A theory im playing around with that the apparent Vulgarity and crudeness of American country/redneck/Conservative culture is actually an adaptive mode of Counter signaling akin to Orthodox Jewish or Amish cultural adaptations to maintain high birth rates and internal cultural coherence in the face of the homogenizing anti-natalist effects of Mainstream Global-liberal-urban monoculture...
American redneck/conservative culture, and Orthodox Jews especially are unique in being the only wealthy cultures to maintain high birth rates beyond the global middle-income, and that both adapted and are defined by their hostile largely hostile relationship with the the most advanced strains of the global mono-culture found in Urban America and the Urbanized anglo-world.
Nations as far afield as Hungary, China, and Iran are trying to save themselves from declining birthrates... Should they try to import American Country culture?
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Notes -
The assumption here is that we are approaching the growth limit, while in reality we’re nowhere close to depleting the resources especially considering the possible technological advances. The current population was thought to be unsustainable pre-green revolution.
The decline in the standards of living, the cost disease, etc. is essentially artificial and caused by the nature of the modern regulatory state.
For millenia people somehow managed to have multiple children, without having access to the modern technology — no washing machines, no diapers, no microwaves, no medicine, no agricultural machines that allow us to grow food on massive scale, no nothing — yet they somehow did that through wars, famines, plagues to this day; and somehow the modern western people fail to do that becase children are "expensive", despite that not a single thing related to raising children should be expensive given the capabilities of modernity.
For most of that time, when people had lots of children, many of them died in said wars, famines, and plagues, or just from everyday diseases. The mother often died in or after childbirth as well.
What is the saying? Consumption always expands to meet the income available? Children are just one example of this--possibly one of hte clearest examples, in fact. Obviously calories are cheap, and people are rich enough to afford much more space per person. But if you tried to raise a child like an 1800s farmer (minimal or no schooling, having them work on your farm from a young age, 12 people in a 1 room house, everyone sleeping on the floor, no electricity or running water, letting them walk to a neighbor alone, etc) you'd be locked up for child abuse (and they wouldn't be set up to do very well in the modern world).
Even if you think about these labor saving devices... many of them correspond to tasks that weren't done at all or were much easier in the past. When your house is small and 1 room, cleaning is much easier than when it's large with many rooms. A simple wood floor is easier to sweep than if you have a mix of tile, wood, carpet, etc. You don't need a dishwasher or laundry machine if you have the absolute bare minimum of dishes and clothes. Or take medicine: If the only medicine you could possibly access is what you can make from herbs, well that's certainly cheaper than buying something expensive at the pharmacy! It just might be completely useless and your child might die.
Yeah, the thing is, you don't have to live as 1800s farmer given that you have access to 2000s technology.
They didn't have tower cranes, mass production industrial factories, reinforced concrete, CAD software, modern materials science, etc..
By all accounts building a separate room for each one of your 12 children should be very cheap but yet it isn't. Same for everything else material.
Just see how cheap electricity production was butchered in the last years, first by shutting down nuclear plants and now by restrictions on oil and gas trade. Energy prices could have been much lower without expending a single thought and brought down even further if the humanity started mass producing nuclear reactors at scale.
Take a look: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5859811/. Essential pharma is in fact dirt cheap to produce.
Even the Romans did it!! 2000 years back from now.
Yeah, that's the problem right there.
The website seems to have eaten my comment, so I'm going to be lazy and summarize a bit. Feel free to ask for more details.
Yes, for all of these categories, you could consume them at an 1800 level for relatively cheap (I could pedantically debate this, but I won't because I don't think the overall point is affected). However, we consume vastly more per person. We use more energy per person, for controlling the temperature of our buildings, for transportation, for shipping goods all over the world. We have more advanced medicine. Yes, some additional cost is artificial, but some of it is because people want things that didn't exist in 1800. Building the same building now is probably easier than in 1800, but we're not talking about that, we're talking about replacing a one-room log-and-thatch cabin with a multi-story structure with many rooms, electric wiring, plumbing, glass windows, etc.
And, even if it were legal to raise a child in 1800s conditions, most people would freely choose not to, I think. Of course, there's also no need to have 12 kids, since survival rates have improved (one of the effects of consuming more per child!). Overall, I don't think there's any confusion as to what people mean when they say that kids are expensive, or why this is the case.
The central point of my argument is that these additional costs are massive, mind-boggling, enormous. If you got rid of insane bureaucratic overhead in every facet of modern production and business, and made different trade-offs on safety, and selected personnel via nothing but ruthless market competition as opposed to credentialism or quotas or whatever else, then you'd get a world as alien to us as our world is to someone from 1800s.
It's a pity that the verbose version of your comment got lost because I think this difference in worldviews can be only productively discussed in details, diving deep into a particular industry, dissecting it's practices, costs, regulations, etc.
Yet somehow when it comes to raising children we manage to get it worse than these 1800s people
These things aren't that hard, I could literally do most of them on my own..
Probably the hardest part is to build the structure itself, but it is my understanding that the modern tech allows to do that really fast and cheap too... especially if you design a building once and mass produce it.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchevka and this was in 1970s - they've built a shit ton of them - under a less than efficient economical system, so to speak.
The fact that a so-called "middle class" man often needs to work several years to buy a property that's barely suitable for a family with e.g. 3 children, is obscene by itself.
On the other hand the construction industry is regulated to hell and back, not to mention their suppliers, which is the one and only real cause of high housing costs.
Why didn't they choose that back then, in such case?
Bumping up survival rates to modern rates is simple and cheap. Hygiene, vaccinations, antibiotics, plentiful food, vitamins, C-sections... what did I miss?
(see e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2665340/) for a sample of child mortality causes in the Middle Ages.
Sure, but I think even in the hyper-competitive world you describe, raising each child would still be much more expensive than it was in the 1800s. I suspect that if you freed up that income, most people would default to using it on more consumption for themself and their few children, rather than having many children.
I can recreate most of what I had, I just don't know if it answers your particular questions:
Energy is very cheap, and we consume a lot more of it. Do you want to drive your kids to school, activities, a friend's house? Do you want goods from all over the world shipped to your local stores? Do you want heating, cooling, electricity, hot and cold water running water on demand? It could be even cheaper, yes, but would that result in people having more kids, or using more energy on what they already have?
Yes, many aspects of medicine are cheap, and the industry as a whole is massively regulated with tons of waste and bullshit. But A) most of the expensive things are still things that people want, even if the marginal value per dollar is less than the basics (medicine is probably a luxury good, and B) I once again suspect that additional income would mostly not go toward having more children.
Did the Romans have hot and cold running water, under pressure, in every house and apartment?
Now to the rest of this comment:
You may have these skills, but most people don't, and in any event doing them for an entire house is time consuming.
Sure, and many of the early Levittown suburbs were built this way, effectively on a production line. Why did we stop doing it? I would guess because once people could afford it, they wanted homes that were more custom, although I have no data here. Home construction is labor-intensive and thus subject to Baumol's cost disease.
I agree that this situation is obscene, but it is absolutely not the only cause, unless you are including all of the restrictions on what you can build where (zoning, environmental review, parking minimums, etc.)
I have no idea what you're asking. In 1800 most people had no choice.
We didn't, really. We upgraded a bit to where there are a handful of floor plans and some modularity, but the vast majority of new developments are cookie-cutter repetitions of their neighbors, pre-cut and packaged, to be assembled simply.
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Why would it be much more expensive, or indeed more expensive at all, if every single thing a child needs can be done both massively cheaper and better in modern times?
You know I agree, certainly the causes of low birth rates are both materialistic and cultural. After all it is known that having children is bad for the environment, racist, and detrimental to building a successful girl boss career. But for that particular malady, Kulak has already prescribed a medicine.
If energy is cheap then how come they have an "energy crisis" in Germany (a supposedly first world rich country)?
Remember that your residential heating, cooling, electricity and so on is the tip of the iceberg. Every single industry has energy as one of it's inputs. Whenever you buy anything you pay for energy multiple times over, the company that produced the thing paid for it and included it in the price, every single supplier that they used paid for it and included it in the price, every single supplier of these suppliers... you get the idea. It's not just your 100$ monthly electricity bill.
They provided water to public bath, fountains, and to private houses whose owners paid for that service, yes. Sure that may be far from every house, but remember that the tools and knowledge the Romans had, were laughably inferior to what we have now.
The price of real estate compared to the income of middle class people is often massive. You wouldn't overpay years of your savings just for the privilege of having your house built in an idiosyncratic way. In my experience the only people who care about these things are the rich and the home building enthusiasts. For everyone else, the choice is dominated by other, more pragmatic, considerations, such as size, building quality, location, etc.
Thus I find your assumption hard to accept, especially so without evidence.
Good question in fact, I think I'll look into that particular case, one of these days. Thank you for pointing it out.
"Cost disease" is just another way of saying "bureaucratic overhead in adjacent industries".
I am deeply convinced that this is the only real cause. Prove me wrong.
Of course I mean all the restrictions! Not only in construction but also in all the industries construction relies on, and all the industries they rely on.
Sure you can keep the 1% of them that are honest to God sane and neccessary, like maybe not demolishing unquie historical monuments or not causing extreme environmental disasters. Everything else has to go.
I feel like I've already expressed my answer to this question: Because of a combination of wanting to advantage their children (which in the modern world means substantial education among other things), preferring high consumption to themselves and a small number of children to having more children, and of the existence of many things which people want (or at least, are willing to buy/do) that didn't exist in 1800.
Well that's a fairly horrifying way of thinking
Cheap is relative. What did energy cost in 1800? What did it cost compared to the median salary? The median German is still going to consume vastly more energy in total this year than his great-great-great-grandfather did in his whole life. In any event, Germany right now is clearly an outlier both compared to other developed regions and compared to its own recent history.
Yes, I'm well aware, and this is my point. Total energy consumption has vastly increased. We could choose not to travel outside walking distance, but people like the ability to quickly and conveniently travel, provided by trains, planes, cars, etc. We could choose to sit in the dark after sunset, but people like having lights. We could choose to only buy goods from the immediate vicinity of where we live, but we like that we can buy a computer from Korea, get fresh fruit from South America in winter. And we like to provide all of these same things to our children.
So every home in the US today, except maybe the very poorest, has what only rich Romans did. Tools and knowledge makes this possible, but it doesn't make it free.
As I said, this is a guess. There's probably multiple reasons. Many houses pre-date the aforementioned process, and it is not cheaper to demolish and rebuild them. Maybe the production lines are not viable in areas that are too spread out, or have varying/hilly geography or other physical complications, and we've already exhausted locations that are amenable. Maybe they're in more use than I think they are (although I suspect that plenty of people are willing to overpay for their "dream home").
No, these are different. The latter increases costs as well, but Baumol's cost disease is simply the observation that if the productivity in some industries increases, then prices will increase in industries that don't see the productivity increase (or see less of one). The textbook example is a live band, which requires the exact same number of people for the same time to play one concert as in 1800, but the salary for musicians has to increase or no one will be a musician when being an unskilled laborer suddenly gets you 10x the income.
It sounds like we don't disagree that much here. I think there is a case to be made that there are financial and/or cultural, although the ways these manifest is often as supply regulations (e.g. local zoning gets imposed because existing homeowners want to make more of a return).
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You're just describing the Amish. They do just fine.
The Amish strike a different balance between 1800s living and modern living. They do fine, although they also give up a lot of modern amenities that many people don't want to live without. These things cost money, but trying to compare the cost directly to the past is pointless because they didn't exist at all.
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