JoBlo Movie Clips
10 HN mentions · mentioned in 9 months, 2020–2026
4:40 · 7.3M views · Dec 6, 2019
The opening scene of the 2006 film Idiocracy, which explains in a short montage how average intelligence declines as less intelligent people have more children.
HN links it in threads on fertility, IQ and demographics as a famous, if satirical, illustration of the argument.
10 comments from Hacker News
The scenario of not wanting to bring a child into an environment that isn't stable is exactly one of the points of the intro to the movie Idiocracy: this video I definitely understand 100%... I just thought it sounded extremely familiar. In my personal scenario, I had my first kid (unplanned) when I was 25. It definitely changed the trajectory of my life, and in a good way in my case. Once I knew I was having a kid I really started to take things more seriously and tried to set up as good of an environment as I could. That meant studying a lot, surrounding myself with good families, moving into a place with more exposure to nature, etc. We never owned a home, had retirement saved up, or a lot of the other things one would consider good "nest egg" scenarios. We just made it work when we had to, and have 2 awesome teenagers now.
It's useful. You have to think on the macro scale. The evolution of the entire population rather then individuals. On the individual level stupider people reproduce more so evolutionary speaking it's more efficient to be stupid. However if a small portion of the population has high IQ they can move society forward via say the discovery of electricity, mathematics, etc, etc. This propels every individual forward as a whole at the detriment of a few individuals who are to nerdy or geeky to get laid that often. Thus from a high level perspective, there is selection pressure that works on the population of people that makes it so that our genes have the mechanisms in place to produce an occasional genius via specific combinations of or simple mutations. For reference this is a short and informative video on the topic: this video
I don't think anyone is blaming the kids. I mean, the decisions to have the kids were made by adults. I'm in favor of blaming the adults. That said, us nerds probably shouldn't stop reproducing. The intro to Idiocracy (2006) is quite relevant today: this video I heard Mike Judge on a podcast about a month ago (JRE) saying that the ability to make that intro was a large factor in his motivation of making the Idiocracy movie in the first place.
A conversation about fertility isn't complete without a link to The Idiocracy (2006) opening scene: this video (length 4:39) It's surprisingly accurate, even if it's very exaggerated, because that's the premise of the movie. tl;dw "Smart/Rich" people put off having kids to the Perfect Time in their life and never end up having kids or maybe just the one. "Stupid/Poor" people just keep having kids all the time.
Fluff piece, I don't see an answer to the question posed in the title. It mainly discusses fertility differences between different socioeconomic classes. This had been well illustrated in the intro to the fantastic 2006 sf comedy Idiocracy . this video