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That doesn't correct the problems caused by making the worse choice of having children with that unsuitable parent in the first place.

edmundsauto 7y ago
What could possibly correct that mistake?
- mjevans 7y ago
  A systemic answer is required to improve this case. I very much doubt there is any single magic bullet thing that will make the problem better.
  - Justsignedup 7y ago
    There is one: Treat every child in poverty as a societal responsibility. Everything will stem from there. a.k.a. start with societal empathy.
    - pinkfoot 7y ago
      i.e. the tax payer's responsibility?
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      By everything you mean solutions such as what? State paid orphanages? Free best education? Then free healthcare on top of that right? Let's continue with cheap and nutritious enough free food, likewise housing. Where will you find enough qualified teachers and nursing staff as the parents are obviously unsuitable? Cooks? Farmers? State would literally have to order at least some of those people to take such jobs. Maximum of factor is perhaps 10 per person, likely much less than that to provide proper quality. Unless you will invest heavily in teaching and nursing staff. It is an interesting model of a society halfway ran like military. Ultimately not too bad and orderly, but the problems of allocation are hard to solve and corruption is still likely. The old adage is that the more you want to control, the more you have to control. (Providing strong incentives might be enough.) Mind you EU socialdemocratic model is only halfway there, and thus limited in results. (Orphanages and nursing are too few, poor people are not relieved off parenthood. Free housing and food is very limited using merit as allocation through social services.)
PavlovsCat 7y ago
It's hard to impossible to figure out the "suitability" of a person for something until they actually did that thing, in this case become a parent. Just like dating and marriage can be very different. Hindsight is 20/20.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Come on, you can easily determine most of the time that a person is too poor to have a kid. (The other cases are usually an exception.)
  - nomel 7y ago
    You missed my point. You can become poor after having a child, due to good choices. A perfect example is when one of the parents succumbs to addiction that wasn't present before the child.
- dennis_jeeves 7y ago
  PavlovsCat, mind sending me an email? Email on my profile.
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    No thanks. I can't help being intelligent, but I can help setting foot into ivory towers. > He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk. -- George Orwell, "Nineteen-Eightyfour"
Spooky23 7y ago
What awful point of view. What's the consequence for being deemed unsuitable? Who determines that you are unworthy of reproduction? What other fundamental rights should unsuitable people be deprived of?
- sershe 7y ago
  How is having children a fundamental right? It's a hobby. In fact, in this case I'd consider it worse than many other hobbies because you are making another person, statistically speaking, suffer because you want to have a pet project that you cannot afford.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    You're just making things up. Once that child grows up it's no longer a "pet project" and contributes to the continued existence of society. Spending resources on the child is an investment into the future productivity of that child when it enters the workforce. The idea that such a logical investment is considered uneconomical is a fatal flaw in modern society. When you consider that the type of family (highly educated) that can actually afford to have children is deciding against having children then your proposal to consider every child as a hobby is just plain stupid. Who's going to have children then? Not the upper class? not the middle class? Not the poor? Nobody?
    - sershe 7y ago
      Well, if we are talking about poverty and inequality, the child may be a net negative for society, even on the ongoing basis before you consider the initial investment. Plenty of people are still going to have children, anyway; if we at some point find ourselves short of children, we can bring the incentives back (or just have more immigration). But I don't think it's likely to happen over the long term... the days of needing to make the maximum number of factory workers and cannot fodder for the motherland are over, at least for a time. Having children is totally a hobby.
  - d10r 7y ago
    Oh yes, lets get back to discussing eugenics instead of discussing our slow descent back into feudalism which creates such issues in the first place. This discussion has already made good progress 100 years ago. Then something happened and suddenly stopped it. Don't remember what it was...

edmundsauto 7y ago

What could possibly correct that mistake?

mjevans 7y ago
A systemic answer is required to improve this case. I very much doubt there is any single magic bullet thing that will make the problem better.
- Justsignedup 7y ago
  There is one: Treat every child in poverty as a societal responsibility. Everything will stem from there. a.k.a. start with societal empathy.
  - pinkfoot 7y ago
    i.e. the tax payer's responsibility?
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    By everything you mean solutions such as what? State paid orphanages? Free best education? Then free healthcare on top of that right? Let's continue with cheap and nutritious enough free food, likewise housing. Where will you find enough qualified teachers and nursing staff as the parents are obviously unsuitable? Cooks? Farmers? State would literally have to order at least some of those people to take such jobs. Maximum of factor is perhaps 10 per person, likely much less than that to provide proper quality. Unless you will invest heavily in teaching and nursing staff. It is an interesting model of a society halfway ran like military. Ultimately not too bad and orderly, but the problems of allocation are hard to solve and corruption is still likely. The old adage is that the more you want to control, the more you have to control. (Providing strong incentives might be enough.) Mind you EU socialdemocratic model is only halfway there, and thus limited in results. (Orphanages and nursing are too few, poor people are not relieved off parenthood. Free housing and food is very limited using merit as allocation through social services.)

PavlovsCat 7y ago

It's hard to impossible to figure out the "suitability" of a person for something until they actually did that thing, in this case become a parent. Just like dating and marriage can be very different. Hindsight is 20/20.

AstralStorm 7y ago
Come on, you can easily determine most of the time that a person is too poor to have a kid. (The other cases are usually an exception.)
- nomel 7y ago
  You missed my point. You can become poor after having a child, due to good choices. A perfect example is when one of the parents succumbs to addiction that wasn't present before the child.
dennis_jeeves 7y ago
PavlovsCat, mind sending me an email? Email on my profile.
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  No thanks. I can't help being intelligent, but I can help setting foot into ivory towers. > He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk. -- George Orwell, "Nineteen-Eightyfour"

Spooky23 7y ago

What awful point of view. What's the consequence for being deemed unsuitable? Who determines that you are unworthy of reproduction? What other fundamental rights should unsuitable people be deprived of?

sershe 7y ago
How is having children a fundamental right? It's a hobby. In fact, in this case I'd consider it worse than many other hobbies because you are making another person, statistically speaking, suffer because you want to have a pet project that you cannot afford.
- imtringued 7y ago
  You're just making things up. Once that child grows up it's no longer a "pet project" and contributes to the continued existence of society. Spending resources on the child is an investment into the future productivity of that child when it enters the workforce. The idea that such a logical investment is considered uneconomical is a fatal flaw in modern society. When you consider that the type of family (highly educated) that can actually afford to have children is deciding against having children then your proposal to consider every child as a hobby is just plain stupid. Who's going to have children then? Not the upper class? not the middle class? Not the poor? Nobody?
  - sershe 7y ago
    Well, if we are talking about poverty and inequality, the child may be a net negative for society, even on the ongoing basis before you consider the initial investment. Plenty of people are still going to have children, anyway; if we at some point find ourselves short of children, we can bring the incentives back (or just have more immigration). But I don't think it's likely to happen over the long term... the days of needing to make the maximum number of factory workers and cannot fodder for the motherland are over, at least for a time. Having children is totally a hobby.
- d10r 7y ago
  Oh yes, lets get back to discussing eugenics instead of discussing our slow descent back into feudalism which creates such issues in the first place. This discussion has already made good progress 100 years ago. Then something happened and suddenly stopped it. Don't remember what it was...