The invention of effective, as in ~100% effective, means of contraception marks the beginning of the Idiocracy era, the Idiocracene. Up until 60 or so years ago, even if you could foresee the risks of an unwanted pregnancy, most likely than not you would eventually end up having a child or two during your lifetime. Not anymore. You can see it clearly when you compare the average IQ of a given country's population and the demographics tendency over time. This graph could be swapped with average children per woman and it would look basically the same:
The future belongs to the individuals, on any species, that are best adapted towards reproducing. Human beings are just another animal subjected to natural selection pressures. It seems that, usually, if you have too high of an IQ you simply refuse to have kids.
If high IQ jobs offered in-building day care as a perk this trend would completely reverse.
Convert the parking garage in the basement into a day care and you'll have phd-level employees for life. Changing jobs for even double the pay would be completely unaffordable.
The negative correlation between education and family size is a function of the cost of raising children in a city. If the cost is reduced then the correlation becomes nuetral or even positive. There is no such correlation in a rural setting. This is a bottleneck in the talent pipeline.
Consider this paper (from Indonesia) in which concluded that the relationship can change over time, as a function of policy:
I do not think just adding a daycare will make having children suddenly make sense to many people - at least not enough to warrant such a blanket statement about it. Aside from simply not wanting any, there are so many reasons to not have children aside from daycare, plenty of them not negatable by policies or financial incentives.
To be fair that last part was probably always true. The future belongs to the next generation, and not everyone values having kids. Probably why most major faiths encourage having kids. The people who were too smart to have kids died out along with their ideas. It's like survival of the fittest, but with ideas. I have a theory that long in our past we've went through periods of secularization like our current modern age. It's just a phase that dies out when the people who believe it do.
Even so, high IQ was a trait that was transmitted through the eons, ergo high IQ individuals in the past used to still have children. I don't think your theory reflects the differences between the past and today's contraception technology tools.
Think of a high IQ man in the late 1700. He can see that having children incurs enormous costs, both financially, emotionally, in terms of time, freedom etc. He can choose to never marry, and just keep being a womanizer. He may have LOTS of unrecognized offspring, that are very hard to be attributed to him, and so pass his genes along. He just want to have sex, reproducing is not at all in his mind. Sex is good and he likes it, so he does it. That's the trick nature plays in order to make 1700 man to pass his genes.
Now in the 21st century, basically no high IQ man would go around having unprotected sex, since the costs associated nowadays are still enormous, probably even more so than 300 years ago, and today those costs are easily enforceable through the judicial system. So 21st century high IQ man, on average, will have a LOT less children than he used to have in the past. Sex is still good, and he will have a lot of it. But now nature's trick stopped working. The sex drive per se is not effective anymore when coupled with a high capacity brain that wants to avoid the costs of having to care for another human beings. So, this trait, high IQ, will be selected out of the gene pool over time.
In the case of high IQ women it's the same story. In the past, with a lot less effective and readily available contraceptive methods, smart women were probably a lot more at risk of having unexpected pregnancies. Nowadays, unexpected pregnancies are basically an IQ test for women.
If your model were accurate it would imply high IQ and psychopathy would co-select wouldn't it? I know psychopaths tend to think they're smarter than anyone with ethics but doesn't the opposite correlation tend to hold?
If I'm not mistaken, a high percentage of psycopaths have high IQs. It's one of the classic profile traits used to represent the stereotipical psycho.
edit: I searched a little bit on this and it seems that it was just a myth propagated by movies and a few very famous cases, i.e. Ted Bundy. But anyway, I do not see how you can make an argument from I wrote on the original post implying a correlation between psycopathy and high IQ. Is it the avoiding of having children, since it's an effective burden on the prospective father? It's just a fact, sexual drive was enough to make a man reproduce in the past. Not anymore. Natural selection wins again, the rules of the game changed, so you're out.
It's the combination of many sexual partners and abandoning one's offspring - the latter is taboo almost everywhere and they're both characteristic behavior of psychopaths.
Eh, it's a worrying scenario but I think it would be taken care of by intertribal competition. The people of Idiocracy would be easy pickings for a group of raiders that prized intelligence highly.
Really, the only two countries that are combining a knowledge economy with an expanding population are Israel and India, both of which essentially have a tech-worker economy subsidizing and intermarrying with a bronze-age economy. That seems like the likely actual solve, a few ivory tower cities surrounded by amish country. Every now and then an Amish tests into the cities or a city-zen absconds to a simpler life, but the net flow is generally intellectual country types moving into the tech hubs.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-i...
The future belongs to the individuals, on any species, that are best adapted towards reproducing. Human beings are just another animal subjected to natural selection pressures. It seems that, usually, if you have too high of an IQ you simply refuse to have kids.