"For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky)."
In recent times, if you want to maximize your chances of finding a wife, it's better to have a safe career as an employee with a stable income. The only risk involved is in aiming for a career for which you have insufficient ability.
Maybe it wasn't like that a long time ago. Maybe having an average job then did not generate enough wealth for the survival of a family.
"If you want to maximize your chances of finding a wife, it's better to have a safe career as an employee with a stable income."
Even if that's true today, the argument that it wasn't true in the environment in which we evolved. We're adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/adaptation-exec.html. Our genes "tell" us to take risks because that's how they evolved, regardless of whether it's the best strategy today.
And (from purely anecdotal experience) it isn't true today either. I did not have a safe career with a stable income when I met and married my wife. One of my best friends dropped out of college and married his sweetheart (they started off living in a single room). Recently, another friend of mine was laid off. He's just got engaged.
IMHO The safe, stable, incomes make it easier to get married only if it is an "arranged" marriage where you are scrutinized by the parent and relatives of your wife-to-be. Otherwise it really doesn't matter.
Did any of them have children? Getting married is one thing, but most people, at least the responsible ones, who don't have a stable income will tend to use birth control.
I'm not sure if culture has anything to do with it. But there is something seriously wrong when well educated people go about reproducing without even thinking about it.
No wonder India is bursting at the seams with all the population overload that it can't really support.
Are you from India? I am not and I don't know it, but I can only imagine that cultural differences make people not worry about child support. Perhaps it is a given that the extended family will take care of children, or people don't mind much if children starve in the street if things don't work out (I don't think so, just saying - things might be very different). In any case I am pretty sure people only have children if it makes sense for them to do so, even in India.
Coming to your question about whether I'm from India, I don't think it really matters; I never claimed that I know India. No matter where it happens, having children without proper planning and letting them starve is not acceptable. May be it's socially acceptable in certain societies to do so, but it's still outright stupid and cruel to children.
If you would stop posting personal anecdotes, and focus on objective arguments, you wouldn't find yourself in a position of taking the conversation personally!
xenophanes's reply to you is exactly what I was thinking. I'm not sure why I was downvoted. Having a good looking SO is important to most people when considering the prestige of the SO. So from your comment, I'm assuming she isn't very good looking. At least she is smart.
I think what you're saying is that ambition is not rewarded in the dating/mating game, which is decidedly not the case (today or a long time ago). If you took birth control out of the equation, which men do you think would father the most babies today in the US, men with high ambition or men who chose a "safe career" and "stable income"?
Birth control changes everything. The number of children a man has is inversely (and counterintuitively) related to the number of sexual partners he's had.
Nowadays, many couples don't want any children and this trend will just increase over time.
As for long ago, it may be true that richer men had fathered more children. But you must also take into count the number of children fathered by the much larger number of men with average salaries.
Having one wife a 2-3 kids is still not the "best" genetic outcome. Many men have 10+ children from several women over there lives.
I suspect that on average men who have one wife and no outside children average less than 2 children and because those children only get 1/2 their DNA it's not really success.
Safe career is better? Not really. Given that a male is reasonably unlikely to be killed, most men will have wives, but the more competitive, higher paid ones, will get the more desirable women. Remember the company Christmas party? The executives didn't have dogs.
The men who dont get wives are those at the bottom of the heap: in jail, on drugs, homeless.
