"at the fake email job I knew I’d eventually get and knew I could do at 16 if I’d been allowed."
I FEEL SO SEEN. One of my many soapboxes is that we as a society greatly underestimate teenagers. I loved school but also resented being made to jump through hoops for so many years. It seemed like an artificial delay of adulthood to prove myself again and again and again in an academic setting and then still be treated with enormous disrespect and unfair pay upon entering the workforce at 22.
Unpopular opinion, this is part of why I think the voting age should be lowered to 16. Let both the AP kids and the juveniles who are being charged with crimes as an adult have a say in their own community. And a lot of them have jobs and pay taxes already anyway. Bonus, if we stop insisting that youth don't deserve a say in their own lives, they will have more and better options, and it will be plausible for more women to decline to go to college and use more of their fertile years doing literally anything else.
See also Ruxandra's back and forth with Lyman Stone on fertility-span extension. Lyman, whose scholarship I admire and who was very nice personally when I met him, is sorta telling on himself IMO in that exchange.
There is a version of "pronatalism" which sees the large and growing delta between desired and achieved fertility as the root problem and thus focuses on what can be done to give women more tools to achieve their sincere desires. And then there is a version which sees Number Less Than 2.1 as the root problem and focuses on what can make Number Go Up. Ruxandra is obviously and fully in the first camp. Lyman spends some sincere time in that first camp, and obviously wants to come across to liberals as a member of that first camp, but keeps straying into the second one.
"at the fake email job I knew I’d eventually get and knew I could do at 16 if I’d been allowed."
I FEEL SO SEEN. One of my many soapboxes is that we as a society greatly underestimate teenagers. I loved school but also resented being made to jump through hoops for so many years. It seemed like an artificial delay of adulthood to prove myself again and again and again in an academic setting and then still be treated with enormous disrespect and unfair pay upon entering the workforce at 22.
Unpopular opinion, this is part of why I think the voting age should be lowered to 16. Let both the AP kids and the juveniles who are being charged with crimes as an adult have a say in their own community. And a lot of them have jobs and pay taxes already anyway. Bonus, if we stop insisting that youth don't deserve a say in their own lives, they will have more and better options, and it will be plausible for more women to decline to go to college and use more of their fertile years doing literally anything else.
I love that idea. Really anything to get the young people who could be ready into adulthood earlier.
See also Ruxandra's back and forth with Lyman Stone on fertility-span extension. Lyman, whose scholarship I admire and who was very nice personally when I met him, is sorta telling on himself IMO in that exchange.
There is a version of "pronatalism" which sees the large and growing delta between desired and achieved fertility as the root problem and thus focuses on what can be done to give women more tools to achieve their sincere desires. And then there is a version which sees Number Less Than 2.1 as the root problem and focuses on what can make Number Go Up. Ruxandra is obviously and fully in the first camp. Lyman spends some sincere time in that first camp, and obviously wants to come across to liberals as a member of that first camp, but keeps straying into the second one.