http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/quotes
Narrator: The years passed, mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.
* Money/class * Laws and social status * Time-to-adulthood for your culture
Educated, middle-class people in Western countries have stopped having kids en masse largely because the first and last factors on that last have risen, massively. It now takes large amounts of time and money for educated, middle-class parents to raise a child to their own level (ie: an educated, middle-class adult), and the process has extremely many points of potential failure. It's often not even likely enough to succeed; for instance, if you live somewhere with bad schools or need your entire 20s to establish your own career before you can afford to feed a child.
> Takes a bunch of effort.
100% with you on that one.
The fact that lots of people currently believe exactly this theory about societal decline due to the lower classes breeding too much just underlines this.
However, poor and uneducated does not mean genetically dumb. People with really low IQ's are far less likely to have kids. Comparing people with sub 60 IQ's with over 140 IQ's the smarter people have more kids.
Except instead of Ow my balls we have reality tv (though wipeout is pretty close to the former).
There are plenty of stupid things in the movie but that doesn't mean the social commentary isn't without insight.
There was some vague sci-fi mashed up with societal critique, but really this was a pretext to get Gun toting presidents, morons and scantily clad chics on screen with a fish-out-of-water present day man.
I have a problem with people saying that it has some sort of profound message. Yeah, it satirizes current-day stupidity pretty well (and I like that) but I do not think it makes any reasonable statements about humanity’s future.