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Viliam comments on Altruistic parenting - Less Wrong
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Everything in human life is temporary. The temporary effect while living with our parents is about 20 years, the average human life is about 70 years... so these "temporary effects" still make about 25% of human life; enough to be included in the utilitarian calculation.
'well-being' is kind of vague here and the subsequent examples imply that the importance is far less than 25%. 'employment' and 'education'? The employment you have while living with your parents as a teenager is a rounding error on your lifetime income (and increasingly teen employment hardly exists) and is worth far far less than 25%. The education is a little more important, but as Caplan has blogged about prolifically, education past middle school is almost entirely about signalling for your career rather than building important skills or learning important knowledge and so it is subsumed under the previous employment point, and the effects of education seem to fade out as other signals assume more importance.
To be honest, all this "what happened in your childhood does not matter, because when you are 18 years old, your life resets to tabula rasa anyway" always felt very suspicious to me. (Strawmanning to better express how I feel about it.)
Sure. But the money your parents have, and how much they are willing to support you, influences whether you have to take the first available job to pay your bills and then get stuck in the "rat race", or whether your hands are untied and you can experiment with learning and working on your own projects.
Maybe I had an exceptionally good university education, but I believe that learning computer science helped me understand the concepts that I probably would struggle with otherwise; at least judging by my colleagues who are smart and diligent, but didn't have the same education.
Also, I'd bet that social class strongly correlates with parents' social class. But yeah, one could argue that the social class is determined by genes. So we would have to study adopted children.
Good point. The interpretation I made there was that parents ought to be less determined to determine their child's future by pressuring them to sacrifice present well-being for adult gain.