We send cops to hunt bad people. We defend the nation in war.
What did the unborn kid do? Sins of the father don't count.
And yes, I really do know these women. If you don't know women like them, maybe you run in leftist circles, or maybe the women avoid the subject when around you. In the seriously leftist parts of the country, pro-baby women have to hide their true feelings to avoid discrimination and other hostility.
Do you even know a midwife, a Catholic, or a woman who chose to raise a rape baby? Have you talked with any of them, or did you just assume that all women support abortion? You might get an earful.
Every year there is a huge anti-abortion protest in DC called March for Life. It tends to be the biggest or second biggest protest, sometimes drawing 650,000 people, but the news media completely avoids all coverage. It's not a sausagefest at all. The crowd appears to be more female than not.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by helel on Friday December 04 2020, @01:18AM
In my (admittedly limited) experience midwives tend to be very pro-choice. The one's I've met are deeply committed to the idea that a woman has the right to control her own body and that authoritarian lawmakers should fuck off.
Remember, midwifery has been and in some states still is banned in the US. Any midwife either owes their legal status to a decades long fight for women's right to choose or is operating illegally because they live in an area that still tells women how they may and may not give birth.
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @01:33AM
Ah, yes, guilty of not following the laws of the oppressors, ahem, ruling class.
Dolphins and whales are guilty life? All the megafauna of the globe that have been driven extinct, and the precious remaining few that are rapidly headed there, they don't count, but an innocent h. sapiens must be preserved from the moment of conception?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @01:37AM
I went to Catholic school for three years. There was a lot of theoretical discussion about rape babies, the ethics of post rape hygiene and how far might be too far to not anger God. In practice, the only Catholic teen pregnancies I know about ended in abortions - very quiet shameful abortions, but abortions nonetheless.
There was the one mother I met at age 30 who had a 17 year old daughter, that wasn't rape either, but by age 25 she was advising her daughter to use any and all forms of birth control to avoid repeating her life.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 4, Touché) by Mykl on Friday December 04 2020, @02:35AM (16 children)
Who are you to play God and decide who lives and dies? We are all guilty of something - what level of 'guilt' determines that it's OK to kill another human? Are you completely without sin that you can cast that stone? Interesting that you are also ignoring the possibility of redemption/salvation - a key tenet of Christianity (which is strongly correlated with pro-life).
And what if you are wrong and the person is actually innocent? You've then killed an innocent life. How many innocent lives are worth killing to justify the killing of a guilty life? If you are truly pro-life then my guess is that you would not risk the death of _any_ innocent in order to kill the guilty.
To be clear, a lot of pro-choice people are equally hypocritical. Being both pro-choice and anti-death-penalty can be viewed as being just as inconsistent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @05:27AM (15 children)
I think most people don't realize the sort of people you end up defending when rejecting the death penalty. So for instance the federal death penalty was just reinstated. Here [cnsnews.com] is a writeup on the first 3 set for execution now (who previously had been 'saved').
1: After a paternity test showed him as the father, a man was required to pay child support for his daughter. So he took temporary custody of her, took her on a trip with him (as a trucker), and proceeded to torture, sexually assault, and ultimately murder his own daughter.
2: Drug dealer who murdered at least 7 people including, in one instance, everybody in a household when one person was unable to pay for his crack.
3: Guy (and a couple of friends) invite 3 women over to his house. One of the women rejects his advances and want to leave. He offers to drive them home. Instead drives them to a secluded forest and murders them all.
Yeah I'm more than happy to cast that first stone. The death penalty is generally not applicable or invoked in the sort of cases where somebody could rightfully become rehabilitated - for instance a murder done in a fit of rage. It's generally reserved not only for people who take other's lives, but who do so in rather heinous ways or those who engage in mass homicide.
When I was younger I used to feel exactly as you. But I think at some point, I just realized some people are simply sick and need to be put down. There's always the risk of creeping dystopia where, as you mention, who gets to decide who gets put down? But in general, this is one of the very few, perhaps the only, power that governments have not completely bastardized. The one thing I would add is that if a prosecutor ever intentionally misleads or in any way restricts access to evidence or reasonable defense then they themselves ought also be able to be charged with premeditated murder and/or attempted murder. While I trivialize it here, to some degree, with my choice of words - the taking of a life is of course very serious, and death penalty cases should not be a competition to see who can win - but instead a concerted effort from both the defense and prosecution at reaching a just and fair outcome.
(Score: 2) by helel on Friday December 04 2020, @02:34PM (14 children)
Actually, when most people argue against the death penalty they are trying to protect the sort of people who are wrongly accused, who are executed despite being innocent. When the justice system screws up and it's only forced to acknowledge it's error years later it's a tragedy for someone who's lost a portion of their life behind bars but at least they can now be let go. Until the state can reinstate the lives of those it kills it cannot be trusted to kill at all.
Even in the case of the guilty tho, it really comes down to what you think the purpose of legal sanction should be. Is the goal of the court to provide revenge or is it to protect society? If you're in the former mindset then it's obvious that murder is the level of revenge you want for some transgressions. On the other hand if you think society should be kept safe than there's no difference to society between someone locked up and unable to do harm and someone dead and unable to do harm.
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @04:20PM (10 children)
What is the purpose of legal sanction? Can I choose door 3? Why do we punish crime and misbehaviors at all? The answer is simple: the social contract.
Our social contract entails that misdeeds have consequences. When you park illegally and are required to pay a fine - that's not "revenge" nor is it really keeping society safe except in some abstract notion. It's simply part of the social contract. Engage in a proscribed behavior, pay a price. As the deeds grow in severity so too does the price. But now what should be the price for something so heinous that we have nothing on Earth that can possibly offer justice in proportion to the offense? Free housing, food, entertainment, and healthcare until the day they die? The discomforts of prison are greatly overstated. There is no justice there.
I fully agree with you on the dangers of invalid prosecution and this is why, in my opinion, the death penalty should only be used in cases where the standard of guilt is not "beyond a reasonable doubt" but "beyond any doubt". Our current system is not ideal but is still held to a much higher standard than a regular conviction due to the requirement of automatic and mandatory appeals. A person effectively needs to be convicted multiple times in order to face the death penalty.
(Score: 2) by helel on Friday December 04 2020, @05:09PM (7 children)
Your door number three is just refusing to examine your own beliefs.
On a basic level number three is protecting society. If you park in front of a fire hydrant and it cannot be accessed quickly enough in an emergency there is real harm done. The fine is an incentive to keep people from doing that and thereby protect society from fire. Likewise for driving unsafely or failing to wash your hands before preparing food at a restaurant.
Now if you insist on enforcing a social contract that goes beyond protecting society, such as stoning adulterers to death, then it's just revenge. That person did something I don't like and I want them to suffer!
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2020, @04:49PM (6 children)
Ah but I think you gave an absolutely perfect counter example to your own hypothesis!
For instance you claim stoning for adultery is "revenge." Does a person going 70 in a 60, or engaging in adultery result in more "unsafe" outcomes in society? It's not even going to be close. And similarly, why do other nations punish adultery with stoning? It it "revenge"? No! It's because in Islam adultery is considered a hadd offense - zina in particular. These are considered some of the most grevious offenses in Islam and is an affront to God himself. And the religion dictates that stoning is the penalty, so the societies institute stoning as the penalty.
All the social contract says is essentially 'If you want to live here, you must abide these rules. If you don't want to do so, feel free to live elsewhere.'
(Score: 2) by helel on Saturday December 05 2020, @05:18PM (5 children)
While death is not the only measure of harm, roughly 102 people die every day as a result of unsafe driving. We might attribute the occasional suicide or homicide to adultery but even then it's hard to imagine we're talking about more than a handful per day. I'm really curios how you come to the conclusion that adultery is more harmful that traffic infractions?
As for Islamic law, just because somebody wrote it with the intent of revenge a long time ago doesn't change your stance if you support such a law now. If you support such a law you believe the law should be used to exact revenge, whether you're honest with yourself or not. If you didn't want revenge you would view such a law as unjust.
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 06 2020, @07:13PM (4 children)
You're not asking yourself the right question. That is:
1) Of all people who end driving above the speed limit how many will end up in a "socially unsafe" incident primarily (e.g. - not because of alcohol) because of this?
2) Of all people who engage in adultery, how many will end up in a "socially unsafe" incident primarily because of this?
When you look at the normalized incident rate, this is really not even going to be remotely close. Adultery is definitely going to be orders of magnitude more dangerous masked only by the fact that it's very rare relative to speeding.
And you can find countless laws where safety has nothing to do with it. For instance we live in a very corporate and commercialized society and so doing something like copying and sending intellectual property to other people is met with some very fierce and aggressively enforced punishments in spite of the fact that damages are, at worst, going to be a negligible commercial loss to a corporation. By contrast in other countries consequences for such tend to be nonexistent. It's not safety, it's not revenge. It's just a different social contract driven by cultural values.
(Score: 2) by helel on Monday December 07 2020, @01:21AM (3 children)
Well, about 1 in 4 people [psychcentral.com] engage in sexual activity outside their primary relationship. Meanwhile alcohol accounts for 29% of crash fatalities [iii.org]. Lets further assume that more-or-less everybody engages in speeding/unsafe driving.
Taking the alcohol out of the daily crash statistics would leave us with 72 deaths a day. Divide by 4 and adultery would need to cause 18 deaths a day to match unsafe driving, and that's without considering all the other, non fatal, harm unsafe driving causes. There are about 51 homicides a day in the US, so if 35% of them occur as a result of adultery than speeding and adultery might be equally harmful, purely on the death rate.
But that's total murders. We discounted alcohol from the driving statistics because it's a major factor in crashes and so, it turns out, is alcohol a major factor in murder, being attributed as a contributing factor in half of all cases. That brings our daily murder rate down to 26 and would require a whopping 70% of homicides to be the result of adultery!
35% of homicides being adultery related seems ... suspect. 70% seems impossibly high. And no matter which number you go with it's not the adultery itself that kills, it's somebody else's choices in response that do the killing, unlike losing control of your vehicle where it's the choice to speed that causes the crash.
Things like copyright penalties are an interesting case. They clearly exist purely because a few rich people wanted them to and as such are, I would argue, a more pure example of using legal penalties to exact revenge. If you download Frozen on LimeWire Bob Iger want you to lose your house.
Now Bob Iger would probably say that's not revenge, it's just stopping others. But let's tie this back to adultery. If you sleep with my partner and I respond by burning down your house it doesn't matter how many times I claim "It's not revenge, it's just stopping others", nobody will believe me. That kind of disproportionate repose is vengeance, period.
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2020, @04:40PM (2 children)
Below, I discuss your numbers. Since I expect there's a good chance you'll just glaze over it - I'm putting the more fun part, TEXT!, up top - though I wrote it afterwards. Anywho. Back to social contract stuff. Calling heavy penalties for copyright infringement "revenge" is not really reasonable. The act in no way whatsoever offends the corporations involved. And the loss itself is, at best, hypothetical. Many studies have shown that piracy in many fields *improves* the sales of the product due to word of mouth among other factors.
But there is no grand rationale to law. It's not about revenge and it's certainly not about safety. It's just about providing a set of punishments for proscribed behaviors in a fashion reflective of the world view of the powers that be. The reason IP violations are punished so severely in the US is not because "a few rich people wanted them" but rather because the US government is controlled by corporations. And that, in turn, implies that the US itself is controlled by corporations. And so laws are going to be reflective of corporate values: copyright infringement = off with his head! Corporate crime (that benefits the corporation) = give us 5 minutes of your annual profit and we'll call it even.
And this is how it's always been, and always will be. You can even go back to the very beginning of laws, thanks to Hammurabi [wikipedia.org]. Ham's code emphasizes that formalized law, since its very advent, has always been about simply enforcing the social contract of a region. So for instance what is more "unsafe", letting a slave free or blinding a man? One gets the death penalty, and one is where the now quite famous reference "eye for an eye" comes from.
---- Insert that stuff you will now skim ----
Come on now, I'm only responding because you clearly put some effort into these numbers but don't you realize you're engaging in that latter part of lies, damned lies, and statistics? When extrapolating outward, use only know what you know to be absolutely true or your conclusion can be challenged on your assumptions alone. For instance, surveys where it's reasonable to expect high variance are not so good. But a survey in social psychology? That field has a ~25% replication success rate, which makes their data less than worthless - it actively undermines any effort at evaluating your hypothesis. Anywho, so on to what we do know:
- 660 [fbi.gov] husbands/wives killed one or the other in 2011. Should get more recent data, but I'm lazy and so interested. The year is not cherry picked though.
- 9,378 [nhtsa.gov] people were killed speeding in 2018.
- 83% [gallup.com] of Americans drive, 64% everyday.
- 50% [pewresearch.org] of Americans are married.
Those should all be mostly incontrovertible numbers. But now we get into the bullshit zone, the magic number zone - where social psychology and filthy social scientists thrive. But instead of doing my best social science impression and juking every number to support my argument, I'm going to do the exact opposite. I'm going to pull a lot of magical numbers out of my ass here, but I'm going to bias them all in your favor of *your* argument! I'm going to be understating how many people speed and how often they speed, while also overstating how many and how often people cheat. So here we go:
- 90% of husband/wife murders were in NO WAY caused by adultery. So those 660 deaths, now become 66.
- 10% of couples engage in 10 acts of adultery each per year (your paper gave 6% per year, that 25% was a lifelong measurement)
- The 19% of Americans who claim they drive frequently, but not everyday - they no longer exist.
- The 64% of Americans who drive everyday, speed only for exactly one moment and only once every other day.
OK! Bullshit presented, now let's roll the numbers! I'm going to be using 64 and 5 (5 coming from 10% of couples * 50% married) as base multiplier populations. I'm implicitly assuming a population of 100 because the actual number there doesn't matter since we're just comparing the RELATIVE ratios. I hope that makes sense!
64 drivers * (365 * 0.5) incidents each yields 9,378 deaths.
5 adulterers * (10) incidents each yields 66 deaths.
- Speed death ratio = 0.8 deaths/incident
- Adultery death ratio = 1.2 deaths/incident.
That adultery is "only" 50% more dangerous than speeding is because I made all my magic numbers crazy in your favor. Also I simply accepted alcohol deaths as well because some rando gov site told me that speeding was the cause, rather than alcohol. And I'm sure they'd never mislead me. Some sarcasm there, if you can't tell.
-------
(Score: 2) by helel on Tuesday December 08 2020, @06:04PM (1 child)
Who do you think controls the major corporations, lizards? Anything a corporation bribes a politician for is something the rich people that own the corporation want. Attributing the action to a legal fiction is disingenuous. If they didn't want the law they'd spend that money on something else.
And, as you point out, studies have again and again show that piracy is, at worst, a non-issue. So, what do you call it when somebody seeks wildly disproportionate harm in response to a slight they suffered? Vengeance? Revenge? Retribution? Cruelty?
I am not claiming there is a "grand rational" to the law. Different parties want different things and all that influence mixed together makes a maddening mess. What I have been claiming from the beginning is that there are two ways to assign penalties under the law - Protection of the public or Revenge. Going back to the foundation, those who are against the death penalty believe the law should be written to protect the public. The fact that the death penalty exists to be debated at all is clear proof that many, perhaps most, people fall into the later camp and desire the law exact revenge (or retribution or vengeance or other synonym, take your pick).
On the whole adultery thing ... I don't agree with you but I think I can see your argument better now. If we treat any vengeful killing in response to adultery as a result of the act then adultery is perhaps more dangerous, per incident, than most unsafe driving? It's much harder to get numbers on but I expect you'd see the trend continue with lessor injuries as well? Only one speeding in ten thousand results in a broken bone but every adultery leads to a broken heart?
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2020, @07:15AM
I just realized that there's a really great way to describe how a social contract falls outside the dichotomy of revenge/safety that you're proposing! Assault. Should this behavior be proscribed? Absolutely. Are there exceptions where somebody is fully justified in engaging in assault? Absolutely. Should they still be required to face the consequences? Absolutely. Proscribing behaviors simply sets a consequence for behaviors that are deemed outside the values of society.
And it's very arbitrary. This is the point I was making with adultery. We both got carried away in the details because it's fun to try to measure, but obviously nobody would ever suggest there are anything but negative overall consequences, sometimes very extreme, from the behavior. Yet it is in no way legally proscribed. The only reason is because we have a social contract that is little more than a reflection of our own cultural values. And our cultural values place a rather large weight on individual liberty.
The reason I was describing corporations in a more broad way is because relationship with the government is quite nuanced. Bribery implies an outsider and an insider. But who's the outsider? By the time you hear the media speaking positively of a candidate in the US, he's already been vetted and approved by corporate interests. Disney owns ABC, Comcast owns NBC, AT&T owns CNN, etc. And if you don't hear the media speaking positively of somebody? Well it's pretty hard for that person to get elected. And this is just one link in the intertwining between government and corporations, though quite an important one. But in any case it's certainly not just 'a few rich people' enacting their will. That suggests if these few rich people suddenly disappeared, then everything would return to "normal", but I don't think that's the case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @11:19PM (1 child)
Bzzt wrong.
In OUR "social contract", "consequences" are but means to an end, which is (advertised as) improving lives overall. For this goal, some actions get declared "misdeeds" and some disincentives get used to reduce their occurrence. Ideally, societal costs of those should be balanced, so that the efforts to (further) reduce misdeeds do not do more harm than the misdeeds themselves.
The people who make the means, "consequences", into an end in itself, usually want one thing and one thing only; a way to safely enjoy torment of fellow human beings. No sane person should be joining their ranks; the damage that the crazies do if unleashed, far outweighs any intended good from "being tough on crime".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2020, @05:11PM
There are many behaviors that completely damage society, and few would argue otherwise, but we accept them because our social contract dictates that such *ought* be accepted. And vice versa we ban many behaviors that likely are, in and of themselves, not only not damaging but perhaps even beneficial.
An example of the former would be social media. Screwing up society something fierce, but is ostensibly the embodiment of free expression which is a cornerstone of our social contract. Examples of the latter are endless. I'm not sure which is the most heinous so I'll simply pick one of the most absurd. In most places in America it is illegal to camp on your own land for more than two weeks. No I am not making that up.
So yes, the social contract and the punishments resultant from it (and our law) are in large part arbitrary. What rationale that does exist is largely subjective which is why a corporate crime that results in unimaginable losses almost never sees jailtime and generally gets a very gentle slap on the wrist, at worst. By contrast low level crime resulting in incomparably small societal losses can see major jail time, even in cases where the acts are not directly disruptive. Again, as above, copyright infringement is a good example.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday December 04 2020, @04:28PM (2 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1) by Socrastotle on Saturday December 05 2020, @04:32PM (1 child)
I used to tell myself the same thing as well, yet there's a simple question you can ask yourself to challenge your hypothesis.
Ask any lifer if they'd rather be sentenced to death. You'll get exactly 0 who will say yes.
Ask any death row inmate if they'd rather be sentenced to life. You'll get exactly 0 who will say no.
This is a testable hypothesis as well since there are pen pal programs for inmates. But I think obviously neither you or I will do that, but it's also equally obvious that it's wholly unnecessary because the answers are 100% predictable.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday December 06 2020, @07:40AM
I will be your black swan for this one: I would absolutely rather be put to death, and fast, than spend life in prison. The stipulation here is that the method is quick and doesn't cause undue suffering, so nitrogen asphyxiation. Death holds no terror for me.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday December 04 2020, @03:19PM (1 child)
Here it's the men who are against abortions, and the women who say "untested you have skin in the game by getting pregnant and carrying it to term, shut the fuck up."
If men got pregnant, free abortion on demand would come with free beer and pizza.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @11:27PM
Many animals (cats, dogs, sheep, deer, ...) reabsorb the fetuses (some of them, or all of them) if the conditions are unfavorable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_resorption [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @06:34AM (2 children)
You missed the other thing lurking in here
The other lurking thing is that in 2016, 53% of white women thought abortion should be illegal, and in 2020 55% of white women think abortion should be illegal!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @09:18AM
White women and Karens should be illegal. There, I said it. I say abort them before they get started.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday December 04 2020, @03:26PM
Fortunately we're heading towards a post-religious world in most civilized countries. The young'uns don't want the old farts religious fantasies.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @01:19AM
Obviously. [youtube.com]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @06:05AM (2 children)
Bad for the Catholic Priest, who wants women to have unwanted man-children, like Milo, that they can "mentor" in the ways of God. Abstinence makes the Church grow Fondlers, as I have heard it. Strange that Runaways is coming down on the side of the pedophiles, and traffickers in children, but then, 666 lost children on the southern border? Is that number a mistake? Stephen Miller is the AntiChrist! Told ya!!
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday December 04 2020, @03:30PM (1 child)
Q. What's black and white, black and white, black and white?
A. A pregnant nun falling down the stairs.
Q. What's black and white and laughs?
A. The priest who pushed her.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @05:46PM
Aren't you late for a church burning?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @02:54PM
FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2020, @10:42PM
Or lungs that haven't even developed, given how early most abortions are done.
It's still a woman's rights issue, and those women you know are forced-birthers. It's 100% possible for women to be against women's rights.
The question is whether or not there's a general human right to use someone else's organs to keep yourself alive. The answer, objectively, is no; there is no precedent for such a right, and there never has been. You could stab someone with a knife and cause them to lose massive amounts of blood, and you still couldn't be forced to give them blood (which is renewable), even though you directly and maliciously caused their situation. Therefore, since there is not a human right to use someone else's organs, women should always be able to terminate their pregnancies, for any reason.
Forced-birth Nazis are hypocrites unless they support forced organ donation as well.
Plenty of women do not. Or, even many of the ones who do, would still choose to get an abortion or allow it for others.
Given that around 1/3 women get abortions in their lifetimes, it seems that many women are choosing abortion.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 04 2020, @12:30AM (4 children)
Bad for white and black Americans who allow their babies to be aborted. Good for Latin Americans, who are looking for new homes, and don't kill their babies.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @01:21AM (3 children)
You don't have to call out the wetbacks by name, you can just say Catholics.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 04 2020, @03:27AM (2 children)
Catholic doesn't make the point. We have some millions of Catholic whites and some blacks in this country who DO NOT subscribe to the church's position on birth control.
Latinos tend to follow the church's edicts on birth control, or at least, a lot more than nth generation Euros do.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @03:45AM (1 child)
I live around the corner from a big Catholic church - several white families with 4+ kids in the neighborhood, and lots of "Choose Life" license plates - much more here than in the broader city.
Sure, there are Catholics who will use rubbers, or even take the pill, just like there are Jews that eat bacon, Amish that use English air tires and buttons, etc. Still, by the percentages, Catholics are much heavier on the "Choose Life" bandwagon than most others.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @06:08AM
Blasphemers!!!
"All I said was this piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah!"
He said it again!!
Getting Catholics using rubbers stoned, that actually just undermines the whole point? Because then they will end up, um, . . . .
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @05:42PM
Parent said:
"Bad for who?"
The answer: Bad for *whom*.
You're welcome!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 03 2020, @11:29PM (13 children)
Most data sources I have seen agree with these trends for US birth and death rates:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/birth-rate [macrotrends.net]
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/death-rate [macrotrends.net]
Summary: 12 births and 8.88 deaths per 1000 people in 2020
The arithmetic I took in school would say that we are still birthing more people than are dying in the U.S., by a wide margin - that seems like a net population growth to me. Even if we are sending our old people to retire in countries with better healthcare economics for the elderly, our immigration balance is a net inflow, with population growing from 213 million to 331 million today. Migrant population is around 47 million, falling far short of explaining the 118 million growth in overall population.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 04 2020, @03:47AM (6 children)
Not at all. First, you start from 1970. The native (third generation or earlier immigrants) population had much higher fertility back then. Second, you're not actually measuring the contribution of immigrants to the overall growth. For example, this link shows percentages [pewresearch.org] of immigrant and second generation immigrant populations from 1900 to 2018 (the cutoff for the study). From 2010 to 2018, the two populations increased from 24.0% share of the US population to 26.4% of the US population. Given that the US population grew from 309 million (April 2010) to 327 million (April 2018), that means that the immgrant/second generation immigrant population grew from 74 million to 86 million over the same timeframe. So out of 18 million growth, 12 million was due to immigrants or second generation immigrants.
I wasn't able to get figures for third generation immigrants, but their number is supposed to be rather high due to the higher fertility of second generation immigrants. That sure looks to me like all of present US population growth can be explained by immigration as advertised.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @01:39PM (5 children)
So, all this: "immigration explains the US population growth" is predicated on the premise that 2nd generation immigrants aren't part of US population growth?
Last I checked, US grants citizenship to anyone born in the US. Just because we're adding children from immigrants doesn't mean that the US isn't growing its own population. Many (most?) of those immigrants would not have had the children if they didn't believe in the prosperity of their new home.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 04 2020, @07:02PM (4 children)
Consider what the label second generation means. You can't have second generation immigrants without first generation immigrants. So in other words, immigration does indeed explain population growth in the US, and is the difference between population growth and shrinking in the US today.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @07:18PM (3 children)
So, as opposed to the founding fathers' vision of second generation being granted automatic citizenship, you'd like to move the goalposts?
Consider that, except for the 3/64th of my ancestry that crossed the Bering Strait land bridge, most of all U.S. citizens are relatively recent immigrants, just a few generations removed.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 05 2020, @04:29AM (2 children)
Moving goalposts would not change the number of second generation immigrants or the number of kids they have. Nor would founding fathers' opinions on the matter. I guess this is as close to progress as we'll with you today.
Because that is somehow remotely relevant? Please tell us how.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 05 2020, @02:16PM (1 child)
Part of what "Made America Great" in the first place was acceptance of all people. Drawing some line in the sand for a New World Order wherein our borders are closed and if you didn't get in before the cutoff a new set of rules applies is a huge step backwards towards the world of genetically differentiated nations at constant war with one another.
Do we let in anybody who can swim the river or hike the desert? No. There always was a legal process for that, still is, and part of that legal process includes tolerance for some amount of less than legal activity, just like speeding on the roads, recreational drug use, buildings not to code, topless sunbathing, etc. It is and always has been part of our system of government: tolerance for some amount of "law breaking." Personally, I'd rather repeal the laws than leave them on the books for arbitrary rare enforcement at the discretion of our jackbooted enforcement types, but that's not how it has ever been done, and that's not likely to change. So, when "your guy" isn't elected chief executive, expect those polices to shift rather quickly, because that's how our system has always worked. Personally, I'd do things differently if I were absolute monarch of the world, but since I don't have that option - this is the best system available to me and my family, and we do have a fair degree of freedom to relocate to other jurisdictions if we wanted to.
Relevant example: again Central Florida, 1985 a Mexican family moves to town and opens a successful, modest restaurant in the WalMart strip mall. It is widely acknowledged by just about the entire county as the best restaurant in town. Mama runs a tight ship, dad cooks, and they hire a dozen or so locals, mostly Mexican girls, to serve and help out. Successful restaurant, plenty of money, Mama has a good immigration lawyer and follows all the advice to stay as legal as possible. Every couple of years Mama travels back home to visit family, and while her guiding influence is absent the quality of service and even food in the restaurant turns to shit, every time. But, when she comes back things straighten out immediately. Not only does Mama pay all her taxes, she donates back to the community, etc. 15 years later, WalMart builds a supercenter and the old location turns to a Tractor Supply, traffic dries up in the strip mall and the restaurant suffers. Flush with cash, but losing money due to lack of traffic, Mama moves out to "Restaurant Row" - a set of four restaurants on the main road, the local population can apparently only support three of these restaurants, one is perpetually out of business, but that's how it has been for 20+ years, the usual pattern is for a new restaurant to move in every 2-3 years and one of the old ones to lose business and close within a year. New location is a booming success, and the old fish restaurant suffers as a result. Old fish restaurant and the other two are owned by locals, they sic immigration on Mama and even though she has followed all procedures as well as the best immigration lawyer in the county knows how, she gets deported permanently. If that makes your heart all warm and fuzzy inside, you can just go fuck yourself with that feeling, that is NOT the America I was raised in and that is NOT the way I will vote to shape our future.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 05 2020, @03:50PM
You demonstrate above that you have no support for your arguments here. Here and elsewhere you've retreated from more births than deaths to knowledge of future population demographics is unknowable and mean-ole khallow has the wrong feelz about immigration policy. I place the blame on ideological brain worms. They've feasted quite well in your above post.
I have never denied that the US has a higher birth rate than death rate or that third plus generation immigrants in the US had lots of kids in the past. What I have repeated stated, backed with facts, is that the US continues to grow in population (a thing I think we can sustain at fairly high levels for a long time) due solely to immigration - not just the immigrants themselves, but also the births due to those immigrants and their children.
To introduce more fact into this discussion, consider that the second generation immigration population increased by 5.3 million (from 34.9 million to 40.2 million) between 2010 and 2018 (see links in my previous post [soylentnews.org] for the data sources). At the end of that period there were 46.1 million immigrants. Even if we suppose that no second generation population died in that period, we have almost a third of the US's population growth during that period solely from immigrants and a birth rate of better than 14 births per thousand. If instead we suppose that 7% of immigrants died over that time period (like the US population as a whole), then we're looking at over 15 births per thousand. That alone drops the birth rate of everyone else from 12 to around 11.5 births per thousand. Add in the fertility of that second generation and you go even lower.
Now add that the US population is getting older so death rate increases and birth rate decreases, and you have the very predictable decline in US population as expected.
(Score: 1) by Socrastotle on Friday December 04 2020, @05:46AM (5 children)
Link to previous comment with more details. [soylentnews.org]
In a nutshell, fertility is only measurable on the scale of a life-cycle. So if you want to see the overall net effect on a population from a certain level of fertility, you need to wait for about 80 years (the life expectancy of a human) *after* that point. To do a reduction to absurdity, imagine you started with a large population but only one in a million were having children. Until you reached the point where that initial population started reaching their life expectancy, you'd actually see a net increase in population per year! But when the declines did drop, you'd see massive reductions in population.
The US fertility rate only dropped below sustainable levels in the 70s. So you're only going to start seeing sharp drops sometime around the 2050s.
This is why fertility is so incredibly important. By the time evidence of a problem becomes apparent, it's long since passed the time where it could have been fixed through moderate means.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @01:50PM (4 children)
The last 80 years has seen more than 3x increase in global population. Even though we're slowing, waiting another 80 years to see how things play out is not a great plan - unless you're going to be dead soon, then, sure, enjoy the party - I've always liked to live by the Def Leppard philosophy of: "It's better to burn out, than fade away." but, only on a personal level - as a species it's a shitty plan, or rather, it's a shitty thing to do to the children of the world which doesn't really involve planning at all.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 1) by Socrastotle on Friday December 04 2020, @02:24PM (3 children)
But there's no sort of 'wait and see'. You can tell exactly what the population levels will be far ahead of time. This is how I can confidently tell you that you'll start seeing substantial 'native' population decline in the US around 2050. It's not an estimate or a guess, it's simply pairing fertility rate with life expectancy which gives you precise values. The past 80 years have seen a tripling of the population because who are you seeing die today? In general it's those born in the 40s. And they had families well beyond the replacement rate, and so even when they die their overall impact is a positive growth in population.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @03:03PM (2 children)
No, I cannot.
The population prediction curves I remember from the 1970s put us somewhere on the "worst case" side of the curves back then. Our methods and accuracy of results have not improved much since then.
Crystal balls don't work. What you can tell exactly is what happened in the past. You can only project, estimate, guess, hope about the future for matters as complex as human population levels.
What age will your confident self be in 2050? What kind of skin will you have left in the game at that point. I'm sure your confidence is risking little for yourself.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 1) by Socrastotle on Friday December 04 2020, @03:27PM (1 child)
Population change is a simple function of exactly one variable: fertility rates. Life expectancy, what might be expected to be another variable, plays a role only in defining how long a 'cycle' is.
The hyperbolic predictions of the 1970s were based upon the assumption that people would continue along their current fertility trends, which were extremely high at the time. They had no way to predict that the entire world (sans Africa and a handful of other locations) would have their fertility rates catastrophically collapse. And so yes I definitely could be wrong if (and only if) somehow the world's fertility rates just exponentially increase. However, (1) I don't believe that's what you're trying to argue and (2) I certainly see no reason to believe this is even a remotely likely scenario.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 04 2020, @07:06PM
There's no place in the world, including Africa, that isn't experiencing substantial declines in fertility. You can consider that catastrophic, but it won't be anywhere near as catastrophic as continued exponential growth.