6 ms·

I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are

I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties. That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.

CalRobert 2y ago
Absolutely, but for some reason pointing this out is considered massively classist in some quarters. I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation.
- thriftwy 2y ago
  Is it better to be one of those 0 to 1 kids, science valuing types who fear insiders? They're not okay with a significant fraction of their peers, which does look maladaptive to me.
- earthscienceman 2y ago
  You see, the thing is, it's deeply classist. It's also misplaced outrage. The poors have been doing this for millenia and we still have a society that progresses rapidly and much of the heavy lifting that moves us forward is done by folks you and others here are denigrating. If they believe the things you disparage it's because the governments and systems that the "smart" and wealthy have created have utterly failed at getting those people educated and involved. Using your education to feel better than others doesn't serve us to advance as a society. I suggest that if you're as smart as you think you are then you find a way to frame the issue such that you're lifting up those people and not punching down.
  - mason55 2y ago
    > If they believe the things you disparage it's because the governments and systems that the "smart" and wealthy have created have utterly failed at getting those people educated and involved. I think the issue is that there are two groups of smart & wealthy people. There's a mid-level of people who are happy to have more than they need and don't have the Machiavellian drive to extract every last ounce of money and power. And there's an upper-level who are fine exploiting anyone and everything. There are of course altruistic people who are extremely wealthy. But sort of by definition, the middle-level is never going to have the drive & energy to fight that upper-level, who's willing to do anything. I guess my point is that there are two groups of smart & wealthy people, and the ones complaining about the lower class being exploited are not the ones who are doing the exploiting. It's a classic setup where the upper class keeps the middle class happy enough to not make it worth the middle class joining the lower class in revolution. And they aim the ire of the lower class at the middle class while they exploit the lower class.
    - pixl97 2y ago
      I'm pretty sure it was Mondays episode of the Daily Show that covered this pretty well in the intro. There are a lot of different groups out there, but the rich and greedy group does seem to lock up a huge amount of resources and propaganda.
  - parpfish 2y ago
    yeah, the classism in the "poor/uneducated people are having too many kids!" always has this assumption that class and values are perfectly presevred across generations and ignores the social mobility and the fact that children are capable of making their own path and not just following in their footsteps. children raised in big families by uneducated, closed-minded parents often rebel against their parents and espouse different views. just look at any subreddit that has youths are complaining about the backwards views of the parents/uncles/grand-parents -- i know it's not a representative sample, but children challenging their elders views is not an anomaly. on the flipside, there's the trope of only children raised being raised by high-class, open-minded families turning into spoiled, selfish brats.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      Of the big households I've personally experienced that most would consider closed-minded parents might have a few of their kids complaining about the backwards views, but not necessarily the majority of the kids. I'd be interested in seeing some actual statistics other than assuming the people ranting on reddit about their families are the majority of that population. The kids who agree with their closed-minded parents probably aren't going online to rant about it.
      - parpfish 2y ago
        yeah, that's why i said it wasn't a representative sample. the subreddit threads don't prove that these views are a majority, just that they are a non-zero proportion.
        kelipso 2y ago
        But then you say "children raised in big families by uneducated, closed-minded parents often rebel against their parents and espouse different views". So non-zero proportion becomes often...
  - danbruc 2y ago
    The poors have been doing this for millenia [...] Why the poor? And is poor the correct label or is this just strongly correlated with the actual reason? In the past children were desirable as sources of additional income and for support at old age, is this still relevant? Otherwise it seems that you would want fewer children if you are poor because they obviously come with additional costs. Is it the cost of contraceptives or abortions instead of a deliberate choice? If it is not poverty directly but worse education because of poverty, how exactly would that work? How much education do you need to realize that additional children will cause additional costs? What other mechanisms are there? In the end it will probably be a mix of factors, but the phenomenon seems more complex than it looks like at first glance.
  - coffeebeqn 2y ago
    The idiocracy thesis supposes that children will mirror their parents behavior and beliefs. As a former teenager and a parent that is very much not the likeliest outcome. It’s also on the wider society to lift all the kids to roughly a level playing field
- cool_dude85 2y ago
  Pointing out differences in age of first child for different groups (race, class, etc.) is not necessarily classist. It's the part that so often comes next, "therefore, we should..." that causes offense. Anyway, what's wrong with having 6 kids? People used to do it all the time and society was fine. Why shouldn't we set up our society in a way that allows this as a reasonable possibility?
  - titzer 2y ago
    Because of ecological overshoot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot), which is a real problem (https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-day/#:~:text=Earth%20Overshoot%20Day%20marks%20the,We%20are%20operating%20in%20overshoot https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-da....). Gradual population decline through declining birth rates is the least jarring and least fascist way of getting human population down to sustainable levels.
    - BurningFrog 2y ago
      Some see people as burdens, some as assets. I think this is a very important world view conflict.
      - CalRobert 2y ago
        The situation can be far more nuanced than this. It's not the people, it's the cars, cows, planes, land, and fuel they consume.
        hersko 2y ago
        Earth can sustain a far larger human population. More humans is absolutely a net-good.
        BurningFrog 2y ago
        For most of those things, people produce as much as they consume. So more people doesn't make things worse. Fossil fuels are a bit of an exception, but the transition to non fossil fuels is in full swing, and will be complete long before the oil runs out. Land is a better argument, though multi story buildings is a partial answer. Either way, we are very far from running out of land.
- maxerickson 2y ago
  Isn't it wildly classist to so patly assume that attitudes are that transmissible? My great grandfather had like 10 siblings and worked on a farm. What's that tell you about me?
  - vel0city 2y ago
    You may be pretty radically different from your grandparents, outliers always exist, nobody's futures are truly written in stone. But what percentage of your distant cousins are more like your great grandparents?
    - psychoslave 2y ago
      You don’t need to wait the answer to take into account that they most likely aren’t farmer for most of them. Though of course it doesn’t mean they all topped the social pyramid as it is by definition structurally unclimbable for most with its power distribution.
      - vel0city 2y ago
        "More like" not "exactly like". I'm not expecting them to all be farmers. But say, having similar-ish religious views, similar-ish social views, etc.
        psychoslave 2y ago
        And how should we measure that?
        vel0city 2y ago
        There are literally hundreds of ways to slice population statistics other than just primary occupation. Practically any of those, maybe! Do you find your primary occupation entirely defines every aspect of yourself?
        2y ago
- anonym29 2y ago
  What about the wealthy assholes that think climate change is fake, pay thousands of dollars to have the catalytic converter removed from their own vehicle to deliberately increase it's exhaust emissions, eat hundreds of pounds of top-grade beef per year, are flying around seemingly constantly on their private jet, but have zero children? Are those otherwise-horrible people comparatively cleansed of their sins solely from their decision to not have kids? Is it not classist to hold more contempt for the poor rednecks in some flyover state with the traits you describe than the conservative millionaires and billionaires hiding among us?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  If you don't have children who will live in the future world, why would you deserve an opinion on how that future world should operate?
- keybored 2y ago
  > I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation. “Classist” is a faux-woke term for the belief that certain socioeconomic groups are better than others. If you believe that certain socioeconomic groups are inferior compared to [probably upper-middle class people] then that is by definition classist.
nkozyra 2y ago
It's very anecdotal. There are countries where the average age of first childbirth is still in the early 20s, and countries like Switzerland, where it's over 30. Among western countries, it looks like the median age for a mother's first child has gone up about 5 years in the past 50 years, which obviously reduces the likelihood of a great-grandparent even with increasing longevity offsets, but it's still going to happen because there is a natural cap to this figure.
- jonhohle 2y ago
  Longevity plays a big role. My grandmother is 96 and grandfather 94, so even with a first child at 29 they’ve still had over a decade with their great grands. I had 6 great grandparents still alive when I was growing up. My parents were young, so will probably be in their 70s for great grand kids and if they make it near 100, could see great-greats (wild!).
hyperpape 2y ago
What you wrote sounds superficially plausible, but you're overcorrecting. It is true that the average age of first birth varies widely based on socioeconomic factors, but it's up for all groups. The average age to have a first child was 21 for a woman in the US in 1972. In 2018, it was 26. For women without a college education it was 23.8, but that's still higher than it was in 1972. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir.... The US is not the most extreme country in this regard either. So yes, there will probably be fewer great-grandmothers in the future, though of course there still will be some.
- binarymax 2y ago
  2016 looks almost binomial. We also need to take into account population size (significantly more in 2016 compared to 1980). It could be that there are just as many young women having children - but there are now more mothers >30. So maybe there won't be less great grandmothers, just a lesser percent of the population.
nemo44x 2y ago
"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." - Jesus
- jesusisntreal 2y ago
  [flagged]
jofer 2y ago
If that were the case, then the demographics data would not show a major shift. It would just bias of a relatively small group. However, demographic data clearly shows a trend over the past several decades. Look up "Mean Age of New Mother" statistics. E.g. here's data from the US: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db232.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db232.pdf It's more dramatic if you extend the data back to the 70's. You can see the same trend in most countries. On average, people are having their first children at a significantly older age than a couple of generations ago. That doesn't mean that folks _aren't_ having children early at all. E.g. I have _tons_ of friends that had kids as teenagers (and a lot at 14, too) and were already grandparents years ago in their 30's. But that's not representative of the overall population. This means that children knowing their great grandparents really is becoming more rare today than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
- binarymax 2y ago
  I don't think mean is a good measurement for this. It's probably also being skewed by new science and treatments enabling more mothers to have children in their mid 40's. I want to see distributions!
pengaru 2y ago
> That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post. We're already living in the idiocracy future. Actually, the film needs a sequel something fierce, smartphones and now AI is fast making our reality post-idiocracy.
- RGamma 2y ago
  "Don't look up" is a sort of spiritual successor. Of course, as you said, there's room for more, now that half the population is TikTok'ed.
  - hackable_sand 2y ago
    Satire is a cathartic tool that helps us reflect on the absurdities of daily life. Critically, satire challenges us to introspect beyond the facile projection of its themes and subjects. Cynical acceptance and refusal to engage with the source material is another exercise in anti-intellectualism. That being said, Don't Look Up wasn't good satire for me. It was funny and well made, but negligently validates emotional ignorance.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
There may be "many" people not thinking about it, but there are measurably and verifiably not plenty, which has a definition something like "more than enough". Fertility rates in western countries, including the United States, are below replacement level. There is a far more disturbing dystopia waiting for us than Idiocracy.
mschuster91 2y ago
> While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties. On average, birth rates have been shrinking virtually everywhere on this planet over the last decades.
keybored 2y ago
I remember that scene. But I think it’s more about neurosis bias: thinking that there will ever be a perfect time to have children. Which never comes. So it just never happens. Contrast that with having children young. Maybe you might be financially worse off in the long run. But most people seem to make it work. So if the goal is to have children eventually? The young parents win. In any case. Shouldn’t people be a bit embarrassed to embrace such an upper-middle class sneerfest in current year? Idiocracy? Christ.

CalRobert 2y ago

Absolutely, but for some reason pointing this out is considered massively classist in some quarters. I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation.

thriftwy 2y ago
Is it better to be one of those 0 to 1 kids, science valuing types who fear insiders? They're not okay with a significant fraction of their peers, which does look maladaptive to me.
earthscienceman 2y ago
You see, the thing is, it's deeply classist. It's also misplaced outrage. The poors have been doing this for millenia and we still have a society that progresses rapidly and much of the heavy lifting that moves us forward is done by folks you and others here are denigrating. If they believe the things you disparage it's because the governments and systems that the "smart" and wealthy have created have utterly failed at getting those people educated and involved. Using your education to feel better than others doesn't serve us to advance as a society. I suggest that if you're as smart as you think you are then you find a way to frame the issue such that you're lifting up those people and not punching down.
- mason55 2y ago
  > If they believe the things you disparage it's because the governments and systems that the "smart" and wealthy have created have utterly failed at getting those people educated and involved. I think the issue is that there are two groups of smart & wealthy people. There's a mid-level of people who are happy to have more than they need and don't have the Machiavellian drive to extract every last ounce of money and power. And there's an upper-level who are fine exploiting anyone and everything. There are of course altruistic people who are extremely wealthy. But sort of by definition, the middle-level is never going to have the drive & energy to fight that upper-level, who's willing to do anything. I guess my point is that there are two groups of smart & wealthy people, and the ones complaining about the lower class being exploited are not the ones who are doing the exploiting. It's a classic setup where the upper class keeps the middle class happy enough to not make it worth the middle class joining the lower class in revolution. And they aim the ire of the lower class at the middle class while they exploit the lower class.
  - pixl97 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure it was Mondays episode of the Daily Show that covered this pretty well in the intro. There are a lot of different groups out there, but the rich and greedy group does seem to lock up a huge amount of resources and propaganda.
- parpfish 2y ago
  yeah, the classism in the "poor/uneducated people are having too many kids!" always has this assumption that class and values are perfectly presevred across generations and ignores the social mobility and the fact that children are capable of making their own path and not just following in their footsteps. children raised in big families by uneducated, closed-minded parents often rebel against their parents and espouse different views. just look at any subreddit that has youths are complaining about the backwards views of the parents/uncles/grand-parents -- i know it's not a representative sample, but children challenging their elders views is not an anomaly. on the flipside, there's the trope of only children raised being raised by high-class, open-minded families turning into spoiled, selfish brats.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Of the big households I've personally experienced that most would consider closed-minded parents might have a few of their kids complaining about the backwards views, but not necessarily the majority of the kids. I'd be interested in seeing some actual statistics other than assuming the people ranting on reddit about their families are the majority of that population. The kids who agree with their closed-minded parents probably aren't going online to rant about it.
    - parpfish 2y ago
      yeah, that's why i said it wasn't a representative sample. the subreddit threads don't prove that these views are a majority, just that they are a non-zero proportion.
      - kelipso 2y ago
        But then you say "children raised in big families by uneducated, closed-minded parents often rebel against their parents and espouse different views". So non-zero proportion becomes often...
- danbruc 2y ago
  The poors have been doing this for millenia [...] Why the poor? And is poor the correct label or is this just strongly correlated with the actual reason? In the past children were desirable as sources of additional income and for support at old age, is this still relevant? Otherwise it seems that you would want fewer children if you are poor because they obviously come with additional costs. Is it the cost of contraceptives or abortions instead of a deliberate choice? If it is not poverty directly but worse education because of poverty, how exactly would that work? How much education do you need to realize that additional children will cause additional costs? What other mechanisms are there? In the end it will probably be a mix of factors, but the phenomenon seems more complex than it looks like at first glance.
- coffeebeqn 2y ago
  The idiocracy thesis supposes that children will mirror their parents behavior and beliefs. As a former teenager and a parent that is very much not the likeliest outcome. It’s also on the wider society to lift all the kids to roughly a level playing field
cool_dude85 2y ago
Pointing out differences in age of first child for different groups (race, class, etc.) is not necessarily classist. It's the part that so often comes next, "therefore, we should..." that causes offense. Anyway, what's wrong with having 6 kids? People used to do it all the time and society was fine. Why shouldn't we set up our society in a way that allows this as a reasonable possibility?
- titzer 2y ago
  Because of ecological overshoot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot), which is a real problem (https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-day/#:~:text=Earth%20Overshoot%20Day%20marks%20the,We%20are%20operating%20in%20overshoot https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-da....). Gradual population decline through declining birth rates is the least jarring and least fascist way of getting human population down to sustainable levels.
  - BurningFrog 2y ago
    Some see people as burdens, some as assets. I think this is a very important world view conflict.
    - CalRobert 2y ago
      The situation can be far more nuanced than this. It's not the people, it's the cars, cows, planes, land, and fuel they consume.
      - hersko 2y ago
        Earth can sustain a far larger human population. More humans is absolutely a net-good.
      - BurningFrog 2y ago
        For most of those things, people produce as much as they consume. So more people doesn't make things worse. Fossil fuels are a bit of an exception, but the transition to non fossil fuels is in full swing, and will be complete long before the oil runs out. Land is a better argument, though multi story buildings is a partial answer. Either way, we are very far from running out of land.
maxerickson 2y ago
Isn't it wildly classist to so patly assume that attitudes are that transmissible? My great grandfather had like 10 siblings and worked on a farm. What's that tell you about me?
- vel0city 2y ago
  You may be pretty radically different from your grandparents, outliers always exist, nobody's futures are truly written in stone. But what percentage of your distant cousins are more like your great grandparents?
  - psychoslave 2y ago
    You don’t need to wait the answer to take into account that they most likely aren’t farmer for most of them. Though of course it doesn’t mean they all topped the social pyramid as it is by definition structurally unclimbable for most with its power distribution.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      "More like" not "exactly like". I'm not expecting them to all be farmers. But say, having similar-ish religious views, similar-ish social views, etc.
      - psychoslave 2y ago
        And how should we measure that?
        vel0city 2y ago
        There are literally hundreds of ways to slice population statistics other than just primary occupation. Practically any of those, maybe! Do you find your primary occupation entirely defines every aspect of yourself?
        2y ago
anonym29 2y ago
What about the wealthy assholes that think climate change is fake, pay thousands of dollars to have the catalytic converter removed from their own vehicle to deliberately increase it's exhaust emissions, eat hundreds of pounds of top-grade beef per year, are flying around seemingly constantly on their private jet, but have zero children? Are those otherwise-horrible people comparatively cleansed of their sins solely from their decision to not have kids? Is it not classist to hold more contempt for the poor rednecks in some flyover state with the traits you describe than the conservative millionaires and billionaires hiding among us?
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
If you don't have children who will live in the future world, why would you deserve an opinion on how that future world should operate?
keybored 2y ago
> I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation. “Classist” is a faux-woke term for the belief that certain socioeconomic groups are better than others. If you believe that certain socioeconomic groups are inferior compared to [probably upper-middle class people] then that is by definition classist.

nkozyra 2y ago

It's very anecdotal. There are countries where the average age of first childbirth is still in the early 20s, and countries like Switzerland, where it's over 30. Among western countries, it looks like the median age for a mother's first child has gone up about 5 years in the past 50 years, which obviously reduces the likelihood of a great-grandparent even with increasing longevity offsets, but it's still going to happen because there is a natural cap to this figure.

jonhohle 2y ago
Longevity plays a big role. My grandmother is 96 and grandfather 94, so even with a first child at 29 they’ve still had over a decade with their great grands. I had 6 great grandparents still alive when I was growing up. My parents were young, so will probably be in their 70s for great grand kids and if they make it near 100, could see great-greats (wild!).

hyperpape 2y ago

What you wrote sounds superficially plausible, but you're overcorrecting. It is true that the average age of first birth varies widely based on socioeconomic factors, but it's up for all groups. The average age to have a first child was 21 for a woman in the US in 1972. In 2018, it was 26. For women without a college education it was 23.8, but that's still higher than it was in 1972. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir.... The US is not the most extreme country in this regard either. So yes, there will probably be fewer great-grandmothers in the future, though of course there still will be some.

binarymax 2y ago
2016 looks almost binomial. We also need to take into account population size (significantly more in 2016 compared to 1980). It could be that there are just as many young women having children - but there are now more mothers >30. So maybe there won't be less great grandmothers, just a lesser percent of the population.

nemo44x 2y ago

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." - Jesus

jesusisntreal 2y ago
[flagged]

jofer 2y ago

If that were the case, then the demographics data would not show a major shift. It would just bias of a relatively small group. However, demographic data clearly shows a trend over the past several decades. Look up "Mean Age of New Mother" statistics. E.g. here's data from the US: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db232.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db232.pdf It's more dramatic if you extend the data back to the 70's. You can see the same trend in most countries. On average, people are having their first children at a significantly older age than a couple of generations ago. That doesn't mean that folks _aren't_ having children early at all. E.g. I have _tons_ of friends that had kids as teenagers (and a lot at 14, too) and were already grandparents years ago in their 30's. But that's not representative of the overall population. This means that children knowing their great grandparents really is becoming more rare today than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

binarymax 2y ago
I don't think mean is a good measurement for this. It's probably also being skewed by new science and treatments enabling more mothers to have children in their mid 40's. I want to see distributions!

pengaru 2y ago

> That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post. We're already living in the idiocracy future. Actually, the film needs a sequel something fierce, smartphones and now AI is fast making our reality post-idiocracy.

RGamma 2y ago
"Don't look up" is a sort of spiritual successor. Of course, as you said, there's room for more, now that half the population is TikTok'ed.
- hackable_sand 2y ago
  Satire is a cathartic tool that helps us reflect on the absurdities of daily life. Critically, satire challenges us to introspect beyond the facile projection of its themes and subjects. Cynical acceptance and refusal to engage with the source material is another exercise in anti-intellectualism. That being said, Don't Look Up wasn't good satire for me. It was funny and well made, but negligently validates emotional ignorance.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

There may be "many" people not thinking about it, but there are measurably and verifiably not plenty, which has a definition something like "more than enough". Fertility rates in western countries, including the United States, are below replacement level. There is a far more disturbing dystopia waiting for us than Idiocracy.

mschuster91 2y ago

> While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties. On average, birth rates have been shrinking virtually everywhere on this planet over the last decades.

keybored 2y ago

I remember that scene. But I think it’s more about neurosis bias: thinking that there will ever be a perfect time to have children. Which never comes. So it just never happens. Contrast that with having children young. Maybe you might be financially worse off in the long run. But most people seem to make it work. So if the goal is to have children eventually? The young parents win. In any case. Shouldn’t people be a bit embarrassed to embrace such an upper-middle class sneerfest in current year? Idiocracy? Christ.