Why do Lower Income Parents Find More Joy In Kids？
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Summary
In this episode, we discuss the growing problem of less than 1% of Americans having more than 1 child, and the root cause of why this is happening, which is the lack of education in our schools. We also talk about the role of the "urban elite" in our society, and why they don't care about the "little guy."
Transcript
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What this graph demonstrates that both the percentage of parents saying that they find
00:00:04.420
being a parent is enjoyable or rewarding, highest among lower income people.
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A lot of people don't realize that when you define your personal goals around hedonism,
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like I am having a kid to be happier, that kid will always provide you with less happiness
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than if you are having a kid because it is your ideological duty to have the kid.
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The happiness that you get from tasks that you do because you think they are a thing
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of intrinsic value and not to make yourself happy will always give you more durable happiness
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than the person who is chasing hedonism in and of itself.
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But the urban monoculture doesn't tell people that.
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It tells people that the highest order goal in anyone's life should be sort of the mass
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You sent me an interesting graph today that I want to talk about because it speaks to
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a point that we often talk about within the prenatalist movement where we will say lower
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income individuals have more children than higher income individuals.
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So that means on average, the less wealth the country has, the more kids, the higher
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fertility rate is going to be, but also within countries.
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In general, like if you look at the US until you get to like really extreme levels of wealth,
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which we've talked about in our other video, like the will child support cause speciation
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video, you do get a high fertility rate again at extreme levels of wealth.
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But generally, the less wealth you have, the more kids you have.
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And I think a lot of people, like especially like wealthier people, when they hear us say
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this are like, oh, well, that's just because these terribly uneducated people are just miserably
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having children because of their dumb religious beliefs or because they're too dumb to use birth
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And they then would, of course, the assumption there is if that is really true, if that is
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what is happening, these are the most miserable parents, right?
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Of course, because they don't have the resources for their kids, right?
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Because raising a child is so expensive these days.
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And because of course, they're having children by mistake because they're so dumb to not use
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So these wealthy parents, yeah, they're the ones who are having the fulfilling parenting
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One would assume, of course, because they were, they paid all the IVF to have their children
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at age 55 and they wanted their children and they had the resources.
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More than that, I think that there is a level of within the urban elite in our society today,
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this urban monoculture we talk about, a dehumanization of the lower classes in America.
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Well, no, I mean, you say you think, but it's something that they, I do not think, realize
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Well, especially the woke masses believe that they are the champions of the poor and uneducated.
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They're like, yeah, I'm the champion of the little guy.
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And then you're like, the little guy is the people who you're like dehumanizing in these,
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you know, and you see this in their language, you know, the quote unquote uneducated.
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And, and, and the reality is, is that they don't champion the little guy.
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They, they really, and their policies generally make things worse for the little guy.
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And the little guy could tell them that, but they just don't want to hear it.
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What they want is centralized control and an expansion of the bureaucracy, which is what
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they're really fighting for because this expanded bureaucracy increases the number of
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jobs that they can have, which actually, before we go into the graph that you sent me, we'll
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go into a graph that I sent you that demonstrates this phenomenon.
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We send graphs to each other and we're like, oh, look at my data.
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This is a graph called growth in education staffing has far outpaced student enrollment.
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When you, oh my gosh, you shared this to me the other day when I think yesterday when
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So if you look at since the 1970s, there has been an 8% increase in student enrollment in
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the US, a 60% increase in teaching staff and a 138% increase in non-teaching staff.
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And this is something we're seeing in the university system as well and stuff like that.
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Wherever this ultra progressive movement has concentrated itself, they expand the number
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of jobs that are in these essentially like cash for nothing programs, right?
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There is no correlation between this and improved student outcomes.
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If you look at like the amount of money going into school systems and stuff like that, anybody
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who is telling you we will pump more money into the school system and get higher outcomes
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is just not relating to the data that we have right now.
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No, and if there were massive reform in the public school system, this could theoretically
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But right now putting money into the school system means giving money to teachers unions
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means basically feeding the bureaucracy and the adults, not the children.
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But the bureaucracy is important for this quote unquote educated class that believes that they
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deserve basically a dole from the state for existing.
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So many people, they grow up so much in this class that you're now getting like this like
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anti-work movement and stuff like that, where they're like even horrified at the idea that
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humans have to work for a living because they have been grown up expecting that each and every
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one of them is so upper class in their expectations that they get to live with a planted gentry.
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What they really mean when they say no work is they mean no work for the college educated.
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Because yeah, someone has to deliver their food.
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Like they genuinely, I do not think see these people as humans.
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Cause I, I just spent like the, I just spent the past more than two weeks every afternoon
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out door knocking freaking cold and the way that people treat you when you were like someone
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And I'm like, I'm heavily pregnant now and it's obvious it is, it is completely wild.
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Like strangers or people seen as like delivery people.
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Like the, you know, who was the one consistent group of people when I was out door knocking,
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who was incredibly nice to me and will always wish me luck, delivery people.
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You know, I don't live in your district, but you'd have my vote.
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And then I also saw how the delivery people were treated by the people in the neighborhoods
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So just, yeah, I, no, no, but it is shocking because you have this art student and you're
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They're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
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I have this degree that's now made pointless by AI, but hold on.
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So let's get to this graph that you shared with me, because it was pretty surprising
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I mean, I'll admit that I was to some extent affected by this bias.
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When people, and I think another reason why you are affected by it is if, for example,
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we look at the fertility crash in Latin America and we see analysts saying, oh, well, the
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reason why fertility is crashing is because all these unwanted children aren't being had
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by these teen mothers in Latin America and therefore blah, blah, blah, which implies
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that the people who had a lot of kids in the past really weren't ready to have them, really
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didn't want to have them, weren't, you know, this was not their thing.
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So you would assume that there's a lot of misery around the city.
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You know, we just, everywhere the data implies that.
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And so I think that you're seeing something different here.
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No, no, well, yes, because this is, we're talking about now and we're talking about
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And, and, and as we point out, yeah, like more lower income people have more kids, but
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So let's go over this graph, what this graph demonstrates.
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And of course it's not profound, but it shows that both the percentage of parents saying that
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they find being a parent is enjoyable or rewarding highest among lower income people.
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So 38% of lower income people and 36% of lower income people find parenting to be either enjoyable
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or rewarding all the time, 38 and 36 respectively.
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So 38% of lower income individuals find being a parent enjoyable all the time and 49% in
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So 86% of lower income people in total find being a parent, very enjoyable all of the time
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Now, if you contrast this with upper income people, instead of 38% all of the time, it
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is 14% all of the time for upper income people.
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And with middle income people, it's only 21% all of the time.
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And you also see lower total levels of all of the time or most of the time.
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So in contrast with the 86% of lower income people that find being a parent enjoyable all
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of the time or most of the time, you only have 79% within the upper income community.
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Now, if we talk about the amount that find it rewarding, you actually have about the
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If you're talking about all of the time or most of the time, it's 80, 79, 81.
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But when you talk about all of the time, do they find it rewarding all of the time?
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The number of lower income people that find it rewarding all the time is 43%.
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Contrast it with only 28% in the upper income community.
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So what you're really seeing here is upper income people seem to pretty dramatically and
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markedly find parenting both less enjoyable and less rewarding.
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And, you know, if I were to like, let's say this graph was presented to us with only the
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numbers and not the income levels, you know, they're like, okay, well now put the incomes.
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Because everyone's, oh, well, the reason why people can't become parents, the reason why
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people are miserable as parents is they don't have enough money.
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And yet, look at this, look at this enjoyable and rewarding.
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So I think that there's a few things going on here.
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The first one is one that often isn't talked about, but I do not think that it is totally
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causal, the correlation between income and parenting.
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I think that there is a correlational element here, which is to say that if you're the type
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of person that values family and parenting more, you are going to spend more time on
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doing that than on maximizing your personal income streams.
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So there's a, there's a different, the causation moves in a different direction.
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You're not having more kids because you're poor.
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Well, you can see you have different life priorities.
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Like you're, you're spending your time raising family instead of, you know, pulling.
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It's for people outside of the world of degrees.
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It's probably literally the hardest degree to get into in the world.
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It's much harder to get out than a Harvard MBA, for example.
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I remember one person who was like, you implied you had a graduate degree from Stanford, which
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would you, which made me think you had a neuroscience PhD from Stanford because you had a neuroscience
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And I got very frustrated with this because I could have gotten a neuroscience.
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It would have been astronomically easier to get into the neuroscience PhD program at Stanford
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It's literally probably about, if you're talking about the difficulty, the difference between-
00:12:03.200
Well, it's not only that, but if you look at like the average scores you need and stuff
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But what I'm saying is I could demand a very high salary.
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Like, we could demand incredibly high salaries if we wanted to play that game, if we wanted
00:12:21.340
to live in like Manhattan and San Francisco, but we didn't.
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Like, we do what we can and our education skills and network gives us some level of financial
00:12:39.500
But we would probably be considered middle-income people.
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I think when I look at the stats or upper middle-income family, whereas we certainly wouldn't
00:12:48.760
We are that because we are optimizing around what we value, which is really important.
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A lot of these people who the chart is looking at as lower income might just be genuinely
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like they're living in a suburban or rural area where their income is intrinsically going
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to be less than if they're living in an urban area because of cost of living, for example.
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So I think that that's one component that we're seeing here.
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But then the other component I think we're seeing could be, and this is a component that
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It could be that high wealth individuals have access to more compelling competing tasks.
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Meaning that when you are lower income, you can't take fancy trips.
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You can't join a board and become a big, big fancy person.
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I really don't think that that many things that you could otherwise do are limited when
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And lower income people are super involved in their communities.
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For example, when you look at rates of giving to charity and like proportional charity donations,
00:14:06.860
So this is my roommate when I was at business school.
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Like just a genuine, one of my favorite moments with him is the, there was this guy in the
00:14:17.840
classroom who was talking about building his app company.
00:14:23.120
He was a guest speaker and my roommate, I'm not going to say his name or anything because
00:14:27.320
he's a very private person and he does a lot of what he does through like shell companies.
00:14:31.120
So people don't know that it's all him, but the guest speaker was like, he said, he had
00:14:35.980
said something about how to get like, how their system for ranking apps works and stuff
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And at that time it was like Apple App Store, right?
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He's, I'm sorry, you, you misunderstand the system.
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And then the guy said snarkily to him, he goes, how many top 10 Apple App Store apps have
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And he goes, how many do I have on the top 10 list today?
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And the guy was just floored because he programs them.
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He's got a number of shell company he uses to program them.
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When we were talking to him about wealth at one point, because he just has an enormous
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He's like, I don't understand the point of being wealthy anymore.
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He's like all of the things that I used to have exclusive or historically I would have
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had exclusive access to as an ultra wealthy person.
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And I, I, I, what I can't, I don't have a private driver anymore.
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Like anyone can have like basically a private driver on demand.
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I don't have, what was it like food delivered to me anymore?
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Like I don't, he was going through all of the things.
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Like all these customized services, hiring someone at the drop of a hat to do something
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Or, oh, you know, what do I have a band in my house?
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I can listen to any band in the world, wherever, you know, constantly playing.
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And he was just going through all of the exclusive things that used to be the realm of the ultra
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wealthy and the ultra elite, which are now generally accessible to everyone.
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In fact, when I look at the wealth gated hobbies right now, a lot of them either suck.
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It's more like a status signal thing or they are hobbies where honestly, the, the expenditure
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of meaningless wealth is part of the point of the hobby.
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So here it's collecting would come into a big part of this.
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I'm talking to you, you Warhammer figure collectors and stuff like that.
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You know, all of these collectibles, all of these, you know, uh, I guess, you know, whatever,
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like the things are going to conferences too, and you're buying all these baubles, which
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have a increased price due to the scarcity due to all of the people who are collecting
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I mean, I think about the hobbies that I have, I'm like, what competes was my time with the
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So that's one thing that's not like a wealth gated thing at all.
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And video games, um, and video games are one of those things where somebody might be
00:17:17.760
like, well, video games have been rising in price recently.
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And I'm like, if you contrast video game prices today was what they were when we were
00:17:26.360
kids, you know, a new video game, when we were kids used to cost 50 bucks, what you
00:17:33.140
I remember I was talking with Simone during the pandemic where I was always shocked that
00:17:36.880
video game prices were rising so much more slowly than they were video games now where
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you'll get AAA games that are selling for $70 or something like that.
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Now, $75, uh, for a base game, which is more than they used to sell for.
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Superbowl tickets are now $9,000 getting into Disneyland is like 4,000, sorry, $400.
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It's really my enjoyment of it because another thing that's changed with video games is also
00:18:02.680
And frankly, I find the AAA games to be a lot less enjoyable than they used to be in
00:18:10.280
And they're even cheaper than games used to be.
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And I have things like Epic store that's giving out like a free new often pretty good game
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So I'm thinking like, where are these wealth gated things that are, they don't exist?
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Well, basically, in other words, yeah, I don't think that that second hypothesis.
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I want to be clear about this point because people might be misunderstanding me.
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When people don't have a lot of wealth, there are things that they don't have access to
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But those things are not in the category of entertainment.
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They are in the categories typically of personal safety, personal health, personal ability to
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do something like, I guess, travel the world on a dime or not have to work.
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But all of those things don't fall into this category of competing for their entertainment
00:19:05.940
So anyway, yeah, that was really interesting to me.
00:19:09.840
I just, I mean, the most important thing that I wanted to point out by doing a podcast on
00:19:13.820
this is just that you think that lower income people who are having more kids are doing this
00:19:21.580
No, they, they're finding this extremely satisfying.
00:19:24.420
And I mean, I think a lot of that's, I mean, a lot of the people have a hypothesis.
00:19:29.720
I think I know what the actual answer is, but I want to hear what you were saying.
00:19:33.740
I think that there's also a correlation between higher levels of, we'll say faith.
00:19:41.240
And that could be a hard culture, any sort of harder culture weirdly correlates with lower
00:19:47.900
And I can't really say why maybe lower income leaves more room in your head for faith.
00:19:54.180
But I think that that's probably a big correlatory factor is people of faith in hard cultures
00:19:58.620
are more likely to be pronatalist, are more likely to find the enjoyment and meaning of
00:20:04.120
And people who are wealthier are far more likely to be part of the urban monoculture and
00:20:08.240
therefore be, if anything, negative utilitarian antinatalists at heart who have children,
00:20:14.460
but then kind of, but I think you're on the fundamental point.
00:20:21.120
Wealthier people are statistically much more likely to be in the urban monoculture than
00:20:29.160
Well, no, because you were saying that the alternative was faith.
00:20:38.780
Faith is one component of this, but you need to keep in mind.
00:20:41.780
If you're less wealthy, regardless of your group.
00:20:45.080
So even if you're a less wealthy Democrat, for example, right, you are often not going
00:20:51.740
You're going to be in your local, often like a minority ethnic community.
00:20:56.520
Like you're going to be ingrained with your local Hispanic, you know, often like Catholic
00:21:00.480
church and family network or your local black community or your local.
00:21:04.500
And these culturally are very different from the urban monoculture, even when you are on
00:21:10.200
And then when you're not on the democratic side, you know, it's not an issue.
00:21:13.380
And so I think what we're really seeing here is that the urban monoculture has created
00:21:18.760
a cultural system for relating to children where they are basically treated like pets
00:21:35.060
Well, when this is, yeah, this is one of the things that I, you know, I talk about here
00:21:40.460
And this is one of the things we talk about on our podcast.
00:21:42.220
Like you can see being happy, being unhappy as a sin, our episode on that concept, which
00:21:47.600
is a lot of people don't realize that when you define your personal goals around hedonism,
00:21:56.660
That kid will always provide you with less happiness than if you are having a kid because
00:22:02.860
The happiness that you get from tasks that you do because you think they are a thing
00:22:08.400
of intrinsic value and not to make yourself happy will always give you more durable happiness
00:22:15.180
than the person who is chasing hedonism in and of itself.
00:22:18.460
But the urban monoculture doesn't tell people that.
00:22:21.640
It tells people that the highest order goal in anyone's life should be sort of the mass distribution
00:22:29.720
So first do what makes you happy and then try to increase pleasure and reduce suffering
00:22:35.600
So you're saying the very nature of the cultural monoculture makes it difficult to actually
00:22:39.880
enjoy having kids and find having kids rewarding because it does detract from in the moment
00:22:47.420
Yeah, because chasing after pleasure, defining your life around pleasure, both your own pleasure
00:22:53.640
and the pleasure of other people's, sort of disables your ability to really feel genuine
00:23:00.200
But then I also think that there's all of these, and we talk about like the psychologist
00:23:05.040
I think the way that these individuals, when they're in deep in the urban monoculture, relate
00:23:09.700
to mental health and frame their own mental health around questions like trauma, the way
00:23:14.840
they interact with things is just really unhealthy.
00:23:17.700
And it causes them to interact with their kids in really unhealthy ways.
00:23:24.120
Well, as you talked about, they treat their kids like little princelings.
00:23:27.220
Well, and, well, and, but then they also apply this whole trauma mindset to their children.
00:23:38.600
And then we've, we've met a decent number of young people from both more conservative,
00:23:43.900
traditional religious communities, as well as super woke communities.
00:23:52.460
One is like super to the point, like super regulated.
00:23:56.940
I've never heard about anything ever that happened that was difficult in her life or anything
00:24:03.140
Just, you know, her comments and thoughts on things.
00:24:06.480
And every single time I talk, there's some mention of trauma or difficulty or ideology,
00:24:15.100
And it just shows how, like, how screwed up this culture is and how it's creating people
00:24:22.040
You allow your kids to engage with this culture of, I don't know what to call it.
00:24:25.700
It's a culture that had disseminated from the psychology community, which was my, originally,
00:24:30.720
I started my career as a neuroscientist and I worked in psychiatry.
00:24:34.280
And so I'm saying this as somebody who is informed about how the community is structured
00:24:38.800
and the way it works and the way the human brain works.
00:24:41.120
It is really much more structurally similar to a cult now, what is taught as psychology,
00:24:48.260
than it is to historically what we called psychology.
00:24:51.160
It's actually much closer to what Scientology was in the 80s than what any real evidence-based
00:25:00.120
And we have episodes on this psychology cult episode, stuff like that.
00:25:03.600
But it has disseminated into all aspects of how these individuals in the urban monoculture
00:25:09.660
see themselves and relate to their own self-narrative.
00:25:13.940
And when a kid is raised in this, and it's funny, you've got the two people who you mentioned
00:25:18.300
And I thought you were thinking of two guys who I know who had the same phenomenon happening.
00:25:23.440
No, I'm now I'm thinking of those two guys, the two young.
00:25:27.000
Yeah, it's really sad because these are really otherwise competent individuals.
00:25:30.960
Well, all of these people, yeah, are equally, I think,
00:25:36.660
And yet, one of these groups, we've given up on their futures, honestly.
00:25:41.900
We've just been like, okay, we're writing you off.
00:25:46.380
Well, and it's interesting, the smart ones, when I think about the smart people who are
00:25:51.740
the, the, and I think that people here, when we're talking about like conservative young
00:25:56.900
people, they, they probably think that we're talking about, I don't know, like white, what
00:26:01.760
they would think of as traditional, like, I don't know, like tradcasts.
00:26:05.480
Every one of the people I'm thinking about are the first generation immigrant descendant.
00:26:08.380
Those are the most, or children, some are children of first generation immigrants.
00:26:15.920
The ones who I'm thinking of, oh, the woke ones.
00:26:22.060
Well, then I don't know the one you're thinking of, but generally the first generation immigrant
00:26:25.400
kids who I know are less affected by wokeness because they're still, you know.
00:26:30.120
I think they have the ability to see in contrast to their home culture, just how like ridiculous
00:26:40.500
And then the ones who I know who have really succumbed to it, their families have been here
00:26:45.020
And they, they succumbed to what culture and they had so much promise, but honestly, more
00:26:50.420
than like 50% of their mental effort seems dedicated to maintaining quote unquote mental health,
00:26:57.700
which is really just degradating of mental health.
00:27:02.760
Like, like the, the elevation of, of this sort of mental landscape that has come with
00:27:08.980
this mental health expansion within our society is both unnecessary and causes more mental health
00:27:15.420
It also pulls people totally off their career track.
00:27:17.720
Like I, I, you see all these people now who like want to be life coaches or want to be
00:27:22.020
therapists or want to go into all these sorts of, they just want to feed into this because
00:27:28.420
And so then they're, they're becoming unproductive.
00:27:31.680
Like they're, they're not getting well-paying jobs.
00:27:34.340
And they're also putting themselves into huge amounts of student debt to get degrees.
00:27:39.300
Well, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's an, and I think very, really an addictive process.
00:27:44.280
And it's interesting to me because people know that I really love studying religions,
00:27:50.020
but my love of studying religions really came from a love of studying cults.
00:27:53.760
I always wanted to understand how do people get enthralled by these ideas that seem just
00:28:06.340
That was something that I always really cared about.
00:28:09.260
If a cult can make you give all your money to strangers and do all these crazy things,
00:28:13.240
well then what could cult tactics make you do if you, if you leverage them for good to
00:28:20.580
Could I create a little, like, like my own mental landscape that would do well and move
00:28:27.680
Seeing as powerful cult tactics are totally, you should be thinking that.
00:28:31.440
Well, I, I believe I've executed on it within my own life.
00:28:34.400
I'm quite, quite happy with my life as everybody always comments on there.
00:28:41.820
And it's no, this is just, I mean, by the way, guys, this is Malcolm at his low point.
00:28:55.680
I am very high energy first thing in the morning.
00:28:59.100
The Chris Williamson interview with me earlier in the morning.
00:29:01.800
And people want to be like, what is Malcolm like when he's like earlier in the morning?
00:29:05.560
You know, I get really excited about everything.
00:29:08.960
Or right after I've completed a task, I'm really excited about.
00:29:11.280
So I think that you can actually brainwash yourself, basically.
00:29:15.260
Not brainwash yourself because it's really just you choose your mental landscape much
00:29:23.420
And when you act like your mental landscape is something that you don't have complete
00:29:27.820
authority over and that you are not the authoritarian dictator of your mental landscape.
00:29:33.960
They're like, oh, I'm listening to all the little voices in my head and I'm trying to
00:29:41.480
You know, this push by like inside out and stuff like that.
00:29:50.980
Your logic is the dictator of your mental landscape.
00:29:53.420
And if you want to feel happy, then you feel happy because you've got bigger things than
00:30:01.140
And we really we are dealing with a collapsing society right now.
00:30:04.720
We cannot afford these types of emotional indulgences.
00:30:08.100
And part of the reason society is collapsing is because so many people are indulging these
00:30:14.700
If you look at historical periods right before societal collapses, you see a similar sort
00:30:19.820
of mental healthism under different names among the...
00:30:30.740
The hypochondriac women who are always swooning and they had these mysterious illnesses, etc.
00:30:36.100
Or always, yeah, competing in these sort of mental games or writing long poems about how
00:30:46.760
Well, I mean, so my takeaway from this graph is basically this, this thought that being
00:30:53.340
pure and being a parent will make you miserable is like just off that, you know, lower income
00:31:02.020
parents are, there are clearly fewer low income parents who don't find any rewarding enjoyment
00:31:11.720
And it's so funny, like when I actually look at, you know, the lower income families we
00:31:16.460
know who are parents and I look at how they are around the kids when we hang out in person
00:31:19.860
and I was just like, look at your, their Facebook posts.
00:31:22.020
And then I think of the higher income parents that we know and their children, I see how
00:31:26.380
they act around them and speak about them and post about them.
00:31:32.420
There's a lot more sort of like cognitive dissonance around being a parent with the wealthy in
00:31:39.000
And also maybe this feeling like they're kind of above raising them so that like time spent
00:31:44.100
with them is kind of like, you know, it's, it's, it's very hard for me to articulate this,
00:31:49.480
but anyway, it does shape the way that I look at pronatalism and income.
00:31:53.580
And I mean, it certainly reinforces our thing, which is, yeah, this whole money, please approach
00:31:57.720
to pronatalism is incredibly dumb, but yeah, I'm glad that you indulged me in talking about