Shadwell wrote:
billsmithglendale wrote:
Idiocracy is one of my favorite movies, and actually one of the reasons I decided to finally get on the ball and have a baby.
What is scary is how true it is -- one need only watch a show like "Maury" here in the U.S. to see it in action -- urban idiots cranking out kids by the dozens, with different women (also idiots), while you and I foot the tax bill. What's sad is that so many of these children will end up as criminals or otherwise unproductive, not ready for the 21st century info economy, and doing more harm than good to our economy.
Meanwhile countries like China and India continue to pass us by in areas like Mathematics -- so basically, their children will be outperforming western world children by the time I am in my 60s.
There is some bad genetics out there no doubt, but poverty is a reason why people have a lot of kids the world over. It's like a survival tactic. They also have terrible schools and its not their fault. People talk down on welfare but they forget rich people are the biggest welfare queens there are.
Oh, I don't dispute it -- don't get me started on the corporate/military-industrial complex and how it rapes the taxpayer (and everyone else).
Yes, poverty is a cause, as is ignorance and religion (for those who refuse to use contraception). But there's more to it, at least here in the U.S. I say the following as a true moderate (I'm a Democrat but conservative on certain issues) -- well-meaning people during the 80s and 90s actually did more harm than good to our urban poor by not holding them to a higher standard. Instead, they decided that the culture of poverty was "their culture" (when nothing could be father from the truth) and that we should all respect it and celebrate it (the corporate entertainment industry had big stakes in this as well). This was condescending and insulting, but the urban masses embraced this and took it as carte blanche to continue things like unmarried childbearing, lack of interest in education, and living off of the public dole (because they "deserved" it). So really, condescension by the middle and upper-middle class made the problem worse.
One stat I can throw at you right now, as an example -- African-Americans had something like a 20% illegitimacy rate in the 1920s (very close to the rest of the population), but this has now ballooned to 80%. Mere poverty didn't cause this -- obviously that community has more money now than then, during what was one of the worst periods for that ethnic group post-Civil War. There were other political factors, but clearly this community is not living up to the dream of Dr. King in the 1960s -- they let themselves down, and we did as well by letting them and even encouraging them.
The other thing to look at -- incentives, which are what drive most of us to do what we do. Until the mid-90s, the welfare system incentivized poor urban mothers to have children -- each additional child was a bonus to the check. We also didn't kick people off of the rolls until the 90s, regardless of whether they tried to find another job or not. So while we basically rewarded one group for spitting out children left and right, we did not similarly subsidize the middle class to do the same. So effectively we are creating an artificial environment where one set of genes, including the criminally-prone, chronically unemployed, and drug addicts, is able to out reproduce the actual tax-paying side. And look how fast it can happen -- I'm 34, and If I were a poor urban man, I might actually be a grandfather by now -- I'm barely a father as it is (just had a baby recently). Multiply that over a hundred years, and the numbers start working against us.
Clearly Maury is not strapped for fathers with multiple children by different mothers, or women who want to blame their baby on multiple men (sometimes as many as 20 at a time, on the early Maury shows of that type) -- it's a scary situation, and makes idiocracy not so unlikely. Meanwhile birthrates are falling in most first-world nations, except the U.S.
01 Dec 2010, 11:30 am
