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Highly educated women no longer have fewer kids
- swagv 11y agoThis means population control requires poverty once again
- DougN7 11y agoNot to be rude or anything, but this should be good news for the gene pool.
- collyw 11y agoEducation has nothing to do with genetics.
- fucking_tragedy 11y agoI have met too many people who truly believe intelligence is heritable. These people also believe they're smarter and better than 95% of the population. Most of these people are the self-described entrepreneurial types and engineers. What I am saying is you may have opened the floodgates for a horrifying debate where pseudo-eugenicists come out of the woodwork.
- jensen123 11y agoIf intelligence is not heritable, then sometimes chimpanzees will have children with an IQ of 170, whereas often humans will have children that are as dumb as chimps, right?
- analog31 11y agoIn partial support of your point, I haven't met a chimp with an IQ of 170. ;-)
- orangecat 11y agoI have met too many people who truly believe intelligence is heritable. For example, almost everyone who has studied the subject? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
- phamilton 11y agoIs intelligence not heritable? I've (naively perhaps) never considered the possibility that my children didn't inherit various characteristics that influence their critical thinking ability. In fact, it's frequently stated by family and friends that my son thinks like I did when I was his age.
- AlisdairO 11y agoAll our best evidence suggests that IQ is heritable. It's not the only factor, but genetic background has a substantial impact.
- douche 11y agoI don't understand why human beings should follow any different rules of genetics and heritability than any other species. We may not fully understand all of the genetic mechanisms of intelligence, but neither did our ancestors when they started selectively breeding dogs or pigs or goats to emphasize certain traits.
- newjersey 11y agoI strongly believe not everyone should have children[footnote]. I also strongly believe that we should not provide incentives (and rather dis incentivize) people from having too many children. I think the one child policy is a great idea. The society at large will subsidize the first (one or two at most) child for any person. Anything beyond that and the parents must be prepared to meet the financial obligation themselves. (And it costs a lot to raise a child, even when you take away the cost of health care with universal health care). I don't think this stance is unreasonable at all. It is surely unpopular though. [footnote] People should decide for themselves if they are fit to be parent though. We have that choice now and we should always have this choice.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoI think the one child policy is a great idea. How do you deal with those who defy it, deliberately or otherwise?
- newjersey 11y agoThey don't get any subsidy. Possibly taxes, garnished wages and so on. This is not a completely fleshed out idea. How do we deal with twins, triplets and so on?
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoWhat subsidy? When you mentioned "society at large," I was assuming some hypothetical communal or kinship arrangements. You should be more clear. The second idea is vile and destructive. Someone elects to have more than one child, and you come in storming to deduct from their payrolls and tax their income as if you deliberately want to wage a war of attrition against the parents' standard of living for raising a child.
- newjersey 11y ago> What subsidy? That is the reason for this whole exercise. We'd create a subsidy to encourage more people to have a first child or first two children. I acknowledge that society needs children. I just think that we're better off if 80% of people have one kid vs 10% of the people have eight kids or something. If you want more children, you must pull your own weight. I did say there has to be some kind of exemption for natural twins and so on.
- dominotw 11y agostormfront is that way --->
- SolaceQuantum 11y agoThis is dangerous thinking. That we don't understand the factors that go into this means we don't know if it actually is good for any genetic pool.
- brlewis 11y agotl;dr 16 years of education 1.74 children, > 16 years 1.89 children Overall more education still means lower fertility rates. There's just a slight blip at the end of the graph.
- wiremine 11y agoThese two paragraphs highlight the findings the the hypothesis explaining the 50%+ change: "During the 2000s, highly educated women had higher fertility rates than women with intermediate levels of education. Importantly, this is a result of a substantial increase in fertility among women with advanced degrees who increased their fertility by 0.7 children, or by more than 50%" "What can explain the rise of fertility among highly educated women during the period that saw the largest increase in the labour supply of highly educated women? We argue that the growing income inequality over the past three decades created both a group of women who can afford to buy services that help them raise their children and run their homes, and a group who is willing to supply these services cheaply." They don't mention anything about birth control, which I found interesting.
- nickbauman 11y agoLong term we get a servant-class of women whose genes are going to be displaced by those of high earning women. What's at issue is selection of earning capacity over time. Does it make for a better civilization? Or do we head towards a new GATTACA-style dystopia?
- toyg 11y agoThis has always been the case, with the difference that, in the past, servant families were seriously at risk of being wiped out, no matter how many children they had: their offspring was the first to be enrolled when cannon fodder was required, the first to suffer from famine, pestilence and low-sanitation standards, the first to suffer from or take part in violent crime, etc etc etc. We're just running fast towards our past.
- thejteam 11y agoAnother thing that happened during this time frame is that certain professions, specifically teachers and nurses, began to require more and more education. I would also speculate, without offering any proof, that women in these professions were more likely to have children than other women of similar education. Therefore the increase.
- tomp 11y agoI would love this to be true. But as always, I'm very skeptical of all social/psychological studies. Provided it turns out to be true, I guess there still is some hope for the human race!
- pen2l 11y agoYeah, these numbers to me don't look right too. Relatedly (and I'm sorry I'm saying this - I feel terrible saying this): women really really need to have children earlier, preferably before age 28. 30 years ago you saw only 7.2 deaths of mothers per 100,000 live births in the US, in 2011, despise tremendously better healthcare, it was 17.8 deaths per 100,000 births. One of the reasons for the jump is women postponing having kids. And completely separate from this, risk of chromosomal abnormalities in babies goes up very high when having them at a later age. Men and women both need to have children early, for so many reasons. It is a great pity that it's so fucking difficult to do so in this day and age.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoIt is a great pity that it's so fucking difficult to do so in this day and age. Elaborate.
- pen2l 11y agoHaving children is reaaaaaally expensive. Much more than people would expect. Most 25 year old couples don't have this money, in this day and age. It would require out of them that they both work hardcore hours... but then when baby has come, who will take care of it? Babysitters? Daycare? They're expensive as hell. Clothes, food stuff, toys, childcare services, carseats, strollers, etc. all add up to something humongous. This is not to mention the mental toll of getting up each damn night at 3a.m. to calm crying babies. Daycare often times costs more than what one of the parents make, it's that expensive. For whatever reason Americans want to get away from their parents after getting married (unlike a lot of Asian countries), so if you can't rely on your parents to help out it's really difficult and it'll exhaust you out before you know it.
- jensen123 11y agoThere are many arguments in favor of income equality/social democracy, and some of them make sense (less crime for example). However, I've never heard anybody point out before that it's not genetically sustainable in the very long-term. Well, ok, there was that movie Idiocracy...
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- digi_owl 11y agoMakes one wonder if the old generational family units had not been broken up, because of the constant demand for mobility in the modern work place, there would not be as much fretting about fertility. I know of people that made good use of their retired parents as babysitters, and the parents were quite happy to do so (getting to spend time with their grandkids and all that).
- rayiner 11y agoMy wife and I are both lawyers and spend three hours a day commuting. Having grandparents pitch in to take care of our daughter has been a huge blessing.
- pjc50 11y agoconstant demand for mobility in the modern work place Under capitalism, fertility is a cost to both the worker and the workplace. If 'society' wants fertility, someone has to pay for it somehow.
- dudul 11y ago"We argue that the growing income inequality over the past three decades created both a group of women who can afford to buy services that help them raise their children and run their homes, and a group who is willing to supply these services cheaply." Somehow this sentence makes me very uneasy. Rich people start having more kids because they can pay poor people to take care of them. This "everything as a service" trend of modern society is very scary because it relies heavily on income inequality, I can foresee a time in the near future where we will go back to feudal laws, a rich person will own a domain and have poor people taking care of it on their behalf.
- jarboot 11y agoSaudi Arabia is that way. Even poor people have a driver and a housemaid.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]