A Place to Stand

Mark Wadsworth says

In the Office for National Statistics (ONS) report on the state of the nation... Over the same period [1970 to 2007] housing, fuel and water had replaced food and non-alcoholic drinks as the biggest household expenditure.

7. Now, if housing is now the biggest item of expenditure (which it clearly is, about one third of people's net incomes) and has got more expensive over the last forty years, we'd expect younger people to be living in smaller houses and/or buying a house (and getting married, settling down and having children) later in life. In a related article the BBC reports:

The traditional nuclear family is in decline in Britain as more people chose to live alone or as couples without children, data suggests.[this might be because fewer young people 'settle down' or because older people are surviving their partners for longer]. The number of people living in family homes with children fell from 52% in 1961 to 36% in 2009, the ONS says. In their Social Trends 40 report, official statisticians say 28% of homes are single person households, while 29% contain childless couples. This is up from 11% and 26% respectively on 1961.

The proportion of people living in lone parent households has also increased over the past half century, jumping from 3% in 1961 to 12% in 2009 [blame the welfare system for that, separate issue]. The Office for National Statistics said the most common type of household was the couple family household, but that there had been a "decline" in the proportion of households containing a "traditional" family unit....

The ONS also said women were having babies later. The proportion of babies born to women under 25 in England and Wales was 47% in 1971. This had dropped to 25% in 2008. And fewer people are getting married, with 143,000 first marriages in England and Wales happening in 2007, compared with 340,000 in 1971...

I have previously shown how house prices are at least 75% political regulation. I replied

Demand is exceeding supply but only because the "planning" system prevents supply. If nothing else the fact that technology has improved makes it relatively to build higher & to build arcologies. Thus even if land prices were going up in real terms there could be more gomes per acre.

I have previously shown how house prices are 4 times what they could be so instead of 33% of income they could be 8% leaving us with an average 25% increase in standard of living. The extra spin offs in increased national spending feeding through to higher growth & not having to pay the "planner's" salaries would be enormous.

And Mark has described the follow through advantages of people being able to have families.

His remarks about the consequences of this state parasitism on having children echo what Steve Sailer has been saying, quite independently, about affordable family formation & its role in the demographic disappearance of western nations described by Al Fin.

Germany is shrinking — fast. New figures released on May 17 show the birth rate in Europe's biggest economy has plummeted to a historic low, dropping to a level not seen since 1946. As demographers warn of the consequences of not making enough babies to replace and support an aging population, the latest figures have triggered a bout of national soul-searching and cast a harsh light on Chancellor Angela Merkel's family policies.
According to a preliminary analysis by the Federal Statistics Office, 651,000 children were born in Germany in 2009 — 30,000 fewer than in 2008, a dip of 3.6%. In 1990, German mothers were having on average 1.5 children each; today that average is down to 1.38 children per mother. With a shortfall of 190,000 between the number of people who died and the number of children who were born, Germany's birth rate is well below the level required to keep the population stable.

...The Federal Statistics Office says Germany's population of 82 million could drop by up to 17 million over the next 50 years. Demographers fear a shrinking workforce will stymie growth and struggle to foot the bill for a rapidly aging population. "Germany's working-age population is likely to decrease 30% over the next few decades," says Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. "Rural areas will see a massive population decline and some villages will simply disappear — Germany will become a weak economic power in the future."_Time
There are limits to the state-supported urban lifestyle, and the shrinking populations of Europe, Russia, Japan, and other "advanced" nations are starting to feel the squeeze. Germany is very close to the point of no return.

But why focus on Germany? Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Japan, and Eastern Europe are worse off than Germany in almost every way.

It all comes round to the fact that we have literally unlimited opportunities if we choose the freedom to take them & can be almost unlimitedly constrained by government parasitism, affecting every aspect of society, if we let it.

Labels: British politics, Government parasitism, Social