Why do Lower Income Parents Find More Joy In Kids?

We analyze a graph showing lower income parents rate being a parent as more enjoyable and rewarding than higher income parents. Debunking the bias that poorer people must be miserable raising children, we argue cultural factors like faith and insulation from the childless urban monoculture better enable them to find meaning in parenting. We also discuss how defining life goals around pleasure paradoxically reduces durable happiness.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] What this graph demonstrates, that both the percentage of parents saying that they find being a parent is enjoyable or rewarding highest among lower income people.

Malcolm Collins: A lot of people don't realize that when you define your personal goals around hedonism, like I am having a kid to be happier.

That kid will always provide you with less happiness than if you are having a kid because it is your ideological duty to have the kid, the happiness that you get from tasks that you do. Because you think they are a thing of intrinsic value and not to make yourself happy will always give you more durable happiness.

And the person who is chasing hedonism in and of itself, but the urban monoculture doesn't tell people that it tells people that the highest order goal in anyone's life should be. Sort of the mass distribution of hedonism.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. You sent me an interesting graph today that I want to talk about because [00:01:00] it speaks to a point that we often talk about within the perinatalist movement, where we will say lower income individuals have more children than higher income individuals. This is true between and within countries.

So that means on average, the less wealth the country has, the more kids, the higher the fertility rate is going to be. But also within countries in general, like if you look at the US until you get to like really extreme levels of wealth which we've talked about in our other video, like the, the will will child support cost speciation video, you do get high fertility rate again at extreme levels of wealth, but generally less wealth you have, the more kids you have.

Simone Collins: And I think a lot of people like, especially like wealthier people. When they hear us say this are like, Oh, well, that's just because these terribly uneducated people are just miserably having children because of their dumb religious beliefs or because they're too dumb to use birth control properly. And they then would, of course, the assumption there is if that is really true, if that is what is happening.

These are the most [00:02:00] miserable parents, right? Of course, because they don't have the resources for the kids, right? Because raising a child is so expensive these days. And because of course they're having children by mistake, because they're so dumb to not use birth control properly.

Malcolm Collins: So these wealthy parents, yeah, they're the ones who are having the fulfilling parenting experience.

One

Simone Collins: would assume, of course, because they were, they, they paid all the IVF. to have their Children at age 55 and they wanted their Children and they

Malcolm Collins: have the resources. I think that there is a level of, within the urban elite in our society today, this urban monoculture we talk about, a dehumanization of the lower classes in, in America.

You think? You don't think? Well, no, I mean, you say you think, but it's something that they, I do not think, realize that they have done.

Simone Collins: Well, especially the woke masses believe that they are the champions of the poor and

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, that's what they say. They're like, yeah, I'm the champion of the little guy.

And, and then you, you, you're, you're, you're like, the [00:03:00] little guy is, is, is the people who you're like dehumanizing and these, these, you know, and you see this in their language, you know, the, the, the quote unquote uneducated. And, and, and the reality is, is that they don't champion the little guy.

They are a group that defines They've never freaking

Simone Collins: met the little guy. Like the vast majority of these people.

Malcolm Collins: They don't, they don't care. They don't have an understanding. They, they really, and, and their policies generally make things worse for the little guy. And the little guy could tell them that, but they just don't want to hear it.

What they want is centralized. Control in an expansion of the bureaucracy, which is what they're really fighting for because this expanded bureaucracy increases the number of jobs that they can have, which actually, before we go into the graph that you sent me, we'll go into a graph that I sent you that demonstrates this phenomenon.

Simone Collins: Version of sex. This is the graph and graphs to each other. And we're like, Oh, look at my data.

Malcolm Collins: Look at my data! So this is a graph called growth in education staffing has [00:04:00] far outpaced student enrollment. Oh yes!

Simone Collins: When you, oh my gosh, you shared this to me the other day, when I think, yesterday when I was out in Harrisburg, right?

And, oh my god. So

Malcolm Collins: if you look at since the 1970s, there has been an 8 percent increase in student enrollment in the U. S. A 60 percent increase in teaching staff and a 138 percent increase in non teaching staff. And this is something we're seeing in the university system as well and stuff like that.

Wherever this ultra progressive movement has concentrated itself they expand the number of jobs that are in these essentially like cash for nothing programs. Right?

Simone Collins: And let's be very clear. There is no correlation between this and improved student outcomes. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, and this is really true. If you look at like the amount of money going into school systems and stuff like that, anybody who is telling you we will pump more money into the school system and get higher outcomes is just not relating to the data that we have right now.

Simone Collins: No, if there were massive reform in the public school system, this [00:05:00] could. Theoretically be possible, but right now, putting money into the school system means giving money to teachers unions means basically feeding the bureaucracy and the adults, not the children. So we're not

Malcolm Collins: saying that like important for this quote unquote educated class.

Yes. Yeah, believes that they deserve basically a doll from the state for existing. And then when Yeah. You know, I love it. So many people, they grow up so much in this class that you're now getting like this like anti work movement and stuff like that where they're like even horrified that the idea that humans have to work for a living because they have been grown up expecting that each and every one of them is so upper class in their expectations that they get to live

Simone Collins: Yeah, no, it is.

It is completely insane. It is. It is what

Malcolm Collins: they really mean when they say no work. If they mean no work for the college educated, they still expect someone to support them

Simone Collins: because yeah, someone has to deliver their food. Who's going to do their door dash? Who's going to

Malcolm Collins: do this to them? Like they genuinely, I do not think see [00:06:00] these people as humans.

Simone Collins: L