Motherhood should not only be a viable career, it should be a highly paid career.
We should pay all pregnant mother’s at least minimum wage (at least in the 10th percentile of other income earners), then pay them on a scale by measuring their child’s math abilities to other children of the same age. A top performing mother should be one of the highest income earners in the economy (in the 99th percentile of other income earners).
Answering your questions and objections:
Why pay mothers to have children? Could this lead to overpopulation?
Motherhood is the most important job we have. The purpose of all biological life is reproduction for every living creature from a single celled amoeba to giant elephants to human beings. Most religions also strongly encourage motherhood. Modern humans have forgotten this basic imperative and lots of people search for meaning in other places and never find it. The meaning of life is simple and it is hardwired into every living creature – procreate.
Motherhood is hard work. I work from home, so I directly observe my wife and she has to work all day every day without rests to care for our children. I am a hardworking CEO and I probably don’t work as hard as she does.
Overpopulation is not near the problem it is made out to be. Supportable population is directly related to the energy we use and the efficiency with which we use it. We have orders of magnitude more energy than we use available in the form of sunlight, and beyond that orders of magnitude more energy than we can use in nuclear, fossil fuels, etc. Our energy usage is becoming orders of magnitude more efficient as we go as well. Between the two, the true maximum supportable population of the planet is out of sight for us now. Before we get there, humans should have the technology to move off planet thanks to the math efforts mentioned.
Climate change is a problem much more close at hand, but the solution here is not cutting population, it is being smarter and more efficient with our resources which is part of the reason behind compensating mothers based on how well they train their children in math.
Why pay mothers based on their child’s math ability? Isn’t there other important skills like reading, work ethic, science, art, music, etc?
Math is the most valuable tool we have as humans for understanding the world around us and for improving life for all of us. It was math that brought us out of the Dark Ages, math that fueled the Industrial Revolution, and math that undergirds our age of technology. Math will be the tool that helps us understand and solve our problems of the future.
Math actually encompasses many other fields of learning. You can’t do math well without good reading comprehension and the ability to write clearly. Learning math requires a strong work ethic. Science mostly is deriving new math from the natural world… Science and math are inextricably intertwined. Music and art have been shown to have very strong relations to math. Math ties into almost every other field of human work from building homes, clearing land, farming, entertainment and games, chess, and much more.
We want to strongly incentivize mothers to train their children in math. No one – not schools, not other relatives, nor the government – is better placed to start training a child in math than their own mother who understands them best and can do it from the youngest possible age.
We want to rewards mothers both for having children and for rearing them up properly. Having a math test that can objectively rank children by age according to their math ability provides a straightforward way of doing this.
Here is my video for children learning math. It’s my first video, so not so great. These will improve with time.