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MAYBE BABY: POPULATION POLITICS PART 2 – politicalbetting.com
MAYBE BABY: POPULATION POLITICS PART 2 – politicalbetting.com
Previously, I examined how conception and maternity rates had changed in England and Wales during the 2010s. Now for the tricky part – should the government seek to alter demographic trends, and if so, why, and how?
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People have long been a bit suspicious of how they managed to gain such a large following and somehow always appear prominently. Now social media requires not only following, but engagement, in order for the algorithm to spread it.
Lots of journalists from leading newspapers have said they play the game better than us, perhaps they have been rule bending to enable this.
Many thanks to @tlg for these.
Demography is much more important and interesting than the generally realised.
Course. It all evolves outwith the electoral cycle, so we rarely hear anything about it.
We do, however have a PM who boasts about having put a crown back on pint glasses. That nobody noticed had gone.
So maybe not.
I once took the president of Zoetis to Five Guys for lunch…
spreadinginforming people about rumours!https://twitter.com/KhophyPatrick/status/1466517763325845505
https://twitter.com/idextratime/status/1467980323828891649
As to the conclusion - I agree it would take a very “brave” politician to go anywhere near this, though I suspect the best chance is Labour via child care costs.
I'm surprised, though, at his conclusion that politicians are unlikely to take up this cause at all. Although the Conservatives have taken anti-natalist steps in recent years - such as the tax credits two child limit - the rhetoric of helping "hard-working families" is still de rigeur for British politicians, and the Tories also took a limited step towards his suggested tax change with the married couples allowance.
Also, given the toxicity of immigration, politicians will find that they will need to find ways to boost the birth rate if they want to engineer a gentle demographic transition, rather than an abrupt one. Providing tax breaks to British families will win more votes than increasing the immigration rate.
I think you're right that Labour might take it up in the form of child care costs. The sensible course of action would be to make changes without explicitly having any aims around demographics.
Part of me also thinks there is something deeply off in a culture that is unwilling to sustain itself.
Feeling better already though. Cleaned the bathroom and everything.
From a personal perspective, I'd say I always idealised having a large family (possibly aresult of being an only child!) If you'd asked me at any point in my life how many children I'd ideally want, the number would have probably always been greater than two (albeit, I hope, with a heavy dose of realism that children are tremendously hard work and that I may change my mind after having one!).Fortunately, my wife was similarly pro-natal - though unfortunately we only met at 33.
Anyway, after, fairly quickly, having one child - who, fortunately for us, was pretty easygoing and a pleasure to parent, we decided we were reasonably well placed to go for a second, who arrived disconcertingly quickly after the first. Two under two is hard work! But it got easier, and we thought we'd go for a third. Three under five is hard work too, but not as hard as two under two.
But, I'm very aware that there were economic decisions in all this. We only felt comfortable going for numbers 1 and 2 because we had a house and didn't have onerous mortgage repayments. Even so, at times, nursery fees per day were more than I earned in a day - I was going to work just in order that I'd still be employable when nursery fees dropped away. And our third, realistically, was only an option because we had had a large inheritance*, enabling us to afford a bigger house and fewer worries about pension etc. We were very lucky to have the option to bring them into the world. Realistically, however poor we were we'd have gone for one child, and struggled as much as we needed to. But beyond that we only had them because we were lucky enough to be able to afford them.
Having children should be an economic decision. People shouldn't have children they can't afford. But I'm not sure its healthy that the only people who can decide to have more than one are those who have been lucky enough to inherit.
*this is the other side to being an only child.
Till I had 2.
Then I wanted one.
There is also the wide social acceptance of the cuckoo male - inseminates as many females as he can by serial polygamy and infidelity. Used to be quite a demon brought out regularly at Tory party conferences - you know, the houysing estate working class Jack the lad who wouldn't face his responsibilities and cut his cloth according to his commitments, or whatever the metaphor is. Yet attacking single mothers with more than 2 weans by penalising their funding is attacking the children themselves.
Edit: who'df be a parent and especially a mother if one might be abandoned in some peropheral housing estate?
I certainly don't wish it on anybody, and I am not actively going out licking the plastic screens in the supermarket, but you are right the narrative has definitely changed in the way we react it hearing the news.
"The number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US is skyrocketing amid the omicron wave, with new admissions up 66 percent in the last week and now past the all-time record high for the pandemic."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/childrens-hospitals-are-filling-nationwide-amid-tidal-wave-of-omicron/
Hope all are well and hearty and looking forward to the year ahead.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/sep/12/cost-insane-uk-parents-unable-afford-childcare
“It was more than my salary – quite a bit more,” she says. “I started panicking. We tried to find a solution but in the end we couldn’t justify the cost. There was no point in me teaching because I’d be spending more money than I earned for someone else to look after the children.”
What would be an optimal cost for childcare? I don’t know, but again, it’s interesting to hear that you worked irrespective of it being a net loss.
I might stick around a bit this time!
https://news.sky.com/story/new-years-honours-nine-people-who-said-no-11593840
Hope you had a good Christmas, Francis.
"Britain got it wrong on Covid: long lockdown did more harm than good, says scientist
A new book outlines the mistakes and missteps that made UK pandemic worse"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/02/britain-got-it-wrong-on-covid-long-lockdown-did-more-harm-than-good-says-scientist
So a small net loss each time I worked rather than looked after the kids.
But on the other hand, it also costs money to spend the day at home with the kids - they need feeding and entertaining.
And had I taken two years out of the workplace I don't think I'd be in the position career-wise that I'm in now. So I think, financially at least, it was still the right decision.
"An overwhelming majority (72%) of Americans believe the people involved in the attack on the Capitol were "threatening democracy," while 1 in 4 Americans believes that the individuals involved were "protecting democracy." Broken down by party identification, Democrats are nearly unanimous (96%) in believing that those involved in the attacks were threatening democracy. Republicans are more split, with 45% saying it was a threat and 52% saying those involved in the riot were "protecting democracy.""
"Sixty-five percent of Americans believe Biden's victory in the 2020 election was legitimate, which is similar to the results of a January 2021 ABC News/Ipsos poll (68%). Nearly all Democrats -- 93% -- think the election results were legitimate while most Republicans do not. Among Republicans, 71% sided with Trump's false claims that he was the rightful winner."
The GOP is in deep shit.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/majority-americans-jan-attack-threatened-democracy-poll/story?id=81990555
Unfortunately, you don't know till you've had kids how you will react to having them all day.
My missus hated it even though she had been a kindergarten teacher. I loved it at weekends, and hated my job. So we swapped over. We were skint for a while while she trained up and earned what I did before. She worked. I looked after the kids and house.
But it was the best thing we ever did. Never occurred to us that was what we should have done in the first place.
Because we just didn't know. And there was some unconscious, ingrained sexism in there, too I confess.
Either Twitter is a publisher who can chose what to publish, or it is a medium for others communication with which case it can’t
The point may come, and soon, when the Government is forced to admit defeat, prioritise testing for health and care workers and vulnerable people, and either restrict or abandon testing and isolation for the general population. Omicron may well simply be too infectious for the whole system to cope with.
Made sense to me. But whether it's entirely what's going on - not sure.
"SEATTLE (AP) — The omicron-fueled surge that is sending COVID-19 cases rocketing in the U.S. is putting children in the hospital in record numbers, and experts lament that most of the youngsters are not vaccinated. ...
"During the week of Dec. 22-28, an average of 378 children 17 and under were admitted per day to hospitals with the coronavirus, a 66% increase from the week before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday. ...
"On a more hopeful note, children continue to represent a small percentage of those being hospitalized with COVID-19: An average of nearly 10,200 people of all ages were admitted per day during the same week in December. And many doctors say the youngsters seem less sick than those who came in during the delta surge over the summer."
Makes it look easy.
I think the biggest change is the rising age of first Conception, which quite obviously reduces the time available for more. No question too that sleepless nights were tougher at 37 than 30. Mrs Foxy did most of the parenting, but we did tag team a lot. She worked nights and weekends, while I was in a research job with Fox Jr a baby, so free nights and weekends. It worked for us.
Some questions for @tlg86 on his chart of changes in fertility by SE Status:
1) are these figures adjusted for the size of these groups? For example there are far fewer long term unemployed, and more white collar workers than 1990.
2) The Conception rate for professionals is broadly stable over the period (presuming the denominator is unchanged) while others have dropped. Is that the other SE classes coming into line with the SE professionals? In other words, are the other classes merely coming into line with a change that had already occurred in SE1?
Twitter claims to be a conduit and therefore can’t be sued as it makes not publishing decision.
"“We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt,” he argues. “All this to protect the NHS from a disease that is a far, far greater threat to the elderly, frail and infirm than to the young and healthy.
“We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. In short, we panicked. This was an epidemic crying out for a precision public health approach and it got the opposite.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/02/britain-got-it-wrong-on-covid-long-lockdown-did-more-harm-than-good-says-scientist
It's like when people try to argue that lockdown created health care backlogs. It didn't. Hospitals having to convert operating theatres to ICU, surgical wards to respiratory wards and orthopedic docs to respiratory physicians that did it. It was the pandemic not the lockdown that dunnit.
The regulations (which were stricture than those in places like Denmark) caused prices to rocket.
This was fine with the government, since they didn't pay.
So the middle classes paid private school fee level fees for legitimate nurseries. Which was financial training for affording private school, I suppose.
Meanwhile a comfortable black market in "watching a couple of kids" took off for those who find £1K a month a bit much.
The ratios for childminders (and nurseries) are set by government. A childminder can have up to 6 children under the age of 8, as long as no more than 3 are under 5.
"We have done all we could to get the nation protected. But if people decide to stand outside the protection the NHS has offered them, that has, very sadly, been their poor choice."