Setting aside that one does not choose the circumstances of their birth, the point is that these choices are more and more “expensive” with time. The tradeoffs involved look very little like the family dynamics prevalent not very long ago.

Reducing this to “choices” ignores the cultural reality surrounding those choices, and obscures that while they may not be bounded by hard imposed limits, they’re still effectively limits for many people.

Why do you say they are choices? You can't choose to have other grandparents or choose that your society behaves in a certain way.

At best you can move to another location, but that means losing your family's presence. These were the default previously and no choice was needed.

We can talk about "choice" for an individual. But when it's hundreds of millions of people in a society overwhelmingly "choosing" the same thing, it becomes more useful to talk about causes, about how society is structured to reward some choices and punish others.

For example, do you think the US has an obesity problem and Japan doesn't because, by pure chance, there are far more people who "choose" to eat unhealthy in the US?

> how society is structured to reward some choices and punish others

Who is gong to punish you for spending more time with your kids, introducing them to interesting people, maybe hiring tutors, even home schooling? People in our society today do all of those things. Nobody punishes them. The discourse around this is veering into the fantastical. We’re human beings in free societies. We get to choose.

It’s as though a lot of the commenters here, members of some of freest and most prosperous societies that have ever existed, have somehow managed to completely abandon the concept of individual responsibility.

Words like "individual responsibility", "free Societies", "prosperous societies" are big words, big in the sense that they're fuzzy. I understand they're popular terms since Modernity. However, for the sake of communication in thread. I have a theory that finding some connection, even if on just emotional level, with the people responding here may be easier if you spoke "around" these words.

Consider for a moment that you are a social animal. For the purpose of this thought experiment, let's say that just means you're an animal that can't function long without being a part of N others like yourself. Also, let's add that there is some variance in behavior in all of these animals.

Also consider that the environment of these groups is not the same and the environment of the group has an effect on the group.

Okay run this experiment for T time based off those assumptions.

Some simple questions to ask: - If you took an individual from one group and plopped them over to another group with a different environment would you expect a difference in their behavior? - If you took an individual from some T and plopped them over to another some other T* (T* >> T) would you expect them to make different choices?

Okay this point you may feel that this is all condescending and what I'm doing here is a strawman of your original points with some nonsense assumptions.

You may feel like this whole speaking around words like "freedom" is dumb because you believe, as I believe, there is a thing called freedom and humans possess this thing. But that's our religion, we made a leap of faith to this freedom concept. Why force this model on others? It's not binary, there's a lot variations on this idea of freedom.

The thing is, I would argue as the others in this thread have implied that, we are not just born into this world, we are also born out of it.

If you follow this thought it gets really hard to buy this discourse as "veering into the fantastical". Because you have to ask what is a free society? To what extent can a society be free?

I’m not arguing that societies don’t have norms, or that social norms don’t have an effect on people. Obviously they do. I’m arguing that free individuals in those societies with the power to choose otherwise, and access to information about the consequences of their choices, don’t get to blame those norms for their behaviour.

Plenty of people in society act contrary to the norms. In fact modern developed societies are incredibly diverse relative to the way they were a few generations ago in terms of lifestyle choices. Individual people do have agency, do have the power to choose and many of them exercise it.

Do again it comes down to responsibility. Averages are a measurement of outcome, not a determinant of it for individuals in the sample.

> I’m arguing that free individuals in those societies with the power to choose otherwise, and access to information about the consequences of their choices, don’t get to blame those norms for their behaviour.

Fair enough, but I care less about how to apportion moral blame for society's collective failings, and more about how to fix it, into a society able to sustain itself and produce exceptional children.

> For example, do you think the US has an obesity problem and Japan doesn't because, by pure chance, there are far more people who "choose" to eat unhealthy in the US?

Yeah a good example is when a family member visited the USA and sent me a picture of their food that they got at a restaurant. It was a downtown restaurant in one of the 20 largest US cities. I was stunned as it was easily 30% more than a food portion you would get in our home country of Germany. In the country I am currently residing in, with BMI scores somewhere between Germany and Japan, you are usually getting 30% less on your plate.

So defaults definitely skew you into one particular direction. But there are also often stronger nudges than just large portions at restaurants. I have heard from friends from rural USA that while their home village is surrounded farmland it's still a food desert because the farms are 100% cash crops and you can't transport vegetables that far economically. Apparently this is the case for many parts of the rural USA. On the other hand, back when people in the USA got excited about gold they would build infrastructure in no time. Just check the pictures how quickly say SF grew. If people got similarly excited about eating healthily, you might find good food even in these remote places.

So yes, it's easier to live in a society where a lot of people have your own lifestyle, than to live in a society where you live a lifestyle different from that of normal society.