A bunch of my friends are very skeptical of the schooling system and promote homeschooling or unschooling as an alternative. I see where they’re coming from, but I worry about the reproductive consequences of stigmatising schooling in favour of those two alternatives. Based on informal conversations, the main reason why people I know aren’t planning on having more children is the time cost. A move towards normative home/unschooling would increase the time cost of children, and as such make them less appealing to prospective parents[*]. This in turn would reduce birth rates, worsening the problem that first-world countries face in the next couple of decades of a low working-age:elderly population ratio [EDIT: also, low population leading to less innovation, also low population leading to fewer people existing who get to enjoy life]. As such, I tentatively wish that home/unschooling advocates would focus on more institutional ways of supervising children, e.g. Sudbury schools, community childcare, child labour [EDIT: or a greater emphasis on not supervising children who don’t need supervision, or similar things].
[*] This is the weakest part of my argument—it’s possible that more people home/unschooling their kids would result in cooler kids that were more fun to be around, and this effect would offset the extra time cost (or kids who are more willing to support their elderly parents, perhaps). But given how lucrative the first world labour market is, I doubt it.
A bunch of my friends are very skeptical of the schooling system and promote homeschooling or unschooling as an alternative. I see where they’re coming from, but I worry about the reproductive consequences of stigmatising schooling in favour of those two alternatives.
While I agree that a world where home/un-schooling is a norm would result in greater time-costs and a lower child-rate, I don’t think that promoting home/un-schooling as an alternative will result in a world where home/un-schooling is normative. Because of this, I don’t think that promoting home/un-schooling as an alternative to the system carries any particularly broad risks.
Here’s my reasoning:
I expect the associated stigmas and pressures for having kids to always dwarf the associated stigmas and pressures against having kids if they are not home/un-schooled. Having kids is an extremely strong norm both because of the underpinning evolutionary psychology and because a lot of life-style patterns after thirty are culturally centered around people who have kids.
Despite its faults, public school does the job pretty well for most of people. This applies to the extent that the opportunity cost of home/un-schooling instead of building familial wealth probably outweighs the benefits for most people. Thus, I don’t believe that the promoting of home/un-schooling is scaleable to everyone.
Lots of rich people who have the capacity to home/un-school who dislike the school system decide not to do that. Instead they (roughly speaking) coordinate towards expensive private schools outside the public system. I doubt that this has caused a significant number of people to avoid having children for fear of not sending them to a fancy boading school.
Even if the school system gets sufficiently stigmatised, I actually expect that the incentives will naturally align around institutional schooling outside the system for most children. Comparative advantages exist and local communities will exploit them.
Home/un-schooling often already involves institutional aspects. Explicitly, home/un-schooled kids would ideally have outlets for peer-to-peer interactions during the school-day and these are often satisfied through community coordination
I grant that maybe increased popularity of home/un-schooling could reduce reproduction rate by an extremely minor amount on the margin. But I don’t think that amount is anywhere near even the size of, say, the way that people who claim they don’t want to have kids because global warming will reproduce less on the margin.
And as someone who got screwed by the school system, I really wish that when I asked my parents about home/un-schooling, there was some broader social movement that would incentivize them to actually listen.
I expect the associated stigmas and pressures for having kids to always dwarf the associated stigmas and pressures against having kids if they are not home/un-schooled.
Developed countries already have below-replacement fertility (according to this NPR article, the CDC claims that the US has been in this state since 1971), so apparently you can have pressures that outweigh pressures to have children. In general I don’t understand why you don’t think that a marginal increase in the pressure to invest in each kid won’t result in marginally fewer kids.
Despite its faults, public school does the job pretty well for most of people.
Presumably this is not true in a world where many people believe that schools are basically like prisons for children, which is a sentiment that I do see and seems more memetically fit than “homeschooling works for some families but not others”.
Lots of rich people who have the capacity to home/un-school who dislike the school system decide not to do that. Instead they (roughly speaking) coordinate towards expensive private schools outside the public system.
My impression was that rich people often dislike the public school system, but are basically fine with schools in general?
I doubt that this has caused a significant number of people to avoid having children for fear of not sending them to a fancy boading school.
Even if the school system gets sufficiently stigmatised, I actually expect that the incentives will naturally align around institutional schooling outside the system for most children. Comparative advantages exist and local communities will exploit them.
This seems right to me barring strong normative home/unschooling, and I wish that this were a more promoted alternative (as my post mentions!).
And as someone who got screwed by the school system, I really wish that when I asked my parents about home/un-schooling, there was some broader social movement that would incentivize them to actually listen.
Yep—you’ll notice that my post doesn’t deny the manifold benefits of the home/unschooling movement, and I think the average unschooling advocate is basically right about how bad typical schools are.
Developed countries already have below-replacement fertility (according to this NPR article, the CDC claims that the US has been in this state since 1971), so apparently you can have pressures that outweigh pressures to have children.
I think the crux of our perspective difference is that we model the decrease in reproduction differently. I tend to view poor people and developing countries having higher reproduction rates as a consequence of less economic slack. That is to say, people who are poorer have more kids because those kids are decent long-term investments overall (ie old-age support, help-around-the-house). In contrast, wealthy people can make way more money by doing things that don’t involve kids.
This can be interpreted in two ways:
Wealthier people see children as higher cost and elect not to have children because of the costs
or
Wealthier people are not under as much economic pressure so have fewer children because they can afford to get away with it
At the margin, both of these things are going on at the same time. Still, I attribute falling birthrates as mostly due to the latter rather than the former. So I don’t quite buy the claim that falling birth-rates have been dramatically influenced by greater pressures.
Of course, Wei Dai indicates that parental investment definitely has an effect so maybe my attribution isn’t accurate. I’d be pretty interested in seeing some studies/data trying to connect falling birthrates to the cultural demands around raising children.
...
Also, my understanding of the pressures re:homeschooling is something like this:
The social stigma against having kids is satisficing. Having one kid (below replacement level) hurts you dramatically less than having zero kids
The capacity to home-school is roughly all-or-nothing. Home-schooling one kid immediately scales to home-schooling all your kids.
I doubt the stigma for schooling would punish a parent who sends two kids to school more than a parent who sends one kid to school
This means that, for a given family, you essentially chose between having kids and home-schooling all of them (expected-cause of home-schooling doesn’t scale with number of children) or having no kids (maximum social penalty). Electing for “no kids” seems like a really undesirable trade-off for most people.
There are other negative effects but they’re more indirect. This leads me to believe that, compared to other pressures against having kids, stigmas against home-schooling will have an unusually low marginal effect.
Presumably this is not true in a world where many people believe that schools are basically like prisons for children, which is a sentiment that I do see and seems more memetically fit than “homeschooling works for some families but not others”.
Interesting—my bubble doesn’t really have a “schools are like prisons” group. In any case, I agree that this is a terrible meme. To be fair though, a lot of schools do look like prisons. But this definitely shouldn’t be solved by home-schooling; it should be solved by making schools that don’t look like prisons.
I tend to view poor people and developing countries having higher reproduction rates as a consequence of less economic slack. That is to say, people who are poorer have more kids because those kids are decent long-term investments overall (ie old-age support, help-around-the-house). In contrast, wealthy people can make way more money by doing things that don’t involve kids.
Kids will grow up and move away no matter if you’re rich or poor though, so I’m not sure the investment explanation makes sense. But your last sentence rings true to me. If someone cares more about career than family, they will always have “no time” for a family. I’ve heard it from well-paid professionals many times: “I’d like to have kids… eventually...”
I think you’re overstating the stigma against not having kids. I Googled “is there stigma around not having kids” and the top two US-based articles both say something similar:
Society telling women they must have children is also on the decline, according to Laura S. Scott, author of “Two is Enough” and director of the Childless By Choice Project. She said American women used to face social isolation from friends and neighbors with children, but, for many, that stigma has dissipated with celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Aniston and Helen Mirren explaining their choice not to become mothers.
I think you’re overstating the stigma against not having kids. I Googled “is there stigma around not having kids” and the top two US-based articles both say something similar:
Agreed. Per my latest reply to DanielFilan:
However, I’ve actually been overstating my case here. The childfree rate in the US is currently around 15%which is much larger than I expected. The childfree rate for women with above a bachelor’s degree is 25%. In absolute terms, these are not small numbers and I’ve gotta admit that this indicates a pretty high population density at the margin.
I massively underestimated the rate of childfree-ness and, broadly speaking, I’m in agreement with Daniel now.
[next quote is reformatted so that I can make it a quote]
This can be interpreted in two ways: wealthier people see children as higher cost and elect not to have children because of the costs; or wealthier people are not under as much economic pressure so have fewer children because they can afford to get away with it. At the margin, both of these things are going on at the same time.
Glad to see we agree—and again, the important point for my argument isn’t whether most of existing low fertility can be attributed to the existing cost of kids, but whether adding extra cost per kid will reduce the number of kids (as the law of demand predicts).
The capacity to home-school is roughly all-or-nothing. Home-schooling one kid immediately scales to home-schooling all your kids.
I’m sure this can’t be exactly right, but I do think that the low marginal cost of home-schooling was something I was missing.
This means that, for a given family, you essentially chose between having kids and home-schooling all of them (expected-cause of home-schooling doesn’t scale with number of children) or having no kids (maximum social penalty). Electing for “no kids” seems like a really undesirable trade-off for most people.
I continue to think that you aren’t thinking on the margin, or making some related error (perhaps in understanding what I’m saying). Electing for no kids isn’t going to become more costly, so if you make having kids more costly, then you’ll get fewer of them than you otherwise would, as the people who were just leaning towards having kids (due to idiosyncratically low desire to have kids/high cost to have kids) start to lean away from the plan.
This leads me to believe that, compared to other pressures against having kids, stigmas against home-schooling will have an unusually low marginal effect.
(I assume you meant pressure in favour of home-schooling?) Please note that I never said it had a high effect relative to other things: merely that the effect existed and was large and negative enough to make it worthwhile for homeschooling advocates to change course.
I continue to think that you aren’t thinking on the margin, or making some related error (perhaps in understanding what I’m saying). Electing for no kids isn’t going to become more costly, so if you make having kids more costly, then you’ll get fewer of them than you otherwise would, as the people who were just leaning towards having kids (due to idiosyncratically low desire to have kids/high cost to have kids) start to lean away from the plan.
Yeah, I was thinking in broad strokes there. I agree that there is a margin at which point people switch from choosing to have kids to choosing not to have kids and that moving that margin to a place where having kids is less net-positive will cause some people to choose to have fewer kids.
My point was that the people on the margin are not people who will typically say”well we were going to have two kids but now we’re only going to have one because home-schooling”; they’re people who will typically say “we’re on the fence about having kids at all.” Whereas most marginal effects relating to having kids (ie the cost of college) pertain to the former group, the bulk of marginal effects on reproduction pertaining to schooling stigmas pertain to the latter group.
Both the margin and the population density at the margin matter in terms of determining the effect. What I’m saying is that the population density at the margin relevant to schooling-stigmas is notably small.
However, I’ve actually been overstating my case here. The childfree rate in the US is currently around 15% which is much larger than I expected. The childfree rate for women with above a bachelor’s degree is 25%. In absolute terms, these are not small numbers and I’ve gotta admit that this indicates a pretty high population density at the margin.
(I assume you meant pressure in favour of home-schooling?) Please note that I never said it had a high effect relative to other things: merely that the effect existed and was large and negative enough to make it worthwhile for homeschooling advocates to change course.
Per the above stats, I’ve updated to agree with this claim.
The trend in China of extreme parental investment (lots of extra classes starting from a young age, forcing one’s kid to practice hours of musical instrument each week, paying huge opportunity costs to obtain a 学区房) almost certainly contributes significantly to its current low birth rate. I think normative home/unschooling has the potential to have a similar influence elsewhere.
But have you thought about whether lower birth rate is good or bad from a longtermist / x-risk perspective? It’s not clear to me that it’s bad, at least.
But have you thought about whether lower birth rate is good or bad from a longtermist / x-risk perspective? It’s not clear to me that it’s bad, at least.
I haven’t thought incredibly carefully about this. My guess is that a high birth rate accelerates basically everything but elderly care, and so the first-order question is whether you think humanity is pushing in roughly the right or wrong direction—I’d say it’s going in the right direction. That being said, there’s also a trickier factor of whether you’d rather have all your cognition be in serial or in parallel, and if you want it to be in serial, then low birth rates look good.
A couple of considerations in the “lower birth rate is good for longtermism” direction:
Lower birth rate makes war less likely. (Less perceived need to grab other people’s resources. Parents are loathe to lose their only children in war.)
Increased parental investment and inheritance which shifts up average per-capita human and non-human capital, which is probably helpful for increasing understanding of x-risk and ability/opportunity to work on it. (Although this depends on the details of how the parental investment is done, since some kinds, e.g., helicopter parenting, can be counterproductive. Home/unschooling seems likely to be good in this regard though.)
One factor here that is big in my mind: I expect per-capita wealth to be lower in worlds with lower populations, since fewer people means fewer ideas that enrich everyone. I think that this makes 2 go in the opposite direction, but it’s not obvious to me what it does for 1.
It’s not clear that positive-sum innovation is linear (or even monotonically positive) with total population. There almost certainly exist levels at which marginal mouths to feed drive unpleasant and non-productive behaviors more than they do the growth-driving shared innovations.
Whether we’re in a downward-sloping portion of the curve, and whether it slopes up again in the next few generations, are both debatable. And they should be debated.
My sense is that on average, more population means more growth (see this study on the question). But certainly at some point probably you run out of ideas for how to make material more valuable and growth just becomes making more people with the same consumption per capita.
Whether we’re in a downward-sloping portion of the curve, and whether it slopes up again in the next few generations, are both debatable. And they should be debated.
I find this comment kind of irksome, because (a) neither I nor anybody else said that they weren’t proper subjects for debate and (b) you’ve exhorted debate on the topic but haven’t contributed anything other than the theoretical possibility that the effect could go the other way. So I see this as trying to advance some kind of point illegitimately. If you make another such comment that I find irksome in the same way, I’ll delete it, as per my commenting guidelines.
I now think the biggest flaw with this argument is that home/unschooling actually don’t take that many hours out of the day, and there’s a lot of pooling of work going on. Thanks to many FB commenters and Isnasene for pointing that out.
And also that anti-standard-school memes are less fit than pro-home/unschooling memes, such that “normative home/unschooling” doesn’t seem that likely to be a big thing.
A bunch of my friends are very skeptical of the schooling system and promote homeschooling or unschooling as an alternative.
As such, I tentatively wish that home/unschooling advocates would focus on more institutional ways of supervising children, e.g. Sudbury schools, community childcare, child labour.
So you’re a proponent of improving institutional ways of supervising children?
So you’re a proponent of improving institutional ways of supervising children?
Tentatively, yes. But I’ve only just had this thought today, so I’m not very committed to it. Also note my edit: it’s more about being in favour of low-time-investment ways to raise children that don’t have the problems schooling is alleged to have.
A bunch of my friends are very skeptical of the schooling system and promote homeschooling or unschooling as an alternative. I see where they’re coming from, but I worry about the reproductive consequences of stigmatising schooling in favour of those two alternatives. Based on informal conversations, the main reason why people I know aren’t planning on having more children is the time cost. A move towards normative home/unschooling would increase the time cost of children, and as such make them less appealing to prospective parents[*]. This in turn would reduce birth rates, worsening the problem that first-world countries face in the next couple of decades of a low working-age:elderly population ratio [EDIT: also, low population leading to less innovation, also low population leading to fewer people existing who get to enjoy life]. As such, I tentatively wish that home/unschooling advocates would focus on more institutional ways of supervising children, e.g. Sudbury schools, community childcare, child labour [EDIT: or a greater emphasis on not supervising children who don’t need supervision, or similar things].
[*] This is the weakest part of my argument—it’s possible that more people home/unschooling their kids would result in cooler kids that were more fun to be around, and this effect would offset the extra time cost (or kids who are more willing to support their elderly parents, perhaps). But given how lucrative the first world labour market is, I doubt it.
While I agree that a world where home/un-schooling is a norm would result in greater time-costs and a lower child-rate, I don’t think that promoting home/un-schooling as an alternative will result in a world where home/un-schooling is normative. Because of this, I don’t think that promoting home/un-schooling as an alternative to the system carries any particularly broad risks.
Here’s my reasoning:
I expect the associated stigmas and pressures for having kids to always dwarf the associated stigmas and pressures against having kids if they are not home/un-schooled. Having kids is an extremely strong norm both because of the underpinning evolutionary psychology and because a lot of life-style patterns after thirty are culturally centered around people who have kids.
Despite its faults, public school does the job pretty well for most of people. This applies to the extent that the opportunity cost of home/un-schooling instead of building familial wealth probably outweighs the benefits for most people. Thus, I don’t believe that the promoting of home/un-schooling is scaleable to everyone.
Lots of rich people who have the capacity to home/un-school who dislike the school system decide not to do that. Instead they (roughly speaking) coordinate towards expensive private schools outside the public system. I doubt that this has caused a significant number of people to avoid having children for fear of not sending them to a fancy boading school.
Even if the school system gets sufficiently stigmatised, I actually expect that the incentives will naturally align around institutional schooling outside the system for most children. Comparative advantages exist and local communities will exploit them.
Home/un-schooling often already involves institutional aspects. Explicitly, home/un-schooled kids would ideally have outlets for peer-to-peer interactions during the school-day and these are often satisfied through community coordination
I grant that maybe increased popularity of home/un-schooling could reduce reproduction rate by an extremely minor amount on the margin. But I don’t think that amount is anywhere near even the size of, say, the way that people who claim they don’t want to have kids because global warming will reproduce less on the margin.
And as someone who got screwed by the school system, I really wish that when I asked my parents about home/un-schooling, there was some broader social movement that would incentivize them to actually listen.
Developed countries already have below-replacement fertility (according to this NPR article, the CDC claims that the US has been in this state since 1971), so apparently you can have pressures that outweigh pressures to have children. In general I don’t understand why you don’t think that a marginal increase in the pressure to invest in each kid won’t result in marginally fewer kids.
Presumably this is not true in a world where many people believe that schools are basically like prisons for children, which is a sentiment that I do see and seems more memetically fit than “homeschooling works for some families but not others”.
My impression was that rich people often dislike the public school system, but are basically fine with schools in general?
Rich people have fewer kids than poor people and it doesn’t seem strange to me to imagine that that’s partly due to the fact that each child comes at higher expected cost.
This seems right to me barring strong normative home/unschooling, and I wish that this were a more promoted alternative (as my post mentions!).
Yep—you’ll notice that my post doesn’t deny the manifold benefits of the home/unschooling movement, and I think the average unschooling advocate is basically right about how bad typical schools are.
I think the crux of our perspective difference is that we model the decrease in reproduction differently. I tend to view poor people and developing countries having higher reproduction rates as a consequence of less economic slack. That is to say, people who are poorer have more kids because those kids are decent long-term investments overall (ie old-age support, help-around-the-house). In contrast, wealthy people can make way more money by doing things that don’t involve kids.
This can be interpreted in two ways:
Wealthier people see children as higher cost and elect not to have children because of the costs
or
Wealthier people are not under as much economic pressure so have fewer children because they can afford to get away with it
At the margin, both of these things are going on at the same time. Still, I attribute falling birthrates as mostly due to the latter rather than the former. So I don’t quite buy the claim that falling birth-rates have been dramatically influenced by greater pressures.
Of course, Wei Dai indicates that parental investment definitely has an effect so maybe my attribution isn’t accurate. I’d be pretty interested in seeing some studies/data trying to connect falling birthrates to the cultural demands around raising children.
...
Also, my understanding of the pressures re:homeschooling is something like this:
The social stigma against having kids is satisficing. Having one kid (below replacement level) hurts you dramatically less than having zero kids
The capacity to home-school is roughly all-or-nothing. Home-schooling one kid immediately scales to home-schooling all your kids.
I doubt the stigma for schooling would punish a parent who sends two kids to school more than a parent who sends one kid to school
This means that, for a given family, you essentially chose between having kids and home-schooling all of them (expected-cause of home-schooling doesn’t scale with number of children) or having no kids (maximum social penalty). Electing for “no kids” seems like a really undesirable trade-off for most people.
There are other negative effects but they’re more indirect. This leads me to believe that, compared to other pressures against having kids, stigmas against home-schooling will have an unusually low marginal effect.
Interesting—my bubble doesn’t really have a “schools are like prisons” group. In any case, I agree that this is a terrible meme. To be fair though, a lot of schools do look like prisons. But this definitely shouldn’t be solved by home-schooling; it should be solved by making schools that don’t look like prisons.
Kids will grow up and move away no matter if you’re rich or poor though, so I’m not sure the investment explanation makes sense. But your last sentence rings true to me. If someone cares more about career than family, they will always have “no time” for a family. I’ve heard it from well-paid professionals many times: “I’d like to have kids… eventually...”
I think you’re overstating the stigma against not having kids. I Googled “is there stigma around not having kids” and the top two US-based articles both say something similar:
USA Today:
Times:
Agreed. Per my latest reply to DanielFilan:
I massively underestimated the rate of childfree-ness and, broadly speaking, I’m in agreement with Daniel now.
[next quote is reformatted so that I can make it a quote]
Glad to see we agree—and again, the important point for my argument isn’t whether most of existing low fertility can be attributed to the existing cost of kids, but whether adding extra cost per kid will reduce the number of kids (as the law of demand predicts).
I’m sure this can’t be exactly right, but I do think that the low marginal cost of home-schooling was something I was missing.
I continue to think that you aren’t thinking on the margin, or making some related error (perhaps in understanding what I’m saying). Electing for no kids isn’t going to become more costly, so if you make having kids more costly, then you’ll get fewer of them than you otherwise would, as the people who were just leaning towards having kids (due to idiosyncratically low desire to have kids/high cost to have kids) start to lean away from the plan.
(I assume you meant pressure in favour of home-schooling?) Please note that I never said it had a high effect relative to other things: merely that the effect existed and was large and negative enough to make it worthwhile for homeschooling advocates to change course.
Yeah, I was thinking in broad strokes there. I agree that there is a margin at which point people switch from choosing to have kids to choosing not to have kids and that moving that margin to a place where having kids is less net-positive will cause some people to choose to have fewer kids.
My point was that the people on the margin are not people who will typically say”well we were going to have two kids but now we’re only going to have one because home-schooling”; they’re people who will typically say “we’re on the fence about having kids at all.” Whereas most marginal effects relating to having kids (ie the cost of college) pertain to the former group, the bulk of marginal effects on reproduction pertaining to schooling stigmas pertain to the latter group.
Both the margin and the population density at the margin matter in terms of determining the effect. What I’m saying is that the population density at the margin relevant to schooling-stigmas is notably small.
However, I’ve actually been overstating my case here. The childfree rate in the US is currently around 15% which is much larger than I expected. The childfree rate for women with above a bachelor’s degree is 25%. In absolute terms, these are not small numbers and I’ve gotta admit that this indicates a pretty high population density at the margin.
Per the above stats, I’ve updated to agree with this claim.
The trend in China of extreme parental investment (lots of extra classes starting from a young age, forcing one’s kid to practice hours of musical instrument each week, paying huge opportunity costs to obtain a 学区房) almost certainly contributes significantly to its current low birth rate. I think normative home/unschooling has the potential to have a similar influence elsewhere.
But have you thought about whether lower birth rate is good or bad from a longtermist / x-risk perspective? It’s not clear to me that it’s bad, at least.
I haven’t thought incredibly carefully about this. My guess is that a high birth rate accelerates basically everything but elderly care, and so the first-order question is whether you think humanity is pushing in roughly the right or wrong direction—I’d say it’s going in the right direction. That being said, there’s also a trickier factor of whether you’d rather have all your cognition be in serial or in parallel, and if you want it to be in serial, then low birth rates look good.
A couple of considerations in the “lower birth rate is good for longtermism” direction:
Lower birth rate makes war less likely. (Less perceived need to grab other people’s resources. Parents are loathe to lose their only children in war.)
Increased parental investment and inheritance which shifts up average per-capita human and non-human capital, which is probably helpful for increasing understanding of x-risk and ability/opportunity to work on it. (Although this depends on the details of how the parental investment is done, since some kinds, e.g., helicopter parenting, can be counterproductive. Home/unschooling seems likely to be good in this regard though.)
One factor here that is big in my mind: I expect per-capita wealth to be lower in worlds with lower populations, since fewer people means fewer ideas that enrich everyone. I think that this makes 2 go in the opposite direction, but it’s not obvious to me what it does for 1.
It’s not clear that positive-sum innovation is linear (or even monotonically positive) with total population. There almost certainly exist levels at which marginal mouths to feed drive unpleasant and non-productive behaviors more than they do the growth-driving shared innovations.
Whether we’re in a downward-sloping portion of the curve, and whether it slopes up again in the next few generations, are both debatable. And they should be debated.
My sense is that on average, more population means more growth (see this study on the question). But certainly at some point probably you run out of ideas for how to make material more valuable and growth just becomes making more people with the same consumption per capita.
I find this comment kind of irksome, because (a) neither I nor anybody else said that they weren’t proper subjects for debate and (b) you’ve exhorted debate on the topic but haven’t contributed anything other than the theoretical possibility that the effect could go the other way. So I see this as trying to advance some kind of point illegitimately. If you make another such comment that I find irksome in the same way, I’ll delete it, as per my commenting guidelines.
I now think the biggest flaw with this argument is that home/unschooling actually don’t take that many hours out of the day, and there’s a lot of pooling of work going on. Thanks to many FB commenters and Isnasene for pointing that out.
And also that anti-standard-school memes are less fit than pro-home/unschooling memes, such that “normative home/unschooling” doesn’t seem that likely to be a big thing.
So you’re a proponent of improving institutional ways of supervising children?
Tentatively, yes. But I’ve only just had this thought today, so I’m not very committed to it. Also note my edit: it’s more about being in favour of low-time-investment ways to raise children that don’t have the problems schooling is alleged to have.