[smt88]

Children per couple goes down as quality of life goes up. All developed countries see birthrates decrease. No one is actively discouraging smart people from reproducing -- they're just better off and don't need children as a safety net for retirement, and they can access good birth control.

The idea that smart people are only produced by other smart people is nonsense. Genes regress to the mean, so most smart people won't have mostly smart children. And intelligence is significantly affected by nurture, not just nature.

And beyond all that, smart people aren't the end-all, be-all of humanity. They make useful things, but are of course capable of great evil (or mental illness or any other issue that limits their contribution to society).

[danieltillett]

Yes nobody is activily discouraging smart people directly from having children (this is why it natural and not artificial selection), but it is still selection.

Where did I say smart people having children is the only way to create smart people or that intelligence is only affected by genes? Please read what I actually wrote, not what you think I wrote.

Smart people are the people that have the ability to solve the hard problems we face. We have a huge number of very hard problems in the world and not enough smart people to solve them all. We need more smart people.

[smt88]

You didn't say it was the only way. You said:

> "The best way we know to create more smart people is to encourage smart people to have more children"

...which is also unsupported by current intelligence research and still relevant to my counterargument.

[danieltillett]

Actually we know that intelligence is mostly genetic (especially at the high end), but even if it isn’t, the family environment provided by (most) intelligent parents is very conducive to raising intelligent children.

It doesn’t matter the means (environment or genetic) as both will contribute to smart parents raising smart children (provided they have children).

[smt88]

Socioeconomic status is far, far more important than genes[1]. If you want more smart people, give people more money.

1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/under-the-influence/...

[danieltillett]

That is not what the article says, nor what the science on this topic says either [0]. Read the section on Heritability and socioeconomic status.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

[fjsolwmv]

Of you give dumb people more money, they will get swindled by smart people.

[tcbawo]

I don't know if we need more smart parents or rather caring/nurturing families. You don't have to be smart, but children of dysfunctional families are at a disadvantage for breaking the cycle.

[danieltillett]

Well we certainly need fewer dysfunctional families, but if we want more smart people we need to encourage more smart people to become parents.

[SamReidHughes]

> The idea that smart people are only produced by other smart people is nonsense.

Don't be ridiculous. If dumb people have more kids than smart people, the next generation will be dumber. Intelligence wouldn't have evolved if this wasn't true.