Apart from that, when you differentiate between men and women, the correlations turn out to be different: while women still have a negative correlation, for men the correlation between IQ and fertility rate turns positive.
See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
Perhaps in the future the same thing will happen: kids will be reared in cheap places, then move to cities for the opportunities there, then fail to produce at replacement levels, and get buffed up by people moving in to the city from the country.
I find Spandrell (and Land, who helped popularize the idea) atrocious.
Spandrell never said anything like smart people are more deserving. He says smart people have more capacity to accomplish things which most people consider good. E.g safety, comfort, health, stability, wealth - and not just for themselves but for others too.
Hard to argue with as far as I can see.
What's more, people living in poor countries and outside of cities aren't 'incapable' of doing good. They are often poorly educated, lack role models, lack good parenting, lack a good peer group, and fundamentally, lack opportunity and a financially stable childhood. Virtually all of it is structural injustices thrown their way through the roll of a dice.
Absolutely not. IQ correlates well with a number of desirable characteristics, for individuals as well as groups.
education, role models, etc
These things don't matter nearly as much as people like to think.
roll of a dice
A dice that appears to be consistently biased in favour of those with high test-solving abilities?
Obviously "doing good" often means other things too, like calling your mom, and volunteering at a soup kitchen. Morally good. I think it's pretty clear from context that this isn't what he's talking about.
>Capacity' to do 'good' (even per your definition) is so strongly reliant on the environment that one exists in
Yes, an environment created by the people in your community. Or were you talking about the climate and mineral resources and stuff like that? Because considering the inverse relationship between natural resources and the outcomes of countries, that doesn't come close to holding up.
>I also find it mildly offensive that your comment, and that of Spandrell, implies that smartness is measured only in IQ.
My comment implied nothing at all like that. Also even if I said that, which I didn't, it would be nonsensical to find it "offensive" unless you're using offense as a goal or a tactic.
>High IQ is only a predictor of high test-solving abilities.
Absolutely not. It is the #1 most predictive psychometric measure ever devised for predicting important life outcomes. It predicts criminality, longevity, income, education, health, and a host of other critical factors better than any other psychometric test that exists.
>people living in poor countries and outside of cities aren't 'incapable' of doing good.
In the modern world, low IQ people lack the mental tools to have a big impact. They're not smart enough to effectively write books, invent technologies, create or run movements or companies or unions, make strong political arguments, etc. It's not their fault, it's just how they are. They can do good in small ways, and many do amazing things in that area. But the modern world revolves around concentrated power, and power concentrates in the hands of those with high IQ.
>They are often poorly educated, lack role models, lack good parenting, lack a good peer group, and fundamentally, lack opportunity and a financially stable childhood.
True. The question is why.
>Virtually all of it is structural injustices thrown their way through the roll of a dice.
If it these injustices were a "roll of the dice", they would be randomly distributed across the population. They're concentrated in low-IQ communities, indicating that they're not random; they're actually connected to the fact the community is low IQ. I argue that there is a causal relationship: low IQ people tend to make decisions that make their communities worse (crime, dropping out of school, drugs, irresponsible parenting, etc), which creates the injustices suffered by the members of that community.
Capability and goodness are generally orthogonal.
They are not generally orthogonal. They generally correlate well.
See Gwern's "The IQ Halo effect": https://www.gwern.net/iq
Smart people aren't having so many kids now because they don't have to. If they don't have a religion telling them they need to, and they have a good career and a very comfortable lifestyle that affords, why would they want to go to all the trouble that raising a lot of kids requires?
In addition to that, kids are very costly in today's society, and with adults not living near their families so much, you don't get any help with your kids when you need it, so that makes it even more unattractive.
Having a lot of kids made sense back in the days when you needed the help on your farm, and your whole extended family (or village) lived together and could collectively share the burdens of child-rearing. Now, it just doesn't.
The answer to me is simple: we need to outsource child-rearing to the State, as shown in the novel "Brave New World" where children were made in factories and then raised by trained professionals.
Suck it up. What, do you want having kids to be as seamless as an Uber Eats order? It's not. It's hard work. I'm sure your parents gave up on a lot to have you, too. That's part of being an adult.
Seems wiser to remain childless than to have and raise kids that you never wanted. How would that work out for the kid, otherwise? Or are we going on the assumption that once the kid is born, OP will no longer see it as a burden?
I think you're missing the point of the comment.
As countless adults these days have proven, no, it's not. You can just opt out of the whole thing.
Is it a problem? I would submit it is a solution.
Merrill Lynch claims that an average retirement 'costs' about $740,000. Demographic breakdowns are much harder here, since they depend on both luck (health, mostly) and post-retirement location, so let's just use it as is.
The average age of first motherhood is 26, and fatherhood is 31. However, to my surprise, that's a bimodal distribution; let's use age 30 for our coastal/urban parents. The average age of retirement is apparently 63, so childrearing costs arrive 16-33 years before retirement costs. A stock market index fund held over the long term can reasonably expect perhaps 8% returns after inflation. Investing that $15k annually for 17 years should produce a retirement nest-egg of a bit over $2,000,000.
I tried to be pretty generous with my math here; paying for college, going from zero to one kid, or adjusting for cost growth all worsen the picture quite a bit. (Having >2 kids or living off the coasts improves it somewhat.) But the really damning part is that kids may not take care of you at all (it's a pretty heavy expectation), and even if they do most people face needs and expenses family can't take care of. If you have health needs that require regular care from a nurse, much less costly surgery, your kids are only going to be able to help by putting up money. And quite a few health problems like severe dementia make living at home with family nearly impossible by requiring full-time monitoring.
Living with family is probably a much better experience than living in a nursing home, and of course it's inherently rewarding for a lot of people. The data is irreparably confounded, but I wouldn't be shocked if people with kids are healthier and even longer-lived than comparable people without them. But there's really no salvaging the idea that having a family substitutes for an expensive retirement.
Studies probably do show that people with kids are healthier and longer-lived than childfree people. And "sucking it up" and having a kid or two like someone above says can give you this. However, this still results in a declining population, remember, which is what the main article was talking about in the first place. Every couple having 1 kid isn't going to maintain the population, for obvious reasons, and not even 2 will do it (you have to have an average of 2.1-2.2).
Now add to this the fact that more and more people aren't even getting married in the first place (which is improving the divorce rate), and not having kids, not necessarily because they don't want them, but because they can't find a suitable partner. I see this all the time here in the DC area on the dating sites: women who are 35+, frequently 40+, sometimes even 45+, saying they're never married, have no kids, but want them. 45 is a little old for a woman to have kids, and most likely if she hasn't found a man to her liking by that age, she never will.
This is a good point.
Even on the callous ROI level I was looking at, 1-2 kids is a particularly weird span. The first kid is most expensive and life-altering, so someone viewing kids as a retirement plan would almost certainly want to have a bunch of them. They're 'cheaper', it hedges against a kid not not taking care of you (for any of numerous reasons from a bad relationship to health problems of their own), and it makes providing care much more doable as a shared responsibility.
Honestly, a whole lot of social norms we took for granted actually seem to rely on families having 3+ kids who grow up to live nearby. Some mix of "community support" and "network effects" mean that the difficulty of raising kids has gone up substantially as family size and proximity have gone down.
Why does childrearing look so hard and expensive these days? Well, you probably don't live near family members with their own kids; my grandparents freed up time by trading 'daycare' with their multiple siblings who all had families.
Why does taking care of parents seem so rare and demanding? (Partly because we've improved longevity ahead of good health, so there are more parents who genuinely need specialized care. But also...) It's relatively easy to have a parent move across town into the spare bedroom that freed up when your kids moved out, and have your siblings come over when you're out of town. It's way harder to uproot your parents to come live in your one-bedroom apartment, or leave your job and friends to move back home and care for them alone.
Not sure what your point about poor people is...
Why don't you suck up me not having any?
Why?
Humans in (actual or perceived) stable social and economic environments with strong extrafamilial support systems adopt low-number, high-investment K-strategy, humans in (actual or perceived) unstable social and economic environments with weak extrafamilial support systems adopt high-number, low-investment r-strategy.
> kids are very costly in today's society,
Kids aren't (generally) nearly as costly for the people having lots of them in our society as they are for those having fewer, as a direct result of different child-bearing approaches.
> The answer to me is simple: we need to outsource child-rearing to the State, as shown in the novel "Brave New World" where children were made in factories and then raised by trained professionals.
In the short term, immigration works. If the whole world is ever developed to the point where K-strategy dominates to the point where maintaining population is a real concern, then, after the giant global celebration we should have for that accomplishment, setting economic incentives so that people with means to raise multiple children at the level society as a whole considered appropriate investment levels also have a rational incentive to do so isn't particularly hard. It's a problem we haven't solved today because we aren't anywhere close to having it, not because it's even a little difficult or requires some kind of drastic reform like you describe.
Every advanced country has built a system for vacuuming up the most talented individuals from the countryside, and giving them important jobs in rat-race cities, where (for various reasons) they will have fewer kids. To counter this, you'd have to draw from somewhere else equally talented newcomers, and maybe a few countries can.
Don't blame the boys - I've known equally pain-in-the-ass families of girls, and wonderful boys. It's the parents.
To me your experiences only emphasize this point. Large portions of our society have decided that masculinity is inherently toxic. We've also, generally speaking, de-emphasized the role of discipline in parenting (I'm not talking about spanking). Our school system has long been stacked against young boys. I think that, as a society, we've forgotten how to parent children, especially boys.
Children learn from other children. Usually older children. Children are largely being raised by the state and that is never a good thing as it leads to conformity. Educational institutions look at children as future workforce and not as individuals.
My 2c.
As far as defining masculinity, I mean it in the sense that psychologists use it: the traits that are generally common to males.
Do we know enough about the Y chromosome? I think being ‘male’ is a genetic mutation with some undesirable effects. The SRY gene turns on/off around 4-6 weeks after conception determining whether zygote would be XX or XY. This has something to do with gonad formation.
I think fundamentally everyone is formed female as default. Not female = male. Which means it’s the Y. Something is wrong with Y.
The parents' DNA, in particular.
Depends on what you're counting on in the future.
If you want to be taken care of when you're older, and almost no one has children, then your future is bleak no matter how much you earn now. Inflation will eat most of your savings that you'd want to spend on care. Of course there's immigration or you can move but you're going to be lonely nevertheless.
It may sound controversial but it's a bit like not getting vaccinated and counting on herd immunity. Who would be writing all those HN comments now if our parents hadn't had children?
Is your (now 32 year old) kid going to have the means to provide you that much assistance in your retirement?
1: http://money.com/money/4629700/child-raising-cost-department...
2: https://www.collegeraptor.com/find-colleges/articles/afforda...
Now may be the best time to stop having kids and instead invest what you’d otherwise spend. Chances are there will be few remaining un-automated jobs by the time they need employment. I say this as someone who has a kid—I fear for her future honestly.
Now translate demand for housing to demand for services, and low supply of houses into low supply of workers providing those services. Everyone around you is using compound interest, so relative to each other you have similar purchasing power to them. Now you compete with the same people for those services. It's the relative power that really decides whether you can afford the services or not. If the workers don't have to compete with each other then you'll spend all that nice compound interest chasing them.
What? This is why investment advice for retirement generally revolves around allocation into stocks and bonds while leaving only an emergency fund plus regular expenses in more liquid assets like savings accounts. Inflation will only eat your savings if you fail to invest. If you want to talk about risk, well, inflation is why a total failure to accept risk is extremely risky!
To take the extreme example, if everyone tried to save up and then take a sabbatical year in 2025, they would all find that their money became almost worthless -- they could buy capital goods (made before) but nothing else.
Before Paul Krugman metamorphozed into a political hack, he wrote some quite solid stuff about economics. His famous baby-sitting co-op [1] runs into this problem: Everyone wishes to earn tickets on weekdays / winter and spend them on weekends / summer, but this is impossible:
Now think about what would happen if there are a lot of old retired people but the number of people willing to work for them is 50% of what is required, in most branches of the economy.
Money will start chasing the workers, and they pay will sky rocket. It's more like SV skyrocketing housing prices and total compensation, bit wider in scope.
Why do you think that this will entirely fail to incentivize prospective retirees to work for more total years of their lives in order to benefit from increased pay?
Please don't bring right-wing racist thought into HN.
It was an interesting observation regardless of who made it.
But you certainly could quote bin Laden here if it were relevant and interesting. It doesn't mean you agree with him or the terrible things he did.
I don't know anything about Spandrell or what else the person has said or written, so all I had to go by was the quote itself. I found it interesting and thought-provoking.
Not that I agree with all of it. I especially do not like the concept of an IQ scale. Different people are good at different kinds of things, and I think IQ is a dangerous oversimplification.
At this moment, every single human population with an IQ over 95 has a fertility rate below replacement; and the places where the most intelligent and productive people tend to live, big cities, have generally fertility rates below 1. Not below 2, replacement, but below 1, half of replacement. As I’ve said again and again, big cities today are IQ shredders, where the genes that code for high intelligence go to get shredded in the corporate and bureaucratic rat-race, depriving humanity of the biological building blocks for a better future.