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I go a bit further.
In addition to the free contraception etc...
there should be CASH rewards to women for delayed/limited childbirth.
$X at age 30. $Y at age 40
with an extra bump for those from a poor home.
I understand your point, but delaying household formation is not good for the economy. I think it should mostly be focused on discouraging teenage motherhood... but by the time people are 25 they really are adults.
Anybody in a housing project ends up locked in for life.
A good friend of mine passed away in his 70s a couple years ago. One of his favorite expressions was "I grew up in the Projects in New York; I don't trust ANYONE" and that is how he lived his life. He rose to become VP of sales for a tech company, and when he died he was a multi-multi millionaire. He owned 27 rental properties, mostly duplexes and triplexes that he personally maintained. He collected rent in person in cash only on the 1st of the month. If someone didn't pay on the 1st, and initiated eviction procedures for anyone who didn't pay the next day, he claimed.
Yeah, he's an extreme outlier. But it is possible to get out of the projects.
I understand your point, but delaying household formation is not good for the economy.
Who said anything about "household formation" ?
The issue is encouraging self sufficiency... of "households" being able to provide for themselves without assistance.
Those least able to provide should be actively discouraged from producing dependents...
including a reward system of some sort for not doing so ...regardless of marital status.
Quote:
I think it should mostly be focused on discouraging teenage motherhood...
Again... the specific age of motherhood is really NOT the issue.
If she has the wherewithal to actually provide for children at 16 (as an extreme example) by her own efforts/skills
that is head and shoulders better than children had by her 26yo cousin who can't provide because she has no skills.
Who said anything about "household formation" ?
The issue is encouraging self sufficiency... of "households" being able to provide for themselves without assistance.
Those least able to provide should be actively discouraged from producing dependents...
including a reward system of some sort for not doing so ...regardless of marital status.
Again... the specific age of motherhood is really NOT the issue.
If she has the wherewithal to actually provide for children at 16 (as an extreme example) by her own efforts/skills
that is head and shoulders better than children had by her 26yo cousin who can't provide because she has no skills.
A good friend of mine passed away in his 70s a couple years ago. One of his favorite expressions was "I grew up in the Projects in New York; I don't trust ANYONE" and that is how he lived his life. He rose to become VP of sales for a tech company, and when he died he was a multi-multi millionaire. He owned 27 rental properties, mostly duplexes and triplexes that he personally maintained. He collected rent in person in cash only on the 1st of the month. If someone didn't pay on the 1st, and initiated eviction procedures for anyone who didn't pay the next day, he claimed.
Yeah, he's an extreme outlier. But it is possible to get out of the projects.
Sure, but look at any socioeconomic class mobility study of the last decade. The Economist did a big spread on it a year ago. If you're in the bottom 20%, very few escape. It's a different value system, work ethic, and level of education. It's often not even a particularly recognizable version of English. That's very different from 1940.
Immigrants tend to have far better class mobility than those with a generation or two in the bottom quintile. It makes sense. Immigrants largely are the brighter entrepreneurs who took the chance to uproot and move. The elite universities have to practice some reverse discrimination against Asians or few white folk would get in.
The real problem is that we have 30+% of the population going to college. 70th percentile IQ is only 107 or 108. We have an awful lot of not-so-bright people at 3rd tier state schools getting a wildly watered down "college education". Most of the people in that college classroom also have a sub-108 IQ so the professor has no choice but to teach down to that level. The top-100 universities largely don't accept people like that because they can't handle the work. When you hire somebody who went to Western Flyover State College, you kind of have to assume they have little better than a certificate of attendance. If you want better than that, you'd better interview them very carefully and do some aptitude testing. There are certainly some bright kids coming out of schools like that because they either couldn't afford better or they underperformed in K-12 and didn't get with the program until they got to age 18. An elite employer isn't going to bother doing all the screening to work through that when they can hire out of schools where they know for sure that anybody who got admitted is pretty smart and had to actually do work for four years.
What about commuting? Sorry if anyone has mentioned this already.
I live in one of the ten worst areas in Canada to find a job. It's a bedroom community where people commute to the nearest large city for work. There's a commuter train available and of course highways.
Many households have one income because of the lack of employment opportunities, the cost of commuting and the cost of childcare.
I live in a town which had a production-based economy as late as the 1980s; the last mill closed in 1994.
Now we're thriving. Why?
Tourism.
In reality, a tourist service job is about the same as a mill job used to be, pays about the same. Cleaner and healthier, really. People act like those jobs of the old days were all rainbows and lollipops. They weren't.
I think it's possible for small towns to find a niche.
I think that's great. I know of a few small towns that have somewhat bounced back due to tourism. I know some of these towns were devastated after the 1990s when most of the manufacturing plants closed up and/or moved overseas.
Unfortunately, location is key for this tourism reason. Lots of small towns dotted across the American mid-west/south would not draw tourists unless the town was in somewhat close by to some decent tourist attraction or physical beauty of the landscape such as mountainous ranges or areas near the coast.
Some smaller towns I am familiar with from childhood are ghosts of their former selves. They're run down, filled with drug addicts and there is no immediate draw to them for working adults with children.
Short-term, I see that people will move to metro areas for the abundance of jobs. I suspect some really small isolated towns will continue to lose population. Only the very elderly and extremely poor stay behind in the small towns because they usually do not have other viable options.
I am a college professor, and you can PM me if you want to see our catalog (I don't want to identify the school in public). None of that is there. You can personally visit my class if you want; in fact I have an ongoing open invitation to the general public.
I am so tired of my profession being slandered. Stop it. Please.
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