Serendipity Book

The big family as status symbol

The Times reports that having a big family is increasingly seen as a status symbol. Having four children "in comfort" is apparently beyond the realistic aspirations of most couples:

In the more expensive postcodes of Britain, in the upper-earning, over-achieving echelons of life in general, there is a new must-have status symbol. Not a car, not a certain type of house, not a super-sleek yacht, but something much more fundamental – and so much more significant: a child. Specifically, a fourth child.

Why four and not three? Well it seems that the incremental cost of having a fourth child is much higher due to the need to buy a much larger car, house and have staff:

Having four children means that you need a house the size of Texas; it means a convoy on the school run; an army of highly trained staff; multiple school fees. It’s the Darwinian expression of a person’s physical, mental and social superiority.

It transpires that the cost of rearing four children is actually about one third again more than the cost of raising three.

Having four children isn't the problem of course. Having them and still living a comfortable existence is the real achievement:

Having four children without incurring so much as a blip in your lifestyle is the ultimate proof of success. The pile of washing is irrelevant: someone else is doing it and there is any number of highly-trained nannies to do the early shift on a Saturday morning.

One reporter spoke about her deeper motives for having a fourth child:

There were also deeper forces at work, less comfortable to examine. At some level, the idea of having four children appealed to my vanity. What a statement about the health of my marriage! Look how competent I must be as a mother! At the time we were feeling financially secure. If I put off rebuilding some sort of career for myself, never mind. I wouldn’t be just a mother; I’d be a chief executive mother! And the small question of what to do with the rest of my life could be shelved for a few more years.

ONS Releases Latest Consumer Trends Update

The UK Government Office for National Statistics has released the latest update (Q3 2006) from their consumer trends research programme. This provides key economic indicators about household expenditure trends broken down by category.

There is loads of interesting stuff in there but I've just picked out three things that caught my eye.

1) Since this time last year the types of goods and services that have seen the most substantial increases in household expenditure are clothing and footwear and recreation and culture...

2) Whilst we've heard a lot about the rising cost of electricity and gas, the growth in household expenditure on such fuels has actually started to fall back ...

3) The last chart shows the collosal shift from from non-durable expenditure (food & drink, vehicle fuel, health and housing costs incl. household bills) towards service expenditure (financial services, communications incl. mobile phones, leisure services incl. gyms, pay television, broadband etc.) over the last 35 or so years.

So few companies have any long term data trends any more which is what makes this data all the more interesting.

Declining populations

Interesting essay on the negative economic consequences of depopulation in the U.S. journal Foreign Affairs from a couple of years ago (Foreign Affairs is that dry looking thing that you would never dream of picking up which sits near the current affairs weeklies in Borders).

The author Philip Longman takes the old Malthusian scaremongering about overpopulation and turns it on its head ...

Most people think overpopulation is one of the worst dangers facing the globe. In fact, the opposite is true. As countries get richer, their populations age and their birthrates plummet. And this is not just a problem of rich countries: the developing world is also getting older fast. Falling birthrates might seem beneficial, but the economic and social price is too steep to pay. The right policies could help turn the tide, but only if enacted before it's too late.

Of course, Longman was not the only one to pick up this meme in 2004, however. Longman's book The Empty Cradle sounds like it will repeat many of the themes of Ben Wattenberg's Fewer: How The Demography of Depopulation will Reshape our Future which came out at more or less the same time.

Depopulation has of course been a concern for European governments for many years so it is interesting to see that it is also rising up the agenda in the US. Most Western European nations long since dipped below replacement levels and have been relying on net inward migration to maintain their populations.

More from Longman:

A look at demographic trends shows that the rate of world population growth has fallen by more than 40 percent since the late 1960s. And forecasts by the UN and other organizations show that, even in the absence of major wars or pandemics, the number of human beings on the planet could well start to decline within the lifetime of today's children. Demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis predict that human population will peak (at 9 billion) by 2070 and then start to contract. Long before then, many nations will shrink in absolute size, and the average age of the world's citizens will shoot up dramatically. Moreover, the populations that will age fastest are in the Middle East and other underdeveloped regions. During the remainder of this century, even sub-Saharan Africa will likely grow older than Europe is today.

As Malcolm Gladwell discusses in the New Yorker this week, both increasing and decreasing populations can offer economic benefits. He quotes research by David Canning and David Bloom on the economic boom in Ireland which suggests that the dependency ratio is can be the key to economic health. The dependency ratio is the relationship between the number of people who aren’t of working age and the number of people who are. The higher the dependency ratio, the higher the social cost of supporting those that don't work.

In Ireland during the sixties, when contraception was illegal, there were ten people who were too old or too young to work for every fourteen people in a position to earn a paycheck. That meant that the country was spending a large percentage of its resources on caring for the young and the old. Last year, Ireland’s dependency ratio hit an all-time low: for every ten dependents, it had twenty-two people of working age. That change coincides precisely with the country’s extraordinary economic surge.

Gladwell also notes that dependency ratios have offered an explanation to many of the differences in the wealth of nations ...

Economists have long paid attention to population growth, making the argument that the number of people in a country is either a good thing (spurring innovation) or a bad thing (depleting scarce resources). But an analysis of dependency ratios tells us that what’s critical is not just the growth of a population but its structure. “The introduction of demographics has reduced the need for the argument that there was something exceptional about East Asia or idiosyncratic to Africa,” Bloom and Canning write, in their study of the Irish economic miracle. “Once age-structure dynamics are introduced into an economic growth model, these regions are much closer to obeying common principles of economic growth.”

Nana Technology

Untangled Life (via PSFK) points to a list of tech innovations for the older generation that they found in USA Today ...

Andrew Carle, an assistant professor at George Mason University coined the term Nana Technology for all the technology that’s being developed and aimed at your grandmother. Or grandfather.

• Smart Pill Dispensers.
  Intel is working with Oregon Health & Science University to design and test a pillbox that works with location sensors to give reminders at the appropriate place and time. Aurora Health Care in Milwaukee also has a pillbox ($800 , or leased for $90 a month) that can be programmed to flash, speak reminders and dispense up to six doses a day for 10 days. If you miss a does by 90 minutes, it can call a caregiver.

• Online Medicine Cabinet.
  Accenture, a public company based in Chicago, is developing a medicine cabinet whose mirror is equipped with a camera and online computers with face recognition software. It would greet you by name and tell you when you’re about to take the wrong pill, and automatically order prescription refills. It would come with a blood pressure sleeve and would use the Internet to call the doctor to schedule an appointment. The project is a prototype; there are no immediate plans for commercial production.

• Mailbox alerts.
  Several companies have sensors that send an alert when postal mail is delivered. For most of us, getting the mail is trivial and an alert would be a convenience, Carle says. But for an older person who looks forward to mail, knowing when it has arrived could save them from going outside in heavy weather several times a day. Note: write to grandma. She loves your letters.

• Balance booster.
  Maxwell Smart had a phone in his shoe. One day, people at high risk for falling will have shoes with technology that helps keep them from losing their balance. The shoes have insoles that send small vibrations to the bottom of a person’s feet to literally tickle the neurons to make them more sensitive to the signals they’re suppose to detect, says project developter Jim Collins, professor of Bio-medical Engineering at Boston University. The technology has been licensed to Afferent Corp. and should be on the market in about a year, Collins says.

• Lifeline pendant.
  These are pendants that seniors - or anyone with a health problem - wear around the neck. Pressing a button sends a wireless phone signal to a central office that can dispatch help. About 500,000 people in the USA subscribe to the Lifeline service (800-380-3111; lifelinesys.com).

• Tracking systems.
  Several companies are developing tracking technologies for people with illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease, who are at risk of wandering and getting lost. At Oatfield Estates, near Portland Ore., residents with Alzheimer’s are tracked so their location is always known. The system also can monitor health and social interaction. Oatfield is developing software for other facilities and individuals. Other companies, including Viterion TeleHealthcare in Tarrytown, N.Y., and QuietCare, produced by the Living Independently Group in New York, also have monitoring systems that can be installed in the home.

• “Intelligent” phones.
  Several places, including Intel, are working on phones for people with memory problems. The phone Intel is developing uses caller ID to display a photo of the person calling, the relationship of the caller, and some notes about their last phone conversation to jog the memory of the person with dementia.

• Walking aids.
  Walkers are being developed that can steer away from obstacles and be retrieved by remote control, to prevent falls while trying to reach the walker. And Oregon Health & Science University is developing a cane that can detect gait, pressure and other warning signs, and sound an alarm when a person is in danger of falling. When used with sensors, it also could be programmed to beep when the user gets up out of a favorite chair, for instance, but forgets where he put his cane, or to alert caregivers when the user is in danger of falling.

• Computer programs that help cognition.
  Several universities are working on computer games that help monitor the player’s cognition, or that can help keep an older person’s mind sharp. Holly Jimison, an associate professor of medical informatics at Oregon Health and Science University, is testiing a card game based on the solitaire game FreeCell, in which performance is tracked over time. If a person is having increased congnition problems, he won’t do as well in the game. The card game also could eventually be used to tell if certain medications are affecting congnitive function, Jimison says.