&gt; There is also evidence that &quot;&quot;educated&quot;&quot; people have been outbred by &quot;&quot;uneducated&quot;&quot; people in the western world recently<p>Well, yeah. Decision to have kids is not rational. Decision to have a LOT of kids (an old coworker has 10) ipmay even be accompanied by religious delusions or some misguided notion that one has a lineage to protect.<p>I think we should not incentivize people to have children. No tax break per dependent. No tax break for saving towards your children&#x27;s college. Basically, the only people who have kids should be people willing to take responsibility. Of course, we need to step up ways we take care of young people but it is the relationship between a society (through government I guess) and a young person. For example, easy, free of cost access to health care, easy, free of cost access to education, nutritious meals dad in school, and so on but no incentives for parents to have kids.<p>&gt; The point I&#x27;m getting at is Wisdom of any given mob in Generation N &gt; Wisdom of any given mob in Generation N+1, during and after the modern age.<p>I feel like this belief is similar to my previous ideas of a glorious past, almost a heaven we got handed down but were unable to keep up. We are looking at the past with Rose colored glasses. I mean surely the average man today is not as smart as Plato was has a mind to think in scientific processes as Lavoisier did. Now, I have to be careful of making a bad assumption that a newer generation is always wiser but I think I can safely say the newer generation has the benefit of hindsight.<p>Basically what I&#x27;m saying is while there seems to be a trend of decline, it might actually be a trend of enlightenment overall and we just see the top declining while we might not see all boats slowly rising.