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Originally Posted by aerohead
It's learning that birth isn't an automatic death sentence for as many infants which creates the inflexion point in birthrate.
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I don't like that explanation either. I don't think people consciously decide to have more babies because a lot of them don't make it, nor do I believe they limit their reproduction consciously by knowing they have access to better medical care. Maybe that can factor in, but primary explanations have to reside outside of conscious decision-making.
Our time has to be filled by something. For almost all of human history, that has been making babies and dying relatively young. Some cultures are still more like those primitive ones. When opportunity to do other things presents itself, more of us take those alternatives.
There's nothing special about school compared with other similar alternatives.
If I had another program that required one to give all they had (both time and money) for the promise of being better off in the future, we'd get similar results.
As a thought experiment, I'm imagining what would happen if women went to school when they were young, but were most attractive and reproductively fit when they were older, like 65 after they retire (and they would live healthy to a hundred or something). Would education primarily limit their birthrates?
Alright, it's a bit of a stretch to imagine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by aerohead
Even PhD Vance Packard, who wrote in the 1950s about the psychology of advertising, admitted that he had no superpowers to protect himself from all manner of come-ons.
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Some protection can be learned.
Mostly it's a disposition. My nature is to assume anything being pitched at me is a deception, and to question all authority. Being told isn't good enough for me, I need it explained.
The other thing is I value understanding over knowledge. While they are codependent, those more inclined to settle for knowing something are likely more susceptible to deceit since they don't understand the systems in which they interact. Their ability to think sophisticatedly is limited to what they know.