Hey, parental dudes, it turns out we’re more than a bit psychic. At least when it comes to money and babies. It’s long been known that people have fewer babies when there’s a messy economy. With the American and global economy cratering right now, you’d think people would begin to put off having babies. Oddly enough, it seems American parents started delaying their plans to have babies even before the economy started tanking.
It’s precognition, dude. Either that or Americans just decided unprotected sex wasn’t the right way to go. All at the same time. I know. Neither one seems likely, but it’s what happened. Well, the results, anyway. Not sure about the cause.
Just before the earliest stages of the recession, there was a steep decline in the population growth of children younger than a year old, newly released census figures show.
Experts have long known that with rising job cuts and home foreclosures, couples often decide the timing isn’t right to add children to their household. But the mystery here is that the pregnancy falloff reflected in the government data actually began months before Wall Street’s plunge last September.
The number of babies increased only 0.9 percent between July 2007 and July 2008, a sharp drop from the record-setting 2.7 percent growth for the preceding year.
The thought is that — somehow — parents, or people who might have become parents, instinctively knew that the economy was going to hit bottom and start digging a hole. Sort of like dogs knowing when an earthquake is going to hit. Only with money. Now, I knew we — as parents — were often a bit on the spendthrift side, but this is ridiculous.
There didn’t seem to be outwardly clear signs of trouble around the corner. During the months when these couples were conceiving babies — or were choosing not to conceive — the stock market was still rising toward its peak above 14,000, unemployment was relatively flat at about 4.5 percent and consumer confidence was reasonably high.
On the other hand, housing prices were near their peak, a pressure on young families. And in hindsight, some banking failures later identified as early signs of the recession were occurring as early as summer 2007, when gasoline costs also began to rise.
There are times when my wife, known to me as She Who Sometimes Falls For The Joke, thinks I’m psychic. She’ll get one word of a sentence or question out of her mouth and I’ll give her an answer. She won’t know how I knew in advance. The answer is that I didn’t know in advance, but when she started talking a whole cascade of connections started running through my brain. I instantly picked up pieces of information from various past conversations, similar events running through my past and her past and put it together with the present context and — walla! I knew what she was going to ask. It’s not psychic. It’s deductive. Maybe parents — or not-so parents — did the same thing on an unconscious level.
I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t mind being able to harness that sort of group think. I’d make a fortune in the stock market selling short.
– Richard
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