The elite couples breeding to save mankind | Hacker News Reader

The elite couples breeding to save mankind

telegraph.co.uk

14 pointsAnon8453 comments

The title is a bit of bait, as well as the carefully chosen goofy photos. From what I read in the article, they are just rich people that think people should have more kids and are doing that themselves.

That being said, if the elite think that everyone should have more kids, they should stop getting so much of the economic pie for themselves and sharing a bit more (pay higher wages? pay their taxes? don't go laying off people any time the economy does a burp?)

A lot of the people who have only one kid would love to have more, but they are afraid of doing so because of economic reasons.

But they went through all of this trouble to justify their sex drives. Certainly that's worth a life of luxury, right?

In the US lower incomes are associated with higher fertility rates. This may suggest the elites, to 'solve' this problem, should bankrupt the population further and then give them lots of time unemployed to spur "free" activity taken during the boredom.

It's exactly the people keeping the wheels turning, the working class and lower middle class, who can't afford to have children at the moment. The spongers above and below are the ones able to breed with abandon. Doesn't seem sustainable.

Yeah, these people say that they want to have 7 kids because they're worried about population decline, but how many of their kids do they want to be janitors or plumbers?

A micro-sized number of "elite" couples, talking their baby-making activities up as if that was some OMG Incredibly Awesome New Thing.

The article's featured couple has 3 kids, and aspires to have 7 kids.

Meanwhile - my lower-middle class grandmother, whose parents were very ordinary rural farmers, had 11 younger siblings.

Children are simply too expensive. My first child cost me over $15,000 in co-pays. School for six hours a day is $1100 a month. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates it'll cost over $230,000 to raise a child to 18. That's before college.

Depends. If someone seduces a doctor (see the trial of Conrad Murray who was Michael Jackson's propofil fixer who was in deep shit to multiple strippers for one night stand child support) for 20% you could take away 40k tax free and move to a quaint midwest town and come out quite ahead. Also if you're poor as dirt and just feed the kids rice and lentils and rely on (now increased) benefits and public institutions for everything else you can come ahead too. Whether this has anything to do with high fertility rates at the low income bands is up for interpretation.

> Children are simply too expensive ... School for six hours a day is $1100 a month.

What? Public school is free and taxpayer-funded in the US.

Sure after kindergarten. But in the preceding 4 years that’s the payment. And that presumes I want to put my kid in public school, where frankly, academics and safety are severely lacking.

Put my daughters into Cheerleading at end of Covid lockdown. At one mark My wife did the math. “7,000 in fees paid to gym” Doesn't even include the private lessons, Hotels, tickets for competition. Special training mats and octagons, etc.

At least kids absolutely love it.

> Children are simply too expensive.

These days? HELL, YES. Modern capitalism (including the education-industrial complex) has learned that kids are just about the ultimate leverage to squeeze money out of their families. And has gotten far too damned good at doing that.

Operative word: grandmother, i.e. not contemporaneous with the actual crisis that’s happening.

It’s obviously not a new thing, it’s the old thing. But the new thing (not having kids) is a big, big problem for most modern civilizations at this point.

Correct. But when they're gushing over $Age_Old_Concept as if it was some incredible new revelation from highest heaven - that's pretty much my standard reaction.

On a farm, kids are free labor, you already have land to build as big a house as you want, and you've got lots of extra food to feed 'em.

You might want to read some accounts of life on lower-middle-class farms, ~120 year ago. Yes, kids were free-ish labor...but basic day-to-day life was incredibly laborious, compared to today. Having kids didn't give you any more land, nor more teams of horses to pull additional plows. Cost of land was not the constraint on the size of your house. Food was not free & unlimited, even in a year with a good harvest. Crop yields were nothing remotely resembling today's post-Green-Revolution & artificially fertilized numbers. Food preservation technology, to have a balanced diet off-season, was home canning and root cellars. The former was highly laborious. The latter had plenty of limitations, even if your local subsoil and water table were ideal for it.

Depending on how much you believe autism is hereditary you could argue that these couples are going to really cause problems for humanity’s gene pool.

My teacher wife has seen this several times already.

College professor/scientist types have kid. Kid is a nightmare in class. So need to start evaluations. Always ends with autism and or other kinds of behavioral issues.

The dysgenics are coming from inside the house.

I imagine if you willingly self identify yourself as elite, you're anything but. These folks sound (and look) absolutely insufferable.

The upper classes are drawn to these theories like flies to shit. The biggest lesson from history is that we never learn from it.

The couple profiled in the article is not beating the "extremely goofy" allegations.

> https://twitter.com/SimoneHCollins/status/164002825079661772...

Too many hot takes to quote them all:

> Some see the idealized conservative wife as something like a stay-at-home pet. I am grateful my husband does not see or treat me that way. I aspire to be his sword, the perfect tool to exert his will upon reality.

> Extreme life extension only seems benign because no one has tried it yet. Today's life extensionists are analogous to communists of the early 1900s. Life extensionists of the future will be seen as transparently evil and self interested as today's communists.

Is that a Coriolanus reference I see? Ah, a woman of culture.

They are very, as they say, Reddit

https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos/status/16484731593630720...

The problem with “elites” breeding to “save the world” are as follows:

1) Who defines elite? Referencing the article, is “working at a think tank” really an indicator of being elite in any sense? I certainly don’t see getting a job at a think tank to be a particular indicator of skill nor do I find the outputs of think tanks to be very enlightening.

2) The problem isn’t that child-rearing is a cool fun thing that people choose not to do because they’re lazy, it’s that we as a society make being a parent suck.. Daytime childcare alone is expensive and complicated enough to turn many people off parenthood.

Well off people having children and then never shutting up about it does not solve any problems.

Despite a tremendous amount of social programming to the contrary, for me it's a huge relief to see that people care about this problem and don't want to go extinct.

meh. the telegraph. my favourite commentary on the telegraph is this bit from yes, prime minister:

https://youtu.be/DGscoaUWW2M?t=57

There are so few elite that their actions can’t matter due to math.

Birth control may be the great filter, as it breaks evolutionary assumptions.

https://archive.is/SblzP

Honestly what a weird set of people. If you have to go out of your way to make sure people know you're not Nazis, maybe you're treading a little too close to dangerous waters.

> It also means resisting any attempt by what Malcolm calls the ‘woke mind virus’ to assimilate their children into a progressive monoculture.

Bwoop bwoop bwoop right wing nut alert.

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