Having children is easy. Any idiot can do it; many of them do; some of them have dozen children.
Is it more beneficial for a society when smart people have children? Yes, it is… but good luck explaining why without saying something politically offensive.
Are people with better genes and higher IQ inherently more worthy? Nice try, Hitler! Do smart people provide better education and other support for their children? This should be solved by social engineering; we should provide better schools for everyone, maybe give everyone free books, etc.
If you are not allowed to specifically praise smart people (and only smart people!) for having more children, then having children cannot provide the same status for smart people as their careers can. A smart person in IT can proudly say they do something that 99% of people don’t understand. They even don’t have to say it; everyone already knows. A smart parent with well-mannered and educated smart children… is still perceived on the same level as an average parent with the same number of average children. You can do a better work, but most people won’t recognize it, so it will not give you status. There is no “best parent in the city” award you could show everyone; no official ladder to climb.
You cannot say “X is better at being a parent than Y” without saying “children of X are better than children of Y”. And the latter is very offensive. “My child is better than your child” is more offensive than “my understanding of quantum physics is better than your understanding of quantum physics”.
It seems like there’s an easy way around this problem. Praise people who are responsible and financially well-off for having more kids. These traits are correlated with good genes and IQ, so it’ll have the same effect.
It seems like we already do this to some extent. I hear others condemning people with who are irresponsible and low-income for having too many children fairly frequently. It’s just that we fail to extend this behavior in the other direction, to praising responsible people for having children.
I’m not sure why this is. It could be for one of the reasons listed in the OP. Or it could just be because the tendency to praise and the tendency to condemn are not correlated.
Having children is easy. Any idiot can do it; many of them do; some of them have dozen children.
Is it more beneficial for a society when smart people have children? Yes, it is… but good luck explaining why without saying something politically offensive.
Are people with better genes and higher IQ inherently more worthy? Nice try, Hitler! Do smart people provide better education and other support for their children? This should be solved by social engineering; we should provide better schools for everyone, maybe give everyone free books, etc.
If you are not allowed to specifically praise smart people (and only smart people!) for having more children, then having children cannot provide the same status for smart people as their careers can. A smart person in IT can proudly say they do something that 99% of people don’t understand. They even don’t have to say it; everyone already knows. A smart parent with well-mannered and educated smart children… is still perceived on the same level as an average parent with the same number of average children. You can do a better work, but most people won’t recognize it, so it will not give you status. There is no “best parent in the city” award you could show everyone; no official ladder to climb.
You cannot say “X is better at being a parent than Y” without saying “children of X are better than children of Y”. And the latter is very offensive. “My child is better than your child” is more offensive than “my understanding of quantum physics is better than your understanding of quantum physics”.
It seems like there’s an easy way around this problem. Praise people who are responsible and financially well-off for having more kids. These traits are correlated with good genes and IQ, so it’ll have the same effect.
It seems like we already do this to some extent. I hear others condemning people with who are irresponsible and low-income for having too many children fairly frequently. It’s just that we fail to extend this behavior in the other direction, to praising responsible people for having children.
I’m not sure why this is. It could be for one of the reasons listed in the OP. Or it could just be because the tendency to praise and the tendency to condemn are not correlated.