I am a little surprised that neither of you brought up the point that excess education affects not just the parents directly but also their estimates of how expensive children will be. When thinking of how many kids to have parents no doubt are considering "how many can I afford to put through how much college?" along with "can I afford to send them all to the best preschool/afterschool activities/all the other programs so they have the best chance of getting into a good college?" Include the effect of wanting your kids to be better off than you were, and so need better opportunities for schooling, and the parents having more education not only puts off when they have kids but also increasingly makes them expect each kid to be more expensive.
I think Bryan is right that if all of the authorities in our impressionable kids' lives enthusiastically encourage college-going and lavish students with social rewards for doing so, but they never give an official sales-pitch in favor of mothering children, then of course college going and career-orientedness will just become more culturally prestigious. Because we're social animals, most people, women included, care a lot about status, following the flow of what's supposed to make us socially impressive objects of admiration and praise. We need to work on according respect and prestige to what is actually socially valuable and impactful: and *obviously* having six kids generally creates more value for the world than becoming a lawyer, college professor, scientist, or doctor.
Not only does it create six lifetimes worth of meaning, pleasure, happiness, relationships, connections, accomplishments, economic value of about $15 million each, etc., but it also sets in motion a chain of reproductive events that could number into the thousands within a few generations (bc your six kids will each have at least one or two, whose kids will have kids too, whose kids will have kids, in perpetuity). To have fewer offspring in order to make senior partner and provide more legal services in this lifetime just so utterly pales in significance to the effects of creating thousands of happy people leading meaningful, stimulating and productive lives.
Meanwhile the legacy of most lawyers is to spend their lives just gumming up the economy with ever increasingly more layers of regulations, red tape, and other inhibitions on the productive activities of businesspeople, and most doctors only impact maybe 1/100th of your final health outcomes. If the latter point isn't obvious, it's because you haven't yet realized that our health outcomes are overwhelmingly more determined by our lifestyle choices and genetics than by our medical care: there's only so much the doc can do for you if you never take care of yourself and your heart is clogged with decades of unhealthy eating/physical inactivity. And most Americans are in that boat! Hence the reason Puerto Rico has a higher life expectancy than the US despite the vastly inferior quality of their physician services, and why the Rand Health Insurance Experiment didn't find any statistically significant effects of medical consumption on objective measures of health after granting thousands of people a five year discretionary subsidy to consume additional medical services. Let's face it, doctors don't really do much for us; we mostly make our own fate health-wise, and dig our own graves.
We have massively misallocated the cultural and social rewards to occupational choices that just don't do all that much for the world compared to being a really good mom. How many times have you heard "damn, isn't it impressive that she became a doctor or a lawyer," or "you should join *the professions,* be a doctor or a lawyer," vs. "holy cow, she became a mom? That's so cool and impressive. What an accomplishment." As weird as it may sound, in terms of actually contributing something of value to the world, the latter statement is much saner and more axiologically appropriate than the former.
I also loathe the idea that we should confer prestige according to what people *consume* vs what they *produce*. I.e., "wow, she may have never had kids or created anything, but she sure did read a lot of books/amass a lot of credentials/go to an Ivy League school." It's like someone who brags about their IQ score but never actually does anything with their lives. Consumption isn't an accomplishment: *making things* and *contributing* and *having an impact* and *making a difference* are accomplishments. Who fucking cares if you became beautifully credentialed Ivy trained childless net-tax-consumer college "educator"/researcher whose publications are read by maybe *6-15* people each ever, peers who don't even like or know you in a deep way. I'd rather share the fruits of my efforts in life with my kids, who I will be close to, and get to watch grow and benefit from them.
It doesn't seem to be true that higher fertility is always selectively favored by definition. If it were, it seems that all species would be r-selected, having as many offspring as feasible. Hominidae seem generally to be regarded as fairly K-selected.
I see aspects of a moral panic about the current "demographical winter" in certain intellectual circles. I think we do not exactly understand future effects of lower fertility now and its causes. It may have special benefits too (e.g. if by chance the carrying capacity, limits to growth team was right, or the like).
I think Bryan is right that if all of the authorities in our impressionable kids' lives enthusiastically encourage college-going and lavish students with social rewards for doing so, but they never give an official sales-pitch in favor of mothering children, then of course college going and career-orientedness will just become more culturally prestigious. Because we're social animals, most people, women included, care a lot about status, following the flow of what's supposed to make us socially impressive objects of admiration and praise. We need to work on according respect and prestige to what is actually socially valuable and impactful: and *obviously* having six kids generally creates more value for the world than becoming a lawyer, college professor, scientist, or doctor.
Not only does it create six lifetimes worth of meaning, pleasure, happiness, relationships, connections, accomplishments, economic value of about $15 million each, etc., but it also sets in motion a chain of reproductive events that could number into the thousands within a few generations (bc your six kids will each have at least one or two, whose kids will have kids too, whose kids will have kids, in perpetuity). To have fewer offspring in order to make senior partner and provide more legal services in this lifetime just so utterly pales in significance to the effects of creating thousands of happy people leading meaningful, stimulating and productive lives.
Meanwhile the legacy of most lawyers is to spend their lives just gumming up the economy with ever increasingly more layers of regulations, red tape, and other inhibitions on the productive activities of businesspeople, and most doctors only impact maybe 1/100th of your final health outcomes. If the latter point isn't obvious, it's because you haven't yet realized that our health outcomes are overwhelmingly more determined by our lifestyle choices and genetics than by our medical care: there's only so much the doc can do for you if you never take care of yourself and your heart is clogged with decades of unhealthy eating/physical inactivity. And most Americans are in that boat! Hence the reason Puerto Rico has a higher life expectancy than the US despite the vastly inferior quality of their physician services, and why the Rand Health Insurance Experiment didn't find any statistically significant effects of medical consumption on objective measures of health after granting thousands of people a five year discretionary subsidy to consume additional medical services. Let's face it, doctors don't really do much for us; we mostly make our own fate health-wise, and dig our own graves.
We have massively misallocated the cultural and social rewards to occupational choices that just don't do all that much for the world compared to being a really good mom. How many times have you heard "damn, isn't it impressive that she became a doctor or a lawyer," or "you should join *the professions,* be a doctor or a lawyer," vs. "holy cow, she became a mom? That's so cool and impressive. What an accomplishment." As weird as it may sound, in terms of actually contributing something of value to the world, the latter statement is much saner and more axiologically appropriate than the former.
I also loathe the idea that we should confer prestige according to what people *consume* vs what they *produce*. I.e., "wow, she may have never had kids or created anything, but she sure did read a lot of books/amass a lot of credentials/go to an Ivy League school." It's like someone who brags about their IQ score but never actually does anything with their lives. Consumption isn't an accomplishment: *making things* and *contributing* and *having an impact* and *making a difference* are accomplishments. Who fucking cares if you became beautifully credentialed Ivy trained childless net-tax-consumer college "educator"/researcher whose publications are read by maybe *6-15* people each ever, peers who don't even like or know you in a deep way. I'd rather share the fruits of my efforts in life with my kids, who I will be close to, and get to watch grow and benefit from them.
I’ve read Hummer’s book “knowledge and reality and value; a mostly common sense guide to philosophy’.
Praises rationality for most of the book. Then -
“” In general, ethical beliefs rest on intuitions. You can choose to prefer some intuitions over others, and maybe you can disguise your intuitions or refuse to call them “intuitions”, but one way or another, your ethics is going to be based on intuitions.’’
An intuition is an appearance. Huemer says to trust appearances as a starting point in the absence of grounds for doubting them. What is your alternative? To... not believe anything you believe is justified ever? To... believe things that appear false? To... disbelieve in what appears true even when there are no special circumstances at play which give you some reason for thinking your appearances are wrong?
The obvious failure mode is that the olds control the politics and they extract value from fertility age parents to the point they have fewer children and doom loop ensues.
Liberalism says that the point of life is to win a Red Queen Race for lifetime dopamine. At most 1-2 kid satisfies that criteria fir most people and sometimes zero for some people. Bryan disagrees but I think he's wrong in most cases. Revealed preference has spoken.
I'm enough of a realist to say we should try to technocratically solve the dopamine imbalance through incentives, but it's hard when parents can't vote for their children to arrive at that solution politically.
You are probably going to need some kind of transcendental value of children for Childrens sake. For us autists we should recognize our role is to add value to that sentiment where we can.
"I was raised Catholic. Even in liberal California, they preached the evils of sex far more than the glories of marriage. I don’t think my experience is so odd."
I was part of a Catholic young adult group with like 3-4 average TFR. I don't really buy this framing.
The joy of parenthood simply isn't enough to attract enough people away from the alternatives, given its cash and opportunity costs. Shaming people won't change that - it is already failing, and that failure is gathering momentum.
Worse, our social focus is still on punishing people for becoming parents - often more severely than we punish actual crimes. Don't believe me? Try seeing what being designated the "non-custodial parent" does for your life: you will not only be punitively and - if you have a higher income - excessively fined, but you will be monitored by lawyers and a court system for decades and you will have no effective say in how the children you love are raised. The material loss, and the loss of personal autonomy and authority are profound; your risk of suicide will skyrocket. People - mostly men - actively don't want to experience that outcome, and telling them how tough it is to be the custodial parent doesn't help in the least (all you do is frighten prospective custodial parents - mostly women).
As a society, if we want more children, we need to make children more relatively attractive. We do NOT want to move back to a "traditional" structure in which half the adult population is effectively retired from the external world before the age of 30. So what do we do? The most obvious and least distorting approach would be to increase effective taxes on the childless and decrease effective taxes on/increase benefits to those with children until the birthrate is where society wants it to be. You may ask, do we give non-present parents the benefit of the tax rate reduction? I can think of several approaches to that but... too far off topic. Change the tax rates until you get the result, and let the market and human creativity figure out the details - marriage or not. As for the fact that the tax cost/benefit impacts might skew toward people with higher education and income potential, all I can say is "yes, exactly".
Bryan makes a strong evidence-based case in his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids that ultimately, over the whole cumulatively considered lifetime, the people who have children experience a greater sum total of the things that make life good. Life isn't just about raw peak experiences of pleasure: it's also about satisfaction, love, meaning, purpose, accomplishment, etc. If it's only about pleasure then just do heroin or something, or spend your life arranging meaningless sexual hookups on the weekends and burn through a series of disposable people like tissue paper without ever going deeper. Having children is an opportunity to experience love in a new way, re-experience life through the eyes of a young and earnest person who wants to be just like you, an adorable little buddy who you can watch grow into a mature, confident, reasoned, articulate, accomplished and happy adult, who can fill your life with critically significant memory-making moments (marriages, childbirths), a feeling of personal continuation into the future, that something of yourself lives after you're gone. It's an opportunity to know a person deeply and to be deeply known, and to live a life that has tremendous sense of stakes, where the possibility of doom makes it all even more important that you succeed, and the success ever more sweeter. Where things really matter in a way they just don't when you don't have anyone who counts on you.
I think Bryan is right that if all of the authorities in our impressionable kids' lives enthusiastically encourage college-going and lavish students with social rewards for doing so, but they never give an official sales-pitch in favor of mothering children, then of course college going and career-orientedness will just become more culturally prestigious. Because we're social animals, most people, women included, care a lot about status, following the flow of what's supposed to make us socially impressive objects of admiration and praise. We need to work on according respect and prestige to what is actually socially valuable and impactful: and *obviously* having six kids generally creates more value for the world than becoming a lawyer, college professor, scientist, or doctor.
Not only does it create six lifetimes worth of meaning, pleasure, happiness, relationships, connections, accomplishments, economic value of about $15 million each, etc., but it also sets in motion a chain of reproductive events that could number into the thousands within a few generations (bc your six kids will each have at least one or two, whose kids will have kids too, whose kids will have kids, in perpetuity). To have fewer offspring in order to make senior partner and provide more legal services in this lifetime just so utterly pales in significance to the effects of creating thousands of happy people leading meaningful, stimulating and productive lives.
Meanwhile the legacy of most lawyers is to spend their lives just gumming up the economy with ever increasingly more layers of regulations, red tape, and other inhibitions on the productive activities of businesspeople, and most doctors only impact maybe 1/100th of your final health outcomes. If the latter point isn't obvious, it's because you haven't yet realized that our health outcomes are overwhelmingly more determined by our lifestyle choices and genetics than by our medical care: there's only so much the doc can do for you if you never take care of yourself and your heart is clogged with decades of unhealthy eating/physical inactivity. And most Americans are in that boat! Hence the reason Puerto Rico has a higher life expectancy than the US despite the vastly inferior quality of their physician services, and why the Rand Health Insurance Experiment didn't find any statistically significant effects of medical consumption on objective measures of health after granting thousands of people a five year discretionary subsidy to consume additional medical services. Let's face it, doctors don't really do much for us; we mostly make our own fate health-wise, and dig our own graves.
We have massively misallocated the cultural and social rewards to occupational choices that just don't do all that much for the world compared to being a really good mom. How many times have you heard "damn, isn't it impressive that she became a doctor or a lawyer," or "you should join *the professions,* be a doctor or a lawyer," vs. "holy cow, she became a mom? That's so cool and impressive. What an accomplishment." As weird as it may sound, in terms of actually contributing something of value to the world, the latter statement is much saner and more axiologically appropriate than the former.
I also loathe the idea that we should confer prestige according to what people *consume* vs what they *produce*. I.e., "wow, she may have never had kids or created anything, but she sure did read a lot of books/amass a lot of credentials/go to an Ivy League school." It's like someone who brags about their IQ score but never actually does anything with their lives. Consumption isn't an accomplishment: *making things* and *contributing* and *having an impact* and *making a difference* are accomplishments. Who fucking cares if you became beautifully credentialed Ivy trained childless net-tax-consumer college "educator"/researcher whose publications are read by maybe *6-15* people each ever, peers who don't even like or know you in a deep way. I'd rather share the fruits of my efforts in life with my kids, who I will be close to, and get to watch grow and benefit from them.
I am a little surprised that neither of you brought up the point that excess education affects not just the parents directly but also their estimates of how expensive children will be. When thinking of how many kids to have parents no doubt are considering "how many can I afford to put through how much college?" along with "can I afford to send them all to the best preschool/afterschool activities/all the other programs so they have the best chance of getting into a good college?" Include the effect of wanting your kids to be better off than you were, and so need better opportunities for schooling, and the parents having more education not only puts off when they have kids but also increasingly makes them expect each kid to be more expensive.
I wonder if pro-natalists will urge would-be students to avoid college.
I think Bryan is right that if all of the authorities in our impressionable kids' lives enthusiastically encourage college-going and lavish students with social rewards for doing so, but they never give an official sales-pitch in favor of mothering children, then of course college going and career-orientedness will just become more culturally prestigious. Because we're social animals, most people, women included, care a lot about status, following the flow of what's supposed to make us socially impressive objects of admiration and praise. We need to work on according respect and prestige to what is actually socially valuable and impactful: and *obviously* having six kids generally creates more value for the world than becoming a lawyer, college professor, scientist, or doctor.
Not only does it create six lifetimes worth of meaning, pleasure, happiness, relationships, connections, accomplishments, economic value of about $15 million each, etc., but it also sets in motion a chain of reproductive events that could number into the thousands within a few generations (bc your six kids will each have at least one or two, whose kids will have kids too, whose kids will have kids, in perpetuity). To have fewer offspring in order to make senior partner and provide more legal services in this lifetime just so utterly pales in significance to the effects of creating thousands of happy people leading meaningful, stimulating and productive lives.
Meanwhile the legacy of most lawyers is to spend their lives just gumming up the economy with ever increasingly more layers of regulations, red tape, and other inhibitions on the productive activities of businesspeople, and most doctors only impact maybe 1/100th of your final health outcomes. If the latter point isn't obvious, it's because you haven't yet realized that our health outcomes are overwhelmingly more determined by our lifestyle choices and genetics than by our medical care: there's only so much the doc can do for you if you never take care of yourself and your heart is clogged with decades of unhealthy eating/physical inactivity. And most Americans are in that boat! Hence the reason Puerto Rico has a higher life expectancy than the US despite the vastly inferior quality of their physician services, and why the Rand Health Insurance Experiment didn't find any statistically significant effects of medical consumption on objective measures of health after granting thousands of people a five year discretionary subsidy to consume additional medical services. Let's face it, doctors don't really do much for us; we mostly make our own fate health-wise, and dig our own graves.
We have massively misallocated the cultural and social rewards to occupational choices that just don't do all that much for the world compared to being a really good mom. How many times have you heard "damn, isn't it impressive that she became a doctor or a lawyer," or "you should join *the professions,* be a doctor or a lawyer," vs. "holy cow, she became a mom? That's so cool and impressive. What an accomplishment." As weird as it may sound, in terms of actually contributing something of value to the world, the latter statement is much saner and more axiologically appropriate than the former.
I also loathe the idea that we should confer prestige according to what people *consume* vs what they *produce*. I.e., "wow, she may have never had kids or created anything, but she sure did read a lot of books/amass a lot of credentials/go to an Ivy League school." It's like someone who brags about their IQ score but never actually does anything with their lives. Consumption isn't an accomplishment: *making things* and *contributing* and *having an impact* and *making a difference* are accomplishments. Who fucking cares if you became beautifully credentialed Ivy trained childless net-tax-consumer college "educator"/researcher whose publications are read by maybe *6-15* people each ever, peers who don't even like or know you in a deep way. I'd rather share the fruits of my efforts in life with my kids, who I will be close to, and get to watch grow and benefit from them.
It doesn't seem to be true that higher fertility is always selectively favored by definition. If it were, it seems that all species would be r-selected, having as many offspring as feasible. Hominidae seem generally to be regarded as fairly K-selected.
I see aspects of a moral panic about the current "demographical winter" in certain intellectual circles. I think we do not exactly understand future effects of lower fertility now and its causes. It may have special benefits too (e.g. if by chance the carrying capacity, limits to growth team was right, or the like).
I’ve assumed ‘intuition’ is just the opposite of what’s seen. It’s what used to understand what appears.
I’m connecting it to the intuitionists vs the constructivists in mathematics. See Herman wyel.
Chantal del sol makes the point that ontology creates epistemology.
Are humans chemical robots (Descartes), smarter animals (Darwin), or the image of God (Moses)?
Different answers produce different assumptions.
Thanks
Clay
I think Bryan is right that if all of the authorities in our impressionable kids' lives enthusiastically encourage college-going and lavish students with social rewards for doing so, but they never give an official sales-pitch in favor of mothering children, then of course college going and career-orientedness will just become more culturally prestigious. Because we're social animals, most people, women included, care a lot about status, following the flow of what's supposed to make us socially impressive objects of admiration and praise. We need to work on according respect and prestige to what is actually socially valuable and impactful: and *obviously* having six kids generally creates more value for the world than becoming a lawyer, college professor, scientist, or doctor.
Not only does it create six lifetimes worth of meaning, pleasure, happiness, relationships, connections, accomplishments, economic value of about $15 million each, etc., but it also sets in motion a chain of reproductive events that could number into the thousands within a few generations (bc your six kids will each have at least one or two, whose kids will have kids too, whose kids will have kids, in perpetuity). To have fewer offspring in order to make senior partner and provide more legal services in this lifetime just so utterly pales in significance to the effects of creating thousands of happy people leading meaningful, stimulating and productive lives.
Meanwhile the legacy of most lawyers is to spend their lives just gumming up the economy with ever increasingly more layers of regulations, red tape, and other inhibitions on the productive activities of businesspeople, and most doctors only impact maybe 1/100th of your final health outcomes. If the latter point isn't obvious, it's because you haven't yet realized that our health outcomes are overwhelmingly more determined by our lifestyle choices and genetics than by our medical care: there's only so much the doc can do for you if you never take care of yourself and your heart is clogged with decades of unhealthy eating/physical inactivity. And most Americans are in that boat! Hence the reason Puerto Rico has a higher life expectancy than the US despite the vastly inferior quality of their physician services, and why the Rand Health Insurance Experiment didn't find any statistically significant effects of medical consumption on objective measures of health after granting thousands of people a five year discretionary subsidy to consume additional medical services. Let's face it, doctors don't really do much for us; we mostly make our own fate health-wise, and dig our own graves.
We have massively misallocated the cultural and social rewards to occupational choices that just don't do all that much for the world compared to being a really good mom. How many times have you heard "damn, isn't it impressive that she became a doctor or a lawyer," or "you should join *the professions,* be a doctor or a lawyer," vs. "holy cow, she became a mom? That's so cool and impressive. What an accomplishment." As weird as it may sound, in terms of actually contributing something of value to the world, the latter statement is much saner and more axiologically appropriate than the former.
I also loathe the idea that we should confer prestige according to what people *consume* vs what they *produce*. I.e., "wow, she may have never had kids or created anything, but she sure did read a lot of books/amass a lot of credentials/go to an Ivy League school." It's like someone who brags about their IQ score but never actually does anything with their lives. Consumption isn't an accomplishment: *making things* and *contributing* and *having an impact* and *making a difference* are accomplishments. Who fucking cares if you became beautifully credentialed Ivy trained childless net-tax-consumer college "educator"/researcher whose publications are read by maybe *6-15* people each ever, peers who don't even like or know you in a deep way. I'd rather share the fruits of my efforts in life with my kids, who I will be close to, and get to watch grow and benefit from them.
Im Confused by your back and forth here. Feels a bit muddly
Well . . .
I’ve read Hummer’s book “knowledge and reality and value; a mostly common sense guide to philosophy’.
Praises rationality for most of the book. Then -
“” In general, ethical beliefs rest on intuitions. You can choose to prefer some intuitions over others, and maybe you can disguise your intuitions or refuse to call them “intuitions”, but one way or another, your ethics is going to be based on intuitions.’’
He’s defending his intuitions.
Odd
Thanks
Clay
An intuition is an appearance. Huemer says to trust appearances as a starting point in the absence of grounds for doubting them. What is your alternative? To... not believe anything you believe is justified ever? To... believe things that appear false? To... disbelieve in what appears true even when there are no special circumstances at play which give you some reason for thinking your appearances are wrong?
The obvious failure mode is that the olds control the politics and they extract value from fertility age parents to the point they have fewer children and doom loop ensues.
Liberalism says that the point of life is to win a Red Queen Race for lifetime dopamine. At most 1-2 kid satisfies that criteria fir most people and sometimes zero for some people. Bryan disagrees but I think he's wrong in most cases. Revealed preference has spoken.
I'm enough of a realist to say we should try to technocratically solve the dopamine imbalance through incentives, but it's hard when parents can't vote for their children to arrive at that solution politically.
You are probably going to need some kind of transcendental value of children for Childrens sake. For us autists we should recognize our role is to add value to that sentiment where we can.
"I was raised Catholic. Even in liberal California, they preached the evils of sex far more than the glories of marriage. I don’t think my experience is so odd."
I was part of a Catholic young adult group with like 3-4 average TFR. I don't really buy this framing.
The joy of parenthood simply isn't enough to attract enough people away from the alternatives, given its cash and opportunity costs. Shaming people won't change that - it is already failing, and that failure is gathering momentum.
Worse, our social focus is still on punishing people for becoming parents - often more severely than we punish actual crimes. Don't believe me? Try seeing what being designated the "non-custodial parent" does for your life: you will not only be punitively and - if you have a higher income - excessively fined, but you will be monitored by lawyers and a court system for decades and you will have no effective say in how the children you love are raised. The material loss, and the loss of personal autonomy and authority are profound; your risk of suicide will skyrocket. People - mostly men - actively don't want to experience that outcome, and telling them how tough it is to be the custodial parent doesn't help in the least (all you do is frighten prospective custodial parents - mostly women).
As a society, if we want more children, we need to make children more relatively attractive. We do NOT want to move back to a "traditional" structure in which half the adult population is effectively retired from the external world before the age of 30. So what do we do? The most obvious and least distorting approach would be to increase effective taxes on the childless and decrease effective taxes on/increase benefits to those with children until the birthrate is where society wants it to be. You may ask, do we give non-present parents the benefit of the tax rate reduction? I can think of several approaches to that but... too far off topic. Change the tax rates until you get the result, and let the market and human creativity figure out the details - marriage or not. As for the fact that the tax cost/benefit impacts might skew toward people with higher education and income potential, all I can say is "yes, exactly".
Bryan makes a strong evidence-based case in his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids that ultimately, over the whole cumulatively considered lifetime, the people who have children experience a greater sum total of the things that make life good. Life isn't just about raw peak experiences of pleasure: it's also about satisfaction, love, meaning, purpose, accomplishment, etc. If it's only about pleasure then just do heroin or something, or spend your life arranging meaningless sexual hookups on the weekends and burn through a series of disposable people like tissue paper without ever going deeper. Having children is an opportunity to experience love in a new way, re-experience life through the eyes of a young and earnest person who wants to be just like you, an adorable little buddy who you can watch grow into a mature, confident, reasoned, articulate, accomplished and happy adult, who can fill your life with critically significant memory-making moments (marriages, childbirths), a feeling of personal continuation into the future, that something of yourself lives after you're gone. It's an opportunity to know a person deeply and to be deeply known, and to live a life that has tremendous sense of stakes, where the possibility of doom makes it all even more important that you succeed, and the success ever more sweeter. Where things really matter in a way they just don't when you don't have anyone who counts on you.
I think Bryan is right that if all of the authorities in our impressionable kids' lives enthusiastically encourage college-going and lavish students with social rewards for doing so, but they never give an official sales-pitch in favor of mothering children, then of course college going and career-orientedness will just become more culturally prestigious. Because we're social animals, most people, women included, care a lot about status, following the flow of what's supposed to make us socially impressive objects of admiration and praise. We need to work on according respect and prestige to what is actually socially valuable and impactful: and *obviously* having six kids generally creates more value for the world than becoming a lawyer, college professor, scientist, or doctor.
Not only does it create six lifetimes worth of meaning, pleasure, happiness, relationships, connections, accomplishments, economic value of about $15 million each, etc., but it also sets in motion a chain of reproductive events that could number into the thousands within a few generations (bc your six kids will each have at least one or two, whose kids will have kids too, whose kids will have kids, in perpetuity). To have fewer offspring in order to make senior partner and provide more legal services in this lifetime just so utterly pales in significance to the effects of creating thousands of happy people leading meaningful, stimulating and productive lives.
Meanwhile the legacy of most lawyers is to spend their lives just gumming up the economy with ever increasingly more layers of regulations, red tape, and other inhibitions on the productive activities of businesspeople, and most doctors only impact maybe 1/100th of your final health outcomes. If the latter point isn't obvious, it's because you haven't yet realized that our health outcomes are overwhelmingly more determined by our lifestyle choices and genetics than by our medical care: there's only so much the doc can do for you if you never take care of yourself and your heart is clogged with decades of unhealthy eating/physical inactivity. And most Americans are in that boat! Hence the reason Puerto Rico has a higher life expectancy than the US despite the vastly inferior quality of their physician services, and why the Rand Health Insurance Experiment didn't find any statistically significant effects of medical consumption on objective measures of health after granting thousands of people a five year discretionary subsidy to consume additional medical services. Let's face it, doctors don't really do much for us; we mostly make our own fate health-wise, and dig our own graves.
We have massively misallocated the cultural and social rewards to occupational choices that just don't do all that much for the world compared to being a really good mom. How many times have you heard "damn, isn't it impressive that she became a doctor or a lawyer," or "you should join *the professions,* be a doctor or a lawyer," vs. "holy cow, she became a mom? That's so cool and impressive. What an accomplishment." As weird as it may sound, in terms of actually contributing something of value to the world, the latter statement is much saner and more axiologically appropriate than the former.
I also loathe the idea that we should confer prestige according to what people *consume* vs what they *produce*. I.e., "wow, she may have never had kids or created anything, but she sure did read a lot of books/amass a lot of credentials/go to an Ivy League school." It's like someone who brags about their IQ score but never actually does anything with their lives. Consumption isn't an accomplishment: *making things* and *contributing* and *having an impact* and *making a difference* are accomplishments. Who fucking cares if you became beautifully credentialed Ivy trained childless net-tax-consumer college "educator"/researcher whose publications are read by maybe *6-15* people each ever, peers who don't even like or know you in a deep way. I'd rather share the fruits of my efforts in life with my kids, who I will be close to, and get to watch grow and benefit from them.
Education is negatively correlated with fertility even when other factors are controlled for.