Unintended implications

I have felt for a long time now that under the current Wealth System in America, the overwhelming majority of adults simply cannot afford to rear children in a financially sustainable way -- unlike the adults in the rentier classes, for example our current President, whose twin daughters recently graduated from college. I would be willing to bet money that these young Bush women have no student loans to pay off, and that they will never have to do any real work, much as Chelsea Clinton got a phoney-sounding but absurdly well remunerated "job" as a "consultant," no doubt because someone owed her politically powerful mother a favor. In a rational society, of course, Chelsea Clinton would have wound up with some job like teaching school in Little Rock. By contrast, President Bush's daughters seem more like Wal-Mart clerk material to me.

The empirical evidence supporting my position has come out in a new book, reviewed here. I plan to get around to reading this study, The Two-Income Trap, some day, but from this and other articles about the economic erosion of the middle class, I draw quite different conclusions. If most American adults can't afford to have children, I don't look for a solution from politics or economics; I look at the radical solution, namely, that you have no business making babies unless you have a substantial guaranteed income from sources that can't fire you, or at least that don't hold you to a rigorous standard of performance.

Ironically even people who should know better don't get it, for example, Immortalists. I recently had an email exchange with a female cryonicist with several young children who endorsed having children as a way of ensuring the success of cryonics, despite all the evidence to the contrary that a commitment to cryonics isn't generationally transmissible. After all, the overwhelming majority of nondeanimated cryonicists today come from non-cryonicist families, and I've heard of cases where children of cryonicists, who were signed up while under their parents' authority, dropped their arrangements upon reaching the age of reason. In addition this woman comes across as financially stressed in news accounts I've read of her (I think her husband was serving in Bush's war against the evil doers), so she illustrates my point about the financial irresponsibility of trying to rear a family on the ridiculously low incomes that pass for wages in today's Wealth System.

I have a lot more to say about the economic aspects of this tar baby later, but I'd also like to add that I think it's morally wrong to bring new human minds into existence that will be traumatized, as we all are, with the knowledge of their mortality. If we could make babies in a regime of engineered negligible senescence so that they had realistic expectations of not dying from the diseases of aging, at the least, then I might consider having some children of my own, despite all the practical difficulties that currently stand in the way -- the main one being the lack of women in our species who would make suitable companions for me.