to people at the bottom of the income distribution, telling them to wait to have children until they’ve found a stable partner and a steady job seems about as reasonable as telling them to wait until after they’ve won the Heisman Trophy. There aren’t a lot of jobs that a high-school graduate can count on to deliver long-term, full-time employment.
It is possible that there are emerging two classes with very different tastes. The Vickies want long-term, full-time employment, health insurance, stable marriages to partners with “consumption complementarity,” and upper-middle class schools for their children (if any). The thetes do not value those goods as highly. They prefer to be more impulsive and less compulsive.
Of the thetes: Except that no one should put these labels on the poor unless they have already been given the rights to help one another with both resources and knowledge in their own environments, and utterly failed in so doing. No one has given them the right to do that, it is questionable whether any one ever will, and so we may never know. I am so unbelievably tired of being angry but you made me angry yet again with this post, even if you don’t completely believe what you wrote.
Maybe we should just tell them not to have kids at all. Or at least adopt Steve Sailer’s “one and done” slogan. I understand fertility is below replacement level already among many classes of people and that has some serious policy implications, but I hold no brief for social insurance schemes, anyway. We need more Vickies and fewer Thetes. Efforts to get the Vickies to make more Vickies aren’t proving too fruitful; we could at least move in the right direction by putting Thetes on the same demographic path.
But is this new? Aesop (and la Fontaine) have La Cigale et la Fourmi (grasshoppers and ants).
Also, isn’t this more likely to be the outcome of very different rates of time preference? Remember the Stanford one marshmallow, two marshmallows study on delayed gratification (for economists, time preference)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment
An obvious point maybe, but marriage does not imply having kids right away. We have friends who were high school sweethearts, married at 20 (during college), finished college, started a business together, then had kids (at ages 26-31).
Society should encourage early marriage (after 18, of course) but delayed child-raising.
To amplify Jeff’s point, why do they need to have kids at all? It is simply assumed by Megan that everybody will want to have kids, when most people throughout human history probably didn’t. We have evolved cultural norms to encourage people to have kids, because a century ago, the tribe with the most kids had the biggest army and won the most battles. That’s not the world we live in today, yet we continue the same silly “traditions.”
The best move we can make is remove this insane cultural pressure to have kids, that permeates most cultures around the world today, particularly since we now have technology for the last half-century that allows us to decide: birth control. If someone would intrinsically like to have a dozen kids, I could care less. The problem is that society is often subtly or overtly pressuring them to do so. Take this giant, backward-looking cultural pressure away and much of the problems described go away.
Silly me, I thought that “most people throughout human history” had lots of kids because (i) reproduction is one of the strongest animal imperatives, (ii) a high percentage of children died in infancy or childhood, and (iii) highly effective birth control is a fairly recent phenomenon. I suppose an indirect effect would be greater numbers for war-making (or defensive arms?), but I’d like to see some evidence of a direct connection.
Let me take those one by one:
“reproduction is one of the strongest animal imperatives” – No, sex is “one of the strongest,” not reproduction. There used to be no meaningful distinction between the two as one inevitably led to the other, but as you yourself noted, “highly effective birth control” broke that connection decades ago. It revealed consumer preference: the much lower birthrates we’ve seen since.
“a high percentage of children died in infancy or childhood” – This assumes that there is a need or desire for kids and simply explains why they’d overshoot in producing them, not why they’d want kids in the first place.
“highly effective birth control is a fairly recent phenomenon” – 50-80 years is “fairly recent?” Obviously, the technology has changed, but that was my point: we can decide now but culture still pressures people into making bad choices, ie having kids. 🙂
“I suppose an indirect effect would be greater numbers for war-making (or defensive arms?), but I’d like to see some evidence of a direct connection.”
Human culture evolved over time to incentivize baby-making for precisely these military reasons. Not sure how you think these complex social phenomena can ever be proved to be direct or indirect effects, it’s fairly obvious to anyone who’s looked into the matter. Once birth control was here, this culture was all that’s left to pressure people into having kids: time to dismantle that antiquated culture.
You realize there’s a non-trivial chance that, short of totalitarian implementation, the progression you’re proffering is likely in thirty or forty years to birth (pun intended) the consequence opposite of your preferences?
No, and I’m not sure what you even mean. If I read you literally, the birth rate going down even further is going to eventually lead to the birth rate going up? Why would that happen, because the hispanics and mormons keep reproducing at high rates, so they’re eventually the majority? What makes you think they wouldn’t eventually change their culture also, to have less kids?
Emerging? I would say those crowds emerged long ago. I’d be curious as to why the impulsive crowd persists.
I strongly with Becky Hargrove.
Arnold Kling, with your terminology, you are effectively dehumanizing the “thetes.” They are, in your description, incapable of the higher executive functions (e.g., planning, taking personal responsibility for foreseeable consequences) that distinguish human beings from lower species.
This is a dangerous mode of thinking.