I do believe that in order to achieve welfare/prosperity, not all the people have to work. And I do believe that there are more important things in life than working. I’d love to be a stay at home dad, but I can’t.

Being a stay at home dad is work. Raising children is necessary work that capitalism requires, because it requires laborers. We have engineered a system in which this work is uncompensated, and if you gender this work, it causes gendered oppression.

I will also point out that in America we have decided that unless you have a “job”, society has decided that you pretty much don’t deserve health care. Anyone who chooses a life of domestic labor in America puts themselves in a position where they are financially dependent on their spouse and their spouse’s employment status. It doesn’t have to be this way. We have forged these chains.

Whether doubling the workforce is a good thing - that I’d keep up for a debate.

If we had more workers, it could be that we wouldn’t need those workers to work as long. Earlier retirement, shorter work weeks, whatever. The issue is not the size of the work force, the issue is what is chosen to be done with it.

Are you trying to imply doubling the available workforce is not good? Its usually a good thing. While their motivations are cynical, those leaders are doing good.

…or are you trying to imply that keeping women out of the traditional work force (by only allowing them to work unpaid in the home in domestic servitude, labor that capital does not value) increases the value of male labor through scarcity, which would be preferred?

Sorry that second question kind of reads as an attack. A shitty coworker of mine said that to me unironically and tried to play it off as a joke when I pushed back.

the kneejerk reaction that the statement always gets is annoying.

I agree with everything you said, but I’m going to point out something. If there is a common kneejerk reaction to some particular topic, there’s probably a reason for that. You yourself said its annoying? I suppose its predictable then. If you can predict that people are going to react in some way, you can write with more explanation to clarify that you aren’t actually supporting something like eugenics. The poster I’m responding to did not do this.

I took this lack of explanation as support (which, on reflection, might be leaping to conclusions). The overall tone of the comment is rather judgemental.

The commenter is also wrong; IQ hasn’t been “drifting towards the bottom”, the average IQ increases every year. Its why they have to constantly adjust the tests, because 100 is meant to be an average score by design. This is primarily why I chose to respond to him. He’s not saying " which is why we should invest in family planning" or “we should invest in children’s education”, he’s making an untrue statement, and then pretending that this will cause some sort of feedback loop. Dumb people making more dumb people.

IQ is not some absolute quantitative metric of intelligence. The people who treat it like it is… I find that a lot of them are pushing some sort of angle or simply don’t understand it.

This is the plot to a fictional movie. Intelligence is a factor of many things, and most of those factors are not genetic.

Your observation seems close to the opinions of old school eugenicists. “The wrong people are having children”.