Fertility problems in the 21st century

[Lyanna Stark]

Min,

I just think pointless anecdotes/stories are pointless, even if Jesus wrote them I'd think they were pointless, sorry. I prefer facts over fiction when it comes to this type of stuff. Just my personal POV. :)

(And yes, if I really tried, I am certain I could insert another "pointless" into that sentence! :leaving: )

OMG I have a vanity alias. I feel proud and sort of important now!! :lol:

EDIT: Curses, my alias has a better sig line than me!

[Ormond]

People do this all the time. Sometimes they even move in with their kids.

People in the USA do do this all the time. As a Baby Boomer, when I look at my friends whose parents are still living, a great many of them have had parents move to the town one of their kids lives in within the last few years. This seems to happen most often with the remaining parent after one of them dies, though. When both parents are still living and still married to each other, it's much less common.

But perhaps in the UK there are both cultural norms and economic constraints (including patterns of home ownership and average house or apartment size) that make that a much less viable option than it is for Americans.

[Chaldanya]

The identity swopping is fun and should be a regular occurence. Continue!!

N

[Silverstar]

People in the USA do do this all the time. As a Baby Boomer, when I look at my friends whose parents are still living, a great many of them have had parents move to the town one of their kids lives in within the last few years. This seems to happen most often with the remaining parent after one of them dies, though. When both parents are still living and still married to each other, it's much less common.

But perhaps in the UK there are both cultural norms and economic constraints (including patterns of home ownership and average house or apartment size) that make that a much less viable option than it is for Americans.

I'd say house/apartment size is probably part of it, with regards to parents moving into the same house as their children. I've always had the impression that average house sizes are a fair bit bigger in the US than in the UK, although that may be a completely false impression. If you're in a typical shoebox-sized three bedroom house, and you have a couple of teenagers, I can see why you wouldn't want to try to squeeze an elderly parent or two into the house as well.

I guess it could partly also be that younger people nowadays are not necessarily going to settle in one place for the rest of their lives anyway, and are often very busy with their own social lives. I can imagine that elderly people don't really want to move to where their children live, only to have to uproot again a few years down the line when their son or daughter gets a job on the other side of the country.

Mind you, we did live with my grandad when I was a kid, but we moved into his house, as opposed to the other way around. With regards to my currently living grandparents, one grandmother has dementia and lives in a care home, one stepgrandmother is still completely active and happy living on her own, and the other stepgrandmother, despite being ninety, frail and very often ill, refuses point blank to move away from Somerset, so that isn't going to happen.

[Lyanna Stark]

People in the USA do do this all the time. As a Baby Boomer, when I look at my friends whose parents are still living, a great many of them have had parents move to the town one of their kids lives in within the last few years. This seems to happen most often with the remaining parent after one of them dies, though. When both parents are still living and still married to each other, it's much less common.

But perhaps in the UK there are both cultural norms and economic constraints (including patterns of home ownership and average house or apartment size) that make that a much less viable option than it is for Americans.

Well, it doesn't help in our cases that my father in law is basically blind and would have a very hard time adjusting to a new place. We just could not ask that of them.

Renting is doable, it would just be a hundred times nicer to have something of your own. :)

Hell, we've even lightly discussed whether I should just become a SAHM, produce one or two more babies and we can apply for a council house since we'd be more deprived. :stunned: I'd rather not tho, since despite all the commie accusations, I don't actually want to play the system.

Yeah, yeah, I know, shock horror etc.

[Noontidal]

People in the USA do do this all the time. As a Baby Boomer, when I look at my friends whose parents are still living, a great many of them have had parents move to the town one of their kids lives in within the last few years. This seems to happen most often with the remaining parent after one of them dies, though. When both parents are still living and still married to each other, it's much less common.

But perhaps in the UK there are both cultural norms and economic constraints (including patterns of home ownership and average house or apartment size) that make that a much less viable option than it is for Americans.

But there are a great number of people in both locations that are not so freely able to move. Your anecdote notwithstanding.

[Zoë Sumra]

Out of curiousity, I looked here and found 28 pages of 2 bedroom flats at 100k or less. :dunno:

These fall into the following categories.

1) Shared ownership

The vast, vast majority of the properties you found.

Shared ownership was a great idea - a housing association helps low income people buy a house/flat by buying 50% or 75% of the property, while the new owner buys the rest and then pays rent to the housing association on the percentage owned by said association. It would mean that a flat worth £100K would be available to the market for maybe only £25K. The individual purchaser would then have the chance to buy shares in the rest of the property from the housing association later, until eventually s/he owned it outright.

Unfortunately, in practice what it means is that a flat that's actually priced at £300K is put on the market at £75K for a 25% share (or similar). The buyer then has to pay rent on the rest of the property. Because the buyer doesn't own the property, there are problems with selling it - it can't be regarded in any way as an asset - and if the buyer can't pay up for the remaining 75% or what have you share, it will never belong to the buyer and will, in the end, just be an expensive way of renting. It is very unlikely that the buyer will ever be able to stump up the remaining £225K or whatever as these purchases are generally restricted to key workers who earn peanuts.

2) In an ex-council block, fourth floor or above

Literally impossible to get a mortgage for, even when the banks were giving them out like crack cocaine, due to the elevation. Only for people who have a deposit for the full value of the flat (i.e. cash buyers). If you had £100,000 in the bank, you wouldn't be a young couple struggling to find somewhere to live.

3) About to fall down

Because they were built from concrete between 1945 and 1960. Trust me on this; my father is a civil engineer specialising in stopping such houses from falling down. If these places had had the work done to stop them from falling down, they'd cost more than this, and if they haven't had the work done, a purchaser would need to stump up the (considerable) money to get it done.

4) Retirement properties

Not possible for under-55s to purchase or live in them, and we were talking about young couples.

5) Other

A very small minority of the list. The ones that don't need £25K spending on making them fit for human habitation and located in areas without the UK's highest murder rates and with public transport within a half-hour walk will probably sell for more than £100K because there's so little wrong with them. The Thames Barrier is actually going to be serviceable up to 2030, so they won't need to be abandoned any time soon.

Regarding renting, the amusing thing throughout the boom years was that people very often paid more each month in rent than the banks said they would be able to pay on a mortgage.

People in the USA do do this all the time. As a Baby Boomer, when I look at my friends whose parents are still living, a great many of them have had parents move to the town one of their kids lives in within the last few years.

Cultural difference. Even more so when you raise the idea of a parent moving back in with an adult child. The most people ever do here is building "granny flats" at the bottom of the garden or rebuilding the house so part of it is self-contained accommodation for an elderly parent, and that requires a big and expensive house to begin with.

Hell, we've even lightly discussed whether I should just become a SAHM, produce one or two more babies and we can apply for a council house since we'd be more deprived. :stunned: I'd rather not tho, since despite all the commie accusations, I don't actually want to play the system.

Don't do it. :stunned: Depending on the area you'd be waiting five years for a council house and even then would only get one if your current house was unliveable-in. There just aren't enough council houses.

[Iskaral Pust]

This is actually quite illegal and could result in some very hefty fines. The current policy in place is that pregnant employees are to be treated similarly to any employee who's enduring some temporary medical conditions. As for maternity leave, the same right is also now extended to fathers as well.

I know it's illegal, so do the employers. You should catch up on the NYTimes articles that have reported an alleged significant increase in the practice in the past year or so and the difficulty that these employees have had in suing employers.

[Lyanna Stark]

Don't do it. :stunned: Depending on the area you'd be waiting five years for a council house and even then would only get one if your current house was unliveable-in. There just aren't enough council houses.

Don't worry, I am not gonna. :)

I wouldn't move to Dagenham either even if they gave me a flat for free. Not keen on getting stabbed any time soon, nor to become a crack dealer. :P

I wonder if I'd get the same baffled reaction if I recommended a young family to go live in East LA "cos it's cheaper there". :P Considering someone compared where I live to Beverly Hills ( uh oh :P ) although I think Greenwich or maybe Kensington should be far more comparable than the armpit of Sussex's commuter belt. :lol:

I think people often forget that Greater London has almost 9 million people, and the South east is also extremely densely populated, but also that moving is often not feasible since the job market is pants in many other regions. I'd LOVE to live in Dorset or Somerset, but working with what?

[Silverstar]

OT slightly amusing anecdote:

I used to work in Dagenham, and was on my way home one evening back to Hertfordshire. Got off my train to find that the station was full of police with sniffer dogs, for some reason. One of the dogs decided to go after me. I got taken aside into a separate room by one of the police officers, and my bag and pockets were searched. They found a half empty packet of paracetamol, I think. They asked me where I'd just come from, and I told them Dagenham, and they looked at each other, and then said "Oh well, that explains it. You must have walked through a cloud of cannibis smoke" and let me go :lol:

[Iskaral Pust]

So we should only pay the taxes that we want to pay? Can I opt out of paying for nuclear weapons, then?

Some level of consent is necessary, of course, but in the UK at least I see no evidence whatsoever that any electorally significant number of people don't want to pay for maternity benefits.

Yes, we should only pay the taxes that we (we the majority, not each individual) want. That's democracy. We have a collective social contract around what public services we are willing to pay taxes for. I made the point that we are willing to pay for the current level of maternity benefits (evidenced by the fact that we actually do), but many would be unwilling to pay for the big increase in benefits that Lyanna and others (MinDonner?) were suggesting. The original suggestion sounded like child rearing should be costless to women because anything less is discriminatory.

But surely we still need to have children in order for there to be economic activity in the next generation? Otherwise, pensions - privately-funded or not - will be worthless, won't they?

I just can't see any set of circumstances in which it can be argued that people having children is not to some degree beneficial to the country as a whole, to the economy of which private firms are a part, and to people in that country, whether they personally are childless or not.

Each additional child born does not add economic value. There are plenty of people in the thirld world who could be permitted to immigrate instead. And I have already addressed why broken PAYG pension systems need to be solved through fiscal discipline rather than a population Ponzi scheme that is doomed to fail.

Honestly, I am not aware of any such evidence, anecdotal or not. I think, in your area, what you might be seeing is bad practise that has always existed now coming to light because it is not culturally accepted any more.

In any case, I am not fond of arguments that say 'people are breaking the law, so it must be a bad one'. Some laws people break because they are bad laws. This is not one of them. The costs to employers of maternity leave remain eminently bearable: there is no evidence that I am aware of to suggest otherwise. Of course I am only familiar with the UK, but the costs there are higher than in the US. This pushes me towards the conclusion that what you are seeing is a cultural argument dressed up as an economic one.

I was not condoning the behavior or holding it up as an example of a flawed law. I was pointing out that the current level of maternity benefit is a stressful cost to employers in a recession with the implication that a significant expansion of maternity benefits would be an even greater difficulty. It would just be a huge stealth tax. Employers might respond by reducing hiring women of child-bearing age, setting us back years in gender equality, or else by having to bear a huge tax that effectively gets distributed to consumers and/or other employees in higher prices and/or lower wages. Any expansion of maternity benefits to make it costless to women is a huge tax. It can't be hidden or swept under the carpet. There is no pool of easy, costless money to fund that - it has to come from somewhere. The proposal is spending a huge amount of other people's money without addressing whether those people wish to pay for it.

Alas, politicians don't like explicit taxation. And as I say, this kind of taxing of companies has a long and extensive history.

I don't let the preferences of politicians influence my prefernces. The spineless pandering of the past decades, pretending that services can be provided without taxation, is what has dug us into a huge hole of debt. The national conversation on these issues has to change tone, rather than accepting empty platitudes and stealth taxes.

We're a long, long way from that point in the UK, and further yet in the US. I can attest that there is a significant economic and personal cost to having children, which I do not mind meeting and am certainly not insulated from. Nor is even the daftest mother on the poorest council estate, whatever the tabloids might have you believe -and I've lived on some of those estates and knew those mothers. They may well have been irresponsible in having their children, but they paid a price for it.

I don't believe for a second that cutting (or enhancing) maternity benefits will have any impact on birth rates. People are not rational economic actors, 'irresponsible' ones least of all.

This is the vaguest area to answer. The people popping out multiple kids with no means to support them tend not to be economically rational, except to the point that they get more welfare for each child. I've seen conservative papers that suggest that these welfare programs did change behavior. Ireland suffered a huge wave of single mothers in the years following the expansion of single mother welfare. It became enormously advantageous to be an unmarried, unemployed mother receiving welfare compared to minimum wage and sure enough the numbers of same exploded among the lowest socio-economic class. I don't want to be too right wing on this, nor superimpose an isolated phenomenon in Ireland on the rest of the world.

If welfare benefits were increased to the levels proposed earlier in this thread, I think you would find that the birth rate would jump. There are some who would take perverse advantage of the welfare, and there are others who wanted kids anyway but were not financially capable.

People are not rational investors or economic agents, but they also have a persistent ability to maximize their self-interest within a system. The more generous the system, the more exploitation will occur. This tends to be the great disappointment to liberals (and I say this as a liberal): we could provide so much govt support if only those who truly needed it sought it out, but unfortunately many, many more will try for their piece of the pie too.

An anology is "jingle mail". In some US states home mortgages are non-recourse. This is supposed to help avoid ruinous bankruptcy proceedings when people can no longer afford the mortgage. However, when home values drop below the value of the mortgage, a lot of people who can still afford the mortgage decide to mail the keys to the bank and just walk away. They use the non-recourse protection to give themselves a put option on their house, even though they can still afford to pay their obligation. The penalty for personal irresponsibility was removed, and many stop doing the right thing. This means that non-recourse loans will be ended, or else the cost of that put option is then spread to all of the responsible mortgage borrowers. And this action is a lot more complicated than deciding to have a child and receive years of well paid maternity leave.

[Lord of Oop North]

I am rather surprised to find out that almost everyone of my parents generation in my neighbourhood, were in fact, not adults, because they happened to live with their parents for a time after getting married. Amazing. It must be nice to be privileged and have options, but not everyone is so lucky.

[Noontidal]

Yes, we should only pay the taxes that we (we the majority, not each individual) want. That's democracy. We have a collective social contract around what public services we are willing to pay taxes for. I made the point that we are willing to pay for the current level of maternity benefits (evidenced by the fact that we actually do), but many would be unwilling to pay for the big increase in benefits that Lyanna and others (MinDonner?) were suggesting. The original suggestion sounded like child rearing should be costless to women because anything less is discriminatory.

By the election of officials the 'majority' do get their way in terms of taxation. Although if you were to leave it up to the real majority you would soon find a large chunk of gov't services (military etc) lossing a massive amount of funding. The simple fact is that the average taxpayer simply does not in fact know 'what is best', and we would be in truly dire straits if we operated under a system that assumed otherwise.

Each additional child born does not add economic value. There are plenty of people in the thirld world who could be permitted to immigrate instead. And I have already addressed why broken PAYG pension systems need to be solved through fiscal discipline rather than a population Ponzi scheme that is doomed to fail.

Individually they add up to a great deal, just because the singular contribution of each falls below your radar does not mean that they in fact do. Additionally there are social issues that are unaddressed by the oversymplistic system of bringing a greater quantity of immigrants in from elsewhere.

I was not condoning the behavior or holding it up as an example of a flawed law. I was pointing out that the current level of maternity benefit is a stressful cost to employers in a recession with the implication that a significant expansion of maternity benefits would be an even greater difficulty. It would just be a huge stealth tax. Employers might respond by hiring women of child-bearing age, setting us back years in gender equality, or else by having to bear a huge tax that effectively gets distributed to consumers and/or other employees in higher prices and/or lower wages. Any expansion of maternity benefits to make it costless to women is a huge tax. It can't be hidden or swept under the carpet. There is no pool of easy, costless money to fund that - it has to come from somewhere. The proposal is spending a huge amount of other people's money without addressing whether those people wish to pay for it.

How much of this problem is real, rather than caused by the inherent sexism present in the system? Ultimately society gains a major benefit out of having replacements for its soon to be unproductive member.

I don't let the preferences of politicians influence my prefernces. The spineless pandering of the past decades, pretending that services can be provided without taxation, is what has dug us into a huge hole of debt. The national conversation on these issues has to change tone, rather than accepting empty platitudes and stealth taxes.

This 'spinless pandering' is a necessary evil born out of the reality that people when presented with the choice would in fact fail to provide adequately for basic services.

[Lyanna Stark]

Silverstar: Good Lord :lol:

Ireland suffered a huge wave of single mothers in the years following the expansion of single mother welfare. It became enormously advantageous to be an unmarried, unemployed mother receiving welfare compared to minimum wage and sure enough the numbers of same exploded among the lowest socio-economic class. I don't want to be too right wing on this, nor superimpose an isolated phenomenon in Ireland on the rest of the world.

Iskaral,

You don't think that maybe there is something else wrong here than the fact that single motherhood became a "viable option"? Like perhaps that people were so desperate they actually went for single motherhood instead of a job?

In my opinion, if becoming a single mother on benefits (and trust me, it's not a glorified world, I have known some) is an improvement, then the problem is not the benefits but the apalling starting conditions. Minimum wage slave jobs with apalling conditions I'd say is a far heavier issue than people seeing a way out of their misery. It is only human to try and improve your worthless lot in life.

To be honest, I could hardly see you post a better poster child for progressive taxation and higher minimum wage even if I dug around all evening. :)

The original suggestion sounded like child rearing should be costless to women because anything less is discriminatory.

Uhm, nobody has ever said this. Ever. You're misunderstanding things on purpose if this is what you are reading. Helping people to work flexibly and to take reasonable time off at the birth of a child in order to stay more productive afterwards isn't "should be costless to women" (and what about men? Is there currently no cost to men? You single out women an awful lot. Is it our biological lot in life to suffer for having a uterus?).

Parenthood should always be a choice only the couple/individual can make, but at least in Europe with the current age distribution we have, it is in the state's best interest to encourage a healthy birth rate, plus also encourage whatever clever ways they can make parents continue working as well (more workers employed = more tax = more money).

You're looking at it as "handouts for the unworthy" while I am looking at it as "a helping hand to continue being a productive member of society".

Also, there has been a lot of talking lately about a lack of consumer spending. Well, families with only one income will often have less spending power due to reduced available cash from only one working family member.

All in all, it seems ideology is clouding people's judgements here. My suggestions aren't bad economy: in fact, they seem like *better* economy in most senses.

[litechick]

I will continue to cite Harrison Bergeron any time I see people making statements to the effect that "government should make people more equal." I would expect people to understand that while the government can treat people equally under law, the government cannot make people equal.

Lyanna, if you find every home in the greater London area to be either too expensive, too small, or too dangerous there is no reasoning with that. I wish you could see that by finding fault with every solution you are creating your own scenario of hard luck but it's just that--wishful thinking.

If you refuse to live in a 'bad' part of town aren't you just perpetuating urban blight? Shouldn't we be trying to place upstanding citizens in those areas to thin out the criminal hordes and improve the neighborhood?

You want a 'helping hand' not a 'handout'. That's a pretty fine distinction. If 'helping hand' translates into money to be given to you in cash, goods or services then I'm failing to see the distinction.

I find it interesting the you can see how the system is set up such that having too many kids would reap a benefit to you but you still scoff at the notion that such incentives will lead people to having kids in order to get that benefit.

I disagree with you on many points and it's not because I am selfish, it's not because I like to kick puppies, and it's not because I'm anti-feminist.

[TheLoneliestMonk]

I disagree with you on many points and it's not because I am selfish, it's not because I like to kick puppies, and it's not because I'm anti-feminist.

but you do like to kick puppies right?

[Iskaral Pust]

Lyanna - I just don't have time for any more lengthy responses that are feeling more and more repetitive. I think litechick said it very well.

[Hereward]

I will continue to cite Harrison Bergeron any time I see people making statements to the effect that "government should make people more equal." I would expect people to understand that while the government can treat people equally under law, the government cannot make people equal.

No, but the government can make people more equal by providing opportunities that more priviliged or lucky members of society take for granted. For instance, my son has dyslexia, so he gets 1-2-1 help with his reading and a teacher's assistant to help him understand the questions in tests. Now, to me that's a good thing because it enables him to get as much from the teaching as children who don't have dyslexia. If someone thinks he's being favoured over children who don't suffer his problems, nd therefore don't get as much individual attention, they either are massively selfish or they really don't understand the concept of fair.

[Bellis]

Wait, did Lyanna just have her baby, have her baby grow to school age, and be diagnosed with dyslexia, all in one night? ;)

ETA: as GD- was cross-posting - because dyslexia is not autism but as usual i have that thing where I mean one thing and i say something completely different that shares no letters in common.

[Filippa Eilhart]

You want a 'helping hand' not a 'handout'. That's a pretty fine distinction. If 'helping hand' translates into money to be given to you in cash, goods or services then I'm failing to see the distinction.

really? to me it's quite obvious. A "helping hand" is designed to help you get back on your feet, i.e. be a productive member of society again. A "handout" has no such aim. I think Lyanna made it quite clear.