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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33442 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Bonus: Not just education, the entire high-maintenance parenting paradigm is negative-sum insanity. Increases perceived and actual child costs to unsustainable levels, no benefits, a pain for the kids, just harms all participants.

The only education, present or hobby a child should expect from her parents is a library card, annually renewed, if she’s been good. Keep the children barefoot and you will keep the women pregnant.

I know it’s hard given our evolutionary history and they’re “sooooo cuuuuuuute”, but we need to flip that r/K switch, people.

If I recall correctly, additional parental investment above a very low baseline has no returns in terms of children's outcomes.

Helicopter parenting, ballet lessons, the best pre-K, all of those add up to pretty much zilch in terms of actual concrete benefits.

As long as you don't active fuck-up your children, via fetal alcohol syndrome, beatings or starvation, they'll turn out just fine, and the marginal returns from fussing over them are close to nil.

Actually IIRC early childhood education of any kind, even the best available, is a net negative compared to staying home with mom. Post-90’s UMC child rearing not only has no advantages over 50’s child rearing, it’s actively worse in many ways.

Brian Caplan describes it using academic terms:

'Parenting is a pass/fail exam'

I think it was Caplan who first familiarized the idea, but I wasn't aware he'd come up with such a pithy phrase! Thanks.

I am not so certain that school itself is the cause of our woes here.

I think even without school, if you take the type of demographic that attend them and put them in to some sort of a job, they will still

delay children until their late 20s early 30s just because the responsibility of having a child would detract from the benefits incurred from having disposable income to travel to world and consume things.

Seems unlikely it's inherent, because it wasn't always the case. The Grand Tour was only a year, right?

Wasn’t the grand tour male specific and occurring in a context where those men could still marry 19 year olds even if they were themselves in their late 20’s to 30’s by the time they were ready to settle down.

More importantly, I assume a Grand Tour was only available to those with means. At least, I assume so, because the concept of Grand Touring cars comes from that concept, and that term refers to pricey sports cars.

Yes, but I assumed "the type of demographic that attend them" referred to the Professional Managerial Class here.

Naw...in ages past it wasn't like well-to-do peasants or carpenters made good went on these. This was very much a 1%er thing if not top 0.1 or 0.01%. The modern equivalent is probably something like a year spent on a personally-owned yacht or something like that...it's for the blue bloods and the people with silver spoons in their mouths.

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