Not 100% what you asked, but I grew up around a lot of queer people who disdained marriage not because it was homophobic but because it was a bourgeois religious relic and form of social control. Several of them would end up getting married when they could, but that may be survivorship bias; most of my father's gay friends from that period died of AIDS long before gay marriage was on the radar screen.
Are they famous? I was literally "who?" there at those names. Then again, I do live under a rock. Possibly they *are* very famous, I've just never heard of them and had no idea they were dating or wanting to marry, never mind their opinions on gay rights.
Kristen Bell starred in a major network sitcom (The Good Place -- if you haven't seen it, you should, it's "Moral Philosophy: the comedy!") and she's the voice of the younger sister in Frozen.
FWIW, and completely anecdotally, among people my age (mid to late 40s), the attitude in youth appeared to be, "we don't need a piece of paper to signal our lifelong commitment to each other, but we *do* need a piece of paper to pay less taxes, so... might as well". This applies to both straight and gay couples, oddly enough.
My father was a big advocate of gay marriage back in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a tax accountant who made house calls. Some of his clients were older men sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village. It was rather obvious that they were homosexual, but they were also taxpayers. He felt that they should be able to get married to get the best deal on their taxes.
Personally, I can't imagine being commitied to a single person for the long term, and not wanting to get married. (In the legal sense, I could understand not wanting the whole ceremony rigmarole, even if personally I do want it).
There are all sorts of benefits, like the option of getting covered under spouses health insurance, automatic rights to visit spouse if they end up in a hospital etc, getting automatically included in inheritance if spouse passes away without a will, access to certain government benefits only available to spouses or famillies, etc. Tax benefits are sort of a mixed bag. There are both benefits and drawbacks, and for a lot of people it pretty much ends up as a wash.
I hold that marriage has primarily been a legal institution since the beginning, and that the main reason people see it as a religious institution is that historically, religion basically was the government from the point of view of most of the population. Actions by the government were always draped in religious overtones, and religions held trials and executed people for certain crimes, actions we certainly consider to be governmental these days.
One of the main arguments I've seen against getting married that are not about mistaking it for being a religious institution, seems to center around divorce. Some people whos parents or friends went though bad divorces seem to want to swear off getting married to avoid that. Which seems really weird to me.
Divorce is a better way of making sure each party from a long term relationship (especially with intermingled finances) gets what is rightfully theirs after the breakup vs relying on the other party not to try to steal/destroy your stuff, and having to sue your former partner if they do. Not getting a divorce (because you never got married) won't necessarily keep you out of family court over custody questions, or child support.
Bottom line, if you break up after a long term relationship but it was not a divorce due to not being married, then most likely it was either: 1) an agreeable seperation (in which case it would likely not have been a particularly nasty divorce), 2) not technically a divorce, but a set of lawsuits and custody cases that amount to the same thing, but are likely more expensive, 3) one of the parties likely getting screwed over due to not involving courts/lawyers, or 4) that the parties ended up avoiding certain things that married couples normally do, like pooling finances, purchasing most things jointly, etc.
There was a piece once by Andrew Sullivan claiming that queer people were against marriage as it was oppressive and bourgeois, until president Bush (I forget which one) said he was against extending marriage to gays, and suddenly it was the new cool thing to campaign for.
I went to grad school with a heterosexual couple that said they weren't going to get married until gay marriage was legalized. I'm 90% sure they did eventually get married.
That's a weird idea, if you ask me. How did they imagine their delaying (or abjuring) their own marriage was going to advance the push for gay marriage legalization? A typical boycott works if there is a financial or reputational penalty paid by the subject of the boycott, like a hotel or a restaurant that loses revenue from being boycotted, for example, but there's no Marriage Multi-National Corporation out there that would be affected by their personal decision. Seems like an ineffective gesture of self-denial, if you ask me.
I didn't understand that at the time. Okay, you persuade every single straight couple not to get married. What happens next? Any government will just shrug and say "Okay, I guess you're not married. But you do want to continue living together as though you are married, the same way you were doing up to now, right?"
The only practical changes I could envisage from that were all the things being touted about "tax advantages for married couples, pensions, wills, hospital visitation" and so on no longer applying to straight co-habiting but not married couples, and since 'palimony' cases started getting legal minds working on this, maybe the result would have been as per this article: no more marriages, but you have an arrangement that is tried under contract law if one or both parties want to end it.
First of all, I assume you don't mean every single straight couple, because if every single straight couple could be persuaded, then the democratically elected government wouldn't really be intractable against gay marriage. But if you meant everyone who believes gay marriage should be legalized...
You turn the institution of marriage into a culture war signifier. If everyone who believes gay marriage should be legal doesn't get married and the other side all gets married, very likely aligned to blue-tribe / red-tribe divisions (especially as it grows as a culture war signifier). Then various institutions would start aligning around those divisions. Blue-tribe companies would institute benefit plans that support their cohabitating employees. Local hospitals would in blue-tribe areas would alter their policies to support cohabitating couples, etc. If a state is blue enough it adopts state level policies. Eventually this split puts a strain at the federal level and either federalism is respected or one side or the other pushes for conformity.
So basically like what really happened, but likely at a larger scale.
But such a protest is the problem because to be effective, it can only work by being adopted on a wide scale. I don't like shellfish, but that won't stop people eating prawn curries. However, if I can persuade a lot, lot of people to swear off shellfish, then it's not worth the trouble of putting prawn curries on the menu.
It's the same argument as veganism; you don't want to eat meat? Well, don't let me stop you but I'm going to have this steak. So vegans need to persuade meat-eaters to stop eating meat.
And gay marriage did not come about because people went "Oh no, two celebrities are not going to formally get married after years of co-habiting and having kids together? We must change the laws now!"
It seems like the goalposts are shifting here. You started with "Okay, you persuade every single straight couple not to get married. What happens next?" and I answered that question (caveated above).
So on the new field:
Marriage is a public commitment to a community. If a famous couple publicly rejects that commitment for X reason, it's broadcasting that meme to other people. If a non-famous couple does the same it will not have the same reach, but it impacts the people in their lives. If the spread of the meme is effective enough, then you get the situation posed in your initial question.
When nobody was publicly gay, for a lot of people the idea of being gay wasn't even on the table. Same for trans people. Same for interracial marriage. Same for vegetarians. Same for women in the workplace. Same for dropping out of college to make a startup. Same for starting your own televangelist megachurch.
This is "if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you do the same?" question.
"If a famous couple publicly rejects that commitment for X reason, it's broadcasting that meme to other people."
If an ordinary person decides not to get married because some B-list celeb made a big deal about it, then I think they are so mush-brained and easily influenced that it is pitiable. Celebs are not known for the stability of their emotional relationships, after all, and unless you are someone who breathlessly follows "Kiana finds new love after her tragic break-up with Phizzip" stories in "Hello!" magazine and the likes, why the hell are you basing your life decisions on what some rich and famous chunderhead that you will never come within a hundred miles of is doing?
Besides, the "famous couples" are not going in for the "public commitment to a community" for a long time now; they're all living together in sin (as it used to be called) before deciding to tie the knot, if at all. "Yes, me and Tarkel lived together for six years and had two darling kids while he cheated on me with seven groupies and then we broke up and I dated Marcellus and then had a fling with Suzannah when I was exploring my sexuality and then we got back together and now our publicists think a romantic wedding in Bali would be fantastic to promote my new album and his new movie, but then our *new* publicist decided it would be even better if we declared we were *not* going to get married until gay marriage is legal. We're still flying out to Bali and having the honeymoon, just not getting married - until the buzz from this latest stunt dies down and we need another promotional boost".
I never got into a deeper discussion with them about it, but I suspect this particular decision was not tied to advancing gay marriage legalization, but was rather done in solidarity with gay people they knew or was just something they felt was morally right, and they aspired to be moral people. From their perspective it probably was effective by those metrics.
Also, they weren't preachy about it. I never heard them discourage anyone else from getting married.
Thanks, I guess as an expression of solidarity it makes some sense, but the self-denial aspect seems over the top, almost like denying one's self medical care that wasn't available to some other group. I think most gay people that I know, if you told them something like that, would be likely to say "thanks, but that's a bit silly. Get married, be happy with your SO, and we'll keep soldiering on in pursuit of the same privileges."
How old is your child? To me, the hardest years are between 1-4 and then between 13-16, at which time I could see parents rating the experience more negatively. Having an eight year old is typically great!
Not all parental experiences are good, especially if you include children with disabilities or who have psychological damage.
What I find fascinating is how much most parents seem to actually like their teenagers, or at least not mind much the fact that they are living with ungrateful jerks. Most of my peers have teenagers, and to me, a majority of them seem AWFUL. They're rude, lazy, spoiled, fat, sanctimonious, self-obsessed, snarky know-nothings. They're embarrassing. Yet their parents seem to love and even like them anyway. Honestly I find it astonishing. If I was their parent I can't imagine treating them with such kindness. Some of my nieces and nephews are the worst, and I have to bit my tongue constantly around them. Yet their parents (and grandparents) fawn all over them. Clearly, the parental care-giving instinct is incredibly strong.
Though this is also a significant reason I didn't want to be a parent -- the parenting culture these days seems to require indulging every weak, gross, narcissistic, manipulative, pathetic personality trait that teens display, and I wanted no part of it and also didn't want to have to be the hardcore mean mom acting like a prison warden in comparison to cultural norms.
The way kids feel free to treat their parents these days -- and it seems that the more affluent and blue-tribeish/educated they are, the worse it is -- is a huge turn-off. Every time we have friends visit and stay with us with their kids, my husband and I turn to each other when they leave in utter disbelief and astonishment at what a nightmare the tweens/teens are, and how poorly they treat their parents (and their parents allow them to). So even if parenthood imbues your brain with some kind of emotional intoxicant to make it all seems worthwhile and even enjoyable, from the outside it looks extremely unappealing.
The elementary-age kids are generally much more delightful.
Teenagers are often exactly as you describe. I live in a subculture (much more conservative) that does not tolerate the worst examples of disrespect, so it's not as bad. They tend to grow out of it relatively soon, especially if there are reasonable boundaries that are consistently enforced. You do have to have a pretty think skin to get through the hyperbolic overreactions ("I hate you!" "You're ruining my life!") but they tend to fade quickly and often lead to genuine remorse on their part.
I certainly feel bad about what my parents had to deal with -- I was insufferable.
Parenting practices are probably the single aspect of conservative culture that I can give endorsement to, as the situation between parents and teens in the affluent/liberal sphere appears to have gone completely off the rails, with a real inmates/asylum feel.
>it seems that the more affluent and blue-tribeish/educated they are, the worse it is
It seems like you're on the cusp of understanding that your observation about kids surrounding you being worthless insufferable jerks is, a) correct, b) more a reflection of your local environment in the present era, than a general statement about human children across space and time.
To facilitate the crossing of that last remaining mile, may I suggest this very fine article by Mary Harrington?
Thank you for the link. I wish she'd taken a crack at how you tell when the use of authority is appropriate, as distinct from making a good case that sometimes (frequently) authority is necessary.
For example, she mentions "normal eating and sleeping habits", and that might be generally appropriate, but I read a thing by someone who was made ill by some common foods. Was demanding that they eat "just one bite" tyrannical?
Thanks for the link. I thought I was avoiding having to deal with this issue by not having kids. Then I got dogs and discovered to my chagrin that this anti-authority, anti-discipline madness has even taken over the dog-owning world. Among a huge group of (mostly youngish under 40, almost entirely female) dog owners, they no longer believe in ANY "negative reinforcement" -- i.e. telling a dog no. They will allow the most atrocious behavior...jumping on counters, stealing food, even *biting their owners*, and cry and complain and turn to each other for constant sympathy about their stress dealing with their dog's terrible behavior. But they will not simply stomp their foot and tell the dog NO! Because apparently that will harm their relationship with the dog and the dog's confidence. I'm not joking. It is literal insanity.
You sound excessively harsh and unsympathetic to teenagers. I also find it really weird that you include "fat" (and to a lesser extent "lazy") among your generalized criticisms of them.
No, I do not dislike fat people (or people for being fat). I'm an American in my 40s -- most of my friends and people I love are fat.
I don't even dislike teenagers, as I was one once and understand why they are the way they are. But many of them are pretty awful, and mostly because the culture allows them to be -- I don't think it's a human universal that teenagers are assumed to be the way we assume them to be in WEIRD societies.
My point was that there are cultural forces that produce outcomes that almost everyone complains about and regards as bad, yet almost no one individually seems to be able to manage changing. I included "fat" because it's a fact that is such an obvious change from the past. Prior to roughly the late 90s, almost all teenagers were rail thin. Now I know many who are plumper than their parents, which is sort of shocking. And I know that those teenagers don't want to be fat, and neither do their parents, so I'd say that's a bad outcome. One which it's pretty clear what the reasons are, yet no one can seem to prevent this bad outcome from happening.
If parents want to fight against the predominate culture of parenting, their kids are probably going to hate it and not like them. Parents want their kids to like them. So even if everyone wishes it would change, any one family has a hard time changing it unless collectively they all band together and change it.
It's sort of like the skyrocketing tuition and increased worthlessness of degrees. If parents all collectively decided to just stop accepting it and boycotted college until the problem is rectified, it would get solved. But no one family is going to do that and put their kid at a disadvantage, they're all competing with each other, so prices will continue to rise.
I will say that despite all the other (in my mind) bad outcomes that result from current parenting culture, it clearly leads to much closer relationships between kids and parents, where the kids really DO see their parents as friends and tell them everything.
I concur. In _Stumbling on Happiness_ Daniel Gilbert gives an explanation as to why so many parents insist on the opposite: self-deception is hardwired by natural selection. It's not good news for the reproduction of our genes if we know that having kids will decrease our personal happiness. So we lie to ourselves about it.
we also lie to others about it... unless you are playing it for laughs, it is not easy to talk about how terrible an experience it is in public. ( somewhat easier on an anonymous message board)
Our son is 7 months old and the first ~2-3 months were *really* hard for me. It wasn't just that I was physically or emotionally tired. Rather, it was the knowledge that our old lifestyle of going out to eat at 9:00 pm, coming home tipsy, sleeping in on the weekends, doing things spontaneously, etc etc, were gone. Of course, I knew that would be the case in the abstract when we decided to have a child, but there ain't no teacher like reality. I found myself irrationally resenting our son, even wishing for a mulligan. I kind of wondered if I was suffering from postpartum depression (it's not just related to female hormones -- men can suffer from it, too).
Then, around the 3ish month mark or so, things started to change for me. I can even define a type of inflection point, where one night after I got done feeding him I just sat their holding him, not wanting to put him in his crib and to go back to bed. I think it has to do a lot with our son being more emotive and responsive to us. He's not just a human that needs constant attention, he's a *person*, with an emerging personality. It's been wonderful to behold. Last Saturday Penn State lost to Iowa in heartbreaking fashion. It was the kind of thing that would have normally made me brood for the rest of the night. The first thing I did was go upstairs, pick up me son, and start to make him laugh. It genuinely made me feel better and put things in perspective.
I still miss my old lifestyle, and I think I always will, sometimes more than others. But it just doesn't seem as important to me as it did a few months ago, and now I look forward to other things.
Maybe it all comes down brain chemistry and evolution, but my feelings are genuine.
And just to be clear, I'm not trying to make anyone who has a different experience feel guilty or defective. There's no guarantee that my outlook might not change again. I'm just trying to be honest about my own experiences.
This is a great line right here: " It was the kind of thing that would have normally made me brood for the rest of the night. The first thing I did was go upstairs, pick up me son, and start to make him laugh. It genuinely made me feel better and put things in perspective."
I think this is the role that a felt sense of purpose plays in a person's life. If you have some clarity about what you're here for, it's tremendously helpful in getting one over the small humps which so much of life entails (and which having your favorite team lose is an instance of).
Without a larger felt sense of purpose -- whether it's raising kids or some other thing, and I by no means think it needs to be kids, but it's also definitely not just "goals" -- one's satisfaction in life tends to boil down to how well we were able to gratify ourselves from one minute to the next. And the world isn't well well-disposed to accommodate us in that.
Same. For me it started to get hard around 6 months, and I had intermittent feelings of deep regret when she was ~ 1.5-2.5. I didn't mind or feel bad that I had these feelings, so I talked about them with people. I think a lot of other people feel shame.
But I no longer have the feelings (no surprise). I like my child a lot. My feelings are genuine.
Could it also just as equally be that childless people are lying to themselves, trying to justify their life choices? If it goes one way, there is no reason it can't go the other.
Which kind of childless people, the ones who say they wanted children but never had any or the ones who say they never wanted children and never had any?
Well, now you know me, and i believe those studies. life is terrible with kids. if you dont believe me, go to a maternity ward and see how much resources are devoted to dealing with depression, and teaching parents how not to harm their children out of anger.
Aren't you referring to postpartum depression here? That's pretty clearly a hormonal issue, I think, not a "my life inherently sucks which is making me depressed" issue.
Source? Pregnancy and childbirth clearly affects women’s hormones, but it also has a dramatic effect on their lives, often harming their relationships and careers, so I’m not sure why we would assume postpartum depression must be hormonal.
I think that preventing this is the main reason some (relatively few) women ingest their placenta, on the theory that losing minerals w/er impacts their mental state. I don't know how solid the science is on that, though.
I thought it happens almost immediately after childbirth? I had a friend once whose wife got PPD and more or less went crazy (in the classical way, she thought she was being chased by Russian spies etc). But she'd had children before that and it was fine. Pretty clearly some sort of biological cause given the severity, speed and prior lack of impact. It wasn't a generalized, man kids are hard work kind of problem. It was a, she needs medication to control it, kind of problem.
So, I could write all day about this, but I'm actually physically at my job today, so I won't. Just let me say a couple of things.
1) I'm really really sorry that this has been your experience, and I hope that things get better for you.
2) This is not at all my experience. I know elsewhere that you talk about how parents lie, to themselves and others about how miserable parenthood is. All I can say is that if I'm lying to myself I'm damned convincing. This is the part I could go on and on about, given the time. I'll just say that my experience is that my life is full and joyful in a way that it just wasn't pre-kids. It seems from other responses that this is a (the?) common experience.
3) Not only would it make a good blog post, Scott has already written it. It's linked elsewhere in the subthread, but I'll repeat it here because the commenting system isn't great. (I know you saw it, but in case anyone else who's in the neighborhood has missed it.) Hat tip to @JDDT. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/16/bundles-of-joy/
i dont think that post is as conclusive as it seems. i think it shows, as was mentioned upstream that there are probably two populations of people when it comes to enjoying kids
I guess I'm a bit puzzled by this sub-thread because it seems to take as a premise that the reason people have children is to increase their "happiness" so if happiness wasn't increased in any given part of it, we need to delude ourselves about that in order to feel that it was a good choice to make anyway.
What happened to the old idea that things worth doing in life are both hard and rewarding? Raising children was as hard as I thought it would be. And it was as rewarding as I'd hoped it would be. I feel immeasurably enriched by the whole thing.
I do think if you're a person who has a long list of things you want to do just for yourself -- travel a lot, work as hard as you can to get to the top of your field, have control over most of your solitude time, see people when you want to and not when you don't want to, have a lot of room to think about and pursue your own interests, use all your spending money on things you want -- then having kids is going to feel like a really big sacrifice.
I don't know how much polls capture the disappointment of people who thought parenting was going to be another kind of experience than it is, or who thought that having kids was going to feel like pursuing other "interests" one does to gratify oneself. Or indeed that many people come to parenting without much thought at all and then are unpleasantly surprised because up to that point in their life they hadn't done something that was really demanding over a long period for a larger purpose, aside from maybe school which parenting resembles not at all.
Raising kids is not mostly "fun" even though there are moments of fun and it requires enormous amounts of sustained energy, not always on things one would right in that moment prefer to be doing. Being an inventor, running a big organization, building something really huge -- those things are like that too, and it seems to me we don't chase those people around and go "but are you happy now?" Because we get that they're doing those things for a bunch of reasons that aren't reducible to "more happiness."
It was a response to the post where Scott is talking about happiness. If you are puzzled, it should be by the original post by Scott, and not by this sub-thread.
I think there's a miscommunication with definitions happening here. If raising kids is rewarding to you, that *is* what people are referring to as happiness. That is, 'happiness' here doesn't just mean something that is fun, but something that impacts you positively in some way.
I would disagree with your last paragraph. I can imagine an inventor or entrepreneur who works really hard, is often stressed, but at the end of the day feels rewarded by their work and *happy* about the direction their projects are progressing. If they don't feel that, at least they believe that they will in the future. If they didn't feel this way, I wouldn't think those things were worth doing for them.
I just spent a little time looking at some of the research and it looks to me like it relies on self-assessments of "generalized distress, depression and everyday negative and positive emotions such as anger and happiness." (https://epc2014.princeton.edu/papers/140098)
If that's the case, then I don't think "rewarding" equals "happy" in terms of this research.
I think the problem is that "happiness" is a vastly multifaceted concept. English words "satisfaction", "joy", and "pleasure" go some way towards catching some of the various often contradictory facets but it's more complicated than that.
Having children certainly trades off one type of happiness (vaguely in the direction of "pleasure") for another (vaguely in the direction of "satisfaction"). It's not unique in this, for instance going on a multi-day hike up a mountain gives you the same tradeoff.
Given that we spend our whole lives pursuing different types of happiness it's bad that we don't have the vocabulary to properly understand it. We're like professional hunters who somehow can't distinguish between different types of prey and are perpetually confused by animal behaviour because they think pigeons and buffalo are the same thing.
I guess I land at the sense that life is much more like a hike up a mountain than it is a chocolate sundae, but as a culture (whatever I mean by that), we seem pretty resentful about the idea of tradeoffs.
I think a lot hinges on the meaning people assign to the word happiness. I can say from experience that life as a parent has been less fun in a hedonistic sense, and more work, than life as a non-parent, and my wife and I expected as much when we decided to have a kid. But I'm also experiencing new, deep, meaningful, occasionally joyous things. Knowing what I know now, I would make the same decision to become a parent (in fact, I wish we had done it sooner).
As others mentioned, this might have something to do with the age of the kids.
Babies are awful (I'm intentionaly pregnant, and still think this). I'm starting to like my 2 year old. In another two years I should have a pair of sisters who can play with each other, which should hopefully be better.
On the other hand, some people actually don't like children.
Parent child relationships start out extremely asymmetric, and become less so over time. That doesn't mean most people don't enjoy their children. I enjoy spending time with my daughter, but some situations lend themselves more to this than others. I really like cuddling with her, hanging out with other families, going on short trips, playing with pets pets, and visiting things like museums and parks -- she makes these things better.
Of course, there are other things that are worse, like unexpected emergencies where it's hard to find someone to watch her, long flights, places where the expectation is that everyone wait quietly for extended periods of time, and restaurants. How difficult small children are probably has a lot to do with how much of your life includes activities in the second category vs the first.
There is an optimal amount of time to spend with your kids: more than zero, less than 24 hours every day. (Actually, this is kinda true for everyone you love.) So it can make sense to complain that kids take too much of your time, while also being happy that you have them.
And too I think how much we value ‘happiness’ relative to other things. I am a pretty happy person and I think I would pick ‘feels deeply meaningful’ or ‘aligned with my life purpose’ over ‘happy’ with respect to some bigger decisions.
I raised two kids by the way and helped raise two others and I would say my happiness has pretty steadily increased year after year without regard to how old my kids were and including before I had kids (which was In my mid-30s).
Kids are a lot of work, and if what really makes you happy is going out and partying all the time then you probably shouldn’t have any. I did a lot of going out and partying in my 20s, which I don’t regret. Had a kid in my 30s (very much on purpose) and It has proven to be one of the best decisions I ever made. Vastly improved my overall happiness. But, of course, YMMV
i hate going out and partying, and did very little of it. and perhaps this is the distinction? maybe if you like partying you *should* have kids? n=2, but you seem to be fine with the tradeoff of partying for kids, and i find the other tradeoffs crushing.
Yeah, there are so many variables involved that it’s pretty much impossible to come up with any one-size-fits-all advice. I definitely agree with Scott that society should chill and just be cool with the fact that some folks want to be parents while others don’t.
Generally I've heard that the studies are that happiness of people who had kids and the kids are now adults is significantly higher than people who did not have kids and are the same age.
It's not the level of happiness while raising kids, but the happiness of having raised kids.
That seems similar to a lot of worthwhile projects, especially art. Often a very painful process, or even best to hope for getting in the "zone" but pretty unreasonable to be truly joyful while you are creating (for many people). But the joy from having /done/ it is significant.
In many ways the opposite of the joy of a night out drinking with friends and the hangover the next day and realization of the transitory nature of the joy.
You're looking at the relationship, not the happiness/satisfaction of the parent, also where's your control group (the childless adults in the same age bracket as the parents)?
This seems to be the case with marriages as well, no? So I guess the question is what is one's expectation going into a big endeavor where the outcome is by no means certain?
Is it true still that 90% of small businesses fail?
I also think those outcomes are not predetermined or entirely outside one's influence.
I work as a psychotherapist with a lot of people in their late 20s and 30s who are working on improving their relationships with their parents, and I work with some people in their 60s who are working on improving their relationships with their grown children. In doing that work, I have been struck by how much children and parents want to have better relationships with each other and how much progress is possible on that front, and how much people's lives are improved when those relationships improve. I was more of a pessimist on the possibility of ever improving relations with a person who is as set in their ways as someone well into their 60s, but it turns out I was wrong, in multiple instances!
Who was it that said something like, "When I left home at the age of 16, it was evident what an idiot my father was. When I came back at the age of 21 I was amazed at just how much he learned in the interim."
I want to say it's a Twain or a Franklin quote, but so many things are misattributed to them.
(Yes, I know your comment was meant in humor. But as I was writing my comment initially I was struck by the choice of 16 as a leaving home date (according to my memory) and I wonder if the increasing stretch of parental-child strife comes from us extending the age of adolescence to 22 or 25 or 30 or whatever it is lately.)
No? I've never read the actual studies directly, so somebody correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but I've always wondered if they miss an important part of the analysis: People who don't have kids typically didn't want kids in the first place. And people with kids typically did want kids. I don't think the happiness comparison between these two groups says much about whether or not someone should have kids. Person A, who's always wanted kids and has kids, might end up less happy on average than Person B, who's never wanted kids and doesn't have kids. But it might also be that Person A ends up happier than Person A', the version of themselves who's always wanted kids but never has those kids.
I've always wanted kids. It's hardly been a question. And it feels like if I didn't have kids, that would always be a nagging regret. To my knowledge these happiness studies don't consider that.
I think something important here is identifying how unhappy not having kids would make (and/or would have left) those people. With a kid in my thirties I am less of some kinds of "happy" than I was in my twenties, but I would have been less of that in my thirties anyway—with my friends busier and farther away, my parents getting older, the head-in-the-clouds 99th-percentile life outcomes wiped off the board, etc.
With the kid I am limiting some of those things earlier than I might have otherwise, but I've also felt my life reordered in a way that makes a lot more sense and is much more rewarding and, honestly, happiness-inducing than living among the slowly decaying ornaments of my life as a twentysomething. The childless version of me at 34 would not now be living the life he did five years ago, or if he did I strongly suspect it would not be hitting the same way. In many ways it just sucks to be old and have responsibilities, and I have come honestly by the ancient cliche of children being a wonderful consolation for my old age.
One other thing I couldn't jam in there—I'm a very undisciplined person and always have been, and it's always been one of the hardest and most frustrating parts of my life. I repeatedly came within a test or two of flunking out of college, I've constantly let stuff slip at work when I know both how to do it and how important it is, just an absolute nightmare.
Having a kid has been the best adjunct to stimulants for the treatment for my ADHD I have ever experienced. I get up early, I take her on long walks, I go to the gym religiously after she goes down for the night when I never used to in those long empty days I had, I'm a better husband, I'm better at my job. I certainly wouldn't say that's going to work for everybody, but whether I actually had the executive function to take care of a baby was something I worried about a lot while my wife was pregnant. It wasn't a seamless transition, but so far so good.
"Right now we only eat about a third of our crops directly - the rest goes mostly to animals, usually requiring about 10x calories of grain to produce x calories of meat."
The so-called inefficiency of meat over plants in creating food for humans has been repeated for decades, and for decades it has been wrong and bad.
Calories are not all created equal, otherwise you could live quite well solely on about 200 grams of corn oil per day and never suffer any deficiencies.
"Calories are not all created equal, otherwise you could live quite well solely on about 200 grams of corn oil per day and never suffer any deficiencies."
Sure, but unless the calories that go into animal feed require an order of magnitude less resources to produce than crops which humans typically consume, there is still a large inefficiency present.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is true in some cases (e.g. animals which graze on wild grass), but my understanding is that a large part of the feed used by the US meat industry is corn and soybeans, which can also be consumed by humans.
It is both true that most current US production of animals is inefficient and that there is lots of land that can only be effectively used for raising animals because it's unsuitable for crops for human consumption.
Especially true for sheep and goats, which are usually grazed on hillsides which aren't suitable for terracing.
And then there are pigs which can be fed on various waste, and cattle which can graze land that is too dry for grain crops.
But the modern industrial food system does use land that is suitable for crops.
Question from a naive foreigner: if animals in the US are fed on grain, then what _are_ hills used for, agriculturally?
Thinking of my own memories of driving around the US, I can't think of too many hillsides dotted with animals. On the other hand, I feel like gentle hillsides actually don't exist all that much in the US, which tends to be either dead flat or steep mountains.
We have a shit load of land, the most advanced agro technology around, and bulldozers. We either don't need the hills agriculturaly, or we knock them down. The east half of the US is covered in hills. The west is flat or steep like you saw.
Around here (Illinois, a north central state), woods. There's a lot of flat in the state as a whole, but also quite a few hills just right here in the Illinois River valley, and the hills are almost exclusively left to grow woods. Or woodlots, as farmers sometimes call them--a source of firewood, sometimes of a little lumber. (Our hills are small and not very rolling, but west of here in Iowa I've seen gently rolling hills planted in huge fields of corn. It doesn't seem a good idea at all, erosion-wise.) But on the farm I work for, they hope to start running some livestock (probably sheep and goats) on the wooded slopes with judicious use of moveable fencing. It's called silvopasture and will apparently result in a sort of wooded & grassy parkland, in the end. Sounds nice.
Farming adjacent dude here: It's both true and false.
You can feed cows off marginal land that is not suitible for cereal crops, eg, the american south-west, parts of the north west, parts of africa, parts of california, mexico, austrailia , new zeland, etc.
Unfortunately, this land requires a kind of ranging grazing where you move cows over a huge amount of land and EXTREMLY strict management. If you let fucking ranchers graze to their hearts content, they damage grass lands to the point of reduced productivity in a decade, because Tragedy Of The Commons is a god damn meme.
(These are the people that do the occasional bit of terrorism but arent punished ever, for SOME REASON)
The vast majority of calories eaten by catle come from arrable land.
Happily, lot's of this feed is silage from ceral crops or cover crops that would be grown any way, so it's not so bad as you might think.
That said, beef is still a pretty god damn ineficiant product in the amounts we consume it. It's not catastrophically bad from an Agg perpsictive, but it could be way better.
(This is all in my experience from raising calves for sale as steer in central america, and being adjacent to ranchers in CA and the south west.)
It may be important to note that silage is chopped up waste plants, such as corn stalks. That is, non-edible to humans and often something that would be grown anyway to make human food.
Not to disagree with you at all, we often use inefficient (in terms of land use) processes to make food for cattle.
What I'm saying is that the crops are not a substitute for the meat, in any quantity, so how efficient or inefficient they are is irrelevant.
Meat is various proteins plus fats. Plants are mostly carbohydrates, plus (depending on the plant) some fats and a few proteins.
But unless you're really conscientious about your diet, as a vegetarian you will end up with various deficiencies. You may not notice this if you have a desk job (you'll just feel lousy). If you do any sort of exercise, particularly strength training, this will quickly become apparent.
"Overall, it seems highly probable that vegan diets are healthier than common Western diets, and perhaps also somewhat healthier than good Western and non-Western omnivore diets. However, that is assuming that the vegan gets all the nutrients that they need, especially vitamin D and vitamin B12, of which two vitamins many vegans don’t have enough. These can be gained through supplements or by eating foods fortified with them."
(note that i am vegan, and was vegetarian when i wrote that, so read with that in mind.)
The vast majority of American (and other Western) diets have much more meat than is needed for health. If the amount of meat production was reduced to just meat from land that is unsuitable for crop production plus industrial facilities using waste plant matter from crop production (weeds, stalks, husks, etc), then there would be much more than enough meat available for health requirements.
It is, of course, possible to get sufficient protein on a vegetarian or vegan diet - from nuts and legumes in particular (there's a reason that soy forms a large part of many veggie diets). However, these crops are nothing like as many calories per acre as cereals, so the calories per acre benefits of switching from omnivorous diets to veggie ones are far less than those that a naive calculation would suggest.
Also, if we're thinking purely of feeding as many people as possible given the amount of land available (One Billion Americans type thinking), then fishing can form a part of that story. There are few seaweeds that can be eaten safely by humans, and most of those have little nutritional value, so fishing is generally a better way of extracting nutrition from the sea. While there certainly are overfishing issues, even the most cautious approach to fishing would still result in a substantial catch - and fish fats are particularly beneficial compared to land animal fats, plus fish tend to be very protein heavy compared to most land animals.
The official guidelines for protein intake are far too low. They were developed by noticing the minimum amounts needed to prevent obvious deficiencies from developing during the duration of the studies.
They were also developed by studying young adults. We've known for some time that older adults do not metabolize protein as efficiently as young ones (hardly surprising).
It also matters which proteins you get. Vegetarian diets are generally low in the ones that humans either cannot synthesize or else do not do it well. Soy may work as a substitute if you also adopt the cuisines that have used it for a long time - there are other ingredients that help with digestion. However many people who use soy don't do that.
The surpluses in Western diets are generally in the simple carbohydrates and vegetable fats, not proteins. It hasn't been noticed as much because we don't do nearly as much physical labor as we used to.
Do you have any sources for this? N=1, but I can, currently in my mid-thirties, build muscle mass while eating little or no meat, on approximately 70 grams of protein a day.
N = 1 for myself as well. But I'm mid-fifties. I was not gaining any strength on the usual 70-80 grams. Moved to 200 grams and it made all the difference in the world.
I agree that meat calories are inefficient; but then, I don't really want to live in a fully efficient world (although I also agree that it is to some extent inevitable). For example, typing pithy comments into a textbox on a blog is the epitome of inefficiency; the time and energy spent on doing this would be better spent on plowing fields, solving math proofs, or virtually anything else. I do in fact have real-world friends who refuse to read fiction (and partake of other forms of entertainment) for reasons of inefficiency. I cannot justify any such activities on purely utilitarian grounds; and yet, I would like to live my life in a world where they still exist.
But... even on the efficiency argument, there would still be significant meat production both grazing on land that is unsuitable for cereal crops, and industrial meat using waste plant matter from crop production (stalks, etc).
I don't know if that would be 50% or 10% of current production, but even 10% would be a lot and would be sufficient for the diet issues that people are talking about elsethread.
A bit off-topic, but another item that wasn't discussed is the use of the crops for fuel production.
In 2019, approximately 30 million acres of US corn cropland were devoted to ethanol production...that's about a third of the national corn crop going to feed vehicles, not people. Biodiesel production from US soybean acreage isn't quite as stark, but it's still substantial.
It should be noted that some of the byproducts of these fuel industries (dried distillers grains and soybean meal) are still used within the animal feed industry. However, the moral of the story is that the production of alternative fuels from crops is actually a hugely important policy decision that wouldn't exist without governmental mandates. So, much of the arable land in the US is already ostensibly devoted to fighting climate change (by replacing oil with alternative fuels).
I don't know why this never gets brought up when people talk about food being grown for animals. I also think many people tend to focus on one system at a time, like just looking at cows and their lifecycle of eating and less on how they fit into the entire ecosystem of the food industry.
If we just cut out cows, like if we just cut out all non-organic or GMO crops, the system as we know it would collapse.
> Indeed, looking at other replies here - people are "too lazy" to have kids, "too immature" to have kids, have "excuses" not to have kids... the reality is that not having kids is a decision one is continuously called to justify and defend against attack in ways other life choices are not.
THE FOLLOWING IS NOT AN ARGUMENT OR CRITICISM BUT SIMPLY A DESCRIPTION OF MY POINT OF VIEW
Comments like this confuse me. I'm 32. I'm single. I don't have any kids. Save the occasional comment made by my grandparents (comments I've been ignoring for a decade now), I cannot think of a single instance in my adult life where members of the general public have pressured me _in any way_ to have children. In fact, I'd make the stronger claim that, at least from my point of view, this is also true of all the other childless 30-somethings I know.
The only people I have ever encountered who have actually cared about this are 'far-right internet people'. But they are not representative of any mainstream perspective, and you can't generalize from them to any wider trends in society.
I don't understand how all of the rest of you are apparently "constantly called on to justify" your choices not to have kids. Who is doing this calling? Why is this a thing that I never encounter?
Just more evidence, in my mind, that my adult life experience is best explained by "the AIs have taken a particularized interest in fucking with me, for who knows why"
Same. I'm around 30, I want kids, and I am completely surrounded by peers who have no interest in kids and seem to think I'm crazy for wanting kids. On the other hand they ask me like every month whether I have a cat yet. I do not like cats, or any non-human animals, and explain this every time, but this they cannot wrap their heads around.
It's mind-blowing how many people I know who hate the idea of kids because they require so much care and trash your house, and then have 7 pets anyway that require a bunch of resources and make the whole house smell like ferret pee.
Because a lot of people find animals to be way more adorable than human babies. As evidenced by the fact that one of the most popular types of content on social media is cute animal content, and hundreds of millions of people are spending every day looking at photos of cute puppies every day, while there is no similarly popular content to look at pictures of babies. And the fact that every other commercial for any product features a dog. While I noticed the new Kia minivan add literally shows the adults putting a *robot child* rather than a human child into the backseat...
They don't borrow the car (although a lot of kids these days don't either because they can't drive), they don't want to go to college, they don't move out or otherwise assert their independence.
They stay pretty much the same after a year or so, until they die. Yes, there are medical bills, but they are still enormously cheaper than a child.
If you don't have anything to pass on to the next generation, or you think you will never die (and therefore there's nobody to pass it onto) then a pet might look like a better tradeoff.
It has always appeared to me that you get about 80% of the benefits of parenting from pets (the cuteness, snuggles, care-taking, lovey feelings etc.), but at a way lesser cost. Like about 1% of the cost for a cat and like 20% for a dog (looking at all costs, not just financial).
This was my experience as well. My wife and I waited until last year to have our first kid (at the age of 37), and we were very much on the fence about whether or not we wanted to have kids for pretty much all of our late 20s and early/mid 30s. The *only* people we got direct pressure from were my mom, and her mom and sister. Anecdotally, this seems to have been the way things went for my friends (i.e., pressure pretty much only from family, and usually from the mom's side).
I'm not trying to discount other people's experiences, just adding my own data point.
For the commenters who don't feel social pressure to have children: How many of you got promoted into a position of leadership in a local social organization before you had a stable marriage and children?
For my subculture, it's church, where there seems to be a preference to draw leaders from those with stable marriages and children. I'm not trying to say that's either good or bad. Just that single people tend to get put in charge of single-people stuff, while general population stuff has family people in charge.
I tend to associate the pressure to have children with this institutional preference for promoting family people. But if people who don't feel pressure to have children have been promoted within similar organizations without having children, that would show that this preference may not be widespread.
OK. Yeah. I think a lot of people who don't feel pressure aren't really *in* similar institutions. Like, a church is a fairly specific institution, and it's not one in which a lot of single young people who aren't otherwise feeling pressure to procreate participate in. For what it's worth, I actually was in a similar but much more liberal institution and there wasn't that kind of selection/pressure.
Sorry for my ignorance -- I thought church leaders were meant to be celibate? Is that nonsense? Or is that only for certain leaders in certain denominations or something?
Certain leaders in certain denominations. There are three main divisions in Christianity: Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant. Orthodox and Catholic churches have the idea of priests who are special in some essential way, and Catholicism requires that those priests be celibate. Us Protestants insist on the equality of all Christians before God, so no priests and no celibacy requirement.
(It's all much, much more complex than that rough description captures.)
I would be surprised if Catholic lay (non-priest) leadership doesn't favor family people, maybe even more than Protestants do.
Is this why protestants don't have nuns and monks?
"no priests" - - wait, Protestants don't have priests? They have a guy handing out wafers? That's not a priest?
So, I was under the impression that women still couldn't take on some roles in Protestantism? How is that viewed alongside the egalitarian stuff?
Sex being evil in some way seems separate from egalitarianism? So is there an explanation as to why Catholicism finds sex evil and Protestantism doesn't? Or does Protestantism also think this but thinks it is necessary or something?
There was a Catholic girl at my university who only practiced anal sex (with her husband) because she didn't want to get pregnant and didn't want to use contraception. So much stuff going on there I didn't understand and conflicted with what I'd heard from elsewhere.
As a moderately conservative Anglican protestant who takes non-wafer bread from married priests: There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Worth pointing out though that there are married Roman Catholic priests from other churches who have taken particular routes across the Tiber, such as joining the Anglican Ordinariate.
While there's not necessarily a visible pressure to do this, but traditionally managers are more likely to hire/promote men who were married with children. Additionally a lot of businesses spend more of their budget on married people (think employer contributions to family health insurance, also flexibility for sick children).
While this is because social stability is valued, and people who can organize married-with-children lives are likely to belong to a group of people with organizational skills, and people with kids have more demands for flexibility/benefits than people who don't, there is this level of accepted discrimination.
This is true. Also more committed to work more generally. NEETs are overwhelmingly unmarried men.
One other argument I heard before from an old-school guy who did a lot of hiring was, "If a guy has a wedding ring, you can at least assume one person in the world can put up with the son of a bitch."
Some of that comes from St. Paul, back when early Christianity was trying to cope with organising itself now that it was beginning to spread outside a few centres:
1 Timothy 3 (qualifications for bishops and deacons)
"Qualifications for Overseers
3 The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. 2 Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, 5 for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church? 6 He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. 7 Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.
Qualifications for Deacons
8 Deacons likewise must be dignified, not double-tongued,[c] not addicted to much wine, not greedy for dishonest gain. 9 They must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience. 10 And let them also be tested first; then let them serve as deacons if they prove themselves blameless. 11 Their wives likewise must be dignified, not slanderers, but sober-minded, faithful in all things. 12 Let deacons each be the husband of one wife, managing their children and their own households well. 13 For those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and also great confidence in the faith that is in Christ Jesus."
This is coming out of a culture where every adult is going to be married, if at all possible, so likewise your church officials will be married, and Protestantism when doing away with clerical celibacy adopted the same measures.
There's a bit of commentary around it, trying to parse what exactly he meant. The basic interpretation is "be married, not catting around with lots of women" and/or "be married but no mistresses/trips to the local brothel on the side".
When the question of divorce came up, and married Protestant clergy or ministers in various denominations were dealing with congregants getting divorced or getting divorced themselves, there was also "so can a bishop be a divorced man?" questions. After all, if you divorce and re-marry, you have two wives: one ex, but still alive, and your current missus. Catholic view tended (and tends) to be "no divorce, and if divorced, no re-marriage", the Protestant denominations moved more towards "well, sometimes divorce is the only remedy for an abusive marriage" and of course as time went on and social standards about sex and marriage liberalised, so they followed.
As to polygamy in the Classical world - well, the Romans didn't (but they had several forms of marriage and permitted divorces and re-marriages) and the Jews had the example of the Patriarchs like Jacob, and their kings, who had more than one wife though I don't think any were engaging in polygamy in St. Paul's time.
It's still a current problem with, for example, African countries where converts may be married with several wives, what is the solution there (especially since sending away the extra wives can expose them to poverty and ill-treatment), and there's a work-around on "pick one wife to be your spouse, live with the others as part of the household but companionate marriage":
Yes, and from family members mainly. If you didn’t grow up in a close knit extended family that does the have-a-child pressure thing then I can see one would think it’s fiction. But it’s not.
While maybe it is mostly directed at women from family members, I've seen a fair number of only-sons get pressured from their family to carry on the family name, and one giant falling out when a second son got a vasectomy in his 20s.
I'm an only son, and while pressure existed, I'd say it was pretty sporadic and I might go years without feeling it. Though it certainly transformed my mother's life and gave her new purpose for living when I finally did have kids.
Meanwhile I had a girlfriend once who got pressure to settle down and have kids from coworkers she wasn't even that friendly with. So yeah, I think women are much more likely to encounter this, primarily from other women in their peer group who are already mothers.
I was raised in the most popular denomination (Catholicism) of the most popular religion (Christinaity) and was told that the only valid options to avoid LITERAL TORTURE LITERALLY FOREVER were celibacy or having a lot of kids. This is not an unusual experience; this is the experience of almost a billion and a half people. (Admittedly taking these threats as literally and seriously as I did is unusual for people raised Catholic in W.E.I.R.D. countries, but I don't think I am the one at fault for assuming people actually mean the things they say.)
You exaggerate. The Catholic church approves of the rhythm method and, although it is not reliable enough to permit lots of sex with zero pregnancies, it is reliable enough to let a married couple have a few children rather than lots of them.
I don't think that's true about evolution: AFAIK the official Catholic teaching is still agnostic on the matter and has set parameters for what would be acceptable teaching on evolution, but it has never proclaimed that a literal account of Genesis 1-2 is definitely false.
NFP (Natural Family Planning) as endorsed by Christian groups who discourage contraception is more wholistic and biologically informed than "rhythm" and is surprisingly effective.
YMMV as far as what actually existing people might teach and practice, of course.
You can go to Hell for many more reasons than engaging in non-reproductive sexual intercourse and deliberately inducing sterility. Do you worry about those as well, in which case it's scrupulosity, or just about "I want to have sex but I don't want to get pregnant so I use contraception and if I did get pregnant, I'd have an abortion", in which case it's something you do need therapy about.
Most of the other ways of going to hell require you to do genuinely bad things. And even if you _do_ do these bad things, you can confess them and be forgiven.
However, confession isn't a total free pass, you're not allowed to commit regular sins safe in the knowledge that you can confess them and get your slate wiped clean every week. In order to be forgiven you need to be genuinely sorry for what you've done. And you can't do that if you don't even think that what you've done (e.g. having sex with a condom) was genuinely bad. So if Catholicism is true then you're stuck in a trap, where you have a super strong urge to sin, you're encouraged by society and everyone you know to sin, and you can't properly confess to the sin because you don't have the godlike wisdom to see why your sin was bad in the first place. It's a terrible spot to be in, especially as a hormonal teenager who takes things too literally.
You're right, I was reading that in 77 the pope said a person with a vasectomy could enter into a legitimate marriage. So I guess that just leaves rhythm and blues (which can be pretty effective but is easy to mess up).
People are surrounded by people in different environments and with different views even within the same country. I believe that some people are told they should have children and I believe some people are never told this.
I want to defend slightly the parental pressure because there is a reason.
After university, and starting ones career, the average woman's window of actually having a child -- reliably, easily, and healthily, is small. According to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infertility female infertility starts a full decade before menopause, which usually starts around 51. And "subfertility" usually begins at 31! This is even before you look at issues like Down's Syndrome which go up rapidly.
Even if you have a son, these are not issues biologically, but the way modern dating works, you'll start to worry about the ability of your son to find a woman who can have children.
As a parent, you see a culture that is in denial about these hard facts of life, and is encouraging young people to put off having children for longer and longer.
It may be hard for children to understand, but your parents are used to nagging you to face up to the big picture and get on with putting the work in to get out of life what you'll want from it in the long term, even if you don't know it yet: whether it's revising for your exams, taking out the trash, or forcing you to practice the piano -- because you'll appreciate it when you're older.
Chances are, your parents are people who think having kids is a good idea, and are in fear of people (particularly women) regretting their choices.
I'm not saying they're correct, but it's fair enough and it makes complete sense. I know many people who have had trouble having children -- it's increasingly common and it's always a tragedy, and it's surprising how often it's a shock for people.
Not to mention that you will be a very different kind of parent having small kids in your 40s than in your 20s. You have the energy to chase them around and get them involved in things. Later on, especially with established careers, you may have neither the time nor the energy. Add to that having grandkids for the first time when you're in your 70s or later, and realizing that you may not get much interaction.
Not that I'm bothered at all by people choosing not to have kids, but there are good reasons to encourage people to do so before it gets too late, whether literally or for the best experience.
A bit after I was born, my great-great-grandmother held me. I have a photo of all 5 generations together. I learned bridge from my great-grandmother and great-grandfather. If everyone waits until their 40s, that's a lot of joy missed out on.
"You'd make a great parent, and I'd be happy to move to where you live (or help you move to where I live) so I could regularly assist you before I get too old" is worth a lot more than "your window for child-bearing is shorter than you think" both in terms of likelihood of positively changing an outcome and of not harming that relationship.
That is exactly my plan when my kids get to their child bearing years. My wife and I have already told my kids that I plan on retiring early and moving to where they are to be their childcare if they want me to.
I had my kids on the later side, so I've seen the pressure from both sides. Most of the pressure to have kids comes from the fact that women in their thirties (including me!) talk about absolutely nothing except their children. This can be very isolating.
On the other hand, while imaginary babies are very popular, actual fussy newborns and rambunctious toddlers are not. I haven't encountered much social pressure to be "child free," but I have encountered a lot of pressure to have well-behaved children who don't intrude on adult spaces. With two very loud, high energy small boys, it's hard not to feel like everyone is glaring at me all the time (especially when everyone is wearing facemasks so I can't see their actual expressions).
This is why parents feel like they constantly need to defend their decision to have children - a screaming baby is an actual, visible, immediate burden on everyone around him. And, for many parents, the best defense is a strong offense.
FWIW, when I'm around other people's fussy children (e.g. on a plane) I never feel burdened or inconvenienced. Children are going to act like children, and even when they're being assholes there is something endearing about it. We may never, ever cross paths, but I can't believe I'm the only person that feels this way. Hopefully that is some small comfort!
I think part of that is when people are having fewer children, putting them off till later in life, maybe not having children at all, and come from families where they had little to no experience of interacting with younger siblings, cousins, or neighbours' children, then people get more upset about "kids being kids" in public.
There are neglectful parents who let their kids run riot, but it's a natural fact that kids will have a lot of energy and will run around and yell and so forth, and it's hard for young children to behave themselves for a long time. If you're not used to being around young kids, this will annoy you. And if people around you are not having kids, you will not be used to being around kids.
May I ask, are you male or female? I think the vast majority of the comments/pressure are aimed at women.
Also, if you are single, of course no one is going to make these comments. In their mind, that might be cruel (I'm not saying it actually is, but to them, it is sad if someone is single and/or childless).
Third, how many older people or conservative people are in any of your real-life networks? If you only know conservatives as "far-right internet people" but don't know any in real life, then again it isn't surprising.
I've easily gotten at least 50 comments over the years, ranging from jokes to earnest attempts to change my mind. They've ranged from implications that I'm selfish and materialistic to kind-hearted attempts to convince me that I would love being a mother, to (the most common form) arguments that I'm the kind of person who "should" be having kids and that I have a duty to help the gene pool.
100% of all such comments have come from males. But, I work with mostly men and plenty of them are older and most of them are not liberal. So, no surprise. And I've almost always been a serious relationship, which I think makes a difference because they looked at me and couldn't understand why I wasn't having kids when all the requisite lifestyle factors were in place.
Unlike a lot of people, these comments have never bothered me. If anything I find them interesting or amusing. But I've also never been on the fence. I've always known I did not want kids, so I guess I never felt like I needed to put up any defenses when it was raised.
It might not be quantity, but WHO is doing the pressuring. If your relationship with your mom is tense, and she is on you about kids in a judgmental way that triggers you, one or two other inquiries from random coworkers will stick out way more than if you're secure in your choice and have a good relationship with your family (or other improtant people) such that their comments roll off your back, or they don't make them at all.
I would add to the notes above how most of it is directed at women that it largely depends on your culture. In China, this pressure is pervasive, everywhere and since recently also pushed by the government itself. More "traditional" cultures push it more, those more "liberal" do so less. I assume among the readers here the pressure will on average be much less than an average person in the world feels. My grandmother grew up in poverty and having kids as labor was an important part of ensuring your old age - of course, she's more likely to push me to have children of my own. Perhaps your grandmother grew up differently?
When I've seen people talk about it, it's been from older family members: parents, aunts, uncles, etc. Long term family friends can as well, but it seems less common.
I've noticed that it tends to get directed more at women and mostly from older women.
We actually don't live in this time, it's just taking 60 years for the full effects of people's reproductive decisions to be felt, because that's the interval between birth and retirement.
"I’m always surprised how willing people are to tear up the liberal contract of 'I don’t question your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine', especially when they’re not guaranteed to be on the winning side, and would completely freak out if the other side tried to create stigma against them."
I certainly agree with your support for the Principle of Charity and the liberal contract. But I think the words "non-externality-having" are doing a lot of work here and might contain the crux of the disagreement between those eager to have children (and to encourage others to have them) and those hesitant. Well-raised children are, I would claim, a *massive* positive externality. They will contribute to the world both in material/economic terms and in social/emotional terms. Children require a large investment from their parents, but (if things go well) contribute back far more than they cost. They don't necessarily pay back their parents in sheer material terms (hopefully friendship/respect/emotional closeness counts for something!), but the net effect on the world is positive.
If one sees children as positive in this light, then the choice *not* to have them looks like a choice which does create negative externalities (or at minimum, negative relative to the alternative of having kids). There is a difficult question of setting the default or zero point here, granted. But this line of thinking undermines the claim that the choice to have kids or not doesn't involve externalities. If someone else's kid might become a doctor taking care of me and my kids in the future (or might pursue a career in any number of fields that improve people's lives), that's an externality.
Also, there may be some (spoken or unspoken) Kantian Universalizing going on. If *everyone* chose to have no kids, the human race would die out, which *most* people would consider a very bad outcome. Granted, I don't think people expect humanity to actually go extinct this way, but it still makes the no-kids choice look "self-defeating" on some level, putting aside the minority of thinkers who actually do support extinction.
I was thinking about that myself. I think, personally, I view children as a net external good to the degree where, while I understand that people might have good reasons for not wanting to have children themselves, having children is something the government should encourage through for example a cash allowance. I don't think people should be going around harassing their friends who don't want to have children, but I do think they are making a choice that, in general, leads to worse overall outcomes for both the non-parents and every level of society than the alternative.
If you want to argue that choosing not to produce a positive externality is equivalent to producing a negative externality, then you are throwing away that contract completely. Every action has an opportunity cost; every time you choose to do something, you are choosing not to do something else that might be better for the world. I'm not saying that judging non-actions is wrong per se, but it's fundamentally incompatible with a do-as-you-will view of the world.
Funnily enough, I do agree that "non-externality-having" is a bad metric because it's a much higher bar than most would like to think. I just don't think that's relevant to negative choices.
I think it’s relevant to negative choices if “negative externalities” are the driver of your decision to make the negative choice.
So if you say “I don’t want to have kids because kids have a net negative impact on the world” then “no, you’re wrong, you’re actually creating more negative impact by NOT having kids” is a perfectly reasonable argument against that.
The question of net worth of a human life is as hard a problem as it gets. With a bit of luck a child can grow up into a wise and loving person who can contribute a lot to the world... and at the same time they add to the mass of human beings who, by the mere fact of moving the amount of energy we do, are making a mess of our habitat. This is exactly the sort of community of people who will rush ahead with estimates to try to quantify both sides and draw a line somewhere.... but my intuition is that the parameters are too hard to actually quantify in any kind of meaningful way, so people will just end up with a bunch of projected numbers with no relevance to anything real. I'm kind of disappointed that Scott would write something as crude as "how little confidence in your own parenting skills do you have to have, to believe that your child will add less than $30,000 in value to the world". And I'm constantly amazed that people can make identities out of having judgments on these topics, even coming up with words like "natalism" and "anti-natalism". Yikes.
At a considerable tangent ... you refer to "Well-raised children." We get along well with our adult children and both my wife and I got along well with our parents, but I gather from what our children tell us about their friends that a lot of them don't get along with theirs at all. Having children who don't like you or who you don't like sounds to me like a terrible risk, and quite likely to result in children who are not a net externality for the rest of the world.
Which raises the question of whether the sort of people who might decide not to have children for the sorts of reasons being discussed are more or less likely than average to produce children who are a net positive for the rest of us. I would expect a positive correlation between how much people enjoy rearing children and how successful they are and between how much they enjoy it and how likely they are to choose to do it.
I think "commit a negative externality" and "refuse to commit a positive externality" are really different things that should be treated really differently.
I'm also not so sure about kids being a positive externality. I know all the arguments in favor. But there's a lot of elite overproduction, so it's not clear that (from the perspective other elite kids) one more elite kid is a good thing. If you're too poor, then you have negative externalities in the form of crime and welfare. If we keep being bad about building new housing, then the size of the population determines housing cost, and if we keep being bad at transit, then extra people increase traffic. And as many other people have said, it's hard to do touristy or naturey things anymore because everywhere is so crowded.
Against that we have do have extra people improving the economy, but it's hard to be too excited about that when you're cramped and miserable. It hardly seems so obvious that every random grandparent should be pushing people to have more children.
I agree with you, and with Act_II, that applying the same reasoning to inaction (declining to do something good) as to action can lead to some pretty strange conclusions and, if we're not careful, could undermine a fair amount of classical liberalism/freedom. Drawing a distinction there makes sense.
I do think that questioning whether "more human life is good" would require rethinking society on a very fundamental level. That seems like not just a deeply-held belief for many, but like a building block that will destabilize a whole lot of conclusions if it's jostled. From the ever-quotable Mr. Chesterton:
"At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, 'Life is not worth living.' We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines; doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins."
Also, everyone seems to imagine that *their* child is going be some grand positive force for good because they will be such a great parent, yadda, yadda. It's almost like regression to the mean doesn't exist. No, you have a kid and your kid will probably be average, with a mix of positive and negative externalities on the rest of the world like most people.
If wealth is a consequence of genuine differences in productivity in turn related to genetics, it may well be a positive externality for wealthy individuals to have more children. (So long as they pax their taxes and all.)
"I think "commit a negative externality" and "refuse to commit a positive externality" are really different things that should be treated really differently."
Why? I may be wrong, but I thought you were a utilitarian of some description, and under that philosophy, they really are the same thing.
I think the disagreement should come down to doubts about kids being a positive externality, and a broad disagreement that we're obligated to perform every action with a net positive utility (as a corollary to your 10% rule).
Charitably, though, I'm also a little iffy on whether a negative and a lack of a positive should be treated the same, since my intuitions seem to fail me (they give different results depending on wording: "not rescuing a drowning child vs pushing them in yourself" feels different, but "watching a child drown vs pushing them in yourself" feels much more similar). But I think this is mostly my intuitions being bad. I generally think consequentialist utilitarianism has the right of it: It's the same, the child is dead when they didn't have to be, and those other objections are safer retreat.
Because people want to recreate in beautiful places. That means mountains, rivers, beaches, and forests. No one wants to recreate on vast empty, flat plains with nothing but tumbleweeds in every direction.
I think Argentus has it right. The US actually has plenty of space for more people with the right investment in infrastructure and many areas of outstanding natural beauty that are sparsely populated. Places like CA and NY are perceived as 'overcrowded' because everyone's trying to cram their kids into 'good schools', which is a separate topic I won't rant about just now.
The whole concept of "elite overproduction" seems very fishy to me. Especially the idea that there is some fixed need for "elites".
Sure, there are ivy grads who are delusional about how easy their life is going to be and everyone loves to make fun of them. But the world is also full of bartenders who think they're destined to run their own successful restaurant and mediocre car salesmen who think they're business geniuses.
There's nothing wrong with the acquisition of knowledge or cultural polish for it's own sake, but there is something wrong with implicitly promising people that a particular set of credentials will net you a 6-figure salary when the number of those jobs are fixed by the nature of economic command hierarchies and will only ever accommodate a tiny minority, or with promising that education will boost the economy when you're teaching skills with limited market value. Most people go to college because they want to get a high-paying job, and unless they're going into STEM they are probably being sold a lie.
I think the main point being made is that having children (or refusing to) is going to have enormous externalities one way or another, so it's not really accurate to say that externalities aren't involved.
I'm not totally dismissive of arguments that a lower global human population could, in the abstract, have benefits, but if you're going to reduce global human population size then it needs to be done in a very slow and controlled manner (all the current social programs and import/export patterns of the OECD are predicated on certain assumptions about the ratio of young working-age consumers versus mature professionals vs. elderly retirees and will be seriously disrupted/bankrupted once those assumptions cease to hold. The fertility declines we're seeing in the developed world (and even in countries like Iran and Indonesia) don't really look 'slow and controlled' enough to keep their social programs afloat. Conversely, the parts of the globe where the most explosive fertility is taking place is where you genuinely are at risk of hitting malthusian limits on the carrying capacity of the landscape. It's all topsy turvy.)
I would greatly recommend looking at some of Peter Zeihan's analysis on this topic if you had time, although some of his forecasts are quite bleak (a lot of these problems should have been addressed 30-40 years ago.)
I thought with all the studies about parental impacts, as long as you don't abuse your child you don't have a lot of impact? So well-raised seems like a pretty low hurdle to clear.
Also, there's the negative externality of growing old without adding enough earners to the economy to pay for your social security/medicaid, but that's a really annoying feature of the system.
I don't fully understand the social security/medicare argument, because you're not adding earners but you're also not adding people who will take from those funds -- isn't it kind of a wash? I get there's a time-based element, but still. Birth rates were very low in the 70s and as a result there are less Americans in their 40s than any other adult age group (other than those 70 and older who are starting to die). Presumably when people now in their 40s reach retirement age, there will be less of them pulling from the SS/Medicare trust fund and it can fatten back up a bit, and no one seems to consider that a problem.
I was EXTREMELY triggered by the original post, lost a lot of sleep over it and had other mental health symptoms that are too personal to share publicly.
I understand that it was not your intent to shame childfree people with the original post but I think that a lot of people would benefit from a more explicit statement of that. There are some extremely large and powerful organizations, such as the Catholic Church, who literally spread the message that non-celibate childfrees deserve literal torture, literally forever. Climate Change activists do sometimes engage in counter-productive scrupulosity bait, but I have never seen them advocate LITERAL TORTURE, LITERALLY FOREVER. (Unless you count Pope Francis as a Climate Change activist, which he maybe kind of is? But a somewhat atypical one.)
I like children very much and if humans laid eggs I'd probably have a double-digit number of children. But after watching my mum have nine pregnancies, four miscarriages, one emergency ceasarean, one post-partum haemorrhage and multiple episodes of life-threateningly severe post-partum depression, I am not willing to go through that. Plus I honestly think it would be cruel to perpetuate my depression and anxiety genes. (I am not normally in favor of eugenics: I think it's fine to perpetuate genes for being intellectually disabled or blind or needing a wheelchair or even having a reduced lifespan, but depression is @#!$ing bad. My life was genuinely not worth living for a very long time, when it became worth living it needed a lot of very very lucky circumstances and even being rich does not mean future kids would get those very very lucky circumstances.)
I don't want to persuade anyone who wants kids not to have them. However, if you are on the fence because of climate change then maybe you should be on the fence for a different reason: your potentially-heritable anxiety and low mood. However, your own best judgement of whether your life is worth living is far more valuable than some stranger's blog comment.
This is going to sound really bad--and I really don't intend to be mean--but have you considered staying away from ACX and talking to a psychiatrist? People here say things a *lot* more triggering than what Scott said in the last post, so if you don't have an unusually high tolerance for that (unusual even for the average healthy person), ACX will be terrible for your mental health.
I genuinely appreciate your concern. I am currently seeing a psychiatrist and and looking for a therapist (or I'm looking for one in theory, but in practice I keep procrastinating because of my many personal failings. This comment is a valuable reminder to actually actually look.)
I am way more triggered by this than more objectively-upsetting things because just any "have some babies" type of post reads to my brain as "GET PREGNANT AND MISCARRY A BABY BECAUSE GOD LOVES BABY CORPSES FOR MYSTERIOUS SPIRITUAL REASONS! DO NOT QUESTION WHY HE LOVES TO SEE YOU SUFFER!" which... is not a remotely rational response to people's actual words.
I should probably block ACX for a while though.
Genuine thanks for your concern, I am not offended. HAve a great day. :)
I think your basic point is probably correct. Worrying about climate change is not a good reason not to have children. Not wanting to have children, for a variety of other reasons, is.
Have you tried any Buddhist psychology techniques for isolating the trigger response you're talking about and cutting it out? In my experience very effective. Here's a random page I found with a nice introduction and some helpful links:
So the idea is that there's some trigger response in your brain connecting what Scott was saying to the response you describe; and that by developing mindfulness you can isolate and observe the connection from one to the other -- and once observed, you can excise it -- since once you see it objectively, it has less and less power over you. Repeating this re-trains your brain out of this habit it has developed.
Don't be put off by the word Buddhist -- it's actually very sensible.
Would be interested in what Scott thinks about these techniques, if he has tried them, and so on.
My immediate response was to jump all over you, but however, let's try and be kinder.
If you really were shaking and crying and not able to sleep etc. over a *blog post*, then consider coming off social media. You probably have family and personal reasons that explain why you are so sensitive and have bad experiences about the state of being "childfree" which explains why you are reacting so excessively.
I'm "childfree" myself, though I'd never use that term, and I don't feel attacked by anyone or anything which states that people should have children. My reasons are somewhat similar to yours - my genetics are not something to be perpetuated, and the depression is terrible.
But triggered? No. So I do recommend you detox for a bit until you get your head together.
> If you really were shaking and crying and not able to sleep etc. over a blog post, then consider coming off social media.
I'd say, consider coming off social media, period, no qualifiers. Social media is just a bag of negative externalities wrapped in a flimsy chocolate shell.
(This isn't a reply to you, but to others who were annoyed about you saying you were triggered.)
PNWbirdfan seems to be just saying how they read that post, and how they felt about it. I can't find any statement in there complaining at Scott Alexander for being wrong, have malicious intent, or being reckless or whatever.
This post is a perfect example of feeding into a pet peeve of mine, which is the over-ethicization of just about anything and everything. Thank you for making the "liberal contract" explicit about not questioning one another's life choices, i.e maintaining a solid notion that there is a wide range of life options here and there, that what to do with one's life is very much an open-ended field, so we should think twice (or 2000+ times) before judging or questioning where someone chooses to put their energy, unless it's obviously antisocial or destructive.
The problem of course is that the obvious caveat ("unless the externalities are too big") is ripe for abuse. Anyone with an ideology to sell is going to push the point that everyone else's externalities are really huge. Put this together with an economy of virtue status-signalling, and you get full blown "culture wars" for the price of an onion peel.
This is especially funny when it comes to questions of procreation, because given a constant number of sentient beings, various approaches to metaethics seem to find relatively sane things to say... but bring in the fact that beings can be brought into the world, and those neat constructs either begin to give nonsense conclusions, or need to be hand-tweaked to match our intuitions.
Honestly at this point, I consider the entire field cursed and wasted, which is why I usually don't bother trying to argue ethics on the internet. But I respect this blog and its readership enough that I will still write a short meta-point on it :)
"There's a pretty decent chance that global dimming killed like a million people."
This feels very much like hacking away at the leaves of evil while leaving the roots alone. It's not like the Ethiopian famine corresponded to a decreased output of surplus medical and food relief supplies due to global dimming. The global resources to feed all those people were abundant, and made available for the crisis.
My (incomplete/non-expert) understanding is that the governance was poor from end to end. If minor fluctuations in global climate might cause a million people to starve to death, we might take at least one point that climate skeptics love to point out seriously: there is always going to be climate variation. We shouldn't go full-alert because a tiny variation "killed like a million people" when we know that there are much more important underlying causal factors that put those million people's lives at risk of a subtle shift like global dimming. Because if it hadn't been global dimming it would have been something else, and sooner rather than later.
It's exactly this kind of minor fluctuation that tyrants have always pointed to as the 'real reason' their economic utopian scheme turned into a dystopia instead. Don't let the tyrants off the hook. We can talk about climate change without accidentally justifying mismanagement at the same time.
I see what you're saying in a moral sense. And obviously we want fewer tyrants. But I feel like holding the level of misgovernance constant, global dimming did in fact cause a famine that might not have happened without it. Those people are still dead. And even though we should blame the tyrants, we're not going to be able to get rid of all tyrants any time soon and realistically if we don't solve global warming then a lot of people in tyrannies could die who would otherwise scrape through.
Sure, but holding the value of climate variation constant, tyranny caused 100% of the deaths.
Holding either one constant isn’t really a fair comparison. There has always been tyranny, and there always has been climate variation large enough to cause famine in marginal populations (which was every population until historically quite recently).
Both can theoretically be changed or mitigated. Which one is easier (less tyranny, or less climate variation) is a totally fair question. Certainly, it would seem to be easier for the tyrants to be less tyrannical than to alter global climate.
According to Wikipedia, "The famine of 1983–1985 is most often ascribed to drought and climatic phenomena. However, Human Rights Watch has alleged that widespread drought occurred only some months after the famine was under way. According to the organization, and Oxfam UK, the famines that struck Ethiopia between 1961 and 1985, and in particular the one of 1983–1985, were in large part created by government policies, specifically a set of so-called counter-insurgency strategies, and for "social transformation" in non-insurgent areas." Reading a little more into the history, it looks like this region had a couple decades of drought that was deliberately caused by policies aimed against the people in certain specific regions. Sometimes you'd see droughts in the affected provinces despite record-breaking crop yields in the adjacent provinces.
Maybe the model that this is 99% caused by one thing, and 1% caused by another thing is wrong. Tyrants have a long history of using famine as a tool. If they're causing the famine in the first place, it's kind of irrelevant to invoke ANY other factor. The famine wasn't an edge-case that got pushed over by annual rainfall/sunshine. It got a hard shove. And if you get extra rainfall this year the tyrant just shoves a little harder and you still go over the edge.
In that scenario, fixing the climate issue means exactly as many people will die as if you'd ignored the problem. This explains why so many people die despite an abundance of foreign aid arriving in emergency shipments. The global community sees suffering and wants to alleviate it. The local tyrant sees suffering and confirms his policies are working. He's not funneling the food elsewhere because he's inefficient. He's funneling the food elsewhere because his policies are having their intended effect, and he doesn't want to ruin that.
“But what turned rural hardship into disaster – even before drought struck – were the counter-insurgency measures Mengistu’s army employed in dealing with rebel activity, notably in Tigray and northern Wollo... Using scorched-earth tactics, the army destroyed grain stores and houses, burned crops and pastures, killed livestock and displaced about 80,000 farmers.”
Excerpt From: Martin Meredith. “The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence”
“I went to his office and truly, he was furious. Anyone who knows Mengistu can tell when he is angry. Before he says anything his cheek bones tremble furiously as he holds in his rage. I nervously braced myself for his attack...
He said that imperialist elements would do everything possible to thwart our efforts, to embarrass us, to destroy the gains of the revolution. One way of trying to embarrass us, he said, was by exploiting the drought. The menace in his voice was unmistakable. He told me that I had to be careful not to fall into their trap. My statement to the UN was inaccurate, exaggerated, he said; it showed Ethiopia in a bad light because it told only of disaster and nothing of governmental achievements or efforts to overcome the crisis. I had not emphasised that it was a natural disaster – a drought, not a famine – and that if it were not for this natural setback the Ethiopian people would have made great strides in overcoming food shortages...”
I think you are leaning into global dimming a lot harder than is reasonable here. We know that communist governments have been directly responsible for some of the worst famines possibly ever, in Ukraine and China, as well as general huge decreases in productivity that is subsequently blamed on the weather. We also know that the majority of modern famines have been due directly to either inept or intentional governments (see Irish Potato Famine) with terribly policies. We further have seen that modern world countries are pretty quick to throw relief supplies at nations with famines or other natural disasters, but that the governments of stricken countries often act to use that aid not to help but control or punish their populations. We have seen all these bad behaviors before, particularly in communist style third world countries, particularly in Africa.
But there is a pretty decent chance that global dimming killed like a million people?
That is a bit like saying a guy who got shot in a gang war while he had a cold was killed by the cold. He was killed by the people who shot him. Had it not been for the lead slug going through his chest he'd have been fine. Even if you argue that the cold slowed him down such that he might not have gotten hit or in a less damaging place, or would have had more energy to recover without the damned cold virus, it wasn't the cold that killed him. It was the bullet, and the fault lies with the person who put it in his chest.
I think in most situations like this the correct approach is that society should try to solve all its problems at once. Sure, prioritize what you work on, highest marginal cost-effectiveness and all that, but the world has lots of room to tackle every major avenue for fixing its problems, even if you personally don't.
I agree with this as a general principle. My claim is that climate change should not be considered a causative factor in this famine. We can try to solve tyranny-induced famine, cancer, and global climate concerns all at the same time without having to make every problem cross-link to every other problem. Indeed, my fear is that people take climate change less seriously when it's treated as a significant-enough-to-worry-about causative factor of problems it's tangentially related to.
Re Luis Pedro's take, I knew a het couple that intentionally married using the forms for same sex couples, at a time when this meant their marriage might be legally invalidated along with all the gay marriages taking place at the same time.
I'm possibly violating charity here, but I thought at the time and still think the few people (mostly fading celebrities) I heard of declaiming this kind of 'sacrifice' were [redacted because Scott doesn't like us calling people idiots].
Oh, how stunning, brave and bold of you! Of course, you are continuing to co-habit, continuing to have sex, continuing (perhaps) to have kids, continuing to take advantage of all the law and rights accorded to non-marital partners that have been built up. And you could always register as a civil partnership, or make legal arrangements around property, money, kids, etc.
It'd be like me - someone who dislikes shellfish - bravely announcing I was no longer going to eat prawns, crabs, shrimps, mussels, oysters, lobsters or winkles (which I don't eat anyway) in solidarity with people who suffer from allergies to shellfish. Yeah, a sacrifice which is no sacrifice is really going to change things!
Indeed no, they were doing it for their own vainglory. I'm not impressed by "give up something I never wanted before" and I'm not out to hurt your feelings but it was a silly protest and really just signalled "I am such good ally!" but did nothing to help anyone.
Maybe, but I don't see it and I am the other side of the aisle(from you) who they might have been trying to sway. Maybe did it for their gay brother or gay best friend. It is ok to be charitable about these things. You know, the whole, "live and let live," thing covered at length above....
Anybody who can be swayed by "I am not going to eat chocolate! (but I will continue to eat all other kinds of candy and I never liked chocolate that much anyway)" type arguments is - well, it's not worth having an argument over it.
Here, let's have something funny to cheer us all up. This is what makes me laugh:
That was in fact very funny. I did not understand the "swayed by ..." bit. And I am not sure I made my point:
When I heard (for the first time, in this thread) that multiple high profile people had postponed marriage, awaiting gay marriage legalization, my initial reaction was "eye-roll" and "idiots." A few milliseconds later I decided this was uncharitable and came up with a plausible explanation to aid in my resumption of the "liberal contract(live and let live)."
You are of course welcome to remain irked by it. However, my suspicion is that you might live longer if you have a system to "write these things off"; we'd miss your posts...
It was a standard thing when gay marriage was an issue to point out that civil partnership was more expensive than marriage, more trouble to set up, and still didn't give all the same rights.
"I’m always surprised how willing people are to tear up the liberal contract of “I don’t question your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine”, especially when they’re not guaranteed to be on the winning side, and would completely freak out if the other side tried to create stigma against them."
I think on both sides there's widespread agreement that this is *not* non-externality-having, the disagreement is what form that externality takes
I would compare this to doing paid labor. Not everyone can or should be doing paid labor -- there are people who aren't equipped for it, or who do other stuff that's more valuable, or whose jobs make the world worse. And even if what you are doing is not "more valuable", you don't really owe anyone an explanation for why you're not working -- it's not really anyone's business unless that person is your spouse or something like that. There are some people who love their jobs and who take great meaning and pleasure from it, and would choose to work with no social or financial pressure to do so -- but that's not enough to keep the lights on, and similarly I don't think there's any reason to think that a norm of "the default should be not having kids, and the decision of to have kids needs to be deeply justified" leads to enough kids, at this time and place, to avoid some pretty big, bad effects. (Or even that it's the best decision for the people making it -- regretting not having kids when it's too late is very much a thing, and probably much more so than the other way around, especially in this kind of audience.) It's possible to go too far and make it too difficult for people to avoid having to do paid labor, but it's also possible to go too far in the other direction. We can have perspectives on this topic, and it's not equivalent to knocking on anyone's door and harassing them about why they're not working or haven't procreated.
(Also, people question each other's much more trivial life choices ALL THE TIME!)
Agreed on Principle of Charity, and the idea that there are some real people scared of bringing children into the world, but I take issue with these "is humanity doomed" polls. You ask people questions like "is humanity doomed by global warming" a large number of people say yes. But then you ask people "what is the biggest problem facing America today" and only a few percent say anything environmental:
Likewise, and Matthew Yglesias harps on this a lot, people a willing to declare global warming a very important problem but then you ask if they're willing to pay an extra $0.25/gallon in gasoline taxes to solve it and the vast majority of people say no. It's internally illogical and rather maddening, since this really is the biggest problem facing the world except maybe AI risk. I'm inclined to say that peoples' answers to an open ended poll rather than a leading question is a better read into their heart of hearts, and what fears and considerations actually affect their behaviour.
If to a first approximation the quality of life in a country is at least 10% worse for each 5 point drop in average IQ, then the positive or negative externality of having a child can be calculated as 2*(midparent_iq-100)*regression_to_the_mean_coeff*life_expectancy QALYs.
Career criminals with an IQ of 75 should probably not be encouraged to have as many children as they want. Even if one doesn't believe in the heritability of IQ, they're more likely to mistreat the children. So I think we definitely need to qualify the statement that "people should have however many kids they want.". Perhaps people who have been multiply convicted of violent crimes should be sterilized to prevent them from beating up their future children.
If you can't believe someone could seriously want a multiply convicted violent felon not to have access to kids then I'm a touch confused by your values. We're willing to lock them behind bars for the rest of their lives; I can't see an involuntary vasectomy being vastly more egregious than that.
This seems like the nirvana fallacy. Just because doing X won't solve the whole problem, we ignore a low hanging opportunity to solve part of the problem. The relevant question is how much more likely are repeat violent felons to beat their children, compared to an average American (where the base rate is lower than that worldwide average)? My guess is many times more likely.
None of which I disagree with, nor am I in favor of forced sterilization as punishment for violent crimes. But it's not beyond the pale to advocate for such a punishment.
Link doesn't actually say that, just that "muh protocols" weren't followed:
"The recent revelation that 148 female prisoners in two California institutions were sterilized between 2006 and 2010 is another example of the state's long history of reproductive injustice and the ongoing legacy of eugenics. The abuse took place in violation of state and federal laws, and with startling disregard for patient autonomy and established protocols of informed consent."
> Perhaps people who have been multiply convicted of violent crimes should be sterilized to prevent them from beating up their future children
Wouldn't it be easier to simply keep them in prison permanently so that they (a) can't commit crimes and (b) can't have children to beat?
Forcible sterilization is something that even an armchair eugenicist like me is pretty uncomfortable with, but longer prison sentences for career criminals is A-OK.
Life in prison is a much more expensive, and much more cruel, way of accomplishing the same result. Maybe they are capable of working a regular job on the outside, and living a semi-normal life, with some supervision by a parole officer or social worker or something.
Thank you for your tireless efforts to be fair here, when you deal with incredibly contentious issues. I think the only real way to effectively influence others for good is to set a really strong example of the principles you hope others will adopt. I can clearly see your effect on me, and I strive to emulate your example.
I just wanted to point out that you mention 'top colleges' twice here. I don't know if you've encountered the line of thinking that says 'the concept of top colleges is a serious problem for american polarization - it would be better if wanted to go the best school where they grew up, rather than the best school in the country.' Ill share a bit of that here, as i think it's relevant.
I believe the existence of top colleges is a mechanism for rewarding people with a combination of 'high intelligence, low value placed on loyalty to your hometown'. It took me a while to 'pick up on' the idea that your career options are limited if you go to 'midwest liberal arts college that nobody outside of your hometown really knows about', so after undergrad I left my hometown for over a decade, decade to pursue academic (top 20 research university) and then career opportunities, and then came back so i could help care for my aging parents.
I've started to better understand why so may people voted for trump. Perhaps economic and cultural power lean left in part because there are natural divides in terms of people's natural 'moral foundations', and "move to away from your hometown in exchange for more money and better career opportunities" has a pretty clear valence attached to it.
If some people are much more concerned with 'fairness' and 'harm reduction', while others care more about 'group loyalty' and 'freedom', for example, then we should expect people who care less about loyalty to be more willing to move away from their family in exchange for bigger financial rewards. Maybe in the short term this is all fine, but over the long term i would expect it to lead to:
* economic and cultural power concentrating among people who have the lowest scores of loyalty + tradition (i.e. being most willing to move for economic opportunity)
* a growing sense among people who place a high value on loyalty and tradition that they are "under attack" from distance elites who use their combination of economic and cultural influence to attack traditions they see as stifling and irrelevant
My parents met at stanford, where people told them to their face they were awful for having multiple children. They relocated to Ohio, where my Dad's family has been located for ~200 years. They raised 9 of us, and 8 out of those 9 left home after college. The one sibling who stayed behind is more political conservative than the rest of us, and i don't think this is a coincidence.
I don't think global warming could end human civilization - But a violent civil war among americans, driven by the culture war? That's what i worry about more than anything else. Thanks for the C.S. Lewis quote, though. That's the mindset i should be in :)
I think you've got a serious point about people who aren't connected to somewhere (I saw a link about being from somewhere vs. being from anywhere), but ending human civilization?
Depends on what you mean by 'civilization' - maybe a better phasing could be 'permanently rolling back the clock of technological progress to before the industrial revolution'. I think some humans will be around regardless of almost anything - even full scale nuclear war - but it's possible we could fall from current technological heights and never recover.
A sufficiently violent civil war could destroy the global trade networks which i think are probably necessary for the global population to be at this size. Large scale population loss might be irreversible.
I don't see how this type of civil war would happen, but if it did, it would not last long, because the right wingers would obviously win, quickly. They have 90% of the guns, they're much more experienced with and comfortable with violence, they have substantially more men, and for the most part they have the police and military on their side. The left would have to surrender within a week. Heck, they could just barricade all the cities and starve them out quite quickly. I think it is pretty clear how any such war would go, which is why it won't happen.
Speaking as a "right-winger"(*) with a bunch of guns and skilled in their use, I think you're overstating the importance of that. The guns themselves aren't that hard to come by, and already more broadly distributed than you might expect. And marksmanship is not even close to being the most important martial skill. Unit cohesion, discipline, leadership, etc, matter far more. And I see lot of that on the left.
Take twenty organized, disciplined club-wielding Antifa activists, give them $200 shotguns and weekend of firearms training, and I'd bet on them over twenty random MAGA-hatted "bubbas" who have been taking their $2000 AR-15s to the range every month for the past twenty years.
There's also the actual military, which gets strong marks for organization, discipline, etc, *and* marksmanship, and military veterans whose skills are recent enough to matter. But while military service has traditionally been a Red Tribe thing, it also includes a whole lot of Black and Brown tribe members who, while socially conservative, probably aren't going to line up with the right-wing militias. Really, not even all the white ones will. And the officer corps is mostly going to line up against whoever started the civil war in the first place.
It is true that the upper-middle-class liberal intellectual elite isn't going to win any civil wars. Nor is "we're the smart ones, we'll tell the rest of you lot what to do and how to die" going to be a winning strategy for them. So while there's a fair chance that the left would win (well, lose less) a Second American Civil War, that probably wouldn't be the sort of victory most "left wing" elites are looking for.
* Libertarian, but I think just about everyone who uses the term "right-winger" lumps us in with them
I'm a typical lefty, Bernie-supporting ultra-nerd type who is married to a special forces combat soldier, so I think I have ample exposure to both "tribes" and I maintain that if the culture war ever turned into an actual shooting civil war, the left would get destroyed, very quickly. Though I also don't think it will ever happen because we are too mixed geographically and within households, etc (and because I think the left knows deep down they would lose).
I don't think guns are as distributed as you think. Those who lean conservative are more than twice as likely to own a gun, and they often don't just have one gun but LOTS of guns. Still, I take the point that the military would ultimately decide it, and the military will fight for whoever signs their checks tells them to (which would be whoever was the one trying to secede or who started the violence).
Personal leanings wise, your point about non-white soldiers is a good one. I don't think they'd want to fight for the right. Though I also don't think they'd want to fight for the other side -- they'd probably wish to sit it out. Most of the military supported Trump. My husband loathes Trump and the GOP, but he equally loathes what he views as a bunch of emotionally deranged, victimization-obsessed, crybaby wimps on the "other side". But you're right, they'd fight against whoever their commanders told them to (and I think they'd be deeply conflicted).
As for "cohesion, leadership, and discipline" on the left, are you serious?!?!? We abhor authority, hate hierarchies, and are an ungovernable herd of cats always getting into circular firing squads and squabbling with each other. And a tiny handful of Portland antifa types aside, most on the left are completely terrified of violence and have zero experience with it. We have a lot of great qualities, including being pacifist, but being brave about physical violence isn't one of them. A huge portion of the blue tribe has major disagreements with today's party line on identity issues, and they're so scared of being thought of badly that they won't speak up. You think people that afraid of reputational damage are going to risk actual physical damage based on principle? They would surrender quickly.
The only hope they would have would be to do zero-resistance in return for the violence to look like the non-aggressor victims, and go out peacefully and put flowers in the barrels of guns or whatever, to get PR that they're the good guys and get international assistance. *That's* a tactic that they would be great at.
I was just talking with someone who is seriously into theory of revolution, and apparently the decisive factor isn't how well-armed a civilian faction is, it's which side the military is on.
"and there will be several million people dead from disasters that we suspect (but will never be sure) that global warming made more likely or worsened."
And if we reduce global warming there will be several million people dead that we suspect (but will never be sure) would have lived if we hadn't.
To take the clearest case, greenhouse gas warming reduces extreme cold as well as extreme heat, as the IPCC mentions in the latest report. It doesn't, at least in the summary version, mention that it reduces extreme cold by more than extreme heat, for the same reason that (as it does mention) it warms the polar regions more than the equatorial regions, and it doesn't mention that extreme cold at present kills many more people than extreme heat. So two million people die from heat who would have lived and four million (both numbers invented) live who would have died from cold.
Very nearly any major change in a world with eight billion people in it means that, over a century, millions will die sooner than they otherwise would have and millions will die later than they otherwise would have. Neither you nor I knows whether the net effect of actions to slow climate change will be more or fewer people dying.
We do know that the largest action the U.S. has yet taken on the issue, the biofuels program, had no effect on climate since it doesn't reduce CO2 output and did reduce the supply and raise the price of maize, thus doing our bit to promote world hunger. I have seen no estimates of the result in excess mortality.
I was going to say there's no way extreme cold kills enough people to balance out even a tiny chance of one Ethiopia-level famine, but the Internet is trying to convince me that it kills 4.6 million people a year. I'm skeptical of this but don't want to doubt too hard until I look into it further.
I do think that there are a couple of important imbalances here:
- Very cold countries are usually highly developed and can take care of themselves. They don't need extra help. Very hot countries are usually already a wreck and don't need more problems.
- In general people are adapted for the conditions they're in. The places that are too cold for anyone to survive don't have populations. The places that are currently just barely survivable, but won't be with a few degrees of warming, do have populations. It's all nice and well to say that this is Pareto-positive and all the hot people can move to the cold places and have carrying capacity left over, but this isn't how things work in the real world. I think a thought experiment would be something like - if you reroll the growing conditions for everywhere in the world, making sure that on average the growing conditions are 5% better than before the reroll (eg China becomes completely barren and some random part of Kazakhstan nobody cares about becomes super-fertile), then even though things are better than average this is probably the worst disaster in history with a billion plus death toll. I think of global warming as doing something like this to a much smaller degree.
Another asymmetry I secretly worry about even though it's non-woke - hot countries basically suck, cold countries are much richer and happier. I'm not sure why this is but I'm concerned it has something to do with parasite load or some sort of neuropsychological response to heat. I think there's a small but real chance that global warming causes rich northern countries to end up with the social systems more typical of poor tropical ones. Hope I'm wrong.
Have you heard the hypotheses that colder countries were forced to create more cultural prosocial norms because survival necessitated things like group cooperation and long-term investment?
The "grasshoper and the ant" story makes no sense if winter never comes.
Even in cold, rich countries, crime of all types reliably spikes in the warm months of summer and goes down when it gets colder. Apparently warm weather just allows for more misbehavior.
Where do you live? There's a difference between warm weather that it's a pleasure to go out in, and hot possibly humid weather which makes life a misery.
What temperatures and humidity levels mark the boundary varies a lot for individuals.
Ah, good point. :-) I'm currently in the Pacific Northwest of America, and I was just going off the statement about "cold, rich countries" and assuming that it meant places like here. Mea culpa. Summers here are wonderful, with up to 16 hours of non-humid daylight, but in winter it's cold and wet and dark. But I've lived elsewhere, including New England, and summer days there can definitely be a misery. Summer evenings, though, can be quite nice.
To toss another idea out there, maybe there's something going on with heat regulation. The human brain generates a lot of heat, and it seems to me that it takes a lot more effort to get rid of that heat when it's hot and humid. Radiator fin(ger)s don't work so well when the ambient temperature approaches the interior temperature.
This is interesting. I have just recently read "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat. He claims that warfare in primitive human societies (hunter-gatherers, pastorialists, agricultural societies, proto-states, but also animal fighting) took and takes very different forms depending on the climate. Essentially, the richer the resources (mostly warm and humid), the more direct and intense competition becomes. I can't do full credit to the book, but he draws a big picture, claiming that some of these difference have shaped large parts of human history.
He attributes the difference to increased territoriality. If resources are scarce, territories become larger, and it is harder to protect them. Plus, higher resources = higher population density = more direct encounters. But the effect that you mention (crimes still spike in warm months) gives a new perspective.
"I'm not sure why this is but I'm concerned it has something to do with parasite load or some sort of neuropsychological response to heat."
My standard joke is that it's because James Watt and Adam Smith were Scottish, therefore countries are rich in proportion to their similarity with Scotland.
More seriously, the recipe for becoming really rich happens to have been invented in Northern Europe a few centuries back, and one of the things rich people liked to do a few centuries back was to buy expensive ships and guns and go conquering places. The more a region's environment matched that of Northern Europe, the more likely the people with the recipe for being rich were to say "we're moving in here and running things our way", as opposed to "ugh, we're just going to rotate a few people through here and take all your stuff".
We're less than a century past the part where we (mostly) stopped doing that, and the effects persist. Though, see Hans Rosling, it's been getting a lot better everywhere outside sub-Saharan Africa, and somewhat better even there.
I second this. I think the pattern of "warm weather = less developed" was plausible 50-100, but the development since then? Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are tropical countries. Australia is hot. California is hot and yet an economic hotspot within the US. Within Europe, southern countries like Spain and Italy have greatly diminished the gap to France or UK. China is catching up very quickly.
It seems that countries with warm weather were worse off, for whatever reason (similarity to Europe, lower productivity, higher violence levels, or some other factor). But they seem to by catching up. Perhaps because of air conditioning, or perhaps because the original causes become less important.
Japan is not tropical. It is a vertical country with diverse climate, but very little tropics. It is on the east coast of Asia and its climate is similar to the east coast of the USA. The weather in Tokyo is the same as the weather in DC. That's why the cherry trees in DC are from Tokyo. The principal cities range from Sapporo, Hokkaido with climate like Montreal to Naha, Okinawa with subtropical climate like Miami.
There was an old Lancet article that estimated global deaths from cold to be nearly twenty times as high as from heat. If you look at US deaths by month you can see the same pattern — higher in the cold months.
The latest IPCC report has a series of maps showing projected temperature change with varying increases in global temperature. It's notable that India (and I think most of Pakistan) shows as lower than average increase. There is a lot of random variation, but the basic pattern is hotter near the poles, less hot near the equator.
The increase in yield due to CO2 fertilization applies everywhere, although it is less in places that grow maize or sugar cane. And it is the most certain part of the story, since it only depends on CO2 concentration, which is the first step in an uncertain causal chain to negative results further along.
In the real world, over a time of a century or so, population does move. China is an enormous country, so can adjust by gradual internal population movement (In the U.S. at present that process is towards warmer states, not away). Looking at the IPCC maps, at 2°C warming most of India and China is projected to warm at between 1° and 1.5°. And that's relative to 1850-1900 — global warming is already just over one degree.
How are these deaths from cold calculated? If it's from excess deaths in cold months vs. warm months in cold countries, I assume that's dominated by deaths from flu and other seasonal infectious diseases. I guess that if the climate were warmer, the prevalence of these would be lower, but not nearly as much as if the prevalence at any given temperature remained the same as today. Indeed, in tropical countries, the flu is much less common than in the temperate winter, but much more common than in the temperate summer.
(Armchair epidemiology incoming:) The reproduction number of the flu depends both on the weather, and on the population's immunity from previous infections. It's somewhat above 1 in the winter, and somewhat below 1 in the summer, for a long-term average of 1. Let's say it's (time since the average person last got a flu in decades)*(weather factor), where the weather factor is 1 in the summer and 2 in the winter, for a yearly average of 1.5. Then we get an equilibrium where the average person has a flu every 13.33 years, and the average person has had the last flu 6.67 years ago. In the winter, r=1.33, in the summer, r=0.67, so the flu virtually disappears. But if, instead, it were summer year-round, we'd get an equilibrium where the average person gets a flu every 20 years, and the average person has had a flu for the last time 10 years ago. So we'd get a 33% reduction, much less than the difference between the current summer prevalence and the year-round average.
> China is an enormous country, so can adjust by gradual internal population movement (In the U.S. at present that process is towards warmer states, not away).
The hot, swampy south of China has been the population center ever since it was originally colonized.
I assume this is mostly due to the substantially higher agricultural productivity.
I believe strongly that even if the world and a large number of people would be much better off (including not dead) if people from near the equator were permitted to move to the high latitudes, this will not be allowed to happen.
My claim is that reduced deaths from cold probably outweigh increased deaths from heat, not that they outweigh all negative consequences of climate change. To calculate the net one would need all negative results of reducing climate change, not just that one. They come in two categories.
The first is eliminating the benefits of climate change. That includes not only fewer deaths from cold but also much larger agricultural yields from CO2 fertilization, lower heating costs in cold countries and seasons, a sizable expansion northward in habitable land, probably a reduction in the (already very low) probability of the end of the current interglacial, and doubtless other things I am missing.
The second category is the cost of things done to slow climate change. As I have mentioned, that includes converting about ten percent of the world crop of maize to alcohol. It includes high energy costs and power shortages in Europe. If we somehow got India and China to stop using coal for power it would almost certainly slow the process by which a couple of billion people are gradually emerging from poverty. It doubtless includes other costs I don't know about.
I'd like to see some type of "green energy bond" from rich nations that allows India/China and so on to borrow for energy infrastructure with bonds that are weighted to internalize the advantages of basically anything not coal. They would be at a lower cost than typical bonds and pay back at a lower rate and longer time, plus a bonus deduction for any observed severe costs of warming experienced by the borrowing country
I've heard it theorized that this type of emissions reduction is twice as efficient as struggling to increase wind/solar and shut down coal plants already built in the first world
Regarding cold deaths, even in a country like India cold related deaths outnumber heat ones by 7-1. It appears at this stage warming saves 100,000 lives a year in terms of temperature related deaths, according to a Lancet study. I hesitate to link the NY Post but I do trust the author Bjorn Lomborg, who strongly tends to follow the science on warming while arguing against the non-science on policy and narrative:
After writing the above post I came across an interesting literature, starting with a 2003 article by Ruddiman, suggesting that anthropogenic warming, beginning seven or eight thousand years ago, has already postponed the next glaciation. I have a blog post on it:
I think the explanation is that fossil fuel is used in producing and transporting the maize, but I haven't looked into the details. I know that Al Gore conceded that it turned out not to reduce CO2, and I have seen the same claim attributed to others.
Natural gas is the major input for making nitrogen fertilizers, that maize needs a lot of. Farm machinery runs on diesel. Distillation is energy intensive and most distillers use natural gas to power their stills.
(adding this much later, because I came across more information)
The argument seems to be that the energy used in producing it is less than the energy it provides, but clearing land to grow maize puts additional CO2 into the air. Of course, we may already be growing it, but then converting some of our maize into alcohol pushes up the world price, causing other people to clear land to grow more maize. That's from one source, so I don't know how reliable it is:
They measure deaths from cold using seasonal variation, and almost all of them are due to the flu and other respiratory viruses. They don't however, measure deaths from heat using seasonal variation, because hot places don't have much seasonal variation, and so they don't attribute malarial deaths to it, when they should.
If you're going to restrict yourself to the effect of direct heat and cold on the body, heat kills an enormous number more people than cold. If you're going to open yourself to every indirect effect of heat and cold on disease, then it is only fair to include the entire parasite load of the tropics in this, which these studies never do.
"Climate Change Saves More Lives Than You’d Think: Eight times as many people die from cold as heat, and the fix for both is access to cheap fuel." By Bjorn Lomborg | Sept. 16, 2021
The liberal principle is good for things that involve consenting adults, but here we're talking about bringing a new child into the world. Consider:
- If Alice has kids, she'll lock them in the basement and torture them.
- If Bob has kids, predictably, somebody else (not Bob) will lock them in the basement and torture them.
- If Charlie has kids, he (Charlie) will be locked up in the basement and tortured.
Clearly, neither Alice nor Bob should have kids. In Bob's case, the torture may not be his fault and he may even try to prevent it, but that doesn't license him to create kids in harm's way. Charlie's case is a bit more ambiguous, but since creating kids is easy and the pain further off, he may be irrationally shortsighted, especially if he thinks having kids (and then potentially being tortured) is normal. In none of these cases should society take a "chill pill" and leave their decision to have children unquestioned.
Given the prevalence of bad lives, this reasoning suggests moderate antinatalism, with a defeasable presumption against having children. This is further reinforced by how common it is to not give enough thought to creating and raising children. (Do you really want to take care of a crying baby? A toddler...? Etc for 18 years? Are you *sure*?)
Are you really arguing that every child born will be locked in a basement and tortured, and if they are not, the parents will be locked in a basement and tortured?
That is such a weird view of replenishing the species, I don't even know how to address it. Having and raising a new human being is the same, functionally, of being imprisoned and tortured.
Well, certainly if that is your feeling on the matter, then don't have kids. But don't tell other people, if they want to have children and can afford it and can take care of them, that they shouldn't do so.
Of course, many lives are far from that bad - the torture case illustrates that "people who want kids should have kids" isn't a great principle, and suggests that people having bad lives as a result of child creation is a defeater for that desire. And bad lives (that aren't extremely bad) are quite common.
People can have no kids and still have bad lives, so it's not really a great argument except if you're a staunch proponent of "humans are a plague, we should all exterminate ourselves and hand the planet back to nature, kill yourself quickly so you suffer as little hardship in this cruel life as possible".
Nature is, of course, even worse, but it can't comprehend its awfulness. Of course, humans can't either, truly, because if we could, we would've gone extinct already. The hellish irony of this is amusing, and horrifying.
At the risk of being that guy... religious Christians believe there is a pretty decent chance their children will be tortured forever, but they tend to have tons of kids.
No, because a tendency to commit suicide in such cases would be evolutionarily selected against. Indeed, willingness to commit suicide seems to have more to do with one's psychological characteristics than with quality of life - even people in extremely terrible circumstances usually try to stay alive.
Also, it's to the advantage of a religion to have a vividly imagined Heaven, but once you've got that, it's to the advantage of the religion to have strictures against suicide.
Not necessarily. There are plenty of factors that could hold someone back from committing suicide even if they would rather not exist than exist, for example:
- Fear of the pain/discomfort of actually dying
- Concern for the feelings of loved ones
- For the religious, fear of eternal Hell even worse than continuing to be alive
- Sense of duty to their community or the world
So in order to commit suicide, someone's life needs to be not just net negative, but net negative by enough to overcome these extra costs. When you consider that even people in truly horrible circumstances, such as Nazi death camps, chose to live more often than to die, it should be clear that these extra costs are sometimes really high. In fact, I would bet that suicidal people are more likely to have unusually low costs rather than unusually awful lives. I could definitely imagine a world in which most people don't want to commit suicide, but do fantasize about blinking out of existence consequence-free.
Right, it's not whether you believe your life is worth living. It's whether the costs you'd inflict by attempting to end your life are worthwhile. You might think it would be better for you, or the world, if you could just blink out of existence without leaving a mess behind, but that's not an option without supernatural intervention. Job asked to have never been born, for example. I recommend Greenstein’s new translation:
For me, religion served as a temporary deterrent — a decade's worth, which is actually pretty effective. Now, though I'm still religious, religion has lost its suicide-deterrent power. The mess I would leave for my family, on the other hand, plus the mess I might make of myself if I attempted, failed and lived, potentially with much worse problems than the ones I already feel shame for not handling better, *is* a deterrent. I don't think "the world" would miss me, but there are some lives — including now children's lives — I could seriously mess up by attempting self-execution, no matter how richly I may deserve it.
So, here I stay. Vexingly enough, I found out *after* having kids that I had been living with an unacknowledged congenital condition that may explain much the "failure to thrive" that left me wondering whether I'm Lebensunwertes Leben — and the condition's heritable! Sorry 'bout that, kids!
On the plus side, knowledge is power: the people who find out they have this condition early get a fairer shot at adapting to it and having a life within the envelope of "normal". Those diagnosed later, as I was, more often seem de-moralized — as in less able to cope, morally — with the physical symptoms.
Something about having to cope with something you're not allowed to acknowledge you're coping with because it officially Does Not Exist, ergo you must be Doing It To Yourself, You Stupid Malingering Lazy Freak, doesn't actually seem to help that much with cultivating fortitude — even though, according to the Tough Love school, those capitalized words ought to be able to solve pretty much any problem, including Long Covid!
"I think the flaw here is that it takes a lot of time to act to stop climate change."
That is one of the reasons that adapting to climate change — diking against sea level rise, changing crop varieties as climate changes — makes more sense than trying to stop it. Raising the dikes protecting a coastal city by a few feet if it turns out that the IPCC underestimated SLR takes months or years, not centuries. A second reason is that adapting faces much less of a public good problem than preventing, since one farmer can do it for himself, one city for itself, where as reducing climate change is a public good problem at the global level. A third reason is that adapting lets us get the benefits — more usable land in the extreme north, more crop yield from CO2 fertilization, fewer deaths from cold — while reducing the costs.
Is there an element to the climate change movement that touches on the stuff in https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/22/beware-systemic-change/ -- that the sort of people who are into it are often the same people (in the case of XR -- exactly the same people) who want to focus on implausibly ambitious systemic changes that will never happen; and that's why it is currently the shape it is and focused on the sort of implausible changes that it is?
"My personal preference is to decide how much time/energy/money I want to spend on charity (I’ve settled on 10% of money; time and energy are harder to budget), and then spend the rest of it however I want."
My guess is that the time and energy you spent on the hobby of running SSC, spend now on ACX, does orders of magnitude more good for the world by promoting dialog and clear thinking than 10% of your income devoted to charity.
"I agree that it’s true that time/energy spent raising children inevitably trades off against time/energy spent doing charity work."
Woah woah -- that's a can of worms.
Isn't caring for children ethically superior than spending time caring for people who aren't your children?
Don't ethnical systems usually preference your nearest? Your family, your neighbors, your children, and so on?
If your ethnics puts no penalty on abortions; don't you end up having to abort healthy fetuses in preference for unhealthy fetuses? Because caring for disabled children seems more like charity than caring for healthy children? I guess I'm saying that reasoning in this sort of way is insane.
> Don't ethnical systems usually preference your nearest? Your family, your neighbors, your children, and so on?
Note that one of points of effective altruism is that helping remote people (say, funding boring anti-malaria nets in far away places) may be much, much more effective than helping people in your city.
> Isn't caring for children ethically superior than spending time caring for people who aren't your children?
It is trickier when you decide between deciding to have children and helping other people. As far as such theoretical case seriously happens.
Helping remote people, all else being equal, is much worse than helping near people. You can actually evaluate the effectiveness of nearby charity.
The catch is, for anyone likely to read this, the far people are much worse off and appreciative of relatively littler marginal assistance compared to the near people.
"Don't ethnical systems usually preference your nearest? Your family, your neighbors, your children, and so on?"
This is an amazing typo. Good work.
I don't think privileging people closer to you naturally falls out of ethics, though I agree it's something you will do anyway so your ethics should be prepared for it. I would urge people to think about the tradeoffs. If it's one of your kid's life vs. one starving Indian orphan's life, I can't imagine anyone not choosing their kid. If it's an extra hour with your already-spoiled kid vs. saving a thousand orphans' lives, choose the orphans. In between those poles, I guess opinions differ, and I don't know of any hard-and-fast way to make the decision.
I would argue that one is far more obligated to care for their children/parents than for random person - if everything else is equal.
If my brother is really sad I am willing to do quite a lot to help. If some random person is sad? I am unlikely to do anything, and it is fine overall.
In general people are often far more motivated, qualified and able to actually help them. Even if I would be comforting random people I am dubious whether it would even help.
It has also other practical benefits. People are far less likely to build elaborate Mao-like failures while helping directly own family. Where something intended to help is done in such braindead way that it produces piles of skulls.
Obviously there are clear failure modes and degenerates to the "build palace for my family you stupid starving peasants" point in extreme.
> I don't think privileging people closer to you naturally falls out of ethics
I guess it depends on how important is the obligation to family/tribe. What would be axiom in ethics rather that outcome of ethics.
To piggyback on the post you responded to, I don't agree that spending time with children requires less time spent on charities. I think that there are two cases where the opposite is true, both of which would likely be much more common for a parent who would otherwise be inclined to give time to charitable causes:
1) Volunteering for charitable causes with their kids, as a means and opportunity to train the children in being charitable.
2) Having raised children to be charitable, thereby increasing the amount of charity being done in the world (in this case by a future generation).
I agree that many people are sincerely motivated by principle when it comes to "it would be irresponsible to have children".
But like I said, the song was the same, it was just the tune was different back when I was a kid. Then it was "it would be irresponsible to have children" because the Earth was groaning under the burden of increasing population. Or "it would be irresponsible to have children" because of the threat of nuclear war, or the oil was going to run out.
But when I looked at who was saying "don't have children, it would be irresponsible to bring a new life into this dying, decaying, threat-ridden, over-burdened world", they weren't doing anything more to change their own lives, particularly in the 'consuming resources' sense. It was like listening to someone lecturing about how alcohol was terrible and a curse, all the while sipping from a glass of whiskey.
So I am reminded about what Chesterton said in regard to Prohibition, after coming back from visiting America in 1921:
"But if I am to deal with Prohibition, there is no doubt of the first thing to be said about it. The first thing to be said about it is that it does not exist. It is to some extent enforced among the poor; at any rate it was intended to be enforced among the poor; though even among them I fancy it is much evaded. It is certainly not enforced among the rich; and I doubt whether it was intended to be.
...But when some of the rich Americans gravely tell us that their drinking cannot be interfered with, because they are only using up their existing stocks of wine, we may well be disposed to smile. When I was there, at any rate, they were using them up very fast; and with no apparent fears about the supply. But if the Ku-Klux Klan had started suddenly shooting everybody they didn’t like in broad daylight, and had blandly explained that they were only using up the stocks of their ammunition, left over from the Civil War, it seems probable that there would at least have been a little curiosity about how much they had left. There might at least have been occasional inquiries about how long it was likely to go on. It is even conceivable that some steps might have been taken to stop it.
No steps are taken to stop the drinking of the rich, chiefly because the rich now make all the rules and therefore all the exceptions, but partly because nobody ever could feel the full moral seriousness of this particular rule. And the truth is, as I have indicated, that it was originally established as an exception and not as a rule."
> Washington State proposed a carbon tax a few years ago, and it failed 56 to 44. Suppose that a bunch of pro-carbon-tax activists equal to 7% of the population moved in the next day. How would this change politics? Would the climate change activists propose something even more ambitious, so that chance of success is held constant? And is there a binary distribution here, such that “carbon tax” is going to offend some people and excite others no matter what the rate is, and so it’s hard to get something that is “like a carbon tax but appeals to 6% more voters”?
Washington actually had two carbon tax initiatives that failed. The first was a business Republican-friendly revenue neutral tax -- anything the tax generated would be rebated back out. This failed because what it gained in centrist support it lost on the left wing who didn't think it went far enough. The next one in response was a tax that would fund "climate justice," essentially a giant slush fund for lefty non profits, and it lost all the support from the center it would have needed to get over 50%.
So the answer to this question seems to be yes -- the farthest left wing will always want more than it can get away with, and adding more pro-climate voters will just tempt them to write an initiative that they fool themselves into thinking they can pass.
This is a constant problem with messaging on this issue. If climate change is such a huge issue, then carbon taxes don’t need to be (and arguably shouldn’t ever be) revenue generators. They are purely to offset the negative externalities of carbon.
But proponents can’t resist tacking on all their other priorities to that big pile of potential revenue. Simultaneously dooming the bill to failure, and revealing that climate change is not quite the all-consuming concern they claim (at a minimum, it’s not important enough to pass up a shot at their other political pet projects).
I don't understand your question. A "tax" generates revenue by definition. The proposals I have heard for taxes of this sort are that the revenue ought to be used to undo some of the unfortunate externalities caused by the tax.
In the case of a Carbon Tax, the tax raises the price of carbon-based energy allowing non-carbon types of energy to be more competitive. The externalities are that, at least in the short term, people have to pay more for their energy. The revenue might be distributed through some progressive scale to mitigate that effect.
Your first paragraph is I guess what I would call “revenue neutral” - any revenue obtained goes back out in credits directly tied to the externalities of the tax. Alternative “revenue neutral” is having a carbon tax but cutting the same number of dollars from other taxes.
The troublesome one is when the carbon tax revenue gets directed to non-climate (or non carbon tax) related ends. Like if you used carbon taxes to fund slavery reparations or planned parenthood or whatever.
The externality of people paying more for energy can be mitigated by reducing their other tax burdens, in this particular case by reducing the WA sales tax by about 15%, increasing sales tax refunds for vulnerable populations (i.e., mailing bigger checks to poor people), and virtually eliminating a particular business tax. Overall the WA tax system would have become more progressive than before.
And then the legislature could still vote to raise those other taxes right back up, and spend that money on whatever it thinks best. Or not, if it doesn't want to. And people can still propose initiatives to raise taxes in general, to fund all those new programs. There's no inherent reason to tie a change in revenue source to a bunch of new spending.
I suspect that this is not inherent to the concept of a carbon tax, but more about political dynamics. Partly, the type of people who favor a carbon tax tend to be more similar to homo economicus, and, well, enough said about that. And partly it's that the conceptual cleanliness of the idea means that it's harder to carve out exceptions and earmark rewards for various interest groups, which mean that it's harder to get them on board because there's nothing in it for them except a better world, so why would they bother?
They absolutely cannot resist the creation of an enormous green slush fund that ends up being pointed at a bunch of progressive causes unrelated to climate change. The poison pill. If they really cared about climate change they would use the tax to build NFL stadiums or something that the other side might like.
Even revenue neutral taxes seemed a bit suspicious. You are going to refund my money annually? How about I take an immediate refund at the pump by not paying the tax in the first place? This just inserts inefficiency into the system. Mr. Cynical also has zero trust that politicians won't be tempted to raid that pile of cash on a moments notice.
People aren't going to like energy taxes, and they especially seem hyper-concerned about artificial changes to gasoline prices.
Presumably the system wouldn't refund *your* taxes specifically to *you*, but, say, pay out everyone's taxes to everyone in equal amounts. So those who emit an average amount of CO₂ get the same amount as they pay, those who emit more than average pay more carbon tax than they get back, and those who emit less than average get back more than they pay. In other words, above-average emitters pay to below-average emitters.
Yes, the carbon sinners will get their just punishment, ha ha. What if you live in a rural area 40 miles from a city, say growing food in vast quantities for the righteous carbon angels living in the city? A basic unjust wealth transfer. Just like all seemingly good ideas on paper there would be real unfairness, attempts at adjustments, lobbying, followed by unjust cutouts for the politically favored.
Cold winter? Hot summer? Pay more taxes to those in favored climates. Got a job in downtown SF and you make a measly $100K and want a family in a safe neighborhood? Commute an hour a day and transfer some wealth to other regions.
I question how much this would actually change behavior, or how much one could adjust their behavior to avoid the taxes if one was predisposed to do so. If energy went up 10X you would likely pay close attention to energy bills of a potential new home, but if that increase was due to the government there would be a taxpayer revolt.
If growing food necessarily emits a lot of CO₂, the taxes would be passed on to city dwellers as part of food prices.
A free market leads to the optimal allocation of resources under many conditions; but it leads to suboptimal allocation if an activity has a negative externality, and people engaging in it aren't forced to pay a Pigouvian tax to compensate for the harm. Whether emitting CO₂ is harmful is itself under debate, but assuming that it is, a Pigouvian tax is the most efficient way to reduce it. That includes incentivizing people to move to climates where there heating and cooling uses the least energy.
You worry about carve-outs, but any measure to reduce CO₂ emissions other than a Pigouvian tax (i.e. a uniform tax on CO₂ emissions) necessarily has (the equivalent of) carve-outs, in as much as it disincentivizes some forms of CO₂ emission more than others.
Hey Scott - I saw the discourse was getting a bit out of hand, and I imagine it's hell to moderate a discussion that large. I threw together a rough draft of a "hey I gave you temp ban, please chill a bit" message that may be useful in reducing some of the cognitive overhead of putting people in timeout when a discussion blows up. That said, I don't know if it's possible to do something like have an automated message sent when a ban is issued.
Also, I'd be very curious to hear the general community's take on liberal short (3 day, 7 day, etc.) bans for norm enforcement.
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Hi there! I want to start this message by offering you my sincere thanks for participating in the ACX community discussions. The community that has grown around this blog is incredibly important to me, and it only exists as long as people choose to actively contribute.
In that spirit, you've been given a temporary (1 week) ban.
I use the ban system as a way of enforcing a set of rules and norms that have been conducive to the development of a community that is intellectually generous, challenging, and curious. The temporary ban is used to give participants the opportunity to review these rules and norms before posting again, and maybe give them a little space from a discussion that is getting out of hand.
There are three obvious and unfortunate failings of this ban system.
The first is that I may issue a ban for a comment that was intended to be entirely innocuous. Please review the tone of your post - not as you intended it, but rather as a reader unfamiliar with your motives might interpret it - to avoid this in the future.
The second is that, with the growth of the community, I often do not have time to issue temporary bans to all commenters that break the rules. This means that you may be issued a temporary ban for a comment that is no worse than a comment that does not result in one. I am truly sorry for this shortcoming but also ask your understanding.
The third shortcoming is related to the second. Because I am trying to manage such a large community while also writing and maintaining a clinical practice, I do not have time to provide explanations of why you were banned, nor do I have time to handle appeals. I hope that the latter limitation is addressed by the relatively short duration of the ban.
If you are uncertain why you received this ban, please review the rules here (actually, please review them even if it is clear to you). In general, the rules aim to maintain a good vibe by avoiding personal attacks, limiting antagonistic (e.g. hostile or patronizing) tones, and encouraging insightful conversation.
If you are still uncertain why you were banned after reading the rules and comparing your comment against comments that did not result in bans, then this community may be a poor fit for your communication style or I may have made a mistake. If it's the latter you have my apologies. If your posts continue to violate the spirit of the rules linked above, I will eventually give you an indefinite ban. I do not give these lightly, but I will not sacrifice the standards of behavior that foster a community of good-faith discussion.
Thank you again for your participation. The addition of differing perspectives often introduces greater clarity to the exploration of a topic. It just needs to be done while maintaining the vibe.
One aspect of having kids that wasn’t covered: many of the people who are concerned about climate change impacts of kids also tend to favor large social welfare programs.
But who will pay for all those programs 50 years from now if wealthy educated people don’t reproduce?
And if social welfare programs are collapsing due to a rapidly aging population, THAT’S the crisis that will get attention, and environmental concerns will get back-burnered.
> Man, I wish I could write like this. Seems like a waste to blog when one could be quoting CS Lewis instead.
Actually Lewis is the closest stylistic match to rationalist-community approaches to reasoning and writing-- Scott's in particular-- out of all the generally-known writers I can think of. (G.K. Chesterton is also worth mentioning but rationalists are more directly conscious of him as an influence.) See also: the surprising influence that Scott et al have had on center-right-ish Christian public intellecutuals specifically (e.g. Ross Douthat, Alan Jacobs). There's a shared sensibility there regarding what kinds of arguments move people, in spite of significant object-level (and sometimes meta-level) disagreements.
"the surprising influence that Scott et al have had on center-right-ish Christian public intellecutuals specifically"
Because Scott has intellectual humility. What turned me off the New Atheist bunch was the attitude some of them had about "I am SO SMART. I am yuuuuge brain. I am too clever by half to fall for dumb religion. See how bright I am?"
Yes, and I'm sure you also had a nine-inch dick and were an Olympic-level athlete. Even the best argument in the world won't be convincing when delivered in the tone of de haut en bas. Which brings me once again to my guilty pleasure book review of yore, Terry Eagleton on "The God Delusion":
> First, the MVT assumes that both parties will end up as indistinguishable centrists, but this clearly hasn’t happened, probably because of the primary process.
Hasn't it? Not when it comes to rhetoric, but when it comes to policy, it seems to be a common complaint on both sides. Though I'm not sure why the MVT should affect policy more than rhetoric.
I lived in n. Idaho at one time and still keep in touch. The wonderful summer there is a good reason for living there. This past summer smoke from forest fires made summer a lot less wonderful for big chunks of time. That's a real loss in quality of life subset of reason for living but I doubt that it impacted the local "gdp" much. Maybe even raised it due to fire fighting crews coming in from elsewhere.
"The people refusing to have kids because of climate change are some of the most intelligent and ethical people around. This is my assessment from knowing some of them, plus my inference from all the articles about them which usually mentions how they went to top colleges."
Maybe. Scott lives, socially and geographically, in a blue tribe high IQ bubble. It's tempting to think that your sort of people are better than not your sort of people.
I have lived in a different bubble (socially — at present I am also in the Bay Area). Of the smartest people I have known I don't think any took (or for those still alive take) seriously the sort of climate catastrophism scare story that motivates someone to not have kids because of climate worries. I too am tempted to think highly of my sort of people.
People who choose not to have children for these reasons are selected for a number of characteristics:
1. Being sufficiently credulous, or conformist to their social surroundings, to accept an exaggerated view of the perils of climate change — exaggerated relative to what Scott believes, as he has just demonstrated, greatly exaggerated relative to what I believe.
2. Not very much wanting to have children. That could reflect risk aversion or a high discount rate, since the returns from having children are uncertain and the costs are greatest early. It could reflect having had an unhappy childhood, poor relations with their parents. It could reflect being lazy or selfish — children, especially small children, are a lot of work.
3. A willingness to do what they and those around them view as the responsible thing. That could, as Scott suggests, be due to being very ethical. It could also be due to being conformist.
A different David Friedman. I'm sure I was sometimes in the Ida Noyes coffee shop, but I don't think often enough to qualify for "hung out." What context do you remember observing a David Friedman in? If it was libertarian arguments or medieval recreation the odds it was me are very high.
“ If we ever approached a point where refugees could actually cause techno-economic decline or civil war or whatever, we would have already built a giant unscaleable border wall. I don’t think our civilization should necessarily be proud of this…”
Oh, I dunno. Avoiding civil war is probably decent enough politics.
An example of a straight couple not getting married for moral reasons: my aunt and uncle got a UK civil partnership recently after having been together but unmarried for 35 years. Civil partnerships were initially introduced in 2004 as a sort of "gay marriage in all but name" but they were only extended to straight couples in the last couple of years (depending in which part of the UK you're in).
It's not exactly what you describe, because their reasons weren't exactly "marriage is homophobic because it excludes gay couples", but they were certainly in the boat of "this thing would be advantageous for our lives but it goes against our principles so we're not doing it."
"The only exception might be fairly extreme geo-engineering attempts that we’ll wish we didn’t have to experiment with. "
Freeman Dyson did the calculation, and we could stop an increase in CO2 emissions by embarking on a massive tree-planting program. Half of the CO2 that exists now gets cycled through trees on a yearly basis. That would give us enough time to do the CO2 mitigation. So once we decide that CO2 is really causing the warming, we can easily generating breathing room. Because who doesn't want more trees?
Well, this says he thinks we should engineer a new super-tree that absorbs and holds CO2, which, great, yes, let's do that, but I don't think we can just decide to do it.
His wikipage talks about his desire to genetically engineer a tree for use in comets, so I'm not sure how much this is him selling his own book. It also says that a trillion trees would remove all CO2 from the environment.
We created rice that cures blindness and wine grapes that thive on both Hoth and the even more inhospitable climate of central Canada. I think the super-tree would be small potatoes.
I think it's also worth noting regarding the future voters argument and MVT that even if MVT is true and dems adjust rightwards to win elections sans the voters who weren't born because their parents were worried about the climate, this probably means that the dems are less supportive of climate polices than they otherwise would be so it still might be.
It’s sad that the unique rewards of having children can’t be communicated in words... if they could, the notion of going child-free “because climate change” would probably not exist. Unfortunately anyone who tries to find language for the rewards of having children just comes off sounding trite. It was not convincing to me in my first 15ish years of adulthood. Now, having had a kid, I feel sadness that there’s no vocabulary to describe this to friends who are on the fence. Seems critical to get the message out, somehow, into low fertility W.E.I.R.D. societies where “your parents and God need you to have babies” is not compelling. (I have no good ideas for how to do this.)
I don't have much experience with psychedelics, but my experience of parenthood feels very much like a drug habit - costs a lot of money, leaves little energy for activities that I used to find meaningful, makes it difficult to maintain friendships, etc. It pains me to see other people slipping into this lifestyle. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
And I'm glad to hear that parenthood has been a positive experience for you!
But I don't think you should worry too much about your friends on the fence. I feel the same sort of responsibility to warn friends away from parenthood that you seem to feel about nudging them towards it, but there's ultimately no way to know which way would make their lives better or worse. For some of your friends, becoming parents could end up being the decision they regret more than any other, and I doubt that you would want to be part of the cause for that regret.
Do you find that a lot of parents around you share your feelings? My understanding is that regret for having had children is an outlier - possibly an extreme outlier - position. (For sure influenced by the fact that one opinion is socially acceptable to express and the other is not, but it’s not clear to me how strong a factor this is.) I’d love to correct my perspective on this.
It's not something I would discuss with other parents around me, for the social acceptability reasons mentioned. In fact, until now I haven't even talked about it anonymously online.
I don't disagree with the "liberal consensus", but it is not entirely true that fewer people having kids has no negative externalities.
As someone who for a while was the only one with kids in my social group, and the only one with kids in my extended family -- it means your kids have fewer friends among like-minded people, and less community for them and for you. And this reflects in psychological ways, not just in material ways (e.g. opportunity to trade babysitting or form a homeschooling pod).
Also, as people get less and less exposed to kids, they make the external world less friendly to kids and parents. I believe that parents should be responsible for the effects of their children's behavior in public, and most of the costs of their children's existence.
BUT in terms of how relaxed other people are around kids, how much trepidation they feel in handling kids, how easily annoyed they are, how accommodating vs resentful your coworkers are due to kids..... All of these things go into the "harder for parents" direction when you're the only parent around.
And again, this is the case, at least anecdotally - in my work experience, most young coworkers were not even close to kids, and th older employees had teenage or grown kids; none of my husband's coworkers don't have small children.
This makes a lot of sense. I live in an opposite situation where everyone still has kids, and fairly early, and things are extremely kid oriented. It is certainly alienating when you are alone in your lifestyle, but this is made worse when amenities, schedules, and other material factors are all designed to be suited for a different type of life. I imagine this is the case for basically any minority lifestyle.
I feel like this isn't within my borders of what constitutes a meaningful negative externality.
It sounds like the same kind of argument as "if other people don't play soccer, there won't be enough people on my soccer team, and society won't invest in good soccer fields". All of this is true, but it doesn't mean that not-playing-soccer has a negative externality, is harmful to others, and society should be able to ban it.
Oh I absolutely don't think it rises to the level of argument for any kind of policy/social pressure in favor of or against having children, just like I don't buy the argument that something "lowers property prices by epsilon" or "increases tax revenue by epsilon" is valid for HOA or eminent domain type decisions.
I do think, however, that it is a real and lamentable negative effect that I've observed.
If we do count this as a negative externality, then the decision to play soccer also has negative externalities because the people who join you in your soccer game won't be available to play basketball with the lonely guy around the corner looking for a pickup game.
Sorry, I should have prefaced it by saying that I don't believe that quantifying these sorts of marginal effects is grounds for any kind of social or political action. "Externality" isn't even the right term, but it is a negative effect.
And yeah, if everyone always played basketball, but suddenly The Powers that Be, and fashion, moved on to soccer - and now suddenly all the basketball facilities are closing, nobody wants to play anymore, nobody's interested in it, the only club that plays it is in the big city an hour away - cause chagrin to the people who still want to play basketball but don't have the numbers, concentration, or resources to resurrect all this infrastructure.
I'm not trying to extend the basketball-having children metaphor too much. But to me, the shift of norms away from "you have children - it's what you do" to "maybe, later, I don't know if I'll ever be ready, is it ethical to even have them?" has a lot of lamentable aspects to it.
"Does anyone else have an experience with a couple like that? If so, what happened?"
Yes, I did! I knew a straight activist couple in Dunedin New Zealand who abstained from marriage until gay marriage was legalized. At the time gay couples could get a 'Civil Union' but could not marry, so they got "civil union-ed" then had a real wedding after gay marriage was legalized in 2013. In my opinion, the Civil Union party was much more fun :)
When old people look back on their lives, often, the most satisfying thing they've done is raise kids. It is puzzling unless you've raised kids yourself.
The days are long, but the years are short, raising kids. It is counter intuitive, but true in my experience.
I hope young people don't deprive themselves of this joy or overthink it. Why do smart people often overthink things?
Doing what one wants might lead to deep regret later. It is not always the right way to make decisions.
This is not to say parenting is the right choice for everyone. I think if one overthinks it, it could lead to regret. There will never be a perfect time to have kids. I was rather influenced by tradition here.
As one gets older, it won't truly be an option after a certain age. I was pretty impressed to see my young niece figured this as a factor in what area of medicine she specialized in, even before even meeting her future life partner. I see that as maturity. She said I'm going to choose internal medicine (not more demanding fields) as it will allow me to graduate by 32 and have kids by a "reasonable age".
I am extremely skeptical about the probability of continuing economic growth
Given how correlated access to energy is to GDP, and how much of our energy comes from fossil fuels, it's hard for me to imagine never-ending growth in a world where, by choice or because of limited supply, we would extract less and less of them.
So what we would need is either decoupling growth from energy production (which seems implausible to me because pretty much every new technology requires more energy, not less) or decoupling growth from energy production, which I don't see happening
Of course, renewables are on the rise, but:
- Because they are very distributed, their construction necessitates huge quantities of materials such as steel and aluminium, which we don't really know how to produce without fossil fuels
- They can't be used exclusively without extensive grid storage, which is another tough technological nut to crack
And nuclear could help us a great deal, but
- Nuclear plants are huge, long-term investments, so they're difficult to finance privately, and
- People are afraid of them, so it's difficult for democratic governments to fund them
Sure, several small modular reactors technologies seem very promising, but I'm just not convinced that this tech will scale fast enough around the world (especially in poor countries)
Also, energy is just part of the opportunities that fossil fuels have given us (materials, chemicals, etc)
It's pretty clear for me that each new technology builds on existing infrastructure, and that we're really far from being able to produce enough energy and materials without fossil products, but I'm actually not sure how to justify this.
It's just that every major industry relies heavily on them: plastic, concrete and steel production, fertilizers etc
And the alternatives seem pretty far off:
- Most biopolymers are not viable replacements and/or complete greenwashing because they use more energy
- Less carbon-intensive concrete projects are a dime a dozen but engineers will be reluctant to use them until they have a proven 50-year track record
- The first carbon-neutral steel plant just opened but all other existing ones will tend to stay open as long as they make money
2) Thanks, didn't know that graph, pretty interesting
Still pretty convinced that our industry is based on energy use (it's not because we use less per dollar that we could make do with even less) but I agree that I was somewhat wrong on this one.
3) I kind of agree, but this is a pretty theoretical statement
Of course we "can" produce plenty of renewable energy, but it would be pretty difficult, especially if steel, silicon and rare earths are in short supply.
I also want to insist on the fact that energy is not necessarily what we need, as much as on-demand power, so that our factories, offices and car chargers work even when it's night/cloudy and there's no wind
The only large-scale energy storage solutions that exist are dams, and new dams need very specific geographic conditions (apart from often being terrible for the local environment), so we're pretty close to full capacity
Maybe you're aware of this though, if so sorry for the rant.
You have kind of moved on from the relation between energy and GDP to what will be do to replace concrete, or polymers without fossil fuels. This is moving from oil as an energy source to as a product.
And your original question wasn't about carbon at all. Therefore although we may never replace concrete ( I think we will) the energy needed in the production of concrete could be through renewables. Also the statements that 'steel, silicon and rare earths are in short supply" is dubious enough for at least two of those, silicon is hugely abundant. Iron has plenty supply. Anyway, not energy related.
I think when it comes to renewables the storage issue does need solving, however there's vastly more wind out there than we need, and plenty of sun. The US is a big place as is Europe, interconnectors and nuclear can solve the intermittent problem. By the way it doesn't matter to your argument if we never get to carbon zero, and we still need some fossil fuels. Wind and solar are additional sources of energy regardless.
So we have a declining demand side and a increasing supply side, there's no running out of energy for GDP growth, although there may be other factors.
What I mean is that GDP is linked to carbon-intensive industries, especially energy but not only that.
I agree I could have been more clear about that from the beginning, and that my discourse was kind of meandering.
As for steel, silicon and rare earth, the short supply I was referring to is not about mining but about refining.
I don't want to make too many claims about rare earths and silicon because I don't know much about them.
About steel, I was thinking about the manufacturing process, which involves coke and is extremely energy-intensive (7.2 % of global GES emissions according to this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector)
(I know I'm talking about energy again but I don't think we can really disentangle these subjects)
About the fact that interconnections and nascent storage solutions will be enough, I don't really have concrete data in mind to support my argument, I guess it's just about subjective differences of appreciation.
Same for the viability of a comfortable life in a world with the more serious climate change that would come from the continued use of fossil fuels
These are going to be in short supply (mining-wise) in the coming decades though, so we're going to have to reduce our consumption eventually:
Almost 44% increase of energy consumption per capita in 60 years with no sign of slowing, along with a growing population... I'm not saying energy demand will never fall, but it's really far from a given at this point
By the way, I came across this graph showing that in the short term, carbon emissions are linked to GDP:
When I as in high school - 30 years ago, I was told there were only 30 years left of oil left. However since I was told there was 30 years left at age 12 and age 17 I didn't take it all that seriously. At age 17 we would have expected 25 years left.
I mean a graph like that should show a linear decline from 25 years in 1990 to 0 in 2015. Imagine the panic there should have been in 2005. Ten years left! Far from that happening the years of reserves left increased to 50 or so, according to your link.
Why was that? The estimate is Proved Reserves/ Present day consumption * estimated increases.
What is a proven reserve. It's a oilfield "that claim an approximate certainty level of at least 90% of being successfully recovered."
90% is fairly high so plenty of then untapped oilfields are, and were, in the probable reserves (50% or more) but moved to the proven column when tapped, or as technology changed. So, as technology changes, or an oil field is actually tapped, the probables become the proven. I can't find it now but the number of years we have for unproven and proven is 200 or so. Similar for coal.
We are more likely to hit peak oil demand[1]
We won't extract it all. The Stone Age didn't end when stone ran out, as a Saudi minister is supposed to have said. The push to carbon zero might not get to zero, but it will replace a lot of coal and oil usage. There's lots of wind out there[2]. Also lots of solar potential.
I had heard that estimating reserves is pretty hard, and even though I still think extracting resources is going to get harder, I probably should have been more cautious about that stuff
The thing is, it's pretty hard for me to find comfort in the fact that there could be more fossil resources, because then we have to rely on people not exploiting them.
Again, I can't prove we can't mitigate the effects of global warming with technological innovations, but you can't prove we can, and I'm just saying we should avoid relying on possible innovations to make up for the downsides of present externalities.
It's nice to know that there is plenty of wind energy to be found; but generally with renewables, the problem is more with difficulties of exploitation than with simple volume (the energy is more spread out)
That's why I think the term capacity is ambiguous: the concept can easily be stretched out, especially when it comes to promoting the development of a specific technology.
About the broader point of CO2 emissions, let's put it this way: for them to go down, net CO2 intensity of GDP has to start shrinking faster than GDP grows.
If we can do that without affecting the growth of GDP per capita, I will be convinced that we can reduce emissions without sacrificing comfort.
Until then, extrapolating growth tendencies is not any more valid than extrapolating C02 emissions tendencies.
When I was in university 40 years ago, I was told that there was a load of oil in the form of oil shale that no one could be bothered extracting because it was too expensive.
GDP is A: not all that correlated with energy use (e.g. England gets three times more GDP per unit energy than China) and B: improving substantially with time (e.g. England/2020 gets about three times more GDP per unit energy than did England/1980).
Your belief is common, but it's wrong and I'm not sure why it's so common. There are greatly diminishing returns to applying More Raw Power to the generation of real wealth even at a fixed level of technology, and one of the biggest focuses in any area of technological development is reducing the amount of power needed to get an equivalent result. We can continue to get richer without ever using more energy than we do now - though we won't and don't need to, because another major focus of technological development is how to get more energy at least cost and environmental impact.
(the graph is on page 88, sorry, I couldn't find a more practical link)
I do want to push back on A because I find it misleading.
Of course, England will have higher GDP/energy, efficiency than China, but I'm pretty sure that's because of the types of industries present in England and China
In England the economy is based on services, finance and other less energy-dependent sectors, but these industries couldn't run without the materials and goods coming from poorer countries, especially China, and we don't know how to make these in a carbon-neutral way.
So they're very different but interdependent, we can't analyze one without taking the other into account.
That's why I'm more convinced by the global evolution, although I'm still skeptical we're going to continue increasing our global comfort with less resources in a short timeframe.
I want to say that my belief is not quite "growth comes from putting more raw power into the system" but "growth, even with innovation, tends to require power"
Which is compatible even with the fact that GDP per unit energy is growing.
I agree we can easily get a lot more GDP for only a little more energy, but we still have to reverse the trend of using more energy per capita:
Which we're going to have to do if world population doesn't fall quickly (obviously don't hope that will happen, pretty opposed to mass death and suffering) and if we don't learn to make a lot of low-carbon energy really quickly.
A good representation of the challenge for achieving net zero in 2050 is on page 22 of this course (sorry again):
Even if the gray line stays flat in the future, that means a huge boost for renewables and nuclear. (especially since renewables get less efficient when they provide a bigger part of the mix)
It's about *CO2 emissions* and GDP though, sorry for the mistake
Although given how much of our energy comes from fossil fuels, I thinks it's safe to assume that energy production follows the same pattern. CO2 is more relevant to my point anyway.
The whole page on the Kaya identity is pretty interesting, and I think it mostly supports my opinions:
I've seen some right-wingers make that claim, though it's hard to tell how earnest it is. Could be they're just trolling, or making up excuses for something they wouldn't or couldn't do anyway.
That's backwards. If you believe in marriage outside the state, you should hold a wedding and socially describe yourself as married, even if you refuse legal recognition. (This may not be possible in some countries, but I think it is possible in America.)
I continue to be confused that the campaign for gay marriage wasn't focused around weddings and assertions of marriage. That is, demand for recognition of something that precedes the state, rather than permission from the state.
By "get married" I meant (A) get legally married, and (B) have social acknowledgement of that. I don't mean that that's what the word marriage "should" mean; only that that is what it /does/ mean in the debate over LGBTQ marriage.
BTW, why isn't there a "P" in there, for polygamy?
There was no need for that campaign. Most gay people (at least among the ones I knew) who had been together awhile had already gotten socially or religiously married, depending on their inclinations.
"We talk about the Principle of Charity here a lot, and most of you are willing to grant it to right-wingers."
Maybe I'm just an uncharitable person by the standards of this community (the people on the SSC Discord certainly thought so), but my conclusions are the polar opposite of yours: Rather than believe these sorts of claims from both right-wingers and left-wingers, I'm extremely skeptical of both.
I think most people who oppose abortion are primarily motivated by a desire to control people's sexuality, as evidenced by the fact that they tend to oppose other forms of untraditional sexual behavior, even when those would serve to reduce abortions (e.g. homosexuality, contraception). I don't think it's rooted in misogyny per se, but rather in an opposition to all forms of sexual behavior outside of heterosexual marriage (which also happens to disproportionately affect women). I'm not saying they're *lying* when they say that abortion is murder in their eyes, but I don't think they *truly* believe it's equivalent to murdering a human being who's already been born. For instance, I'm fairly sure that the vast majority of them would choose to save a single toddler over an arbitrarily large number of fertilized eggs. And aside from the absolute most extreme anti-abortion activists, they don't *really* act like you'd expect people to act if they lived in a country where babies were being murdered en masse. They might make that claim in their rhetoric, they might even think that in their surface-level thoughts, but their behavior is not consistent with that belief. (There are a few exceptions, of course, but those are generally the people who tend to murder abortion doctors or support those who do.)
Likewise, I don't really believe leftists who claim that they're not having children because of climate change. Again, it's not exactly that I think they're lying. It's more that, even if scientists invented a source of 100% clean renewable energy and ended the climate crisis tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of those people would still choose not to have children. Just like the liberals who claimed they weren't getting married because it wasn't an option for gay couples still didn't get married even after gay marriage became legal. Just like the conservatives who claim to oppose premarital sex because it leads to abortions would still oppose it even if we developed 100% effective and universally-available contraception and reduced the number of abortions to zero. These people have a myriad of reasons for not wanting children, they simply use climate change as an excuse that also gives them ammunition against their Outgroup. And just like most anti-abortionists don't truly behave as though abortion is the exact equivalent of felony homicide, most climate activists don't truly behave as though the literal extinction of humanity or end of human civilization is just around the corner. (Again, there are a few exceptions, and those tend to be the sorts of people who think Kaczynski was right.)
It's not lying. But it's more than just a lack of conviction. It's a lack of *belief*, or at least belief that goes beyond the surface level and actually becomes part of a person's intuitive and intellectual framework. I remember someone on the SSC forums once mentioned that a typical conservative Christian might accept her creationist pastor's claim that God created the Earth six thousand years ago, and likewise accept a park ranger's claim that rock formations are hundreds of millions of years old, without bothering to think about the contradiction much. Likewise, I think a typical progressive might accept some vocal activist's claim that humanity will die out within the century, and likewise accept that some work of speculative fiction set five hundred years in the future is an accurate depiction of what the world will probably be like, without bothering to think about the contradiction much.
Here's a demonstration that people don't believe in Hell the way they believe in the material world.
Imagine a duffle bag full of $100 bills. (Someone here probably won't just imagine it, they'll calculate the likely value.)
It's on one side of a very busy expressway, and the believer in Hell is on the other side. The believer will take more risks of Hell than they will risk getting run over.
I think the point is that many people who claim to believe in Hell would steal a duffel bag full of money if they could do it without getting caught or facing consequences here in the material world (thus putting their souls at risk of damnation), but most of those people wouldn't risk physical death by crossing a busy highway for the same bag of money.
I don't understand where Hell comes into it if you aren't going with "stealing sends you to Hell" (which isn't really Christian belief on heaven/hell anyway).
Are you saying you expect people who believe in the afterlife should be reckless risk-takers or else they must not really believe in the after life?
That's a great line. I had a friend long ago whose parents were devout Catholics, and when his father was dying, both his mother and father approached it fearlessly and with joy, which I'd never seen before in anyone up to that point. It seemed to me my friend's parents believed Heaven was every bit as real as Australia. I had a few moments of envy about that, since that road would never be mine and I would have to make peace with mortality in some whole other way.
Interestingly, there is a very small fringe party here in the US that takes exactly that stance, opposing abortion but likewise opposing war and capital punishment and border camps on the basis of being earnestly pro-life in every regard. (They're almost entirely Catholic, whereas the broader anti-abortion movement is a mix of Catholics and Protestants.) And in many ways, they're the exception that proves the rule: It's striking just how *different* they are from mainstream anti-abortion activists; they really don't fit into American conservative culture at all, and in pretty much all regards other than abortion, conservatives would be extremely turned off by their views.
And likewise, the types of people who really and earnestly believe that the world is ending due to climate change are a tiny fringe minority that really doesn't fit into American progressive culture, and hold views that would be considered anathema by most progressives. They're reactionary Hard Green types more likely to support either outright eco-fascism on one extreme or anarcho-primitivism on the other, often with no shortage of politically incorrect views (to put it mildly) regarding the masses of poor people in the developing world.
This is a bit like the "how can you claim to be pro-life when you're also pro-capital punishment?" question, though. And I'm consistent on that: anti-abortion and anti-capital punishment, for many of the same reasons.
It really is one of those Tweedledee and Tweedledum exchanges: "How can you be okay with executing criminals and then oppose abortion?" "Well, how can you be okay with ending innocent lives but then want to let murderers and rapists live?" It's generally in the American context this is raised, since many countries have abolished the death penalty so there isn't the same connection made between stances on X and Y.
As mentioned below, it's probably because I'm Catholic that I hold this position:
It seems like this philosophy is a bit less clear cut once you throw in that some of the babies are future criminals and some of the criminals are in fact innocent.
If Nancy or I touched a nerve, then I'm sorry for that. I certainly didn't mean to imply that you, personally, were being insincere about your beliefs. My accusations of hypocrisy (and I think Nancy's too) were mainly directed at a particular type of American Evangelical conservative, for whom religion is inextricably tied up with cultural tribalism and political partisanship. From what I know, you're a Scottish Catholic with political views that fall all over the place in regard to the American left/right dichotomy, and I don't doubt that you're consistent about your views in a way that many "pro-life" Americans are not.
I went to a Catholic school growing up, with priests who'd march alongside right-wingers protesting abortion one month, and then march alongside left-wingers protesting the Iraq War the next month. And I have a great deal of respect for that position, even if I don't agree with them. But, as I mentioned in my reply to Nancy above, people like that are not at all typical for conservative Christian Americans.
No bother at all, people on here tend to be more sincere and honest in their opinions than the general run of social media, so if I do get stung I am more than capable of stinging back.
As to Scottish, well - left and then down a bit from Scotland 😁☘
I do believe most of us have multiple reasons at varying layers of awareness for the choices we make. But it doesn't add up to me to a conclusion that people are not sincere in their stated reasons.
I think most of us have some ideas about how we wish the world were in order for it to be more to our liking. We could call those preferences or values.
Some people I think want to live in a world where abortion is viewed collectively as a sin and a tragedy and either never happens or almost never happens. In that world, other things are also happening that align more with their values; maybe it's bigger families, more churchgoing, more socially conservative views generally, etc. So the prevalence of abortion in our world now to that person is a sign of how far away we are from the kind of world they want.
Some people want to live in a world where humans have not had irreversible (and negative from their view) impacts on our planet, from species extinction to climate change and everything in between. For those people, the impact we've had on the planet is something like a sin and a tragedy.
Some people I think want to live in a world where we treat animal suffering as a significant and real issue such that it profoundly changes how we relate to non-human life. They see the eating of meat to be something like a sin and a tragedy.
Some people want to live in a world where the variety of human sexual and gender expression is not shamed or stigmatized and where people with "minority" expressions have equal social standing and rights. For those people, a world where some people can get married and not others, some people have job protection and not others, is like a sin and a tragedy.
People's actions look to me like honest efforts to solve the existential problem they feel in living in a world that is tragically far from the kind of world they hoped to live in. I think the feeling at the center for all of these people is a kind of profound disappointment (I mean, maybe it also manifests as anger, but I think grief is the thing underneath that).
In the context of that kind of profound existential disappointment, it makes sense to me that people might choose to protest (like abortion) or opt out -- by not eating meat, not getting married, or not having children.
It seems completely understandable to me that people might pause at whether to bring children into a world that they have profound misgivings about. Not so different from a person who doesn't want to have kids because of their own lineage of ill health and fear that they will pass that kind of suffering onto their children.
I'm not saying any of this is "right" in any objective sense. I'm just saying it seems possible to me that people would sincerely hold these views, not for convenience or cynically or for merely performative reasons.
This is where I think Scott's piece both stands up and falls down. I'm not sure a little bit of reasoning with the data is going to take someone who has profound misgivings about the world and its future and move them off of that spot. There are deeper world-views driving that disappointment. On the other hand, there are probably a few fence-sitters who are looking for reasons to have hope to be able to do the thing they want to do (have kids in this case). Information will do that for some people, but not everyone. An entirely worthy effort it seems to me though.
Are they sincere in their belief? I suppose it depends on how you define "sincere," and for that matter, how you define "belief." There's a reason I specified three times in my post that I don't think they're lying. But I don't think most pro-lifers believe that aborting a six week old fetus is murder in the same way they believe a serial killer stabbing people to death on the street is murder. And I don't think that climate activists believe the world is going to end in the same way they believe that an object dropped from a height will fall to the ground, or even in the same way they believe that a reckless driver might get into a car accident.
I would be interested in a conversation about this in the next Open thread that allows politics.
A general debate about abortion is pointless, but discussing what beliefs are consistent is significant.
I am Pro-Life for religious reasons, but I also continue to be interested in rationalism, and working through some of the motivated reasoning and struggles of belief.
I don’t believe the extreme position. I would save a child before an early term fetus, but I believe every fetus is a unique wonderful creation of God to be a particular person. I think it’s inconsistent to go from completely treating a certain age of fetus as worthless and then suddenly inviolable at birth.
It is not a productive question to ask. As Randall Collins realized, "sincerity is not an important question in politics, because sincere belief is a social product: successful interaction rituals make people into sincere believers." Also, accusing people of insincerity is a very powerful character attack (not surprising in a species of cooperative apes) and almost guarantees that people will become one's enemies and will not listen to what one has to say.
The flip side of this would be claiming that most people who favor (a right to) abortion are primarily motivated by a desire to have lots of purely recreational sex, because they need abortion on demand in order for that sex to be the zero-consequence fun that they want it to be.
And there's almost certainly a *correlation*, on both sides, because whether you hold an belief like "abortion is (murder/just fine)" does depend on how much that belief costs you. If you've already decided to abstain from all but marital sex and to have a few kids at some point, pro-life is a cheap position to take. If you plan to spend your twenties having lots of fun sex with many temporary partners, pro-life becomes a very expensive belief. That does matter.
But I think it's going too far to say "most people are simply hypocrites" on that basis, particularly if you're only saying it of the outgroup. Lots of people, on both sides, are sincere in their beliefs.
Also, I think you're a bit out of date on the extent to which the pro-life movement is anti-contraceptive or even anti-sex. The idea that contraception should be banned or even substantially restricted, while common in the 20th century, is an extremely fringe position even among Republicans in the 21st.
When you say fringe among Republicans in the 21st, you're speaking of voters? I believe there are plenty of states and school boards in Red states pushing for abstinence only education. The Catholic Church is still entirely anti contraception.
True enough. I still feel more comfortable agreeing that voters have shifted away from that position rather than that party leadership has. In most polls I have seen, the majority of Republicans favor some form of legal abortion. That is certainly not true of party leadership.
Certainly the same can be said about the other side(mine) of the aisle as well.
As noted, abstinence only education is not a restriction of any kind on contraception. You seem to be trying to simplify this into "Republicans sex-negative, Democrats sex-positive" and seeing Republican support of one "sex-negative" position as evidence that they support other, different "sex-negative" positions. It doesn't work that way.
And Catholics are not Republicans. I mean, some are, obviously, but as near as anyone can tell Catholic voters split their votes about 50/50 Democrat and Republican, and Catholic politicians are ~60% Democrats. The priesthood is encouraged to remain officially apolitical, so we don't know where they stand on political issues generally, but they're not going to be marching lockstep with the GOP. This is another place where I think you're trying to simplify things, this time to "Christian = Republican", and again it doesn't work that way.
If you want to know where the parties stand on birth control, you need to look specifically at where parties or partisan politicians stand on specifically birth control. At present, the biggest restriction on access to hormonal birth control is the need for an ob-gyn visit to get a prescription. As of 2014, the only politicians who would go on record as supporting an end to that restriction were Republicans. https://reason.com/2014/07/02/politicians-who-want-otc-birth-control/
Since then, there have been some Democrats who signed on - but also more and higher-profile Republicans, like Ted Cruz. When it comes to "maybe we should just let women buy birth control pills if they want to", Republicans really do seem to be more progressive than Democrats. Go figure.
"And Catholics are not Republicans. I mean, some are, obviously, but as near as anyone can tell Catholic voters split their votes about 50/50 Democrat and Republican, and Catholic politicians are ~60% Democrats. The priesthood is encouraged to remain officially apolitical, so we don't know where they stand on political issues generally, but they're not going to be marching lockstep with the GOP. This is another place where I think you're trying to simplify things, this time to "Christian = Republican", and again it doesn't work that way."
As someone who was raised Catholic, I'm aware of this! But as I said in my reply to Nancy above, regarding Catholics who really do adhere to a consistent life ethic on every issue: "They're the exception that proves the rule: It's striking just how *different* they are from mainstream anti-abortion activists; they really don't fit into American conservative culture at all, and in pretty much all regards other than abortion, conservatives would be extremely turned off by their views."
Agreed, but I was responding to your citing "The Catholic Church is still entirely anti contraception" as counterevidence to my claim that banning contraception is now a fringe position among Republicans. The Catholic Church as an institution isn't Republican; it's its own unique thing that doesn't really fit with Republicans or conservatives generally except for some cross-membership in the lay population (and American lay Catholics are not big on the whole no-contraception part; that's the apolitical church leadership).
Banning or substantially(*) restricting contraception is a fringe position among Republican politicians, among rank-and-file Republican voters and political conservatives, and among American lay Catholics. It is, I agree, the orthodox position among American Catholic priests, but so what?
* i.e. beyond "OK but you have to pay for yourself"
If you're simply saying that people who support abortion (or at least support it being legal) also tend to support sexual freedom, that's probably true. If you're saying that their belief about abortion not being equivalent to murder is insincere (implying that they *do* believe it's murder, but simply support it anyway out of convenience), or that they came to the "abortion is not murder" conclusion out of motivated reasoning, then I really don't agree. Most of them would very strongly oppose infanticide, for instance, even if that was also a convenient way to prevent unwanted children. Many of them even oppose late-term abortions except in cases where the mother's life is at risk or the child would die anyway, on the grounds that killing a fetus that close to being born *is* equivalent to murder, unlike killing a fetus that's only a few weeks old.
As for conservatives not wanting to literally prohibit contraception by law, that's narrowing the goalposts a bit. I think most cultural conservatives still socially discourage it, and in some cases seek to have schools (which are public institutions) officially discourage it. Whereas if they truly believed that abortion was murder, you'd expect them to *encourage* it, or at least not overtly rail against it. I know Scott's argument back in the day was "they're not consequentialists and wouldn't trade a major evil for a lesser one," but that never rang true to me. I'm fairly certainly most of these people make moral tradeoffs in plenty of other areas, and the fact that they won't on this particular one is telling to me.
So would you choose to save a toddler over an arbitrarily large group of cats in a burning building? And if you did, you monster! How can you value one member of one species over multiple members of a different species, just because that one entity is the same species as you? https://thehumaneleague.org/article/animal-rights
I'll be more convinced by pro-abortion activists that they truly do understand why pro-lifers think the way they do, when the pro-abortion crowd stop using stupid tricks.
This seems harsh. I am sure there are pro-choice people using stupid tricks. But there are also plenty of us who don't call you anti-woman or anti-freedom. Calling someone pro-abortion is inaccurate and divisive. Abortion is bad. I would guess that for the vast majority of women who make that choice, it is one of the hardest they will ever make.
I don't fault you for believing that the life is the important thing. Please don't fault me for believing that minimizing the suffering is the important thing and that the best person to judge that is the (potential) mother. We should each vote our conscience.
shoutyourabortion.com, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShoutYourAbortion would suggest that many people are definitely pro-abortion. Enough people to make a pretty loud campaign about it: "Tens of thousands of people worldwide have shared their abortion experiences online using the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion."
The "safe, legal, rare" thing has turned into "safe and legal" with many many people definitely being "pro-abortion" as a stance and not believing there is anything bad about abortion.
Yes, I would choose to save a toddler over even a very large number of cats, because while animal lives do have value to me, human lives have immeasurably more. In fact, that's about how I expect many anti-abortion activists really feel about fetuses deep down, similar to the way that animal rights activists feel about dogs and cats: they're living beings and shouldn't be killed for trivial reasons, but killing one isn't truly equivalent to killing an infant, child, or adult human being. (Yes, there are some people who truly and genuinely believe that killing a fetus is morally equivalent to shooting a random person on the street, just like there are some people who truly believe that killing a cat is morally equivalent to shooting a random person on the street. I just think those people are a very tiny minority among the general populace, and even a minority *among people who specifically claim to hold that position*, at least in terms of how their moral intuitions "cash out" in practice. "You shall know them by their works" and all that.)
For the record, I'm not "pro-abortion" any more than the other side is "anti-choice." I don't think abortion is good or even morally neutral, I think it's bad, just less bad than the results of banning it would be. We can probably agree that people shouldn't kill cats or fetuses trivially. But I *really* didn't want to get into an object-level debate about abortion, and only even brought it up to make a broader point by piggybacking on an example that Scott used. The point about choosing to save a toddler over a hundred fetuses isn't a "stupid trick," it's the entire crux of my argument, and the point I'm making applies to far more issues than just abortion. And I'd much rather discuss that broader point than push a "pro-abortion" agenda, or debate this particular issue at all.
First I'll say, I don't think it's a great revelation to say that the pro-life cause and traditional sexual morality are closely intertwined, as the pro-life cause is largely (though not quite entirely) a Christian cause.
But let me add: there is a difference between intellectually thinking something to be wrong, and viscerally feeling it to be wrong. And I'm sure everyone who thinks hard about moral problems runs into this, including the many utilitarians in this community. You can arrive logically at one thing being more wrong than another, and yet still find that your moral intuitions flare up in ways contrary to this. I think both the Christian and the utilitarian would agree that moral intuitions are a guide to good behavior, but an imperfect one, or why even have moral philosophy?
To the Christian, this isn't at all contrary to teaching. It can be argued that part of the Christian journey called sanctification is to come to hate sin as God hates sin, but with the recognition that man in this life can never fully come to understand sin's evil.
For my part, I concluded intellectually that abortion was evil long ago, but I didn't really come to grasp it viscerally until I held my firstborn in my arms. Would I be more bothered yet if infanticide of one's own children were legal and such things were happening all around me? Maybe, but I'm not so sure. This isn't really some sort of fantastical scenario, plenty of societies have normalized this sort of thing, including societies that lived alongside early Jews and Christians, who were also troubled by it and worked to end it.
I think it is implausible to claim that nobody is choosing not to have children because of climate change but quite likely that some of the people who say that is what they are doing are people who for other reasons don't want children.
I don't think you should be surprised, or probably even annoyed, that some of your commenters were a little brisk in their defense of child-bearing. You opened the door. I mean, you were careful to qualify and hedge at many points, so I have no specific criticism of any specific words -- but overall, the tone of the post was "I've thought about this deeply, and the critique that having kids is a selfish Gaia-raping immoral act is wrong, despise some not facially absurd concerns that it might be, and therefore I approve of your decision to do so."
Who is going to react to that well? I mean, try it with a slightly different focus: "I've thought about it a lot, and decided that those of you who are gay are not in fact perverted child-molesters, despise some not facially absurd concerns in certain quarters that you might be -- I emphasize that in my opinion those people are badly mis-informed -- and therefore I approve of your lifestyle."
I would guess that you would not touch that with an infinity-foot pole, and you would not be the slightest bit surprised if, were anyone to do so, that gay people would react with considerable hostility, as in "who the f*** do you think you are that I *need* your approval?"
You can't really expect to make a post in which you imply judgment of peoples' decisions on such an intimate subject, with respect to concerns which plenty of people -- you already know this -- believe are wildly overblown -- and *not* expect some hostile responses. No matter how much hedging you do in the details.
That doesn't of course mean the post shouldn't have been made, or made another way -- I'm not saying *that* at all. I'm just saying it seems unreasonable to then be surprised, or even disappointed, that it turned out some people were annoyed who felt you were judging them publically -- even if you eventually came down on their side. Some people were absolutely bound to react that way, and that was 100% forseeable.
More precisely, I think, criticized the claim by such people that the reason was concern with climate change. I don't remember anyone suggesting that the decision not to have children was always wrong.
exactly what I was going to say - a lot of people are actually too lazy to have kids and use climate change as an excuse :)
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ramparen
No one really does it because of climate change imo, that is just a neat excuse to avoid the responsibility and limitations that being a parent brings into your life
I know one person who chose to reproduce for state-of-the-world reasons. The fall of the Berlin wall gave her enough hope that she had her first and only child.
>I’m always surprised how willing people are to tear up the liberal contract of “I don’t question your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine”, especially when they’re not guaranteed to be on the winning side, and would completely freak out if the other side tried to create stigma against them.
Having lived for three decades in the US, I have seen no evidence of such a liberal contract actually being enforced at any point in that time.
That may be due to your parenthetical escape hatch, since it is trivial to argue that any behavior has some effect positive or negative on third parties. That was the logic of Wickard v. Filburn after all; to grow crops on your own property for personal consumption is to participate in interstate commerce. Really though, I just don't see any evidence that anyone beyond a handful of principled yet powerless libertarians ever took the idea of "live and let live" seriously.
So I'm not particularly worried about rightists violating this supposed principle which leftists, centrists, etc. likewise routinely violate.
>Refugees seem to be something we take zero chances with, something where we’re heavily biased towards rejecting them at the slightest sign that maybe someone thinks something might possibly be affecting vague unmeasurable qualities.
Can we trade realities? Between this and the liberal contract, I really would prefer to live in your world than mine.
Well, as I pointed out in the same thread, I don't disagree that "refusing to have kids because of climate change are some of the most intelligent and ethical people around."
Certainly higher IQ and more conscientious than average, though also probably more conformist - prone to adopting whichever irrational, cult-like beliefs happen to predominate in given society. And yes, as it happens in this scenario, literally maladaptive (at least from the POV of reproductive fitness). Further irony being that the effects of AGW are ambiguous - in fact, quite possibly outright positive, in the case of the IPCC's likeliest mid-range 2-3C scenario - and that in any case the problem can be solved for very cheap (relative to carbon taxes, renewables, etc.) with geoengineering should it really, really become necessary.
I'll go further and say that if there's a specific "future castastrophe" related reason to avoid children (and perhaps put a bullet in your head ASAP just to be on the safe side) it's this: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
The intersection of pervasive brain scanning techs + cheap mind emulation + human sadism --> Daemon Worlds of Warhammer 40K made real is a genuinely frightening prospect. I would go so far as to say that anti-natalism borne of these considerations and related ones like peeved basilisks is vastly *less* irrational than from AGW (note - it is still irrational, given how speculative and theoretical it is, just much less so). Hilariously, though, these at least minimally plausible concerns are the exclusive preserve of a few Internet eccentrics who've encountered Hanson and Egan, whereas AGW-related anti-natalism is a significant social trend.
When I gave a talk at Google on my _Future Imperfect_, I started by listing three different technologies that could wipe out the human race with a century — none involving climate change or nuclear warfare.
Incidentally, I certainly agree with you on nuclear warfare as well. ~1% chance of ~100 million deaths over a century isn't optimal, but certainly not an X Risk, even if modestly more deserving of concern than AGW.
Oh, ugh, the WA carbon tax debacle... *wry grin* For people who may go TLDR, this Vox piece is a decent description of what happened in 2016 (it's a bit biased - actually, the initiative proposer has outright said that the author was dishonest - but it's easy to read between the lines):
And for anyone who wants a summary and some links, and who doesn't mind a bit of my frustration leaking out...
In 2016 (technically, several years before, given the length of the initiative process), a group headed by economist Yoram Bauman proposed initiative 732, a simple, revenue-neutral carbon tax that slowly ramped up over time, and was coupled with progressive tax reductions to make the initiative overall revenue-neutral. The group, Carbon WA, figured that being revenue-neutral and cutting other taxes would get support from the right, and that helping the environment would get support from the left. But the organizers found out that there was a left-wing group, the Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy, that had been assembling a large coalition in favor of a nebulous future proposal, by promising specific perks and a voice in whatever eventually resulted. To be diplomatic, Bauman is not the most diplomatic person around, and communication between the two groups soured. Large parts of the left opposed the initiative, and it ultimately failed. Meanwhile, the Alliance still hadn't gotten anything together.
Then in 2017, Governor Inslee and some Democratic legislators tried to pass a carbon tax in SB 6203, but it never made it out of committee. I'm not sure what the problem was there. There's speculation about too many carve-outs for interest groups, but my cynical guess is that once legislators heard that the Alliance had finally put together the upcoming Initiative 1631, they didn't want to compete against it, having seen what happened last time. (Even though they added a provision saying that if the initiative passed, the bill would be void.)
Then in 2018, the Alliance brought forth Initiative 1631. This time they called it a "carbon fee", but I don't know whether that actually changed anything. (In WA, our right wing tends to be less conservative and more libertarian, and even setting aside all the people intelligent enough to realize that it was just a rebranded tax, I have a suspicion that the word "fee" might get a bad reaction in and of itself.) More of the left was on board with it, but not enough, and it had much more right-wing opposition, so it failed too.
SB 5126 (the "Washington Climate Commitment Act") has passed the Senate, but there's still some wrangling going on, so it might not go into effect. As a compromise, the bill was conditional on a gas tax increase, but the governor line-item vetoed that condition, but a court invalidated the veto, and the WA state supreme court is pondering. Also, the governor vetoed a line requiring tribal consent for some stuff, which has seriously annoyed our tribes (From a Quinault leader: "After using and exploiting Tribal Nation's political capital to pass his climate bill, Jay Inslee made the cowardly decision on the day of the bill's signing to ambush Tribal leaders by suddenly vetoing all Tribal consultation requirements and all protections for Native American sacred sites and burial grounds that his office and the State Legislature had negotiated as a condition of the bill's passage. Jay Inslee will be mercilessly judged by history long after Indigenous Peoples triumph over his petty veto and continue to lead the world’s fight against climate change. The only thing I will ever agree with Donald Trump about is that Jay Inslee is a snake"), so it's not a simple partisan thing. Overall, the bill is a cap-and-trade approach (rebranded as "cap-and-invest") with a bunch of carve-outs for special interest groups, and a requirement that a significant chunk of the revenue be more-or-less directed by a governor-appointed committee. My rough guess is that it's one of those "pass it now, figure out what it means later" deals, where politicians run up against a deadline and find a way to postpone the rest of their wrangling until after the deadline.
And on the other hand, there's SB 5373 ("Washington STRONG"), which is another carbon tax bill. It hasn't been voted on yet, and might be dead in the water. It seems to have fewer carve-outs and special exceptions (as one would expect from a carbon tax), but the revenue is heavily ear-marked for pet causes. Plus, there's this strange scheme where it seems like the legislature gets to issue bonds based on future expected revenue from this specific tax, and then revenue from the tax is first devoted to paying down the bonds. I don't understand this, and I suspect it's a fancy way to get around some form of borrowing limit, or take advantage of "green bond" tax status, but I really have no idea.
It feels pretty overconfident to say that drought is not increasing globally (also a little strange to talk only about the fourth and fifth IPCC reports when they've recently released the sixth). You can see which regions are likely to have increased drought in the summary of the sixth report (p13) - drought is increasing overall, and doesn't seem to be decreasing anywhere (p35). My guess is that much of that comment was cherry-picked.
Thanks for writing this article Scott, this is certainly an issue that a lot of my friends are going through and it's good to hear your thoughts.
I've now looked at the sixth, in particular the regional map on drought. Out of about 45 regions, there are only two where it shows both moderate confidence of increased drought and moderate confidence that it is due to human contribution. There are ten more where they have moderate confidence that drought has increased, low confidence due to limited agreement that it is due to humans. One with moderate confidence in decreasing drought, low confidence of human contribution. Twenty-eight regions with "low agreement on the type of change" and four with "limited data or literature."
It's true that one of the two is Western North America, where many of us live.
Yeah, and that's good (although the IPCC reads as perpetually underconfident to me) but it still feels cherry-picky that you chose to comment so extensively on drought, but left out the increases in virtually every other natural disaster.
Just to add that hurricanes displace by far the most people out of the three disasters you could've commented on (hurricanes, wildfires and floods (oh my!)) - hurricanes are possibly increasing, but less so than droughts. Floods are certainly increasing and displace similar numbers of people to hurricanes.
Hurricanes — tropical cyclones (TC) in the IPCC terminology — are interesting. The proportion that are strong is projected to go up, which sounds bad, until you discover that:
"Most, but not all, high-resolution global simulations project significant reductions in the total number of TCs, with the bulk of the reduction at the weaker end of the intensity spectrum as the climate warms (Knutson et al., 2020).
Most TC-permitting model simulations (10-60 km or finer grid spacing) are consistent in their projection of increases in the proportion of intense TCs (Category 4-5), as well as an increase in the intensity of the strongest TCs defined by maximum wind speed or central pressure fall (Murakami et al., 2012; Tsuboki et al., 2015; Wehner et al., 2018a; Knutson et al., 2020). The general reduction in the total number of TCs, which is concentrated in storms weaker than or equal to Category 1, contributes to this increase. The models are somewhat less consistent in projecting an increase in the frequency of Category 4-5 TCs"
(From Chapter 11 of the sixth IPCC report)
In other words, the number of weak hurricanes is projected to go down, the ratio of strong to weak hurricanes to go up. It is unclear whether the number of strong hurricanes goes up or down, but the worst are expected to get a little worse.
Looking at the drought stuff more carefully, there is a serious problem. The IPCC defines drought in terms of soil moisture but what matters to us is the effect on plants. As the IPCC mentions in another part of the report, increasing CO2 concentration reduces the amount of water needed by plants. If soil moisture goes down by 10% but water needed by plants goes down by 20% that's an increase in drought by their definition, a decrease in terms of what matters to us.
They didn't calculate it that way, may not have had the necessary data. But the report says that, with great confidence, total global vegetation has increased over the past two or three decades. That suggests that, on average, drought defined by the effect on plants has decreased, the opposite of the pattern they found by their definition.
Are you saying that you stand by your previous focus on drought at the expense of the most impactful natural disasters? And before I go for a deep dive into the literature on this topic - have you checked whether the report's authors have already made that connection and adjusted for it?
With a four thousand page report, it is hard to be certain, but the discussion of drought is pretty explicit about what it is based on and CO2 fertilization is never mentioned. Nor is observed plant growth. It's basically measures of soil moisture.
I don't think changes in drought are more important than other changes, good and bad. It was just a point where I thought it was clear that what the IPCC was doing was wrong, measuring the wrong thing and so getting what was probably the wrong conclusions.
So, climate change is going to have many effects, mostly negative but some of them positive. If you list all the positive ones like in your comment, of course you're going to persuade a bunch of people that "the direct effects on world GDP will be low." On the other hand, you're doing exactly what alarmists do, but in the opposite direction. I don't particularly want to read a list of all the positives or a list of all the negatives out of context and without a justification for why we should care about each one.
CO2 fertilization isn't talked about in the WGI report because that report is about what is causing climate change and how it works. CO2 fertilization, along with all other impacts of climate change, are covered in the WGII reports https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/
I don't agree with your "mostly negative but some of them positive." The fact that positive effects are rarely mentioned either in the public discussion or the IPCC summary reports and played down in the body of the reports explains why so many people take that for granted.
You might try to list positive effects, and see if I can point out important ones you are missing.
The report is also about the consequences of climate change. Each time they talk about more hot weather in one area or another they comment on the negative effects. They mention less cold weather but spend much less print on it, and don't generally mention the positive effects for humans. In order to discover that coldest temperatures are going up faster than hottest temperatures you have to go through the report, extract the information from different places, and compare.
About fifty years ago, when population growth occupied the same niche that climate change does now as the looming catastrophe that something big had to be done about it soon, I tried to calculate the sum of positive and negative effects on others from having one more child and concluded that the size of both was too uncertain to sign the sum, published it as a paper from the Population Council. Population in poor countries continued to grow, poverty went sharply down instead of sharply up, calories per capita in poor countries trended up instead of down.
That is one of the reasons I am skeptical of the latest looming catastrophe orthodoxy.
> I think society should take a chill pill and people should have however many kids they want.
Would be nice but has it ever happened? "Society" (mostly one's peer circle, relatives and random busybodies, for non-famous people) always tries to prescribe something, whether is it what to wear, how many kids to have, what car to drive or stuff like that. There's no sign it's going to stop anytime soon.
"Reagan won the 1984 election by 525 to 13 (and AFAICT MVT should be aiming at the median electoral vote in an electoral system)."
i think the MVT is better understood as targeting not the median EC vote, but the *median voter in the state that casts the median EC vote* (that is, the median voter of the tipping point state). Mondale got only 40% in Michigan, which is terrible, but is hardly the 2% outcome that would repudiate the MVT.
In light of the current energy crunch I'd like to plug the preferability of a carbon tax to things like Germany's top down politically directed switch to wind and solar. A properly assessed carbon tax would not have had the "diving headfirst into a half full green energy pool" effect that we are witnessing with various attempts to subsidize green energy and block fossils but rather incrementally affect the total energy system in an efficient way. Climate economists estimate a global carbon tax to be twice as effective as policies that focus on hard caps and short term goals in the way the Paris treaty was designed
On the "high concern" side I think carbon taxes at this stage are likely to seem like too little. In fact the main effect comes as the century progresses, the tax rises, and technology meets the economic effect of the tax. Short term it appears that direct investment into transformative technology rather than subsidies are a better "do something big now" type of policy. I'd like to see a neutral market designed pay out green tech according to their actual use and effect in the economy as well as more typical top down grants that may be prone to funding catchy ideas rather than practical ones
On the "skeptical" side I think it is time to adopt carbon taxes as well as direct innovation investment. Green policies are eventually going to happen and if we don't get ahead of them with a carbon tax they will cost double. I know a wrinkle is that carbon taxes have proven to be not sustainably revenue neutral as in British Columbia. However I would say I have the answer to that: pass a carbon tax with the stipulation that a neutral agency evaluates it yearly for neutrality and if it fails it is subjected to a vote requiring a 2/3rds majority to keep it. If the tax is voted down it is still retained but suspended for a year to prevent a non-neutral replacement. Rather than fight carbon taxes, fight for a revenue neutral carbon tax - be the guy who is doing the smart and popular thing. It doesn't really matter how skeptical you are - at the level of carbon tax I've heard proposed by climate economists it's reasonable ignoring any social cost of carbon and only considering air pollution costs to the economy and society
For those of you who are interested in other perspectives about Climate Change and why we should not be hysterical, I would like to recommend the following books. Each of the authors is well informed in the premises, not of them disputes that the Climate is changing or that change is caused by human activities, but each of the argues that problems can be solved by strategies that will do far less damage than shutting down industrial civilization, and which could be more helpful to the billions of really poor people all over the world.
"Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters" by Steven E. Koonin April 27, 2021
I'm not sure that "I'm not going to have children because I am guessing that the world will be worse" is rational. The world could *always* be worse in ways you could not anticipate or in anticipated events whose timing we cannot predict. E.g. meteorite strike. E.g. accidental nuclear bomb release. E.g. Yellowstone volcano eruption. E.g. Tsunami hitting NYC because a large part of Africa falls into the sea.
"I’m always surprised how willing people are to tear up the liberal contract of 'I don’t question your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine'"
would have worked better without the parenthetical. I know what you're getting at, and on "technically correct is the best kind of correct" grounds, your version is better. But in terms of communicating in colloquial English with non-rationalists, you've just given every wannabe busybody license to question everybody else's life choices - all they have to do is show the bare existence of some externality, and they "win". They will feel they have permission to ignore you, or even cite you as supporting their position, and they will. And people on both sides of every debate have gotten really good at this.
The vast majority of externalities are small enough to be overwhelmed by the direct effects on the participants. The majority of externalities where that isn't the case, are so obvious that they're already baked into the debate, accepted by both sides, and if you omit them and someone else brings them up are trivially dismissed with "well obviously we didn't mean *that*".
If you omit the externality clause, you'll still be right >95% of the time. If you want to do better, you'll want to break out the externality clause, give it a sentence of its own, and expand it to state that the externality needs to be one of the unusually large ones, and that the burden of proof is on the person claiming the externality. Otherwise, instead of persuading anyone of the value of the liberal contract, you've merely sent them on a trivial hunt for the token externality they need to defect.
"The people refusing to have kids because of climate change are some of the most intelligent and ethical people around. "
Or, that is what they want you to think. I think they are typical of their generation. High on self esteem. Ignorant of history, philosophy, religion, and the ways of the world. Their "ethics" is all sentiment and solipsism. They have neither the tools nor the practice of reasoning through ethical issues and understanding their dimensions. Nor, of reaching conclusions about those issues and being able to hold considered judgements that they can articulate to others.
"This is my assessment from knowing some of them, plus my inference from all the articles about them which usually mentions how they went to top colleges."
ROTFLMAO. Really? Getting into the top colleges means only that your parents are rich, your high school is one of the magic circle, and that you play a sport that is only played by rich people at fancy private schools like lacrosse or rowing. Granted, they are not complete dummies, but they are the ordinarily bright children of the upper classes (IQs >1 & <3 σ) . The truly brilliant, do not thrive in American high schools. They are bored witless by the pablum feed to the students, won't play the game of being good team members, and won't get the administration backing for the college admissions game.
"And by definition, they’re people who really care about helping others and are willing to make major sacrifices to do so."
Don't make me gag. They care about their status in their in group and wouldn't dream of sacrificing any of that. They will join the peace corps and have interesting adventures overseas, but they will always have mummy & daddy to fall back on. There are St. Francises among them. A big sacrifice will be riding a $3,00 bicycle instead of driving a car.
We won't miss them or their genes when they are gone. Childless, i hope.
I think you're extremely wrong about this. Deciding not to have kids is a huge, difficult choice - really the polar opposite of signalling. Also you're making a string of generalizations rather than a coherent argument there.
What would change your mind on that? Here are some possibilities that you should consider: (1) you've encountered a biased sample of those people, (2) you have encountered too small a sample size, (3) your calculation is flawed (or... maybe you just haven't done one?), (4) you've overestimated how easy ethics is and are holding a special group to a high standard (for example I'd love to hear one or two groups that you think have reasonable ethical goals and methods)
By the way - just to make it very clear, your comment reads as unnecessarily aggressive and judgemental. I'm sure you had the time of your life writing it, but if you actually want to be productive and persuade people that you're right, I suggest you change the way you engage online.
It is like any thing else. The facts change, my opinion changes. E.g. I have given up on free trade with China.
"...you should consider: (1) ... biased sample of those people, (2) ... too small a sample size, (3) your calculation is flawed ..."
I am not running a social science research project. The comment I was responding to had no research apparatus either.
Although, I will say, that I have evidence on the smarts of the grads of "top colleges'. I hired a bunch of them. Mostly they were just ordinary. The best hires I ever had were from schools like Central Michigan and U Toledo.
"you've overestimated how easy ethics is and are holding a special group to a high standard"
I think I expressly said that ethics is very difficult. Far too difficult for the uneducated mass of top college students.
"for example I'd love to hear one or two groups that you think have reasonable ethical goals and methods"
Group?
Don't be silly. "Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you." The Prince Ch. 17. "the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth" Gen 8:21.
My mother's test was, would they hide you in the basement? I can only think of one or two close friends who would pass that test.
"your comment reads as unnecessarily aggressive and judgemental."
I will accept judgemental. I will own it. I don't think it was aggressive. I didn't suggest anything violent, or even unpleasant.
"if you actually want to be productive and persuade people that you're right, I suggest you change the way you engage online."
You may not be running a social science research project, but if you haven't done some due diligence and self-reflection about your experiences and what conclusions you can draw from them, others may not particularly value your input.
It feels quite "old man yells at cloud" to write a comment complaining about a particular group that you believe are bad at reasoning and acting ethically, when you think that everybody is bad at reasoning and acting ethically. It'd be easier to forget about the smaller group and get to the heart of your idea which seems that to be that everybody sucks.
This doesn't seem to be kind, necessary, or even true. I'd venture so far as to suggest that these hypothetical people may not be alone in their signaling.
It is, but I do not take it the same as most (I think). I see it more as a warning against using scare, guilt or global altruist rhetoric when pushing for policies or change in behavior, either when you try to support your prefered policies/behavior, or are among those who need to be convinced: Those problems are usually picked for supporting a desired goal (policy, new behavior), not the other way around (trying to find the best means to solve a problem)...
So I would say: Beware of Big Speech about altruistic goal, especially when those goals are quite ill defined, inherently difficult to measure and abstract/far in the future/very global (usually a combination of those), while the means to reach the goal are local, now and very concrete. This quack like scam, walk like scam, looks like scam...Maybe it's not a scam, but it's worth triple-checking...
One good way is to propose alternative mean that should help in the problem but is clearly from the opposite political spectrum compared to the set of means proposed initially. Reaction to this new mean tells you a lot....Maybe this can even tell something on Scott initial piece: not having children could be seen as a not-often-proposed (or maybe extreme) solution to GW. Maybe the reaction to this tells far more about how seriously you should consider GW than anything else :-)
True, but for all we know he's a terrible father. The only thing I know about his parenting is that he christened his last child with a gimmick. Considering how much time he seems to spend on work, it's hard for me to imagine he has much time left over for raising kids.
"I’m always surprised how willing people are to tear up the liberal contract of “I don’t question your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine”, especially when they’re not guaranteed to be on the winning side, and would completely freak out if the other side tried to create stigma against them."
I want to query this a bit more.
So I was having a conversation the other day with some people who were saying they never want to have children, and I was like "oh really, why?" and got quite a big reaction accusing me of sticking my nose into their business. But I didn't get it. Because we'd been talking about them wanting to do academia rather than go into industry and I'd asked "why?"; living in the city rather than the country "oh really, that's interesting, why?"; and I dunno -- outside of this conversation I feel you can generally ask people in this neutral way about things, but asking why they weren't having children was offensive.
I wondered if they thought I was dog whistling "you're wrong, how dare you?"; but even so.
I mean, this liberal contract you're talking about is alien to me? Unless "question" is a euphemism for "be judgmental and intolerant to your face about"? But were people really doing that in the comments last time? if not, and you really do just mean "question" or "discuss" then -- c'mon, you can't have thought it was obviously bad behaviour when you wrote the original blog post questioning people's behaviour? Or maybe questioning the behaviour of a cohort is different to questioning individuals?
I thought questioning people about their ideas is completely normal for this blog. And the difference is in the sensitivity around this particular issue, because it is so important and so irreversible and so life determining.
In terms of parental pressure, parents I know are actually more sensitive around this than they are around, say, piercings, tattoos, haircuts, dressing well, choice of partners, and so on.
Well, having children is the only way that all human societies preserve themselves, so it's unsurprising that the relationship between this simple fact and individual choices it's comprised of is more sensitive than most. What adds spiciness to this situation nowadays is, I think, that liberalism is currently ascendant in the culture war, and "children are optional" stance is clearly a part of its package, which is in tension with one of the more popular conservative positions of "having children is a sacred duty".
Sure, if we're being meticulous, conservative positions do carve out some exceptions for social roles which contribute to society in other ways. Still, if you presume to claim that such an exception applies to you, the onus implicitly is on you to prove it, which probably is the reason OP's question makes some people instinctively defensive.
It's not only preservation, it's competition, a traditional way to attack other groups (or, defend against possible exterior threats if you want to be PC): increase your relative demographic weight by promoting a higher natality that your competitors. This is classical for authoritarian regimes, ideologies, religions, hell it's Darwinism 101. And this is nasty, because how the higher natality would affect happiness or standard of living of your group is completely irrelevant.
This was, to me at least, the more controversial of Scott's rebuttals by far, and I am disappointed not to see much discussion around that in this highlight...
I'd go further. I've never thought that liberalism/libertarianism was about not questioning other people's (non-externality-having) life choices. (I assume by 'questioning', Scott meant questioning in a critical way, not just asking why.) It's about not coercing other people into particular choices, and not punishing them for their choices.
Criticizing, judging, questioning, advising are fair game. Advising others in their own interest (as perceived by you) especially so. They may be right or wrong in any particular case, but they have little to do with liberalism.
Are you perhaps non-American? The longer I've lived in the U.S., the more I notice that many Americans, contrary to their "straight-shooting" image, are surprisingly indirect in their communication and sensitive in their reception of said communication compared to many Western Europeans (the other group I have the most experience with.) What might be taken as a simple question in France (especially if it's "Why?") is often assumed to have subtext in the U.S. And specifically negative subtext--a side-effect, it seems to me, of middle-class Americans' wariness of speaking negatively in general. (Outside of very specific contexts, like bashing what everyone in the room agrees is an outgroup deserving to be bashed, etc. Gotta let off steam?) Everyone knows negativity exists, everyone knows their entire acquaintance doesn't unequivocally love everything they do, so if people don't air even a handful of their negative thoughts, others watch under the surface of their words for them. Which definitely leads to some misunderstandings.
I suppose a key factor that hasn't been fully discussed is how much instability in poorer countries can grow without it spilling over to richer countries. Because rich countries are not necessarily all that well insulated from the rest of the world... I remember seeing some arguments that the original trigger for the mess in Syria was due to agricultural issues caused by climate variations. What if these sorts of conflicts become an order of a few times more likely - do we have an idea of how much of that would be possible without destabilising rich countries too?
Even if you only consider the water use of alfalfa, it is a mistake to say that it takes a lot of water. It is flexible in its water use, the number of harvests per year easily changed. Since the supply of water in California changes a lot from year to year, we need something about the consumption to change, too. Alfalfa is a great choice for making use of the excess water in the wet years. I'm not sure that's how it's actually used, though.
<i>The people refusing to have kids because of climate change are some of the most intelligent and ethical people around. This is my assessment from knowing some of them, plus my inference from all the articles about them which usually mentions how they went to top colleges. And by definition, they’re people who really care about helping others and are willing to make major sacrifices to do so. These are exactly the sort of people whose genes I want in the next generation. </i>
Ok, so these are the people who 1) went to top colleges 2) care a lot about helping others - but the others in this case are pretty abstract people who do not exist yet and will presumably suffer terribly in 2100 3) rely on most hysterical media rather than e.g. on IPCC for answers to existential questions. Your interpetation is that these people are intelligent and ethical. Two other possible interpetations are that A) we need to review or prior on the ability of top colleges or, at least, certain programs at top colleges to teach basic critical thinking and working with simple sources or that B) these people in question are so dumb that they are unable of critical thinking or reading even after graduating from a top college.
By the way, note a peculiar king of empathy that these people have - they are driven by empathy towards abstract future people and somehow rather less empathy towards actual living people, so they decide against having children out of empathy towards yet non-existant denizens of 2100 who are expected by IPCC to suffer from GDP per capita of 3.9x current US levels rather than 4x projected without the warming. The plight of e.g. current real children in Haiti (GDP per capita 0.01x US) does not inspire them as much. People from top colleges driven by this kind of future-oriented empathy were quite prominent historically in many countries. These are the kind of people who led Khmer Rouge, or Chinese Cultural Revolution, or Russian Revolution in 1920s. I do not know about the role of genes here, but I doubt you will really enjoy life in a society run by this kind of people.
"The plight of current real children in Haiti does not inspire them as much" - If you are developing an interest in the fine art of imagining a guy, tricking yourself into believing that guy exists, and getting mad about it, might I suggest looking into Twitter? It is the traditional and probably still the best place for practicing that art, and you will encounter many kindred souls there.
Meanwhile, if you wish to share an argument for believing that the best thing graduates of top US colleges can do for the children currently living in Haiti is to produce more children of their own, I'm sure people around here would be delighted to give it due consideration.
I am not sure I can make such an argument as this is not the statement I am making. We are discussing people who are strong believers in "climate emergency", and especially people making existential choices based on these beliefs. Most of these people are not making equally harsh existential choices to help the current inhabitants of e.g. Haiti. By "equally hard" I mean the choices with a similar impact to having children, i.e. serious lifestyle changes and expenses of 30%+ of income. I think such a group of people exists because I know some of them. What is your evidence that they do not exist? Perhaps some links to Twitter?
If you're taking about specific people you know personally, then fair enough. If you have ever discussed the Khmer Rouge analogy with these people, what was their response?
Thought on the Median Voter Theorem: might recent trends be simply a generalisation of the MVT where politicians are pitching not to individual voters but to "blocks" of aggregated voters who will tend to vote similarly?
In my head I'm specifically thinking of some old decision theory work (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/089533004773563458) where they try to explain the apparent paradox of why people don't "defect" more in elections by having people vote in such "blocks". The basic idea seems to fit well with this intuition that it's best to galvanise particular key groups than to be acceptable to the median voter, but presumably the politicians pulling this off will still need to aim for some generalised median voter in these blocks. (Although I suppose in 2-party races there will be more slack to deviate from this new median than in the classic MVT.)
There are too many people, that’s why I am all for not having children. I contribute to Population Connection, formerly ZPG. Current growth is not sustainable, imho.
Something worth addressing is that most of the expected value of mitigating climate change is in the right tail of outcomes, not the median. Somewhere way out there on the right tail where the boreal forests burn off, the permafrost fills with methane ponds, and temperatures go up 6C, is a end-permian-extinction-like event that kills 95% of life on earth. Reducing the probability of such an event, and every bit of marginal probability on the disastrous outcomes in between, is worth a lot more than preventing small amounts of sea level rise and optimal growing areas shifting north.
We know such events are common in geologic history under conditions similar to the ones we are creating, and even if your faith in our ability to model climate is low (or especially if) your priors should come from that.
The PETM was an estimated increase of more than 6°C. Some deep ocean organisms (formanifera) went extinct, but land animals, including mammals, did fine.
Which is more likely, the sort of extreme you describe or that global warming is what is holding off the glaciation due to end the current interglacial, which has been running long enough so it might be due to end? Both are unlikely, but a glaciation would have larger negative effects than any plausible extreme of warming. Half a mile of ice over the present locations of London and Chicago and every port in the world high and dry, as sea level drop by several hundred feet.
As best I can tell, Nordhaus tries to include the very low probability high cost results of climate change in his calculations of expected cost but ignores low probability, high cost results of preventing it, of which that is the obvious example.
> First, the MVT [Median Voter Theory] assumes that both parties will end up as indistinguishable centrists, but this clearly hasn’t happened, probably because of the primary process. Probably it’s trivial to extend MVT into a world where this happens, but it’s a trivial thing I haven’t done and am not completely sure about.
I think MVT is missing a concept that moving to the center can cause you to lose voters from the your more extreme edge. My understanding of MVT is that it assumes this doesn't happen. I think acknowledging this may be enough to prevent the two parties from becoming indistinguishably centrist. If you move too far center, you start losing your fringe.
Regarding Nordhaus, I read a pretty hefty critic a while back
https://www.patreon.com/posts/economic-of-ipcc-46104505 which highlighted some big problems with his methodology. It seems like Nordhaus systematically underestimated which sectors of the economy will be affected and takes a very liberal approach when it comes to the effect and likelihood of tipping points. For example, "Using Nordhaus's sanguine prediction of a mere 7.9% reduction in global income from a 6°C increase (Nordhaus, 2018b, p. 345) as a reference point, three of the most obvious threats of a 6°C warmer world are the impact of these temperatures on human physiology, on the survival of other animals, and on the structure of the Earth's atmospheric circulation systems."
Reading your blog it seems like you show that his findings don't match his conclusion. Both criticism highlight fundamentally different issues with his work. Steve Keen shows that the data/model Nordhaus constructs/uses is flawed and you show that the model does not support his conclusion. So your conclusion seems to fall apart if the numbers Nordhaus calculates for costs and damages are way too small.
Yes. But one of my conclusions is that he is trying to make the numbers look as large as he can, subject to not saying things he believes are not true.
That's also my view of the IPCC, after reading a good deal of the latest report. When it is clear that something that makes climate change look more threatening isn't true, they say so. They repeatedly combine more heat waves and fewer cold waves in their discussion of the effect on temperature extremes. But when it comes down to details, they give them for the heat waves and somehow forget about the cold waves.
"Maybe kids are such a big choice that it’s inevitable that some of the cost would bleed into your other projects, and I do think that’s a risk, but I also know cases where they don’t. Elon Musk has seven kids, and he’s no slacker."
My theory/experience is that the first kid consumes 90% of your free time, and the second kid consumes 90% of your remaining free time (additional children just cannibalize the time spent on the first two because you have nothing left to give). Maintaining 10% of your life for charity or anything else is incredibly difficult once you have children (in the early years, at least).
Having money, especially billions of dollars, can go a long way toward freeing up that time (and a lot of other time spent doing life logistics), so Musk is definitely an outlier. A partner/relative who doesn't work is similarly effective.
I find children to be all-consuming, though that may relate to how I prioritize my time. I guess I *could* spend 10% of my time on charity at the expense of my children and they wouldn't be taken away from me or anything. So it might be more accurate to say that children introduce a high priority item to one's life that would be happy to consume all of your time, making it difficult to prioritize charity (or friendships, or personal time, etc.) given cultural norms and biology that say that nothing is more important than taking care of them.
>Having money, especially billions of dollars, can go a long way toward freeing up that time (and a lot of other time spent doing life logistics), so Musk is definitely an outlier. A partner/relative who doesn't work is similarly effective.
Note that Elon Musk had his first child before he made his first billion, and the same year he founded SpaceX. I'm certain his sub-billion money helped. but having a wife who was willing to be a stay-at-home mother probably helped more.
I think people who can choose whether or not to have children usually base their decision on their level of optimism about the future. Early Christians avoided having children because they felt that this world was doomed and that they should focus on the next. People in the Soviet Union avoided having children in its later years because they didn't feel optimistic about the country their children would live in. The US birth rate plummeted during the Great Depression when the world felt like it was falling apart in the US and overseas, but it soared after World War II when it appeared that there was a bright future ahead.
Global climate change is one reason to be pessimistic about the future. No one seems to be willing to make the big changes necessary to mitigate it, and it seems that even the changes necessary for surviving it will be crisis based and minimal. If we had just passed some major landmark, like moving to 75% renewable energy and carbon dioxide levels had stopped rising, people would be more optimistic. We might even see a baby boom as we did after World War II.
Some people will make the choice solely based on the prospects for their children. If you are in a position where you are confident that you can buy your children's way out of the impact of global warming, you will ignore the issue. Others will worry that their children might not be able to buy their way out or might be concerned about the societal cost of a world where most people will suffer from global warming even if their children might have a good chance of avoiding its effects.
Of course, a lot of people just don't want to have children and a lot of people refuse to believe them. Maybe they just say "global warming" just to get those people to shut up.
>it’s hard to get something that is “like a carbon tax but appeals to 6% more voters”?
How about stealing an idea from the behavioral economists' "save more later" approach to increasing 401k contributions: pass a single bill that pre-commits us to gradually phasing in a carbon tax over the next 20 years.
No such bill is possible. The United States Constitution does not allow for a law that prevents the government in the future from passing exactly the opposite law. A treaty could in theory do it; in practice the United States is really good at ignoring or renouncing treaties it doesn't care about and intimidating lesser nations to go along with it. A Constitutional amendment *might* do it, but see Prohibition for what happens to amendments whose implementation turns out to be massively unpopular.
You'd need a filibuster proof majority to undo the bill, and once it's passed there will be some status quo bias working in its favor. I think it could work.
> “I don’t question your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine”
Although parenthood and non-parenthood both have significant externalities. In the first two decades, non-parents have time and can build wealth which parents spend on their children. A further few decades later, the childless will need the same amount of elder care as any other old person, but will have produced less future labor for its provision. There is also the issue of how children change the communities and culture they are in: e.g. property tax rates to pay for schools.
A heterosexual couple waiting for all kinds marriages to be legalized before marrying is like saying tha I wont eat until everyone in my city/country/world has food to eat. It's stupid.
If that's true, I challenge those people to make this vow not to eat until the world is fed! No one will do that since it's effect is immediate, while you can get away with other kinds of statements.
Emissions are already reducing in the developed world. If you really oppose climate change, you should be advocating strikes against coal power plants and car factories in China and India where nearly all of the world's emissions growth will come from as well as all of their emissions. This belief that the key to stopping climate change is somehow in the West is an absurd proposition.
"Preventing global warming will never seem cost-effective because the global economy just doesn’t place a very high value on the lives of Ethiopian subsistence farmers. But we can choose place a high value on their lives, and I think if we do that then preventing global warming seems worth it in expectation."
What is instead we spent that money on pulling Ethiopia out of poverty? One important step in this process would be improving their energy infrastructure - I.e. increasing their fossil fuel use. But climate activists obviously oppose this. IMO they are effectively trying to kill millions in the third world by keeping them pre industrial.
● Extreme events: The AR5 assessed that human influence had been detected in changes in some
climate extremes. A dedicated chapter in the AR6 (Chapter 11) concludes that it is now an established fact that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions have led to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since 1850, in particular for temperature extremes. Evidence of observed changes and attribution to human influence has strengthened for several types of extremes since AR5, in particular for extreme precipitation, droughts, tropical cyclones and compound extremes (including fire weather). (TS.1.2, TS.2.1)
I knew only one heterosexual couple who agreed not to get married until gay marriage was legal. They lived together as unmarried partners for several years. In 2008, Massachusetts passed a law allowing out-of-state gay couples to go there and get married. This couple regarded that as satisfying the condition, given that any gay couple in the US could then go to Mass. and get married legally. They began planning their wedding immediately and were married in 2009.
It's somewhat frustrating when you or members of your readership brag about valuing the principle of charity and good faith discussion, when my experience seems to point to exactly the opposite.
For example, you seem to be consistently unwilling to extend even the slightest bit of charity or good faith towards styles of communication that are less characteristic of agreeableness than you prefer. Aside from creating a political bias (because agreeableness influences people's political dispositions to a great extent), it is a very effective way of suppressing participation from people who are frustrated due to being marginalised by the ideology (ordoliberalism) that ACX is largely associated with.
My impression is that it is not so much that members of this community tend to be highly charitable, but that they tend to profess to value charity and spend a lot of time signalling charity and good faith, and that this signalling is convincing enough - provided you're not actually on the receiving end of frequent bad faith from members of this community - to actually convince people in it.
I think it has to do with mistake theory. My impression is that mistake theorists often regard themselves as paragons of good faith by the very fact of being mistake theorists, even though mistake theory - as it is applied in practice rather than in theory - tends to just lead to dismissing the outgroup as being stupid. For an example of how this plays out when other people do it, consider the concept of "false consciousness" in Marxist class analysis. Mistake theory tends to be rather akin to a kind of Protestant division of the world into people who believe in the one true faith and are advancing the causes of righteousness and piety versus all the people who are being misled by the devil (or by the mindkiller of politics, which is basically just another phrase meaning "false consciousness").
On this note, let us recall how many commenters on the mistake vs conflict theory post were going "omg yes the conflict theorists are so stupid and I hate them". I find this to be pretty characteristic of the bad faith I see in this community.
And so, I see this self-congratulatory discussion about how charitable ACX is, and all this talk about how much you all value charity and good faith, but to me that indicates vanity more than anything else, and having been in a lot of conversations with members of this community where I have decidedly not been met with good faith, I'm left with this frustration that I want to express, but I know that if the tone of my comment were too resentful, it would no doubt be interpreted as unkind and unnecessary, and I would be banned. According to you, I suspect the reason would be because my behaviour is inconducive to niceness, community, and civilization, but according to me, the reason would be that I'm not high enough in agreeableness to be welcome here.
For the same reason that my legal practice textbook tells me not to draft my own letters. Now, they are to some extent mistaken because I type faster than I could dictate. But the principle is sound - you need to do the things that only you can do. Anything other people can do, you should try to get other people to do. It's cheaper for the client.
In this case, if you can make 500 bucks doing something for an hour then donate that, or spend an hour doing something that someone else could do if paid ten dollars, you should do the first thing.
Are you better off donating an hour of your time to a soup kitchen, or giving them an hour's wages? In most cases, I'd say an hour's wages.
There may be charitable causes that only you can serve. But barring those, that's one of the things money is for.
>> Exactly, life will be slightly harder and will get harder until we reach an equilibrium or intervene to prevent further climate change.
> I think the flaw here is that it takes a lot of time to act to stop climate change.
The other flaw is the idea that global warming stops exactly when we finally do take action. That's not how this works.
Two technical terms for you: ECS and TCR. Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) is the amount of warming you get eventually (after 1000 years or so) while TCR is the amount of warming you get immediately (by definition, increasing CO2 1% per year, thus doubling in 70 years). The actual rate of increase was 12.2% in the last 20 years or 0.58% per year, so we should get slightly more warming than TCR predicts. Anyway, TCR is typically estimated around 1.75°C and ECS around 3.0°C, so after the CO2 concentration stops increasing, warming will continue at a slower rate as Earth inches very slowly toward equilibrium. (On the other hand, the oceans will continue having some ability to absorb CO2 so if we actually do stop *all* our emissions, CO2 concentrations will drop for quite some time afterward, allowing global warming to finally stop. Also, the actual amount of warming observed somewhat below this median TCR prediction when non-CO2 greenhouse gases are considered.) Reasons for the slower temperature increase include ocean warming (oceans take a very long time to heat up, which is a big part of the reason that ocean surfaces have warmed slower than land) and the melting of arctic surface ice, a feedback loop that causes more sunlight absorption that in turn causes more melting.
Another factor is aerosol-induced cooling. When we burn fossil fuels, it puts aerosols in the atmosphere that have, perhaps surprisingly, a cooling effect, related to the global dimming that Scott mentioned. Like white paint, these aerosols reflect some sunlight back to space, but they are temporary and disappear soon after emission. From 1945 to 1975 the northern hemisphere cooled by about 0.3°C and there was talk of a coming ice age—that's the aerosol effect, and it is estimated that the (poor and relatively unpopulated) southern hemisphere actually warmed slightly in the same time period, though measurements in the southern hemisphere were spotty. Aerosols don't accumulate in the atmosphere like CO2, so eventually the CO2 effect became larger. As a Broeker paper correctly stated in 1975: "…a strong case can be made that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide."
Sea level rise certainly won't stop. Ice melts at zero celcius; there is little or no melting below zero. Standard practice by dismissives (who hate the other "d" word) is to linearly interpolate between dates. So if some scientists say 8 feet of sea level rise this century is "physically plausible", the dismissive takes this as a prediction that there DEFINITELY should have been 20% of that by now (1.6 feet) when actually there has only been about 3 inches, so the scientist's prediction about 2100 has already been falsified. (Note: sea level rise before 1993 was primarily caused by thermal ocean expansion.)
But Greenland is a mile thick. It doesn't melt linearly as the temperature rises, and it most certainly doesn't stop melting the instant we stop burning fossil fuels.
Overall I think Scott is right on the money that the first world will suffer very little and the third world much more. Try living a couple of years in the Philippines or Costa Rica before you tell me you wouldn't mind if it were a couple of degrees warmer. Note that global warming is faster on land than sea, and if scientists were better at marketing they would have set the Paris target at 5°F over land which is approximately equivalent to 2°C globally, but sounds bigger.
In summary, the idea that market forces alone will stop global warming "because we'll build clean energy eventually if and when it gets bad" (with no carbon tax, no border carbon adjustments or other economic tools) is wrong because
1. Global warming and especially sea level rise will continue after the CO2 concentration stabilizes, partly because the climate system has inertia and partly because the loss of cooling aerosols will have an extra warming effect.
2. The people harmed most (third worlders) are those least responsible (1st world + China). That's why Nixon created the EPA in the first place: polluters weren't themselves harmed by their pollution, so why stop? [to those saying "CO2 isn't pollution because we breathe out CO2": would you also say that noise pollution can't exist because people can talk?]
3. Responsibility is diffuse - my personal contribution to global warming is negligible, and even large companies have little effect. If I personally live sustainably it will make no difference, hence the need to internalize the negative externality.
4. We just have to build nuclear reactors, people. People of the 20th century made this WAY harder than it needed to be by ferociously opposing a statistically very safe power source (while not opposing coal to anywhere near the same extent). Reactors were affordable in the 1970s and could be again, if we make that choice. We even have superior options now, such as molten salt reactors, which can greatly increase the safety-to-cost ratio, plus key components and even entire reactors can be factory-constructed.
2. The impressions created by television coverage of the dangers of radiation (check one)
59 grossly exaggerate the danger.
110 substantially exaggerate the danger.
26 slightly exaggerate the danger.
5 are approximately correct.
3 slightly underplay the danger.
2 substantially underplay the danger.
1 grossly underplay the danger.
This was in 1982, and it was still evident after Fukushima in 2011. I spent a couple of hours in 2011 watching videos of the tsunami in awe. The magitude 9.0 earthquake killed ~16,000 people but the amount of property damage was even more amazing. Watching a helicopter's view of the tsunami as it just kept going and going and going, like the Energizer bunny from hell — I'll never forget it. But I noticed that pretty soon the news wanted to talk about Fukushima exclusively. It didn't help that there was an unnecessary and botched relocation that probably killed more people (~1000) than the radiation itself is likely to have killed if a sensible temporary evacuation had been done instead. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957582017300782)
Renewables can take us much of the way, but cloudy windless days happen, and you can already see the solar farm NIMBYs growing alongside the existing nuclear NIMBYs... so nuclear badly needs more defenders right now.
And by the way, the nuclear power thing is a perfect example of why smart people should have kids and ask those kids to help steer public policy; who else will overcome the inertia of dumb policy?
My standard thought experiment about nuclear power by the way: meltdown world, a world in which literally every reactor on the planet has a fukushima-style meltdown. It really looks like the world we actually live in is worse than that. https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/jtm6hm/how_bad_is_meltdown_world
Not 100% what you asked, but I grew up around a lot of queer people who disdained marriage not because it was homophobic but because it was a bourgeois religious relic and form of social control. Several of them would end up getting married when they could, but that may be survivorship bias; most of my father's gay friends from that period died of AIDS long before gay marriage was on the radar screen.
Also Brad and Angelina did not quite make it in their pledge to wait until gay marriage was legalized, having got married less than a year before federal legalization. https://time.com/3208755/brad-pitt-angelina-jolie-gay-marriage/
Replying because it's another famous couple. Apparently Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell did wait 3 years for gay marriage to be legalized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dax_Shepard#Relationships
Are they famous? I was literally "who?" there at those names. Then again, I do live under a rock. Possibly they *are* very famous, I've just never heard of them and had no idea they were dating or wanting to marry, never mind their opinions on gay rights.
Kristen Bell starred in a major network sitcom (The Good Place -- if you haven't seen it, you should, it's "Moral Philosophy: the comedy!") and she's the voice of the younger sister in Frozen.
So yeah, she's famous.
Yeah I also didn't know who they were, and was surprised they haven't gotten divorced yet.
FWIW, and completely anecdotally, among people my age (mid to late 40s), the attitude in youth appeared to be, "we don't need a piece of paper to signal our lifelong commitment to each other, but we *do* need a piece of paper to pay less taxes, so... might as well". This applies to both straight and gay couples, oddly enough.
Also useful for health reasons like insurance!
My father was a big advocate of gay marriage back in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a tax accountant who made house calls. Some of his clients were older men sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village. It was rather obvious that they were homosexual, but they were also taxpayers. He felt that they should be able to get married to get the best deal on their taxes.
Personally, I can't imagine being commitied to a single person for the long term, and not wanting to get married. (In the legal sense, I could understand not wanting the whole ceremony rigmarole, even if personally I do want it).
There are all sorts of benefits, like the option of getting covered under spouses health insurance, automatic rights to visit spouse if they end up in a hospital etc, getting automatically included in inheritance if spouse passes away without a will, access to certain government benefits only available to spouses or famillies, etc. Tax benefits are sort of a mixed bag. There are both benefits and drawbacks, and for a lot of people it pretty much ends up as a wash.
I hold that marriage has primarily been a legal institution since the beginning, and that the main reason people see it as a religious institution is that historically, religion basically was the government from the point of view of most of the population. Actions by the government were always draped in religious overtones, and religions held trials and executed people for certain crimes, actions we certainly consider to be governmental these days.
One of the main arguments I've seen against getting married that are not about mistaking it for being a religious institution, seems to center around divorce. Some people whos parents or friends went though bad divorces seem to want to swear off getting married to avoid that. Which seems really weird to me.
Divorce is a better way of making sure each party from a long term relationship (especially with intermingled finances) gets what is rightfully theirs after the breakup vs relying on the other party not to try to steal/destroy your stuff, and having to sue your former partner if they do. Not getting a divorce (because you never got married) won't necessarily keep you out of family court over custody questions, or child support.
Bottom line, if you break up after a long term relationship but it was not a divorce due to not being married, then most likely it was either: 1) an agreeable seperation (in which case it would likely not have been a particularly nasty divorce), 2) not technically a divorce, but a set of lawsuits and custody cases that amount to the same thing, but are likely more expensive, 3) one of the parties likely getting screwed over due to not involving courts/lawyers, or 4) that the parties ended up avoiding certain things that married couples normally do, like pooling finances, purchasing most things jointly, etc.
There was a piece once by Andrew Sullivan claiming that queer people were against marriage as it was oppressive and bourgeois, until president Bush (I forget which one) said he was against extending marriage to gays, and suddenly it was the new cool thing to campaign for.
I went to grad school with a heterosexual couple that said they weren't going to get married until gay marriage was legalized. I'm 90% sure they did eventually get married.
That's a weird idea, if you ask me. How did they imagine their delaying (or abjuring) their own marriage was going to advance the push for gay marriage legalization? A typical boycott works if there is a financial or reputational penalty paid by the subject of the boycott, like a hotel or a restaurant that loses revenue from being boycotted, for example, but there's no Marriage Multi-National Corporation out there that would be affected by their personal decision. Seems like an ineffective gesture of self-denial, if you ask me.
I didn't understand that at the time. Okay, you persuade every single straight couple not to get married. What happens next? Any government will just shrug and say "Okay, I guess you're not married. But you do want to continue living together as though you are married, the same way you were doing up to now, right?"
The only practical changes I could envisage from that were all the things being touted about "tax advantages for married couples, pensions, wills, hospital visitation" and so on no longer applying to straight co-habiting but not married couples, and since 'palimony' cases started getting legal minds working on this, maybe the result would have been as per this article: no more marriages, but you have an arrangement that is tried under contract law if one or both parties want to end it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimony
First of all, I assume you don't mean every single straight couple, because if every single straight couple could be persuaded, then the democratically elected government wouldn't really be intractable against gay marriage. But if you meant everyone who believes gay marriage should be legalized...
You turn the institution of marriage into a culture war signifier. If everyone who believes gay marriage should be legal doesn't get married and the other side all gets married, very likely aligned to blue-tribe / red-tribe divisions (especially as it grows as a culture war signifier). Then various institutions would start aligning around those divisions. Blue-tribe companies would institute benefit plans that support their cohabitating employees. Local hospitals would in blue-tribe areas would alter their policies to support cohabitating couples, etc. If a state is blue enough it adopts state level policies. Eventually this split puts a strain at the federal level and either federalism is respected or one side or the other pushes for conformity.
So basically like what really happened, but likely at a larger scale.
But such a protest is the problem because to be effective, it can only work by being adopted on a wide scale. I don't like shellfish, but that won't stop people eating prawn curries. However, if I can persuade a lot, lot of people to swear off shellfish, then it's not worth the trouble of putting prawn curries on the menu.
It's the same argument as veganism; you don't want to eat meat? Well, don't let me stop you but I'm going to have this steak. So vegans need to persuade meat-eaters to stop eating meat.
And gay marriage did not come about because people went "Oh no, two celebrities are not going to formally get married after years of co-habiting and having kids together? We must change the laws now!"
It seems like the goalposts are shifting here. You started with "Okay, you persuade every single straight couple not to get married. What happens next?" and I answered that question (caveated above).
So on the new field:
Marriage is a public commitment to a community. If a famous couple publicly rejects that commitment for X reason, it's broadcasting that meme to other people. If a non-famous couple does the same it will not have the same reach, but it impacts the people in their lives. If the spread of the meme is effective enough, then you get the situation posed in your initial question.
When nobody was publicly gay, for a lot of people the idea of being gay wasn't even on the table. Same for trans people. Same for interracial marriage. Same for vegetarians. Same for women in the workplace. Same for dropping out of college to make a startup. Same for starting your own televangelist megachurch.
This is "if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you do the same?" question.
"If a famous couple publicly rejects that commitment for X reason, it's broadcasting that meme to other people."
If an ordinary person decides not to get married because some B-list celeb made a big deal about it, then I think they are so mush-brained and easily influenced that it is pitiable. Celebs are not known for the stability of their emotional relationships, after all, and unless you are someone who breathlessly follows "Kiana finds new love after her tragic break-up with Phizzip" stories in "Hello!" magazine and the likes, why the hell are you basing your life decisions on what some rich and famous chunderhead that you will never come within a hundred miles of is doing?
Besides, the "famous couples" are not going in for the "public commitment to a community" for a long time now; they're all living together in sin (as it used to be called) before deciding to tie the knot, if at all. "Yes, me and Tarkel lived together for six years and had two darling kids while he cheated on me with seven groupies and then we broke up and I dated Marcellus and then had a fling with Suzannah when I was exploring my sexuality and then we got back together and now our publicists think a romantic wedding in Bali would be fantastic to promote my new album and his new movie, but then our *new* publicist decided it would be even better if we declared we were *not* going to get married until gay marriage is legal. We're still flying out to Bali and having the honeymoon, just not getting married - until the buzz from this latest stunt dies down and we need another promotional boost".
> If a state is blue enough it adopts state level policies.
Blue states could already legalize gay marriage regardless of the federal government's stance, and many did.
That's what my last line said.
"So basically like what really happened, but likely at a larger scale."
Co-habitating indefinitely to own the cons.
I never got into a deeper discussion with them about it, but I suspect this particular decision was not tied to advancing gay marriage legalization, but was rather done in solidarity with gay people they knew or was just something they felt was morally right, and they aspired to be moral people. From their perspective it probably was effective by those metrics.
Also, they weren't preachy about it. I never heard them discourage anyone else from getting married.
Thanks, I guess as an expression of solidarity it makes some sense, but the self-denial aspect seems over the top, almost like denying one's self medical care that wasn't available to some other group. I think most gay people that I know, if you told them something like that, would be likely to say "thanks, but that's a bit silly. Get married, be happy with your SO, and we'll keep soldiering on in pursuit of the same privileges."
<quote>a lot of people really want kids, and having kids would make them happy</quote>
Doesn't this go against most studies on kids and happiness?
Yes it does. However, no one I know (or have read) who has kids believes those studies. Which is interesting, and maybe worth a blog post on its own.
I have a kid, and unambiguously believe those studies.
How old is your child? To me, the hardest years are between 1-4 and then between 13-16, at which time I could see parents rating the experience more negatively. Having an eight year old is typically great!
Not all parental experiences are good, especially if you include children with disabilities or who have psychological damage.
What I find fascinating is how much most parents seem to actually like their teenagers, or at least not mind much the fact that they are living with ungrateful jerks. Most of my peers have teenagers, and to me, a majority of them seem AWFUL. They're rude, lazy, spoiled, fat, sanctimonious, self-obsessed, snarky know-nothings. They're embarrassing. Yet their parents seem to love and even like them anyway. Honestly I find it astonishing. If I was their parent I can't imagine treating them with such kindness. Some of my nieces and nephews are the worst, and I have to bit my tongue constantly around them. Yet their parents (and grandparents) fawn all over them. Clearly, the parental care-giving instinct is incredibly strong.
Though this is also a significant reason I didn't want to be a parent -- the parenting culture these days seems to require indulging every weak, gross, narcissistic, manipulative, pathetic personality trait that teens display, and I wanted no part of it and also didn't want to have to be the hardcore mean mom acting like a prison warden in comparison to cultural norms.
The way kids feel free to treat their parents these days -- and it seems that the more affluent and blue-tribeish/educated they are, the worse it is -- is a huge turn-off. Every time we have friends visit and stay with us with their kids, my husband and I turn to each other when they leave in utter disbelief and astonishment at what a nightmare the tweens/teens are, and how poorly they treat their parents (and their parents allow them to). So even if parenthood imbues your brain with some kind of emotional intoxicant to make it all seems worthwhile and even enjoyable, from the outside it looks extremely unappealing.
The elementary-age kids are generally much more delightful.
Teenagers are often exactly as you describe. I live in a subculture (much more conservative) that does not tolerate the worst examples of disrespect, so it's not as bad. They tend to grow out of it relatively soon, especially if there are reasonable boundaries that are consistently enforced. You do have to have a pretty think skin to get through the hyperbolic overreactions ("I hate you!" "You're ruining my life!") but they tend to fade quickly and often lead to genuine remorse on their part.
I certainly feel bad about what my parents had to deal with -- I was insufferable.
Parenting practices are probably the single aspect of conservative culture that I can give endorsement to, as the situation between parents and teens in the affluent/liberal sphere appears to have gone completely off the rails, with a real inmates/asylum feel.
>it seems that the more affluent and blue-tribeish/educated they are, the worse it is
It seems like you're on the cusp of understanding that your observation about kids surrounding you being worthless insufferable jerks is, a) correct, b) more a reflection of your local environment in the present era, than a general statement about human children across space and time.
To facilitate the crossing of that last remaining mile, may I suggest this very fine article by Mary Harrington?
https://reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/p/on-mothers-and-political-violence
Thank you for the link. I wish she'd taken a crack at how you tell when the use of authority is appropriate, as distinct from making a good case that sometimes (frequently) authority is necessary.
For example, she mentions "normal eating and sleeping habits", and that might be generally appropriate, but I read a thing by someone who was made ill by some common foods. Was demanding that they eat "just one bite" tyrannical?
Thanks for the link. I thought I was avoiding having to deal with this issue by not having kids. Then I got dogs and discovered to my chagrin that this anti-authority, anti-discipline madness has even taken over the dog-owning world. Among a huge group of (mostly youngish under 40, almost entirely female) dog owners, they no longer believe in ANY "negative reinforcement" -- i.e. telling a dog no. They will allow the most atrocious behavior...jumping on counters, stealing food, even *biting their owners*, and cry and complain and turn to each other for constant sympathy about their stress dealing with their dog's terrible behavior. But they will not simply stomp their foot and tell the dog NO! Because apparently that will harm their relationship with the dog and the dog's confidence. I'm not joking. It is literal insanity.
You sound excessively harsh and unsympathetic to teenagers. I also find it really weird that you include "fat" (and to a lesser extent "lazy") among your generalized criticisms of them.
Speaking as an ex-teenager who was for years forced to endure being among other teenagers, the majority of them are terrible.
You apparently think it's alright to dislike (at least) people for being fat.
No, I do not dislike fat people (or people for being fat). I'm an American in my 40s -- most of my friends and people I love are fat.
I don't even dislike teenagers, as I was one once and understand why they are the way they are. But many of them are pretty awful, and mostly because the culture allows them to be -- I don't think it's a human universal that teenagers are assumed to be the way we assume them to be in WEIRD societies.
My point was that there are cultural forces that produce outcomes that almost everyone complains about and regards as bad, yet almost no one individually seems to be able to manage changing. I included "fat" because it's a fact that is such an obvious change from the past. Prior to roughly the late 90s, almost all teenagers were rail thin. Now I know many who are plumper than their parents, which is sort of shocking. And I know that those teenagers don't want to be fat, and neither do their parents, so I'd say that's a bad outcome. One which it's pretty clear what the reasons are, yet no one can seem to prevent this bad outcome from happening.
If parents want to fight against the predominate culture of parenting, their kids are probably going to hate it and not like them. Parents want their kids to like them. So even if everyone wishes it would change, any one family has a hard time changing it unless collectively they all band together and change it.
It's sort of like the skyrocketing tuition and increased worthlessness of degrees. If parents all collectively decided to just stop accepting it and boycotted college until the problem is rectified, it would get solved. But no one family is going to do that and put their kid at a disadvantage, they're all competing with each other, so prices will continue to rise.
I will say that despite all the other (in my mind) bad outcomes that result from current parenting culture, it clearly leads to much closer relationships between kids and parents, where the kids really DO see their parents as friends and tell them everything.
I concur. In _Stumbling on Happiness_ Daniel Gilbert gives an explanation as to why so many parents insist on the opposite: self-deception is hardwired by natural selection. It's not good news for the reproduction of our genes if we know that having kids will decrease our personal happiness. So we lie to ourselves about it.
we also lie to others about it... unless you are playing it for laughs, it is not easy to talk about how terrible an experience it is in public. ( somewhat easier on an anonymous message board)
Exactly. Gilbert makes that point as well.
I don't think I'm lying to myself, or to others.
Our son is 7 months old and the first ~2-3 months were *really* hard for me. It wasn't just that I was physically or emotionally tired. Rather, it was the knowledge that our old lifestyle of going out to eat at 9:00 pm, coming home tipsy, sleeping in on the weekends, doing things spontaneously, etc etc, were gone. Of course, I knew that would be the case in the abstract when we decided to have a child, but there ain't no teacher like reality. I found myself irrationally resenting our son, even wishing for a mulligan. I kind of wondered if I was suffering from postpartum depression (it's not just related to female hormones -- men can suffer from it, too).
Then, around the 3ish month mark or so, things started to change for me. I can even define a type of inflection point, where one night after I got done feeding him I just sat their holding him, not wanting to put him in his crib and to go back to bed. I think it has to do a lot with our son being more emotive and responsive to us. He's not just a human that needs constant attention, he's a *person*, with an emerging personality. It's been wonderful to behold. Last Saturday Penn State lost to Iowa in heartbreaking fashion. It was the kind of thing that would have normally made me brood for the rest of the night. The first thing I did was go upstairs, pick up me son, and start to make him laugh. It genuinely made me feel better and put things in perspective.
I still miss my old lifestyle, and I think I always will, sometimes more than others. But it just doesn't seem as important to me as it did a few months ago, and now I look forward to other things.
Maybe it all comes down brain chemistry and evolution, but my feelings are genuine.
And just to be clear, I'm not trying to make anyone who has a different experience feel guilty or defective. There's no guarantee that my outlook might not change again. I'm just trying to be honest about my own experiences.
This is a great line right here: " It was the kind of thing that would have normally made me brood for the rest of the night. The first thing I did was go upstairs, pick up me son, and start to make him laugh. It genuinely made me feel better and put things in perspective."
I think this is the role that a felt sense of purpose plays in a person's life. If you have some clarity about what you're here for, it's tremendously helpful in getting one over the small humps which so much of life entails (and which having your favorite team lose is an instance of).
Without a larger felt sense of purpose -- whether it's raising kids or some other thing, and I by no means think it needs to be kids, but it's also definitely not just "goals" -- one's satisfaction in life tends to boil down to how well we were able to gratify ourselves from one minute to the next. And the world isn't well well-disposed to accommodate us in that.
Brought tears to my eyes. I’m holding my son putting him to bed as I write this. So worth it.
Same. For me it started to get hard around 6 months, and I had intermittent feelings of deep regret when she was ~ 1.5-2.5. I didn't mind or feel bad that I had these feelings, so I talked about them with people. I think a lot of other people feel shame.
But I no longer have the feelings (no surprise). I like my child a lot. My feelings are genuine.
I think (from experience) it's right to mistrust the statements of parents in the known bad phases (toddlerhood, maybe teenagehood), because shame.
But to some degree take us at our word that it's a good experience on the whole.
Humans evolved a sense of humor to keep them from murdering their children.
Could it also just as equally be that childless people are lying to themselves, trying to justify their life choices? If it goes one way, there is no reason it can't go the other.
Which kind of childless people, the ones who say they wanted children but never had any or the ones who say they never wanted children and never had any?
I urge you to look at the research, that’s all I can say.
Well, now you know me, and i believe those studies. life is terrible with kids. if you dont believe me, go to a maternity ward and see how much resources are devoted to dealing with depression, and teaching parents how not to harm their children out of anger.
In the interest of balance, this experience is utterly foreign to me. Life got better with each kid.
I agree. Not only did life get better with each kid, but each stage of parenting was better than the one before it, too.
From my perspective parenthood is an unequivocal good.
Aren't you referring to postpartum depression here? That's pretty clearly a hormonal issue, I think, not a "my life inherently sucks which is making me depressed" issue.
Source? Pregnancy and childbirth clearly affects women’s hormones, but it also has a dramatic effect on their lives, often harming their relationships and careers, so I’m not sure why we would assume postpartum depression must be hormonal.
Okay, after a quick Google search, it appears the causes are not as clear cut as I believed.
I think that preventing this is the main reason some (relatively few) women ingest their placenta, on the theory that losing minerals w/er impacts their mental state. I don't know how solid the science is on that, though.
I thought it happens almost immediately after childbirth? I had a friend once whose wife got PPD and more or less went crazy (in the classical way, she thought she was being chased by Russian spies etc). But she'd had children before that and it was fine. Pretty clearly some sort of biological cause given the severity, speed and prior lack of impact. It wasn't a generalized, man kids are hard work kind of problem. It was a, she needs medication to control it, kind of problem.
The maternity ward isn't "life with kids", it's life soon after birth.
Depending on the hospital's practices, the mothers might even be separated from their babies.
they are instructing on life with kids, not on life of the one night you spend in the maternity ward. i was not separated from the baby
So, I could write all day about this, but I'm actually physically at my job today, so I won't. Just let me say a couple of things.
1) I'm really really sorry that this has been your experience, and I hope that things get better for you.
2) This is not at all my experience. I know elsewhere that you talk about how parents lie, to themselves and others about how miserable parenthood is. All I can say is that if I'm lying to myself I'm damned convincing. This is the part I could go on and on about, given the time. I'll just say that my experience is that my life is full and joyful in a way that it just wasn't pre-kids. It seems from other responses that this is a (the?) common experience.
3) Not only would it make a good blog post, Scott has already written it. It's linked elsewhere in the subthread, but I'll repeat it here because the commenting system isn't great. (I know you saw it, but in case anyone else who's in the neighborhood has missed it.) Hat tip to @JDDT. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/16/bundles-of-joy/
i dont think that post is as conclusive as it seems. i think it shows, as was mentioned upstream that there are probably two populations of people when it comes to enjoying kids
I guess I'm a bit puzzled by this sub-thread because it seems to take as a premise that the reason people have children is to increase their "happiness" so if happiness wasn't increased in any given part of it, we need to delude ourselves about that in order to feel that it was a good choice to make anyway.
What happened to the old idea that things worth doing in life are both hard and rewarding? Raising children was as hard as I thought it would be. And it was as rewarding as I'd hoped it would be. I feel immeasurably enriched by the whole thing.
I do think if you're a person who has a long list of things you want to do just for yourself -- travel a lot, work as hard as you can to get to the top of your field, have control over most of your solitude time, see people when you want to and not when you don't want to, have a lot of room to think about and pursue your own interests, use all your spending money on things you want -- then having kids is going to feel like a really big sacrifice.
I don't know how much polls capture the disappointment of people who thought parenting was going to be another kind of experience than it is, or who thought that having kids was going to feel like pursuing other "interests" one does to gratify oneself. Or indeed that many people come to parenting without much thought at all and then are unpleasantly surprised because up to that point in their life they hadn't done something that was really demanding over a long period for a larger purpose, aside from maybe school which parenting resembles not at all.
Raising kids is not mostly "fun" even though there are moments of fun and it requires enormous amounts of sustained energy, not always on things one would right in that moment prefer to be doing. Being an inventor, running a big organization, building something really huge -- those things are like that too, and it seems to me we don't chase those people around and go "but are you happy now?" Because we get that they're doing those things for a bunch of reasons that aren't reducible to "more happiness."
If there was a like button, I'd click it for this post.
+1
It was a response to the post where Scott is talking about happiness. If you are puzzled, it should be by the original post by Scott, and not by this sub-thread.
I think there's a miscommunication with definitions happening here. If raising kids is rewarding to you, that *is* what people are referring to as happiness. That is, 'happiness' here doesn't just mean something that is fun, but something that impacts you positively in some way.
I would disagree with your last paragraph. I can imagine an inventor or entrepreneur who works really hard, is often stressed, but at the end of the day feels rewarded by their work and *happy* about the direction their projects are progressing. If they don't feel that, at least they believe that they will in the future. If they didn't feel this way, I wouldn't think those things were worth doing for them.
I just spent a little time looking at some of the research and it looks to me like it relies on self-assessments of "generalized distress, depression and everyday negative and positive emotions such as anger and happiness." (https://epc2014.princeton.edu/papers/140098)
If that's the case, then I don't think "rewarding" equals "happy" in terms of this research.
I think the problem is that "happiness" is a vastly multifaceted concept. English words "satisfaction", "joy", and "pleasure" go some way towards catching some of the various often contradictory facets but it's more complicated than that.
Having children certainly trades off one type of happiness (vaguely in the direction of "pleasure") for another (vaguely in the direction of "satisfaction"). It's not unique in this, for instance going on a multi-day hike up a mountain gives you the same tradeoff.
Given that we spend our whole lives pursuing different types of happiness it's bad that we don't have the vocabulary to properly understand it. We're like professional hunters who somehow can't distinguish between different types of prey and are perpetually confused by animal behaviour because they think pigeons and buffalo are the same thing.
So well said.
I guess I land at the sense that life is much more like a hike up a mountain than it is a chocolate sundae, but as a culture (whatever I mean by that), we seem pretty resentful about the idea of tradeoffs.
Hilarious and true!
Slate Star Codex article on it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/16/bundles-of-joy/
the follow up after the headline makes it out to be a bit more ambiguous
I think a lot hinges on the meaning people assign to the word happiness. I can say from experience that life as a parent has been less fun in a hedonistic sense, and more work, than life as a non-parent, and my wife and I expected as much when we decided to have a kid. But I'm also experiencing new, deep, meaningful, occasionally joyous things. Knowing what I know now, I would make the same decision to become a parent (in fact, I wish we had done it sooner).
i like to assign the meaning 'enjoying life'. kids took me from a ten to a one
As others mentioned, this might have something to do with the age of the kids.
Babies are awful (I'm intentionaly pregnant, and still think this). I'm starting to like my 2 year old. In another two years I should have a pair of sisters who can play with each other, which should hopefully be better.
On the other hand, some people actually don't like children.
but then this sounds like kids make you happier the less time you actually have to spend with them. but not having kids also achieves this.
Parent child relationships start out extremely asymmetric, and become less so over time. That doesn't mean most people don't enjoy their children. I enjoy spending time with my daughter, but some situations lend themselves more to this than others. I really like cuddling with her, hanging out with other families, going on short trips, playing with pets pets, and visiting things like museums and parks -- she makes these things better.
Of course, there are other things that are worse, like unexpected emergencies where it's hard to find someone to watch her, long flights, places where the expectation is that everyone wait quietly for extended periods of time, and restaurants. How difficult small children are probably has a lot to do with how much of your life includes activities in the second category vs the first.
There is an optimal amount of time to spend with your kids: more than zero, less than 24 hours every day. (Actually, this is kinda true for everyone you love.) So it can make sense to complain that kids take too much of your time, while also being happy that you have them.
And too I think how much we value ‘happiness’ relative to other things. I am a pretty happy person and I think I would pick ‘feels deeply meaningful’ or ‘aligned with my life purpose’ over ‘happy’ with respect to some bigger decisions.
I raised two kids by the way and helped raise two others and I would say my happiness has pretty steadily increased year after year without regard to how old my kids were and including before I had kids (which was In my mid-30s).
It's Type II fun.
Kids are a lot of work, and if what really makes you happy is going out and partying all the time then you probably shouldn’t have any. I did a lot of going out and partying in my 20s, which I don’t regret. Had a kid in my 30s (very much on purpose) and It has proven to be one of the best decisions I ever made. Vastly improved my overall happiness. But, of course, YMMV
i hate going out and partying, and did very little of it. and perhaps this is the distinction? maybe if you like partying you *should* have kids? n=2, but you seem to be fine with the tradeoff of partying for kids, and i find the other tradeoffs crushing.
Yeah, there are so many variables involved that it’s pretty much impossible to come up with any one-size-fits-all advice. I definitely agree with Scott that society should chill and just be cool with the fact that some folks want to be parents while others don’t.
Generally I've heard that the studies are that happiness of people who had kids and the kids are now adults is significantly higher than people who did not have kids and are the same age.
It's not the level of happiness while raising kids, but the happiness of having raised kids.
That seems similar to a lot of worthwhile projects, especially art. Often a very painful process, or even best to hope for getting in the "zone" but pretty unreasonable to be truly joyful while you are creating (for many people). But the joy from having /done/ it is significant.
In many ways the opposite of the joy of a night out drinking with friends and the hangover the next day and realization of the transitory nature of the joy.
i look at the relationships most of my friends have with their parents, and it seems the chance that kids turns out to be worthwhile is 50/50 at best
You're looking at the relationship, not the happiness/satisfaction of the parent, also where's your control group (the childless adults in the same age bracket as the parents)?
This seems to be the case with marriages as well, no? So I guess the question is what is one's expectation going into a big endeavor where the outcome is by no means certain?
Is it true still that 90% of small businesses fail?
I also think those outcomes are not predetermined or entirely outside one's influence.
I work as a psychotherapist with a lot of people in their late 20s and 30s who are working on improving their relationships with their parents, and I work with some people in their 60s who are working on improving their relationships with their grown children. In doing that work, I have been struck by how much children and parents want to have better relationships with each other and how much progress is possible on that front, and how much people's lives are improved when those relationships improve. I was more of a pessimist on the possibility of ever improving relations with a person who is as set in their ways as someone well into their 60s, but it turns out I was wrong, in multiple instances!
Who was it that said something like, "When I left home at the age of 16, it was evident what an idiot my father was. When I came back at the age of 21 I was amazed at just how much he learned in the interim."
This person clearly did not leave home during the rise of cable news :)
I want to say it's a Twain or a Franklin quote, but so many things are misattributed to them.
(Yes, I know your comment was meant in humor. But as I was writing my comment initially I was struck by the choice of 16 as a leaving home date (according to my memory) and I wonder if the increasing stretch of parental-child strife comes from us extending the age of adolescence to 22 or 25 or 30 or whatever it is lately.)
Oh you said what I was trying to say above, but shorter and clearer, thanks.
I have a strong suspicion that no *average* change in happiness masks quite large individual changes in happiness.
I'm so much happier with kids that I sometimes feel sad for whoever it is that has to feel equally miserable with kids to balance the ledger.
No? I've never read the actual studies directly, so somebody correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but I've always wondered if they miss an important part of the analysis: People who don't have kids typically didn't want kids in the first place. And people with kids typically did want kids. I don't think the happiness comparison between these two groups says much about whether or not someone should have kids. Person A, who's always wanted kids and has kids, might end up less happy on average than Person B, who's never wanted kids and doesn't have kids. But it might also be that Person A ends up happier than Person A', the version of themselves who's always wanted kids but never has those kids.
I've always wanted kids. It's hardly been a question. And it feels like if I didn't have kids, that would always be a nagging regret. To my knowledge these happiness studies don't consider that.
I think something important here is identifying how unhappy not having kids would make (and/or would have left) those people. With a kid in my thirties I am less of some kinds of "happy" than I was in my twenties, but I would have been less of that in my thirties anyway—with my friends busier and farther away, my parents getting older, the head-in-the-clouds 99th-percentile life outcomes wiped off the board, etc.
With the kid I am limiting some of those things earlier than I might have otherwise, but I've also felt my life reordered in a way that makes a lot more sense and is much more rewarding and, honestly, happiness-inducing than living among the slowly decaying ornaments of my life as a twentysomething. The childless version of me at 34 would not now be living the life he did five years ago, or if he did I strongly suspect it would not be hitting the same way. In many ways it just sucks to be old and have responsibilities, and I have come honestly by the ancient cliche of children being a wonderful consolation for my old age.
One other thing I couldn't jam in there—I'm a very undisciplined person and always have been, and it's always been one of the hardest and most frustrating parts of my life. I repeatedly came within a test or two of flunking out of college, I've constantly let stuff slip at work when I know both how to do it and how important it is, just an absolute nightmare.
Having a kid has been the best adjunct to stimulants for the treatment for my ADHD I have ever experienced. I get up early, I take her on long walks, I go to the gym religiously after she goes down for the night when I never used to in those long empty days I had, I'm a better husband, I'm better at my job. I certainly wouldn't say that's going to work for everybody, but whether I actually had the executive function to take care of a baby was something I worried about a lot while my wife was pregnant. It wasn't a seamless transition, but so far so good.
"Right now we only eat about a third of our crops directly - the rest goes mostly to animals, usually requiring about 10x calories of grain to produce x calories of meat."
The so-called inefficiency of meat over plants in creating food for humans has been repeated for decades, and for decades it has been wrong and bad.
Calories are not all created equal, otherwise you could live quite well solely on about 200 grams of corn oil per day and never suffer any deficiencies.
"Calories are not all created equal, otherwise you could live quite well solely on about 200 grams of corn oil per day and never suffer any deficiencies."
Sure, but unless the calories that go into animal feed require an order of magnitude less resources to produce than crops which humans typically consume, there is still a large inefficiency present.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is true in some cases (e.g. animals which graze on wild grass), but my understanding is that a large part of the feed used by the US meat industry is corn and soybeans, which can also be consumed by humans.
It is both true that most current US production of animals is inefficient and that there is lots of land that can only be effectively used for raising animals because it's unsuitable for crops for human consumption.
Especially true for sheep and goats, which are usually grazed on hillsides which aren't suitable for terracing.
And then there are pigs which can be fed on various waste, and cattle which can graze land that is too dry for grain crops.
But the modern industrial food system does use land that is suitable for crops.
Question from a naive foreigner: if animals in the US are fed on grain, then what _are_ hills used for, agriculturally?
Thinking of my own memories of driving around the US, I can't think of too many hillsides dotted with animals. On the other hand, I feel like gentle hillsides actually don't exist all that much in the US, which tends to be either dead flat or steep mountains.
We have a shit load of land, the most advanced agro technology around, and bulldozers. We either don't need the hills agriculturaly, or we knock them down. The east half of the US is covered in hills. The west is flat or steep like you saw.
Around here (Illinois, a north central state), woods. There's a lot of flat in the state as a whole, but also quite a few hills just right here in the Illinois River valley, and the hills are almost exclusively left to grow woods. Or woodlots, as farmers sometimes call them--a source of firewood, sometimes of a little lumber. (Our hills are small and not very rolling, but west of here in Iowa I've seen gently rolling hills planted in huge fields of corn. It doesn't seem a good idea at all, erosion-wise.) But on the farm I work for, they hope to start running some livestock (probably sheep and goats) on the wooded slopes with judicious use of moveable fencing. It's called silvopasture and will apparently result in a sort of wooded & grassy parkland, in the end. Sounds nice.
Farming adjacent dude here: It's both true and false.
You can feed cows off marginal land that is not suitible for cereal crops, eg, the american south-west, parts of the north west, parts of africa, parts of california, mexico, austrailia , new zeland, etc.
Unfortunately, this land requires a kind of ranging grazing where you move cows over a huge amount of land and EXTREMLY strict management. If you let fucking ranchers graze to their hearts content, they damage grass lands to the point of reduced productivity in a decade, because Tragedy Of The Commons is a god damn meme.
(These are the people that do the occasional bit of terrorism but arent punished ever, for SOME REASON)
The vast majority of calories eaten by catle come from arrable land.
Happily, lot's of this feed is silage from ceral crops or cover crops that would be grown any way, so it's not so bad as you might think.
That said, beef is still a pretty god damn ineficiant product in the amounts we consume it. It's not catastrophically bad from an Agg perpsictive, but it could be way better.
(This is all in my experience from raising calves for sale as steer in central america, and being adjacent to ranchers in CA and the south west.)
It may be important to note that silage is chopped up waste plants, such as corn stalks. That is, non-edible to humans and often something that would be grown anyway to make human food.
Not to disagree with you at all, we often use inefficient (in terms of land use) processes to make food for cattle.
yuh, that's why its in the "Hapilly" section instead of the "That said" section
What I'm saying is that the crops are not a substitute for the meat, in any quantity, so how efficient or inefficient they are is irrelevant.
Meat is various proteins plus fats. Plants are mostly carbohydrates, plus (depending on the plant) some fats and a few proteins.
But unless you're really conscientious about your diet, as a vegetarian you will end up with various deficiencies. You may not notice this if you have a desk job (you'll just feel lousy). If you do any sort of exercise, particularly strength training, this will quickly become apparent.
Is this true in general? My impression is that some people do well on a vegetarian diet and some don't.
with a vegetarian/vegan diet you are at risk of some vitamin deficiencies, chiefly vitamin d and vitamin b12. but these are really easy to supplement.
i wrote about the health effects of vegan diets here: https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/can-a-vegan-diet-be-healthy-a-literature-review/ (scroll down for the part on nutritional deficiencies). my conclusion was:
"Overall, it seems highly probable that vegan diets are healthier than common Western diets, and perhaps also somewhat healthier than good Western and non-Western omnivore diets. However, that is assuming that the vegan gets all the nutrients that they need, especially vitamin D and vitamin B12, of which two vitamins many vegans don’t have enough. These can be gained through supplements or by eating foods fortified with them."
(note that i am vegan, and was vegetarian when i wrote that, so read with that in mind.)
The vast majority of American (and other Western) diets have much more meat than is needed for health. If the amount of meat production was reduced to just meat from land that is unsuitable for crop production plus industrial facilities using waste plant matter from crop production (weeds, stalks, husks, etc), then there would be much more than enough meat available for health requirements.
It is, of course, possible to get sufficient protein on a vegetarian or vegan diet - from nuts and legumes in particular (there's a reason that soy forms a large part of many veggie diets). However, these crops are nothing like as many calories per acre as cereals, so the calories per acre benefits of switching from omnivorous diets to veggie ones are far less than those that a naive calculation would suggest.
Also, if we're thinking purely of feeding as many people as possible given the amount of land available (One Billion Americans type thinking), then fishing can form a part of that story. There are few seaweeds that can be eaten safely by humans, and most of those have little nutritional value, so fishing is generally a better way of extracting nutrition from the sea. While there certainly are overfishing issues, even the most cautious approach to fishing would still result in a substantial catch - and fish fats are particularly beneficial compared to land animal fats, plus fish tend to be very protein heavy compared to most land animals.
The official guidelines for protein intake are far too low. They were developed by noticing the minimum amounts needed to prevent obvious deficiencies from developing during the duration of the studies.
They were also developed by studying young adults. We've known for some time that older adults do not metabolize protein as efficiently as young ones (hardly surprising).
It also matters which proteins you get. Vegetarian diets are generally low in the ones that humans either cannot synthesize or else do not do it well. Soy may work as a substitute if you also adopt the cuisines that have used it for a long time - there are other ingredients that help with digestion. However many people who use soy don't do that.
The surpluses in Western diets are generally in the simple carbohydrates and vegetable fats, not proteins. It hasn't been noticed as much because we don't do nearly as much physical labor as we used to.
Do you have any sources for this? N=1, but I can, currently in my mid-thirties, build muscle mass while eating little or no meat, on approximately 70 grams of protein a day.
N = 1 for myself as well. But I'm mid-fifties. I was not gaining any strength on the usual 70-80 grams. Moved to 200 grams and it made all the difference in the world.
Do you have any source for this? I think you are overstating how big of an impact a plant based diet has.
I agree that meat calories are inefficient; but then, I don't really want to live in a fully efficient world (although I also agree that it is to some extent inevitable). For example, typing pithy comments into a textbox on a blog is the epitome of inefficiency; the time and energy spent on doing this would be better spent on plowing fields, solving math proofs, or virtually anything else. I do in fact have real-world friends who refuse to read fiction (and partake of other forms of entertainment) for reasons of inefficiency. I cannot justify any such activities on purely utilitarian grounds; and yet, I would like to live my life in a world where they still exist.
Agreed.
But... even on the efficiency argument, there would still be significant meat production both grazing on land that is unsuitable for cereal crops, and industrial meat using waste plant matter from crop production (stalks, etc).
I don't know if that would be 50% or 10% of current production, but even 10% would be a lot and would be sufficient for the diet issues that people are talking about elsethread.
A bit off-topic, but another item that wasn't discussed is the use of the crops for fuel production.
In 2019, approximately 30 million acres of US corn cropland were devoted to ethanol production...that's about a third of the national corn crop going to feed vehicles, not people. Biodiesel production from US soybean acreage isn't quite as stark, but it's still substantial.
It should be noted that some of the byproducts of these fuel industries (dried distillers grains and soybean meal) are still used within the animal feed industry. However, the moral of the story is that the production of alternative fuels from crops is actually a hugely important policy decision that wouldn't exist without governmental mandates. So, much of the arable land in the US is already ostensibly devoted to fighting climate change (by replacing oil with alternative fuels).
I don't know why this never gets brought up when people talk about food being grown for animals. I also think many people tend to focus on one system at a time, like just looking at cows and their lifecycle of eating and less on how they fit into the entire ecosystem of the food industry.
If we just cut out cows, like if we just cut out all non-organic or GMO crops, the system as we know it would collapse.
> moonshadow adds:
> Indeed, looking at other replies here - people are "too lazy" to have kids, "too immature" to have kids, have "excuses" not to have kids... the reality is that not having kids is a decision one is continuously called to justify and defend against attack in ways other life choices are not.
THE FOLLOWING IS NOT AN ARGUMENT OR CRITICISM BUT SIMPLY A DESCRIPTION OF MY POINT OF VIEW
Comments like this confuse me. I'm 32. I'm single. I don't have any kids. Save the occasional comment made by my grandparents (comments I've been ignoring for a decade now), I cannot think of a single instance in my adult life where members of the general public have pressured me _in any way_ to have children. In fact, I'd make the stronger claim that, at least from my point of view, this is also true of all the other childless 30-somethings I know.
The only people I have ever encountered who have actually cared about this are 'far-right internet people'. But they are not representative of any mainstream perspective, and you can't generalize from them to any wider trends in society.
I don't understand how all of the rest of you are apparently "constantly called on to justify" your choices not to have kids. Who is doing this calling? Why is this a thing that I never encounter?
Just more evidence, in my mind, that my adult life experience is best explained by "the AIs have taken a particularized interest in fucking with me, for who knows why"
Same. I'm around 30, I want kids, and I am completely surrounded by peers who have no interest in kids and seem to think I'm crazy for wanting kids. On the other hand they ask me like every month whether I have a cat yet. I do not like cats, or any non-human animals, and explain this every time, but this they cannot wrap their heads around.
It's mind-blowing how many people I know who hate the idea of kids because they require so much care and trash your house, and then have 7 pets anyway that require a bunch of resources and make the whole house smell like ferret pee.
Because a lot of people find animals to be way more adorable than human babies. As evidenced by the fact that one of the most popular types of content on social media is cute animal content, and hundreds of millions of people are spending every day looking at photos of cute puppies every day, while there is no similarly popular content to look at pictures of babies. And the fact that every other commercial for any product features a dog. While I noticed the new Kia minivan add literally shows the adults putting a *robot child* rather than a human child into the backseat...
Yet another example of visual media distorting what the real experience is like. (I kid, I kid.)
I suspect it's because pets don't grow up.
They don't borrow the car (although a lot of kids these days don't either because they can't drive), they don't want to go to college, they don't move out or otherwise assert their independence.
They stay pretty much the same after a year or so, until they die. Yes, there are medical bills, but they are still enormously cheaper than a child.
If you don't have anything to pass on to the next generation, or you think you will never die (and therefore there's nobody to pass it onto) then a pet might look like a better tradeoff.
It has always appeared to me that you get about 80% of the benefits of parenting from pets (the cuteness, snuggles, care-taking, lovey feelings etc.), but at a way lesser cost. Like about 1% of the cost for a cat and like 20% for a dog (looking at all costs, not just financial).
This was my experience as well. I'm sure this varies by subculture, but at the very least, this certainly isn't universal.
This was my experience as well. My wife and I waited until last year to have our first kid (at the age of 37), and we were very much on the fence about whether or not we wanted to have kids for pretty much all of our late 20s and early/mid 30s. The *only* people we got direct pressure from were my mom, and her mom and sister. Anecdotally, this seems to have been the way things went for my friends (i.e., pressure pretty much only from family, and usually from the mom's side).
I'm not trying to discount other people's experiences, just adding my own data point.
For the commenters who don't feel social pressure to have children: How many of you got promoted into a position of leadership in a local social organization before you had a stable marriage and children?
Can you give some examples of what you're talking about?
For my subculture, it's church, where there seems to be a preference to draw leaders from those with stable marriages and children. I'm not trying to say that's either good or bad. Just that single people tend to get put in charge of single-people stuff, while general population stuff has family people in charge.
I tend to associate the pressure to have children with this institutional preference for promoting family people. But if people who don't feel pressure to have children have been promoted within similar organizations without having children, that would show that this preference may not be widespread.
OK. Yeah. I think a lot of people who don't feel pressure aren't really *in* similar institutions. Like, a church is a fairly specific institution, and it's not one in which a lot of single young people who aren't otherwise feeling pressure to procreate participate in. For what it's worth, I actually was in a similar but much more liberal institution and there wasn't that kind of selection/pressure.
Sorry for my ignorance -- I thought church leaders were meant to be celibate? Is that nonsense? Or is that only for certain leaders in certain denominations or something?
Certain leaders in certain denominations. There are three main divisions in Christianity: Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant. Orthodox and Catholic churches have the idea of priests who are special in some essential way, and Catholicism requires that those priests be celibate. Us Protestants insist on the equality of all Christians before God, so no priests and no celibacy requirement.
(It's all much, much more complex than that rough description captures.)
I would be surprised if Catholic lay (non-priest) leadership doesn't favor family people, maybe even more than Protestants do.
Is this why protestants don't have nuns and monks?
"no priests" - - wait, Protestants don't have priests? They have a guy handing out wafers? That's not a priest?
So, I was under the impression that women still couldn't take on some roles in Protestantism? How is that viewed alongside the egalitarian stuff?
Sex being evil in some way seems separate from egalitarianism? So is there an explanation as to why Catholicism finds sex evil and Protestantism doesn't? Or does Protestantism also think this but thinks it is necessary or something?
There was a Catholic girl at my university who only practiced anal sex (with her husband) because she didn't want to get pregnant and didn't want to use contraception. So much stuff going on there I didn't understand and conflicted with what I'd heard from elsewhere.
As a moderately conservative Anglican protestant who takes non-wafer bread from married priests: There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Worth pointing out though that there are married Roman Catholic priests from other churches who have taken particular routes across the Tiber, such as joining the Anglican Ordinariate.
Official church ministers/priests/whatever for some breeds of church yes. But I assumed this was talking about lay positions.
While there's not necessarily a visible pressure to do this, but traditionally managers are more likely to hire/promote men who were married with children. Additionally a lot of businesses spend more of their budget on married people (think employer contributions to family health insurance, also flexibility for sick children).
While this is because social stability is valued, and people who can organize married-with-children lives are likely to belong to a group of people with organizational skills, and people with kids have more demands for flexibility/benefits than people who don't, there is this level of accepted discrimination.
Also because men with multiple dependents will feel less free to quit and more “loyal” to the organization.
This is true. Also more committed to work more generally. NEETs are overwhelmingly unmarried men.
One other argument I heard before from an old-school guy who did a lot of hiring was, "If a guy has a wedding ring, you can at least assume one person in the world can put up with the son of a bitch."
OK, but then the other side of that is being less likely to hire/promote women who are married with children.
Some of that comes from St. Paul, back when early Christianity was trying to cope with organising itself now that it was beginning to spread outside a few centres:
1 Timothy 3 (qualifications for bishops and deacons)
"Qualifications for Overseers
3 The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. 2 Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, 5 for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church? 6 He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. 7 Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.
Qualifications for Deacons
8 Deacons likewise must be dignified, not double-tongued,[c] not addicted to much wine, not greedy for dishonest gain. 9 They must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience. 10 And let them also be tested first; then let them serve as deacons if they prove themselves blameless. 11 Their wives likewise must be dignified, not slanderers, but sober-minded, faithful in all things. 12 Let deacons each be the husband of one wife, managing their children and their own households well. 13 For those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and also great confidence in the faith that is in Christ Jesus."
This is coming out of a culture where every adult is going to be married, if at all possible, so likewise your church officials will be married, and Protestantism when doing away with clerical celibacy adopted the same measures.
Quite true.
"the husband of one wife"-- does this mean polygamy was common?
There's a bit of commentary around it, trying to parse what exactly he meant. The basic interpretation is "be married, not catting around with lots of women" and/or "be married but no mistresses/trips to the local brothel on the side".
When the question of divorce came up, and married Protestant clergy or ministers in various denominations were dealing with congregants getting divorced or getting divorced themselves, there was also "so can a bishop be a divorced man?" questions. After all, if you divorce and re-marry, you have two wives: one ex, but still alive, and your current missus. Catholic view tended (and tends) to be "no divorce, and if divorced, no re-marriage", the Protestant denominations moved more towards "well, sometimes divorce is the only remedy for an abusive marriage" and of course as time went on and social standards about sex and marriage liberalised, so they followed.
As to polygamy in the Classical world - well, the Romans didn't (but they had several forms of marriage and permitted divorces and re-marriages) and the Jews had the example of the Patriarchs like Jacob, and their kings, who had more than one wife though I don't think any were engaging in polygamy in St. Paul's time.
It's still a current problem with, for example, African countries where converts may be married with several wives, what is the solution there (especially since sending away the extra wives can expose them to poverty and ill-treatment), and there's a work-around on "pick one wife to be your spouse, live with the others as part of the household but companionate marriage":
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7845930/
I think most of the pressure is directed to women
Yes, and from family members mainly. If you didn’t grow up in a close knit extended family that does the have-a-child pressure thing then I can see one would think it’s fiction. But it’s not.
While maybe it is mostly directed at women from family members, I've seen a fair number of only-sons get pressured from their family to carry on the family name, and one giant falling out when a second son got a vasectomy in his 20s.
I'm an only son, and while pressure existed, I'd say it was pretty sporadic and I might go years without feeling it. Though it certainly transformed my mother's life and gave her new purpose for living when I finally did have kids.
Meanwhile I had a girlfriend once who got pressure to settle down and have kids from coworkers she wasn't even that friendly with. So yeah, I think women are much more likely to encounter this, primarily from other women in their peer group who are already mothers.
I was raised in the most popular denomination (Catholicism) of the most popular religion (Christinaity) and was told that the only valid options to avoid LITERAL TORTURE LITERALLY FOREVER were celibacy or having a lot of kids. This is not an unusual experience; this is the experience of almost a billion and a half people. (Admittedly taking these threats as literally and seriously as I did is unusual for people raised Catholic in W.E.I.R.D. countries, but I don't think I am the one at fault for assuming people actually mean the things they say.)
You exaggerate. The Catholic church approves of the rhythm method and, although it is not reliable enough to permit lots of sex with zero pregnancies, it is reliable enough to let a married couple have a few children rather than lots of them.
I don't think that's true about evolution: AFAIK the official Catholic teaching is still agnostic on the matter and has set parameters for what would be acceptable teaching on evolution, but it has never proclaimed that a literal account of Genesis 1-2 is definitely false.
Only one data point, but my wife was horniest when she was fertile, rhythm method might have lead us to no sex, or more kids.
NFP (Natural Family Planning) as endorsed by Christian groups who discourage contraception is more wholistic and biologically informed than "rhythm" and is surprisingly effective.
YMMV as far as what actually existing people might teach and practice, of course.
You can go to Hell for many more reasons than engaging in non-reproductive sexual intercourse and deliberately inducing sterility. Do you worry about those as well, in which case it's scrupulosity, or just about "I want to have sex but I don't want to get pregnant so I use contraception and if I did get pregnant, I'd have an abortion", in which case it's something you do need therapy about.
Most of the other ways of going to hell require you to do genuinely bad things. And even if you _do_ do these bad things, you can confess them and be forgiven.
However, confession isn't a total free pass, you're not allowed to commit regular sins safe in the knowledge that you can confess them and get your slate wiped clean every week. In order to be forgiven you need to be genuinely sorry for what you've done. And you can't do that if you don't even think that what you've done (e.g. having sex with a condom) was genuinely bad. So if Catholicism is true then you're stuck in a trap, where you have a super strong urge to sin, you're encouraged by society and everyone you know to sin, and you can't properly confess to the sin because you don't have the godlike wisdom to see why your sin was bad in the first place. It's a terrible spot to be in, especially as a hormonal teenager who takes things too literally.
Vasectomies have been okay since 1977 I believe.
I don't think that's true. I did some googling and all the sources I could find say it's still bad (except in cases of medical necessity): https://catholicstraightanswers.com/why-does-the-church-teach-regarding-sterilization/
You're right, I was reading that in 77 the pope said a person with a vasectomy could enter into a legitimate marriage. So I guess that just leaves rhythm and blues (which can be pretty effective but is easy to mess up).
Someone who already had a vasectomy could enter into marriage, but you can't get married then get a vasectomy because you don't want kids.
Where did you grow up? That’s a strange Catholicism.
People are surrounded by people in different environments and with different views even within the same country. I believe that some people are told they should have children and I believe some people are never told this.
I want to defend slightly the parental pressure because there is a reason.
After university, and starting ones career, the average woman's window of actually having a child -- reliably, easily, and healthily, is small. According to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infertility female infertility starts a full decade before menopause, which usually starts around 51. And "subfertility" usually begins at 31! This is even before you look at issues like Down's Syndrome which go up rapidly.
Even if you have a son, these are not issues biologically, but the way modern dating works, you'll start to worry about the ability of your son to find a woman who can have children.
As a parent, you see a culture that is in denial about these hard facts of life, and is encouraging young people to put off having children for longer and longer.
It may be hard for children to understand, but your parents are used to nagging you to face up to the big picture and get on with putting the work in to get out of life what you'll want from it in the long term, even if you don't know it yet: whether it's revising for your exams, taking out the trash, or forcing you to practice the piano -- because you'll appreciate it when you're older.
Chances are, your parents are people who think having kids is a good idea, and are in fear of people (particularly women) regretting their choices.
I'm not saying they're correct, but it's fair enough and it makes complete sense. I know many people who have had trouble having children -- it's increasingly common and it's always a tragedy, and it's surprising how often it's a shock for people.
Not to mention that you will be a very different kind of parent having small kids in your 40s than in your 20s. You have the energy to chase them around and get them involved in things. Later on, especially with established careers, you may have neither the time nor the energy. Add to that having grandkids for the first time when you're in your 70s or later, and realizing that you may not get much interaction.
Not that I'm bothered at all by people choosing not to have kids, but there are good reasons to encourage people to do so before it gets too late, whether literally or for the best experience.
A bit after I was born, my great-great-grandmother held me. I have a photo of all 5 generations together. I learned bridge from my great-grandmother and great-grandfather. If everyone waits until their 40s, that's a lot of joy missed out on.
"You'd make a great parent, and I'd be happy to move to where you live (or help you move to where I live) so I could regularly assist you before I get too old" is worth a lot more than "your window for child-bearing is shorter than you think" both in terms of likelihood of positively changing an outcome and of not harming that relationship.
That is exactly my plan when my kids get to their child bearing years. My wife and I have already told my kids that I plan on retiring early and moving to where they are to be their childcare if they want me to.
Fair enough.
I had my kids on the later side, so I've seen the pressure from both sides. Most of the pressure to have kids comes from the fact that women in their thirties (including me!) talk about absolutely nothing except their children. This can be very isolating.
On the other hand, while imaginary babies are very popular, actual fussy newborns and rambunctious toddlers are not. I haven't encountered much social pressure to be "child free," but I have encountered a lot of pressure to have well-behaved children who don't intrude on adult spaces. With two very loud, high energy small boys, it's hard not to feel like everyone is glaring at me all the time (especially when everyone is wearing facemasks so I can't see their actual expressions).
This is why parents feel like they constantly need to defend their decision to have children - a screaming baby is an actual, visible, immediate burden on everyone around him. And, for many parents, the best defense is a strong offense.
FWIW, when I'm around other people's fussy children (e.g. on a plane) I never feel burdened or inconvenienced. Children are going to act like children, and even when they're being assholes there is something endearing about it. We may never, ever cross paths, but I can't believe I'm the only person that feels this way. Hopefully that is some small comfort!
I think part of that is when people are having fewer children, putting them off till later in life, maybe not having children at all, and come from families where they had little to no experience of interacting with younger siblings, cousins, or neighbours' children, then people get more upset about "kids being kids" in public.
There are neglectful parents who let their kids run riot, but it's a natural fact that kids will have a lot of energy and will run around and yell and so forth, and it's hard for young children to behave themselves for a long time. If you're not used to being around young kids, this will annoy you. And if people around you are not having kids, you will not be used to being around kids.
May I ask, are you male or female? I think the vast majority of the comments/pressure are aimed at women.
Also, if you are single, of course no one is going to make these comments. In their mind, that might be cruel (I'm not saying it actually is, but to them, it is sad if someone is single and/or childless).
Third, how many older people or conservative people are in any of your real-life networks? If you only know conservatives as "far-right internet people" but don't know any in real life, then again it isn't surprising.
I've easily gotten at least 50 comments over the years, ranging from jokes to earnest attempts to change my mind. They've ranged from implications that I'm selfish and materialistic to kind-hearted attempts to convince me that I would love being a mother, to (the most common form) arguments that I'm the kind of person who "should" be having kids and that I have a duty to help the gene pool.
100% of all such comments have come from males. But, I work with mostly men and plenty of them are older and most of them are not liberal. So, no surprise. And I've almost always been a serious relationship, which I think makes a difference because they looked at me and couldn't understand why I wasn't having kids when all the requisite lifestyle factors were in place.
Unlike a lot of people, these comments have never bothered me. If anything I find them interesting or amusing. But I've also never been on the fence. I've always known I did not want kids, so I guess I never felt like I needed to put up any defenses when it was raised.
It might not be quantity, but WHO is doing the pressuring. If your relationship with your mom is tense, and she is on you about kids in a judgmental way that triggers you, one or two other inquiries from random coworkers will stick out way more than if you're secure in your choice and have a good relationship with your family (or other improtant people) such that their comments roll off your back, or they don't make them at all.
I would add to the notes above how most of it is directed at women that it largely depends on your culture. In China, this pressure is pervasive, everywhere and since recently also pushed by the government itself. More "traditional" cultures push it more, those more "liberal" do so less. I assume among the readers here the pressure will on average be much less than an average person in the world feels. My grandmother grew up in poverty and having kids as labor was an important part of ensuring your old age - of course, she's more likely to push me to have children of my own. Perhaps your grandmother grew up differently?
When I've seen people talk about it, it's been from older family members: parents, aunts, uncles, etc. Long term family friends can as well, but it seems less common.
I've noticed that it tends to get directed more at women and mostly from older women.
"I think society should take a chill pill and people should have however many kids they want." Many upvotes.
We actually don't live in this time, it's just taking 60 years for the full effects of people's reproductive decisions to be felt, because that's the interval between birth and retirement.
"I’m always surprised how willing people are to tear up the liberal contract of 'I don’t question your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine', especially when they’re not guaranteed to be on the winning side, and would completely freak out if the other side tried to create stigma against them."
I certainly agree with your support for the Principle of Charity and the liberal contract. But I think the words "non-externality-having" are doing a lot of work here and might contain the crux of the disagreement between those eager to have children (and to encourage others to have them) and those hesitant. Well-raised children are, I would claim, a *massive* positive externality. They will contribute to the world both in material/economic terms and in social/emotional terms. Children require a large investment from their parents, but (if things go well) contribute back far more than they cost. They don't necessarily pay back their parents in sheer material terms (hopefully friendship/respect/emotional closeness counts for something!), but the net effect on the world is positive.
If one sees children as positive in this light, then the choice *not* to have them looks like a choice which does create negative externalities (or at minimum, negative relative to the alternative of having kids). There is a difficult question of setting the default or zero point here, granted. But this line of thinking undermines the claim that the choice to have kids or not doesn't involve externalities. If someone else's kid might become a doctor taking care of me and my kids in the future (or might pursue a career in any number of fields that improve people's lives), that's an externality.
Also, there may be some (spoken or unspoken) Kantian Universalizing going on. If *everyone* chose to have no kids, the human race would die out, which *most* people would consider a very bad outcome. Granted, I don't think people expect humanity to actually go extinct this way, but it still makes the no-kids choice look "self-defeating" on some level, putting aside the minority of thinkers who actually do support extinction.
I was thinking about that myself. I think, personally, I view children as a net external good to the degree where, while I understand that people might have good reasons for not wanting to have children themselves, having children is something the government should encourage through for example a cash allowance. I don't think people should be going around harassing their friends who don't want to have children, but I do think they are making a choice that, in general, leads to worse overall outcomes for both the non-parents and every level of society than the alternative.
If you want to argue that choosing not to produce a positive externality is equivalent to producing a negative externality, then you are throwing away that contract completely. Every action has an opportunity cost; every time you choose to do something, you are choosing not to do something else that might be better for the world. I'm not saying that judging non-actions is wrong per se, but it's fundamentally incompatible with a do-as-you-will view of the world.
Funnily enough, I do agree that "non-externality-having" is a bad metric because it's a much higher bar than most would like to think. I just don't think that's relevant to negative choices.
I think it’s relevant to negative choices if “negative externalities” are the driver of your decision to make the negative choice.
So if you say “I don’t want to have kids because kids have a net negative impact on the world” then “no, you’re wrong, you’re actually creating more negative impact by NOT having kids” is a perfectly reasonable argument against that.
Sure, hence why I have no problem with Scott's original post, but that's not at all what the commenter I'm replying to was saying.
The question of net worth of a human life is as hard a problem as it gets. With a bit of luck a child can grow up into a wise and loving person who can contribute a lot to the world... and at the same time they add to the mass of human beings who, by the mere fact of moving the amount of energy we do, are making a mess of our habitat. This is exactly the sort of community of people who will rush ahead with estimates to try to quantify both sides and draw a line somewhere.... but my intuition is that the parameters are too hard to actually quantify in any kind of meaningful way, so people will just end up with a bunch of projected numbers with no relevance to anything real. I'm kind of disappointed that Scott would write something as crude as "how little confidence in your own parenting skills do you have to have, to believe that your child will add less than $30,000 in value to the world". And I'm constantly amazed that people can make identities out of having judgments on these topics, even coming up with words like "natalism" and "anti-natalism". Yikes.
At a considerable tangent ... you refer to "Well-raised children." We get along well with our adult children and both my wife and I got along well with our parents, but I gather from what our children tell us about their friends that a lot of them don't get along with theirs at all. Having children who don't like you or who you don't like sounds to me like a terrible risk, and quite likely to result in children who are not a net externality for the rest of the world.
Which raises the question of whether the sort of people who might decide not to have children for the sorts of reasons being discussed are more or less likely than average to produce children who are a net positive for the rest of us. I would expect a positive correlation between how much people enjoy rearing children and how successful they are and between how much they enjoy it and how likely they are to choose to do it.
I think "commit a negative externality" and "refuse to commit a positive externality" are really different things that should be treated really differently.
I'm also not so sure about kids being a positive externality. I know all the arguments in favor. But there's a lot of elite overproduction, so it's not clear that (from the perspective other elite kids) one more elite kid is a good thing. If you're too poor, then you have negative externalities in the form of crime and welfare. If we keep being bad about building new housing, then the size of the population determines housing cost, and if we keep being bad at transit, then extra people increase traffic. And as many other people have said, it's hard to do touristy or naturey things anymore because everywhere is so crowded.
Against that we have do have extra people improving the economy, but it's hard to be too excited about that when you're cramped and miserable. It hardly seems so obvious that every random grandparent should be pushing people to have more children.
I agree with you, and with Act_II, that applying the same reasoning to inaction (declining to do something good) as to action can lead to some pretty strange conclusions and, if we're not careful, could undermine a fair amount of classical liberalism/freedom. Drawing a distinction there makes sense.
I do think that questioning whether "more human life is good" would require rethinking society on a very fundamental level. That seems like not just a deeply-held belief for many, but like a building block that will destabilize a whole lot of conclusions if it's jostled. From the ever-quotable Mr. Chesterton:
"At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, 'Life is not worth living.' We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines; doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins."
Also, everyone seems to imagine that *their* child is going be some grand positive force for good because they will be such a great parent, yadda, yadda. It's almost like regression to the mean doesn't exist. No, you have a kid and your kid will probably be average, with a mix of positive and negative externalities on the rest of the world like most people.
If wealth is a consequence of genuine differences in productivity in turn related to genetics, it may well be a positive externality for wealthy individuals to have more children. (So long as they pax their taxes and all.)
"I think "commit a negative externality" and "refuse to commit a positive externality" are really different things that should be treated really differently."
Why? I may be wrong, but I thought you were a utilitarian of some description, and under that philosophy, they really are the same thing.
I think the disagreement should come down to doubts about kids being a positive externality, and a broad disagreement that we're obligated to perform every action with a net positive utility (as a corollary to your 10% rule).
Charitably, though, I'm also a little iffy on whether a negative and a lack of a positive should be treated the same, since my intuitions seem to fail me (they give different results depending on wording: "not rescuing a drowning child vs pushing them in yourself" feels different, but "watching a child drown vs pushing them in yourself" feels much more similar). But I think this is mostly my intuitions being bad. I generally think consequentialist utilitarianism has the right of it: It's the same, the child is dead when they didn't have to be, and those other objections are safer retreat.
"And as many other people have said, it's hard to do touristy or naturey things anymore because everywhere is so crowded."
Try flying across the country and looking down. "Everywhere" is so crowded because the places you are observing are the places with people in them.
Because people want to recreate in beautiful places. That means mountains, rivers, beaches, and forests. No one wants to recreate on vast empty, flat plains with nothing but tumbleweeds in every direction.
I think Argentus has it right. The US actually has plenty of space for more people with the right investment in infrastructure and many areas of outstanding natural beauty that are sparsely populated. Places like CA and NY are perceived as 'overcrowded' because everyone's trying to cram their kids into 'good schools', which is a separate topic I won't rant about just now.
It's the beautiful mountain states like Montana that are empty. It's the junky ugly places like New Jersey that are crowded.
The whole concept of "elite overproduction" seems very fishy to me. Especially the idea that there is some fixed need for "elites".
Sure, there are ivy grads who are delusional about how easy their life is going to be and everyone loves to make fun of them. But the world is also full of bartenders who think they're destined to run their own successful restaurant and mediocre car salesmen who think they're business geniuses.
There's nothing wrong with the acquisition of knowledge or cultural polish for it's own sake, but there is something wrong with implicitly promising people that a particular set of credentials will net you a 6-figure salary when the number of those jobs are fixed by the nature of economic command hierarchies and will only ever accommodate a tiny minority, or with promising that education will boost the economy when you're teaching skills with limited market value. Most people go to college because they want to get a high-paying job, and unless they're going into STEM they are probably being sold a lie.
I think the main point being made is that having children (or refusing to) is going to have enormous externalities one way or another, so it's not really accurate to say that externalities aren't involved.
I'm not totally dismissive of arguments that a lower global human population could, in the abstract, have benefits, but if you're going to reduce global human population size then it needs to be done in a very slow and controlled manner (all the current social programs and import/export patterns of the OECD are predicated on certain assumptions about the ratio of young working-age consumers versus mature professionals vs. elderly retirees and will be seriously disrupted/bankrupted once those assumptions cease to hold. The fertility declines we're seeing in the developed world (and even in countries like Iran and Indonesia) don't really look 'slow and controlled' enough to keep their social programs afloat. Conversely, the parts of the globe where the most explosive fertility is taking place is where you genuinely are at risk of hitting malthusian limits on the carrying capacity of the landscape. It's all topsy turvy.)
I would greatly recommend looking at some of Peter Zeihan's analysis on this topic if you had time, although some of his forecasts are quite bleak (a lot of these problems should have been addressed 30-40 years ago.)
I thought with all the studies about parental impacts, as long as you don't abuse your child you don't have a lot of impact? So well-raised seems like a pretty low hurdle to clear.
Also, there's the negative externality of growing old without adding enough earners to the economy to pay for your social security/medicaid, but that's a really annoying feature of the system.
I don't fully understand the social security/medicare argument, because you're not adding earners but you're also not adding people who will take from those funds -- isn't it kind of a wash? I get there's a time-based element, but still. Birth rates were very low in the 70s and as a result there are less Americans in their 40s than any other adult age group (other than those 70 and older who are starting to die). Presumably when people now in their 40s reach retirement age, there will be less of them pulling from the SS/Medicare trust fund and it can fatten back up a bit, and no one seems to consider that a problem.
I was EXTREMELY triggered by the original post, lost a lot of sleep over it and had other mental health symptoms that are too personal to share publicly.
I understand that it was not your intent to shame childfree people with the original post but I think that a lot of people would benefit from a more explicit statement of that. There are some extremely large and powerful organizations, such as the Catholic Church, who literally spread the message that non-celibate childfrees deserve literal torture, literally forever. Climate Change activists do sometimes engage in counter-productive scrupulosity bait, but I have never seen them advocate LITERAL TORTURE, LITERALLY FOREVER. (Unless you count Pope Francis as a Climate Change activist, which he maybe kind of is? But a somewhat atypical one.)
I like children very much and if humans laid eggs I'd probably have a double-digit number of children. But after watching my mum have nine pregnancies, four miscarriages, one emergency ceasarean, one post-partum haemorrhage and multiple episodes of life-threateningly severe post-partum depression, I am not willing to go through that. Plus I honestly think it would be cruel to perpetuate my depression and anxiety genes. (I am not normally in favor of eugenics: I think it's fine to perpetuate genes for being intellectually disabled or blind or needing a wheelchair or even having a reduced lifespan, but depression is @#!$ing bad. My life was genuinely not worth living for a very long time, when it became worth living it needed a lot of very very lucky circumstances and even being rich does not mean future kids would get those very very lucky circumstances.)
I don't want to persuade anyone who wants kids not to have them. However, if you are on the fence because of climate change then maybe you should be on the fence for a different reason: your potentially-heritable anxiety and low mood. However, your own best judgement of whether your life is worth living is far more valuable than some stranger's blog comment.
This is going to sound really bad--and I really don't intend to be mean--but have you considered staying away from ACX and talking to a psychiatrist? People here say things a *lot* more triggering than what Scott said in the last post, so if you don't have an unusually high tolerance for that (unusual even for the average healthy person), ACX will be terrible for your mental health.
I genuinely appreciate your concern. I am currently seeing a psychiatrist and and looking for a therapist (or I'm looking for one in theory, but in practice I keep procrastinating because of my many personal failings. This comment is a valuable reminder to actually actually look.)
I am way more triggered by this than more objectively-upsetting things because just any "have some babies" type of post reads to my brain as "GET PREGNANT AND MISCARRY A BABY BECAUSE GOD LOVES BABY CORPSES FOR MYSTERIOUS SPIRITUAL REASONS! DO NOT QUESTION WHY HE LOVES TO SEE YOU SUFFER!" which... is not a remotely rational response to people's actual words.
I should probably block ACX for a while though.
Genuine thanks for your concern, I am not offended. HAve a great day. :)
I think your basic point is probably correct. Worrying about climate change is not a good reason not to have children. Not wanting to have children, for a variety of other reasons, is.
Bird fan, Pacific Northwest, extremely triggered by babies - I think I know who you are! Hi! Sorry to hit your sore spot so badly.
Have you tried any Buddhist psychology techniques for isolating the trigger response you're talking about and cutting it out? In my experience very effective. Here's a random page I found with a nice introduction and some helpful links:
https://healthypsych.com/learning-center-buddhist-psychology-theory-tools/
So the idea is that there's some trigger response in your brain connecting what Scott was saying to the response you describe; and that by developing mindfulness you can isolate and observe the connection from one to the other -- and once observed, you can excise it -- since once you see it objectively, it has less and less power over you. Repeating this re-trains your brain out of this habit it has developed.
Don't be put off by the word Buddhist -- it's actually very sensible.
Would be interested in what Scott thinks about these techniques, if he has tried them, and so on.
Isn't that just a CBT technique? I don't see what's especially Buddhist about it.
My immediate response was to jump all over you, but however, let's try and be kinder.
If you really were shaking and crying and not able to sleep etc. over a *blog post*, then consider coming off social media. You probably have family and personal reasons that explain why you are so sensitive and have bad experiences about the state of being "childfree" which explains why you are reacting so excessively.
I'm "childfree" myself, though I'd never use that term, and I don't feel attacked by anyone or anything which states that people should have children. My reasons are somewhat similar to yours - my genetics are not something to be perpetuated, and the depression is terrible.
But triggered? No. So I do recommend you detox for a bit until you get your head together.
> If you really were shaking and crying and not able to sleep etc. over a blog post, then consider coming off social media.
I'd say, consider coming off social media, period, no qualifiers. Social media is just a bag of negative externalities wrapped in a flimsy chocolate shell.
(This isn't a reply to you, but to others who were annoyed about you saying you were triggered.)
PNWbirdfan seems to be just saying how they read that post, and how they felt about it. I can't find any statement in there complaining at Scott Alexander for being wrong, have malicious intent, or being reckless or whatever.
This post is a perfect example of feeding into a pet peeve of mine, which is the over-ethicization of just about anything and everything. Thank you for making the "liberal contract" explicit about not questioning one another's life choices, i.e maintaining a solid notion that there is a wide range of life options here and there, that what to do with one's life is very much an open-ended field, so we should think twice (or 2000+ times) before judging or questioning where someone chooses to put their energy, unless it's obviously antisocial or destructive.
The problem of course is that the obvious caveat ("unless the externalities are too big") is ripe for abuse. Anyone with an ideology to sell is going to push the point that everyone else's externalities are really huge. Put this together with an economy of virtue status-signalling, and you get full blown "culture wars" for the price of an onion peel.
This is especially funny when it comes to questions of procreation, because given a constant number of sentient beings, various approaches to metaethics seem to find relatively sane things to say... but bring in the fact that beings can be brought into the world, and those neat constructs either begin to give nonsense conclusions, or need to be hand-tweaked to match our intuitions.
Honestly at this point, I consider the entire field cursed and wasted, which is why I usually don't bother trying to argue ethics on the internet. But I respect this blog and its readership enough that I will still write a short meta-point on it :)
"There's a pretty decent chance that global dimming killed like a million people."
This feels very much like hacking away at the leaves of evil while leaving the roots alone. It's not like the Ethiopian famine corresponded to a decreased output of surplus medical and food relief supplies due to global dimming. The global resources to feed all those people were abundant, and made available for the crisis.
My (incomplete/non-expert) understanding is that the governance was poor from end to end. If minor fluctuations in global climate might cause a million people to starve to death, we might take at least one point that climate skeptics love to point out seriously: there is always going to be climate variation. We shouldn't go full-alert because a tiny variation "killed like a million people" when we know that there are much more important underlying causal factors that put those million people's lives at risk of a subtle shift like global dimming. Because if it hadn't been global dimming it would have been something else, and sooner rather than later.
It's exactly this kind of minor fluctuation that tyrants have always pointed to as the 'real reason' their economic utopian scheme turned into a dystopia instead. Don't let the tyrants off the hook. We can talk about climate change without accidentally justifying mismanagement at the same time.
I see what you're saying in a moral sense. And obviously we want fewer tyrants. But I feel like holding the level of misgovernance constant, global dimming did in fact cause a famine that might not have happened without it. Those people are still dead. And even though we should blame the tyrants, we're not going to be able to get rid of all tyrants any time soon and realistically if we don't solve global warming then a lot of people in tyrannies could die who would otherwise scrape through.
Sure, but holding the value of climate variation constant, tyranny caused 100% of the deaths.
Holding either one constant isn’t really a fair comparison. There has always been tyranny, and there always has been climate variation large enough to cause famine in marginal populations (which was every population until historically quite recently).
Both can theoretically be changed or mitigated. Which one is easier (less tyranny, or less climate variation) is a totally fair question. Certainly, it would seem to be easier for the tyrants to be less tyrannical than to alter global climate.
According to Wikipedia, "The famine of 1983–1985 is most often ascribed to drought and climatic phenomena. However, Human Rights Watch has alleged that widespread drought occurred only some months after the famine was under way. According to the organization, and Oxfam UK, the famines that struck Ethiopia between 1961 and 1985, and in particular the one of 1983–1985, were in large part created by government policies, specifically a set of so-called counter-insurgency strategies, and for "social transformation" in non-insurgent areas." Reading a little more into the history, it looks like this region had a couple decades of drought that was deliberately caused by policies aimed against the people in certain specific regions. Sometimes you'd see droughts in the affected provinces despite record-breaking crop yields in the adjacent provinces.
Maybe the model that this is 99% caused by one thing, and 1% caused by another thing is wrong. Tyrants have a long history of using famine as a tool. If they're causing the famine in the first place, it's kind of irrelevant to invoke ANY other factor. The famine wasn't an edge-case that got pushed over by annual rainfall/sunshine. It got a hard shove. And if you get extra rainfall this year the tyrant just shoves a little harder and you still go over the edge.
In that scenario, fixing the climate issue means exactly as many people will die as if you'd ignored the problem. This explains why so many people die despite an abundance of foreign aid arriving in emergency shipments. The global community sees suffering and wants to alleviate it. The local tyrant sees suffering and confirms his policies are working. He's not funneling the food elsewhere because he's inefficient. He's funneling the food elsewhere because his policies are having their intended effect, and he doesn't want to ruin that.
“But what turned rural hardship into disaster – even before drought struck – were the counter-insurgency measures Mengistu’s army employed in dealing with rebel activity, notably in Tigray and northern Wollo... Using scorched-earth tactics, the army destroyed grain stores and houses, burned crops and pastures, killed livestock and displaced about 80,000 farmers.”
Excerpt From: Martin Meredith. “The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence”
“I went to his office and truly, he was furious. Anyone who knows Mengistu can tell when he is angry. Before he says anything his cheek bones tremble furiously as he holds in his rage. I nervously braced myself for his attack...
He said that imperialist elements would do everything possible to thwart our efforts, to embarrass us, to destroy the gains of the revolution. One way of trying to embarrass us, he said, was by exploiting the drought. The menace in his voice was unmistakable. He told me that I had to be careful not to fall into their trap. My statement to the UN was inaccurate, exaggerated, he said; it showed Ethiopia in a bad light because it told only of disaster and nothing of governmental achievements or efforts to overcome the crisis. I had not emphasised that it was a natural disaster – a drought, not a famine – and that if it were not for this natural setback the Ethiopian people would have made great strides in overcoming food shortages...”
-Dawit Wolde Giorgis, a minister in Ethiopia
I think you are leaning into global dimming a lot harder than is reasonable here. We know that communist governments have been directly responsible for some of the worst famines possibly ever, in Ukraine and China, as well as general huge decreases in productivity that is subsequently blamed on the weather. We also know that the majority of modern famines have been due directly to either inept or intentional governments (see Irish Potato Famine) with terribly policies. We further have seen that modern world countries are pretty quick to throw relief supplies at nations with famines or other natural disasters, but that the governments of stricken countries often act to use that aid not to help but control or punish their populations. We have seen all these bad behaviors before, particularly in communist style third world countries, particularly in Africa.
But there is a pretty decent chance that global dimming killed like a million people?
That is a bit like saying a guy who got shot in a gang war while he had a cold was killed by the cold. He was killed by the people who shot him. Had it not been for the lead slug going through his chest he'd have been fine. Even if you argue that the cold slowed him down such that he might not have gotten hit or in a less damaging place, or would have had more energy to recover without the damned cold virus, it wasn't the cold that killed him. It was the bullet, and the fault lies with the person who put it in his chest.
I think in most situations like this the correct approach is that society should try to solve all its problems at once. Sure, prioritize what you work on, highest marginal cost-effectiveness and all that, but the world has lots of room to tackle every major avenue for fixing its problems, even if you personally don't.
I agree with this as a general principle. My claim is that climate change should not be considered a causative factor in this famine. We can try to solve tyranny-induced famine, cancer, and global climate concerns all at the same time without having to make every problem cross-link to every other problem. Indeed, my fear is that people take climate change less seriously when it's treated as a significant-enough-to-worry-about causative factor of problems it's tangentially related to.
Re Luis Pedro's take, I knew a het couple that intentionally married using the forms for same sex couples, at a time when this meant their marriage might be legally invalidated along with all the gay marriages taking place at the same time.
I'm possibly violating charity here, but I thought at the time and still think the few people (mostly fading celebrities) I heard of declaiming this kind of 'sacrifice' were [redacted because Scott doesn't like us calling people idiots].
Oh, how stunning, brave and bold of you! Of course, you are continuing to co-habit, continuing to have sex, continuing (perhaps) to have kids, continuing to take advantage of all the law and rights accorded to non-marital partners that have been built up. And you could always register as a civil partnership, or make legal arrangements around property, money, kids, etc.
It'd be like me - someone who dislikes shellfish - bravely announcing I was no longer going to eat prawns, crabs, shrimps, mussels, oysters, lobsters or winkles (which I don't eat anyway) in solidarity with people who suffer from allergies to shellfish. Yeah, a sacrifice which is no sacrifice is really going to change things!
I am pretty sure they weren't doing it for you.
Indeed no, they were doing it for their own vainglory. I'm not impressed by "give up something I never wanted before" and I'm not out to hurt your feelings but it was a silly protest and really just signalled "I am such good ally!" but did nothing to help anyone.
Maybe, but I don't see it and I am the other side of the aisle(from you) who they might have been trying to sway. Maybe did it for their gay brother or gay best friend. It is ok to be charitable about these things. You know, the whole, "live and let live," thing covered at length above....
Anybody who can be swayed by "I am not going to eat chocolate! (but I will continue to eat all other kinds of candy and I never liked chocolate that much anyway)" type arguments is - well, it's not worth having an argument over it.
Here, let's have something funny to cheer us all up. This is what makes me laugh:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMk__UkbzSA
That was in fact very funny. I did not understand the "swayed by ..." bit. And I am not sure I made my point:
When I heard (for the first time, in this thread) that multiple high profile people had postponed marriage, awaiting gay marriage legalization, my initial reaction was "eye-roll" and "idiots." A few milliseconds later I decided this was uncharitable and came up with a plausible explanation to aid in my resumption of the "liberal contract(live and let live)."
You are of course welcome to remain irked by it. However, my suspicion is that you might live longer if you have a system to "write these things off"; we'd miss your posts...
The video is unavailable.
It was a standard thing when gay marriage was an issue to point out that civil partnership was more expensive than marriage, more trouble to set up, and still didn't give all the same rights.
"I’m always surprised how willing people are to tear up the liberal contract of “I don’t question your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine”, especially when they’re not guaranteed to be on the winning side, and would completely freak out if the other side tried to create stigma against them."
I think on both sides there's widespread agreement that this is *not* non-externality-having, the disagreement is what form that externality takes
I would compare this to doing paid labor. Not everyone can or should be doing paid labor -- there are people who aren't equipped for it, or who do other stuff that's more valuable, or whose jobs make the world worse. And even if what you are doing is not "more valuable", you don't really owe anyone an explanation for why you're not working -- it's not really anyone's business unless that person is your spouse or something like that. There are some people who love their jobs and who take great meaning and pleasure from it, and would choose to work with no social or financial pressure to do so -- but that's not enough to keep the lights on, and similarly I don't think there's any reason to think that a norm of "the default should be not having kids, and the decision of to have kids needs to be deeply justified" leads to enough kids, at this time and place, to avoid some pretty big, bad effects. (Or even that it's the best decision for the people making it -- regretting not having kids when it's too late is very much a thing, and probably much more so than the other way around, especially in this kind of audience.) It's possible to go too far and make it too difficult for people to avoid having to do paid labor, but it's also possible to go too far in the other direction. We can have perspectives on this topic, and it's not equivalent to knocking on anyone's door and harassing them about why they're not working or haven't procreated.
(Also, people question each other's much more trivial life choices ALL THE TIME!)
Agreed on Principle of Charity, and the idea that there are some real people scared of bringing children into the world, but I take issue with these "is humanity doomed" polls. You ask people questions like "is humanity doomed by global warming" a large number of people say yes. But then you ask people "what is the biggest problem facing America today" and only a few percent say anything environmental:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.aspx
and this was true before coronavirus started being a major answer:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/246800/record-high-name-government-important-problem.aspx
Likewise, and Matthew Yglesias harps on this a lot, people a willing to declare global warming a very important problem but then you ask if they're willing to pay an extra $0.25/gallon in gasoline taxes to solve it and the vast majority of people say no. It's internally illogical and rather maddening, since this really is the biggest problem facing the world except maybe AI risk. I'm inclined to say that peoples' answers to an open ended poll rather than a leading question is a better read into their heart of hearts, and what fears and considerations actually affect their behaviour.
"Am I being one of those people?"
No, because the choice of whether to have kids is the MOST externality-having decision the average person makes in his or her lifetime.
If to a first approximation the quality of life in a country is at least 10% worse for each 5 point drop in average IQ, then the positive or negative externality of having a child can be calculated as 2*(midparent_iq-100)*regression_to_the_mean_coeff*life_expectancy QALYs.
Career criminals with an IQ of 75 should probably not be encouraged to have as many children as they want. Even if one doesn't believe in the heritability of IQ, they're more likely to mistreat the children. So I think we definitely need to qualify the statement that "people should have however many kids they want.". Perhaps people who have been multiply convicted of violent crimes should be sterilized to prevent them from beating up their future children.
If you can't believe someone could seriously want a multiply convicted violent felon not to have access to kids then I'm a touch confused by your values. We're willing to lock them behind bars for the rest of their lives; I can't see an involuntary vasectomy being vastly more egregious than that.
This seems like the nirvana fallacy. Just because doing X won't solve the whole problem, we ignore a low hanging opportunity to solve part of the problem. The relevant question is how much more likely are repeat violent felons to beat their children, compared to an average American (where the base rate is lower than that worldwide average)? My guess is many times more likely.
None of which I disagree with, nor am I in favor of forced sterilization as punishment for violent crimes. But it's not beyond the pale to advocate for such a punishment.
"Forced sterilization is still practised in the U.S., particularly in prisons (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sterilization-california-prisons_b_3631287) and the effect on the overall number of violated children has been negligible."
Link doesn't actually say that, just that "muh protocols" weren't followed:
"The recent revelation that 148 female prisoners in two California institutions were sterilized between 2006 and 2010 is another example of the state's long history of reproductive injustice and the ongoing legacy of eugenics. The abuse took place in violation of state and federal laws, and with startling disregard for patient autonomy and established protocols of informed consent."
> Perhaps people who have been multiply convicted of violent crimes should be sterilized to prevent them from beating up their future children
Wouldn't it be easier to simply keep them in prison permanently so that they (a) can't commit crimes and (b) can't have children to beat?
Forcible sterilization is something that even an armchair eugenicist like me is pretty uncomfortable with, but longer prison sentences for career criminals is A-OK.
Life in prison is a much more expensive, and much more cruel, way of accomplishing the same result. Maybe they are capable of working a regular job on the outside, and living a semi-normal life, with some supervision by a parole officer or social worker or something.
Thank you for your tireless efforts to be fair here, when you deal with incredibly contentious issues. I think the only real way to effectively influence others for good is to set a really strong example of the principles you hope others will adopt. I can clearly see your effect on me, and I strive to emulate your example.
I just wanted to point out that you mention 'top colleges' twice here. I don't know if you've encountered the line of thinking that says 'the concept of top colleges is a serious problem for american polarization - it would be better if wanted to go the best school where they grew up, rather than the best school in the country.' Ill share a bit of that here, as i think it's relevant.
I believe the existence of top colleges is a mechanism for rewarding people with a combination of 'high intelligence, low value placed on loyalty to your hometown'. It took me a while to 'pick up on' the idea that your career options are limited if you go to 'midwest liberal arts college that nobody outside of your hometown really knows about', so after undergrad I left my hometown for over a decade, decade to pursue academic (top 20 research university) and then career opportunities, and then came back so i could help care for my aging parents.
I've started to better understand why so may people voted for trump. Perhaps economic and cultural power lean left in part because there are natural divides in terms of people's natural 'moral foundations', and "move to away from your hometown in exchange for more money and better career opportunities" has a pretty clear valence attached to it.
If some people are much more concerned with 'fairness' and 'harm reduction', while others care more about 'group loyalty' and 'freedom', for example, then we should expect people who care less about loyalty to be more willing to move away from their family in exchange for bigger financial rewards. Maybe in the short term this is all fine, but over the long term i would expect it to lead to:
* economic and cultural power concentrating among people who have the lowest scores of loyalty + tradition (i.e. being most willing to move for economic opportunity)
* a growing sense among people who place a high value on loyalty and tradition that they are "under attack" from distance elites who use their combination of economic and cultural influence to attack traditions they see as stifling and irrelevant
My parents met at stanford, where people told them to their face they were awful for having multiple children. They relocated to Ohio, where my Dad's family has been located for ~200 years. They raised 9 of us, and 8 out of those 9 left home after college. The one sibling who stayed behind is more political conservative than the rest of us, and i don't think this is a coincidence.
I don't think global warming could end human civilization - But a violent civil war among americans, driven by the culture war? That's what i worry about more than anything else. Thanks for the C.S. Lewis quote, though. That's the mindset i should be in :)
I don't want to derail the thread into getting too off topic, but just wanted to say this is really interesting.
I think you've got a serious point about people who aren't connected to somewhere (I saw a link about being from somewhere vs. being from anywhere), but ending human civilization?
Depends on what you mean by 'civilization' - maybe a better phasing could be 'permanently rolling back the clock of technological progress to before the industrial revolution'. I think some humans will be around regardless of almost anything - even full scale nuclear war - but it's possible we could fall from current technological heights and never recover.
A sufficiently violent civil war could destroy the global trade networks which i think are probably necessary for the global population to be at this size. Large scale population loss might be irreversible.
I don't see how this type of civil war would happen, but if it did, it would not last long, because the right wingers would obviously win, quickly. They have 90% of the guns, they're much more experienced with and comfortable with violence, they have substantially more men, and for the most part they have the police and military on their side. The left would have to surrender within a week. Heck, they could just barricade all the cities and starve them out quite quickly. I think it is pretty clear how any such war would go, which is why it won't happen.
Speaking as a "right-winger"(*) with a bunch of guns and skilled in their use, I think you're overstating the importance of that. The guns themselves aren't that hard to come by, and already more broadly distributed than you might expect. And marksmanship is not even close to being the most important martial skill. Unit cohesion, discipline, leadership, etc, matter far more. And I see lot of that on the left.
Take twenty organized, disciplined club-wielding Antifa activists, give them $200 shotguns and weekend of firearms training, and I'd bet on them over twenty random MAGA-hatted "bubbas" who have been taking their $2000 AR-15s to the range every month for the past twenty years.
There's also the actual military, which gets strong marks for organization, discipline, etc, *and* marksmanship, and military veterans whose skills are recent enough to matter. But while military service has traditionally been a Red Tribe thing, it also includes a whole lot of Black and Brown tribe members who, while socially conservative, probably aren't going to line up with the right-wing militias. Really, not even all the white ones will. And the officer corps is mostly going to line up against whoever started the civil war in the first place.
It is true that the upper-middle-class liberal intellectual elite isn't going to win any civil wars. Nor is "we're the smart ones, we'll tell the rest of you lot what to do and how to die" going to be a winning strategy for them. So while there's a fair chance that the left would win (well, lose less) a Second American Civil War, that probably wouldn't be the sort of victory most "left wing" elites are looking for.
* Libertarian, but I think just about everyone who uses the term "right-winger" lumps us in with them
I'm a typical lefty, Bernie-supporting ultra-nerd type who is married to a special forces combat soldier, so I think I have ample exposure to both "tribes" and I maintain that if the culture war ever turned into an actual shooting civil war, the left would get destroyed, very quickly. Though I also don't think it will ever happen because we are too mixed geographically and within households, etc (and because I think the left knows deep down they would lose).
I don't think guns are as distributed as you think. Those who lean conservative are more than twice as likely to own a gun, and they often don't just have one gun but LOTS of guns. Still, I take the point that the military would ultimately decide it, and the military will fight for whoever signs their checks tells them to (which would be whoever was the one trying to secede or who started the violence).
Personal leanings wise, your point about non-white soldiers is a good one. I don't think they'd want to fight for the right. Though I also don't think they'd want to fight for the other side -- they'd probably wish to sit it out. Most of the military supported Trump. My husband loathes Trump and the GOP, but he equally loathes what he views as a bunch of emotionally deranged, victimization-obsessed, crybaby wimps on the "other side". But you're right, they'd fight against whoever their commanders told them to (and I think they'd be deeply conflicted).
As for "cohesion, leadership, and discipline" on the left, are you serious?!?!? We abhor authority, hate hierarchies, and are an ungovernable herd of cats always getting into circular firing squads and squabbling with each other. And a tiny handful of Portland antifa types aside, most on the left are completely terrified of violence and have zero experience with it. We have a lot of great qualities, including being pacifist, but being brave about physical violence isn't one of them. A huge portion of the blue tribe has major disagreements with today's party line on identity issues, and they're so scared of being thought of badly that they won't speak up. You think people that afraid of reputational damage are going to risk actual physical damage based on principle? They would surrender quickly.
The only hope they would have would be to do zero-resistance in return for the violence to look like the non-aggressor victims, and go out peacefully and put flowers in the barrels of guns or whatever, to get PR that they're the good guys and get international assistance. *That's* a tactic that they would be great at.
I was just talking with someone who is seriously into theory of revolution, and apparently the decisive factor isn't how well-armed a civilian faction is, it's which side the military is on.
... and they own and control food production. That will be noticed rather quickly.
"and there will be several million people dead from disasters that we suspect (but will never be sure) that global warming made more likely or worsened."
And if we reduce global warming there will be several million people dead that we suspect (but will never be sure) would have lived if we hadn't.
To take the clearest case, greenhouse gas warming reduces extreme cold as well as extreme heat, as the IPCC mentions in the latest report. It doesn't, at least in the summary version, mention that it reduces extreme cold by more than extreme heat, for the same reason that (as it does mention) it warms the polar regions more than the equatorial regions, and it doesn't mention that extreme cold at present kills many more people than extreme heat. So two million people die from heat who would have lived and four million (both numbers invented) live who would have died from cold.
Very nearly any major change in a world with eight billion people in it means that, over a century, millions will die sooner than they otherwise would have and millions will die later than they otherwise would have. Neither you nor I knows whether the net effect of actions to slow climate change will be more or fewer people dying.
We do know that the largest action the U.S. has yet taken on the issue, the biofuels program, had no effect on climate since it doesn't reduce CO2 output and did reduce the supply and raise the price of maize, thus doing our bit to promote world hunger. I have seen no estimates of the result in excess mortality.
I was going to say there's no way extreme cold kills enough people to balance out even a tiny chance of one Ethiopia-level famine, but the Internet is trying to convince me that it kills 4.6 million people a year. I'm skeptical of this but don't want to doubt too hard until I look into it further.
I do think that there are a couple of important imbalances here:
- Very cold countries are usually highly developed and can take care of themselves. They don't need extra help. Very hot countries are usually already a wreck and don't need more problems.
- In general people are adapted for the conditions they're in. The places that are too cold for anyone to survive don't have populations. The places that are currently just barely survivable, but won't be with a few degrees of warming, do have populations. It's all nice and well to say that this is Pareto-positive and all the hot people can move to the cold places and have carrying capacity left over, but this isn't how things work in the real world. I think a thought experiment would be something like - if you reroll the growing conditions for everywhere in the world, making sure that on average the growing conditions are 5% better than before the reroll (eg China becomes completely barren and some random part of Kazakhstan nobody cares about becomes super-fertile), then even though things are better than average this is probably the worst disaster in history with a billion plus death toll. I think of global warming as doing something like this to a much smaller degree.
Another asymmetry I secretly worry about even though it's non-woke - hot countries basically suck, cold countries are much richer and happier. I'm not sure why this is but I'm concerned it has something to do with parasite load or some sort of neuropsychological response to heat. I think there's a small but real chance that global warming causes rich northern countries to end up with the social systems more typical of poor tropical ones. Hope I'm wrong.
> neuropsychological response to heat
widespread air conditioning maybe may help
Have you heard the hypotheses that colder countries were forced to create more cultural prosocial norms because survival necessitated things like group cooperation and long-term investment?
The "grasshoper and the ant" story makes no sense if winter never comes.
Even in cold, rich countries, crime of all types reliably spikes in the warm months of summer and goes down when it gets colder. Apparently warm weather just allows for more misbehavior.
See, also, Florida.
Hot weather plausibly makes people worse-tempered.
The stereotype, which I think most people have a fair amount of confirmatory experience with, is that hot weather makes people listless and lethargic.
Possibly by making it comfortable to go outside at all? :-) Although that might just be my low opinion of human nature.
Where do you live? There's a difference between warm weather that it's a pleasure to go out in, and hot possibly humid weather which makes life a misery.
What temperatures and humidity levels mark the boundary varies a lot for individuals.
Ah, good point. :-) I'm currently in the Pacific Northwest of America, and I was just going off the statement about "cold, rich countries" and assuming that it meant places like here. Mea culpa. Summers here are wonderful, with up to 16 hours of non-humid daylight, but in winter it's cold and wet and dark. But I've lived elsewhere, including New England, and summer days there can definitely be a misery. Summer evenings, though, can be quite nice.
To toss another idea out there, maybe there's something going on with heat regulation. The human brain generates a lot of heat, and it seems to me that it takes a lot more effort to get rid of that heat when it's hot and humid. Radiator fin(ger)s don't work so well when the ambient temperature approaches the interior temperature.
This is interesting. I have just recently read "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat. He claims that warfare in primitive human societies (hunter-gatherers, pastorialists, agricultural societies, proto-states, but also animal fighting) took and takes very different forms depending on the climate. Essentially, the richer the resources (mostly warm and humid), the more direct and intense competition becomes. I can't do full credit to the book, but he draws a big picture, claiming that some of these difference have shaped large parts of human history.
He attributes the difference to increased territoriality. If resources are scarce, territories become larger, and it is harder to protect them. Plus, higher resources = higher population density = more direct encounters. But the effect that you mention (crimes still spike in warm months) gives a new perspective.
"I'm not sure why this is but I'm concerned it has something to do with parasite load or some sort of neuropsychological response to heat."
My standard joke is that it's because James Watt and Adam Smith were Scottish, therefore countries are rich in proportion to their similarity with Scotland.
More seriously, the recipe for becoming really rich happens to have been invented in Northern Europe a few centuries back, and one of the things rich people liked to do a few centuries back was to buy expensive ships and guns and go conquering places. The more a region's environment matched that of Northern Europe, the more likely the people with the recipe for being rich were to say "we're moving in here and running things our way", as opposed to "ugh, we're just going to rotate a few people through here and take all your stuff".
We're less than a century past the part where we (mostly) stopped doing that, and the effects persist. Though, see Hans Rosling, it's been getting a lot better everywhere outside sub-Saharan Africa, and somewhat better even there.
I second this. I think the pattern of "warm weather = less developed" was plausible 50-100, but the development since then? Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are tropical countries. Australia is hot. California is hot and yet an economic hotspot within the US. Within Europe, southern countries like Spain and Italy have greatly diminished the gap to France or UK. China is catching up very quickly.
It seems that countries with warm weather were worse off, for whatever reason (similarity to Europe, lower productivity, higher violence levels, or some other factor). But they seem to by catching up. Perhaps because of air conditioning, or perhaps because the original causes become less important.
Japan is not tropical. It is a vertical country with diverse climate, but very little tropics. It is on the east coast of Asia and its climate is similar to the east coast of the USA. The weather in Tokyo is the same as the weather in DC. That's why the cherry trees in DC are from Tokyo. The principal cities range from Sapporo, Hokkaido with climate like Montreal to Naha, Okinawa with subtropical climate like Miami.
> Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are tropical countries.
They say two out of three isn't bad, but then again, you're getting one out of three.
There was an old Lancet article that estimated global deaths from cold to be nearly twenty times as high as from heat. If you look at US deaths by month you can see the same pattern — higher in the cold months.
The latest IPCC report has a series of maps showing projected temperature change with varying increases in global temperature. It's notable that India (and I think most of Pakistan) shows as lower than average increase. There is a lot of random variation, but the basic pattern is hotter near the poles, less hot near the equator.
The increase in yield due to CO2 fertilization applies everywhere, although it is less in places that grow maize or sugar cane. And it is the most certain part of the story, since it only depends on CO2 concentration, which is the first step in an uncertain causal chain to negative results further along.
In the real world, over a time of a century or so, population does move. China is an enormous country, so can adjust by gradual internal population movement (In the U.S. at present that process is towards warmer states, not away). Looking at the IPCC maps, at 2°C warming most of India and China is projected to warm at between 1° and 1.5°. And that's relative to 1850-1900 — global warming is already just over one degree.
How are these deaths from cold calculated? If it's from excess deaths in cold months vs. warm months in cold countries, I assume that's dominated by deaths from flu and other seasonal infectious diseases. I guess that if the climate were warmer, the prevalence of these would be lower, but not nearly as much as if the prevalence at any given temperature remained the same as today. Indeed, in tropical countries, the flu is much less common than in the temperate winter, but much more common than in the temperate summer.
(Armchair epidemiology incoming:) The reproduction number of the flu depends both on the weather, and on the population's immunity from previous infections. It's somewhat above 1 in the winter, and somewhat below 1 in the summer, for a long-term average of 1. Let's say it's (time since the average person last got a flu in decades)*(weather factor), where the weather factor is 1 in the summer and 2 in the winter, for a yearly average of 1.5. Then we get an equilibrium where the average person has a flu every 13.33 years, and the average person has had the last flu 6.67 years ago. In the winter, r=1.33, in the summer, r=0.67, so the flu virtually disappears. But if, instead, it were summer year-round, we'd get an equilibrium where the average person gets a flu every 20 years, and the average person has had a flu for the last time 10 years ago. So we'd get a 33% reduction, much less than the difference between the current summer prevalence and the year-round average.
> China is an enormous country, so can adjust by gradual internal population movement (In the U.S. at present that process is towards warmer states, not away).
The hot, swampy south of China has been the population center ever since it was originally colonized.
I assume this is mostly due to the substantially higher agricultural productivity.
I believe strongly that even if the world and a large number of people would be much better off (including not dead) if people from near the equator were permitted to move to the high latitudes, this will not be allowed to happen.
My claim is that reduced deaths from cold probably outweigh increased deaths from heat, not that they outweigh all negative consequences of climate change. To calculate the net one would need all negative results of reducing climate change, not just that one. They come in two categories.
The first is eliminating the benefits of climate change. That includes not only fewer deaths from cold but also much larger agricultural yields from CO2 fertilization, lower heating costs in cold countries and seasons, a sizable expansion northward in habitable land, probably a reduction in the (already very low) probability of the end of the current interglacial, and doubtless other things I am missing.
The second category is the cost of things done to slow climate change. As I have mentioned, that includes converting about ten percent of the world crop of maize to alcohol. It includes high energy costs and power shortages in Europe. If we somehow got India and China to stop using coal for power it would almost certainly slow the process by which a couple of billion people are gradually emerging from poverty. It doubtless includes other costs I don't know about.
I'd like to see some type of "green energy bond" from rich nations that allows India/China and so on to borrow for energy infrastructure with bonds that are weighted to internalize the advantages of basically anything not coal. They would be at a lower cost than typical bonds and pay back at a lower rate and longer time, plus a bonus deduction for any observed severe costs of warming experienced by the borrowing country
I've heard it theorized that this type of emissions reduction is twice as efficient as struggling to increase wind/solar and shut down coal plants already built in the first world
Regarding cold deaths, even in a country like India cold related deaths outnumber heat ones by 7-1. It appears at this stage warming saves 100,000 lives a year in terms of temperature related deaths, according to a Lancet study. I hesitate to link the NY Post but I do trust the author Bjorn Lomborg, who strongly tends to follow the science on warming while arguing against the non-science on policy and narrative:
https://nypost.com/2021/07/14/more-die-of-cold-medias-heat-death-climate-obsession-leads-to-lousy-fixes/
After writing the above post I came across an interesting literature, starting with a 2003 article by Ruddiman, suggesting that anthropogenic warming, beginning seven or eight thousand years ago, has already postponed the next glaciation. I have a blog post on it:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-humans-held-back-glaciers.html
Why doesn't the biofuel program reduce (net) CO₂ output?
I think the explanation is that fossil fuel is used in producing and transporting the maize, but I haven't looked into the details. I know that Al Gore conceded that it turned out not to reduce CO2, and I have seen the same claim attributed to others.
It's also less fuel efficient, so you burn more of it to get the same output.
Natural gas is the major input for making nitrogen fertilizers, that maize needs a lot of. Farm machinery runs on diesel. Distillation is energy intensive and most distillers use natural gas to power their stills.
(adding this much later, because I came across more information)
The argument seems to be that the energy used in producing it is less than the energy it provides, but clearing land to grow maize puts additional CO2 into the air. Of course, we may already be growing it, but then converting some of our maize into alcohol pushes up the world price, causing other people to clear land to grow more maize. That's from one source, so I don't know how reliable it is:
https://www.pfpi.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/PFPI-biomass-carbon-accounting-overview_April.pdf
They measure deaths from cold using seasonal variation, and almost all of them are due to the flu and other respiratory viruses. They don't however, measure deaths from heat using seasonal variation, because hot places don't have much seasonal variation, and so they don't attribute malarial deaths to it, when they should.
If you're going to restrict yourself to the effect of direct heat and cold on the body, heat kills an enormous number more people than cold. If you're going to open yourself to every indirect effect of heat and cold on disease, then it is only fair to include the entire parasite load of the tropics in this, which these studies never do.
"If you're going to restrict yourself to the effect of direct heat and cold on the body, heat kills an enormous number more people than cold. "
Maybe. How do you know?
You can at least use seasonal variation for the U.S., where cold months have higher mortality rates than hot.
"Climate Change Saves More Lives Than You’d Think: Eight times as many people die from cold as heat, and the fix for both is access to cheap fuel." By Bjorn Lomborg | Sept. 16, 2021
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-heat-cold-deaths-medical-journal-health-risk-energy-cost-fossil-fuels-11631741045
The liberal principle is good for things that involve consenting adults, but here we're talking about bringing a new child into the world. Consider:
- If Alice has kids, she'll lock them in the basement and torture them.
- If Bob has kids, predictably, somebody else (not Bob) will lock them in the basement and torture them.
- If Charlie has kids, he (Charlie) will be locked up in the basement and tortured.
Clearly, neither Alice nor Bob should have kids. In Bob's case, the torture may not be his fault and he may even try to prevent it, but that doesn't license him to create kids in harm's way. Charlie's case is a bit more ambiguous, but since creating kids is easy and the pain further off, he may be irrationally shortsighted, especially if he thinks having kids (and then potentially being tortured) is normal. In none of these cases should society take a "chill pill" and leave their decision to have children unquestioned.
Given the prevalence of bad lives, this reasoning suggests moderate antinatalism, with a defeasable presumption against having children. This is further reinforced by how common it is to not give enough thought to creating and raising children. (Do you really want to take care of a crying baby? A toddler...? Etc for 18 years? Are you *sure*?)
Are you really arguing that every child born will be locked in a basement and tortured, and if they are not, the parents will be locked in a basement and tortured?
That is such a weird view of replenishing the species, I don't even know how to address it. Having and raising a new human being is the same, functionally, of being imprisoned and tortured.
Well, certainly if that is your feeling on the matter, then don't have kids. But don't tell other people, if they want to have children and can afford it and can take care of them, that they shouldn't do so.
Of course, many lives are far from that bad - the torture case illustrates that "people who want kids should have kids" isn't a great principle, and suggests that people having bad lives as a result of child creation is a defeater for that desire. And bad lives (that aren't extremely bad) are quite common.
Okay, but if you knew for a fact that you child would be tortured forever, that would affect whether you want to have kids.
“People who want kids should have kids” usually assumes the “people” do at least a little bit of thinking before they determine their “want”.
People can have no kids and still have bad lives, so it's not really a great argument except if you're a staunch proponent of "humans are a plague, we should all exterminate ourselves and hand the planet back to nature, kill yourself quickly so you suffer as little hardship in this cruel life as possible".
Nature is, of course, even worse, but it can't comprehend its awfulness. Of course, humans can't either, truly, because if we could, we would've gone extinct already. The hellish irony of this is amusing, and horrifying.
At the risk of being that guy... religious Christians believe there is a pretty decent chance their children will be tortured forever, but they tend to have tons of kids.
I agree there should be a presumption towards not having kids who will live terrible lives.
"Given the prevalence of bad lives"
If most lives are worse than nonexistence, wouldn't we expect the suicide rate to be enormously greater than it is?
No, because a tendency to commit suicide in such cases would be evolutionarily selected against. Indeed, willingness to commit suicide seems to have more to do with one's psychological characteristics than with quality of life - even people in extremely terrible circumstances usually try to stay alive.
Also, it's to the advantage of a religion to have a vividly imagined Heaven, but once you've got that, it's to the advantage of the religion to have strictures against suicide.
> No, because a tendency to commit suicide in such cases would be evolutionarily selected against.
You're making the assumption here that a life can be objectively worse than nonexistence even though the being in question believes the opposite.
Not necessarily. There are plenty of factors that could hold someone back from committing suicide even if they would rather not exist than exist, for example:
- Fear of the pain/discomfort of actually dying
- Concern for the feelings of loved ones
- For the religious, fear of eternal Hell even worse than continuing to be alive
- Sense of duty to their community or the world
So in order to commit suicide, someone's life needs to be not just net negative, but net negative by enough to overcome these extra costs. When you consider that even people in truly horrible circumstances, such as Nazi death camps, chose to live more often than to die, it should be clear that these extra costs are sometimes really high. In fact, I would bet that suicidal people are more likely to have unusually low costs rather than unusually awful lives. I could definitely imagine a world in which most people don't want to commit suicide, but do fantasize about blinking out of existence consequence-free.
Right, it's not whether you believe your life is worth living. It's whether the costs you'd inflict by attempting to end your life are worthwhile. You might think it would be better for you, or the world, if you could just blink out of existence without leaving a mess behind, but that's not an option without supernatural intervention. Job asked to have never been born, for example. I recommend Greenstein’s new translation:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/job-edward-l-greenstein/594769/
For me, religion served as a temporary deterrent — a decade's worth, which is actually pretty effective. Now, though I'm still religious, religion has lost its suicide-deterrent power. The mess I would leave for my family, on the other hand, plus the mess I might make of myself if I attempted, failed and lived, potentially with much worse problems than the ones I already feel shame for not handling better, *is* a deterrent. I don't think "the world" would miss me, but there are some lives — including now children's lives — I could seriously mess up by attempting self-execution, no matter how richly I may deserve it.
So, here I stay. Vexingly enough, I found out *after* having kids that I had been living with an unacknowledged congenital condition that may explain much the "failure to thrive" that left me wondering whether I'm Lebensunwertes Leben — and the condition's heritable! Sorry 'bout that, kids!
On the plus side, knowledge is power: the people who find out they have this condition early get a fairer shot at adapting to it and having a life within the envelope of "normal". Those diagnosed later, as I was, more often seem de-moralized — as in less able to cope, morally — with the physical symptoms.
Something about having to cope with something you're not allowed to acknowledge you're coping with because it officially Does Not Exist, ergo you must be Doing It To Yourself, You Stupid Malingering Lazy Freak, doesn't actually seem to help that much with cultivating fortitude — even though, according to the Tough Love school, those capitalized words ought to be able to solve pretty much any problem, including Long Covid!
I think most of us regard death as much worse than never having existed.
"I think the flaw here is that it takes a lot of time to act to stop climate change."
That is one of the reasons that adapting to climate change — diking against sea level rise, changing crop varieties as climate changes — makes more sense than trying to stop it. Raising the dikes protecting a coastal city by a few feet if it turns out that the IPCC underestimated SLR takes months or years, not centuries. A second reason is that adapting faces much less of a public good problem than preventing, since one farmer can do it for himself, one city for itself, where as reducing climate change is a public good problem at the global level. A third reason is that adapting lets us get the benefits — more usable land in the extreme north, more crop yield from CO2 fertilization, fewer deaths from cold — while reducing the costs.
Is there an element to the climate change movement that touches on the stuff in https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/22/beware-systemic-change/ -- that the sort of people who are into it are often the same people (in the case of XR -- exactly the same people) who want to focus on implausibly ambitious systemic changes that will never happen; and that's why it is currently the shape it is and focused on the sort of implausible changes that it is?
"My personal preference is to decide how much time/energy/money I want to spend on charity (I’ve settled on 10% of money; time and energy are harder to budget), and then spend the rest of it however I want."
My guess is that the time and energy you spent on the hobby of running SSC, spend now on ACX, does orders of magnitude more good for the world by promoting dialog and clear thinking than 10% of your income devoted to charity.
I'll also give credit to the discussion about there being no risk that earth will become like Venus.
"I agree that it’s true that time/energy spent raising children inevitably trades off against time/energy spent doing charity work."
Woah woah -- that's a can of worms.
Isn't caring for children ethically superior than spending time caring for people who aren't your children?
Don't ethnical systems usually preference your nearest? Your family, your neighbors, your children, and so on?
If your ethnics puts no penalty on abortions; don't you end up having to abort healthy fetuses in preference for unhealthy fetuses? Because caring for disabled children seems more like charity than caring for healthy children? I guess I'm saying that reasoning in this sort of way is insane.
> Don't ethnical systems usually preference your nearest? Your family, your neighbors, your children, and so on?
Note that one of points of effective altruism is that helping remote people (say, funding boring anti-malaria nets in far away places) may be much, much more effective than helping people in your city.
> Isn't caring for children ethically superior than spending time caring for people who aren't your children?
It is trickier when you decide between deciding to have children and helping other people. As far as such theoretical case seriously happens.
Helping remote people, all else being equal, is much worse than helping near people. You can actually evaluate the effectiveness of nearby charity.
The catch is, for anyone likely to read this, the far people are much worse off and appreciative of relatively littler marginal assistance compared to the near people.
"Don't ethnical systems usually preference your nearest? Your family, your neighbors, your children, and so on?"
This is an amazing typo. Good work.
I don't think privileging people closer to you naturally falls out of ethics, though I agree it's something you will do anyway so your ethics should be prepared for it. I would urge people to think about the tradeoffs. If it's one of your kid's life vs. one starving Indian orphan's life, I can't imagine anyone not choosing their kid. If it's an extra hour with your already-spoiled kid vs. saving a thousand orphans' lives, choose the orphans. In between those poles, I guess opinions differ, and I don't know of any hard-and-fast way to make the decision.
(except, of course, the excellent and incontrovertible system described in https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/17/newtonian-ethics/ )
I would argue that one is far more obligated to care for their children/parents than for random person - if everything else is equal.
If my brother is really sad I am willing to do quite a lot to help. If some random person is sad? I am unlikely to do anything, and it is fine overall.
In general people are often far more motivated, qualified and able to actually help them. Even if I would be comforting random people I am dubious whether it would even help.
It has also other practical benefits. People are far less likely to build elaborate Mao-like failures while helping directly own family. Where something intended to help is done in such braindead way that it produces piles of skulls.
Obviously there are clear failure modes and degenerates to the "build palace for my family you stupid starving peasants" point in extreme.
> I don't think privileging people closer to you naturally falls out of ethics
I guess it depends on how important is the obligation to family/tribe. What would be axiom in ethics rather that outcome of ethics.
To piggyback on the post you responded to, I don't agree that spending time with children requires less time spent on charities. I think that there are two cases where the opposite is true, both of which would likely be much more common for a parent who would otherwise be inclined to give time to charitable causes:
1) Volunteering for charitable causes with their kids, as a means and opportunity to train the children in being charitable.
2) Having raised children to be charitable, thereby increasing the amount of charity being done in the world (in this case by a future generation).
I agree that many people are sincerely motivated by principle when it comes to "it would be irresponsible to have children".
But like I said, the song was the same, it was just the tune was different back when I was a kid. Then it was "it would be irresponsible to have children" because the Earth was groaning under the burden of increasing population. Or "it would be irresponsible to have children" because of the threat of nuclear war, or the oil was going to run out.
But when I looked at who was saying "don't have children, it would be irresponsible to bring a new life into this dying, decaying, threat-ridden, over-burdened world", they weren't doing anything more to change their own lives, particularly in the 'consuming resources' sense. It was like listening to someone lecturing about how alcohol was terrible and a curse, all the while sipping from a glass of whiskey.
So I am reminded about what Chesterton said in regard to Prohibition, after coming back from visiting America in 1921:
"But if I am to deal with Prohibition, there is no doubt of the first thing to be said about it. The first thing to be said about it is that it does not exist. It is to some extent enforced among the poor; at any rate it was intended to be enforced among the poor; though even among them I fancy it is much evaded. It is certainly not enforced among the rich; and I doubt whether it was intended to be.
...But when some of the rich Americans gravely tell us that their drinking cannot be interfered with, because they are only using up their existing stocks of wine, we may well be disposed to smile. When I was there, at any rate, they were using them up very fast; and with no apparent fears about the supply. But if the Ku-Klux Klan had started suddenly shooting everybody they didn’t like in broad daylight, and had blandly explained that they were only using up the stocks of their ammunition, left over from the Civil War, it seems probable that there would at least have been a little curiosity about how much they had left. There might at least have been occasional inquiries about how long it was likely to go on. It is even conceivable that some steps might have been taken to stop it.
No steps are taken to stop the drinking of the rich, chiefly because the rich now make all the rules and therefore all the exceptions, but partly because nobody ever could feel the full moral seriousness of this particular rule. And the truth is, as I have indicated, that it was originally established as an exception and not as a rule."
And from what I remember one of his works had society where prohibition was introduced. With alcohol-by-prescription available as medicine for rich.
> Washington State proposed a carbon tax a few years ago, and it failed 56 to 44. Suppose that a bunch of pro-carbon-tax activists equal to 7% of the population moved in the next day. How would this change politics? Would the climate change activists propose something even more ambitious, so that chance of success is held constant? And is there a binary distribution here, such that “carbon tax” is going to offend some people and excite others no matter what the rate is, and so it’s hard to get something that is “like a carbon tax but appeals to 6% more voters”?
Washington actually had two carbon tax initiatives that failed. The first was a business Republican-friendly revenue neutral tax -- anything the tax generated would be rebated back out. This failed because what it gained in centrist support it lost on the left wing who didn't think it went far enough. The next one in response was a tax that would fund "climate justice," essentially a giant slush fund for lefty non profits, and it lost all the support from the center it would have needed to get over 50%.
So the answer to this question seems to be yes -- the farthest left wing will always want more than it can get away with, and adding more pro-climate voters will just tempt them to write an initiative that they fool themselves into thinking they can pass.
This is a constant problem with messaging on this issue. If climate change is such a huge issue, then carbon taxes don’t need to be (and arguably shouldn’t ever be) revenue generators. They are purely to offset the negative externalities of carbon.
But proponents can’t resist tacking on all their other priorities to that big pile of potential revenue. Simultaneously dooming the bill to failure, and revealing that climate change is not quite the all-consuming concern they claim (at a minimum, it’s not important enough to pass up a shot at their other political pet projects).
I don't understand your question. A "tax" generates revenue by definition. The proposals I have heard for taxes of this sort are that the revenue ought to be used to undo some of the unfortunate externalities caused by the tax.
In the case of a Carbon Tax, the tax raises the price of carbon-based energy allowing non-carbon types of energy to be more competitive. The externalities are that, at least in the short term, people have to pay more for their energy. The revenue might be distributed through some progressive scale to mitigate that effect.
Your first paragraph is I guess what I would call “revenue neutral” - any revenue obtained goes back out in credits directly tied to the externalities of the tax. Alternative “revenue neutral” is having a carbon tax but cutting the same number of dollars from other taxes.
The troublesome one is when the carbon tax revenue gets directed to non-climate (or non carbon tax) related ends. Like if you used carbon taxes to fund slavery reparations or planned parenthood or whatever.
The externality of people paying more for energy can be mitigated by reducing their other tax burdens, in this particular case by reducing the WA sales tax by about 15%, increasing sales tax refunds for vulnerable populations (i.e., mailing bigger checks to poor people), and virtually eliminating a particular business tax. Overall the WA tax system would have become more progressive than before.
And then the legislature could still vote to raise those other taxes right back up, and spend that money on whatever it thinks best. Or not, if it doesn't want to. And people can still propose initiatives to raise taxes in general, to fund all those new programs. There's no inherent reason to tie a change in revenue source to a bunch of new spending.
My understanding is that poling has shown the idea of a carbon tax to be generally hated by voters on both sides of the aisle.
I suspect that this is not inherent to the concept of a carbon tax, but more about political dynamics. Partly, the type of people who favor a carbon tax tend to be more similar to homo economicus, and, well, enough said about that. And partly it's that the conceptual cleanliness of the idea means that it's harder to carve out exceptions and earmark rewards for various interest groups, which mean that it's harder to get them on board because there's nothing in it for them except a better world, so why would they bother?
Forgot to add:
British Columbia seems to be fine with their carbon tax, and I doubt that they're very much different than us in WA state.
They absolutely cannot resist the creation of an enormous green slush fund that ends up being pointed at a bunch of progressive causes unrelated to climate change. The poison pill. If they really cared about climate change they would use the tax to build NFL stadiums or something that the other side might like.
Even revenue neutral taxes seemed a bit suspicious. You are going to refund my money annually? How about I take an immediate refund at the pump by not paying the tax in the first place? This just inserts inefficiency into the system. Mr. Cynical also has zero trust that politicians won't be tempted to raid that pile of cash on a moments notice.
People aren't going to like energy taxes, and they especially seem hyper-concerned about artificial changes to gasoline prices.
Presumably the system wouldn't refund *your* taxes specifically to *you*, but, say, pay out everyone's taxes to everyone in equal amounts. So those who emit an average amount of CO₂ get the same amount as they pay, those who emit more than average pay more carbon tax than they get back, and those who emit less than average get back more than they pay. In other words, above-average emitters pay to below-average emitters.
Yes, the carbon sinners will get their just punishment, ha ha. What if you live in a rural area 40 miles from a city, say growing food in vast quantities for the righteous carbon angels living in the city? A basic unjust wealth transfer. Just like all seemingly good ideas on paper there would be real unfairness, attempts at adjustments, lobbying, followed by unjust cutouts for the politically favored.
Cold winter? Hot summer? Pay more taxes to those in favored climates. Got a job in downtown SF and you make a measly $100K and want a family in a safe neighborhood? Commute an hour a day and transfer some wealth to other regions.
I question how much this would actually change behavior, or how much one could adjust their behavior to avoid the taxes if one was predisposed to do so. If energy went up 10X you would likely pay close attention to energy bills of a potential new home, but if that increase was due to the government there would be a taxpayer revolt.
Knock off the snark.
If growing food necessarily emits a lot of CO₂, the taxes would be passed on to city dwellers as part of food prices.
A free market leads to the optimal allocation of resources under many conditions; but it leads to suboptimal allocation if an activity has a negative externality, and people engaging in it aren't forced to pay a Pigouvian tax to compensate for the harm. Whether emitting CO₂ is harmful is itself under debate, but assuming that it is, a Pigouvian tax is the most efficient way to reduce it. That includes incentivizing people to move to climates where there heating and cooling uses the least energy.
You worry about carve-outs, but any measure to reduce CO₂ emissions other than a Pigouvian tax (i.e. a uniform tax on CO₂ emissions) necessarily has (the equivalent of) carve-outs, in as much as it disincentivizes some forms of CO₂ emission more than others.
Hey Scott - I saw the discourse was getting a bit out of hand, and I imagine it's hell to moderate a discussion that large. I threw together a rough draft of a "hey I gave you temp ban, please chill a bit" message that may be useful in reducing some of the cognitive overhead of putting people in timeout when a discussion blows up. That said, I don't know if it's possible to do something like have an automated message sent when a ban is issued.
Also, I'd be very curious to hear the general community's take on liberal short (3 day, 7 day, etc.) bans for norm enforcement.
---
Hi there! I want to start this message by offering you my sincere thanks for participating in the ACX community discussions. The community that has grown around this blog is incredibly important to me, and it only exists as long as people choose to actively contribute.
In that spirit, you've been given a temporary (1 week) ban.
I use the ban system as a way of enforcing a set of rules and norms that have been conducive to the development of a community that is intellectually generous, challenging, and curious. The temporary ban is used to give participants the opportunity to review these rules and norms before posting again, and maybe give them a little space from a discussion that is getting out of hand.
There are three obvious and unfortunate failings of this ban system.
The first is that I may issue a ban for a comment that was intended to be entirely innocuous. Please review the tone of your post - not as you intended it, but rather as a reader unfamiliar with your motives might interpret it - to avoid this in the future.
The second is that, with the growth of the community, I often do not have time to issue temporary bans to all commenters that break the rules. This means that you may be issued a temporary ban for a comment that is no worse than a comment that does not result in one. I am truly sorry for this shortcoming but also ask your understanding.
The third shortcoming is related to the second. Because I am trying to manage such a large community while also writing and maintaining a clinical practice, I do not have time to provide explanations of why you were banned, nor do I have time to handle appeals. I hope that the latter limitation is addressed by the relatively short duration of the ban.
If you are uncertain why you received this ban, please review the rules here (actually, please review them even if it is clear to you). In general, the rules aim to maintain a good vibe by avoiding personal attacks, limiting antagonistic (e.g. hostile or patronizing) tones, and encouraging insightful conversation.
If you are still uncertain why you were banned after reading the rules and comparing your comment against comments that did not result in bans, then this community may be a poor fit for your communication style or I may have made a mistake. If it's the latter you have my apologies. If your posts continue to violate the spirit of the rules linked above, I will eventually give you an indefinite ban. I do not give these lightly, but I will not sacrifice the standards of behavior that foster a community of good-faith discussion.
Thank you again for your participation. The addition of differing perspectives often introduces greater clarity to the exploration of a topic. It just needs to be done while maintaining the vibe.
One aspect of having kids that wasn’t covered: many of the people who are concerned about climate change impacts of kids also tend to favor large social welfare programs.
But who will pay for all those programs 50 years from now if wealthy educated people don’t reproduce?
And if social welfare programs are collapsing due to a rapidly aging population, THAT’S the crisis that will get attention, and environmental concerns will get back-burnered.
> Man, I wish I could write like this. Seems like a waste to blog when one could be quoting CS Lewis instead.
Actually Lewis is the closest stylistic match to rationalist-community approaches to reasoning and writing-- Scott's in particular-- out of all the generally-known writers I can think of. (G.K. Chesterton is also worth mentioning but rationalists are more directly conscious of him as an influence.) See also: the surprising influence that Scott et al have had on center-right-ish Christian public intellecutuals specifically (e.g. Ross Douthat, Alan Jacobs). There's a shared sensibility there regarding what kinds of arguments move people, in spite of significant object-level (and sometimes meta-level) disagreements.
Point of reference, I first learned of SSC from National Review, which promoted him positively.
"the surprising influence that Scott et al have had on center-right-ish Christian public intellecutuals specifically"
Because Scott has intellectual humility. What turned me off the New Atheist bunch was the attitude some of them had about "I am SO SMART. I am yuuuuge brain. I am too clever by half to fall for dumb religion. See how bright I am?"
Yes, and I'm sure you also had a nine-inch dick and were an Olympic-level athlete. Even the best argument in the world won't be convincing when delivered in the tone of de haut en bas. Which brings me once again to my guilty pleasure book review of yore, Terry Eagleton on "The God Delusion":
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
> First, the MVT assumes that both parties will end up as indistinguishable centrists, but this clearly hasn’t happened, probably because of the primary process.
Hasn't it? Not when it comes to rhetoric, but when it comes to policy, it seems to be a common complaint on both sides. Though I'm not sure why the MVT should affect policy more than rhetoric.
"Seems like a waste to blog when one could be quoting CS Lewis instead."
Ain't that the truth.
I lived in n. Idaho at one time and still keep in touch. The wonderful summer there is a good reason for living there. This past summer smoke from forest fires made summer a lot less wonderful for big chunks of time. That's a real loss in quality of life subset of reason for living but I doubt that it impacted the local "gdp" much. Maybe even raised it due to fire fighting crews coming in from elsewhere.
> I agree - I don’t see this a lot in my everyday life, so it was pretty disappointing to see how
> many commenters here want to challenge other people’s life choices not to become parents.
> I’m always surprised how willing people are to tear up the liberal contract of “I don’t question
> your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine”, especially when they’re
> not guaranteed to be on the winning side, and would completely freak out if the other side
> tried to create stigma against them.
We've already torn up that contract. The culture war is all about trying to be in a dominant position when the music stops.
"The people refusing to have kids because of climate change are some of the most intelligent and ethical people around. This is my assessment from knowing some of them, plus my inference from all the articles about them which usually mentions how they went to top colleges."
Maybe. Scott lives, socially and geographically, in a blue tribe high IQ bubble. It's tempting to think that your sort of people are better than not your sort of people.
I have lived in a different bubble (socially — at present I am also in the Bay Area). Of the smartest people I have known I don't think any took (or for those still alive take) seriously the sort of climate catastrophism scare story that motivates someone to not have kids because of climate worries. I too am tempted to think highly of my sort of people.
People who choose not to have children for these reasons are selected for a number of characteristics:
1. Being sufficiently credulous, or conformist to their social surroundings, to accept an exaggerated view of the perils of climate change — exaggerated relative to what Scott believes, as he has just demonstrated, greatly exaggerated relative to what I believe.
2. Not very much wanting to have children. That could reflect risk aversion or a high discount rate, since the returns from having children are uncertain and the costs are greatest early. It could reflect having had an unhappy childhood, poor relations with their parents. It could reflect being lazy or selfish — children, especially small children, are a lot of work.
3. A willingness to do what they and those around them view as the responsible thing. That could, as Scott suggests, be due to being very ethical. It could also be due to being conformist.
Bothered me too. My take is below.
Are you the David Friedman who hung out in the coffee shop at Ida Noyes Hall around 1970?
Probably. But there could have been a different one.
I think I was more often in Reynolds club
A different coffee shop or a different David Friedman?
A different David Friedman. I'm sure I was sometimes in the Ida Noyes coffee shop, but I don't think often enough to qualify for "hung out." What context do you remember observing a David Friedman in? If it was libertarian arguments or medieval recreation the odds it was me are very high.
Definitely Libertarianism. I wanted to thank you. I learned a lot. It was my gateway drug out what was then known as Liberalism.
IIRC, you were a graduate student in Physics..
Correct. I got a doctorate in physics, did a few years as a post-doc, then switched to economics.
“ If we ever approached a point where refugees could actually cause techno-economic decline or civil war or whatever, we would have already built a giant unscaleable border wall. I don’t think our civilization should necessarily be proud of this…”
Oh, I dunno. Avoiding civil war is probably decent enough politics.
An example of a straight couple not getting married for moral reasons: my aunt and uncle got a UK civil partnership recently after having been together but unmarried for 35 years. Civil partnerships were initially introduced in 2004 as a sort of "gay marriage in all but name" but they were only extended to straight couples in the last couple of years (depending in which part of the UK you're in).
It's not exactly what you describe, because their reasons weren't exactly "marriage is homophobic because it excludes gay couples", but they were certainly in the boat of "this thing would be advantageous for our lives but it goes against our principles so we're not doing it."
"The only exception might be fairly extreme geo-engineering attempts that we’ll wish we didn’t have to experiment with. "
Freeman Dyson did the calculation, and we could stop an increase in CO2 emissions by embarking on a massive tree-planting program. Half of the CO2 that exists now gets cycled through trees on a yearly basis. That would give us enough time to do the CO2 mitigation. So once we decide that CO2 is really causing the warming, we can easily generating breathing room. Because who doesn't want more trees?
I'm a little skeptical that this, er, low-hanging fruit is just waiting here to be done.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_climate_establishment
Well, this says he thinks we should engineer a new super-tree that absorbs and holds CO2, which, great, yes, let's do that, but I don't think we can just decide to do it.
https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-planting-trees-to-save-the-environment/
This suggests it's just a stopgap.
His wikipage talks about his desire to genetically engineer a tree for use in comets, so I'm not sure how much this is him selling his own book. It also says that a trillion trees would remove all CO2 from the environment.
Did I say it was a solution? I thought I said it was a stopgap to create breathing room.
We created rice that cures blindness and wine grapes that thive on both Hoth and the even more inhospitable climate of central Canada. I think the super-tree would be small potatoes.
You only need to upregulate a couple of genes to get super trees. There are small, ambitious teams which are trying to make it a reality.
Places that don't already have trees don't have them for a reason. Either trees won't grow there, or someone is using the land for something else.
I wouldn't go up against Freeman Dyson in a thinking contest, and he's even dead!
I think it's also worth noting regarding the future voters argument and MVT that even if MVT is true and dems adjust rightwards to win elections sans the voters who weren't born because their parents were worried about the climate, this probably means that the dems are less supportive of climate polices than they otherwise would be so it still might be.
It’s sad that the unique rewards of having children can’t be communicated in words... if they could, the notion of going child-free “because climate change” would probably not exist. Unfortunately anyone who tries to find language for the rewards of having children just comes off sounding trite. It was not convincing to me in my first 15ish years of adulthood. Now, having had a kid, I feel sadness that there’s no vocabulary to describe this to friends who are on the fence. Seems critical to get the message out, somehow, into low fertility W.E.I.R.D. societies where “your parents and God need you to have babies” is not compelling. (I have no good ideas for how to do this.)
I don't have much experience with psychedelics, but my experience of parenthood feels very much like a drug habit - costs a lot of money, leaves little energy for activities that I used to find meaningful, makes it difficult to maintain friendships, etc. It pains me to see other people slipping into this lifestyle. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
I’m sorry to hear this.
And I'm glad to hear that parenthood has been a positive experience for you!
But I don't think you should worry too much about your friends on the fence. I feel the same sort of responsibility to warn friends away from parenthood that you seem to feel about nudging them towards it, but there's ultimately no way to know which way would make their lives better or worse. For some of your friends, becoming parents could end up being the decision they regret more than any other, and I doubt that you would want to be part of the cause for that regret.
Do you find that a lot of parents around you share your feelings? My understanding is that regret for having had children is an outlier - possibly an extreme outlier - position. (For sure influenced by the fact that one opinion is socially acceptable to express and the other is not, but it’s not clear to me how strong a factor this is.) I’d love to correct my perspective on this.
It's not something I would discuss with other parents around me, for the social acceptability reasons mentioned. In fact, until now I haven't even talked about it anonymously online.
Indeed.
I don't disagree with the "liberal consensus", but it is not entirely true that fewer people having kids has no negative externalities.
As someone who for a while was the only one with kids in my social group, and the only one with kids in my extended family -- it means your kids have fewer friends among like-minded people, and less community for them and for you. And this reflects in psychological ways, not just in material ways (e.g. opportunity to trade babysitting or form a homeschooling pod).
Also, as people get less and less exposed to kids, they make the external world less friendly to kids and parents. I believe that parents should be responsible for the effects of their children's behavior in public, and most of the costs of their children's existence.
BUT in terms of how relaxed other people are around kids, how much trepidation they feel in handling kids, how easily annoyed they are, how accommodating vs resentful your coworkers are due to kids..... All of these things go into the "harder for parents" direction when you're the only parent around.
And again, this is the case, at least anecdotally - in my work experience, most young coworkers were not even close to kids, and th older employees had teenage or grown kids; none of my husband's coworkers don't have small children.
This makes a lot of sense. I live in an opposite situation where everyone still has kids, and fairly early, and things are extremely kid oriented. It is certainly alienating when you are alone in your lifestyle, but this is made worse when amenities, schedules, and other material factors are all designed to be suited for a different type of life. I imagine this is the case for basically any minority lifestyle.
I feel like this isn't within my borders of what constitutes a meaningful negative externality.
It sounds like the same kind of argument as "if other people don't play soccer, there won't be enough people on my soccer team, and society won't invest in good soccer fields". All of this is true, but it doesn't mean that not-playing-soccer has a negative externality, is harmful to others, and society should be able to ban it.
Oh I absolutely don't think it rises to the level of argument for any kind of policy/social pressure in favor of or against having children, just like I don't buy the argument that something "lowers property prices by epsilon" or "increases tax revenue by epsilon" is valid for HOA or eminent domain type decisions.
I do think, however, that it is a real and lamentable negative effect that I've observed.
If we do count this as a negative externality, then the decision to play soccer also has negative externalities because the people who join you in your soccer game won't be available to play basketball with the lonely guy around the corner looking for a pickup game.
Sorry, I should have prefaced it by saying that I don't believe that quantifying these sorts of marginal effects is grounds for any kind of social or political action. "Externality" isn't even the right term, but it is a negative effect.
And yeah, if everyone always played basketball, but suddenly The Powers that Be, and fashion, moved on to soccer - and now suddenly all the basketball facilities are closing, nobody wants to play anymore, nobody's interested in it, the only club that plays it is in the big city an hour away - cause chagrin to the people who still want to play basketball but don't have the numbers, concentration, or resources to resurrect all this infrastructure.
I'm not trying to extend the basketball-having children metaphor too much. But to me, the shift of norms away from "you have children - it's what you do" to "maybe, later, I don't know if I'll ever be ready, is it ethical to even have them?" has a lot of lamentable aspects to it.
"Does anyone else have an experience with a couple like that? If so, what happened?"
Yes, I did! I knew a straight activist couple in Dunedin New Zealand who abstained from marriage until gay marriage was legalized. At the time gay couples could get a 'Civil Union' but could not marry, so they got "civil union-ed" then had a real wedding after gay marriage was legalized in 2013. In my opinion, the Civil Union party was much more fun :)
When old people look back on their lives, often, the most satisfying thing they've done is raise kids. It is puzzling unless you've raised kids yourself.
The days are long, but the years are short, raising kids. It is counter intuitive, but true in my experience.
I hope young people don't deprive themselves of this joy or overthink it. Why do smart people often overthink things?
Doing what one wants might lead to deep regret later. It is not always the right way to make decisions.
This is not to say parenting is the right choice for everyone. I think if one overthinks it, it could lead to regret. There will never be a perfect time to have kids. I was rather influenced by tradition here.
As one gets older, it won't truly be an option after a certain age. I was pretty impressed to see my young niece figured this as a factor in what area of medicine she specialized in, even before even meeting her future life partner. I see that as maturity. She said I'm going to choose internal medicine (not more demanding fields) as it will allow me to graduate by 32 and have kids by a "reasonable age".
*becoming a parent (not parenting)
I am extremely skeptical about the probability of continuing economic growth
Given how correlated access to energy is to GDP, and how much of our energy comes from fossil fuels, it's hard for me to imagine never-ending growth in a world where, by choice or because of limited supply, we would extract less and less of them.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/access-to-electricity-vs-gdp-per-capita
(This might not be the best graph, because it's only about access to electricity, but I can probably find a better one)
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix?country=#energy-mix-what-sources-do-we-get-our-energy-from
So what we would need is either decoupling growth from energy production (which seems implausible to me because pretty much every new technology requires more energy, not less) or decoupling growth from energy production, which I don't see happening
Of course, renewables are on the rise, but:
- Because they are very distributed, their construction necessitates huge quantities of materials such as steel and aluminium, which we don't really know how to produce without fossil fuels
- They can't be used exclusively without extensive grid storage, which is another tough technological nut to crack
And nuclear could help us a great deal, but
- Nuclear plants are huge, long-term investments, so they're difficult to finance privately, and
- People are afraid of them, so it's difficult for democratic governments to fund them
Sure, several small modular reactors technologies seem very promising, but I'm just not convinced that this tech will scale fast enough around the world (especially in poor countries)
Also, energy is just part of the opportunities that fossil fuels have given us (materials, chemicals, etc)
1) It’s not true that new technology needs more energy not less.
2) GDP per barrel of oil (or equivalent) is increasing.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP
3) renewables can produce far more than we need even at today’s technology.
Storage is a problem though.
1) I admit my statement was a bit hand-wavy
It's pretty clear for me that each new technology builds on existing infrastructure, and that we're really far from being able to produce enough energy and materials without fossil products, but I'm actually not sure how to justify this.
It's just that every major industry relies heavily on them: plastic, concrete and steel production, fertilizers etc
And the alternatives seem pretty far off:
- Most biopolymers are not viable replacements and/or complete greenwashing because they use more energy
- Less carbon-intensive concrete projects are a dime a dozen but engineers will be reluctant to use them until they have a proven 50-year track record
- The first carbon-neutral steel plant just opened but all other existing ones will tend to stay open as long as they make money
2) Thanks, didn't know that graph, pretty interesting
Still pretty convinced that our industry is based on energy use (it's not because we use less per dollar that we could make do with even less) but I agree that I was somewhat wrong on this one.
3) I kind of agree, but this is a pretty theoretical statement
Of course we "can" produce plenty of renewable energy, but it would be pretty difficult, especially if steel, silicon and rare earths are in short supply.
I also want to insist on the fact that energy is not necessarily what we need, as much as on-demand power, so that our factories, offices and car chargers work even when it's night/cloudy and there's no wind
The only large-scale energy storage solutions that exist are dams, and new dams need very specific geographic conditions (apart from often being terrible for the local environment), so we're pretty close to full capacity
Maybe you're aware of this though, if so sorry for the rant.
You have kind of moved on from the relation between energy and GDP to what will be do to replace concrete, or polymers without fossil fuels. This is moving from oil as an energy source to as a product.
And your original question wasn't about carbon at all. Therefore although we may never replace concrete ( I think we will) the energy needed in the production of concrete could be through renewables. Also the statements that 'steel, silicon and rare earths are in short supply" is dubious enough for at least two of those, silicon is hugely abundant. Iron has plenty supply. Anyway, not energy related.
I think when it comes to renewables the storage issue does need solving, however there's vastly more wind out there than we need, and plenty of sun. The US is a big place as is Europe, interconnectors and nuclear can solve the intermittent problem. By the way it doesn't matter to your argument if we never get to carbon zero, and we still need some fossil fuels. Wind and solar are additional sources of energy regardless.
So we have a declining demand side and a increasing supply side, there's no running out of energy for GDP growth, although there may be other factors.
What I mean is that GDP is linked to carbon-intensive industries, especially energy but not only that.
I agree I could have been more clear about that from the beginning, and that my discourse was kind of meandering.
As for steel, silicon and rare earth, the short supply I was referring to is not about mining but about refining.
I don't want to make too many claims about rare earths and silicon because I don't know much about them.
About steel, I was thinking about the manufacturing process, which involves coke and is extremely energy-intensive (7.2 % of global GES emissions according to this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector)
(I know I'm talking about energy again but I don't think we can really disentangle these subjects)
About the fact that interconnections and nascent storage solutions will be enough, I don't really have concrete data in mind to support my argument, I guess it's just about subjective differences of appreciation.
Same for the viability of a comfortable life in a world with the more serious climate change that would come from the continued use of fossil fuels
These are going to be in short supply (mining-wise) in the coming decades though, so we're going to have to reduce our consumption eventually:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-reserves-left
(again, that's with no regard to carbon emissions, or increase in extraction costs due to more difficult mining)
About the "declining energy demand" part, that trend still has to be reversed:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE
Almost 44% increase of energy consumption per capita in 60 years with no sign of slowing, along with a growing population... I'm not saying energy demand will never fall, but it's really far from a given at this point
By the way, I came across this graph showing that in the short term, carbon emissions are linked to GDP:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-gdp-growth
Which of course is compatible with your point about longer-term evolution of energy density of GDP.
But this one shows that the decrease in GDP carbon intensity is pretty far from canceling out GDP growth:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/kaya-identity-co2?time=1960..latest&country=~OWID_WRL
When I as in high school - 30 years ago, I was told there were only 30 years left of oil left. However since I was told there was 30 years left at age 12 and age 17 I didn't take it all that seriously. At age 17 we would have expected 25 years left.
I mean a graph like that should show a linear decline from 25 years in 1990 to 0 in 2015. Imagine the panic there should have been in 2005. Ten years left! Far from that happening the years of reserves left increased to 50 or so, according to your link.
Why was that? The estimate is Proved Reserves/ Present day consumption * estimated increases.
What is a proven reserve. It's a oilfield "that claim an approximate certainty level of at least 90% of being successfully recovered."
90% is fairly high so plenty of then untapped oilfields are, and were, in the probable reserves (50% or more) but moved to the proven column when tapped, or as technology changed. So, as technology changes, or an oil field is actually tapped, the probables become the proven. I can't find it now but the number of years we have for unproven and proven is 200 or so. Similar for coal.
We are more likely to hit peak oil demand[1]
We won't extract it all. The Stone Age didn't end when stone ran out, as a Saudi minister is supposed to have said. The push to carbon zero might not get to zero, but it will replace a lot of coal and oil usage. There's lots of wind out there[2]. Also lots of solar potential.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/pandemic-brings-forward-predictions-peak-oil-demand-2021-09-28/
[2]https://www.iea.org/reports/offshore-wind-outlook-2019 ( search within that for Offshore wind technical potential and electricity demand, 2018)
Right
I had heard that estimating reserves is pretty hard, and even though I still think extracting resources is going to get harder, I probably should have been more cautious about that stuff
The thing is, it's pretty hard for me to find comfort in the fact that there could be more fossil resources, because then we have to rely on people not exploiting them.
Again, I can't prove we can't mitigate the effects of global warming with technological innovations, but you can't prove we can, and I'm just saying we should avoid relying on possible innovations to make up for the downsides of present externalities.
It's nice to know that there is plenty of wind energy to be found; but generally with renewables, the problem is more with difficulties of exploitation than with simple volume (the energy is more spread out)
That's why I think the term capacity is ambiguous: the concept can easily be stretched out, especially when it comes to promoting the development of a specific technology.
About the broader point of CO2 emissions, let's put it this way: for them to go down, net CO2 intensity of GDP has to start shrinking faster than GDP grows.
If we can do that without affecting the growth of GDP per capita, I will be convinced that we can reduce emissions without sacrificing comfort.
Until then, extrapolating growth tendencies is not any more valid than extrapolating C02 emissions tendencies.
When I was in university 40 years ago, I was told that there was a load of oil in the form of oil shale that no one could be bothered extracting because it was too expensive.
> What I mean is that GDP is linked to carbon-intensive industries, especially energy but not only that.
Note that increasing part is software-related that is far less energy heavy.
Sure
That's probably a big part of why the CO2 intensity of GDP is decreasing.
Apparently that's not enough though, because total emissions are still climbing steadily (apart from a Covid respite I believe)
>Given how correlated access to energy is to GDP
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trend-of-GDP-per-unit-of-energy-use-Energy-is-considered-one-of-the-crucial_fig5_284174378
GDP is A: not all that correlated with energy use (e.g. England gets three times more GDP per unit energy than China) and B: improving substantially with time (e.g. England/2020 gets about three times more GDP per unit energy than did England/1980).
Your belief is common, but it's wrong and I'm not sure why it's so common. There are greatly diminishing returns to applying More Raw Power to the generation of real wealth even at a fixed level of technology, and one of the biggest focuses in any area of technological development is reducing the amount of power needed to get an equivalent result. We can continue to get richer without ever using more energy than we do now - though we won't and don't need to, because another major focus of technological development is how to get more energy at least cost and environmental impact.
About global GDP per unit energy, I agree I spoke too confidently, see my answer to Eugene above.
GDP and energy are pretty correlated year-over-year though:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/165qxftXo_VHXxeDi-8owwK7CbHbDH1tw
(the graph is on page 88, sorry, I couldn't find a more practical link)
I do want to push back on A because I find it misleading.
Of course, England will have higher GDP/energy, efficiency than China, but I'm pretty sure that's because of the types of industries present in England and China
In England the economy is based on services, finance and other less energy-dependent sectors, but these industries couldn't run without the materials and goods coming from poorer countries, especially China, and we don't know how to make these in a carbon-neutral way.
So they're very different but interdependent, we can't analyze one without taking the other into account.
That's why I'm more convinced by the global evolution, although I'm still skeptical we're going to continue increasing our global comfort with less resources in a short timeframe.
I want to say that my belief is not quite "growth comes from putting more raw power into the system" but "growth, even with innovation, tends to require power"
Which is compatible even with the fact that GDP per unit energy is growing.
I agree we can easily get a lot more GDP for only a little more energy, but we still have to reverse the trend of using more energy per capita:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE
Which we're going to have to do if world population doesn't fall quickly (obviously don't hope that will happen, pretty opposed to mass death and suffering) and if we don't learn to make a lot of low-carbon energy really quickly.
A good representation of the challenge for achieving net zero in 2050 is on page 22 of this course (sorry again):
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/165qxftXo_VHXxeDi-8owwK7CbHbDH1tw
Even if the gray line stays flat in the future, that means a huge boost for renewables and nuclear. (especially since renewables get less efficient when they provide a bigger part of the mix)
Better source for the data:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution?country=~OWID_WRL
I could find a better source for the first graph I linked!
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-gdp-pop-growth
It's about *CO2 emissions* and GDP though, sorry for the mistake
Although given how much of our energy comes from fossil fuels, I thinks it's safe to assume that energy production follows the same pattern. CO2 is more relevant to my point anyway.
The whole page on the Kaya identity is pretty interesting, and I think it mostly supports my opinions:
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-drivers
Are there libertarians who don't get married because they believe the state shouldn't be involved in marriage at all?
I believe there are, although I am not one of them.
Also are there anti gay marriage activists who refuse to get married until gay marriage is repealed?
I've seen some right-wingers make that claim, though it's hard to tell how earnest it is. Could be they're just trolling, or making up excuses for something they wouldn't or couldn't do anyway.
That's backwards. If you believe in marriage outside the state, you should hold a wedding and socially describe yourself as married, even if you refuse legal recognition. (This may not be possible in some countries, but I think it is possible in America.)
I continue to be confused that the campaign for gay marriage wasn't focused around weddings and assertions of marriage. That is, demand for recognition of something that precedes the state, rather than permission from the state.
By "get married" I meant (A) get legally married, and (B) have social acknowledgement of that. I don't mean that that's what the word marriage "should" mean; only that that is what it /does/ mean in the debate over LGBTQ marriage.
BTW, why isn't there a "P" in there, for polygamy?
There was no need for that campaign. Most gay people (at least among the ones I knew) who had been together awhile had already gotten socially or religiously married, depending on their inclinations.
"We talk about the Principle of Charity here a lot, and most of you are willing to grant it to right-wingers."
Maybe I'm just an uncharitable person by the standards of this community (the people on the SSC Discord certainly thought so), but my conclusions are the polar opposite of yours: Rather than believe these sorts of claims from both right-wingers and left-wingers, I'm extremely skeptical of both.
I think most people who oppose abortion are primarily motivated by a desire to control people's sexuality, as evidenced by the fact that they tend to oppose other forms of untraditional sexual behavior, even when those would serve to reduce abortions (e.g. homosexuality, contraception). I don't think it's rooted in misogyny per se, but rather in an opposition to all forms of sexual behavior outside of heterosexual marriage (which also happens to disproportionately affect women). I'm not saying they're *lying* when they say that abortion is murder in their eyes, but I don't think they *truly* believe it's equivalent to murdering a human being who's already been born. For instance, I'm fairly sure that the vast majority of them would choose to save a single toddler over an arbitrarily large number of fertilized eggs. And aside from the absolute most extreme anti-abortion activists, they don't *really* act like you'd expect people to act if they lived in a country where babies were being murdered en masse. They might make that claim in their rhetoric, they might even think that in their surface-level thoughts, but their behavior is not consistent with that belief. (There are a few exceptions, of course, but those are generally the people who tend to murder abortion doctors or support those who do.)
Likewise, I don't really believe leftists who claim that they're not having children because of climate change. Again, it's not exactly that I think they're lying. It's more that, even if scientists invented a source of 100% clean renewable energy and ended the climate crisis tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of those people would still choose not to have children. Just like the liberals who claimed they weren't getting married because it wasn't an option for gay couples still didn't get married even after gay marriage became legal. Just like the conservatives who claim to oppose premarital sex because it leads to abortions would still oppose it even if we developed 100% effective and universally-available contraception and reduced the number of abortions to zero. These people have a myriad of reasons for not wanting children, they simply use climate change as an excuse that also gives them ammunition against their Outgroup. And just like most anti-abortionists don't truly behave as though abortion is the exact equivalent of felony homicide, most climate activists don't truly behave as though the literal extinction of humanity or end of human civilization is just around the corner. (Again, there are a few exceptions, and those tend to be the sorts of people who think Kaczynski was right.)
It's not lying. But it's more than just a lack of conviction. It's a lack of *belief*, or at least belief that goes beyond the surface level and actually becomes part of a person's intuitive and intellectual framework. I remember someone on the SSC forums once mentioned that a typical conservative Christian might accept her creationist pastor's claim that God created the Earth six thousand years ago, and likewise accept a park ranger's claim that rock formations are hundreds of millions of years old, without bothering to think about the contradiction much. Likewise, I think a typical progressive might accept some vocal activist's claim that humanity will die out within the century, and likewise accept that some work of speculative fiction set five hundred years in the future is an accurate depiction of what the world will probably be like, without bothering to think about the contradiction much.
This reminds me of Orwell's comment that he had never met a Christian who believed in Heaven the way he believed in Australia.
Here's a demonstration that people don't believe in Hell the way they believe in the material world.
Imagine a duffle bag full of $100 bills. (Someone here probably won't just imagine it, they'll calculate the likely value.)
It's on one side of a very busy expressway, and the believer in Hell is on the other side. The believer will take more risks of Hell than they will risk getting run over.
I feel like I'm missing part of this because I don't get it at all.
I think the point is that many people who claim to believe in Hell would steal a duffel bag full of money if they could do it without getting caught or facing consequences here in the material world (thus putting their souls at risk of damnation), but most of those people wouldn't risk physical death by crossing a busy highway for the same bag of money.
That's about it, though I admit I was just thinking of the duffle bag as desirable rather than an issue about stealing.
I don't understand where Hell comes into it if you aren't going with "stealing sends you to Hell" (which isn't really Christian belief on heaven/hell anyway).
Are you saying you expect people who believe in the afterlife should be reckless risk-takers or else they must not really believe in the after life?
That's a great line. I had a friend long ago whose parents were devout Catholics, and when his father was dying, both his mother and father approached it fearlessly and with joy, which I'd never seen before in anyone up to that point. It seemed to me my friend's parents believed Heaven was every bit as real as Australia. I had a few moments of envy about that, since that road would never be mine and I would have to make peace with mortality in some whole other way.
My feeling is that people who are anti-abortion would also be deeply anti-war, since embryos and fetuses get killed in wars.
I meant to say "if they were consistent". Some of them are anti-war, but I don't think most of them are.
Interestingly, there is a very small fringe party here in the US that takes exactly that stance, opposing abortion but likewise opposing war and capital punishment and border camps on the basis of being earnestly pro-life in every regard. (They're almost entirely Catholic, whereas the broader anti-abortion movement is a mix of Catholics and Protestants.) And in many ways, they're the exception that proves the rule: It's striking just how *different* they are from mainstream anti-abortion activists; they really don't fit into American conservative culture at all, and in pretty much all regards other than abortion, conservatives would be extremely turned off by their views.
And likewise, the types of people who really and earnestly believe that the world is ending due to climate change are a tiny fringe minority that really doesn't fit into American progressive culture, and hold views that would be considered anathema by most progressives. They're reactionary Hard Green types more likely to support either outright eco-fascism on one extreme or anarcho-primitivism on the other, often with no shortage of politically incorrect views (to put it mildly) regarding the masses of poor people in the developing world.
This is a bit like the "how can you claim to be pro-life when you're also pro-capital punishment?" question, though. And I'm consistent on that: anti-abortion and anti-capital punishment, for many of the same reasons.
It really is one of those Tweedledee and Tweedledum exchanges: "How can you be okay with executing criminals and then oppose abortion?" "Well, how can you be okay with ending innocent lives but then want to let murderers and rapists live?" It's generally in the American context this is raised, since many countries have abolished the death penalty so there isn't the same connection made between stances on X and Y.
As mentioned below, it's probably because I'm Catholic that I hold this position:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistent_life_ethic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_capital_punishment
It seems like this philosophy is a bit less clear cut once you throw in that some of the babies are future criminals and some of the criminals are in fact innocent.
If Nancy or I touched a nerve, then I'm sorry for that. I certainly didn't mean to imply that you, personally, were being insincere about your beliefs. My accusations of hypocrisy (and I think Nancy's too) were mainly directed at a particular type of American Evangelical conservative, for whom religion is inextricably tied up with cultural tribalism and political partisanship. From what I know, you're a Scottish Catholic with political views that fall all over the place in regard to the American left/right dichotomy, and I don't doubt that you're consistent about your views in a way that many "pro-life" Americans are not.
I went to a Catholic school growing up, with priests who'd march alongside right-wingers protesting abortion one month, and then march alongside left-wingers protesting the Iraq War the next month. And I have a great deal of respect for that position, even if I don't agree with them. But, as I mentioned in my reply to Nancy above, people like that are not at all typical for conservative Christian Americans.
No bother at all, people on here tend to be more sincere and honest in their opinions than the general run of social media, so if I do get stung I am more than capable of stinging back.
As to Scottish, well - left and then down a bit from Scotland 😁☘
I do believe most of us have multiple reasons at varying layers of awareness for the choices we make. But it doesn't add up to me to a conclusion that people are not sincere in their stated reasons.
I think most of us have some ideas about how we wish the world were in order for it to be more to our liking. We could call those preferences or values.
Some people I think want to live in a world where abortion is viewed collectively as a sin and a tragedy and either never happens or almost never happens. In that world, other things are also happening that align more with their values; maybe it's bigger families, more churchgoing, more socially conservative views generally, etc. So the prevalence of abortion in our world now to that person is a sign of how far away we are from the kind of world they want.
Some people want to live in a world where humans have not had irreversible (and negative from their view) impacts on our planet, from species extinction to climate change and everything in between. For those people, the impact we've had on the planet is something like a sin and a tragedy.
Some people I think want to live in a world where we treat animal suffering as a significant and real issue such that it profoundly changes how we relate to non-human life. They see the eating of meat to be something like a sin and a tragedy.
Some people want to live in a world where the variety of human sexual and gender expression is not shamed or stigmatized and where people with "minority" expressions have equal social standing and rights. For those people, a world where some people can get married and not others, some people have job protection and not others, is like a sin and a tragedy.
People's actions look to me like honest efforts to solve the existential problem they feel in living in a world that is tragically far from the kind of world they hoped to live in. I think the feeling at the center for all of these people is a kind of profound disappointment (I mean, maybe it also manifests as anger, but I think grief is the thing underneath that).
In the context of that kind of profound existential disappointment, it makes sense to me that people might choose to protest (like abortion) or opt out -- by not eating meat, not getting married, or not having children.
It seems completely understandable to me that people might pause at whether to bring children into a world that they have profound misgivings about. Not so different from a person who doesn't want to have kids because of their own lineage of ill health and fear that they will pass that kind of suffering onto their children.
I'm not saying any of this is "right" in any objective sense. I'm just saying it seems possible to me that people would sincerely hold these views, not for convenience or cynically or for merely performative reasons.
This is where I think Scott's piece both stands up and falls down. I'm not sure a little bit of reasoning with the data is going to take someone who has profound misgivings about the world and its future and move them off of that spot. There are deeper world-views driving that disappointment. On the other hand, there are probably a few fence-sitters who are looking for reasons to have hope to be able to do the thing they want to do (have kids in this case). Information will do that for some people, but not everyone. An entirely worthy effort it seems to me though.
Are they sincere in their belief? I suppose it depends on how you define "sincere," and for that matter, how you define "belief." There's a reason I specified three times in my post that I don't think they're lying. But I don't think most pro-lifers believe that aborting a six week old fetus is murder in the same way they believe a serial killer stabbing people to death on the street is murder. And I don't think that climate activists believe the world is going to end in the same way they believe that an object dropped from a height will fall to the ground, or even in the same way they believe that a reckless driver might get into a car accident.
I would be interested in a conversation about this in the next Open thread that allows politics.
A general debate about abortion is pointless, but discussing what beliefs are consistent is significant.
I am Pro-Life for religious reasons, but I also continue to be interested in rationalism, and working through some of the motivated reasoning and struggles of belief.
I don’t believe the extreme position. I would save a child before an early term fetus, but I believe every fetus is a unique wonderful creation of God to be a particular person. I think it’s inconsistent to go from completely treating a certain age of fetus as worthless and then suddenly inviolable at birth.
> Are they sincere in their belief?
It is not a productive question to ask. As Randall Collins realized, "sincerity is not an important question in politics, because sincere belief is a social product: successful interaction rituals make people into sincere believers." Also, accusing people of insincerity is a very powerful character attack (not surprising in a species of cooperative apes) and almost guarantees that people will become one's enemies and will not listen to what one has to say.
The flip side of this would be claiming that most people who favor (a right to) abortion are primarily motivated by a desire to have lots of purely recreational sex, because they need abortion on demand in order for that sex to be the zero-consequence fun that they want it to be.
And there's almost certainly a *correlation*, on both sides, because whether you hold an belief like "abortion is (murder/just fine)" does depend on how much that belief costs you. If you've already decided to abstain from all but marital sex and to have a few kids at some point, pro-life is a cheap position to take. If you plan to spend your twenties having lots of fun sex with many temporary partners, pro-life becomes a very expensive belief. That does matter.
But I think it's going too far to say "most people are simply hypocrites" on that basis, particularly if you're only saying it of the outgroup. Lots of people, on both sides, are sincere in their beliefs.
Also, I think you're a bit out of date on the extent to which the pro-life movement is anti-contraceptive or even anti-sex. The idea that contraception should be banned or even substantially restricted, while common in the 20th century, is an extremely fringe position even among Republicans in the 21st.
When you say fringe among Republicans in the 21st, you're speaking of voters? I believe there are plenty of states and school boards in Red states pushing for abstinence only education. The Catholic Church is still entirely anti contraception.
Abstinence only education =/= contraception ban.
True enough. I still feel more comfortable agreeing that voters have shifted away from that position rather than that party leadership has. In most polls I have seen, the majority of Republicans favor some form of legal abortion. That is certainly not true of party leadership.
Certainly the same can be said about the other side(mine) of the aisle as well.
As noted, abstinence only education is not a restriction of any kind on contraception. You seem to be trying to simplify this into "Republicans sex-negative, Democrats sex-positive" and seeing Republican support of one "sex-negative" position as evidence that they support other, different "sex-negative" positions. It doesn't work that way.
And Catholics are not Republicans. I mean, some are, obviously, but as near as anyone can tell Catholic voters split their votes about 50/50 Democrat and Republican, and Catholic politicians are ~60% Democrats. The priesthood is encouraged to remain officially apolitical, so we don't know where they stand on political issues generally, but they're not going to be marching lockstep with the GOP. This is another place where I think you're trying to simplify things, this time to "Christian = Republican", and again it doesn't work that way.
If you want to know where the parties stand on birth control, you need to look specifically at where parties or partisan politicians stand on specifically birth control. At present, the biggest restriction on access to hormonal birth control is the need for an ob-gyn visit to get a prescription. As of 2014, the only politicians who would go on record as supporting an end to that restriction were Republicans. https://reason.com/2014/07/02/politicians-who-want-otc-birth-control/
Since then, there have been some Democrats who signed on - but also more and higher-profile Republicans, like Ted Cruz. When it comes to "maybe we should just let women buy birth control pills if they want to", Republicans really do seem to be more progressive than Democrats. Go figure.
"And Catholics are not Republicans. I mean, some are, obviously, but as near as anyone can tell Catholic voters split their votes about 50/50 Democrat and Republican, and Catholic politicians are ~60% Democrats. The priesthood is encouraged to remain officially apolitical, so we don't know where they stand on political issues generally, but they're not going to be marching lockstep with the GOP. This is another place where I think you're trying to simplify things, this time to "Christian = Republican", and again it doesn't work that way."
As someone who was raised Catholic, I'm aware of this! But as I said in my reply to Nancy above, regarding Catholics who really do adhere to a consistent life ethic on every issue: "They're the exception that proves the rule: It's striking just how *different* they are from mainstream anti-abortion activists; they really don't fit into American conservative culture at all, and in pretty much all regards other than abortion, conservatives would be extremely turned off by their views."
Agreed, but I was responding to your citing "The Catholic Church is still entirely anti contraception" as counterevidence to my claim that banning contraception is now a fringe position among Republicans. The Catholic Church as an institution isn't Republican; it's its own unique thing that doesn't really fit with Republicans or conservatives generally except for some cross-membership in the lay population (and American lay Catholics are not big on the whole no-contraception part; that's the apolitical church leadership).
Banning or substantially(*) restricting contraception is a fringe position among Republican politicians, among rank-and-file Republican voters and political conservatives, and among American lay Catholics. It is, I agree, the orthodox position among American Catholic priests, but so what?
* i.e. beyond "OK but you have to pay for yourself"
If you're simply saying that people who support abortion (or at least support it being legal) also tend to support sexual freedom, that's probably true. If you're saying that their belief about abortion not being equivalent to murder is insincere (implying that they *do* believe it's murder, but simply support it anyway out of convenience), or that they came to the "abortion is not murder" conclusion out of motivated reasoning, then I really don't agree. Most of them would very strongly oppose infanticide, for instance, even if that was also a convenient way to prevent unwanted children. Many of them even oppose late-term abortions except in cases where the mother's life is at risk or the child would die anyway, on the grounds that killing a fetus that close to being born *is* equivalent to murder, unlike killing a fetus that's only a few weeks old.
As for conservatives not wanting to literally prohibit contraception by law, that's narrowing the goalposts a bit. I think most cultural conservatives still socially discourage it, and in some cases seek to have schools (which are public institutions) officially discourage it. Whereas if they truly believed that abortion was murder, you'd expect them to *encourage* it, or at least not overtly rail against it. I know Scott's argument back in the day was "they're not consequentialists and wouldn't trade a major evil for a lesser one," but that never rang true to me. I'm fairly certainly most of these people make moral tradeoffs in plenty of other areas, and the fact that they won't on this particular one is telling to me.
So would you choose to save a toddler over an arbitrarily large group of cats in a burning building? And if you did, you monster! How can you value one member of one species over multiple members of a different species, just because that one entity is the same species as you? https://thehumaneleague.org/article/animal-rights
I'll be more convinced by pro-abortion activists that they truly do understand why pro-lifers think the way they do, when the pro-abortion crowd stop using stupid tricks.
This seems harsh. I am sure there are pro-choice people using stupid tricks. But there are also plenty of us who don't call you anti-woman or anti-freedom. Calling someone pro-abortion is inaccurate and divisive. Abortion is bad. I would guess that for the vast majority of women who make that choice, it is one of the hardest they will ever make.
I don't fault you for believing that the life is the important thing. Please don't fault me for believing that minimizing the suffering is the important thing and that the best person to judge that is the (potential) mother. We should each vote our conscience.
shoutyourabortion.com, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShoutYourAbortion would suggest that many people are definitely pro-abortion. Enough people to make a pretty loud campaign about it: "Tens of thousands of people worldwide have shared their abortion experiences online using the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion."
The "safe, legal, rare" thing has turned into "safe and legal" with many many people definitely being "pro-abortion" as a stance and not believing there is anything bad about abortion.
Yes, I would choose to save a toddler over even a very large number of cats, because while animal lives do have value to me, human lives have immeasurably more. In fact, that's about how I expect many anti-abortion activists really feel about fetuses deep down, similar to the way that animal rights activists feel about dogs and cats: they're living beings and shouldn't be killed for trivial reasons, but killing one isn't truly equivalent to killing an infant, child, or adult human being. (Yes, there are some people who truly and genuinely believe that killing a fetus is morally equivalent to shooting a random person on the street, just like there are some people who truly believe that killing a cat is morally equivalent to shooting a random person on the street. I just think those people are a very tiny minority among the general populace, and even a minority *among people who specifically claim to hold that position*, at least in terms of how their moral intuitions "cash out" in practice. "You shall know them by their works" and all that.)
For the record, I'm not "pro-abortion" any more than the other side is "anti-choice." I don't think abortion is good or even morally neutral, I think it's bad, just less bad than the results of banning it would be. We can probably agree that people shouldn't kill cats or fetuses trivially. But I *really* didn't want to get into an object-level debate about abortion, and only even brought it up to make a broader point by piggybacking on an example that Scott used. The point about choosing to save a toddler over a hundred fetuses isn't a "stupid trick," it's the entire crux of my argument, and the point I'm making applies to far more issues than just abortion. And I'd much rather discuss that broader point than push a "pro-abortion" agenda, or debate this particular issue at all.
First I'll say, I don't think it's a great revelation to say that the pro-life cause and traditional sexual morality are closely intertwined, as the pro-life cause is largely (though not quite entirely) a Christian cause.
But let me add: there is a difference between intellectually thinking something to be wrong, and viscerally feeling it to be wrong. And I'm sure everyone who thinks hard about moral problems runs into this, including the many utilitarians in this community. You can arrive logically at one thing being more wrong than another, and yet still find that your moral intuitions flare up in ways contrary to this. I think both the Christian and the utilitarian would agree that moral intuitions are a guide to good behavior, but an imperfect one, or why even have moral philosophy?
To the Christian, this isn't at all contrary to teaching. It can be argued that part of the Christian journey called sanctification is to come to hate sin as God hates sin, but with the recognition that man in this life can never fully come to understand sin's evil.
For my part, I concluded intellectually that abortion was evil long ago, but I didn't really come to grasp it viscerally until I held my firstborn in my arms. Would I be more bothered yet if infanticide of one's own children were legal and such things were happening all around me? Maybe, but I'm not so sure. This isn't really some sort of fantastical scenario, plenty of societies have normalized this sort of thing, including societies that lived alongside early Jews and Christians, who were also troubled by it and worked to end it.
Yeah, I thought it was incredibly rude to suggest people are just using climate change as an excuse, and I'm glad that you pushed back.
I think it is implausible to claim that nobody is choosing not to have children because of climate change but quite likely that some of the people who say that is what they are doing are people who for other reasons don't want children.
I don't think you should be surprised, or probably even annoyed, that some of your commenters were a little brisk in their defense of child-bearing. You opened the door. I mean, you were careful to qualify and hedge at many points, so I have no specific criticism of any specific words -- but overall, the tone of the post was "I've thought about this deeply, and the critique that having kids is a selfish Gaia-raping immoral act is wrong, despise some not facially absurd concerns that it might be, and therefore I approve of your decision to do so."
Who is going to react to that well? I mean, try it with a slightly different focus: "I've thought about it a lot, and decided that those of you who are gay are not in fact perverted child-molesters, despise some not facially absurd concerns in certain quarters that you might be -- I emphasize that in my opinion those people are badly mis-informed -- and therefore I approve of your lifestyle."
I would guess that you would not touch that with an infinity-foot pole, and you would not be the slightest bit surprised if, were anyone to do so, that gay people would react with considerable hostility, as in "who the f*** do you think you are that I *need* your approval?"
You can't really expect to make a post in which you imply judgment of peoples' decisions on such an intimate subject, with respect to concerns which plenty of people -- you already know this -- believe are wildly overblown -- and *not* expect some hostile responses. No matter how much hedging you do in the details.
That doesn't of course mean the post shouldn't have been made, or made another way -- I'm not saying *that* at all. I'm just saying it seems unreasonable to then be surprised, or even disappointed, that it turned out some people were annoyed who felt you were judging them publically -- even if you eventually came down on their side. Some people were absolutely bound to react that way, and that was 100% forseeable.
Some commenters weren't just "a little brisk" in their defense of child-bearing-- they attacked people who chose not to have children.
More precisely, I think, criticized the claim by such people that the reason was concern with climate change. I don't remember anyone suggesting that the decision not to have children was always wrong.
"14159265356 min
exactly what I was going to say - a lot of people are actually too lazy to have kids and use climate change as an excuse :)
****
ramparen
No one really does it because of climate change imo, that is just a neat excuse to avoid the responsibility and limitations that being a parent brings into your life
I know one person who chose to reproduce for state-of-the-world reasons. The fall of the Berlin wall gave her enough hope that she had her first and only child.
>I’m always surprised how willing people are to tear up the liberal contract of “I don’t question your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine”, especially when they’re not guaranteed to be on the winning side, and would completely freak out if the other side tried to create stigma against them.
Having lived for three decades in the US, I have seen no evidence of such a liberal contract actually being enforced at any point in that time.
That may be due to your parenthetical escape hatch, since it is trivial to argue that any behavior has some effect positive or negative on third parties. That was the logic of Wickard v. Filburn after all; to grow crops on your own property for personal consumption is to participate in interstate commerce. Really though, I just don't see any evidence that anyone beyond a handful of principled yet powerless libertarians ever took the idea of "live and let live" seriously.
So I'm not particularly worried about rightists violating this supposed principle which leftists, centrists, etc. likewise routinely violate.
>Refugees seem to be something we take zero chances with, something where we’re heavily biased towards rejecting them at the slightest sign that maybe someone thinks something might possibly be affecting vague unmeasurable qualities.
Can we trade realities? Between this and the liberal contract, I really would prefer to live in your world than mine.
Well, as I pointed out in the same thread, I don't disagree that "refusing to have kids because of climate change are some of the most intelligent and ethical people around."
Certainly higher IQ and more conscientious than average, though also probably more conformist - prone to adopting whichever irrational, cult-like beliefs happen to predominate in given society. And yes, as it happens in this scenario, literally maladaptive (at least from the POV of reproductive fitness). Further irony being that the effects of AGW are ambiguous - in fact, quite possibly outright positive, in the case of the IPCC's likeliest mid-range 2-3C scenario - and that in any case the problem can be solved for very cheap (relative to carbon taxes, renewables, etc.) with geoengineering should it really, really become necessary.
I'll go further and say that if there's a specific "future castastrophe" related reason to avoid children (and perhaps put a bullet in your head ASAP just to be on the safe side) it's this: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
The intersection of pervasive brain scanning techs + cheap mind emulation + human sadism --> Daemon Worlds of Warhammer 40K made real is a genuinely frightening prospect. I would go so far as to say that anti-natalism borne of these considerations and related ones like peeved basilisks is vastly *less* irrational than from AGW (note - it is still irrational, given how speculative and theoretical it is, just much less so). Hilariously, though, these at least minimally plausible concerns are the exclusive preserve of a few Internet eccentrics who've encountered Hanson and Egan, whereas AGW-related anti-natalism is a significant social trend.
When I gave a talk at Google on my _Future Imperfect_, I started by listing three different technologies that could wipe out the human race with a century — none involving climate change or nuclear warfare.
Just saw this on Twitter the other day, looks like David Shor also believes it's not in the Top 5: https://twitter.com/KateAronoff/status/1447266245460566018 (to the apparent anguish of journalists)
Incidentally, I certainly agree with you on nuclear warfare as well. ~1% chance of ~100 million deaths over a century isn't optimal, but certainly not an X Risk, even if modestly more deserving of concern than AGW.
Oh, ugh, the WA carbon tax debacle... *wry grin* For people who may go TLDR, this Vox piece is a decent description of what happened in 2016 (it's a bit biased - actually, the initiative proposer has outright said that the author was dishonest - but it's easy to read between the lines):
https://www.vox.com/2016/10/18/13012394/i-732-carbon-tax-washington
And for anyone who wants a summary and some links, and who doesn't mind a bit of my frustration leaking out...
In 2016 (technically, several years before, given the length of the initiative process), a group headed by economist Yoram Bauman proposed initiative 732, a simple, revenue-neutral carbon tax that slowly ramped up over time, and was coupled with progressive tax reductions to make the initiative overall revenue-neutral. The group, Carbon WA, figured that being revenue-neutral and cutting other taxes would get support from the right, and that helping the environment would get support from the left. But the organizers found out that there was a left-wing group, the Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy, that had been assembling a large coalition in favor of a nebulous future proposal, by promising specific perks and a voice in whatever eventually resulted. To be diplomatic, Bauman is not the most diplomatic person around, and communication between the two groups soured. Large parts of the left opposed the initiative, and it ultimately failed. Meanwhile, the Alliance still hadn't gotten anything together.
https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=732&year=2015&initiative=True
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Washington_Initiative_732
https://www.realchangenews.org/news/2015/07/08/communities-color-say-carbon-washington-s-initiative-732-confuses-equity-treating
https://seattleglobalist.com/2015/12/30/45907/45907
https://thinkprogress.org/washington-carbon-tax-campaign-7ce90a306e7f/
https://www.vox.com/2016/10/18/13012394/i-732-carbon-tax-washington
https://inthesetimes.com/article/why-the-left-doesnt-want-carbon-tax-washington-i-732-climate-change-ballot
http://standupeconomist.com/vox-should-fire-journalist-david-roberts-for-intentionally-lying-about-i-1631/
http://standupeconomist.com/readings-about-i-732-and-carbon-taxes/
Then in 2017, Governor Inslee and some Democratic legislators tried to pass a carbon tax in SB 6203, but it never made it out of committee. I'm not sure what the problem was there. There's speculation about too many carve-outs for interest groups, but my cynical guess is that once legislators heard that the Alliance had finally put together the upcoming Initiative 1631, they didn't want to compete against it, having seen what happened last time. (Even though they added a provision saying that if the initiative passed, the bill would be void.)
https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=6203&Year=2017
https://crosscut.com/2018/02/carbon-tax-washington-legislature-governor-jay-inslee
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/washington-states-carbon-tax-bill-dies-in-legislature/
https://www.nwpb.org/2018/03/08/bills-passed-didnt-washingtons-2018-legislative-session/
Then in 2018, the Alliance brought forth Initiative 1631. This time they called it a "carbon fee", but I don't know whether that actually changed anything. (In WA, our right wing tends to be less conservative and more libertarian, and even setting aside all the people intelligent enough to realize that it was just a rebranded tax, I have a suspicion that the word "fee" might get a bad reaction in and of itself.) More of the left was on board with it, but not enough, and it had much more right-wing opposition, so it failed too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Washington_Initiative_1631
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/will-washington-voters-warm-to-a-new-carbon-tax-initiative/
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/the-seattle-times-recommends-no-on-initiative-1631/
https://reason.com/2018/11/07/washington-state-carbon-tax-initiative-l/
https://crosscut.com/2018/11/lessons-washington-carbon-tax-autopsy
Now in 2021 we've got 2 more proposals.
SB 5126 (the "Washington Climate Commitment Act") has passed the Senate, but there's still some wrangling going on, so it might not go into effect. As a compromise, the bill was conditional on a gas tax increase, but the governor line-item vetoed that condition, but a court invalidated the veto, and the WA state supreme court is pondering. Also, the governor vetoed a line requiring tribal consent for some stuff, which has seriously annoyed our tribes (From a Quinault leader: "After using and exploiting Tribal Nation's political capital to pass his climate bill, Jay Inslee made the cowardly decision on the day of the bill's signing to ambush Tribal leaders by suddenly vetoing all Tribal consultation requirements and all protections for Native American sacred sites and burial grounds that his office and the State Legislature had negotiated as a condition of the bill's passage. Jay Inslee will be mercilessly judged by history long after Indigenous Peoples triumph over his petty veto and continue to lead the world’s fight against climate change. The only thing I will ever agree with Donald Trump about is that Jay Inslee is a snake"), so it's not a simple partisan thing. Overall, the bill is a cap-and-trade approach (rebranded as "cap-and-invest") with a bunch of carve-outs for special interest groups, and a requirement that a significant chunk of the revenue be more-or-less directed by a governor-appointed committee. My rough guess is that it's one of those "pass it now, figure out what it means later" deals, where politicians run up against a deadline and find a way to postpone the rest of their wrangling until after the deadline.
https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?Billnumber=5126&year=2021
https://juustwa.org/sb-5126-climate-commitment-act/
https://www.invw.org/2021/03/12/washington-climate-activists-disagree-about-how-to-cut-carbon/
https://wacities.org/news/2021/03/15/climate-and-carbon-related-transportation-bills-heating-up
https://crosscut.com/opinion/2021/04/why-climate-package-washington-state-democrats-falls-short
https://www.chronline.com/stories/washington-house-passes-carbon-pricing-bill-with-promise-of-a-5-cent-gas-tax-for-transportation,262958
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/inslee-signs-climate-bills-but-vetoes-parts-tying-them-to-transportation-package/
https://lastrealindians.com/news/2021/5/21/tribal-leaders-legislators-condemn-inslees-surprise-veto-of-tribal-human-rights-provisions-in-climate-commitment-act
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/tribal-leaders-legislators-slam-inslee-over-vetoes-in-climate-bills/
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2021/05/24/tribal-leaders-blast-washington-governors-cap-and-trade-betrayal
https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/ncai-shows-support-for-president-fawn-sharp-after-washington-governor-implies-she-is-not-a-real-tribal-leader
And on the other hand, there's SB 5373 ("Washington STRONG"), which is another carbon tax bill. It hasn't been voted on yet, and might be dead in the water. It seems to have fewer carve-outs and special exceptions (as one would expect from a carbon tax), but the revenue is heavily ear-marked for pet causes. Plus, there's this strange scheme where it seems like the legislature gets to issue bonds based on future expected revenue from this specific tax, and then revenue from the tax is first devoted to paying down the bonds. I don't understand this, and I suspect it's a fancy way to get around some form of borrowing limit, or take advantage of "green bond" tax status, but I really have no idea.
https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5373&Year=2021
https://www.waclimateleg.info/sb5373/
https://www.washingtonports.org/blog/2021/1/29/summary-of-senate-bill-5373-carbon-tax
https://juustwa.org/carbon-pollution-bill-sb-5373-washington-strong/
https://crosscut.com/environment/2021/03/washington-climate-activists-disagree-about-how-cut-carbon
It feels pretty overconfident to say that drought is not increasing globally (also a little strange to talk only about the fourth and fifth IPCC reports when they've recently released the sixth). You can see which regions are likely to have increased drought in the summary of the sixth report (p13) - drought is increasing overall, and doesn't seem to be decreasing anywhere (p35). My guess is that much of that comment was cherry-picked.
Thanks for writing this article Scott, this is certainly an issue that a lot of my friends are going through and it's good to hear your thoughts.
I've now looked at the sixth, in particular the regional map on drought. Out of about 45 regions, there are only two where it shows both moderate confidence of increased drought and moderate confidence that it is due to human contribution. There are ten more where they have moderate confidence that drought has increased, low confidence due to limited agreement that it is due to humans. One with moderate confidence in decreasing drought, low confidence of human contribution. Twenty-eight regions with "low agreement on the type of change" and four with "limited data or literature."
It's true that one of the two is Western North America, where many of us live.
Yeah, and that's good (although the IPCC reads as perpetually underconfident to me) but it still feels cherry-picky that you chose to comment so extensively on drought, but left out the increases in virtually every other natural disaster.
Just to add that hurricanes displace by far the most people out of the three disasters you could've commented on (hurricanes, wildfires and floods (oh my!)) - hurricanes are possibly increasing, but less so than droughts. Floods are certainly increasing and displace similar numbers of people to hurricanes.
https://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2020/
Hurricanes — tropical cyclones (TC) in the IPCC terminology — are interesting. The proportion that are strong is projected to go up, which sounds bad, until you discover that:
"Most, but not all, high-resolution global simulations project significant reductions in the total number of TCs, with the bulk of the reduction at the weaker end of the intensity spectrum as the climate warms (Knutson et al., 2020).
Most TC-permitting model simulations (10-60 km or finer grid spacing) are consistent in their projection of increases in the proportion of intense TCs (Category 4-5), as well as an increase in the intensity of the strongest TCs defined by maximum wind speed or central pressure fall (Murakami et al., 2012; Tsuboki et al., 2015; Wehner et al., 2018a; Knutson et al., 2020). The general reduction in the total number of TCs, which is concentrated in storms weaker than or equal to Category 1, contributes to this increase. The models are somewhat less consistent in projecting an increase in the frequency of Category 4-5 TCs"
(From Chapter 11 of the sixth IPCC report)
In other words, the number of weak hurricanes is projected to go down, the ratio of strong to weak hurricanes to go up. It is unclear whether the number of strong hurricanes goes up or down, but the worst are expected to get a little worse.
Looking at the drought stuff more carefully, there is a serious problem. The IPCC defines drought in terms of soil moisture but what matters to us is the effect on plants. As the IPCC mentions in another part of the report, increasing CO2 concentration reduces the amount of water needed by plants. If soil moisture goes down by 10% but water needed by plants goes down by 20% that's an increase in drought by their definition, a decrease in terms of what matters to us.
They didn't calculate it that way, may not have had the necessary data. But the report says that, with great confidence, total global vegetation has increased over the past two or three decades. That suggests that, on average, drought defined by the effect on plants has decreased, the opposite of the pattern they found by their definition.
Are you saying that you stand by your previous focus on drought at the expense of the most impactful natural disasters? And before I go for a deep dive into the literature on this topic - have you checked whether the report's authors have already made that connection and adjusted for it?
With a four thousand page report, it is hard to be certain, but the discussion of drought is pretty explicit about what it is based on and CO2 fertilization is never mentioned. Nor is observed plant growth. It's basically measures of soil moisture.
I don't think changes in drought are more important than other changes, good and bad. It was just a point where I thought it was clear that what the IPCC was doing was wrong, measuring the wrong thing and so getting what was probably the wrong conclusions.
So, climate change is going to have many effects, mostly negative but some of them positive. If you list all the positive ones like in your comment, of course you're going to persuade a bunch of people that "the direct effects on world GDP will be low." On the other hand, you're doing exactly what alarmists do, but in the opposite direction. I don't particularly want to read a list of all the positives or a list of all the negatives out of context and without a justification for why we should care about each one.
CO2 fertilization isn't talked about in the WGI report because that report is about what is causing climate change and how it works. CO2 fertilization, along with all other impacts of climate change, are covered in the WGII reports https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/
I don't agree with your "mostly negative but some of them positive." The fact that positive effects are rarely mentioned either in the public discussion or the IPCC summary reports and played down in the body of the reports explains why so many people take that for granted.
You might try to list positive effects, and see if I can point out important ones you are missing.
The report is also about the consequences of climate change. Each time they talk about more hot weather in one area or another they comment on the negative effects. They mention less cold weather but spend much less print on it, and don't generally mention the positive effects for humans. In order to discover that coldest temperatures are going up faster than hottest temperatures you have to go through the report, extract the information from different places, and compare.
About fifty years ago, when population growth occupied the same niche that climate change does now as the looming catastrophe that something big had to be done about it soon, I tried to calculate the sum of positive and negative effects on others from having one more child and concluded that the size of both was too uncertain to sign the sum, published it as a paper from the Population Council. Population in poor countries continued to grow, poverty went sharply down instead of sharply up, calories per capita in poor countries trended up instead of down.
That is one of the reasons I am skeptical of the latest looming catastrophe orthodoxy.
> I think society should take a chill pill and people should have however many kids they want.
Would be nice but has it ever happened? "Society" (mostly one's peer circle, relatives and random busybodies, for non-famous people) always tries to prescribe something, whether is it what to wear, how many kids to have, what car to drive or stuff like that. There's no sign it's going to stop anytime soon.
Not my experience.
"Reagan won the 1984 election by 525 to 13 (and AFAICT MVT should be aiming at the median electoral vote in an electoral system)."
i think the MVT is better understood as targeting not the median EC vote, but the *median voter in the state that casts the median EC vote* (that is, the median voter of the tipping point state). Mondale got only 40% in Michigan, which is terrible, but is hardly the 2% outcome that would repudiate the MVT.
It also tells you more about general trends than any particular event. Same way the efficient market hypothoses or regression to the mean work.
In light of the current energy crunch I'd like to plug the preferability of a carbon tax to things like Germany's top down politically directed switch to wind and solar. A properly assessed carbon tax would not have had the "diving headfirst into a half full green energy pool" effect that we are witnessing with various attempts to subsidize green energy and block fossils but rather incrementally affect the total energy system in an efficient way. Climate economists estimate a global carbon tax to be twice as effective as policies that focus on hard caps and short term goals in the way the Paris treaty was designed
On the "high concern" side I think carbon taxes at this stage are likely to seem like too little. In fact the main effect comes as the century progresses, the tax rises, and technology meets the economic effect of the tax. Short term it appears that direct investment into transformative technology rather than subsidies are a better "do something big now" type of policy. I'd like to see a neutral market designed pay out green tech according to their actual use and effect in the economy as well as more typical top down grants that may be prone to funding catchy ideas rather than practical ones
On the "skeptical" side I think it is time to adopt carbon taxes as well as direct innovation investment. Green policies are eventually going to happen and if we don't get ahead of them with a carbon tax they will cost double. I know a wrinkle is that carbon taxes have proven to be not sustainably revenue neutral as in British Columbia. However I would say I have the answer to that: pass a carbon tax with the stipulation that a neutral agency evaluates it yearly for neutrality and if it fails it is subjected to a vote requiring a 2/3rds majority to keep it. If the tax is voted down it is still retained but suspended for a year to prevent a non-neutral replacement. Rather than fight carbon taxes, fight for a revenue neutral carbon tax - be the guy who is doing the smart and popular thing. It doesn't really matter how skeptical you are - at the level of carbon tax I've heard proposed by climate economists it's reasonable ignoring any social cost of carbon and only considering air pollution costs to the economy and society
For those of you who are interested in other perspectives about Climate Change and why we should not be hysterical, I would like to recommend the following books. Each of the authors is well informed in the premises, not of them disputes that the Climate is changing or that change is caused by human activities, but each of the argues that problems can be solved by strategies that will do far less damage than shutting down industrial civilization, and which could be more helpful to the billions of really poor people all over the world.
"Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters" by Steven E. Koonin April 27, 2021
https://www.amazon.com/Unsettled-Climate-Science-Doesnt-Matters/dp/1950665798/
Koonin is a former Obama administration official and an academic physicist.
"False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet by Bjorn Lomborg July 14, 2020
https://www.amazon.com/False-Alarm-Climate-Change-Trillions/dp/1541647467/
Lombirg is a Danish economist who focuses on using resources to aleviate poverty and sufffering in the third world.
"Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All" by Michael Shellenberger June 30, 2020
https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Never-Environmental-Alarmism-Hurts/dp/0063001691/
Shellenberger is an environmental activist and journalist.
I don't think very many climate activists are in favor of "shutting down industrial civilization" either.
@Stompy: Evidence?
I'm not sure that "I'm not going to have children because I am guessing that the world will be worse" is rational. The world could *always* be worse in ways you could not anticipate or in anticipated events whose timing we cannot predict. E.g. meteorite strike. E.g. accidental nuclear bomb release. E.g. Yellowstone volcano eruption. E.g. Tsunami hitting NYC because a large part of Africa falls into the sea.
Scott:
"I’m always surprised how willing people are to tear up the liberal contract of 'I don’t question your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine'"
would have worked better without the parenthetical. I know what you're getting at, and on "technically correct is the best kind of correct" grounds, your version is better. But in terms of communicating in colloquial English with non-rationalists, you've just given every wannabe busybody license to question everybody else's life choices - all they have to do is show the bare existence of some externality, and they "win". They will feel they have permission to ignore you, or even cite you as supporting their position, and they will. And people on both sides of every debate have gotten really good at this.
The vast majority of externalities are small enough to be overwhelmed by the direct effects on the participants. The majority of externalities where that isn't the case, are so obvious that they're already baked into the debate, accepted by both sides, and if you omit them and someone else brings them up are trivially dismissed with "well obviously we didn't mean *that*".
If you omit the externality clause, you'll still be right >95% of the time. If you want to do better, you'll want to break out the externality clause, give it a sentence of its own, and expand it to state that the externality needs to be one of the unusually large ones, and that the burden of proof is on the person claiming the externality. Otherwise, instead of persuading anyone of the value of the liberal contract, you've merely sent them on a trivial hunt for the token externality they need to defect.
"The people refusing to have kids because of climate change are some of the most intelligent and ethical people around. "
Or, that is what they want you to think. I think they are typical of their generation. High on self esteem. Ignorant of history, philosophy, religion, and the ways of the world. Their "ethics" is all sentiment and solipsism. They have neither the tools nor the practice of reasoning through ethical issues and understanding their dimensions. Nor, of reaching conclusions about those issues and being able to hold considered judgements that they can articulate to others.
"This is my assessment from knowing some of them, plus my inference from all the articles about them which usually mentions how they went to top colleges."
ROTFLMAO. Really? Getting into the top colleges means only that your parents are rich, your high school is one of the magic circle, and that you play a sport that is only played by rich people at fancy private schools like lacrosse or rowing. Granted, they are not complete dummies, but they are the ordinarily bright children of the upper classes (IQs >1 & <3 σ) . The truly brilliant, do not thrive in American high schools. They are bored witless by the pablum feed to the students, won't play the game of being good team members, and won't get the administration backing for the college admissions game.
"And by definition, they’re people who really care about helping others and are willing to make major sacrifices to do so."
Don't make me gag. They care about their status in their in group and wouldn't dream of sacrificing any of that. They will join the peace corps and have interesting adventures overseas, but they will always have mummy & daddy to fall back on. There are St. Francises among them. A big sacrifice will be riding a $3,00 bicycle instead of driving a car.
We won't miss them or their genes when they are gone. Childless, i hope.
I think you're extremely wrong about this. Deciding not to have kids is a huge, difficult choice - really the polar opposite of signalling. Also you're making a string of generalizations rather than a coherent argument there.
I and I am all in favor of them going childless. i think that is a net good for society.
What would change your mind on that? Here are some possibilities that you should consider: (1) you've encountered a biased sample of those people, (2) you have encountered too small a sample size, (3) your calculation is flawed (or... maybe you just haven't done one?), (4) you've overestimated how easy ethics is and are holding a special group to a high standard (for example I'd love to hear one or two groups that you think have reasonable ethical goals and methods)
By the way - just to make it very clear, your comment reads as unnecessarily aggressive and judgemental. I'm sure you had the time of your life writing it, but if you actually want to be productive and persuade people that you're right, I suggest you change the way you engage online.
"What would change your mind on that?"
It is like any thing else. The facts change, my opinion changes. E.g. I have given up on free trade with China.
"...you should consider: (1) ... biased sample of those people, (2) ... too small a sample size, (3) your calculation is flawed ..."
I am not running a social science research project. The comment I was responding to had no research apparatus either.
Although, I will say, that I have evidence on the smarts of the grads of "top colleges'. I hired a bunch of them. Mostly they were just ordinary. The best hires I ever had were from schools like Central Michigan and U Toledo.
"you've overestimated how easy ethics is and are holding a special group to a high standard"
I think I expressly said that ethics is very difficult. Far too difficult for the uneducated mass of top college students.
"for example I'd love to hear one or two groups that you think have reasonable ethical goals and methods"
Group?
Don't be silly. "Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you." The Prince Ch. 17. "the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth" Gen 8:21.
My mother's test was, would they hide you in the basement? I can only think of one or two close friends who would pass that test.
"your comment reads as unnecessarily aggressive and judgemental."
I will accept judgemental. I will own it. I don't think it was aggressive. I didn't suggest anything violent, or even unpleasant.
"if you actually want to be productive and persuade people that you're right, I suggest you change the way you engage online."
Thanks, Dad. I will keep that in mind.
You may not be running a social science research project, but if you haven't done some due diligence and self-reflection about your experiences and what conclusions you can draw from them, others may not particularly value your input.
It feels quite "old man yells at cloud" to write a comment complaining about a particular group that you believe are bad at reasoning and acting ethically, when you think that everybody is bad at reasoning and acting ethically. It'd be easier to forget about the smaller group and get to the heart of your idea which seems that to be that everybody sucks.
This doesn't seem to be kind, necessary, or even true. I'd venture so far as to suggest that these hypothetical people may not be alone in their signaling.
The author brought it up. i what I thought was an egregious manner.
CS Lewis was one of the greats.
I guess I didn't give the "not having kids 'cause climate change" people much credit, having never met one or heard of them. Maybe they are a thing.
It is, but I do not take it the same as most (I think). I see it more as a warning against using scare, guilt or global altruist rhetoric when pushing for policies or change in behavior, either when you try to support your prefered policies/behavior, or are among those who need to be convinced: Those problems are usually picked for supporting a desired goal (policy, new behavior), not the other way around (trying to find the best means to solve a problem)...
So I would say: Beware of Big Speech about altruistic goal, especially when those goals are quite ill defined, inherently difficult to measure and abstract/far in the future/very global (usually a combination of those), while the means to reach the goal are local, now and very concrete. This quack like scam, walk like scam, looks like scam...Maybe it's not a scam, but it's worth triple-checking...
One good way is to propose alternative mean that should help in the problem but is clearly from the opposite political spectrum compared to the set of means proposed initially. Reaction to this new mean tells you a lot....Maybe this can even tell something on Scott initial piece: not having children could be seen as a not-often-proposed (or maybe extreme) solution to GW. Maybe the reaction to this tells far more about how seriously you should consider GW than anything else :-)
"Elon Musk has seven kids, and he’s no slacker."
True, but for all we know he's a terrible father. The only thing I know about his parenting is that he christened his last child with a gimmick. Considering how much time he seems to spend on work, it's hard for me to imagine he has much time left over for raising kids.
"I’m always surprised how willing people are to tear up the liberal contract of “I don’t question your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine”, especially when they’re not guaranteed to be on the winning side, and would completely freak out if the other side tried to create stigma against them."
I want to query this a bit more.
So I was having a conversation the other day with some people who were saying they never want to have children, and I was like "oh really, why?" and got quite a big reaction accusing me of sticking my nose into their business. But I didn't get it. Because we'd been talking about them wanting to do academia rather than go into industry and I'd asked "why?"; living in the city rather than the country "oh really, that's interesting, why?"; and I dunno -- outside of this conversation I feel you can generally ask people in this neutral way about things, but asking why they weren't having children was offensive.
I wondered if they thought I was dog whistling "you're wrong, how dare you?"; but even so.
I mean, this liberal contract you're talking about is alien to me? Unless "question" is a euphemism for "be judgmental and intolerant to your face about"? But were people really doing that in the comments last time? if not, and you really do just mean "question" or "discuss" then -- c'mon, you can't have thought it was obviously bad behaviour when you wrote the original blog post questioning people's behaviour? Or maybe questioning the behaviour of a cohort is different to questioning individuals?
I thought questioning people about their ideas is completely normal for this blog. And the difference is in the sensitivity around this particular issue, because it is so important and so irreversible and so life determining.
In terms of parental pressure, parents I know are actually more sensitive around this than they are around, say, piercings, tattoos, haircuts, dressing well, choice of partners, and so on.
Well, having children is the only way that all human societies preserve themselves, so it's unsurprising that the relationship between this simple fact and individual choices it's comprised of is more sensitive than most. What adds spiciness to this situation nowadays is, I think, that liberalism is currently ascendant in the culture war, and "children are optional" stance is clearly a part of its package, which is in tension with one of the more popular conservative positions of "having children is a sacred duty".
Sure, if we're being meticulous, conservative positions do carve out some exceptions for social roles which contribute to society in other ways. Still, if you presume to claim that such an exception applies to you, the onus implicitly is on you to prove it, which probably is the reason OP's question makes some people instinctively defensive.
It's not only preservation, it's competition, a traditional way to attack other groups (or, defend against possible exterior threats if you want to be PC): increase your relative demographic weight by promoting a higher natality that your competitors. This is classical for authoritarian regimes, ideologies, religions, hell it's Darwinism 101. And this is nasty, because how the higher natality would affect happiness or standard of living of your group is completely irrelevant.
This was, to me at least, the more controversial of Scott's rebuttals by far, and I am disappointed not to see much discussion around that in this highlight...
I'd go further. I've never thought that liberalism/libertarianism was about not questioning other people's (non-externality-having) life choices. (I assume by 'questioning', Scott meant questioning in a critical way, not just asking why.) It's about not coercing other people into particular choices, and not punishing them for their choices.
Criticizing, judging, questioning, advising are fair game. Advising others in their own interest (as perceived by you) especially so. They may be right or wrong in any particular case, but they have little to do with liberalism.
Are you perhaps non-American? The longer I've lived in the U.S., the more I notice that many Americans, contrary to their "straight-shooting" image, are surprisingly indirect in their communication and sensitive in their reception of said communication compared to many Western Europeans (the other group I have the most experience with.) What might be taken as a simple question in France (especially if it's "Why?") is often assumed to have subtext in the U.S. And specifically negative subtext--a side-effect, it seems to me, of middle-class Americans' wariness of speaking negatively in general. (Outside of very specific contexts, like bashing what everyone in the room agrees is an outgroup deserving to be bashed, etc. Gotta let off steam?) Everyone knows negativity exists, everyone knows their entire acquaintance doesn't unequivocally love everything they do, so if people don't air even a handful of their negative thoughts, others watch under the surface of their words for them. Which definitely leads to some misunderstandings.
I suppose a key factor that hasn't been fully discussed is how much instability in poorer countries can grow without it spilling over to richer countries. Because rich countries are not necessarily all that well insulated from the rest of the world... I remember seeing some arguments that the original trigger for the mess in Syria was due to agricultural issues caused by climate variations. What if these sorts of conflicts become an order of a few times more likely - do we have an idea of how much of that would be possible without destabilising rich countries too?
Even if you only consider the water use of alfalfa, it is a mistake to say that it takes a lot of water. It is flexible in its water use, the number of harvests per year easily changed. Since the supply of water in California changes a lot from year to year, we need something about the consumption to change, too. Alfalfa is a great choice for making use of the excess water in the wet years. I'm not sure that's how it's actually used, though.
<i>The people refusing to have kids because of climate change are some of the most intelligent and ethical people around. This is my assessment from knowing some of them, plus my inference from all the articles about them which usually mentions how they went to top colleges. And by definition, they’re people who really care about helping others and are willing to make major sacrifices to do so. These are exactly the sort of people whose genes I want in the next generation. </i>
Ok, so these are the people who 1) went to top colleges 2) care a lot about helping others - but the others in this case are pretty abstract people who do not exist yet and will presumably suffer terribly in 2100 3) rely on most hysterical media rather than e.g. on IPCC for answers to existential questions. Your interpetation is that these people are intelligent and ethical. Two other possible interpetations are that A) we need to review or prior on the ability of top colleges or, at least, certain programs at top colleges to teach basic critical thinking and working with simple sources or that B) these people in question are so dumb that they are unable of critical thinking or reading even after graduating from a top college.
By the way, note a peculiar king of empathy that these people have - they are driven by empathy towards abstract future people and somehow rather less empathy towards actual living people, so they decide against having children out of empathy towards yet non-existant denizens of 2100 who are expected by IPCC to suffer from GDP per capita of 3.9x current US levels rather than 4x projected without the warming. The plight of e.g. current real children in Haiti (GDP per capita 0.01x US) does not inspire them as much. People from top colleges driven by this kind of future-oriented empathy were quite prominent historically in many countries. These are the kind of people who led Khmer Rouge, or Chinese Cultural Revolution, or Russian Revolution in 1920s. I do not know about the role of genes here, but I doubt you will really enjoy life in a society run by this kind of people.
"The plight of current real children in Haiti does not inspire them as much" - If you are developing an interest in the fine art of imagining a guy, tricking yourself into believing that guy exists, and getting mad about it, might I suggest looking into Twitter? It is the traditional and probably still the best place for practicing that art, and you will encounter many kindred souls there.
Meanwhile, if you wish to share an argument for believing that the best thing graduates of top US colleges can do for the children currently living in Haiti is to produce more children of their own, I'm sure people around here would be delighted to give it due consideration.
Thank you for your comment.
I am not sure I can make such an argument as this is not the statement I am making. We are discussing people who are strong believers in "climate emergency", and especially people making existential choices based on these beliefs. Most of these people are not making equally harsh existential choices to help the current inhabitants of e.g. Haiti. By "equally hard" I mean the choices with a similar impact to having children, i.e. serious lifestyle changes and expenses of 30%+ of income. I think such a group of people exists because I know some of them. What is your evidence that they do not exist? Perhaps some links to Twitter?
If you're taking about specific people you know personally, then fair enough. If you have ever discussed the Khmer Rouge analogy with these people, what was their response?
Thought on the Median Voter Theorem: might recent trends be simply a generalisation of the MVT where politicians are pitching not to individual voters but to "blocks" of aggregated voters who will tend to vote similarly?
In my head I'm specifically thinking of some old decision theory work (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/089533004773563458) where they try to explain the apparent paradox of why people don't "defect" more in elections by having people vote in such "blocks". The basic idea seems to fit well with this intuition that it's best to galvanise particular key groups than to be acceptable to the median voter, but presumably the politicians pulling this off will still need to aim for some generalised median voter in these blocks. (Although I suppose in 2-party races there will be more slack to deviate from this new median than in the classic MVT.)
There are too many people, that’s why I am all for not having children. I contribute to Population Connection, formerly ZPG. Current growth is not sustainable, imho.
Something worth addressing is that most of the expected value of mitigating climate change is in the right tail of outcomes, not the median. Somewhere way out there on the right tail where the boreal forests burn off, the permafrost fills with methane ponds, and temperatures go up 6C, is a end-permian-extinction-like event that kills 95% of life on earth. Reducing the probability of such an event, and every bit of marginal probability on the disastrous outcomes in between, is worth a lot more than preventing small amounts of sea level rise and optimal growing areas shifting north.
We know such events are common in geologic history under conditions similar to the ones we are creating, and even if your faith in our ability to model climate is low (or especially if) your priors should come from that.
The PETM was an estimated increase of more than 6°C. Some deep ocean organisms (formanifera) went extinct, but land animals, including mammals, did fine.
Which is more likely, the sort of extreme you describe or that global warming is what is holding off the glaciation due to end the current interglacial, which has been running long enough so it might be due to end? Both are unlikely, but a glaciation would have larger negative effects than any plausible extreme of warming. Half a mile of ice over the present locations of London and Chicago and every port in the world high and dry, as sea level drop by several hundred feet.
As best I can tell, Nordhaus tries to include the very low probability high cost results of climate change in his calculations of expected cost but ignores low probability, high cost results of preventing it, of which that is the obvious example.
> First, the MVT [Median Voter Theory] assumes that both parties will end up as indistinguishable centrists, but this clearly hasn’t happened, probably because of the primary process. Probably it’s trivial to extend MVT into a world where this happens, but it’s a trivial thing I haven’t done and am not completely sure about.
I think MVT is missing a concept that moving to the center can cause you to lose voters from the your more extreme edge. My understanding of MVT is that it assumes this doesn't happen. I think acknowledging this may be enough to prevent the two parties from becoming indistinguishably centrist. If you move too far center, you start losing your fringe.
Regarding Nordhaus, I read a pretty hefty critic a while back
https://www.patreon.com/posts/economic-of-ipcc-46104505 which highlighted some big problems with his methodology. It seems like Nordhaus systematically underestimated which sectors of the economy will be affected and takes a very liberal approach when it comes to the effect and likelihood of tipping points. For example, "Using Nordhaus's sanguine prediction of a mere 7.9% reduction in global income from a 6°C increase (Nordhaus, 2018b, p. 345) as a reference point, three of the most obvious threats of a 6°C warmer world are the impact of these temperatures on human physiology, on the survival of other animals, and on the structure of the Earth's atmospheric circulation systems."
I have criticized him from the other side on my blog. For the relevant posts see:
https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=Nordhaus
Reading your blog it seems like you show that his findings don't match his conclusion. Both criticism highlight fundamentally different issues with his work. Steve Keen shows that the data/model Nordhaus constructs/uses is flawed and you show that the model does not support his conclusion. So your conclusion seems to fall apart if the numbers Nordhaus calculates for costs and damages are way too small.
Yes. But one of my conclusions is that he is trying to make the numbers look as large as he can, subject to not saying things he believes are not true.
That's also my view of the IPCC, after reading a good deal of the latest report. When it is clear that something that makes climate change look more threatening isn't true, they say so. They repeatedly combine more heat waves and fewer cold waves in their discussion of the effect on temperature extremes. But when it comes down to details, they give them for the heat waves and somehow forget about the cold waves.
"Maybe kids are such a big choice that it’s inevitable that some of the cost would bleed into your other projects, and I do think that’s a risk, but I also know cases where they don’t. Elon Musk has seven kids, and he’s no slacker."
My theory/experience is that the first kid consumes 90% of your free time, and the second kid consumes 90% of your remaining free time (additional children just cannibalize the time spent on the first two because you have nothing left to give). Maintaining 10% of your life for charity or anything else is incredibly difficult once you have children (in the early years, at least).
Having money, especially billions of dollars, can go a long way toward freeing up that time (and a lot of other time spent doing life logistics), so Musk is definitely an outlier. A partner/relative who doesn't work is similarly effective.
I find children to be all-consuming, though that may relate to how I prioritize my time. I guess I *could* spend 10% of my time on charity at the expense of my children and they wouldn't be taken away from me or anything. So it might be more accurate to say that children introduce a high priority item to one's life that would be happy to consume all of your time, making it difficult to prioritize charity (or friendships, or personal time, etc.) given cultural norms and biology that say that nothing is more important than taking care of them.
>Having money, especially billions of dollars, can go a long way toward freeing up that time (and a lot of other time spent doing life logistics), so Musk is definitely an outlier. A partner/relative who doesn't work is similarly effective.
Note that Elon Musk had his first child before he made his first billion, and the same year he founded SpaceX. I'm certain his sub-billion money helped. but having a wife who was willing to be a stay-at-home mother probably helped more.
I think people who can choose whether or not to have children usually base their decision on their level of optimism about the future. Early Christians avoided having children because they felt that this world was doomed and that they should focus on the next. People in the Soviet Union avoided having children in its later years because they didn't feel optimistic about the country their children would live in. The US birth rate plummeted during the Great Depression when the world felt like it was falling apart in the US and overseas, but it soared after World War II when it appeared that there was a bright future ahead.
Global climate change is one reason to be pessimistic about the future. No one seems to be willing to make the big changes necessary to mitigate it, and it seems that even the changes necessary for surviving it will be crisis based and minimal. If we had just passed some major landmark, like moving to 75% renewable energy and carbon dioxide levels had stopped rising, people would be more optimistic. We might even see a baby boom as we did after World War II.
Some people will make the choice solely based on the prospects for their children. If you are in a position where you are confident that you can buy your children's way out of the impact of global warming, you will ignore the issue. Others will worry that their children might not be able to buy their way out or might be concerned about the societal cost of a world where most people will suffer from global warming even if their children might have a good chance of avoiding its effects.
Of course, a lot of people just don't want to have children and a lot of people refuse to believe them. Maybe they just say "global warming" just to get those people to shut up.
>it’s hard to get something that is “like a carbon tax but appeals to 6% more voters”?
How about stealing an idea from the behavioral economists' "save more later" approach to increasing 401k contributions: pass a single bill that pre-commits us to gradually phasing in a carbon tax over the next 20 years.
No such bill is possible. The United States Constitution does not allow for a law that prevents the government in the future from passing exactly the opposite law. A treaty could in theory do it; in practice the United States is really good at ignoring or renouncing treaties it doesn't care about and intimidating lesser nations to go along with it. A Constitutional amendment *might* do it, but see Prohibition for what happens to amendments whose implementation turns out to be massively unpopular.
You'd need a filibuster proof majority to undo the bill, and once it's passed there will be some status quo bias working in its favor. I think it could work.
Spending and revenue bills are explicitly exempt from the filibuster. Setting the carbon tax rate to 0.0% can be done under reconciliation.
Aren't there exceptions to the exception? They couldn't, for example, abolish social security in reconciliation?
If the carbon tax is earmarked for to mandatory entitlement spending like UBI, then perhaps it couldn't be killed in reconciliation?
> “I don’t question your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine”
Although parenthood and non-parenthood both have significant externalities. In the first two decades, non-parents have time and can build wealth which parents spend on their children. A further few decades later, the childless will need the same amount of elder care as any other old person, but will have produced less future labor for its provision. There is also the issue of how children change the communities and culture they are in: e.g. property tax rates to pay for schools.
A heterosexual couple waiting for all kinds marriages to be legalized before marrying is like saying tha I wont eat until everyone in my city/country/world has food to eat. It's stupid.
If that's true, I challenge those people to make this vow not to eat until the world is fed! No one will do that since it's effect is immediate, while you can get away with other kinds of statements.
Emissions are already reducing in the developed world. If you really oppose climate change, you should be advocating strikes against coal power plants and car factories in China and India where nearly all of the world's emissions growth will come from as well as all of their emissions. This belief that the key to stopping climate change is somehow in the West is an absurd proposition.
"Preventing global warming will never seem cost-effective because the global economy just doesn’t place a very high value on the lives of Ethiopian subsistence farmers. But we can choose place a high value on their lives, and I think if we do that then preventing global warming seems worth it in expectation."
What is instead we spent that money on pulling Ethiopia out of poverty? One important step in this process would be improving their energy infrastructure - I.e. increasing their fossil fuel use. But climate activists obviously oppose this. IMO they are effectively trying to kill millions in the third world by keeping them pre industrial.
"Broadly agree" with climate skeptic talking points from 10 years ago? Try something more recent: https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-i/
From the 2021 Report:
● Extreme events: The AR5 assessed that human influence had been detected in changes in some
climate extremes. A dedicated chapter in the AR6 (Chapter 11) concludes that it is now an established fact that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions have led to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since 1850, in particular for temperature extremes. Evidence of observed changes and attribution to human influence has strengthened for several types of extremes since AR5, in particular for extreme precipitation, droughts, tropical cyclones and compound extremes (including fire weather). (TS.1.2, TS.2.1)
I knew only one heterosexual couple who agreed not to get married until gay marriage was legal. They lived together as unmarried partners for several years. In 2008, Massachusetts passed a law allowing out-of-state gay couples to go there and get married. This couple regarded that as satisfying the condition, given that any gay couple in the US could then go to Mass. and get married legally. They began planning their wedding immediately and were married in 2009.
It's somewhat frustrating when you or members of your readership brag about valuing the principle of charity and good faith discussion, when my experience seems to point to exactly the opposite.
For example, you seem to be consistently unwilling to extend even the slightest bit of charity or good faith towards styles of communication that are less characteristic of agreeableness than you prefer. Aside from creating a political bias (because agreeableness influences people's political dispositions to a great extent), it is a very effective way of suppressing participation from people who are frustrated due to being marginalised by the ideology (ordoliberalism) that ACX is largely associated with.
My impression is that it is not so much that members of this community tend to be highly charitable, but that they tend to profess to value charity and spend a lot of time signalling charity and good faith, and that this signalling is convincing enough - provided you're not actually on the receiving end of frequent bad faith from members of this community - to actually convince people in it.
I think it has to do with mistake theory. My impression is that mistake theorists often regard themselves as paragons of good faith by the very fact of being mistake theorists, even though mistake theory - as it is applied in practice rather than in theory - tends to just lead to dismissing the outgroup as being stupid. For an example of how this plays out when other people do it, consider the concept of "false consciousness" in Marxist class analysis. Mistake theory tends to be rather akin to a kind of Protestant division of the world into people who believe in the one true faith and are advancing the causes of righteousness and piety versus all the people who are being misled by the devil (or by the mindkiller of politics, which is basically just another phrase meaning "false consciousness").
On this note, let us recall how many commenters on the mistake vs conflict theory post were going "omg yes the conflict theorists are so stupid and I hate them". I find this to be pretty characteristic of the bad faith I see in this community.
And so, I see this self-congratulatory discussion about how charitable ACX is, and all this talk about how much you all value charity and good faith, but to me that indicates vanity more than anything else, and having been in a lot of conversations with members of this community where I have decidedly not been met with good faith, I'm left with this frustration that I want to express, but I know that if the tone of my comment were too resentful, it would no doubt be interpreted as unkind and unnecessary, and I would be banned. According to you, I suspect the reason would be because my behaviour is inconducive to niceness, community, and civilization, but according to me, the reason would be that I'm not high enough in agreeableness to be welcome here.
Regarding your time...don't.
For the same reason that my legal practice textbook tells me not to draft my own letters. Now, they are to some extent mistaken because I type faster than I could dictate. But the principle is sound - you need to do the things that only you can do. Anything other people can do, you should try to get other people to do. It's cheaper for the client.
In this case, if you can make 500 bucks doing something for an hour then donate that, or spend an hour doing something that someone else could do if paid ten dollars, you should do the first thing.
Are you better off donating an hour of your time to a soup kitchen, or giving them an hour's wages? In most cases, I'd say an hour's wages.
There may be charitable causes that only you can serve. But barring those, that's one of the things money is for.
>> Exactly, life will be slightly harder and will get harder until we reach an equilibrium or intervene to prevent further climate change.
> I think the flaw here is that it takes a lot of time to act to stop climate change.
The other flaw is the idea that global warming stops exactly when we finally do take action. That's not how this works.
Two technical terms for you: ECS and TCR. Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) is the amount of warming you get eventually (after 1000 years or so) while TCR is the amount of warming you get immediately (by definition, increasing CO2 1% per year, thus doubling in 70 years). The actual rate of increase was 12.2% in the last 20 years or 0.58% per year, so we should get slightly more warming than TCR predicts. Anyway, TCR is typically estimated around 1.75°C and ECS around 3.0°C, so after the CO2 concentration stops increasing, warming will continue at a slower rate as Earth inches very slowly toward equilibrium. (On the other hand, the oceans will continue having some ability to absorb CO2 so if we actually do stop *all* our emissions, CO2 concentrations will drop for quite some time afterward, allowing global warming to finally stop. Also, the actual amount of warming observed somewhat below this median TCR prediction when non-CO2 greenhouse gases are considered.) Reasons for the slower temperature increase include ocean warming (oceans take a very long time to heat up, which is a big part of the reason that ocean surfaces have warmed slower than land) and the melting of arctic surface ice, a feedback loop that causes more sunlight absorption that in turn causes more melting.
Another factor is aerosol-induced cooling. When we burn fossil fuels, it puts aerosols in the atmosphere that have, perhaps surprisingly, a cooling effect, related to the global dimming that Scott mentioned. Like white paint, these aerosols reflect some sunlight back to space, but they are temporary and disappear soon after emission. From 1945 to 1975 the northern hemisphere cooled by about 0.3°C and there was talk of a coming ice age—that's the aerosol effect, and it is estimated that the (poor and relatively unpopulated) southern hemisphere actually warmed slightly in the same time period, though measurements in the southern hemisphere were spotty. Aerosols don't accumulate in the atmosphere like CO2, so eventually the CO2 effect became larger. As a Broeker paper correctly stated in 1975: "…a strong case can be made that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide."
Sea level rise certainly won't stop. Ice melts at zero celcius; there is little or no melting below zero. Standard practice by dismissives (who hate the other "d" word) is to linearly interpolate between dates. So if some scientists say 8 feet of sea level rise this century is "physically plausible", the dismissive takes this as a prediction that there DEFINITELY should have been 20% of that by now (1.6 feet) when actually there has only been about 3 inches, so the scientist's prediction about 2100 has already been falsified. (Note: sea level rise before 1993 was primarily caused by thermal ocean expansion.)
But Greenland is a mile thick. It doesn't melt linearly as the temperature rises, and it most certainly doesn't stop melting the instant we stop burning fossil fuels.
Overall I think Scott is right on the money that the first world will suffer very little and the third world much more. Try living a couple of years in the Philippines or Costa Rica before you tell me you wouldn't mind if it were a couple of degrees warmer. Note that global warming is faster on land than sea, and if scientists were better at marketing they would have set the Paris target at 5°F over land which is approximately equivalent to 2°C globally, but sounds bigger.
In summary, the idea that market forces alone will stop global warming "because we'll build clean energy eventually if and when it gets bad" (with no carbon tax, no border carbon adjustments or other economic tools) is wrong because
1. Global warming and especially sea level rise will continue after the CO2 concentration stabilizes, partly because the climate system has inertia and partly because the loss of cooling aerosols will have an extra warming effect.
2. The people harmed most (third worlders) are those least responsible (1st world + China). That's why Nixon created the EPA in the first place: polluters weren't themselves harmed by their pollution, so why stop? [to those saying "CO2 isn't pollution because we breathe out CO2": would you also say that noise pollution can't exist because people can talk?]
3. Responsibility is diffuse - my personal contribution to global warming is negligible, and even large companies have little effect. If I personally live sustainably it will make no difference, hence the need to internalize the negative externality.
4. We just have to build nuclear reactors, people. People of the 20th century made this WAY harder than it needed to be by ferociously opposing a statistically very safe power source (while not opposing coal to anywhere near the same extent). Reactors were affordable in the 1970s and could be again, if we make that choice. We even have superior options now, such as molten salt reactors, which can greatly increase the safety-to-cost ratio, plus key components and even entire reactors can be factory-constructed.
I like to cite Bernard Cohen's survey of radiation scientists on this (http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter5.html):
2. The impressions created by television coverage of the dangers of radiation (check one)
59 grossly exaggerate the danger.
110 substantially exaggerate the danger.
26 slightly exaggerate the danger.
5 are approximately correct.
3 slightly underplay the danger.
2 substantially underplay the danger.
1 grossly underplay the danger.
This was in 1982, and it was still evident after Fukushima in 2011. I spent a couple of hours in 2011 watching videos of the tsunami in awe. The magitude 9.0 earthquake killed ~16,000 people but the amount of property damage was even more amazing. Watching a helicopter's view of the tsunami as it just kept going and going and going, like the Energizer bunny from hell — I'll never forget it. But I noticed that pretty soon the news wanted to talk about Fukushima exclusively. It didn't help that there was an unnecessary and botched relocation that probably killed more people (~1000) than the radiation itself is likely to have killed if a sensible temporary evacuation had been done instead. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957582017300782)
Renewables can take us much of the way, but cloudy windless days happen, and you can already see the solar farm NIMBYs growing alongside the existing nuclear NIMBYs... so nuclear badly needs more defenders right now.
And by the way, the nuclear power thing is a perfect example of why smart people should have kids and ask those kids to help steer public policy; who else will overcome the inertia of dumb policy?
My standard thought experiment about nuclear power by the way: meltdown world, a world in which literally every reactor on the planet has a fukushima-style meltdown. It really looks like the world we actually live in is worse than that. https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/jtm6hm/how_bad_is_meltdown_world