⛰🏔⛰Torb 🌬 🌲🌞⛷🍄✨

So why do high-IQ populations stop having babies when they reach a certain tech level? Precisely because high IQs are so valuable. When the combination of wealth and technology from high-IQ men reach a certain level, high-IQ labor becomes the bottleneck. At this point, wealthy industrialists, and indeed entire civilizations, face an irresistible temptation. They can double the size of the labor force, and half the real wages of high-IQ workers while building more, by putting all the women to work. And since women are instinctively compliant with social norms, all you have to do to accomplish this is convince women that society thinks careers are high-status, and children are low status. Both radical feminists and reactionaries both noticed some time ago that when you educate women, they stop breeding. Reactionaries thought this was because women are retarded, and they are genetically programmed to blow up society if you empower them. Feminists thought this was because having kids is horrible oppression, and women everywhere hate it, and have only ever done it because they forced into it by rape and sexual slavery, so the moment you empower them, they stop. Amusingly enough, these are actually the same idea, except written with snarl or purr words. And either way, this idea is wrong. Women don't stop having kids because you educate them. You could send them to finishing school for six years and teach them about matters animal, vegetable, and mineral, along with many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse, and absolutely nothing would change. Except they'd be better conversationalists, and terrific at educating their kids. No, the reason women stop breeding when you educate them has nothing to do with education at all. It's because of what you're educating them FOR. You educate them to put them into the workforce, and once they are in the workforce, you have three things going on. First, they can build careers or have babies, they can't do both. Two, you just told them kids were for low-class, uneducated, barefoot-and-pregnant loser women living in shacks in rural Kansas. But most importantly, three, when they compete with men in the workplace, and have their own incomes, they lose respect for men. Women, whether you like it or not, whether I like it or not, only want to have babies with men they consider their superiors. If they work in the same workplaces as men, they consider those men to be equals, even if his job is "senior multithreaded kernel programmer" and hers is "project schedule kanban board den mother". So what you've done, what high-tech societies always do, is sacrifice their entire futures for one to three generations of increased shareholder value. But hey, we know some really great recipes for seedcornbread.