As some of you know and the rest of you are about to learn, I have a daughter who’s getting near adulthood. Nominal adulthood. Alleged adulthood. Something like that.

One issue that comes up with almost-adults as they near the end of mandated schooling is, What next? For most middle-class Americans, the obvious, why-are-you-even-asking answer is college.

I’ve told my daughter, like her brothers before her, that if she goes into engineering, premed, accounting, or some other field where the expected salary is worth the cost (not only tuition but four years spent not working), I’d help pay for it. If she wants to study Medieval French Literature or Dance Therapy or Sociology, you’re on your own, kid.

The boys went into engineering school. The daughter had been firmly set on that path, too, but has been having second thoughts. She gives a variety of reasons but I think it comes down to not being excited by it. OK, that’s fine. There are other options. She was thinking about a general STEM-oriented freshman year and then deciding, which makes good sense. We started putting together plans.

Enter Heaven. That’s stage direction for a young woman, not a suggestion to die and go to the afterlife. And Heaven isn’t her real name, but it’s thematically similar. I’m not blaming her for her name, just as I wouldn’t blame Starlit Waterfall a couple generations earlier. It’s her parents’ doing, not hers. But her name does suggest a few things about her parents’ values and her upbringing, beyond being a woman born in 2000s America.

She’s six or so years older than my daughter, in grad school. She and my daughter have been talking about many things, from care of aquatic frogs to careers. And there’s the problem.

Heaven’s studying psychology or sociology or something similar. While such degrees can lead to decent-paying jobs, that’s not the way to bet, not until you’ve been doing it long enough that you can open your own practice. I’ll dig up some employment statistics and income projections if I remember once I’m back online. (Let’s face it, I won’t remember. I’m very tired and very busy. Wouldn’t be writing this if I weren’t stuck sitting and waiting, with no connectivity.)

Heaven is encouraging my daughter to follow her dream and things will work out and the money will take care of itself. Because, you know, that’s how it works.

The daughter’s dream right now is getting into game design. Maybe as a social psychologist (Maybe? I think that’s what she said the job was called.) working on the psychological cues that go into computer games. Maybe as a programmer. Maybe as a graphic designer. There’s lots of choices!

Should she look into what’s involved in working for a gaming company, like hours worked and expected salaries and job security and market trends? Nah! Talk to her best friend’s father, who works in the biz? Nah! Sit down and start designing a game yourself? Nah! Apply for a position as an intern at the local game development company? Nah! Just sign up for the college classes. It’ll work itself out!

Another dismissed idea is taking a gap year and working, whether to test a career field or two or simply to earn money and get a feel for adult life. She likes welding, so why not practice and hone her skills and then apprentice for a year to see if she likes working as a welder? And another dismissed idea is getting married and starting a family and doing some kind of work-from-home while raising the kids. (Rejected out of hand. I’m never going to have grandchildren at this rate, heh.)

You might deduce from my subtle phrasing choices that I’m not thrilled about Heaven’s advice. You might also deduce that I’m not thrilled that my daughter is listening to someone who tells her what she wants to hear rather than what may actually help her.

I’m not claiming to be the one source of Truth. I’m not saying that my suggestions are the only ones that will lead her to happiness and success, however defined. I am saying that you should look carefully at costs and benefits before signing up for a hundred thousand in non-dischargeable student loans. Especially when the dream you’re following is likely to change within the year, let alone before it starts paying off.

I’m also not claiming that economic utility is the only value of a college education. I am saying that a college education which will not pay off economically is a luxury, to be purchased with spare wealth. It is certainly not to be borrowed for.

I’m not even claiming that psychology and sociology degrees are worthless. 90% worthless, maybe, but not totally. But again, they are luxuries, to be purchased when your future is assured and you have time and money to put into them.

But the easy advice, the advice to do what you want to do (at the moment) and to avoid the hard work and the hard decisions, that advice is just so much more tempting!

Any individual man is disposable.

More broadly, any individual person is disposable. Even a George Washington or a Nikola Tesla could die in infancy and the species would muddle along. But as a group, men are more disposable than women.

Everyone knows this. All but the most broken societies are organized around it. “Women and children first” in a catastrophe, men are conscripted and sent off to die in wars, the jobs with the highest death rate are overwhelmingly filled by men.

It makes perfect sense, of course. The most primal instincts are to stay alive and to reproduce. A mammalian species which loses most of its females before they reproduce will probably go extinct. A mammalian species which loses most of its males before they reproduce might not even notice. See, for instance, the deer population in the United States. A sizable fraction of the bucks might be killed in any year, between hunters and other predators and car accidents and Winter, but the population comes right back up.

That’s for most species, either loners or those in which the males and females are equally able to obtain food.

Humans are different.

Humans obtain resources by specialization to a degree unknown in any other species. Humans choose to work in a specialized field according to their own opportunities and abilities and preferences.

And there’s the rub. Most of the jobs which keep modern society functioning are held by men: keeping the electricity and the water flowing, constructing buildings and roads, growing the crops. Any individual man might be replaceable but losing even 20% of men would cause systems to fail. The species might not be doomed but society as we know it would be.

Women are still essential, of course, because they are needed to produce the next generation. Any one woman can make only so many babies, so we need them all in order to keep the species going. Each individual woman is valuable and important regardless of her material or economic contribution.

… Or is she?

In modern, industrialized society, a large and increasing fraction of women have no children. The fraction of women who never have children went up from about 1/20 a couple of generations ago to 1/4 or even almost 1/3 today.

In almost all cases this is because they choose not to. In the past, most childless women were infertile or suffered repeated miscarriages. Today, fertility problems are much reduced and miscarriages, while individually tragic, are less common and are less likely to result in ongoing problems. That leaves choice. Some women never wanted children at all. Some put it off until they were emotionally or financially ready but by the time they’re ready they are unable to bear children. Some “can’t find the right man”. Some do indeed have fertility problems but they were caused by hormonal birth control or years-long use of IUDs or STDs left untreated too long.

We see the effects in birth rates and in demographic distributions. The United States, Canada, most of Europe, Japan, mainland China, and South Korea all have birthrates below replacement level. Their populations are either decreasing or are being sustained only by immigration. This has serious implications on societies and economies. Without a steadily-increasing population, most consumer economies will be shaken or or destroyed. Without a supply of younger workers, who will produce the goods and perform the services that an ever-aging population will need?

Demographic collapse signals societal collapse.

Demographic collapse is the result of women’s choices.

Demographic collapse can be halted only by women choosing to have more babies.

Women’s value as women was always based on their ability to have babies.

Women who choose not to have babies should lose that intrinsic value. No more “women and children first”. Now it’s “women /with/ children first”. No women-only college scholarships. No welfare for childless women. No hiring preferences for childless women. Draft childless women for war and send them to the front lines.

A woman who does not have children should be valued only for the value she brings. That is, what she does that others value enough to pay for. Just as men are.

Doctors (almost half female in the US) and nurses (overwhelmingly female in the US) are important but most people can go quite a while without needing to see them. Linesmen (overwhelmingly male) are unappreciated because if they do their job right no one notices (and because they don’t need college degrees) but if they disappeared, chunks of the nation would notice after every storm and the electrical grid would fall apart within a year or two. Garbage collectors (overwhelmingly male) are looked down on for their dirty, smelly job (and no college requirement) but if they all disappeared, people would for sure notice within a week. Sewer workers, doubly so. Modern city life would become impossible very shortly.

The loss of workers in jobs typically held by independent women would have, shall we say, somewhat less dire effects. If every social worker in the nation disappeared overnight, how long would it be before anyone noticed? If every HR department in every corporation was depopulated? If every not-for-profit little art gallery had to close?

If the ability to birth the next generation will not be used, if one is a net consumer of resources and wealth, who really is disposable?

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