SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.