Relevant only by virtue of also being about historical children’s drawings, but it reminds of another example of a child’s drawings preserved for us to see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim
> … Onfim, was a boy who lived in Novgorod (now Veliky Novgorod, Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark, which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod.
I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial or surprising, but it’s easy to forget that people who came long before us were really no different from us (or put differently, were no different than them), and it helps to better understand history if you think of them that way.
Hi Ben! I'll email you a repost invite for the Onfim article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705174) - if you wait a week or so and then use it, the repost will go in the second-chance pool.
The reason for waiting is to give the hivemind cache time to clear. Normally we'd re-up the existing post, but we don't want two overly similar threads on the frontpage within a short time period.
> I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us.
I find this viewpoint surprisingly underutilized in institutional history and archeology sometimes. I occasionally watch documentaries with distinguished talking heads on e.g. egyptology and what not, and they often bend over backwards to find complicated explanations that defy all "this is just not how humans or human organizations operate" logic. For example, analyzing an impressive building and then assuming that the same people capable of constructing it also made a basic mistake or in other ways assuming they were daft. Or requiring a complex lore/spiritual explanation for something that can be equally explained by classic big org fuckups.
The formal name for this kind of argument is "ethnographic analogy". It's widespread in archaeology and institutional history, but doesn't always show up so overtly because
1. It's not very interesting to say "they're just like us" and
2. "like us" is a huge statement hiding a lot of assumptions.
Analogy is also considered a fairly weak argument on its own. There are vanishingly few accepted "cultural universals" despite decades of argument on the subject (which I'll let the wiki article [0] summarize), so justifying them usually follows an argument like "X is related/similar to Y, and X has behavior Z, so Y's behavior is an evolution of Z". That's fine if you're talking Roman->Byzantines, maybe, but it's a bit of a stretch when your analogy is "modern US->Old Kingdom Egypt". It's also very, very easy to get wrong and make a bad analogies. Take basically the entire first couple centuries of American anthropology as an example.
For a long time, I also somehow thought that people from earlier eras were less intelligent—simply because, in retrospect, all those obvious mistakes are so apparent. It took considerable mental effort for me to accept that people back then were probably just like us today, only living under different circumstances.
Intelligence vs education. On average, most humans have about the same baseline intelligence. Obviously some have more and some have less, but that's an inherent quality of our species, and the baseline is really only moved by evolution.
It can be hard to square the fact that intelligence and education are totally unrelated to each other. Ancient humans certainly knew less than we do now, but they were more or less just as intelligent as modern humans.
We can see from archaeology that ancient humans had language, sophisticated religions, and complex and vast societies. That's not something you can really accomplish with a significantly different baseline intelligence.
We know a lot more now and have a much more complicated global society, but mainly because we have machines to do a lot of the thinking and management for us. We're still just as intelligent as we always were, we just have tools to multiply our efforts now.
Humans today really are smarter, i.e., better at abstract reasoning--see the Flynn effect. That's partly due to better nutrition and lower disease load, but also due to modern education and lifestyles, which force people to learn to reason abstractly from an early age.
This is the nub of it - we're better at one very particular thing. I think I'm gonna get crucified if I really go into arguing against abstract reasoning as the baseline for understanding the world on this site, but without trying to defend that particular assertion I'd just make a note to say that what IQ tests are testing is a very specific type of thinking and not actually generalized intelligence, which is a very broad topic.
So, this isn't my area of expertise, but - I score very high on abstract reasoning tests, and I've been lucky enough to be around a bunch of people who are adept at things that at best require a whole lot more effort on my part to grok. I've got friends who can pick up a new language in a matter of months. I've got friends who can hear a song, know what keys it's in, improvise to it, extend it, and build complementary riffs to it on almost anything that makes a sound with more than one tone. I've got friends who can go into a room of children and have them all quiet and paying rapt attention in minutes. I've got friends who could sell an anchor to a drowning man, or have a dude in full biker gear and tattoos discussing their relationship with their mother and their childhood home. I've got friends who can read a book a day and tell you anything you ask about any of them and how they relate to each other. I've got friends who are almost telepathic in their ability to read and react to animals. I've got friends whose kinesthetic sense, ability to move their bodies, and ability to learn new physical movements is almost uncanny. I've got friends who can create absolutely stunning works of art that capture a feeling or a moment without any concrete imagery.
I am, and I say this without ego, a very smart person, and there are situations I absolutely excel - I can synthesize new information very quickly, I can draw correlations and relationships and principles from sparse data, I recognize patterns and build and dissect systems easily. Abstract reasoning is my wheelhouse, but I cannot do the things my friends can do with the ease they do them - I can get there eventually, in the same way that they can get to where I am eventually, but the things they do very clearly require a different type of intelligence than my variety.
The Flynn effect is about the change in measured intelligence through the 20th century. It tells us precisely nothing about the difference in intelligence between the 13th century and today, let alone going back before the Bronze Age Collapse or agriculture.
A large part of the Flynn effect may be due to reductions in environmental pollutants, which would mean it would be a reversal of the effect of the industrial revolution. Or it may have been due to people being much more used to taking tests. Or it may be due to nutrition. It is unlikely to be due to modern education forcing people to "learn to reason abstractly from an early age" because schools don't require students to learn to reason abstractly from an early age.
I think this is compounded by the correlation of beliefs between modern cranks who reject their education and believe what science now knows to be absurdities like "the Earth is flat" or "carrying this crystal pendant will please the gods and protect you from getting sick" with smart ancient people who believed the Earth is flat or crystal pendants will please the gods and prevent you from getting sick.
Yes, perhaps both Homer (the author of the world-famous literary classic the Iliad and the Odyssey) and a hypothetical modern Homer (d'oh!) believed in a flat Earth. The modern Homer failed to understand or rejected the education he was offered, while a hypothetical modern observer, who feels more intelligent than the flat-earther, understood and accepted it. But that does not mean that the ancient Homer was of similar intelligence!
The difference between us and them is the accumulated knowledge. You and I had no better an idea of what a volcano is than an anyone from thousands of years ago until someone told us.
I think of certain types of knowledge as one way functions. In order to acquire the knowledge you have to search a huge key space or experience costly elimination of options. Once you know the answer it feels obvious and intuitive. We have accumulated so much of this knowledge now that we have a hard time intuitively understanding the gap between people without it and us.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he considered the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception." ... Douglas believed that it was the third policy alternative [the object of the industrial system is merely to provide goods and services] upon which an economic system should be based, but confusion of thought has allowed the industrial system to be governed by the first two objectives [to impose upon the world a system of thought and action and to create employment]. If the purpose of our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of effort, then the ability to deliver goods and services with the least amount of employment is actually desirable. Douglas proposed that unemployment is a logical consequence of machines replacing labour in the productive process, and any attempt to reverse this process through policies designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our cultural inheritance. Douglas also believed that the people displaced from the industrial system through the process of mechanization should still have the ability to consume the fruits of the system, because he suggested that we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance, and his proposal for a national dividend is directly related to this belief."
Thank you for this; surprised I haven't heard much about him prior, since I've been digging into political economy lately.
Specifically, his notes on consumption / full employment are refreshing - it never sits right with me that the goal of economic policy at a high level is so often at odds with doing things in a "smart" way (measuring projects in jobs created, for example).
It's like the theory of "they must have been slaves driven to work by their nobles!" When I believe it turned out they were just blue-collar Ancient Egyptian workers with families and paychecks who thought they'd be doing a good thing by honoring the Pharoah.
Although the laborers working on pyramids and tombs were initially mostly corvee labor, they did evolve into a more specialized and privileged class of artisans over the (very long) course of Egyptian history. The first recorded labor strike in history occurred in a village of such artisans over lack of pay.
Someone I knew once questioned, after seeing it in person, how ancient Egyptian and Inca builders could have fit stones so well together and polished them so smoothly without advanced technology. I essentially said to him, “If I gave you two rocks and three weeks of nothing else to do, you’d have the faces of those rocks even smoother than those others”.
My favorite part of wikipedia's article on Onfim is this absurdly understated sentence:
> One of the drawings features a knight on a horse, with Onfim's name written next to him, stabbing someone on the ground with a lance, with scholars speculating that Onfim pictured himself as the knight.
I guess we'll never truly be able to know what Onfim was thinking when he drew a knight named "Onfim" stabbing an enemy with a lance from horseback. The past is a foreign country, and the mind of a child can't be understood anyway.
The article suggests it's his teacher, and I'm inclined to believe this. Pretty consistent with the idea of a kid who doesn't want to do homework, and scorns the source of all homework (the teacher)
It's amazing to think about. I'm sure you could take one of more ancient human babies, teleport them to the present day, and they would be able to grow up like any other kid. It's remarkable. Part of our human-ness is our robust written and oral histories.
On the flip side, in the year 1200 the average person would likely not have considered the people living 800 years before them to be all that different from them (unlike many of us today).
Perhaps that's a way in which we're less educated than those who came before us
Some people living in the 13th-14th century in Europe considered the people who lived prior to the fall of the Roman Empire to be more civilised and advanced, if not actually more intelligent than they were. From their perspective the world had gone through a a dark age of ignorance and sin, and was only starting to recover.
It wasn't until much later, in the 15th and 16th century onwards, that people began to think that they were more advanced and accomplished than the ancient Greeks and Romans.
We have some pretty interesting family records, and if I look back 200 and 500 (and sometimes longer..) years ago, the information we have about family members feels remarkably current. There were divorces, economic and political challenges, times of prosperity and times of struggle. Property changed hands, taxes were levied, sometimes family members quarreled and sometimes they started new ventures together. The particular skills one might need in any one era or the social and political environment might change, but the human condition is remarkably common throughout the ages.
>in the year 1200 the average person would likely not have considered the people living 800 years before them to be all that different from them
How do you know this?
And does the average person today really think someone living in the year 1200 to be all that different from them living in 2025? If so, in what way does this person think people 800 years ago are different from us? (I'm asking because I don't share your assumptions if this hypothetical person were to think on this matter for more than 5 seconds)
65% of humans have lactose intolerance, so depending on where exactly you teleport them to it might be a completely normal thing. I'd imagine the immune system will have the capacity to develop in the same way too, so really it should work out fine.
Lactose tolerance in Europeans likely arose with early PIE groups as they began domesticating horses and oxen. Perhaps several time independently in different groups.
Lactose tolerance in populations is linked with pastoralism, and if I am remembering correctly colder climates as well.
Most humans today are not lactose tolerant as adults - it’s actually the exception.
> I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial or surprising, but it’s easy to forget that people who came long before us were really no different from us (or put differently, were no different than them), and it helps to better understand history if you think of them that way.
In many ways no different to us, in other ways, knowledge, cultural norms, gender roles, morality, etc they are very different to us.
We're very tribal and very hostile to people outside of our tribe, and what we consider our tribe has slowly expanded over time.
Thankfully today we mostly don't form up into raiding parties to go kill, rape, and enslave people in the neighboring suburb - but that would have been historically a very normal and acceptable thing to do.
It's curious to consider that Onfim probably grew up, toiled, had a family, and died with an entire life behind him... yet we still think of him as "a boy who lived in Novgorod" because the only evidence of his existence is this set of random childhood scribbles.
Novgorod was the only major East Slavic settlement to avoid destruction or subjugation by the Golden Horde, so I think it is akin to a boy from a well-to-do family in medieval Avignon or Strasbourg learning to read and write. Meaning, not just any city or any family in the mid/late 13th century had the need or means for such schooling, but as pointed out in this thread it was more likely in Novgorod.
Well, probably not most children. I don’t really know anything about that particular region at that particular time, but based on history generally, literacy was - until recently - often reserved for higher social classes.
> Scholars believe that the Novgorod Republic had an unusually high level of literacy for the time, with literacy apparently widespread throughout different classes and among both sexes.
One of the drawings had the inscription 'I am a wild beast' -- that's 5-7 year old territory. Ofc it's possible that I'm missing some cultural nuance, but the picture is consistent with precocious-little-kid-with-visceral-imagination. He must have been a joy to parent!
I had to look up the article to figure out if this was the intolerable downside of having kids (all this work raising them, and then they just fly out of the nest) or _not_ having them (with your scientific work the only great project of your life). I believe he meant the latter :)
Worker bees will reproduce when the hive queen's suppression pheremone disappears. Of course, they're not fertilized so they only produce haploid offspring, who in the bee world are all male and hence useless for anything but mating with a queen. Worker bees can't mate.
Haha, thank you for the correction but also thank you for appending that last sentence, because otherwise I was going to say "Yes, okay, but Darwin probably didn't mean..."
In those those days though I'm not sure the calculus of working for the sake of the children was quite the same.
You might have kids, and then they work the farm, then you manage the farm and slowly the children take over the manual labor and hard work of it. In old age the investment in the children pays off and a reciprocal relationship is formed where you take care of the grandchildren and your own children take care of you.
Now that is flipped on its head. The parent makes the lions share of the investment in the child, but the benefits of the child is largely socialized. Want daycare, food, recreational, extra-cirricular activities -- basically anything other than public schooling you pay taxes for already? Go fuck yourself.
But once the children is grown up, well well well we are a society here! Tax the shit out of the kid, spread the social security benefits around to everyone including people that didn't raise any children. And if you directly want a piece of the investment from the children, as people got in the old days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard -- it is only morally right when all of society does the exact same thing to the kid.
There is every possible incentive in today's society to encourage others to have kids, ensuring your own retirement, but to reneg on doing it yourself because some other poor bastard can front most the costs and then you can tax the shit out of the kid for your retirement / social benefits. I think children were a rational decision in Darwin's day, now they are definitely not, because you are on the sucker end of a tragedy of the commons deal.
Another interesting cultural development here is that the scope of parental responsibility has started to extend into what is conventionally considered adulthood, obligating parents to pay for their child’s post-secondary education. By contrast, children have effectively no legal obligations to their parents in old age. This privileges those who invest in financial instruments in lieu of having children, since the instruments will (at least in theory) provide the investor with the resources necessary to hire help in their old age.
Is that actually a contrast though? Parents are generally considered to have some moral obligation to help their kids pay for college, but no legal obligation. Children are (generally?) considered to have some moral obligation to help out their elderly parents (in my family at least), but no legal one.
> Children are (generally?) considered to have some moral obligation to help out their elderly parents (in my family at least), but no legal one.
The level of this is very culture-specific, with a gamut spanning from "children have no responsibility for their parents once they're independent" to "of course the first destination to send cash once you've made it is your folks". The two cultures I've lived among (German and Korean) are very different in this regard.
My personal take is that you should only have children if it's something you actually want to do and consider its own reward, with no expectations on "ROI".
The policy question of whether this is also the correct society-wide social contract to adopt is very valid, though.
If you look at real life reality though -- the argument for stuff like public schooling almost always a dominating piece is "we will educate the kids so society can get a good ROI." That not only the kids are better off, but the people around them will be too. Sure it's nice that the kid gets something out of it, but public schooling would not get as much support as it does were it not for what society gets out of it.
Society never actually holds themselves to the moral standards they demand upon parents. But people are people, people respond to incentives, and individual parents are no different than society in this regard. The position now, and the mass rejection of parenthood, I think in part reflects the outcome of this hypocrisy and doublespeak.
In Canada you cannot get subsidized student loans if your parents’ income is too high. You can’t get student loans at all unless they co-sign. If they don’t want to pay and you want to go to school you have to cut off communication and convince a judge you have no relationship.
There is case law which establishes a legal precedent obligating (usually divorced) parents to provide tuition for post-secondary education. I’m not aware of any such case law obligating a child to care for his aging parents.
> children have effectively no legal obligations to their parents in old age
I don't know which country you are talking about, but at least in France and Belgium they do.
Parents do not have an obligation to pay for their children's post-secondary education though (but they have to provide for them if they are not financially independent).
Single people in Belgium often complain that they are more taxed than families and that it's some kind of injustice.
>Single people in Belgium often complain that they are more taxed than families and that it's some kind of injustice.
On face this is true in the US. If you dig down into it in the slightest though, at least for a middle class family, it is extremely misinformed.
Society puts all kinds of burden on the parent that they would not otherwise have to spend
1) Car seats, safety equipment,
2) Employment and corporate taxes, regulatory overhead (including any government-imposed insurance and bond requirements), and licensing costs on daycare. And daycare is required because in US leaving children alone is illegal and providing unlicensed childcare for money is also in many cases illegal. (this one likely completely eats up the child tax credit)
3) Taxes charged on items of utility for the child, often even food.
If you are a single person you are not paying sales taxes for all the shit a kid consumes, you are not paying all the overhead taxes of childcare and child healthcare workers, you are not paying for all the costs associated with licensing requirements of child services providers, you are not paying sales taxes for car seats and all those goodies. You are also paying increased property taxes for the real estate the child needs, although this one is less questionable since you are more likely to consume public schooling which is usually a major component of that.
When you sum it all up I have zero doubt whatsoever a middle class parent pays way more in extra taxes and government imposed overhead than they get in tax breaks. And this is ignoring the fact that the single people in the end still ultimately benefit from the pyramid scheme we have going where social security is paid upward, and the investment to make that possible is mostly born on parents who in the end get the same stake on the returns as someone who did not raise a kid much beyond the scraps taken out of their property taxes.
I think he was saying working working like a neuter bee (as in just working without any kids of your own) won’t do. So the opposite interpretation. Everyone has to work after all, kids or no kids.
> And if you directly want a piece of the investment from the children, as people got in the old days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard
consider the following: if your children don't care about you, the societal structure of capitalism may not be the primary reason.
To put it in words close to finance: it is not an early cash investment in daycare and food, but lifelong kin work, that is rewarded with emotional bonds and long term dividends.
Living together in multi-generational homes facilitates kin work, there i agree, but it is not a strictly necessary requirement.
There are also other effects at work, especially psychological. Many adults don't grasp that their elders have increased demands, because they are used to see them in a providing role. They understand it on a abstract and logical level, it is so obvious and well known, but to truly understand it on a personal level is far more difficult. In the same way people growing older often try to stay in this providing role as long as possible, as they for many years defined themselves through it.
There comes a time in life when easter invitations switch direction. If you live together on a farm, this changes gradually.
I think the more common scenario is the kid cares about the parent but is unable to financially assist them because they're being taxed 20-30% by "society" (who as a kid basically left them high and dry), in addition to paying a large amount for their own children due to society imposed costs like paying out regulatory / licensing / tax overhead for daycare which is now required because being a latchkey kid or going to unlicensed daycare is effectively illegal -- leaving nothing left over to assist the parents financially.
If you killed off social benefits, desirable or not, there would be lot more left over for intra-familial support and the incentive would come back for people to invest in their own children. Or alternatively under a more society-driven system, make a proportional societal investment in children to what you ultimately take from them so that the incentives are not skewed. Ultimately the issue here is not individualistic or social systems for raising children but rather shoving almost all the costs on the individuals and then totally changing the system to being societal as soon as society can extract benefit.
Why do the kids need to assist their parents financially in order to assist them in their old age?
In my experience friends and family have helped take care of elderly parents without that. I help my parents without giving them money.
Even if the elderly are destitute they generally have social security and medicare. If you need to you temporarily move in with them or they move in with you.
Also latchkey kids are very much so legal in most states: ~37 states have no statutory age limit. Your real issue there is probably liability if something does go wrong.
And unlicensed (license-exempt) daycare is perfectly legal in many (most?) states, usually with limits on the number of children and the location. In my state you can legally pay (or not) the stay-at-home mom neighbor with kids to watch your kid after school and she doesn't need a license.
I agree with the idea that smaller family sizes and cultural changes (outside of some communities like immigrants) have led to child raising changing in negative ways compared to communal approaches.
And I agree the financial calculus of having kids does not lean in favor of having kids (mainly because of high cost of living compared to wages, especially in certain regions).
But the rest of it doesn't seem to have strong supporting evidence. While personal income tax rates in the US can be high compared to some countries, overall tax burden as a % of GDP (25.2%) is below average (33.9%) [oecd].
I don't think there is any evidence that shows family size changes or multi-generational living are correlated with tax rate. That's usually correlated with other factors like women's wage employment/rights/education/ethnicity.
And the return value of a society where life expectancy at birth is not in our 40s seems pretty good.[1] There's no left over money from taxes you didn't have to pay if you or the family members you would spend it on are already dead.
>>>> And if you directly want a piece of the investment from the children, as people got in the old days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard
>>> consider the following: if your children don't care about you, the societal structure of capitalism may not be the primary reason.
>>I think the more common scenario is the kid cares about the parent but is unable to financially assist them b
>Why do the kids need to assist their parents financially in order to assist them in their old age?
For one, the law says the kids have to support the parents, writ large, in a pooled scheme via SS. If you don't pay it, IRS agents seize your bank account and possibly even bust down the door and put you in a tiny cell. So we're not starting with the premise as a question. It is the current reality.
Now, I don't have a personal belief that kids should have to support their parents, but to philosphically hold that means they shouldn't have to pay SS to them either. The difference between children paying parents individually and writ large is just different mechanisms (collective vs familial), so if you agree with the collective system you already agree children should be forced to pay the parents.
Now, to be clear -- I didn't believ in the premise that if someone doesn't pay their parent, that it means the child doesn't care about them. I don't understand why the respondent said that vicious straw man, but I totally object to it. But I replied based on their fiction so I could address the underlying point about support without a further argument.
Ultimately elderly do need support. Children are ofter going to want to support the elderly. My point is that it would make more sense to tie that elderly support to investment in children so the incentives are in place to put a good investment in children and also to ensure people don't just free ride by rejecting children or helping children but then gladly gobbling up the dividends of the investment. This incentive system can be fixed by either an individual or collective approach but the bastardized system where we privatize the investment and socialize the dividends presents the worst moral hazards and anti-natal outcomes.
>> I didn't believe in the premise that if someone doesn't pay their parent, that it means the child doesn't care about them. I don't understand why the respondent said that vicious straw man,
Children who emotionally care about their parents but are financially unable to assist are rarely going to say
> go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard
i did not build that strawman, you did, i just set it on fire
Personally I prefer the low-tax individualistic model, but my point is that I would also defer that a high-tax model would also present balanced incentives if they better reciprocated an investment in children.
The argument for taxes is usually something along the lines of forming a society, but society is almost totally gone when you make the investment in a child to become productive but then magically appears as soon as the kid is productive. As we are finding out this bastardized model is not working out for kids or parents.
Charles Darwin actually only lived in London for a few years, and spent most of his life in what was at that time the county of Kent. Although in any case, as you say, his home did not involve a farm.
I think you're looking at this with a misunderstanding of how SS works. You didn't pay hardly any SS to the youth that will support you from which you will make your demands. Rather you reciprocated to the investment made by elders that raised you.
The money you paid the elderly in SS is gone. The question is what proportion of the investment in the youth did you make that will pay you. Probably some, but likely less on average than a parent/guardian.
I haven't conflated them, it's just that it's required that you misunderstand in order to continue on with the fiction that the youth owe you the money you paid into our elders. That doesn't make any sense. Your premise that you're getting back what you paid in only makes sense if you look at it that you actually paid something into the people paying you, which in practice is the investment in the youth becoming productive. Which you definitely do, just on average non-parents do not do it as much as parents.
It just does not make any sense whatsoever non-parents would get the same stake in SS that parents do. It makes 0 sense at all, as the system is currently set up, and I suspect is responsible for a large part of the moral hazard where people grab SS made possible by investment in children but reject children, basicaly renegging the investment but grabbing the dividends. This is part of the reason why I think SS is a broken system, and as we are finding out is likely destined for bankruptcy as the population pyramid inverts.
You still haven’t explained how you made this leap from elders to parents. That’s not the same thing. Social security benefits are based on how much you pay in, not how many children you have.
Because it's not just parents that raise children, it's our elders. You're paying property taxes to raise the children. You are contributing to society in ways that aid children. To the extent that your logic holds, you definitely do not deserve nothing. When you pay SS up to the elders you are in effect paying dividends on the investment they made in you, finally paying back into what they spent on you. The paying back happens when you pay SS, that's you settling the reciprocal arrangement. It makes no sense the youth (or if you insist, other people's children) would owe you for settling the reciprocation to your own elders.
My stance has and remains that the payoff from children, if it is to be violently enforced at the hand of the taxman as it is now, should be proportional to the investment, there is no reason to restrict that to just parents, it just happens to be that parents generally make the lions share of the investment.
>You still haven’t explained how you made this leap from elders to parents
It's a leap to refer to social security benefits as paid to (at least on average by far) our elders? .
And thus you understand. That's my whole point! That is my objection! But to be clear I didn't say that's how SS works, I said that's how the reciprocation works -- I did not say that's when you pay back the SS money elders paid you (they didnt) but rather their investment. I clearly explained SS flows upward.
The flow of investment in the youth is largely from private individuals to youth. [privatized]
But the flow (dividends) the other way is largely through SS upwards. [socialized]
That's my whole point! It's a terrible system because the reciprocation encourages free-riders and poor incentives for investment in the youth, as the ROI is poorly coupled to those making the investment.
>You lost me here. I don’t have children but I pay into Social Security. Why shouldn’t I get something back in retirement?
Because you seem to think you're owed something 'back' when in fact the people you're asking something 'back' weren't people that you paid SS to.
What's more accurate is that SS is you paying the elderly back for their investment, not that you somehow create a debt for the children because you paid SS to the elderly. Your position there made zero sense.
Any debt you think you're owed 'back' from children who will pay you SS would be created when the children actually received something from you -- i.e. being raised, schooled, etc. Not created because you paid a 3rd party.
Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. — better than a dog anyhow.– Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. — These things good for one’s health. —
"""but terrible loss of time. —""" !!!!
So ruthless in his calculus. One wonders if he was on the spectrum?
Everyone who marries marries their cousin, it's just a matter of degree. Before the advent of the automobile, people traveled a lot less. Even more so as you go further back. Combine that with families having a lot more kids (you might have 36-64 surviving first cousins), and you've got a situation where nearly everyone you interact with might well be only a couple degrees of separation by blood. Marriage between first cousins has historically been a bit taboo, but so called third and fourth degree (aunts and uncles, first cousins) marriages were still pretty common. It wasn't really until the rise of the eugenics movement that the modern taboos and legal prohibitions were established.
I've been doing a fair bit of genealogy lately, and you can see on the family tree pretty clearly when people moved from from smaller, insulated communities to larger cities. Above that point, the tree fans out a lot less.
Both Charles Darwin and Benjamin Franklin are quoted in informal Decision Theory. Both used pro-vs-cons tables to orient decision; Franklin also used weights.
> When those difficult cases occur, they are difficult, chiefly because while we have them under consideration, all the reasons pro and con are not present to the mind at the same time; but sometimes some set present themselves, and at other times another, the first being out of sight. Hence the various purposes or inclinations that alternately prevail, and the uncertainty that perplexes us. // To get over this, my way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns; writing over the one pro, and over the other con. Then during three or four days consideration, I put down under the different heads short hits of the different motives, that at different times occur to me, for or against the measure. // When I have thus got them all together in one view, I endeavor to estimate their respective weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out. If I find a reason pro equal to two reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two reasons con, equal to some three reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the balance lies, and if, after a day or two of further consideration, nothing new that is of importance occurs on either side, I come to a determination accordingly
This reminds me of the fascinating story of how Shakespeare's first folio was assembled, in that many of the plays were assembled from folks who had copies that were annotated - either as reading notes or with random family musings like todo lists.
This is one of the few things children still do even centuries later. In many aspects, we have changed so drastically that I think 100-year-ago people would find us weird and unsociable.
Not at all. Young children, in particular, do the same things they’ve been doing since modern humans evolved, if not even earlier than that. My three and six year old boys wake up in the morning and pretend to be puppies. I’m sure kids their age were doing that 30,000 years ago when humans domesticated dogs.
They were playing tic tac toe the other day, and asked my dad whether he played tic tac toe when he was a kid. My dad—who grew up in a village in Bangladesh—explained that he did, except they drew the game in the dirt with sticks.
Oh, if you think that's bad, see Samuel Pepy's diary (conveniently syndicated in realtime here: https://bsky.app/profile/samuelpepys.bsky.social; think they're on the third run through, currently doing 1662). No detail of everyday life, no matter how objectionable, left uncovered.
That really is wonderful! Reading how Pepys arranged for his diary to be preserved makes me think that he would have enjoyed this more modern presentation.
> Found out my uncle Wight and Mr. Rawlinson, and with them went to the latter’s house to dinner, and there had a good dinner of cold meat and good wine, but was troubled in my head after the little wine I drank.
"Troubled in the head" is a euphemism due a revival!
This is a good snapshot and piece of history of a mindsets freshly tuned into a new way of thinking. Thanks for this, this article was a relaxing break in these politically tense times.
The other story here is incremental growth of camera technology. The daguerreotype came out after his voyage on the HMS Beagle, by the time Origin of Specices was published (with no photography) Cameras still had to many practical limitations to justify a worse image. By 1872 Darwin would publish a book full of photography despite his remarkable drawing skills.
Something gives me the feeling that a lot of people are going to follow Darwin's example in the near future
People talk about how hard it is to have kids these days without realizing that this sort of chaos was normal for the vast majority of humans throughout history and they still achieved great things. Part of it is the expectation of others. So what if your kids color your book, interrupt your meetings, or cause embarrassment in front of your boss. They need to get over it.
Like him or hate, the fact that the Vice President takes his kids everywhere is a good reminder of how un-child-friendly our societies have become. It's almost transgressive to exist with children these days.
Loved this! I took my child to work even when it wasn’t the specific holiday so she could see what a real exec review looked like or how boring work could seem to be. The experiment is still running, so I can’t tell you the outcome... yet! ;)
Curious if anyone reading this has explored the alternative theories to Darwinian evolution. I only recently started looking at it, so don't want to share links because I don't know what is believable. But it seems there are major flaws that even Darwin knew about. He considered Origin of Species an abstract, and was promising the full "big book" for the rest of his life, but never was able to pull it together.
> But it seems there are major flaws that even Darwin knew about.
Sure. He recognized the importance of inheritance, but didn't know the mechanism. We've learned a lot since Darwin's days about how it all works - genetics, in particular - but the basic concept has held up just fine.
Can you elaborate on this? My understanding is that evolution (to be precise, we're presumably referring to natural selection) has been proven again and again and that there is a clear scientific consensus around it, and I'm not familiar with any particular large gaps in the theory.
I'm guessing it's passages like this one regarding transitional forms:
Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.
Relevant only by virtue of also being about historical children’s drawings, but it reminds of another example of a child’s drawings preserved for us to see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim
> … Onfim, was a boy who lived in Novgorod (now Veliky Novgorod, Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark, which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod.
I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial or surprising, but it’s easy to forget that people who came long before us were really no different from us (or put differently, were no different than them), and it helps to better understand history if you think of them that way.
Author of the original Appendix article here (the one about Darwin's kids) - I think it got on HN today because I linked to while discussing Onfim here: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/onfims-world-medieval-chil...
Hi Ben! I'll email you a repost invite for the Onfim article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705174) - if you wait a week or so and then use it, the repost will go in the second-chance pool.
The reason for waiting is to give the hivemind cache time to clear. Normally we'd re-up the existing post, but we don't want two overly similar threads on the frontpage within a short time period.
That's one of the most endearing article I have read in a long time. Thanks for the joy.
2014! Amazing.
> I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us.
I find this viewpoint surprisingly underutilized in institutional history and archeology sometimes. I occasionally watch documentaries with distinguished talking heads on e.g. egyptology and what not, and they often bend over backwards to find complicated explanations that defy all "this is just not how humans or human organizations operate" logic. For example, analyzing an impressive building and then assuming that the same people capable of constructing it also made a basic mistake or in other ways assuming they were daft. Or requiring a complex lore/spiritual explanation for something that can be equally explained by classic big org fuckups.
The formal name for this kind of argument is "ethnographic analogy". It's widespread in archaeology and institutional history, but doesn't always show up so overtly because
1. It's not very interesting to say "they're just like us" and
2. "like us" is a huge statement hiding a lot of assumptions.
Analogy is also considered a fairly weak argument on its own. There are vanishingly few accepted "cultural universals" despite decades of argument on the subject (which I'll let the wiki article [0] summarize), so justifying them usually follows an argument like "X is related/similar to Y, and X has behavior Z, so Y's behavior is an evolution of Z". That's fine if you're talking Roman->Byzantines, maybe, but it's a bit of a stretch when your analogy is "modern US->Old Kingdom Egypt". It's also very, very easy to get wrong and make a bad analogies. Take basically the entire first couple centuries of American anthropology as an example.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal
For a long time, I also somehow thought that people from earlier eras were less intelligent—simply because, in retrospect, all those obvious mistakes are so apparent. It took considerable mental effort for me to accept that people back then were probably just like us today, only living under different circumstances.
Intelligence vs education. On average, most humans have about the same baseline intelligence. Obviously some have more and some have less, but that's an inherent quality of our species, and the baseline is really only moved by evolution.
It can be hard to square the fact that intelligence and education are totally unrelated to each other. Ancient humans certainly knew less than we do now, but they were more or less just as intelligent as modern humans.
We can see from archaeology that ancient humans had language, sophisticated religions, and complex and vast societies. That's not something you can really accomplish with a significantly different baseline intelligence.
We know a lot more now and have a much more complicated global society, but mainly because we have machines to do a lot of the thinking and management for us. We're still just as intelligent as we always were, we just have tools to multiply our efforts now.
Humans today really are smarter, i.e., better at abstract reasoning--see the Flynn effect. That's partly due to better nutrition and lower disease load, but also due to modern education and lifestyles, which force people to learn to reason abstractly from an early age.
> smarter, i.e., better at abstract reasoning
This is the nub of it - we're better at one very particular thing. I think I'm gonna get crucified if I really go into arguing against abstract reasoning as the baseline for understanding the world on this site, but without trying to defend that particular assertion I'd just make a note to say that what IQ tests are testing is a very specific type of thinking and not actually generalized intelligence, which is a very broad topic.
What kind of question would you put on an iq test to make it a better measurement of generalized intelligence?
So, this isn't my area of expertise, but - I score very high on abstract reasoning tests, and I've been lucky enough to be around a bunch of people who are adept at things that at best require a whole lot more effort on my part to grok. I've got friends who can pick up a new language in a matter of months. I've got friends who can hear a song, know what keys it's in, improvise to it, extend it, and build complementary riffs to it on almost anything that makes a sound with more than one tone. I've got friends who can go into a room of children and have them all quiet and paying rapt attention in minutes. I've got friends who could sell an anchor to a drowning man, or have a dude in full biker gear and tattoos discussing their relationship with their mother and their childhood home. I've got friends who can read a book a day and tell you anything you ask about any of them and how they relate to each other. I've got friends who are almost telepathic in their ability to read and react to animals. I've got friends whose kinesthetic sense, ability to move their bodies, and ability to learn new physical movements is almost uncanny. I've got friends who can create absolutely stunning works of art that capture a feeling or a moment without any concrete imagery.
I am, and I say this without ego, a very smart person, and there are situations I absolutely excel - I can synthesize new information very quickly, I can draw correlations and relationships and principles from sparse data, I recognize patterns and build and dissect systems easily. Abstract reasoning is my wheelhouse, but I cannot do the things my friends can do with the ease they do them - I can get there eventually, in the same way that they can get to where I am eventually, but the things they do very clearly require a different type of intelligence than my variety.
The Flynn effect is about the change in measured intelligence through the 20th century. It tells us precisely nothing about the difference in intelligence between the 13th century and today, let alone going back before the Bronze Age Collapse or agriculture.
A large part of the Flynn effect may be due to reductions in environmental pollutants, which would mean it would be a reversal of the effect of the industrial revolution. Or it may have been due to people being much more used to taking tests. Or it may be due to nutrition. It is unlikely to be due to modern education forcing people to "learn to reason abstractly from an early age" because schools don't require students to learn to reason abstractly from an early age.
I think this is compounded by the correlation of beliefs between modern cranks who reject their education and believe what science now knows to be absurdities like "the Earth is flat" or "carrying this crystal pendant will please the gods and protect you from getting sick" with smart ancient people who believed the Earth is flat or crystal pendants will please the gods and prevent you from getting sick.
Yes, perhaps both Homer (the author of the world-famous literary classic the Iliad and the Odyssey) and a hypothetical modern Homer (d'oh!) believed in a flat Earth. The modern Homer failed to understand or rejected the education he was offered, while a hypothetical modern observer, who feels more intelligent than the flat-earther, understood and accepted it. But that does not mean that the ancient Homer was of similar intelligence!
The difference between us and them is the accumulated knowledge. You and I had no better an idea of what a volcano is than an anyone from thousands of years ago until someone told us.
I think of certain types of knowledge as one way functions. In order to acquire the knowledge you have to search a huge key space or experience costly elimination of options. Once you know the answer it feels obvious and intuitive. We have accumulated so much of this knowledge now that we have a hard time intuitively understanding the gap between people without it and us.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he considered the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception." ... Douglas believed that it was the third policy alternative [the object of the industrial system is merely to provide goods and services] upon which an economic system should be based, but confusion of thought has allowed the industrial system to be governed by the first two objectives [to impose upon the world a system of thought and action and to create employment]. If the purpose of our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of effort, then the ability to deliver goods and services with the least amount of employment is actually desirable. Douglas proposed that unemployment is a logical consequence of machines replacing labour in the productive process, and any attempt to reverse this process through policies designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our cultural inheritance. Douglas also believed that the people displaced from the industrial system through the process of mechanization should still have the ability to consume the fruits of the system, because he suggested that we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance, and his proposal for a national dividend is directly related to this belief."
Thank you for this; surprised I haven't heard much about him prior, since I've been digging into political economy lately.
Specifically, his notes on consumption / full employment are refreshing - it never sits right with me that the goal of economic policy at a high level is so often at odds with doing things in a "smart" way (measuring projects in jobs created, for example).
For pyramids, I think modern thinkers underestimate power of a lot of people working together in harmony for long time.
It's like the theory of "they must have been slaves driven to work by their nobles!" When I believe it turned out they were just blue-collar Ancient Egyptian workers with families and paychecks who thought they'd be doing a good thing by honoring the Pharoah.
They weren’t subhuman slave class. But it’s far from clear they had economic agency.
Although the laborers working on pyramids and tombs were initially mostly corvee labor, they did evolve into a more specialized and privileged class of artisans over the (very long) course of Egyptian history. The first recorded labor strike in history occurred in a village of such artisans over lack of pay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina_strikes
Someone I knew once questioned, after seeing it in person, how ancient Egyptian and Inca builders could have fit stones so well together and polished them so smoothly without advanced technology. I essentially said to him, “If I gave you two rocks and three weeks of nothing else to do, you’d have the faces of those rocks even smoother than those others”.
My favorite part of wikipedia's article on Onfim is this absurdly understated sentence:
> One of the drawings features a knight on a horse, with Onfim's name written next to him, stabbing someone on the ground with a lance, with scholars speculating that Onfim pictured himself as the knight.
I guess we'll never truly be able to know what Onfim was thinking when he drew a knight named "Onfim" stabbing an enemy with a lance from horseback. The past is a foreign country, and the mind of a child can't be understood anyway.
The article suggests it's his teacher, and I'm inclined to believe this. Pretty consistent with the idea of a kid who doesn't want to do homework, and scorns the source of all homework (the teacher)
It's amazing to think about. I'm sure you could take one of more ancient human babies, teleport them to the present day, and they would be able to grow up like any other kid. It's remarkable. Part of our human-ness is our robust written and oral histories.
On the flip side, in the year 1200 the average person would likely not have considered the people living 800 years before them to be all that different from them (unlike many of us today).
Perhaps that's a way in which we're less educated than those who came before us
Some people living in the 13th-14th century in Europe considered the people who lived prior to the fall of the Roman Empire to be more civilised and advanced, if not actually more intelligent than they were. From their perspective the world had gone through a a dark age of ignorance and sin, and was only starting to recover.
It wasn't until much later, in the 15th and 16th century onwards, that people began to think that they were more advanced and accomplished than the ancient Greeks and Romans.
We have some pretty interesting family records, and if I look back 200 and 500 (and sometimes longer..) years ago, the information we have about family members feels remarkably current. There were divorces, economic and political challenges, times of prosperity and times of struggle. Property changed hands, taxes were levied, sometimes family members quarreled and sometimes they started new ventures together. The particular skills one might need in any one era or the social and political environment might change, but the human condition is remarkably common throughout the ages.
>in the year 1200 the average person would likely not have considered the people living 800 years before them to be all that different from them
How do you know this?
And does the average person today really think someone living in the year 1200 to be all that different from them living in 2025? If so, in what way does this person think people 800 years ago are different from us? (I'm asking because I don't share your assumptions if this hypothetical person were to think on this matter for more than 5 seconds)
Seconded!
If you had a time machine and went back 10,000 years and adopted a baby from then, no one but geneticists would ever know.
Maybe even 100,000.
You could probably go tens of thousands of years back and have this still be the case.
Except for their immune systems or lactose tolerance.
65% of humans have lactose intolerance, so depending on where exactly you teleport them to it might be a completely normal thing. I'd imagine the immune system will have the capacity to develop in the same way too, so really it should work out fine.
As an immunologist, I see no reason why the newborn from tens of thousands of years ago wouldn't be perfectly suited for the modern world.
Lactose tolerance in Europeans likely arose with early PIE groups as they began domesticating horses and oxen. Perhaps several time independently in different groups.
Lactose tolerance in populations is linked with pastoralism, and if I am remembering correctly colder climates as well.
Most humans today are not lactose tolerant as adults - it’s actually the exception.
I think it is pretty controversial and surprising. As Wikipedia puts it:
"Debate continues as to whether anatomically modern humans were behaviorally modern as well."
Anatomically modern humans emerged 300,000 years ago but behaviourally modern humans only date back to 60,000-150,000 years ago.
> I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial or surprising, but it’s easy to forget that people who came long before us were really no different from us (or put differently, were no different than them), and it helps to better understand history if you think of them that way.
In many ways no different to us, in other ways, knowledge, cultural norms, gender roles, morality, etc they are very different to us.
We're very tribal and very hostile to people outside of our tribe, and what we consider our tribe has slowly expanded over time.
Thankfully today we mostly don't form up into raiding parties to go kill, rape, and enslave people in the neighboring suburb - but that would have been historically a very normal and acceptable thing to do.
It's curious to consider that Onfim probably grew up, toiled, had a family, and died with an entire life behind him... yet we still think of him as "a boy who lived in Novgorod" because the only evidence of his existence is this set of random childhood scribbles.
> you’d find they’re just like us.
Yep, and it's good to remember that "us" is still a pretty diverse bunch.
this is insane. 6 year olds 800 years ago went to school ?
Novgorod was the only major East Slavic settlement to avoid destruction or subjugation by the Golden Horde, so I think it is akin to a boy from a well-to-do family in medieval Avignon or Strasbourg learning to read and write. Meaning, not just any city or any family in the mid/late 13th century had the need or means for such schooling, but as pointed out in this thread it was more likely in Novgorod.
Well, probably not most children. I don’t really know anything about that particular region at that particular time, but based on history generally, literacy was - until recently - often reserved for higher social classes.
From the wiki article:
> Scholars believe that the Novgorod Republic had an unusually high level of literacy for the time, with literacy apparently widespread throughout different classes and among both sexes.
I read that too and I was surprised, but then the first thing that popped into my mind was that this is probably a case of survivorship bias
Ah, I missed that important bit.
It's not clear how old he was.
One of the drawings had the inscription 'I am a wild beast' -- that's 5-7 year old territory. Ofc it's possible that I'm missing some cultural nuance, but the picture is consistent with precocious-little-kid-with-visceral-imagination. He must have been a joy to parent!
I am a wild beast
I am not in the 5-7 year old territory
Right? I don’t doodle as much as I used to, but I’m still a wild beast well into my 40’s.
I used to be a wild beast, I still am, but I used to be too.
My favorite Darwin fun fact is his detailed pros and cons list on whether to get married.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/08/14/darwin-list-pros-a...
For such a giant of the scientific community, he was after all human.
My two favorite journal entries:
"But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything."
"I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids and today I hate them worse than everything."
He had chronic nausea (possibly abdominal migraine), so I'm not surprised he was feeling poorly.
"I cannot brain today, I have the dumb"
Me too Charles, me too.
Huh, I feel much closer to Darwin now
"I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before"
Well, this hit harder than I thought it would
I try to remember Vonnegut: "We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different."
An older lady friend used to say, "People like to spend their lives screaming around. When they don't want to wake others, they quietly fart around."
Vonnegut truly nailed it
Amen.
I had to look up the article to figure out if this was the intolerable downside of having kids (all this work raising them, and then they just fly out of the nest) or _not_ having them (with your scientific work the only great project of your life). I believe he meant the latter :)
Yeah it's in the marriage pros section, so I assume it's the latter. And worker bees can't reproduce.
Worker bees will reproduce when the hive queen's suppression pheremone disappears. Of course, they're not fertilized so they only produce haploid offspring, who in the bee world are all male and hence useless for anything but mating with a queen. Worker bees can't mate.
But I understand the sentiment.
Haha, thank you for the correction but also thank you for appending that last sentence, because otherwise I was going to say "Yes, okay, but Darwin probably didn't mean..."
In those those days though I'm not sure the calculus of working for the sake of the children was quite the same.
You might have kids, and then they work the farm, then you manage the farm and slowly the children take over the manual labor and hard work of it. In old age the investment in the children pays off and a reciprocal relationship is formed where you take care of the grandchildren and your own children take care of you.
Now that is flipped on its head. The parent makes the lions share of the investment in the child, but the benefits of the child is largely socialized. Want daycare, food, recreational, extra-cirricular activities -- basically anything other than public schooling you pay taxes for already? Go fuck yourself.
But once the children is grown up, well well well we are a society here! Tax the shit out of the kid, spread the social security benefits around to everyone including people that didn't raise any children. And if you directly want a piece of the investment from the children, as people got in the old days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard -- it is only morally right when all of society does the exact same thing to the kid.
There is every possible incentive in today's society to encourage others to have kids, ensuring your own retirement, but to reneg on doing it yourself because some other poor bastard can front most the costs and then you can tax the shit out of the kid for your retirement / social benefits. I think children were a rational decision in Darwin's day, now they are definitely not, because you are on the sucker end of a tragedy of the commons deal.
Another interesting cultural development here is that the scope of parental responsibility has started to extend into what is conventionally considered adulthood, obligating parents to pay for their child’s post-secondary education. By contrast, children have effectively no legal obligations to their parents in old age. This privileges those who invest in financial instruments in lieu of having children, since the instruments will (at least in theory) provide the investor with the resources necessary to hire help in their old age.
Is that actually a contrast though? Parents are generally considered to have some moral obligation to help their kids pay for college, but no legal obligation. Children are (generally?) considered to have some moral obligation to help out their elderly parents (in my family at least), but no legal one.
> Children are (generally?) considered to have some moral obligation to help out their elderly parents (in my family at least), but no legal one.
The level of this is very culture-specific, with a gamut spanning from "children have no responsibility for their parents once they're independent" to "of course the first destination to send cash once you've made it is your folks". The two cultures I've lived among (German and Korean) are very different in this regard.
My personal take is that you should only have children if it's something you actually want to do and consider its own reward, with no expectations on "ROI".
The policy question of whether this is also the correct society-wide social contract to adopt is very valid, though.
If you look at real life reality though -- the argument for stuff like public schooling almost always a dominating piece is "we will educate the kids so society can get a good ROI." That not only the kids are better off, but the people around them will be too. Sure it's nice that the kid gets something out of it, but public schooling would not get as much support as it does were it not for what society gets out of it.
Society never actually holds themselves to the moral standards they demand upon parents. But people are people, people respond to incentives, and individual parents are no different than society in this regard. The position now, and the mass rejection of parenthood, I think in part reflects the outcome of this hypocrisy and doublespeak.
In Canada you cannot get subsidized student loans if your parents’ income is too high. You can’t get student loans at all unless they co-sign. If they don’t want to pay and you want to go to school you have to cut off communication and convince a judge you have no relationship.
There is case law which establishes a legal precedent obligating (usually divorced) parents to provide tuition for post-secondary education. I’m not aware of any such case law obligating a child to care for his aging parents.
> children have effectively no legal obligations to their parents in old age
I don't know which country you are talking about, but at least in France and Belgium they do.
Parents do not have an obligation to pay for their children's post-secondary education though (but they have to provide for them if they are not financially independent).
Single people in Belgium often complain that they are more taxed than families and that it's some kind of injustice.
>Single people in Belgium often complain that they are more taxed than families and that it's some kind of injustice.
On face this is true in the US. If you dig down into it in the slightest though, at least for a middle class family, it is extremely misinformed.
Society puts all kinds of burden on the parent that they would not otherwise have to spend
1) Car seats, safety equipment,
2) Employment and corporate taxes, regulatory overhead (including any government-imposed insurance and bond requirements), and licensing costs on daycare. And daycare is required because in US leaving children alone is illegal and providing unlicensed childcare for money is also in many cases illegal. (this one likely completely eats up the child tax credit)
3) Taxes charged on items of utility for the child, often even food.
If you are a single person you are not paying sales taxes for all the shit a kid consumes, you are not paying all the overhead taxes of childcare and child healthcare workers, you are not paying for all the costs associated with licensing requirements of child services providers, you are not paying sales taxes for car seats and all those goodies. You are also paying increased property taxes for the real estate the child needs, although this one is less questionable since you are more likely to consume public schooling which is usually a major component of that.
When you sum it all up I have zero doubt whatsoever a middle class parent pays way more in extra taxes and government imposed overhead than they get in tax breaks. And this is ignoring the fact that the single people in the end still ultimately benefit from the pyramid scheme we have going where social security is paid upward, and the investment to make that possible is mostly born on parents who in the end get the same stake on the returns as someone who did not raise a kid much beyond the scraps taken out of their property taxes.
None of this applies to Darwin though, he was wealthy and didn't need to think about "working the farm".
Interesting, he doesn't portray his wealthiness in these readings, he seems to think kids might make him not have enough $ for books!
But apparently he needed to think about having to work for income to sustain a family.
I think he was saying working working like a neuter bee (as in just working without any kids of your own) won’t do. So the opposite interpretation. Everyone has to work after all, kids or no kids.
Another quote then:
"If marry — means limited, Feel duty to work for money."
You can see the consequences of this playing out in highly developed countries
> And if you directly want a piece of the investment from the children, as people got in the old days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard
consider the following: if your children don't care about you, the societal structure of capitalism may not be the primary reason.
To put it in words close to finance: it is not an early cash investment in daycare and food, but lifelong kin work, that is rewarded with emotional bonds and long term dividends.
Living together in multi-generational homes facilitates kin work, there i agree, but it is not a strictly necessary requirement.
There are also other effects at work, especially psychological. Many adults don't grasp that their elders have increased demands, because they are used to see them in a providing role. They understand it on a abstract and logical level, it is so obvious and well known, but to truly understand it on a personal level is far more difficult. In the same way people growing older often try to stay in this providing role as long as possible, as they for many years defined themselves through it.
There comes a time in life when easter invitations switch direction. If you live together on a farm, this changes gradually.
I think the more common scenario is the kid cares about the parent but is unable to financially assist them because they're being taxed 20-30% by "society" (who as a kid basically left them high and dry), in addition to paying a large amount for their own children due to society imposed costs like paying out regulatory / licensing / tax overhead for daycare which is now required because being a latchkey kid or going to unlicensed daycare is effectively illegal -- leaving nothing left over to assist the parents financially.
If you killed off social benefits, desirable or not, there would be lot more left over for intra-familial support and the incentive would come back for people to invest in their own children. Or alternatively under a more society-driven system, make a proportional societal investment in children to what you ultimately take from them so that the incentives are not skewed. Ultimately the issue here is not individualistic or social systems for raising children but rather shoving almost all the costs on the individuals and then totally changing the system to being societal as soon as society can extract benefit.
Why do the kids need to assist their parents financially in order to assist them in their old age?
In my experience friends and family have helped take care of elderly parents without that. I help my parents without giving them money.
Even if the elderly are destitute they generally have social security and medicare. If you need to you temporarily move in with them or they move in with you.
Also latchkey kids are very much so legal in most states: ~37 states have no statutory age limit. Your real issue there is probably liability if something does go wrong.
And unlicensed (license-exempt) daycare is perfectly legal in many (most?) states, usually with limits on the number of children and the location. In my state you can legally pay (or not) the stay-at-home mom neighbor with kids to watch your kid after school and she doesn't need a license.
I agree with the idea that smaller family sizes and cultural changes (outside of some communities like immigrants) have led to child raising changing in negative ways compared to communal approaches.
And I agree the financial calculus of having kids does not lean in favor of having kids (mainly because of high cost of living compared to wages, especially in certain regions).
But the rest of it doesn't seem to have strong supporting evidence. While personal income tax rates in the US can be high compared to some countries, overall tax burden as a % of GDP (25.2%) is below average (33.9%) [oecd].
I don't think there is any evidence that shows family size changes or multi-generational living are correlated with tax rate. That's usually correlated with other factors like women's wage employment/rights/education/ethnicity.
And the return value of a society where life expectancy at birth is not in our 40s seems pretty good.[1] There's no left over money from taxes you didn't have to pay if you or the family members you would spend it on are already dead.
[1] https://u.demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html
Let's rewind and see how we got here:
>>>> And if you directly want a piece of the investment from the children, as people got in the old days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard
>>> consider the following: if your children don't care about you, the societal structure of capitalism may not be the primary reason.
>>I think the more common scenario is the kid cares about the parent but is unable to financially assist them b
>Why do the kids need to assist their parents financially in order to assist them in their old age?
For one, the law says the kids have to support the parents, writ large, in a pooled scheme via SS. If you don't pay it, IRS agents seize your bank account and possibly even bust down the door and put you in a tiny cell. So we're not starting with the premise as a question. It is the current reality.
Now, I don't have a personal belief that kids should have to support their parents, but to philosphically hold that means they shouldn't have to pay SS to them either. The difference between children paying parents individually and writ large is just different mechanisms (collective vs familial), so if you agree with the collective system you already agree children should be forced to pay the parents.
Now, to be clear -- I didn't believ in the premise that if someone doesn't pay their parent, that it means the child doesn't care about them. I don't understand why the respondent said that vicious straw man, but I totally object to it. But I replied based on their fiction so I could address the underlying point about support without a further argument.
Ultimately elderly do need support. Children are ofter going to want to support the elderly. My point is that it would make more sense to tie that elderly support to investment in children so the incentives are in place to put a good investment in children and also to ensure people don't just free ride by rejecting children or helping children but then gladly gobbling up the dividends of the investment. This incentive system can be fixed by either an individual or collective approach but the bastardized system where we privatize the investment and socialize the dividends presents the worst moral hazards and anti-natal outcomes.
>> I didn't believe in the premise that if someone doesn't pay their parent, that it means the child doesn't care about them. I don't understand why the respondent said that vicious straw man,
Children who emotionally care about their parents but are financially unable to assist are rarely going to say
> go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard
i did not build that strawman, you did, i just set it on fire
It’s ok: you can just say you don’t like taxes.
Personally I prefer the low-tax individualistic model, but my point is that I would also defer that a high-tax model would also present balanced incentives if they better reciprocated an investment in children.
The argument for taxes is usually something along the lines of forming a society, but society is almost totally gone when you make the investment in a child to become productive but then magically appears as soon as the kid is productive. As we are finding out this bastardized model is not working out for kids or parents.
A farm, in the middle of 19th century London ?
Charles Darwin actually only lived in London for a few years, and spent most of his life in what was at that time the county of Kent. Although in any case, as you say, his home did not involve a farm.
> Tax the shit out of the kid, spread the social security benefits around to everyone including people that didn't raise any children.
You lost me here. I don’t have children but I pay into Social Security. Why shouldn’t I get something back in retirement?
I think you're looking at this with a misunderstanding of how SS works. You didn't pay hardly any SS to the youth that will support you from which you will make your demands. Rather you reciprocated to the investment made by elders that raised you.
The money you paid the elderly in SS is gone. The question is what proportion of the investment in the youth did you make that will pay you. Probably some, but likely less on average than a parent/guardian.
I understand exactly how social security works. You’re conflating “youth” with “offspring” and “elders” with “parents”.
I haven't conflated them, it's just that it's required that you misunderstand in order to continue on with the fiction that the youth owe you the money you paid into our elders. That doesn't make any sense. Your premise that you're getting back what you paid in only makes sense if you look at it that you actually paid something into the people paying you, which in practice is the investment in the youth becoming productive. Which you definitely do, just on average non-parents do not do it as much as parents.
It just does not make any sense whatsoever non-parents would get the same stake in SS that parents do. It makes 0 sense at all, as the system is currently set up, and I suspect is responsible for a large part of the moral hazard where people grab SS made possible by investment in children but reject children, basicaly renegging the investment but grabbing the dividends. This is part of the reason why I think SS is a broken system, and as we are finding out is likely destined for bankruptcy as the population pyramid inverts.
You still haven’t explained how you made this leap from elders to parents. That’s not the same thing. Social security benefits are based on how much you pay in, not how many children you have.
Because it's not just parents that raise children, it's our elders. You're paying property taxes to raise the children. You are contributing to society in ways that aid children. To the extent that your logic holds, you definitely do not deserve nothing. When you pay SS up to the elders you are in effect paying dividends on the investment they made in you, finally paying back into what they spent on you. The paying back happens when you pay SS, that's you settling the reciprocal arrangement. It makes no sense the youth (or if you insist, other people's children) would owe you for settling the reciprocation to your own elders.
My stance has and remains that the payoff from children, if it is to be violently enforced at the hand of the taxman as it is now, should be proportional to the investment, there is no reason to restrict that to just parents, it just happens to be that parents generally make the lions share of the investment.
>You still haven’t explained how you made this leap from elders to parents
It's a leap to refer to social security benefits as paid to (at least on average by far) our elders? .
> When you pay SS up to the elders you are in effect paying dividends on the investment they made in you
That’s not how Social Security works. The current Social Security beneficiaries made contributions to their seniors, not to me (their junior).
>That’s not how Social Security works
And thus you understand. That's my whole point! That is my objection! But to be clear I didn't say that's how SS works, I said that's how the reciprocation works -- I did not say that's when you pay back the SS money elders paid you (they didnt) but rather their investment. I clearly explained SS flows upward.
The flow of investment in the youth is largely from private individuals to youth. [privatized]
But the flow (dividends) the other way is largely through SS upwards. [socialized]
That's my whole point! It's a terrible system because the reciprocation encourages free-riders and poor incentives for investment in the youth, as the ROI is poorly coupled to those making the investment.
> I think you're looking at this with a misunderstanding of how SS works.
You accused me of not understanding how Social Security works, not of how you think it should work.
>You lost me here. I don’t have children but I pay into Social Security. Why shouldn’t I get something back in retirement?
Because you seem to think you're owed something 'back' when in fact the people you're asking something 'back' weren't people that you paid SS to.
What's more accurate is that SS is you paying the elderly back for their investment, not that you somehow create a debt for the children because you paid SS to the elderly. Your position there made zero sense.
Any debt you think you're owed 'back' from children who will pay you SS would be created when the children actually received something from you -- i.e. being raised, schooled, etc. Not created because you paid a 3rd party.
On marriage and partner - "These things good for one’s health."
Proven by modern science now. At least longer life.
The Natural state of Man -- at least, according to Ben Franklin.
Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. — better than a dog anyhow.– Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. — These things good for one’s health. —
"""but terrible loss of time. —""" !!!!
So ruthless in his calculus. One wonders if he was on the spectrum?
> calculus
It is calculus, it is performed like calculus - it has to.
“better than a dog anyhow”
Darwin was a real catch.
It always blows my mind how many people, historically, married their cousins. I guess smaller towns had shallower gene pools.
Everyone who marries marries their cousin, it's just a matter of degree. Before the advent of the automobile, people traveled a lot less. Even more so as you go further back. Combine that with families having a lot more kids (you might have 36-64 surviving first cousins), and you've got a situation where nearly everyone you interact with might well be only a couple degrees of separation by blood. Marriage between first cousins has historically been a bit taboo, but so called third and fourth degree (aunts and uncles, first cousins) marriages were still pretty common. It wasn't really until the rise of the eugenics movement that the modern taboos and legal prohibitions were established.
I've been doing a fair bit of genealogy lately, and you can see on the family tree pretty clearly when people moved from from smaller, insulated communities to larger cities. Above that point, the tree fans out a lot less.
> Everyone who marries marries their cousin, it's just a matter of degree.
Right, clearly I meant close (1st and 2nd) cousins. At the end of the day, we are all related, but that's kind of a technicality.
Also royalty. The instability of some European monarchs has been attributed to inbreeding.
Brits are well-known romantics even today but 19th century society was on a whole different level.
I could have sworn that was Ben Franklin that wrote that
Both Charles Darwin and Benjamin Franklin are quoted in informal Decision Theory. Both used pro-vs-cons tables to orient decision; Franklin also used weights.
> When those difficult cases occur, they are difficult, chiefly because while we have them under consideration, all the reasons pro and con are not present to the mind at the same time; but sometimes some set present themselves, and at other times another, the first being out of sight. Hence the various purposes or inclinations that alternately prevail, and the uncertainty that perplexes us. // To get over this, my way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns; writing over the one pro, and over the other con. Then during three or four days consideration, I put down under the different heads short hits of the different motives, that at different times occur to me, for or against the measure. // When I have thus got them all together in one view, I endeavor to estimate their respective weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out. If I find a reason pro equal to two reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two reasons con, equal to some three reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the balance lies, and if, after a day or two of further consideration, nothing new that is of importance occurs on either side, I come to a determination accordingly
This reminds me of the fascinating story of how Shakespeare's first folio was assembled, in that many of the plays were assembled from folks who had copies that were annotated - either as reading notes or with random family musings like todo lists.
I highly recommend the Chris Laoutaris' book on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeares-Book-Behind-Making-Shake...
My brothers and I and all our friends were allowed to draw on the walls when we were kids as long as it was in our bedrooms.
My friends thought it was the coolest thing ever.
We painted it over when we got older.
This is one of the few things children still do even centuries later. In many aspects, we have changed so drastically that I think 100-year-ago people would find us weird and unsociable.
Not at all. Young children, in particular, do the same things they’ve been doing since modern humans evolved, if not even earlier than that. My three and six year old boys wake up in the morning and pretend to be puppies. I’m sure kids their age were doing that 30,000 years ago when humans domesticated dogs.
They were playing tic tac toe the other day, and asked my dad whether he played tic tac toe when he was a kid. My dad—who grew up in a village in Bangladesh—explained that he did, except they drew the game in the dirt with sticks.
The article makes no mention of the name "Babbage" in Emma's diary. Could that relate to Charles Babbage, who was a contemporary?
I'm wondering about Wednesday April 15, 1840 -- "Much flatulence"
Sometimes history provides too much information to future generations.
Oh, if you think that's bad, see Samuel Pepy's diary (conveniently syndicated in realtime here: https://bsky.app/profile/samuelpepys.bsky.social; think they're on the third run through, currently doing 1662). No detail of everyday life, no matter how objectionable, left uncovered.
> syndicated in realtime here: https://bsky.app/profile/samuelpepys.bsky.social
That really is wonderful! Reading how Pepys arranged for his diary to be preserved makes me think that he would have enjoyed this more modern presentation.
> Found out my uncle Wight and Mr. Rawlinson, and with them went to the latter’s house to dinner, and there had a good dinner of cold meat and good wine, but was troubled in my head after the little wine I drank.
"Troubled in the head" is a euphemism due a revival!
> Reading how Pepys arranged for his diary to be preserved makes me think that he would have enjoyed this more modern presentation.
I mean, he might not be too happy about the faux-Spanish bits, in which he wrote about his many affairs and other bad behaviour, being decoded...
It's a lot of fun, though, and the comments are usually quite good.
It's TMI only because he lived for a long time after. If he had died on April 16th, it might point to some type of illness or mariticide.
Royal Armouries Ms. I.33[0] was also used for colouring practice by children, e.g., in folii 2r - 8v as shown on Wiktenauer[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Armouries_Ms._I.33
[1] https://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Walpurgis_Fechtbuch_(MS_I.33)
This is a good snapshot and piece of history of a mindsets freshly tuned into a new way of thinking. Thanks for this, this article was a relaxing break in these politically tense times.
The other story here is incremental growth of camera technology. The daguerreotype came out after his voyage on the HMS Beagle, by the time Origin of Specices was published (with no photography) Cameras still had to many practical limitations to justify a worse image. By 1872 Darwin would publish a book full of photography despite his remarkable drawing skills.
Something gives me the feeling that a lot of people are going to follow Darwin's example in the near future
"from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
Apparently less so in the case of his offspring.
People talk about how hard it is to have kids these days without realizing that this sort of chaos was normal for the vast majority of humans throughout history and they still achieved great things. Part of it is the expectation of others. So what if your kids color your book, interrupt your meetings, or cause embarrassment in front of your boss. They need to get over it.
Like him or hate, the fact that the Vice President takes his kids everywhere is a good reminder of how un-child-friendly our societies have become. It's almost transgressive to exist with children these days.
Loved this! I took my child to work even when it wasn’t the specific holiday so she could see what a real exec review looked like or how boring work could seem to be. The experiment is still running, so I can’t tell you the outcome... yet! ;)
I guess he figured it out after all that.
"If I catch you rascals, I will give you the Darwin award in fine arts!"
Curious if anyone reading this has explored the alternative theories to Darwinian evolution. I only recently started looking at it, so don't want to share links because I don't know what is believable. But it seems there are major flaws that even Darwin knew about. He considered Origin of Species an abstract, and was promising the full "big book" for the rest of his life, but never was able to pull it together.
> But it seems there are major flaws that even Darwin knew about.
Sure. He recognized the importance of inheritance, but didn't know the mechanism. We've learned a lot since Darwin's days about how it all works - genetics, in particular - but the basic concept has held up just fine.
We can even demonstrate it in lab conditions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...
Can you elaborate on this? My understanding is that evolution (to be precise, we're presumably referring to natural selection) has been proven again and again and that there is a clear scientific consensus around it, and I'm not familiar with any particular large gaps in the theory.
I'm guessing it's passages like this one regarding transitional forms:
Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.
Fun fact: Archaeopteryx - a transitional fossil between dinosaurs and birds - was discovered two years after Origin of Species.