7 ms·

Welcome to the world of dysgenics where the brightest and most diligent are not reproducing.

by sprash 5y ago

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Society needs to pay a competitive price relative to their other options.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Extremely unlikely there will ever be a will to do this considering the long term value to be compensated (hundreds of thousands of dollars per child, if not $1MM). Society is too short sighted and short term financially focused. The world already has almost 8 billion people though (with population momentum landing is at 10B-11B by the end of the century), so I’m hard pressed to argue for more children (and the necessary policy and financial support) when we, in aggregate, already don’t take care of the ones here (no subsidized child care, limited parental leave, half a million kids in foster care at any one time [US], ~120 million unintended pregnancies globally annually, etc). Also consider that in parts of Europe where pro natalist policies are very robust (subsidized childcare, very generous leave policies, and “baby bonuses”), the fertility rate continues to decline regardless. Kids might be valuable to society, but the data supports the idea they are not as important to individuals (opportunity costs, life choices, etc).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - xyzzy123 5y ago
    You could give the parents some kind of benefit(s) proportional to the taxes generated by their children /ducks (Yes, terrible idea for a number of reasons, but the incentives would be aligned...)
    - WithinReason 5y ago
      Or just reduce their taxes, e.g. like Hungary
  - cjbgkagh 5y ago
    Life is one big selection criteria bias. You don’t need all societies to work, just one. Unfortunately for us it may not be our society that makes it so there may be temporary setbacks. So long as designer baby technology is developed practically any amount of dysgenics can be reversed.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > Extremely unlikely there will ever be a will to do this considering the long term value to be compensated (hundreds of thousands of dollars per child, if not $1MM). Parent here. You don’t need $1mm to raise a kid. You don’t need anywhere close to that, actually. Kids aren’t free, obviously, but this internet meme that they’ll bankrupt you is getting out of control. Honestly, how do you think people making the median US household income are affording kids? Multiple kids, even? I hope it’s obvious that households with two kids earning <$100K per year (a common situation) aren’t spending $1mm on each of them.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      I did not say their cost ($270k in 2022 inflation adjusted dollars per child in the US). I said their long term value (over their lifetime to society). If you’re at a median income, you’re barely getting by with kids.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      What people prefer is what matters, now that people can enjoy sex without worrying about having kids. I would not have had kids with a household income less than $100k (or even $200k), but that is just my preference for the type of life I would have wanted for the kids. I grew up poor as the child of struggling immigrants, and I want my kids to be very far from that quality of life for the portion of their life I am responsible for.
      - ip26 5y ago
        I’m not sure how you can spend a 200k income on a kid and avoid them becoming spoiled rotten. Having been poor, you should have a good sense of just how little money it actually takes to leave the insecurity & want far behind (in my own experience & opinion)
        michaelt 5y ago
        I think a lot of people on this site are from Silicon Valley, and what they actually mean is "I wouldn't start a family until I could afford a 3-bedroom house in a reasonable school district, and you can't afford such a house in Silicon Valley without a 6-figure income"
  - dmm 5y ago
    > The world already has almost 8 billion people though The grocery stores are already full of food, why do we still need farms? If you ever plan to stop working you need young people to buy your 401k stocks from you and pay for your Social Security. The problem with low fertility rates is not (primarily) population decline, it's demographic collapse. As long as fertility is below replacement the proportion of elderly increases _forever_. What about immigration? The US is in a much better position wrt to this than many other nations because of our high rates of immigration but low fertility is a global phenomenon outside of a handful of places like Nigeria and Afghanistan. > the fertility rate continues to decline regardless. You're right. Nobody has figured out how to raise fertility rates once they start dropping.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I’m always baffled when I read these comments from non-parents who describe parenting as the end of your life. Daycare isn’t prohibitively expensive for any of us in tech careers. Anyone quitting a $150K+ job to avoid paying $20-30K for a good daycare for the few years before kids entire school isn’t doing it because it’s the optimal financial decision. You don’t stop having a career or earning money or having career advancement when you have kids.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I am a parent, but society wide data indicates people’s preferences/risk assessments/perceived cost-benefit ratios better than individuals’ opinion.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    I agree that for high income people ($150k+ for the sake of argument) it’s not strictly speaking a good idea financially to drop out of the workforce to avoid child care expenses. However, given the way taxes on two earner families work it is a much cheaper decision then it looks like at first blush. Maybe this is a good thing. But it is a bit counterintuitive if you think of salary in pretax dollars.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I am not sure what you are referring to, but the tax penalty for dual similar income earning married filing joint tax filers was removed in the 2017 tax cuts and jobs act. https://taxfoundation.org/tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-marriage-penalty/ https://taxfoundation.org/tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-marriage-pen...
      - bradleyjg 5y ago
        What’s the disposable income difference, in say California, between: 1) Spouse 1 grossing $250,000 a year, spouse 2 grossing $150,000 a year, $40,000 in childcare costs. and 2) Spouse 1 grossing $250,000 a year, spouse 2 grossing $0 a year, $0 in childcare costs?
Teever 5y ago
I predict that we will see the development of artificial wombs in the next 10-15 years and combined with rudimentary genetic modification this will result in a baby boom from the middle and upper class.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  By and large, pregnancy isn’t something that hinders work in a large way, with the obvious exception of the last few weeks. It’s the small child that needs years of care that does that.
- paxys 5y ago
  "Artificial wombs" for the rich exist today, and are called surrogates. Ultimately the bigger problem isn't the birth itself but the time, money and space required to raise a child after it is born. For more and more young professionals in urban areas the numbers simply don't work out.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Unfortunately surrogacy is entangled with large amounts of human trafficking around the world…
- doliveira 5y ago
  Wow, I was about to joke about artificial wombs coming up as a solution in tech circles, but you beat me to it by being serious.
  - shrimp_emoji 5y ago
    Sexless, genderless, genetically modified people grown in vats operated by the state and implanted with cybernetic backpacks that short-circuit decades of education before they're sent off to subvert alien civilizations and expand the empire is obviously the way to go; this demented legacy biology game we're trapped in is played out af.
  - Teever 5y ago
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
From the real world, I can assure you this is entirely untrue. It may seem like that if you’re living in a super high cost of living city and everyone in your work social bubble is in their 20s and early 30s, but step outside of those small bubbles and age groups and there are plenty of happy parents. This whole “lol parents are dumb” meme really needs to die.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  Parents are not dumb but they are paying a high price that in a totally incentive-driven world nobody would pay. We (the public) who set the incentives need to do some soul-searching about the question of why we assign such a high cost to creating our future.
- sprash 5y ago
  As somebody who lives in Europe in a country with one of the lowest reproductive rates in the world I can assure you that is is entirely true.
- francisofascii 5y ago
  Sure, but, there is plenty of evidence that educational attainment is negatively correlated with number of children. And so we have this strange phenomenon of educational success negatively correlated to evolutionary success. Here is a graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attain...
nkrisc 5y ago
Perhaps society shouldn’t make women choose between a career and a family and it would be less of a problem. Many white collar workplaces are pretty hostile to working mothers in some ways overt, and other ways more subtly. It’s entirely possible to have a culture where women can have families and careers at the same time. It’s entirely a cultural problem and is completely solvable if there is a collective will to solve it.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  Where are these countries that within the population a woman’s fertility isn’t negatively correlated to her education and career attainments? Scandinavian countries do everything you are advocating for and have the same fertility trends as everyone else. Advocate for those policies anyway, if you want to, but don’t claim they are going to move the needle when we have evidence they won’t.
  - mgbmtl 5y ago
    Which evidence? In Quebec/Canada, when state-spondored affordable daycare was introduced, it made a notable difference both for the number of women in the workforce, and also an increase in childbirth. https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/daycare-difference-quebec-fertility-rate-outpacing-ontario-s-1.4018340 https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/daycare-difference-queb... Far from perfect, it was defunded in recent years, and it again made the birthrate and workforce go down. As a parent, I can anecdotally say that this system, when it worked, made a huge difference for our family.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      As someone who grew up thanks to this system, it did tremendous good to our family.
    - Zpalmtree 5y ago
      why is throwing kids in daycare so parents can go slave for more money a good thing
    - 5y ago
cjbgkagh 5y ago
Designer babies are around the corner so I wouldn’t worry about dysgenics.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nostrademons 5y ago
It's interesting how the world of dysgenics ignores the idea of mass class-correlated die-offs, despite them featuring prominently in both the historical and genealogical record. COVID was a dress rehearsal. Deaths were heavily skewed toward poorer people, who had to go to work as essential workers despite the danger, or dumber people, who refused to get vaxxed. We'll likely have a famine later this year and into next - rich people will wince at the hit to their pocketbook from higher food prices, poor people will starve and die. If we get nuked, it's going to hit the inner cities, where relatively poorer people concentrate in dense housing, rather than the country estates and vacation homes of the rich. Poor people join the armed forces because it's their best option, rich people go to college and get a draft deferment. If a hostile totalitarian government takes over, the "brightest and most diligent" will bribe the right people to be left alone, the hoi polloi will get shot in the streets if they look at an armed soldier the wrong way. Genealogical studies have indicated that most Europeans living today are descended from the nobility of the High Middle Ages. What happened to all the peasants? Well, between Black Death, the Hundred Years War, Wars of the Roses, Wars of Religion, and other mass-casualty events, most of them caught fatal diseases from living in crowded and unsanitary city conditions, or they got sent to die in some nobleman's war.
imtringued 5y ago
This is because childbirth is an externality that we expect women to bear. Isn't it strange how there are only three factors of production? Land, capital and labor? Ultimately everything is being derived from the land but surely it doesn't take much imagination that humans are also derived from female humans. Reproductive work is not part of any economic model. It's just lumped in with labor even though it is not compensated and the very thing it produces is labor.

Welcome to the world of dysgenics where the brightest and most diligent are not reproducing.

by sprash 5y ago

Welcome to the world of dysgenics where the brightest and most diligent are not reproducing.

lotsofpulp 5y ago

Society needs to pay a competitive price relative to their other options.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Extremely unlikely there will ever be a will to do this considering the long term value to be compensated (hundreds of thousands of dollars per child, if not $1MM). Society is too short sighted and short term financially focused. The world already has almost 8 billion people though (with population momentum landing is at 10B-11B by the end of the century), so I’m hard pressed to argue for more children (and the necessary policy and financial support) when we, in aggregate, already don’t take care of the ones here (no subsidized child care, limited parental leave, half a million kids in foster care at any one time [US], ~120 million unintended pregnancies globally annually, etc). Also consider that in parts of Europe where pro natalist policies are very robust (subsidized childcare, very generous leave policies, and “baby bonuses”), the fertility rate continues to decline regardless. Kids might be valuable to society, but the data supports the idea they are not as important to individuals (opportunity costs, life choices, etc).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- xyzzy123 5y ago
  You could give the parents some kind of benefit(s) proportional to the taxes generated by their children /ducks (Yes, terrible idea for a number of reasons, but the incentives would be aligned...)
  - WithinReason 5y ago
    Or just reduce their taxes, e.g. like Hungary
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  Life is one big selection criteria bias. You don’t need all societies to work, just one. Unfortunately for us it may not be our society that makes it so there may be temporary setbacks. So long as designer baby technology is developed practically any amount of dysgenics can be reversed.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Extremely unlikely there will ever be a will to do this considering the long term value to be compensated (hundreds of thousands of dollars per child, if not $1MM). Parent here. You don’t need $1mm to raise a kid. You don’t need anywhere close to that, actually. Kids aren’t free, obviously, but this internet meme that they’ll bankrupt you is getting out of control. Honestly, how do you think people making the median US household income are affording kids? Multiple kids, even? I hope it’s obvious that households with two kids earning <$100K per year (a common situation) aren’t spending $1mm on each of them.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    I did not say their cost ($270k in 2022 inflation adjusted dollars per child in the US). I said their long term value (over their lifetime to society). If you’re at a median income, you’re barely getting by with kids.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    What people prefer is what matters, now that people can enjoy sex without worrying about having kids. I would not have had kids with a household income less than $100k (or even $200k), but that is just my preference for the type of life I would have wanted for the kids. I grew up poor as the child of struggling immigrants, and I want my kids to be very far from that quality of life for the portion of their life I am responsible for.
    - ip26 5y ago
      I’m not sure how you can spend a 200k income on a kid and avoid them becoming spoiled rotten. Having been poor, you should have a good sense of just how little money it actually takes to leave the insecurity & want far behind (in my own experience & opinion)
      - michaelt 5y ago
        I think a lot of people on this site are from Silicon Valley, and what they actually mean is "I wouldn't start a family until I could afford a 3-bedroom house in a reasonable school district, and you can't afford such a house in Silicon Valley without a 6-figure income"
- dmm 5y ago
  > The world already has almost 8 billion people though The grocery stores are already full of food, why do we still need farms? If you ever plan to stop working you need young people to buy your 401k stocks from you and pay for your Social Security. The problem with low fertility rates is not (primarily) population decline, it's demographic collapse. As long as fertility is below replacement the proportion of elderly increases _forever_. What about immigration? The US is in a much better position wrt to this than many other nations because of our high rates of immigration but low fertility is a global phenomenon outside of a handful of places like Nigeria and Afghanistan. > the fertility rate continues to decline regardless. You're right. Nobody has figured out how to raise fertility rates once they start dropping.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I’m always baffled when I read these comments from non-parents who describe parenting as the end of your life. Daycare isn’t prohibitively expensive for any of us in tech careers. Anyone quitting a $150K+ job to avoid paying $20-30K for a good daycare for the few years before kids entire school isn’t doing it because it’s the optimal financial decision. You don’t stop having a career or earning money or having career advancement when you have kids.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I am a parent, but society wide data indicates people’s preferences/risk assessments/perceived cost-benefit ratios better than individuals’ opinion.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  I agree that for high income people ($150k+ for the sake of argument) it’s not strictly speaking a good idea financially to drop out of the workforce to avoid child care expenses. However, given the way taxes on two earner families work it is a much cheaper decision then it looks like at first blush. Maybe this is a good thing. But it is a bit counterintuitive if you think of salary in pretax dollars.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I am not sure what you are referring to, but the tax penalty for dual similar income earning married filing joint tax filers was removed in the 2017 tax cuts and jobs act. https://taxfoundation.org/tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-marriage-penalty/ https://taxfoundation.org/tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-marriage-pen...
    - bradleyjg 5y ago
      What’s the disposable income difference, in say California, between: 1) Spouse 1 grossing $250,000 a year, spouse 2 grossing $150,000 a year, $40,000 in childcare costs. and 2) Spouse 1 grossing $250,000 a year, spouse 2 grossing $0 a year, $0 in childcare costs?

Teever 5y ago

I predict that we will see the development of artificial wombs in the next 10-15 years and combined with rudimentary genetic modification this will result in a baby boom from the middle and upper class.

lostlogin 5y ago
By and large, pregnancy isn’t something that hinders work in a large way, with the obvious exception of the last few weeks. It’s the small child that needs years of care that does that.
paxys 5y ago
"Artificial wombs" for the rich exist today, and are called surrogates. Ultimately the bigger problem isn't the birth itself but the time, money and space required to raise a child after it is born. For more and more young professionals in urban areas the numbers simply don't work out.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Unfortunately surrogacy is entangled with large amounts of human trafficking around the world…
doliveira 5y ago
Wow, I was about to joke about artificial wombs coming up as a solution in tech circles, but you beat me to it by being serious.
- shrimp_emoji 5y ago
  Sexless, genderless, genetically modified people grown in vats operated by the state and implanted with cybernetic backpacks that short-circuit decades of education before they're sent off to subvert alien civilizations and expand the empire is obviously the way to go; this demented legacy biology game we're trapped in is played out af.
- Teever 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

From the real world, I can assure you this is entirely untrue. It may seem like that if you’re living in a super high cost of living city and everyone in your work social bubble is in their 20s and early 30s, but step outside of those small bubbles and age groups and there are plenty of happy parents. This whole “lol parents are dumb” meme really needs to die.

whatshisface 5y ago
Parents are not dumb but they are paying a high price that in a totally incentive-driven world nobody would pay. We (the public) who set the incentives need to do some soul-searching about the question of why we assign such a high cost to creating our future.
sprash 5y ago
As somebody who lives in Europe in a country with one of the lowest reproductive rates in the world I can assure you that is is entirely true.
francisofascii 5y ago
Sure, but, there is plenty of evidence that educational attainment is negatively correlated with number of children. And so we have this strange phenomenon of educational success negatively correlated to evolutionary success. Here is a graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attain...

nkrisc 5y ago

Perhaps society shouldn’t make women choose between a career and a family and it would be less of a problem. Many white collar workplaces are pretty hostile to working mothers in some ways overt, and other ways more subtly. It’s entirely possible to have a culture where women can have families and careers at the same time. It’s entirely a cultural problem and is completely solvable if there is a collective will to solve it.

bradleyjg 5y ago
Where are these countries that within the population a woman’s fertility isn’t negatively correlated to her education and career attainments? Scandinavian countries do everything you are advocating for and have the same fertility trends as everyone else. Advocate for those policies anyway, if you want to, but don’t claim they are going to move the needle when we have evidence they won’t.
- mgbmtl 5y ago
  Which evidence? In Quebec/Canada, when state-spondored affordable daycare was introduced, it made a notable difference both for the number of women in the workforce, and also an increase in childbirth. https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/daycare-difference-quebec-fertility-rate-outpacing-ontario-s-1.4018340 https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/daycare-difference-queb... Far from perfect, it was defunded in recent years, and it again made the birthrate and workforce go down. As a parent, I can anecdotally say that this system, when it worked, made a huge difference for our family.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    As someone who grew up thanks to this system, it did tremendous good to our family.
  - Zpalmtree 5y ago
    why is throwing kids in daycare so parents can go slave for more money a good thing
  - 5y ago

cjbgkagh 5y ago

Designer babies are around the corner so I wouldn’t worry about dysgenics.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

nostrademons 5y ago

It's interesting how the world of dysgenics ignores the idea of mass class-correlated die-offs, despite them featuring prominently in both the historical and genealogical record. COVID was a dress rehearsal. Deaths were heavily skewed toward poorer people, who had to go to work as essential workers despite the danger, or dumber people, who refused to get vaxxed. We'll likely have a famine later this year and into next - rich people will wince at the hit to their pocketbook from higher food prices, poor people will starve and die. If we get nuked, it's going to hit the inner cities, where relatively poorer people concentrate in dense housing, rather than the country estates and vacation homes of the rich. Poor people join the armed forces because it's their best option, rich people go to college and get a draft deferment. If a hostile totalitarian government takes over, the "brightest and most diligent" will bribe the right people to be left alone, the hoi polloi will get shot in the streets if they look at an armed soldier the wrong way. Genealogical studies have indicated that most Europeans living today are descended from the nobility of the High Middle Ages. What happened to all the peasants? Well, between Black Death, the Hundred Years War, Wars of the Roses, Wars of Religion, and other mass-casualty events, most of them caught fatal diseases from living in crowded and unsanitary city conditions, or they got sent to die in some nobleman's war.

imtringued 5y ago

This is because childbirth is an externality that we expect women to bear. Isn't it strange how there are only three factors of production? Land, capital and labor? Ultimately everything is being derived from the land but surely it doesn't take much imagination that humans are also derived from female humans. Reproductive work is not part of any economic model. It's just lumped in with labor even though it is not compensated and the very thing it produces is labor.