Digital future

The media has always had a fascination of what the home of the future would look like. From the 1950's visions of flying cars and push-button cooking, to current predictions of universally portable computer preferences. A lot of this stuff has come true as time has marched on, but never in the form predicted; though push-button cooking has been here since the advent of the microwave oven, you still have to prepare your food before throwing it in.

One of the perennial predictions of the past couple decades is video on demand. The vision keeps changing as technology provides new ways of providing that. Cable-systems of the 1980's and earlier had 60 channels to choose from, vastly more than the 15 broadcasters in medium and larger markets, and in the later period had Pay-Per-View to provide on-demand-like service. The 1990's introduced satellite systems and digital cable, which upped the channel count into the hundreds. More recently, On-Demand services have been leveraging the two-way nature of digital cable to allow cable providers to stream video to receivers directly, rather than broadcast on the whole system the way PPV was. And now work is being done on IPTV, or TV over the Internet, which is billed as a way to get thousands of channels!

IPTV is one of a set of features that have been billed as a holy grail of The Internet. The idea of 'doing everything from the comfort of your own home' has been around for decades, though the modern form was introduced in the 1980's. This list of features hasn't changed all that much:

• Shop for groceries, and have them delivered.
• Shop for anything, and have them delivered.
• Do your banking
• Work from home
• Get all your music without having to hunt around for it
• Get the TV you want, the way you want it
• See movies

Several of those points are limited by bandwidth constraints, and we're only now beginning to see how we can deliver full streams of video to households. The same video data in High-Def quality is still 5-7 years away, though. But each of those items is either being done now, or there are major plans to make it work.

• Shop for groceries, and have them delivered. SimonDelivers and its kin do exactly this.
  
• Shop for anything, and have it delivered. The conversion of Mail-order to internet-order has been ongoing for years now, and is now 'normal' where mail-order (or phone-order) is less common.
• Do your banking. Banks have had phone-banking for a long time. Internet-banking provides a level of control that bank-by-phone never let you have.
• Work from home. Some form of this has been done for decades. Improvements in bandwidth and remote-office technologies have made this a lot easier to do. Right now, this is a workplace-policy decision most of the time rather than an ability decision.
• Get all your music without having to hunt around for it. This has been around illegally since Napster came on to the scene, and Apple iTunes has really created the online market.
• Get the TV you want, the way you want it. This is a big thing, and we don't have it quite yet. In the not too distant future, cable/satellite providers will have the bandwidth in place to allow subscribers to select the individual channels they want to subscribe to. Right now its package deals, with premium channels the sole layer of discressionary selection. Bandwidth on the internet is still scanty enough that this can't be truly done without some very noticeable quality sacrifices.
• See Movies. There have been multiple systems devised for delivering movie-quality movies to homes without having to rent or mail the movie in question. The technology is there, though currently mired in copyright protection arguments. Once again, this is an area where bandwidth is a major factor since people are much less likely to be content with lower visual-quality movies than they would for mere cable.
  

Since the digital future is almost here, we have to move on to a newer vision of the future. And that, my friends, is why your cell-phone will soon allow you to do all of the above. Just as soon as they solve the wireless bandwidth problems, of course.

Fertility and parenthood

It has been noted that fertility rates in industrialized countries are dropping below the replacement level. The countries that are increasing population are those that have significant immigrant inflow, such as the US. As a result, the total of world population living in 'first world' countries is decreasing as a percentage of the total.

The reasons for this are several, and the trends have been in place for some time. The age of adulthood has been both decreasing and increasing at the same time. While you can vote earlier, the age of first marriage is getting later. This creates an inbetween state that I'll call 'young adulthood' where you are old enough to make some decision (i.e. military service, voting) but not old enough for other decisions (i.e. permanent sterilization, drinking).

Also adding to this situation is that the goal of having children is no longer seen as a requirement. This is partly due to the feminist movement and their efforts to redefine 'woman' as separate from 'mother'; though it is still unbalanced, women these days have the same culturally sanctioned option to not have children that men have. Another part of this is that the cost of living has gone up far enough that two-earner households are much more of a rule than they were even 30 years ago.

The final and probably most significant factor in this trend is the simple cost of parenthood. A college education, which is required if the potential child is to have any real chance to do well, now costs about 60% of a new house in most markets. Considering that a house is typically purchased on a 30 year mortgage, the prospect of having multiple children and having to help finance multiple college educations make parenthood the demense of the very driven, or the fairly well off. People of my generation are already having to help pay off college debt earned ten years ago that still haunts us to this day. And tuition rates are increasing at over twice the rate of inflation. And this doesn't even get into the cost of housing, medical care, and extracurricular activities a child incurs.

So it is no wonder to me that making children a culturally optional thing causes the birth-rate to drop in the face of the cost of parenthood. Biological drives are strong, so plenty of parents will make a go of it and try to pay for it all "somehow". It is no surprise that industrialized Europe has a negative population growth-rate, especially in the face of restrictive immigration laws.

This also impacts how our Culture views when is a good time to be a parent. Since we haven't perfected uterine replicators yet, parenthood requires a mother to carry a child to term. Simple biological necessity that I hope science will eventually fix. So the 'motherhood' window is limited by the fertility window of that mother.

The age of menarche has been getting younger in the past few decades. The causes are not clear, but I suspect it has a lot to do with good nutrition. Ironically, the very thing that allows us to live longer means our reproductive systems hit full-speed earlier. Back when I was taking sex-ed classes, that special age was widely believed to be on or around 14. Since then the conventional wisdom has revised somewhat downward to 13 (or 12 if you want to cause debates).

At the other end of the spectrum, you get menopause. The average age of that has been increasing a bit in the past few decades as well, though not as fast as lifespan has. This is an area where science has a big influence in its impact to women. Fertility science has advanced to the point where even 55 year olds can be parents. It is an accepted biological fact that a woman is only given so many eggs, and once they are gone they can't be replaced.

Which gives a very rough fertility window of age 13( +/- 2) through 40(+/- 10). Now that we've gotten the science out of the way, lets examine cultural guidelines and rules:

• Thou Shalt Not Have Children Until Thou Art Adult. Or Thou Shall Be A Teen Pregnancy, and Lo, it is bad. Where "Adult" in this case means "over 18". This is an area where Culture conflicts with Nature in a BIG way. Both males and females are most fertile on or before age 18.
  
• Having a child late in life is possibly bad for the child. Eggs get old. The longer you wait to have a child, the more likely that child will be medically high-maintenance. The conventional wisdom for where the line is for 'too old' is not clear, though subjective evidence shows that anyone over 35 will probably get talked about by their peers.
• You don't want to pay for college and retirement at the same time. Consider the average 4 year college, the 'accepted' retirement age of 67, and you get a no-later-than date for last-child-birth of 45. Add in the fact that a lot of people don't really start saving for retirement until they hit their 40's anyway, and you have problems in spades.

Ok, that reduces the window to ages 18 through 35. But we're not done yet. There are certain other realities to factor in that aren't as strongly cultural.

• You really should be out of college before having a child. Because if you get pregnant while in college, your ability to finish college goes w-a-y down, and that impacts your ultimate earning potential. And earning-potential is all about paying for your own child's college in 18 years. So, no child-birth for you until you're older than 22.
• You really should have health-care coverage before having a child. Which means either paying for it out of pocket (ouch!) or finding an employer that offers family medical coverage. Since it is common for 'family' private medical insurance to cost over $1000/month, the employer route is far more likely for most freshly-graduated people. Especially in the face of student loan payoffs.
• You really should have child-care arranged. Especially in the years between birth and full-time school. Extended families aren't as common as they used to be, so the free grandma babysitter isn't as available as it once was. Also, women still earn less than men on average, so it is more likely to be financially wiser for the woman to stop earning and become a full-time parent than it would be the man to do it. The choice comes down to a horrible trio:
• One parent stay home and do it, giving up a job
• Pay for child-care
• Rearrange work-schedules so there is always someone home.
• You need to be able to afford it. Children are expensive. All that clothing and stuff. There is a very good reason that 1/3rd of all garage sales are held to to try and hawk the old, never-to-be-used-again children's clothing and toys. Also, a lot of employers do not cover 'sick kid' under paid sick-leave, so that's a hit to earning potential right there.
  

The next three are far more variable in their impact on the fertility window. Culture says 18-35 for that window. The college rider moves that to 22-35. The health-care option may arrive on graduation, or be worked into, so that could add anywhere from zero to never for the lower end of that spectrum. Child-care is another big if and ties right into the affording it point. On the assumption that it takes a few years after graduation to become established on ones career, this moves the window to a mere 26-35. So of the roughly 27 years of fertility a woman is given by nature, only 11 of those years (40%) are actually usable for that reason.

There are exceptions to this, of course. Life is variable like that. If one earner is earning enough to really be able to support a family by their self, this opens up the window quite a bit. Some employers offer paid sick-leave for children AND affordable family medical insurance to all employees, which also opens up the window. And some two-earner households may never break the $40,000/year mark, which shortens the window dramatically. These are far from hard and fast rules, merely guiding influences.

It sounds really grim, but there is hope on the horizon. Glimmerings at the moment, but they do hint at greater things.

In the past decade Science has succeeded in creating precursor cells for both human spermatozoa, and ova. Should the ova technology get perfected, in the next 15 years we could see 60 year old women mothering children from eggs created in a lab (probably in batches, with the best eggs selected for fertilization) and not subjected to 60+ years of biological entropy. Both technologies will allow same-sex parents to create children descended from both parents. Because of the technology involved, these methods will be relatively expensive. However, since they allow parenthood later in life this actually helps pre-select parents for those who are actually able to afford the college/retirement duality problem.

And as the old saying goes, "It takes a village to raise a child". Collations of parents can get together to pool child-care resources, which can really help parents get over the critical hump between birth and full-time schooling. I saw some of this growing up, and it worked. Socialism isn't all bad, you know.

As the world industrializes, it should provide a break on our population growth. Right now the vast majority of our population growth are in countries where birth-control is scarce, nonexistent, or culturally taboo. The world may finally hit zero population growth simply because it'll get too expensive to have that many children. Reproductive options are a good thing!