The statistics about fertility rates in Nepal corresponding closely to level of education are telling. Education past the age of 12 has to be having some effect. But what is the mechanism?
Jim hypothesizes that there is a subtle indoctrination that begins in school around that age that dissuades women from having children. Perhaps a little bit...but is that all there really is to it?
Let’s think about this for a second: let’s imagine that it were legal for girls in the U.S. to drop out of school at 13. (I think the current legal age is 16).
What does a 13 year old girl do in American society if she isn’t going to school? What can she usefully do?
She could theoretically get a job. There are probably some jobs that a 13-year old could be reasonably good at...like coffee house barista. Or maybe just the coffee house barista’s helper who buses the tables. How hard are those jobs, really?
But, how’s a 13 year old going to get that sort of job when the job market is swarming with over-qualified college graduates who can’t get work in their fields of study, will be at least marginally more effective at those jobs (perhaps in terms of social interactions with the patrons or ancillary skills they might have picked up in college), and who will also be willing to work for minimum wage?
So a 13-year old drop-out can’t reasonably expect to get a job. So, what about marriage and kids? Can a 13-year old reasonably expect to find a man who is at least vaguely within her age range (<18 years old) who is willing and ABLE to support her and her kids?
I noticed that this Jim guy pins a lot of the blame on Western women not wanting to have kids. Now, do we actually have evidence for this? Do we in fact know that it is not the Western MEN who are hesitant about having to provide for kids?
I myself have a beautiful wife who would make for a great mother, both genetically and in terms of raising kids, but the thought of having kids seems just insane to me right now. Why? I make about $10,000 a year with a MASTER’S DEGREE as a part-time college adjunct instructor and as a K-12 substitute teacher. My wife makes about the same with a BACHELOR’S DEGREE as a part-time nurse’s aid in a hospital. Together, we might scrape together $20,000. Our expenses are about $16,000 a year if we are frugal (we have a very small apartment and only one old car). Not much buffer room. Not much money to save up towards a house or a new car for when the old one breaks down. Don’t even talk to me about children.
Now, our luck could change. One of us could land a full-time job with benefits. Realistically, a job where one of us made $25,000 a year would have us jumping for joy. But in the current economy, there are no guarantees. And even if I did get a nice full-time job, I would still not have the confidence in the economy to expect that I would keep it, or something like it, for the next 20 years while my wife and I raised our kids.
It seems to me that the problems are that:
There are way too few well-paying jobs in the economy for the number of over-qualified college graduates that there are to fill them. This is why I think that the politically-correct catchphrase, “Education is the KEY!” is way off track. Our problem is not lack of education. If everyone tomorrow suddenly starting doing better in school and went on to higher degrees, the only difference that would make is, we would suddenly have Ph.D.s working at McDonalds or Starbucks. More education does not magically create more jobs or better jobs.
There are also higher cultural expectations on how good of a parent you have to be (at least, if we are talking about the “nice middle-class white” demographic whose low fertility rates the neoreactionaries are so worried about). “Close-parenting” is now the expected norm among this demographic. I get the sense from the stories my parents and grandparents tell that people used to assume that kids kinda “raised themselves.” You just told them to go out in the neighborhood and play with other kids, and be home for supper, and you put food on the table, and you occasionally reprimanded them when they misbehaved or did poorly in school. You didn’t micromanage their extra-curricular activities, go to all of their extra-curricular activities, research college-preparatory programs, etc. You didn’t “helicopter parent.” Now, if you don’t “helicopter parent,” then
A. other parents will look down on you, and
B. your kid probably will go off track and end up as a street thug in some gang or as a couch potato because the surrounding culture is not as much of a supportive ally. (Now why is that?)
All of this adds up to the fact that it is probably not just women who are wary of having kids, but men too.
If a girl starts having kids at 14 like some neoreactionaries advise, it is NOT going to be in a stable marriage with a nice male provider. And that is not necessarily going to be solely due to any bad choices on the girl’s part. Even if the girl only tried to woo nice, decent men, what nice, decent 18-year olds are going to be willing and ABLE to raise a family in our economy and culture?
A big problem I see is that, in traditional societies, children are a net economic assets, whereas in modern society, children seem like a net economic drain. That, combined with the inability for a person to get a single-breadwinner job at 18, pretty much makes Jim’s neoreactionary strategy not viable, even if a young woman tried to take his advice and execute it conscientiously.
I myself have a beautiful wife who would make for a great mother, both genetically and in terms of raising kids, but the thought of having kids seems just insane to me right now. Why? I make about $10,000 a year with a MASTER’S DEGREE as a part-time college adjunct instructor and as a K-12 substitute teacher. My wife makes about the same with a BACHELOR’S DEGREE as a part-time nurse’s aid in a hospital. Together, we might scrape together $20,000. Our expenses are about $16,000 a year if we are frugal (we have a very small apartment and only one old car). Not much buffer room. Not much money to save up towards a house or a new car for when the old one breaks down. Don’t even talk to me about children.
And yet fertility is negatively correlated with income.
There are also higher cultural expectations on how good of a parent you have to be (at least, if we are talking about the “nice middle-class white” demographic whose low fertility rates the neoreactionaries are so worried about).
Bingo. Except its perfectly possible to raise “nice middle-class” kids without micromanagement, your parents’ generation did just that.
“Close-parenting” is now the expected norm among this demographic. I get the sense from the stories my parents and grandparents tell that people used to assume that kids kinda “raised themselves.” You just told them to go out in the neighborhood and play with other kids, and be home for supper, and you put food on the table, and you occasionally reprimanded them when they misbehaved or did poorly in school. You didn’t micromanage their extra-curricular activities, go to all of their extra-curricular activities, research college-preparatory programs, etc. You didn’t “helicopter parent.” Now, if you don’t “helicopter parent,” then A. other parents will look down on you,
Really, I get the feeling that these days people don’t pay much attention to their neighbors, also why do you care what they think?
Also in the “old days” the neighbors would look down on someone who divorces or has sex outside of marriage rather than someone who’s a non-helicopter parent. Why did this change?
and B. your kid probably will go off track and end up as a street thug in some gang or as a couch potato because the surrounding culture is not as much of a supportive ally. (Now why is that?)
Probably not if you live in a neighborhood without thugs, granted this is becoming harder now that progressives are transporting thugs out of ghettos to other neighborhoods in the name of diversity.
And yet fertility is negatively correlated with income.
I imagine that, if I were making more money, I would be working more hours, which would mean I would have less time for parenting, which would make parenting even more unattractive. (This is under the assumption, which might be mistaken as you point out, that good parenting requires lots of money and time).
So basically, Westerners have gotten more picky about having children to the point of insisting on having a lot of free time AND a high income, AND for child-rearing to be a more intrinsically interesting activity than other things they could be doing with that time and money (say, being an unemployed millionaire who trades stocks and plays poker for fun). Time, money, and interest have all become necessary, but not sufficient conditions.
I think this has to do with the vast increase in the number of fun distractions in modern society. As a farmer in Sub-Saharan Africa, what does one do with one’s time? Herd cattle? Why not have kids? They are like little super-intelligent robots that you can help program and develop. How neat! That sort of technology pretty much blows every other entertainment they would have right out of the water. But Westerners? They think, “Oh, whoop-de-do, a super-intelligent robot that you can help program and develop...but which you will also be responsible for and which may occasionally be stressful...no thanks, I’m more interested in football/LessWrong/youtube/something that is equally interesting but not as stressful.”
Bingo. Except its perfectly possible to raise “nice middle-class” kids without micromanagement, your parents’ generation did just that.
Nah, my parents helicoptered and micromanaged. But if you want to talk about my parents’ parents’ generation, then yes. The thing is, they didn’t really raise good middle-class kids, in that my father ended up being a roofer and my mother a housewife. Neither graduated college until my mother went back to school after my siblings had gotten out of high school. Not that it hurt them too much in their generation. My father made good money at roofing. Would the money still be as good? I don’t know.
Really, I get the feeling that these days people don’t pay much attention to their neighbors, also why do you care what they think?
By “neighbors,” I mean social circle, whether or not they geographically border one’s property.
Probably not if you live in a neighborhood without thugs, granted this is becoming harder now that progressives are transporting thugs out of ghettos to other neighborhoods in the name of diversity.
And living in a neighborhood with a good peer group requires money.
Also in the “old days” the neighbors would look down on someone who divorces or has sex outside of marriage rather than someone who’s a non-helicopter parent. Why did this change?
My naive progressive feeling about this is because “ending an unhappy marriage through divorce” or “sex outside of marriage” produce net good things. Progressives have this idea that divorce is the psychologically “healthier” option in that it is more honest and builds less resentment. Likewise, progressives tend to have this idea that having sex outside of marriage is a good way to make sure that sexual chemistry is compatible before marrying, plus it is just fun, and if protection is used and people are careful with each other’s feelings, then there are no downsides (and progressives do not see lack of babies as a downside).
On the other hand, progressives have this idea that being a non-helicopter parent produces net bad things, such as children getting stuck in dysfunctional life situations. Buuuut...I will admit that there are those intriguing studies that suggest that parenting style does not have much of an effect on child outcome, which would be a bombshell to the progressive mindset.
The thing is, they didn’t really raise good middle-class kids, in that my father ended up being a roofer and my mother a housewife.
You seem to have strange ideas about what constitutes “middle class”.
Likewise, progressives tend to have this idea that having sex outside of marriage is a good way to make sure that sexual chemistry is compatible before marrying, plus it is just fun, and if protection is used and people are careful with each other’s feelings, then there are no downsides
Now, if you don’t “helicopter parent,” then A. other parents will look down on you, and B. your kid probably will go off track and end up as a street thug in some gang or as a couch potato because the surrounding culture is not as much of a supportive ally. (Now why is that?)
B strikes me as unlikely, or at least not much more likely than it was twenty years ago when I was a largely unsupervised preteen. Everything I’ve read about childrearing suggests that parenting style (short of abuse or utter neglect) has very little effect, suggesting in turn that the contemporary norms of “good parenting” have much more to do with signaling than actual outcomes.
The popularity of a belief is, strictly speaking, evidence against its being a delusion, but it isn’t necessarily very strong evidence. Especially in a field as rife with superstition and bullshit as parenting.
I think there are plausible claims that helicopter parenting can be psychologically damaging. Maybe find some beneficial activities which require little oversight. Giving someone a book requires less work than driving them to Karate lessons.
I noticed that this Jim guy pins a lot of the blame on Western women not wanting to have kids. Now, do we actually have evidence for this? Do we in fact know that it is not the Western MEN who are hesitant about having to provide for kids?
FWIW, as of the last LW survey women and men were about equally likely to want (more) children (though they’re not necessarily a representative sample of Western people).
Also keep in mind something people quickly discovered when they first started doing market researcher. What people say they want can be very different from their actual revealed preferences.
It’s not obvious that revealed preferences are necessarily more “actual” than stated preferences [1, 2]. In any event it takes both a man and a woman to conceive a child; how do we disentangle their revealed preferences from each other?
The question is what causes more or fewer children to be conceived. Jim argues with some evidence that a major factor is relative status of men and women.
Now, our luck could change. One of us could land a full-time job with benefits. Realistically, a job where one of us made $25,000 a year would have us jumping for joy.
the answer would appear to be that he has tried to get a better job and so far been unsuccessful. Your question, on the other hand, seems to presume that he hasn’t tried and isn’t trying. Do you have some relevant knowledge that makes that an appropriate presumption?
A full-time job is more or less 2,000 hours/year. The federal mininum wage is $7.25/hour and the state minimum wage is often a bit higher. 2000 * 7.25 = $14,500/year.
Someone who managed to get a master’s degree can probably manage to get a job at higher that the federal minimum wage—if only he’d be willing to ignore the status considerations and just get down into the blue-collar trenches.
At the time I was very poor I worked, basically, as a construction worker for cash. If you don’t have any money, working as a “part-time adjunct” is silly.
Well, I don’t know what he’s tried, or what work is available where he is, or whether getting down into the blue-collar trenches would worsen his chance of getting a better job later.
Unless you have specific knowledge of Matthew’s situation, asking “why don’t you get a job?” and telling him that working at the job he actually has is “silly” has, to me, a definite whiff of Qu’ils mangent de la brioche about it.
Well, of course. But I don’t claim certainty. All I offer is opinions and opinions about people over the internet are quite likely to be hilariously wrong. That’s the well-known baseline and reciting it in every post will get tiring pretty quickly.
In any case, in my badly informed opinion Matthew lives in poverty because of status considerations which prevent him from taking on a lower-status but a better-paying job. Unless he has severe disabilities, earning more than $10K/year is not hard at all.
The statistics about fertility rates in Nepal corresponding closely to level of education are telling. Education past the age of 12 has to be having some effect. But what is the mechanism?
Jim hypothesizes that there is a subtle indoctrination that begins in school around that age that dissuades women from having children. Perhaps a little bit...but is that all there really is to it?
Let’s think about this for a second: let’s imagine that it were legal for girls in the U.S. to drop out of school at 13. (I think the current legal age is 16).
What does a 13 year old girl do in American society if she isn’t going to school? What can she usefully do?
She could theoretically get a job. There are probably some jobs that a 13-year old could be reasonably good at...like coffee house barista. Or maybe just the coffee house barista’s helper who buses the tables. How hard are those jobs, really?
But, how’s a 13 year old going to get that sort of job when the job market is swarming with over-qualified college graduates who can’t get work in their fields of study, will be at least marginally more effective at those jobs (perhaps in terms of social interactions with the patrons or ancillary skills they might have picked up in college), and who will also be willing to work for minimum wage?
So a 13-year old drop-out can’t reasonably expect to get a job. So, what about marriage and kids? Can a 13-year old reasonably expect to find a man who is at least vaguely within her age range (<18 years old) who is willing and ABLE to support her and her kids?
I noticed that this Jim guy pins a lot of the blame on Western women not wanting to have kids. Now, do we actually have evidence for this? Do we in fact know that it is not the Western MEN who are hesitant about having to provide for kids?
I myself have a beautiful wife who would make for a great mother, both genetically and in terms of raising kids, but the thought of having kids seems just insane to me right now. Why? I make about $10,000 a year with a MASTER’S DEGREE as a part-time college adjunct instructor and as a K-12 substitute teacher. My wife makes about the same with a BACHELOR’S DEGREE as a part-time nurse’s aid in a hospital. Together, we might scrape together $20,000. Our expenses are about $16,000 a year if we are frugal (we have a very small apartment and only one old car). Not much buffer room. Not much money to save up towards a house or a new car for when the old one breaks down. Don’t even talk to me about children.
Now, our luck could change. One of us could land a full-time job with benefits. Realistically, a job where one of us made $25,000 a year would have us jumping for joy. But in the current economy, there are no guarantees. And even if I did get a nice full-time job, I would still not have the confidence in the economy to expect that I would keep it, or something like it, for the next 20 years while my wife and I raised our kids.
It seems to me that the problems are that:
There are way too few well-paying jobs in the economy for the number of over-qualified college graduates that there are to fill them. This is why I think that the politically-correct catchphrase, “Education is the KEY!” is way off track. Our problem is not lack of education. If everyone tomorrow suddenly starting doing better in school and went on to higher degrees, the only difference that would make is, we would suddenly have Ph.D.s working at McDonalds or Starbucks. More education does not magically create more jobs or better jobs.
There are also higher cultural expectations on how good of a parent you have to be (at least, if we are talking about the “nice middle-class white” demographic whose low fertility rates the neoreactionaries are so worried about). “Close-parenting” is now the expected norm among this demographic. I get the sense from the stories my parents and grandparents tell that people used to assume that kids kinda “raised themselves.” You just told them to go out in the neighborhood and play with other kids, and be home for supper, and you put food on the table, and you occasionally reprimanded them when they misbehaved or did poorly in school. You didn’t micromanage their extra-curricular activities, go to all of their extra-curricular activities, research college-preparatory programs, etc. You didn’t “helicopter parent.” Now, if you don’t “helicopter parent,” then A. other parents will look down on you, and B. your kid probably will go off track and end up as a street thug in some gang or as a couch potato because the surrounding culture is not as much of a supportive ally. (Now why is that?)
All of this adds up to the fact that it is probably not just women who are wary of having kids, but men too.
If a girl starts having kids at 14 like some neoreactionaries advise, it is NOT going to be in a stable marriage with a nice male provider. And that is not necessarily going to be solely due to any bad choices on the girl’s part. Even if the girl only tried to woo nice, decent men, what nice, decent 18-year olds are going to be willing and ABLE to raise a family in our economy and culture?
A big problem I see is that, in traditional societies, children are a net economic assets, whereas in modern society, children seem like a net economic drain. That, combined with the inability for a person to get a single-breadwinner job at 18, pretty much makes Jim’s neoreactionary strategy not viable, even if a young woman tried to take his advice and execute it conscientiously.
And yet fertility is negatively correlated with income.
Bingo. Except its perfectly possible to raise “nice middle-class” kids without micromanagement, your parents’ generation did just that.
Really, I get the feeling that these days people don’t pay much attention to their neighbors, also why do you care what they think?
Also in the “old days” the neighbors would look down on someone who divorces or has sex outside of marriage rather than someone who’s a non-helicopter parent. Why did this change?
Probably not if you live in a neighborhood without thugs, granted this is becoming harder now that progressives are transporting thugs out of ghettos to other neighborhoods in the name of diversity.
Does that still hold when controlling for IQ, conscientiousness, age and religion?
I imagine that, if I were making more money, I would be working more hours, which would mean I would have less time for parenting, which would make parenting even more unattractive. (This is under the assumption, which might be mistaken as you point out, that good parenting requires lots of money and time).
So basically, Westerners have gotten more picky about having children to the point of insisting on having a lot of free time AND a high income, AND for child-rearing to be a more intrinsically interesting activity than other things they could be doing with that time and money (say, being an unemployed millionaire who trades stocks and plays poker for fun). Time, money, and interest have all become necessary, but not sufficient conditions.
I think this has to do with the vast increase in the number of fun distractions in modern society. As a farmer in Sub-Saharan Africa, what does one do with one’s time? Herd cattle? Why not have kids? They are like little super-intelligent robots that you can help program and develop. How neat! That sort of technology pretty much blows every other entertainment they would have right out of the water. But Westerners? They think, “Oh, whoop-de-do, a super-intelligent robot that you can help program and develop...but which you will also be responsible for and which may occasionally be stressful...no thanks, I’m more interested in football/LessWrong/youtube/something that is equally interesting but not as stressful.”
Nah, my parents helicoptered and micromanaged. But if you want to talk about my parents’ parents’ generation, then yes. The thing is, they didn’t really raise good middle-class kids, in that my father ended up being a roofer and my mother a housewife. Neither graduated college until my mother went back to school after my siblings had gotten out of high school. Not that it hurt them too much in their generation. My father made good money at roofing. Would the money still be as good? I don’t know.
By “neighbors,” I mean social circle, whether or not they geographically border one’s property.
And living in a neighborhood with a good peer group requires money.
My naive progressive feeling about this is because “ending an unhappy marriage through divorce” or “sex outside of marriage” produce net good things. Progressives have this idea that divorce is the psychologically “healthier” option in that it is more honest and builds less resentment. Likewise, progressives tend to have this idea that having sex outside of marriage is a good way to make sure that sexual chemistry is compatible before marrying, plus it is just fun, and if protection is used and people are careful with each other’s feelings, then there are no downsides (and progressives do not see lack of babies as a downside).
On the other hand, progressives have this idea that being a non-helicopter parent produces net bad things, such as children getting stuck in dysfunctional life situations. Buuuut...I will admit that there are those intriguing studies that suggest that parenting style does not have much of an effect on child outcome, which would be a bombshell to the progressive mindset.
You seem to have strange ideas about what constitutes “middle class”.
How about making it harder to bond with your spouse when you do settle down?
B strikes me as unlikely, or at least not much more likely than it was twenty years ago when I was a largely unsupervised preteen. Everything I’ve read about childrearing suggests that parenting style (short of abuse or utter neglect) has very little effect, suggesting in turn that the contemporary norms of “good parenting” have much more to do with signaling than actual outcomes.
The popularity of a belief is, strictly speaking, evidence against its being a delusion, but it isn’t necessarily very strong evidence. Especially in a field as rife with superstition and bullshit as parenting.
I think there are plausible claims that helicopter parenting can be psychologically damaging. Maybe find some beneficial activities which require little oversight. Giving someone a book requires less work than driving them to Karate lessons.
FWIW, as of the last LW survey women and men were about equally likely to want (more) children (though they’re not necessarily a representative sample of Western people).
Also keep in mind something people quickly discovered when they first started doing market researcher. What people say they want can be very different from their actual revealed preferences.
It’s not obvious that revealed preferences are necessarily more “actual” than stated preferences [1, 2]. In any event it takes both a man and a woman to conceive a child; how do we disentangle their revealed preferences from each other?
The question is what causes more or fewer children to be conceived. Jim argues with some evidence that a major factor is relative status of men and women.
So why don’t you get a job?
Given that he wrote
the answer would appear to be that he has tried to get a better job and so far been unsuccessful. Your question, on the other hand, seems to presume that he hasn’t tried and isn’t trying. Do you have some relevant knowledge that makes that an appropriate presumption?
A full-time job is more or less 2,000 hours/year. The federal mininum wage is $7.25/hour and the state minimum wage is often a bit higher. 2000 * 7.25 = $14,500/year.
Someone who managed to get a master’s degree can probably manage to get a job at higher that the federal minimum wage—if only he’d be willing to ignore the status considerations and just get down into the blue-collar trenches.
At the time I was very poor I worked, basically, as a construction worker for cash. If you don’t have any money, working as a “part-time adjunct” is silly.
Well, I don’t know what he’s tried, or what work is available where he is, or whether getting down into the blue-collar trenches would worsen his chance of getting a better job later.
Unless you have specific knowledge of Matthew’s situation, asking “why don’t you get a job?” and telling him that working at the job he actually has is “silly” has, to me, a definite whiff of Qu’ils mangent de la brioche about it.
Not quite—been there, done it, didn’t care about the T-shirt.
It is not necessarily safe to assume that because you could do it, Matthew can do it. His circumstances could be relevantly different in many ways.
(I apologize if this is insultingly obvious. I’m pointing it out only because your comments seem not to acknowledge its obviousness.)
Well, of course. But I don’t claim certainty. All I offer is opinions and opinions about people over the internet are quite likely to be hilariously wrong. That’s the well-known baseline and reciting it in every post will get tiring pretty quickly.
In any case, in my badly informed opinion Matthew lives in poverty because of status considerations which prevent him from taking on a lower-status but a better-paying job. Unless he has severe disabilities, earning more than $10K/year is not hard at all.
“‘Never Settle’ Is A Brag” (or, as the SJWs put it, “check your privilege”).
I’m not telling the OP to follow his dream—I’m telling him to get out of the bottom income quantile of his peers.