10 ms·

Now, consider the "meta-brain-drain" of 1) increased assortative mating (people are increasingly more likely to marry someone of similar educational and profess

• neilv 8y ago
  I think you have some good points, but I don't think the following is a safe assumption, and it can be very counterproductive: > If we assume educational attainment is correlated with intelligence, and children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence, [...] You could imagine how this idea can discourage people of modest origins, and can also encourage people of advantage to see themselves as innately superior.
• chrischattin 8y ago
  An interesting way to look at this is that nature (from an evolutionary perspective) is selecting away from what the popular sentiment of this board considers intelligent.
• drb91 8y ago
  I don’t see any reason to assume that intelligence is strongly correlated with parent intelligence. Weakly, sure, but nurture factors contribute immensely. I attribute my own success not to genetics, though my parents are successful, but to reading a LOT as a kid and an upbringing encouraging curiosity, and then nepotism. The knack I have for puzzles that I share with my family seems to contribute less to my place in the world and more the roles I choose in this place—that is, I don’t think it has significantly impacted my material position—much more due to the earthly explanations of privilege.
  • ikeyany 8y ago
    It takes high intelligence to teach your kids to read or do puzzles as a hobby. Your parents could have just as easily put you in front of a TV for your whole childhood, or they could have provided a stressful or abusive environment to grow up in. Intelligence takes many forms.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
• ausbah 8y ago
  That sounds exactly like the plot of "Idiocracy" - people who aren't 'smart' are having more children then those who are 'smart' so society is ruined. How about trying to make education and other opportunities more accessible to the less educated instead of bashing them for having a couple more kids?
  • JamesBarney 8y ago
    Because educating people doesn't change their genetics. If as a society you care about basketball playing ability. And you find tall people are having less kids than short people no amount of basketball camps are going to make the next generation taller. Also what we care about is societal contribution which primarily happens through work and we're terrible at making people better at their jobs through the education system.
    • LeifCarrotson 8y ago
      Success is hardly a heritable genetic trait. Most of the education differences you see among families is environmental, and can be compensated for by improving public education.
      • JamesBarney 8y ago
        Intelligence and conscientousness are both very heritable and highly correlated with success. And there are no educational interventions that come close to the effect size of intelligence or conscientousness.
        • kgarten 8y ago
          What do you mean by intelligence and conscientiousness? If you are referring to IQ scores, yes it seems there’s a factor that’s inherited. For intelligence, I would like to know your definition and the research you are basing it on. Even for IQ scores it‘s not so clear, as our measure of IQ is variable and there are no longitudinal studies to my knowledge showing what you claim.
• asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  We're probably less than a century away from having the capability to edit intelligence into the genome of embryos. Certainly not more than two, assuming we don't blow ourselves up. At that point in time, a child will not be shackled to the luck of their parents' genetic fortunes -- at least not because of our technical inability to break those chains. I doubt any hypothetical dysgenic effects will have become so acute by then that we'll be unable to make that advancement, although I too feel some kind of visceral concern over this issue. Also worth noting: according to [1], women who don't finish high school are only about 50% more fertile than women who finish college, and that group represents only 20% of the population. The difference between the high school, some high school, and college cohorts is much smaller. We also don't know exactly how well that difference in educational attainment is linked to a genetic difference. That is, it seems very likely that some of the difference in attainment is due to family socioeconomic circumstances, not an underlying genetic difference in intellect. As such, I don't think any dysgenic effects are going to be so pronounced as to cause a crisis before genetic engineering efforts can be well under way. [1]: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/9/education-level-inversely-related-to-childbearing/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/9/education-le...
  • pmiller2 8y ago
    We’re far closer to blowing ourselves up than 1-200 years, though. It could literally happen via nuclear war or metaphorically via irreversible climate catastrophe within 15 years, easily.
• shmageggy 8y ago
  > It seems like we as a society need to figure out a way to make "have children at a reasonable age" not be a low-status move for highly educated / driven / intelligent women. Isn't the obvious answer better maternity leave laws? Ambitious women in the US don't have kids because it fucks their career. The US is literally last among OECD countries, offering zero guaranteed maternity pay [1]. [1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/19/news/economy/countries-most-maternity-leave/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/19/news/economy/countries-most...
  • yellow_postit 8y ago
    Paternity laws as well, though Maternity should come first. It needs to be at the federal or state level.
  • nradov 8y ago
    That would be a good start, but overall I think access to high quality child care is more important than maternity leave.
    • simonsarris 8y ago
      Higher/highest quality child care is not putting your kid in child care at all. I don't know why rich parents would want to risk the long term welfare of their kids so they can work more. Kids that spend lots of time in child care are objectively worse off. https://ifstudies.org/blog/measuring-the-long-term-effects-of-early-extensive-day-care https://ifstudies.org/blog/measuring-the-long-term-effects-o... > Within 10 years, comprehensive analyses of the universal, “$5 per day childcare” program, including its impact on child care use, employment patterns, and children’s and parent outcomes, suggested cause for concern. Social development among children, as indicated by both emotional and behavioral measures, had significantly deteriorated in Quebec, relative to the rest of Canada (10% of a standard deviation lower). Comparisons between children ages 2 to 4 who had been exposed to the program, with older children (and siblings) who had not, revealed significant increases in anxiety, hyperactivity, and aggression in those exposed to the program. And the analyses found more hostile, inconsistent parenting, and lower-quality parental relationships among parents of children exposed to the program. But it was hard to predict whether the negative outcomes identified for 2- to 4-year-olds would persist across their development, or simply dissipate. > Their research confirmed that the negative effects did continue, and in some cases became stronger across development. Among 5 to 9-year-olds, negative social-emotional outcomes not only persisted, but in some cases increased, as indicated by 24% of a standard deviation increase in anxiety, a 19% increase in aggression, and a 13% in hyperactivity. The impact on boys and children with the most elevated behavioral problems was stronger, especially in measures of hyperactivity and aggression.
• jraby3 8y ago
  I don’t believe educational attainment is that strongly correlated with intelligence. Their are so many environmental and societal factors at play.
  • steve_taylor 8y ago
    And there are plenty degrees that don’t require intelligence.
    • rmdashrfstar 8y ago
      A crucial detail that people spouting "free college forever for anyone for any major!" are absolutely living in another dimension where funding a student's degree in civil engineering or chemistry is considered equivalent to the saturated academia-only majors whose only future career prospects are becoming a professor for that same subject matter.
• balls187 8y ago
  > This doesn't bode well for future generations. It hasn't impacted any generations thus far. Low income and/or poorly educated Americans have always had more children than higher income/well educated Americans. From back when health standards were terrible, to when having more kids meant more hands to work the farm. Yet society still has found a way not to collapse on itself.
  • reredacted 8y ago
    "hasn't happened yet, therefore it never will" Are you daft? Why are you even here?
    • thekyle 8y ago
      HN isn't a place for personal attacks. Try to be more polite.
  • DoingIsLearning 8y ago
    > Americans have always had more children than higher income/well educated Americans. But is this Universally true? 250 years of US history is a blip in Human history. You could argue that lower classes used to have a lot of children because child mortality rate and morbility rate was very high. Also children were needed as labour, with a role in the household or working along side their mother or father. With modern healthcare, social security, and children rights legislation none of the previous pattern is true. In comparison higher income people or more accurately land owning ruling class had the luxary of better nutrition and several children were a way of reducing the risk of having no heir to handover to. Another fundamental difference for higher income families introduced with Christianity is that the ruling class was now (officially) restricted to a single wife. In comparison if you look at several empiries in Asia and Africa, the biggest benefit of power and wealth (from a patriarch perspective) was the ability to 'acquire' multiple wifes and to maximise your genetic descent, the most brutal example of this was probably Genghis Khan. The point I wanted to make is that having several (surviving) children used to be a privilege reserved for the rich and powerful of whatever society at the time. However with our science/social/legal achievements and progress this is no longer true in our social fabric and I am unsure we can accurately predict how this 'recent' change will impact humans as a whole.
• trabant00 8y ago
  Maybe education _is_ the problem. Maybe we're teaching children that things like career and information hoarding are more important than family and living life in general. And maybe hyper specialized brains (almost computers) should stay in low numbers relative to the general population. Maybe we're just walking hard drives, full of "facts". Maybe we're not as smart as we think.
  • blub 8y ago
    "We" are not teaching. Everyone can see for themselves that raising kids is a thankless, difficult job which can hardly be reconciled with a successful career.
    • RandomInteger4 8y ago
      You need to connect more with other humans.
      • blub 8y ago
        I did not get the above information from Mars, but rather from other humans and also from reading and becoming aware of current social topics. I would have thought that it's a pretty well known thing nowadays that motherhood is at least a part-time job and in spite of the best intentions, fathers can only partly compensate for the additional effort. Furthermore, being a mother is not a respected "job", it's neither associated with a good salary, nor high status. But perhaps you've connected with other humans or live in a different country. Would be nice to share those experiences instead of acting uppity.
        • rmdashrfstar 8y ago
          Motherhood is not a zero sum game where having a child is somehow a loss to the mother that must be compensated by the father. It's a cooperative effort, not a competitive one. Motherhood is not respected only by those who don't respect family, and those who don't value and respect the idea of family, well they're lost souls.
• volkl48 8y ago
  What we can basically dub the "idiocracy hypothesis" is becoming less true than it was in the past, not more true. Take a look at the second section for 1995-2010 changes: https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/02/lets-not-panic-over-women-with-more-education-having-fewer-kids/273070/ https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/02/lets-not-p... Yes, the less educated still have more children than the more educated, but that gap is getting smaller. ---------- In more current data: Teenage pregnancies are down by 55% since 2007, which is an enormous public health success that no one seems to have noticed. And while I can't find more recent data by educational attainment, there does appear to be racial data, which given the enormous differences in average educational attainment between racial groups, are something you can make inferences from. The groups which are statistically lower educational attainment have seen 2-6x larger drops in fertility than the groups which are statistically higher educational attainment. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/us/fertility-rate-decline-united-states.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/us/fertility-rate-decline... (last sections for figures).
  • jopsen 8y ago
    Further more, the "Idiocracy hypnosis" assumes that: > educational attainment is correlated with intelligence, and children's intelligence is correlated to parental intelligence For this we have no evidence. Quite the opposite in fact -- not that this should stop anyone from enjoying a hilarious movie :) (Just keep in mind that Idiocracy is fictional)
    • PavlovsCat 8y ago
      > For this we have no evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
      • rosemary1337 8y ago
        Genetics is not the only form of inheritance. You can "inherit" opportunity -- wealthier (and usually more intelligent) people end up in wealthier neighborhoods with better schools and the vicious cycle turns and turns.
• jasonkester 8y ago
  Perhaps educated people are better at realising that 40 is a “reasonable age” to have children, while 24 is not. Raising kids after 15 years of extra life experience, savings, and career advancement sure does make having kids easy. It was pretty straightforward in my experience but I couldn’t imagine how I would have pulled it off back when I was trying to scrape together some savings with my entry level job and tiny studio apartment.
  • blub 8y ago
    Biologically, 40 is a bad age to have kids at. The risk of Down syndrome and other diseases increases by a lot with each passing year in the 30s and it's anyways harder to conceive. Pregnancies over 35 are considered risky and are monitored much more closely. Having kids early is problematic because of the changing economic factors: job uncertainty combined with families moving for jobs and not being able to rely on grandparents for help. But the 20s are the perfect biological age range to have kids in.
    • jasonkester 8y ago
      The thing they don’t talk about much is that age isn’t so much the factor as overall health. The two correlate pretty well, so it’s more polite to talk in terms of age, but we could watch the way my fit, active, wife was treated compared to a more sedentary, overweight, woman 10 years younger, and it was clear which one people were more concerned about. Beyond that, even assuming the official numbers are right, I was still happy to exchange “lose one lottery draw when it counts” for an extra 15 years of doing thing you can’t do after having kids. (And of course being able to afford having them comfortably.)
      • blub 8y ago
        Like you said, economically it makes sense, but I have to emphasise that biologically it's risky(er) to wait. Risk doesn't imply a negative outcome, as you have discovered for yourself, but each would-be parent should at least know what the pros and cons are. According to Uhl's Obstetrics and Gynaecology for example, fertility is impacted negatively for females of age > 35 and a first pregnancy over 35 or under 19 is considered a risky pregnancy. Same goes for subsequent pregnancies over 40, which have a higher risk of genetic defect, placenta insufficiency, etc. It's perhaps interesting to note that a genetic consultation is offered to women over 35, but only to men over 50. The risk of a trisomy over 35 is 1 : 370, whereas earlier it's in the thousands and can be shrunk further through non-invasive diagnosis. There are many more things which become problematic over 35 (thrombosis, diabetes, hypertensive disorders), I don't have time to list them all, but any good book on obstetrics will have the details. Weight issues (BMI > 25, < 19) and a sedentary lifestyle increase the risk for pre-eclampsia, pre-term birth, pregnancy diabetes or spontaneous abortion. This would explain why the lady you mentioned was likely closely monitored. It seems that some attributes of the mother (e.g. being overweight, diabetes) are also reflected in the later predisposition to disease of the child. This can include even things like natural vs. C-section birth.
• RandomInteger4 8y ago
  A college education != higher IQ.
• archagon 8y ago
  “The poors are outbreeding us” is not a statement that is going to age well.