Pay Mothers and Tie Increases to Child's Math Skills

I can only hope that this is some poor attempt at satire? This is some of the most obscenely technocratic nonsense I have ever seen in my life.

There are so many things wrong here I don't even know where to start.

> Math is the most valuable tool we have as humans for understanding the world around us and for improving life for all of us. It was math that brought us out of the Dark Ages

This is ahistoric rubbish; the dark ages didn't exist, and even if they did, I have never seen anyone try to claim that mathematics was the beacon of enlightenment that dragged humanity out of the darkness.

> We want to strongly incentivize mothers to train their children in math. No one – not schools, not other relatives, nor the government – is better placed to start training a child in math than their own mother who understands them best and can do it from the youngest possible age.

Being a mother in no way qualifies you as a teacher ready to "train their children in math"; what does this even mean anyway? Teach them arithmetic? We're reasonably good at that as a society already. Bring them up on a diet of ZFC and category theory? This is unlikely to work out well, ask the French.

These are of course minor points compared to the huge, glaring issue that the author clearly has no knowledge of child development whatsoever; "lack of mathematical talent" at the age of 5 in no way determines ability, at all.

The notion of giving some kind of "performance bonus" to mothers for the mathematical talent of their children is absurd, since they have no impact on any innate talent whatsoever; I dread to think what kind of an impact this would have when the proposed bonus is high enough to put them in the 99th centile of income.

Ah yes. The goal is to cover every square inch of every known planet with pulsing human flesh, and if it means we wipe out everything else and just harvest vats of yeast to eat, hey God told some of us to do it a long time ago (apparently). Thank goodness people don’t care that you once could see animals and stars in the outdoors, or hear birds sing. We’ll pack in more tightly with Netflix to keep us on the couch.

Pay is already tied somewhat to math skills in life anyway. The math that leads to allocating resources optimally and growing them when possible is only useful when combined with impulse control. Otherwise you blow your income on cigarettes and Doordash.

Weird and vaguely eugenic.

Can't happen. It would instantly be racist--it turns out the people with kids who can do math are the kinds of people who did not need the money. An instant wealth transfer to the well-off.

It is interesting as a thought experiment only.

> Math is the most valuable tool we have as humans for understanding the world around us and for improving life for all of us. It was math that brought us out of the Dark Ages

Wouldn’t literacy be what brought us out of the dark ages, by definition?

I would strongly support living wages being paid to stay at home parents. Or even working parents. Restricting it to mothers seems stupidly short sighted.

We have tax cuts for this but it’s not nearly enough.

Tying it to math is... dumb.