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I think the education issue is part of the story as well. A teenager in 1600 could just start adulting at 14-15 and be just fine. You didn’t need to be able to read or do high level math, or even geometry. You just became a blacksmith, or a farmer by following dad around. Modern people need an almost absurdly long education in highly complex skills that massively cut into prime boot knocking years that happen in the teenage years. A 16 year old male and 16 year old female are biologically the most horny humans around. But, those kids are not free to indulge even if they want to. Instead, we make them sit in classrooms learning about mollusks in preparation for taking the SAT with a view to going to college where they will learn higher levels of skills that hopefully within 5-7 years after graduation will have them earning enough money to get a two bedroom apartment in which, by the time these humans are ready to have children in the financial sense, they have much lower libido and the woman has missed half to 2/3 of her fertility to the education system. Then everyone is like “wait, why no kids?” It’s because by the time a person stable enough to have kids, they’re too old to have kids. Hence fewer kids.
You only "need" that education in the sense that credentialing inflation and an unwillingness to let people (or, more accurately, racial groups) fail has made all degrees before the bachelor's worthless (and is currently in the process of destroying that signal, too). The vast majority of jobs can be done with a few weeks, or at most months, of training, assuming the worker already knows how to read and write and do arithmetic, which most kids can do by the time they graduate middle school (and, for the ones that don't, an extra four years of remedial classes are not going to help).
The Amish demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to be economically productive with an eight grade education. We just make it illegal to drop out until 16, strongly encourage people to remain in school until 18 by making it free and putting all sorts of limits on working while underage, and then pipeline people into college while making it illegal for employers to just give applicants IQ tests and gatekeeping lots of jobs under the legal requirements of a bachelor's degree.
The notion that four years of Shakespeare, algebra, chemistry, and history, followed by another four years of specialized study, are in any way necessary or useful to do a modern job is mental.
For a natalist subculture to exist, it needs an alternative to the evils of the education system. We need a path for kids to skip college, and a cultural narrative that says this is good and proper rather than making you a low status loser.
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Yeah, the most significant change in education IMO is the normification of leaving your hometown for university. Catastrophic social norm by Darwinian standards.
That problem matters as well, but my main issue with over-educating is that it basically means that by the time a couple is ready to settle down and is financially stable enough to think about having kids, they are too old to have said kids, or at best one or maybe two. Add in the much longer dependent stage means committing to a much longer project that’s actually quite resource intensive, which means that parents need even more resources to devote to their children. It’s actually insane how many obstacles we put in front of the couple who might want to have kids.
I wouldn't say that. Even if you do grad school, you're still out by 25, unless you do a doctoral degree of some sort, which is a pretty tiny percentage of the population. There's plenty of time to have a couple kids starting then.
The problem is that 25 isn't the starting point! The issue is you typically went off to another city for university, which made you lose contact with your high school girlfriend(s), then go to yet another city to actually settle down after that, so you lose contact with all your university girlfriend(s), and so by the time you're 25 you likely don't even have any serious marriage prospects because you and everyone around you keeps relocating to different places. This is a ridiculous social model.
If everyone would just stay put for a while, I think the issue would resolve itself. For example, the Mormons don't have much issue settling down and getting married, and they're not exactly operating under an 18th century apprenticeship mentality. But they do all go to the same university (BYU), so while they are relocating in a technical sense, they're all relocating to the same place, so it doesn't really count in the same way it does for normal kids, where everyone scatters to the four winds after high school graduation and never sees each other again. That, and BYU is a university that actively encourages them to marry, rather than presenting marriage as some icky distraction from study.
It’s not just college, but finding work after college, paying off debt, and earning your way to either owning a home or at least renting a nice enough apartment that you’d feel comfortable having a child in. This takes a while. So if you’re doing the typical 4-5 years post high school, then an internship or two or a shitty entry level job that you’re working insane hours to get up the ladder from.
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