Children, what do we do with them?

On affection, education, and a Physiocratic school.

Much has been said and done about the birth rate already, and as tiresome as it is to harp on the same subject, I think something essential is missing from this discussion, something fundamental to having children in the first place: the way we attach ourselves to them and the way we educate them. Sensible people know, in advance, the depth of the bond and responsibility that comes with raising children, and that this is not something that can simply be circumvented by outsourcing care or other practical responsibilities. Moreover, it isn’t actually something people want to circumvent, because if they did, what would remain of having children? Consider a story Plutarch tells in Life of Solon:

When Solon went to Thales at Miletus, he expressed his wonder at his having never married and had a family. Thales made no answer at the time, but a few days afterwards arranged that a man should come to him and say that he left Athens ten days before. When Solon inquired of him, whether anything new had happened at Athens, the man answered, as Thales had instructed him, that “there was no news, except the death of a young man who had been escorted to his grave by the whole city. He was the son, they told him, of a leading citizen of great repute for his goodness, but the father was not present, for they said he had been travelling abroad for some years.” “Unhappy man,” said Solon, “what was his name?” “I heard his name,” answered the man, “but I cannot remember it; beyond that there was much talk of his wisdom and justice.” Thus by each of his answers he increased Solon’s alarm, until he at last in his excitement asked the stranger whether it were not Solon’s son that was dead. The stranger said that it was. Solon was proceeding to beat his head and show all the other marks of grief, when Thales stopped him, saying with a smile, “This, Solon, which has the power to strike down so strong a man as you, has ever prevented my marrying and having children. But be of good courage, for this tale which you have been told is untrue.”

Thales makes a point by drawing attention, in a rather cruel way, to the vulnerability that comes with having children. The point Thales precisely does not make, perhaps because he sensed this was the covert accusation Solon was leveling at him, is that he doesn’t want children because he dislikes them or because the practical responsibilities of raising them would be too time-consuming or burdensome.

Of course, I think these latter objections are still genuine ones that some people really do have. But crucially, they are also objections that people who do want children have, and yet these concerns do not prevent them from having children anyway. They accept the logistical inconvenience because they seek the affection, the warmth, the emotional investment that children give, because that is the only thing that still stands firmly when it comes to having children, and the only thing one can logically expect from having them, and the only thing there is to gain. But even when they were still economic assets, necessary for securing old-age support, instruments of property, lineage, or strategic marriage, such as they were in the days of Solon and Thales, it was understood that at the centre of it, or perhaps partially hidden underneath it, is the emotional bond. In a similar spirit, Theophrastus, the student of Aristotle writing roughly two centuries after Solon, is reported by later authors to have remarked that childless men may indeed be happier, but that theirs is a gloomy kind of happiness.

We empirically know financial incentives do influence fertility, even if only marginally, but no one thinks the push factor for parents in this case is literal financial gain, unless you are dealing with some very cynical people. But in most cases it is safe to say financial incentives work because people want to give their children the best possible upbringing, more comfort, and by extension more affection, which is easier to accomplish with less financial strain. Such, at least, is a shared sentiment among Westerners. Part of the reason I began writing this article was in response to Bronze Age Pervert’s Caribbean Rhythms episode 201, in which he proposes a radical natalist program: combining large financial bounties for reproduction among high-IQ individuals with the option of extensive to full outsourcing of childcare through communal or institutional arrangements. And while I find the emphasis on material incentives somewhat compelling, I am far less convinced by the latter component. Although I can imagine the fruition of such a plan being a net win, I think it could only really be a win as a social experiment whose outcomes would be scientifically interesting, not that it could function as a genuine solution at scale.

Most people understand parenthood as an irreducible relationship, something beyond a mere bundle of tasks, and partial outsourcing of care can indeed make having children easier. Full outsourcing of childcare, however, strikes me as an entirely unconvincing way to encourage smart people—especially women who otherwise do not want to bear children—to have them, because they feel, justifiably, that early childhood is primarily a domain of attachment, from the child’s perspective as well. Consider that substituting and fragmenting care entirely into the hands of people who are not the parents, if the would-be biological parent has even an ounce of suspicion that this could negatively affect the child in any way (and it is not illogical for them to have this suspicion), would be sufficient reason not to have children at all. Harsh as it may sound, this is at least a small part of the reason why abortion is more common than adoption. Yes, people would rather kill their children than put them out of their control and into the hands of others, and if you can suspend your moral disgust at this for a moment, you would see that this is not because people are so “evil” but because it just makes sense from the perspective of the non-negotiability of the biological bond. And you can come up with a hypothetical where the biological parents are guaranteed the children will be provided with the best upbringing, etcetera, but this will always be a hypothetical; in practice no such certainty exists. The only certainty parents can meaningfully possess lies in their own assumed responsibility, their presence and judgment, so in practical terms at least in near-daily involvement for prolonged periods of time.

So far on the proposal of fully outsourcing care, which is simply put too targeted and wouldn’t seduce enough people. And if I take a purely aesthetic position on the financial incentives, bounties, breeding compounds, and daycares as proposed by BAP, I would say it’s worthwhile to carry these things out, but I would still say they are also too targeted and frankly cost-inefficient from the perspective of getting actual “results.” A more scalable alternative would be to establish an open-access schooling system that identifies and rewards inborn intellectual ability early, while directing those for whom this track is unsuitable toward more practical forms of education better matched to their capabilities. It is plausible that more than enough sufficiently intelligent individuals already exist, and will continue to be born, but fail to rise through an educational system that does not primarily reward creativity or real intellect, instead favoring those willing to work the longest hours reproducing pre-chewed knowledge. Besides, intelligence is heritable, but it is not rare for highly intelligent or otherwise talented individuals to be born to parents of average or slightly above-average intellect, and you want those children to succeed too. Under a system that selects for intellect rather than for those who put in the most work, there would be far less need for explicit financial bounties or aggressive encouragement of higher fertility, because selection would become more accurate concerning every individual, in order to sift out the desirable ones. I imagine otherwise far too many resources would be wasted attempting to engineer outcomes through reproduction itself, a process subject to regression toward the mean. A differentiating schooling system, moreover, kills two birds with one stone, since students of average ability would also receive education more appropriate to them, and fewer resources would be wasted on them. In this way, the problem is addressed at both ends and investment is more efficiently allocated.

A schooling system filtering on real intellect seems like such a silver bullet to me (think of what it could solve vis-à-vis the supposed “need” for immigrants in the labour market because of the “lack of people willing to do low-skilled labour”) that, when I was in the process of writing this article, I was somewhat surprised I hadn’t seen it mentioned in relation to the birth rate before. That was until my attention was drawn to a 2023 article in Pimlico Journal, which offers a convincing argument that a realistic understanding of IQ, when translated into the schooling system, could help raise fertility rates. The article’s central claim is that the absence of such realism, that is, an educational culture that makes success achievable through effort alone, produces a “striver competition” in which the perceived cost of raising children becomes so high that having fewer is rational.

Reading that article made me realize that when I said that affection, warmth, and emotional bonds are the only things left to gain from having children in the developed world, I was slightly off. Children can also provide you with “vicarious achievements”: their accomplishments become your accomplishments, and therefore optimizing their success can become paramount. In countries where parental pride and joy is especially mediated through children’s success, such as in East Asian countries par excellence, we can see what this does for the birth rate: it nearly obliterates it. As the Pimlico article points out, when a child’s failure is experienced as a threat to parental identity, parenting becomes a high-stakes project, encouraging spending in terms of both money and time on schooling and tutoring.

Affection is supposed to feel at least somewhat unconditional. In more compartmentalized education systems, where children of lesser inborn intellect can pursue alternative paths such as practical or skilled trades earlier without having to do all the striving first, parents can relax their anxieties about performance. Knowing that their children have viable futures outside the corridors of academic “striverism” preserves space for affection. In such a system, the joys of both parenthood and childhood can remain intact. At the same time, parents of highly intelligent children can also feel reassured, knowing that their children’s potential will be recognized and nurtured appropriately.

I have kept this discussion perhaps at too general a level, but the dynamics I am describing do not differ radically from country to country. Across the West, educational systems tend to share the same underlying logic of “effort” fetishism, albeit to varying degrees. One might object that a schooling system that genuinely and openly differentiates children on inborn intellectual ability is almost as politically implausible as the more radical natalist proposals, such as the breeding compounds mentioned earlier. Yet liberal countries such as the Netherlands and Germany already operate systems that differentiate students early into distinct educational tracks. These systems, however, only approximate selection on inborn ability. While the standardized tests taken at the end of primary school (age eleven or twelve) are not exams one can meaningfully study for, and thus capture some inherent ability, final placement also depends heavily on teacher recommendations. These recommendations are influenced by perceived effort, behavior, and increasingly by diversity considerations, which means that selection is only imperfectly aligned with raw intellectual ability.

In the Netherlands, after primary school, pupils are typically streamed into vmbo, havo, or vwo (separated into Atheneum and Gymnasium, with the latter including Greek and Latin courses), roughly separating vocational, applied academic, and pre-university trajectories. In Germany, a comparable division exists between Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium, with vocational schooling (Ausbildung) offering a route into skilled and stable employment. This differentiation is reflected on the teaching side as well, where instructors at different school levels are required to hold different qualifications and credentials. Crucially, the lower, non-academic tracks are not merely “leftover” categories but structured pathways with institutional continuity, though they do not lead directly to university; only the highest track does. Such systems at least demonstrate that relatively early grouping into different schools can exist within liberal societies without necessarily being perceived as “oppressive.”

I would also like to remind anyone who has questions about the degree to which such new schooling systems are implementable under current conditions that the legitimacy of modern “meritocracy,” educational systems, and hiring practices is already under strain. In the United States, dissatisfaction with DEI and quota-based interventions, though mainly related to workplaces, is very widespread and explicit; the Compact Magazine article The Lost Generation made waves just this week. In Europe too, right wing politicians question gender- and minority-based selection policies and how “meritocratic,” and thus “fair,” they are. Okay, but that is not necessarily the same as saying inherent intellect should be prioritized over effort-based learning, since that too, in the minds of many, is not “meritocratic.” And I have avoided calling it meritocratic so far for that reason. But you could easily take merit to mean ability rather than endurance. And is not willingness and ability to sustain the highest levels of effort over the longest periods of time to a degree also an inborn characteristic? Anyhow, you could argue that the current conditions unfairly advantage not only minorities but also those whose learning ability is related to endurance, and the well-off: children with parents who can finance tutoring, supervision, and prolonged academic paths. In this sense, prioritizing intellect over effort does not undermine meritocracy but restores it, by aligning rewards more closely with the capacities education is meant to cultivate in the first place. Still, a new name might be appropriate, so we can call it a “Physiocracy,” loosely, by which I mean absolutely not literally, after the economic doctrine that originated in eighteenth-century France, which at its core meant the belief that all real wealth ultimately comes from land and agriculture, not from trade, industry, or finance.

How would a new physiocracy help the birth rate? Perhaps at first glance, it wouldn’t. But whatever you might think of them, the tradwives are completely correct in assessing that “striver society” is a killer when it comes to family life. Asking women to take a voluntary step back out of all of this will not work, first of all because they would not listen, but also because the job market is for a large part modeled on striverism. Undoing that means undoing it in pre-job-market education first.

That also means the job of teaching itself needs to change. I suggest the following microcosm:

Establish a physiocratic school, but perhaps one that, in legal terms, is not formally classified as a school in order to avoid certain regulatory constraints, or else one that is set up in a country with a large degree of educational freedom. Invite people to come teach at this school with the only strict requirements being that they have a tested IQ of at least 130 and that they are willing to teach for a minimum of one year for a salary somewhere in the range of $75,000 to $100,000. It would not be required for them to have held teaching jobs previously, though it would likely be desirable for them to demonstrate extensive knowledge in at least one field (mathematics, a language, history, the natural sciences, philosophy, etc.). To make teaching a desirable occupation again, teachers would be given broad freedom to teach whatever and however they like, outside the bounds of suffocating institutions, so long as the emphasis remains on developing insight and understanding rather than merely reproducing information. It should be exploratory and challenging.

The students would be adolescents, perhaps between the ages of twelve and sixteen, with a minimum tested IQ of around 120, so that instruction can proceed without being dragged or slowed down. Younger could also work, like between ages eight and twelve.

Importantly, such a school should not be funded by parents. Funding would instead have to come from external sources like private endowments, foundations, and individual patrons. With the proper funding, it could even be a kind of boarding school.

I suppose this would be an attractive offer to many young, intelligent people looking for work outside the usual pathways, who might be interested in teaching without necessarily wanting to make an entire career out of it, and who would want to be assured their students are gifted enough to work with. At the same time, it would be a relief to parents who want to see their children educated seriously and not have them be in smothering and mediocre learning environments. As a microcosm, such a school would not “solve” the birth rate problem on its own, but it would demonstrate an alternative to effort fetishism.

There is much more I could say on the topic of having and raising children, and I have not properly addressed the difficulty of the situation of people who want to have children but for whom this feels out of reach. Nor have I explored the freedom that can be gained through having children, which is something I strongly believe in. Perhaps these matters warrant future articles. For now, I will conclude with a beautiful and fitting passage from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra:

“Ah, where shall I now ascend with my longing! From all mountains do I look out for fatherlands and motherlands.

But a home have I found nowhere: unsettled am I in all cities, and decamping at all gates.

Alien to me, and a mockery, are the present-day men, to whom of late my heart impelled me; and exiled am I from fatherlands and motherlands.

Thus do I love only my children’s land, the undiscovered in the remotest sea: for it do I bid my sails search and search.

To my children will I make amends for being the child of my fathers: and to all the future - for this present-day!

Thus spoke Zarathustra.”