The Politics of Procreation
Odd, is it not, that the higher the educational level and the more relative wealth the fewer children are produced. In a biological-evolutionary sense it's perhaps explicable: just as biology persuades a plant under stress to heroically produce flowers and from those, seeds, so it will have progeny and its evolutionary DNA will not become extinct.
But we are also rational beings, unlike plants, and it always amazes me that those among us who have attained a high degree of education, those who have amassed wealth, produce few offspring, while the vast majority of people, those in the underclass of society with respect to education levels and socio-economic standing, continue to produce children one after another.
The state, in most developed countries, makes every effort to aid and assist the poor and uneducated in the raising of their children. The standards with respect to economic assistance are, of course, low in comparison with the disposable income available to wealthy people in raising their children, but the poor manage, somehow, to get by. And in the process they raise children who know want, who often cannot see the utility of education, but strive instead to find jobs at an early age; or, conversely, settle into a life of welfare themselves, completing the cycle, generation after generation.
In the meanwhile, those who can afford to see that their children have every advantage that an advanced society can offer to its young, do so. Their children acquire good educations, aspire to become respected professionals, begin their own meagre families, and sometimes determine to have no children at all, rather than interfere with their chosen career paths. The end result there is that the educated, intelligent, well-remunerated population are not replacing their own numbers.
We raise an inordinate number of children to take the place of their non-achieving parents, while the sparsely-numbered children of society's educated administrators continue to decline in number.
A woman in her 70s can have produced, for example, seven children of her own throughout her child-bearing womanhood, and transfer to her children the same values and limitations which life has offered to her. Those children who adapt readily to that limiting way of life will have their own children at a relatively young biological age, just as their mother did. That 70-year-old-plus woman with seven children will have a conservative 36 grandchildren, and 17 great-grandchildren, and counting.
A more educated woman, determined to live a more moderate, modern life may have had two children, and of that two one may have decided not to have any children of her own, adopting her mother's lifestyle and values, while the second child may end up with two children of his own, with a wife who shares his background.
We are not necessarily willed by nature and by circumstances to continue in the manner in which we began life, but odds are that we will. Nature has, it seems, a truly wicked sense of humour.
But we are also rational beings, unlike plants, and it always amazes me that those among us who have attained a high degree of education, those who have amassed wealth, produce few offspring, while the vast majority of people, those in the underclass of society with respect to education levels and socio-economic standing, continue to produce children one after another.
The state, in most developed countries, makes every effort to aid and assist the poor and uneducated in the raising of their children. The standards with respect to economic assistance are, of course, low in comparison with the disposable income available to wealthy people in raising their children, but the poor manage, somehow, to get by. And in the process they raise children who know want, who often cannot see the utility of education, but strive instead to find jobs at an early age; or, conversely, settle into a life of welfare themselves, completing the cycle, generation after generation.
In the meanwhile, those who can afford to see that their children have every advantage that an advanced society can offer to its young, do so. Their children acquire good educations, aspire to become respected professionals, begin their own meagre families, and sometimes determine to have no children at all, rather than interfere with their chosen career paths. The end result there is that the educated, intelligent, well-remunerated population are not replacing their own numbers.
We raise an inordinate number of children to take the place of their non-achieving parents, while the sparsely-numbered children of society's educated administrators continue to decline in number.
A woman in her 70s can have produced, for example, seven children of her own throughout her child-bearing womanhood, and transfer to her children the same values and limitations which life has offered to her. Those children who adapt readily to that limiting way of life will have their own children at a relatively young biological age, just as their mother did. That 70-year-old-plus woman with seven children will have a conservative 36 grandchildren, and 17 great-grandchildren, and counting.
A more educated woman, determined to live a more moderate, modern life may have had two children, and of that two one may have decided not to have any children of her own, adopting her mother's lifestyle and values, while the second child may end up with two children of his own, with a wife who shares his background.
We are not necessarily willed by nature and by circumstances to continue in the manner in which we began life, but odds are that we will. Nature has, it seems, a truly wicked sense of humour.
posted by Pieface @ 6:08 PM
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